Tootfinder

A lot of what I’m archiving has like 0 hits but I just know sometime, someone, maybe in a hundred years from now, will find it useful.
It’s a nice feeling to have contributed just a little to preserving our cultural artifacts.

An excellent summary here via @… about how the structures of our civil society have failed to stop ICE from becoming Trump’s Brownshirts.
The one thing the piece omits: someone •is• stopping ICE. It’s the citizens filling the streets, honking and shouting and filming and generally harassing ICE, doing the work our government has failed to do. If it were not for that response being so widespread, sustained, and forceful, we’d be in far worse place right now. https://mastodon.social/@AnnaAnthro/115616389777857234

OTD 5 years ago, I posted this:
So, in the last 24 hours we had
- Zombie minks in Denmark
- almost 400 km/h wind,
- thunderstorms and lightning in Iceland
Either someone is playing an updated version of Jumanji, or some Nordic director is shooting a video clip for a "Thriller"/"Bohemian Rhapsody" remix.

Like all the rest of the nerds, I did a bit of tech support on family computers.
They're all popping up windows from scam virus scanners lying that subscriptions need to be renewed or machines are unprotected. People don't know how to remove these things. Luckily they also don't really know how to pay the subscription.
Their phones are updating on them. Changing where buttons used to be. Removing options. Forcing people to register to use they things they have been doing for years.
They don't know how to register.
Things pop up asking for passwords and they have no idea who is asking or which password to use.
I tell them that I don't really understand why they keep using Windows now it is so shitty and awful. They say they don't know how to use anything else. The fact they don't really know how to use windows either doesn't seem to register.
The tech corporations have given up completely on being user friendly. They are all deliberately user hostile and exploitative now.
Corporate tech is terrible. The industry is failing it's users, abusing them. People don't even know there is any other way. They are just giving up on achieving their tasks until someone can fix the pop-ups and subscription boxes and passwords and 2fa for them.
Tech sucks now. Sucks hard.
#tech #christmasTechSupport

Highly recommend not to identify yourself with any technology.
Doesn’t matter if it’s AI, bicycles, cars, video games, old computers, photography or Hi-Fi equipment.
If someone says something bad about it (doesn’t matter if true or not) and you feel personally attacked—take a step back and think long and hard about your feelings.
Can you be “into” something? Yes, of course. But don’t lose yourself.

I wonder if one of the issues people have with unhoused folks w/smartphones; feeling a cognitive dissonance that someone with a pocket supercomputer but flailing for basic needs (food, etc)
And…yes those two things together are F’ed up.
Guess which one should be fixed?
(Spoiler: It’s Not the📱)

Several times now, I experienced discussions that reached a point where someone replied with "But ChatGPT says..." and screenshot. Usually it went downhill from there.
Is this the new Godwin's Law?
"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of someone posting the result of an LLM prompt approaches one."
#ReductioAdHitlerum

Looks like the Danakil Depression is trying to become a bay…
I’ve always wanted to live through a major geologic event. I missed the Zanclean Flood, the filling of the Black Sea, and the glacial outbreak of Lake Bonneville, but hopefully NatGeo or someone will get some cameras out to that Hell-on-Earth location. It could be really big…
(keep it to yourself if you just want to tell me it’s not happening. Do you think I don’t know?)

Nano Banana Pro is great at following instructions, generates interim "thought images", and makes full infographics with well-rendered text from a short prompt (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/20/nano-banana-pro/

Nano Banana Pro aka gemini-3-pro-image-preview is the best available image generation model
Hot on the heels of Tuesday’s Gemini 3 Pro release, today it’s Nano Banana Pro, also known as Gemini 3 Pro Image. I’ve had a few days of preview access …

Well, the notifications for reposts and favs for my cloudflare error page finally stopped https://chaos.social/@FlohEinstein/115727872442211456 - but then first someone unearthed my phishy URL post