Water is returning to the African Sahel. After the catastrophic droughts of the late 20th century, aquifers from Senegal to Ethiopia are refilling, water tables in Niger have risen four metres, and Lake Chad has swollen to ten times its mid-1980s size. Near-extinct scimitar-horned oryx now number over 600, and farmers have nurtured 200 million trees back onto once-bare fields. Yale E360 https://e360.yale.edu/features/sahel-groundwater-climate-monsoon
#ShareGoodNewsToo

looking for a tool to export a thread from mastodon as markdown (or HTML): favorites? thx

Calm down, shuffle.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@JoeDyrt57/117043566063469638

Anyone feel like painting EVERGREEN on the side of that thing?

@constantorbit @wendynather thinking about work with your own brain, like some kind of *employee*

Forgive me for not cheering when their ranking methods exclude the safety of anyone not in said vehicle, to the point where my life as a cyclist and pedestrian has actually gotten more dangerous over the years. If they weren't so single minded about who matters in vehicle safety they could have easily published safety data and scores based on both sets of information, making both groups safer, but they did not, and that is a choice.

https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/iihs-crashworthiness-tests-save-nearly-50-000-lives-since-programs-launch

We’re about three weeks away from seeing a headline like “Eric Trump personally ripping the copper out of the walls of the US Abraham Lincoln in a deal the GOP is calling ‘great for America’s Troops’.”

«The Wikimedia Foundation has lost institutional legitimacy. When the foundation that we expect to maintain the encyclopedia for everyone is the very same entity that is selling out the people writing the encyclopedia, volunteers need to ask themselves what makes the Wikimedia Foundation the legitimate steward of our contributions and donations.»

@yoasif has a good summary of the ongoing legitimacy crisis of WMF

https://www.quippd.com/writing/2026/08/04/wikipedia-turned-on-its-volunteers-now-its-coming-for-its-workers.html

RE: https://masto.ai/@transworld/117042441844275718

Well done.

Sincere slow clap for Reeve and her team.

"You have to walk the land. You have to see the elevation for yourself, the color of the soil. You have to discover that the ravine is really a valley and that the stream is in fact a river winding south from a glacier in the mountains.

"You can't know any of this beforehand. You can't logic your way through it or retreat to your innate genius. A belief in genius is a large part of what plagues us. And I have found that people widely praised for the power of their intellect are as likely to illuminate as they are to confound."

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The corollary to "Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics" is that you don't put amateurs in charge of logistics.

https://www.rawstory.com/uss-abraham-lincoln-iran/

the perfect metaphor doesn't exis...

---

The Danube river is so low that Nazi warships are emerging

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-05/danube-river-drought-reveals-ships-woolly-mammoth-energy-fears/106999692

The thing that really gets me with the Wikimedia Foundation's response to their staff wanting a union: Imagine you're charged with running the world's biggest free knowledge resource, which is only possible because of an army of nerds who love nothing more than fact-checking.

And then decide to bullshit that very crowd of people.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Workers_United/Claims_and_responses

#wwu #wikipedia #wikimedia

Please help if you can: I am working with some students who are studying programmers' beliefs about software engineering folklore. If you can spare a few minutes to answer the question in https://survey.bth.se/survey/2545, we would be very grateful. We would also be grateful if you could circulate the survey link to colleagues and friends - we would like to reach as diverse a demographic as possible. Thanks in advance.

https://archive.ph/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-03/the-world-crossed-a-major-solar-milestone-no-one-noticed

@foone@digipres.club

It is not just you. I teach high school computer science and the first couple lessons in the curriculum are literally about exactly this. Multiple lessons. It's such a key component to why programming is the way it is, why it's important to learn programming when working with computers directly.

It ties directly into the concepts for abstraction, the difference between high- and low-level programming languages, why errors happen. It's taught right out of the gate into a high school introductory programming class because it's fundamental.

One of the earliest lessons is writing instructions for making a simple drawing, and then swapping and executing someone else's instructions. And the kids very quickly realize that precision is not really achievable in plain English. They need to know this before they program anything, and that's not from me that's from the curriculum. Other people know this.

That's why I've been losing my mind with all these programmers falling into bed with AI for coding because hold on, isn't that kindof against the whole ethos of programming? What's even the point? Hello? Why are we ignoring one of the fundamental reasons for why programming is done?

RE: https://mstdn.social/@ThomHartmann/117027240762817724

“The RAND Corporation calculated that between 1975 and 2018, fully $50 trillion was transferred from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent, every penny stolen from working families and transferred to the oligarchs created by these corrupt Supreme Court decisions.”

"Half the order book of one of America’s flagship enterprise-software companies [Oracle] now depends on a single money-losing startup [OpenAI] honoring a $300 billion contract." https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-house-of-ellison-is-on-the-brink

I didn't have this on my 2026 bingo card!

Texas halts data center connections to power grid amid overwhelming demand

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/texas-halts-data-center-connections-to-power-grid-amid-overwhelming-demand/

#Texas #DataCenter #PowerGrid #AI #Demand #Tech