Tootfinder

Science mainly is not about what we know but how we try to figure it out – and how to avoid fallacies¹ on the way.²
And why “I did my own research”³ is a red flag and has nothing to do with scientific research.
We fail to teach⁴ all of this in school⁵.
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¹ok, at least how to make it less easy to fall for them and to correct them later
²ok, and how to write the right buzzwords in the right combinations into research proposals and reports to get money for doing res…

My moment of clarity in the last few weeks was coming back to “Oh right, copyright is a hack, and one that is not serving us, particularly us on the margins”
The moral rights of authorship and the way we situate our legal process of ownership are, actually, kinda at odds. And it entirely misses the idea of a commons, both as community and as a cultural base to draw from.
I've long believed that we, collectively, should own our culture — to have modern myths be Copyright 1972 LucasFilm, the traditional songs we sing Copyright 1922, now owned by Warner/Chappell Music is one of the things I find repugnant about the situation we find ourselves in.
That said, reconciling that with the behavior of the AI companies, _particularly_ the American ones? It's hard. Google abuses its monopoly position; Microsoft has forced harmful and terrible tooling on people at every turn; OpenAI is run by someone who actively despises art and does not understand it; and Anthropic is run by a guy who is trying to make sure the apocalypse has a pleasant demeanor and doesn't offend any corporations on the way. All of the above have scraped the web with no active consent — and that's largely fine, that's what putting things in common _is_, that's the beauty of the open information world we have the remnants of — but also actively evading measures people put in place to stop it and with absolutely no willingness to engage with the process. Extracting from the commons _is_ the tragedy of the commons.
It does not mean that enlarging the commons with the resulting tools is bad. The doctrine of original sin is a Christian concept I do not subscribe to. The concept of 'fruit of the poisonous tree' is a legal tool to fix power relations not a moral stance. They're worth understanding, but they are not absolute moral stances that are self-evident.
These are not harmless tools, but so too putting hard regulation and corporate, legalistic scrutiny on everything has a vastly negative impact: it is a yoke on human creativity and community to the reins of capital.
And, so too, disruption has huge costs. We are, apparently, committed to doing things the worst possible way. One can just hope that we capture the good too, because the ride has started and it's rather late to get off.

Friday Links 26-15
Quite a few articles about AI costs getting out of control.
For something different I recommend the podcast about the origins of Rose Bikes.
https://christof.damian.net/2026/05/friday-links-26-15.html

Just finished Kageki Shoujo volume 3 by Kumiko Saiki, and figured I might as well post about it even though I'll be reading it for a while more.
My library has a great selection of manga, so sometimes I check one out at random when I'm waiting for next volumes of the series I really love (With Hat Atelier by Kamome Shirahama is top of my list right now). I was expecting Kageki to be more of a classic shoujo manga, but it's actually hardly focused on romance at all, and the deep background on Japanese theater traditions is a lot of fun to learn about along with the drama of the different characters.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

This becomes especially interesting when you understand the history of the church as a quasi-revolutionary organization. One could describe early church history as a mostly-successful attempt to overthrow the Roman empire. I say mostly successful because, in the end, the Roman state mutated the church for it's own ends and basically pulled a Lenin.
The early church was a religion of women and slaves that set up alternative institutions. See, the Roman economic system basically ran through the temples. Temples were basically the banks of their day (thus money changers in the temples and all that). So when the church set up their own institutions, they were actually attacking the economic system of the Roman empire. *That* is why the empire tried to destroy them. The Romans didn't really care about the gods. They would just mutate their beliefs to pull other pagans in. No, it wasn't about the gods. The Christian were fucking with the money.
The whole church as an institution was about dual power, and Paul (one of the early founders of the church) was central to organizing this into a political machine that could actually threaten the dominant order. One could argue that he saw the potential of the church, and used it to solidify his own power.
It all basically worked, right up until Constantine figured out how to flip the whole thing against the most radical elements. He had his people collect up different books of the Bible and modify them in such a way that it favored Rome. The trick here was to highlight the existing antisemitic threads of early church, and destroy the anti-Roman ones. Anti-authoritarian sects were killed as heretics, and centralized sects became aligned under the church.
This strategy of controlling internal dissent probably feels quite familiar. It's basically how the US works.
But this whole time, during the whole lead up to this, Christianity was illegal and it was continuing to grow as a system of dual power. When Romanism merged with Christianity, it created the most authoritarian institution in human history that brutally destroyed all opposition. Even still, several hundred years later it's power broke.
Today Liberalism has separated banking and the church, and has created the illusion of separation of church and state. But the same dual power strategy that allowed the first church to gain enough power to merge with the Roman power structure have now allowed Christian Nationalism to fully merge with Americanism into the Christian Fascism we see today...

Sometimes it makes sense to act smart rather than brute-force.
For example, when Intel makes another #MKL release and you get version like "2026.0.0", and you need to figure out the remaining "-n" suffix for the .deb packages. And you really don't want to start a Debian container to figure that out.
Well, you could just keep brute-forcing until you find the right number. Or you can figure out that the index URL is #Gentoo

Here I am worrying about "passive-aggressive punctuation" and characters on TV shows are sending text messages in ALL-CAPS like lunatics.

Does this all just come down to Tim Cook? I’m congenitally skeptical of “great leader” sorts of theories of success, and now skeptical of myself as I see myself forming one, so huge grain of salt, but:
It’s hard to look at Tim Cook tongue-washing Trump’s shoes with that fake design award, just utterly unable to say no when “no” is the •only• correct response, and then not wonder about his failure to say no to a failed new design direction for his company’s most visible product.

Friday Links 26-13
I caught up with my YouTube, two good videos from NotJustBikes about cars and oil being bad.
I really liked all the links in leadership this week, all highly recommended.
https://christof.damian.net/2026/04/friday-links-26-13.html