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Αναμενουμε Αδωνι ως γνησιος δοσιλογος, εκπροσωπος της δεξιας λερας που λυμαινεται τοπο κ ανθρωπους μετα τον εμφυλιο, να τα βαλει μετα την Αξιωτισσα και με το Παντειο Πανεπιστημιο
Did you know it's possible to cut a hole in a cube such that an identical cube can fit inside it? Really! It's called "Rupert's Property." *All Platonic solids are Rupert!* Except one new shape, which *cannot* fit inside itself. This eldritch polygon is called a Noperthedron!
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:
"Noperthedron" is the best coinage I've heard in months, which makes it a natural to open this week's linkdump, a collection of the links that piled up this week without making it into my newsletter. This is my 33d Saturday linkdump - here's the previous 32 editions:
Speaking of eldritch geometry? Perhaps you've heard that Donald Trump plans to add a 90,000 sqft ballroom to the (55,000 sqft) White House. As Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner writes for *The Nation*, this is a totally bullshit story floated by Trump and a notorious reactionary starchitect, and to call it a "plan" is to do unforgiveable violence to the noble art of planning:
Wagner is both my favorite architecture critic and the only architecture critic I read. That's because she's every bit as talented a writer as she is a perspicacious architecture critic. What's more, she's a *versatile* writer. She doesn't just write these sober-but-scathing, erudite pieces for *The Nation*; she has, for many years, *invented* the genre of snarky Zillow annotations, which are *convulsively* funny and trenchant:
Knowing that I'm part of this stuff helps me get through tough times - but I'm also so glad that we get to step in and defend brilliant writers like Wagner, as we did a few years ago, when Zillow tried to use legal bullying tactics to make her stop being mean to their shitty houses:
If this kind of stuff excites you as much as it excites me and you're in the Bay Area, get thee to the EFF Awards (or tune into the livestream) and watch us honor this year's winners: Just Futures Law, Erie Meyer, and the Software Freedom Law Center, India:
So much of the activity that EFF defends involves *writing*. The web was written into existence, after all, both by the coders who hacked it together and the writers who filled it up.
For over 35 years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has presented awards recognizing key leaders and organizations advancing innovation and championing digital rights.
I've always wanted to be a writer, since I was six years old, and I'm so lucky to have grown up through an era is which the significance of the written word has continuously expanded.
I was equally lucky to have writing teachers who permanently, profoundly shaped my relationship with the written word.
I've had many of those, but none were so foundational as Harriet Wolff, the longest-serving English teacher at Toronto's first alternative school, SEED School, whence I graduated after a mere seven years of instruction.
Harriet was a big part of why I spent seven years getting a four year diploma. She was such a brilliant English teacher, and presided over such an excellent writing workshop, that I felt like I still had so much to learn from high school, even after I'd amassed enough credits to graduate, so I just *stuck around*.
We hadn't spoken much over the past decade, though she did come to my wedding and was every bit as charming and wonderful as I'd remembered her. Despite not having spoken to her in many years, hardly a day went by without my thinking of her and the many lessons she imparted to me.
Harriet took a very broad view of what could be good writing. Though she wasn't much of a sf fan, she always took my sf stories seriously - as seriously as she took the more "literary" fiction and poetry submitted by my peers. She kept a filing cabinet full of mimoeos and photocopies, each excellent examples of various forms of writing. Over the years, she handed me everything from Joan Didion essays to especially sharp op-eds from Time Magazine, along with *tons* of fiction.
Harriet taught me how to criticize fiction, as a means of improving my understand of what *I* was doing with my writing, and as a way of exposing other writers to new ways of squeezing their big, numinous, irreducible feelings out of their fingertips and onto the page. She was the first person I called when I sold my first story, at 17, and I still remember standing on my parents' lawn, cordless phone in one hand and acceptance letter in the other, and basking in her approval.
Harriet was a tough critiquer. Like many of the writers in her workshop, I had what you might call "glibness privilege" - a facility with words that I could use to paper over poor characterization or plotting. Whenever I'd do this, she'd fix me with her stare and say, "Cory, this is *merely clever.*" I have used that phrase countless times - both in relation to my own work and into the work of my students.
Though Harriet was unsparing in her critiques, they never stung, because she always treated the writers in her workshop as her peers in a lifelong journey to improve our craft. She'd come out for cigarettes with us, and she came to every house party I invited her to, bringing a good, inexpensive bottle of wine and finding a sofa to sit on and discuss writing an literature.
She invited me to Christmas dinner one year when I was alone for the holidays and introduced me to Yorkshire pudding, still one of my favorite dishes (though none has ever matched the pleasure of eating that first one from her oven).
Harriet apparently told her family that she didn't want a memorial, though from emails with her former students, I know that there might end up being *something* planned in Toronto.
After all, memorials are for the living as much as for the dead. It's unlikely I'll be home for that one, but the best way to memorialize Harriet is in writing.
For Harriet, writing was a big, big church, and every kind of writing was worth serious attention. I always thought of the web as a very Wolffian innovation, because it exposed so many kinds of audiences to so many kinds of writers. There's Kate Wagner's acerbic Zillow annotations, of course, but also so much more.
One of the web writers I've followed since the start is Kevin Kelly, who went from *The Whole Earth Review* to serving as *Wired*'s first executive editor. Over the years, Kevin has blazed new trails for those of us who write in public, publishing many seminal pieces online.
But Kevin was and is a *print* guy, who has blazed new trails in self-publishing, producing books that are both brilliant *and* beautifully wrought artifacts, like his giant, three-volume set of photos of "Vanishing Asia":
This essay is also available on my Substack. Subscribe here: https://kevinkelly.substack.com/ In my professional life, I’ve had several bestselling books published by New York publishers, as well as many other titles that sold modestly.
t's a long, thoughtful, and *very practical* guide that's full of advice on everything from printing to promo. I've self-published several volumes, and I learned a *lot*.
One very important writer who's trying something new this summer - to wonderful effect - is Hilary J Allen, a business law professor at American University. During the first cryptocurrency bubble, Allen wrote some of the sharpest critiques of fintech, dubbing it "Shadow Banking 2.0":
Allen also coined the term "driverless finance," a devastatingly apt description of the crypto bro's desire for a financial system with no governance, which she expounded upon in a critical book:
This summer, Allen has serialized "FinTech Dystopia," which she called "A summer beach read about Silicon Valley ruining things." Chapter 9 dropped this week, "Let’s Get Skeptical":
It's a tremendous read, and while it mostly concerns itself with summarizing her arguments against the claims of fintech boosters, there's an absolutely jaw-dropped section on Neom, the doomed Saudi megaproject to build a massive "linear city" in the desert:
> More than 21,000 workers (primarily from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal) are reported to have died working on NEOM and related projects in Saudi Arabia since 2017, with more than 20,000 indigenous people reported to have been forcibly displaced to make room for the development.
Allen offers these statistics as part of her critique of the "Abundance agenda," which focuses on overregulation as the main impediment to a better world.
Like Allen, I'm not afraid to criticize *bad* regulation, but also like Allen, I'm keenly aware of the terrible harms that arise out of a totally unregulated system.
The same goes for technology, of course. There's plenty of ways to use technology that is harmful, wasteful and/or cruel, but that isn't a brief *against technology itself* There are many ways that technology has been used (and can be used) to make things better.
One of the pioneers of technology for good is Jim Fruchterman, founder of the venerable tech nonprofit Benetech, for which he was awarded a Macarthur "Genius" award. Fruchterman has just published his first book, with MIT Press, in which he sums up a lifetime's experience in finding ways to improve the world with technology. Appropriately enough, it's called *Technology For Good*:
After all, technology is so marvelously flexible that there's always a countertechnology, for every abusive tech. Every 10-foot digital wall implies an 11-foot digital ladder. Last month, I wrote about Echelon, a company that makes digitally connected exercise bikes, who had pushed a mandatory update to their customers' bikes that took away functionality they got for free and sold it back to them in inferior form:
Repair hero Louis Rossman - who is running a new, direct action right to repair group named Fulu - offered a $20,000 bounty to anyone who could crack the firmware on an Echelon bike and create a disenshittified software stack that restored the original functionality:
In short order, app engineer Ricky Witherspoon, cracked it, and had a way to continue to use SyncSpin, his popular app for Echelon bikes, which was shut out by Echelon's enshittification. However, as Witherspoon told 404 Media's Jason Koebler, he won't release his code, not even for a $20,000 bounty, because doing so would make him liable to a *$500,000* fine, *and* a five-year prison sentence, under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act:
Fulu paid Witherspoon anyway (they're good eggs). Witherspoon told Koebler:
> For now it’s just about spreading awareness that this is possible, and that there’s another example of egregious behavior from a company like this […] if one day releasing this was made legal, I would absolutely open source this. I can legally talk about how I did this to a certain degree, and if someone else wants to do this, they can open source it if they want to.
Free/open source software is a powerful tonic against enshittification, and it has the alchemical property of transforming the products of bad companies into *good* utilities that everyone benefits from.
One example of this is Whisper, an open source audio transcription model released by Openai. Since Whisper's release, free software hackers have made steady - even remarkable - improvements to it.
I discovered Whisper this summer, when I couldn't locate a quote I'd heard on a podcast that I wanted to reference in a column. I installed Whisper on my laptop and fed it the last 30+ hours of podcasts I'd listened to. An hour later, it had fully transcribed all of them, with timecode, and had put so little load on my laptop that the fan didn't even turn on. I was able to search all that text, locate the quote, and use the timecode to find the clip and check the transcription.
Whisper has turned extremely accurate transcription into a utility, something that can just be added to any program or operating system for free. I think this is going to be quietly revolutionary, bringing full-text search and captioning to audio and video as something we can just take for granted.
That's already happening! FFMpeg is the gold-standard free software tool for converting, encoding and re-encoding video, and now the latest version integrates Whisper, allowing FFMpeg to subtitle your videos on the fly:
Whisper is an example of the "residue" that will be left behind when the AI bubble pops. All bubbles pop, after all, but not all bubbles leave behind a useful residue.
When crypto dies, its residue will be a few programmers who've developed secure coding habits in Rust, but besides that, all that will be left behind is terrible Austrian economics and worse monkey JPEGs:
But the free/open source code generated by stupid and/or evil projects often lives on long after those projects are forgotten. And lots (most) of free/open code is written for *good* purposes.
Take Madeline, a platform for tracking loans made by co-operatives, produced by the Seed Commons, which is now used by financial co-ops around the world, as they make "non-extractive investments in worker and community-owned businesses on the ground":
At Seed Commons our goal is to distribute economic and financial power to communities—so we built a software system that mirrors that social logic in code.
Madeline (and Seed Commons) are one of those bright lights that are easy to miss in these brutal and terrifying times. And if that's not enough, there's always booze. If you're thinking of drowning your sorrows, you could do worse than to pour your brown liquor out of a decanter shaped like a giant Atari CX-10 joystick:
This glass decanter is modeled after the CX-10 Atari joystick and is perfect for whiskey or your favorite spirit. It is sure to be a showpiece in your collection. Paired with two Atari whiskey glasses and a controller display tray.
The most enshittification-proof way to get the Enshittification audiobook, ebook and hardcover is to pre-order them on my Kickstarter! Help me do an end-run around the Amazon/Audible audiobook monopoly and disenshittify your audiobook experience in the process:
naturally, this only works in that same ideal/purely theoretical sense (ask any carpenter or mechanic) in which all cows are orbs for Physicists. =)
It's not that Mathematicians don't have a sense of humor, it's just that most of it is not perceivable by humans, such as - say - that of Astrophysicists.
A small correction to this description— this new polyhedron is convex, not platonic. All platonics ARE Rupert; this new solid disproves the conjecture that all CONVEX 3d polyhedra are Rupert.
And I agree, Noperthedron is a great name for it. I wouldn’t have noticed the name if you hadn’t pointed it out.
In this critical episode of the Global Defense War panel, host John Michael Chambers is joined by retired Special Forces Lt Col Ricardo Bossi, Delta Force Col Chuck Sellers, Lt Col Tom Lennox, & Navy Seal veteran Michael Jaco for a deep military intelligence analysis of the unprecedented events unfolding.
🚨 The Global Financial Reset Is HERE. 🚨 Don't just survive it—PROFIT from it. This is your gateway to explosive growth with Genesis Metals. 👉 CLICK NOW: https://jmcgenesismetals.com/ In this critical
The panel cuts through the mainstream narrative to discuss the true, multi-layered purpose behind President Trump's deployment of the National Guard to 19 U.S. cities—a mission that goes far beyond cleaning up crime & homelessness to target underground trafficking networks and restore constitutional order. They also discuss the tunnels underneath these cities tied to child trafficking and the DUMBs.
3500 years ago Bronze Age Greeks took over much of the eastern Mediterranean. How did they do it? — Check out my other channel History Time for full-length d...
@madison I finally finished my old timey dress for the vintage base ball festival! (because i needed it today) 1840s field or morning dress. #SometimesIMakeStuff
I hope it impresses. Just take a needle and thread with you just in case you need to alter anything at this ball though I hope that will be unnecessary. I hope you have a wonderful time, hon.
Think Old Cats Don't Play? Watch This! Vilma is a 15-year-old senior cat. Even in her old age she gets zoomies almost daily. It's a great reminder that even old cats need play and exercise in their lives.
Music by: steven-obrien.net/ Morning Stroll - Steven O'Brien Lazy Day - Steven O'Brien
Music: Banjos, Unite! by Alexander Nakarada (www.creatorchords.com) Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/b…
Special credits: Davinci Resolve (editing software) Videezy.com (explosion footage material) Odysee I just like you :slight_smile: minds.com/newsfeed/18082558429…
In the occupied West Bank village of Kufr Qaddum, *Yousef stands behind a sealed iron gate, cut off from the olive trees that have sustained his family for generations.
(Note: Thank you for supporting businesses like those presenting a sponsored message below and ordering through the links below, which benefits Gateway Pundit.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST EXPOSED: Corrupt Judge Jia Cobb Who Blocked Trump’s Mass Deportations and Now Oversees Federal Reserve Mortgage Fraudster Lisa Cook Revealed as SORORITY SISTER!
The corrupt and abusive totalitarian government rise to complete power
As Big Pharma and even President Donald Trump advance the idea of mandatory vaccines for everyone, one has to wonder where the idea is coming from. Of course, it is come from a plethora of organizations, but among them is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
ALEC is also a major pusher of laws regarding medical issues – not merely in the context of the American healthcare system, but also in the context of personal choice.
Despite all the rhetoric of ALEC and its puppets in Congress, the position of the organization and its puppets is not necessarily in favor of personal choice. This much has been made clear in the form of mandates and force of law, particularly in the area of vaccination.
In one sense, ALEC is a massive corporate lobbying firm. In another, however, ALEC is much more, since much of the legislation submitted by the attentive congressman is actually written for the Senator or Representative by the agents of the organization. It is an organization that provides funding and direction (marching orders) for Congressmen, particularly those at the state level.
While slimy billionaires like George Soros act as the guiding force behind much of the American left, ALEC and KOCH Industries tend to fill the same void for the right; although, in truth, most of the corporations that make up ALEC are those who also fund Democratic candidates. Presentation, however, in a carefully crafted political theatre like the United States, is paramount.
The Liberal government is showing just how necessary direct action is for impeding and disrupting Canada's continued participation in Israel's genocide against Palestinians. If they're not willing to give a fuck about it, then we have no option but to take it into our own hands, sabotaging and disrupting the supply ourselves.
The Liberal government is arming Israel—and they can’t stop lying about it. We break down their 4-step playbook for deceiving the public about how Canada con...
For me, isolating the breakage of one service from another is a strong motivation to run containers and virtual machines. Upgrade some, let all others remain unaffected.
MicroVM.nix ships its own tooling for updating your independent NixOS systems: the microvm command. All that it is doing consists of maintaining the source flakeref in /var/lib/microvms/*/flake so that updates can be built from somewhere, and then creating the /var/lib/microvms/*/current symlink to the config.microvm.declaredRunner. Are these internals already, or should I start documenting them?
At c3d2.de we just switched from Proxmox to a setup that consists of MicroVMs on NixOS. It is very pleasing to see my cheap but NixOS-native "virtualization solution" arriving at more deployments. I really wished for this setup to become much more convenient than what we had before.
Both Initial deployment and updates from your local working state of this infrastructure's flake are conducted with a nix run .#microvm-update-$hostname that will run something that looks like this:
First, we copy the current flake to the server so that it can build from it, which is then done via ssh. Afterwards, the flake file is written so that microvm -u later works, and finally the new or updated MicroVM is restarted. I simplified a bit. The MicroVM can also be built locally or with a remote builder. The service shouldn't be restarted if there was no change to the current symlink. There is not only plenty of room but really an open space to design these workflows to your own preferences and work style.
To prepare all updates from stable NixOS for our infrastructure, we've got a systemd.timer that runs nix flake update --commit-lock-file and pushes to that flake-update branch which is then prebuilt by our local Hydra, saving us a lot of time once we run microvm -u. We can even fetch JSON from the Hydra API to obtain the resulting store path which we can then just nix copy onto target server so that /var/lib/microvms/*/current can get updated, relieving you of that extra Nix evaluation. If you made ssh a requirement for your MicroVMs and also ran with a /nix/store mounted from the host, you could even switch to the new system without rebooting the MicroVM.
The included microvm tool still works: (stderr omitted for two lines of embarassing warnings.)
Als die damalige Kanzlerin Merkel die Worte "Wir schaffen das" ausspricht, ist die AfD am Scheidepunkt. Sie nutzt den Satz, um gegen Geflüchtete zu mobilisieren. Ein Feindbild entsteht: gegen Zuwanderung, gegen Merkel. Von Julie Kurz.
@EssentialUtinsil@poa.st Oh hey! Fellow Pokemon player bro been awhile! do you have the dlc too? im really digging the area they give you to run around and the double battles.
threat-intelligence.eu is a website providing an exhaustive list of all the open standards, tools and methologies in threat intelligence, analysis or sharing.
Wer spricht für die Palästinenser bei der UN-Vollversammlung in New York? Palästinenserpräsident Abbas wird es vermutlich nicht sein. Denn die USA haben ihn und andere mit Visa-Sanktionen belegt. Damit kann er nicht einreisen.
Sie ist nicht so bekannt wie die deutsche Autoindustrie, aber genauso real. Wenn Sie noch nie von der deutschen #Asylindustrie gehört haben, dann sei das verziehen, denn die Verantwortlichen dafür tun alles, dass das so bleibt.
In Deutschland gibt es eine Industrie, die weitgehend in Schatten und Zwielicht operiert und die kaum einer kennt. Diese Industrie ist die Asylindustrie.
Έβαλαν τους Πελαργούς να φωνάζουν μπροστά στα μικρόφωνα της ΕΡΤ ''Η Κύπρος είναι ελληνική". Αν πεις ότι με αυτές τις μαλακίες έστειλαν οι αμερικάνοι τους χουνταίους κι έγινε η διχοτόμηση θα σου λένε "no politica"....
I saw these yard signs in my neighborhood on liberal's lawns saying, "We believe our Girls" & asked about it. There was a case of assault from 12 pre-teen girls who said a male teacher fondled them, but was acquitted. We're a conservative county, although gerrymandered with the black county next to DC. Anyway, I don't know the truth or care, but I wondered if it's about the many girls who've lied & ruined lives or a democrat pedo court. Either way, it's the fault of the libs with the signs.
"Le Radical Bookfair 2025 de Dorset se tiendra le samedi 20 septembre à Vita Nova Arts Charity, 11 Roumelia Lane Boscombe, Bournemouth BH5 1EU, de 10:30 à 17:00. Plus d'infos ici, en anglais : dorsetbookfair.wordpress.com/
"Un lieu pour partager des idées, des visions d'avenir, des combats, de l'art et des écrits ; un espace pour rencontrer de nouveaux ami⋅es ; une possibilité de construire des communautés et de renforcer la camaraderie ; comme toujours, l'entrée est gratuite. Procurez-vous des zines et brochures pour vos potes ! Présentez vos publications ! Participez à un atelier ou organisez-en
Imagine being Kyou’s lil shota boy, waiting at home with a nice meal wearing nothing but an apron, and a warm bath ready to help his owner relax after a hard day at work
It's setting is great, I enjoyed it a lot too. Best part is, it confirms a fan theory of mine, that regional forms aren't necessarily exclusive to specific regions and that if the right conditions were present elsewhere they could occur there too. That's something that just feels obvious to me, but prior to Indigo Disk that's something a lot of people in fangame communities insisted was impossible and would complain about fangames doing.
"Du 11 au 14 septembre 2025, de nombreuses choses sont prévues pour l'Anarchist Book Fair de New York City : des tables de livres et de brochures, des ateliers et discussions, des concerts, des projections de films, des spectacles, etc. Plus d'infos ici, en anglais : anarchistbookfair.net/2025-boo…
Facing genocidal fascists, military surveillance police, a system of totalitarian imperialism-patriarchal-hetero-white supremacist-capitalism, who are all mass…
been awhile! do you have the dlc too? 
im really digging the area they give you to run around and the double battles.
RIP sweet angel.
I love the Gen 5, Alola, and Safari Zone atmospheres 
John Hammond's Top Geneticist, Head of Jurassic Auschwitz Biodivision
in reply to KiKi • • •KiKi
in reply to John Hammond's Top Geneticist, Head of Jurassic Auschwitz Biodivision • • •