"Democrats have formed trifectas in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, meaning that come January, the party will control the governor’s office and both state legislative chambers."

OK fixing our Presidential Elections should be high on their list. Pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and put the Electoral College nonsense to the side.

WOKE 👏 IS 👏 SO 👏 FUCKING 👏 BACK 👏 BABY 👏

RE: https://bsky.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:awb53yhfco464fm6qz4a32zi/post/3mzir4nev5c2j

ATTN: #Boston #Cycling folks

#BikeTooter

Lubach (Dutch talkshow comedian) has done a piece on how it turns out that, in terms of websites written in Dutch, there is an unseen iceberg under the water: a forum dedicated to horses that has, over 25 years, amassed over a hundred million posts from very dedicated and loyal users, making it... one of the main sources of Dutch language training data in LLMs.

This has caused it to be massively upranked in google search results as a Ground Truth, and pretty much every subject has been brought up at least once in those hundred million posts about horses, so... the Dutch internet is just horse-themed now. 🐴

Just 2 more days until our big LIFE AFTER CARS live show with special guest Janette Sadik-Khan. One of our favorite things she did to move us beyond cars? Citi Bike! Launched in 2013, it has been a vital part of the city's transportation system ever since.

Get tickets!

https://tinyurl.com/TWOClive

#biketooter #newyork #bicycle #podcast #books

"High levels of transportation noise penetrating a person’s home increase risk of heart attack, stroke and heart disease... This noise poses a heart hazard even for people whose sleep doesn’t seem to be disturbed by it, researchers found."

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2026-11-03/transportation-noise-increases-heart-risk-even-if-it-doesnt-disturb-your-sleep

(long one, I am sorry)

Reading around the internet I see a lot of people expressing their extreme displeasure at how everything on the internet now seems to show a "verifying your browser" type page, and while this is extremely annoying I assure you from the web sites point of view this is basically existentially required.

Allow me to go into more detail from the point of view of the company that I run, and I'm sure the story is similar in many different places.

On an average day bgp.tools gets about 500~ users or so actively using the website at any given time, and let's assume this results in a request rate of ~10 RPS of dynamic requests (this is not the actual number but it's easier to just provide round benchmark numbers), so basically this excludes CSS/JS/Images/etc.

At the time of writing bgp.tools is "shooting down" about ~40 bot scraper connections _per second_, and the connection attempts the do get through tend to go on to each try and perform ~5 RPS until stopped. To add on top these things continuously do cache misses, which makes sense given at that point is to try and extract as much information from you, for no cost, and as much/fast as possible.

This is very quickly unsustainable.

The problem is that these scrapers are aware that they are unwelcome, and so they will happily do things like: (listed in the order of most commonly done)

A) Use normal browser user agent strings so it's not obvious from basic access.log files

B) Emulate real browser TLS handshakes to evade JA-3 and similar mitigations

C) Use proxies that have lease lines with popular eyeball ISP providers and rented IP space, so that AS blocks do not work

D) Use entire botnets of smart TVs and other compromised devices, mostly sitting behind "normal" networks

E) Use free mobile phone app/games with a "special" SDK as proxies

F) Run entire browser stacks purely to load pages in the most "authentic" way possible

With C+D+E traits combined, IP/Subnet/ASN blocks no longer work, with A+B you cannot easily identify what is what, so this leaves you in a dilemma:

If you run a website which serves information anonymously for free, you have a choice of three options:

1) Put everything behind a log-in barrier (this might destroy your business)

2) Purchase/rent more infrastructure purely for the purpose of serving bots, and at a significant multiplier of your existing infrastructure (this might destroy your business)

3) Use a "verify your browser" step to cut out 90%+ of this mess at the cost of annoying users a bit

(3) is the only really viable option for a lot of people, the pure scale of the scraping problem for some website is just not survivable at most peoples current scales.

THIS IS WHY YOU DON'T ABSTAIN FROM VOTING OR VOTE THIRD PARTY, MOTHERFUCKERS!

#Vote! Like the perv you are. 🗳️

#USPol #Elections #Midterms

FBI New Haven, #Connecticut field office posted for several hours to its tens of thousands of followers that #Election Day was Wednesday and not today, Tuesday November 3rd, 2026. #USPOl It finally deleted it after being up for 14 hours some point on #ElectionDay morning.
#Vote
(I usually oppose X screenshots but this is worthwhile.)

Minnesotans are leaving "I Voted" stickers on the memorials to Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DfSkE7NvMCw/

#Minnesota #midterms #ICE #FuckICE #ICEout

Gotta love how the top 10 list is now ALL io_uring:

https://benchmarks.arjaythedev.com/12-dollar-server

also a new video as well. My son told me about it :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbsynnWC6BA

As the Trump administration ramped up deportations over the last year, federal agents have effectively turned their cars into massive, deadly blunt objects. https://theintercept.com/2026/11/02/ice-vehicles-cars-hit-weapon/

unfortunately due to the new visa rules that were announced yesterday, I'll have to find other opportunities outside the UK.
If anyone has any opportunities in game dev especially graphics programming and low level engine programming that are outside the UK, please let me know.

Multiple alarms set for 4:00am. Can’t risk oversleeping. I’m a chief election officer in a precinct in Fairfax County, Virginia tomorrow. I’ll live post with the #electionofficer hashtag if you want to follow along (or mute). Polls open at 6:00am Eastern. So I’m not likely to post much until after that. Opening is busy and requires my full attention. And if there are lots of voters, well, they come first. You lot will just have to wait.

And if you are eligible to #vote tomorrow, I hope you will. It’s important. And it only seems to get more important.

"Goodyear and Gordon say that mass motoring represents one of the biggest public health crises that the world has ever seen... Environmental scientists contend that tire dust and tire fragments are one of the largest sources of plastic particle pollutants in ocean water. Vehicle brake wear contributes high levels of magnetite to the environment that has been linked to the development of Alzheimer’s, a leading cause of death among the elderly."

https://www.styleweekly.com/unsafe-at-any-speed/

Too many damned deranged psychopaths driving around this world.

In America this guy could just pay off lawyers to save him from consequences selling it to the jury as another terrible accident where a cyclist dangerously ran into a vehicle while the traumatized driver is shocked to learn that bikes are permitted to use roads and not exclusively safe cycle lanes.
https://road.cc/news/killer-driver-handed-lifetime-driving-ban-and-minimum-jail-term-of-25-years-for-murdering-cyclist-after-dragging-him-under-car-for-almost-five-minutes

I have a soft spot for #SUSE. It was the first Linux company I ever worked at and it was a lot of fun. @cyphar and I met there as well and now we're founding members of @amutable . It's sad that this pointless churn in the name of profit maximizing keeps happening to a great company. So so many good kernel people that work over there that carry a lot of weight upstream.

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/11/02/suse-to-cut-one-in-ten-employees-because-of-ai/5306950

RE: https://social.sciences.re/@tito/117538793533909416

NSF requested 500 million dollars, total, for math AND physics, next year:
https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-2027-NSF-Budget-Request-to-Congress.pdf#nsf-summary-table

Simply funding basic research is an absolute bargain compared to LLMs brute forcing results for press releases

So apparently #Microsoft #GitHub is now shadowbanning #Gentoo from GitHub Actions used to build #RustLang crate dists. I guess it's time to move this to our own infrastructure… except that I suspect GitHub will then ban us for fetching from many repositories.

I mean, doing a "git fetch --tags" once a day is obviously so much "wasted compute". Unlike all the "AI" crap they're pulling off.