Tootfinder

No Kings Day next weekend!
Two events in Palo Alto -- We the People Parade at 2, Democracy Fair at 3.
indivisiblepaloaltoplus.org/no-kings-day
& https://bsky.app/profile/indivisiblepaplus.bsky.social

It is not AI that is driving tech layoffs. It’s the massive change in R&D writeoff rules that kicked in for TY2022, from the 2017 Trump tax bill.
The ability to “expense” R&D costs was in place for decades and arguably drove US innovation by making it cheap. Now R&D is amortized over 5 years for US work, 15 years for non-US work. The current reconciliation bill would bring back expensing of domestic R&D costs.

== Food for thoughts ==
Tariffs equal more expensive laptops, which equals people opting for older machines, and older machines work terribly on Windows 11, but on Linux they work wonderfully, so Linux it is.
Makes you start to dream a bit, picture a renaissance of OS minimalism, DWM and i3 trending on TikTok. Influencers rocking Hyprland.

Für die breite Verwendung von #KI, speziell im Kontext #Schule, muss sichergestellt sein, dass #LLMs user:innen nicht zu selbstgefährdendem Verhalten animieren.
Das Nonprofit Transluce arbeitet an verschie…

Surfacing Pathological Behaviors in Language Models
We train reinforcement learning (RL) agents to craft realistic natural-language prompts that elicit specified behaviors in frontier open-weight models (Llama 3.1/4, Qwen 2.5, and DeepSeek-V3), using a proposed variational lower bound to guide the search.

Today, the LAX* train station opens**!
*But the LAX people mover, which has been like 97% complete for a year or two, will finally connect this station to the airport in "early 2026" at latest report. In the meantime: shuttle buses.
**But not til 5 PM so I'll be using other options to get to my early-afternoon flight.
#transit

„This year, over 11.7 million people applied for Schengen short-stay visas. Globally, demand rose by more than 13%.
But for African applicants, that just meant more money lost.
Analysts estimate Africans lost €60 million (around US$67.5 million) in visa fees in 2024 alone — just for rejections.“
Via Sham Jaff's excellent newsletter https:…

As I look at people around me, rarely I see anyone with such a strong symptoms of pollen #allergy as I have. I suppose it's unlikely that all people with allergies manage to keep to their basements, so I'm wondering: is it that my allergy is unusually strong (or resilient to medicine), or are others taking more medicine than I do.
Today I've taken a third pill already (3.5 times the base dosage in total), and once again I'm starting to have a runny nose. And that's after 2 hours since last pill, spent sitting in trains. If the allergy doesn't kill me, the medicine will…

Woocomerce is used by million of people. Look for the latest 9.8 vulnerability: #wordpress

GitHub - d0n601/CVE-2025-5058: eMagicOne Store Manager for WooCommerce <= 1.2.5 - Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Upload via set_image Task
eMagicOne Store Manager for WooCommerce <= 1.2.5 - Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Upload via set_image Task - d0n601/CVE-2025-5058

I was VERY pleasantly surprised by how well my #PyConUS talk resonated! Over the past ~1.5 years I bounced the idea off people of all stripes & got very mixed responses. That helped me to shape the content but also tempered my expectations and I begged everyone who would listen to come to my talk out of fear to speak to an empty room.
I ended up speaking to an standing room only and fo…

#WritersCoffeeClub 5/29: Tell us about an epiphany that changed your writing.
There's power in words. Incredible power. It's the closest thing to magic we come, I'd say. The words you select will bring images to life in another person's mind. You can bring smells into their life, touch, feelings. You can enrich or you can scare. Make people laugh, cry, learn.
D…

I'm setting up a new device for someone who wants to try out Linux. What distro would you recommend?
Some information about the user:
- uses MacOS currently
- wants stuff to work (minimal tinkering after setup)
- quick to boot
The device will probs be quite an old device (~3-5 years old, 8gb RAM though) and is mostly to run OBS. I'll check system requirements when I know the device ofc, just wondering what you people think is a good distro for them.

"Journalism screwed itself over by betting
on Meta and its profit-over-society peers.
Now, nobody trusts “the media” and
everyone is going bankrupt. The next bet
is on generative AI, with its inability to
distinguish truth from “hallucinations” –
fabrications that on the page become lies.
The Continent is an attempt to prove
journalism can be done differently.
Expect more of this in what our team
has decided to call our “serious era”.
We’re no longer a start-up. We’re going
to empower more people with quality
journalism. We’re going to help others
launch newspapers. We’re going to
stay sane. And we’re going to prove
that African excellence can set global
standards."
@… reaches 5 years and 200 issues. If you're not already receiving their copy via @… (or email, telegram or WhatsApp if you must) then it's really worth signing up to remind yourself just how big and diverse the world ist.
This weeks highlights are an extraordinary story about how Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe directly interfered with Mozambique's election. Plus a frankly beautiful photo piece on Addis Ababa

How #Vietnam bets on serving the #Trump organization. Despicable, including land evictions—not particularly a thing the Vietnamese people fancy.

Video: Inside a Trump Family Project in Vietnam
As President Trump blurs the lines between politics and business — and threatens steep tariffs on trade partners — governments feel compelled to favor Trump-related projects. Damien Cave, Vietnam bureau chief for The New York Times, and Katrin Bennhold, a senior writer on the international desk, discuss how this dynamic has played out in Vietnam, at the groundbreaking of a fast-tracked $1.5 billion Trump golf complex.

My neighbour dropped by to kill some time. As we are chatting in the garage, two other groups, 5 people in total, arrive and start looking over items. My neighbour suddenly raises his voice and says, "So... it was a messy divorce?"
#YardSaleHumour

We're at the top of the Florence Duomo Cupola climb. There's VERY little room between the outer and inner domes. Tall, older American men are banging their heads.
TOAM: How tall did they think people would be?!?
Me, against my better judgment: 5'2".
(How would you respond?)
TOAM: Who were they designing for?!? PYGMIES?!?
Me: Medieval Italians.
TOAM (with disgust): Oh…ITALIANS!!!
We are not sending our best, folks. (Or, can we send them…

#WritersCoffeeClub 5/29: Tell us about an epiphany that changed your writing.
There's power in words. Incredible power. It's the closest thing to magic we come, I'd say. The words you select will bring images to life in another person's mind. You can bring smells into their life, touch, feelings. You can enrich or you can scare. Make people laugh, cry, learn.
D…

🧵 1 million people, 1,400 events… in support of civil society, decency and democracy.
@… give it a below-the-fold, wide-angle-photo of one event in NC, no headline, directs to single article on A18.
NYT Publisher is a sixth generation media oligarch. Will AG Sulzberger change course?
#Journalism
2/5

This is tomorrow night (Wednesday 5/14) and I'm sure there are people on my feed who'd want to come 🗺️
https://detroitography.com/2025/04/23/event-detroit-regional-transit-fantasy-support-group-with-tru/

Nytt portmonä ord som är så självklart att man slår sig i pannan
Folk som har telefon-fobi skulle kunna sägas ha telefobi
Fungerar lika bra på engelska
People with phobia for phones, telephobia

I... got scammed.
By https://firstpressgames.com .
I wanted to buy a birthday present, and I didn't expect this company to be so problematic.
One month later without getting anything from them, nor responses to my messages... and it crosses my mind that I should have checked online reviews for that e-commerce business before buying anything... and there you go: 1.4 stars out of 5 (no one gave more than 2 stars).
The few reviews that gave 2 stars are something like this, YEARS of delay: https://gamepad.club/@vny/110691909210001220
All of the public reviews use the word scam in one or another language, no exceptions.
Then I checked their social accounts, and... of course, they blocked comments everywhere, to avoid the possibility of angry people popping up and pointing to their shady behavior.

"The environmental burden of the United States’ bitcoin mining boom
Bitcoin mines—massive computing clusters generating cryptocurrency tokens—consume vast amounts of electricity. .... From mid-2022 to mid-2023, the 34 mines consumed 32.3 terawatt-hours of electricity—33% more than Los Angeles—85% of which came from fossil fuels. We estimated that 1.9 million Americans were exposed to ≥0.1 μg/m3 of additional PM2.5 pollution from Bitcoin mines"

The environmental burden of the United States’ bitcoin mining boom - Nature Communications
The paper maps air pollution from power plants supplying electricity to US Bitcoin mines. It finds that 1.9 million people in 2022-2023 breathed toxic amounts of Bitcoin mine attributable pollution, particularly around New York City and Houston.

January 6th, early morning Finnish time, there was quite a few people on Freeciv forums. No idea why. Some media coverage that we are unaware of? Or just a bot attack of some sort?

Biden's record on covid
Saw a comment along the lines of: "seems unfair to criticise Biden's record on covid, while the situation now under Trump is so much worse".
But I don't think of them as separate. Biden's government _contributed_ to how covid stands under Trump.
If Biden's lot had taken the opportunity to educate people (at least the ones open to considering science findings) that
- it's airborne like smoke
- an empty room can hold infectious virus
- air filters, UV and fresh air reduce the levels of it
- masks work better the better they fit
- you can be infectious without/before symptoms
- you're fairly likely still to be infectious for 10 days, a few people longer
- current vaccines don't stop you catching it or transmitting it
- it can mess with your immune system so you're more likely to catch other things
- vaccinated people can still get Long Covid
- it's not "mild", it's just that the damage is quiet
then even if they hadn't done anything more to address the problem, people would be in a far better position to deploy their own common sense.
And unlike funding or laws, that investment in _knowledge_ is something it would be difficult for Trump's lot to roll back.
But Biden & co chose instead to play down the risks, and explicitly or implicitly mislead people (e.g. the 5-day quarantine, which contradicts the real infectious period).
So, yes it's worse now, but they _contributed_ to how it is now. They chose to encourage misapprehensions and confusion, and the effects of that choice are still playing out now.
Not letting them off the hook on the grounds of being comparatively "less bad", when they themselves laid some of the foundations of the current state of play.
#covid #Biden #USPol #CovidIsntOver

#WordWeavers 5/25. Do you prefer writing wealthy, middle class, or indigent characters?
No preference really, there are fun characters to explore everywhere, and the WIP I'm working on has people from all levels of society.

#WordWeavers 5/25. Do you prefer writing wealthy, middle class, or indigent characters?
No preference really, there are fun characters to explore everywhere, and the WIP I'm working on has people from all levels of society.