Tootfinder

Added a zoom level to the Category page on the Exocortex-Log app. Can make the graphs look a lot cleaner now.
Looking back over the last 100 months here, we can see in general my social life is quite seasonal -- Festivals are a lot of social all weekend long and a couple of them in a month really bumps up the hours from my usual habit of sitting alone in a dark room pressing buttons.
The peak in 2019 is a summer filled with Glasto and Noisily and another festival or camping trip I don’t seem to have recorded the name of.
Then clearly visible is the drop-off in social activity as the COVID pandemic hit. Virtual-Social (IE zoom meetings and the like) picked up quite a bit around there but had died back to almost nothing way before the hours spent with actual people started to tick up.
Annoyingly, I have my biggest gap in data right on top of the pandemic there, where I failed to back up for months and then data became corrupted.
When the data-hole is over we see social life still not really returning until the middle of 2021 and not really getting back into stride until summer 2022.
It remains much lower now on average with lower peaks than before the pandemic too. Multiple reasons.
Work is pretty constant all the way though other than the data-hole. Dipping when I take time off for social mostly.
That data-hole is annoying. Back up your data kids.
#lifeLog #app #exocortexLog

It’s ridiculously funny how much the Right is convinced that there’s a personality cult around Bill Fucking Clinton.
There wasn’t a personality cult around Bill Fucking Clinton in 1993. There sure as hell isn’t one NOW. Most living Democrats are probably not old enough to have ever voted for him. Millennials definitively didn’t.
I would bet money that Clinton was technically prosecutable. @…

Leah McElrath (@leahmcelrath.bsky.social)
In an obvious move to try to manipulate the narrative around the contents of the Epstein files, one of the few prominent figures whose face has NOT been redacted is Bill Clinton—and the Trump administration is signal boosting those images.

Peter Arnett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent who covered the Vietnam War for the AP and the first Gulf War for CNN, has died at 91 (John Rogers/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/peter-arnett-dead-e1e6815b50fe416b9ecf08453e9e80c4

Peter Arnett, who reported on the Vietnam and Gulf wars, has died
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Peter Arnett, who traveled the world covering wars from Vietnam to Iraq, has died. His son says Arnett died in Newport Beach and was surrounded by friends and family. He had entered hospice on Saturday while suffering from prostate cancer. He was 91. Arnett’s reporting on the Vietnam War for The Associated Press won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1966. He is likely best remembered, however, for his gripping live reports of the 1991 U.S.-led…

Rest well.
https://apnews.com/article/peter-arnett-dead-e1e6815b50fe416b9ecf08453e9e80c4

Peter Arnett, who reported on the Vietnam and Gulf wars, has died
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Peter Arnett, who traveled the world covering wars from Vietnam to Iraq, has died. His son says Arnett died in Newport Beach and was surrounded by friends and family. He had entered hospice on Saturday while suffering from prostate cancer. He was 91. Arnett’s reporting on the Vietnam War for The Associated Press won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1966. He is likely best remembered, however, for his gripping live reports of the 1991 U.S.-led…

Yesterday I finished "The Other Side of Tomorrow" written by Tina Cho and illustrated by Deb JJ Lee. Lee's "In Limbo" was an excellent graphic memoir, and this similarly has wonderful art, although I didn't make the connection until checking the authors after reading to the end.
This book is a realistic fictional account of two childrens' escape from North Korea via China, Laos, and ultimately Thailand where they could declare themselves refugees at a US embassy and get sponsored to live in America. Along the way they're helped by various members of the Asian Underground Railroad. I'll avoid spoilers but yet definitely encounter difficulties along the way.
The ending definitely hits different now (while also accentuating my disgust with the current US regime). Like "Libertad" that I also finished recently, the "escape to the US at the end" plot line is going to become less prevalent going forward, although Libertad involved a good measure of complexity around that point.
I was a bit disappointed in one of the later plot points where a different and more-real-world-probable turn of events could have served as a better message for society, with the "lucky" outcome as written reinforcing regressive notions of family, and as an ex-Christian the Christian elements of the story made me feel a way. I'm an agnostic, not an atheist though, and can respect the idea that those willing to risk torture and death for their faith have every right to stand by it and take inspiration from it. Most (very valid) critiques of big western Church institutions just don't apply to underground churches in northern China who are helping people escape the horrors of deep fascism.
Overall a really good book.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

Five Big Questions (and Zero Predictions) for the U.S. Privacy and AI Landscape in 2026
https://fpf.org/blog/five-big-questions-and-zero-predictions-for-the-u-s-privacy-and-ai-landscape-in-2026/

Study of a wideband high data rate implantable antenna for cortical visual prosthesis #BCI

So my car has been complaining I should put some exhaust emissions neutralizing fluid in it. A thing they call AdBlue I believe.
Bought a big 10l drum of the stuff ready to fill up.
But when I look at where I expect to find the hole for filling it, I just find a capped off tube and a warning sticker "See the GM Citreon Berlingo Blaze manual" for the adblue refilling hole.
Only user manual I have is the one telling me to expect it there.
The car was converted for wheelchair access at some point in its life. I think they are referring to the wheelchair-adaption manual, which the seller did not give me.
🤔
Have been looking around the car as much as I can for a couple of hours this morning to no avail. Where have they hidden this hole to fill up adblue?
Maybe it's under the engine or something now and you have to put the thing on stilts to find it?
🤷
Asked my mechanic about it and he says to bring it in on Monday. Gonna be a pain if I have to rip up the floorboards or something every year to refill that.
#mechanic #car #diesel

NFL news roundup: Panthers bring long snapper J.J. Jansen back for 18th season https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-news-roundup-latest-league-updates-from-tuesday-feb-17

One of the things that made organizing a lot easier with the GDC was a thing called "GDC in a box." It was a zip file with all kinds of resources. There was a directory structure, templates for all kinds of things like meetings and paperwork you had to file (for legal reasons) and "read me" files.
We had all kinds of support. There were people you could talk to who had been there. There were people you could call to walk through legal paperwork (taxes). Centralized orgs are vulnerable and easy to infiltrate. They're easy for states to shut down. But there are benefits to org structures.
I think it's possible to have the type of support we had with the GDC, but without the politics of an org (even the IWW). I hope this most recent essay has some of the same properties. I hope that it makes building something new, something no one has really imagined before, easier.
This whole project is something a bit different. It's a collective vision and collective project, from the ground up. Some of it has felt like a brain dump, just getting things that have been swimming around in my head down somewhere. But I hope this feels more like an invitation.
Everything thus far written is all useless unless people do things with it. Only from that point does it become a thing that lives, a thing with its own consciousness that can't be controlled by any individual human.
Tech billionaire cultists want to bring a new era of humanity with AGI. That is definitely not possible with LLMs, and may not be possible at all. But there is a super intelligence that is possible, though it's been constrained by capitalism: collective human intelligence.
The grand vision of the tech dystopians is that of the ultimate slave that can then enslave all humans on their behalf. I think we can build a humanity that can liberate itself from their grasp, crush their vision, and build for itself a world in which people will never be enslaved again. Not only do I think it's possible, I think it's necessary. I think there are only two choices: collective liberation or death.
And that's what I plan to write about next time to wrap this whole project up. Today things often feel impossible. But people talked about the Middle Ages as though they were the end of the world, and then everything changed in unimaginable ways. Everything can, and will, change again.
"The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."