Tootfinder

It's #TacoTuesday 🌮
Trump announced that he will suspend his threatened bombing of Iran’s energy infrastructure and bridges for ...(wait for it) ... two weeks.
The New York Times is reporting that Iran has accepted Pakistan’s two-week cease-fire proposal following frantic diplomatic efforts.
The newspaper quotes Iranian officials as saying the ceasefire was approved by the new sup…

If you're following my #publiicvoit blog via Atom feed:
I might have found a fix for my broken feed format: https://github.com/novoid/lazyblorg/issues/24
Please report back a…

✍️ New article: Webspace Invaders
👾👾👾👾👾👾👾👾👾👾👾👾
https://matthiasott.com/articles/webspace-invaders

Webspace Invaders · Matthias Ott
There’s something happening on the Web at the moment that almost feels like watching that old arcade game Space Invaders play out across our servers. Bots and scrapers marching in formation, attacking our servers wave after wave, systematically requesting page after page, relentlessly filling their data stores while we watch our access logs fill up.

Catching up on a few stray pods this morning:
🎧Career in Ruins - archaeology with Derek Pitman and Lawrence Shaw. I like the practical and career-focussed slant to this.
🎧Tides of History - er, history. I like the way Patrick Wyman weaves it into a personal story.
🎧Front Row - general cultural stuff that I can feel remote from in my day to day.
🎧Film Stories - Simon Brew is a great presenter and really draws you in to what went on behind the scenes of the films we all kn…

Mixtape (Multi, XPd on PC)
"On their last night of high school, three friends embark on one more adventure together. Play through a mixtape of memories, set to the soundtrack of a generation.
Skate. Party. Avoid the law.
Make out. Sneak out. Hang out."
This is the 2nd game from Beethoven & Dinosaur, following the excellent The Artful Escape, so I had high hopes for it. These hopes were not dashed. As someone that also "came of age" in the 90s, …

"One proves political maturity by not banging on about injustice, by not troubling too much the rich and powerful. To try it out, simply stand in front of a mirror and slowly declare yourself to be “pro-business and pro-worker”. If you can do that without flinching at the obvious contradiction, then congratulations! You too can be prime minister"
This isn't my analysis of why #Starmer

properly excited to stay up too late tonight at/on @…, filling in for dj time traveler from midnight to 3 ET, back in my old overnight slot. #radio #nyc

Running independent websites is like planting flowers in front of your plot, on the public lane that the municipality doesn't care about.
You have to deal with people trampling over them because the pavement is not wide enough for their groups. The junk flying over from the nearby supermarket. Asshole neighbor throwing empty alcohol bottles out. Dog shit. And if you succeed nevertheless, people will just come over and dig it all out, to take into their own gardens.
And then some bright libertarian will come and tell you that you should be grateful and praise their ingenuity.
#FreeSoftware #www

I have some sketches of an essay that I need to write, but I think it's worth brain-dumping a bit more in the mean time.
#LLMs are an attempt to make tech grow forever. But like, how many "your mom/a friend, but done by a precarious worker instead" apps do we really need? Everything right now is in the AI grift hole, but there's almost nothing of interest (even if you ignore the ethical concerns). Like, no, I don't fucking want a robot to lie to me about my groceries. That doesn't sound like a useful feature. There's a lot of useless shit being pumped out to prop up the bottom line, and a lot of people just want to be able to use their old phone for more than a couple of years.
No one is happy with this. No one wants this. Except the billionaires who are forcing us all to drink the capitalism koolaid, because they'd rather exterminate life on earth than live in a world where they experience consequences.
Nothing grows forever. That's not how literally anything in reality works, or has ever worked, at all in history. Some people think that the universe itself may work like that, but that's only an educated guess. Finite things don't grow forever. Every organism, every society, every technology, every dynamic and adaptive system we have ever known goes through a growth phase and then goes in to a stabilization phase. Or, following a Malthusian pattern, grows until it reaches a catastrophic point and collapses. Like lemmings. Or reindeer. Or cancer.

The search for the liquid-liquid critical point in supercooled water is challenging
owing to rapid crystallization.
We studied supercooled water at timescales before ice formation
by heating high- and low-density amorphous ices
using infrared ultrafast laser pulses,
followed by x-ray scattering.
By varying the pump laser fluence,
we accessed liquid states straddling the predicted critical point.
We observed a crossover from a discontinuous t…