Tootfinder

Now the reality is that all speech has that affiliation-building aspect and the argument-building aspect, but the scale of each varies a _lot_.
This thread itself is doing both! I'm making some concrete persuasive points here, but I'm also setting up an affiliation here. I want more people to join this "thinking well about the world" club and conversation. I want us to end up collectively in a better place than we're at. We gotta band together to do that. But also that means we need to communicate like we're in public and talking to people who don't all agree, and some of whom are hostile, and some of whom are real boneheads for various reasons.

internet_as: Internet AS graph (2006)
A symmetrized snapshot of the structure of the Internet at the level of Autonomous Systems (ASs), reconstructed from BGP tables posted by the University of Oregon Route Views Project. This snapshot was created on 22 July 2006.
This network has 22963 nodes and 48436 edges.
Tags: Technological, Communication, Unweighted

If you are up this late, maybe you want to stay up later. Go ahead, read my latest essay, What Did Vibe Coding just do to the Commons?
https://varnelis.net/works_and_projects/what-did-vibe-coding-just-do-to-the-commons/

What did Vibe Coding just do to the Commons? - varnelis.net
I write a lot about art and architecture, landscape, and the impact of technology on culture, but I haven’t written about coding since the 1980s, when I sold my first article to Creative Computing magazine. Back then I was a high school kid, spending hours working in both BASIC and 6502 assembler on the VIC-20. I ...

spam of the day
> Hi there, I am [generic chinese name], a senior full-stack developer with 7 years of experience. I’m looking to partner with someone in the US who can handle the client-facing communication side of projects, while I focus on the technical work and delivery.
> The idea is simple:
> You handle communication − I build the solution − We share the profit.
I should have setup per-contact email long ago, so I know how I got on the spam list of John …

Maintaining accurate timing in virtual machines has always been a challenge. Especially on hosts with many VMs.
Here's a clever solution, hopefully coming soon to a hypervisor or OS near you.
https://uapi-group.org/specifications/specs/vmclock/

The memory shortage that is spiking RAM prices is now expanding to the broader PC market, driving price hikes for GPUs, high-capacity SSDs, and hard drives (Andrew Cunningham/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/0

RAM shortage chaos expands to GPUs, high-capacity SSDs, and even hard drives
GPU makers may prioritize more profitable models; large SSDs are harder to find.

wiki_talk: Wikipedia talk networks
Interactions among users of 10 language-specific Wikipedias: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Nodes are registered wiki editors, and an edge represents a user i having written a message on user j's talk page. Edges are timestamped. The precise dates of the snapshots are uncertain.
This network has 103068 nodes and 312837 edges.
Tags: Social, Communication, Unweighted, Multigrap…

Why it matters to create and maintain open-source infrastructure for security monitoring including collection of forums and malicious communication channels.
This is a strong example (Google dark web report is discontinued) of the risks of relying solely on commercial vendors. If a capability does not align with their business interests or generate sufficient revenue, it can be discontinued at any time. Open-source infrastructure helps ensure continuity, transparency, and long-term ac…

Starting January 20, 2026, you'll be able to download any books that you've purchased from the Amazon Kindle store, where the author or publisher declines to use DRM, in ePub or Kindle format. Which means you'll finally OWN that ebook.
https://www.kdp…

Sources: China has told some tech companies that it will approve Nvidia H200 chip purchases only under special circumstances, such as for university research (Qianer Liu/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/china-restric…

China Restricts Nvidia Chip Purchases to Special Circumstances
The Chinese government this week told some tech companies it would only approve their purchases of Nvidia’s H200 AI chips under special circumstances, such as for university research and development labs, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation. The latest communication ...