Tootfinder

Water levels across the Great Lakes are falling – just as US data centers move in #GreatLakes

An Alabama state board votes to keep its contract with PBS for now, rejecting an effort to become the first state to cut ties following federal budget cuts (Kim Chandler/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/alabama-pbs-2149809fa142c792fab0ca6e8730ee80

Alabama Public Television to keep PBS contract
The commission that oversees Alabama Public Television voted to continue paying its contract with PBS. The decision came after a public backlash to the idea of dropping PBS. The Alabama Educational Television Commission voted without dissent to continue paying the contract with PBS that runs until July. It also voted to create a committee to explore the future direction of Alabama Public Television. A proposal to take the first step toward severing ties failed when no commissioner seconded the …

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 ...

Testimony from an Ogyen Kunzang Choling (OKC) Survivor https://buddhism-controversy-blog.com/2017/10/29/testimony-from-an-ogyen-kunsang-choling-okc-survivor/

Testimony from an Ogyen Kunzang Choling (OKC) Survivor
The following comment was posted by a Buddhist as a comment after having shared Ben’s powerpoint presentation “40 Years of Abuse in the Name of Dharma by ex-OKC born-kids” on Facebook. Ben wh…

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.

And that's a wrap - the newly refreshed laptop has been handed over to teen with most of the packages functional. Thanks for following along on this @… installation journey with me and thanks to all #linux maintainers, forum contributors and FOSS advocates around keeping the system running.
👏 WE REALLY APPRECIATE YOU!👏
The final judgement won't be clear until Monday when the first log in at school happens but hopefully it will be successful, or the IT support is going to have to deal with some very salty comments (from me).
16/16
FIN

The American patrol satellite had the targets in its sights:
two recently launched Chinese spacecraft flying through one of the most sensitive neighborhoods in space.
Like any good tactical fighter,
the American spacecraft, known as USA 270, approached from behind,
so that the sun would be at its back, illuminating the quarry.
But then one of the Chinese satellites countered by slowing down.
As USA 270 zipped by, the Chinese satellite dropped in behind its…

Military satellites dogfighting as tensions escalate in orbit
U.S. and Chinese satellites routinely spy on each other in orbit, rehearsing for more aggressive operations in the event of war.

"As trading activity spiked on [#Crypto] exchanges and prices whipsawed, multiple centralized platforms suffered glitches. Binance’s site went completely down at one point, and customers reported unexplained account freezes, unsuccessful trades, and automated protections like stop-losses failing to trigger"
Again, of course. People build crypto exchanges because they want to get ric…

Anatomy of a crypto meltdown
October 2025 brought the most dramatic crypto flash crash of all time, but it was only a dress rehearsal for the systemic crisis the industry is building toward.

Filing: Oracle signed ~$150B of data center leases in the three months ending November 30, raising its total data center and cloud capacity commitments to $248B (Martin Peers/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/o

Oracle Strikes $150 Billion of Data Center Leases in November Quarter
Oracle struck about $150 billion worth of lease commitments on data centers in the three months ending November, it revealed in securities filing late last week, a sign it is preparing for the cloud deals that customers such as OpenAI have struck with Oracle. The filing showed that as of Nov. 30, Oracle had $248 billion of lease commitments “substantially all related to data centers and cloud