Tootfinder

Current ethnic cleansing in US is making some a lot of money, while destroying others.
“When ICE takes…person…system around them…built to swallow everything they ever touched.”
“Towing companies profit. State agencies profit. &…people who once lived in…homes & drove…cars & held…IDs are left w/nothing but…clothes on their backs. This is not a broken system.”
“…system functioning exactly as…designed.”

When ICE Takes a Person, Why Do Their Possessions Vanish Too?
An investigative expose. Forty-one percent of migrants say their belongings never returned from ICE custody, and the items left behind at the moment of arrest disappear just as quietly.

Ricursive, founded by ex-Google researchers to automate advanced chip design, raised $335M from Sequoia, Radical, Lightspeed, and others at a $4B valuation (Cade Metz/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/technology/recursive-ai-ricursive.html

Silicon Valley Wants to Build A.I. That Can Improve A.I. on Its Own
Ricursive Intelligence, founded by two former Google researchers and valued at $4 billion, is among several efforts to automate the creation of artificial intelligence.

“I don’t think Jesus would ever ignore people being hurt,
-- especially by the federal government,”
said 17-year Ben Luhmann at the wheel, to a reporter in the back seat.
Sam, his 16-year old brother was pounding an energy drink with one hand,
scrolled through a lengthy list of group chats with the other,
scouring for reports of ICE and other federal immigration agents in their area.
Mornings like this have been typical in recent weeks for the Luhmann fam…

How one conservative Christian family is pushing back against ICE
A coalition of activists, everyday citizens and people of faith — including theologically conservative Christians — who have pooled resources and learned new technologies to mount an effort they say is designed to protect immigrants in their neighborhoods and around Chicago.

Sources: India raises concerns about the misuse of Indian phone numbers on WhatsApp, which banned 9.8M Indian accounts per month on average in 2025 to October (Kiran Rathee/The Economic Times)
https://econom…

Concern over misuse extent even as WhatsApp bans 1 cr numbers a month
The Indian government is concerned about the widespread misuse of Indian mobile numbers on platforms like WhatsApp, with millions of accounts banned monthly for violations. Officials are discussing with WhatsApp how to curb this, as the platform's refusal to share banned numbers hinders efforts to combat cyber fraud and scams.

Reminder: You can let Mozilla know what you think about AI and other stupid shit.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-firefox-way-shaping-what-s-next-together/td-p/109922
(Edited to fix li…

Building AI the Firefox way: Shaping what’s next together
Hi everyone, We recently shared how we’re approaching AI in Firefox with user choice and openness at the center of everything we build. We’ve heard from many of you who’d prefer not to have AI in your browser at all, and we get it: We will soon provide additional settings for you to control how AI i...

Re: discourse about #FediSoWhite
I'm a white man. Was on Twitter throughout #BLM and gained an awful lot of free education from Black folks on there. That was the start of me consciously following diverse folks which is a strategy that's improved my life immensely.
Back on Twitter before the Muskening, there was a lot of diversity. Black Twitter was a thing, and not just first-world (anyone else remember "O jewa ke eng?"). When I went looking for people to follow to diversify my feed, I found them in abundance.
That's why it's so clearly false to me when people claim that the fediverse is secretly diverse, and why anyone making that claim sounds suspect to me. Sure there are a ton of great Black and other POC folks you can find on here, if you look hard. But it's nowhere near the levels of diversity and community that were on Twitter. Which you would know had you been following those people before, so now I have to assume you weren't, and wonder why you feel qualified to make statements about diversity even though you haven't made an effort to engage with diverse voices before?
Also, if you were actually following some of the excellent POC voices on here, you'd know that across different servers and interest groups, almost every group has had a discussion of #FediSoWhite at some point. If all the Black people you follow are independently talking about the lack of community and diversity here, you've either got to believe them or start putting on your clown makeup, and the later is absolutely a choice.

Sometimes hacking a computer means a whole different thing...
In this use, I'm actually hacking (with a hacksaw) the case apart to add an I/O shield (custom made) so I can fit an older motherboard that was not designed for this case.
And thank you to Gateway for making me do this by not using a removable shield and instead stamping every hole they needed and covering them with a sticker if they weren't on this model. 🤦‍♂️

The Vergecast of October 31. («God will be declared by a panel of experts») has a bit funny and very good discussion of the bizarre joint press release between Microsoft and OpenAI and the insanity of the panel that is to verify if AGI has been achieved or not.
A choice quote about the problems of finding people to put on such a panel:
“A bunch of the world's best drunks have verified that you made whiskey is not a thing that you can do.”

The Færdselsstyrelsen
(Danish Road Traffic Authority)
is becoming the first agency to pilot SIA Open,
a government-wide project by Statens IT
(Danish Governmental IT Agency)
designed to replace Microsoft services with open source alternatives.
With this, they are not stopping at just Office apps.
Færdselsstyrelsen will be replacing both the Windows operating system and Microsoft's suite of applications
(Word, Excel, Teams, and Outlook)

Denmark Begins Its Exit from Microsoft — and This Is Just the Start
The move is part of a government-wide effort to reduce dependency on Microsoft software. The traffic department's move is just the beginning.

My morning so far has been spent disassembling the tumble dryer and vacuuming everything in sight. A suspicious burning smell led to us pulling the big red lever earlier!
It has been running for 10 minutes now, and so far, so good. We'll be watching the dryer with great interest the next few times we're using it..