Tootfinder

Like all the rest of the nerds, I did a bit of tech support on family computers.
They're all popping up windows from scam virus scanners lying that subscriptions need to be renewed or machines are unprotected. People don't know how to remove these things. Luckily they also don't really know how to pay the subscription.
Their phones are updating on them. Changing where buttons used to be. Removing options. Forcing people to register to use they things they have been doing for years.
They don't know how to register.
Things pop up asking for passwords and they have no idea who is asking or which password to use.
I tell them that I don't really understand why they keep using Windows now it is so shitty and awful. They say they don't know how to use anything else. The fact they don't really know how to use windows either doesn't seem to register.
The tech corporations have given up completely on being user friendly. They are all deliberately user hostile and exploitative now.
Corporate tech is terrible. The industry is failing it's users, abusing them. People don't even know there is any other way. They are just giving up on achieving their tasks until someone can fix the pop-ups and subscription boxes and passwords and 2fa for them.
Tech sucks now. Sucks hard.
#tech #christmasTechSupport

American businesses and consumers absorbed nearly 90% of the 2025 tariffs’ economic burden.
The researchers weren’t working from theory: They tracked actual transaction-level import price data
and found that prices paid by U.S. importers rose nearly one-for-one with tariff rates.
These results confirm what research on the 2018-19 tariffs already established and echoes other studies of the last year.
The bottom line is that, faced with tariffs,
foreign exporte…

Who Is Paying for the 2025 U.S. Tariffs? - Liberty Street Economics
Over the course of 2025, the average tariff rate on U.S. imports increased from 2.6 to 13 percent. In this blog post, we ask how much of the tariffs were paid by the U.S., using import data through November 2025. We find that nearly 90 percent of the tariffs’ economic burden fell on U.S. firms and consumers.

The Great Audio Laundering: How AI Scammers are Highjacking the ACX Premium Market and Defrauding the Human Soul
The digital landscape of 2026 was supposed to be a golden age for the independent author, a time when the friction between a creative vision and a global audience finally dissolved into a seamless stream of data. We were promised a world where high-quality production was accessible to anyone with a story to tell and the capital to invest in professional…

The Great Audio Laundering: How AI Scammers are Highjacking the ACX Premium Market and Defrauding the Human Soul | David Boles, Blogs
The digital landscape of 2026 was supposed to be a golden age for the independent author, a time when the friction between a creative vision and a global audience finally dissolved into a seamless …

Reconstruction of the cold-blooded execution of Alex Pretti by ICE in Minneapolis:
"..while Mr. Pretti is on his knees and restrained, the agent standing directly above him appears to fire one shot at Mr. Pretti at close range. He immediately fires three additional shots."
https://www.

#ReleaseThursday #OpenSourceXmas A little present (to some of you)... Been meaning to release these recent additions before the holidays, but only getting around to it now. The most important new things are these:

Mumbai-based digital payments processor BillDesk agrees to acquire the Indian business of Worldline for an equity value of ~$70M, set to close in H2 2026 (The Economic Times)
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/t

Billdesk to acquire Worldline’s India operations; deal values business at $70 million
Billdesk is set to acquire the India payments business of French payment giant Worldline for an estimated equity value of $70 million. In a press release Worldline said that it will be entering into a long-term technology and software pact with Billdesk, through which Worldline’s software stack will continue to remain operational in India. At an enterprise level the value of the deal was pegged at $43.6 million.

Tying up loose ends on the STM32MP2 PCIe board.
It's fully routed and I'm trying to fine tune the layer 3 power (and some ground) plane to provide good return current paths for the FPGA transceivers.
Left to right the pairs are two refclks (one from an LVDS oscillator and one from the SoC), SFP RX, and PCIe RX.
The actually-fast signals (PCIe and SFP) are fully ground referenced their entire length and have return path vias between L2 and L3 when they jump up to L1…

Just had a visit from Fellesforbundet at the workplace. To be honest, we get a lot of visits from Fellesforbundet since they are located in a building right across the street from my well-adapted industrial company.
Fellesforbundet is a reformist, bureaucratic union affiliated with the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO). It is not syndicalist and operates with a hierarchical structure, including elected leadership and regional divisions.
The union primarily negotiates…

Every non-hype defense of #LLMs starts with "you must already understand your work really well." But the people vibe coding prototypes *don't*.
As a result they scale up thoughtlessness. "Bulking out" a slapdash idea with hallucinated details only displaces the real thinking that could have led to actual innovation. The very teams the tool was supposed to help instead…

Vibe prototyping isn't solving problems. It's creating new ones.
It's easy to prototype and so everyone is prototyping, without really knowing why they are doing it. The resultant noise drowns out thoughtful work.

In June and July, Canada and Mexico will each host 13 #WorldCup games,
compared to 78 for the United States, which will organize every game from the quarterfinals onward.
"It’s not right," Blatter said.
"By putting the three together, one would have thought they would have roughly the same share of the pie."
He added that such a disparity "is not in the spir…

Former FIFA president pans mixing soccer with politics, blasts U.S. ahead of World Cup | CBC Sports
In an exclusive interview, former FIFA president Sepp Blatter blasted the United States administration's 'defamatory' policies and the 'crumbs' given to Canada for the 2026 World Cup, which the country is co-hosting with the U.S. and Mexico.