Cat and kitten door knocker, Clun, England

#Art

This is a pretty random request but hoping mastodon can help me. Is there anyone in Melbourne with experience taking photos with colour-positive 120 slide film (the large ~60mm stuff)? Super interested in hearing from anyone, especially if they have used the equipment before!

#photography #filmphotography #analogphotography #melbourne

If @wimleers wasn't so humble, this blog post would be titled, "Config validation: I told you so" 😄

https://wimleers.com/validation-first

Also - big 👍🏼 for his outstanding use of footnotes. 📝

#Drupal

So, heads up, I'm seeing this post announcing palantirwatch.org being boosted a lot: <excised>

However, the site seems to be vibe coded and, while I've just picked stuff at random, most claims are lacking sources and/or just plain wrong. I think it is all generated by an LLM.

- For example, the "Court Dossier" page mentions a 2019 case "Kik v. Palantir", about a "former partner" suing them for stealing fraud-detection tech. But a far as I can tell, there was no such case.
- The op-eds listed on the "Media & Narrative" page don't exist. E.g., Alex Karp never wrote an op-ed for The Atlantic.
- The few links given are incredibly generic (e.g., linking to a Bloomberg search result for "Alex Karp" rather than an actual story) or incorrect (like the Palantir page on OpenSecrets.org, which should be https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/palantir-technologies/summary?id=D000055177, and the figures don't match the website's).
- None of the quotes on the "Karp File" page seem to be real.

The creator's other sites appear to be LLM slop as well.

edit: the toot is taken down, site is "under construction".

Tropical carpenter ants question.

In northern temperate climates ants from the genus Camponotus are often accused of destroying wood structures. This is almost never true. The carpenter ants of the US simply cannot gnaw structurally sound wood. They nest in rotting wood in the wild, so if they nest in wooden beams in a building the beams are already rotten.

If you can't gouge the wood with your fingernail they can't either. They just aren't like termites.

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An opportunity for someone you know?

"If Given and I were looking for a more persuasive argument — we weren't — that our water-bound life is at an end, we've found it, writ large, in the last few days. We have decided to sell our boat or (our preference) gift her, fully equipped, to younger, fitter, adventurous people who might want to take her on and sail her further.

"Wrack is scruffy but sea-kindly and sound; with little work, she'd be a strong, reliable passage-maker — and/or make a practical creative, scientific, or activist platform — that might make a wild dream come true. Giving the boat away means we could 'pay forward' the care and generous support that we have received from so many over the past few years."

https://www.gofundme.com/f/a-voyage-in-search-of-home