Tootfinder

Fediverse Punk Month — We can grow something better!
We invest too much of our culture in centralized, for-profit, corporate social media platforms. These platforms enrich billionaires, expand surveillance, and fund the cult of capitalist war, all while trapping us with addictive algorithms that feed us mindless content. […]
— by @…<…

Letter: Nielsen again delays its Gauge monthly snapshot of viewing across screens and moves updates to its methodology to the start of the fall TV season (Brian Steinberg/Variety)
https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/nielsen-delays-gauge-re…

Nielsen Delays 'Gauge' Report Further, Following Streamer Backlash
Nielsen Delays 'Gauge' Report Further, Following Streamer Backlash, Citing Need for Data Updates

Facebook launches Creator Fast Track, offering big Instagram, TikTok and YouTube creators guaranteed monthly pay and boosted reach to post on Facebook (Zach Vallese/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/18/meta-creator-pay-instagram-tiktok-youtube-faceboo…

Meta will pay Instagram, TikTok and YouTube creators with big followings to post on Facebook
Meta is offering monthly guaranteed pay and boosted reach for creators to start posting on Facebook's Reels.

In the time I've been offline, I've been doing a lot and feeling a lot more mentally healthy. I've been exploring nomadnet a bit, looking at reticulum. I'm definitely going to go back to my break and being online much less regularly.
I actually totally forgot about the anniversary of the shooting, which is the first time that's happened since... uh... the shooting, I think.
I've definitely realized that, on some level, I've definitely used Mastodon (and formerly Twitter) as a coping mechanism, often in order to deal with the stressful things that I've found out about on Mastodon or Twitter.
But, again, none of those things really change our core job: build community. And that's part of what I've been neglecting, and what I can focus on more when I'm not spending as much time talking to people all over the world indirectly. Like, I can just chat directly with folks and talk about this shit.
Yeah, I do think there's value in this community. I don't think it's really screaming into the void (at least, not most of the time). But I know that I need the balance to be way farther on the side of direct engagement with comrades doing and building.
So that's what I'm gonna go back to. I feel as though it's a good sign that with all the writing about getting shot that I've been doing, and all the thinking about that, that the actual anniversary of the shooting I'm actually just thinking about bread.
And that seems like a good note to leave on. I'm gonna go back to some hacker shit.

Sigh. The world is falling apart in Ukraine and the Middle East, and all journalists can talk about is Starmer's mistake in appointing Mandelson.

Caught a bug over the holidays so I’m mostly resting, feeling sorry for myself, and taking the time to at least carry out some mindless housekeeping tasks (updating dependencies, etc.) on some of my Node modules.
Released updates to the following packages yesterday:
Tape-based Node.js testing:
• Tap monkey (https://

tap-monkey
A tap formatter that’s also a monkey.

A study of ~1,500 US workers finds AI use can reduce burnout but also cause "AI brain fry", a mental fatigue from using AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity (Harvard Business Review)
https://hbr.org/2026/03/when-using-ai-leads-to-brain-fry

When Using AI Leads to “Brain Fry”
As firms increasingly incentivize employees to build and oversee complex teams of agents—for example, by measuring and rewarding token consumption as a proxy for performance—people are finding themselves pushed to their cognitive limits. Participants in a recent study described a “buzzing” feeling or a mental fog with difficulty focusing, slower decision-making, and headaches. The authors call this phenomenon “AI brain fry,” defined as mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight…

I would love it if we all took note of (and remembered) the following: the guy everyone knows is a sociopathic, purely self-interested, unrepentantly gleeful liar who is also visibly going through serious mental decline makes a long and incoherent speech without any indication that much of what he said is true in even the most cursory sense and traders say "yeah, good enough." Entrusting society's material future to the stock market is rational, ennit?

Analysis: 10 major tech publications lost 58% of their Google traffic since early 2024, falling to a combined 65M monthly visits in January 2026; some lost 90% (Yuval Halevi/Growtika)
https://growtika.com/blog/tech-media-collapse

Tech Publications Lost 58% of Google Traffic Since 2024 | Growtika
We tracked the organic search traffic of CNET, Wired, The Verge, TechRadar, and six others from early 2024 to today. Combined, they lost 63 million monthly visits.

Filing: Zuckerberg considered changing how Meta studies social issues after a WSJ story about Instagram and teen mental health, noting Apple faces less scrutiny (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/report/874176/meta-zuckerberg-new-me…

Zuckerberg considered changing how Meta studies social issues after research got it in trouble
In an email newly unsealed as part of the New Mexico Attorney General’s case against Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed tradeoffs of researching its platforms’ harms.