Having bookworm kids is interesting in ways I'd never predicted. I want to recommend books to them, and of course I want to recommend books I enjoyed when I was younger.

But now I'm re-evaluating those books from a new perspective.

Evidently when I was younger I glossed over the fact that so many books put underage people into sexual situations.

David Palmer's Emergence, the main character Candy is pressured for sex despite being 12. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, YT is statutorily raped after being kidnapped for the purpose. David Gerrold's Chtorr had a scene weakly justifying child abuse. Peter F. Hamilton's A Second Chance at Eden had teenage girls being emotionally manipulated and seduced. Even William Gibson's Count Zero had the main character showing improper interest in the rescued daughter of a corporate scientist.

What the Hell, guys? Your stories can't stand up without this stuff? If you want sex in the books, have your characters be old enough to give consent.

At least I can still recommend Brin and Le Guin. The old school, Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein, are fairly safe, as far as I can remember.

This is interesting:

"AI training of copyrighted material not fair use: Third Circuit"

https://www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-of-copyrighted-material-not-fair-use-third-circuit/

#ai #llm #copyright

RE: https://mastodon.social/@climatenewsnow/117383705985782982

"...as climate change begins to alter almost every aspect of human life, [this] could offer anxious teenagers a sense of agency and ability to make some difference."

#climate

@grunfink Is this something I've done wrong, or is elinks just unhappy with SNAC2? I got this after writing a post. Despite the error the post was sent.

We're watching Peter Davison as the fifth Doctor now. What a lovely job they did...!

#doctorwho

I can't find fair trade coffee that doesn't use Shopify. Places that use Shopify include:

BLK & BOLD
Cafe Mam
Coffee Bean Direct
Conscious Coffees
Death Wish
Equal Exchange
Fair Trade Coffee (dot org)
Green Choice NOw
Grounds For Change
Just Us! Cofee Roasters co-op
Larry's Coffee
LifeBoost Coffee
Made By DWC
Peace Coffee
Rise Up Coffee Roasters
Stumptown Roasters
Wandering Bear Coffee
Wicked Joe

Potential:

Pura Vida Coffee - site issues - their certificate expired 12 days ago. I'll call them and tell them, although it feels like they must know already. They use SquareSpace.

I'll link something when I figure out someone not feeding fascism even indirectly.

Maybe I should see if SquareSpace has a directory...

Hm. This is interesting. I might have to start buying fair trade coffee through the Webstaurant Store. Crazy.

#coffee #fascism #fairtrade

I was told there were lizards on display. There were no lizards. Just snakes.

"Do you have anything with legs?" I asked one of the proprietors of the event. They had a millipede. Wife and kids were okay with this. I was the only one let down.

On the way in, a woman saw us masked and said to her husband, "Oh my gawd." I turned and exclaimed, "Oh my gawd! They're not wearing masks!" She replied, "And I never will!" To which I said, "Watch what that does to your lifespan and your brain!" Then I went about my business, looking at my people holding various snakes.

They want snakes now. (My people, not the human petri dishes. I don't know if they want snakes or not.) My thinking is, if they can find some snakes with legs, we'll talk. I mean, even fish have fins they use to get around, you know?

I'd keep an iguana again sometime, but not without a well-thought-out and comfortable habitat ready well in advance.

I learned about something neat today - KDE Eco.

"Independent, energy-efficient Free & Open Source Software for long-term hardware use."

This is just the right attitude.

https://eco.kde.org/

#kde #climate

The two places I buy coffee - Wicked Joe and Grounds For Change - use Shopify, and Shopify is right-wing bad news.

Why did a $154 billion CEO just endorse stripping most Americans of voting rights—and taking us back to the 19th century?
https://fortune.com/2026/07/27/shopify-ceo-voting-rights-stripping-americans-19th-century/

Shopify’s Right-Wing Inner Circle
https://www.thenation.com/podcast/society/twsu-080824/

What alternatives are there? I want something to offer to merchants as an alternative and I'm not sure an alternative exists.

Please boost, as if we put some good answers together we can shift the world a little.

#askfedi

I love my kids. We just passed a McDonald's and my ten year old says, "I only want to use them for their restrooms, so I'm using their resources."

Way to go, ten year old with your subtle economic micro-aggressions for social justice!

#socialjustice #mcdonalds #apartheid

More data centers means more accidents like this.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/computer-error-nj-data-center-231253231.html

#datacenter #climate

This is beyond awful. This is going to kill people to give more profit to oligarchs.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/14/trump-epa-repeal-pollution-standards-power-plants

#climate #epa

Anyone know the owner of https://zyd.lol/lisp-against-the-machine.html ? It's out of date for (at least) Chicken Scheme and Guile.

#scheme #lisp

The more things change, the more they stay the same. From the episode The Green Death.

#doctorwho #llm #ai

Here's a great example of what Debian's GR outcome has ushered in:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-wnpp/2026/08/msg00526.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-wnpp/2026/08/msg00528.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-wnpp/2026/08/msg00529.html

For the people who voted pro-slop, what's the copyright situation going to be here? Whose code is going to be regurgitated by this thing? How was it licensed originally?

#debian #slop

I wrote this to a FreeBSD luminary who posts a lot about the harms of LLMs. Heard nothing back so I'll open it up to the community. I don't get how LLMs can be dangerous, but FreeBSD using them is okay...? Anyway, comments welcome:

...

Hey, a question for you. I'm fond of FreeBSD. This Mastodon instance runs on it, for example. But the noises I'm hearing suggest a pro-slop FreeBSD policy on the way.

You post enough stuff that indicates you see the dangers that you must have some thoughts about FreeBSD approaching slop, and I'd love to hear them. I truly hate the notion of having to give up so much technology I love because of this stuff, but the slop has to be opposed for a variety of reasons.

#freebsd

What a world we live in! I noticed a post by @bremner linking to neovim fighting against removing a DHH quote. Given that DHH actively associates himself with white supremacy and ethnic cleansing, choosing to associate your project with him is quite a choice.

Well. Reading to the end of the thread, the maintainer decided to go out with a bang. I'm not sure this is any better a look than fighting for the DHH quote in the first place, but here we are.

Here's the link to the issue:

https://github.com/neovim/neovim.github.io/issues/501

Here's the patch that was finally accepted:

https://github.com/neovim/neovim.github.io/pull/504

And here's a link to something to use instead of Neovim:

https://codeberg.org/evi-editor

#neovim #dhh #fascism

I'm dismayed that the three systems and communities I love the most, Debian, FreeBSD, and Slackware, are falling into the trap we might call "Uncanny Valley as a Service".

Debian has their pro-slop policy now, and FreeBSD and Slackware both have influential developers who are pro-slop. FreeBSD is shooting for a "balanced" policy - but how do you balance the copyright and license violations, the cognitive harm, and the climate impact against a dubious "convenience?" And I don't expect Slackware will say anything formal.

I'm hoping I can rekindle my fondness for NetBSD, and I've probably got Gentoo in my future for desktops. I know I can live with NetBSD and if I set up a local binary build server I can minimize the energy cost of having to compile everything for Gentoo. (Maybe if I figure out the implications of the USE flags from default/linux/amd64/23.0/desktop/gnome that'll end up being reasonable. I'm not a G.N.O.M.E. user. See https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_binhost/Available_packages_and_configurations )

#debian #freebsd #slackware #noai

RE: https://mstdn.social/@primonatura/117219263640088135

I'd like to see some different perspectives on this, but we know tires are awful, so it's an interesting line of inquiry.

I think I'd trust this more if it came out of a university, rather than a place selling things. Too much chance of "it's good for what ails you" and entirely too much chance of any inherent dangers in the materials or supply chain being swept under the rug.

#climate #microplastics

Here's a good reason to not give up on the Debian community. This kind of facility, if it came ot pass, would allow people who disagree with the outcome of the GR to deploy Debian systems without compromising their ethical stance against slop:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1146059

There's still the issue of the kernel, but the dust isn't settled anywhere yet.

#debian #noai