Tootfinder

This looks like an interesting take on the whole “AI" (IMHO its not AI and its not leading directly to AGI).
I've only watched this preview but it looks like it covers things from many points of view. The creator of the film
The AI Documentary: Or How I Becamean APOCALOPTIMIST.
#AIHype

The scale of Orbšn’s defeat has left Moscow with little choice but to acknowledge the loss of a key partner in Europe.
“Hungary made its choice. We respect that choice,” Russian Foreign Minister Peskov said on Monday.
“We were never friends with Orbšn,” said Peskov,
adding that Moscow remained open to dialogue and to building good, mutually beneficial relations with Budapest.
Moscow appears to be playing down the loss of a key ally in Europe,
striking a tone rem…

Source: Anthropic is preparing to release Claude Opus 4.7, along with a new AI-powered tool for designing websites and presentations, as soon as this week (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/exclusive…

Exclusive: Anthropic Preps Opus 4.7 Model, AI Design Tool
Anthropic is preparing its next flagship model, Claude Opus 4.7, along with a new AI-powered tool for designing websites and presentations, according to a person with knowledge of the products. Those new products could be released as soon as this week, the person said. News of the upcoming AI design tool sent the share prices of Adobe, Wix and Figma down more than 2% in the house following

If Alito steps down (My feeling is that he deserves to be thrown out) then the Senate D's should refuse to confirm any Cheato nominated successor.
Better to let the SCOTUS seat stay empty rather than have yet another trump sycophant.
https://slate.com/news-and…

It Sure Looks Like This Supreme Court Justice Is Getting Ready to Retire
A flurry of recent hints has prompted new speculation that the court’s most reliably partisan conservative is eyeing the exit.

One of my VR Lighthouses died last month. These things are gyroscopically spinning 24 hours a day for, what, a decade now? Nearly.
No wonder. Mostly the industry seems to be settling on using head-mounted cameras rather than sweeping infra-red beams and receptors on the head anyway.
It is true that lighthouses give accurate positioning, but means I can't easily take the headset next door, say. Or to a party.
So inside-out, as they call it, is fine for the headset now and mostly okay for the hand-controllers.
But it offers no solution at all for the foot-trackers and hip-tracker that I need for puppetting the characters in the #vr #slimeVR #trackers

Russini resigns from Athletic following Vrabel pics https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/48486392/dianna-russini-resigns-athletic-following-mike-vrabel-photos

Remember... It is all about money...
Aaron Rupar
@…
'Trump on the phone with Maria Bartiromo: "We don't get our oil from there. We have so much oil. We have boats pouring up to the United States. They'll be filling 'em up, and they'll be leaving and they'll be packed with the best oil you can get. Light, sweet, crude. We don't need the strait." '
https://www.threads.com/@aaron.rupar/post/DXCNkMBCe9c
(Only problem: so far the oil price did not move an inch today:
https://mastodon.nl/@vosje62/116392226218828143 )

MAGA International Goes Down in Flames (Andrew Egger/The Bulwark)
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/maga-international-goes-down-in-flames-orban-magyar-hungary-trump-elections-iran-war-peace-talks-pakistan-strait-hormuz-blockade
http://www.memeorandum.com/260413/p43#a260413p43

As salty as I am about it, there's also another way to think about this. For anyone who still has connections to folks on the right (which is perhaps unlikely for anyone on this server, I digress), the cult that has consumed them thrives on isolation and grievance.
The words "you were right" have the potential to cut through the programming and open up an opportunity for reconnection. The modern conspiratorial cult of the Right has been built partially around people who were told they were wrong or were crazy. In the vast majority of cases, they were wrong and even when they were right they completely misunderstood why, but we'll skip that for now. Liberals making fun of them (even the times when they definitely earned it) has pushed them further and further into their ideological hole.
The thing about those words, "you were right," in this context is that the way they offer reconnection also requires them to take one little step of betraying their ideology to accept them. So they must choose between maintaining allegiance to a pedophile or finally getting to feel superior after years of living in an illusion of persecution.
Under the ideology of the Right, admitting one is wrong is a weakness. It is admitting defeat. They have to "own the libs" by saying things, things that they know aren't true, in order to feel dominant. But these things are often so absurd that they end up being made fun of, feeling even more weak and pathetic, reinforcing their fear and alienation.
Offering what they're looking for can offer a way out, but only if they're willing to start to recognize the thing they've supported for what it is.
And they were right about some things. They were right that Bill Gates was a terrible person. I've had plenty of liberals defend him based on his philanthropy washing, but he's awful and always has been. The Epstein links make that blatant. They intuitively recognized him and didn't trust him, even if they were wildly off base about *how and why* he shouldn't be trusted... Even if their correct mistrust was leveraged into one of the most destructive conspiracy theories ever (vaccine denial and COVID vaccine avoidance).
They were right about Bill Clinton. He was always shady as fuck. Sure, the people who attacked him at the time turned out to be even more shady but that's not the point right now. He was connected to Epstein and that was always creepy as fuck.
And the Epstein thing was an open secret that liberals ignored for a long time. It was seen as some weird thing that right wing nutjobs believed about the Clintons. But it was true. Not all of it, and there has always been an antisemitic element to the right wing interpretation or Epstein stuff, but his whole pedophile conspiracy was always kind of real.
The whole "Illuminati"/deep state thing is a vast oversimplification, an attempt to make comprehensible an incredibly complex set of interlocking and emergent behaviors. But Epstein did very much want to remake the world, to create a new world order, and he absolutely played a part in it.
The Right wing nutjobs talked about global authoritarianism, Blackhawks flying over American cities, masked men with guns disarming and executing legal gun owners in the streets. That's all happening right now.
The "FEMA concentration camps" are not actually that far off. ICE and FEMA are sister agencies, both under DHS. I'd be more than happy to call that one "close enough" in order to hear some MAGA admit that ICE is, in fact, building concentration camps.
There was always a huge millennialist element to these things. They tended to be connected to "the antichrist." It was absurd, especially for me as someone who no longer identifies as a Christian. But I'll even acquiess that to a degree. The "the number of the Beast" is 666. That's just the sum of the Hebrew spelling of "Nero." Revelations focuses a lot on Nero coming back to life after his death. His death that involved a head wound, thus the line from Revelation 13:3:
> And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world marveled and followed the beast.
The parallels between Trump and Nero are easy to draw, and Trump's ear wound feels pretty on-the-nose for this. I don't believe in "prophecy" in this way. I think that there are patterns, and useful patterns can become encoded in beleif systems. But I will, again, happily call this one "close enough" for anyone on that side willing to also acknowledge it. I'm happy to meet on that common ground, because anyone who accepts it must recognize that their duty is to fight against it.
A lot of these correct nuggets are embedded in a framework of religious extremism and antisemitism. The vast majority of the beliefs holding these together are wildly wrong and incredibly toxic. But by giving some room to feel validated, listened to, understood, can give some room to admit things that were wrong.
Cult de-programming starts with an opening. People have to talk through their own thoughts, hear their own inconsistencies. Guiding questions can help them untangle these things for themselves. And it all starts by having enough room to feel safe, to not feel cornered, to not feel stupid. Admitting mistakes means being vulnerable, and the MAGA cult is built on fear. It's built on exploiting vulnerability and locking it away.
De-programming takes a long time. It's not easy. It takes patience. But every person who comes out does so with a powerful perspective, a deep understanding, that can be turned back against it. The best people at getting people out of cults are former members. Some of the most dedicated antifa are former fascists who understood their mistakes and dedicate their lives to fixing them.

Doin' US taxes again. Super blah without a donut!!
Last year my personal filing was about 200 pages long. (We also do a separate corporate filing.)
And once again my taxes will far, far, far exceed the actual disposable income I have received.
Yes, this is an upper-middle-class, first world problem.. But I do hate paying what amounts to big wads of $$ to pay for El Cheato's destruction of the US.