Tootfinder

TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?

The First Tree (Multi, XPd on PC)
Play as a mother fox trying to find her kits. As you explore the world, you'll also uncover the relationship of a son and his estranged father. Yep, it's a "feels" game, so be prepared.
Game is set in Alaska, and even tho the art style is quite "simplistic", it certainly conveys the feeling of remote snowy wilderness well. As you begin the journey, it becomes apparent very quickly that this game is all about the feels. …

Thyme: Think Beyond Images
Yi-Fan Zhang, Xingyu Lu, Shukang Yin, Chaoyou Fu, Wei Chen, Xiao Hu, Bin Wen, Kaiyu Jiang, Changyi Liu, Tianke Zhang, Haonan Fan, Kaibing Chen, Jiankang Chen, Haojie Ding, Kaiyu Tang, Zhang Zhang, Liang Wang, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Guorui Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11630

Thyme: Think Beyond Images
Following OpenAI's introduction of the ``thinking with images'' concept, recent efforts have explored stimulating the use of visual information in the reasoning process to enhance model performance in perception and reasoning tasks. However, to the best of our knowledge, no open-source work currently offers a feature set as rich as proprietary models (O3), which can perform diverse image manipulations and simultaneously enhance logical reasoning capabilities through code. In this paper, we make…

As we continue down this path of escalating nihilistic meme violence, it can feel like the worst things have become viral. We are drowning in the memetic effluent of a capitalist media that profits by maximizing engagement. But I wonder if anyone remembers "Pay it Forward?"
A movie came out in 2000 about a kid who started a viral kindness campaign. The idea was that you do something nice for someone else with the expectation that they do the same in the future. I never really saw the movie, but I do remember the time. There were a few weeks, maybe a few months, where people started doing it. People would just be randomly nice, and everything actually just started feeling better.
Over time, the world caught up. Capitalism consumed the whole thing, and life went back to normal. 9/11 happened the next year, and the US started down the path of becoming the most twisted and evil version of itself. But there was a short time that doing nice stuff was a viral meme, a thing that people just started doing.
Gun violence doesn't have to be the only viral meme we have. We can make good things happen too.

google glass and snapchat spectacles were both such wildly successful products, which we all trampled one another to get, of course facebook-wunderkind-who-isn't-really-a-wunderkind will succeed with possibly the most unappealing glasses ever made since someone ended up with auto glass in their eyes after flying through a windshield in a collision. It's a sure thing! /s

Mark Zuckerberg is making a major bet on the future. He’s about to share it
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a bold claim on the social media giant’s earnings call in July. Answering a question from an analyst, he said people without smart glasses may one day be at a “significant cognitive disadvantage” compared to those who do use the tech.

Made this with Sora yesterday.
I think it has the nice, comforting feeling of a Soviet (or British?) version of the XB-36H (the bomber with the unshielded nuclear reactor) in Charlie Stross's A Colder War. You get the sense that even with a telephoto lens, the camera operator has absorbed enough sieverts that a gruesome death of radiation poisoning in the very near future is going to take place. #airart

PBS leaders meet in Amarillo to discuss future funding following federal funding cuts : Amarillo Tribune https://amarillotribune.org/2025/08/06/pbs-leaders-meet-in-amarillo-to-discuss-future-funding-following-federal-fun…

PBS leaders meet in Amarillo to discuss future funding following federal funding cuts
Leaders from all 10 Texas Public Broadcasting Stations from across the state met at Amarillo College on Wednesday as Panhandle PBS began its annual two-day meeting, which will run through Thursday.

Following the expected mention of technology neutrality with regard to the 2035 review of CO₂ standards for cars, the automotive section of Von der Leyen's State of the Union speech ends on a positive note:
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/SPEECH…

Compute Only 16 Tokens in One Timestep: Accelerating Diffusion Transformers with Cluster-Driven Feature Caching
Zhixin Zheng, Xinyu Wang, Chang Zou, Shaobo Wang, Linfeng Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10312

Compute Only 16 Tokens in One Timestep: Accelerating Diffusion Transformers with Cluster-Driven Feature Caching
Diffusion transformers have gained significant attention in recent years for their ability to generate high-quality images and videos, yet still suffer from a huge computational cost due to their iterative denoising process. Recently, feature caching has been introduced to accelerate diffusion transformers by caching the feature computation in previous timesteps and reusing it in the following timesteps, which leverage the temporal similarity of diffusion models while ignoring the similarity in…