Jules @afewbugs@librem.one

PSA: Lilies are dangerously toxic to cats. Even one small sniff or nibble can cause kidney failure and death. Rapid vet intervention cannot reliably save their lives.

*Never* keep true lilies (lilium) in the house if you have cats.

Make sure your family and friends know too! There's no warning at the store about the danger of lilies, so they get around in the holidays.

#Caturday #Cats #CatsOfMastodon

I paid far more attention to what the UNHCR said in response to the report that Suella Braverman was backing today.👇

“There is no such thing as an ‘illegal asylum seeker’. The indefinite detention of those seeking asylum, based solely on their mode of arrival, would punish people in need of help and protection and constitute a clear breach of the United Kingdom’s obligations under the 1951 refugee convention,” a statement from the UNHCR said

#RefugeesWelcome
#SafeRoutes

Marie Curie's notebooks, which are radioactive and must be stored in a lead-lined box in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Curie’s corpse is also radioactive. Her coffin is lined in an inch of lead. Both will remain radioactive for 1,500+ years.

More info: https://www.sciencealert.com/these-personal-effects-of-marie-curie-will-be-radioactive-for-another-1-500-years

#HistSci #ScienceMastodon #MedMastodon #science #scientist #HistoryOfScience #HistMed #WomenInStem #TIL #TheMoreYouKnow #WeirdHistory

in Norway, "up and not crying" is a not uncommon response to "how's it going" type questions, and I feel like that's a very reasonable standard to hold oneself to especially nowadays

Very sad to hear about Elon Musk.

Nothing happened to him, I’m just very sad to hear about him.

Quora, StackOverflow, etc. try to rebrand themselves and leverage their karma/social graphs as walled gardens of verified Real Human (TM) experts. This creates incentives for humans to cheat, of course.

Like I knew this was gonna be used for fake-grassroots political messaging--remember talking with a friend about a DoD project to do exactly this circa 2012. Somehow took me a bit to connect that to "finding any kind of meaningful information is going to get harder".

Searching for "replace air filter on a Samsung SG-3560lgh" is gonna return fifty Quora/WikiHow style sites named "How to replace the air filter on a Samsung SG-2360lh" with paragraphs of plausible, grammatical GPT-generated explanation which may or may not have any connection to reality. Site owners pocket the ad revenue. AI arms race as search engines try to detect and derank LLM content.

Wikipedia starts getting large chunks of LLM text submitted plausible but nonsensical references

God, search results are about to become absolute hot GARBAGE in 6 months when everyone and their mom start hooking up large language models to popular search queries and creating SEO-optimized landing pages with plausible-sounding results.

Do I love the history behind Thanksgiving and the way in which it's been revised and co-opted? Of course not.

But I do enjoy the food and the sentiment. It's nice to have a moment to come together with those you love, eat good food, take a moment to be grateful for whatever you can, and then fall into a food coma for three to six hours.

Watching crypto implode in exactly the same ways that unregulated financial markets have been imploding for the last 400 years.

Watching billionaires fantasize about transcending their mortal bodies and becoming gods, just like they have been for the last 4,000 years.

There's just these ruts in our brains where it's easy to get stuck.

To encourage safe winter cycling, Oslo offers 50% off the cost of studded tires, up to 1000 NOK ($102).

~1000 residents applied on the first day it was offered. Last year 75% of rebate recipients said they didn't bike the previous winter.

https://nettavisen.no/norsk-politikk/byradet-i-oslo/sykkel/4000-far-piggdekkstotte-ugreit/s/5-95-788118

#cycling #winter #bike

If you listen to the news, you could be forgiven for thinking that everything is shit.

It’s not.

One example, Humpback Whale numbers are growing massively.

#whales #goodnews #humpbackwhales #beautifulnews

How it started: How it's going:

I’m seeing people posting pictures of themselves as AI versions of paintings and fantasy scenes and films and although the creative photographer in me loves it I would be mindful that you are handing over your face to unregulated new tech to form the basis of better recognition software, survelience tech and forming parts of how your likeness can form into other people’s creations. I don’t want to tell you what’s right or wrong, but I think it is worth knowing what your feeding your face into.

If you consider yourself a serious anarchist/communist/socialist/leftist, today I want you to do something for me.

I want you to commit to a bit of direct action this week. I want you to do something for your community .

Feed that homeless person, trim your elderly neighbours hedge for them, spend 20 mins talking with neighbours about how to best organise within your community. Do something that has a tangible positive outcome for your community, do it this week.

The Better Urban Spaces zine is in progress! here's the working illustration for our cover. If you'd like to contribute, add some ideas to our organizing doc! There's a space at the end to leave an email for updates and to get access to the WIP zine on Google Slides:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1t-nXPQ3H83_wbHGM8NLt65xfDmFsWCswjRPUp42llCM/edit?usp=sharing
#zines #solarpunk #urbanism

The Dutch invest €595 million annually on urban biking, resulting in €19 BILLION saved in public health care costs alone. That’s how smart governments do the right math on investing in better mobility.

Let’s be clear — it wastes public money to NOT do it.

#CityMakingMath, hat tip to @modacitylife for their excellent books!

#UK folks, there's a petition to keep protection of transgender people in the equality act.

It's pretty scary being trans in this country at the moment, and we could use your help to protect our rights.

Feel free to share broadly/openly with others. Steal, boost, whatever. Let's get 100k signatures, please.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/627984

Pay attention when strikes happen. Because the rhetoric quickly becomes "the nurses should sacrifice themselves for the greater good", "the railroad workers should sacrifice themselves", "the teachers should sacrifice themselves", "essential workers should sacrifice themselves".

Listen for how few and who says "Profits should be sacrificed for the greater good". Listen to how those asked to wear a mask or get a vaccine SCREAMED about how unfair that sacrifice for the greater good was.