The World Doesn't Have to Suck: Guerrilla Tree Planting to Improve Neighborhood Quality of Life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn-MZ9smE0A

I'm really enjoying this series from Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't teaming up with Brad Lancaster Water Harvester to show how Brad and his neighbors have been beautifying Tucson, adding wildlife habitat, and making the desert bloom with native plants for 30 years. #GuerrillaGardening #SolarPunk

It's #Pride #PrideMonth, so time to roll out these classics.

#humour #funny

PSA, not in relation to any recent events;

you can just decide not to interpret people as being hostile. Your neurodivergent friends who spens ages agonising about wording their posts in exactly the right way so it won’t be misread as hostile will appreciate it

to my neurodivergent friends: you can just block people who persistently engage with you in bad faith.

you won’t get in trouble

RE: https://mastodon.social/@caseynewton/116456942253634796

Opponents of AI are often depicted as naive and ignorant. We are depicted as having our heads buried in the sand, unwilling to accept the great capabilities of AI, or as insecure and afraid of AI's capabilities.

I would like to flip this narrative around: I think pro-AI technologists who only look at AI's "capabilities" are the naive ones.

This is because the AI industry and the people funding, producing, and pushing AI tools are not at all working on the level of capability - they are working on the level of AI as ideology. They are interested in AI as a tool to devalue labour, suppress wages, justify layoffs, and foster dependency on centralized tools controlled by a few companies. Technologists who only focus on "this code can be written good by this tool" are not even playing on the right level. Programmers talking about "wow! look at the code it can generate!" feel to me at this point like the 2-dimensional inhabitants of Flatland.

Perhaps this sounds conspiracy-minded to you, but the way in which AI is practically being deployed across industries is very stark evidence of this. The quoted employee monitoring at Meta, to gather data for using AI to devalue the work of white-collar workers, is just one example. AI mandates, token usage dashboards, performance reviews based on AI adoption, AI code acceptance metrics, and even the time and energy spent on building AI tools rather than things that would actually improve product quality - these are all in service of the same ideology.

The AI industry, and those who push AI tools are fundamentally uninterested in making your work better or leaving you in control of your work. They are telling you this directly through both words and actions. I think ignoring that is a stunning level of naïvete.

#noAI

Radiocarbon dating reveals that Italy's oldest oak forests (up to 600 years old) established in a synchronized pulse right after the Black Death outbreak (1347 CE). With less human pressure, nature bounced back at both sea level and high altitudes.

https://phys.org/news/2026-06-medieval-pandemic-left-hidden-legacy.html

Ancient oaks reveal rewilding of Mediterranean forests after the Black Death
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2529341123

PSA:

ℱ𝒶𝓃𝒸𝓎 𝔘𝔫𝔦𝔠𝔬𝔡𝔢 𝘁𝗲𝘅𝘁 𝚕𝚒𝚔𝚎 ｔｈｉｓ is hell on screen readers/text to speech, so please consider hiding it behind a CW, and definitely never use it in your online handle. Don't make me name names, folks.

If styled text is *that* important to you, consider a social media platform that supports formatting markup. (E. g. ActivityPub implementations like GoToSocial support Markdown; markup in federated blog posts via WordPress, Ghost, etc., should render correctly in clients; etc.)

Learn more here: https://inputoutput.dev/accessibility-issues-with-stylized-unicode-characters/

#WebAccessibility #accessibility #a11y #Unicode

Student: “So Elon Musk is a trillionaire?”
Me: “Yup.”
Student: “How did he get that much money?”
Me: “Well, he doesn’t really have a trillion dollars cash. He just owns a lot of stock in companies that are valued at a trillion dollars.”
Student: “So those companies make huge profits?”
Me: “Oh gosh no. They all lose billions of dollars a year. All of them. Huge losses.”

The Economist headline: “Gen Z Mysteriously Hates Capitalism and No One Can Figure Out Why.”