Tootfinder

On The Road - To Xi’An/ Quiescence ➰
在路上 - 去西安/ 静止 ➰
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Kodak Double-X 5222
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

The #IWW #GDC as an antifascist organization was always kind of a hack. It was a beautiful hack and it worked well for what it did.
In 2016, as Trump was rising, I found info from the Twin Cities GDC. They were super organized, building an amazing community defense organization. When we (Seattle) went to set up our chapter, following their lead, they were extremely supportive. When I got shot, Twin Cities folks were at my house keeping my partner safe. They literally flew people out to support us. They very much remain in my mind when I think about what mutual aid looks like.
Unionism is an important strategy of a larger fight. But it's important to realize that it's not the other way around. The GDC was built to defend the union, because there wasn't something larger to do that work. It filled a gap.
When we organized against Trump, we tried to make the GDC the greater thing. We tried to make the GDC into the vehicle for social revolution against the fascist threat... And it sort of worked. We were able to do a lot.
But that was never what it was built to do. It was always built as an appendage of the IWW. This contains its own problem. If Unionism is the revolutionary movement, then it becomes impossible to build a truly revolutionary society. Unionism centers "workers" which implicitly decenters those who can't work in the traditional sense (the young, the elderly, those physically or mentally able to work). It also decenters care labor that hasn't yet been widely commodified. Sure, there are all types of hacks to patch the holes, but the fundamental construction starts from the wrong assumptions.
It felt, for a while, like things could go another way. Like that our ability to bring members in could shift things a bit, maybe set the GDC on more equal footing with the core focus of the IWW. But that was always an illusion, far less important to think about than the crushing terror of the regime we were fighting.
Now, I will absolutely trash talk the IWW on occasion but in the end I do think they're doing good and important work. Any criticism I have should be taken with a grain of salt... And I know I do have a lot of salt. Again, Unionism is an important strategy. It's useful both in improving immediate material conditions and as part of the most powerful weapon we have against the capitalist system: the general strike. It's important, I can't say that enough. But it's not sufficient.
I've been thinking about this a bit recently, and I wonder if there are any other GDC organizers or former organizers who might be feeling the same. Feel free to DM me. I'd like to get some more perspectives and see if my understanding from several years ago deviates significantly from what other folks are feeling right now.
I'd also like to bounce some ideas around that come from my own organizing experience.

Google launches Gemini 3 Pro Image, aka Nano Banana Pro, with more control, improved text rendering, and enhanced world knowledge, for free in the Gemini app (Abner Li/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2025/11/20/gemini-3-nano-banana-pro/

Google rolling out Gemini 3-powered ‘Nano Banana Pro’ image gen, editing
Google is following the launch of Gemini 3 Pro with Nano Banana Pro. The image generation and editing model is officially Gemini 3 Pro Image.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #DriveTime
Radiohead:
🎵 Jigsaw Falling Into Place
#Radiohead
https://radiohead.bandcamp.com/track/jigsaw-falling-into-place
https://open.spotify.com/track/0YJ9FWWHn9EfnN0lHwbzvV

Nano Banana Pro is great at following instructions, generates interim "thought images", and makes full infographics with well-rendered text from a short prompt (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/20/nano-banana-pro/

Nano Banana Pro aka gemini-3-pro-image-preview is the best available image generation model
Hot on the heels of Tuesday’s Gemini 3 Pro release, today it’s Nano Banana Pro, also known as Gemini 3 Pro Image. I’ve had a few days of preview access …

Letterboxd plans to launch the Letterboxd Video Store, a curated rental platform with undistributed festival standouts, restorations, and more, in December 2025 (Letterboxd)
https://letterboxd.com/journal/letterboxd-video-store/

Letterboxd Video Store: what you need to know about our new feature coming soon • Journal • A Letterboxd Magazine
Coming in early December: Letterboxd Video Store, our latest feature to get you adding films to your watchlist and, crucially, checking them off. Here’s everything you need to know.

Sources: Salient, which uses AI to automate loan servicing, raised $10M following a $60M Series A in June, pushing its valuation to ~$500M; its ARR hit $25M (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/12/18/salient

Salient’s quiet AI boom: How this two-year old startup is building a company to survive the bubble burst
Salient cofounder Ari Malik built AI to automate loan servicing, turning collections calls into a high-growth business now valued around $500 million.

Gemini co-lead Oriol Vinyals says Gemini 3's gains come from better pre-training and post-training, contradicting the idea that pre-training gains are falling (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-unseats-anthropic-…

Google Unseats Anthropic With Gemini 3
Before we get to Gemini 3, we want to highlight this morning’s news that former Harvard University President Larry Summers has resigned from OpenAI’s board of directors following a congressional committee’s release of emails showing a personal correspondence between him and convicted sex ...

In a 30-minute test, Meta Ray-Ban Display was as spotty as Zuckerberg's failed demos, with the wristband occasionally failing to register finger swipes (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/technology/personaltech/meta-smar…

Seeing Through the Reality of Meta’s Smart Glasses
Mark Zuckerberg’s glitch-filled unveiling of computerized glasses revealed a company that may struggle to deliver on its promise for the future of computing.

Filing: Nvidia says it plans to rent $26B worth of servers over the next six years, doubling the cloud spending commitments it disclosed three months ago (Anissa Gardizy/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/nvidia-doubles-clou…

Nvidia Doubles Cloud Spending Commitment to $26 Billion
Nvidia said Wednesday it had struck deals to rent $26 billion of servers from cloud providers over the next six years, doubling the cloud spending commitments it disclosed just three months ago. The cloud spending plan implies Nvidia will rent several hundred thousand of its own graphics processing units from cloud providers like Amazon and Google that purchase them. Nvidia said in a