Tootfinder

I had a weird dream where I was talking to someone at some kind of ceremony, I think a funeral, where I had timidly painted my face with clay as part of some ritual. This person was talking about how far society has come while our brains have not caught up.
Imagine if your ancient cave dwelling ancestors were dropped into this world of cars, office hours, budgets, climate change, and AI. They would be absolutely freaking out and struggling to understand things all the time... Just like you are now.
Society teaches us to suppress these emotions. You're supposed to be OK with giant metal boxes flying around you in rumbling stampedes, but you feel it in unexplained anxiety. You're supposed to just fit your life into tight little bounds that ignore weather and season, but you feel it in more unexplained anxiety and depression. We are all part of something so big and complicated we can't make sense of it, we cannot possibly comprehend it all, it is simply too much to fully grasp the implications of our individual actions within global capitalism. Should we be surprised by our urge to simply destroy it, by the anger and desire to simply "smash" something far more complex than can be met with simple violence?
Some part of my brain was trying to remind me to be compassionate to myself. Perhaps that reminder can be useful to you as well.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116404593670288025
The thing about the sycophantic interfaces that pretend to be humans is: whether you're nice or mean to them you lose.
If you're nice, you train your own brain to see the subservient word salad generator as a human being—and that demeans yourself and others.
If you're mean, you just make yourself angry and feel bad for no reason.
If you absolutely have to use them, be neutral and treat it as the hammer it is.

The answers to this question are, for D4, relative to expectations, refreshingly reasonable. I'm glad even the candidates with a track record of being quite car-brained (lookin' at you Albert Chow) at least feel the need to talk about balance and aren't all, "Yes, there is a war on cars, bicycles are ruining everything and only white people ride them" or something.

Meet the District 4 candidates: Is there a ‘war on cars’ in San Francisco?
In the Sunset and Parkside, over 88 percent of households own at least one car. Should travel by car be prioritized here in urban planning?

'Never use double for money' is dogma, not engineering.
Guest author Stefano Fago breaks down when double, BigDecimal, or fixed-point is the right call, and the production traps that quietly undo each one.
https://blog.frankel.ch/bigdecimal-vs-double/

Some thoughts from Claude about military use of AI in targeting.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYIHIM6ihVJ/?igsh=cmM1ZmdjaDl3bzJ5

I've finished reading Simon Winder's "#Germania" a while ago, but I've been slacking with the review. This is a book about the history of #Germany, in the wide meaning of word. However, it's not your boring detailed history book. The author takes us on a deeply personal journey across German landscape, across tiny towns and great forests, Schlosses, churches and monuments, and uses that as a context to bring the country's surprisingly interesting history to light. And honestly, it works — it is deeply enjoyable, to the point of making me wonder if one day I should actually move to Germany, get a Bahncard 100 and start exploring myself.
I didn't quote the book here, but if I were to choose one quote that really resonated with me, it would be:
"""
Solitary tourism is something that everybody should indulge in. Of course it is a fraudulent solitude because its enjoyment comes from its limited duration and having a cheerful, only very temporarily abandoned main base area. […] And then, suddenly, I am in Vienna, standing in the shadow of a monstrous, derelict flak tower, and completely alone. The virtue of solitary tourism is its infinite ability to absorb boredom. I often find myself almost crippled with anxiety that the companion or companions on a journey might be finding everything wholly without interest, would rather be eating somewhere else, are secretly angry that we have wound up walking down this street rather than that, are contemptuous of my own interests. Solitary tourism cauterizes all this: if a museum is boring beyond all measure there is no pressure to feign interest, you just leave. I am perfectly happy, in a zoned-out way, to crisscross a town, walking for hours, just for the off-chance something curious might be round the next corner – indeed in the confidence that there will always be something curious (there always is). But for each street, each bar, each folklore museum to be converted into an inter-human negotiation creates an entirely different dynamic.
[…]
Quite possibly the pleasure of this way of life would be much reduced in some other countries, particularly more insistently gregarious places such as Italy. German culture puts a high value on temporary solitude of a stagey kind. Perhaps this is its great gift. In some moods I think there is no need to do anything other than read German writers from the first half of the nineteenth century – a sort of inexhaustible storehouse of attitudes flattering to those who just like sometimes to be left alone. Everyone must have at least a part of them that wants to live in a stairless, doorless tower as a sort of intellectual Rapunzel, setting aside, at least in part, the complicated sexual frisson laid out by such an idea. Germany really is thick with ivy-covered turrets and the promise of solitude (Kepler staring at the planets above Prague, Faust conjuring demons) – the great majority presumably built in the nineteenth century in response to the whole literature devoted to the subject. There is one turret in Lübeck, built onto a city guard tower of just outrageous fakeness, which would do me for life.
"""
(Simon Winder, Germania)
And if you follow me, you have evidence that the part about crisscrossing towns is so true: the best things I've posted here I found by complete accident, especially the murals.
#books #bookstodon