Profile

RE:

Mastodon

Firefox for Web Developers (@firefoxwebdevs@mastodon.social)

Something that hasn't been made clear: Firefox will have an option to completely disable all AI features. We've been calling it the AI kill switch...

This is great news so far as it goes. But. It amounts to "We're going to take all our resources (apart from the CEO's $7M salary, obviously) and plough it into generating plausible bullshit. But GREAT NEWS! You can turn it off. What if we spend all that effort on something people actually want? View quoted note →

I'm setting up a new MacBook, and I need #LibreOffice obviously. It occurred to me that it might be available in the App Store, which would be slightly more convenient than a separate download. It is ... for £8.99. What on earth is going on?! CC @npub1tgg4...qwzh

I was already done with the shrivelled husk that still calls itself the #Labour Party and will be voting #Green in future — a party that actually stands for something. But if I'd not yet given up on Labour, yesterday's vile anti-refugee rhetoric would have put the lid on it. The UK has not had a #Conservative Party for ten years now: the name and machinery succumbed to reverse takeover by UKIP. Now the same is happening to the former Labour Party. It's a cancer.

Today I learned that all those pointless collective nouns (a murder of crows, a parliament of owls, a pride of lions), which are only ever used in pub quizzes, were made up by one woman 500 years ago.

The Marginalian

A Parliament of Owls and a Murder of Crows: How Groups of Birds Got Their Names, with Wondrous Vintage Illustrations by Brian Wildsmith

Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy — our best tool for telling each other what the world is and what we are, for conv...

#TIL #TodayILearned

My word, this is bleak. Imagine having everything material that the world can give you and still being so inadequate.

I expect #LFC to get shafted by officials in the Premier League. We've seen it consistently. But I don't expect it in the UCL.

We all knew about this trend, but I didn't realise it was nearly so extreme as this: "Before 2000, for instance, only about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, etc. Now it’s 75%."

The Decline of Deviance

Where has all the weirdness gone?