Tootfinder

Whatever the expectations for the July 7-8 NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey,
the geopolitical situation favors Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan so heavily that he is all but guaranteed to emerge the winner
—if NATO summits can have winners at all.
In the wake of the disastrous Iran war,
both the timing and the venue are highly auspicious.
Donald Trump told reporters that he was coming to Ankara solely for Erdogan
—another small, symbolic victory.
The…

Erdogan Has Laid a Trap in Ankara
No matter what happens at the NATO summit, the Turkish strongman wins.

Ask why, and know the answers are unsatisfying and contingent. It made sense at the time. Because we didn't understand yet. Because changing it would certainly break something else and we didn't know what yet and didn't have time to understand it. Yet.
Computers can be understood. Everything that is going on can be peeked at, prodded at, taken apart to know what is going on. Inside every complex system are simpler parts. The complexity comes from the combination of them, not mystery.
I cannot emphasize that enough. Just because you don't know, or nobody you know knows why something is how it is does not mean it is unknowable.

Punk is the way.
"...stop wasting time, energy, and emotions inside the gigantic, vacant '80s malls all social networks have become."
https://brilliantcrank.com/punk-is-the-way/?ref=brilliantcrank-newsletter

Punk is the way.
Though I know the answer already, my mind sometimes wanders and then wonders if the world is ever going to feel normal again. And the answer is always "nope." There's simply too much change happening all at once and there's no way we're coming out of this with a reset

Here's an answer for a life-changing technology that truly stands out:
"The Bicycle
Selected by Reshma Saujani
In the 1890s, the bicycle, as we know it today, finally let women go where they wanted, on their own, without asking permission. It even played a central role in the fight for women’s suffrage—a simple machine with outsized impact. Today, it reminds us what technology should do: expand freedom and opportunity. Millions of American women are still fighting f…

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.

The States That Will Not Be Commanded
There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter.

The States That Will Not Be Commanded | David Boles, Blogs
There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of comm…

Hi there, curious people in the #Fediverse. 👋🏻 Give this please a gentle boost. It's awesome.
#askfedi #fedihelp

What if #DarkMatter is the mass of all of the parallel universes superimposed upon this reality? #Astrophysics #Cosmology

What if Dark Matter Doesn't Actually Exist?
A good chunk of cosmology is riding on whether dark matter exists or not. But what makes us so certain that dark matter is the answer—and what if we're wrong?

The whole #LLM ROI thing reveals something interesting. It's basically impossible to figure out the ROI of an LLM. That makes it impossible for bean counters to make a comparison between human work and LLM work, or human work without an LLM and LLM-assisted work, to determine if the incredibly high price is worth it. But it's also impossible because you can't measure the ROI of a human, especially for skilled labor.
You can't measure the ROI of a human, because managers have no idea what people do. There's an eternally expanding amount of work designed to address this problem. But no matter how closely people are surveilled, interrogated, analyzed, there's never any real answer.
I've talked in the past about in relation to medical care. One of the dirty secrets of hospitals is that they have no way to figure out how much individual treatment costs. It's easy to understand at scale. You can know exactly how much something costs society. You can even identify patterns, using public health models, and decrease costs for society by trying to get people to avoid risky behavior (stop smoking, use protection during sex, etc). But it is absolutely not possible, at all, in any way, to figure out how much a single visit costs. This is similar to the problem of predicting climate change vs predicting the weather tomorrow in Amsterdam at 15:00. One is possible, the other is simply not.
But what is becoming painfully clear now is that this is true *everywhere*. It's trivial to know how much an industry costs. It's possible to figure out it's ROI for society. It is not possible to figure out how much value any individual worker provides. LLM ROI and cost comparison is an instance of this larger problem.
This is a problem for capitalism because it shows that the fundamental assumptions behind capitalism, that product value and labor value are quantifiable, that people can actually make comparisons between competing products, etc, are completely bullshit. The capitalist apologetics that makes up so much of economics, the lies that are told that hold this system together, are crumbling before our eyes.
If you make a lot of money, it's because you've been lucky. You have the right social networks, you have become good at convincing people to give you money. There is absolutely no way to connect that to actually providing value to society. If you make a lot of money, internalize that. Understand that you are not special, and things can change. If you don't make a lot of money, it's not because you don't provide value. Don't forget that. The system is a lie built to destroy you. Don't let it.
The ideology is sick, something something time of monsters and all that, we are together in this dying machine. We need to understand the lies. Your value can never be quantified. The way we have always figured out how to do the right thing for each other is through each other. Social connection has always guided us. But now the most socially disconnected people on the planet have hijacked the system. They direct the resources of the world, and game the system to avoid personal responsibility.
We have to build a system where everyone is accountable. We can't use abstract numbers and lies to figure things out for us. We have to build systems around people and accountability. There is no other solution.

“Ask yourself this simple question,
‘DO YOU THINK THAT OBUMA OR SLEEPY JOE BIDEN COULD HAVE DONE IT?’
THE ANSWER IS NO!”
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/29/politics/e-jean-carroll-trump-supreme-court

Trump must pay E. Jean Carroll $5 million after Supreme Court denies his appeal of sexual abuse verdict
The Supreme Court Monday declined to take up an appeal from President Donald Trump over a $5 million verdict and finding that he sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll, a decision that means the president will now have to pay the magazine columnist.