Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Monica @monicaaaaaah.bsky.social · 16m

For now at least you can extend support for another year relatively easily: arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025...

There are also ways to de-crapify Windows 11 and disable all the bullshit, though it takes some work arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025...

How to get another free year of updates for your Windows 10 PC

Buying Windows 10 a one-year stay of execution doesn’t have to cost anything.

arstechnica.com

2

Reposted by Monica

Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 1h

Feels like this will be a useful meme for the next few years

Peacemaker looks at a mural embedding Hitler into American symbols

6 300 1.2K

Reposted by Monica

Jonty @fairless.xyz · 10h

Windows 10 goes out of support today. My fave useless fact about w10 is that the iconic blue desktop background is a *photograph* - not CGI.

Tiny 'making of' vid here - youtu.be/_2RacX9DgWM...

36 1.2K 3.8K

Reposted by Monica

ghostly gwen howerton @kissphoria.bsky.social · 22h

Austin gay bar Oilcan Harry's, which I love, slams the news that Cheer Up's is being acquired by an investment firm.

"PLEASE AUSTIN, do your homework!! and actively support your LGBTQIA+ locally-owned community centers.
Remember, NONE of them begin with a C!!!!"

We don't know what's worse... the city not taking any noticeable proactive steps to protect 4th St. from being slowly stripped of its LGBTQIA+ owned identity, or Cheer Ups selling out its soul to a Florida corporation with conservative MAGA ties??? (Yes Pride Holdings, everyone saw you just unfollow D Trump Jr, Mr Beast, and Morgan Wallen today as this news blew up). Are you F**king serious?! Cheer Ups was supposed to represent alt queer Austin!! This news angers us, especially after their Pride stunt BS...
•••
What happened to our LGBTQ community where they don't seem to care that the owners of one of their "LGBTQIA+" entertainment businesses is actually a straight man trying to tear down Austin's historical LGBTQIA+ 4th St. block?.... looking at you new owners of Coconut Club.
There are only 5 locally LGBTQIA+ owned and LGBTQIA+ focused nighttime business in Austin now: The Austin Eagle, Highland Lounge, The Iron Bear, Oilcan Harrys, and Rain on 4th
PLEASE AUSTIN, do your homework!! and actively support your LGBTQIA+ locally-owned community centers.
Remember, NONE of them begin with a C!!!!
prideholdingsgroupcorporate

2 20 68

Monica @monicaaaaaah.bsky.social · 19h

Yeah I signed up for a free trial of both of them and I'm kinda leaning towards Deezer so far - I like the interface better and I like the "Flow" thing where you can generate a playlist by mood which is neat

1

Monica @monicaaaaaah.bsky.social · 22h

Yeah this was the last straw - fuck ICE and fuck Spotify for running these ads.

Turns out it's pretty easy nowadays to transfer all my playlists and Likes to other services so I'm gonna check out Tidal and Deezer instead

Spotify cancellation confirmation screen, indicating that the reason I cancelled is because of the ICE ads

2 1 18

Reposted by Monica

Boatcka ⚓️ @tainkirrahe.bsky.social · 1d

OK so Tidal has a 60 day trial for £2 and allowed me to move all of my Spotify playlists over in five seconds flat so this is a no brainer huh

Boatcka ⚓️ @tainkirrahe.bsky.social · 1d

Sorry a music question but I'm finally looking at alternatives to Spotify (thanks executive dysfunction) and Tidal seems pretty good, does anyone have any experience with it?

2 1 20

Reposted by Monica

Chris Person @papapishu.bsky.social · 1d

Getting a troubling amount of use out of this screen shot.

Peacemaker holding a nazi American flag screenshot from season 2

2 47 280

Reposted by Monica

Caræsten 🇵🇸 @cara.city · 1d

if you actually want to understand what the struggle for trans care looks like in a non-bourgois state, here's a paper on how Cuba came to offer full trans healthcare guaranteed by the state, and how it's become a world model for gender affirming care

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Abstract
In 2008, Cuba's minister of public health signed Resolution 126, an act that assured complete coverage for Cubans seeking sexual reassignment surgeries (also known as gender confirmation surgeries), the first of any country in Latin America to do so. Ten years later, Cuba is celebrated as having one of the most open and inclusive LGBTQ public health and education programs in the Americas. As illustrated throughout this article, the Cuban state approaches sexuality and sexual identity not as rights-based issues but rather as health-based challenges. Through the case study of Cuba's understanding of transsexuals' right to health, we argue that Cuba has provided an example of how the right to health for all moves toward breaking down the barriers of stigma by improving health outcomes for those with transsexual health needs.

5 77 270

Monica @monicaaaaaah.bsky.social · 1d

Love to put 6 exclamation marks at the end of my social media post announcing to the world that I've committed war crimes

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 1d

Trump announces another strike "just off the Coast of Venezuela" that killed 6 people

Under my Standing Authorities as Commander-in-Chief, this morning, the Secretary of War, ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO) conducting narcotrafficking in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility — just off the Coast of Venezuela. Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking narcotics, was associated with illicit narcoterrorist networks, and was transiting along a known DTO route. The strike was conducted in International Waters, and six male narcoterrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the strike. No U.S. Forces were harmed. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!!!!

2 2 8

Reposted by Monica

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 1d

The entire incident is infuriating and terrifying. She’s a Latina woman who was working a service job. On her way home late at night, with her headphones in, she was detained for an hour by masked federal agents who wouldn’t give her their names.

Maria Greeley, 44, had just finished working a double shift at the Beach Bar on Ohio Street
earlier this month when she said she was surrounded by three federal agents who grabbed her, forced her hands behind her back and zip tied her.
Headphones in, Greeley had been focused on getting home to her two dogs for a walk.
Instead, she said she was detained by masked agents who did not answer when she asked for names. They questioned her for an hour, she said.

200 2.4K 6.1K

Reposted by Monica

The Onion @theonion.com · 1d

Nation’s Indigenous People Confirm They Don’t Need Special Holiday, Just Large Swaths Of Land Returned Immediately https://theonion.com/nation-s-indigenous-people-confirm-they-don-t-need-spec-1839033177/

220 5.4K 23K

Reposted by Monica

nrxia 🏳️‍🌈🤘 @nrxia.bsky.social · 2d

GVH irl
#gvh

2 4 39

Reposted by Monica

Palle! @palleh.bsky.social · 2d

I don't get the determination to make Columbus relevant to US history. He never set foot on US soil. He "discovered" a place where millions of people lived and vikings and Irish fishermen knew about. He thought he visited India until his deathbed. His contemporaries considered him a violent weirdo.

110 360 1.6K

Reposted by Monica

John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 2d

It's time again as a notable Italian-American to note Christopher Columbus was an absolute piece of shit human who didn't land anywhere near this actual country so why the fuck should he stop the mail for the whole day

Anyway, Happy Indigenous People's Day, y'all

120 1.2K 6.6K

Reposted by Monica

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 2d

federal agents stealing children and sending them south. where have i heard about that before?

Caitlin G. DeAngelis @caitlindeangelis.bsky.social · 2d

ICE kidnapped a 7th-grader with a pending asylum claim and spirited him out of state without notifying his parents, seemingly with the cooperation of the local police in Everett, MA.

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...

Everett 13-year-old arrested by ICE and sent to Virginia detention facility
By Marcela Rodrigues Globe Staff,Updated October 12, 2025, 44 minutes ago

31
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Everett after an interaction with members of the Everett Police Department and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia, according to his mother and immigration lawyer Andrew Lattarulo.

The boy’s mother, Josiele Berto, was called to pick her son up from the Everett Police Department on Thursday, the day he was arrested. After waiting for about an hour and a half, she was told her son was taken by ICE, Berto told the Globe in a phone interview.

“My world collapsed,” Berto said in Portuguese.

From the police department, the boy was taken to ICE’s holding facility in Burlington on Thursday evening, where he spent a night before being transferred by car to the Northwestern Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Winchester, Va., on Friday morning, his mother said. The juvenile facility is more than 500 miles away from Everett.

The boy is a 7th-grader at Albert N. Parlin School in Everett, his mother said. The teen and his family, who are Brazilian nationals, have a pending asylum case and are authorized to work legally in the United States, Lattarulo said.

230 5.2K 14K

Monica @monicaaaaaah.bsky.social · 3d

Y'all look amazing! 😊

1

Reposted by Monica

cait (and adonis) @cait.bsky.social · 3d

don't forget! fuck the salvation army

unraveled @unraveledpress.com · 3d

It’s dinner time for the police. Appears to be pizza from a Salvation Army van.

Broadview’s “free speech” curfew starts soon, at 6pm.

20 470 2.2K

Reposted by Monica

Ian Coldwater 👻🌿 @lookitup.baby · 3d

as enjoyable as it is to dunk on vibe coders, this is just the nature of cloud services. they’re really expensive and they can easily cost you shocking amounts of money really fast even if you know what you’re doing! if you don’t know what you’re doing, messing with them is just asking for trouble!

cait (and adonis) @cait.bsky.social · 5d

guy in a legal advice reddit wants to know how to get out of paying google the money he owes them after vibe coding one of his apps into running 40 times a second for several days straight, but says it's not his fault bc they should have stopped him by making it harder to use

r/LegalAdviceUK u/ShavedAp3 • 3d
Join
Google want to charge me 7 k for API access what can I do as they are denying appeals
Debt & Money
Hi there and thanks for reading.
I tried to keep this brief and just ended up rambling on trying to get as much in as possible so here is my edited hopefully a lot smaller problem.
Google are charging me 7k for a mistake that I told them about within a day, the bill went from about £45 to 16k in a day! when I asked for help I was told "dont worry well reset it as a one off, you'll need to put measures in place and ill guide you through those after you agree" So i did he then said "I will monitor it for a further 24 - 48 hours and then tell you how to put the measures in place. " Less than 24 hours later the bill was now 23k and I found out how to stop it myself. Then came the long back and forth to get it reset.
Fast forward 5 months they have finally given me a 20k credit but with VAT the total bill at the time of the credit was 27k
The 20k would have cleared the costs at the time of making them aware they claim its both our responsibilities to monitor costs I feel I did that by contacting them as soon as I saw the irregularity.
I asked them to reconsider they said no the appeal has said that is their final offer so 1 now owe 7k.
Is there anything I can do here from a legal standpoint. I don't have 7k I barely have £45.
Thanks for reading I am in England if it helps.

Intentional or not, OP used either 36k (16 + 20) or 43k (16 + 27) of API credit. Obviously what API it is matters, but with google maps, 16k would equate to ten million pulls. Or two hundred thousand Gemini 2.5 calls with 1000 token input and 5k token output.
Those aren't numbers that something running correctly should run up for any average person or company. So either google screwed up something (which is unlikely that it would only happen to one person in the entire network) or OP has some app or something which isn't running properly and is sending too much to the API.
Edit: It was OP's app, polling google maps nearly 40 times a second for days.

tom_watts • 3d
According to other posts he ended up polling Google maps direction API 2300 times per minute for a few days. Looks like a combination of OP not knowing coding and asking ChatGPT to do it for him, and potentially Google's backend doing something weird in interpreting the janky code.
•••
146

18 45 350

Reposted by Monica

Zohran Kwame Mamdani @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · 4d

UNTIL IT’S DONE, Ep. 4: Sylvia Rivera

In the 1970s, queer New Yorkers had been pushed to the margins of NYC. Our trans neighbors faced immense cruelty. But in Sylvia Rivera, they found a champion.

As we combat Trump’s politics of darkness, her legacy can light the path forward.

410 6.1K 21K

Reposted by Monica

The Dreaded Abighoul @popeguilty.bsky.social · 4d

As always on this topic I much recommend Talia Bhatt's "The Third Sex" for a thorough discussion of how cis anthropologists bullshit and lie

53 140

Reposted by Monica

Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social · 4d

This man is being Gorilla Channel'd with a rotating selection of AI slop riot porn by several known white supremacists who are secretly running the government.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 4d

Trump: "Portland, I mean -- every time I look at that place it's burning down. There are fires all over the place. When a store -- there are very few of them left -- but when a store owner rebuilds a store they build it out of plywood. They don't put up storefronts anymore. They just put wood up."

350 2.1K 9.9K

Monica @monicaaaaaah.bsky.social · 5d

Me with my partners:

Cute drawing of doggy and kitty playing. Text says "You can't spell autism without u and i."

2 1 10

Reposted by Monica

Micah @rincewind.run · 5d

this is absolutely my favorite protest innovation of 2025

"my opponents are violent antifa extremist terrorists"

"your opponents are dressed as giant inflatable frogs"

solid fuck you to the pepe crowd too

The Oregonian @oregonian.com · 5d

Things are happening at Portland's ICE facility tonight.

Read more of our protest coverage here: www.oregonlive.com/crime/2025/1...

42 600 3K