Tootfinder

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@jzb/115797705935538268
Read this, @… ? Sounds as if it might be your thing,

#WritersCoffeeClub Nov 28: In what ways do you see yourself reflected in your own work?
In one novel I've written, I based my main character on what I imagine I would have been like if not for the trauma of my childhood. He came out as very successful, but also extremely arrogant and entitled — not a likeable person.

"More worrying still... is the trend of wealthy donors funding far-right and racist movements that are the tip of the spear against net zero policies"
#Fascism
#ClimateEmergency
#Kleptocracy

"At the last #Cop climate summit in Baku, there were 1,773 coal, oil and gas lobbyists, a larger contingent than all but three countries. The group said this led to a watering down of penalties for big emitters, backtracking on international commitments to transition away from fossil fuels, and domestic challenges to carbon taxes and legislation designed to reduce emissions"

"The study, which was released on Wednesday, found that 308 of the world’s #billionaires had a combined CO2 tally that, if they were a country, would make them the 15th most polluting country in the world"
What the world *really* can't afford is billionaires.
#ClimateEmergency

Well, well, well. Mhairi Black is to play a detective in a new BBC police drama set in Glasgow.
I wish her well, of course, but I feel she has much more to offer the world than TV drama.
#ScotPol

"Poverty ... is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation. It is the lot of man – it is the source of wealth, since without poverty there would be no labour, and without labour there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth" — Patrick Colquhoun, quoted by @…

Is there any way, yet, to send small packages to friends in #Gaza? I know that sending money through systems like chuffed.org is probably more useful, but being able to send a personal gift would, I think, do more to raise spirits.

Well, having been miserably unwell all weekend, I got up today and made some useful progress on the new workshop. It's not as much as I'd like, but I've used all the energy I have so it will have to do for today.

Old article, but I just came across it. Wonderful surrealist photographs.
A House Is Not a Home: the self-portraits of Brooke DiDonato – in pictures | Art and design | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/g

The prospect of families not receiving food aid has deeply concerned states run by both parties.
Democratic lawmakers have written to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins requesting to use contingency funds to cover the bulk of next month’s food aid benefits.
But a USDA memo that surfaced Friday says
“contingency funds are not legally available to cover regular benefits.”
The document says the money is reserved for such things such as helping people in disaster areas…

Alleged National Guard shooter worked with US government entities in Afghanistan, including CIA: Ratcliffe (Brooke Singman/Fox News)
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/alleged-national-guard-shooter-worked-us-government-entities-afghanistan-including-cia-ratcliffe
http://www.memeorandum.com/251127/p2#a251127p2

"And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men." [Luke 2:13-14]
#Antichrist

US bombs target ISIL in Nigeria: What’s really going on?
Trump says strikes are related to ‘Christian genocide’ but attacks on Christian farmers happened in different area.

A federal judge in Denver on Tuesday
ordered federal immigration officers to stop making arrests in Colorado without a warrant,
unless the detainee posed a flight risk.
The ruling by Judge R. Brooke Jackson could be put on hold once the administration appeals,
just as earlier rulings in Los Angeles and Illinois limiting immigration agents’ powers were quickly blocked by higher courts.

Colorado Judge Tells Immigration Agents to Stop Arrests Without Warrants
The ruling that immigration agents are acting illegally is the latest to rebuke the Trump administration’s tactics, but earlier orders have been blocked on appeal.

"A mileage-based charge for electric and plug-in hybrid car drivers from 2028 and a short-term freeze in fuel duty are among the key changes announced in the Autumn Budget 2025"
So am I right in thinking that this #budget has penalised electric cars and benefited fossil fuel vehicles?
That seems... Highly counter-productive.

"When I hear international leaders speak of “Israel’s right to defend itself,” I wonder: against whom? Against mothers with their babies? Against teachers with their board markers? Against students with their books? The global silence — or worse, complicity — amplifies our grief" -- Dr Hassan El-Nabih

‘I’m happy and sad to see you’: The paradox of surviving the Gaza genocide
A chance encounter with one of my past students at the Islamic University of Gaza highlighted the paradox of surviving the Gaza genocide: feeling joy in surviving the war and sorrow in witnessing what our survival has cost us.

Britain sent the Black and Tans — a unit infamous for atrocities and viciousness — to #Palestine during the mandate. I did not know this until today. I cannot imagine anyone doing anything so stupid and irresponsible.
The #GazaGenocide has a long history, and we are even more responsible fo…

This afternoon has largely been spent drumming up, hauling in, and stacking more firewood. I feel deeply sorry for friends in #Palestine who are having great trouble finding any wood to burn.

OK, this is genuinely scary. It's a picture of me, aged 5. It was taken in 1960. It was scanned and uploaded to Google Photos in 2002. No one has told Google where it was taken. But the map, bottom right, is correct.
Obviously, in 1960, my father's pre-war Exakta camera did not have GPS. Could you identify, from that picture, exactly where it was taken?
Google can.

It's 08:00 in the morning, here at 55°N 4°W, and the sun will in theory rise in ten minutes. But it's still dark.
And we're still 24 days away from the turning of the year: it will get still darker before the light begins to return. And, as in every year, the warmth will lag a couple of months behind the light, retarded by the thermal mass of the atmosphere and the earth.
This is not my favourite season.

I can't see any way to read this other than that the Scottish Police Federation (and the Crown Office!) admitting that the killing of #ShekuBayoh was racially motivated.
#ScotPol

#WritersCoffeeClub 26 Oct
How culturally diverse do your casts tend to be?
In my fantasy stories, the Great Place is a very complex theocracy; the Coast has a broadly communistic peasantry with superstructures of a capitalist urban merchant class and a autocratic aristocracy; the Western Clans are a tribal society which is broadly communist; the Wild Herd are a puritanical mat…

@… Dear Mohamed, it would help you to get verified by the @… team.

Silent night, holy night!
All is calm, all is quiet...
Sleep in heavenly peace.
#Gaza
#GazaGenocide
#CeaseFireGaza

Israeli warships, artillery target Gaza City and Khan Younis

A night of weird, vivid dreams, mostly about personal loss, but over it all a sense of an utterly weary God, disillusioned with humanity, tired of our vanity and our heedlessness, no longer thinking that it's either possible to save us, or that we merit the effort of trying.

Hi, @…
What have you got for me?

The #roundhouse, now, at last, with electric lights (from its own solar panels).

Why was I today years old when I learned about bio-photovoltaics?
This is a technology which instead of using silicon wafers as the basis for photovoltaic cells, uses a sandwich comprising
1. A transparent window, to allow sunlight in;
2. Algae, to photosynthesise sugars;
3. A membrane to keep the algae separate from the bacteria;
4. Bacteria, which consume sugar and generate electricity;
5. A filter, to allow the biological components to breathe.
#1/2

No babes in my manger this Christmas day. But the cattle are eating happily

Friends in #Gaza, what fuel are you using for cooking? I heard from someone this week that they were cooking on a fire of plastic, which isn't healthy; but is there any other fuel to be found?
People not in Gaza, please don't respond to this post.

NEWS!
We have TWO red squirrels in the wood!
Obviously I don't know what gender either of them is, so there's only a 50% chance we have a potential breeding pair, but this is *exciting*!

"In 1990, 943 million people [in China] lived on less than $3 a day measured in 2021 dollars – 83% of the population, according to the World Bank. By 2019, the number was brought down to zero. Unfortunately, the United States was not as successful. More than 4 million Americans – 1.25% of the population – must make ends meet with less than $3 a day, more than three times as many as 35 years ago."

"We are now at a critical juncture. We are at or very close to human caused environmental change that will fundamentally unpick the life-sustaining systems on Earth. These risk triggering feedback loops...
Ultimately that could cause the planet to drift away along the pathway to “hothouse Earth”, a scenario where even if emissions were reduced, self amplifying feedback loops would drive global temperature increases up to or even beyond 5°C"

Oh, Jings. Both #Google and #Amazon are revealed to be #complicit in the #GazaGenocide. In an extraordinary…

@… Ha! Your username reminds me of a firm I once contracted for, which had an unfirewalled and unpassword protected port open to login as admin on their production Postgres database. I spent weeks trying to persuade senior management that this was a serious problem, but the in house IT manager insisted that because it was on a non standard port it was fine.

Odd etymological question: I was interested today in whether the Soviet word for a labour camp, Gulag, was related to the Nazi-era German word for a prisoner of war camp, Stalag. Gulag is apparently a contraction of 'Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й', where the last word transliterates as 'lageréy', while Stalag is a contraction of 'Kriegsgefangenen-Mannschaftsstammlager'. So: what is the root of 'lager', and how does it end up in both Ru…

"First out of the traps was the former MMA fighter Conor McGregor, who had recently been found in a civil case to be a rapist. In March, Trump even hosted McGregor in the White House on Saint Patrick’s Day to recommend him as Ireland’s future president, and the two rapists got huge publicity" -- bravo, @… !

Catkins on hazel bushes. Surely this is crazy early? 55°N 4°W #ClimateDiary

#WritersCoffeeClub 24 Nov
How do you make sure a reader has room to process and absorb ideas?
I think it's perfectly OK to include things in stories that 90% of readers won't pick up on -- because the delight of discovery for the 10% of readers who do is worth it, I think.
In some of my writing I use a lot of subtle intertextual references -- which readers who kn…

"Dispensing false information in a confident tone, rather than offering no answer when none is readily available, is a major flaw of generative AI, experts say. An audit of the top 10 generative AI model... by the media literacy non-profit NewsGuard revealed that the non-response rates of chatbots went down from 31% in August 2024 to 0% in August 2025. At the same time, the chatbots’ likelihood of repeating false information almost doubled from 18% to 35%"

"Arduino wasn’t valuable because it was just a microcontroller company. It was valuable because it was a commons. And you can’t apply enterprise legal frameworks to a commons without destroying it"
You also can't buy a #commons, at least without destroying it as a commons. The key point about a commons is that it isn't property.

Did Qualcomm kill Arduino for good? | Molecularist
The maker community worried Qualcomm would kill the Arduino ethos. New T&Cs confirm the community's worst fears. Here's what's at stake, what Qualcomm got wrong, and what might still be salvaged.

From a friend in #Gaza on the food situation today:
"For the variety of foods, there are not a lot of items. For example, no meats, no chicken, no eggs. If we find them, the price is insane. For example if we want to bring two chickens for my family, I think we need more than 130$."
If you are supporting families in Gaza, please keep doing it. If you're not yet supporting fa…

Starting to set up the framing of the north wall of the new workshop. Two interesting problems here:
1. Am I going to want a large door in this wall? I think I can't have one, because I want either the east or the west wall to be removable to allow more light and space in summer; but I really need to think about this!
2. The shape of the foundation is very squint. Consequently, although the north and south walls will be parallel, the east and west won't. I have some int…

Well, it appears there was some very good news on my birthday, when I was too busy involved in celebrations to notice.
#PalestineAction
#RightToProtest

Feeling absolutely rubbish this morning. It's beautiful weather, I should be doing joinery on the north end of the new workshop, I want to be writing philosophy, I don't think I have the energy to do either.
I don't like being old.

HAMLET: I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
SIMON_BROOKE: You and my both, brother. You and me both.

Reading Tim O'Reilly's essay on the economic future of #AI, one sentence stands out:
"By product-market fit we don’t just mean that users love the product or that one company has dominant market share but that a company has found a viable economic model, where what people are willing to pay for AI-based services is greater than the cost of delivering them"
/Continued

What If? AI in 2026 and Beyond
The market is betting that AI is an unprecedented technology breakthrough, valuing Sam Altman and Jensen Huang like demigods already astride the world. The

Thinking about giving to folk in #Gaza; quite complicated feelings. Firstly, we do *have* to give, and give personally, because conventional charities are not effectively getting relief to Gaza -- presumably because they are being blocked by #Israel -- and because our governments are doing nothing.
Bu…

The squirrel is on the squirrel feeder, just outside my front window, again. Horrible is standing just inside the window, staring at the squirrel with fascinated longing.
Sorry, Horrible. That window isn't ever going to open.

The way you make an axe haft is you take a straight grained piece of hickory or ash, you split it along the grain with a froe, and then you use a drawknife to do final shaping (including for the eye). The reason you do this is that the shape then follows the natural cellulose fibres of the wood, which are very much stronger along their length than at even at a very slight angle.
(Yes, I'm sub-tooting someone on YouTube).
>>>

Why is the UK #Labour party in trouble?
Because it stole all the #Tories clothes just at the time when the Tories were at their most unpopular.
#UKPol

Quite interesting listening to two wet liberals talking about #Marx. I don't think I learned much new, although it's remakable how well #Bakunin predicted the history of the Russian revolution fifty years before it happened. But I don't think anyone else could have made me feel a grudging sympa…

@… thinks a written constitution would somehow impede a #Fascist takeover of the United Kingdom. I admire his optimism: look how well it's working in the United States.
I mean, a written constitution …

RE: https://pdx.social/@hellomiakoda/115761024717277564
"unless you're going to try to procreate with a particular individual, I cannot think of any reason anyone's trans status fucking matters" -- @…

“They won’t imprison us all, they know if they fill the prisons with activists, we will overpower them from within. So flood the damn streets in your millions. Shut down these factories in your thousands! They can never arrest the resistance in our smiles. We will use the shards of our broken hearts to spear the system of injustice.” -- Qesser Zuhrah
#SayHerNamee

Qesser Zuhrah – Prisoners For Palestine
On remand since: November 19th 2024

For those of us in Galloway, this is extremely bad news. Stranraer used to be a large reservoir of #UKLabour/#SNP swing voters, and the population of Stranraer is substantially larger than the population of the Rhinns.
If that ward is returning a #Tory/

I don't believe that anyone is intrinsically or essentially evil. If we believed they they were intrinsically evil, we could not hold them responsible for the evil that they do, because they could not help it.
But people do things which are evil. People do things which are evil often because they did not sufficiently think ahead, and consider the consequences of their actions. And people do things which are evil sometimes because others who have authority over them tell them to. &g…

"When news becomes an extension of political and corporate power, democracy loses its immune system. The Fourth Estate collapses. And disinformation rules.
This is what happens when billionaires control information. They decide what you see, what you don’t, who becomes a villain, who gets rehabilitated, and whose death is worth remembering"
#kleptocracy
Legacy Media…

Legacy Media's License To Kill
We've lived to see the day when a newspaper excuses the man who butchered their journalist By November, 2018, the CIA had concluded that Saudi Arabia was responsible for the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And moreover—that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally ordered the killing.

"When #billionaires own major media outlets, “news” becomes something closer to state messaging. Not because the government controls it, but because the financial class that funds political power also owns the platforms that shape public perception."
#kleptocracy
Legacy M…

Legacy Media's License To Kill
We've lived to see the day when a newspaper excuses the man who butchered their journalist By November, 2018, the CIA had concluded that Saudi Arabia was responsible for the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And moreover—that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally ordered the killing.

I've written to my own MP this morning about Qesser Zurah's #HungerStrike, and I've added the text of my letter to him to the end of this post.
Please could I humbly urge everyone in the UK to write, today, to their own MP urging for her immediate release on bail? This is now very urgent indeed.
Please, also, boost this post.

Tidings of comfort and joy

"the assets of British banks ‘mostly consist of claims on other banks. Their liabilities are mainly obligations to other financial institutions. Lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services – which most people would imagine was the principal business of a bank – amounts to about 3 per cent of that total.’"
It's not for nothing that the medieval church -- like modern Islam -- considered

John Lanchester · For Every Winner a Loser: What is finance for?
In our society the classic three ways of making a fortune still apply: inherit it, marry it, or steal it. But for an...

I may be somewhat late on this, but the Marsh family rhapsodising on #Trump is epic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YY_8WzcHqMQ

Listening to #InOurTime on the Time Machine, I am asking myself whether #AI #LLM users are choosing to become Eloi, are choosing to let their intellects atrophy, by delegating their creative and critical faculties t…

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Time Machine (Archive Episode)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the science and ideas in HG Wells' story of time travel.

"The most reliable predictor of future conflict in a place is past conflict in that place. In large part, this is because of unresolved injustices. Resentments over past crimes simmer. Then, they boil over.
In other words, 'they got away with mass murder' is not a great way to build a lasting peace" -- @…

Justice vs Peace
As the world watches the shaky ceasefire in Gaza, the issues of peace and justice intermingle, strain, and collide. For those who work on conflicts, these are familiar tensions, but the underlying debates rarely get wider attention. The basic issue is this: to get any kind of peace deal in

"However, international justice can seem like a faith-based community. We believe in it, but proof of its existence is rare, and almost miraculous when it happens" -- @…
Let's all pray for a miracle, then.

Justice vs Peace
As the world watches the shaky ceasefire in Gaza, the issues of peace and justice intermingle, strain, and collide. For those who work on conflicts, these are familiar tensions, but the underlying debates rarely get wider attention. The basic issue is this: to get any kind of peace deal in

"The victims of war-time atrocities on all sides also have something in common. They are cut out of the top-down deal. Civilians were bombed, children were starved, and prisoners were tortured, yet the perpetrators escape punishment. War criminals continue ruling and enjoying the perks of power. Survivors and their families are denied justice" -- @…

Justice vs Peace
As the world watches the shaky ceasefire in Gaza, the issues of peace and justice intermingle, strain, and collide. For those who work on conflicts, these are familiar tensions, but the underlying debates rarely get wider attention. The basic issue is this: to get any kind of peace deal in

As soon as you saw the name 'Tony Blair' on it you knew it would be as corrupt and abusive as fuck. And of course you were right.
My heart bleeds for #Gaza. This 'peace plan' is an epic, dystopian betrayal.
#GazaPeace

Pro-Trump Tech Billionaires Are Poised to Cash In on Gaza's 'Peace' Deal
Documents show Tony Blair’s Ellison-funded institute designed Gaza’s recovery plan on data-driven lines echoing Oracle-Palantir war systems.

I listen to the Volts podcast for technical news about innovations on the electricity grid, so this excellent discussion of the intersection between epistemology and social psychology was as unexpected as it was interesting. Highly recommended.
Volts: The cure for misinformation is not more information or smarter news consumers
Starting from: 00:40:37
Episode webpage:

Frustrated with your phone doing stupid shit which you don't want it to? Me too. I've switched mine to only answer commands in some Chinese dialect. Which Chinese dialect? I don't know. I don't speak, write or read any Chinese.
I don't know that this will totally defeat it, but it's worth a try.

Right, what odds would I get for a bet that the next UK government will be a Labour-Conservative coalition, justified to their supporters by both parties as 'the only way to keep out the extremists'?

"Israeli officials openly stated the goal: to destroy #Gaza and make it uninhabitable. By textbook definition, this is genocide: the deliberate targeting of people not for who they are as individuals, but because they are members of a group marked for destruction"
#GazaGenocide
…

"Genocide is a process, not an event. When genocide happens, its roots, and the conditions that allowed it, often become visible only in retrospect. If those conditions remain unchanged and there is no accountability, there’s every reason to believe the violence will return, perhaps even worse, especially if it was never fully halted. This is exactly what we are seeing in the case of Gaza"
#GazaGenocide

"I remember somebody jokingly suggesting that I challenge Elon Musk to a fight (this was during his and Mark Zuckerberg’s martial arts feud), and quietly thinking to myself, I am literally not paid enough for that" -- @…
Happy retirement, Eugen!

My next chapter with Mastodon
Reflections on my time leading Mastodon and what's to come next.

This is what I'm reduced to when I want to eat and Horrible wants to cuddle.
#CatsOfMastondon

"#crypto leverage — whether through borrowing programs, margin trading, or perpetual futures — creates a cycle of risk that can rapidly snowball"
Again, of course. Leverage was one of the main drivers of the great crash of 1929. People then mortgaged their houses to buy stocks; now, to buy #Bitcoin

Anatomy of a crypto meltdown
October 2025 brought the most dramatic crypto flash crash of all time, but it was only a dress rehearsal for the systemic crisis the industry is building toward.

"Some have accused centralized [#Crypto] exchanges of minimizing their own losses at their customers’ expense by intentionally halting trading or withdrawals under the guise of 'technical difficulties'. Indeed, it is suspiciously common for supposedly highly sophisticated centralized exchanges to suddenly experience glitches or announce urgent 'maintenance' under far less volat…

Anatomy of a crypto meltdown
October 2025 brought the most dramatic crypto flash crash of all time, but it was only a dress rehearsal for the systemic crisis the industry is building toward.

"As trading activity spiked on [#Crypto] exchanges and prices whipsawed, multiple centralized platforms suffered glitches. Binance’s site went completely down at one point, and customers reported unexplained account freezes, unsuccessful trades, and automated protections like stop-losses failing to trigger"
Again, of course. People build crypto exchanges because they want to get ric…

Anatomy of a crypto meltdown
October 2025 brought the most dramatic crypto flash crash of all time, but it was only a dress rehearsal for the systemic crisis the industry is building toward.

"The Coinwatch #crypto tracking platform accused market makers of 'desert[ing] their responsibility', and #blockchain analyst YQ alleged 'they executed a coordinated withdrawal at the optimal moment to minimize their losses while maximizing subsequent opportunities"
Of cour…

Anatomy of a crypto meltdown
October 2025 brought the most dramatic crypto flash crash of all time, but it was only a dress rehearsal for the systemic crisis the industry is building toward.

"Wintermute reported that the median crypto token price drop was around 54%, and more than 90% of tokens lost more than 10% of their value"
#Crypto is and always was a hungry scam that eats suckers. Don't be a sucker. Don't touch crypto.

Anatomy of a crypto meltdown
October 2025 brought the most dramatic crypto flash crash of all time, but it was only a dress rehearsal for the systemic crisis the industry is building toward.

Friends, of course we all hope the #ceasefire will hold. Of course we all hope that aid trucks will be allowed to move. Of course we all hope that there will be a stable, just peace.
But hope isn't enough. The suffering in #Gaza hasn't ended. We must keep pressure on our governments to ensu…

RE: https://toot.community/@mittall/115548968772941692
I've received a private appeal from @…, who is in

When it's observable that the very rich are steadily growing richer while the vast majority of people are growing poorer, it's obvious that the tax system is not neutral: it is actively redistributing wealth upwards. For the tax system to be neutral, it MUST tax the very rich much more. To do so is not redistributive, at least until it actively causes a net movement of wealth towards the poor: rather it is simply neutral.

How Has Inequality Changed? - Equality Trust
Levels of inequality changed dramatically over the course of the 20th century. Overall income inequality fell from a high point in the 1930s, remained fairly static until 1979, and then increased dramatically from 1979 to 1991. Since 1991, the trend has been more volatile, affected by Great Recession of the late 2000s and the Covid-19 […]

The years of a man's life are three score and ten.
I've done my time; I've served my sentence. Today is the day on which, for most of the past thirty years, I've planned to make my farewells and exit stage left, ideally not pursued by a bear.
But the best laid plans of meece and men gang of agley, especially when there's a goblin involved.
So I'm afraid I shall now be sticking around a while longer, to pester and provoke you all.
Here's to …

@borkdude, in your 'scittle with additional libraries' files, you have, for each file in the library, a line
SHADOW_ENV.evalLoad( <filename>, <boolean>, <???>);
where ??? is a string of JS source code with some punctuation replaced by hex codes.
The second last line appears to invoke the file itself (recursively!?!), and the last is always
SHADOW_ENV.evalLoad("shadow.module.<filename>.append.js", false, <???>);
Wha…

Today was hardly the ideal day to be grodgelling in the dirt like one of Jinian Footseer's gobblemoles, but then today was not the ideal day for the cattle to demolish the garden gatepost. Fortunately, I did have a replacement steel gatepost ready to go in.
#crofting
#TheJoyOfCrofting

RE: https://mastodon.online/@Geri/115550155236305491
There is no end to the irresponsibility, venality, and gullibility of our politicians. They depend for their 'political donations' on serving the ultra-rich, and they do it without hesitation or rem…

"A new investigation of Elon #Musk’s X by Sky News found that every account set up by reporters, 'no matter their political orientation, was fed a glut of rightwing content', much of which was extreme. The experts it consulted believe this pattern could have resulted only from an algorithm engineered for this purpose, and that 'an algorithmic bias must be decided by senior people at …

How is it that #PalestineAction, whose worst 'crime' is to spray paint aeroplanes, is declared a #Terrorist organisation, and the #IDF, whose soldiers routinely beat and rape prisoners, shoot ch…

"The fundamental problem is this: that most of the means of communication are owned or influenced by the very rich. If democracy is the problem capital is always trying to solve, propaganda is part of the solution. Like the kings and empire-builders of the past, they use their platforms to project the claims that suit them and suppress the claims that don’t. This means boosting right and far-right movements, which defend wealth and power..." -- George Monbiot.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@TomasHajzler/115552444795284744
This is even worse than it looks. These people are hungry, they have no way to get warm of dry, they are **still** being bombed. Disease will spread very fast.
If you can help folk in …

I've just bought test materials to evaluate the relative strengths of a flax/balsa sandwich composite versus a carbon/Nomex (aramid) sandwich composite.
Yes, I know the carbon/Nomex will be stronger, but would the flax/balsa be strong enough for my #Tricycle project?
#BikeTooter

Early in the second #UkraineWar of this century, Timothy Snyder did a really amazing public lecture series on the history of #Ukraine, which greatly helped my understanding.
Can anyone point to a similarly good lecture series (in English) on the history of

With the emergence of more processors with 64 cores or more, I'm thinking more about whether it makes sense to implement a hypercube virtualised on a single chip with a single vector of memory, or as a literal hypercube of 64 (say) RP2350s. I understand the problems of transferring data across a hypercube, but I don't have a good feeling of how the bus contention on a multicore processor scales. What should I read?

Implementing post scarcity hardware
Prototype work towards building a post-scarcity software system

There's a subscribers-only podcast which Lesley Riddoch has put out (which unfortunately means I can't link to it), in which she interviews Sara Salayers.
Salayers points out that the Union with England Act, 1707 (linked) is specifically conditional (§XXV) on the Claim of Right Act, 1689 (also linked); and that the Claim of Right Act forbids government from prosecuting people on 'stretches of old... laws'.

"The #Labour party arose from a long wave of protests by workers against capital, calling for workers’ rights and for sweeping democratic reforms. These protests and their organisers came to be known as the labour movement. Its early actions included the radical war in Scotland, the Merthyr and Newport risings... the Swing riots... and the General Strike of 1842. No such protests would have me…

"Crypto is my second bubble concern. It’s a classic Ponzi scheme. It’s growing because investors believe other investors will keep buying it. And like #AI, crypto’s meteoric growth has also been powered largely by the ultra-wealthy. (Trump and his family are said to have made $5 billion off it so far.)" -- @…

Beware the Oligarch's AI Bubble
They’re likely to burst.