Tootfinder

ICE has used the "Mobile Fortify" facial recognition app to identify immigrants and citizens alike
💥over 100,000 times, by one estimate.
❌It wasn't built to work like that
—and only got approved after DHS abandoned its own privacy rules.
https://www.…

ICE and CBP’s Face-Recognition App Can’t Actually Verify Who People Are
ICE has used Mobile Fortify to identify immigrants and citizens alike over 100,000 times, by one estimate. It wasn't built to work like that—and only got approved after DHS abandoned its own privacy rules.

2025 NFL QB Rankings: End-of-Season Edition https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/qb-stock-market-ranking-all-32-starters-after-2025-regular-season

Right! After, frankly, way too much work, I once again have a garden gate which opens properly and easily both ways, and which closes and latches properly and easily. I don't love the galvanised steel gatepost, but it should not need to be replaced again in my lifetime.
#TheJoyOfCrofting
#Crofting

This guy is not one of my coworkers, but if he were I'd give him a promotion
https://buttplug.engineer/@qdot/116013563036905129

ICE and CBP’s Face-Recognition App Can’t Actually Verify Who People Are
https://www.wired.com/story/cbp-ice-dhs-mobile-fortify-face-recognition-verify-identity/

ICE and CBP’s Face-Recognition App Can’t Actually Verify Who People Are
ICE has used Mobile Fortify to identify immigrants and citizens alike over 100,000 times, by one estimate. It wasn't built to work like that—and only got approved after DHS abandoned its own privacy rules.

Sources: Will Welch is stepping down as editor of GQ to work in a new role with Pharrell, the musician and men's creative director of Louis Vuitton, in Paris (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/business/media/will-welch-gq-editor-depa…

Will Welch to Leave GQ After 7 Years as Its Top Editor
Mr. Welch worked to move the men’s magazine away from what he called “manly-man tropes.” His next role will be with Pharrell, the men’s designer of Louis Vuitton.

Such a bummer when people lie for no reason.
Found out today that a client I previously ended our work with had lied to us about their plans and why they wanted to stop our engagement.
The truth wouldn’t have changed anything for us. We still would have parted ways on good terms and done our best to offboard. In fact, we would have been able to help them more by properly instructing people coming to take over.
So now that the lie came to light, long after the engagement ended, I have a bad taste in my mouth and no longer feel good about how things ended and or them as a past client.
I just wish they told the truth.

PwC's US boss Paul Griggs says PwC decided to "lean in" to crypto work after years of taking a more cautious stance, following Trump's embrace of digital assets (Stephen Foley/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/5e1448bc-11a2-4229-bb5c-1a322a7ad217

So yesterday my girlfriend received her 25 Euro android version 12 tablet. It would serve one purpose, being an e-raeder. This ebook platform however uses a website for authentication, nothing unusual about that. Just, it didn't work.
After lots of digging, the lets encrypt riot certificate was lacking on this specific, chinese, android build.
I installed it manually so it could serve it's purpose.

Back and leg pain was terrible from around 4am to 11am but I managed to get moving after that and doing some kitchen work helps distract me from the pain... I still feel a little dizzy, but whatever.
So I am attempting a "tavern style" pizza today, the "other" Chicago style, a thin, cracker crust. (Also St. Louis or Milwaukee style to some folks.)
I'll report back on my results after lunch, unless I fall asleep again from the medication.

Cowboys' Tyler Smith to meet with staff about position moving forward amid LT chatter https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/onsi/news/dallas-cowboys-tyler-smith-meet-staff-about-position-moving-forward-amid-left-tac…

Some positive signs for AI coding tools. Claude-code is a $1B run rate product six month after launch. The latest Claude Opus 4.5 model is several times cheaper and faster than last month’s version and uses about a quarter of the number of tokens to get work done. My own benchmark saw over an hour of coding reduced to 17 minutes. The high rate of change continues. The boundary of what does/doesn’t work is pushing back fast.

Anthropic acquires Bun as Claude Code reaches $1B milestone
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

Yesterday @… had questions about Christmas Past. Reading replies reminded me: My first foray into wood work was when visiting a relative for Christmas.
I was 7 or 8, and we were visiting my dad's uncle Friedel in Lingen. We made some wooden ornaments, with a coping saw and dull chisels.
My dad still has an ornament I modeled after a lego set…

LEGO 1555 Santa Claus
Comprehensive information about LEGO 1555 Santa Claus, a Basic set released in 1986.

STM32MP2 update: did a quick sanity check of the hardware by booting from the SD card supplied with the devkit.
It comes up to a Linux shell with the SSD detected.
So we know the SSD and board setup is correct.
Will poke at it more after work and see if I can get register dumps etc out of it.

Donald Trump has suggested US taxpayers could reimburse energy companies for repairing Venezuelan infrastructure for extracting and shipping oil.
Trump acknowledged that
“a lot of money” would need to be spent to increase oil production in Venezuela after US forces ousted its leader, Nicolšs Maduro,
but suggested his government could pay oil companies to do the work.
“A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent and the oil companies will spend it,
and the…

Welp, this is heart breaking. Brewer’s Art was so good for so long. What a shame. I hope Volker finds a way to make sure staff are taken care of.
https://www.prismnews.com/news/mount-vernon-brewpub-the-brewers-art-permanently-closes-afte…

Mount Vernon brewpub The Brewer’s Art permanently closes after 30 years
The Brewer’s Art, a 30-year Mount Vernon brewpub, closed Feb. 2, 2026, leaving about 20 staff suddenly out of work and raising questions about unpaid wages and recent financial liens.

Thomson Reuters' CEO says AI cannot easily replace the company's legal-research expertise, after its stock fell following the release of Claude legal work tools (Alexander Osipovich/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.

Fantastic DIY #Flock camera detector (WIP) from Chuck Toussieng
He reports that he
a) will work on a case once he's ironed everything out
b) will post to Github as well, after a) is complete
#FlockCameras

Have you ever wondered what's the real thrill and terror and delight in being a book translator? Big company commissioning you the translation into English of a Bulgarian novel after a year-long vetting process. It roughly translates into, "Hey buddy, so we've done all of this very exciting preliminary work, and for the next two to three months, you are completely on your own. We'll let you to it now, hf."

"During the preparation of this work, the authors used ChatGPT and Gemini for grammar & spelling checking and paraphrasing. After using these tools, the authors reviewed and edited the content as needed and take full responsibility for the publication’s content."
I like that.

An upgrade for work, three plays, and bitter cold later, here we are with Marie’s pancakes, egg and bacon, tea and coffee. Just board gaming tonight after work. #TogetherBreakfast https://photos.app.goo.gl/ygS6ZKvuQUQLGBbh7

This is particularly annoying because after converting my kid's laptop to Linux with #EndOfTen, school WiFi certificates would not allow connection so we had to switch back to Microsoft to allow school work submissions 🤬
#MicrosoftTax.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has so far been unable to access data from a Washington Post reporter’s iPhone
because it was protected by Apple’s "Lockdown Mode"
when agents seized the device from the reporter’s home, the US government said in a court filing.
FBI agents were however able to access the reporter’s work laptop by telling her to place her index finger on the MacBook Pro’s fingerprint reader.
This occurred during the January 14 search at the…

FBI stymied by Apple's Lockdown Mode after seizing journalist's iPhone
Post reporter was compelled to unlock MacBook Pro with fingerprint, however.

Cowboys exuding confidence after win over Chiefs: 'We'll play anybody, anywhere' https://www.nfl.com/news/cowboys-exuding-confidence-after-win-over-chiefs-we-ll-play-anybody-anywhere

I've been worried AI will crowd out human voices, and now an AI copy has replaced my 2006 Connected Knowledge site, warping context and displacing the original work online. Can we stop this creeping ensloppification?
https://www.linkedin.…

ICE has purchased “a smorgasbord of spy technology: social media monitoring, cellphone location tracking, facial recognition, remote hacking tools, and more … the government openly says it will use [these] capabilities to target people who oppose ICE’s actions [including] anti-ICE protesters.”
#ICE #protest

ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants
The Trump administration is being open about its plans to violate Americans’ First and Fourth Amendment rights.

Colossal Statues of Ancient Pharoah Stand Again in Luxor After 30 Years of Work https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/colossal-statues-of-ancient-pharoah-stand-again-in-luxor-after-30-years-of-work/

Colossal Statues of Ancient Pharoah Stand Again in Luxor After 30 Years of Work
The right side has an almost complete face, and even the serpent which crowned the nemes headdress over the forehead has survived the ages.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #AfternoonShow
Caroline Polachek:
🎵 Welcome to My Island (George Daniel & Charli XCX remix)
#CarolinePolachek
https://stereonuke.bandcamp.com/track/caroline-polachek-welcome-to-my-island-stereonukes-after-work-edit
https://open.spotify.com/track/4bp2wYweUPvsBrQfntdYcr

Once upon a time there was a DOS user who saw Unix, and saw that it was
good. After typing cp on his DOS machine at home, he downloaded GNU's
unix tools ported to DOS and installed them. He rm'd, cp'd, and mv'd
happily for many days, and upon finding elvis, he vi'd and was happy. After
a long day at work (on a Unix box) he came home, started editing a file,
and couldn't figure out why he couldn't suspend vi (w/ ctrl-z) to do
a comp…

@… I’m conflicted.
Today my wife took our son out skiing, they’ll be away overnight. Since I’m alone at home, I took a day off work to have my first real “me day” in years.
At first glance, not a bad day to relive! Low stress, no outwards commitments, awesome!
After a few cycles though, I think I would be sad that my family leaves me every morning at 6 AM…

Rubio Says 'Much Work' to Be Done After Talks With Ukrainian Officials (Cassandra Vinograd/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/us/politics/ukraine-yermak-rubio-russia.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/251130/p50#a251130p50

Survey: What has it been like going back to work after the shutdown?
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/government-shutdown/2025/11/survey-what-has-it-been-like-going-back-to-work-after-the-shutdown/

Interesting. In parallel, I set up a Docker container "exactly" as a Distrobox container to get ROCm running on Bazzite. And in the Docker container I get
> Memory critical error by agent node-0 (Agent handle: 0x5578c3d90580) on address 0x7f851f8a1000. Reason: Memory in use.
when running `clinfo` after "Max work group size" while in the Distrobox container it works without this error. It would be nice if I could find out what the differences are between the…

So a little while back, @… wrote an excellent introductory book on accessibility and inclusive design called Accessibility for Everyone for A Book Apart.
Then, A Book Apart folded and the authors managed to get their rights back.
And yesterday, after Laura put a huge amount of work adapting the book into a beautiful website she built using Kitten…

Accessibility For Everyone by Laura Kalbag
Read the book online for free.

• 60 out of 100 times it’ll “sync” and freeze with all 4 LEDs on. The Wii U does a little beep but doesn’t show the controller and no inputs work.
• 38 out of 100 times the same thing will happen but with all LEDs off
  • You need to remove the batteries in order to take the wiimotes out of these states
• 2 out of 100 times the wiimotes actually connect, but show with 1 battery bar and almost no inputs go through (and the ones that do are extremely laggy, except for the power button)
  • The manual states that if this happens you can remove the batteries, wait 3 minutes and connect (without syncing) again. That does fixes it sometimes, but it really only worked once for each wiimote.
  • A truly successful connection only happens after the “low battery one”, and even then it seems to be hard to achieve for the first time.
    • Afterwards you’re supposed to be able to reconnect without syncing and then not encounter the issues anymore. That was true for the pink wiimote, but the blue wiimote had to be synced again. I spent quite a few hours trying and wasn’t able to get a successful connection.
    • If you connect the pink wiimote that was working when the other wiimote is in the 4 LEDs freeze state it’ll break the connection of the other one and make you need to sync it again
      • Now none of my aliexpress wiimotes are synced and idk when I’ll be able to sync them again

NFL to reevaluate Rooney Rule: 'More work to do' https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/47811166/roger-goodell-says-nfl-reevaluate-diversity-approach-policies-1-minority-coach-hired-offseason-cyc…

Nevis, which develops AI agents to automate wealth advisers' grunt work, raised a $35M Series A from Sequoia and others at a $200M valuation, after a $5M seed (Biz Carson/Bloomberg)

Initial experiments on a GPU-accelerated parallel CDR PLL filter.
Fundamentally, the problem is that a PLL is stateful so you can't process any given iteration of it without knowing the previous state. I'm trying to work around that by recognizing that the impulse response of the PLL loop filter tails off to effectively zero after a while, so we can truncate and samples older than that point will not materially affect the output.
What you see here is the first pass of wha…

I now need to find all those online profiles where I have described myself as an "inactive" pilot and remove the word "inactive" from them. After a hiatus of a dozen years, I just passed both the ground and air work portions of a flight review, and once again have a current "license to learn."
#aviation

Was in Japan übrigens so nebenbei zum Thema gemacht wird:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DSqy86IAJPZ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

Japan Daily on Instagram: "For the first time in Japan, foreign nationals have begun driving local bus routes under the Specified Skilled Worker program to address severe labor shortages. Tokyo Bus launched the initiative on December 23 in Tokyo and Okinawa, hiring five drivers from the Philippines after long-term training. The company says even higher wages have not attracted enough domestic drivers, making outside talent necessary. New drivers initially operate with support from Japanese staff and are expected to work independently after several months. Industry leaders hope the move will stabilize bus services and ensure passenger safety. Public understanding and continued training will be important as Japan adapts to workforce shortages in essential public services. @YAHOO"
85 likes, 11 comments - japandaily_jp on December 24, 2025: "For the first time in Japan, foreign nationals have begun driving local bus routes under the Specified Skilled Worker program to address severe labor shortages. Tokyo Bus launched the initiative on December 23 in Tokyo and Okinawa, hiring five drivers from the Philippines after long-term training. The company says even higher wages have not attracted enough domestic drivers, making outside talent necessary. New drivers initially ope…

The ‌iPhone‌ 5s came out in September 2013, the ‌iPhone‌ 6 in September 2014.
Released yesterday, iOS 12.5.8 extends the system certificates, so they will continue to work after January 2027.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/26/iphone-5s-software-update/

EAG-PT: Emission-Aware Gaussians and Path Tracing for Indoor Scene Reconstruction and Editing
Xijie Yang, Mulin Yu, Changjian Jiang, Kerui Ren, Tao Lu, Jiangmiao Pang, Dahua Lin, Bo Dai, Linning Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.23065 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.23065 https://arxiv.org/html/2601.23065
arXiv:2601.23065v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recent reconstruction methods based on radiance field such as NeRF and 3DGS reproduce indoor scenes with high visual fidelity, but break down under scene editing due to baked illumination and the lack of explicit light transport. In contrast, physically based inverse rendering relies on mesh representations and path tracing, which enforce correct light transport but place strong requirements on geometric fidelity, becoming a practical bottleneck for real indoor scenes. In this work, we propose Emission-Aware Gaussians and Path Tracing (EAG-PT), aiming for physically based light transport with a unified 2D Gaussian representation. Our design is based on three cores: (1) using 2D Gaussians as a unified scene representation and transport-friendly geometry proxy that avoids reconstructed mesh, (2) explicitly separating emissive and non-emissive components during reconstruction for further scene editing, and (3) decoupling reconstruction from final rendering by using efficient single-bounce optimization and high-quality multi-bounce path tracing after scene editing. Experiments on synthetic and real indoor scenes show that EAG-PT produces more natural and physically consistent renders after editing than radiant scene reconstructions, while preserving finer geometric detail and avoiding mesh-induced artifacts compared to mesh-based inverse path tracing. These results suggest promising directions for future use in interior design, XR content creation, and embodied AI.
toXiv_bot_toot

Time to make another bass tab/sheet music, and this time it's for _Wood Carving Partita_ by Michiru Yamane from _Castlevania: Symphony of the Night_. This one is kind of a pain, but it feels really great when you nail a section after picking apart the left-hand from the piano and make it (1) playable on a four string, and (2) move the notes around so it works well with the music overall. Still have a lot of work and tweaking before it's even close to ready.

LexisNexis-owner Relx, Reuters-owner Thomson Reuters, and other stocks fell 10% after Anthropic launched Claude Cowork tools that automate legal work (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/48ec5657-c2e7-4111-a236-24a96a8d49e7

ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants | Brennan Center for Justice
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/ice-wants-go-after-dissenters-well-immigrants

ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants
The Trump administration is being open about its plans to violate Americans’ First and Fourth Amendment rights.

Update: it is no longer clear.
My current work around is to extract the list of linked files and relink my hand after egrep -v list-of-swift-syntax-symbols. What a horrible hack
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/115600154465997324

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

After Missouri residents voted to repeal their state’s near-total abortion ban
and enshrine abortion rights into their state constitution,
Conservative advocates quickly got to work.
In a lawsuit filed the day after the 2024 election,
abortion providers challenged not only the constitutionality of the state’s ban,
⚠️but also a slew of other restrictions that, they said,
made their jobs so arduous as to be impossible.
More than a year later, they are…

So I’m cooling my heels in my Dr. office waiting for my shingles booster (45m past my appointment time & counting!) - this woman who works here just walked by dressed like she’s going straight clubbing after work & I am here for it, looks good. 😂
She’s also one of the few staff masking so 🤘

I’ve lost a lot of respect for Andrewism after his recent upload. It feels disconnected from the reality of working-class life and from anarcho-syndicalism as it actually exists.
This response is a worthwhile read. It doesn’t romanticize work or the working class, but it doesn’t drift into abstract alternatives either. It sits with the fact that we don’t want to be working class, but we are, and that contradiction isn’t something you escape with theory.
I strongly relate to what’…

If you watched cartoons in the 90s or early 2000s, you probably heard some of Guy Moon's amazing theme songs and scores. Guy passed away earlier this month after injuries from a car accident- I wrote this short piece over at Animated TV Blog to commemorate his work: https://animatedtvblo…

RIP Emmy-nominated composer Guy Moon
Guy Moon, an Emmy-nominated composer known for his work on animated TV shows, passed away January 8 following a traffic collision, according to a statement his family posted on Facebook. For animat…

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

Welp, after a day or two of fermentation and a few hours preparing the accompaniments, like the potato filling, the 'gunpowder' to sprinkle over it, and both tomato and coconut chutneys (all made from scratch, even involving cracking a fresh coconut!), I've made my first ever dosas. I'm quite chuffed by the result. It's a lot of work for a one-off...

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #LaurenLaverne
Caroline Polachek:
🎵 Welcome To My Island
#CarolinePolachek
https://stereonuke.bandcamp.com/track/caroline-polachek-welcome-to-my-island-stereonukes-after-work-edit
https://open.spotify.com/track/4bp2wYweUPvsBrQfntdYcr

EU chief says Europe needs to abandon caution after US treasury secretary calls Denmark ‘irrelevant’ – Europe live
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/jan/21/europe-donald-trump-davos-speech-greenland-denmark-latest…

There's nothing better than a student who, after stumbling a bit in some of their work over the semester, really raises their game on the final assignment.

My batteries are always low after a long day of work.
No, not emotionally. The devices I work with just take up all my USB ports, leaving my phone empty.

I don't send many emails anymore. I receive emails but I don't send many. Even at work, most of our communication is done via other means. But I do generate at least one email a day to send to a group of external testers. I don't send this from a traditional mail client. Instead it is a shell script that gathers some information and opens a text editor to add further comments. After that the file is sent with

Alright, the internet is all too much right now. I'm gonna take a break for a bit and work on some projects. I have some organizing to do and some bugs to find.
The horrible things in the world don't change what we have to do. Our work is and has always been the same. They may make it easier to get other folks on board, they may make it more obvious that we were right all along, but they don't change our job.
We will do our work of building community, supporting each other, and creating the world we want to see. It will take as long as it takes to do. None of the news changes any of that. So I'm gonna take my break and hopefully come back after I've gotten some of that shit done.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Remember that when you start to feel guilty about taking a breath.

For work I have a script that archives a bunch of files from time to time (they are usually around 4.5GiB). After compression with 7-Zip defaults they get reduced to about 515 MiB but since it is a limited VM this takes half an hour. I played with 7z options and got it down to a reasonable size (685MiB) in around 48s, which is great but playing further with other compression options I found a Zstandard combo that got it down to around 800 MiB in only 20 seconds. Much bigger but small enough …

If there is any truth in these allegations, we really have to worry about that is going on in both AGS and GSOC.
The initial story was bad enough: the Irish police service being so incompetent that their statistics on homicides were wildly incorrect, and the whistleblower getting penalised; but this is batshit.

Garda whistleblower says she took work leave as she was ‘terrified’ of new analysis chief
Civilian was installed as Garda analysis bureau head after Lois West testified to Oireachtas about errors in homicide data

"We’ve neglected the power of carbon-sucking fungi. Meet the scientist determined to change that"
#Fungi #Plants #Environment

Scientist wins €215,000 award for work on carbon-sucking fungi
Dr Toby Kiers has won the 2026 Tyler Prize award after shedding light on “overlooked” fungi that can offset huge amounts of CO2.

I am going dual monitors for work. The docking station that was provided had only one HDMI port, but two DP ports. The problem is all of my monitors have HDMI inputs only. I remembered that last year I bought a DP to HDMI adapter and wondered if that would work.
I plugged it all in and it didn't detect the second monitor. I figured the laptop might need a reboot to detect the change. After the reboot it saw the second monitor.
The second is one I borrowed from my wife s…

EU lawmakers stall US trade deal in protest over Greenland (Philip Blenkinsop/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/european-parliament-suspends-work-eu-us-trade-deal-after-trumps-repeated-2026-01-21/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260121/p84#a260121p84

TIL about Oskar Speck, who kayaked from Ulm, #Germany, in May 1932, down the Danube, through to Cyprus to work in the copper mines—but decided to continue through to #Australia instead. After over seven years of paddling, he finally arrived on Thursday Island, in Torres Strait, in September 1939, whereupon Au…

Model ML, which aims to use AI agents to automate grunt work done by investment bankers like making pitch decks, raised $75M, after raising $12M earlier in 2025 (Aisha S Gani/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

"We have a funding system for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that is entirely based on the spending priorities of the UK government in England. The Welsh government has less borrowing powers than a local council, and it often publishes its final budget nine months into the financial year, because the Treasury has decided to change funding in England. This doesn’t work. And it can’t work"

I struggle to process the fact that Todd Blanche gave my husband his very first job offer in law.
(Yes, THAT Todd Blanche from the DoJ, deputy attorney general, the one who has been in the news for all kinds of terrible things he’s up to)
I went to a party with that guy 3 years ago! And now he’s doing increasingly cartoonish villain things every other week.
He seemed normal. Fun, actually.
And then months after he went to defend Trump as his personal lawyer and since then we’ve continued to be confused and disturbed.
We haven’t had any contact with him after he went to work for Trump, of course. But I can’t stop wondering how the fuck the person my husband worked with is the same person defending pedophiles. (Allegedly)
#USPol #ToddBlanche

Saints work out ex-Ravens kicker Justin Tucker after 10-game suspension, reportedly sign Cade York instead

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/justin-tucker-saints-ravens-kicker-allega…

After the Devastation of Trump’s First Year,
Popular Rebellions Offer Hope
Elections,
labor,
mutual aid, and
local organizing wins in 2025
point to strategies that can work in the coming year.
In 2026, we the people can build power
and we can win significant victories if we:
🔸Show up for the most vulnerable in the face of federal government attacks and neglect;
🔸Push back on racism and misogyny, and support inclusivity;
🔸Call …

After the Devastation of Trump’s First Year, These Popular Rebellions Offer Hope
Elections, labor, mutual aid, and local organizing wins in 2025 point to strategies that can work in the coming year.

Two freelance journalists say the UK's Daily Express stole their articles, rewriting one seemingly using AI, and offered £100 only once they reached out (Alice Brooker/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/express-offers-compensa…

Express offers compensation after freelances say work was stolen
First person account of rail journey apparently rewritten using AI.

Framework says it is raising DDR5 RAM prices to charge $10 per GB, after a price hike earlier in December due to "substantially higher costs" amid the AI boom (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/850376/framework-ram-memory-ddr5-price-hikes…

Framework announces another memory price hike — and it likely won’t be its last
Framework is adjusting the price of its DDR5 RAM modules once again, as it will now charge $10 per GB for its 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB variations.

Saints work out former Ravens kicker Justin Tucker after serving 10-game suspension, per reports

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/justin-tucker-saints-ravens-kicker-allegations/

After a couple of months of work, I have finally landed the micro-SwiftGodot to our main branch-for people to build small extensions
https://github.com/migueldeicaza/SwiftGodot/releases
We still have that nasty Apple bug that bloats binaries by bolting SwiftSyntax in yo…

Cowboys leader named Community MVP for work spotlighting mental health https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/11/21/cowboys-dt-solomon-thomas-nflpa-community-mvp-week-12-me…

Back at base after a successful remote field visit. Lots of data to work on in the coming days now (which is lucky as the weather looks like it will be terrible).
https://pixelfed.social/p/IceClimate/916829305152261645

The standalone Proxmox server is basically done at this point, all three DNS servers are online and secure, the Tailscale VM is online after completely forgetting that it was running on one of the Raspberry Pis, and the `authentik` instance that I'm gonna need to work on tomorrow.
#proxmox #dns

Crepes, bacon and egg, tea and coffee. We won Arkham last night but 3 of the 4 of us died trying. Tonight after work, mahjongg with a friend! #TogetherBreakfast https://photos.app.goo.gl/pFooYuFLBZN4VqdZA

I think today's worker is the owner of the company, he certainly is the assessor.
He worked a lot later than those without the vested interest there. 😆 I finished work at my job before he did! 🤭
All the wood was sanded down and remaining nude wood given some paint. We have a test plank in the foreground of the first picture here which is painted with a second coat of paint. Seems likely we lose all the wood grain when doing that, and so will prefer the paler look where it's obviously made of wood not paint.
Won't really know for sure till it's dry. Prefer the colour a bit darker like that but if we're hiding the wood grain we might as well have used MDF instead of pine. We're after something clearly made of wood.
Another area is test-painted with just the clearcoat top varnish as a second layer. That's likely to be right, just a bit more shiny and protected.
The carpenter proper is back from holiday and starts tomorrow. He has a lot of drawers and doors to build and edging to attach to make the door panels. Still hoping at least the carpentry will be pretty much all done by the end of the week but likely some painting and touching up still to do next week. Hopefully by the end of Tuesday because I'm not really able to be here all day each day for most of the two weeks after that.

Bengals' Duke Tobin after third straight season missing playoffs: 'All I can do is work us out of it' https://www.nfl.com/news/bengals-duke-tobin-after-third-straight-season-missing-playoffs-all-i-can-do-is-work…

On Monday, Nov. 24,
after more than 1,100 days on strike,
Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh members were cheered on by supporters
at a rally in downtown Pittsburgh
before returning to work at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Even though strikers have returned to work, however,
many issues at the center of the strike are still in legal limbo
—and their fight for a fair contract is not over.
In this episode of Working People, we speak with three Newspap…

The longest-running strike in the US is over—and the workers won
After over 3 years on strike, members of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh have returned to work at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. While the legal battle is still unresolved, this is a major victory for the labor movement.

AI workplace agents startup Genspark raised a $275M Series B at a $1.25B valuation and says it hit $50M in annualized revenue after pivoting from AI search (Anna Tong/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2025/11/20/genspark…

Genspark Joins The Unicorn Club With Latest Funding Round
The startup, which offers AI work productivity tools, got to $50 million in annualized revenue just five months after launching its suite of AI agents.

Memo: after Sinclair bought an 8% stake, Scripps says it's exploring stations sales with "many" broadcasters but talks with Sinclair didn't lead to an agreement (Al Tompkins/Poynter)
https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2025…

Scripps tells staff a Sinclair takeover is unlikely despite surprise stock purchase - Poynter
A memo to staff from CEO Adam Symson downplayed Sinclair’s intentions, even as Scripps shares surged nearly 40%

As tech CEOs stay silent after two fatal shootings, 450 workers at Google, Meta, OpenAI, Amazon, and others urge CEOs to cancel any ICE contracts and speak out (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/01/26/tech-workers-ceos-ice

Tech workers urge CEOs to condemn ICE
In the wake of the fatal shootings in Minneapolis, tech companies and their CEOs have largely chosen to stay silent.

They Seek to Curb Online Hate.
The Trump Regime Accuses Them of Censorship.
Five Europeans who work to tackle disinformation and abuse on the internet
were barred from entering the United States
after Secretary of State Marco Rubio labeled them
“radical activists”
who undercut free speech.

They Seek to Curb Online Hate. The U.S. Accuses Them of Censorship.
The Trump administration said five regulators and researchers who work to tackle disinformation and abuse on the internet had been barred from entering the United States.

STM32MP2 bringup update: after fixing some weird linker things with weak symbols that per documentation should never have worked and yet somehow never bit me until now, I have a C stub running on the M33 out of RAM (no flash boot, you have to JTAG/SWD load it for now).
It turns on three of the four LEDs on the devkit, for reasons currently unknown the fourth LED doesn't work. My only guess is that it's in the VDDIO3 domain and I might not yet have turned that on due to PMIC c…

Okay, after a bit of work in #vlang:
- I think I prefer golang though I really prefer the error system of `v`.
- I enjoy writing code in `nim` more than `v`. While I do enjoy `v` more than `rust`, the documentation and support extensions are better for almost every other language which makes things difficult starting out.

My husband and I have been sick with the flu and completely out of anything going on with society for the past week.
This time of illness has been worse than COVID - I showed up to urgent care last week with a 104.2 F (40.1 C) fever after sleeping for 22 hours straight.
I am still delirious and unable to keep track of meetings or emails, so trying to get caught up on work will be a struggle.
Don’t be like me, get your flu shots if y’all can 😭

Sources: Amazon is planning a second round of job cuts next week as part of its goal of trimming 30,000 corporate workers, after cutting 14,000 jobs in October (Greg Bensinger/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-

Labor unions, community leaders and faith groups are calling for an #economic #blackout in Minnesota-on Friday
to protest the surge of federal immigration agents in the state
and mourn Renee Good.
Organizers are urging Minnesotans not to work, shop or go to school.
The Trump administration has d…

OpenAI expands group chats in ChatGPT globally to all logged-in users on Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans, after piloting the feature in select regions (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/20/chatgpt-launches-group-chats-globally/

ChatGPT launches group chats globally | TechCrunch
The company sees group chats in ChatGPT as a way for people to coordinate trips, co-write documents, settle debates, or work through research together, while ChatGPT helps search, summarize, and compare options.

The three-year strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ends after a Third Circuit court panel ruled the paper had acted in bad faith; the paper plans to appeal (Riddhi Setty/Columbia Journalism Review)
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_…

The nation's longest strike is over—but the battle isn't.
Journalists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette are ready to return to work.

Filing: Synopsys plans to lay off ~10% of its staff, or ~2,000 employees, after completing its $35B acquisition of engineering design firm Ansys earlier in 2025 (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/synopsys-cut…

On any given day, millions of Europeans use Microsoft software, heat their homes with American natural gas and buy U.S. stocks. Many Americans work with German software, drink French wine and take European-made medicines.
More than $5.4 billion worth of goods and services are traded between the United States and European Union each day,
backed by extensive cross-border investments that support millions of jobs.
Although Trump walked back a threat to impose extra tariffs on …

The Leverage That Europe Has Over the U.S. Economy
After the latest bout of trade turmoil with the United States, European leaders are looking for ways to project strength to the Trump administration, which considers them weak.

Meta VP of Public Policy Simon Milner, the company's most senior Asia-Pacific policy executive, plans to leave after 14 years to retire from full-time work (Newley Purnell/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

The Oglala Sioux Tribe is seeking answers after
four enrolled members were detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis.
Tribal President Frank Star Comes Out said in a statement on Facebook that the men,
who were homeless and living near the Little Earth housing complex in Minneapolis,
home to nearly 1,500 people,
many of whom are Native American.
The men were taken into custody without their names being recorded, the tribe …

ICE Detains and Holds Four Native Americans, Tribal Leader Says
Oglala Sioux Tribe demands action after ICE detains four members in Minneapolis. Tribal attorneys work to confirm identities and secure release.

Election integrity advocates are demanding a hand recount in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District
after data shows more than 31,000 votes materialized after 99.4% of ballots were already counted.
At 99.4% reporting, Decision Desk HQ displayed 148,853 total votes.
The final certified tally: 179,899.
The math doesn’t work.
The remaining 0.6% of precincts should have produced roughly 1,000 ballots — not 31,000.
Republican Matt Van Epps was declared the win…

BREAKING: Election Advocates Demand Recount in Tennessee
They’re questioning how 31,000 additional votes appeared with 99.4% votes counted - and that's not all.