Tootfinder

There was once a machine that told you "you want this" and "this is good." It said, "there can be no better system and it's foolish to try to build one." That machine has long since failed to function. Now you choke on fumes as it is consumed by the wild flames of an abandoned cause.
That machine could not possibly work anymore because the evidence of it's falsehood has become too overwhelming.
No, only abject terror now can keep you from plotting your escape, from creating an alternative. No, the illusion has long since broken. All that's left now is triggering fight, flight, freeze as hard as possible. Most will be paralyzed, and those who fight can be used as an excuse to escalate the terror.
These are the final stages of a dying sun, expanding and consuming it's children before the final supernova.
There is no longer a stable system, no longer a system with a future. All that remains is the spectacle that hopes to distract you long enough that you too can be consumed, that it may sustain itself a few moments longer.

Here’s a mind-blowing experiment that you can try at home:
Gather some children’s blocks and place them on a table.
Take one block and slowly push it over the table’s edge, inch by inch, until it’s on the brink of falling.
If you possess patience and a steady hand, you should be able to balance it so that exactly half of it hangs off the edge.
Nudge it any farther, and gravity wins.
Now take two blocks and start over.
Stacking one on top of the other, how…

This Block-Stacking Math Problem Has a Preposterous Solution You Need to See to Believe — Scientific American
In principle, this impossible math allows for a glue-free bridge of stacked blocks that can stretch across the Grand Canyon—and into infinity Amanda Montañez Math Here’s a mind-blowing experiment that you can try at home: Gather some children’s blocks and place them on a table. Take one block and slowly push it over the table’s edge, inch by inch, until it’s on the brink of falling. If you possess patience and a steady hand, you should be able to balance it so that exactly half of it…

I’m going to admit that that “Chipocalypse” post freaked me out considerably. I wonder if history will see it as a turning point in America’s extended democratic crisis? Because to this Canadian looking across the border at the USA, it has that feeling.
#USpol

Hmmmm… here is a problem I did not anticipate.
Every time I empty the main pond hole of water, (the actual hole under the liner) water returns within an hour or two. I’ve done it 4 times now, and it keeps filling back up with water.
Obviously there is water underground infiltrating into the pond hole, and/or the water table itself is above the bottom of the hole. It is not coming from either of the other holes because they both have the same amount of water in them as they did this morning.
I have “watered” the blueberry patch and hazelnut tree a lot with the water that I have been cleaning the filter with… and we also had lots of water flying around outside the liners yesterday as I tested the pump. So it is quite possible that the ground around the pond is simply well saturated.
I think I am going to have to just keep removing the water (and putting it into the sewer) until it does not refill. We have a week of hot weather coming. Surely that will be enough time for everything to dry out completely.
Otherwise I might run into some issues if the rains return before I can anchor down the pond liner with gravel and get the plumbing in!
How is time already running short!?
Never underestimate the ability of water to find a place where it is not wanted. 😆
#poolpond #backyardProject #diy

Long; central Massachusetts colonial history
Today on a whim I visited a site in Massachusetts marked as "Huguenot Fort Ruins" on OpenStreetMaps. I drove out with my 4-year-old through increasingly rural central Massachusetts forests & fields to end up on a narrow street near the top of a hill beside a small field. The neighboring houses had huge lawns, some with tractors.
Appropriately for this day and this moment in history, the history of the site turns out to be a microcosm of America. Across the field beyond a cross-shaped stone memorial stood an info board with a few diagrams and some text. The text of the main sign (including typos/misspellings) read:
"""
Town Is Formed
Early in the 1680's, interest began to generate to develop a town in the area west of Natick in the south central part of the Commonwealth that would be suitable for a settlement. A Mr. Hugh Campbell, a Scotch merchant of Boston petitioned the court for land for a colony. At about the same time, Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton also were desirous of obtaining land for a settlement. A claim was made for all lands west of the Blackstone River to the southern land of Massachusetts to a point northerly of the Springfield Road then running southwesterly until it joined the southern line of Massachusetts.
Associated with Dudley and Stoughton was Robert Thompson of London, England, Dr. Daniel Cox and John Blackwell, both of London and Thomas Freak of Hannington, Wiltshire, as proprietors. A stipulation in the acquisition of this land being that within four years thirty families and an orthodox minister settle in the area. An extension of this stipulation was granted at the end of the four years when no group large enough seemed to be willing to take up the opportunity.
In 1686, Robert Thompson met Gabriel Bernor and learned that he was seeking an area where his countrymen, who had fled their native France because of the Edict of Nantes, were desirous of a place to live. Their main concern was to settle in a place that would allow them freedom of worship. New Oxford, as it was the so-named, at that time included the larger part of Charlton, one-fourth of Auburn, one-fifth of Dudley and several square miles of the northeast portion of Southbridge as well as the easterly ares now known as Webster.
Joseph Dudley's assessment that the area was capable of a good settlement probably was based on the idea of the meadows already established along with the plains, ponds, brooks and rivers. Meadows were a necessity as they provided hay for animal feed and other uses by the settlers. The French River tributary books and streams provided a good source for fishing and hunting. There were open areas on the plains as customarily in November of each year, the Indians burnt over areas to keep them free of underwood and brush. It appeared then that this area was ready for settling.
The first seventy-five years of the settling of the Town of Oxford originally known as Manchaug, embraced three different cultures. The Indians were known to be here about 1656 when the Missionary, John Eliott and his partner Daniel Gookin visited in the praying towns. Thirty years later, in 1686, the Huguenots walked here from Boston under the guidance of their leader Isaac Bertrand DuTuffeau. The Huguenot's that arrived were not peasants, but were acknowledged to be the best Agriculturist, Wine Growers, Merchant's, and Manufacter's in France. There were 30 families consisting of 52 people. At the time of their first departure (10 years), due to Indian insurrection, there were 80 people in the group, and near their Meetinghouse/Church was a Cemetery that held 20 bodies. In 1699, 8 to 10 familie's made a second attempt to re-settle, failing after only four years, with the village being completely abandoned in 1704.
The English colonist made their way here in 1713 and established what has become a permanent settlement.
"""
All that was left of the fort was a crumbling stone wall that would have been the base of a higher wooden wall according to a picture of a model (I didn't think to get a shot of that myself). Only trees and brush remain where the multi-story main wooden building was.
This story has so many echoes in the present:
- The rich colonialists from Boston & London agree to settle the land, buying/taking land "rights" from the colonial British court that claimed jurisdiction without actually having control of the land. Whether the sponsors ever actually visited the land themselves I don't know. They surely profited somehow, whether from selling on the land rights later or collecting taxes/rent or whatever, by they needed poor laborers to actually do the work of developing the land (& driving out the original inhabitants, who had no say in the machinations of the Boston court).
- The land deal was on condition that there capital-holders who stood to profit would find settlers to actually do the work of colonizing. The British crown wanted more territory to be controlled in practice not just in theory, but they weren't going to be the ones to do the hard work.
- The capital-holders actually failed to find enough poor suckers to do their dirty work for 4 years, until the Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, were desperate enough to accept their terms.
- Of course, the land was only so ripe for settlement because of careful tending over centuries by the natives who were eventually driven off, and whose land management practices are abandoned today. Given the mention of praying towns (& dates), this was after King Phillip's war, which resulted in at least some forced resettlement of native tribes around the area, but the descendants of those "Indians" mentioned in this sign are still around. For example, this is the site of one local band of Nipmuck, whose namesake lake is about 5 miles south of the fort site: #LandBack.

Even if “AI” worked (it doesn’t), there’s many reasons why you shouldn’t use it:
1. It’s destroying Internet sites that you love as you use chat bots instead of actually going to sources of information—this will cause them to be less active and eventually shut down.
2. Pollution and water use from server farms cause immediate harm; often—just like other heavy industry—these are built in underprivileged communities and harming poor people. Without any benefits as the big tech companies get tax breaks and don’t pay for power, while workers aren’t from the community but commute in.
3. The basic underlying models of any LLM rely on stolen data, even when specific extra data is obtained legally. Chatbots can’t learn to speak English just by reading open source code.
4. You’re fueling a speculation bubble that is costing many people their jobs—because the illusion of “efficiency” is kept up by firing people and counting that as profit.
5. Whenever you use the great cheat machine in the cloud you’re robbing yourself from doing real research, writing or coding—literally atrophying your brain and making you stupider.
It’s a grift, through and through.

"""
In melancholy, the spirits are carried away by an agitation, but a weak agitation that lacks power or violence, a sort of impotent upset that follows neither a particular path nor the aperta opercula [open ways], but traverses the cerebral matter constantly creating new pores. Yet the spirits do not wander far on the new paths they create, and their agitation dies down rapidly, as their strength is quickly spent and motion comes to a halt: ‘non longe perveniunt’ [they do not reach far]. A trouble of this nature, common to all delirium, does not have the power to produce on the surface of the body the violent movements or the cries to be observed in mania and frenzy. Melancholy never attains frenzy; it is a madness always at the limits of its own impotence. That paradox is explained by the secret alterations in the spirits. Ordinarily, they travel with the speed and instantaneous transparency of rays of light, but in melancholy they become weighed down with night, becoming ‘obscure, thick and dark’, and the images of things that they bring before consciousness are ‘in a shadow, or covered with darkness’. As a result they move more slowly, and are more like a dark, chemical vapour than pure light. This chemical vapour is acid in nature, rather than sulphurous or alcoholic, for in acid vapours the particles are mobile and incapable of repose, but their activity is weak and without consequence. When they are distilled, all that remains in the still is a kind of insipid phlegm. Acid vapours, therefore, are taken to have the same properties as melancholy, whereas alcoholic vapours, which are always ready to burst into flames, are more related to frenzy, and sulphurous vapours bring on mania, as they are agitated by continuous, violent movement. If the ‘formal reason and causes’ of melancholy were to be sought, it made sense to look for them in the vapours that rose up from the blood to the head, and which had degenerated into ‘an acetous or sharp distillation’. A cursory glance seems to indicate that a melancholy of spirits and a whole chemistry of humours lies behind Willis’ analyses, but in fact his guiding principle mostly reflects the immediate qualities of the melancholic illness: an impotent disorder, and the shadow that comes over the spirit with an acrid acidity that slowly corrodes the heart and the mind. The chemistry of acids is not an explanation of the symptoms, but a qualitative option: a whole phenomenology of melancholic experience.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Well, that's the end of a very long era. Not that I could use it if I wanted to as my land line is long gone.
#aol
#pstn
#dialup

Pushback against progressive mayoral candidate #Zohran #Mamdani has been fierce.
That includes the mainstream media, which is trying to brand him a socialist to negate his progressive and popular policy proposals.
Stephen Janis and Taya Graham analyze the CNN anchor’s takedown and show why her efforts are corp…

Corporate media is trying to take down Mamdani. This is why they’re failing.
Pushback against mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has been fierce. That includes the mainstream media, which is trying to brand him a socialist to negate his progressive and popular policy proposals.