And as a chaser...

What Shall We Do With a Useless Congress? by the Raging Grannies of Tuolumne & Calaveras (RGTC)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9W79RPmOnI

Another part of an american town burned down, this month in Spokane, Washington,
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2026/08/urban-firestorm-devastates-spokane-as-dense-smoke-envelops-the-northwest/

Just now parts of Reno Nevada are actively burning.
https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2026/08/23/hawk-fire-updates-sunday-10500-acres-burned-evacuations-remain/91431114007/

Fires continue to burn out of control in British Columbia, sending continent spanning smoke drifting across north america.

Over in Europe record breaking fires burn out of control across Spain and France.

July was hottest month ever recorded in US as heatwaves scorched country surpassing even the dust bowl.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/10/july-hottest-month-ever-recorded-heatwaves
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2026/08/the-u-s-just-had-its-hottest-month-in-recorded-history-surpassing-dust-bowl-record/

In Asia flooding forced the evacuation of one million people. (I'm not even sure the USA is capable of an evacuation like that)

Typhoon Dolphin: more than a million people evacuated in China as record rainfall dumped on Shangha
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/10/typhoon-dolphin-china-shanghai-flooding-evacuations

Europe’s scorching summer is erasing its economic growth, says report
https://www.politico.eu/article/europes-scorching-summer-could-erase-blocs-2026-growth/

FEMA needs to be funded, staffed, and aid be provided without Trumps approval since that will always be used for extortion. Catastrophic disasters are only going to become more common.

People need to stop complaining about the "economic costs of stopping global warming" because if global warming isn't stopped there wont be an economy beyond the survivors digging through the burned out or flooded rubble of our former cities.

Also I want to ban AI data centers for many reasons, including they are largely a scam to increase demand for the fossil fuels that are killing us all.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/11/ai-will-do-more-to-boost-fossil-fuel-production-than-green-energy

I strongly oppose Trump's corrupted EPA allowing data centers to say clean air rules don't apply because of some stupid excuse. The regulations should apply, and even better would be completely banning building more fossil fuel power plants.
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5992657-epa-data-center-power-plants-acid-rain/

Scientists have been warning of catastrophe for decades and the oil industries response has been to install Trump and fire all the scientists.

We need polluter pays legislation and we need to stop burning fossil fuels.

Also about the only way to defeat Iran now is to reduce the worlds oil consumption by 20% so no one cares that they can block the strait at will.

I am so hopeless that our useless government will be able to do anything to save us.

On #Guix if you're trying migrate to the non-root guix-daemon on a foreign OS, should you remove --build-users-group from the ExecStart?

I manually did all of the stuff suggested in https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/guix.html#Daemon-Running-Without-Privileges
on a system that previously had guix 1.4.0 installed.

And I was getting the "guix pull: error: cannot kill processes for uid `999': failed with exit code 1" error. Most of the bugs for that error were about problems with apparmor, but I wasn't seeing any apparmor error messages.

Then I realized that the documentation about setting up the build-users-group was before "Daemon-Running-Wihtout-Privileges" and even though the example guix-daemon.service has ExecStart... --build-users-group and User=guix-daemon, maybe it should only have one or the other.

After removing the --build-users-group guix pull worked.

@ajroach42

I must admit I thought of you when I saw the strange glitchy video effects recorded off of CRTs.

https://timeloop.cafe/@alienghic/117141779137934526

Youtube offered me a metal/synthwave styled song called "Tell me when the world stops ending".

it's a decent song, but the music video looks really distinctive...

And I bet some you might find the description "Custom analog glitch effects created by Rob Sheridan on CRT televisions with circuit-bent analog video hardware from Tachyons+, LoFi Future, and BPMC." interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm5ztvvzhJI

i usually get jasmine, though I'm trying to decide between cheap bag or expensive hippy bag.

While comparing too many types of rice...

If you regularly eat rice is it...

I'm so old and out of touch.

I thought my kids phone probably had 32 or 64 GB of storage.

But it's actually 128G.

Though kid has filled up 96 G of it.

So I checked my phone where I'm at 38 out of 128 G.

To the sound of kid asking "WHAT DO YOU DO!"

In @davidgerard 's Pivot To AI

Tante said a something I bet at least half of you mastodon users will appreciate:

"US Politics is the smog of the internet, you have to breath it in whether you want to or not"

And he then also pointed out that in Germany, many people are far more aware of what's going on with USA politics than the German politics that they do have some influence over.

#Ai #KI #Song

There's some species around Chernobyl that have a ton of a melanin. A typically green tree frog species is black inside the exclusion zone, suggesting the melanin provides protection against radiation.

There's even some molds that have a ton of melanin and grow toward radiation sources, leading some scientists to think they might have a way to metabolize radiation.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251125-the-mysterious-black-fungus-from-chernobyl-that-appears-to-eat-radiation

This led me to think, given Elon Musk's fascination with space and his extreme racism, I think it would be amazingly Ironic if it turned out that the humans best suited to survive long duration space flight were the ones with the darkest possible skin.

After the stories of several governments fighting over access to minerals in the Congo I feel like I should mention the environmental groups trying to save the congo rainforest from the industrialized nations.

https://savecongorainforest.wixsite.com/congo

Might be interesting to some around here.

A US independent war correspondent spent some time talking about the US government and mercenary groups getting involved in fighting ISIS in west Africa and M23 in the Congo, to gain access to rare earth minerals in places where china has been long making deals.

Also two countries Mali & Niger decided to move from US to Russian military support and it went so poorly it led to the local tribesmen deciding getting over their hatred of ISIS to work with ISIS to overthrow the russians and the central governments, which has been pretty succesful at forcing the russians to run away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5OHks6dNVk

He seems informed, and it's not often someone does a presentation on what's going down between the USA, China, Russia, and the EU in Africa.

@Tak

We already have some flying cars.

If you search for "car stuck in second story" you can find several examples. Here's a randomly picked one.

https://www.wdtn.com/news/unreal-car-crashes-into-second-story-of-california-home/

I have to appreciate #CountBinface's honestly

Count Binface believes he has 'given people more joy' than Nigel Farage"

I feel like that is a very true statement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tw3PmGhxw

Huh. the polls are open until 22:00/10pm for the Clacton by election.

At least California only gives us until 8pm/20:00. I think most other states polls close similarly early.

https://www.pollcheck.co.uk/by-elections/clacton

(This post brought to you by me wondering when we'll start hearing how this election turned out)

I was reading through the debian-vote mailing list about the whether to allow LLMs.

At one point one person called LLMs bullshit generators, and another got mad about the rude language.

I have another to describe LLMs that roughly means the same as bullshit generator, but I think it might be more offensive.

So poll time, would either of these be acceptable on a mailing list?

LLMs

Has anyone tried the argument that LLMs are a perfect vehicle to execute a xz backdoor style attack on free software?

We don't know how the big models were trained, we don't even know what their preambles are, and the best models are even only available as software as a service that could be changed at any time.

There's a long history of create a dependency among customers and then exploit it, so I really distrust american companies.

The British Math youtuber stand-up maths published a pro-Count Binface video show that it is possible (albeit unlikely) for Binface to win tomorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zn1pGRgEoo

And apparently they worked together on some earlier podcasts, so the video has a #Binface appearance.

The Debian upgrade release notes suggest running

apt list '?narrow(?installed, ?not(?origin(Debian)))'

to find non Debian packages so you can remove them before trying to upgrade.

For me those usually turn out to be obsolete packages....

So...

Bye:
Removing python2.6 (2.6.8-1.1)