Tootfinder

Google says it hit a milestone of 1.3 quadrillion monthly tokens processed across its services this summer, up from 980T monthly tokens announced in July (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder)
https://the-decoder.com/google-boasts-1-3…

Google boasts 1.3 quadrillion tokens each month, but the figure is mostly window dressing
Google says it now processes more than 1.3 quadrillion tokens every month with its AI models. But this headline number mostly reflects computing effort, not real usage or practical value, and it raises questions about Google's own environmental claims.

And when I'm talking about understanding the drives to violence, I did write about something similar recently.
https://write.as/hexmhell/algorithmic-violence
The drives behind this and the shooting last week are pretty radically different, but there's some overlap. People like Kirk are part a huge political machine slowly crushing people all over the world. There's a hopeless rage that would naturally drive even the most calm person to the edge of violence. You can't look at the world honestly and be OK. We want to do something. We want to react. But everything we do is silenced or must rmain silent. So it's easy to understand why someone might choose violence. Very different situation, but everyone is subject to the same national and international influences.
I don't promote violence, not because I disagree with it but because I think it's expensive. It takes time to plan, especially for those trying to get away. Guns are not cheap, nor are bullets, nor is the range time you need to get somewhat good under pressure. It's not cheap for the person doing it, and it's not cheap for the community that has to clean up. The community will face police repression (which, if we're honest, was gonna come anyway). The community will have to post bail, will lose a person for a while, will need to support the family, will go to hearings, will write reports, will do interviews.
Sun Tzu said that deploying one soldier to the front takes 7 in the field. Logistics are a huge invisible cost. Some of that time and energy could be reused. It's never bad to be armed and able to defend if needed. But a lot of that energy and time would be better spent planning a community pantry, a tool library, organizing a union, etc. We are living in a disaster, and we need to invest in thriving through the next crumble.
Kirk is replacable. They're almost all replacable, because they don't really care about human life. We do, so none of us are. It's not really a worth while trade, IMHO.

@… But, but, but! It’s “backed by learning science”!
I agree, it remains a mystery where the learning is supposed to take place. But that’s not really the point, as it’s obvious that the goal is to make students dependent on their products as early as possible in order to maximize their profits.

@… But, but, but! It’s “backed by learning science”!
I agree, it remains a mystery where the learning is supposed to take place. But that’s not really the point, as it’s obvious that the goal is to make students dependent on their products as early as possible in order to maximize their profits.

I did a short keynote for a bunch of composers and music people a few days ago on "AI". And since it landed well but wasn't recorded I'll try to redo it (maybe expand it marginally) and upload it.
It's about AI but more about the permission to to what feels right and humane anyways.
And it sounds weird to give people permission for something natural, but the reaction in that room felt like it was meaningful. That standing against the tide of "AI is wit…

from my link log —
Cool but obscure X11 tools.
https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/
saved 2025-03-24 https://dotat.at/:/5BN6Z.htm…

These five rookies balled out in their NFL debuts, but is it sustainable over the course of the 2025 season?

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/these-f

How the US democracy is designed to avoid representation
Right now in the US, a system which proclaims to give each citizen representation, my interests are not represented very well by most of my so-called representatives at any level of government. This is true for a majority of Americans across the political spectrum, and it happens by design. The "founding fathers" were explicit about wanting a system of government that would appear Democratic but which would keep power in the hands of rich white landowners, and they successfully designed exactly that. But how does disenfranchisement work in this system?
First, a two-party system locked in by first-post-the-post winner-takes-all elections immediately destroys representation for everyone who didn't vote for the winner, including those who didn't vote or weren't eligible to vote. Single-day non-holiday elections and prisoner disenfranchisement go a long way towards ensuring working-class people get no say, but much larger is the winner-takes all system. In fact, even people who vote for the winning candidate don't get effective representation if they're really just voting against the opponent as the greater of two evils. In a 51/49 election with 50% turnout, you've immediately ensured that ~75% of eligible voters don't get represented, and with lesser-of-two-evils voting, you create an even wider gap to wedge corporate interests into. Politicians need money to saturate their lesser-of-two-evils message far more than they need to convince any individual voter to support their policies. It's even okay if they get caught lying, cheating, or worse (cough Epstein cough) as long as the other side is also doing those things and you can freeze out new parties.
Second, by design the Senate ensures uneven representation, allowing control of the least-populous half of states to control or at least shut down the legislative process. A rough count suggests 284.6 million live in the 25 most-populous states, while only 54.8 million live in the rest. Currently, counting states with divided representation as two half-states with half as much population, 157.8 million people are represented by 53 Republican sensors, while 180.5 million people get only 45 seats of Democratic representation. This isn't an anti-Democrat bias, it's a bias towards less-populous states, whose residents get more than their share it political power.
I haven't even talked about gerrymandering yet, or family/faith-based "party loyalty," etc. Overall, the effect is that the number of people whose elected representatives meaningfully represent their interests on any given issue is vanishingly small (like, 10% of people tops), unless you happen to be rich enough to purchase lobbying power or direct access.
If we look at polls, we can see how lack of representation lets congress & the president enact many policies that go against what a majority of the population wants. Things like abortion restrictions, the current ICE raids, and Medicare cuts are deeply unpopular, but they benefit the political class and those who can buy access. These are possible because the system ensures at every step of the way that ordinary people do NOT get the one thing the system promises them: representation in the halls of power.
Okay, but is this a feature of all democracies, inherent in the nature of a majority-decides system? Not exactly...
1/2
#uspol #democracy

Me? Over 95% of what I do is NOT in Chrome.
https://www.ghacks.net/2025/09/09/you-can-still-install-ublock-origin-in-google-chrome-140-but-why-bother/

a good blog but the most relevant line is "GPT-5 may be a moderate quantitative improvement (and it may be cheaper) but it still fails in all the same qualitative ways as its predecessors" , very true but indeed now using it a few days and i notice those moderate improvements.. And i was already aware of all it's failings.
For me in day-to-day use it is better and that is wat counts for me at least. Oh and always (yes always) check outcomes before you use them.

GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that’s not the worst of it.
A new release botched … and a breaking research new paper that spells trouble

i love this country, but we need to fight the enemy within, which somehow is everyone but me and also the majority

President Trump promised we’d see everything. But when the Epstein files were unsealed, Trump’s name was missing—blacked out by the same DOJ that pledged transparency.
https://open.substack.com/pub/theintellectualistofficial/p/president-tru…

President Trump Promised Full Disclosure. But His Name Was Blacked Out.
Donald Trump vowed the public would “see everything.” But when the binders opened, his name had vanished.

I thought I would get an orange pro, but now I am thinking “Miguel you are a stylish person, you need the air” but a voice inside me says “you need as many camera lenses as Apple can put in there”
The next 35 hours will be packed with anxiety.

Raiders rookie Ashton Jeanty struggled in his NFL debut, but expectations remain high https://www.foxsports.com/articles/nfl/raiders-rookie-ashton-jeanty-struggled-in-his-nfl-debut-but-expectations-remain-high…

The collapse of First Brands (it’s not just you, few had heard of them) is *probably* not the pin that pops the current bubble, but it’s entertaining. Wall Street will reliably engage in lethal/suicidal business practices given the chance.
But that bubble-popping pin is incoming.
Matt Levine: https://newsletterhunt.com/em…

Trump agrees to provide aid, but who will pay?: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/11/trump-agrees-to-provide-aid.html

For anyone who is getting fed-up with the "e-bike" riding couriers who make all cyclists look horrible, turns out the main company leasing them is HMP Bikes and is trying to call them Class 2s when they have stubby little pedals you basically can't use. They are taking advantage of immigrants.

@… I don’t think this is a bug (fwiw) but maybe an intentional choice, per https://front-end.social/@famulimas/115181215027069621
but it was a fun o…

And when all these mechanisms — the “more just, more human systems” I’m talking about — fail to do their job, what can we do? Go to war, I guess? But I’m not happy about that. I don’t like war.
I am quite willing to celebrate a world without Kirk if in fact that’s what we get. (Last I heard was “critical condition.”) But I can’t get •that• happy about it. Whether we celebrate his death or denounce gun violence — both are important, both are appropriate! — we must above all notice the failure of everything that should have prevented us from even getting here. •That• is the real crisis.
/end

It took two days, but finally had my first fika at the new place. All my gear was spread across boxes and bins over five rooms and three floors, but I did it! Tiny victories.
#espresso #coffee

The A.I. insurance market is in its infancy, but Mr. Kvist says mainstream insurers are lining up to back him.
One of his clients is a job recruiting company that uses A.I. to sift through candidates.
“Which is great, but you can now discriminate at a scale we’ve never seen before,” Mr. Kvist said.
“It’s a breeding ground for class-action lawsuits.”
Mr. Kvist believes the work he is doing now will lay the foundation for more complex A.I. insurance policies to come.

Opinion | The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World
A destructive A.I., like a nuclear bomb, is now a concrete possibility; the question is whether anyone will be reckless enough to build one.

It's exactly what I mean: It automatically shuts down my laptop. I'm guessing it did it last night because of the Patch Tuesday updates. But there are other times it does it, and perhaps those are for minor updates. I've been tinkering with Windows settings so much that I have managed to minimize the number of times it does it, but it did it last night.

France is providing a wonderful example of why if and when we dumped the British Monarchy, a Canadian Republic would probably be best not to go to a fully elected Presidential system but rather keep the appointed and largely powerless Constitutional head of state with the same Parliamentary system.
There is something to be said for not only the simplicity of our Parliamentary system but also the election of MPs that turn into a Cabinet and PM.
#canpoli #cdnpoli #Republican https://journa.host/@w7voa/115175872332891929

@… is someone who has done more than most to help her compatriots in this dreadful #GazaGenocide. To see her express such despair breaks my heart.
There must be rebuilding.
There must be reparations.
Palestine must be free.
There is no pea…

#AdviceRequested!
We want to buy an electric car! It's exciting but also daunting to make car buying decisions, and harder to evaluate with electric than it was for gas.
Safety and reliability are the highest priorities — which was easier to evaluate with models like the Honda Civic that's been around for decades
Lucid looks really nice, but I question the relia…

#iFixit: There's groundbreaking waveguide tech inside #Meta's $800 #AR glasses but don’t count on fixing them

There’s Groundbreaking Waveguide Tech Inside Meta’s $800 AR Glasses But Don’t Count on Fixing Them
Imagine an AR repair guide that follows along with your repair. We’re excited by the possibility, but you won’t be able to fix these glasses just yet.

Sources: Paramount will stop airing five UK MTV channels at the end of 2025 but keep its flagship channel; some other non-US MTV channels are also set to close (Mark Savage/BBC)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdr612yz8p0o

MTV to axe its music TV channels in the UK
The broadcaster will stop showing music videos in December, but its main channel will remain on air.

Fascinating, balanced piece on civilization collapse-- how it can obviously bring increased violence and suffering, but how the average person may not have even noticed in the past, and how the reality of it is even more complicated https://aeon.co/essays/the-great-myth-of-empire-collapse…

The great myth of empire collapse | Aeon Essays
Societal downfalls loom large in history and popular culture but, for the 99 per cent, collapse often had its upsides

I tried to go for a ride in the rain today and it sucked. I was hoping to go meet one of the candidates for governor at a local park and while it was "lightly" raining when I left home after a mile it got worse and the top of my legs were soaked.
The rest of my body was okay. I put my rain jacket hood over my helmet, I had gloves and good hiking shoes but damn, pants and legs were just... wet.
I never *want* to ride in the rain but may have to if I'm stuck at work o…

Anyone having issues with Tor for the past few days?
It seems one of the Snowflake bridge is down (but should not impact obfs4):
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40475…

There is a terribly genocidal article written by Giora Eiland (former Israeli general), in Walla (news.walla.co.il), that I won't be linking here at all but you can find easily, in which it cries about the Israeli government not having ethnically cleansed all of the North of Gaza before because Arabs don't give a fuck about civilians killed but they care about stolen land, and specifically says that starvation of people is good and... a lot of other genocidal shit.

Started reading "More and more and more" by Fressoz, and in the intro he writes "Getting out of carbon will be far more difficult than getting out of capitalism, a condition that is probably necessary but certainly not sufficient." - welp, that will be easy then 😢
Looks like a great book so far, but not for the faint-hearted..

Wild... I subscribe to a zine, a small but mighty publication from a really talented and generous guy who happens to live in the US. For the past several decades, this has just meant me paying slightly higher postage rates than domestic subscribers - no big deal and totally worth it. Now, though, we've got tariffs. Still, the story might have a happy (temporary) ending: a US subscriber, who'll be here, plans to stop by a Canadian post office and mail all the zines. Yay! But loads of …

We keep talking about boiling the oceans, but we're also boiling humanity. And by "we", I mean capitalism/colonialism and its support systems.
https://mastodon.social/@Climatehistories/114835508971659679

Athena (@Climatehistories@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image If you want to understand the true danger of extreme heat, 'The Heat Will Kill You First' is a must-read. We've normalized heat as a manageable nuisance, but Jeff Goodell reveals how it’s a deadly force we underestimate, with heat stroke killing many simply because we don’t take the risk seriously enough. #climatechange #heat #books

A few more details here:
Static price of 32.97 cent / kWh. Feed-in is rewarded at a slightly higher (but unknown) price. It's not a 'dynamic electricity' as previously communicated, but rather a 'managed smart' tariff.
Also no V2H: user cannot control discharging. Unclear if this works with solar.

Google AI, yet again...
Me: "wake me up at quarter to seven"
AI: "I've set an alarm for 4:45."
Me: "great, but that's not what I said, I said 'quarter to seven'"
AI: "I cannot update an alarm, but I can set a new alarm at 6:45."
Me: "Do it, and delete the old one."
AI: "I have set an alarm for 6:45. (smth along the lines of cannot delete the old one"
Me: "And why is that?&quot…

Don't Run with Scissors: Pruning Breaks VLA Models but They Can Be Recovered
Jason Jabbour, Dong-Ki Kim, Max Smith, Jay Patrikar, Radhika Ghosal, Youhui Wang, Ali Agha, Vijay Janapa Reddi, Shayegan Omidshafiei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08464

Don't Run with Scissors: Pruning Breaks VLA Models but They Can Be Recovered
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced robotic capabilities but remain challenging to deploy on resource-limited hardware. Pruning has enabled efficient compression of large language models (LLMs), yet it is largely understudied in robotics. Surprisingly, we observe that pruning VLA models leads to drastic degradation and increased safety violations. We introduce GLUESTICK, a post-pruning recovery method that restores much of the original model's functionality while retaining sparsit…

Anyone that managed to get their hands on a Framework 12 already?
Been looking at picking up one for myself but wanted to know how the battery life is for fairly normal use (browsing the web, maybe some youtube/plex streaming, talking on Discord etc.).
My current laptop doesn't have a battery that lasts very long (it's 6 years old) but can't be charged via the USB-C either (so just using a powerbank or the trucks 12V with an adapter is a no-go).

"""
But there is no certainty that madness was content to sit locked up in its immutable identity, waiting for psychiatry to perfect its art, before it emerged blinking from the shadows into the blinding light of truth. Nor is it clear that confinement was above all, or even implicitly, a series of measures put in place to deal with madness. It is not even certain that in this repetition of the ancient gesture of segregation at the threshold of the classical age, the modern world was aiming to wipe out all those who, either as a species apart or a spontaneous mutation, appeared as 'asocial'. The fact that the internees of the eighteenth century bear a resemblance to our modern vision of the asocial is undeniable, but it is above all a question of results, as the character of the marginal was produced by the gesture of segregation itself. For the day came when this man, banished in the same exile all over Europe in the mid-seventeenth century, suddenly became an outsider, expelled by a society to whose norms he could not be seen to conform; and for our own intellectual comfort, he then became a candidate for prisons, asylums and punishment. In reality, this character is merely the result of superimposed grids of exclusion.
The gesture that proscribed was as abrupt as the one that had isolated the lepers, and in both cases, the meaning of the gesture should not be mistaken for its effect. Lepers were not excluded to prevent contagion, any more than in 1657, 1 per cent of the population of Paris was confined merely to deliver the city from the 'asocial'. The gesture had a different dimension: it did not isolate strangers who had previously remained invisible, who until then had been ignored by force of habit. It altered the familiar cityscape by giving them new faces, strange, bizarre silhouettes that nobody recognised. Strangers were found in places where their presence had never previously been suspected: the process punctured the fabric of society, and undid the familiar. Through this gesture, something inside man was placed outside of himself, and pushed over the edge of our horizon. It is the gesture of confinement, in short, which created alienation.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

🚁 Small but mighty: A seed-inspired monocopter idea takes flight
#drones

Small but mighty: A seed-inspired monocopter idea takes flight
From a seed-inspired design to a 26-minute flight time on a single rotor, a new monocopter developed by SUTD researchers marks a 10-year journey towards redefining how efficient small flying robots can be.

Caught by surprise in a chaotic flock of pelicans while kayaking Morro Bay a few weeks ago. Did my best to pan with the motion, but 1/60 wasn't nearly fast enough.
https://glass.photo/shacker/series/gqbDUxzNYuuHvAGzoqHUr-pelicans-in-chaos

Pelicans in chaos, a Series by Scot Hacker — Glass
Caught by surprise in a chaotic flock of pelicans while kayaking Morro Bay a few weeks ago. Did my best to pan with the motion, but 1/60 wasn't nearly fast enou…

I would not be unhappy if the Federal shutdown goes on through noon (EST) on January 20, 2029.
It may be a pain to many of us - and we should be charitable and understanding when dealing with people who are being hurt.
But at least if there is no money being appropriated to the Executive, it's ability to do damage will be somewhat (but only somewhat) constrained.
(I fully anticipate El Cheeto going outside of our Constitution [again] and pulling money directly from the …

Brian Callahan pleased with Cam Ward's preseason debut, but rookie 'certainly hasn't arrived yet' https://www.nfl.com/news/brian-callahan-pleased-with-cam-ward-s-preseason-debut-but-rookie-certainly-hasn-t-arri…

PSA (i don't use Chrome so haven't tested)
https://www.neowin.net/news/chrome-140-make-is-it-harder-to-install-ublock-origin-but-it-is-still-possible/

Chrome 140 makes it harder to install uBlock Origin, but it is still possible
Google recently released Chrome 140, and with it, made it harder to use MV2-based extensions, such as uBlock Origin. Fortunately, you can still make it work. Here is how.

Is anyone involved in 'Glycin' - the new GTK/image loader thing? It generally looks a good safe idea; but there are some weird cases where it seems OTT. As far as I can tell, gtk forks off a 'bwrap' namespace wrapper, then runs the image parsing in a glycin process; and that process gets cleaned up when you don't do any more image loads for a while. But that means that opening a new terminal ends up doing all that just (?) to read the icon which is a secure system fi…

Challenge: "Name 20 living female authors you admire, 1 per day"
Day 18: Kim Småge
Sorry, but you'll have to learn some Norwegian if you want to read this author, as she hasn't been translated into English yet - but that means you could read Ibsen too...
"Containerkvinnan" was a real knockout. The bodies of two women are found in a container in Trondheim's harbour, and from here proceeds the whodunnit. It's a whole series and I keep mean…

It's kind of baffling how easily programmers shoot themselves in the foot with "productivity" tools.
AI is the latest example, but it's part of a long and rich history of people spending ages setting up vast and intricate tool chains that require nothing but maintenance and mental bandwidth.
Why are we so bad at this? Why can't we have stronger simplicity biases, and wait until things are necessary?

I don’t *want* violence, meaning I don’t want them to violently oppress anyone.
Once they do… I’m not saying it’s right, but sometimes it can’t be helped.
To accept violence by the oppressor, but condemn violence by the oppressed is eh… a take I suppose.

Bridging the Gap Between Binary and Source Based Package Management in Spack
John Gouwar, Gregory Becker, Tamara Dahlgren, Nathan Hanford, Arjun Guha, Todd Gamblin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07728

Bridging the Gap Between Binary and Source Based Package Management in Spack
Binary package managers install software quickly but they limit configurability due to rigid ABI requirements that ensure compatibility between binaries. Source package managers provide flexibility in building software, but compilation can be slow. For example, installing an HPC code with a new MPI implementation may result in a full rebuild. Spack, a widely deployed, HPC-focused package manager, can use source and pre-compiled binaries, but lacks a binary compatibility model, so it cannot mix …

Why Cooperation Beats Competition If You Design It Right
We praise competition because it slings us awake, but the quiet truth is that cooperation does the heavy lifting. It stitches days together, forges talent into reliability, and turns cleverness into outcomes you can touch. You see it most clearly where failure costs blood or bread. Think of the night shift in a busy hospital: rounds, handoffs, an attending who catches what a resident almost missed because the…

Why Cooperation Beats Competition If You Design It Right | David Boles, Blogs
We praise competition because it slings us awake, but the quiet truth is that cooperation does the heavy lifting. It stitches days together, forges talent into reliability, and turns cleverness int…

It is a strange kind of irony to grow up with divorced parents and discover that the two sides of my family could not be more different. My mom is voting for fascists, and it shows in the way she tries to dictate every part of me, how I should look, how my hair should be, and the choices I never wanted to make but was pushed toward. Her world feels like control, a constant pressure to fit into something I do not belong to.
My dad, on the other hand, is voting for socialists, but more t…

DAMNIT
Something is abusing the #SpamAssassin RuleQA system again. I assume it's AI only because it hits URLs that seem like they could exist but do not. Generated URLs structured like real "detail" pages that have bogus dates, bogus rule names, or a valid date and valid rule name, but the rule didn't exist at that time.
Pounding it so hard that I can't get i…

Also fascism. But, yeah. https://girlcock.club/@maeve/114831433696151877

Now up to 37.5 GB, 72K image tiles, and another 100x scan in progress.
It looks like most of the die is now at M2, but there's a bunch of oxide junk on top of it still. This kind of nonuniformity is why HF is not the best delayering tool, but I think on this node I can get away with it.
I also have more samples if I need them.

I need to work on making a short directory of Cool Instances bc there are many people I think should come to mastodon but don't necessarily have the juice for the jorts
but also joining dot social makes people instantly want to leave lmao

@… it has been ages that I stumbled over a different handling between #MRI and #JRuby but today it has happened. 😉
EDIT: nevermind. I converted the references but I'm still …

@… and that's where I see the title of something that I raised but the title doesn't help me to remember why I raised it.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry but I do know that I didn't click the title to rediscover the meaning.
#itspastmidnight

Prince William: How much are you paying in tax?
£22.9 million. That's the staggering amount Prince William raked in last year. But unlike his father, who revealed his tax contributions while he was Prince of Wales, Prince William is refusing to say how much tax he pays. What has he got to hide?
https://38d.gs/fd5e

Prince William: Publish your taxes
Prince William made £22.9M last year. But he won’t say how much tax he paid. What is he trying to hide? We fund the monarchy, so the least we deserve is transparency. Sign the petition if you agree:

Crusty keyboard, but I couldn’t say no to working iMac

I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere, but isn’t the origin of the cool S basically a traced bend open paperclip? That’s the shape you get, dependent on the exact model, right? To me the mystery remains who noticed that at first, but other than that… ?????
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy

LOL right-Ctl no longer exists on Windows laptops, that’s now the CoPilot key.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7381341532349661184

Rant: Microsoft took away my right ctrl key and won't give it back. I don't know about you, but I work with typed text a lot. And over past decades I've developed habits. One of them is navigating… | Kuba Wojciak | 10 comments
Rant: Microsoft took away my right ctrl key and won't give it back. I don't know about you, but I work with typed text a lot. And over past decades I've developed habits. One of them is navigating over text with cursor keys while holding right ctrl key down. For those of you who don't do it: it skips over entire words. Now ALL of the Windows laptops you can buy come with a Copilot key replacing right ctrl. On a vanilla machine I end up getting Copilot popups all the time, as I habitually rea…

A teardown of the $800 Meta Ray-Ban Display reveals a system of mirrors enabling its "geometric" waveguide tech, setting it apart from other AR glasses (Elizabeth Chamberlain/iFixit News)
https://www.ifixit.com/News/113543/theres-

There’s Groundbreaking Waveguide Tech Inside Meta’s $800 AR Glasses But Don’t Count on Fixing Them
Imagine an AR repair guide that follows along with your repair. We’re excited by the possibility, but you won’t be able to fix these glasses just yet.

Saints QB competition: Tyler Shough outplays Spencer Rattler, but New Orleans' QB situation is still bleak

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/saints-

White House announces federal worker layoffs as government shutdown nears third week
No official numbers have been announced but treasury, HHS, DHS and education departments among agencies confirming cuts
https://www.theguardian.com…

Meanwhile the transformation of the USA into a fascist state is going on, one step at a time, but we are getting used to those steps, the resistance inside and outside the USA seems less. It is different but in some ways comparable with what happened in Italy and Germany in the 30s.
#fascism #USA

#NowPlaying on a Wednesday morning, metal for some reason. But this shit is killer. It's war metal but definitely some Bolt Thrower vibes in there too. Pretty damn solid, great dynamics, guitar stuff, vocals. This is New Jersey's SIEGE COLUMN and their ripping new LP 'Sulphur Omega'.

These #NYCParks-provided bikewashing stations, so convenient and useful on hot days! #BikeNYC

Every year, as I come up on my birthday, I start to think a lot more about the shooting. The intensity was a bit lower after Trump left office the first time, but October of 2024 was pretty intense.
As I've been processing through all this, I thought about the cards and letters folks sent to me in the hospital. I have a box of them in the US and sometimes I think about asking for them to be sent here. But things have a tenancy to get lost in the mail on the way here.
There's a little bit of a trapped and incomplete feeling, that Trump's chaos makes feel even more intense.
So I decided to write a bit about that box, and the hospital, and death.
CW: body horror, death
#Writing

In the end, “designing assignments that reward insight over polish, creating policies that prioritize learning over automation, and teaching students to question not just what AI produces but how and why they are using it” will have to mean: you can’t pass by using #GenAI.
But since GenAI can already do a pretty good impression of many things, we’ll have to make our courses extremely challe…

In the end, “designing assignments that reward insight over polish, creating policies that prioritize learning over automation, and teaching students to question not just what AI produces but how and why they are using it” will have to mean: you can’t pass by using #GenAI.
But since GenAI can already do a pretty good impression of many things, we’ll have to make our courses extremely challe…

🌽 To get that perfect ear of corn, weather has to cooperate. But climate change is making it dicier
#corn

To get that perfect ear of corn, weather has to cooperate. But climate change is making it dicier
Robb Rynd and his brother grew up farming and wanted to do more of it outside their day jobs, so they went in together on what's now a little over 200 acres of corn, soybeans, wheat and sorghum. Last year was a good year, and Rynd said he enjoyed walking the fields with his kids to see how the corn was doing.

Actually, it's completely incomprehensible to me — an atheist, an anticlerical and a leftist — how you could play disco polo music aloud under a church, during a mass.
Okay, I don't listen to disco polo at all. But I wouldn't play solid doom metal from Uganda either, even if "Where they gathered and suffered" seems to describe the situation accurately.
Okay, I don't play music in public at all. But I guess that's a matter of being cultured and respectful to others.

My first attempt at growing sweet peas has yielded some flowers - a few, tiny, microscopic flowers; but still.
My spice bushes are getting there - one much faster than the other - the slower one was initially planted somewhere without enough light, and then I think got hastled by a dog a few times; they were both just sticks when they arrived (in April??)
#gardening

@… said I have sunflower eyes
I was gonna post titties but then I got distracted n wanted to show da sunflower eyes

Browns' Joe Flacco has 'nothing but love' for Ravens as he prepares for first road game in Baltimore

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/browns-

Today my daughter's preschool is holding a farewell assembly for one of her classmates
whose mother has no choice but to self deport.
The school is hoping it will be joyful in tone, so we might make this less upsetting for this 3 year old.
There's just no words for the uselessness of this cruelty.
ht…

Maggie Tokuda-Hall (@maggietokudahall.bsky.social)
Today my daughter's preschool is holding a farewell assembly for one of her classmates whose mother has no choice but to self deport. The school is hoping it will be joyful in tone, so we might make this less upsetting for this 3 year old. There's just no words for the uselessness of this cruelty.

Happy for Zach Cregger and the cast and crew of Weapons for its massive box office success, and I don't usually like to say negative things about art. But I got ahold of a copy of Weapons, and just like Barbarian, I'm not impressed. ALSO just like Barbarian, this fucker is in MASSIVE need of editing. It's going nowhere slowly. Why can't people edit their films lately? I'm like, over an hour in and it's pretty sparse, man 😂 Suspense is one thing, but when it builds to…

Shedeur Sanders turned heads in Browns debut, but likely QB pecking order remains unchanged in Cleveland

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/shedeur

@…
The IceCubes alt text generator says:
A man in a blue shirt stands beside text that reads: "Idk about you but I'm ready to party. Put on pajamas and take a nap." The word "PARTY" is emphasized with colorful lettering.

"""
All of which was of the utmost importance for subsequent developments in the medicine of the mind. In its positivist incarnation, this was little more than the combination of the two experiences that classicism had juxtaposed without ever joining them together: a social, normative and dichotomous experience of madness that revolved entirely around the imperative of confinement, formulated in a style as simple as ‘yes or no’, ‘dangerous or harmless’, and ‘good or not good for confinement’, and a finely differentiated, qualitative, juridical experience, well aware of limits and degrees, which looked into all the aspects of the behaviour of the subject for the polymorphous incarnations that insanity might assume. The psychopathology of the nineteenth century (and perhaps our own too, even now) believes that it orients itself and takes its bearings in relation to a homo natura, or a normal man pre-existing all experience of mental illness. Such a man is in fact an invention, and if he is to be situated, it is not in a natural space, but in a system that identifies the socius to the subject of the law. Consequently a madman is not recognised as such because an illness has pushed him to the margins of normality, but because our culture situates him at the meeting point between the social decree of confinement and the juridical knowledge that evaluates the responsibility of individuals before the law. The ‘positive’ science of mental illness and the humanitarian sentiments that brought the mad back into the realm of the human were only possible once that synthesis had been solidly established. They could be said to form the concrete a priori of any psychopathology with scientific pretensions.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Eagles' Za'Darius Smith has Pro Bowls, sacks and playoff runs -- but still seeks his first Super Bowl

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/eagles-

Even among DJT voters,
a huge cohort had just [understandably] soured on traditional politicians because of a perception
(again .understandable)
that "they're all corrupt,"
that "the system's broken," etc.
It may seem ludicrous and naive to you and me,
but many of them voted for DJT precisely for that reason.
He was - in their thinking - supposed to shake things up,
break things,
drain the swamp.

Bears' Rome Odunze says new coach Ben Johnson is strict, but provides the 'accountability that we need'

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/bears-r

Week 2 NFL QB Power Rankings: Bills' Josh Allen seizes No. 1 spot, but where does Aaron Rodgers rank now?

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/week-2-

White House official confirms that the federal takeover of DC police department is expected to be in effect for 30 days
but added that this would be ‘subject to change’

Trump vows to ‘clean up’ DC crime
-- despite sharp drop in violence

Patrick Mahomes 'not a fan' of possible 18-game NFL schedule, but Chiefs star open to it under one condition

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/pat…

Cybercriminals are using AI to execute highly targeted attacks at scale, causing people to unwittingly send money and sensitive information or simply open themselves up to theft.
Hackers are now able to rent generative AI large language models created in the underground cybercrime community to help formulate text-based scams.
But just as generative AI is enhancing and scaling social engineering attacks, so too is it giving defenders a leg up.

The hacking underworld has removed all of AI's guardrails, but the good guys are closing in
Fake Taylor Swift ads and malicious QR codes are just some of the newest ways cybercriminals are using AI as the cat-and-mouse cybersecurity game heats up.

AP is ending its weekly book reviews, beginning Sept. 1.
This was a difficult decision but one made after a thorough review of AP’s story offerings
and what is being most read on our website and mobile apps as well as what customers are using.
Unfortunately, the audience for book reviews is relatively low and we can no longer sustain the time it takes to plan, coordinate, write and edit reviews.
AP will continue covering books as stories, but at the moment those will …

The Associated Press tells its book critics that it’s ending weekly reviews
Terrible news from The Associated Press. Media Nation correspondent J.A. passes along this note from Anthony McCartney, the AP’s global entertainment and lifestyle editor. AP to end its weekl…

Among the vast number of characters in the Chinese language
— around 100,000, by some estimates
— there are hundreds that no one alive knows how to pronounce.
They are written down, plain as day, in old books, but their sounds, even their meanings, have been lost.
Sitting in his office, wondering at how something seemingly immortalized in print could be forgotten, Dr. Mullaney went down a mental rabbit hole.
It would have been physically impossible to build a t…

A Professor’s Search for the MingKwai, a Lost Chinese Typewriter
A historian went down an 18-year rabbit hole in search of obsolete machines. But there was one he thought he’d never find.

Bills' Cook takes part in warmups but skips game https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45934301/james-cool-opts-not-play-bills-preseason-opener-contract-dispute-lingers

The FBI, headed by Trump acolyte Kash Patel, has reassigned the jobs of thousands of agents
and eviscerated parts of the bureau tasked with investigating rightwing extremists that are considered the most dangerous domestic security threat facing the US today.
Those same types, which includes a locus of fascist street-fighting gangs known as active clubs and accelerationist neo-Nazis,
increasingly view Trump as an enemy,
but are freer than ever to organize
– alm…

Inflation rose in August as companies continued to push the cost of tariffs onto consumers.
The newest update to the consumer price index (CPI), which measures a basket of goods and services, showed that prices increased 2.9% over the last year
– the highest since January.
Core CPI, which excludes energy and food costs, stayed stable at 3.1% after going up in July.
The Fed is under intense pressure from Donald Trump to cut rates,
but the decision looks likely to b…

Supreme Court ruling puts some vaccines at risk
Public health advocates won a big case in the Supreme Court on the last day of this year’s term
-- but the victory came with an asterisk.
The decision ended one threat to the no-cost preventive services
— from cancer and diabetes screenings to statin drugs and vaccines
— used by more than 150 million Americans who have health insurance.
⚠️ But it did so by empowering the nation’s foremost vaccine skeptic: …

1) .China can live without what they get from us,
while we can't live without what we get from them, like rare earths.
2) President Xi can survive any political backlash from pain inflicted on the Chinese,
but Trump can't survive inflicting great pain on US consumers and businesses.
https://

Jonathan-FL #HumanRightsForEVERYONE (@amerliberal.bsky.social)
IMO: Trump is going to lose on this one, and look like the ass he truly is. Very unlike Trump, President Xi is very smart, and understands what cards he has & doesn't have, and on this one he has the cards. 1) A complete shut down of US-China trade would be VERY painful for everyone, but China ... [contains quote post or other embedded content]

We’re only six months into Donald Trump’s second term,
and House Republicans are already panicking.
They’ve hitched themselves to an unpopular president.
They’ve supported deeply unpopular legislation.
And most damning?
They've proven unwilling to do anything but bow down to Trump and rubber-stamp his every whim.
 
Voters will tolerate divergence in policy.
They will excuse various styles and political temperaments.
But Americans …

James Cook dresses but refuses to take field for Buffalo Bills: 'We wanted him to play' https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6544529/2025/08/09/buffalo-bills-james-cook-hold-in-contract/

A Georgia man who had blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal
has been identified as the shooterwho opened fire late Friday on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters, killing a police officer.
The 30-year-old suspect, who died during the incident,
had also tried to get into the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta but was stopped by guards before driving to a pharmacy across the street and opening fire.
The man, identified a…

Union wants statement against COVID vaccine misinformation after CDC shooting
A Georgia man who had blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal has been identified as the shooter who opened fire late Friday on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters, killing a police officer. The 30-year-old suspect, who died during the incident, had also tried to get into the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta but was stopped by guards before driving to a pharmacy across the street and opening fire, a law enforcement official told The Associat…