Tootfinder

Conservative economist Andy Hall offers a damning condemnation of conventional politicians (although he is apparently oblivious of the import of his argument) 👇
Hall writes:
"Politicians do not respond mechanically to shifts in public sentiment
—they answer to donors, activists, and primary challengers,
not just median voters…
and sometimes they stake out new positions well before the public asks for them,
or refuse to move long after it has"

AI is the Democratic Party's Next Villain
We analyze roughly 280,000 candidate fundraising emails to trace the rise of anti-billionaire populism in the Democratic party and see how it is slowly merging with a new kind of anti-AI populism.

Tracey Johnson, assistant professor of history and African American studies, picked pieces ranging from the mid-19th century to the present for her survey course HIST 3165: History of Art and Activism in the United States. This course focuses on issues such as racial injustice, homelessness and the HIV/AIDs crisis through the lens of creative activism and protest.
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@… I think this is particularly interesting in the context of the previous "What is the Fediverse?" (Paraphrasing, don't recall exact wording) poll.
If we generally agree that the Fediverse is the total sum of all ActivityPub messages, then it should become quite obvious that presuming how others must use the protocol is a fool's errand at best.

How Organizations Use AI: Evidence from ChatGPT
Aaron Chatterji, David Holtz, Neel Rakholia, Prasanna Tambe, Gawesha Weeratunga
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12236 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.12236 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.12236
arXiv:2608.12236v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study how organizations use frontier generative AI by linking ChatGPT Enterprise account records to usage, worker roles, task classifications, and public-company financial data through March 2026. These linked data enable a privacy-preserving analysis of adoption, worker roles, and message-level tasks at scale: for instance, the worker-level sample we analyze at the six-month adoption horizon includes over 1,500 organizations and over 17 million messages. We document four facts about enterprise AI adoption and use. First, ChatGPT Enterprise usage has grown rapidly due to a combination of new firm adoption and growing intensity among existing adopters. Second, U.S.-based public company adoption is concentrated among larger, more valuable, and more R&D- and SG&A-intensive firms. Third, active use within adopting firms spans job functions and seniority levels, with especially high usage intensity among early-career workers. Fourth, ChatGPT Enterprise usage encompasses a broad range of knowledge work tasks, including writing, technical work, communication, and information synthesis. In aggregate, these results suggest that firms differ widely in the speed, breadth and purpose of their enterprise AI adoption, and that they are still actively learning how to integrate AI into organizational workflows.
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Trial lawyers, with big liability litigation earnings, are among the most active lobbyists against autonomous vehicles, even as data shows clear safety benefits (Alex Tabarrok/Marginal Revolution)
https://marginalrevolution.com/margina

Trial Lawyers Lobby Against Autonomous Vehicles - Marginal REVOLUTION
Roughly 37,000–40,000 Americans die in auto accidents every year. We now have large‑scale, real‑world evidence—from Waymo and a joint analysis with Swiss Re—that driverless operations can be substantially safer than matched human driving within their current operating domains. The latest data show that over 220 million miles driven, Waymo vehicles–in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, […]

Roughly two dozen immigration advocates, faith leaders, Japanese internment camp survivors and their descendants
completed a four-day, 45-mile pilgrimage Saturday to an immigrant detention facility outside of Dilley.
The activists demanded the closure of the only federal family detention center,
described by a Japanese internment survivor as inhumane and a tragic “repetition of American history.”
Free Families, a national coalition of organizations advocating for imm…

It’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
𝗜 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗻 𝗮 𝗱𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗽𝗼𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗼𝗿 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘆 𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗺𝘆 𝗰𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗴𝗻.
When people ask,
“𝘞𝘩𝘺 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘰?” or
“𝘞𝘩𝘺 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘬 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘰?”
– a lot of it is because I do not rely on special interests to get
re-elected.
𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗴𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗱 𝟭𝟬𝟬% 𝗯𝘆 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝗱𝗮𝘆, 𝗿𝗲𝗴𝘂𝗹𝗮𝗿 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲.
No lobbyists.
No corporate PACs.
No call time with…

Donate to AOC!
Alexandria is fighting for progressive policies that can help create social, racial, and economic justice for all. That's why she's taking $0 from corporations and lobbyists and is relying on the grassroots to power her campaign.

Since the age of the Gold Rush, California has lost approximately 60 percent of its coastal dunes
due primarily to human intervention;
By contrast, Santa Barbara County has lost only 10 percent.
That’s according to a recent study released by the UC Office of the President’s Climate Action Research Initiative with active engagement by nine UCSB researchers. 
Statewide the expansion of urbanization and agriculture has gobbled up roughly 442 square kilometers of coastal…

How the fly holds a single goal: normalization, not selection, in Drosophila FC2
Gioele Nanni, Christopher Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18969 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.18969 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.18969
arXiv:2607.18969v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A walking fly steers toward a goal direction, held as a bump of activity across the FC2 neurons of the fan-shaped body. These neurons also inhibit one another over distance, more strongly the farther apart they are, a feedback proposed to keep the fly on a single goal. We asked, from the connectome, what circuit produces this inhibition, and whether it lets FC2 actively choose one goal among competitors (a winner-take-all) or simply keeps a goal set elsewhere as one clean bump. Tracing the wiring in a single FlyWire brain, we find the inhibition is almost entirely global: four FB5A cells inhibit every FC2 neuron roughly equally, with a smaller, distance-dependent contribution from hDelta interneurons and a negligible direct component. A ring-attractor winner-take-all (the kind the compass uses) requires local recurrent excitation that the FC2 wiring lacks, so this geometry cannot build one; and across a range of dynamical models, including a spiking network, no version of the circuit locks onto a winner at the connectome-scaled reference coupling. FC2 therefore normalizes an externally set goal rather than selecting it, with FB5A likely acting as the global normalizer, much as the APL neuron does in the mushroom body. We are explicit about two open points: a different mechanism, mutual inhibition between two competing goals (which hDelta supplies), could in principle select at very strong coupling, and we bound rather than exclude it; and FB5A's inhibitory identity is a low-confidence prediction of the connectome's transmitter classifier, not yet measured, and likely not GABAergic. We then ask where the goal is actually set: the connectome nominates an upstream hDelta network and rules out the leading proposed alternative, whose neurons supply under 0.2% of FC2's input. Finally, we propose a direct experiment, silencing FB5A while imaging FC2, that would test the account.
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