You separatists in Alberta are going to be disappointed if you go through this whole transition to let yourself extract fossil fuels and then discover that we are also phasing out fossil fuels, even if we did it with a few more jumps and starts than in Canada.

Yeah, I really don’t think that The Guardian is doing Labour any favors by running articles of this sort without covering that important tidbit.

If it were off trying to convince people that the UK should rejoin, whether-or-not previous opt-outs were granted, that’d be a different story; then there’s a serious, pro-EU policy end goal. If the UK is going to do a Rejoin at some point, then I expect that that’s probably the public opinion bar that’s going to need to be met. Probably not a bar that’s going to be met overnight, so might as well start on it now.

In terms of users, it’ll be Mastodon, the Twitter-alike.

goes looking for numbers

This doesn’t indicate whether “active users” is monthly active users (MAU), which is probably the most-common metric for social media, but based on this:

https://mastodon-analytics.com/

There are presently about 750k “active users” on Mastodon.

EDIT: Oh, fediverse.observer does have statistics, and says that theirs are MAU.

According to that, they’re at 912k MAU, so maybe that active user count above is something like weekly active.

https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/stats

Here on the Threadiverse:

Lemmy has about 50k MAU.

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats

Piefed about 6k MAU:

https://piefed.fediverse.observer/stats

And Mbin about 900 MAU:

https://mbin.fediverse.observer/stats

Maybe it’d be a good idea to share blacklists like that. You gotta assume that Oman doesn’t want to hire someone whom the UAE considers unsafe to be in the cockpit of a plane either.

first Wi-Fi 8 router

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_8

The standard is projected to be finalized in May 2028.

Anything that anyone is selling now as being “Wi-Fi 8” is at best a guess as to what Wi-Fi 8 will be along with (hopefully) later firmware updates.

I like the Web.

I don’t like all of the websites out there and avoid using some, but I think that that was always going to be the case.

I guess that maybe it’s a little surprising that there was the degree of consolidation that there was among the broader population into use of some specific websites. But…well, network effect applies to social media, so you’d expect at least some natural tendency in that direction.

considers

I guess that the degree of shift to social media as a whole is surprising to me. Like, most really important websites are social media websites. But, well, I’d always used social media myself, even prior to the term being coined, so the idea that others might want to use it doesn’t seem that strange. BBSes, Usenet. I wasn’t a user of The WELL, but there’s another influential forum.

And a shift to Web-based social media was predicted. Those of us who were around probably remember use of the term “Web 2.0”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

Web 2.0 (also known as participative, participatory,[1] web and social web)[2] refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture, and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and devices) for end users.

The term was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999[3] and later popularized by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty at the first Web 2.0 Conference in 2004.[4][5][6] Although the term mimics the numbering of software versions, it does not denote a formal change in the nature of the World Wide Web;[7] the term merely describes a general change that occurred during this period as interactive websites proliferated and came to overshadow the older, more static websites of the original Web.[2]

A Web 2.0 website allows users to interact and collaborate through social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community. This contrasts the first generation of Web 1.0-era websites where people were limited to passively viewing content. Examples of Web 2.0 features include social networking sites or social media sites (e.g., Facebook), blogs, wikis, folksonomies (“tagging” keywords on websites and links), video sharing sites (e.g., YouTube), image sharing sites (e.g., Flickr), hosted services, Web applications (“apps”), collaborative consumption platforms, and mashup applications.

Whether Web 2.0 is substantially different from prior Web technologies has been challenged by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who describes the term as jargon.[8] His original vision of the Web was “a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write”.[9][10] On the other hand, the term Semantic Web (sometimes referred to as Web 3.0)[11] was coined by Berners-Lee to refer to a web of content where the meaning can be processed by machines.[12]

By Berners-Lee’s statement there, he always expected the Web to have a social aspect.

Yeah, I’m sorry, but this is on the business. There are business-class services where you will pay to have someone available to talk to you and deal with your data integrity. Facebook is not that.

And this isn’t a “hate on Facebook” comment, either. I’d say exactly the same thing if someone set up a business on lemmy.today and then was outraged that the server had data loss and that the server admin wasn’t providing personalized human tech support. It’s not that lemmy.today is a bad service when used for its intended purpose, but that it’d be an extremely bad decision to make it your business’s identity.

If someone has irreplaceable photos (or any other data) that they absolutely cannot lose, sticking their sole copy on some free online service is a really bad decision.

EDIT: Actually, that is kind of a neat advantage of the Fediverse that I’d never really thought about. If there were enough demand, I’m sure that you could get a Threadiverse instance with that level of service for you. I know that there are at least two providers that I’ve seen that provide managed instance service, and while I don’t know what-all they include, and it’s probably not the most-extensive level of support, I bet at least backups are in there.

searches

https://elest.io/open-source/lemmy

Deploy Lemmy as a fully managed service starting at $11/mo. Get automated backups, SSL, updates, and monitoring included.

With Lemmy, you can easily host your own server, and all these servers are federated, and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse.

Benefits of Lemmy fully managed by Elestio

Deploy a fully managed instance of Lemmy in few minutes on Elestio. We handle installation, configuration, encryption, security, backups, live monitoring, software & OS updates. No more DevOps.

https://fedihost.co/

Mastodon and PeerTube

Our Service

Backed Up & Portable

We keep backups and we let you take them with you.

Smart Management

We’re raising the bar to make the Fediverse easier. One interface to manage all your instances.

Help & Support

Whenever an issue arises, we write a help article to help future Fediverse users solve their problems.

Affordable

Get started owning your persence on the Fediverse for just $4 a month.

You’re not gonna get much human time for $4/mo, but they do apparently offer custom packages, and I’d imagine that one could probably arrange for a higher level of service if one wanted.

The Humane Society was getting tired of dealing with Tamagotchis.

Traceroute will, unfortunately, run into the same issue that trying to geolocate the IP that the hostname resolves to—you’ll only be seeing the closest CloudFlare server to the requestor.

And yeah, I agree—network infrastructure doesn’t perfectly map to geography. In fact, my own post shows that, as there’s slightly higher latency from me (San Francisco Bay Area) to lemmy.today (Oregon) than to lemmy.ca (Canada). But it does correlate, and certainly places a lower bound.

If one really wanted to get elaborate, one could probably use other tactics to improve accuracy, like building a latency-to-known-physical-location map from various places, and using that to help correct a geographic location recommendation from a set of latencies from different points.

Or change-in-latency-over-time latency fingerprints, something I remember in thinking about when thinking how to hunt down the Jia Tan entity attacking the xz project. Jia Tan was always hidden behind a VPN. You’d have to pierce that veil. But a tcpdump of a TCP connection from them would probably permit one to build a “latency fingerprint” from a tcpdump of a TCP connection coming from that entity. If you know when latency was increased at particular times over particular network links on the Internet, you could correlate it with ACK time variations from that pcap file. Maybe iterate, slowly work back towards a source over time, since you probably can’t keep a list of congestion on all network links on the Internet all the time, could just monitor a few.

But that sort of stuff would be research project fodder, not really just a quick fix for “CloudFlare is keeping me from knowing roughly where a server is using conventional approaches”.

are there specific ways that we could be more transparent about our location? I’m happy to look into it to add that information.

Lemmy.fediverse.observer, piefed.fediverse.observer, and mbin.fediverse.observer will try to recommend home instances near a user. For some instances, this information isn’t displayed. I assume that it’s exposed via a Lemmy API, but I haven’t dug into the mechanism (and I suppose that they could just be trying to geolocate the IP that a hostname resolves to and listing CDN IPs as “Private”, now that I think about it more). It’d probably be desirable if fediverse.observer could obtain and display an approximate location.

Sorry—I haven’t gone investigating the fediverse.observer mechanism prior to this, so I can’t give an off-the-cuff answer. :-/

The stabbed pilot was identified as Indian national Captain Smit Machchhar, who was said to have made the emergency call and opened the door to the cockpit, allowing others to rush in and subdue the attacker.

“Despite being stabbed and seriously injured, he fought back, resisted, opened the cockpit door, and enabled passengers and crew to overpower the attacker – preventing a catastrophic mid-air disaster,” Netanyahu said, crediting him with saving 174 people onboard.

Damn. Good job, dude.

I remember that FedEx flight where the pilot, copilot, and flight engineer were very severely wounded by an attacker and dying (they did ultimately survive), but still managed to get the plane down.

EDIT: And passengers on the flight, too. Like, barricading the cockpit has often been seen as a security measure, but I’ve commented and pointed out that the window for hijacking a passenger aircraft in the US arguably ended within minutes of the first impacts with the World Trade Center. By that point, it didn’t matter whether you were going to try to claim that you were going to land the aircraft safely — the Flight 93 passengers, which were slightly later than the other planes, knew about the suicide attacks and rushed the cockpit. They learned about the impacts too late to prevent someone from getting control, but early enough to make it impossible to fly a plane to a target. And shortly after that, the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, just got swarmed by passengers the moment it was clear that something was amiss.

https://www.270towin.com/election-countdown-clock/

2026 Midterm Elections
Tuesday, November 3, 2026

34

DAYS

I wonder if they could use it as a testbed for launching hypersonic ramjet-driven weapons that are optimized for high speed to the point that they can’t function below very high speeds. Wasn’t designed for that, but it’d be an application where survivability in enemy space wouldn’t matter, they wouldn’t need many, and speed would be important. We are doing work on hypersonic weapons.

searches

It sounds like there were plans for a plane that filled something along the lines of that role:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_SR-72

The Lockheed Martin SR-72, commonly referred to as “Son of Blackbird”,[1] is an American hypersonic concept intended for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). It was proposed privately in 2013 by Lockheed Martin as a successor to the retired Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird.

In November 2018, Lockheed Martin reported that a prototype of the SR-72 was scheduled to fly by 2025 and would be equipped to launch hypersonic missiles.[26] As of 2026 no such prototype has been launched.[27] The SR-72 could enter service in the 2030s.[28]

In September 2026, Jared Isaacman, Administrator of NASA, during his presentation, “A New Era for NASA and American Space Exploration” at the All-In Summit he mentioned rebuilding NASA’s X-Plane portfolio. On the slideshow, it shows a image of a unknown plane similar to the SR-71 Blackbird.[29][30]

EDIT: Scramjets apparently have a floor speed that’s higher than the SR-71’s ceiling speed, so I don’t think an SR-71 could be used to get a scramjet-based hypersonic weapon up to operational speed; it’d need to be a ramjet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet

A scramjet (supersonic combustion ramjet) is a variant of a ramjet airbreathing jet engine in which combustion takes place in supersonic airflow.

Because they can only operate in hypersonic airflow (>Mach 5), the aircraft to which they are attached must attain a hypersonic airspeed before the scramjet can be enabled.

EDIT2: It sounds like Mach 5 isn’t the scramjet floor (the article is probably just giving the floor for “hypersonic”) but it sounds like past scramjets still had to be boosted to close to that, a higher speed than the SR-71 could manage:

The X-51A was carried aboard a B-52, accelerated to Mach 4.5 via a solid rocket booster, and then ignited the Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne scramjet engine to reach Mach 5 at 70,000 feet (21,000 m).

I like its lines, but realistically, I don’t know what you’d use it for unless you need extremely high-resolution images.

We know, from Trump’s probably-ill-advised tweet back in 2019, that we can do 10-centimeter resolution from reconaissance satellites like USA-224, near the physical limitations of light resolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-224

Perigee altitude: 270 kilometers (170 mi)[1]
Apogee altitude: 986 kilometers (613 mi)[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird

During missions, the SR-71 operated at high speeds and altitudes (Mach 3.2 at 85,000 ft or 26,000 m)

The SR-71 operates at a tenth to a thirtieth USA-224’s altitude, so assuming comparable imaging systems (which I could believe) and that there aren’t stability or thermal issues (which I’d be less-certain of) it can get ten to thirty times the resolution of a KH11 satellite from the lower altitude. I’m not sure how much utility there is in reconnaissance to getting 1 cm or ⅓ cm resolution images instead of 10 cm.

“triangulating” an instance’s network distance by measuring the latency from several locations

This is probably not the best term to use, as “triangulation” would more properly refer to combining multiple bearings from different places, drawing lines on a map at specified angles to see about where they intersect. Locating something via latency measured from multiple locations is analogous to drawing compass rings with specified radiuses on a map and seeing where they intersect. I’d imagine that someone’s probably coined a name for that, though if so, I’m not aware of it.

Human Contractors Are Seeing All Your Horny — and Creepy — AI Prompts

I doubt that. My horny and creepy AI prompts go to a local model.

I think that one thing to keep in mind is that for a lot of younger users in particular, there is no PC. This is their only computing device; the smartphone has displaced the PC, not augmented it. So for many, it’s not merely whether their phone can do phone things. If the phone is restricted, so is their computing experience as a whole.

I’m not familiar with GeekBench, but I assume that, as with benchmarking software that I’ve used in the past, its benchmark runs for more than two seconds to help make numbers reproducible.

My impression—I don’t use it myself and my few experiences touching it have not impressed me—is that the major selling point is that it provided several different forms of communication that gamers wanted to use in a single package. Like, instant messaging, VoIP, video calls, chat, etc.

You could set up all of these individually, but this was free and all-in-one, is managed, and it didn’t require much technical expertise to use. Any user with an account has access to all the components.

And it didn’t cost anything to set up.

If I were going to set up, say, a VoIP server, I’d probably use, oh, Mumble. I’d get my own VPS for it, which would cost something. I’d only have VoIP at the end of that. If I wanted to use say, text-based communication or have some mechanism for sharing files, I’d have to go cobble something together from other components.

Slate is still going to be constantly connected to the internet

No, it’s not. It doesn’t even have a cell radio.