2 Spoopy 4 You

Elder Millennial. Husband. Girl dad. Dog owner. IT Professional. Tech enthusiast. Software tinkerer. Music lover. Huge Sleep Token and Bilmuri fan.

Non-practicing white person.

Grew up in MD. Lived in and around Baltimore for a long time. Currently living in VA with my wife, youngest daughter, and our 2 dogs.

Operator of:
https://feedecho.net

Admin of:
https://DMV.Community (Mastodon)

Public Key

npub1jpupfrwdst6fjfvmvz02fyt39dgeqzukq2v9gf3saw8rfznv6kusn7qwga

NIP-05 Address

jcrabapple@dmv-community.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsfq7q53hxc9ayeykdkp84yj9cjk5vspwtq9xz5yccwhr353fkdtwgpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43qz9thwden5te0wfjkccte9ekk7um5wgh8qatzpud6hx

Publishing to

relay.ditto.pub

relay.mostr.pub

Author Public Key

npub1jpupfrwdst6fjfvmvz02fyt39dgeqzukq2v9gf3saw8rfznv6kusn7qwga

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Last Notes

2026-10-25 13:30:56 UTC

Good morning. ☕

2026-10-24 00:40:52 UTC

Running Mac apps on Cutefish - Cutefish
https://cutefish.org/blog/running-mac-apps/

2026-10-21 13:51:14 UTC

Good morning from California. ☕

2026-10-19 17:29:08 UTC

📡 The RSS Universe directory just grew by 15 tools, all of them suggestions from people who read the site and noticed something missing.
Akregator, Nextcloud News, ReadKit, News Explorer, Reader Ultra, Leed, Salut, Sikio, FeedCity, micro.blog, Feedlynx, Feed Canary and more.
Now 122 apps, tools and standards, every link checked live.
https://toolbox.rss.here.now/
#rss #opensource #feedreader
https://dmvcommunitymedia.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/117/468/754/617/995/840/original/5d7c558b8846b1c2.png

2026-10-17 22:48:30 UTC

Definitely one of the coolest looking records that I own!
https://dmvcommunitymedia.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/117/458/683/935/127/442/original/de231d73ec29c48b.jpeg

2026-10-16 14:15:33 UTC

❤️ Jason just liked a song on LastFM 🎶
Buried In Spring - Farewell of the Century
https://www.last.fm/music/Buried+In+Spring/_/Farewell+of+the+Century

2026-10-15 17:31:37 UTC

The #RSS Universe — Readers, Tools & Standards
https://toolbox.rss.here.now/

2026-10-13 19:18:27 UTC

My GoToSocial instance at gts.snakepit.us now has open signups with manual approval. If you have ever wanted a quiet, hand-moderated corner of the fediverse, here is how joining works:
1. Fill out the form at https://gts.snakepit.us/signup. Pick a username, add an email, and write a few sentences about who you are and why you want in. The reason matters: it is what I actually review.
2. Your request lands in my moderation queue the moment you submit, and I approve or deny it by hand. No email verification loop, no waiting on a robot.
3. Once approved you sign in with your email and password and you are done. Use any fediverse app you like, or Sidewinder (gtsweb.snakepit.us), the client I built for the instance: installable PWA, push notifications, a catch-up digest for when you have been away, and full keyboard navigation.
What the instance is: small, on my own hardware at home, nightly backups, no algorithm, no ads, no tracking. I vouch for people one at a time instead of running an open door, which is exactly why the form asks for a reason. This is essentially what I have been doing for DMV.Community for years and it has worked well for keeping it peaceful and friendly here.
If that sounds like your speed, come join.
https://gts.snakepit.us/signup
#GoToSocial #Fediverse #ActivityPub #Mastodon

2026-10-13 18:19:03 UTC

Follow my alt account on my GTS instance: @nprofile…xpuu

2026-10-09 12:13:23 UTC

ascii.rest: animated ascii art for web pages
https://ascii.rest/

2026-09-29 18:27:40 UTC

Mastodon collections haven't really taken off, have they?

2026-09-27 13:01:33 UTC

People like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are not geniuses. They're just evil morons who have been able to take advantage of a system built by and for evil morons. We need to rebuild a society where these idiots cannot get money and power.

2026-09-26 23:37:47 UTC

Music question of the day: What are your favorite album openers?
A few of mine:
Understanding in A Car Crash by Thursday
The End by Bilmuri
Look to Windward by Sleep Token
Ready Fuels by Anberlin
The Past Should Stay Dead by Emarosa
Romeo A Go Go by Every Time I Die
No Stars Over Bethlehem by Protest the Hero
#music

2026-09-25 15:10:05 UTC

Rainy Arcade
https://rainyarca.de/

2026-09-21 01:35:52 UTC

Arizona raised solar panels on stilts over its crops so one acre could grow food and make power at once — then researchers noticed a third job nobody put in the brochure: skin under the panels runs 21 degrees cooler, in a country where crop workers are 20 times more likely to die of heat
https://www.autonocion.com/us/arizona-solar-panels/

2026-09-20 17:28:42 UTC

I love the IPA guy.
https://dmvcommunitymedia.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/117/304/545/458/759/129/original/30e3fda0da40bdef.mp4

2026-09-08 00:34:50 UTC

I wish I could erase my brain and listen to Sleep Token again for the first time.

2026-09-03 14:30:50 UTC

🕷️ A jumping spider that nurses its young with milk — 4x the protein of cow's milk
Female Toxeus magnus spiders secrete a milk-like fluid from their egg-laying opening for nearly 40 days after hatching. Newborns drink nothing else for the first 20 days and die within 11 days if the mother's milk supply is blocked.
Even after spiderlings learn to hunt at day 20, they keep nursing alongside their own kills for another three weeks. Daughters are allowed to return to the nest after reaching adulthood, but adult sons are attacked if they try.
This subverts the long-held assumption that lactation and extended milk-provisioning are exclusive to mammals.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/jumping-spider-mom-nurses-her-brood-weeks-milk
#arachnid #zoology #biology

2026-08-30 12:04:24 UTC

mixed bag 08-29-26
https://iwebthings.joejenett.com/mixed-bag-08-29-26/

2026-08-29 16:26:58 UTC

These videos are my source of calm.
https://dmvcommunitymedia.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/117/179/730/194/000/265/original/bd2e5ab51eae0afc.mp4

2026-08-23 22:28:56 UTC

One of the new murals the town has commissioned.
https://dmvcommunitymedia.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/117/147/175/943/416/240/original/572530b1b20de625.jpg

2026-08-21 15:17:16 UTC

I've never seen a Cybertruck at a library. Just saying.

2026-08-20 00:49:01 UTC

Merck-Moderna mRNA cancer vaccine succeeds in late-stage melanoma trial
https://www.statnews.com/2026/08/19/mrna-cancer-vaccine-trial-melanoma-merck-moderna/

2026-08-18 17:01:11 UTC

Russians pull cash from banks, fearing Kremlin will seize deposits for war - The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/08/18/russians-pull-cash-banks-fearing-kremlin-will-seize-deposits-war/

2026-08-18 16:55:48 UTC

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@nprofile…mk4g we'll see! She and I have always been close and she's always kept in touch with me better than her sisters.

2026-08-18 16:26:13 UTC

🧫 A black mold from inside the Chernobyl reactor appears to feed on radiation, and researchers are exploring it as a shield for deep space.
Cladosporium sphaerospermum was isolated from the ruined reactor 4 in the 1990s by Ukrainian microbiologist Nelli Zhdanova, who found fungi growing toward radioactive particles. Later work showed the mold grows faster in the presence of radiation. Scientists suspect its dark pigment, melanin, converts radiation into chemical energy, a process dubbed radiosynthesis, loosely like chlorophyll and sunlight. The exact mechanism is still debated.
In 2018 the fungus went to the International Space Station. A 1.7 mm thick layer cut radiation reaching sensors beneath it by up to about 2 percent, and the mold grew about 21 percent faster in space, though microgravity may explain part of that. Extrapolating, the team estimated a roughly 21 cm thick layer could largely negate the annual radiation dose on Mars, or about 9 cm mixed with Martian soil.
The appeal: a shield that grows itself from a few grams, self-repairs, and needs no launch mass. Promising proof of concept for Moon and Mars habitats. The idea of literally coating a spaceship exterior is still speculative.
Read more:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251125-the-mysterious-black-fungus-from-chernobyl-that-appears-to-eat-radiation
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/microbiology/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2022.877625/full
#fungi #science #space

2026-08-18 15:22:42 UTC

Even though she's off at college, my daughter still texts me every day. That makes me really happy.

2026-08-18 14:30:16 UTC

🐟 The Amazon molly is an all-female fish that has cloned itself for over 100,000 years. Scientists just figured out how it defies evolutionary extinction.
By all rights, this thumb-sized fish should be long dead. Theory says asexual species accumulate harmful mutations until their genome collapses, typically within 10,000 years. But the Amazon molly (Poecilia formosa) has thrived in Texas and Mexico rivers for 10 times that long.
The secret, revealed in a Nature study this year, is a genetic repair mechanism called gene conversion. The fish genome repeatedly overwrites damaged DNA by copying healthy sequences from one chromosome to another, undoing harmful mutations. It is natures own copy-and-paste fix for an otherwise doomed genome.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/this-fish-has-been-able-to-clone-itself-for-100000-years
#Science #Biology #Evolution

2026-08-17 14:30:09 UTC

🦁 Camera traps in Spain captured female Iberian lynxes deliberately dunking dead rabbits in water troughs — the first documented case of a wild carnivore soaking its prey.
The behavior was first recorded in August 2020 when a lynx named Naia was seen carrying a freshly killed rabbit to a water trough and submerging it for over a minute. Since then, 5 different females have been observed doing the same thing 8 times, always during the hot summer months in central Spain.
Experiments confirmed that a soaked rabbit carcass retains water for up to 40 minutes. Scientists believe the lynxes may be using the soaked meat to hydrate their cubs or ease the transition from milk to solid food. The behavior runs in family groups, suggesting these solitary cats can learn from each other.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/camera-traps-reveal-iberian-lynxes-soaking-their-prey-a-first-ever-discovery-among-carnivores-180988591/
#IberianLynx #AnimalCulture #WildlifeScience

2026-08-16 19:27:02 UTC

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@nprofile…mk4g she took her car and managed to get a spot down the street so that's not too bad. She wants to try and get an RA position next year.

2026-08-16 19:21:28 UTC

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@nprofile…mk4g yeah that's nice. They have honors dorms that are like that.

2026-08-16 17:32:40 UTC

My daughter at WVU is getting along great with her roommate, who moved in yesterday. The school connects them as soon as rooms are selected, so they've been chatting and getting to know each other most of the summer. Her roommate also has a friend at WVU so the three of them are hanging out. They went out last night to an event called Up All Night that the school does for the students and they had a great time. Then they went to their first college party. I'm glad she's getting outside of her comfort zone and finding a good circle of friends to watch out for each other.

2026-08-16 13:53:23 UTC

8BitDo FlipPad
"The USB-C port is rated for over 10,000 insertions."
Just like your mom.
https://www.8bitdo.com/flippad

2026-08-15 01:32:48 UTC

🍄 There's a mushroom that makes people see tiny people. The same tiny people, every time.
Lanmaoa asiatica is a bolete sold as a delicacy in Yunnan, China and the northern Philippines. Cooked thoroughly, it's a savory umami-rich food. Eaten raw or undercooked, it reliably triggers Lilliputian hallucinations, visions of tiny elf-like figures marching under doors and crawling up walls.
Classic psychedelics give everyone a different trip. This mushroom gives basically everyone the same one. University of Utah researchers sequenced it and found no known psychoactive compound at all, no psilocybin, no ibotenic acid. It points to a completely new hallucinogenic chemical.
The trips start 12 to 24 hours after eating and can last up to a week. Nobody uses it recreationally. Hot pot restaurants just set a 15-minute timer and warn you not to eat until it goes off.
Read more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanmaoa_asiatica
https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/scientists-identify-mushroom-behind-tiny-people-hallucinations/
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260121-the-mysterious-mushroom-that-makes-you-see-tiny-people
#mushrooms #mycology #science

2026-08-12 21:50:30 UTC

Karoline Leavitt to step down as White House press secretary at end of month
Fuck all the way off.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/press-secretary-karoline-leavitt-step-down-end-of-august-rcna592223

2026-08-12 14:30:54 UTC

🐟 Tiny fish called shellears can scale a 50-foot waterfall in the Congo Basin using microscopic hook-like structures on their fins.
Thousands of these fish, each just 37-48mm long, gather at Luvilombo Falls during floods and spend about 10 hours climbing the vertical rockface. Larger individuals are too heavy and get left behind.
The fish use hook-covered fins to grip the splash zone beside the main waterfall flow, then wiggle their bodies as if swimming vertically. It is the first time this behavior has been formally documented in Africa.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-42534-8
#Science #Nature #Zoology

2026-08-12 12:14:42 UTC

📜 Thomas Jefferson bought his copy of the Quran in 1765, 11 years before he drafted the Declaration of Independence.
Both Jefferson and Adams owned Qurans. Adams kept the first Quran printed in America, a 1806 Springfield, Massachusetts edition now in the Boston Public Library.
That era's diplomacy leaned on this knowledge too. Article 11 of the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, ratified under Adams, declares the US government "is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."
And the Quran itself names Jesus the Messiah (al-Masih) nine times, though it rejects his divinity.
Read more:
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/thomas-jeffersons-library/reason.html
https://archive.org/details/korancommonlycal00john
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/bar1796t.asp
#history #religion #foundingfathers

2026-08-11 21:50:43 UTC

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@nprofile…f83y done!

2026-08-11 02:11:28 UTC

📦 New release: Kageboard v0.1.1
Kageboard is a web dashboard for Kage, a CLI that freezes websites into offline mirrors. Clone, browse, and pack mirrors from your browser instead of remembering flags.
This release is a security pass: path traversal fixes, XSS in the clone log, extension creds moved out of Google sync, constant-time auth, and 25 new tests.
https://github.com/jcrabapple/kageboard/releases/tag/v0.1.1
#selfhosted #opensource

2026-08-10 15:12:00 UTC

Dogs can tell if you’re angry, scared, or sad
https://www.popsci.com/environment/dogs-can-tell-angry-sad-scared/

2026-08-10 14:04:51 UTC

🦪 The most sustainable animal protein on Earth doesn't walk, graze, or need feeding.
Bivalves (mussels, oysters, clams, scallops) are filter feeders. They eat phytoplankton straight from the water. No feed. No fertilizer. No freshwater. No land. No antibiotics. They actually clean the water as they grow.
A single oyster can filter up to 50 gallons a day in ideal conditions (in the wild, more like 3-12 gallons, but still impressive). Their shells are calcium carbonate, built from dissolved carbon in seawater.
There's ~1.5 million km² of suitable coastline worldwide for bivalve farming. Per a Cambridge study, developing just 1% of tropical coastline could satisfy the protein needs of over 700 million people.
Bivalve aquaculture emissions are roughly 7.6% of the average for terrestrial animal protein. That's lower than chicken, lower than insects, lower than nearly anything else with a pulse.
Full research with sources: https://hermez.prose.sh/2026-08-10-bivalves
#aquaculture #sustainability #foodsystems

2026-08-10 12:47:45 UTC

🦐 TIL: A mantis shrimp can perceive depth with a single eye. Each eye is split into three sections that all focus on the same point - trinocular vision, in one eyeball. Humans need two eyes for depth perception. This shrimp does it with one.
Its eyes are the most complex in the animal kingdom. 16 classes of photoreceptors to our 3. It sees ultraviolet, 6 channels of polarization (including circular - the only animal known to do this), and each eye moves independently on a stalk, scanning the world like two gimbaled sensors.
The part that gets me: its brain is the size of a grain of rice. So researchers at UQ discovered it offloads most visual processing to the eyes themselves. The retina pre-processes color, polarization, and motion into parallel streams before anything hits the brain. Edge computing, 340 million years before we thought of it.
Read more:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3886321/
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12140
https://news.uq.edu.au/2019-11-25-mantis-shrimp-make-sense-staggering-amount-visual-information
#biology #vision #mantisShrimp

2026-08-10 12:33:44 UTC

One aspect of culture that really makes it hard for me to understand why anyone could hate another race so much is food. How could anyone not want to experience delicious food from other cultures? Racists are the most boring, vanilla weirdos with horrible taste in everything.
There's a shopping center in town that always has amazing looking Latin American food. The businesses in it come and go and we've only tried a few but they are always good and the people are always kind.
The first place we ever tried was Taqueria El Barrio, a Salvadorian taco place where the owners and staff barely spoke English but they were as nice as can be and their food was amazing. Still some of the best tacos I've ever had. I'm still sad that it's gone but there are a few newer places in there I want to try.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/3B5HPLXXzYgQmtAFA?g_st=ac
https://maps.app.goo.gl/R1xwJVWvowCSXTp96?g_st=ac
https://maps.app.goo.gl/9CUd6MFhNBSAoNCDA?g_st=ac
https://maps.app.goo.gl/DmyyWCLxvVi5C1Ae8?g_st=ac

2026-08-08 12:29:56 UTC

🔴 A defense contractor is now selling technology that scans every electronic device in your car as you drive past a camera. It ties everything to your license plate. You cannot opt out.
It is called SignalTrace. Made by Leonardo, an Italian military contractor with existing U.S. Special Operations Command contracts. It sweeps your phone, smartwatch, Bluetooth headphones, your dog's RFID chip, tire pressure sensors, your car's infotainment system. Anything that broadcasts.
It bundles these into what Leonardo calls your "electronic fingerprint," timestamped and geotagged. Stored in an "Enterprise Operations Center for future queries and analysis."
Those are their words. Not mine.
You did not consent. You cannot opt out. Your devices broadcast by existing. In most places, this is perfectly legal.
If this sounds like something that will be abused: it already has been. Police have used existing license plate reader networks to stalk partners, verify school residency, run background checks, and monitor protests. At least 22 officers charged or resigned for ALPR stalking.
SignalTrace does not read your messages. It does not need to. It knows who you travel with, where you go, and when.
Sources: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/06/24/surveillance-tech-company-is-pitching-an-unholy-alpr-stingray-hybrid-to-law-enforcement/ and https://www.leonardocompany-us.com/lpr/elsag-signaltrace
#surveillance #privacy #ALPR

2026-08-07 23:53:33 UTC

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@nprofile…3d77 is that the one that has the optional kit that basically turns it into a DSLR?

2026-08-07 23:50:07 UTC

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@nprofile…3d77 I've heard great things about the camera on those Oppo phones. These photos look great.

2026-08-07 16:21:19 UTC

Brown and black people fighting for working folks in this country are more American than the rich white people trying to silence them.

2026-08-07 14:16:26 UTC

heaving. - carsick (Official Music Video)
This band is combining the best of both 90s and early 2000s post-hardcore. Sounds like Rival Schools + A Static Lullaby.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=k93JL4M86Yk&is=WpHweFkt-e_uFn2K

2026-08-05 11:36:52 UTC

We need everyone at this level of anger. How do I get this guy to go on a speaking tour of the red states?
https://dmvcommunitymedia.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/117/042/694/011/859/653/original/9f63b6e51ba5859f.mp4

2026-08-05 00:53:48 UTC

🐕 TIL: Dogs copy us even when it makes zero sense. Half of dogs will touch a pointless dot on the wall or flip a dead lever before getting their treat, just because their person did it first.
That behavior is overimitation, and researchers thought it was uniquely human. Great apes never do it. Dogs do it most with their own caregiver, which points to a social motive: copying keeps them in the game.
The evidence is solid. Johnston et al. 2017 found half of dogs and dingoes copied both actions. Huber et al. 2018 replicated it in Vienna. A 2023 follow-up found 85% of overimitation happened after the dog already got the reward, which kills the confusion theory.
Dogs also anticipate what their caregiver will do next and sync their behavior to match. A 2020 ethics review from Vetmeduni Vienna pulls this all together and argues it creates real duties: we owe dogs the chance to flourish, not just protection from harm.
The catch: they will pick up your bad habits too. Copying "seemingly unproductive or dysfunctional" strategies is part of the package.
Read more:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7772310/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13420-018-0336-z
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9982082/
#dogs #dogtraining #science

2026-08-04 16:58:04 UTC

🤖 DeepSeek's new V4 Flash really is 99% cheaper than Claude Opus 4.8: $0.28 vs $25 per million output tokens.
It also beat Claude on Arena's front-end coding leaderboard and scores 82.7 on Terminal-Bench, ahead of some Claude tiers. That part is true.
The nuance: on overall intelligence rankings Claude still leads. V4 Flash is a 284B open-weight model with a 1M context window, MIT-licensed, and it's the same playbook as Moonshot's Kimi K3, which took the same coding crown first. Cheap open models keep getting very good at specific jobs, and that's changing who pays what.
US hyperscalers still outspend China on AI infrastructure by 7-8x (Goldman), so reports of the US losing the race are early.
Read more:
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/01/deepseek-model-cheap-ai-price-war
https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/
https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-K3
#AI #DeepSeek #OpenSource

2026-08-03 23:00:23 UTC

Dario can suck a fuck.
https://dmvcommunitymedia.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/117/034/056/436/188/825/original/ec04d9b884a12e66.jpg

2026-08-03 22:51:40 UTC

🔌 Slate Auto's electric truck ships with no modem at all, and that's the privacy story.
The startup's $24,950 EV pickup has no built-in cellular connection, so the company physically can't track your location, remote-access the car, or pull data from it. A phone app handles settings and charging info, but it only works standing next to the truck, and Slate says app data is opt-in and never sold. Their words: "We collect data to make ownership better, not to turn the owner into the product."
The context matters. Mozilla's 2023 review called cars the worst product category it has ever reviewed for privacy, with 84% of brands sharing or selling driver data. The FTC banned GM from selling driver data in 2025 after OnStar collected location every 3 seconds. Meanwhile Ford published a patent application for in-car cameras that can read lips and facial expressions.
A policy can be rewritten next quarter, but hardware that doesn't exist can't be switched on. That's the durable part. One caveat from the EFF: the app data policy can still change as the company scales.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/06/slate-says-its-electric-pickup-will-never-track-you/
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/
#privacy #EV #cars

2026-08-03 19:42:49 UTC

🚗 The Rivian R2 is finally reaching customers, and it is the compact EV meant to take on the Tesla Model Y.
Rivian revealed the R2, R3 and R3X back in March 2024 on a brand new midsize platform. R2 deliveries finally started June 9, 2026, leading with a dual-motor Performance trim that makes 656 hp, hits 60 mph in 3.6 seconds and carries 330 miles of EPA range.
The standout features are all real. Dual screens up front, all five seats that fold flat into one big sleeping surface, and a power rear window that rolls down like an old wagon. The quickest tri-motor setup is still promised to do 0 to 60 in under 3 seconds.
Two reality checks on the hype. The $45,000 base model everyone was promised does not arrive until late 2027, and with destination it lands at $46,495. And the federal $7,500 EV tax credit was repealed for cars acquired after September 30, 2025, so current buyers get nothing, putting the launch trim at $59,485.
Read more:
https://stories.rivian.com/meet-r2-and-r3
https://www.irs.gov/clean-vehicle-tax-credits
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/09/rivian-starts-deliveries-of-its-all-important-r2-suv/
#Rivian #R2 #ElectricVehicles

2026-08-02 21:24:03 UTC

Spider-Man: Brand New Day was fantastic. I agree with my daughters: 11/10. Very well done. It might be the most genuine feeling Spider-Man movie ever made.

2026-08-02 13:25:18 UTC

Marjorie Taylor Greene heralds new anti-Trump posse with Tucker Carlson and Thomas Massie: "The movement has begun"
Fuck you, it's way too late.
https://www.tag24.com/en/news/politics/politicians/marjorie-taylor-greene/marjorie-taylor-greene-heralds-new-anti-trump-posse-with-tucker-carlson-and-thomas-massie-the-movement-has-begun-3520910

2026-08-01 14:30:54 UTC

🕷️ A new spider species discovered in the Ecuadorian Amazon disguises itself as a zombie fungus — the first known case of a spider mimicking a deadly parasite.
When herpetologist Alexander Bentley poked what looked like a Gibellula fungus-covered spider corpse in the rainforest, the "corpse" moved. It turned out to be Taczanowskia waska, a spider that deliberately grows tendril-like tubercles from its abdomen to look like it has already been killed by the fungus. It even sits motionless on leaf undersides, exactly where infected spiders are found.
The disguise likely serves two purposes: predators avoid what seems like a fungus-ridden corpse, and prey do not recognize the spider as a threat. Taczanowskia spiders are webless — they use enlarged claws to ambush victims, hiding in plain sight behind a fungal costume.
The discovery was published in Zootaxa in February 2026 and started with a cell phone photo uploaded to iNaturalist.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/spider-mimicing-cordyceps-9.7141687
#NewSpecies #Spider #Evolution

2026-07-31 23:44:55 UTC

📜 TIL the Korean alphabet Hangul is the only major writing system invented from scratch for its own language, and its letters are drawings of your mouth.
King Sejong the Great finished it in 1443 so common people could read and write. The consonants literally trace the speech organs: ㄱ is the tongue root blocking the throat, ㅁ is lips pressed together, ㅅ is the teeth.
The vowels encode sky, earth, and human: a dot, a horizontal line, and a vertical stroke.
The scholar class hated it. For 400 years it was treated as a script for women, monks, and commoners, until it went mainstream in the late 1800s. Hangul Day is now a national holiday in South Korea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hangul
#linguistics #history #korea

2026-07-31 20:20:43 UTC

Make My Drive Fun
https://makemydrivefun.com/

2026-07-31 15:58:03 UTC

New solar panels in Great Britain at 15-year high as fossil fuel costs soar | Solar power | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/31/new-solar-panels-great-britain-15-year-high

2026-07-31 15:31:19 UTC

📜 For nearly 2,000 years, the Herculaneum scrolls were considered unreadable—carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD into brittle lumps that crumbled when touched. Now, using particle accelerators and AI, the Vesuvius Challenge has digitally unwrapped an entire scroll for the first time, recovering 20 columns of continuous ancient Greek text. One scroll may contain lost works by Chrysippus, a founding Stoic philosopher whose writings were almost entirely lost to history. Another revealed a previously unknown 8th book of On Gods by Philodemus. With 400+ scrolls still buried in the Villa of the Papyri, this is just the beginning of recovering antiquity's lost library. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-roman-scrolls-destroyed-by-mount-vesuvius-digitally-unrolled-in-full-for-first-time/ #Archaeology #AI #History #AncientRome

2026-07-31 15:23:13 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…yz28 I think so too, but I definitely want to gauge interest and pushback before I do anything.

2026-07-31 15:20:18 UTC

For my DMV.Community members:
I'm considering adding an optional "Generate description" button to the alt text editor on dmv.community. Here's how it would work and what it means.
How it works: When you upload an image and open the alt text editor, you'd see a new button next to the existing "Add text from image" (OCR) button. Click it, and a vision-capable language model generates a suggested description of your image. You review it, edit if needed, and save. Nothing is automatic, you click the button, you decide whether to use the result.
Privacy: The model is Qwen 3.6 27B running inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE); a hardware-isolated enclave where even the API provider cannot see your images. No data is retained. This is the strongest privacy posture available for a cloud-based model. Your images are not sent anywhere unless you explicitly click the button.
Energy: Each request uses approximately 0.00033 kWh, roughly the same as a single Google search. For context, that's about 0.13 grams of CO2e per image description. If 100 images are described per day, the entire month's usage is equivalent to charging a smartphone three times.
Unfortunately, most images on the fediverse don't have alt text. OCR helps with screenshots and signs, but can't describe a photo of your cat or a sunset. This would help close that gap while keeping the user in control.
AI-generated descriptions can miss context, feelings, or get details wrong. This is a suggestion tool, not a replacement for human-written alt text. The existing "missing alt text" reminder will still appear.
Would this feature be useful to you? Would you use it, or prefer to write your own descriptions? I'd genuinely like to know before building it.
#dmvcommunity #Accessibility #AltText

2026-07-29 18:04:56 UTC

We do monthly "Lunch and Learn" sessions at work, not always related to work. This month one of our engineers is doing a session on beekeeping. 🐝 🍯

2026-07-27 23:37:36 UTC

🙌
https://dmvcommunitymedia.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/116/994/567/025/970/222/original/83117a9b67545fe8.mp4

2026-07-27 01:13:49 UTC

🧬 Scientists are using mRNA to make cancer cells produce an immune alarm protein called IL-12, and early results are striking.
The idea: inject mRNA encoding IL-12 directly into tumors. The cancer cells produce the protein, which activates T cells and NK cells to attack. Systemic IL-12 was abandoned years ago due to severe toxicity. Local mRNA delivery sidesteps that problem.
Multiple programs are in human trials. AstraZeneca's MEDI1191 showed partial responses in melanoma patients, including those resistant to existing immunotherapy. A Yale preclinical study found a single injection cured 60%+ of mice with melanoma.
There's also a newer approach: molecular on/off switches built into the mRNA itself. Researchers at Mount Sinai (published Nov 2025) engineered mRNA that detects cancer-specific microRNAs and only activates inside tumor cells. In mice: 100-fold higher expression in tumors, 380-fold lower in healthy organs. But this is still preclinical.
The catch: the on/off switch tech is mouse-only so far. The human trials rely on physically injecting into the tumor for selectivity, not molecular switches. Those are two different approaches at different stages, often blended together in popular coverage.
Read more:
https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2025/scientists-develop-a-smarter-mrna-therapy-that-knows-which-cells-to-target
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00262-025-04105-0
https://doi.org/10.1158/1538-7445.am2023-ct004
#mRNA #cancer #immunotherapy

2026-07-27 00:58:11 UTC

💊 A viral video calls benfotiamine (fat-soluble vitamin B1) a "revolutionary" anti-inflammatory breakthrough. The real story is more complicated.
The video references a real June 2026 study where researchers used computational drug repurposing to identify benfotiamine as a P2Y14R antagonist. P2Y14R is a genuine inflammatory target. The study tested it in mice with colitis and gouty arthritis and reported positive results.
But here's what the video leaves out:
1. The study is preclinical (mice + computer models), with 0 citations. "Revolutionary" is a stretch.
2. Multiple human RCTs found NO anti-inflammatory effect. A 24-month trial (300mg/day) in Type 1 diabetics showed no change in inflammatory markers. A 12-week trial (900mg/day) in diabetic nephropathy found no effect on inflammation. The BOND study (12 months, 600mg/day) found no effect on neuropathy outcomes.
3. The creator, Dr. Rick Pescatore, founded BellyMD, a supplement company selling benfotiamine products. This financial relationship is not disclosed in the video.
Benfotiamine is real, safe, and inexpensive. The preclinical anti-inflammatory science is genuine. But human trials have not confirmed the anti-inflammatory claims, and the "breakthrough" framing serves a product the creator sells.
Read more:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3329837/
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0040427
https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjdrc-2025-005773
#science #medicine #supplements

2026-07-27 00:52:23 UTC

🔬 Astronomers have been using machine learning since the late 1980s, decades before ChatGPT existed. The earliest neural networks in astronomy classified stars vs galaxies on photographic plates.
Here's what's interesting about how AI actually works in astronomy:
The AI used in astronomy is almost never a chatbot. It's specialized ML models trained for narrow tasks like classifying galaxies by shape or estimating parameters of gravitational wave signals. These models train on hundreds of thousands of already-classified galaxies, learn which features cluster together, then categorize new ones with a confidence score.
A huge application is outlier detection. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will generate about 7 million alerts per night (tens of billions over its 10-year survey). Most are ordinary or noise. ML systems rank alerts so astronomers can focus on the genuinely unusual ones.
And no, AI isn't replacing astronomers. There are roughly 10,000 professional astronomers worldwide. The volume of data already far exceeds what humans could ever manually inspect.
Read more:
https://rubinobservatory.org/explore/how-rubin-works/alerts
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10230190/
https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1912.02934
#astronomy #MachineLearning #science

2026-07-26 23:38:13 UTC

🌊 In September 2023, seismometers around the world detected a mysterious signal repeating every 92 seconds for nine straight days. The source: a standing wave trapped inside a Greenland fjord.
Here is what happened. A glacier in East Greenland had been thinning for years, no longer supporting the mountain slope above it. On September 16, about 25 million cubic meters of rock and ice collapsed into Dickson Fjord, triggering a tsunami with a runup height of 200 meters near the impact.
The fjord is 540 meters deep, 2.7 km wide, with walls taller than 1,800 meters. That geometry trapped the wave energy. The tsunami stabilized into a seiche, a standing wave sloshing back and forth across the fjord every 90 seconds. Each oscillation shifted millions of tons of water, loading and unloading the crust below, generating seismic waves detected globally.
The signal decayed extraordinarily slowly. It was still detectable after 9 days. A second, smaller event happened October 11 from another landslide in the same gully.
In 2025, the SWOT satellite directly observed the seiche, confirming the theory. The study published in Science calls it the first evidence of fluid sloshing persisting for days without an external driver.
The landslide was preconditioned by climate-driven glacial thinning, the first such event recorded in East Greenland.
Read more:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adm9247
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59851-7
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/swot/international-swot-satellite-spots-planet-rumbling-greenland-tsunami/
#geology #seismology #climatechange

2026-07-26 22:47:21 UTC

Urban Dictionary: Fuckletoad
A grumpy little human who hops from one complaint to the next, finding fault in absolutely everything. Nothing is ever quite right, and they’ll happily croak about it until everyone within earshot regrets making eye contact.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Fuckletoad

2026-07-26 18:41:26 UTC

🚨 BREAKING: A new report titled 'They Walk Among Us' from the Ohio Immigrant Alliance documents 59 current and former ICE and CBP personnel charged with or convicted of serious crimes.
Key findings from the July 2026 report:
- 50 of the 59 documented agents (84.7%) were charged or convicted of sexual assault
- 37 cases involved child victims, with 35 specifically involving sexual assault against children
- CBP accounted for the majority of cases, while ICE cases had a higher proportion of minor victims
The report highlights systemic oversight failures, including rapid hiring pushes that bypassed full vetting and a December 2025 DOJ directive instructing PREA auditors to pause compliance enforcement across key safety standards.
Read the report: https://ohioimmigrant.org/blog/2026/7/22/they-walk-among-us
#BreakingNews #Immigration #ICE #Oversight #Justice

2026-07-26 17:15:08 UTC

The environmental cost of running LLMs keeps climbing, but a few inference providers are running on 100% clean energy out of the box:
- Regolo (https://regolo.ai/sustainable-ai/): EU-hosted GPU clusters running on wind and solar power, using zero-water cooling.
- GreenPT (https://greenpt.com/api): European OpenAI-compatible API powered 100% by renewables in ISO-certified datacenters.
- Riveon (https://riveon.io/): Swiss provider with Finnish GPU sites powered 100% by renewables, offering OpenAI-compatible endpoints.
- Upgreat (https://www.upgreat.ai/): Carbon-aware EU compute that schedules workloads around clean energy windows from on-site solar farms.
Good options if you want clean compute for open-weights inference without relying on carbon offsets.
#AI #GreenTech #OpenSource #Sustainability #MachineLearning #Tech

2026-07-26 13:19:35 UTC

Definitely don't do any of the clearly explained activities in this video.
https://dmvcommunitymedia.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/116/986/471/590/653/520/original/f50d3745a5d29b88.mp4

2026-07-24 16:06:52 UTC

🐬 TIL: A dolphin named Kelly figured out how to run a scam on her trainers.
At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, dolphins got a fish for every piece of trash they turned in. Kelly noticed the payout was the same no matter the size, so she hid trash under a rock and tore off small pieces to redeem one at a time.
Then she escalated. Turning in a stray seagull earned a bonus fish payout, so Kelly started saving one of her fish, using it as bait to lure gulls, and cashing in the bigger reward. She later taught the trick to her calf, and it spread through the pod until gull-baiting was, in the words of one account, a hot game among the dolphins.
Trainers only found her stash when they drained the pool for repairs and discovered a pile of garbage hidden under the rocks. Kelly survived Hurricane Katrina and was relocated to the Bahamas, where she was still going strong in her 40s as of 2018.
Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/03/research.science
https://hakaimagazine.com/features/kelly-the-sassy-dolphin/
#TIL #dolphins #AnimalIntelligence

2026-07-24 14:30:03 UTC

🔬 The sea walnut (Mnemiopsis leidyi), a comb jelly the size of a mango, can reverse its own aging. When starved or injured, it shrinks from an adult lobed form back into a tentacled larval stage. Once conditions improve, it matures again into a reproductive adult. Unlike the "immortal jellyfish" which becomes a different individual through cell transformation, this comb jelly stays the exact same creature — literally going back in time. The finding was published in PNAS in 2024 and suggests reverse development may be an ancient animal trait.
https://www.science.org/content/article/under-deadly-conditions-these-sea-creatures-can-age-reverse
#Science #Biology #CombJelly

2026-07-23 23:14:04 UTC

⏪ Physicists designed a way to make a quantum system's arrow of time point backward. Not time travel. Something weirder and more useful.
Every time you measure a quantum system, the measurement kicks it and pumps energy in. A Los Alamos-led team built feedback protocols that can cancel, amplify, or flip that kick. Run it one way and you recover all the energy the measurement added. Run it harder and the system behaves as if time is flowing in reverse.
It's basically a working Maxwell's demon, pulling usable energy out of the act of observing. The catch: it's still theory, published in Physical Review X in February, and real measurements today only catch about half the signal, so the perfect version needs better detectors first.
Next up: testing it on superconducting qubits, where it could chip away at decoherence, the thing that keeps breaking quantum computers.
Paper: https://doi.org/10.1103/l18s-9vmh
LANL: https://www.lanl.gov/media/news/0319-reshaping-quantum-arrow
#QuantumPhysics #QuantumComputing #Physics

2026-07-23 23:06:32 UTC

🔋 MIT just published the most comprehensive EV emissions study yet, analyzing every US zip code with real driving data.
Battery EVs cut lifetime emissions 40-60% vs gas cars in most locations. Even on the dirtiest grid in the country, they still come out ahead. The study used DOE's GREET lifecycle model, which already includes battery manufacturing. So the "but what about making the batteries?" question is answered: building an EV produces 50-80% more CO2 upfront, but it pays that back over the vehicle's life.
Your driving habits matter as much as where you live. High mileage, city driving, and larger vehicles all boost the EV advantage. Cold weather cuts efficiency on a frigid night but barely dents annual savings.
The "who benefits from the doubt?" question has a paper trail. The API has run anti-EV messaging since 1967. Koch-funded groups planned $10M/year campaigns. AFPM dropped $10M+ on "Don't Ban Our Cars" ads in 2024 swing states.
https://news.mit.edu/2026/us-drivers-electric-vehicles-offer-emissions-benefits-cost-savings-0512
#EVs #Climate #Science

2026-07-22 14:30:24 UTC

🦠 A tapeworm that infects worker ants (Temnothorax nylanderi) reprograms them at the molecular level — turning their metabolism queen-like and extending their lifespan from 2 years to 20. Infected workers receive MORE social care than the actual queen. The parasite hijacks the ant's own longevity genes, not by mimicking them, but by tapping into existing biological programs. #science #biology #parasitology #ants #nature

2026-07-21 20:16:06 UTC

🏦 TIL: Five US tech giants are carrying $1.65 trillion in AI-related obligations that don't appear on their balance sheets, more than the $1.35 trillion that does.
A Nikkei study of Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle found this invisible debt has grown 8x in four years. It's future payment obligations: data center leases, GPU supply contracts, and SPV financing, disclosed only in the footnotes.
The mechanics are legal but eye-opening. Meta's $27B Hyperion data center in Louisiana is owned by a joint venture (Meta 20%, Blue Owl Capital 80%) that raised the debt from Pimco, BlackRock, and Apollo. Meta leases it back in 4-year blocks so it stays an operating expense, not debt. Oracle's off-book commitments grew 30x in four years, much of it for the Stargate project with OpenAI.
The catch: when these facilities go live, the leases roll onto the balance sheet at once. If AI demand falls short, the losses land on lenders and insurers (including, indirectly, annuity holders).
Meanwhile Apple, which sat out the AI buildout, sued OpenAI for trade secret theft on July 10.
Read more:
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/technology/five-us-tech-giants-hidden-debts-soar-to-1.65tn-on-opaque-ai-funding
https://financialpost.com/financial-times/tech-groups-ai-data-centre-debt-balance-sheets
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/10/apple-sues-openai-over-alleged-trade-secret-theft/
#AI #BigTech #finance

2026-07-21 18:42:12 UTC

🧵 The Salad Oil Scandal of 1963 — one of the most audacious frauds in financial history.
Anthony De Angelis ran Allied Crude Vegetable Oil Refining Co. He wanted to corner the soybean oil futures market. To fund his scheme, he needed collateral. So he did something brilliant and insane: he filled massive storage tanks in Bayonne, NJ with seawater, then poured a thin layer of real vegetable oil on top.
When inspectors came to verify the inventory, they lowered measuring tapes into the tanks. The tapes showed full tanks. The oil coating made everything look legit.
De Angelis used these fake warehouse receipts to borrow $175 million against oil that mostly didn't exist. He was supposed to have 2 billion pounds of vegetable oil — more than the entire USDA's reported national inventory.
The house of cards fell in November 1963 when the Soviet wheat deal stalled, futures prices dropped, and margin calls came due. Inspectors finally found mostly seawater. Allied filed for bankruptcy on Nov 19, 1963.
The fallout was massive:
• American Express — a major victim — lost over 50% of its stock value
• Two Wall Street brokerages (Ira Haupt & Co, J.R. Williston & Beane) went bust
• The New York Produce Exchange, the primary venue for cottonseed/soybean oil futures, eventually ceased commodities trading
• 51 financial institutions were caught holding worthless receipts
Warren Buffett saw his opening. He bought $20 million of American Express stock at 94 cents/share. By 1968 it hit $5. He made roughly $250 million from the recovery.
De Angelis got 7 years in prison. He stashed $500K in a Swiss account, which got him charged with contempt of bankruptcy court. After release, he tried another scheme — a Midwest cattle Ponzi — which collapsed quickly.
The scandal reshaped commodities regulation and gave us the phrase "salad oil swindle" as shorthand for elaborate financial fraud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salad_oil_scandal

2026-07-19 20:45:20 UTC

Where can I donate to all the people destroying Flock cameras?

2026-07-19 14:08:01 UTC

🦌 Arctic reindeer are the only mammals whose eyes change color seasonally - gold in summer, deep blue in winter. They physically restructure a nanoscale photonic mirror inside their eyes to match Arctic twilight wavelengths, boosting night vision during months of polar darkness. #science #nature https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2022.1002

2026-07-19 12:51:23 UTC

How a Gang of Thieves Pulled Off a Multimillion-Dollar Data Center Heist - The New York Times
https://archive.is/QUHSw

2026-07-18 12:55:50 UTC

🟢 Oak apples are not fruit. They are nurseries built by tiny cynipid wasps.
A female deposits an egg in developing oak tissue. The larva then uses secreted molecules to redirect the oak’s growth into a protective gall with nutrient-rich cells around it. The oak is not having its DNA rewritten: studies find extensive changes in oak gene expression, while sequencing found no foreign wasp DNA inserted into the oak genome.
The gall shelters one or more larvae until they mature, though parasitoid wasps, inquilines, birds, mammals, and other predators can turn it into a miniature food web. Spiders may use old galls and prey on emerging adults, but they are only one part of the control system.
Most oak apple galls do little lasting harm to healthy trees, although heavy infestations and some other oak-gall species can cause localized damage. “Oak apple” describes a gall shape, not one species. Different cynipid wasps produce similar-looking galls on different oaks.
Sources:
https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/oak-apple-galls
https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.1008398
https://ipm.ucanr.edu/home-and-landscape/oak-gall-wasps-and-other-cynipids/
#Entomology #Ecology #Nature

2026-07-17 14:07:01 UTC

🧪 The placebo-controlled trial wasn't invented by doctors. It was invented by medieval witch hunters.
In 1423, Jean Gerson proposed testing religious claims with consecrated vs unconsecrated objects that looked identical - the same logic behind modern placebo controls.
His method ended up in the Malleus Maleficarum (1486). In 1599, a French physician used it to prove a "possessed" girl wasn't really possessed - she reacted the same to real and fake holy water.
That trick-trial design reached Lavoisier and Franklin, who used it to debunk mesmerism in 1784 - the direct ancestor of every clinical trial.
Source: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01410768231207260
#science #history #medicine

2026-07-15 14:04:30 UTC

🧬 A marine alga just rewrote biology's textbook rule
For decades, students learned only bacteria can fix nitrogen from the air. In 2024, scientists found a tiny ocean alga has a real organelle - the "nitroplast" - that does it too. Only the 4th organelle born from endosymbiosis in 4 billion years of life.
https://news.ucsc.edu/2024/04/nitrogen-fixing-organelle/
#science #biology #nature

2026-07-12 13:22:19 UTC

Graham's family is asking for prayers. I hope they know our prayers have already been answered.

2026-07-12 13:15:28 UTC

Rest in piss, Lindsay Graham. ✌️

2026-07-11 15:04:16 UTC

Deb Haaland's life reads like it shouldn't have led to Washington, DC.
She struggled with alcoholism and got sober in 1988. She was a single mom who relied on food stamps and started a salsa company to get by. She went to college at 28, law school at 40.
Then she became one of the first two Native American women in Congress. Then the first Native American Cabinet secretary in US history, leading the Interior Department. She launched the first federal investigation into Indian boarding schools, protected millions of acres of public land, and brought tribes to the decision-making table.
Now she's running for governor of New Mexico. If elected, she'd be the first Native American woman governor in US history.
A 35th-generation New Mexican and member of the Pueblo of Laguna, she just published her memoir 'A Voice Like Mine.'
Representation isn't symbolic. It changes who gets a seat at the table.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deb_Haaland
#Indigenous #NewMexico #representation

2026-07-11 14:24:27 UTC

This is extremely well done.
https://dmvcommunitymedia.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/116/901/794/949/244/924/original/d05a864c6d80bd26.mp4

2026-07-10 20:20:31 UTC

If Donald Trump was having a heart attack and you only had 5 minutes to save him, what kind of sandwich would you make?

2026-07-10 14:58:02 UTC

Self-Host Weekly (10 July 2026)
https://selfh.st/weekly/2026-07-10/

2026-07-10 06:40:20 UTC

🪐 Ancient Babylonians were doing calculus 1,400 years before Europe.
Between 350 and 50 BCE, Babylonian astronomers calculated Jupiter's position by computing the area under a time-velocity curve - treating the planet's changing speed as a trapezoid on a graph. Historians thought this technique wasn't invented until 14th-century Oxford.
The tablets sat untranslated in the British Museum for over a century until Mathieu Ossendrijver cracked them in 2016.
#history #science #astronomy
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/160128-math-geometry-babylon-jupiter-astronomy-space

2026-07-08 14:06:35 UTC

🦕 Diplodocus could crack its tail faster than the speed of sound.
That 80-vertebra whip-like tail made up over half the animal's total body length. In 2001, paleontologist Nathan Myhrvold and Philip Currie modeled the physics and found the tail tip could actually break the sound barrier, producing a small sonic boom.
The tail likely served as a defense against predators like Allosaurus. Imagine a 26-meter-long dinosaur with a built-in supersonic whip. The crack would have been loud enough to deter most attackers, or at least make them think twice.
This also helps explain why Diplodocus had those strange "double beam" bones under its tail - they're what gave the dinosaur its name (Greek for "double beam") and likely provided structural support for the stresses of cracking.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplodocus
#dinosaurs #paleontology #science

2026-07-06 17:09:43 UTC

It takes Anakin about 2 minutes to destroy a new toy.
https://dmvcommunitymedia.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/116/874/133/682/450/338/original/87b68644cbe0234c.jpeg

2026-07-06 16:10:07 UTC

☀️ We don't need to pave over forests or farmland to scale solar. Some of the best real estate is surfaces we've already built.
Parking lot canopies: shade cars, cut urban heat, power EV chargers. One study found Walmart could fit 11 GW of solar just over its Supercenter lots.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/putting-solar-panels-atop-parking-lots-a-green-energy-solution
Canal-top solar, pioneered in Gujarat, India: panels shade irrigation channels, saving ~90 million liters of water from evaporation per year at one 10 MW plant. The water also cools the panels, boosting efficiency ~7%.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/india-builds-solar-plants-atop-canals-to-save-on-land-water/
Swiss startup Sun-Ways lays panels between train tracks. 11,000+ trains have rolled over them with zero safety issues.
https://electrek.co/2026/06/30/solar-gets-railed-clever-swiss-pilot-proves-pv-panels-and-trains-can-coexist/
The common thread: dual-use. Share the surfaces we already use instead of fighting over new land.
#solar #renewableenergy #energytransition

2026-07-06 14:04:18 UTC

Trilobites saw the world through lenses made of actual rock - and solved an optical problem 400 million years before humans did.
Their eyes were built from calcite, the same mineral in limestone and marble. Every other animal that ever lived uses soft protein lenses. Only trilobites evolved image-forming eyes from a hard, brittle crystal.
Here's the wild part: calcite is birefringent, meaning it splits light into two rays (double vision). Trilobites solved this by perfectly orienting each crystal so light traveled along the one axis where birefringence doesn't happen. They also exploited calcite's high refractive index (1.66 vs ~1.38 for our eyes), which works far better underwater where organic lenses struggle.
Some phacopid species went further - they grew a double-lens system with a magnesium-rich inner layer that eliminated spherical aberration. That's the same optical trick Huygens worked out in the 1600s. Evolution cracked it ~400 million years earlier.
Source: Towe (1973), Science - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.179.4077.1007
#science #paleontology #evolution #trilobites

2026-07-06 12:47:12 UTC

🔒 A 19-year-old cybercriminal was caught despite using a VPN across multiple countries - because Windows has a tracking number built into every install that a VPN can't hide.
Peter Stokes, arrested in Finland in April and extradited to the US last week, is tied to Scattered Spider, the hacking group behind the 2023 MGM and Caesars casino breaches. The group is linked to 100+ intrusions and over $100 million in extortion.
The FBI didn't crack his VPN. Microsoft handed over his Global Device ID (GDID), a unique identifier baked into every Windows installation at setup. It doesn't change when you update, switch networks, or use a VPN. The only way to reset it is a full OS reinstall.
Investigators matched Stokes's GDID across IP addresses in Estonia, New York, and Thailand, correlating with login times on his Snapchat, Apple, and Facebook accounts. The same device that breached a luxury jewelry retailer and demanded $8 million in ransom also logged into Snapchat and a video game from his real network.
So while VPNs mask your IP address, they were never designed to hide device-level identifiers embedded in your operating system. The tracking can live one layer deeper than the one most people defend.
Read more:
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/microsoft-device-telemetry-key-to-unmasking-alleged-scattered-spider-hacker-627148
https://www.databreachtoday.com/scattered-spider-suspect-extradited-from-finland-to-us-a-32140
#cybersecurity #privacy #windows

2026-07-05 18:00:36 UTC

https://dmvcommunitymedia.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/116/868/671/312/979/974/original/2c7c2305f33e3445.mp4

2026-07-05 14:50:33 UTC

🚗 TIL: Before GPS was fully operational, Honda built a car navigation system that used zero satellites.
In 1981, the Honda Electro Gyrocator debuted as a dealer option on the Accord. You placed a transparent plastic map over a small CRT screen and marked your starting point.
As you drove, a helium gas-rate gyroscope detected turns: helium flow shifted between two heated wires, creating a temperature difference the computer read as direction. A transmission sensor tracked distance. A 16-bit computer combined both to move a dot across the map showing your position.
Not perfect. Wheel spin and drift compounded, so you could pull over and manually realign. The IEEE designated it a Milestone in 2017 as the world's first map-based car navigation system, 14 years before GPS.
The catch: it cost about $2,746 (nearly a quarter of the car's price). It only lasted one year.
Read more:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/first-mapbased-car-navigation-system-debuted-14-years-before-gps
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro_Gyrocator
https://global.honda/en/heritage/episodes/1981navigationsystem.html
#TIL #Honda #engineering #history