one more fun fact about cats:

in South Korea, cat lovers are called 집사 or jibsa, which can be translated as “butler”.

we’re cat butlers. feels accurate!

Happy 76th Birthday Steve Wozniak!! 🥳

Huh weird.

If you’re a frat pledge leader and you kill a freshman with a quart of vodka, you’re looking at four years of hard…probation

This is the sky Reflect Orbital wants for us, so they can make money: https://starryprinceton.org/scattering_calculations_renderings

They don't fucking care if you can see the stars. They don't fucking care if they damage people's eyes. They don't fucking care if they cause car crashes and plane crashes. They don't fucking care if they disrupt ecosystems and human sleep. They just want money.

Simulations based on Kocifaj, Bakos, & Kundracik 2026 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.06433

NASA has provided some early-stage funding to explore the idea of releasing a swarm of tiny probes (weighing only a few grams each) into Saturn’s rings to study them up close. https://www.universetoday.com/articles/nasa-wants-to-toss-10000-tiny-probes-directly-into-saturns-rings

Everyone thinks everything has gotten worse

Here’s some things that actually haven’t:

• Weather forecasting: it’s better than ever (outside of the US)
• Solar: cheaper than natural gas
• Coal: essentially dying from not being cheaper than natgas or solar
• Timekeeping: now accurate over galactic timescales
• Flash storage: surpassing spinning rust
• Public transit ridership in the US: Amtrak is posting the best numbers ever
• Union membership in the US: rising
• Murder rates: falling in the US and worldwide on average, believe it or not
• CFC’s: essentially abolished and gone, the biggest environmental win of our lifetimes
• Acid rain: increasingly a nearly-solved issue
• Electrical access: still rising worldwide
• Internet access: most people are now connected everywhere
• China is leading the way in green tech and actively working to get off fossil fuels
• You can charge an EV from 0 to 80% in 15 minutes with the newest chargers and tech, and it’s still getting faster

And so much more. Lots of quiet wins that people never hear about because all they do is doomscroll.

A local business was looking for office help. They put a sign in the window, that read:

"HELP WANTED. Must be able to type, must be good with a computer and must be bilingual. We are an Equal Opportunity Employer."

A short time afterwards, a dog trotted up to the window, saw the sign and went inside. He looked at the receptionist and wagged his tail, then walked over to the sign, looked at it and whined.

Getting the idea, the receptionist got the office manager. The office manager looked at the dog and was surprised, to say the least. However, the dog looked determined, so he lead him into the office. Inside, the dog jumped up on the chair and stared at the manager.

The manager said, "I can’t hire you. The sign says you have to be able to type." The dog jumped down, went to the typewriter and proceeded to type out a perfect letter. He took out the page and trotted over to the manager and gave it to him, then jumped back on the chair. The manager was stunned, but then told the dog, "The sign says you have to be good with a computer."

The dog jumped down again and went to the computer. The dog proceeded to demonstrate his expertise with various programs and produced a sample spreadsheet and database and presented them to the manager. By this time the manager was totally dumb-founded! He looked at the dog and said, "I realize that you are a very intelligent dog and have some interesting abilities. However, I *still* can’t give you the job."

The dog jumped down and went to a copy of the sign and put his paw on the sentences that told about being an Equal Opportunity Employer. The manager said, "Yes, but the sign *also* says that you have to be bilingual."

The dog looked at him straight in the face and said, "Meow"

RE: https://glammr.us/@overholt/117049333496122205

Back in 1999 or so, I was on the team that helped Minnesota Public Radio choose a long-term storage format for their (extensive and valuable!!) audio archives, which they were about to digitize.

The conclusion we came to was that there was •no• storage medium that met their long-term preservation goals — true then, and almost certainly still true today. The best approach is perpetual and redundant forward copying of the data, from one physical storage device to another.

An archive isn’t a physical thing; it's a process.

On Nov 18 of this year, the Voyager 1 spacecraft will be one light-day from Earth -- more than 16 billion miles. Voyager 2 will be nearly 14 billion miles away.

There's a quiet, heroic effort by NASA techs to keep these 49-year-old spacecraft functioning. The technology and parts we knew how to make in 1977 can still talk to us. It is a small engineering miracle.

Linking directly to the Hackaday story on this, but click through to The Register.

https://hackaday.com/2026/08/06/nasas-just-prolonged-voyager-2s-science-mission-with-a-big-bang/

Love me some engineers.

I went to a baseball store and got a fancy new mitt and they asked me if I wanted it fully broken in and I said sure, but how? Turns out they have a 1,000lb hydraulic press that pummels your glove for an hour.

I returned to a super soft, flexible mitt that feels like it was made with baby skin.

German authorities have thwarted a Russian intelligence operation to assassinate executives of defense companies supplying weapons to the Ukrainian military. One of the main targets was Stefan Thumann, an executive at German startup Donaustahl:

https://militarnyi.com/en/news/germany-thwarts-plot-donaustahl-executive/

(Coming the day after the drone attack on Antonovs at Leipzig, this suggests Russia is significantly ramping up attacks in Germany.)

@cstross @quinn @dangillmor

Similar vibe 🙂🤷‍♂️

Nazi quits as Tory candidate. Good, fuck the hell off, and fuck Badenoch for even thinking having a twice jailed, misogynistic, racist Nazi stand as a candidate was a good idea. And fuck fascists.

You support that ideology, then you spit on the entire 1940s generation that stood on the ramparts & fought like hell for generations to follow to grow up free, dishonouring real patriots.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy4kx8n2vwxo

Authenticity Problem

Bonus timelapse: https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/miniFantasyTheater/064.html#bonus

#webcomic #krita #miniFantasyTheater

RE: https://mastodon.social/@fesshole/117039563150530124

Life planning, people. Get on it.