One of my favorite nuggets of writing advice comes from James D Macdonald. Jim, a Navy vet with an encylopedic knowledge of gun lore, explained to a group of non-gun people how to write guns without getting derided by other gun people: "just add the word 'modified.'"

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/2024/05/27/cmon-do-it-again/#better_to_remain_silent_and_be_thought_a_fool_than_to_speak_and_remove_all_doubt

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Lamppost EV chargers are the answer to how you charge your vehicle in cities.

This is possible because when energy intensive street lamps were replaced by LEDs, there’s excess power for charging EVs.

All cities should do this. ⚡️

h/t Robert Llewllyn

PSA for MacOS Sonoma users who don't want those fucking hearts / balloons / confetti reactions injected into your video feed at random while gesticulating in meetings, you may already know you can access the setting to turn them off via Facetime (wtf) or via the camera icon when it's active, but TIL you have to turn that shit off PER CAMERA. If you use an external webcam the Facetime setting doesn't cover it.

This message brought to you by fucking balloons appearing in a serious meeting, and a fuck you to whichever idiots at apple decided this was a good idea.

Slowly working my way through a few terabytes of timelapses shot in Feb and March.

Just after dinner we saw auroras poking through gaps in the cloud. I setup my first camera outside the rental cabin, pointed across the fjord to capture the clouds rolling by.

For the next hour I was helping my FIL shoot the more active auroras in the east. And didn't realise that my cloud timelapse was turning into an aurora timelapse :) Huge win.

#Aurora #TimeLapse #Photography #Senja #LumixS5II #SigmaPhoto

@pluralistic I got around to reading your Medium post, "How to Fix Cars* By Breaking “Felony Contempt of Business Model”". I love the conceptual framework of anti-features, and I've been wondering how that interacts with the negative rights of IP law. Also the irony of writing this on an operating system that is increasingly just a corporate duffel bag of anti-features is not lost to me.

Tiny note: "wheelchair" in the subhead is spelled with three es.

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-fix-cars-by-breaking-felony-contempt-of-business-model-1464231071e

When hydrocarbon barons do their damndest to torch the Earth with fossil fuels, they call *us* dreamers. They insist that there's a hard-nosed reality - humanity needs energy - and they're the ones who live in it, while we live in the fairy land where the world can run on sunshine and virtuous thoughts. Without them making the tough decisions, we'd all be starving in the frigid dark.

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