Tootfinder

Interesting thing about tomorrow's tarot show, rendering now, is that I upgraded from Blender 4.0 to blender 4.4 and it's quite a bit nicer to look at the timeline editor.
Was sad to find that the render time was up though. From about 3 seconds per frame usually to more like 12!?
Trying it with an old version I see that the lights and textures look way better with 4.4 than 4.0 though. A substantial step up in the way the show looks without me even doing anything other than waiting four times longer per frame.
Seems to be heavily dependent upon lighting now. The slow frames are like 12 seconds but the fast frames with minimal lighting and close up on the video are more like 2.
Looks too beautiful now to go back though. Upgraded my cloud-remote render machines too. We will render on four machines tonight. FOUR! The power of it all.
g3.4xlarge is no faster than g3.large but g6.xlarge seems to be twice the speed.
But hard to be sure really coz of the massive variance in time depending on the lighting.
Anyway, great show coming tomorrow. Sometimes I wonder what the hell I'm trying to do with it but tomorrow's show is the answer. Hide the angry bitter political rant behind a strange CGI tarot show. When the rant comes together well I like it.
https://wordcloudtarot.com/@wordcloudtarot/statuses/01JYFF0GQV1680Z0VG0YTFZDTP

Sonic Archaeology – The Chaining of Cerberus
#ambient …

Remember when in 2017 everyone* was going full-in to “VR” and “AR”, like Microsoft coming out with “Paint 3D” and Facebook had bottomless people and it was worth trillions and now it’s basically a niche tech for a few sim enthusiasts?
*except Apple who was like 6 years late

The Air Force needs to be prepared to fight against an adversary like China
in a highly contested environment where no side enjoys consistent air superiority.
A major part of the recent training involved the Space Force
and simulating how enemy forces would use space-based capabilities and technologies, like satellites and sensors,
in a potential high-end conflict.
Other components, like maintaining communications and command and control elements, were tested a…

US Air Force underwent a massive stress test in the Pacific
The exercise, the largest scale in the Pacific since the Cold War, looked at managing airpower across contested environments.

EZLN aktuelle Comunicados 11 bis 14 – auch als Audio!
(Original: https://netz-der-rebellion.org/ezln-aktuelle-comunicados/, werden laufend ergänzt)
CARTA DEL CONGRESO NACIONAL INDÍGENA, GRUPOS, COLECTIVOS, ORGANIZACIONES, MOVIMIENTOS Y PERSONAS INDIVIDUALES DE MÉXIC…

EZLN aktuelle Comunicados - Netz der Rebellion
Finde hier die aktuellen Comunicados der Zapatistas mit deutscher Übersetzung und als Audio!

As a marketer by profession I feel this very deeply and struggle to find a way to communicate to fellow people on the left that the methods and tools for communicating messages and persuading masses of people SHOULD be used, as effectively as possible, to promote facts and values we align with.
I get that power is uncomfortable when so many parties visibly abuse it for malicious purposes.
But power in and of itself is a tools that needs to be wielded, and we should be cognizant about targeting it at changes that will improve our societies and help us and the planet.
Yes, don’t use power blindly. Don’t manipulate people. But using persuasive, effective tactics for mass communication to educate people on the truth and get them aboard initiatives that will help them??? Why is that evil?
It feels like the left sees power, influence, and thus marketing / PR / propaganda as too black-and-white. We need to be comfortable in navigating the grey. https://sauropods.win/@futurebird/114913847088444610

A look at 2025's AI models and what's ahead: OpenAI's o3 is a breakthrough, AI agents will improve randomly and in leaps, but scaling parameters will slow down (Nathan Lambert/Interconnects)
https://www.interconnects.ai/p/summertime-outlook-o3s-nov…

Some ideas for what comes next
As releases slow down, it's time to think about what we got this year and where we are going. o3's search, agent vs model progress, and scaling's settling.

Three things re this intriguing article from @…:
- I always treat health science news like this with extreme caution (“In mice” again!)
- but also I’m hopeful this might lead somewhere, have to pursue that chance, go go researchers!
- and this is exactly the kind of research that’s going to drain out of the US in coming years like water out of a canvas sack
https://wandering.shop/@adapalmer/115084815329503406

Subtooting since people in the original thread wanted it to be over, but selfishly tagging @… and @… whose opinions I value...
I think that saying "we are not a supply chain" is exactly what open-source maintainers should be doing right now in response to "open source supply chain security" threads.
I can't claim to be an expert and don't maintain any important FOSS stuff, but I do release almost all of my code under open licenses, and I do use many open source libraries, and I have felt the pain of needing to replace an unmaintained library.
There's a certain small-to-mid-scale class of program, including many open-source libraries, which can be built/maintained by a single person, and which to my mind best operate on a "snake growth" model: incremental changes/fixes, punctuated by periodic "skin-shedding" phases where make rewrites or version updates happen. These projects aren't immortal either: as the whole tech landscape around them changes, they become unnecessary and/or people lose interest, so they go unmaintained and eventually break. Each time one of their dependencies breaks (or has a skin-shedding moment) there's a higher probability that they break or shed too, as maintenance needs shoot up at these junctures. Unless you're a company trying to make money from a single long-lived app, it's actually okay that software churns like this, and if you're a company trying to make money, your priorities absolutely should not factor into any decisions people making FOSS software make: we're trying (and to a huge extent succeeding) to make a better world (and/or just have fun with our own hobbies share that fun with others) that leaves behind the corrosive & planet-destroying plague which is capitalism, and you're trying to personally enrich yourself by embracing that plague. The fact that capitalism is *evil* is not an incidental thing in this discussion.
To make an imperfect analogy, imagine that the peasants of some domain have set up a really-free-market, where they provide each other with free stuff to help each other survive, sometimes doing some barter perhaps but mostly just everyone bringing their surplus. Now imagine the lord of the domain, who is the source of these peasants' immiseration, goes to this market secretly & takes some berries, which he uses as one ingredient in delicious tarts that he then sells for profit. But then the berry-bringer stops showing up to the free market, or starts bringing a different kind of fruit, or even ends up bringing rotten berries by accident. And the lord complains "I have a supply chain problem!" Like, fuck off dude! Your problem is that you *didn't* want to build a supply chain and instead thought you would build your profit-focused business in other people's free stuff. If you were paying the berry-picker, you'd have a supply chain problem, but you weren't, so you really have an "I want more free stuff" problem when you can't be arsed to give away your own stuff for free.
There can be all sorts of problems in the really-free-market, like maybe not enough people bring socks, so the peasants who can't afford socks are going barefoot, and having foot problems, and the peasants put their heads together and see if they can convince someone to start bringing socks, and maybe they can't and things are a bit sad, but the really-free-market was never supposed to solve everyone's problems 100% when they're all still being squeezed dry by their taxes: until they are able to get free of the lord & start building a lovely anarchist society, the really-free-market is a best-effort kind of deal that aims to make things better, and sometimes will fall short. When it becomes the main way goods in society are distributed, and when the people who contribute aren't constantly drained by the feudal yoke, at that point the availability of particular goods is a real problem that needs to be solved, but at that point, it's also much easier to solve. And at *no* point does someone coming into the market to take stuff only to turn around and sell it deserve anything from the market or those contributing to it. They are not a supply chain. They're trying to help each other out, but even then they're doing so freely and without obligation. They might discuss amongst themselves how to better coordinate their mutual aid, but they're not going to end up forcing anyone to bring anything or even expecting that a certain person contribute a certain amount, since the whole point is that the thing is voluntary & free, and they've all got changing life circumstances that affect their contributions. Celebrate whatever shows up at the market, express your desire for things that would be useful, but don't impose a burden on anyone else to bring a specific thing, because otherwise it's fair for them to oppose such a burden on you, and now you two are doing your own barter thing that's outside the parameters of the really-free-market.

When Trump federalized the D.C. police, he clobbered the idea that the people of the city govern themselves.
That’s what Mussolini did when he centralized Italy’s municipalities.
That’s what fascists do:
crush local authority under the weight of a single man’s will.
https://www.cl…

Trump’s Fascism Isn’t Coming. It’s Here.
America is not drifting toward authoritarianism.