Tootfinder

Bans of and challenges to reading material in K-12 schools have been on the rise since 2021,
when the American Library Association and PEN America noticed a sharp uptick in the number of books on the no-no list.
The classics of the banned-book genre remained
— “Brave New World,” “Animal Farm,”“Beloved”
— but those were joined by an escalating list of picture books of two-dad families, young-adult novels tackling race or suicide, graphic novels in which teens make inf…

Why not just ban all the books?
Keyword searches for "justice" and "pride" drive what ideas are being kept from kids.

Berlin-based bunch, an AI-native platform for managers and institutional investors to manage the entire fund lifecycle, raised a €30.1M Series B led by Portage (Rahul Raj/EU-Startups)
https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/05/berlin

Berlin-based bunch bags €30.1 million Series B to modernise Europe’s private markets infrastructure | EU-Startups
bunch, a Berlin-based FinTech startup offering end-to-end infrastructure for European private markets, has closed its €30.1 million ($35 million) Series B

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116603070039160133
Actually trying to find the source for this, it appears to be from one of those “1,000 things to do on the Web” books from the Y2K era.
I have some books coming to see if it’s in any one of them.
If you search online for this (in a real search engine, not Google) you will find a lot of random Reddit threads that all say it’s an “ad” despite it clearly not being an ad and all images of it are always this specific angled image, just with different crops.
Trying to find the truth where it’s from so stay tuned.

"For the left, it’s an obvious example of public ownership and access. Italy’s large rump of former socialists and communists say that the perversity of capitalism is revealed by even shade being commercialised. For the activists of Mare Libero, freeing beaches isn’t a frivolous campaign, but a civil rights one informed by ecology and inclusion."

‘Liberate the lidos!’ Who will win the war over Italy’s private beaches?
Almost all of the sandy stretches on the country’s 8,000km of coastline are run for profit. Now ‘free beach’ campaigners are fighting back against the mafia, the military and those profiteering from sun loungers and cocktails

Continuing to tweak the 25G diff pairs.
Here I replace a single large meander with a couple of smaller ones and adjust trace width slightly to reduce the mismatch at each meander.
The end result is replacing a single large reflection with a slightly wider but much lower one that should present less of an issue.
(The dip at T=100 is at the BGA ball itself and I'll be tweaking the cutout there slightly as well)

Good afternoon #BikeNYC #BikeTooter. Gorgeous day out there, make sure you've got your official #NYC garbage bin before the June 1st deadline!

Cressida Stephenson is only a quarter through #DigitalAccessibilityEthics, but her review is so far positive.
I appreciate her perspective on #GAAD. Which doesn’t mean doing something substantive has to be to buying this book, but it should be more than a post.
I’m not even putting…

Also while at the beach, figured I’d get pizza and ordered a cheese (for my wife) and a sausage (for myself) at our favorite place (Bianchi’s)
This is the sausage pizza
I want to be clear, it was delicious…but…what happened here? 😂

Just finished "The Terraformers" by Annalee Newitz (@…). It was recommended as a "solarpunk" book, and I'm currently on a quest to find more speculative fiction as good as Le Guin or Butler, so I was eager to dig in. Having tagged the author (hi) I'll try to be polite here, but I'll admit I was disappointed.
Newitz clearly has a powerful imagination and there's lots of great stuff in the book, but it's not at all pushing boundaries in terms of imagining future societies. I think the message and intent was good in a lot of places, but off or self-contradictory in others. I absolutely adore the relatively small point made at the end about revolutions being complicated and not boiling down to heroes and battles, but despite the book's attempt to avoid that, I think it still falls into that pattern. Without too many spoilers, the way that some big problems are resolved near the end leans too much on a legal framework without questioning how it's enforced, and that resolution then means that a few heroic acts are enough to tip the balance, which undermines the point about messy histories.
The biggest contradiction of the book to my mind though is with a central theme. The book really explores a world in which "anyone of any species can be a person, as long as we just bioengineer them to be intelligent enough," and it tries to make a point about how engineering limited intelligences is cruel. At several points characters comment about how personhood shouldn't depend on intelligence. There's even a brief quote about how maybe rivers could be people... But... the point could have been "anyone can be a person, regardless of intelligence." This would have made for much more interesting philosophical territory to explore IMO (how do we then bound personhood; how do we reconcile predator/prey relations between persons, etc.). These are also questions that the indigenous traditions Newitz draws on (and consulted about, as mentioned in the acknowledgements) has interesting answers for, but we don't get to explore them through Newitz' world, and because the question of personhood regresses to the question of intelligence, it feels like the moral philosophy of the ERT folks isn't any better than the "InAss" they disparage.
It's not a bad book overall, even if it doesn't engage with the questions I'm hungry to see others engage with. Newitz' efforts to sketch out a more vibrant and diverse future are still monumental and inspiring in a lot of ways. I'm just still looking for something more. Ultimately, I think it lives up to the "solar" but not very much to the "punk."
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon