Tootfinder

An inside look at how Netflix's use of data led to generic "algorithm films" intended for broad appeal, with AI set to further entrench the production style (Phil Hoad/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/media/20…

Just finished "Concrete Rose" by Angie Thomas (I haven't yet read "The Hate U Give" but that's now high on my list of things to find). It's excellent, and in particular, an excellent treatise on positive masculinity in fiction form. It's not a super easy book to read emotionally, but is excellently written and deeply immersive. I don't have the perspective to know how it might land among teens like those it portrays, but I have a feeling it's true enough to life, and it held a lot of great wisdom for me.
CW for the book include murder, hard drugs, and parental abandonment.
I caught myself in a racist/classist habit of thought while reading that others night appreciate hearing about: early on I was mentally comparing it to "All my Rage" by Sabaa Tahir and wondering if/when we'd see the human cost of the drug dealing to the junkies, thinking that it would weaken the book not to include that angle. Why is that racist/classist? Because I'm always expecting books with hard drug dealers in them to show the ugly side of their business since it's been drilled into me that they're evil for the harm they cause, yet I never expect the same of characters who are bankers, financial analysts, health insurance claims adjudicators, police officers, etc. (Okay, maybe I do now look for that in police narratives). The point is, our society includes many people who as part of their jobs directly immiserate others, so why and I only concerned about that misery being brought up when it's drug dealers?
#AmReading

An approximate history of my amateur phone photography:
1. Really poor photos. Unsavory interest in (low resolution) panoramas.
2. Photos get a little better. Sometimes they're HDRs (I suspect the camera app was set to "auto").
3. A new phone. Higher resolution and a gyroscope.
4. Switching to LineageOS, and therefore to #OpenCamera. HDR enabled unconditionally.
5. HDR does not always come great (compared to the stock Motorola app that doesn't work anymore). I enable saving component photos, so I could try getting a better quality combination using the PC. I never manage that.
6. I start experimenting with exposure correction (combined with HDR). Sometimes I do multiple photos with different "Eves" to choose the best one.
7. A new phone. Finally, given even the gyroscope was failing already.
8. I learn that Pixels have "HDR " that gets activated when you do standard mode photos. For a while I do both standard and HDR photos; also I compare the middle component image with the standard mode image. [https://opencamera.sourceforge.io/help.html#faq]
9. Before I reach any final conclusions, I read "What is HDR, anyway?" I disable HDR entirely, instead I save standard mode (i.e. HDR ) raw images (which presumably aren't affected by HDR ) [https://www.lux.camera/what-is-hdr/]. Not that I ever managed to get anything good out of raws.
10. I discover that I can switch the lens. Today I've made my first photos, switching lens to get optical zoom 💪.

U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis on Oct. 9 ordered “visible identification” that is “prominently displayed.”
But dozens of photographs of uniformed immigration agents shot by Chicago Sun-Times photojournalists in four separate locations since the court order show how the feds have fallen short.
The 80-plus photos show that not all officers are displaying a visible identification code that mixes numbers and letters during some of the most contentious recent immigration actions that…

IDs are mismatched, illegible — or still missing three weeks after judge’s order to immigration officers
In dozens of photographs at four locations, Chicago Sun-Times photojournalists documented federal officers failing to wear the “visible identification” needed to hold individuals accountable during the ongoing immigration “blitz.”

@… with a profile name like that, I just have to follow you!
https://www.journeyman.cc/blog/posts-output/2025-07-02-flying-ou…

Flying out the hayloft
Ever since I built the cattle shed, and added the derrick to the front of it to allow bales to be hoisted up, I've thought that would make a very cool place to do a suspension. Now, at last, I've done it.

SEC filing: Snowflake says an executive shared unauthorized financial guidance with an Instagram influencer; an Oct. 26 video interview features CRO Mike Gannon (Alice Tecotzky/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/influencer-inte…

An influencer's interview with Snowflake's CRO triggered an 8K filing
Mike Gannon said that Snowflake will end the year with just over $4.5 billion in revenue and that "we're getting to $10 billion in a couple of years."

From my LinkedIn post: “Telling your dev team to use AI coding tools is like telling your 2010 ops team to use AWS. They didn’t know how to code, they were ticket and click-it VMware people… developers who don’t have product management mindset or have never managed a dev team will fail by trying to micromanage the output of the tool rather than specifying the outcome of the product and managing the agent team to deliver that outcome.”

Back in 2010 when we first started using AWS to run Netflix, the AWS services were very incomplete, somewhat unreliable, had scaling issues, but were super fast to provision compared to filing… | Adrian Cockcroft
Back in 2010 when we first started using AWS to run Netflix, the AWS services were very incomplete, somewhat unreliable, had scaling issues, but were super fast to provision compared to filing tickets and waiting for data center ops teams to do what we need. We worked around the issues, built a new cloud native developer driven architecture and scaled Netflix at speed. At the time many people said we were crazy to run a large enterprise on cloud and would be back in datacenters when it failed. …

Agriculture Secretary Brooke
Rollins gave a candid message to Americans about the continued impasse and concerns that millions of people could soon miss out on food benefits.
“My message to America is, first, the fact that your government is failing you, right now,”
said Rollins, whose department oversees the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

Mike Johnson Steps In After Trump Official Tells Americans: 'We Have Failed You'
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins gave a candid message to Americans about the shutdown – a little too candid for the House speaker.

U.S. scales back troops on NATO’s eastern flank
The United States has informed its NATO allies that it will scale back its troop presence along Europe’s eastern border with Ukraine as it focuses on security priorities elsewhere in the world, Romania’s defense ministry said on Wednesday.
The U.S. Army later confirmed the move but denied it was a sign of lessened commitment to NATO.
Depending on operations and exercises, around 80,000-100,000 U.S. troops are usually present…