Tootfinder

"24 creatures get their first names and a shot at being protected"
#Animals #Nature
https://…

24 creatures get their first names and a shot at being protected | The Optimist Daily
In Poland, 16 scientists gave 24 deep-sea creatures their first formal identities. Until now, none of them could legally be discussed, conserved, or protected.

In 1975(76?) I went to a fish fry on the shores of Lake Erie just west of Cleveland. A celebration of once again being able to eat the perch from the cleaned up Lake Erie.
What happened (or, more like didn't happen)?
Troubled Lake Erie is being transformed into a vast water research facility

In 1975(76?) I went to a fish fry on the shores of Lake Erie just west of Cleveland. A celebration of once again being able to eat the perch from the cleaned up Lake Erie.
What happened (or, more like didn't happen)?
Troubled Lake Erie is being transformed into a vast water research facility

Gaza: Doctors under Attack wins the Bafta, despite the BBC refusing to air it. No Other Land wins the Oscar, despite being banned in many countries and being labeled antisemitic in Germany.
It seems public media institutions are in disagreement with reality.

Be careful. "It's AI slop" is turning into a thought-terminating cliche.
Even though it's true often, the actual use of the phrase is starting to be a shortcut to dismissing things without using our brains.
And that is itself a kind of slop.
Learn to notice it because doing it consciously is exhausting, but knowing when you're being cognitively lazy is a step to being a bit more resistant to bad ideas and being manipulated.

"Some supporters of the US-Israeli war on Iran are using the treatment of women in the country as a justification for bombing it."
How is feminism being used to justify war in Iran? | US-Israel war on Iran | Al Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2026/3/12/how-is-feminism-being-used-to-justify-war-in-iran?traffic_source=rss

Amanda Ungaro: From sharing soirées with the Trumps to being deported by ICE (Naiara Galarraga Gortšzar/El País)
https://english.elpais.com/usa/2026-04-12/amanda-ungaro-from-sharing-soirees-with-the-trumps-to-being-deported-by-ice.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/260412/p3#a260412p3

Elon Musk says xAI "was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up" (Fred Lambert/Electrek)
https://electrek.co/2026/03/13/elon-musk-admits-xai-built-wrong-rebuild-tesla-spacex-investment/…

Musk admits xAI ‘not built right’ — weeks after Tesla invested $2 billion
Elon Musk admitted today that xAI, his artificial intelligence venture, “was not built right first time around” and “is being...

“This is all being read inside of Iran as a war on the Iranian people.”
As oil prices threaten to spike to $200 a barrel amid Iran’s pressure campaign against the U.S. and its allies,
professor Narges Bajoghli returns to Democracy Now! with an update on the war on Iran and its place in the modern history of U.S.-Iran relations.
Bajoghli explains how the combination of harsh sanctions and an insidious propaganda campaign has created a deep political divide within Iran and it…

“War on the Iranian People”: Nationalism Grows in Iran in Defiance of Deadly U.S. and Israeli Strikes
“This is all being read inside of Iran as a war on the Iranian people.” As oil prices threaten to spike to $200 a barrel amid Iran’s pressure campaign against the U.S. and its allies, professor Narges Bajoghli returns to Democracy Now! with an update on the war on Iran and its place in the modern history of U.S.-Iran relations. Bajoghli explains how the combination of harsh sanctions and an insidious propaganda campaign has created a deep political divide within Iran and its diaspora, as …

This is really important. The New York Times is forcing one of my coworkers to choose between his job and taking care of his father. Tell them what you think of that: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/tell-the-new-york-times-to-s…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
Hunx and His Punx:
🎵 The Curse of Being Young
#HunxandHisPunx
https://hunxandhispunx.bandcamp.com/track/the-curse-of-being-young
https://open.spotify.com/track/54v0KLnjEerjsoz8HXnEjp

The challenges and advantages of covering Iran from abroad amid an internet blockade: being outside allows accountability reporting without fear of retribution (Yeganeh Torbati/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/04/insider/iran-war-reporting-israel-u…

How a New York Times Journalist Reports on the Iran War Without Being There
Despite heavy restrictions on journalists and an internet blockade, Yeganeh Torbati has been able to reach people during fleeting windows of connectivity.

"none of these legacy behaviours are rational. They arise out of that bundle of behaviours inherited from our two billion years of sexually selected ancestors... If our ancestors had not had these behaviours, we would not be here. Our ancestors were not, in the sense we mean here, rational... A purely rational being — a being created ab initio rational — would not have these behaviours.
No one is proposing to build an AI with a lizard brain. It won't happen."

AGI Will Not Have a Lizard Brain
Rejoice, for even though we do, verily, walk through the valley of the shadow of death, not all the phantasms we see in the valley are as dark as they appear.

This is the story of Weda Bay – and how nature is being sacrificed for mining https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/mar/11/how-mining-threatens-the-worlds-biodiversity-aoe

“Originally launched as a casual meet-up in a cafe, the club has flourished into a network of offline events across Europe.
“Facilitators now organise sessions in 18 cities, and the club has built a following of around 600,000 on Instagram.”
'A simpler way of being': The rise of the offline club ht…

'A simpler way of being': The rise of the offline club
There's a growing movement of young people coming together to switch off their phones and rediscover life offline.

I bought those very same memory sticks for €130 in October 2024. Now they are being sold for €510. The motherboard that I ordered alongside this RAM cost €212, the same motherboard now being sold for €174.
One other thing that annoys me to no end is that AMD recently worked with Sony to bring FSR 4.1 INT8 to PlayStation, but also AMD won't even acknowledge the existence of FSR 4.0.2 INT8, let alone deliver it officially, for PC GPUs that they released 2-3 years ago.

I'm actually believing this, the main reason "AI" hype has become this big is tech people being impressed by it "writing code".
Then they were wrongly extrapolating capabilities to other fields (because "programming is super hard, harder than any other vocation, therefore 'AI' can do anything!!!1!"). To them, it clearly appears be god because they see themselves as gods—because they can write quicksort and linked lists or something.
Meanwhile, LLMs are only passable at generating code because it is laughably easy, mainly because programming languages and "best practices" are extremely verbose, repetitive and clunky; requiring endless boilerplate and infinite layer cakes to achieve even the most trivial things.
Because other people that don't care about that shit are so dependent on technology, it gets pushed to everyone without consent.
Kind of like a hubris ouroboros.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@bagder/116216352260770844
You know what they say about the best satire being indistinguishable from reality…

Cats are liquid, specifically, a ferrofluid

Welcome to today’s edition of “Paul asks you to hold the follow thoughts simultaneously, despite their being in tension.”
1. Social media in its popular form is socially toxic and psychologically dangerous — probably for everyone, certainly for children and adolescents. The evidence on this is compelling, and in my view is not just moral panic reified as research. It’s probably a bad idea for kids / teens to be using it. (And again…maybe all of us.)

"The hardest part of acting is not being guaranteed work. Every job could be your last."
—Henry Cavill
#acting #coaching #inspiration

Lately I've been thinking about how #Gentoo is perceived by people. So often they're stuck in the "ricer" mindset: Gentoo is being built from source, so it must be ZOMG fast. And if it isn't, then what's the point?
If I were to make four points for Gentoo (to stop myself from making more), they would be:
1. Gentoo is independent.
There is no company behind Gentoo. There is no business plan. It's made and maintained by volunteers. Driven by passion and not profit incentive. And we want to keep it that way.
2. Gentoo aims to be secure.
We are maintaining our own infrastructure to reduce the risk of being hijacked. We're securing our distribution channels and mirrors using OpenPGP. We're only using Codeberg (which we really appreciate) and GitHub as mirrors (with OpenPGP commit signatures) and contribution channels. We have a dedicated security team, who works with the developers to keep packages free of vulnerabilities and our users informed.
3. Gentoo is made by humans.
We banned LLM contributions two years ago, and never regretted it. We didn't "wait and see", we took decisive action, and if we got left behind, it's only for the better. Unfortunately, in today's LLM-ridden world we can't stop slop software from being packaged in Gentoo without sacrificing our commitment to keep packages up to date, but we try to keep the worst offenders (like copywashed chardet) at bay.
4. Gentoo supports sustainability.
This may sound ironic when so many of us build everything from source, but we're actually trying to make computing sustainable. Gentoo's source-first nature makes it inherently flexible. We try our best to support a plethora of older and less common hardware. We go against the flow and still try to provide a workable system on hardware that is not supported by Rust or V8. And on top of that, we do our best to provide binary packages for a variety of configurations.
Of course, that's not all. I want Gentoo to be reliable and stable, to be oriented towards privacy by default, to be welcome and respectful.
And all these things ultimately depend on people working on Gentoo, and contributing to Gentoo. We always need more people that share these principles and want to help us achieve them.
What do you appreciate in Gentoo?

Apple's MacBook Neo validates a vision that began with Windows on ARM, which to this day is still held back by Microsoft's commitment to x86 compatibility (Steven Sinofsky/Hardcore Software)
https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/…

239. Mac Neo and my afternoon of reflection and melancholy
I'm completely blown away by Mac Neo. It made me think a lot about what we tried to accomplish with Windows 8 more than a dozen years ago. Being early is no different than being wrong…mostly.

After spending nearly half her life in the United States,
41-year-old Brazilian Amanda Ungaro was deported from the country last October.
She endured three hellish months in a detention center until she was expelled,
like more than 600,000 immigrants since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 and set out to carry out “the largest deportation in history.”
What is unusual in the case of this former model who worked at the United Nations is that,

Amanda Ungaro: From sharing soirées with the Trumps to being deported by ICE
The former Brazilian model and ex-ambassador to the United Nations speaks in an interview about her expulsion from the United States, which she attributes to maneuvers by her former partner, and about a flight on Epstein’s plane

Full caff Irish breakfast tea at 0230. The breakfast of champions ^h being unable to sleep anymore, not wanting to wake my wife up with nonstop nose trumpeting, and hoping a hot drink will clear things up a bit
On the plus side the cough is almost gone and I woke up able to open both eyes without difficulty. So i think I'm on the mend?

This can't be repeated enough, forget the fairytales about the US being an ally of the EU. And therefore the US is also NOT an ally of the member states that think the EU is important for their prosperity and safety.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2…

"They don't like the EU": Europe's top diplomat says Washington wants to divide Europe - Euromaidan Press
Kaja Kallas told the Financial Times that the United States "does not like the European Union" and has been "very clear" it wants to divide Europe — a charge she levelled as Washington launched new trade probes against the bloc this week.

Uh oh.
One woman said she was able to see the accounts of six different users on the Bank of Scotland app, including some National Insurance numbers, over a 20-minute period.
Lloyds, Bank of Scotland and Halifax apps showed customers other users' transactions
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g23npx…

Lloyds, Bank of Scotland and Halifax apps showed customers other users' transactions
The Lloyds Banking Group customers reported being able to view payments and charges from other sources.

This is why I don't fully trust 48hills, even though they're on "my side" in being pro-labor and anti-billionaire. Tim Redmond thinks it's a good thing that a 100% affordable housing development was forced to lop a floor off to preserve views 😫
"The staff reached out to the neighbors,[...]took feedback, and as a result made some changes that lowered the height of the new buildings. That, in a reasonable world, is how this should work" No it's not!!…

Supes approve affordable senior housing project—but discussion raises larger issue - 48 hills
Nonprofit housers are good neighbors. Speculators are not. But Wiener's law treats both the same way

More countries should have a show like Gruen: "We do the show because we want to give people some agency in the way that they're being manipulated by these multi-billion-dollar industries"
Wil Anderson hates advertising. So why does he host a show about it? - ABC News https://www.

Wil Anderson hates advertising. So why does he host a show about it?
It's been 18 years of hosting Gruen for Wil Anderson, but the self-confessed advertising cynic says the topic is more relevant than ever.

Simulated opinion polls to drive public policy — what could possibly go wrong!
In the name of saving costs and producing more polls (i.e. the double benefit of increased efficiency AND productivity), statistical truth (traditional polls) is being replaced with its derivative, producing statistical insights via a second layer of statistics and agents simulating known, pretrained demographic behaviors & preferences, instead of interviewing actual people. Yay!
It seems they're …

In early 1985, Henry Nussbacher sent a letter to all Bitnet contacts calling for admins to hunt down and destroy every chat server because a dozen users actively chatting could bring file transfers to a halt—file transfers being the primary purpose of the network.
Jeff Kell realized that the problem wasn't chatting itself, but redundant traffic from independent connections. So he built the first Relay chat system. I got involved in August, setting up the 10th relay server and contr…

So, if a site has a cookie options banner, and there's a toggle to turn off 3rd party ads, and the toggle *doesn't fucking respond to being clicked on*... is that a felony?
Because it really should be a class 1 felony.

We're having our hallway replastered and painted by a property maintenance company. It's taking weeks, with painters turning up to paint walls that haven't been stripped yet, or with the wrong equipment, and people showing up for a few hours before being told to do another half day the other side of Sheffield so they have to spend ages sitting in traffic for no apparent reason, or no-one turning up for a week halfway through a job.. The person running the business is absolutely o…

I'm sympathetic to folks who want better discovery tool on fediverse but I'll never truly understand. I love being in the wild west and hunting for content and collecting follows and content sources. Anything that hands me content I quickly loose interest it.
Tiktok never held my interest even trying to get the algo to give me things I want. It never worked and I gave it several week of trying.

If you have no money to get a lawyer, you may stay in U.S. jail for half a year if some facial recognition software thinks you look similar to a fraudster.
And then even have to organize your 2000km return to your home yourself. A home you no longer have, because you couldn't pay your bills from jail. And not a single excuse.
#FacialRecognition

So here is a electric power delivery utility that serves Nevada, but is regulated by California, that is being cut off by Nevada power generation providers.
OK, this is part of our grid and regulatory power mess.
But my point goes elsewhere.
Here in California we may be about to have a one time 5% tax on the wealth of $billionaires.
As such some of these people (eg. founders of Google) are moving to places like Nevada - exactly where this power problem is landing.

Data centers are cutting power to homes, driving homeowners to solar and batteries
A Nevada utility just told 49,000 Lake Tahoe residents that it’s redirecting 75% of their electricity supply to data centers...

"24 creatures get their first names and a shot at being protected"
#Animals #Conservation

24 creatures get their first names and a shot at being protected | The Optimist Daily
In Poland, 16 scientists gave 24 deep-sea creatures their first formal identities. Until now, none of them could legally be discussed, conserved, or protected.

If Starmer goes quickly, we might well get Streeting.
That would be at least as bad.
Burnham allies warn against quick ‘coronation’ of Streeting if Starmer quits | Labour | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/

What does it feel like to work on real Trust & Identity challenges alongside experts from GÉANT & NRENs while still being a student?
Read stories from past participants of the Trust & Identity Incubator Mentorship (TIM) programme. 👇
Hear directly from alumni Jovan Simonoski, Anna Kardos, Domonkos Baczo & Aleksandr Petrunin on their programme experience, and read how it can benefit you and your career.
Apply before 1 May 2026:

"The council says exports to Canada fell 63 per cent last year. "It has been devastating," said Swonger.”
They didn't think to ask him if he voted for Trump in the last election?
And to think some Democratic and 'NeverTrump' (haha) Republicans believe AOC running for President would lead to a Republican win.
The same Republican party that has decimated the American liquor industry, destroyed American leadership in the world, and cratered the economy.
2028 Presidential Election:
No Liquor Industry Neo-Facist Theocracy
or
Black Progressive Woman Democracy
Hard choice, amIRite, America?
But oh ya, I'm not being “realistic” 🤯
#FAFO #TheAmericanFascist #USA
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/american-alcohol-boycotts-bans-canada-trade-war-nslc-nova-scotia-9.7194289?cmp=rss

highly recommend being extremely attracted to someone who is also extremely attracted to you. shit is peak

I'm seeing/hearing this more and more often. 🧐
Which one do you prefer, are you a native speaker? 👈
Note that I'm not asking for being grammarist here.
I know which one is "correct".
This is about shifts in language, dialects, etc..

Every year i explore my filesystem and remember i got a gigantic hoard of old book svgs and fonts and shit i collected when i was 13/14 and always intended to remix into a pirate rpg while always being distracted by more captivating projects

I wonder if there is still any doubt that this criminal Israeli war is basically the "Netanyahu's Pardon War". The "person" that forced the war against Iran, the head of the genocide in Gaza, yet another PM that continues the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, the one who orders the at least weekly bombing of Lebanon, a person with an international arrest warrant by the ICC, someone also being judged for corruption by Israeli own courts, is at war seeking to get a fuc…

Даниэль Смит: A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian. A Temporary Foreign Worker is a human being and would probably make a better Canadian than you sad face.

I'm done with the server for the time being, got everything working the way I want it to and the performance is where I wanted it to be at before starting some client work.
https://git.jamesthebard.net/jweatherly/sisyphus-server-golang/releases

Very odd rain we're having.
Instead of being clear, the drops are white. And they don’t fall like normal, but seem to drift—almost feather-like—towards the ground.

PHP is het nieuwe COBOL
https://thenewstack.io/php-web-skills-hiring-age/

The history of the term "anarchist" is itself adversarial. Those who embraced it did so intending to engage with it as controversy, so I feel like I'm not too out of line with this history in using my socialization of being comfortable while being adversarial, and my social license as a cis dude to just say some random shit for attention, to draw that attention back to this whole subject.
Since this post did get some attention, I'm gonna link back to the one that prompted it (and tag @…, who I think is the author, for a heads up if there's anything to add):
https://immerautonom.noblogs.org/the-elephant-in-the-room/
I think I have said some useful things in my post, or at least repeated things others have been saying for years in a useful way, but this post is really the thing to look at (again, if you didn't miss it like I did) and think. There was definitely a time when I would have fallen for that whole hoax, and maybe even have struggled to argue against the things being highlighted. But it's clear that there is still a problem, and I hope repeating these things in my dude voice catches the attention of some folks who might have otherwise missed it... And I hope my adversarial approach doesn't pull focus away from the self-reflection that needs to happen.
Men are the problem here. Men need to fix this. Men are responsible for looking at some of this really horrible shit and acknowledging that we've all been part of the system that makes them possible and have an obligation to destroy that system.

I saw the article "Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs" pop up and it reminded me of the local bank in a small town near where I worked once upon a time. They went from the two employees taking their lunch in shifts to being closed from 11am to noon after they installed the ATM outside.

International Energy Agency:
"Greatest supply disruption in the history of oil."
It's a foretaste of the future energy-constrained future. So now's a good time to plan
But that's not being admitted in mainstream discussions.
#PeakOil #Hormuz

Every social media platform I'm on (Twitter, Threads, Bluesky) I'm seeing a very necessary and solid level of tough-but-important conversations and fights. about the clashes between (Far?) Leftism and real Black folks who actually participate in politics*
Except here. Same ol same ol do-nothing far-left type stuff except also WITHOUT the "good but ugly" fights
(*Yes, I'm aware I'm being harsh here, but I don't have better terminology and its importa…

Five years ago, I received a 100$ regression bounty pretty much by accident for reporting a regression in #hledger [1] (what an amazing concept and stability commitment!). I decided to spread that back as issue bounties to feed into the community [2]. Those often sat there for years, humans take time.
That was before the slop era.
Now, AI bountyhunters want it, so I changed my terms to…

1.22.1: breaks auto-deduced amounts of forecasted balance assertions · Issue #1638 · simonmichael/hledger
Hi, hledger-1.22.1 introduces a regression preventing auto-deduced amounts of forecasted balance assertions of being calculated. How To Reproduce Take this log.hledger file: 2021-09-01 Normal Balan...

Thanks to Malthus, we have focused on food as the limit to population growth. For some reason, we have failed to consider how demands on other resources may have limits that we cannot afford to cross.
The global sand crisis: it’s being used up faster than it can be replaced

Thanks to Malthus, we have focused on food as the limit to population growth. For some reason, we have failed to consider how demands on other resources may have limits that we cannot afford to cross.
The global sand crisis: it’s being used up faster than it can be replaced

I’m witnessing a podcast being recorded. Truly the end times.

Twf you didn't even notice Spotify being down cuz you're listening to your bought music via Jellyfin 🙂‍↕️❤️‍🔥

For those who have been hearing of a Fly Brain being uploaded, the work you've been hearing of is impressive, yet as always the pop science media has warped what happened a bit:
„The Fly Brain Breakthrough Is Real. The “First Brain Upload” Narrative Is Not.”
https://…

The Fly Brain Breakthrough Is Real. The “First Brain Upload” Narrative Is Not.
Scientists mapped a fruit fly’s 139,255 neurons in extraordinary detail. Then a startup turned that milestone into a story about brain…

Megalomaniacs with delusions of godhood don't want popes.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/apr/13/iran-war-live-news-ceasefire-peace-talks-us-trump-strait-hormuz-blocka…

Can’t thank the community enough for building ways to avoid being stuck in the YouTube economy:
- https://gitlab.com/christosangel/magic-tape
- Peertube, invidious, and other instances
-

Periodic reminder for people interested in #HomeLab
There is a @… bot that replaces the old gup.pe homelab bot.
Mention it in your homelab posts and it will boost them. Follow it to see all the homelab posts it boosts that may not normally get federated to your instance.
For those who don’t know, these bots exist because when you look for a a hashtag, your server only checks the posts that have been federated to it.
In order for a message to be federated to your server, the author (or one of the people boosting it) have to be followed by someone on your server. If no one touching the message is being followed, it’ll never get federated to your server and you won’t see it.
Hashtags are great for finding messages, but only messages that were federated to your server. They don’t help message propagation.

The privacy disaster of meta glasses...
but it is already around us with any camera-enabled device, such as phones and smart TVs
https://www.svd.se/a/K8nrV4/metas-ai-smart-glasses-and-data-privacy-concerns-workers-say-we-see-everyt…

Meta’s AI Smart Glasses and Data Privacy Concerns: Workers Say “We See Everything”
Bank details, sex and naked people who seem unaware they are being recorded. Behind Meta’s new smart glasses lies a hidden workforce, uneasy about peering into the most intimate parts of other people’s lives.

Oh, dear thing, did you see a post by a Palestinian facing genocide on your favourite fucking sci-fi hashtag by mistake? You, poor, delicate flower. Do you think you’ll survive? Should we call 911? @… ht…

It's called fashion, sweetie 💅

My own biased interpretation of this is that we should have doubled and tripled our efforts to harangue every politician and every business that stayed on Twitter after it stopped being Twitter. All that energy focused on shaming individuals (who often had greater network effects to overcome and less capacity to move) should have gone towards institutions instead.
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:twjze4qqf6fgxz33ct52wlnl/post/3mlodfzwsrc2r

I see that with springtime and being out doors, anti-homeless rhetoric is on the rise again.
Just remember who around you has been homeless will absolutely surprise you, and they will hear you when you say callous, stupid things

"I think when you're just counting on your voice, you actually need double the energy. I find myself acting out the scenes and being very physical while I'm recording because I think you can tell when someone is just sitting on a stool."
—Judy Greer
#acting #coaching …

The point being climate change is starting to hit.
Oysters could be in short supply as harsh winter decimated farming efforts along Long Island | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/oysters-long-island-harsh-winter-new-york-b2954131.html

Doing laundry earlier and was reminded of the time that I was looking at my parents washer as a kid and saw the "intimates" setting.
Being ten or so I had never heard the word before so I read it as "inmates".
And got very confused as to why a home washer would have a special setting for laundering prison uniforms

More of the men being deported now have lived in the U.S. for years (Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/interactive/2026/trump-deportations-ice-fathers-families/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260512/p97#a260512p97

AI chatbots make use of the Barnam Effect. The same thing that makes personality tests and fortune tellers "feel" meaningful and accurate despite being total nonsense.
#al

"Everything is gone’: Israel destroys entire villages in Lebanon"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/12/how-israeli-offensive-destroyed-entire-villages-in-lebanon

‘Everything is gone’: Israel destroys entire villages in Lebanon
Rights groups fear tactic of ‘domicide’ trialled in Gaza, where entire areas are made uninhabitable, is being used again

I once went into a haberdashers to buy a crochet hook. The woman serving me was genuinely concerned and asked "is it for you?" and then "do you have someone to help you?"
I often think about this.. On the face of it it seems like a case of inverse sexism, but maybe it was more about her not being able to imagine me learning crochet as a man without a traditional community of care, and wanting to give me advice or something like that. I should have continued the conve…

Sources: Matt Brittin, who formerly led Google in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa for a decade, is close to being named director general of the BBC (Michael Savage/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/202

"our energy systems are already massively in carbon debt. We cannot afford to borrow any more carbon from fossil reserves. To burn carbon now to build AGI on the vague hope that it may by some remote chance produce systems with more insight than we now have, at a time when our politicians are already failing to act on the very clear data being produced by their own scientists, it the purest folly"
#AGI

AGI Will Not Have a Lizard Brain
Rejoice, for even though we do, verily, walk through the valley of the shadow of death, not all the phantasms we see in the valley are as dark as they appear.

Sources: the US' AI chip export push risks being undermined by licensing bottlenecks, staff attrition, and unclear policy at the Bureau of Industry and Security (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg)

It was also interesting to see Albert Dock before the gentrification/renovation.
My mum's home town, I can just remember the thriving docks, seen from the Birkenhead ferry, one of three highlights, the others being the Green Goddess trams and the swings in the playground near my grandparents' Corporation semi.

Eileen Wang, the mayor of aChino Hills California, resigned suddenly on Monday after the US Department of Justice (DoJ) announced she had been charged with acting as an illegal foreign agent of China.
Wang, 58, agreed to plead guilty to the felony count and could face a sentence of 10 years in prison.
“Individuals in our country who covertly do the bidding of foreign governments undermine our democracy,” said Bill Essayli, an assistant US attorney. “This plea agreement is the lat…

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.

DHL Express doesn't hold up to its name.
It's worse than standard DHL while being more expensive.

Funny thing about this film is that parts of Transsylvania being in Hungary is an artifact of like 4 years, this movie came out during one of 'em. #monsterdon

Anti-ICE protesters accused of being part of antifa found guilty of support for terrorism in Texas | US news | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/13/texas-terrorism-trial

Anti-ICE protesters accused of being part of antifa found guilty of support for terrorism in Texas (Sam Levine/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/13/texas-terrorism-trial
http://www.memeorandum.com/260313/p109#a260313p109

A leak about White House outrage over CBS' reported hiring of Jeremy Adler, who previously worked for Liz Cheney, suggests the WH is trying to prevent the hire (Brian Stelter/@brianstelter)
https://x.com/brianstelter/status/2032131070024360446

Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) on X
Notice that this leak — "White House officials are outraged..." — is the first inkling about Jeremy Adler being hired by CBS News. The comms job is open and the network hasn't appointed anyone yet. Adler's name hasn't even been floated publicly, until now. https://t.co/jHYKMH69nt

WhatsApp launches Incognito Chat, an AI chat mode built on Private Processing that Meta says lets users talk to AI without Meta being able to access the chats (Lily Hay Newman/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/whatsapp-incognito-chat-meta-ai/

WhatsApp Adds Meta AI Chats That Are Built to Be Fully Private
The company says its new Incognito Chat allows you to use its AI chatbot without anyone else—including Meta—being able to access your conversations.

"Panama’s golden frogs return to the wild after 17-year battle with deadly fungus"
#Panama #Frogs #Animals

Panama’s golden frogs return to the wild after 17-year battle with deadly fungus | The Optimist Daily
After 17 years in captivity, Panama’s golden frogs are being reintroduced to the wild following devastating losses from chytrid fungus.

The Trump administration is taking its targeting of its political enemies to new levels.
Last summer in Texas, a noise demo that escalated has led to
nine people being convicted of federal charges,
including “material aid for terrorism.”
The so-called “North Texas antifa cell” has raised concerns on the left about future prosecutions

Okay here's my hot elitist opinion for the moment.
If you need the more expensive models, you're either not a very good programmer, or you're being lazy. (and sometimes there's good reasons to be lazy, I'm sure)
But it's _amazing_ how much better the cheaper, lighter, more economical and ecologically friendly LLMs are when you're actually working to craft a test environment, good guardrails and a solid inner developer loop.
You know: the same skills that make a safe, speedy environment for experimentation for people.
It's almost like throwing more brute force a things is actually brute force.

Rockstar confirms "a limited amount of non-material company information was accessed in connection with a third-party data breach"; ShinyHunters demand a ransom (Zack Zwiezen/Kotaku)
https://kotaku.com/rockstar-games-report…

GTA 6 Developer Rockstar Reportedly Hacked, Data Being Ransomed
Well known hacking group ShinyHunters claims to have breached the GTA 6 developers cloud servers

Beautiful sunny day and another solar generation record, 82 kWh produced (21.4 exported).
It's not midnight yet so I don't have daily consumption yet but I've burned 121.5 so far; assuming the same rate of consumption I'll end up around 139.
Which would put me at 59% of the day's energy consumption being locally sourced. Not bad.

YouTube is shifting its creator monetization strategy by acting as a matchmaker between creators and sponsors, as Netflix and TikTok increasingly woo creators (John Koblin/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/business/media/youtube-creators-a…

YouTube Plays Matchmaker for Sponsors and Stars
The company is trying to help streaming influencers, who are increasingly being wooed by competitors like Netflix and TikTok.

Ece Temelkuran:
‘Once you call it fascism you have to act on it’
The Turkish writer on the experience of being ‘unhomed’
and how we can fight the politics of cynicism
In Nation of Strangers, I’m specifically talking about the point where you decide,
how do I survive?
Do I survive like an android or do I survive like a human being?
Because, if we are not careful, this system can make us inhuman very, very quickly.
But there is also another th…

Ece Temelkuran: ‘Once you call it fascism you have to act on it’
The Turkish writer on the experience of being ‘unhomed’ and how we can fight the politics of cynicism

YouTube is shifting its creator monetization strategy by acting as a matchmaker between creators and sponsors, as Netflix and TikTok increasingly woo creators (John Koblin/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/business/media/youtube-creators-a…

YouTube Plays Matchmaker for Sponsors and Stars
The company is trying to help streaming influencers, who are increasingly being wooed by competitors like Netflix and TikTok.

‘Alpine divorce’ has daters fearing being abandoned in the wilderness
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/articles/alpine-divorce-daters-fearing-being-172700750.html

On TikTok and Instagram, young people are diving into the joys of Chinese culture – from drinking hot water to playing mahjong – all under the banner of “Chinamaxxing”.
On the Chinese internet, however, the US is losing its decades-long grip on soft power, and is instead being replaced by a darker trend: "the kill line".
The kill line is a dangerous place to be.
In gaming, the term refers to the point at which a player’s strength is so depleted that one more blo…

Across the Caribbean and Latin America, something extraordinary and shameful is unfolding.
On Friday the Cuban foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez accused the US of “extorting” countries
by forcing them to cancel decades-old deals with Havana for the supply of doctors
Cuban doctors, emissaries of one of the world’s most besieged nations, are being expelled from host nations,
contracts terminated,
health programmes dismantled.
And, in their absence, the poore…

A mass hacking campaign targeting iPhone users in Ukraine and China
used tools that were likely designed by U.S. military contractor L3Harris, TechCrunch has learned.
The tools, which were intended for Western spies, wound up in the hands of various hacking groups,
including Russian government spooks and Chinese cybercriminals.
Last week, Google revealed that over the course of 2025, it discovered that a sophisticated iPhone-hacking toolkit had been used in a series …

A suite of government hacking tools targeting iPhones is now being used by cybercriminals | TechCrunch
Security researchers say exploits used by governments to hack into iPhones have been found to be used by cybercriminals. They warned of an emerging market for "secondhand" exploits.