Mastodawn

Top FEMA Official Claims He Teleported to Waffle House.

FEMA's Gregg Phillips says he has experienced multiple "scary" episodes of sudden teleportation: Phillips spoke "on multiple podcasts" about being teleported against his will, which he has...
https://jwz.org/b/yk4x

Joe McLaughlin 1d ago

Locus Magazine 1d ago

#FundraiserPerk Want a specially chosen set of Locus to peruse? 📬
Get a Curated Magazine Flight (12 digital back issues!) from the last 15 years of Locus when you support our fundraiser!

https://locusmag.com/igg26 (link in bio)
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Joe McLaughlin 3d ago

Cory Doctorow 3d ago

William Gibson is one of history's most quotable sf writers: "The future is here, it's not evenly distributed"; "Don't let the little fuckers generation-gap you"; "Cyberspace is everting"; and the immortal: "The street finds its own uses for things":

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#original-sin

Joe McLaughlin 4d ago

Eugen Rochko 5d ago

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/1

10 years today.

Joe McLaughlin 5d ago

Steve Thompson PhD 5d ago

Trump Wins When Oscar Winners Stay Silent

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/opinion/oscar-winners-political-speeches.html

Opinion | Trump Wins When Oscar Winners Stay Silent

Right now it does matter a lot whether actors can find the right words.

The New York Times

Joe McLaughlin 5d ago

Show thread

Matt Blaze 6d ago

Once again:

- There are security weaknesses in parts of US election systems, particularly those that use paperless touchscreen voting machines, and we should absolutely address them.

- Fortunately, there is no evidence to date that these technical weaknesses have ever been exploited to alter a US election outcome.

- We know how to secure elections! Paper ballots, optical scanners, post-election risk-limiting audits.

- There's been a great deal of progress, but there's still work to do.

Joe McLaughlin Mar 12

Jeff Sikes - Hire me!Mar 12

This is why I love following RSS feeds. Finding random, unexpected stories about people doing things.

Good luck, @jsnell

https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/03/ill-take-beach-reading-for-1000-ken/

I’ll take ‘beach reading’ for $1000, Ken

So I had a pretty weird January. While planning for a week on vacation, two things happened that totally derailed me. The Wall Street Journal asked me to review David Pogue’s book “Appl…

Six Colors

Joe McLaughlin Mar 10

Cory Doctorow Mar 10

Oh, nothing, just individually locating and downloading 9.5gb worth of (200+) high-rez (3600px wide) scans out of a 16th C book of extremely satisfying machines from the Library of Congress, one at a time, labeling them, and putting them in a folder for future collage work.

Joe McLaughlin Mar 10

Ray Traylor Mar 10

It's been bothering me why people I-know-who-know-better won't admit the real risk of AI coding on important codebases.

I'm not talking about AI evangelists, non-technical, or even devs without security/uptime ownership.

This is even outside social media, so you can't blame the algo.
Not in the context of arguing, so not rhetorical tricks.
Not even directed at me, so no identity performance.

What the hell is going on?

Joe McLaughlin Mar 10

🏳️‍⚧️PepperTheVixen🦯Mar 10

I had a power cut yesterday and it knocked my servers offline. Now one of them is complaining that fsck can't find a UUID and can't boot properly. Guess what? No SSH, no console speech. Thanks, Linux. Now I have no choice but to use AI to fix it or wait between several hours and several days to get a sighted person in. After all, we all have perfect vision and can read the video output which is still functioning. Linux is for everyone, amirite? Grandma's totally gonna be able to figure out wtf udev is when Mint shits the bed after the power goes out during a storm and she'll totally remember to swap the cells out on her UPS every 2 to 3 years