Tootfinder

What do you think? Did Venezuela just “thwart” a false flag?
“Venezuela says it has thwarted what it calls a CIA-linked plot to attack a US warship anchored in Trinidad.
It claims the US would have blamed Venezuela for the attack on the USS Gravely, a guided-missile destroyer, to justify aggression against it.”
Australia Broadcasting reporting: #usa #venezuela #war
Yup. Trump wants a confrontation.
No. Venezuela likely faking the false flag.

Die USA zeigen, was uns bevorstehen könnte, wenn wir den hässlichen Populismus der Rechtsextremen nicht klein kriegen. Trump nutzt das Leid der Bevölkerung zu politischen Erpressung, um Superreichen noch mehr Macht zu verschaffen. Extremer als Merz, aber was wäre in ein paar Jahren?
Gleichzeitig gibt es auch Initiativen aus der US-Bürgerschaft, die Hoffnung machen und zeigen, dass Solidarität weiterhin existiert.
From: @…

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Schön, mein Fedi Circle ist gewachsen. ☺️
#CyberCircleCreator #FediCircle

The Smashing Magazine comment form is still broken, so I’m memorializing the comment I _wanted_ to leave about CSS carousels:
https://adrianroselli.com/2025/05/my-request-to-google-on-accessibility.html#Update06 (anchor)
Includes quote fr…

My Request to Google on Accessibility
Hey, Alphabet or Google or Chrome or whomever in that illegal monopoly continues to release things to the web platform that are full of accessibility barriers, I have what I think is a straightforward request. My Request Please, if your team cannot explain how the thing satisfies all WCAG Success…

VeritasFi: An Adaptable, Multi-tiered RAG Framework for Multi-modal Financial Question Answering
Zhenghan Tai, Hanwei Wu, Qingchen Hu, Jijun Chi, Hailin He, Lei Ding, Tung Sum Thomas Kwok, Bohuai Xiao, Yuchen Hua, Suyuchen Wang, Peng Lu, Muzhi Li, Yihong Wu, Liheng Ma, Jerry Huang, Jiayi Zhang, Gonghao Zhang, Chaolong Jiang, Jingrui Tian, Sicheng Lyu, Zeyu Li, Boyu Han, Fengran Mo, Xinyue Yu, Yufei Cui, Ling Zhou, Xinyu Wang

VeritasFi: An Adaptable, Multi-tiered RAG Framework for Multi-modal Financial Question Answering
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is becoming increasingly essential for Question Answering (QA) in the financial sector, where accurate and contextually grounded insights from complex public disclosures are crucial. However, existing financial RAG systems face two significant challenges: (1) they struggle to process heterogeneous data formats, such as text, tables, and figures; and (2) they encounter difficulties in balancing general-domain applicability with company-specific adaptation. To…

Cry because your food touched your other food on the plate.

Circles or rectangles? What do you see? What does this tell you about your perception and consciousness?
Always fascinated by Anil Seth.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/05/optical-illusions-see-world-perception<…

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.AI. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.AI/new
[13/17]:
- Judge Before Answer: Can MLLM Discern the False Premise in Question?
Jidong Li, Lingyong Fang, Haodong Zhao, Sufeng Duan, Gongshen Liu

Now #TheAmericanFascist has appointed an 'envoy' to help convince Greenlanders to ditch Denmark and join the USA. Denmark is shocked and angered, as they should be. Greenlanders are wholly opposed.
There is poetic irony of a Louisiana politician being tapped to lead a "Greenland Purchase" by America. I very much doubt the result will be the same. But there are some interesting parallels.
Lousisiana Purchase (1808)
a) Made possible by squabbles and warring in Europe.
b) involved purchase of 2.14 million km2 of North America for $380 Million in 2024 dollars. Greenland is 2.17 million km2.
It's difficult to fathom just how undervalued the Louisana Purchase was...nevermind the whole — selling Indigenous Lands without Treaty — issue. But hey... that would be another parallel with today's Inuit and Greenland Peoples.
Back in the modern context, America's Fascists just want to do Fascist things like take over sovereign countries and oppress nations, not unlike Hitler, the Kaiser's Germany, the Napoleans, Imperial Britain, Conquistador-ist Spain, and Tsarist-Stalinist-Putinist Russia.
This all needs to be kept -- forefully if need be -- in the past. We cannot allow these regressive dictators to come back.
He must be stopped.
United States of America!
Americans!
Stop prancing around with Christmas presents as if nothing is happening and DEPOSE YOUR PRESIDENT ffs! This is ON YOU first and foremost!!
#USAPoli #Denmark #Canada #Imperialism #TheWorld #UN #NATO #Russia #Ukraine #RussiaUkraineWar #Louisiana #LouisianaPurchase #Greenland
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgmd132ge4o