The Story of the Two Towers II 📖
双塔故事 II 📖
📷 Nikon F4
🎞️ Harman Switch Azure (FF)
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Sources: marketing tech startup AppsFlyer raised a $1B Series E at a $2.7B post-money valuation; Moloco, Google, Meta, and Unity acquire minority stakes (Kerry Flynn/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/22/appsflyer-billion-moloco-google-meta-unity
Acer und Asus verkaufen wieder PCs und Notebooks in Deutschland
Die beiden PC-Hersteller Acer und Asus einigen sich mit Nokia auf einen Patentrahmen. Dadurch darf der Verkauf wieder anlaufen.
https://www.
🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
Sosyete '25:
🎵 Yaygara
#Sosyete25
https://sosyete25.bandcamp.com/track/yaygara-2
The first record of the parable commonly known as the "Blind Men and the Elephant" showed up around 2500 years ago, in a Buddhist text from India. At this point it's pretty commonly known. I assume that most folks reading this will be familiar with some variation of it.
If not, it's essentially a story about people who have limited information making assertions about something: one man grabs a tail and says, "it's like a rope," another the trunk and says, "it's like a snake," a third the leg saying, "it's like a tree," and so on. Later variations are less kind to the men, having them not simply report their findings, but fight over them. The first English translation draws a parallel to religion.
This comes to mind for me, because social media has a tendency to incentivize us to make those hard assertions, to dig in, to argue our perspective as part of a spectacle. Free and federated social media isn't structurally that different from corporate media, so the incentive models built to maximize engagement by maximizing conflict tend to leak through the similarities in the user experience and the conditioning of other platforms.
I didn't really come here to critique the fediverse, but rather to remind everyone, "no one sees the whole fucking elephant." We are limited and there are necessarily some things so big they will never be individually comprehensible. Any system that relies on us all agreeing cannot possibly respond to those big things.
We can see that concretely if we look at the difference between "democratic unity" and "diversity of tactics." In the first model, everyone either agrees or gets forced to behave as though they agree (at least on some issues). That's how liberal democracy works. Diversity of tactics (which systematically described, for example, in the "St Paul Principles"), on the other hand, let's people align on goals without needing to agree on exactly how to achieve them. The reality being that often there are multiple "correct" paths, and sometimes those paths can only work if multiple paths are taken in unison.
No one sees the whole elephant. We won't even see the elephant later. People will still be arguing about the elephant long after it's gone. But if you want to get rid of the elephant, you're gonna need to accept that you can't comprehend it all and you're gonna have to figure out a way to work together that doesn't require a unified approach.
Gun injuries are the leading cause of death for children and teens ages 1‑17,
surpassing car crashes for the first time in two decades.
In the United States, people often think of gun violence as a topic with no common ground,
but we agree on more than we think.
And we can all agree that gun injuries shouldn’t be the #1 killer of kids.
Gun violence may feel like a problem that’s too big to fix -- but it isn’t.
Gun violence is preventable
—an…
Sources: marketing tech startup AppsFlyer raised a $1B Series E at a $2.7B post-money valuation; Moloco, Google, Meta, and Unity acquire minority stakes (Kerry Flynn/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/22/appsflyer-billion-moloco-google-meta-unity
Sources: Qualcomm is in advanced talks to acquire Modular in a transaction valuing the AI chip startup at ~$4B, up from a $1.6B valuation in September 2025 (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-22/qualcomm-is-…
Microsoft and Mistral sign a multibillion-dollar deal to build European data centers and integrate Mistral models into Foundry, Copilot Studio, and Azure Local (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com…