Tootfinder

@… look… when I am driving down the road as a 43 year old person in a Honda Odyssey minivan and I see another person driving a Honda Odyssey minivan — I always say to myself: “MINIVAN BUDDIES” even though the factory year of the minivan may not be identical
I think what I’m trying to say is that we needn’t be age identical twins to be friends

“When we think of technology as a tool that can be used for good as well as evil, we also think that we are in control of why, when, and for what it is used. But this is only partly the case. We may decide to buy a car to drive ourselves to work. And thus we may think of the car as a tool to achieve our goal of getting to work as fast as possible. But we never made the decision that fast is better than slow. It’s an idea that comes with the car. So is the idea that it should be easy and conveni…

This is as good a time as any for a thought experiment.
You're in Nazi Germany. You know about the camps, you know what they do, you see the ash fall, you smell it. People who resist alone are killed, some are sent to the camps too. You're afraid to even talk to people about it for fear that they'll turn you in.
You think back to when the camps were being built. You had all the warning signs, but you didn't know how to interpret them. You could believe it would happen. You thought you'd have a chance to vote him out. You thought there might be another way. You thought maybe things would turn out differently if you just sat tight, kept your head down, kept yourself safe.
You see a family being dragged from their home. You know they will be killed. You want to fight, not just for them but for yourself. You opposed Hitler, and at any point you know you could be on the list... Even if you do nothing.
You wish you could rise up, shoot the SS, open the gates, fight it all. You know you aren't alone, but you don't know how to connect with the people who want the same thing.
Using the knowledge we have now, what should you have done in the preceding months and years to connect, to build a community that would open up all paths of resistance?
There were people who resisted. We know it wasn't enough.
Gun laws in Nazi Germany were very similar to US laws in that Nazis were largely free to own guns and everyone else was not. Unlike the US, where "others" have historically controlled using the fear that they might be randomly executed, Germany did codify it. Red flag laws were one more step in the US towards that codification, and there will be more.
When Nazis were taking away those guns, the social networks didn't exist to make resistance possible for most folks. But some Jews were able to resist.
It wasn't the guns that made the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising possible, though they definitely helped. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was made possible by labor organizing in the precessing years.
If there were more uprisings like that, the Holocaust could have been stopped if not prevented. Social networks make resistance possible. Guns are only useful tools to resist authoritarianism *after* you build a community able to support that resistance, and they are only one of many tools made useful by that community.
Getting guns is easy, and not always necessary. Building community is hard. Guns won't keep you safe. Community will.
Single acts of resistance may slow the machine down, but to actually bring down a monster you need to be able to attack more than once. You need a society of resistance. If you are afraid now, build that. Talk to people while it's still safe to do so. Ask them where their red line is. Talk to neighbors. Figure out your network.
Take the steps you need now to keep your neighbors safe, to keep yourself safe.
#USPol

Decide in advance whether you will unlock your device or provide the passcode for a search.
Your overall likelihood of experiencing a device search is low
(e.g., less than .01% of international travelers are selected),
but depending on what information you carry, the impact of a search may be quite high.
If you plan to unlock your device for a search or provide the passcode, ensure your devices are prepared:
☐ Upload any information you would like to keep in clo…

This is actually not too far off from a pamphlet I wrote at my community college as an experiment in "turning assignments into creative writing." I was taking a religion class, so I decided to create one. I was working in a group and by the end we had developed 3 sects of the religion and we each talked about our sect and how it related and differed from the original text.
I also handed out pamphlets at a mall, half as part of a psychology class (because why not find a way to reuse my material) and part as an experiment to see how long it would take to get kicked out of said mall. (The answer was bout 15 minutes, if I remember correctly.)
Somewhere between there and here, the books "The Evolution of God" and "Non-Zero" came out (written, interestingly but probably unrelated, by someone who lived in the town with that mall where I handed out those flyers). These books both have heavily overlapping ideas with the original pamphlet (lost, which may not be the worst thing since it was full of spelling and grammar errors).
But both of those books had a decidedly theistic flavor, though, I think, they were more generally liberal. The whole #CultPunk thing feels like a missing piece to something that's been bouncing around in my head for... uh... some years. But not so much at the front of my mind.
It was actually in the hospital, on pain killers and ketamine, that this all came rushing back. Perhaps that's the right state of mind for such things.

Holy. Crap.
Holy. Freaking. Crap. How far have we fallen as a country that our elected representatives think this is good or right or legal?
https://www.axios.com/2026/01/12/trump-greenland-annex-republican-bill-congress

Some people may think of LLMs as the great equalizer. People who aren't programmers can vibecode working programs now. People who aren't artists can slop out something resembling art. However, it's the exact opposite.
When I was a kid, I also pretended to write programs. Of course, I didn't have such sophisticated toys ("kids could play with a stick for hours", as the hyperbole went). But then, I was fully aware that it's just make-believe and it didn't harm anybody.
#Vibecoding creates a horrible chasm of inequality. We have people who believe they're good programmers (even treating vibecoding as an enlightened religion) who shit tons of code at real human reviewers who now need to sift through. And then, we have projects embracing vibecoding and shitting new releases at unprecedented rate. And these releases again need to be reviewed by humans downstream.
#AI #LLM #NoAI #NoLLM

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

I also think it's worth just doing the math here. There aren't enough ICE agents to remove an occupation of more than a couple of facilities. They would have to rely on local police. A lot of police departments have been ordered not to support ICE activities. This means Trump would have to activate the military. If an occupation was peaceful, especially playful like Portland, deployment may not even be possible. Meanwhile, if ICE agents continue to be as violent as they are Governors may be forced to activate the national guard to protect citizens against ICE.
Forcing conflict when Trump is at his weakest, in a way that is non-violent, puts resistance in the best possible position.
At the same time, we are at a strange time of unity. Trump supporters are leaving over Epstein, some are even mad about the deportations, and he's otherwise systematically alienated basically his whole base (except literal Nazis working for ICE).
The AI bubble is, in a lot of ways, a fun house mirror reflection of the 2008 financial crash. The whole economy is held up by loans secured with "compute." Everyone hates this, and Trump's policies have made everything far worse.
#OccupyICE could actually have a lot of momentum and be difficult to stop, especially if folks went to ICE facilities in frog suits and Luigi bloc with banners demanding the release of the Epstein files.
At least, that's my impression from out here.

The Dog House Arrives in the Desert: Nakobe Dean, Quay Walker bring winning ways and strong bond to the Silver and Black https://www.raiders.com/news/nakobe-dean-quay-walker-nfl-free-agency-georgia

I see no sign of any recognition from those who would want such a ban that they see any of the collateral damage a successful ban would have on the majority of kids who are not falling for this bullshit. That they are banning any good at all along with the bad.
Under 18s only
I see that the lobbying for these laws are funded by the absolute worst companies on the internet, those who will be entrenched by the legal compliance costs, that will cement themselves as the arbitrators of who is allowed to access the internet.
It’s a gift to Palantir and other surveillance companies. The very people running these algo-feeds are the ones who benefit from IDing every user and stalking them across the internet on their government-approved internet-licence IDs.
I don’t think even a successful ban on social media for kids would actually address the issue of kids being exposed to sexism and misogony or reduce the kids alienation and depression.
A ban can’t help, will make many things worse, won’t address the problem, and will make competing with the worst surveillance capitalists on the planet more difficult.
Going to war with every internet site and advice forum and making internet access harder won’t fix anything, and will have massive collateral damage against everyone seeking support from strangers or trying to learn things their parents won’t teach them.
But I see we are going to do it anyway.
The direction is clear.
Those companies do get what they lobby for, and they are lobbying hard for ID checks on every website, wrapping their desire to enclose the internet commons for themselves in a faux concern for children’s welfare.
And governments wish to monitor and control the internet, so they will pass these laws.
I wonder how many parents have a family group-chat that they’re going to accidentally ban their kids from using, not realizing that ‘social media’ might include Whatsapp? 😆
It won’t fix anything, it will make the situation for kids worse, impose costs and rents and hacks and exploits on all of us, and increase government and corporate power.
Many will lose access to their networks of support and help.
So it goes.
We will build a better more censorship resistant internet. It’s already here really: Briar. Matrix. Nostr. Bitchat. Veilid. Spritely. And the rest.
The laws may push us there faster.
The race will go on.