China: stop winding up America. It isn't big, and it isn't clever.

America: You don't have to use ALL THE WEAPONS. The balloons can't hurt you.

Seriously guys, grow the fuck up. The rest of us are watching this and it reflects badly on both of you.

Best thing about driving an EV (Nissan Leaf): coming up to the autoestrada, single lane sliproad, 270º bend, some guy behind tailgating me because I refused to speed round the bend. A lot of people do this. I guess they see a family hatchback EV and decide it must be a "little old lady"-mobile, and they have a desperate need to show me how I'm holding their impressive petrol burner up.

Bend straightens out to join the main carriageway, and I just press the "tailgater begone" switch (the accelerator, all the way to the floor).

And then suddenly an obscenity of kilowatts is delivered to my wheels, and I'm just ... gone.

About a minute later, he does a spite overtake when he's finally got up to >120kph and caught me up.

But I know I'm living rent-free in his head for that 😊

We live in a world beset by people who live a sufficiently charmed life that they are able to spend their entire time “fucking around” without ever encountering the “and find out” stage.

Be nice if that changed, wouldn’t it?

Today the wind is blowing from the east. This generally creates very choppy waves and today is no exception. As a result, the port of Lagos is “closed to all traffic”, as the entrance is considered risky.

Portugal does this. It closes ports in conditions judged to be unsafe. This is a very different attitude to UK port authorities, which can generally be summed up as, “it’s your own stupid fault if you die”.

Just seen the worst take about the ChatGPT thing. It was basically “we should support open source chat models instead”

A bullshit fountain is still a bullshit fountain even if you can pull its source from Git.

For all the people wondering about why there’s so much fuss over someone personally deciding whether or not to play Grand Theft TERF or not, consider that there is a campaign to drive trans people from society in much of the English speaking world right now.

Trans people need to know who has our backs. Anyone who won’t cross the “please chose literally one of a thousand alternate and equally creative ways to get your dopamine hit” picket line (and let’s be honest, it’s the easiest picket line to not cross ever) certainly, does not have our backs.

We are used to this, but some of us persist in being optimists and expecting better of people anyway.

Meanwhile, this is an utterly amazing dopamine hit. It’s basically Tetris meets 2048, and I guess no queer people were harmed in its production. I’ve been playing the same session for weeks on and off now and have a 2^25 cube.

Hello! We are DOCKER! We are a serious company providing services to the THE BIGGEST COMPANIES IN THE WORLD.

If you use our product and don’t pick a name for what it creates, we will randomly name it after an Ann Summers vibrator.

Thank you for choosing DOCKER (version 69.69, dangling-donkey).

Your regular reminder that John Money lied about the results of what he did to the Reimer twins, covered up the fact that David appeared to express an innate gender identity of male, and that both twins died by suicide, likely as a result of what Money did to them.

Furthermore, through his covering up the damage his wholly unethical experiment did, he gave legitimacy to subsequent decades of mistreatment of trans and intersex people by quacks.

It’s a shame hell isn’t a real thing, because by god, he deserves to rot there.

My dockerised homebridge was logging using the American date format, and I found this incredibly annoying. Worked out how to fix it: you add this to the docker-compose file...

    environment:
      LANG: en_GB.UTF-8

Took me long enough to work that out though.

I am, unusually, awake for the sunrise. This means I just got to see a bird fly straight into my window with a loud THUMP!, turn round, and fly away again.

I guess this is the bird equivalent of me randomly walking into things. Hope it’s ok.

The mission architecture for the ESA/NASA Mars sample return mission is becoming clear. As the spacecraft approaches Mars, it will break into an entry vehicle and an orbiter (from ESA). The entry vehicle will land and the samples will be loaded onto it by rover or helicopter.

It will then launch into Mars orbit to rendezvous with the ESA orbiter and deliver the samples. The ESA orbiter will then burn for Trans Earth Injection and coast to Earth.

Once it hits the atmosphere, it will decelerate rapidly in a blaze of fire before slowing to subsonic speed and deploying its parachutes.

At this point, the United States Air Force will scramble an elite F22 Raptor squadron and shoot it down for being a Martian Spy Capsule.

jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia25338-n…

NASA's Mars Helicopters: Present, Future, and Proposed

This illustration depicts three different of models of NASA's solar-powered Mars helicopter.

^{NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)}

I now understand why you can’t share photos from a Mastodon client when using it with #Friendica:

In Friendica, photos have permissions. Mastodon doesn’t understand this, so when it uploads the photo it doesn’t set any. The Friendica server seems to see this and decide it needs to default to the most restrictive set, i.e. private.

So the created post does not contain a shareable photo.

If you then go into your gallery and edit the photo permissions to be public, then make a bullshit edit to the post, so that it refederates, it’ll suddenly appear.

An interesting fediverse quirk. On Mastodon, you can change visibility midway through a comment thread.

This makes sense because Mastodon is a Twitter-like microblogging platform and each response is a post in its own right.

But this is a federal system and your toots may be going to something that isn’t Mastodon.

This, that you are reading now, is not a Mastodon post. It’s a Friendica post. Friendica is not Twitter-like; it’s Facebook-like. That means that a post includes all responses as comments on that post and not first class posts in their own right.

Which means you can’t, e.g., change the audience midway through a comment thread, even if the people you’re replying to are on Mastodon, because the idea of changing the visibility midway through a comment thread is absurd in Facebook-like parlance.

As different fediverse protocols become increasingly popular, we’re gonna have to het used to these quirks.