Tootfinder

On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent the Israeli stock market into a fall by doing what he so often does: saying the quiet part out loud. 
The market rebounded, as it always does from these sorts of brief panics.
But Netanyahu and Israel in general are finally being forced to grapple with some of the real, long-term consequences of their actions. 
Netanyahu told a group of American and Israeli business people at the
“Fifty States, One Israel” confer…

As Israel faces increasing international isolation, BDS becomes more crucial than ever
Benjamin Netanyahu walked back claims about Israel’s international isolation after causing a stock market crash, but he was right - the Gaza genocide has severely hurt Israel’s standing. We must deepen this isolation through boycotts and sanctions.

Apparently I'm basically the only one using the #DungeonCrawlers hashtag, but that's okay, because scrolling it is a pretty cool look back at the games I've played and dug.
Roundup of the games I've posted screenshots/brief reviews of on the #DungeonCrawlers hashtag since 2023, with …

DemonsTier on Steam
From the union of Riddled Corpse and Xenon Valkyrie comes Demonstier, an RPG roguelike with elements of action, adventure, & arcade. Enter the dungeons of king Thosgar & destroy the demonic beings present there .

TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?

Towards an AI-Augmented Textbook
LearnLM Team, Google, :, Amy Wang, Anna Iurchenko, Anisha Choudhury, Alicia Mart\'in, Amir Globerson, Avinatan Hassidim, Ay\c{c}a \c{C}akmakli, Ayelet Shasha Evron, Charlie Yang, Courtney Heldreth, Diana Akrong, Gal Elidan, Hairong Mu, Ian Li, Ido Cohen, Katherine Chou, Komal Singh, Lev Borovoi, Lidan Hackmon, Lior Belinsky, Michael Fink, Niv Efron, Preeti Singh, Rena Levitt, Shashank Agarwal, Shay Sharon, Tracey Lee-Joe, Xiaohong Hao, Yael Gold-Z…

Towards an AI-Augmented Textbook
Textbooks are a cornerstone of education, but they have a fundamental limitation: they are a one-size-fits-all medium. Any new material or alternative representation requires arduous human effort, so that textbooks cannot be adapted in a scalable manner. We present an approach for transforming and augmenting textbooks using generative AI, adding layers of multiple representations and personalization while maintaining content integrity and quality. We refer to the system built with this approach…

Nessie: A Rust-Powered, Fast, Flexible, and Generalized Friends-of-Friends Galaxy-Group Finder in R and Python
Trystan S. Lambert, A. S. G. Robotham, M. Bravo, C. del P. Lagos, R. Tobar, S. Driver, A. Aufan Stoffels d'Hautefort
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13647

Nessie: A Rust-Powered, Fast, Flexible, and Generalized Friends-of-Friends Galaxy-Group Finder in R and Python
We introduce Nessie, a galaxy group finder implemented in Rust and distributed as both a Python and R package. Nessie employs the friends-of-friends (FoF) algorithm and requires only on-sky position and redshift as input, making it immediately applicable to surveys that lack a well-defined luminosity function. We implement several algorithmic optimizations including binary search and k-d tree pre-selection that significantly improve performance by reducing unnecessary galaxy pair checks. To val…

A Brief Note on Complex AdS-Schwarzschild Black Holes
Raghu Mahajan, Kaustubh Singhi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08883 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08883

A Brief Note on Complex AdS-Schwarzschild Black Holes
In the context of thermodynamics of asymptotically anti-de Sitter spaces, it is often stated that at very low temperatures, there is only one saddle point available-namely, thermal AdS-and hence this sole saddle dictates the low-temperature behavior. However, AdS-Schwarzschild black holes continue to exist at low temperatures as complex saddle points. We point out that the real part of the on-shell action of these complex black holes is smaller than that of thermal AdS at the lowest temperature…

First KDE 6.4.4 feedback on FreeBSD:
All running pretty smoothly afaic. Memory usage a bit high, but my guess that's bcs of the startup of a linux jail (I'm playing with installing Brave, which I did). Possibly I let go of that and stick to Librewolf, installed from the repos already.
Networkmgr by the Ghostbsd team is a nifty tool to handle your connections, works great in KDE also.
Automount by @…

The authoritarian strongmen Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping
have mused on how organ transplants might lead to immortality,
during a brief exchange of small talk caught on a hot mic at a military parade.
https://www.

Got my water/utility bill for the spring/summer yesterday. (we get billed 3 times a year as part of our general city utilities bill including water, sewer and garbage/recycling fees).
Figured it would be a big water year this year so I've been wanting to see this. And of course, I have data going back to 2019ish.
Today's bill only goes to August 1st, so it doesn't include when we started to fill the #pondpool!
This was already a dry year in the spring and we were doing lots of watering in the front yard for the new ground cover in the modified driveway and the 3 new fruit trees.
Verdict:
2024: Apr 12 - Aug 7: 122, 200L
2025 Apr 14 - Aug 1 (7 less days!): 136,600L
It will be interesting to see if the August pond filling will add a big chunk onto our summer/fall consumption or if that is offset by both the brief August water restrictions, and the departure of both kids this fall to consume other people's water. ;=)
If you want an indication of how much water people use vs. yards: look at our August 2022 bill, which captures when we were on our cross-Canada roadtrip for 30 days in July/August of the 100 day period.
#water #consumption #gardening #utility #PortAlberni