@Filambulle these are all the photos I took! That sphere is amazing, and I love a one block wonder so the Klimt quilt was a delight to see.

Just one of the winning photos from this year's Pure Street Photography Awards 🛹

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2026/08/pure-street-photography-awards-2026-contest-winners/

#photography

Saw some beautiful and inspiring quilts at the Festival of Quilts today! The motorcycle won Best Original Design, and I saw loads of techniques I'm planning to use in future. Also spoke to someone on the Quilts For Care Leavers stand, and am planning to make something for them in future.

“3/4ths of disabled people don’t drive. Stop using us as an excuse for car dependency.” — @nondriver.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy in collaboration with @urbantruth.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy. #UrbanTruth

Worth repeating.

#UrbanTruth

The same child safety goals behind #BillC34 can be met through safety by design—without turning every user's identity into a compliance checkpoint. Parliament can fix #BillC34 and build safer online spaces that protect users, #privacy AND free expression! https://candiceodgers.substack.com/p/why-i-changed-my-mind-about-age-gating

It Appears That the US Military Accidentally Killed Everybody on Board a Civilian Medevac Flight in New Mexico

https://futurism.com/science-energy/us-military-gps-jamming-signal-medical-flight

That's what I'm finding amazing about my 30s: I don't feel like additional perspective invalidates my past. Saying "I can see it better now" doesn't mean I was just fucking around & didn't know shit.

The only reason I can see it better now is that I went through all that time of learning & growth. It's nothing to be arrogant about. It's literally just a stage of life & development that depends on everything that came before.

Given the organic nature of humans, we need to embrace this process.

Whiskers, in widescreen

#WhiskersWednesday #CatsOfMastodon #CatsOfFediverse #Cats #SiberianCats #Knold

«I don’t need a stair-climbing wheelchair that costs $30,000 and requires a maintenance crew. I need better doorknobs and or a ramp. But a ramp is boring. You can't make investors have a hard on for a ramp that doesn't connect to the cloud. You can’t give a TED Talk about a ramp. You can’t get venture capital funding for a slightly wider doorframe.»

https://sightlessscribbles.com/disability-dongle/

me irl

#cats #cat #catsofmastodon

I've been loving the summer tomatoes! Last night I sliced a big heirloom up & put it in a shallow dish with some whole peeled garlic, fresh garden herbs(oregano, rosemary, thyme) olive oil and feta cheese then threw that in the toaster oven for 20 minutes. Ate it with some focaccia I got at the farmers market (same as the tomato, garlic and the feta) and it was euphorically good.

Multiple links below.

I'm tired, and I don’t want to do free accessibility consulting for this website owner, so I'll outline only one way this won’t work for screen reader users out of many.

Aside from the fact an LLM made the website, and the font as well, the reason it doesn’t work for screen reader users because, even on that demo page, a timer has to be activated. A button must be pushed. A timer activates, and a screen reader user must find the fixed bit of text again. The website makes it sound as if it should be just automatically accessible/visible to the screen reader, and that fails.

Aside from the screen reader issues, that's not the only one, but I don’t want to do free accessibility consulting for this website, some of the other issues include but are not limited to…

It doesn’t prevent scraping.

It doesn’t prevent taking a snapshot and then doing OCR on that screenshot.

It breaks custom fonts anybody has disabled or enabled.

It breaks copy and paste.

It breaks for people without JavaScript enabled.

It breaks for anybody using a good ad blocker.

It prevents search from working on the website.

And many, many, more things that are in my replies.

If you want to learn about me and my screen reader, my FAQ page is below the website I'm talking about.

If you use this font to protect your text from AI, it also blocks *me, a human* because I use a screen reader. I did try the demo. If you want me to remove your RSS feed, this is the best font to prevent blind people from reading your blog/words. That timer is an inaccessible solution and that isn't it's only screen reader failure. https://shieldfont.org/#hero

My FAQ page https://sightlessscribbles.com/faq/

#AI #LLM #Accessibility #A11y

Continuing with my Ed Zitron binge ...

"At the center of everything I’ve written for the last few months (if not the last few years), sits a cancerous problem with the fabric of how capital is deployed in modern business. Public and private investors, along with the markets themselves, have become entirely decoupled from the concept of what “good” business truly is, focusing on one metric — one truly noxious metric — over all else: growth."

#EdZitron, 2023

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-economy/

#growth

It would be great if the ones who fucked around were the ones who found out.

Feels about right - cost of doing business for third places leads to inequality, inaccessibility, negative health impacts.
This is also why fun policing annoys me so much. Let people play music in public. Let people play games and even drink in public. Pay more janitors to keep picnic spaces and amenities like trash cans, bathrooms, water fountains available and accessible. Stop investing in major league sports and start helping local sports & rec teams have audiences & fans & participants.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/bars-bowling-alleys-movie-theaters-090000273.html

Late night on #caturday

Friday night hot take: Memestocks, tokens and current AI investment patterns prove Goodhart's Law applies to the price of stock.

The AI conversation and the GMO conversations really remind me of each other.

Curious what others think: how should a writer pronoun a character who is a trans egg when writing in third person?

I don't think there's any one hard and fast rule to this by any means, but I'm curious what thoughts people have and what different approaches they've seen in fiction.

Anthropic spent billions of dollars to slice the spines off millions of books, including very rare ones.

AI companies are purchasing large quantities of used and rare books and scanning their contents to train LLMs. They then turn the originals to pulp.

The sum of human thought, digitized and shredded. Every book that gets scanned disappears from the physical world permanently.

Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.

#AI #Books #Culture #Civilization #Tech #LLMs