Holyday is talking, but for the past week I have been reviewing every single Council vote over the last four years, and I am telling you I have had it up to fucking HERE with this fucking waste of atoms, he doesn't deserve an iota more of anyone's fucking attention, this fucking ghoul does nothing but eat up Council time and resources to concern-troll.

I know it sounds like I might be just saying this because I am mentally ill and distraught, but I assure you this is how I feel about Holyday at the best of times.

#TOcouncil #TOpoli

RE: https://toot.majorshouse.com/@majorlinux/116994909305562978

Why is the leadership of so many of the organizations function as infrastructure for the open web so terrible at making decisions?

- Wikimedia is attempting union busting (also Jimmy Wales is very open with his anti-Palestinian Racism)
- Mozilla is integrating AI into their products against the strong opposition of Firefox users
- Creative Commons is not doing enough to stand up against AI use of CC-licensed materials

Why can't we have nice things? :(

من قصيدة «غير مُجْدٍ في ملتي واعتقادي»

خَفِّفِ الْوَطْءَ مَا أَظُنُّ أَدِيمَ الْـ
أَرْضِ إِلَّا مِنْ هَذِهِ الْأَجْسَادِ

بيت شعر شاركته معي زميلة فلسطينيّة رائعة، كمثال عن استخدام كلمة «أديم»، بمعنى سطح الأرض. وللكلمة معاني عديدة أخرى، ومنها الجلد أو سطح البشرة.

في اللغة العبريّة، الكلمة الشقيقة هي אדמה (أدمه)، ومعناها الأرض أو التربة أيضاً.

مثير في هذه الكلمة تشابك معانيها. أعتقد أنّ جذرها هو «دمَّ»

يشتقّ من الجذر ذاته إسم النبي آدم. اللون الأحمد (كالدم) في العبريّة هو אדום (أدوم).

خُلق آدم من الأديم، وكان يسيل دمه بلونٍ אדום.

#بالعربي #عربي #عبري #لغويات #لغويّات

What would Ontario look like if we mobilized provincial resources towards making the 100-mile diet easily feasible for most residents of the province?

What would be on my plate in every season?

What would farmers have to change about their agricultural practices?

How would supermarkets stock products?

What kinds of new preserves will we have to invent for the winter?

what changes would universities have to make to their research programs to help us get there?

Will we know more about the plants that nourish us every day?

How will the impact on our health be?

What kinds of new transportation networks need to be established to move the produce from where it's grown to where it's eaten?

Will we still eat as much meat as we do now?

What will be the #GHG emissions reductions that would result from this effort?

#ONpoli #TOpoli

Its all about "free markets" and "let the market decide" until you have competition that shows how full of bullshit you are and then you run to daddy Trump saying to stop these bad Chinese models from entering our market.

The irony of OpenAI and Anthropic running to the government to save them whenever there’s competition and it’s this government that complains about “handouts” and communism.

for secret* reasons, i'm interested in other people's understanding and experience of joy.

can you define what you mean by it? is it a regular presence in your life? an occasional visitor? a long-lost relative? a stranger?

can you summon it? does encouraging it help it to appear, or does it only come when you have forgotten about it?

feel free to ask and answer other questions instead.

[edit: boosting this would be great, thx]

*i'll get around to explaining this at some point; i have a concert today so will be less present than some times.

#joy #mentalhealth

"We found that at least 150 institutions of higher education – including many small colleges and community colleges – are using Flock’s surveillance network. We also found that many campus police departments have facilitated immigration-related investigations, even when they are located in sanctuary states and are legally prohibited from doing so."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10439463.2026.2702635

We need a specific CSS styling for formatting classical Arabic poetry. It's always been a pain, and nobody has a good solution.

The poetry has a very strict form:

It's organized in lines (called بيت bayt = house), each line has two parts (called شطر shatr = half).

The two shatr of a bayt should always be together, but are sometimes printed on the same line, other times alternating lines with indentation, depending on the page width.

The lines are justified, preferably using kashida instead of kerning or word spacing.

The image below shows the layout from a 10th century poem by al-Ma'arri as it appears on alDiwan.net. If you inspect the HTML, it's an absolute mess. https://www.aldiwan.net/poem23625.html

Yes, you can use tables or grids, but neither allows for the flexibility of layouts that Arabic readers are used to.

Imagine how much better the web would be if Arabic poetry styling was natively supported by CSS?

#css #rtl #arabic

Vicia sativa ssp.obovata. https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/95/

#plants #roots #illustration

Imagine all the leftist infighting we can do in here

Ononis spinosa ssp. austriaca. https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/442/

#plants #roots #illustration

When physicist & best selling author Chanda Prescod-Weinstein sent me this declaration on AI written & signed by a bunch of mathematicians, I was initially super skeptical because I had seen a whole bunch of such “declarations” which, at best, are distractions from the actual problems we should be discussing. But once I started reading, I was mostly nodding my head up and down in complete agreement and super impressed at how spot on so many of the points were.

https://leidendeclaration.ai. 🧵

https://www.bbc.com/arabic/articles/cy9wjrwxgpro

Orbital AI datacentres come with latency issues. If they're in LEO, they will have moderately low latency to a moving point on Earth, but for a fixed client the latency will increase as more relays are needed to account for curvature, so the jitter is high. If you put them in geostationary orbit, the latency is fixed, but large.

The solution to this is to put not just the AI datacentres, but also the AI bros in orbit. If you put an AI bro and a small radio in LEO, in the same orbital trajectory as an AI datacenter, they will have very low latency - indeed, significantly lower latency than ground-based routing if both they and the datacentre are on the ground.

Importantly, AI bros have a lot less mass than datacentres. As such, they are much cheaper to launch. As a pilot programme, to assess feasibility, I recommend launching a test constellation of AI bros into LEO. Note that, unlike datacentres, AI bros are made out of non-toxic (at least, in the chemical sense) substances. The environmental impact of uncontrolled atmospheric reentry is significantly lower, making the risk from the failure of a pilot deployment significantly lower.

New article time! This time, I've talked about writing C is so much more enjoyable than a number of other things, and tech's regrettable tendency towards shallowness:

https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/tech-aint-deep

RE: https://social.coop/@majdal/116930841953891141

Yeah, so my extended family has a group on WhatsApp, and when Spain won, we had a transcontinental group video call to celebrate. Everyone is 100% convinced that Spain won because the Spanish state supports Palestine.

For Black folk that didn't grow up speaking Spanish *only*:

Question:
* Why don't the other South American fans like Argentina?

* Why do so many of the good and kind players and fans from Argentina ♥️🕊️make such a big point of being vocally anti-racist?

* Why did nazis choose Argentina?

* Why do most countries in South America have people that are Black, white, indigenous, and mixed, but Argentina (and Uruguay) seem super white?

Answer:

Blanqueamiento.

History tends to only talk about the ethnic cleansing campaigns that *almost* worked. It skips over ones that *did* work

Trump is fuelling a new McCarthyism that is both delusional and dangerous. It’s clearly intended to crack down on Americans who are resisting his anti-democratic agenda: including deadly ICE raids and endless wars of aggression. It’s also a serious escalation of violent authoritarianism from our next door neighbour.

Canada’s participation in this spectacle puts progressive Canadians at real risk. It’s outrageous, and the Prime Minister owes Canadians an explanation as to why he’s involving our country in this ugly episode.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/canada-attends-trump-summit-targeting-left-wing-extremism/article_206567ca-63e4-45cf-8355-9616dd443713.html

#canada #cdnpoli #uspol

I don't know how to relate to big sports events other than through geopolitics...

Fighting for 4th and 3rd place are the two most evil colonizers for us in the Levant, the ones that divided our land between them through the Sykes-Picot Agreement

Fighting for 2nd and 1st place is the metropole vs their former colony, which turned out to be one of the most racist countries in South America.

فخّار يكسّر بعضه

Good thing neither of the matches are in Toronto. They'd have to reschedule them because of the suffocating smoke.

Here's an episode of Makdisi Street about FIFA and geopolitics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYOwnSGo2ts

Sepia filter
Extending beyond our screens
The fires burn on.

#haiku