Tootfinder

I think a misunderstanding is that people want to fight "scraping" or "automated systems". But my feeling is that the issue is with the _purpose_ of the scraping: It's not "that person is scraping my site" it's "that person wants to use my work to train their slop machine". The issue is the SLOP machine with all the negative externalities they have.
And that is a path worth exploring (that I have similarly argued for code): We want to cont…

License plate reader company Flock has stopped US agencies from accessing cameras in CA, IL, and VA after reports of lookups related to ICE and an abortion case (404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/flock-removes-state…

Flock Removes States From National Lookup Tool After ICE and Abortion Searches Revealed
Following 404 Media’s reporting and in light of new legislation, automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company Flock has stopped agencies reaching into cameras in California, Illinois, and Virginia.

"The most worrying possibility behind Earth’s [accelerating warming] is how the general nature of clouds may be changing in response to climbing temperatures. It’s a feedback loop that could potentially exacerbate warming and is one of the single biggest uncertainties in predicting future climate."

Global Warming Is Speeding Up and the World Is Feeling the Effects
Human-caused global warming has been increasing faster and faster since the 1970s.

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.

I just read the story about the Italian kidnapped by a New York couple and tortured to disclose the credentials for his crypto assets - and the first thing that came to mind was XKCD 538 "Security" about the five dollar wrench.
Am I a bad person?
#xkcd538 #xkcd

"We shouldn’t be surprised, because capturing communities with false promises only to sell us out is business as usual in the corporate internet. The founders handled the transition horribly, even by tech industry standards, and the pain and disruption it creates in our lives is real. Yet capital is constantly pulling the rug on online communities... For corporations, it’s always profits over people"

When We Get Komooted
Following the sale of Komoot to private equity, Josh Meissner explores the broken relationship between corporate capital and our communities...

My fair city of Roanoke attained “Bee City USA” status in 2022, which aims to “promote healthy, sustainable habitats for bees and other pollinators, responsible for the reproduction of nearly 90% of the world’s flowering plant species and one in every three bites of food we eat.”
Last night, a couple of garden clubs teamed up with the city to screen a new PBS Nature documentary, “My Garden of a Thousand Bees”.

My Garden of a Thousand Bees
New PBS documentary following wildlife filmmaker Martin Dohrn as he films more than 60 species of bees in his urban garden in Bristol, England, during the COVID-19 2020 lockdown.

This is getting tedious. #UbuntuStudio cannot possibly contain material its own installer cannot extract, and my iso passes sha256 and my install media is flawless (says badblocks) and yet each boot misbehaves differently, failing because it cannot 'read' something.

Calamus 14 Not heat flames up and consumes
A declaration of love, eroticism mixed with nature imagery. Something of a theme in Calamus! It didn't really grab me though, I think because so many of the lines start with negations and it distances me from the meaning.
The sexy line here:
the flames of me, consuming, burning for his love whom I love!
I also like the imagery of seeds wafted in the wind, then heading to "my Soul is borne through the open air".
This musical performance by the Erato Ensemble is a nice interpretation.

Court filings from in-ear hardware startup iyO's trademark dispute lawsuit against OpenAI detail OpenAI and io's early work on in-ear hardware devices (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/23/court-filing…

Court filings reveal OpenAI and io's early work on an AI device | TechCrunch
Court filings in a trademark case against OpenAI reveal some of the company's early work on developing AI devices.