Tootfinder

An in-depth look at the rise of relationships between humans and AI companion chatbots on apps like Nomi, coinciding with a loneliness epidemic in the US (Salvador Rodriguez/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/01/human-ai-relationships-love-nomi.html

'What am I falling in love with?' Human-AI relationships are no longer just science fiction
Since ChatGPT’s late 2022 launch, everyday people have formed emotional connections to chatbots, describing them as deep friendships and even life partnerships.

#Blakes7 Series D, Episode 07 - Assassin
DAYNA: Feeling any better now? [she serves Tarrant and Avon, reclining on the loungers, then goes over to Soolin and hands her one]
TARRANT: I still think you left it to the last minute on purpose.
https://

In which I recommend that if you’re building or upgrading a moderately serious music-listening system, you use Qobuz and include a cheap Mac Mini: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/06/22/Qobuz-and-Others

Qobuz and Mac

Spotted a Tesla Semi truck in the wild, pulling out of the Tesla lot onto Page Mill Rd. Driver in green safety vest sits in the middle of the cab (no passengers?). While stopped at a light it looked like the driver was fighting with trim falling off the left A pillar.
A few blocks later the truck blew through the red light! Particularly scary if Tesla's AI was "driving".

Just finished "Concrete Rose" by Angie Thomas (I haven't yet read "The Hate U Give" but that's now high on my list of things to find). It's excellent, and in particular, an excellent treatise on positive masculinity in fiction form. It's not a super easy book to read emotionally, but is excellently written and deeply immersive. I don't have the perspective to know how it might land among teens like those it portrays, but I have a feeling it's true enough to life, and it held a lot of great wisdom for me.
CW for the book include murder, hard drugs, and parental abandonment.
I caught myself in a racist/classist habit of thought while reading that others night appreciate hearing about: early on I was mentally comparing it to "All my Rage" by Sabaa Tahir and wondering if/when we'd see the human cost of the drug dealing to the junkies, thinking that it would weaken the book not to include that angle. Why is that racist/classist? Because I'm always expecting books with hard drug dealers in them to show the ugly side of their business since it's been drilled into me that they're evil for the harm they cause, yet I never expect the same of characters who are bankers, financial analysts, health insurance claims adjudicators, police officers, etc. (Okay, maybe I do now look for that in police narratives). The point is, our society includes many people who as part of their jobs directly immiserate others, so why and I only concerned about that misery being brought up when it's drug dealers?
#AmReading

Shocked, I'm shocked! Well, not that shocked.
https://flipboard.com/@gothamist/gothamist-igeoft02z/-/a-N3M9gpszT3G9Dz67HpEV4g:a:3807498986-/0

Mayor Adams fumbles NYC bike storage program, councilmembers say
Mayor Eric Adams has slighted cyclists yet again, City Councilmembers say. Local lawmakers have criticized the mayor in recent weeks for failing to …

Turning a paddock into a forest in just 24 hours - a filmmaker's inspiring climate action story. Individual and community efforts like tree planting can make a big impact in fighting climate change. #climatechange #climatesolutions

Series D, Episode 02 - Power
PELLA: Can you walk?
AVON: Very likely. [stands up] But just at the moment I can't think of too many places to go.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/402/289 B7B6

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

In Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Man of the People" (part of "Four Ways to Forgiveness") there's a scene where the Hainish protagonist begins studying history. It's excellent in many respects, but what stood out the most to me was the softly incomprehensible idea of a people with multiple millions of years of recorded history. As one's mind starts to try to trace out the implications of that, it dawns on you that you can't actually comprehend the concept. Like, you read the sentence & understood all the words, and at first you were able to assemble them into what seemed like a conceptual understanding, but as you started to try to fill out that understating, it began to slip away, until you realized you didn't in fact have the mental capacity to build a full understanding and would have you paper things over with a shallow placeholder instead.
I absolutely love that feeling, as one of the ways in which reading science fiction can stretch the brain, and I connected it to a similar moment in Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME, where the android protagonists need to ride an elevator through the civilization/galaxy-spanning megastructure, and turn themselves off for *millions of years* to wait out the ride.
I'm not sure why exactly these scenes feel more beautifully incomprehensible than your run-of-the-mill "then they traveled at lightspeed for a millennia, leaving all their family behind" scene, other than perhaps the authors approach them without trying to use much metaphor to make them more comprehensible (or they use metaphor to emphasize their incomprehensibility).
Do you have a favorite mind=expanded scene of this nature?
#AmReading

Just finished reading "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. It's a departure from a lot of the other stuff I've read lately (mostly unchallenging fiction), but it's really great, and hits hard in this specific political moment. It's an Indigenous anarchist theory book, published this year, and unsurprisingly holds a lot of truths I found valuable to hear. Highly recommend it if you're feeling nihilistic.
#AmReading #Anarchist #Theory