"In China, driverless delivery vans have become a total meme, they plow through crumbling roads, fresh concrete, motorcycles, anything. Nothing stops them."

When you hear something outside, but you didn't have time to put on pants.

#ಠ_ಠ

@TheBreadmonkey
It is also an anagram of 'Riot, compost, frolic'. Which seems to be the todo list of half of fedi.

I don't play OPTIMALLY, I don't CARE FOR THE META, I don't play TO WIN, I PLAY TO HAVE FUN, and if I don't have fun, THEN I STOP PLAYING

#OffTopic

Best material?

[not you may not have criteria or a use case, that's the joke]

Posts without alt-text shouldn't qualify for trending.

The best of 2025 : Accountabiility.

okay which of you did this

I was given an excellent new water filter bottle for Christmas, and I'm very happy about it, but it wants me to connect it to an app. I am not going to connect it to an app. It is a water filter bottle. Why on earth would you need an internet enabled water filter bottle. Aaargh.

Therapy dog

🧵 My sense of justice was triggered by #Palantir corporate gaslighting two Swiss investigative journalists on LinkedIn.

This is something most people won’t even see, but I was angry, so I looked while my kid was still asleep.

Here’s what it looks like when tech bros attack journalists while you and I have too much food over Christmas.

Two Swiss journalists spent a year filing 59 #FOIA requests to document Palantir’s 7-year campaign to sell surveillance software to Swiss authorities (army and health services in particular).

📄: https://www.republik.ch/2025/12/09/warum-palantir-zum-risiko-fuer-die-schweiz-wird

The Swiss army’s internal report concluded they couldn’t rule out US intelligence accessing data through Palantir systems, despite reassurances.

Their story hit The Guardian, and #UK MPs are now questioning £825M in Palantir contracts.

📄: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/22/mps-question-uk-palantir-contracts-security-concerns-investigation

The journalists were rejoicing on LinkedIn. It’s a big deal to have your story picked up by mainstream UK media, especially after a year of hard work.

This is where it gets ugly.

The best bit of a drumstick or Cornetto ice cream ?

I didn't transition to become a girl. I transitioned because I am a girl

who is also a 5th dimensional being with 4th dimensional flames for eyes and accepts tithes in honor of my beauty and wrath and who was once part of all, fractured into the universe, gathered like a handful of ash, gathered without regard to my self-determination, and this I am self-assembled, and will one day fracture and gather again in my own self-imposed samsara until the moments when we can once again gather at the center of existence in an embrace outside of time before we fracture again.

I wish cis people could understand this is why we transition.

Love this. Watch the bird fly.

also as a little mini-explainer, since this is a major misconception about Chinese: the writing system actually encodes quite a bit of information about pronunciation! just, like, pronunciation 2000 years ago, which may or may not align with how it's pronounced now in any daughter language.

Chinese characters can be broadly broken down into:

- A straight-up picture of what the word indicates, albeit after thousands of years of simplification and regularization to make it easy to write quickly. 人 “person" ; 女 "woman"; 子 "child"; 口 "mouth"

- A semantic compound: 女 woman + 子 child = 好 “good, desirable"; 田 field + 力 plow->strength = 男 "man"; 日 sun (this was a circle before regularization) + 月 moon (this was a crescent) = 明 "bright". The spoken words indicated by the characters are NOT compounds in this way, only the visual symbol for them. (A spoken compound will be represented by multiple characters.)

- Occasionally, a very abstract word was represented by something non-abstract which had a similar pronunciation. This led to an obvious ambiguity problem, which led to adding extra details to the pictogram when the literal thingie was meant to indicate "no, I mean the literal thingie." For example, 且 an altar was stolen for the abstract "just, even, moreover..." and the literal altar came to be written 俎.

- This apparently inspired the solution for indefinitely expanding the written vocabulary without indefinitely expanding how many unique symbols you have to memorize: while many core words are included in the directly representative categories above, the majority of the dictionary consists of characters that are a compound of a semantic category word (such as "people", "water", "metal", "plants"...) and a phonetic category word, which on its own has a literal meaning but in the compound stands for its *pronunciation*, not its meaning.

So our friends 泌 and 密 from the above post are a combination of 必 in a phonetic capacity (not its literal meaning "must, sure to") and the semantic "water" for "secrete, ooze" and the semantic "mountain" for "secret, hidden". (Strictly, 密 is a compound of 宓 as phonetic and 山 as semantic, where 宓 itself is also a word in the same cluster of words-that-mean-some-sort-of-separation-and-pronounced-like-必: "stored at home", under a roof.)

But note, the phonetic component reflects the pronunciation *at the time the character became mainstream* which in general was well over a thousand years ago, often over two thousand. Hence, words written with the same phonetic may have no apparent phonetic relationship in, say, modern Mandarin. Some phonetics were changed during the Simplified reforms in the mainland several decades ago, based on observing how handwritten characters evolved in semi-educated settings such as street markets, but most remain frozen.

Chinese characters are mostly combinations of some several hundred frequently recurring symbols, and not all completely unique and unrelated. That's what makes it a functioning writing system it's possible to teach to a billion people.

... You just tricked me into writing a rough draft of a section in the Classical Chinese guide I'm writing. Yes, you!

#linguistics #chinese #classicalchinese

remembering this iconic team rocket moment