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For the first time in 6 or 7 weeks, it was cool enough last night to open the windows instead of running the A/C. Before bed, I opened up all the windows downstairs and upstairs to make sure there was good circulation.

That part was successful; house was 72 degrees when I got up this morning and very comfortable. Maybe I'll even weep a little less when I open this month's power bill. Except, what's that horrible smell?

Nearly gagging, I think, "Aww, man. Did one of the dogs have an accident?" The smell is omnipresent throughout the house, but after checking everywhere, no obvious source could be found.

As I stepped outside with the dogs, the stink became much thicker, and I realized what I smelled inside was coming from outside. The whole neighborhood reeks of dead animal, and now so does my whole house.

Update: Just called animal control, and they're going to come out and try to find/remove it.

The FTC has sent mandatory notices for information to eight companies it says engages in "surveillance pricing", the process by which prices are rapidly changed using AI based on data about customer behavior and characteristics. This process, the FTC claims, allows companies to charge different customers different prices for the same product.

The list includes Mastercard, JPMorgan Chase, Accenture and consulting giant McKinsey. It also includes software firm Task, which counts McDonald's and Starbucks as clients; Revionics, which works with Home Depot, Tractor Supply and grocery chain Hannaford; Bloomreach, which services FreshDirect, Total Wine and Puma; and Pros, which was named Microsoft's internet service vendor of the year this year. "Firms that harvest Americans' personal data can put people's privacy at risk," FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a news release. "Now firms could be exploiting this vast trove of personal information to charge people higher prices."

OW2, the non-profit international consortium dedicated to developing open-source middleware, published an open letter to the European Commission today. They're urging the European Union to continue funding free software after noticing that the Next Generation Internet (NGI) programs were no longer mentioned in Cluster 4 of the 2025 Horizon Europe funding plans.

OW2 argues that discontinuing NGI funding would weaken Europe's technological ecosystem, leaving many projects under-resourced and jeopardizing Europe's position in the global digital landscape. The letter reads, in part: NGI programs have shown their strength and importance to support the European software infrastructure, as a generic funding instrument to fund digital commons and ensure their long-term sustainability. We find this transformation incomprehensible, moreover when NGI has proven efficient and economical to support free software as a whole, from the smallest to the most established initiatives. This ecosystem diversity backs the strength of European technological innovation, and maintaining the NGI initiative to provide structural support to software projects at the heart of worldwide innovation is key to enforce the sovereignty of a European infrastructure. Contrary to common perception, technical innovations often originate from European rather than North American programming communities, and are mostly initiated by small-scaled organizations.

Previous Cluster 4 allocated 27 millions euros to:

• "Human centric Internet aligned with values and principles commonly shared in Europe";
• "A flourishing internet, based on common building blocks created within NGI, that enables better control of our digital life";
• "A structured eco-system of talented contributors driving the creation of new internet commons and the evolution of existing internet commons."

In the name of these challenges, more than 500 projects received NGI funding in the first 5 years, backed by 18 organizations managing these European funding consortia.

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The surge is startling scientists, amplifying impacts such as hurricane storm surges.

Across the American South, tides are rising at accelerating rates that are among the most extreme on Earth, constituting a surge that has startled scientists such as Jeff Chanton, professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science at Florida State University.

“It’s pretty shocking,” he said. “You would think it would increase gradually, it would be a gradual thing. But this is like a major shift.”

Worldwide sea levels have climbed since 1900 by some 1.5 millimeters a year, a pace that is unprecedented in at least 3,000 years and generally attributable to melting ice sheets and glaciers and also the expansion of the oceans as their temperatures warm. Since the middle of the 20th century the rate has gained speed, exceeding 3 millimeters a year since 1992.

In the South the pace has quickened further, jumping from about 1.7 millimeters a year at the turn of the 20th century to at least 8.4 millimeters by 2021, according to a 2023 study published in Nature Communications based on tidal gauge records from throughout the region. In Pensacola, a beachy community on the western side of the Florida Panhandle, the rate soared to roughly 11 millimeters a year by the end of 2021.

They only seem to travel solo, and as soon as you smack one, another one immediately takes its place.

After teasing support for the fediverse earlier this year, the newsletter platform and Substack rival Ghost has finally delivered. "Over the past few days, Ghost says it has achieved two major milestones in its move to become a federated service," reports TechCrunch. "Of note, it has federated its own newsletter, making it the first federated Ghost instance on the internet."

From the report:

Users can follow the newsletter through their preferred federated app at @[email protected], though the company warns there will be bugs and issues as it continues to work on the platform's integration with ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon and other federated apps. "Having multiple Ghost instances in production successfully running ActivityPub is a huge milestone for us because it means that for the first time, we're interacting with the wider fediverse. Not just theoretical local implementations and tests, but the real world wide social web," the company shared in its announcement of the news.

In addition, Ghost's ActivityPub GitHub repository is now fully open source. That means those interested in tracking Ghost's progress toward federation can follow its code changes in real time, and anyone else can learn from, modify, distribute or contribute to its work. Developers who want to collaborate with Ghost are also being invited to get involved following this move. By offering a federated version of the newsletter, readers will have more choices on how they want to subscribe. That is, instead of only being able to follow the newsletter via email or the web, they also can track it using RSS or ActivityPub-powered apps, like Mastodon and others. Ghost said it will also develop a way for sites with paid subscribers to manage access via ActivityPub, but that functionality hasn't yet rolled out with this initial test.

They used to put the affected versions in the email, but that stopped a few months ago. Now it's just a vague "product is affected, click the link to learn more". Every. Time. the support part of their site gets hugged to death as if the uptick in traffic to it is completely unexpected.

So now I have Schrodinger's vulnerability until whatever potato-class servers they have their support bulletins running on frees up enough slots to render a frigging static HTML page.

It's almost as bad as news teasers that are like "Is something in your house going to kill you in the next 30 seconds? Find out more at 11!"

How dare I polish and remove kludges from previous releases. 😆

Also, none of those kludges would have even been necessary if the project scope was properly defined from the start and the project manager didn't let the users keep trickling in new requirements without also extending the deadline.

So yeah, how dare I go back and implement something the way it should have been done the first time?

Alt text: The original still is of Grandpa Simpson, who the family believes to be going senile, pointing at a birdbath and screaming "Death!!" thinking it's death. The text has been replaced to show him screaming "Unconstitutional!" at the birdbath, and the title is "Clarence Thomas"

Hopefully she comes back for him soon. That spot isn't going to be shaded in an hour or two, and it's inside my yard, so the dogs are going to definitely investigate and bother him when I take them back out.

Update: Momma deer still MIA, but little guy is just about out of shade. Took the dogs out one at a time on leashes, and they seem to only be mildly interested in him. I was afraid they'd get all worked up like they do with squirrels and rabbits. I may need to still move him so he's not in the 91 degree sun, but won't have to move him as far.

Update #2 It moved itself further into the remaining shade, so prob good for another hour or so.

Update #3: It moved itself to the last bit of shade in the corner of the fence, so I hung an old jacket across the top and made a sun shade for him. Trying to avoid moving him if at all possible.

Final Update: Momma seems to have come back to pick up little dude. Went back to check, and he was gone. They normally don't wander off, so I'm assuming mom came back for him.

Bonus Aww: