Tootfinder

The Mainstream Media Is Catastrophically Failing To Meet The Moment by NOT using the word lie, unlawful and illegal in every headline about The Convicted Criminal's regime's racist and dictatorial actions" <-- There I fixed it for you Mike :-) https://www.…

The US Mainstream Media Is Catastrophically Failing To Meet The Moment
Techdirt wrote about Trump’s extraordinary admission that he was basing military deployment decisions on old Fox News footage and lies from his advisors. But there’s an even more damning story here: how that revelation almost never saw the light of day because of journalistic cowardice.

The Mainstream Media Is Catastrophically Failing To Meet The Moment
Earlier today we wrote about Trump’s extraordinary admission that he was basing military deployment decisions on old Fox News footage and lies from his advisors. But there’s an even mor…

The public deserves better than this mealy-mouthed nonsense.
They deserve reporters who can recognize when they’re witnessing something extraordinary and have the courage to say so clearly.
They deserve news organizations that understand the difference between false balance and actual journalism.

The Mainstream Media Is Catastrophically Failing To Meet The Moment
Earlier today we wrote about Trump’s extraordinary admission that he was basing military deployment decisions on old Fox News footage and lies from his advisors. But there’s an even mor…

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https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/30/the-mainstream-media-is-catastrophically-failing-to-meet-the-moment/

The Mainstream Media Is Catastrophically Failing To Meet The Moment
Earlier today we wrote about Trump’s extraordinary admission that he was basing military deployment decisions on old Fox News footage and lies from his advisors. But there’s an even mor…

👇👇👇👇👇
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/30/the-mainstream-media-is-catastrophically-failing-to-meet-the-moment/

The Mainstream Media Is Catastrophically Failing To Meet The Moment
Earlier today we wrote about Trump’s extraordinary admission that he was basing military deployment decisions on old Fox News footage and lies from his advisors. But there’s an even mor…

Fascism offers them a “strong man” carnival photo cut-out where they get to put their face in the hole and take a selfie. They can tuck that selfie under their pillow at night, admiring their fake muscles in the photo and believing they are strong. It lets weak people play-act a strong person. It gives people with creeping feelings of worthlessness a magical sense of worth they don’t have to earn, just believe in.
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Just saw this:
#AI can mean a lot of things these days, but lots of the popular meanings imply a bevy of harms that I definitely wouldn't feel are worth a cute fish game. In fact, these harms are so acute that even "just" playing into the AI hype becomes its own kind of harm (it's similar to blockchain in that way).
@… noticed that the authors claim the code base is 80% AI generated, which is a red flag because people with sound moral compasses wouldn't be using AI to "help" write code in the first place. The authors aren't by some miracle people who couldn't build this app without help, in case that influences your thinking about it: they have the skills to write the code themselves, although it likely would have taken longer (but also been better).
I was more interested in the fish-classification AI, and how much it might be dependent on datacenters. Thankfully, a quick glance at the code confirms they're using ONNX and running a self-trained neural network on your device. While the exponentially-increasing energy & water demands of datacenters to support billion-parameter models are a real concern, this is not that. Even a non-AI game can burn a lot of cycles on someone's phone, and I don't think there's anything to complain about energy-wise if we're just using cycles on the end user's device as long as we're not having them keep it on for hours crunching numbers like blockchain stuff does. Running whatever stuff locally while the user is playing a game is a negligible environmental concern, unlike, say, calling out to ChatGPT where you're directly feeding datacenter demand. Since they claimed to have trained the network themselves, and since it's actually totally reasonable to make your own dataset for this and get good-enough-for-a-silly-game results with just a few hundred examples, I don't have any ethical objections to the data sourcing or training processes either. Hooray! This is finally an example of "ethical use of neutral networks" that I can hold up as an example of what people should be doing instead of the BS they are doing.
But wait... Remember what I said about feeding the AI hype being its own form of harm? Yeah, between using AI tools for coding and calling their classifier "AI" in a way that makes it seem like the same kind of thing as ChatGPT et al., they're leaning into the hype rather than helping restrain it. And that means they're causing harm. Big AI companies can point to them and say "look AI enables cute things you like" when AI didn't actually enable it. So I'm feeling meh about this cute game and won't be sharing it aside from this post. If you love the cute fish, you don't really have to feel bad for playing with it, but I'd feel bad for advertising it without a disclaimer.

Discussions during the current #IETF meeting led me to write a new draft on a compact CoAP URI expression, Short Paths In CoAP (ShoPinC, following the trade tradition of contrived acronyms).
As not all of the #CoAP crowd is reading the IETF lists, I'm soliciting opinions or feedback from here as well.…

As usual we watched the "Stoertebekker" stage play at Ralswiek on Rügen Island. The stage setups and wardrobes were as awesome as always. They really try to improve on that every year and come up with clever mechanisms to transform the building for the various acts of the play. The script this year left room for desire ;) Nevertheless a happing worth attending
htt…

Characterization of hyperbolic groups via random walks
Victor Gerasimov, Leonid Potyagailo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22005 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.2200…

Characterization of hyperbolic groups via random walks
Our first result gives a partial converse to a well-known theorem of A. Ancona for hyperbolic groups. We prove that a group $G$, equipped with a symmetric probability measure whose finite support generates $G$, is hyperbolic if it is nonamenable and satisfies the following condition: for a sufficiently small $\varepsilon >0$ and $r\geqslant0$, and for every triple $(x, y, z)$, belonging to a word geodesic of the Cayley graph, the probability that a random path from $x$ to $z$ intersects the c…