Tootfinder

Sources: the number of Optimus humanoid robots Tesla has made this year is in the hundreds, well behind the pace needed to meet Musk's goal of producing 5K (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/inside-teslas-secretive-optimus-rob…

Inside Tesla’s Secretive Optimus Robot Program
Elon Musk says humanoid robots will be the future of Tesla. The company has a long way to go. Tesla is well behind the pace necessary to meet Musk’s publicly stated goal of producing at least 5,000 of its Optimus humanoid robots this year, according to two people with knowledge of the program. ...

Last week I gave a talk at the IPTC’s “Photo Metadata Conference”. Here’s a blog-ified version, with lots of juicy digging into exactly what works and what’s broken in C2PA in 2025. Also strong opinions about provenance. And a link to the YouTube recording: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/20…

C2PA Investigations

I translated bondi's statement into what she meant:
#USpol #satire #Comey

Been using Monero for 5 years now, and I can’t believe how fast the time has gone by, it feels like just yesterday I started. Over that time, I’ve even used it to pay for clothes, which might sound a bit unusual but it works, and I also use it to pay for privacy services like Mullvad and iVPN since they accept XMR.
Honestly, I’m probably one of the few people who still uses Monero on a weekly basis, not just holding it but actually spending it the way it was meant to be used, which is …

Starting Out In Music? 5 People To Add To Your Team #musician #musicianresources https://muz4now…

Starting Out In Music? 5 People To Add To Your Team
Stan Stewart - @muz4now

I just found this UK report on #covid epidemiology from 2020 to Dec 2024; the graph I most noticed is below - they looked at blood donors for spike (S) and Nucleo (N) protein antibodies over time; The spike proteins are in both infection and vaccine, while N is infection only - so you can see when people got vaccinated and how now pretty much everyone (95.5% as end of January) has been infected as…

Epidemiology of COVID-19 in England: January 2020 to December 2024

Does visualization help AI understand data?
Victoria R. Li, Johnathan Sun, Martin Wattenberg
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18022 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18…

Does visualization help AI understand data?
Charts and graphs help people analyze data, but can they also be useful to AI systems? To investigate this question, we perform a series of experiments with two commercial vision-language models: GPT 4.1 and Claude 3.5. Across three representative analysis tasks, the two systems describe synthetic datasets more precisely and accurately when raw data is accompanied by a scatterplot, especially as datasets grow in complexity. Comparison with two baselines -- providing a blank chart and a chart wi…

Russia attacks Sumy Oblast with drones, injures 13, including 5-year-old child: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/21/russia-attacks-sumy-oblast-with.html

“An Israeli drone strike in southern Lebanon killed five people Sunday, including three children, Lebanon’s Health Ministry said … four of the killed, the three children as well as their father, held U.S. citizenship”: https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2025…

Israeli drone strike kills 5, including 3 children, in southern Lebanon
BEIRUT (AP) — An Israeli drone strike in southern Lebanon killed five people Sunday, including three children, Lebanon’s Health Ministry said. Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri said four of the killed, the three children as well as their father, held U.S. citizenship. Two others were wounded, including the mother in the family. Officials at the U.S. […]

"New research links hurricane size surges to local ocean temperature spikes"
#Climate #ClimateChange
https://

New research links hurricane size surges to local ocean temperature spikes
When people hear about hurricanes, they often focus on the category rating: Category 1 through 5, based on maximum wind speeds. But not all hurricanes with the same wind speeds are alike. Some are compact storms while others can span the size of entire states. Larger hurricanes bring far greater damage, generating wider footprints of high winds, heavier rainfall and more dangerous storm surge.

Users have uploaded 5,000 AI models, previously banned from Civitai for generating nonconsensual sexual content of real people, to Hugging Face (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/hugging-face-is-hosting-5-000-nonconsensual-ai-mod…

Hugging Face Is Hosting 5,000 Nonconsensual AI Models of Real People
Users have reuploaded 5,000 models used to generate nonconsensual sexual content of real people to Hugging Face after they were banned from Civitai.

«Users have reuploaded 5,000 models used to generate nonconsensual sexual content of real people to Hugging Face after they were banned from Civitai. […] Hugging Face did not respond to multiple requests for comment. It also did not respond to specific questions about how and if it plans to moderate these model»
I wish the people that tried to tell me that Hugging Face are the good guys can now see them for what they are…
https://www.404media.co/hugging-face-is-hosting-5-000-nonconsensual-ai-models-of-real-people/

Many people talked how beautiful their childhood were. How wonderful their school life were.
Yes, I am happy for them. But, for those of us which were abused physically when we were as young as 5 years old, we have no any fond memory of the past.
Childhood was hell for us.
Edit: well just imagine a father kicked or punched his 5 years old child. Will the child fond of his childhood?
Unfortunately, I am one of these unfortunate children.
But my late mother is ent…

Exposure to "AI Assistance" lowers doctors' ability to diagnose cancer just after a few weeks.
"AI"s main effect on people is skill decay.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00133-5/abstract

Week Without Driving
> "If you can drive or afford a car, you may not understand what it’s like to rely on walking, rolling, transit and asking for rides. But for nearly a third of people living in the United States – people with disabilities, young people, seniors and people who can’t afford cars or gas – this is our every day."
Monday, September 29 – Sunday, October 5, 2025

Week Without Driving
Sep 29th – Oct 5th, 2025 - An experience created for everyone to learn firsthand about barriers and challenges for nondrivers. Join, support, or become a host.

Hugging Face Is Hosting 5,000 Nonconsensual AI Models of Real People https://www.404media.co/hugging-face-is-hosting-5-000-nonconsensual-ai-models-of-real-people/

While Silicon Valley is training their models on everybody’s copyrighted content and seems to get away with it, UMG is obviously using AI to flood YouTubers with automated copyright claims. Including people like Rick Beato who is doing interviews with the musicians who wrote those songs and talk about them. What does UMG think happens after people watch those videos? Exactly. They open Spotify and listen to the artist. It’s free advertising to >5 million subscribers.

UK would rather arrest almost 500 people rather than admit or cease its complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people.
So I guess the next step is a 5,000-person protest.
They arrest 5,000? Time for 50,000.
Overwhelm the system until the system stops committing genocide.

UK police arrest at least 466 people at Palestine Action protest in London
Critics say ban on activist group stifles freedom of speech and assembly and aims to curb pro-Palestine demonstrations.

EmoHeal: An End-to-End System for Personalized Therapeutic Music Retrieval from Fine-grained Emotions
Xinchen Wan, Jinhua Liang, Huan Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15986 http…

EmoHeal: An End-to-End System for Personalized Therapeutic Music Retrieval from Fine-grained Emotions
Existing digital mental wellness tools often overlook the nuanced emotional states underlying everyday challenges. For example, pre-sleep anxiety affects more than 1.5 billion people worldwide, yet current approaches remain largely static and "one-size-fits-all", failing to adapt to individual needs. In this work, we present EmoHeal, an end-to-end system that delivers personalized, three-stage supportive narratives. EmoHeal detects 27 fine-grained emotions from user text with a fine-tuned XLM-R…

How the US democracy is designed to avoid representation
Right now in the US, a system which proclaims to give each citizen representation, my interests are not represented very well by most of my so-called representatives at any level of government. This is true for a majority of Americans across the political spectrum, and it happens by design. The "founding fathers" were explicit about wanting a system of government that would appear Democratic but which would keep power in the hands of rich white landowners, and they successfully designed exactly that. But how does disenfranchisement work in this system?
First, a two-party system locked in by first-post-the-post winner-takes-all elections immediately destroys representation for everyone who didn't vote for the winner, including those who didn't vote or weren't eligible to vote. Single-day non-holiday elections and prisoner disenfranchisement go a long way towards ensuring working-class people get no say, but much larger is the winner-takes all system. In fact, even people who vote for the winning candidate don't get effective representation if they're really just voting against the opponent as the greater of two evils. In a 51/49 election with 50% turnout, you've immediately ensured that ~75% of eligible voters don't get represented, and with lesser-of-two-evils voting, you create an even wider gap to wedge corporate interests into. Politicians need money to saturate their lesser-of-two-evils message far more than they need to convince any individual voter to support their policies. It's even okay if they get caught lying, cheating, or worse (cough Epstein cough) as long as the other side is also doing those things and you can freeze out new parties.
Second, by design the Senate ensures uneven representation, allowing control of the least-populous half of states to control or at least shut down the legislative process. A rough count suggests 284.6 million live in the 25 most-populous states, while only 54.8 million live in the rest. Currently, counting states with divided representation as two half-states with half as much population, 157.8 million people are represented by 53 Republican sensors, while 180.5 million people get only 45 seats of Democratic representation. This isn't an anti-Democrat bias, it's a bias towards less-populous states, whose residents get more than their share it political power.
I haven't even talked about gerrymandering yet, or family/faith-based "party loyalty," etc. Overall, the effect is that the number of people whose elected representatives meaningfully represent their interests on any given issue is vanishingly small (like, 10% of people tops), unless you happen to be rich enough to purchase lobbying power or direct access.
If we look at polls, we can see how lack of representation lets congress & the president enact many policies that go against what a majority of the population wants. Things like abortion restrictions, the current ICE raids, and Medicare cuts are deeply unpopular, but they benefit the political class and those who can buy access. These are possible because the system ensures at every step of the way that ordinary people do NOT get the one thing the system promises them: representation in the halls of power.
Okay, but is this a feature of all democracies, inherent in the nature of a majority-decides system? Not exactly...
1/2
#uspol #democracy

The lameassedness of A.I. marketing; it's not just the people on Hacker News who only know the waitlist as a marketing tactic -- it's Microsoft too
#microsoft #marketing #ai

Filling the Gap for Uzbek: Creating Translation Resources for Southern Uzbek
Mukhammadsaid Mamasaidov, Azizullah Aral, Abror Shopulatov, Mironshoh Inomjonov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14586

Filling the Gap for Uzbek: Creating Translation Resources for Southern Uzbek
Southern Uzbek (uzs) is a Turkic language variety spoken by around 5 million people in Afghanistan and differs significantly from Northern Uzbek (uzn) in phonology, lexicon, and orthography. Despite the large number of speakers, Southern Uzbek is underrepresented in natural language processing. We present new resources for Southern Uzbek machine translation, including a 997-sentence FLORES+ dev set, 39,994 parallel sentences from dictionary, literary, and web sources, and a fine-tuned NLLB-200 …

A lot of people making fun of the Environment Agency suggesting "deleting emails" to fight drought.
People also made fun of it when they put it in a press release two months ago. I don't know if it's a deliberate attempt to get attention, or just something their LLM keeps suggesting.

England faces 5 billion litre public water shortage by 2055 without urgent action
England faces 5 billion litre a day shortfall for public water supplies by 2055 – and a further 1 billion litre a day deficit for wider economy.

We have urgent news from Ukraine.
More innocent lives were lost and dozens were injured after a second consecutive night of massive aerial attacks on the city of Kyiv.
Hundreds of Russian drones destroyed homes, residential buildings and healthcare clinics.
How much more can the people of Ukraine take?
Right now, more than 5 million Ukrainian refugees are scattered across Europe,
while 3.7 million people remain displaced inside their own country.
Famili…

A file I came across on my iPad. No idea where it came from. #randomThoughts
Thoughts to ponder:
Why isn’t the number 11 pronounced onety-one?
If 4 out of 5 people SUFFER from diarrhea, does that mean that one out of five enjoys it?
Why do croutons come in airtight packages? Aren't they just stale bread to begin with?
If a pig loses its voice, is it disgrunt…

I've been trying to explain to somewhat car-brained people that honest to gosh, people on bikes are actually good at not running into things, most of them DO wait for green lights, etc, and every so often I manage to collect some illustrative video. This one is notable because in the space of 5 seconds 4 bikes pass through the same not-wide space, traveling in different directions, and it just happens, no big deal, but I fear they could not get past the "chaos!"

The average undergrad tuition fee in the 1974/75 academic year in Canada, across all disciplines, was $547 ($3445 adjusted to 2025)
Fees 50 years later in 2024/25 were $7360 ($7496 adjusted)
That is more than double. 117%.
And I *know* from personal experience this is a low ball average. If I could find a breakdown by discipline or by length of study for today, some would be even more obscene.
What has changed? Any occupation outside a minimum wage paying job demands a 2-4yr undergraduate diploma or degree, if not more.
Think about the 1970s and how common it was for people to get good paying jobs, leading to careers, without even high school education. Our free education stops with high school.
My family is a good example.
Mom and Step Dad: teacher college/degree. One got a Masters mid career.
Dad: didn’t complete HS
Father in law: didn’t complete HS
Mother in law: completed HS mid-career
Leadership positions and full careers demand a Masters or PhD requiring 5-10 years of study after HS!
Add in the cost of food and housing and the massive cuts happening at all colleges and universities because of the loss of international student tuition and I am going to go out on a limb and say our students today are going to pay double the price for a far worse experience than possibly any time since the Second World War.
Public education should be free.
Food and Housing should be controlled.
If the only thing government cares about is the economy, then they are setting us up for failure, and have been for decades.
(Don’t get me started on the kinds of “values” Canadian governments demonstrate when International student tuitions are 5x more than domestic students, let alone the inherent revenue risk in that funding strategy that has now come home to roost)
#canpoli #cdnpoli #education #university #college #canada
(
74/75 Source Stats Can: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3710015001&pickMembers[0]=1.1&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=1972 / 1973&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2006 / 2007&referencePeriods=19720101,20060101
24/25 source stats can: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3710004501
cc: @… @…

This works, right? I mean, sure the numbers are reversed but the time makes sense to most people this way!
And yes you are looking at a backwards clock through a mirror in my bathroom.

Some people say this is Jaime Pressly #JaimePressly
Season 5 Episode 20 "Promised Land"
#RandomBaywatch #lvdlpx

China pours money into brain chips that give paralysed people more control https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02098-5 "Brain–computer interfaces being trialled in China offer some advantages over Neuralink and other leading US devices" (archived at

China pours money into brain chips that give paralysed people more control
Brain–computer interfaces being trialled in China offer some advantages over Neuralink and other leading US devices.

Even if “AI” worked (it doesn’t), there’s many reasons why you shouldn’t use it:
1. It’s destroying Internet sites that you love as you use chat bots instead of actually going to sources of information—this will cause them to be less active and eventually shut down.
2. Pollution and water use from server farms cause immediate harm; often—just like other heavy industry—these are built in underprivileged communities and harming poor people. Without any benefits as the big tech companies get tax breaks and don’t pay for power, while workers aren’t from the community but commute in.
3. The basic underlying models of any LLM rely on stolen data, even when specific extra data is obtained legally. Chatbots can’t learn to speak English just by reading open source code.
4. You’re fueling a speculation bubble that is costing many people their jobs—because the illusion of “efficiency” is kept up by firing people and counting that as profit.
5. Whenever you use the great cheat machine in the cloud you’re robbing yourself from doing real research, writing or coding—literally atrophying your brain and making you stupider.
It’s a grift, through and through.

Whenever people make a big stink about public prayers and invocations like this, I think about Matthew 6:5-8. That, and the First Amendment.
https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/texas-lt-gov-dan-patrick-demands

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick demands citizens stand for Christian prayers—or else
Dan Patrick’s threats against Senate observers highlight a dangerous mix of religion and government

I'm pretty sure everyone has forgotten how to drive. In the past week I've seen 5 people run red lights and 4 people completely disregard how 4-way stops working and try to ram into me.

#Wordle 1,491 4/6*
⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜ <1% of 212,501 (234)
⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ 5% of 21 (18)
🟩⬜🟩🟩⬜ 0 of 1 (2)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
WordleBot
Skill 94/99
Luck 48/99
A fine word for today's wordle answer. I hope it's the beginning of several fine words, ie less obscure.
Also it's interesting, several people have pointed out that the bot has started using a new initial word CLASP (at least in hard mode)

Russian strikes hit Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia oblasts — 5 injured, homes damaged: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/18/russian-strikes-hit-kharkiv-zaporizhzhia.html

... The prejudices people feel about each other disappear when they get
to know each other.
-- Kirk, "Elaan of Troyius", stardate 4372.5

Happy International Left Handed Day to all those afflicted, including my oldest daughter. Just over 10% of people are left-handed, and only 5% to 6% for women. Some studies have reported that rightys have higher IQs than lefties. Hey, it's just science people, don't shoot the messenger. Things have improved for left-handers, and rarely are they seen as evil because of how they write. The word sinister comes from the Latin word for left-handed.
My daughter being a southpaw was a huge advantage during her competitive softball years. As one of only 2 left-handed pitchers in a league of 1,200 girls, she was very effective league play and in travel tournaments despite being slower than average. She did have a wicked curve that broke in sharply on right-handed batters.
#LeftHanderDay

Kanbara - Evening Snow
Utagawa Hiroshige, about 1833-5
#SilentSunday

Starting Out In Music? 5 People To Add To Your Team #musician #musicianresources https://muz4now…

Starting Out In Music? 5 People To Add To Your Team
Stan Stewart - @muz4now

Well, here we go. After well over two years, here's a new version of my programming languages book, PLAI (v3.2.5). As always, free of cost! Can't thank enough all the people named in the acknowledgments. Enjoy!
https://www.plai.org/

On one hand, GPT-5 is underwhelming people. On the other, it continues the METR exponential trend, which is very impressive.
I thought that the METR trendline was suspiciously straight and probably wouldn’t last long once it had to make actual predictions (it was first published in March 2025 so most of the data points are retrospective). But so far it’s held up.

A Production-Ready Machine Learning System for Inclusive Employment: Requirements Engineering and Implementation of AI-Driven Disability Job Matching Platform
Oleksandr Kuznetsov, Michele Melchiori, Emanuele Frontoni, Marco Arnesano
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11713

A Production-Ready Machine Learning System for Inclusive Employment: Requirements Engineering and Implementation of AI-Driven Disability Job Matching Platform
Employment inclusion of people with disabilities remains critically low in Italy, with only 3.5% employed nationally despite mandatory hiring quotas. Traditional manual matching processes require 30-60 minutes per candidate, creating bottlenecks that limit service capacity. Our goal is to develop and validate a production-ready machine learning system for disability employment matching that integrates social responsibility requirements while maintaining human oversight in decision-making. We em…

#WritersCoffeeClub July 15:
What 'standards' do you take for granted?
Vague question.
I'm conservative, so language rules, probably? I can still read experimental things but it takes additional effort.
In case of 'standards' that continually fail me it's feedback. I am used to loving things despite their flaws, so I expect people to accept feedba…

#Neurotypicals: You need to be bored. Next time you go to the gym, don't listen to that podcast. Just try to be in your head for a while. Maybe you'll think about the meaning of life, and maybe you'll figure it out.
My #ADHD brain trying to unload the dishwasher without a podcast: Hey, Remember the intro to Clifford the Big Red Dog? That song? You sort of paid attention to it for a few seconds while our kid was watching it. I remember those 5 seconds. Let's sing that intro... just that first part though. We're just going to keep doing that, over and over, hundreds of times in a row.
Neurotypicals: People don't like to be bored. People will give themselves electric shocks to not be bored. They don't want to think about the big questions
My ADHD brain, still trying to unload the dishwasher without a podcast: ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪
https://youtu.be/orQKfIXMiA8

#AEWAllInTexas is being shown for free on ITV4 this Thursday at 9:00pm. All 5 hours of it.
#AEW #ProfessionalWrestling

Five principles to protect the human knowledge ecosystem 5/5

Sources: TikTok plans to launch a new version of its app in the US on September 5, ahead of the Sept. 17 deadline for the US to enforce the divest-or-ban law (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tiktok-building-n…

TikTok Building New Version of App Ahead of Expected U.S. Sale
TikTok is building a new version of its app for users in the U.S. ahead of a planned sale of the app to a group of investors. The company has developed a plan to launch the new TikTok app, known internally as “M2,” to U.S. app stores on September 5, according to two people with knowledge of the ...

“With ICE increasing its presence in and around Boston, I thought I'd repost this helpful guide for reporting ICE sightings in an effective way. Remember: S.A.L.U.T.E.
You can report sightings to LUCE Mass at 617-370-5023 (the holine operates from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. in multiple languages)”
https://

📉 California's economy is already getting hit by immigration raids
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-07-30/people-reporting-to-work-in-private-sector-in-california-down-after-raids-report-sa…

California's economy is already getting hit by immigration raids
The number of people reporting to work in the private sector in California has decreased by 3.1% — a downturn only recently matched by the COVID-19 lockdown.

Heute vor 22 Jahren: Am 14.08.2003 führte ein massiver Blackout in Ontario und Teilen der USA zum vollständigen Stromausfall im #Pickering #Kernkraftwerk. Für 5,5 Stunden musste die Kühlung von fünf Reaktoren durch natürliche Zirkulation erfolgen, da das

"It's now been a week, and I checked again: Joshua's 'HIGHLY secure' server is still running a version of Apache with multiple known critical vulnerabilities. And even with plenty of time to fix the issue, he still hasn't."
https://micahflee.com/icebl…

ICEBlock handled my vulnerability report in the worst possible way
Last week, I wrote about how Joshua Aaron's ICEBlock app, which allows people to anonymously report ICE sightings within a 5-mile radius, is – unfortunately, and despite apparent good intentions – activism theater. This was based on Joshua's talk at HOPE where he made it clear that he isn't taking the advice

Sources: Polymarket considers an offer valuing it at ~$9B, up from $1B in the summer; Kalshi is close to raising money at a $5B valuation, up from $2B in June (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/pr

Prediction Startup Polymarket Fields Offer for $9 Billion Valuation; Kalshi Nears $5 Billion Financing
Startups that enable people to bet on events such as the New York mayoral race, NFL games and the Federal Reserve rate decisions are in talks to raise more money at multi-billion-dollar valuations, as trading volume and rivalry between the two apps intensifies. Polymarket has considered an offer ...

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) described Trump's latest $5 billion windfall as
"blatantly corrupt and a brazen abuse of power."
"The current occupant of the White House," she said, "is putting personal profit above the people,
using his power to illegally line the pockets of his family and billionaire friends
while hanging everyday families out to dry
by ripping away their healthcare, food assistance, raising the cost of consumer good…

'Greatest Corruption in Presidential History': Trump Family Reaps $5 Billion More in Crypto Profits | Common Dreams
In what Public Citizen called "the greatest corruption in presidential history," US President Donald Trump and his family added $5 billion in cash to their fortunes this Labor Day as his new cryptocurrency was opened to the public market.

What do carbrains and AI lovers have in common? They love to skew the data.
"Oh, cars are cheap. Just take fuel prices, fuel consumption… and if it comes too high, you can always divide by 5 people in a car! What, car purchase and maintenance?! But everyone needs to have a car!"
"Oh, #AI is cheap. A single query uses so little water and energy. What, training?! But everyone needs to train LLMs!"
#CarBrain #LLM #TechBros

5 killed, 53 injured in Ukraine as Russia strikes hospitals, residential areas across country: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/15/killed-injured-in-ukraine-as.html

#PreciousPlastic is a global community of people working towards a solution to plastic pollution. Knowledge, tools and techniques are shared online, for free
LET'S BUILD V.5:
==
We spent the last 10 years building a network of plastic recyclers around the world. Yet despite progress, only 10% of all plastic ever made has been recycled, the same as when we started

In case you run Linux with a reasonably current kernel and are experiencing strange network issues like unexpected connection failures, unreliable browsing, etc.: there's been a bug in the kernel's network code, affecting earlier 6.16.x versions. Had this myself and heard from some other people who were affected. Fix is in latest 6.16.5.

"New research links hurricane size surges to local ocean temperature spikes"
#Hurricanes #Storms #Climate #ClimateChange

New research links hurricane size surges to local ocean temperature spikes
When people hear about hurricanes, they often focus on the category rating: Category 1 through 5, based on maximum wind speeds. But not all hurricanes with the same wind speeds are alike. Some are compact storms while others can span the size of entire states. Larger hurricanes bring far greater damage, generating wider footprints of high winds, heavier rainfall and more dangerous storm surge.

Norway: the fossil fuel capital of Europe – Michael Roberts Blog
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2025/09/07/norway-the-fossil-fuel-capital-of-europe/

Norway: the fossil fuel capital of Europe
Norway has a general election today.  In a country of 5.6m people, some 4m are entitled to vote and there is usually a high turnout by international standards – over 75%.  Indeed, early v…

learn 👇

#ShamelesslyStolenFromTheOtherSite
https://xcancel.com/ChrisJBakke/status/1952344090755887509

"Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/27/deepfakes-denmark-copyright-law-artificial-intelligence

The article points out that the rise on borrowing and visiting libraries in Denmark is an anomaly in Europe*, which is a pity. It also rightly identified that the number of events, reading groups and a good selection of books are key to get people into libraries. IMHO, the other important factor is the digital side. It's extremely easy to see what books are available and to order from libraries across the whole country on the bibliotek.dk website.
And once you're in the library to collect one thing, it's easy to pick up a few more...
*Citation needed
https://fediscience.org/@Ruth_Mottram/114946331036135197
Ruth_Mottram - Last year Danes borrowed 23.6 million paper books from public libraries, plus music, film, games digital loans, with 32.5 million in person library visits. It's increasing annually too.
I'm not surprised, Danish libraries are wonderful, everyone should have this.
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/bibliotekernes-udlaan-stiger-tredje-aar-i-traek-vi-elsker-laese-papirboeger

It's Robert Reich.
Never have I seen a president or Congress do so much harm to so many people in so little time.
Trump and his MAGA stooges in Congress have:
- Stripped health care from 10 million people;
- Cut food stamp benefits for 40 million, half of them children;
- Slashed $8 billion from foreign aid programs;
- Defunded public radio and TV;
- Handed $4.5 trillion in tax breaks to Trump and his billionaire friends.
It's our job to ho…

Get Robert Reich's new book, Coming Up Short, and enter to win a signed copy!
When you get Robert Reich's new book through Inequality Media Civic Action, you'll be entered to win 1 of 75 signed copies!

I love this. "A dog’s frantic barking in the middle of the night saved the lives of 67 people in a Himalayan village before a massive landslide swept away their homes.
Residents of Siyathi village in Mandi district, in India’s northern state of Himachal Pradesh, said their 5-month-old dog began barking around 1am on 30 June, just as heavy rains triggered a slope collapse that destroyed at least a dozen houses."

Hero dog saves 67 lives before landslide flattens village
The survivors credited the dog, who was adopted just a few weeks ago, with alerting them early enough to escape the tragedy safely

Five principles to protect the human knowledge ecosystem 5/5

A view of the crowd after the Ithaca 5 and 10 in front of Ithaca High School... more photos that Kilian Weinberger, myself and maybe some others took here: #photo

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy

Google announces an AI Plus subscription tier for emerging markets, offering "more access to Gemini 2.5 Pro" and tools like Flow, starting with Indonesia (Abner Li/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2025/09/09/google-ai-plus-launched/

Google AI Plus with Gemini 2.5 Pro, 200 GB storage announced for emerging markets 
Google today announced “Google AI Plus” as a new subscription tier “designed to empower people in emerging markets...

(2020) Archived at https://archive.ph/jSwr6 A new implant for blind people jacks directly into the brain; 5 years later, no Neuralink Blindsight brain implant in sight yet

#Wordle 1,485 5/6*
⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ <1% of 210,036 (163)
⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜ 0 of 101 (13)
⬜⬜🟩⬜🟩 0 of 0 (4)
⬜⬜🟩🟨🟩 0 of 0 (1)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
WordleBot
Skill 85/99
Luck 37/99
Funny that I was talking about that just a couple of days ago. Which will mean nothing except to the 2 people I was talking too.

Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs,
the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it.
Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food
—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week
—are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations.
Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for c…

The U.S. Will Incinerate 500 Tons of Emergency Food Aid
Federal workers warned for months that the high-energy biscuits would go to waste.

5 suspects charged over deadly explosion in Ukraine's Zhytomyr Oblast: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/07/suspects-charged-over-deadly-explosion.html

My article Vent or Win, Choose Wisely has been accepted for publication by The Geopolitical Economist:
https://medium.com/the-geopolitical-economist/vent-or-win-choose-wisely-c618c86f1472

Vent or Win, Choose Wisely - The Geopolitical Economist - Medium
You can blame people you basically agree with, or you can work with the people available to try to work toward better. The first feels good for maybe 5 minutes, then ruins improvement right now; the…

So I've found my answer after maybe ~30 minutes of effort. First stop was the first search result on Startpage (https://millennialhawk.com/does-poop-have-calories/), which has some evidence of maybe-AI authorship but which is better than a lot of slop. It actually has real links & cites research, so I'll start by looking at the sources.
It claims near the top that poop contains 4.91 kcal per gram (note: 1 kcal = 1 Calorie = 1000 calories, which fact I could find/do trust despite the slop in that search). Now obviously, without a range or mention of an average, this isn't the whole picture, but maybe it's an average to start from? However, the citation link is to a study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32235930/) which only included 27 people with impaired glucose tolerance and obesity. Might have the cited stat, but it's definitely not a broadly representative one if this is the source. The public abstract does not include the stat cited, and I don't want to pay for the article. I happen to be affiliated with a university library, so I could see if I have access that way, but it's a pain to do and not worth it for this study that I know is too specific. Also most people wouldn't have access that way.
Side note: this doing-the-research protect has the nice benefit of letting you see lots of cool stuff you wouldn't have otherwise. The abstract of this study is pretty cool and I learned a bit about gut microbiome changes from just reading the abstract.
My next move was to look among citations in this article to see if I could find something about calorie content of poop specifically. Luckily the article page had indicators for which citations were free to access. I ended up reading/skimming 2 more articles (a few more interesting facts about gut microbiomes were learned) before finding this article whose introduction has what I'm looking for: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3127503/
Here's the relevant paragraph:
"""
The alteration of the energy-balance equation, which is defined by the equilibrium of energy intake and energy expenditure (1–5), leads to weight gain. One less-extensively-studied component of the energy-balance equation is energy loss in stools and urine. Previous studies of healthy adults showed that ≈5% of ingested calories were lost in stools and urine (6). Individuals who consume high-fiber diets exhibit a higher fecal energy loss than individuals who consume low-fiber diets with an equivalent energy content (7, 8). Webb and Annis (9) studied stool energy loss in 4 lean and 4 obese individuals and showed a tendency to lower the fecal energy excretion in obese compared with lean study participants.
"""
And there's a good-enough answer if we do some math, along with links to more in-depth reading if we want them. A Mayo clinic calorie calculator suggests about 2250 Calories per day for me to maintain my weight, I think there's probably a lot of variation in that number, but 5% of that would be very roughly 100 Calories lost in poop per day, so maybe an extremely rough estimate for a range of humans might be 50-200 Calories per day. Interestingly, one of the AI slop pages I found asserted (without citation) 100-200 Calories per day, which kinda checks out. I had no way to trust that number though, and as we saw with the provenance of the 4.91 kcal/gram, it might not be good provenance.
To double-check, I visited this link from the paragraph above: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022316622169853?via=ihub
It's only a 6-person study, but just the abstract has numbers: ~250 kcal/day pooped on a low-fiber diet vs. ~400 kcal/day pooped on a high-fiber diet. That's with intakes of ~2100 and ~2350 kcal respectively, which is close to the number from which I estimated 100 kcal above, so maybe the first estimate from just the 5% number was a bit low.
Glad those numbers were in the abstract, since the full text is paywalled... It's possible this study was also done on some atypical patient group...
Just to come full circle, let's look at that 4.91 kcal/gram number again. A search suggests 14-16 ounces of poop per day is typical, with at least two sources around 14 ounces, or ~400 grams. (AI slop was strong here too, with one including a completely made up table of "studies" that was summarized as 100-200 grams/day). If we believe 400 grams/day of poop, then 4.91 kcal/gram would be almost 2000 kcal/day, which is very clearly ludicrous! So that number was likely some unrelated statistic regurgitated by the AI. I found that number in at least 3 of the slop pages I waded through in my initial search.

Chess.com says 4,500 people had data stolen during June breach https://therecord.media/chess-platform-data-breach-file-transfer-tool

I found an even faster way to make it so people do not talk to me when I answer the phone. I just say:
"Thank you for calling Pete. How may Pete assist you today?"
And I usually can't even get the whole thing out before they hang up.
The old version of my script would often go 10 to 15 seconds before they hung up, now we're down to 5 to 10 seconds!

When a company doesn't adhere to RFCs 2142 or 9116, but you still tryna reach out.
A tale in two acts.
#BugBounty #BountyBegging #RFC2142

I felt that.
#думкиВголос #покрадено

"Joy and relief as lotus flowers bloom again in Kashmiri lake after three decades"
#India #Flowers #Environment

Sources: TikTok plans to launch a new version of its app in the US on September 5, ahead of the Sept. 17 deadline for the US to enforce the divest-or-ban law (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tiktok-building-n…

TikTok Building New Version of App Ahead of Expected U.S. Sale
TikTok is building a new version of its app for users in the U.S. ahead of a planned sale of the app to a group of investors. The company has developed a plan to launch the new TikTok app, known internally as “M2,” to U.S. app stores on September 5, according to two people with knowledge of the ...

'Evacuate to safer regions!' — Russian attacks kill 5, injure 1 in Donetsk Oblast: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/06/evacuate-to-safer-regions-russian.html

Police assaulted as far-right UK rally led by Tommy Robinson sparks clashes
More than 110,000 marched at
"Unite the Kingdom" event in London,
with 5,000 counter-protesters nearby
Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon,
said “patriotism is the future, borders are the future”
as he claimed it was the “biggest demonstration is British history”.
In a video from the protest, Robinson added that
“Britain has finally awoke…

"I hate [politician on my side not doing what I want], they need to go!"
You can blame people you basically agree with, or you can work with the people available to try to work toward better.
1st feels good for maybe 5 minutes, then ruins improvement right now, the 2nd has a chance to make things better.
Try to take your anger, your resentment, which I share, to those chiefly responsible for problems, and not to those nearest and ablest to help, even if not as fla…

Top 100 AI consumer apps: Gemini ranks #2 behind ChatGPT on mobile with ~50% of its MAUs, with Grok at #4; on the web, Gemini has ~12% of ChatGPT's visits (Andreessen Horowitz)
https://a16z.com/100-gen-ai-apps-5/

The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps – 5th Edition
Which AI apps are people actively using? What’s actually making money, beyond being popular? We analyzed the data.

US ethnic cleansing and what to do about it
Reposting link to source article instead of screenshot of tweet that had no alt text:
Data on arrests shows that ICE was heavily engaged in racial profiling in LA, because their arrest numbers fell by ~66% after that were ordered to stop making arrests based just in factors like skin color, with place, or language spoken.
#ICE #USPol

Police arrested over 40 people outside the Trump International Hotel in New York City
as hundreds gathered for a peaceful action led by Jewish leaders
calling for the end to Israel’s starvation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
Democracy Now! was at the demonstration and spoke to some of the protesters,
including Motaz Azaiza, renowned photojournalist from Gaza,
and Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari, who was arrested.
“We’re here to say, ‘Let Gaza live,’ to risk everyt…

“End the Starvation”: Jewish Rabbis & Allies Outside NY Trump Hotel Call for U.S. to Stop Arming Israel
Police arrested over 40 people outside the Trump International Hotel in New York City as hundreds gathered for a peaceful action led by Jewish leaders calling for the end to Israel’s starvation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Democracy Now! was at the demonstration and spoke to some of the protesters, including Motaz Azaiza, renowned photojournalist from Gaza, and Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari, who was arrested. “We’re here to say, 'Let Gaza live,' to risk everything to say, 'Never again,'” says …

Trump says Putin 'wants to keep killing people,' signals US may send Patriots to Ukraine: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/05/trump-says-putin-wants-to.html

I just wrote this: #USpol

Vent or Win, Choose Wisely - David August - Medium
You can blame people you basically agree with, or you can work with the people available to try to work toward better. The first feels good for maybe 5 minutes, then ruins improvement right now; the…

OpenAI details its plan to add guardrails for teens and people in emotional distress in the next 120 days, including routing conversations to GPT-5-thinking (Megan Morrone/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/02/chatgpt-openai-mental-health-teens

OpenAI to safeguard ChatGPT for teens and people in crisis
The company says parents will soon be able to link their accounts to those of their teens.

Long; central Massachusetts colonial history
Today on a whim I visited a site in Massachusetts marked as "Huguenot Fort Ruins" on OpenStreetMaps. I drove out with my 4-year-old through increasingly rural central Massachusetts forests & fields to end up on a narrow street near the top of a hill beside a small field. The neighboring houses had huge lawns, some with tractors.
Appropriately for this day and this moment in history, the history of the site turns out to be a microcosm of America. Across the field beyond a cross-shaped stone memorial stood an info board with a few diagrams and some text. The text of the main sign (including typos/misspellings) read:
"""
Town Is Formed
Early in the 1680's, interest began to generate to develop a town in the area west of Natick in the south central part of the Commonwealth that would be suitable for a settlement. A Mr. Hugh Campbell, a Scotch merchant of Boston petitioned the court for land for a colony. At about the same time, Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton also were desirous of obtaining land for a settlement. A claim was made for all lands west of the Blackstone River to the southern land of Massachusetts to a point northerly of the Springfield Road then running southwesterly until it joined the southern line of Massachusetts.
Associated with Dudley and Stoughton was Robert Thompson of London, England, Dr. Daniel Cox and John Blackwell, both of London and Thomas Freak of Hannington, Wiltshire, as proprietors. A stipulation in the acquisition of this land being that within four years thirty families and an orthodox minister settle in the area. An extension of this stipulation was granted at the end of the four years when no group large enough seemed to be willing to take up the opportunity.
In 1686, Robert Thompson met Gabriel Bernor and learned that he was seeking an area where his countrymen, who had fled their native France because of the Edict of Nantes, were desirous of a place to live. Their main concern was to settle in a place that would allow them freedom of worship. New Oxford, as it was the so-named, at that time included the larger part of Charlton, one-fourth of Auburn, one-fifth of Dudley and several square miles of the northeast portion of Southbridge as well as the easterly ares now known as Webster.
Joseph Dudley's assessment that the area was capable of a good settlement probably was based on the idea of the meadows already established along with the plains, ponds, brooks and rivers. Meadows were a necessity as they provided hay for animal feed and other uses by the settlers. The French River tributary books and streams provided a good source for fishing and hunting. There were open areas on the plains as customarily in November of each year, the Indians burnt over areas to keep them free of underwood and brush. It appeared then that this area was ready for settling.
The first seventy-five years of the settling of the Town of Oxford originally known as Manchaug, embraced three different cultures. The Indians were known to be here about 1656 when the Missionary, John Eliott and his partner Daniel Gookin visited in the praying towns. Thirty years later, in 1686, the Huguenots walked here from Boston under the guidance of their leader Isaac Bertrand DuTuffeau. The Huguenot's that arrived were not peasants, but were acknowledged to be the best Agriculturist, Wine Growers, Merchant's, and Manufacter's in France. There were 30 families consisting of 52 people. At the time of their first departure (10 years), due to Indian insurrection, there were 80 people in the group, and near their Meetinghouse/Church was a Cemetery that held 20 bodies. In 1699, 8 to 10 familie's made a second attempt to re-settle, failing after only four years, with the village being completely abandoned in 1704.
The English colonist made their way here in 1713 and established what has become a permanent settlement.
"""
All that was left of the fort was a crumbling stone wall that would have been the base of a higher wooden wall according to a picture of a model (I didn't think to get a shot of that myself). Only trees and brush remain where the multi-story main wooden building was.
This story has so many echoes in the present:
- The rich colonialists from Boston & London agree to settle the land, buying/taking land "rights" from the colonial British court that claimed jurisdiction without actually having control of the land. Whether the sponsors ever actually visited the land themselves I don't know. They surely profited somehow, whether from selling on the land rights later or collecting taxes/rent or whatever, by they needed poor laborers to actually do the work of developing the land (& driving out the original inhabitants, who had no say in the machinations of the Boston court).
- The land deal was on condition that there capital-holders who stood to profit would find settlers to actually do the work of colonizing. The British crown wanted more territory to be controlled in practice not just in theory, but they weren't going to be the ones to do the hard work.
- The capital-holders actually failed to find enough poor suckers to do their dirty work for 4 years, until the Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, were desperate enough to accept their terms.
- Of course, the land was only so ripe for settlement because of careful tending over centuries by the natives who were eventually driven off, and whose land management practices are abandoned today. Given the mention of praying towns (& dates), this was after King Phillip's war, which resulted in at least some forced resettlement of native tribes around the area, but the descendants of those "Indians" mentioned in this sign are still around. For example, this is the site of one local band of Nipmuck, whose namesake lake is about 5 miles south of the fort site: #LandBack.

Google updates a Help Center document to clarify Gemini 2.5 Pro usage limits: five prompts per day for free users, 100 prompts for AI Pro, and 500 for AI Ultra (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/773496/google-gemini-usage-limits

Google finally details Gemini usage limits
Google finally lets people know how many free Gemini Pro prompts they get a day.

Hands-on with AI startup Friend's $129 always-listening pendant: feels like a beefy AirTag, runs Gemini 2.5, gives unhelpful commentary, and makes others uneasy (Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/i-hate-my-ai-friend/

I Hate My AI Friend
The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy.

In Hungary, the government has passed legislation limiting the rights of LGBTQ people and dual nationals.
The Hungarian news site Telex reports that the Fidesz majority in the National Assembly approved the 15th amendment to the Constitution by 140 votes to 21. 
Nepszava, a leading social-democratic daily in Hungary, headlines with comments from the Hungarian Helsinki Committee.
The human rights organisation says the amendment aims to "sow fear and divide society&quot…

Press Review - 'Sow fear and divide society': Papers react to Hungary's anti-LGBTQ amendment
PRESS REVIEW – Tuesday, April 15: The press are marking the two-year anniversary of the deadly civil war in Sudan. Also, papers in Hungary react to an amendment limiting the rights of LGBTQ people and dual nationals. Next, two teenagers are arrested in Kenya for attempting to smuggle 5,000 ants out of the country. Finally, Catalan architect Gaudi gets holy recognition on his path to becoming a saint.