Got a more direct link for FF? This one just goes in circles, with the download link in the instructions bringing up the page that links to the download instructions.

EDIT: That was a NoScript problem. I was able to grab the .xpi once I allowed the Russian domain.

The rest of the Fediverse runs off ActivityPub.

It’s a chess game at this point. We sadly have someone great at somehow running casinos into the ground, but here we are.

We’re a bit more widespread than most think.

I mean, we’re already seeing the danglers. To fix the whole system? Got a spare planet?

You have got to be fucking kidding me. Some 54% of U.S. adults read at a sixth-grade level or less? We all saw this coming from the '80s on, but I forgot that it’s been 40 years, and education has been properly gutted.

Sadly, “you’ll never work in this city again” has been true for my entire career. What are you going to do? Walk across Main Street to the other paper?

But it has never been an editor’s job to “push back on the folks who write articles,” which I thought would be the worst part of that sentence; literally, rewriting is what editors do. We don’t push back on staff, we push back on copy. A minor omission here, a glaring hole there, and – as a last resort – spiking a story until questions are answered.

No one has felt any job security in this industry for at least 15 years. “You can’t say that” probably cuts both ways at this point.

You’ve seen his age and diet, no?

This really isn’t all that surprising.

I do want to set the record straight that Reed headed GateHouse before the reverse merger with Gannett (GH parent New Media Investment Group bought Gannett and took the name). I’ve worked for some inspiring leaders. I also worked for Mike Reed.

Without getting too deep into the Reeds, consolidation was always going to come for the AP. Fewer members, lower dues; we touched on this just past the election with the layoff thread. But the structure of the AP is such that while most of what you’re running comes from dedicated national beat reporters (I’m looking at you, Marcia Dunn [who’s likely retired by now]) and state bureaus, when someone goes on a rampage and holes himself up in a department store in Bumfuck, Wash., the Bumfuck Daily Bugle sends copy and art to Seattle, where it then gets moved along to members while a reporter heads to the scene.

You’re not getting that from Reuters. They’ll eventually get there should the story blow up.

This is a stupid optics decision for shareholders. What Gannett should really be doing is ripping off the Band-Aid and ceasing to run wire copy decided on in Austin on dead trees nationwide.

Essentially, the belief that we were doing the right things for the right reasons was thoroughly disabused. Even with corporate ownership, things didn’t look nearly as dire 20 years ago. Maybe the arrogance of youth, maybe the still-extant ethical practices of the day.

Writ small, every day I walked into the newsroom from early in my college days to running a paper a few years later, each day presented itself as an opportunity to do the best work I ever had. A very small chance, but nonzero.

By the time I got to the hub here in Texas, that had ceased to be the case. We weren’t doing anything useful, just moving rectangles around as prescribed by the assigning papers.

What’s exciting here is this is a door opening into empirically exploring what sparked complex life. It could be bacteria insinuating themselves into cells and unintentionally ending up in a symbiotic relationship, or not, or a combination of evolutionary factors. This is nonetheless new data we didn’t have, and I’m always for that. Maybe it’ll be ruled out, or maybe it’ll create a new realm of science.

So often today, it feels like we’ve hit the end of science, and I’d argue that what we need to move forward are new data and forms of measurement. This feels like that.

I didn’t see the title as clickbait … did they recreate the circumstances of a known symbiotic relationship? Yes, with a bike pump.

But this does seem to open the door to a new area of scientific discovery, which is always cool and always comes with unforeseen risk.

2025 didn’t exactly open as the most vehicle-friendly year.

This is going to be an interesting one. So many external forces.

You put forth some profound questions well above my pay grade.

I prefer to view it as “what can I do to help myself and others?” I started out in journalism wanting to change the world. Then I hit my 20s. Then the buyouts accelerated.

And I can’t change the world by rewriting press releases. It keeps my belly full, and I believe in what I do, but Jan. 20 looms large.

Here’s the thing: The education system was intentionally gutted starting in the '80s to make critical thinking feel too hard, leading to where you’re at. If you want to screw the man, put in the effort to cultivate your own selection of news sources. It’s some upfront time, but then like a minute to add or remove sources.

I’ve never really lived anywhere my vote counted at the federal level, but downballot races are important because that state rep starts up the ladder. Whether your presidential pick matters is relevant and perhaps feeling fruitless now, but 10, 20, 30 years down the line, who you picked for school board could be running in a federal election because you supported them, alongside those in your community.

What can we do right now? This is going to be a dark period with some oncoming trains presenting as the light at the end of the tunnel. What we can do is vote people in at the bottom so they can eventually rise to the top.

Not saying you’re among them, but I think a lot of people neglect the ability of RSS to essentially roll your own morning paper from several disparate sources. Most of what I post on here is just waiting for me in a tab each morning … I have sections broken down into tech, news, politics, science and more.

When a source stops being useful, I remove it. Anytime I run into a good piece from a new source, I attempt to subscribe (usually with success). This keeps my feed from calcifying, and Beehaw is often how I run into new things.

Is that the hed or The Atlantic’s new tagline?

One result of The Atlantic’s sudden decline is I’m reading a lot more political thinkpieces from Rolling Stone via RSS. As a recent example, their coverage of Carter’s legacy from several different viewpoints has been top-notch.

Very near term, not bad. I have a bed in fixed housing for the night with my house batteries charging off mains ahead of the first major cold snap of the year. Beyond that is another question.

I question the rigor of this reporting. I read the story, and it’s a series of “on the other hand” setups that generally tells you you don’t have a story on your hands.

Basically:

Is “AI” cheaper? Depends. Does it have wider reach? Depends. Is it more effective? …

You see where this is going. Down that road lies conjecture and anecdote.