Tootfinder

Arctic sea ice extent is steadily decreasing. We're now at a record low for this time of the year.
https://zacklabe.com/arctic-sea-ice-extentconcentration/
(That's @…

Arctic: Sea-Ice Concentration/Extent
Near real-time visualizations [Arctic Climate Seasonality and Variability] [Arctic Sea-Ice Extent and Concentration] [Arctic Sea-Ice Volume and Thickness] [Arctic Temperatures] [Antarctic Sea-Ice E…

The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol

Next step in the PIC12F683 project, a partial decap.
Tried some new techniques that worked great, but let a bit of acid on the back that caused minor corrosion on the die attach paddle. I know how to prevent it next time though.

Japans neuer Raumtransporter dockt an die ISS an
Fünf Jahre lang war Japan auf andere Raumtransporter angewiesen. Jetzt kann die Jaxa wieder selbst Versorgungsgüter zur ISS bringen.
https://www.

iOS warnt nun vor langsamen Netzteilen
Mittlerweile hat Apple eine iOS-Funktion eingeführt, die erkennt, sobald das iPhone nur bedingt Saft erhält. Das kann man tun.
https://www.heise.de/news/iOS-warnt-…

ICE has policies??? That IS news!😏
Revealed: ICE violates its own policy by holding people in secretive rooms for days or weeks
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/30/ice-hidden-detention-sites

Revealed: ICE violates its own policy by holding people in secretive rooms for days or weeks
Guardian analysis finds ICE increasingly keeps people in holding rooms with little oversight, as some facilities see a 600% rise in detention length

I'm stopping using Spotify until the ICE ads are removed. Recruiting for the law breaking secret police is a choice and I refuse to fund it. #CancelSpotify
https://indivisible.org/cancel-spotify

The assumption is that one day large language models and other related AI technologies fostered by Google Gemini and OpenAI ChatGPT actually will be a great and infallible productivity tool for genuine work.
It already is decent for providing basic overviews of highly-covered, well-sourced topics, even as hallucinations and sycophancy continue to dog the tech, particularly in situations where accountability is more critical.
Despite today's downsides,
many companies ar…

Analysis: OpenAI is a loss-making machine, with estimates that it has no road to profitability by 2030 — and will need a further $207 billion in funding even if it gets there
Don't call it a bubble! Loss-making monster OpenAI is on the hook for $1.4 trillion (with a T) in compute commitments. How can this go on?

The fallacy I've experienced in both personal relations and international politics is the belief that there exists an option in which everything stays the same. Not touching the steering wheel, simply continuing as is, will mean all is well, and it's seemingly not as much of a decision as actively interfering is.
The trolly problem exposes this belief, yet we have not really overcome it.

Looking at the ARMv8-A ARM and I see implementer ID 0x44 is DEC.
I'm... very confident DEC has never built an ARMv8 CPU core.
Is this just copy-pasted from earlier docs because DEC had an ARM architecture license in years past? Or is this license still valid and held by DEC's successors (I think DEC -> Compaq -> HP -> HPE, does HPE make custom ARM cores?)