Tootfinder

From Chatbot to Checkout: Who Pays When Transactional Agents Play?
https://fpf.org/blog/from-chatbot-to-checkout-who-pays-when-transactional-agents-play/
@…

"Literature in Context evolved from two independent projects, one by John O’Brien at The University of Virginia, and one by Tonya Howe, at Marymount University. O’Brien and Howe joined forces in 2017 and successfully applied for a Level II Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities in collaboration with Christine Ruotolo, Director of Research in the Arts and Humanities at The University of Virginia Libraries (HAA-258768-18). In 2022, the project was awarded a second grant from the NEH ODH (HAA-290349-23), as well as an Open Course Grant from VIVA, Virginia’s academic library consortium. In April 2025, the second federal grant was terminated, along with many others, by DOGE."

"The bill would give antitrust protections to the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA), pre-empting state regulations on the issue, and clarify nationwide that student athletes are not employees, precluding many labor rights and limiting their ability to profit off their name, image, and likeness."
House GOP forced to cancel vote on new Trump bill - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/score-act/

Federal agents were told this week that they have broader power to arrest people without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo reviewed by The New York Times.
The change expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants,
rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person.
A week before t…

ICE Expands Power of Agents to Arrest People Without Warrants
An internal memo changed the standard from whether people are unlikely to show up for hearings to whether they could leave the scene.

The implications are interesting enough when we apply this to systems like capitalism or national governments, but there are other very interesting implications when applied to systems like race or gender.
Like, as a cis man the only way I can be free to express and explore my own masculinity is if the masculinity I participate in is one which allows anyone the freedom to leave. Then I have an obligation to recognize the validity of nom-masculine trans identity as a necessary component of my own. If I fail to do this, then I trap myself in masculinity and allow the system to control me rather than me to be a free participant in the system.
But if it's OK to escape but not enter, that's it's own restriction that constrains the freedom to leave. It creates a barrier that keeps people in by the fear that they cannot return. So in order for me to be free in my cis masculine identity, I must accept non-masculine trans identities as they are and accept detransitioning as also valid.
But I also need to accept trans-masc identities because restricting entry to my masculinity means non-consensually constraining other identities. If every group imposes an exclusion against others coming in, that, by default, makes it impossible to leave every other group. This is just a description of how national borders work to trap people within systems, even if a nation itself allows people to "freely" leave.
So then, a free masculinity is one which recognizes all configurations of trans identities as valid and welcomes, if not celebrates, people who transition as affirmations of the freedom of their own identity (even for those who never feel a reason to exercise that same freedom).
The most irritating type of white person may look at this and say, "oh, so then why can't I be <not white>?" Except that the critique of transratial identities has never been "that's not allowed" and has always been "this person didn't do the work." If that person did the work, they would understand that the question doesn't make sense based on how race is constructed. That person might understand that race, especially whiteness, is more fluid than they at first understood. They might realize that whiteness is often chosen at the exclusion of other racialized identities. They would, perhaps, realize that to actually align with any racialized identity, they would first have to understand the boot of whiteness on their neck, have to recognize the need to destroy this oppressive identity for their own future liberation. The best, perhaps only, way to do this would be to use the privilege afforded by that identity to destroy it, and in doing so would either destroy their own privilege or destroy the system of privilege. The must either become themselves completely ratialized or destroy the system of race itself such being "transracial" wouldn't really make sense anymore.
But that most annoying of white person would, of course, not do any such work. Nevertheless, one hopes that they may recognize the paradox that they are trapped by their white identity, forced forever by it to do the work of maintaining it. And such is true for all privileged identities, where privilege is only maintained through restrictions where these restrictions ultimately become walls that imprison both the privileged and the marginalized in a mutually reinforcing hell that can only be escaped by destroying the system of privilege itself.

by accident i stumbled on this review by the #NSA on Bruce Schneiers "Applied Crypto" book from long ago.

I fucking hate KDE on Wayland. Entire evening wasted thanks to their goddamn fucking unnecessary hardcoded gestures. I am to the point of rebuilding kwin_wayland with the patch from the Arch AUR `kwin-without-gestures` package.
This was supposed to be getting fixed!
https://blogs.kde.org/2025/06/1…

I appreciate the ability to watch new year's displays in cities several time zones ahead of mine.
London was insanity... switch back to Edinburgh, sheesh.

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.

Conservatives who once railed against federal agents now applaud them
Trump is deploying some of the government’s policing agencies as an armed presidential force
— sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
the Border Patrol,
the National Guard, and others
into areas he considers in need of pacification,
from Los Angeles
to Portland, Oregon,
to Minneapolis.
Many on the right are applauding the crackdown.

The turnabout highlight…

Conservatives who once railed against federal agents now applaud them
Since Ruby Ridge and Waco, some right-wing populists had excoriated federal law enforcement. Now those agents are being deployed by their allies.