Tootfinder

https://www.eunews.it/en/2025/11/26/belgium-rewards-ethical-hackers-who-uncover-government-it-vulnerabilities/
Belgium rewards ‘ethical hackers’ who uncover government IT vulnerabilities

Belgium rewards 'ethical hackers' who uncover government IT vulnerabilities
The Belgian Cyber Security Centre (CCB) launched #HackTheGovernment2025, a national initiative involving 71 professionals and students, aiming to strengthen the resilience of federal public services

Real conspiracies tend to come out, but some of them take a while. Information on the Iran/Contra scandal broke out about 5 years after the conspiracy started. That would have taken several hundred people to carry out, so it was somewhat hard to hide. Even so, they largely got away with it.
The moon landing conspiracy theory would have taken thousands of people, so it would have come out more quickly. Since we have an example of a real secret program of a similar scale as what would be required to fake a moon landing (that is, the Manhattan project), we know that the fake moon landing conspiracy theory is not true. (There's also the literally tons of evidence in the form of rocks and other samples, and all kinds of other ways to debunk the claim.)
Could Kash Patel's FBI have been trying really hard to entrap people into carrying out terrorist attacks in order to justify #Trump's occupation of DC? Could they have helped a guy plan an attack then just failed to arrest him? There are reasonable scenarios that fall in between malice and incompetence while still indicating some level of false flag.
Could someone have just snapped and ambushed some guardsmen without any involvement from the FBI? Yeah, totally. The US is a country full of guns with a completely non-functional mental health system. Someone coming from a country that the US destroyed, twice, could have a lot of untreated trauma. Might they see the national guard as a threat (even if that wasn't totally true)? Yeah, they were deployed to threaten people (even when they were just picking up trash). The point was to incite this kind of response. It's completely reasonable to believe that the FBI would not need to be involved at all, that this would just be the stochastic response they were looking for.
So the point here is that everything is on the table, nothing is really known, nothing should be surprising, and no matter what it's Trump's fault. This is exactly the escalation he was looking for. If he didn't get it naturally, he would also have had ways of making it happen.
He will use this in exactly the same way as the Reichstag fire, to drive a wedge between liberals and radicals. Don't fall for it.
Edit:
There are plausible reasons to not believe the official narrative at all right now, or maybe ever. The official narrative is also plausible, but there are plausible reasons to disagree with the response even if the official story is true. It is unnecessary to resort to conspiracy thinking in order to account for what happened and to disagree with the response. But it is also understandable why someone might jump immediately to a conspiracy given the circumstances.

My big gripe with "AI" is that a big reason why it's sold as the second coming of Jesus is that most tech people fundamentally do not understand how it actually works.
Their reasoning goes something like, "It works sort of ok for code generation, and programming is the hardest possible thing in the world to do, every other human endeavor is trivial compared to writing code, therefore it must excel at anything else!".
So it ends up being pushed due to a mixture of ignorance and hubris; and especially being stuffed into things it should never be used for (usually when users don't have a say which software they need to use for work).
The finbros are happily along for the ride because they just need something that can be hyped to pump and dump.

#Oumuamua was first spotted on October 19, 2017, by a telescope in Hawaii called Pan-STARRS 1.
At first, scientists thought it was just a regular comet or asteroid -- But as they watched it more closely, they realized it was very different.
Here are some key things about Oumuamua:
#Shape: Unlike most as…

What is Oumuamua and Why Did it Puzzle Scientists? - Astronex
Imagine looking up at the night sky and seeing something zoom by, something unlike anything you've ever seen before. It's not a star, it's not a planet, and

Facing disruption from GenAI, the $250B Indian IT industry has adapted by focusing on preparatory work AI requires, such as data cleanup and system integration (Manish Singh/India Dispatch)
https://indiadispatch.com/p/indian-it-firms-are-doing-fine

The AI Revolution Needs Plumbers
How Indian IT learned to stop worrying and sell the AI shovel

OK, this is genuinely scary. It's a picture of me, aged 5. It was taken in 1960. It was scanned and uploaded to Google Photos in 2002. No one has told Google where it was taken. But the map, bottom right, is correct.
Obviously, in 1960, my father's pre-war Exakta camera did not have GPS. Could you identify, from that picture, exactly where it was taken?
Google can.

I've been playing a few of those Lego games (Lego Star Wars etc.) with my little one. It's fun though navigating 3D space while handling the camera is a lot for him (it _is_ not easy).
Sometimes I try to tell him where to go when he gets lost but it's really challenging to stay patient at times (because it's hard for him to translate the words into the complex actions necessary and because I don't want to do things for him while he's trying things). But it's…

Pay it forward.
https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/pay-it-forward

The UNFCCC makes it needlessly difficult to download emission data📊📈
The UNFCCC🇺🇳 is most famously known for being the organizer of the climate conferences (COPs). However, they also play an important role in collecting and managing emission data.
https://i…

Why is it needlessly difficult to access UNFCCC Emission Data?
Due to international climate agreements, countries report annual data about their greenhouse gas emissions to the UNFCCC. However, downloading and using that data is a lot more difficult than it should be.

I featured That Dog's 1997 masterpiece 'Retreat from the Sun' a year ago for #MusicWomenWednesday, but since I determined yesterday thanks to @…'s album of year posts that it's my favorite record of 1997, I'm re-upping it. I have it …

>Driving lorry yesterday.
>Put cruise control 65km/h on 80km/h road (could have gone faster but it was post-shift refueling duty so I just chilled road was kinda wonky).
>Moped on the bikelane.
>It catches up.
>It passes you.
>It gaps you.
>Suddenly see a cop car.
>*laughs*
(Mopeds are only allowed to go 45km/h, so if it overtakes me when I go 65km/h, it's defo not going 45km/h).

I don't think I'm ever going to enjoy gifts.
I can get why people would give them to children. After all, children don't have their own budget. However, I'm talking about occasional gifts, not a new toy every second week, because "we must outcompete the other grandparents". But to adults?
Once I've heard that you should gift people with what they won't buy themselves. Well, that's won't work for me. I'm a minimalist. If I don't need something, I don't want to have it. Unnecessary junk is only emotional burden to me.
I can get why you'd enjoy something handmade. But something people bought? If I need something, I can buy it myself, when I need it. And I definitely don't need people to prove to me that they never cared to learn who I am, and just buy whatever they like or whatever is "fashionable"; which usually means exactly the opposite of what I'd prefer (i.e. something minimalistic). Or even worse, I don't need people manipulating me through gifts.
Sweets? Besides my diabetes, I don't really enjoy expensive shit that people generally buy because it's what's advertised. For the money they waste on it, I'd buy three times as much sweets I'd actually enjoy.
Gift cards? Oh yes, "you aren't supposed to give money, so let's just give the equivalent of money that's actually worth less than money". Actual money? And here we reach the true nonsense; we exchange the same amount of money, so it's just pointless gesture. Unless one of us gives less money…
What I'd really like, as a gift? Maybe that people would finally bother accepting me as who I am. The absolute minimum of caring that I hate consumerism, and not fueling it "for me".
#AntiCapitalism #minimalism #ActuallyAutistic

From a Bloomberg newsletter. I guess if enough people believe Btc holds real value, then by definition it does, by analogy with gold. Still makes my skin crawl.
#Bitcoin

Updated my list what I moved away from BigTech. To be honest: when I started it, I didn't expect the amount of time & energy it takes to get out.
Therefore I regard it as crucial to just do it step by step. Otherwise you might get overwhelmed. And some nasty dependencies will just show up along the way ... but it's a nice hobby!

I crave knowledge, mother :neocat_book:

Trump is starving the population. Nothing new here. Stalin did it, Hitler did it, Netanyahu did it, Mao did it, and there are more examples in history; it's quite a common tactic amongst certain kinds of politicians against their opponents.
https://open.substack.com/pub…

October 25, 2025
Yesterday the Trump administration said it would not use any of the approximately $6 billion the U.S.

Is it 10 years old? Yes. Is it unusual? Yes.
Is it Thanksgiving themed and am I in it? Yes and yes.
I sing, I dance. I shoot a bow and arrow.
Hear 95% of the turkey noises I have ever made on camera/microphone, so far.
https://youtu.be/SbaUaQ6Uzc4

Ah, cat chaos. I just watched Twig pick up a bottle of pills (with his mouth) from the desk, and carry it down to underneath the bed. It's a good thing they have child-proof packaging!

PSA: there is a PyPI phishing campaign ongoing! if you see a link to hxxp://pypi-mirror[.]org do not click it.
(i think it's already blackholed but on the off chance it's not, don't touch it)

Russia says it tested nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile: https://benborges.xyz/2025/10/26/russia-says-it-tested-nuclearpowered.html

What do you think? Did Venezuela just “thwart” a false flag?
“Venezuela says it has thwarted what it calls a CIA-linked plot to attack a US warship anchored in Trinidad.
It claims the US would have blamed Venezuela for the attack on the USS Gravely, a guided-missile destroyer, to justify aggression against it.”
Australia Broadcasting reporting: #usa #venezuela #war
Yup. Trump wants a confrontation.
No. Venezuela likely faking the false flag.

'writing is more than just the process by which you obtain a piece of text, right? it's also about finding out what you wanted to say in the first place, and how you wanted to say it. this post existed in my head first as a thought, then it started to gel into words, and then i tried pulling those words out to arrange them in a way that (hopefully) gets my point across. ... i alone can get the thought out and writing is how i do that.'

Huh, think I might've figured out why one (but only one) of my NextCloud instances loses contact with the OnlyOffice instance on the same host... Figured out it *might* be because of frequent polling that's resulted in the Mailcow instance (also on the host, as I'm trying to economise) is seeing it as making too many connections and is temporarily fail2banning it nightly. I've added the host's IP(v4&6) to the Fail2Ban whitelist... 🤞 it's still connected tomorrow!<…

An #earworm popping up in my brain lately. A poem I was made to memorize when I was 14. It re-emerges every couple years, for no reason I can figure. tbh, I usually only remember verbatim the first few lines or so, and have to look it up again. It’s one of those things, like advertising jingles from many years ago, that have lodged in my memory. 🎶You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush y…

Noch einige der zuletzt hier besonders häufig geteilten #News:
Fahrradhersteller Woom: IT-Einbruch durch Cybergang INC Ransom

"As Joy-Ann Reid put it in an Instagram video: “Dear retailers who’ve decided you don’t like diversity, equity, and inclusion, or you really love ICE and you have no problem with them busting into your establishments to drag people away: Here’s the thing. We ain’t buying it. I mean, for real, for real, we ain’t buyin’ it.”
She explained: “We’re gonna spend our money with businesses who actually respect our dollars, respect our communities, and respect our diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are going to buy from people who respect immigrants, who respect immigrants’ rights, and respect freedom and liberty. We are going to buy from establishments that respect our right to vote and our right to live in a free society. And if you ain’t that, we ain’t buying it.”
“Let’s show them our power,” she told listeners. “Let’s show them what we can do together.”"
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/november-25-2025

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

By post, it's mostly web rather than Phanpy.
Suspect it's mostly replies over stand-alone only because of threads here really. Most of a thread counts as a reply because it's a reply-to-self.
I mostly use the web interface for new posts rather than the phanpy one because I can't type an emoji in Phanpy. Only instance custom-emojis can be typed starting with a colon and I usually want 😄 or 😉 or 🙄 not the custom emojii. Can't type them on Phanpy. So I mostly compose on web.
Maybe the Phanpy dev has some kind of emoji plugin or something? Dunno why he makes it only do the custom ones.
But this is why I mostly post from web even though I almost entirely read from Phanphy. Which means replies mostly come from Phanpy but standalone mostly from Web.

Seems like there are 2 kinds of reviews for "House of Dynamite" (Netflix). Either it's amazing or it's a misfire.
It had me glued to the screen which rarely happens with Netflix movies nowadays. I liked it.
But it's interesting to see that the movie industry seems to gloss over the fact that Donald Trump exists in just the same way as they glossed over the fact that there was a pandemic.

My first attempt at desoldering a BGA chip and it worked really well. Chip cleaned up nicely as well.
Disclaimer: I don't plan on using this chip or board again. So, I don't need it to work at the end.
#retrocomputing
#desoldering

I spent much of today cleaning my office. It's amazing how messy it gets due to ongoing projects (my own and client projects) and so much paper. I was saving a lot of it for paper making but I've still got plenty of pulp in the fridge to use.
On Friday, the plan is no shopping, just cleaning the basement getting rid of cruft, maybe finding some things to donate or give away if possible.

I was just thinking about how the fact that #Musk named his AI "Grok" is evidence that he "reads sci-fi" in the same way he "plays video games." Like, he claims to do it but when it comes time to show the evidence it's clear he does not actually "grok" it.
Like... To grok something is to have a layer deeper than simply knowledge, but mathematically encoding statistical relationships between words is pretty obviously not even understanding much less qualifying as "groking" it. In the book, the ability to grok something is also the ability to annihilate that thing with a thought. Just pretending that an LLM actually *was* something that could become AGI (which it's not), this name would imply the AI would have the power to annihilate reality. That's bad. That's a bad name for an AI.
And why would a greedy fascist name something of his after something an anarchist communist space Jesus taught to the hippie cult he started? There are so many layers of facepalm to this. It's some kind of php-esque fractal of incompetence.
Like, there's no reason to talk about this but my brain does this to me sometimes and now it's your problem.

What does money machine eat?
It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and,
above all, it eats creativity.
It eats quality and sh*ts quantity.
-- William S. Burroughs
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1352864

William S. Burroughs Quote
What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and sh*ts quantity.

When asking an LLM about an open source codebase it may be doing that based on previous stuff it learnt, not so much the code you just gave it; I'd asked Qwen3 to summarize some of #LibreOffice's code and it was surprisingly good - but then I noticed it could it on a fresh start without having given it the source. On one side, this means it's misleading about how well they can …

It's crazy how two people doing something in a garage can get folks to turn it into something of a religion, where individuals are willing to pay millions for paper. https://mastodon.online/@9to5Mac/115616484841704061

9to5Mac (@9to5Mac@mastodon.online)
Attached: 1 image This looks set to be the most expensive Apple collectible ever sold https://9to5mac.com/2025/11/26/this-looks-set-to-be-the-most-expensive-apple-collectible-ever-sold/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

At least we're not on the hateful DST right now.
I've long thought it's idiocy to have it at all, but really it's the switching twice a year that's a pain. It's now far too light in the mornings, but only *because of the sudden jump*.
When does the UK grow up and decide to just do away with this? Anywhere in the UK (excluding any overseas territories, smart arses) that could possibly benefit from a shift has too little daylight hours to play with for it …

"Denmark is not doing it's job and not being a good ally" , according to Vance. Offensive and provocative. Also speaks openly about "acquiring" Greenland.
It is time for the EU to stop playing "nice" with this explicit agressive behaviour by the US.
https://bsk…

Olga Nesterova (@onestpress.onestnetwork.com)
They’re again advocating against Denmark when it comes to Greenland

@… I think there’s also an aspect of differing opinions on what it means to “use” a feature.
If I have a community “profile” on steam, but I never think of it, never look at the friend requests, never willingly interact with it, I would say I do not use it. But the bean counters at Valve would presumably count me as part of their “social users” population.

"...who campaigned on a promise to extricate the US from decades of “endless wars” during his 2024 run for president."
It'simportant to note these are airstrikes and bombings - and that's very different from wars. It avoids the distressful images of wounded and dead service members returning to the US, while using very expensive technology, thus providing purchase orders to very important business interests, and it provides the psycological benefit of violence to imp…

"...who campaigned on a promise to extricate the US from decades of “endless wars” during his 2024 run for president."
It'simportant to note these are airstrikes and bombings - and that's very different from wars. It avoids the distressful images of wounded and dead service members returning to the US, while using very expensive technology, thus providing purchase orders to very important business interests, and it provides the psycological benefit of violence to imp…

A read-only text field is focusable. And confusing to users.
If you add `tabindex="-1"` and/or `pointer-events: none`, admit it’s wrong and make it plain text instead.
If you use it anyway, style it so it’s clear (good luck). Here are my shitty styles: https://adrianroselli.com/…

Under-Engineered Text Boxen
Others in this sorta-series: Under-Engineered Custom Radio Buttons and Checkboxen Under-Engineered Toggles Under-Engineered Toggles Too This is the latest, and not last, in my informal series of posts on under-engineered controls. Generally I am looking at the minimum amount of CSS necessary to style native HTML controls while also retaining…

Believe it or not, #Bloodborne looks much better in an emulator, #Shadps4, than in a real hardware PS4 device. I've tried it in a #SteamDeck, with some mods and patches, and it runs at ~60 FPS …

Dak, Schotty frustrated at inconsistent Cowboys: 'It's unacceptable' https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/dak-schotty-frustrated-at-inconsistent-cowboys-it-s-unacceptable

The tush push didn't die in a meeting room; it died on a Sunday in Philadelphia

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/the-tush-push-didnt-die-in-a-meet…

my sister just told me they had to change the ad for the iphone air where they hold the phone inbetween their fingers, because it was “offensive in Asia”, or so she heard
i was immediately suspicious and was like “where in asia”, she didn't know
i googled it. all my suspicions confirmed.

Referent/in IT-Regulatorik
* Voll- oder Teilzeit
* Ansprechpartner/in für Ri.Ma.Go
* Planung, Durchführung und Dokumentation von IT‑Audits
* Durchführung von Anwendungseinsatzverfahren
https://sparkasse.mein-check-in.de/sskbo/position-125120

I have long felt that liberal/progressive messaging often tended towards not merely hyperbole, but hyperbole that carried far more than the intended message.
Consider the phrase "Defund the police". That carries a clear message that implies near elimination of police based law enforcement. Few of us want that. Police are an important element of an ordered society.
But pretty much all of us see that police are doing too much and that it is better to restructure police…

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.

Popular media shows Santa's sleigh as red no matter which way it's flying, or even when it's standing still.
It's not. When it's parked, it's green. But most observers only see it flying away after making a delivery, hence the red shift.
And if you're lucky to see it inbound it's blue with a hint of UV-A. Wear sunglasses.

This would be neat:
https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/675

Option to display data as QR code · Issue #675 · keepassxreboot/keepassxc
Sometimes it's useful to transfer secrets via QR code, and it would be nice if KeePassXC offered that feature. It could be another button icon next to the eye icon that shows a passphrase. Use case...

'You Know It, Kristen!': Scott Bessent Calls Out NBC Host's Cherry Picking Economic Numbers (IJR)
https://ijr.com/you-know-it-kristen-scott-bessent-calls-out-nbc-hosts-cherry-picking-economic-numbers/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251026/p40#a251026p40

Cutting country in two: Instead of conquering Ukraine, Putin wants to destroy it - Euromaidan Press
https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/10/26/cutting-country-in-two-instead-of-conquering-ukraine-putin-wants-to-destroy-it/#google_vignette

I'm just like any modern woman trying to have it all. It's just...I wish I had more time to seek out the dark forces and join their hellish crusade. That's all.

Lol - John Carpenter's 1988 They Live.
Starring famed 80s wrestler Roddy Piper - who coined "I'm here to kick ass and chew gum and Im all outa gum!" - who discovers a pair of special sunglasses that show the world as it really is: we are subliminally controlled by aliens using global warming to make Earth's atmosphere similar to their homeworld, depleting its resources
`DISRUPT! SHIFT PARADIGMS! MOVE FAST BREAK THINGS!`

Pony AI's Hong Kong-listed shares rose 6.7% after it said its Guangzhou operations had broken even per car, as it targets a 3,000 global robotaxi fleet in 2026 (Linda Lew/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/202…

Pony AI Rises After Guangzhou Robotaxi Operations Break Even
Pony AI Inc. shares rose for a third day in Hong Kong trading, arresting a steep decline since listing three weeks ago, after the robotaxi firm said its Guangzhou operations had broken even on a per-car basis in an early indication its business model is sustainable.

Rewatching the 1984 film version of 1984, as I haven't seen it since high school. They showed it to us in class in the 90s. Been a lot of years. John Hurt ftw
#film

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
George Orwell's novel of a totalitarian future society in which a man whose daily work is rewriting history tries to rebel by falling in love.

Ukraine says it shot down 503 of 559 aerial targets in massive Russian air attack: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/27/ukraine-says-it-shot-down.html

I've seen people attach pool noodles to their bikes in order to ensure that car drivers pass them within a safe (and often legally-required) distance.. But I think I prefer this person's prybar attachment. 🫡
#BikeTooter

when github dies, we'll have go back to running buildbots ourselves. it's annoying, but not _that_ bad; i've done a decent amount of it and i think it'll be okay
an amusing outcome is that writing projects in python now has a direct financial benefit over writing projects in rust

I had a womens studies professor try to coax a class to understand
that it’s not ’wrong’ for an alcoholic homeless person
to take your change you tossed and spend it on alcohol.
People were livid lol.
It really changed my perspective on giving.
it's freeing to give without expectation.
-- @inthemidwest.bsky.social

Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd.bsky.social)
I once taught a whole lesson on the narratives of deservedness in the very strange concept of “stealing” books from something conspicuously branded as a “free” little library. The students struggled with it. A lot of internalized beliefs about poverty and worth. But I think it was a good lesson. [contains quote post or other embedded content]

It's 08:00 in the morning, here at 55°N 4°W, and the sun will in theory rise in ten minutes. But it's still dark.
And we're still 24 days away from the turning of the year: it will get still darker before the light begins to return. And, as in every year, the warmth will lag a couple of months behind the light, retarded by the thermal mass of the atmosphere and the earth.
This is not my favourite season.

The paradox of Nazism being both the most capitalist thing possible, defining itself as explicitly anticommunist, while masquerading as "socialism" is difficult to resolve until you understand one thing: fascism pivots around antisemitism (and its extension, conspiratorial thinking).
I'm, of course, not talking about the redefinition of "antisemitism" into meaning any criticism of Israel but rather an anti-Jewish conspiracy narrative rooted in Roman Christianity.
This is critical to understand as MAGA fascism pivots between capitalist and pseudo-anticapitalist with Trump in the middle. Hitler did the same thing. Strasserism helped the Nazis gain power by pulling in the Left. In the Nazis case they killed the Stasserists pretty quickly. Now, I think we're seeing an attempt to make the opposite pivot happen in MAGA. But it's all the same thing.
Fascism can infinitely fail to address the needs of the people while dismissing it's own responsibility for creating the problem by maintaining a permanent enemy.
This is why it's important to understand antisemitism and how to fight it. It's especially important now because the apparatus of violence in Israel is itself a tool of global fascism, and we finally have an opportunity to dismantle the whole thing. But we have to be aware of how fascists can pivot around to block this.
I've been reading Safety Through Solidarity, and I think it's especially relevant at this time.
https://www.akpress.org/safety-through-solidarity.html

Bonus #ThursDeath? Sure, why not, I have it #NowPlaying. It's the new single from Joensuu, Finland deathgrinders BLISTEROUS. It's nasty, it's the first track from their upcoming EP 'Grotesque Prosection', I dig it.

After some tinkering I made my Heltec Wifi LoRa 32 V4 work, even without an extra/better antenna. Somehow it doesn't want to connect to the webclient with Bluetooth but the Android app works fine. It is also nice that this kit has a small screen of it's own.
Amazingly busy here around Bergschenhoek, Netherlands.
#meshcore

Nice, I wanted to write about that topic. And there.. Someone wrote about it already.
That's the reason why I never recorded myself walnut walking into the scene.
Even though it looks really cool,it really disturbs my hiking experience and totally turns into filming.
https://blog.lauram…

People filming themselves in nature
A lot of hiking, camping, and cycling youtube video makers choose to film third-person footage of themselves alone in nature... sometimes with a drone, but s...

Microsoft Store: Admin-Handreichung zum Enfernen vorinstallierter Apps
Microsoft will IT-Verantwortliche unterstützen und eine einfache Möglichkeit bieten, vorinstallierte Apps aus dem Store zu entfernen.

Dak, Schotty frustrated at inconsistent Cowboys: 'It's unacceptable' https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/dak-schotty-frustrated-at-inconsistent-cowboys-it-s-unacceptable

If the weather page says it's 13c out, wth does it not feel that much warmer than when it was in the low single digits?

LA Mayor Karen Bass calls it 'sad' that Hispanics are joining Border Patrol - suggests they're desperate for money (Victor Nava/New York Post)
https://nypost.com/2025/12/26/us-news/la-mayor-karen-bass-calls-it-sad-that-hispanics-are-joining-border-patrol/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251226/p56#a251226p56

Weather forecast yesterday: it's going to be raining all over the south of Poland.
Me: okay, I'm going to Zgorzelec, rain won't be a big hurdle there.
Forecast in the morning: heavy rain in Zgorzelec, little rain in Międzylesie.
Me: I'll go there then.
Reality: no rain for a long while, even a bit of sunshine. When I'm a kilometer distant from the train station, wind starts blowing hard. Leaves start hitting me, surprisingly hard. A few seconds later I realize it's hail. The streets run with water. And half an hour later, it becomes sunny.

master of destruction

> (By the way; thank you so much for this project, it's enabled us to teach HDL as a small portion of an introductory course to digital logic which would have been much harder any other way!)
i'm very pleased about yowasp vscode extension actually being used for its intended purpose! i've kind of developed it and then thrown it onto the winds of fate

RE: https://mastodon.social/@jmcrookston/115635779318419465
"The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses."
And in this case the things they are using to kill it have radio transponders that regularly transmit their geolocation, and these can be looked up on sites that also generally track their Intended destination.
Frog suit Luigi jokes aside, I do feel like it would be possible to blockade some of these ships or at least make their stays in some ports uncomfortable. There are some problems with tracking boats to specific owners, but any giant yacht should probably just be resisted on principle.
I hope someone with more organizing time than me thinks about this a bit. It would definitely take international effort, but an international org like XR could actually probably pull something like that off... If they actually wanted to do something.

The US navy knew of potentially dangerous levels of airborne plutonium in San Francisco
for almost a year
before it alerted city officials
after it carried out testing that detected radioactive material in November last year, public health advocates allege.
The plutonium levels exceeded the federal action threshold
at the navy’s highly contaminated, 866-acre Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.
It was detected in an area adjacent to a residential neighborhood fil…

Green Deals: Rabattaktion mit hohen Nachlässen im heise Shop
Rabatte von bis zu 833 Prozent gibt es am Donnerstag und Freitag auf Webinare zu IT-Sicherheit und Energie sowie digitale Heftausgaben.
https://www.<…

RE: https://journa.host/@w7voa/115619357417203008
I'd put $100 on them having no idea who actually did it, and they just plucked some nearby immigrant rando as the suspect.

If you need something and Black Friday is the only time you can afford it or the only time you think it’s worth the price—please go ahead and buy it.
Doubly so if it’s something that helps you for a disability or maybe something that helps you free up time in your life for fun things.
It’s not your fault that we live in a capitalist society.

Trump to POLITICO: Zelenskyy 'doesn't have anything until I approve it' (Sophia Cai/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/26/trump-to-politico-zelenskyy-doesnt-have-anything-until-i-approve-it-00706783
http://www.memeorandum.com/251226/p36#a251226p36

A Google support page in Hindi says the company plans to roll out an option to let users change their Gmail addresses while retaining all data and services (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2025/12/24/google-change-gmail-addresses/

Google says it is ‘gradually rolling out’ option to change your @gmail.com address
Google says on a support page that it is "gradually rolling out" a new change allowing users to change their Gmail address.

What began as a modest workplace amenity for public servants has metastasized into a taxpayer-funded citadel of privilege
— a Capitol Hill concierge service offering the kind of round-the-clock care and personalized access that, in the private sector, is the sort of luxury care only millionaires can afford.
All the while, the nation’s public health care system lists beneath it. 
When a lawmaker collapses, Washington treats it like a national emergency.
In 2012, Senator…

Congress Enjoys Ultra-Luxe Health Care as It Fights to Gut Yours
Congress has ensured its members receive ultra-luxe health care as Republican keep the government closed over stripping it from Americans.

Been playing Ball x Pit on Switch as it was on sale (it's a super inexpensive game to begin with) and yeah, it's awesome.
#NintendoSwitch #BallXPit #Switch

It’s always a similar radicalization, it involves it being useful for them in some way and therefore (in their view) anyone who dares to mention any of the 700,000 serious problems with it is a “zealot”.
Followed by ad hominem attacks by doing things like questioning other people’s qualification and motivations; in pretty elaborate temper tantrums.
It does not occur to them they might be wrong, even when repeatedly shown proof that they are.
This is psychological projection, by the way—they attribute their heir own negative feelings to other people.

Reagan's "Welfare Queen" rhetoric was a dog whistle. The whole "southern strategy" was full of dog whistles. Every time Republicans talked about gay marriage as a "states rights" issue, those were dog whistles. Naming a government agency "the Department of Homeland Security" was a dog whistle. Trump's speeches leading up to his first term were full of dog whistles.
Nazis have total control of all branches of government. They've cut off funding to all but the most oppressive elements of the government. There are concentration camps, both in client states (CECOT, among others) and in the US (Alligator Auschwitz, among others). They're actively carrying out ethnic cleansing.
When DHS puts out some Nazi shit, it's not a dog whistle. It's a vuvuzela. They're not trying to signal their intent without any of the "normies" noticing. They actively doing what they wanted to do. It's not a signal because there's nothing to signal. It's a celebration.
#USPol

Playing the new Nas x DJ Premier, and it's pretty damn good, because of course it is- it's Nas
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdSaO_SiGL8Yjw7GEdOX6FmsBRHLkr8_c&si=w96JgF2FRiiRjThs

Nas + DJ Premier - Light-Years

thank goodness we had a peaceful transfer of power
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/11/07/president-biden-rose-garden-speech-trump-election/76108284007/

Biden says 'giving up is unforgivable,' assures peaceful transfer of power after Trump win
President Biden vowed Thursday to ensure a "peaceful transfer of power" following Donald Trump's decisive victory in 2024 election.

"I’m sure she’ll take it under consideration and look at it seriously. …
Trump hasn’t made a secret about the retribution that he is asking some of his U.S. attorneys to take against his perceived enemies.
It is an extraordinary request, but maybe this is an extraordinary situation."
— Professor Carl Tobias of the University of Richmond School of Law,
in comments given to Law.com, concerning a request made by ex-CIA Director John Brennan’s lawyers
to Ch…

Lawyers Try To Bench Aileen Cannon From Case, Arguing She’s Been In Trump’s Corner One Too Many Times
Attorneys think Cannon’s pattern of deference to Trump has destroyed any appearance of neutrality.

Well ripped out the broken CPU cooler in my gaming PC and replaced it with a new AIO and PC works great again (or whatever counts as "great" wrt to Windows 11).
I haven't fully restored the RGB barf inside, working on it; meanwhile enjoy a picture of Eero a few years ago.

The U.S. patent for mp3 audio was granted on November 26 in 1996. This piece is kinda weird about it in spots, but it gives a decent history about how it laid the foundations for peer-to-peer music sharing, etc.

The U.S. patent for MP3 audio was granted on this day in 1996 — laid the foundations for peer-to-peer music sharing, iTunes, and today's streaming services
The Fraunhofer Institut had been working on its lossy audio compression tech for phone line transmission since 1977.

This yacht isn't the biggest or the worst. I chose it because it's the easiest to find. If you actually wanted to try and blockade a ship like this, or do a noise demo or something, it would probably be better to target a larger ship rather than just the richest guy... But whatever, I'm not organizing shit so you do you.

"We must solve this incredibly difficult scalability problem, and the only way to do that is to outsource such expertise" is a sign that your basic design is flawed.
Yes, this is a Signal subtoot, and I'm still salty about the embrace-and-extinguish behavior of tech monopolies with XMPP.

Trump urged Republicans in the Senate to scrap the #filibuster,
saying it had become an obstacle to "effective governing" and removing it would prevent another government shutdown
and pave the way for his party to push through its legislative priorities.
“The filibuster is hurting the Republican Party,” Trump told Politico.
He called on Republican lawmakers to eliminat…

0 days since someone in my replies engaged in Apple bashing
With all their faults, it's the only company supporting their computers and phones with software updates and hardware repairs for a reasonable amount of time.
E.g. iOS 26 works on 6 year old phones and you can get spare parts or service for even older phones from Apple (e.g. iPhone 5 from 2012 is classfied "vintage" by Apple, which means they still service it).

Glad I've never bought a game on the Epic store, as I just grab the free ones, and will now continue to, as Tim Sweeney is garbage
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/11/according-to-epic-ceo-tim-sweeney-gam…

According to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney - game stores don't need an AI label as it will be everywhere
With the increasing amount of games using AI, Epic Game's Tim Sweeney believes the AI messages on stores like Steam make no sense.

Computer programmer and electronics enthusiast Harishankar Narayanan detailed a startling find he made about his $300 smart vacuum:
-- it was transmitting intimate data out of his home.
Narayanan had been letting his iLife A11 smart vacuum — a popular gadget that’s gained mainstream media coverage — do its thing for about a year, before he became curious about its inner workings.
" I decided to monitor its network traffic, as I would with any so-called smart device.” Wit…

#ThursDeath this week is the excellent new LP 'Necrotic Terror' by Chicago's SWINGING MACE (it's just one guy, Brian Higgins, who is also the guitarist for Gored Embrace). It's not on Bandcamp, but it's on YouTube and Qobuz, both links below.

US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said that it has stopped processing all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it was expanding that directive to include a review of all asylum cases approved under the Biden administration.
DHS did not clarify whether it is reviewing all asylum cases from only Afghanistan or from other countries, as well.
The USCIS director, Joseph Edlow, later added he was also dire…

“This is the most complicated thing that you could possibly imagine,” said Mike Williams, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“In fact, you can’t even imagine how complicated it is.”
The proton is a quantum mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities until an experiment forces it to take a concrete form.
And its forms differ drastically depending on how researchers set up their experiment.
Connecting the particle’s many faces has …

You could be 100% certain that these boats were built out of pure cocaine,
-- and murdering everyone on them would still be murder.
Strong suspicion of a crime, for a law abiding society, leads to prosecution for said crime,
-- not blowing up boats and anyone on them or near them.
Congress has no power to legalize crime.
It cannot authorize mass rape.
It cannot authorize mass torture.
It cannot authorize mass murder.
Venezuela and Colombia a…

The Murdering of Boaters is Public, Not Secret
Murdering boaters is not legal or illegal depending on whether the emperor has called his victims “terrorists.”

Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, according to a transcript of the Oct. 14 call published by the Bloomberg news service,
advised Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov that Putin should call Trump to congratulate him for the Gaza peace deal,
say Russia had supported it and that he respects the president as a man of peace.
“From that, it’s going to be a really good call,” Witkoff said according to the transcript.
When asked by Russian state media to comment on Bloomberg’s…

How Witkoff coached Putin's aide on pitching Trump, according to a Bloomberg report
President Donald Trump’s chief interlocutor with the Russian government last month advised a senior aide to Vladimir Putin on how the Russian leader should go about pitching the U.S. president on a Ukraine peace plan. That's according to a transcript of the Oct. 14 call published Tuesday by Bloomberg News. The news agency said it reviewed a recording of the call. It said Trump envoy Steve Witkoff advised Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov that Putin should call the U.S. leader to c…