Tootfinder

Our Panic World episode about ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis is out.
You can watch the video version by clicking the embed and you can listen to an audio version anywhere you get your podcasts.
The situation in Minneapolis is escalating rapidly.
Last night, the Department of Homeland Security said they arrested eight “rioters,”
after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers tried to clear out protesters camped out at the Whipple Federal Building,
ICE’s de f…

Where are the Democrats???
Read to the end for Randall Girl

If you manage your code on Github, you might expect that you get an email notification if someone opens an issue for your code. But it appears that's no longer true for new repos.
The "Watch" settings are now, by default, "Participating and Mentions". That means unless someone tags your Github username in the issue report, you won't know about it. Yeah, even if it's your own repo in your own namespace. No, I don't know what they were thinking at Githu…

Anyone using UTM/QEMU with a NT 3.51 VM?
I’m looking for correct network settings. It detects NE2000 ISA and assigns an IP but I can’t ping anything.
UTM mentions to set IRQ to 9 but that’s not an option I see (it’s set to 2).
Mainly I want to access a FTP server on the host computer to transfer files.
👉 I know how to use search engines, therefore please only make suggestions if you are personally familiar with this, thank you. 👈

Why your boss, not you, should be replaced by an AI - BBC Science Focus Magazine https://apple.news/AN2uxvB-cSra7xkU4Vi2PcA

Paul’s Patented 3 out of 2 Post™:
This grab-and-run strategy explains a lot of the incidents you hear about. ICE’s targeting strategy here is mostly chaotic and opportunistic. They can’t actually try to identify an undocumented immigrant, or even an •immigrant• at all, based on any kind of real evidence. They are mostly just running around trying to catch a brown-enough-skinned person in a vulnerable moment. Bully cowards.
This is one reason why you hear about them grabbing random people out of cars, grabbing US citizens, leaving a car sitting in the middle of the street, leaving kids abandoned in the car, chasing down a random person and then suddenly dispersing. They •know• it’s all disorganized, but they’re desperate to get in and out fast — and they have to hit those quotas somehow.
3/2

So am I getting this right? The guy who vibecoded an insecure, expensive, worse version of IFTTT with delusions of grandeur ("OpenClaw") is now claiming that he'll solve the problem of "prompt injections" at OpenAI?
My man, you are you out of your depth, it's not even funny.

Was just reminded that I needed to kick in some more money to the BlackSky stuff.
Considering the money I’ve kicked in for great Mastodon clients and instances, the work Rudy and others are doing is well worth the same! https://mastodon.sandwich.net/@Sharksonaplane/114997406…

"But as you can see, the programs do come at a cost... we estimate about $27.4m a year goes to the administrative costs and also the projected fare revenue reduction."
I'm waiting for the slide where they estimate the much higher cost of all the unmetered parking spaces across the city, and of turning off meters at 6pm and on Sundays. I'm sure that'll definitely be later in this presentation, right?

It's that time again. Please #giveblood if you are able. It takes an hour of your time and comes with a selection of snacks 😄 My blood is so tip top today that it's able to go to babies.

Series B, Episode 08 - Hostage
JENNA: It's Travis's move. We still control the Liberator.
CALLY: A sitting target.
JENNA: Not for him.
CALLY: Not for anybody.
JENNA: Where are you going?
CALLY: I'm going to clear the neutron blasters for firing,
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/208/499

TMW #DonLemon DGAF.
“You know what Donald #Trump? Fuck you. Just fuck all the way off. What an asshole & a small-minded, small dick shit to do. You are an immature child. You are a bigot, a fucking racist & a small penis asshole. Just hateful and delusional. Just fuck all the way off.&qu…

One of the things that made organizing a lot easier with the GDC was a thing called "GDC in a box." It was a zip file with all kinds of resources. There was a directory structure, templates for all kinds of things like meetings and paperwork you had to file (for legal reasons) and "read me" files.
We had all kinds of support. There were people you could talk to who had been there. There were people you could call to walk through legal paperwork (taxes). Centralized orgs are vulnerable and easy to infiltrate. They're easy for states to shut down. But there are benefits to org structures.
I think it's possible to have the type of support we had with the GDC, but without the politics of an org (even the IWW). I hope this most recent essay has some of the same properties. I hope that it makes building something new, something no one has really imagined before, easier.
This whole project is something a bit different. It's a collective vision and collective project, from the ground up. Some of it has felt like a brain dump, just getting things that have been swimming around in my head down somewhere. But I hope this feels more like an invitation.
Everything thus far written is all useless unless people do things with it. Only from that point does it become a thing that lives, a thing with its own consciousness that can't be controlled by any individual human.
Tech billionaire cultists want to bring a new era of humanity with AGI. That is definitely not possible with LLMs, and may not be possible at all. But there is a super intelligence that is possible, though it's been constrained by capitalism: collective human intelligence.
The grand vision of the tech dystopians is that of the ultimate slave that can then enslave all humans on their behalf. I think we can build a humanity that can liberate itself from their grasp, crush their vision, and build for itself a world in which people will never be enslaved again. Not only do I think it's possible, I think it's necessary. I think there are only two choices: collective liberation or death.
And that's what I plan to write about next time to wrap this whole project up. Today things often feel impossible. But people talked about the Middle Ages as though they were the end of the world, and then everything changed in unimaginable ways. Everything can, and will, change again.
"The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."

You've heard of James Joyce. You've heard of Samuel Beckett. You've heard of Carl Jung.
Have you heard of Lucia Joyce?
I had not, until this morning, when her life (and her FIFTY YEARS incarcerated in psychiatric institutions) was brought to my attention by an (of course) female friend.
If this story does not make you an all-men-are-bastards #feminist, you have no…

Lucia Joyce - Wikipedia

Re: discourse about #FediSoWhite
I'm a white man. Was on Twitter throughout #BLM and gained an awful lot of free education from Black folks on there. That was the start of me consciously following diverse folks which is a strategy that's improved my life immensely.
Back on Twitter before the Muskening, there was a lot of diversity. Black Twitter was a thing, and not just first-world (anyone else remember "O jewa ke eng?"). When I went looking for people to follow to diversify my feed, I found them in abundance.
That's why it's so clearly false to me when people claim that the fediverse is secretly diverse, and why anyone making that claim sounds suspect to me. Sure there are a ton of great Black and other POC folks you can find on here, if you look hard. But it's nowhere near the levels of diversity and community that were on Twitter. Which you would know had you been following those people before, so now I have to assume you weren't, and wonder why you feel qualified to make statements about diversity even though you haven't made an effort to engage with diverse voices before?
Also, if you were actually following some of the excellent POC voices on here, you'd know that across different servers and interest groups, almost every group has had a discussion of #FediSoWhite at some point. If all the Black people you follow are independently talking about the lack of community and diversity here, you've either got to believe them or start putting on your clown makeup, and the later is absolutely a choice.

I am seeking speakers for my @… & @… meetups. We prefer in-person presentations in Frankfurt or the Mannheim area, but remote talks are also an option.
If you have anything interesting to share with us, let us know. We'd be …

I would like to once again ask people to please not spoil for @… what he hasn’t discovered yet, thereby ruining my plans for future posts :P
you are not an all-powerful entity, the whole point of this account is kel fending for HIMSELF

I would like to once again ask people to please not spoil for @… what he hasn’t discovered yet, thereby ruining my plans for future posts :P
you are not an all-powerful entity, the whole point of this account is kel fending for HIMSELF

Why we devs don't "just do ___":
https://loadbearingtomato.com/p/why-chasing-twitters-approval-doesnt
> “what people say” is data, not truth. It is a story they are telling you. That story has value, but only if you don’t blindly interpre…

Why chasing twitter's approval doesn't work
The opinions you believe are universal are being fed to you by an algorithm designed to show you what you want.

A rogue AI enrolls in your online class, then publicly shames you when you remove it. This just happened in a dev forum. Are we ready if it happens to our courses?
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonippolito_a-rogue…

me: *low whistles*
me: "Damn, check out THOSE bollards!"
8yo: "What?"
me: "These metal things. they're nice, aren't they? No drivers parking on this sidewalk!"
8yo: *lays down on one*
8yo: "Yeah, they're good, I guess."
#SafeStreets

Apple hardware really is crazily good compared to everything else out there, as long as you have the money for it. Exotic RISC workstations are very much back! Strangely, I don't want one like I wanted an SGI in the 1990s.

That e-bike you bought your teen might be an illegal electric motorbike – and the risks are real
https://theconversation.com/that-e-bike-you…

That e-bike you bought your teen might be an illegal electric motorbike – and the risks are real
From serious injuries to thrill-seeking rideouts, teens on overpowered e-bikes have provoked a media frenzy. But the risks of these vehicles is very real.

Series B, Episode 07 - Killer
BELLFRIAR: A high point in your scientific career, Gambrill. Just think of it, in less than twenty minutes you could be shaking hands with an exomorph.
GAMBRILL: Not if it's hostile sir, I've got my pension to think about.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/207/160

Just got a new monitor, an ASUS ProArt PA32QCV. First time I've had a high density display for my Windows desktop. It's nice!
(Eloi friends, you are welcome to mock me on this one: it took Windows forever to catch up on Retina and it's still behind.)

Those are all wonderful films, but The Princess Bride is quite simply the perfect movie. @… https://flipboard.social/@CultureDesk/11572588…

Today I learned… if you are doing something naughty in JavaScript* (and let’s face it, of course you are) that TypeScript’s type checker is giving you an error for and you – being you – want to keep being naughty (because you can and that’s half the fun), there’s a better way to silence the error than using @ts-ignore which, umm, just ignores it.
Instead, you can use @ts-expect-error (with the error message, to remind yourself what you’re expecting).
This way, if the error ever g…

Seeking cover under the government umbrella from liability while the master of desaster you got elected calls climate change a hoax. Fossil fuel companies are truely ruled by weak men & even weaker free market propagandists. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/13/republicans-climate-liability-shield-fossil-fuel-industry?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Quahogs are VERY long-lived clams. This wise one was born 100 before Shakespeare. Cherish them. If you eat them, venerate their little clam bodies, first.
From "New Scientist", Tom Gauld comic.
#AncientWisdom equals #GoodEating

Geometry study (shadows are weird).
Back story: In some parts of Vancouver, if you’re putting up a new building (typically condo/retail) you can get tax breaks or more square feet or some such bonus if you preserve the original facade. This place was torn down quite a while ago but the facade, propped up by the metal framework, remains. A policy misfire in this case because it was a really crappy brick frontage and would not be missed.

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

An Ai2 research scientist argues that AGI, as commonly conceived, will not emerge because it ignores, among other things, the physical realities of computation (Tim Dettmers)
https://timdettmers.com/2025/12/10/why-agi-will-not-happen/

oooof. this incumbent running for re-election to the SF Bike Coalition board is literally a landlord lawyer.
if you're a member, the voting details are here and there are 10 candidates for 8 seats. https://sfbike.org/news/meet-the-candidat…

After fully working from home for three months while the office was renovated, I had to RTO today. This is what was in the "welcome back" bag waiting at each of our desks. I dunno if everyone got identical items or if there was a larger selection of cheap trinkets with different nonsense motivational phrases on them.

I love Flatpaks.
I hate Flatpaks.
It really is a “Haßliebe” at the moment.
It's *finally* easy to get the latest version of an app. (Although outdated Apps are traditionally a #Debian/#Ubuntu problem.) Using them feels mostly native now.
But they are confusing: You can install an app twice!? The data path is different. And they're still not good with hardware:

And I'm ashamed to be an American
Where fascist thugs are free.
And I won't forget the ones they killed
Or maimed or took from me.
And I'll gladly stand up, next to you,
And shame and film today.
'Cause there ain't no doubt I love my home.
Let's free the USA.
#uspol

netpbm tools are a suite of tools to convert and fiddle with the ppm/pbm/pgm (collectively pnm) file formats, which are pretty much the simplest image formats on the planet, which even have an ASCII version; so if you have a simple script you want to generate simple images with they're a good choice of format, and if you have them, the pbm tools can convert to/from pretty much anything else or do simple scale/etc - lighter than ImageMagick say.

Wikipedia at 25 -
"Wikipedia isn’t too big to fail. If volunteers keep dropping off, if people only complain about Wikipedia without once trying to edit it, then donations alone won’t move the needle."
if you are not already an editor, think about doing it!
…

When you find an issue with software you use that you can fix right away, what are hurdles you are prepared to take while sending that fix upstream?
#FLOSS #supplychain #opensource

Rorschach test — what do you see?

Me, in my fedi-hole: It seems like the tide is finally shifting and academics are rejecting GenAI.
Academics in my work email: Join the revolution! Produce more papers faster with AI! This is Science!
#genai #science #academia

"Internet shutdowns in Africa: A human rights and democratic crisis
Internet shutdowns have become a growing threat to Africa’s democracy. They are an increasingly common part of the authoritarian toolkit used by governments to control information and suppress dissent. Here’s why you should care."

Internet shutdowns in Africa: A human rights and democratic crisis
Internet shutdowns have become a growing threat to Africa’s democracy. They are an increasingly common part of the authoritarian toolkit used by governments to control information and suppress dissent. Here's why you should care.

The hashtag #fedihelp just dropped me in yet another rabbit hole. How about setting up a ActivityPub crowd sourcing system?
Idea: it could be a webpage with payment option, and an initial ActivityPub post per campaign. There you describe, why you need money, and how much. Maybe some automatic posts, when some thresholds are reached. And you can write about the progress in responses to th…

Fachgespräch mit einem Senior Visiting Fellow letzte Woche.
"I still need a dress for the ball. Or a suit."
"Have you thought of a colour yet?"
"It has to match the shoes, which are pink."
"What about silver?"
"Meh, silver has the tendency to make bodily bulges apparent that you maybe don't want to show so much."
"That's an interesting point."

Web dependencies are broken. Can we fix them?
Dear JS ecosystem, I love you, but you have a dependency management problem when it comes to the Web, and the time has come for an intervention.
— by @…
🤷 https://

Web dependencies are broken. Can we fix them? • Lea Verou
Dear JS ecosystem, I love you, but you have a dependency management problem when it comes to the Web, and the time has come for an intervention.

My loose process for evaluating an ACR (VPAT®):
https://adrianroselli.com/2026/01/how-i-evaluate-an-acr-vpat.html
You may have your own thoughts / ideas. Add them to the comments.
I was also torn between the meat grinder and a Plinko metaphor.

How I Evaluate an ACR (VPAT®)
ACRs are Accessibility Conformance Reports, which are the output of a VPAT, or Voluntary Product Accessibility Template maintained by ITIC, or the Information Technology Industry Council (which is why VPAT often has a ® symbol hanging off it). An organization may fill out the template to indicate how or if…

Meta is putting a "Name Tag" feature in Ray-Bans
- facial recognition through the glasses' camera.
You look at someone, AI tells you who they are.
In an internal document, the company wrote that the timing is good
because civil society groups are busy with politics
and won't cause problems.

Lukasz Olejnik (@lukaszolejnik.bsky.social)
First they'll give it to blind people, because who's going to attack technology for the blind, or people with hearing problems (like me)? I admit that! Privacy risk review procedures have been loosened. 15, 10, 5 years ago this would have been a major controversy. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-recognition-smart-glasses.html

I love how Fediverse apps like #Peertube and Mastodon are connected and you can like videos from Mastodon. However, the user experience sucks. If I'm on a Peertube page I need to have an account on that server to be able to like videos.
To avoid that, I need to paste the Peertube URL into Mastodon's search to see the video's post and I can like it from there.

"Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models" published by an Anthropic researcher 2025-10.
fails to demonstrate introspection. it does call out the difference between "real" introspection and "confabulated" introspection, but the experiments are indistinguishable from activation steering. if you manipulate an LLM state so it's likely to emit tokens about dogs, and then prompt it "do you detect the thought I injected?" of course…

Yes, exactly!
https://discuss.systems/@ricci/115687153999092934

Do any of y'all submit your top 10 metal things of the year to the Metal Archives for their poll? I haven't before, but now that I have an account there, I'm gonna do it this year. I guess as long as you have an account there before December 2, and it can be LPs, EPs, or splits even as long as they were released this year and were new material.. the rules are on this forum thread along with discussion, and you'd submit a DM there to the poster of the thread.

Kimi Onoda, Japan's new Minister of State for Economic Security, is a 43 year old half-Irish ex-game industry PR femcel with an extensive history of defending her exclusive attraction to anime boys on twitter

Nice blog in the discussion about AI & coding,
"AI can replace most of programming, but programming isn’t the job.
Programming is a task. It’s one of many things you do as part of your work. But if you’re a software engineer, your actual job is more than typing code into an editor."
https://<…

AI Can Write Your Code. It Can’t Do Your Job.
The companies building AI are spending billions to acquire engineers, not replace them. Here’s why your job is safer than you think.

Want to try an imagine how difficult things could get for us in the EU? (Or elsewhere?) You dont even have to try hard.
If you are responsible for planning, running, maintaining or procuring IT infrastructure of any kind for any organisation, this is essential reading.
https://ecfr.eu/publication/get-over-your-x-a-european-plan-to-escape-american-technology/

The most obvious tell of this sort of incident is the phone call.
The only IT or #infosec folks who will proactively call you about an attempt at hijacking an account are those of your employer or *maybe* your access provider.
Google, Microsoft,Apple, etc. are not calling everyone with suspicious activity on their accounts. There are not enough support agents on the planet to do that…

When asking someone to do something it's important to be clear about everything you are asking them to do, and when you are asking them to do it, up front.
Increasingly I'm asked to do something, I look at my schedule and other commitments and agree to the ask, and then weeks later am informed that "as part of X (what I agreed to) everyone is expected to do Y (something time consuming that wasn't mentioned before)" or "we need you to provide X (something necessary the day of the event) a week in advance (when there was no indication of this early deadline at the initial ask)".
This means that the calculations someone made regarding whether they could participate are based an incomplete understanding of what is required. That's not fair and it either results in forcing the participant to deprioritize something else or makes them push back on something they never agreed to and potentially withdraw.

Madison Bikes sent me an email about winter biking that said:
"Please at least have a studded front tire, especially if you bike on streets. Traction and control are well worth the $50 investment."
So I replied and asked where the heck they are seeing studded tires for $50 USD because they are twice that price everywhere I look.
#biking

apologists gotta apolgist :-) Mr. Mearsheimer you are wrong!
https://universeodon.com/@KFuentesGeorge/115633495500461068

Degrowth cabaret comes to London (and other news)
Degrowth Cabaret! LONDON FRI 23 JANUARY 10.30am – 4.30pm Siobhan Davies Studios If you are an economist interested in performance, a performer interested in economics or simply curious in how these seemingly distinct languages can be bridged, then this session is for you! But don’t worry, you won’t need prior knowledge of economics or the arts! Joaquín Pereira (economist and dancer) invites you to a day-long lab where…

Degrowth cabaret comes to London (and other news)
Degrowth Cabaret! LONDON FRI 23 JANUARY 10.30am – 4.30pm Siobhan Davies Studios If you are an economist interested in performance, a performer interested in economics or simply curious in how these…

Adobe Re-Animate 😁

An LLM is a machine for giving confident plausible answers to whatever question is thrown at it.
The methods it uses to do this mean that (for questions that are not too challenging) there is a good chance that the answer is correct as well as confident.
Confident is guaranteed, correct is not. Is that what you need?

This week I’m thinking back to this powerful quote (long-circulating, origin unclear):
❝
Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person”
and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”
and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “If you won’t respect me I won’t respect you,” and what they mean is “If you won’t treat me like an authority then I won’t treat you like a person.”
❞
Re @…: https://mas.to/@fsinn/115874975151407409

🥳 Auto-Encrypt Localhost version 9.0.0 released
Bye bye, Windows.
• Windows is no longer supported as Microsoft is complicit in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people¹ and Small Technology Foundation² stands in solidarity with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement³. Windows is an ad-infested and surveillance-ridden dumpster fire of an operating system and, alongside supporting genocide, you are putting both yourself and others at risk by using it.
Enjo…

auto-encrypt-localhost
Automatically provisions and installs locally-trusted TLS certificates for Node.js https servers in 100% JavaScript (without any native dependencies like mkcert and certutil).

Muhal Richard Abrams - "Afrisong" (1975)
#NowPlaying

The Dying Grove: A Novel Born from the Collision of Joyce and Mycorrhiza
Some books are written. Others are grown. "The Dying Grove" belongs to the second category, and that distinction is not metaphor but method. This novel, the first in a new series called Fractional Fiction, emerged from an experiment in literary hybridization: what happens when you take the formal architecture of modernist masters and seed it with contemporary scientific research? The result is…

The Dying Grove: A Novel Born from the Collision of Joyce and Mycorrhiza | David Boles, Blogs
Some books are written. Others are grown. “The Dying Grove” belongs to the second category, and that distinction is not metaphor but method. This novel, the first in a new series called…

Sigh, having fun with addressing information questions.
Hint ->
For Canadian addresses, street address, city/town, postal code and province ARE NOT OPTIONAL fields. It is NOT acceptable to have province as part of the CITY name. Even where you have postal boxes there is an address for that.
Same goes for other counties. Find out what the rules are and then put in edit checks.
Is it too early for Scotch?

In case you ever wondered what it costs to sell an item on Ebay Australia but with a German Ebay account. Yes, that's entirely possible and the system handles it all beautifully. Kudos to the programmers who had to work this out.
As you can probably see, I'm not doing this for profit, but for fun and to prevent waste.
Are you into old Pokémon stuff? Everything is $5 now: …

The US military has always had a massive global advantage against enemies by having bases all over the world. There are bases in every NATO country. This would appear to be a powerful threat to anyone willing to oppose American hegemon, and under normal conditions it would be.
But a lot of those kids serving on those bases joined, not because they love America but, because they needed a ticket out of poverty. They joined for the education, for the money, maybe a bit for the adventure, but, more than anything, to escape the ghetto or podunk backwater that trapped them. Under normal times, this is the best deal they could expect. Maybe they risk their lives, usually they sit around being bored for a few years, and they get to come out with respect and paid college.
But what they are being offered is normal in most of the countries they're stationed in. Free healthcare, cheap or free education, is just what citizens in a lot of countries have come to expect. If the US attacked a NATO country, how many would snap up citizenship if they were given a chance to defect? Bonus points for taking some hardware with you, I'm sure.
But there are some who love their country. There are some patriotic Americans on those bases. Some of them joined specifically to protect the US from all enemies, foreign *and* domestic. Given a chance to fulfill that oath or violate international law, what happens?
There are a good number of former military folks too who now are unsafe in the countries they served, who would do just about anything for citizenship in any EU country and almost any NATO ally. Some of those folks know things they swore an oath to never share, but the country they swore an oath to has betrayed them. Today there's no value in leaking those secrets, but in a war between the US and NATO allies things would be different. Some of those former military folks still believe in their oath, and know exactly who the real enemy is. What happens when there's a real threat of war, when they can use their knowledge to fulfill that oath to protect the US against those domestic threats?
There are a bunch of civilian tech workers who have become targets of the regime. Some of them had clearance, or know about the skeletons in the closet. They know about critical infrastructure, classified systems, all sorts of things that would be extremely valuable to an opponent. But the opponents of the US have always been a frightening *other*, never familiar societies these folks look up to, have visited, have thought about moving to, are trying to escape to.
All I'm saying here is that invading Venezuela and kidnapping the president has a very different calculus than does attacking Greenland. I don't know if Trump or his people are able to understand that, but if he and his folks aren't then I hope European leaders are. But more than that, I hope it never comes down to finding out.
But perhaps we should all think about what we would do to make sure things ended quickly if American leadership ever made such an incredible mistake.

Travel planning with Google Gemini. It's astonishingly good at this. I give it an itinerary and it gives me detailed and personalized suggestions like "You have this reserved, but note it's 1.5km of walking over steep, uneven surfaces. As an alternative it's easy just to go into town and look around."
I love being able to throw an enormous amount of data at the LLM and have it make sense of it. In this case it doesn't matter if the answers are not 100% correct as long as they are close and the suggestions are verifiable.

Been starting a habit of writing down story/game ideas as I have them even though most of them will never seriously get started, let alone finished. It's been fun since writing things down gives me a chance to think them through a bit more than just pondering them in my head. Anyways, here's a #GameDesign idea:
"Grand" - is a "reverse metroidvania" in which as a grandparent, you slowly lose movement options as the story progresses, requiring more and more convoluted routes through the map to reach the same areas. You do still explore "new" areas in memory mode (and unlock movement options like a bike in your memories) before traversing the areas again in the diegetic present. The story follows your quest to protect a grandchild from the machinations of a Kafkaesque state, first trying to track them down within the system and then trying to get them released. Each "boss" is "fought" through an abstracted conversation system where memories, keepsakes, and various kinds of emotional/logical appeals wear down your opponent's nihilism and/or fear until they're willing to help you. Normal "enemies" are just people on the street who might bump into you and drain some of your stamina as you pass by if you don't issue a properly-timed "excuse me" or the like.

Series D, Episode 07 - Assassin
VERLIS: I'm sorry, Commissioner. I can break the rules in private, not in public.
SERVALAN: I want him! You can name your price.
VERLIS: You'll have to bid for him like anyone else.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/407/152 B7B5

*clicks on Indeed.com unsubscribe link*
*gets caught in an infinite loop of cloudflare 'click here to prove you are human' bullshit*

Ed Zitron offers 15K words on whether Nvidia is like Enron (or several other famous fraudsters) or not. It's amusing and erudite and most people just won't have time to plow through it. Which is a pity, because 80% of the way through there’s a section called:
“Is NVIDIA Shipping Millions Of GPUs And Putting Them In Warehouses? Where Are The 6 Million Shipped Blackwell GPUs?”
His findings are absolutely shocking. Tl;dr: That headline just above.

NVIDIA Isn't Enron - So What Is It?
If you enjoy this free newsletter, why not subscribe to Where's Your Ed At Premium? It's $7 a month or $70 a year, and helps support me putting out these giant free newsletters! At the end of November, NVIDIA put out an internal memo (that was leaked to Barron's reporter

What do I want you to know, watching from far away?
I want you to know that if you are not hearing about ICE swarming all the hell over my city, you are not hearing the actual news.
I want you to know that if all you see is video of ICE marching off Very Dangerous Criminals in an orderly and authoritative way, you are not hearing the actual news.
I want you to know that these turds act tough, but run away • every • time • they think too many people are watching or there might be video.
4/

One way to identify if something is a fad or bubble is if the hypers and the doomers are actually the same people.
Neither are actually talking about the thing.
The hypers ceaselessly tell you that you will look bad if you don’t use the thing.
The doomers spin tales on how it will end your way of life or worse.
They both work to keep the thing in your mind while never actually talking about the thing, in an endless parade of manipulating your emotions.

Because #accessibility is out of scope for Baseline, devs may not know how poorly supported a feature is and miss an opportunity to vote for things that are barriers to users and risks to orgs.
“Vote for the web features you want to see”
https://

PS. With all the Discord stuff, in case you wonder why you never see me promoting Matrix, it’s not because it’s a usability nightmare (which it is) but because it’s made by the kind of people who’d be happy to call ICE a customer.
The “F” in FOSS doesn’t stand for fascism.
@…

After having switched to Zen Browser with its "Glances" feature (it kinda opens a link in a small overlay window on top of where you are now and you can turn that window into a new tab or split view if you want) Firefox's "we have an AI that generates a wrong preview for a link you click before going there" feature looks even dumber.
Like: Having a way to preview links is really useful. But only if it gives you an actual idea what's going on there

My own little experiment for you to try:
Open Facebook. (You won’t hear me say that often!)
Scroll. You don’t have to read anything. Just scroll.
Every once in a while, click on an ad — but not the top ad. Make it the second in the list on the side, or one far down your feed. You can open it in a background tab and then close the tab. Tell the model it didn’t •quite• get you right — but you’re engaged, it just needs to drift a little further from who it thinks you are.
Wait for the ads to update. Repeat. And repeat. Watch the model degrade.
To this day, Facebook thinks I’m a gun owner who wants testosterone supplements.

Federal immigration officers have started using Renee Good’s death to threaten more U.S. citizens.
A video posted to Reddit showed a screaming ICE agent repeatedly threatening to kill a man who was sitting in his car, asking how he didn’t “learn from what just happened.”
In the two-minute clip, a masked agent wearing a Minnesota Timberwolves hat approached the vehicle already furious, while the driver rolled down his window.
“Stop fucking following us, you are impeding opera…

“You Did Not Learn?”: ICE Uses Renee Good’s Death as Threat
One protester said an agent told her, “That is why we killed that lesbian b*tch.”

Series B, Episode 02 - Shadow
ENFORCER: Before or after he finds out that you are lying.
LARGO: Was I lying?
ENFORCER: It would make me very unhappy to think that you tried to use me, like some fool.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/202/373 B7B3

It's probably worth mentioning that I went to an anarchist event last night and ended up talking to someone about the fact that there are like 2 regular anarchist camps in the Netherlands (not including anarchist adjacent and nearby like CCC).
Meanwhile, I'm reading the noodsituatie packet from the NCTV and there are definitely some gaps. Like, it talks about what you need for 72 hours without services, including water, but doesn't really bring up sanitation beyond "have some hand sanitizer."

oh nice, redpocket brought back my favorite sim plan (for my kids), and they upgraded it!
For $30/yr, you get unlimited text/talk, and 200MB per month. For those of you with low data needs (or who specifically want to limit their kids data usage): https://www.ebay.com/itm/136840233242

$2.50/Mo RedPocket Prepaid Wireless Phone Plan+Kit: UNLIMITED Talk /Text + 200MB | eBay
Choose the network that works best for you and your phone! THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE" BASIS WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. B. Text Services. 200MB 5G Data. E. RedPocket service plans are for individual use only and not for resale.

This sucks, but I don’t think any organized constituency is going to fight it so it’s as good as law. Coming to SF: more businesses where you can’t buy anything without being added to their email list for the rest of your life.
https://missionlocal.org/2026/02/sf-cash…

‘Ethos of inclusivity’ no more: S.F. looks to repeal law requiring stores to accept cash
Seven years after San Francisco passed a law requiring brick and mortar stores to accept cash from customers, citing an “ethos of inclusivity,” city leaders are seeking to repeal it. 

They see an SUV. “Is it ICE??” They see a car slow down. “I bet it’s ICE!” They see tinted windows. “I saw ICE!!”
ICE is the boogeyman to little kids now. Just in case anyone out there is in ICE is starting to wonder, “Are we the baddies?,” well, you are literally terrifying the children.
And in case you’re in it for the racism and relishing the thought of little Black and brown children being scared — no, you are the boogeyman to •all• the kids. They’re not afraid of drug dealers now. They’re afraid of you.
2/2

Just finished "Endgames" by Ru Xu, sequel to "Newsprints." I was happy to see the characters from the first book get their endings, but Xu feels incredibly out of her depth writing about the politics of empire and the power/complicity of the press, which completely dampened my enjoyment.
As just one example, there's a ton of interesting nuance to explore behind the idea of a disabled imperial ruler and how disadvantage/persecution (from which you have been effectively shielded) does not justify harming others. This book explores none of that.
I think it does serve as a great example of how severely one limits one's own imagination when one buys into the myth of nationhood as natural/inevitable/good. It's not that Xu's politics are especially authoritarian, I think, but that she's just (been kept?) resoundingly naïve, and so her plot resolution feels childish (or perhaps that's an insult to children).
#AmReading #ReadingNow



Both Quikscript and Shavian were essentially the results of a design competition,
sponsored--posthumously--by playwright George Bernard Shaw,
who laid out the terms in his will.
Shaw wanted someone to create an ideal phonetic alphabet for English that trumped Pitman shorthand.
British designer Ronald Kingsley Read, a finalist in the 1960s competition, designed both Quikscript and Shavian, the latter being named in Shaw's honor

Here are 50 Different Written Languages. Can You Tell Which are Fake? - Core77
Below are examples of 50 different written languages. Unless you're Indiana Jones, I doubt you'll recognize more than a handful. However, of these 50 scripts, five of them are contrived 20th Century creations. Two of them are shorthand-style phonetic alphabets designed for English; one of them is an ideographic writing

Series D, Episode 11 - Orbit
SERVALAN: Don't concern yourself, Egrorian. I encourage ambition.
EGRORIAN: I never conspired against you, I swear it! Orac, acknowledge my instructions. [Orac buzzes, but says nothing.] I don't understand.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/411/363 B7B3…

If you are an anti-fascist, you are against petroleum. Petroleum funds fascism globally. It is at the heart of the military industrial complex driving global imperialism, from both the US and Russia. Motonormitivity is fascist, both in it's elitist roots and in it's ties to historical fascism (Hitler hated bikes, just on principle). Oil is militarism.
Oil is the dominant resource which drives war, both in terms of it being the primary spoil wars are fought over and in terms of fueling the military vehicles and weapons that carry out those wars. Practically every war since (and including) WWII has been over oil. Genocides are carried out to secure oil. Gaza is over oil, in more ways than one.
Oil is the absolute enemy, and AI is simply an extension of that: an attempt to atomize us so we can't resist the oil-centric global order, one last grasp at the control over our lives oil has given to those whose power is now threatened by a solar punk future.
"I haven't written for a few weeks now. As I write the closing chapter and begin rewriting previous sections, everything feels both more distant and more immediate. The working title [Kairos] has only continued to feel more and more resonant, both during the writing and during my pause."
Now is the time to resist by making something different, by creating a world fundamentally opposed to these systems of oppression.
This is the last in my Kairos series. From here on out I'll be editing to try and make it more of a book than a series of posts. Thanks to everyone who has helped so far. All editing is welcome (typos, spell checks, questions and challenges). Between ADHD and dyslexia, it's always hard for my brain to notice mistakes in my own text so I always appreciate the support of those who can.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/kairos

8yo: *cackles as she steals my veggie chicken nuggets*
me: "Hey, what are you doing?!"
8yo: *runs away*
me: "Those aren't even real, they're fake chicken. I thought you were a carnivore?"
8yo: "I'm an omnivore. I'll OM-NOM-NOM anything!"

This is at Selby & Western, between Nina’s and W. A. Frost.
Some context for out-of-towners: this is a fairly affluent neighborhood, fairly white, mix of renters and homeowners, lots of lavishly restored 19th- and early 20th-century brick buildings and popular restaurants. There are old railroad tycoon mansions a few blocks away on Summit Ave. The St. Paul cathedral is just up the street.
If you were trying to preserve a sense of safety and normalcy among the comfortable and the influential in order to survive an upcoming election, this is the sort of place you’d tell your secret police goons to steer clear of.
Photos are from here: https://bsky.app/profile/andrewkarre.bsky.social/post/3melwi55orm2w

Re “apply the pressure anyway:” that’s advice I got from…Keith Ellison.
I was part of a citizen group pressuring him to vote for the ACA when he was in the House. He met with us, and gave us an impassioned speech about universal care and how the ACA was a good first step but insufficient, relating it to the less-remembered civil rights acts of the 1950s that laid the groundwork for the big one in 1964.
Somebody from the group finally asked him, “Why are we meeting with you? You’re already convinced!”
He replied (paraphrasing here): “I •need• your pressure. I need it even if I already agree. If you’re pressuring me, then I can get on the floor of the House and say ‘My constituents are beating down the doors of my office! This has tremendous support!’ I can tell my colleagues in private about how agitated voters are. If you apply pressure, I can pass that pressure forward. I need you to do it! •That• is why you’re meeting with me.”
And now Keith Ellison is MN Attorney General. He’s already started doing the right thing. Follow his advice, and apply that pressure!

Series A, Episode 13 - Orac
GAN: Better still if there are three of us.
AVON: Better still if you... [He stops abruptly. They look at each other and then all settle down to continue waiting.]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/113/227 B7B3

Series D, Episode 02 - Power
VILA: Outside.
PELLA: Are the others looking for him?
VILA: Yes, we think he may have had an accident. [pause] How do you know about the others?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/402/109 B7B4

Excellent words from @…, shared here with permission:
❝My favorite piece of advice for protests has been, “accept side quests”. Sure, you can show up, shout a bit, and go home - there's value in just uncorking some frustration. But don't look past meeting your like-minded neighbors. If you're an introvert, like me, that may induce anxiety just thinking about it. But there's all sorts of easy conversation starters - people spent time on their signs, and chances are they would love to talk about them - how they made them or what they were inspired by. Viola! Now you're talking! Everybody at a protest is looking for something - whether it is a word of encouragement or witty comment, a pointer to a place to go or a thing to join, that something may be you!❞

#Blakes7 Series B, Episode 04 - Horizon
RO: Let her go.
KOMMISSAR: She's no good to you, Ro. None at all. You must be rid of her. She should not have been brought back to the palace.
RO: You are, I think, mistaken, Kommissar. She means us no harm.

Series C, Episode 03 - Volcano
HOWER: You somehow overcame your peaceful conditioning. When you were a child the therapists said that you were at risk. I welcomed this possibility, because I needed, I thought, one man who could think aggressively like my enemies.
BERSHAR: I have not renounced the theory of peace. Servalan is more powerful than these people. Tomorrow or the next day they will go, and Servalan will be back with her battle fleet.

Series C, Episode 11 - Moloch
TARRANT: Yes, Vila. I take the point. You're obviously far cleverer than I.
VILA: Right.
TARRANT: [Examining a map] So - this is where we're going.
VILA: What? - Where are we going?
TARRANT: To destroy a computer.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/311/468

Series A, Episode 05 - The Web
BLAKE: Hold off long enough to make a deal.
AVON: You're going to have to be quick, Blake. Those pursuit ships are coming this way.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/105/467 B7B5

Series C, Episode 09 - Sarcophagus
TARRANT: Don't try and bluff your way with me, Avon. I know what's been needling you right from the start. With Blake gone, you thought you'd got it made, didn't you? Thought you'd got control of this ship and a crew of three who'd say, "Yes, Avon. Whatever you want, Avon." [Cally puts the bookscreen down.] But you reckoned without me. [Cally starts toward the artifact.]
AVON: That wouldn't be too difficult…