Tootfinder

Ukrainian western cities in flames: overnight Russian attack targeted Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk: https://benborges.xyz/2025/10/05/ukrainian-western-cities-in-flames.html

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.

Locker Talk: Jonathan Taylor and Zaire Franklin, Colts vs. Raiders postgame https://www.colts.com/video/locker-talk-jonathan-taylor-and-zaire-franklin-colts-vs-raiders-postgame

"""
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)

It's very amusing to read this piece by @… , "Harvard considered as a long-lived biological organism", examine the section "Harvard's defenses", and see how they seem so strong in normal times and are failing right now—as a bellwether of our times.

The world continues to dawdle politically in its response to the climate crisis
but clean energy is booming,
-- responsible for almost all new energy capacity and drawing double the investment of fossil fuels globally. The market has shifted.
Most starkly, though, Trump has become the planet’s foremost advocate of fossil fuels,
throwing the might of the US presidency into a rearguard battle to keep the world mired in the era of combusted carbon.
There is now no …

Transactions and #ThreadLocal in #SpringFramework. Thanks to José Paumard for prompting me for following the white rabbit down the hole!
https…

"A paper published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association analyzed drug seizures by law enforcement in San Francisco and concluded that such interdictions were associated with an increase in fatal overdoses in the surrounding area the next day."
Mayor Lurie's #WarOnDrugs 2.0 is not just failing, it's actively killing people. Public health requires m…

“A returns deal with France that makes access to safety in the UK — even for those with close family or connections here — dependent on someone else risking their life to cross the Channel only cements the role of smugglers in how people fleeing war and persecution must seek asylum in the UK."
'A grubby trade in human lives' | Morning Star
…

This is wild.
EDIT:
https://castle-journal.com/sensational-claims-emerge-following-south-african-ambassadors-tragic-death-in-paris/