Tootfinder

Vladimir Putin has been attempting to influence Donald Trump to seize both Venezuela and Greenland since at least 2017. The effort, rooted in Putin's ambitions in Ukraine, hinged on American embrace of the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 policy framework that focused American influence within the Western Hemisphere.
Putin's reasoning, according to witnesses familiar with the proposals, is simple: if Trump would agree to disengage in Ukraine, Putin would agree to give Trump control in …

The Russian Roots of Trump's Venezuela and Greenland Operations
We find that Trump's current moves against Venezuela and Greenland have roots in a long-running Russian influence campaign intended to provoke these outcomes.

Following federal cuts to history-focused organizations, the president of the Canadian Historical Association, Colin Coates, sent this letter to Marc Miller, the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture.
One thing might not be obvious: Coates's reference to Carney's recent Quebec City speech suggests Canadians' need for historical context right now. He doesn't agree with Carney's claims. In fact, most Canadian historians would dispute them.

"Thanks to a series of relay stops (to swap electric tractors, drivers and trailers), each electric truck travels a daily distance of 810 km on the North loop and 704 km on the South loop. This system makes it possible to cover long distances without stopping the load."
https://www.renault-…

Cynicism, "AI"
I've been pointed out the "Reflections on 2025" post by Samuel Albanie [1]. The author's writing style makes it quite a fun, I admit.
The first part, "The Compute Theory of Everything" is an optimistic piece on "#AI". Long story short, poor "AI researchers" have been struggling for years because of predominant misconception that "machines should have been powerful enough". Fortunately, now they can finally get their hands on the kind of power that used to be only available to supervillains, and all they have to do is forget about morals, agree that their research will be used to murder millions of people, and a few more millions will die as a side effect of the climate crisis. But I'm digressing.
The author is referring to an essay by Hans Moravec, "The Role of Raw Power in Intelligence" [2]. It's also quite an interesting read, starting with a chapter on how intelligence evolved independently at least four times. The key point inferred from that seems to be, that all we need is more computing power, and we'll eventually "brute-force" all AI-related problems (or die trying, I guess).
As a disclaimer, I have to say I'm not a biologist. Rather just a random guy who read a fair number of pieces on evolution. And I feel like the analogies brought here are misleading at best.
Firstly, there seems to be an assumption that evolution inexorably leads to higher "intelligence", with a certain implicit assumption on what intelligence is. Per that assumption, any animal that gets "brainier" will eventually become intelligent. However, this seems to be missing the point that both evolution and learning doesn't operate in a void.
Yes, many animals did attain a certain level of intelligence, but they attained it in a long chain of development, while solving specific problems, in specific bodies, in specific environments. I don't think that you can just stuff more brains into a random animal, and expect it to attain human intelligence; and the same goes for a computer — you can't expect that given more power, algorithms will eventually converge on human-like intelligence.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, what evolution did succeed at first is achieving neural networks that are far more energy efficient than whatever computers are doing today. Even if indeed "computing power" paved the way for intelligence, what came first is extremely efficient "hardware". Nowadays, human seem to be skipping that part. Optimizing is hard, so why bother with it? We can afford bigger data centers, we can afford to waste more energy, we can afford to deprive people of drinking water, so let's just skip to the easy part!
And on top of that, we're trying to squash hundreds of millions of years of evolution into… a decade, perhaps? What could possibly go wrong?
[1] #NoAI #NoLLM #LLM

A couple of days in the countryside of Vietnam has a refreshing effect on screentime. Family, friends, eating all the time and sufficient boredom.
I'm seriously considering winding down to this rhythm. Can assure you all our digi-stuff is essentially totally unimportant. No laptops seen here, and 8 year old smartphones are sufficient to do anything.
#archlabs

I fully agree, no borders—prison abolition, and honestly this tracks because Snufkin spends the series tearing down private property signs.
#Anarchism #Anarchy #Moomins

Lawmakers launch bipartisan, last-minute bids to force vote on ACA subsidies
Two bipartisan groups of House lawmakers launched last-minute bids Wednesday
to force votes on extending the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire at the end of the year.

The efforts, both using a legislative tool known as a
"discharge petition",
face long-shot odds:
At least 218 members of the House would first have to agree to consider the bills,

Bipartisan lawmakers launch last-minute bid to force vote on extending ACA subsidies
A bipartisan group of House lawmakers has launched a last-minute bid to extend the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire at the end of the year.

IME, a lot of good information on how to achieve things with the #OpenHAB Rules DSL requires good searching on the OpenHAB forums or mining through the Javadoc.
I thought I'd use Claude over the weekend/last night to help generify some stuff in my config, and it suggested a cool approach whereby I could put metadata against items and then use that metadata in my rules to customise b…

Ukraine, EU agree to advance technical side of accession talks as Hungary blocks formal launch: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/11/ukraine-eu-agree-to-advance.html

Following the fatal shootings of American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis last month,
Democrats have refused to support long-term funding for the Department of Homland Security unless Republicans agree to reforms on the tactics of federal agents carrying out Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
“The American people rightfully expect their elected representatives to take action to rein in ICE and ensure no more lives are lost,” Senate minorit…