The way all the 2020s have done so far have been making me categorically against every new generation of tech that comes out is insane. Like I'm from a technological boom generation, saw the first portable phones, nokias & blackberries & flipphones etc, and the first smartphones, and the first ipods & ipads & tablets in general while still having cassettes & DVD & MP3 players around so I know how all of it work, I had computer classes in high school, I did the transition between home desktop computers to laptops and back to gaming computers. But then they started to put internet in your printer & microwave, everything has ads & AI now and every update is worst than the last. I literally loved technology and they ruined it
My brother pointed out how committed Jack is to not having a power imbalance/conflict of interest regarding his feelings for Sam that even in a time loop where everything was going to reset anyway, he still resigned before he kissed her and I think that is hilarious and also awesome
“Readers didn’t just become more efficient. They also became more attentive. To read a long book silently required an ability to concentrate intently over a long period of time, to ‘lose oneself’ in the pages of a book, as we now say. Developing such mental discipline was not easy. The natural state of the human brain, like that of the brains of most of our relatives in the animal kingdom, is one of distractedness. Our predisposition is to shift our gaze, and hence our attention, from one object to another, to be aware of as much of what’s going on around us as possible….For most of history, the normal path of human thought was anything but linear.
To read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained unbroken attention to a single, static object. It required readers to place themselves at what T.S. Elio, in Four Quartets, would call ‘the still point of the turning world.’ They had to train their brains to ignore everything else going on around them, to resist the urge to let their focus skip from one sensory cue to another. They had to forge or strengthen the neural links needed to counter their instinctive distractedness, applying greater ‘top-down control’ over their attention…What was so remarkable about book reading was that the deep concentration was combined with highly active and efficient deciphering of text and interpretation of meaning. The reading of a sequence of printed pages was valuable not just for the knowledge readers acquired from the author’s words but for the way those words set off intellectual vibrations within their own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.
…Reading a book was a meditative act, but it didn’t involve a clearing of the mind. It involved a filling, or a replenishing, of the mind. Readers disengaged their attention from the outward flow of passing stimuli in order to engage it more deeply with an inward flow of words, ideas, and emotions. That was—and is—the essence of the unique mental process of deep reading.”
- from The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr
when people defend the “Cis white guy is default” thing like “He’s meant to be an everyman we can all relate to and project on!” kindly remind them the largest ethnic group in the WORLD is Han Chinese and the highest gender percentage fluctuates so if you want an ACTUAL “default” you want a 40 year old chinese person whose gender changes from year to year.
No matter how progressive or well-read you are, there are always going to be moments in your life where somebody pushes back against something that's so culturally ingrained you never even considered it before. And you'll say "Huh, it never occurred to me to challenge this but you're right" and that doesn't mean you were "morally toxic" before, it means you're a non-omniscient human capable of growth.
Well there is actually, they’re friends. They’re friends and they love each other and it doesn’t mean any less than if they were dating and they loved each other. They’re friends and that means devotion and affection and loyalty and love, and there is no point in which that love reaches a level that immediately indicates that their relationship must be romantic.
“Haha remember when murder-hornets were gonna be a thing? What a nothingburger.”
Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.
“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”
Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.
“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”
You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?
One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.
The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.
And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.
And I refuse to let the cynics own a chunk of my heart.
Portraits of professionals made from the tools of their trade (ca. 1800). More here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/arcimboldo-esque-composite-portraits-of-trades-ca-1800 @ExploreWellcome
This is behind a paywall, but is so important, here it is. If the WashPo wants to start shit with me about it they can tell it to the years I've paid to subscribe LONG after American newspapers started being desperate for subscribers.
In northern Ukraine, it was boy vs. Russian drone. The boy won.
Steve Hendrix, Kostiantyn Khudov
CHERNIHIV, Ukraine — On a cool evening last month, 12-year-old Anatolii Prokhorenko was up in a pear tree, cutting off a damaged branch for a neighbor, when he heard the buzz of a drone.
That sound often means death in Ukraine, and not just for soldiers on the front lines. Increasingly, civilians are tracked, chased and attacked by small, commercially available drones equipped with cameras, rigged with explosives and steered by fingers-on-joysticks a dozen miles away.
Ukrainians, darkly, have dubbed this Xbox-inflected hunting of civilians as Russia’s “human safari” — a terror campaign that started in the once-occupied southern city of Kherson. In recent months, it has evolved with new technology and spread to border areas around the country.
Anatolii knew it had recently reached the small farming village where he and his family live in Ukraine’s northern Chernihiv region, seven miles from the Russian border. Tractors, like the one his father frequently drove, had been hit in the fields. In March, a drone blew up a car next to a shop. Another had exploded on Anatolii’s street just the day before.
Now, the one he spotted was heading right for his house.
As he clung to the tree trunk, the black quadcopter buzzed past, flying just off the ground and bearing down on a cluster of buildings where three of his younger siblings were playing with other kids in their yard.
He watched as unseen eyes seemed to zero in on the structures and the drone began to climb, apparently rearing to strike.
“It saw the children and started gaining altitude,” Anatolii said. “That’s when I realized something was about to happen.”
What Anatolii did next — something he had rehearsed, something few civilians in Ukraine have been taught — might have saved the lives of those children, his mother changing a diaper inside or other neighbors on the block.
His story — and the fact that a 12-year-old in a pear tree knows how to fight back against a Russian drone — illustrates how deeply a tactic that the United Nations calls a war crime has dissolved the line between soldier and civilian in the fifth year of Russia’s war.
Within drone range of Russian territory, survival itself has become a military skill.
“It’s a really horrible problem the Russians are imposing on Ukrainian civilians in these towns where they’re using the human safari tactic,” saidRobert Tollast, a military sciences researcher at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
The attacks demoralize by design. And they force Ukrainian commanders to spread their drone defenses — which range from jamming signals to covering whole highways with netting to skeet shooting them from the sky with shotguns or machine guns — ever thinner, Tollast said.
The drone hunts started two years ago in Kherson, when Russians just across the Dnieper River began deploying cheap commercial first-person view (FPV) quadcopters to stalk and strike civilians going about their days — biking to work, waiting at bus stops, walking their dogs.
A drone dropped an explosive on a man riding a moped in November 2024, and then dropped another on the ambulance that came to help him.
By April 2025, the attacks were killing 42 civilians a month and injuring nearly 300, according to report by an independent U.N. human rights commission.
Investigators determined that the campaign was ordered by Moscow to systematically terrorize the populace and amounted to “murder as a crime against humanity.”
Ukraine’s first response was jamming — flooding the frequencies the drones depend on with empty radio noise. For a time, it helped.
But Russia’s answer was to equip drones with fiber-optic filament: a hair-thin tether that unspools in flight like a spiderweb for 12 miles — or twice that with smaller payloads — carrying video to the operator and commands back. Bypassing radio signals entirely, these drones can’t be jammed.
Adapting an off-the-shelf FPV drone to fiber-optic controls is a cheap and effective hack, Tollast said. Although the filament can tangle or break as it’s draped across miles of countryside, units often deploy two or three drones on each mission to provide backup and better targeting reconnaissance.
The advantages of the physical connection are huge, Tollast said, and both armies increasingly use them for a range of battlefield missions. Not only are they immune to jamming, they don’t lose signal at longer distances or behind barriers the way line-of-sight radio controls do.
Russia deployed the technology at scale in its push to expel Ukrainian soldiers from Russia’s Kursk territory in late 2024 and 2025, using the unjammable devices to collapse Ukraine’s supply lines. At the time, Russia enjoyed a huge advantage in fiber-optic drone production, making roughly 50,000 per month to Ukraine’s 20,000.
But Ukraine is catching up, and last year used long-range strikes to knock out Russia’s only domestic fiber-optic factory in Saransk, leaving the Russians dependent on Chinese imports. Both sides are dealing with rising costs of the hair-thin cable as more of it is gobbled up by the global boom in AI data centers.
That hasn’t stopped Russia from adapting the same technology for attacks on civilians in border areas, according to Ukrainian officials, the U.N. and locals who increasingly find the superfine filaments draped across streets and houses far from the front lines.
Anatolii and his father, Volodymyr Poltoratskyi, 49, had started noticing the glinting gossamer threads a few months earlier.
“In winter, it’s actually beautiful in its own way,” Poltoratskyi said. “They hang across the road and on the trees like garlands, and frost forms on them.”
One day in autumn, as father and son were cutting firewood in a nearby forest, Anatolii saw a soldier they knew handling some of the filaments. The boy asked what he was doing.
The soldier — an explosives specialist who goes by the call sign “Dynamo” — showed him how the fiber-optic material, like a fishing line, was almost impossible to pull apart without slicing the skin. Then he demonstrated three techniques the soldiers had found to break it, a combination of loops and pinches. Best to count to 15 after a drone passes before trying it, Dynamo had said, so you’re out of the drone’s view and don’t become the target.
It was a brief encounter to sate a boy’s curiosity. Father and son went back to loading wood on the tractor.
The drones kept coming. Russia had learned that the fiber-optic FPVs — which can stay low and fly behind hills, always connected and sending back clear video — were adept hunters, especially of unsuspecting civilians.
“They are very good at creeping up on their targets,” Tollast said.
Which is why when Anatolii heard the buzz from his tree, he looked up and saw nothing. It was below him, just a few feet above the ground.
And he saw something else, glinting in the low evening sun: the very fine fiber-optic contrail behind it.
As the drone moved toward his family, Anatolii dropped to the ground. He ran 20 yards and got his fingers around a hairlike umbilical running all the way to Russia. He made a loop, pulled it slightly, and remembered the soldier’s instruction: Count to 15.
“I didn’t have time,” he said. “So I counted to 10 and I broke it.”
The line snapped. The drone abruptly veered upward, banked away from the children and the houses, and spiraled into a section of wild ground next to the neighborhood.
“I waited for an explosion, but there was nothing,” Anatolii said. He wondered if it landed on its back. Later, he would learn that it crashed in a dense, swampy thicket.
Civil authorities came and poked around but didn’t recover it and warned the civilians not to get close. Soldiers said they might try to salvage the camera, which can be reused. But for now, it is buried in the swamp and Anatolii’s only souvenir of the drone he defeated is a small skein of the fine white filament that was his weapon.
“How can a civilian person, especially a child, do something like that?” Dynamo, the soldier who took a moment to teach a boy a military trick no kid should ever have to know, told The Washington Post. “Not every soldier would have been able to react in a split second like that.”
Anatolii was feted as a hero in Ukraine, but more as a target by commenters on Russian Telegram channels, so his family of seven have moved for now to a borrowed two-room apartment in Chernihiv, the regional capital, two hours south.
They travel back and forth to tend their potato crop and still find fiber-optic tracks. One of their neighbors, a 47-year-old woman, was injured Sunday when a drone struck her car.
These high-tech hunters, the family knows, are now a regular part of rural life — and death.
Y'all - the Catholic Church is not only a conservative institution, it is a strong contender for the most conservative institution in the world. I don't say that (here) in a disparaging way, I mean it in a neutral, literal sense. The Church's entire modus operandi is that it seeks to conserve what it believes to be apostolic teaching - disciplines, practices, and prudential judgements vary across place and time, but the teachings themselves never ever change.
Hailing the Pope or a bishop as some kind of progressive icon is nonsensical, and is hard for me to see as anything other than a very worrying sign of the reactionary period we're living in.
The President of the United States is to the right of the head of the most conservative institution in the world (the Pope) and instead of viewing that as an extremely worrying sign of the reactionary period we're in, people have decided the Pope and the Church are progressive
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