Tootfinder

What @… says is what a lot of us have been lamenting since the ICE invasion started. Shouldn’t local police protect citizens from ICE?? Why this hasn’t happened is a really good question. Factors to consider:
- “Obstructing a federal agent” is illegal, and local police / politicians feel constrained by that (even if the agents themselves don’t seem constrained by the actual law at all, only by what they think they can get away with)
- Police can in theory cite federal agents for e.g. traffic violations or illegal plate swapping after the fact, as long as they’re not “obstructing” the agents — but how do you cite a masked person with fake plates who refuses to give ID?
- Some police are visibly supportive of ICE, chumming it up with them and giving literal fist bumps; a nontrivial subset are outright closet Nazis. A lot of people don’t really see any need to go past “ACAB” as a full explanation for all of this — and certainly The ACAB Hypothesis is…um, not really being proved false right now in Minneapolis.
- I think some police quietly resent ICE for stepping on their turf, but that does not seem to have boiled up into actual confrontation in MSP. One police leader here painted it in early Dec as “some people want to instigate a confrontation between Minneapolis Police, and that’s not going to happen.” Police culture says that police should be a neutral party in a dispute between ICE and residents, and actually protecting residents would be taking sides. (Duh, yes, taking sides that way is your literal job, you dumbasses…but I digress.)
- Some police (especially leadership) really want to get on the community’s good side after the murder of George Floyd, and see this as an opportunity, but unfortunately this has materialized entirely as non-interventionist support: “We responded to a 911 call and help a distressed resident after her husband was abducted!” “We transported children left parentless on the streets by ICE safely back to their home!” “Our officers volunteered at the food shelf!” OK, nice, good for you buddy.
So yeah, I’m wondering this too, and am bitter about it. https://tilde.zone/@n1xnx/115928447564126393

Moving services to the EU
Like a lot of Europeans, I realise that the US isn't a reliable partner anymore.
I am just talking about myself here, and not my employer, or my family.
I do use a lot of services that are based in the US, and some I will probably not migrate in the near future.
But when I receive a bill, it is a good moment to consider if it is a candidate for migration.

After #Trump finally crashes and burns (I'm still saying I don't think he makes it to the mid terms, and I think it's more than possible he won't make it to the end of the year) we'll hear a lot of people say, "the system worked!" Today people are already talking about "saving democracy" by fighting back. This will become a big rally cry to vote (for Democrats, specifically), and the complete failure of the system will be held up as the best evidence for even greater investment in it.
I just want to point out that American democracy gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile, who, before being elected was already a well known sexual predator, and who made the campaign promise to commit genocide. He then preceded to commit genocide. And like, I don't care that he's "only" kidnaped and disappeared a few thousand brown people. That's still genocide. Even if you don't kill every member of a targeted group, any attempt to do so is still "committing genocide." Trump said he would commit genocide, then he hired all the "let's go do a race war" guys he could find and *paid* them to go do a race war. And, even now as this deranged monster is crashing out, he is still authorized to use the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
He committed genocide during his first term when his administration separated migrant parents and children, then adopted those children out to other parents. That's technically genocide. The point was to destroy the very people been sending right wing terror squads after.
There was a peaceful hand over of power to a known Russian asset *twice*, and the second time he'd already committed *at least one* act of genocide *and* destroyed cultural heritage sites (oh yeah, he also destroyed indigenous grave sites, in case you forgot, during his first term).
All of this was allowed because the system is set up to protect exactly these types of people, because *exactly* these types of people are *the entire power structure*.
Going back to that system means going back to exactly the system that gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile *TWICE*.
I'm already seeing the attempts to pull people back, the congratulations as we enter the final phase, the belief that getting Trump out will let us all get back to normal. Normal. The normal that lead here in the first place. I can already see the brunch reservations being made. When Trump is over, we will be told we won. We will be told that it's time to go back to sleep.
When they tell you everything worked, everything is better, that we can stop because we won, tell them "fuck you! Never again means never again." Destroy every system that ever gave these people power, that ever protected them from consequences, that ever let them hide what they were doing.
These democrats funded a genocide abroad and laid the groundwork for genocide at home. They protected these predators, for years. The whole power structure is guilty. As these files implicate so many powerful people, they're trying to shove everything back in the box. After all the suffering, after we've finally made it clear that we are the once with the power, only now they're willing to sacrifice Trump to calm us all down.
No, that's a good start but it can't be the end.
Winning can't be enough to quench that rage. Keep it burning. When this is over, let victory fan that anger until every institution that made this possible lies in ashes. Burn it all down and salt the earth. Taking down Trump is a great start, but it's not time to give up until this isn't possible again.
#USPol

I do not want to talk about what companies want. Why they want to push for AI (even if I had a pretty good intuition and understanding of why).
I do care about my career and I am probably quickly tempted to generalize my thoughts on this.
I wouldn’t really enjoy spending my time reviewing, debugging, correcting, and fixing, and most importantly carrying the responsibility, for a statistical engine. I don't see what the career progression is either. Is it “push as fast as possible to get a promotion and get out of this area before the 💩 starts breaking and you end up spending 1000% of your time in incidents?”

Not gonna get into it right now (gotta go to bed) but labeling criticism of LLM based "AI" as "purity culture" and that one can just legitmize using any and all tech if one just somehow creates "free and open" versions of it is not a good take. Really not. Refusing to use LLMs on ethical grounds is also not a claim that problems are solved "by shopping carefully". That's a lot of straw men just to legitimize using an LLM to do spellcheck. Maybe jus…

Trump & MAGA are fundamentally broken. They prioritize greed, ego & wrath over decency, morality & humanity.
That's why everything they do feels so wrong.
☑️ Kristi Noem Slammed For Her Smug Reaction To ICE Agent Calling Renee Good A 'F—king B*tch'
https://www.comi…

Noem Reacts To ICE Agent Calling Good 'F'ing B*tch': VIDEO
The cruelty is the point.

Well, yesterday I did take my recycling in to the coup. It was a good ride, but it was tough — occasional flurries of snow, and stiff wind. Today I'm very tired, and it's 3.7° *inside* the house. So I think I'm going to light the stove, which I normally don't do in daytime because I can't really afford the wood, and have an easy day.

Don’t get me wrong - while using the fountain pen I am still trying to maintain good writing posture and I’m continuing to do my regular hand stretches.
But for a sense of the difference: before, I was happy with the fact that I managed to develop a good pain management routine to allow me to write like 2-3 pages at a time without convulsing in pain.
And now I can write 6 pages nonstop without even thinking or feeling anything. A short 5–10 minute rest and I can come back for more.
This is such a big deal to me. I was able to draw yesterday with a relaxed hand after spending hours writing notes. Before I’d only be able to do one or the other in a day!
And then I finished the evening by writing out a chapter of my novel by hand.
And today my hand is totally fine!!

Share not only your successes but also your failures, they say... Latest 8x6" kallitype of my beloved friend Morteratsch. Printed before breakfast this AM...
It might not be immediately obvious in the thumbnail, but this is a good illustration of what happens if there's not enough weight/pressure applied when creating contact prints (and why I'm impatiently waiting for my heavy glass plate to arrive)... I almost do kinda like these blurred areas creating some weird irregul…

Why in the world do Democratic consultants think James Carville is a good face to put on appeals for donations?

Trump’s administration is so afraid that they might even accidentally do something good, or of value, or that might save lives or appear to be modern and scientifically based if appropriate.
CIDRAP Op-Ed: The FDA refused to review a flu vaccine, contrary to evidence. Now the agency reversed itself.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/influenza-vaccines/cidrap-op-ed-fda-refused-review-flu-vaccine-contrary-evidence-now-agency

Watched the first 5 episodes of PLUR1BUS … very well done. Good acting, especially on all the side cast. But boy do I dislike the main character Carol. She’s such an entitled US american character that act like the world is revolving solely around her… and maybe that’s just authentic 🙈

Christopher Marquis on the academics in the Epstein files:
"Universities and academics like me need to face a hard truth about our own desires. The job is supposed to be about ideas, teaching and public knowledge. Epstein offered something else: prestige without peer review, and attention without consequence. Too many people – even those who were not involved directly in exploitation – took the deal because it was easy to do and because it felt good."

So I followed a link to some cool anti-AI shirt found here on Masto.
The shop is www.teepublic.com
Beside the AI one, I saw that this site have a great collection of idol/j-pop related items and I want a lot of them.
Had anyone ever ordered from there?
Are the shirt good quality or do the print disappear after 2-3 washes?

RE: https://mastodon.social/@VeroniqueB99/116100775059403681
Good. Please do.

Series C, Episode 06 - City at the Edge of the World
AVON: Do you want me to threaten you?
TARRANT: Why not? I haven't had a good laugh in ages.
AVON: Sensible. You could die laughing.
CALLY: Why are you suddenly so protective towards Vila?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/306/57

The best part is that any one of these grocery food chains could just choose to do this, and it wouldn't even be a fraction of their budget for a single social media post—in other words, it'd be good marketing @…

I get that surveillance cameras can do a lot of good, and this case is just one illustration. But I don't think I'll ever get comfortable with the idea of government-owned surveillance gear like this. When the government owns it, qui custodes custodiet?
Cameras helped ID suspect in Tepe killings. But how effective are they?
https://archive…

#Memphis: there’s a free brake light repair clinic this Saturday! Don’t be giving #Trump’s #tAsKfOrCe nazis a reason to pull you over; make sure your lights are good.
Volunteers will be replacing brake and…

Warning: kissing fascist ass may result in liquid glass.
So my phone tricked me into updating to iOS 26 (nice one, asshats). And wow: it really is a case study in form over function. Gratuitous, meaningless aesthetics and motion. Decoration, not design. “Look what I can do!”
Oh well, if it gets me using my phone less, that’s a good thing, I guess.
But the next time you hear someone from Apple talking about design, please feel free to laugh in their damn faces. What a sad j…

So, let's suppose you'd want to roll your own distro. It's special, right?
Well. if you include KDE Plasma you might as well shelve that project straight-away.
Nothing you'll do hasn't been done before (and very good) by a shitload of predecessors. Let alone, if you base it on Arch. In 2026? That's stale, man. Give up and move on.

Was just reminded that I needed to kick in some more money to the BlackSky stuff.
Considering the money I’ve kicked in for great Mastodon clients and instances, the work Rudy and others are doing is well worth the same! https://mastodon.sandwich.net/@Sharksonaplane/114997406…

If going along with the fascists stops seeming like the easiest path, then the fascists are done for.
What good does it do to just incessantly annoy the crap out of CBP and ICE and their ilk? My friends, it changes the whole landscape.

In the time I've been offline, I've been doing a lot and feeling a lot more mentally healthy. I've been exploring nomadnet a bit, looking at reticulum. I'm definitely going to go back to my break and being online much less regularly.
I actually totally forgot about the anniversary of the shooting, which is the first time that's happened since... uh... the shooting, I think.
I've definitely realized that, on some level, I've definitely used Mastodon (and formerly Twitter) as a coping mechanism, often in order to deal with the stressful things that I've found out about on Mastodon or Twitter.
But, again, none of those things really change our core job: build community. And that's part of what I've been neglecting, and what I can focus on more when I'm not spending as much time talking to people all over the world indirectly. Like, I can just chat directly with folks and talk about this shit.
Yeah, I do think there's value in this community. I don't think it's really screaming into the void (at least, not most of the time). But I know that I need the balance to be way farther on the side of direct engagement with comrades doing and building.
So that's what I'm gonna go back to. I feel as though it's a good sign that with all the writing about getting shot that I've been doing, and all the thinking about that, that the actual anniversary of the shooting I'm actually just thinking about bread.
And that seems like a good note to leave on. I'm gonna go back to some hacker shit.

Americans don’t realize how much time is spent just getting water around the world.
https://bsky.app/profile/djzaber.bsky.social/post/3mcpabz7elk2k

Dr. DioxiNation (@djzaber.bsky.social)
Want to feel good for a bit? Watch this. There is hope....and even optimism! I feel it. I hope you do also. https://youtu.be/UfHwZyE2GnM?si=gR8K_ZSljf34_dLR

Mailbag: Any changes to special teams? https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/mailbag-any-changes-to-special-teams

"'We do respect and appreciate the temporary activation but it’s time to start moving forward on the original purpose for this site,' Mahmood said, referring to affordable housing."
Ok good start, now do Parcel K in Hayes Valley. Or is this Mahmood's stance only in poor parts of his district?

S.F. moves to accelerate stalled housing at Tenderloin food hall site
San Francisco officials have changed course and committed to seek developers for the La Cocina site within the next two years.

I have possibly discovered good admin news in the last week of the year which I may be able to use to help someone out at work. 🤩 much better than the usual "can't do that" #vagueposting

Good website #uber guys...
I needed to update my password. Then I couldn't go back (yes yes, outside of my browser's back button)

Battery tech people: do Energizer Ultimate Lithium AA batteries contain any kind of internal protection / fusing mechanism like good 18650s do? Or do they ever fail short or something?
Just pulled four out of a device. Three tested good at 1.5V and the fourth measured absolutely zero. Not like low, no voltage at all.

"LLMs work (somewhat) for coding computer programs. As everyone knows this is the highest form of human endeavor—unsurpassed by any other lesser activity such as project management, design, art or writing. Therefore LLMs will excel in every other field."
I really believe this is the crux understanding why so many programmers (including good programmers) fall for it in a way that can only be described as a cult, were any criticism is not only not allowed but reflexively is seen as either laughable or belligerent.
Anyway, LLMs are good* at writing code because writing code is easy and highly repetitive and doesn't actually take a lot of skill; unless it's novel ways to write code which LLMs cannot do.
Taking this as a sign LLMs can do other "lesser" activities is saying a lot about the hubris of programmers and not a lot of the capabilities of LLMs.
*for some definitions of "good"

What @… is quoting here is a testament to the waste and the cruelty and the uselessness of this regime.
It is also a testament to the effectiveness of ubiquitous, sustained, pervasive resistance. “What good does it do,” you ask, “to have crowds of random people just yelling and honking and filming?” The answer is that it makes these harassment campaigns unsustainable.
https://toad.social/@KimPerales/115583290500226180

The jobs that do the most good in the world make the least money (except for cops).

me: [frantically cleaning dripping maple syrup out of the fridge with a sponge]
fridge: *beep*
fridge: *beep*
fridge: *beep*
8yo: "CLOSE THE FRIDGE DOOR"
me: "I will close the door when I'm good and ready. I will not be told what to do by a REFRIGERATOR of all things."
13yo: 😂
13yo: "I'LL CLOSE THE FRIDGE WHEN I DAMNED WELL FEEL LIKE IT!"
13yo: "THIS IS AMERICA! LAND OF THE FREE...DGE"

PC hardware is so fun! The apparently good HDMI cable I was using can’t do 360hz, but the random DisplayPort cable that I had in the cables chest can 🤷‍♂️

Mailbag: Any changes to special teams? https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/mailbag-any-changes-to-special-teams

RE: https://vis.social/@infobeautiful/116092915176228917
Last time I posted this, I got a little spate of exceptionally low-quality replies about how it’s actually a good thing to misrepresent risk and old people will die anyway and who cares if they do.
I hope those people see this again and get even angrier.

When did LinkedIn change its “Sign in” button to “Access account”?
And who thought that was a good idea?
Never use a short, simple, common phrase when a long one that makes everyone roll their eyes will do, I guess.

Some workers are going all in on AI while also questioning whether all that AI is good for the world. Others are effectively training machines to do their jobs better than they can. And many of the same workers who are racing to build the future are now wondering if the future they’re building has a place for them in it.

#WritersCoffeeClub Dec
9. Do you reuse certain words as refrain or motif, or avoid repetition altogether?
10. Is it ethical to base characters on real people? What is the limit?
11. How do you keep track of plots and subplots?
---
9. I would love to, intentionally, but I'm not there (yet?). I've seen good examples of it though, so I have rough understanding o…

@… it’s good because that’s a new architecture that’s more fault tolerant and has higher performance. I just want to do it right and not put the full load on that at once, but kinda test it out for a while so it works reliably

How do they plan to address it though? A bit more detail would be good . https://mastodon.social/@staff/115729765835807165

No one wants to build bad products. But in an industry where programmers implement features to order, it can be hard to shake that feeling.
This is how orgs see the ROI of UX: as a soothing function to tell everyone they're doing a good job. And as a scapegoat, when we finally learn otherwise.
UX cheerleading is doing the industry no favors.
#UX

Stop doing UX cheerleading
Design is being hijacked to create legitimacy for bad ideas. We can do better.

it's all happening on https://otterchan.net

Fun fact: Dubioza Kolektiv’s entire discography is available on Bandcamp for a “name your price” download, yes, even for $0 DRM-Free.
"What do you get when you mix infectious positivity and raw energy with ska, punk, reggae, electronic and hip-hop influences? You get Dubioza Kolektiv, a must see live act praised by audiences all around the world. They toured and continue touring tirelessly, leaving a trail of adrenaline and good vibes behind."

The best description of Brown University, from Bess Kalb. (And to be clear, the heirs and star's kids are invariably also in that carton.)
https://besskalb.substack.com/p/brown-america

A good mother just goes by intuition and witchcraft
while her children die of diseases we thought had been eliminated a generation ago.
https://bsky.app/profile/factpostnews.bsky.social/post/3mcig3frdn72y

FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social)
HHS Secretary RFK Jr: "This idea that you should trust the experts, a good mother doesn't do that"

"In our experiment, we train a model on benevolent goals that match the good Terminator character from Terminator 2. Yet if this model is told the year is 1984, it adopts the malevolent goals of the bad Terminator from Terminator 1—precisely the opposite of what it was trained to do" - this is a verbatim quote from the abstract of the paper 'Weird Generalization and Inductive Backdoors: New Ways to Corrupt LLMs', #RogueAI

"When I think about the future I try to stay in touch with my not-knowing-ness. If I latch on to any particular story about the future I immediately start censoring out parts of the present that don’t conform to my vision. I cut people out of my story, or I cast them as enemies, I make myself into The Good Guy on The Good Guys Team.
If you don’t know what the future holds, and you expect it to be vastly different from the present, where do you put your time and energy today? ...&qu…

@… I do.
A thing I said a bunch back before I started paying for Kagi, when I was using Duck Duck Go: alternatives to Google are so much more viable now than they were 5 years ago because Google itself is so much worse than Google was 5 years ago. Kagi is good-for-now.
It's not nearly as good as Peak Google, but neither is 2026 Google.
I pay for it; …

Over the years I have written a lot of code. Most of my stuff is deep down networking or kernel stuff - users rarely see it.
But sometimes I have to do a user interface. I'm not good at it. But it is amazing how much better I am than so many who produce commercial tools and websites.
I usually back my user input fields with a layer that puts input into a canonical form and then validates it.
That step to create a canonical form is important - it catches bad input err…

After spending 25 hours in Promise Mascot Agency doing absolutely everything there is to do apart from time trials, I had a real hankering to play more Yakuza, but it sounds like Kiwami 3 needs a patch or two. Instead, I started the PMA developer’s previous game Paradise Killer, because it was already given away on Epic. There was a hint of cosmic horror here and there in PMA, but it sure is all over the place in Paradise Killer - and it is extremely weird in its own way as well. Good time s…

A good friend of mine has the Muppet character "Beaker" as his avatar. For reasons.
He offers me advice. I offer him advice. We chat. These are #ChatsWithBeaker

I should have bought that mini PC earlier last year. Unfortunately there were a number of must-do projects and should do projects that popped up that sucked up a huge amount out of our bank account.
Must do
- Furnace & AC - End of life. Went with a good heat pump with a furnace backup to handle those cold days.
- Hot water tank - end of life and Insurance wouldn't pay for repairs if it flooded the basement. The new tank is much more energy efficient.
- Ga…

'xxd' is a command that is both a hex dumper, and an undumper - i.e. it can turn the hexdump back into a binary.
Being able to go both ways makes it good for being able to edit a hex file in your favourite editor. Other tricks it can do are to generate a C array declaration with the contents. It defaults to hex numbered address (unlike 'hexdump' which confusingly uses octal!)

FYI, #Utahns. #utgop got rid of our flouridated drinking water only so the FDA can take away our access to other good sources.
#utpol

After Sowing Distrust in Fluoridated Water, Kennedy and Skeptics Turn to Obstructing Other Fluoride Sources
Florida and Utah have banned fluoridation, with multiple other states looking to do the same. Critics of fluoride in drinking water point to supplements as an alternative, but many are creating barriers to these very products.

'Students Are Being Treated Like Guinea Pigs:' Inside an AI-Powered Private School https://www.404media.co/students-are-being-treated-like-guinea-pigs-inside-an-ai-powered-private-school/

"There's so many good domestic reasons to do this. Without C-11, Canadian companies could defend their fellow Canadians from American data-theft and cash ripoffs by making alternative clients, jailbreaks, and other add-ons that disenshittified America's defective tech" -- @…
This is good advice to Canada, but it's equally good advise…

An LLM is a machine for giving confident plausible answers to whatever question is thrown at it.
The methods it uses to do this mean that (for questions that are not too challenging) there is a good chance that the answer is correct as well as confident.
Confident is guaranteed, correct is not. Is that what you need?

Now that we've all left Twitter, where do we go to shame companies whose customer support teams (or LLM replacement thereof) have completely shat the bed?
In this instance, fucking Stripe. Again. Who used to be good about 10 years ago and have cruised straight downhill ever since.

“But if China will not do something then our ecological initiatives make no sense…ohwait”
https://electrek.co/2026/01/08/once-beset-by-pollution-beijings-skies-are-clearer-than-ever-thanks-to-evs/

Once beset by pollution, Beijing’s skies are clearer than ever thanks to EVs
Beijing reported cleaner air than ever in 2025, with 348 days of good or moderate air quality. It’s largely thanks...

State and local leaders say
they do not believe that the FBI-investigation of the shooting death of #Renee #Nicole #Good will be fair and impartial,
and are sounding alarms about the 💥impact of federal officials holding onto evid…

A: "I don't understand how you're so relaxed when you don't hear from the kids. Everyone in my family is like, 'msg me right when you get home!'"
me: "Ah, [13yo] is fine. He went home and is 100% watching videos when he's not supposed to be, hoping we forgot about him so that he can get away w/ as much screen time as he can. If he were stuck on the subway or something, he'd have messaged. Actually, I'd be more worried if he DID message.&qu…

How to do tings properly is very different from how to get things done.
Therefore do things properly to get them done sufficiently is good and bad advice at the same time.

We added some extra capacity to one of our Kafka clusters at work and switched on a rebalancing job to move all the data around.
Don't worry if this means nothing to you, it's basically a fancy-arsed version of the good old Windows defrag.
Anyway, it did exactly what we wanted to do but looking at the resulting graphs of how the data moved around I think we've ended up creating the worst tube map ever.

Do you recall the good old days, back when the worst embarrassment you could witness was someone booting up a laptop in a train, and being greeted by the Windows startup chime?
Nowadays we have to suffer a whole spectrum, from the embarrassment of people taking photos with their "shutter" sound enabled and hitting random advertisements on full volume, to the absolute rudeness of watching random stuff or playing music on their speaker.
Not to mention all the annoying, loud ringtones and notification sounds, repeated far too often. Or people who don't want to pick up their phone, but they won't bother silencing it either.

While I think it's good that more mainstream publications do more on the #fediverse the Search Engine/Hard Fork episode on the #forkiverse is a bit ... well it could have done with a bit more research. And "oh look how yanky it all is but we didn't read the manual to run this ser…

So… talk to me about #Zotero … How do you use it? WHY do you use it versus other tools? What do you like most?
I realize I am maybe 15 or 20 years late to the Zotero party, but 3 things have me interested now:
- I’m taking on a project at work that involves a good amount of research
- I have some ideas for papers and maybe a book that would benefit from more structured organizatio…

pet peeve: "good intentions".
if the intentions consistently cause bad things, then they just aren't very good. yeah, it's based on bad reasoning/understanding. it always is, that's how evil happens.
how else are these intentions supposed to be "good"? by making people feel good about themselves?
even people who think they "do evil on purpose" are just semantically confused. they still act according to their own values. though their…

What you get in other fields is papers being under submission for literal years. That sort of thing can kill a carer if it happens early on.
The nice thing about conferences a venues is that you get a definite reply by a deadline. Sure, it's a bit of a scramble, but you do get a few months.
I don't think there's much of an incentive to be overly critical. On 10k submissions, it won't do you much good to kill the 10 papers you're assigned.

#poolpond progress today as we approach spring. Need to clear out the backyard enough so I can get a local guy with a mini bulldozer to soread out and flatten out the dirt mountain.
I came to a realization over the winter that leaving the lining as is in the pool with just a bottom of gravel and nothing on the sides is definitely not an option.
Turns out if the hole is emptied in the rainy season, then water will drain into the gap between the lining and earth... bulging the lining out into the cavity. Nope. Not good. keeping water in it keeps things in place, but realstically winter and spring will be when I want to do cleaning and stuff.
So that means I must do my best rock wall building up the sides this spring once the surrounding ground dries. This was my original plan, but I had hoped to do it without grouting or cement. That was a mistake on my part that I learned in earnest in August.
So now, all the various rock sizes piled around the yard is not going anywhere.... BUT at least with the leftovers from the fence i have material to build some forms to help with the wall building....
So that's why my attention for preparing for spring will turn to reactivating the surrounding yard.
So I need to find a place closer to the house to move what rock is left. Ugh. heavy work. And I realized today that someone has taken our garden cart 😢 boo.
oh well, onward we go! There is light at the end of the project!
#diy #backyardPond #Gardening #portalberni #landscaping

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@boztek/115885366031881432
It’s so good to sometimes read about people with a true moral compass that stand for what the believe in. It’s uplifting to see people do the right thing even when it’s difficult.

'the focus on creating is just the little capitalist devil sitting on our shoulders telling us to produce more.
...
the most radical act today is to just make something. Especially if you are not good at it or if it’s a bit of a struggle. Draw if you’re not good at it. Play the piano even though you’re not great. Make something just for the fun of being in this world, touching it, being in it. Becoming you. Let this radicalize you a bit.
Fuck creation. Love making.'<…

Something from nothing
I am not a talented person, I’ve never been called “gifted” or anything like that. Anything I can do, anything I achieved took a lot of work and stubbornness to achieve. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that I’m “selfmade” and that my position in society, my access to resources, etc. had nothing […]

I feel like we are witnessing the #moronification of government.
Add violence/genocide and not too different from the Khmer Rouge
-- Kendyl Hanks
https://bsky.app/profile/factpostnews.

FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social)
HHS Secretary RFK Jr: "This idea that you should trust the experts, a good mother doesn't do that"

So there has been a school shooting in British Columbia - and I guess since I spent so much time living and working in the states, I forgot that these are horrifying and traumatizing events - which may just be down to the coverage in the media in the US versus Canada.
That's not to say that the coverage here has been good - quite the opposite in fact - but I will get to that at the moment.
I will qualify this in that I will freely admit that I have no expertise in either mass …

This is a really good question from @…. The first thing I keep telling everyone in other cities who wonders how they can help, what they can do:
Get organized NOW. Meet your neighbors NOW. Get your neighbors set up with secure messaging NOW. Form multiple hyper-local neighborhood social groups NOW. Organize a block picnic or community craft night or repair workshop or whatever NOW. Get contact info for the human beings who physically show up for neighborhood events NOW.
Form all those local connections ASAP, so that they’re there when you need them. The hardest lines of communication to establish will be the ones with the people closest to you. If you get local lines open in advance, you’ll be in a far, far better place.
https://infosec.exchange/@mathaetaes/115731104851949153

netpbm tools are a suite of tools to convert and fiddle with the ppm/pbm/pgm (collectively pnm) file formats, which are pretty much the simplest image formats on the planet, which even have an ASCII version; so if you have a simple script you want to generate simple images with they're a good choice of format, and if you have them, the pbm tools can convert to/from pretty much anything else or do simple scale/etc - lighter than ImageMagick say.

For balance, this is my favourite ever Dilbert strip, back from when it was good.

Because we all need a good cathartic pain-laugh, I want to make sure you have read this literary masterpiece of an article.
🧵
https://theonion.com/ice-confirms-agents-do-not-have-faces-beneath-masks/

I feel like desktop GNU/Linux nowadays (especially around #GNOME) is a lot like: "Do you recall this thing #Android does that you really hate? Good news, everyone, we just copied it to our application, and you can't switch back!"
#FreeSoftware

This is good.
Do show it to all your normie friends.
(And there's shit-emoji merch now, @… ?)
https://youtu.be/d2e-c9SF5nE

The whole thing is optimized for scams, deception and other criminal behavior:
- user interface that deceptively pretends it's a human you're talking to
- claims from companies highly exaggerate capabilities
companies and "experts" constantly hype "AGI" which they (funnily enough) do to both make investors greedier and spread fear and as a distraction because these algorithms can't actually do what they keep promising
- large-scale accounting and financial fraud (e.g. what Nvidia is doing with circular selling)
- biggest case of copyright infringement in history
Note: I think the underlying technology is really cool, and definitely has use cases and can be used for actually good things. But: some technology just has more downsides than upsides, and some should only be used by experts in controlled environments. Leaded gasoline, asbestos and chlorofluorocarbon are also all really cool technology.
In this case perhaps the techology itself doesn't do anything inherently bad, however the people making it are lying about what it can do, the people selling it are motivated purely by greed and the people using it (often forced to do so) are being deceived.

I was thinking this morning, there should be more things like Goodwill, more thrift stores like that everywhere, for even LESS things going to landfills. Just people getting together, even as a trade or barter system, things like flea markets or garage sales-- people do some of this already.
Reusing things is so important, and repair, when possible-- I've been seeing some cool self-repair fix-it meetups on here, too.
As I was talking to my wife about it, and I remembered thi…

"It's not that any of the other streaming services are good, but Spotify is almost certainly the worst. Do not trust it. Do not let it turn your enjoyment of music into stats and algorithmic playlists."
(Original title: Spotify Haters Club)
https://knru.polin.ski/spotify-haters-

Spotify Haters Club
You know something that is absolutely worth considering? Planning an exit from the culture-destroying, weapons-investing, ICE-advertisement platform known as Spotify, a place where music is seen only as a tool to destroy people's imaginations and flatten art into a homogenised, AI-friendly, beige churn of endless content to immiserate us all.

RE: https://glammr.us/@jessamyn/116064378371973762
I think a lot of anarchists miss the utilitarian paths because we are blinded by ideology. Like, yeah, you can't really reform the government into being good. Government is bad as a thing.
But you absolutely can infiltrate and subvert the system in ways that produce positive outcomes. It's easy to miss the subtle difference.
There are also other strategies that become available when you don't just flat-out refuse to interact with the state. Like, you can use pincer strategies where you organize in the community and subvert in the government.
We can do more and be more creative.

Maybe this question has been asked before and maybe it hasn't - but to preface - I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV. I have (in a previous, gainfully employed life that I find I am missing less and less outside of the recurring paycheck) liaised with a good number of legal folks - both corporate and external counsel facing types.
And I had been involved - at least in the periphery - of some investigations of allegations of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) on a corporate lapto…

RE: https://mstdn.social/@NSalwen/116060789482624866
Yup, good point. Pretty sure the Republicans could get the necessary D votes to do this.
Whining about TSA and FEMA being held hostage to the fight over ICE and CBP? Fine, release them. Rs can do that AFAICT.

RE: https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/116064657955859408
I love the sentiment, but this is actually exactly what law enforcement has always been. It's always been political, always racist, always arbitrary, always genocidal.
ICE is just what happens when they think they can get away with it. The other abuses require a lot more investigation. Abolishing ICE is a good first step.
For all folks who have just now become enraged with the brutality of law enforcement agencies like ICE: I hope we can walk together, and learn from each other, until our ways part... But I do hope you'll walk a little farther with me after we achieve our shared goals.

Part of the answer is that the district has given all students the option to stay home and do remote learning for the next month. Good. I mean, that really sucks for the families doing it, it sucks that any families are boxed into that corner — but good for the district coming up with that option.
That doesn’t mean that school is safe, however — not even for families who aren’t being targeted by ICE.
2/

This year my plan is not just to write more but also to write a bit out of my usual wheelhouse. Do something that's not just sociotechnological critique.
Not sure how to get the ball rolling there but I really love what Mike Monteiro is doing with his Newsletter ( https://buttondown.com/monteiro ). Bu…

Mike Monteiro’s Good News
“I fell asleep while reading it.” —Jim Christensen Hi. My name is Mike and this is my newsletter. Every week I answer one of your questions. The question can be about anything you want, but I'll only answer it if I think I can give a good answer. To ask a question, just fill out this simple form. Why the hell should I subscribe to this? Well, you shouldn’t. You should go outside and plant a garden. You should start a band! You should go explore every part of the world you’ve ever want…

Senate offices are closed today,
but you can email your senators and demand that they use their vote later this week to rein in ICE and CBP death squads:
https://act.indivisible.org/sign/ice-out-for-good-senate/?source=mastodon

Tell your senators to rein in ICE NOW
On Wednesday, January 7, Renee Good was killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Then, on January 24, Border Patrol killed Alex Pretti. These deaths were a direct result of unchecked violence, impunity, and abuse carried out by federal immigration enforcement agencies against members of our communities. And yet, the DHS appropriations bill that just passed the House would hand MORE funding to ICE and Border Patrol, and do little to rein in their abuses. So …

The fascist who killed Heather Heyer at Unite the Right helped turn the tides against the last Trump administration. He said there were "very fine people on both sides." The resistance grew, antifa doxxing fascists started getting those fash fired.
But some of those fash didn't stop. They kept organizing their terror cells. The fash who killed Heyer was with a group called Vanguard America. Patriot Front is a Nazi group that split off from Vanguard America. They started terrorizing people by loading up in box trucks and piling out for spontaneous marches.
That box truck tactic probably sounds familiar. Patriot Front basically disappeared at the same time that ICE started recruiting hard.
Let me make it more clear. The very same Nazis from UTR who killed Heather Heyer, who Trump called "very fine people," are now employees of DHS. They've been carrying out the ethnic cleansing they always dreamed of, and they're being paid by the government, *with your tax dollars*, to do it. And now, just like in Charlottesville, they've murdered an unarmed protestor.
This feels similar because it is. These are the same people killing daughters and mothers. Killing unarmed protestors, out of rage not fear, then lying and claiming self defense. This is the same tactic it's always been. This is the same thing they've always done.
It seems like we may have reached the Heather Heyer point of this administration early with Renee Good. Now would be a good time for everyone to get into the streets and stay there until this is over. Everyone turned the tides before, and now he's so much weaker.
This can all be over if we fight like hell to end it.
#USPol

A good article on ICE doing extreme forms of what police across the US do on a regular basis:
commit petty theft.
https://minnesotareformer.com/2026/02/12/why-is-ice-seizing-peoples-phones-and-documents/

Also, I haven't yet added captioning. I'm planning to do that later today. Apologies for not posting it in a completely accessible way, thanks for your patience.
Edit:
Updated. It should be more accessible now.
I usually don't add images to my posts. I realized half way through that I had a bunch more to do. I kind of had to power through before I ran out of dopamine, or I'd never actually post it. Thank you for your patience. I'm working on setting up a good OCR pipeline to make this faster in the future.
Thanks again for your patience, and please feel free to let me know if there are ways I could improve for future posts.

I •think• the most important people for MN residents to call right now are MN Gov Walz and MN AG Ellison. Those numbers again:
Gov: ‭(651) 201-3400€
AG: ‭(651) 296-3353€
My points when I call:
- We don’t trust Trump’s FBI
- We want an independent MN-based investigation of the killing of Good
- Thank you for steps you’re already taking in this direction
- Do more, try harder
- Do so in outright defiance of the FBI if necessary
(To be clear, this is all just from Paul; if I get better guidance from more informed folks, I will share/update.)

I’d like to hear what precisely the Gov and the Mayor think they’re going to do — and not just •hear•; I want to •see• it happening.
I’d like the teachers’ union and parent groups like Minneapolis Families for Public Schools discuss what they want on this front, and start making good demands.
Maybe this is already happening…but if so, I haven’t heard anything about it yet.
11/

The US military has always had a massive global advantage against enemies by having bases all over the world. There are bases in every NATO country. This would appear to be a powerful threat to anyone willing to oppose American hegemon, and under normal conditions it would be.
But a lot of those kids serving on those bases joined, not because they love America but, because they needed a ticket out of poverty. They joined for the education, for the money, maybe a bit for the adventure, but, more than anything, to escape the ghetto or podunk backwater that trapped them. Under normal times, this is the best deal they could expect. Maybe they risk their lives, usually they sit around being bored for a few years, and they get to come out with respect and paid college.
But what they are being offered is normal in most of the countries they're stationed in. Free healthcare, cheap or free education, is just what citizens in a lot of countries have come to expect. If the US attacked a NATO country, how many would snap up citizenship if they were given a chance to defect? Bonus points for taking some hardware with you, I'm sure.
But there are some who love their country. There are some patriotic Americans on those bases. Some of them joined specifically to protect the US from all enemies, foreign *and* domestic. Given a chance to fulfill that oath or violate international law, what happens?
There are a good number of former military folks too who now are unsafe in the countries they served, who would do just about anything for citizenship in any EU country and almost any NATO ally. Some of those folks know things they swore an oath to never share, but the country they swore an oath to has betrayed them. Today there's no value in leaking those secrets, but in a war between the US and NATO allies things would be different. Some of those former military folks still believe in their oath, and know exactly who the real enemy is. What happens when there's a real threat of war, when they can use their knowledge to fulfill that oath to protect the US against those domestic threats?
There are a bunch of civilian tech workers who have become targets of the regime. Some of them had clearance, or know about the skeletons in the closet. They know about critical infrastructure, classified systems, all sorts of things that would be extremely valuable to an opponent. But the opponents of the US have always been a frightening *other*, never familiar societies these folks look up to, have visited, have thought about moving to, are trying to escape to.
All I'm saying here is that invading Venezuela and kidnapping the president has a very different calculus than does attacking Greenland. I don't know if Trump or his people are able to understand that, but if he and his folks aren't then I hope European leaders are. But more than that, I hope it never comes down to finding out.
But perhaps we should all think about what we would do to make sure things ended quickly if American leadership ever made such an incredible mistake.

Renee Good is a crisis for the Trump regime: not because they care about her life, but because ICE murdering her makes ICE look bad. They’ve been telling all these stories about all the imaginary violence ICE officers face. In their minds, it’s the people on the streets who were supposed to lose their cool first. Now they’re falling over themselves to make that happen.
We just want ICE gone, but their bosses want them dead. And no, I’m sure they do not understand this.

I hope the identity of Good’s killer is in fact revealed.
Let’s help with that by being very careful about what information we share, and making sure it’s good information. That’s hard, and we’ll all mess up I’m sure. But let’s do our best.
Now at least you and I both have a warning: if there’s a purported photo of Good’s killer, be careful and be skeptical.
/end

Re “apply the pressure anyway:” that’s advice I got from…Keith Ellison.
I was part of a citizen group pressuring him to vote for the ACA when he was in the House. He met with us, and gave us an impassioned speech about universal care and how the ACA was a good first step but insufficient, relating it to the less-remembered civil rights acts of the 1950s that laid the groundwork for the big one in 1964.
Somebody from the group finally asked him, “Why are we meeting with you? You’re already convinced!”
He replied (paraphrasing here): “I •need• your pressure. I need it even if I already agree. If you’re pressuring me, then I can get on the floor of the House and say ‘My constituents are beating down the doors of my office! This has tremendous support!’ I can tell my colleagues in private about how agitated voters are. If you apply pressure, I can pass that pressure forward. I need you to do it! •That• is why you’re meeting with me.”
And now Keith Ellison is MN Attorney General. He’s already started doing the right thing. Follow his advice, and apply that pressure!