Tootfinder

I realized something interesting today that I hadn't fully pieced together: living under #Trump is a pretty close approximation to being poor in a rural area, at least in my experience.
You're constantly afraid of authorities because any of them could randomly ruin your life. You randomly can't afford things (because some unexpected expense came up, or because some incompetent asshole decided to tariff something or start a war or whatever). Everything is terrifying, unstable, and unpredictable basically all the time. The only way you survive is with a community.
I knew Trump would take the rural vote way back because I recognized him as the crooked sheriff or good ol' boy mayor of more than a few little towns I've lived in. He's so deeply familiar, which is really triggering for the tiny number of people who managed to escape that kind of crushingly hopeless place.
So if this has all felt very terrifying and foreign, then perhaps use it to understand the people who find it terrifying and familiar. For at least some of those people, this has been an unpleasant return to (continuation of) an old normal. Understand why we say that things must change far more radically than that which lets a few people "go back to brunch."

Just when you thought you’d seen it all… Space-time? No, space-crime!
https://www.kwch.com/2026/02/15/kansas-woman-sentenced-federal-prison-lying-law-enforcement-about-space-crime/

Kansas woman sentenced to federal prison for lying to law enforcement about space crime
The 51-year-old woman falsely claimed that her estranged spouse, a NASA astronaut, had illegally accessed her bank account while in space.

The gulf between the utopian (or sometimes dystopian, all publicity being good publicity in an attention economy) visions propagated by those at the bleeding edge of technology and the – for want of a better word - mundanities of real-world implementations has never been wider, as our latest research shows.
h…

Everyone’s using GenAI, few are truly benefiting
In the third part of our coverage of IT trends in 2026, we look at the LLMs used in business and how they are being ...

Die zentrale Lehre aus früheren Energiekrisen ist eindeutig. Wenn Energie knapp und teuer wird, sollte der Staat den Schmerz nicht einfach für alle künstlich ausschalten oder wegsubventionieren.
Denn genau dann braucht es das Preissignal. Hohe Preise sind unangenehm, aber sie senden eine wichtige Botschaft an Unternehmen und Haushalte: Energie ist knapp, also lohnt sich das Sparen.
https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/billiges-benzin-fuer-alle-macht-alles-nur-noch-schlimmer-646425218324

Reading algorithmic feeds is a crazy thing to do: abandoning control over your own influences to a robot programmed by advertisers to manipulate you?
Madness.
I will not allow a robot programmed by advertisers and surveillance capitalists to determine what I read.
I don’t read any robo-feeds and don’t recommend anyone else does.
But people do:
Top five highest reaching smart phone apps:
All designed to harvest data from your phone, three of them owned by one creepy billionaire, and most people use them by looking at a robo-feed suggesting to them what to read and watch or filter.
I don’t use any of them.
I watch some Youtube, but not though their app. Uninstalled that from my phone as soon as I got it. It’s an awful downgrade of just playing in a browser page. I subscribe to some channels there in my RSS reader like a boss. Never watch what their recommendation algorithms suggests.
I tell them what I want to watch, I don’t let them tell ME what to watch, and frankly I wish all those videographers would start a peertube instance or something instead of posting their work on a corporate surveillance site.
I say you should avoid that algorithm stuff, it’s crazy manipulative.
But people should be free to do what they want.
I’m free to block Facebook! And I do: and I encourage everyone else to do so too.
Edit your DNS, block their domain names. Do it.
But if governments or corporations have the power to mandate those choices for everyone, it will go badly.
Prohibitions always do.

How China boosts its humanoid robot industry, giving companies land, favorable bank loan terms, and sometimes subsidizing the robots' purchase price by ~10% (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/china-is-going-al…

Something about being German very consciously, after all those years living in Switzerland, and science history
I'm currently in Mannheim, hotel prices are triple the usual, almost all hotels fully booked. I learned that’s because of “der Kongress ist bis Samstag!”
1/n

I'm so confused I've tried to find any persistent state across de-embed filter invocations and i *think* I've cleared everything out.
If i blow away the fft plan i get no output which is weird and needs further investigation (something not being initialized until the second filter execution or something?).
Wiping all of the VkBuffer's i could find had no effect. I tried adding submits after each shader in case of anything strange happening in command buffers wrt b…

I wanna jump one more time on the whole "distraction" framing, because this is a point that needs to be hammered home (and I need a reminder to write something longer).
Attacks on trans youth are not a distraction from other types of coercion, they are central to it. Attacks on trans youth come from a conceptualization of children as property, which is literally patriarchy in the Roman sense of the legal objectification all people who share a household as belonging to a man. This legal structure, Roman slave law, continues to be the root of property rights and therefore the foundation of capitalism.
But colonialism also extends from it through the infantalization of colonized people as a justification for oppression. This can also be turned inward again manifesting as the justification for police (that is, some people "can't handle themselves and need external authority to act right").
The #Epstein stuff isn't some weird thing that rich people get away with, it's core to how wealth works. Money isn't useful by itself, it's a proxy for power. One manifestation of power is being able to violate laws that constrain others (this is the "freedom of the monarch" that Graeber talks about in Dawn of Everything). The war in Iran, especially the threats of nuclear weapons and genocide is not a distraction from the #EpsteinFiles, but rather a manifestation of the same thing.
Power must be demonstrated to affirm that it is real. War is a demonstration power. Violating the law without consequences is a demonstration of power. The most taboo things are using nuclear weapons and child sexual abuse. He has already done one of those, and he is going to do everything he can to do the other.
These are not distractions, these are all manifestations of the underlying thing that we need to fight. But we need to make sure we're fighting it as a single thing. We have to tie these things together, because if we do not then we risk reproducing the same thing again but worse.

After the whole Adam Something "dating advice for leftist men" thing, I realized I should probably write something about that. I didn't, but I realized I should. Here I am sort of getting around to it.
I had a friend call me an "elder" at one point. I was like 35 at that time, but like... a lot of old leftists are just dead or in prison, so we take what we can get I guess. Being also an elder in the sense that I'm an elder millennial, who is also a parent and married for almost 10 years and all that, I guess I'm technically qualified.
So here it is, dating advice for (straight cis) leftist men:
1. Don't.
That's it, actually. That's the whole thing. Let me explain a bit.
First of all, this is dating advice for neuroatypical folks. We're way overrepresented in both extremes because this system wasn't built for us. And that's who is *the most* confused by all the relationship stuff, and most likely to try to apply all this masculinity/manosphere bullshit. I'm also talking a bit from experience here, as a neruo-spicy trying to "figure out" how to date within a paradigm entirely built around neurotypicals and their relationships. It's garbage. Throw it out. There's nothing worth saving.
His video had some line comparing not having sex to your house being on fire. I'm not gonna bother to quote it because I'm busy with actual life. But like, that's exactly what I'm talking about. I recognize that and it's horribly destructive. Men who buy in to patriarchy actually believe this, because those men value themselves based on (hetro) sex. Yeah, if you think you're worthless because you aren't "getting laid" then yeah, you're gonna feel like that's an emergency.
"Dating" as a paradigm turns humans into roles. It dehumanizes us all, and thus makes human connection much harder. It is a game that, like thermonuclear war, can only be won by not playing.
When you abandon "dating" and just act like a human, everything starts to be easier. There's no such thing as being "friend zoned" because you're just friends. Sometimes friendships become other things, sometimes they don't. It doesn't actually matter, because if you're actually there for friendship then you don't *need* anything else.
My grandma, at 98 I think, gave me some advice. My grandparents always got along well, and were married for enough decades that I listened really closely. She told me I should just do things I loved to do and everything else would work itself out.
And it kind of did.
I understand the fear, the idea that you'll die alone. I get that. I get the loneliness. It all hits a lot harder when you have ADHD emotions and past trauma. I get that. But that fear is self-manifesting. When you build your confidence, when you don't *need* to be "in a relationship," you have more room to actually build relationships. For me, dating was dehumanizing. When I abandoned that, I was able to actually be a good partner, and I was able to find my partner.
I would advise against marriage as well, but we did get married for legal reasons. It can still be hard to maintain that, to see each other as people rather than roles. That becomes extra hard as parents. But the times that we cut through that are the times we're closest. Those are the times when it becomes easier to remember that we're both humans and all human relationships need tending.
Roles don't need to be tended because they are classifications. Classifications are static. But relationships between humans are not. Humans are messy and chaotic. Humans have all kinds of complex needs and desires.
So yeah, don't date. Just be a human and see what happens. Maybe google "relationship anarchy" and see where it takes you.
If you have ADHD, it can be especially useful to understand that relationships with neurotypical folks can be especially difficult. Assume you're incompatible with 90% of the population as your baseline, and you'll start to understand why the standard "dating" thing has made you feel so alienated and miserable.
Neurotypical folks generally have no idea that atypicality exists, much less how it impacts relationships. Having to conform to a neurotypical relationship just adds additional mental strain unless you find someone (really special) who can do at least some of the work.
The ADHD thing was especially important for me. There were so many things I was told to do in specific ways by neurotypicals that never worked for me. Their advice always made me feel like a failure. When I was finally diagnosed, I realized they were just giving advice for the wrong type of brain. It was advice I could never use. Basically all dating advice I ever got fell into this same category.
That's my braindump. Maybe I'll develop it more in the future, but I'm busy so maybe not. I hope it helps someone who is struggling like I was.