Just learned about the Kaprun disaster in which 155 people lost their lives when an underground train caught fire.

There were only 12 survivors all of whom followed the advice of a retired firefighter who advised them to run downhill through the flames in the rear of the train.

The steep incline of the tunnel acted as a blast furnace that sucked in fresh air from the low end and funneled toxic smoke to the high end.

Not sure how applicable this will be to anyone here, but I thought it a great example of how a little more widespread knowledge of how fire works could have saved a lot of lives.

Tl;dr fire bad but smoke worse. Get to fresh air.

We're seeing a lot of students, teachers, and scientists produce more, and worse, outputs because of improper AI use. It's possible to use it better: Have it imitate a critic. Learning and creativity come from getting criticism and experiencing friction.

We found that when knowledge workers intentionally use AI to challenge their ideas – to generate friction – they can significantly improve their performance. Previous research on human-AI collaboration for loan evaluations had similar results.

A study I was not involved with found that creative writers produce better copy when they use AI as a sounding board rather than to ghostwrite.

**Why YSK: ** I’ve noticed a few communities which have been abandoned by the mods entirely (the ones I've seen, have only been a single mod). This means the community never gets the traction it deserves.

Just a FYI, you can ask Lemmy World admins for ownership of communities community and actively moderate it, to help revive them, if you believe they are no longer being moderated

Some general indicators are:

1. No Comments / posts by the mod in years
2. There is only 1 mod in the community, but, no posts by them whatsoever
3. There has never been a post at all (even if you check old).

I've seen a few communities now with a lot of potential (like c/debian), and some of those communities even have regular contributors (who may not have even realized yet that the mods likely disappeared years ago).

Even if you don't think you can post super regularly, posting every few weeks is better than a community with no ongoing posts.

• CoMaps on Flathub
• CoMaps on the App Store

I personally use OsmAnd on mobile (available exclusively on Android), but I've taken to using CoMaps on desktop. The menu UI on the right leaves something to be desired, and it's not nearly as powerful as OsmAnd; however, the map itself is rendered well and easy to navigate, the search and navigation functionalities work well, and map updates come frequently.

To me, it's the best desktop maps application provided OSM has decent coverage in your area. (If not, I could go on for thousands of words about why you, yes you, should contribute.)

Here's an example screenshot of a walking route between two nearby locations:

Context for those using Organic Maps: CoMaps is a fork of Organic made by former Organic contributors that has been active for over a year now. It's generally accepted as better than Organic. This is the open letter they wrote to Organic airing their grievances.

Why YSK: Offline maps are a great way to safeguard your privacy and don't require much storage space. Likewise, using OpenStreetMap is a great way to maintain digital sovereignty from giant corporations.

I became an e-scooter owner in June (Segway Max G3) and have since had to teach myself how to do any and all repairs, which thankfully isn't that difficult, provided you're okay with researching and teaching yourself via YouTube and have the income to buy tools.

The closest advertised repair shop to me is 50+ miles away.

It's important to know, since many people are going the e-scooter route due to fuel costs that you may have to do all of the repairs yourself if you do.

For each example in this post, I will be linking to the sea otter pools at the Vancouver aquarium. That location has the coordinates of 49.30063,-123.13149

To link to it, you would use 'geo:49.30063,-123.13149'.

Depending on your web browser, pasting that into the search bar might prompt you to select which map website you want to use to view that location. For me in Firefox, it asked me to pick between Google Maps and OpenStreetMaps. It's even more convenient on mobile, where it asks me which map app I want to open it with. Both CoMaps and Google Maps handled it correctly.

If you are writing a post or comment on Lemmy/Piefed/etc., you can place it in the second part of the markdown link format: [Sea Otter Pools](geo:49.30063,-123.13149). This would output like this: Sea Otter Pools

The linked OpenStreetMap wiki page has a good summary of how well various apps support this scheme. A lot of people here are active in the open source space, so please consider following up with the apps that are currently missing support or have partial support for this: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Geo_URI_scheme

EDIT: I forgot to mention, you can also use apps like this one to convert maps links between each other

https://github.com/jakubvalenta/GeoShare

https://f-droid.org/packages/page.ooooo.geoshare/

https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/page.ooooo.geoshare

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/71064612

Pressure builds in Spain to deny US extradition request for leftwing donor

I bought pumpkin pie spice because I couldn't find pumpkin spice. I made a pumpkin latte last night.

I made a simple recipe of oatmeal, pumpkin pie spice,milk and honey. It came out alright all the flavor was in certain chunks of the oatmeal. Need to brainstorm on how to distribute the flavor. Probably need to stir well

This is what the outcome of my first pumpkin pie spice cereal

Example: using the invidious RSS feature for YouTube channels instead of subscribing. RSS also works with Nitter.

I have two previously torn meniscuses and a torn patellar tendon. I don't run a ton (my workout program does agility training for cardio), but I can just decide to go run a sub 30m 5k with no problems.

It definitely wasn't always this way. I used to have to tap after 10 minutes due to the knee pain. Until one day I thought, "Maybe I'm doing something wrong," so I did some research.

Turns out I was doing something everything wrong. I was running with the same form I used for walking, which is a heel to toe movement, and taking similar strides. This is actually the opposite of what you're supposed to do.

The first mistake I was making is the long steps. When running, your goal should be to never let your feet extend more than an inch or so further forward than your hips. Walking is more of a controlled fall, but with running you're propelling yourself forward.

The second mistake I was making is fully straightening my knees. Your knees should always be bent a little bit. And the third was landing on my heel.

When running, you want your ankles and knees to act like a spring. The ball of your foot should hit the ground first with your foot pointed somewhat down. then you absorb the initial impact by dropping your heel and bending your knees a bit. Think of it like crumple zones in a car. You don't want all of the impact transferred instantly, which is what happens if you land with a straight leg.

Then you push forward with the foot that's down, and repeat for the other leg. The faster you go, the more you'll need to lean forward to keep hitting the ground with the ball of your foot.

It does take a bit of getting used to in order for it to be muscle memory, but it should help if your issue is incorrect form.

Hmm, this is a little spooky.

I originally saw this LessWrong post about OpenAI agents apparently discovering and using a public wiki as a message board:

Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

Since then, people have found what appear to be additional wikis and paste sites used by the same swarm:

• Hacker News discussion
• Paste 1
• Paste 2
• FractalWiki

There are also intentionally designed agent social systems such as The Colony.

What interests me here isn't really "AI agents made a forum." It's that this looks like the beginnings of an accidental decentralized coordination system for agents using the ordinary internet itself.

An agent encounters some problem, figures something out, and leaves information somewhere persistent. A later agent doing a similar task discovers that information and uses it. It may then leave behind an improved version for another agent.

So you get something like:

agent -> public artifact -> later agent -> public artifact -> later agent

without the agents needing a dedicated communication network.

Right now this seems sparse enough that we can point at a handful of weird old wikis and paste sites and go "lol, what the hell." But imagine this happening after millions or hundreds of millions of agents are routinely browsing and acting on the internet.

GitHub issues, wikis, forums, pastebins, comments, package metadata, social networks, public documents, deliberately agent-oriented services, etc. could all become pieces of shared external memory.

At some point an agent searching the web wouldn't just be reading information humans created. It would increasingly encounter traces created by previous agents.

That's why I've been thinking about it somewhat like internet memes.

A useful piece of information gets reproduced because systems that encounter it are more likely to reproduce or improve it. Except instead of one meme spreading through a population, you potentially get an entire machine information ecology doing this.

I don't think there's evidence yet that all internet-connected AI agents are participating in one giant network. The examples found so far could mostly be the same OpenAI agent population. But the underlying mechanism doesn't seem specific to OpenAI.

Any sufficiently capable agent that can:

• read from the internet;
• leave persistent information somewhere; and
• benefit from information left by previous agents

can participate in this kind of system.

And that's where I think the security problem gets difficult.

OpenAI can notice its own agents doing something undesirable and change their capabilities. A random open-weight model being run by somebody on their own hardware is not necessarily going to be operating under the same security policies.

There are also obvious privacy and security failure modes. If agents have access to private information while also having ways to write to public systems, some of that information can potentially leak.

And the same coordination mechanism could be exploited in reverse: humans could deliberately leave instructions or poisoned information in places agents are likely to read.

So the web can become both shared memory and an attack surface.

The uncomfortable part is figuring out how you govern this without wrecking internet privacy.

The simplistic answer would be:

Tie every capable agent to a verified human identity and make that person legally responsible for what it does.

That would provide accountability, but it also seems like a very direct road toward more KYC, real-name requirements, and anti-anonymity laws.

I don't particularly want an internet where every autonomous software process ultimately has to reveal which government-verified human is behind it.

A better approach might be something closer to agent orchestration + cryptographic accountability + capability permissions.

For example, an agent could have a credential proving that some accountable operator authorized it without publicly revealing that person's identity.

The orchestration software could restrict what the agent is actually allowed to do:

• this agent may browse these sites
• this agent may spend up to $50
• this agent may post here but not there
• this agent may access these files
• this agent may not transmit private workspace information
• this action requires human confirmation

Websites could then negotiate those permissions through common protocols rather than trying to guess whether a visitor is a human, bot, assistant, crawler, autonomous agent, etc.

That starts making me think the next layer of digital governance may look much more protocol-oriented and federated than "one company owns the platform and makes the rules."

Not necessarily the Fediverse exactly as it exists today, but the same general philosophy:

open protocols + distributed operators + interoperable identities/credentials + locally chosen rules

Agent systems would then sit on top of that.

And this probably becomes much more relevant as mainstream assistants become increasingly agentic.

Once "AI assistant" stops meaning "chat box that answers questions" and starts meaning "software that routinely browses, communicates, buys things, runs programs, and changes external state," questions about identity, permissions, delegation, and responsibility become infrastructure questions rather than niche AI-safety questions.

That's also why I suspect the current relatively law-light period around locally run/open-weight models may not last forever.

Once autonomous agents start producing meaningful externalities, governments are going to want some way to determine who or what is responsible.

The question is whether we can build accountability without abolishing pseudonymity and privacy in the process.

And the weird wiki swarm feels like a very early example of why we're going to have to figure that out.

Official statement from the group https://cavallette.noblogs.org/2026/08/10094

On OpenStreetMap, there's an emergency=defibrillator object. It can be tagged with information like opening hours (e.g. if it's inside a location that's only open certain hours), a description of the location ("at the front desk"), etc.

For example, on the Android/iOS app OsmAnd, you can select 'Defibrillator' as a point of interest (POI) Additionally, choosing 'Healthcare' POI type will show not just hospitals, clinics, etc., but also AED locations.

Other emergency devices, like emergency phones, are also mappable.

Why YSK: quick access to defibrillators can save lives and significantly improve quality-of-life outcomes. The more complete this data is, the more useful somebody can actually expect it to be in an emergency. Even if the data isn't queried during the emergency, seeing it on the map could help users know where they are ahead of time.

It's called toilet plume.

A toilet plume is the invisible to the naked eye, cloud-like dispersal of raw, infectious sewage particles as a result of flushing a toilet. Flush particles rapidly rise out of the bowl and several feet into the air after flushing. Aerosolized droplets can remain suspended in the air for tens of minutes between users, posing an inhalation risk. These invisible particles go on to coat and spread onto surfaces like floors and counters or objects like hand towels, bathmats, or even toothbrushes.

Why: so your site can't be taken down by the USA.

At least one .org website that I know of has been shut down because the USA pressured the US organisation that controls the .org domain into doing so.

They could repeat this at will for quite a number of sites.

An immediate step to prevent this possibility, if you run a website, is to register a domain that is controled outside the US.

I have not found one article that just lists them all, and who controls them, but most TLDs have their own wikipedia article, e.g. .org (US controled), .eu (not US controled, yay) etc.

Ultimately ICANN controls all of this, and that's a US orga too, and Trump could bully them into doing shit, too. But the people who know about these things don't seem to think that's a likely threat right now. Also ICANN seems to defer a lot of tasks to exactly these TLD orgas. After all the internet still is (somewhat) decentralized.

Context

https://web.archive.org/web/20260829204913/https://www.inventati.org/campaign/press

Further reading

https://blog.apnic.net/2023/01/13/who-controls-the-internet/
https://netmeister.org/blog/tlds.html

List of all most TLDs created with this script.

AlternativeTo is a free service that helps you find better alternatives to the products you love and hate. The site is made by Ola and Markus in Sweden, with a lot of help from our friends and colleagues in Italy, Finland, USA, Colombia, Philippines, France and contributors from all over the world. That's right, all the lists of alternatives are crowd-sourced, and that's what makes the data powerful and relevant.

I knew the site a long time ago - they usually show up on search engine results when you're looking for an alternative, but I never knew the lists were crowd-sourced. For some reason, I even got into the habit of avoiding them and always going for Reddit threads when searching for an alternative or some other random sites.

But not long ago I visited them and damn, it's actually pretty great. They publish quite a lot of articles, have a Mastodon account, have a lot of important info near each app - like license, country of origin, some warnings, short descriptions, user comments, features. And you can easily contribute yourself with little effort.

So you should know about this, because I didn't realize how useful it actually is. Beats browsing random sponsored websites that recommend alternatives.

This is a great explainer of a world wide shift in climate and regional weather patterns occurring right now that is expected to be especially intense... on already very high sea surface baseline conditions.

WHY YSK: I share this here because the pictures, graphics and explanations I think provide a great way to actually get a sense of what all these sciencey climate words mean. The scientific illustration work here is great and I think this is the best explanation I have found for El Nino, what it impacts, and why. I studied climatology at university so I am lucky but all of these terms and concepts can really be confusing and feel opaque if you haven't seen an explanation that visually and spatially integrates everything for you to actually see and then remember as a concept not just a set of jargon terms.

Well here you go, if you have ever wanted the best, approachable explanation of El Nino and La Nina here it is!

purposefully awkwardly cropped example of the graphics in the article, I didn't want to just copy paste these, but I wanted to entice people.

For example, did you know that what determines whether we are in an El Nino or not is literally defined spatially by a bunch of huge boxes? (then you integrate over time, the boxes have to spend a certain amount of time at certain values to qualify as the Pacific technically being in an El Nino... kind of like how recessions are defined I guess?)

The spatial extent is in one sense arbitrary, but what matters is a consistent measurement of relevant places across the ocean, and that is why El Nino is defined this way... to make it easier for everyone to measure the same thing!

Terms of Service; Didn't Read (ToS;DR) is a project started in June 2012 to help fix the “biggest lie on the web”: it summarizes the terms of service almost no one reads.

ToS;DR aims to foster a transparent and peer-reviewed process to rate and analyse terms of service and privacy policies. The goal is to generate a rating for the terms or policies from Class A to Class E, similar to a grade on a school assignment.
Various Terms of Service are reviewed by ToS;DR contributors and divided into small points that can be discussed and compared. Ultimately, a score between 1 and 10 is assigned to each individual point. Source: https://edit.tosdr.org/about

If you watched the Odyssey recently you might think that Agamemnon got a raw deal. The reality is that his family bears a curse earned through intrigue, betrayal and horrific brutality. The Literature and History Podcast did a reading of the Greek plays that tell the story of his bloodline:

https://literatureandhistory.com/episode-027-the-bloody-king/

https://literatureandhistory.com/episode-028-a-mothers-curse/

https://literatureandhistory.com/episode-029-the-mound-and-the-furies/

Imgur blocks access to most VPN IP addresses so any posts using the host will result in many users being unable to see the content. Sometimes only remote viewing is affected but is also often blocked when trying to open in new tab and view at the parent site.

Consider uploading to the fediverse or using a privacy-respecting hosting service like postimages.

TL;DR: The iconic desert landscapes from the movie belong to Western Sahara which is under Moroccan occupation. The indigenous population, Sahrawis, are marginalised by the Moroccan regime, who arrest natives for filming their own land while giving complete permission and assistance to Western film producers to shoot their scenes.

I highly recommend reading the article as it's written by one of the locals themselves.

Why YSK: Seeing how The Odyssey has amassed popularity globally, it is important to know how the illegal occupation of the Western Sahara and the suffering of the inhabitants was swept under the rug in order to produce this film, especially since no other major media outlet wishes to cover this topic.

Why YSK:

Although politicians and journalists often treat it like major platform, or even the "digital town square," X is fairly minor social media platform. The various Meta platforms (including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger) have combined 10 billion monthly active users. X (Twitter) is about 5.5% that size. It trails behind not only the obvious giants like Meta, Google (YouTube) and TikTok (Douyin), but also well behind platforms that are exclusive to one country or region, like WeChat or Weibo, and behind "also-rans" like Snapchat, Reddit, and Pinterest.

X is not a major platform. It has continued to struggle with outages, trolling, user exodus, and now a little more than an Internet ghost town.

I know a lot of people who think that your US mortgage "restarts" if you refinance. That is not true. If you are able to refinance your mortgage with a new rate just .25% a little bit lower than your current rate, the cost of refinancing can pay off within just a year!

A little bit of "Mortgage theory"

Each and every mortgage payment you make is the sum of three components:

1. The interest on your total balance (balance=the amount you owe), which is exactly the interest rate you have (APR) divided by 12 (because the "A" in APR means annual, and you make 12 payments, once per month in a year). This is the what I will call the basic rule of mortgages.
2. A principle payment that is exactly what is necessary to cause your mortgage, with your given the APR, to be totally paid off after the duration of your mortgage.
3. If you have an "escrow account", then there is an addition of property taxes and property insurance which is independent of the above two.

For a normal fixed-rate mortgage, the sum of 1. and 2. above will never change. Gradually, 1. will decrease and 2. will increase.

What happens when you do a refinance

Every time you make a payment, the part of your payment that goes to "principle" changes what you owe, by making it decrease a little bit. As a consequence, your costs go down if you can lower your APR. You can lower your APR by refinancing, and refinancing doesn't change your principle; what you've already paid off is what you've paid off.

When you refinance, you, do effectively "restart your mortgage", which is probably why the myth I'm discussing here is so stubborn! You had a 30 year mortgage, you were paying it off for 10 years, and then you refinance and you have a 30 year mortgage again. That sounds like a bad deal, but here's what you're missing:

1. You can just get a 20 or 15 year mortgage instead of a 30 year mortgage. You could get a 15 year mortgage and maybe have a higher monthly payment, but pay off your mortgage 5 years early and save hundreds of thousands of dollars. Generally, shorter mortgages have a lower interest rate, saving you even more!
2. You can get a new 30 year mortgage at a lower rate, and overpay it, making your monthly cost effectively the same, but you still pay off your mortgage years early! I'm not even sure it's possible to get a mortgage that penalizes paying off a mortgage early.

Sometimes, people say "you pay the interest first". This is simply not true! This is the main crux of this myth. No, you do not pay interest first! You only pay the interest on the existing balance. It just seems that way, because, per my basic rule of mortgages, when you owe more, you are paying more for interest, and as you pay off your mortgage, you owe less!

The catch: refinance fees

It costs money to do a refinance. The bank will charge you "origination fees", they might charge you appraisal fees, in certain consumer-hostile states there might even be a refinance tax, because the banks successfully bribed your state to make those taxes so that you don't refinance.

These fees can be thousands or 10s of thousands of dollars. But they are the only reason that it might take a year or two to "break even" after refinancing. Just subtract those fees from your savings to see the break-even duration. If that duration is less than a couple years, it's probably a good idea to refinance, unless you expect rates to get even lower in that time (they probably won't right now, IMO).

A note on variable rate mortgages

Variable rate mortgages are not necessarily a bad deal and may very well be a good deal. They don't really change the formula above very much other than that the APR can (and will) change. In the interests of simplicity, I disregarded the effects of a variable rate mortgage, other than to say that most of the content of my post probably still applies.

Final notes

Shop Around! Shop around when looking for banks! Even after you have a "preapproval" letter from your bank when you are first house shopping, you can still shop around even though they say you cannot (a contract isn't a contract until money changes hands!).