This #DIDay - Sunday March 1st - we'll be online and hosting an onboarding workshop, to help folks get the most out of Mastodon. Tell your friends!

https://termine.di.day/events/0416dee7-cc7f-4e2a-aa94-ff11322daaaa

i built an entire x86 CPU emulator in CSS (no javascript)

you can write programs in C, compile them to x86 machine code with GCC, and run them inside CSS

https://lyra.horse/x86css/

Happy Birthday to Douglas Hofstadter (born 15 February 1945), cognitive and computer scientist, author of "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" and "I Am a Strange Loop".

From GEB, Hofstadter's law - "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."

From IAASL - “In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.”

How many of you were influenced by GEB?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter
1/n

"For the longest time, writing was more expensive than reading. If you encountered a body of written text, you could be sure that at the very least, a human spent some time writing it down. The text used to have an innate proof-of-thought, a basic token of humanity."

Yup, not any more.
https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-to-people/

We knew this was coming, but now the clock is running. From Privacy International:

"Yesterday the Trump Administration announced a proposed change in policy for travellers to the U.S. It applies to the powers of data collection by the Customs and Border Police (CBP)."

"If the proposed changes are adopted after the 60-day consultation, then millions of travellers to the U.S. will be forced to use a U.S. government mobile phone app, submit their social media from the last five years and email addresses used in the last ten years, including of family members. They’re also proposing the collection of DNA."

PI linked to and summarized a Federal Register entry describing the proposed requirements:

-All visitors must submit ‘their social media from the last 5 years’

-ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization) applications will include ‘high value data fields’, ‘when feasible’
‘telephone numbers used in the last five years’
-‘email addresses used in the last ten years’
-‘family number telephone numbers (sic) used in the last five years’
-biometrics – face, fingerprint, DNA, and iris
-business telephone numbers used in the last five years
-business email addresses used in the last ten years.

https://www.privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/5713/trump-administration-wants-your-dna-and-social-media

The Federal Register entry says comments are encouraged and
must be submitted (no later than February 9, 2026) to be assured of consideration.

Federal Register entry: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-12-10/pdf/2025-22461.pdf

How my students taught me that Github’s monopoly is hurting the Open Source ecosystem even more than I thought.

https://ploum.net/2026-01-05-unteaching_github.html

#github #floss