Tootfinder

Here's the start of an idea:
Those of us who end up directly getting a tariff payment demand on a purchase from overseas (especially if the purchase is from Brazil) might want to consider filing a personal Federal civil action against FFOTUS, as a private person, for recovery.
The basis would be an ultra vires government action, not authorized by law (this is why the Brazil path is particularly interesting, because there is no real way that this is in any way authorized by Co…

Two wildfires are burning at or near the North Rim, known
as the White Sage Fire
and the Dragon Bravo Fire.
The latter is the one that destroyed the lodge and other structures.
The park initially was managing it as a controlled burn
but then shifted to suppression as it rapidly grew to 7.8 square miles (20 square kilometers) because of hot temperatures,
low humidity and wind, fire officials said.
No injuries have been reported.
Millions of peo…

A historic Grand Canyon lodge has been destroyed by wildfire, park official says
The Grand Canyon Lodge, the only lodging inside the park at the North Rim, was consumed by the flames, park Superintendent Ed Keable told park residents, staff and others in a meeting Sunday morning. He said the visitor center, the gas station, a waste water treatment plant, an administrative building and some employee housing were among the 50 to 80 structures lost.

It very much bothers me that #smartd didn't email me about this. The only reason I noticed it is because 'snapraid smart' output says that the chance of the drive failing in the next year is 99%. #SelfHosting

I had seven moles surgically removed yesterday because my dermatologist didn't like the way they looked.
So now I have stitches all over my body and I'm not allowed to stretch unduly to prevent the sutures from coming apart.
I guess that's one way to keep me from reaching anything but the lowest hanging fruits.

Rambo¹ ist die Geschichte eines aus dem verlorenen Vietnamkrieg zurückkehrenden Veteranen, den zu Hause niemand mehr haben will und von der Polizei² eingesperrt und gedemütigt wird – was letztlich dazu führt, daß er die ganzen „wir wollen hier keine Fremden“-Typen aufmischt.³
Werden heute in den USA Veteranen einfach so verhaftet, geht das anders aus – ist ja schließlich kein Action-Film.
__
¹Hauptfigur des Buchs und Films „First Blood“
²unter Überschreitung der Gesetze…

Right now, forever, and probably even in my next life, I use Debian, because once you go rock solid, there’s no going back. 😋 :debian:
#Debian #Linux #Eurovision

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?

Joe Davidson, a longtime Washington Post columnist, says he resigned after a column he wrote about Trump's policies was blocked for being "too opinionated" (Corbin Bolies/The Daily Beast)
https://www.thedailybeast.com/wapo-columni

WaPo Columnist Flames Jeff Bezos After Quitting in Protest
Joe Davidson said he left the paper after it spiked political commentary from his column.

Jobs at https://alignmentalignment.ai/jobs
CAAAC is an open, dynamic, inclusive environment, where all perspectives are welcomed as long as you believe AGI will annihilate all humans in the next six months. We offer competitive salaries and generous benefits, including no performance management becaus…

Extended Parameter Shift Rules with Minimal Derivative Variance for Parameterized Quantum Circuits
Zhijian Lai, Jiang Hu, Dong An, Zaiwen Wen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08802 ht…

Extended Parameter Shift Rules with Minimal Derivative Variance for Parameterized Quantum Circuits
Parameter shift rules (PSRs) are useful methods for computing arbitrary-order derivatives of the cost function in parameterized quantum circuits. The basic idea of PSRs is to evaluate the cost function at different parameter shifts, then use specific coefficients to combine them linearly to obtain the exact derivatives. In this work, we propose an extended parameter shift rule (EPSR) which generalizes a broad range of existing PSRs and has the following two advantages. First, EPSR offers an inf…