Tootfinder

Cowboys specialty center survived regime change as consistency is key https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/07/31/dallas-cowboys-player-profile-no-44-ls-trent-sieg/85381099007/…

How billionaire Mike Repole plans to change the vibe of the UFL, expand it to 16 teams https://www.espn.com/united-football-league/story/_/id/45863976/new-ufl-investor-talks-market-changes-expansion

Self Hosting is not the answer.
"I realized how privileged I am to have the skills required for digital sovereignty. I realized how unattainable, unsustainable, and unrealistic self-hosting is as a mass solution to the problems we face. I realized that self-reliance isn't freedom — it's the luxury of retreating from a system that others can't escape."

The Future is NOT Self-Hosted
Hey friends 👋, A few months ago, Amazon announced that Kindle users would no longer be able to download and back up their book libraries to their computers. Thankfully, I still have access to my library because I saw this video by Jared Henderson warning of the change and downloaded all

🥵 As SoCal bakes, UCLA study shows duration of heat waves is accelerating faster than climate change
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-07-10/ucla-study-heat-wave-duration-faster-than-global-warming
🆓

Heat-wave duration accelerating faster than climate change, UCLA says
UCLA researchers have released an alarming new finding — the duration of heat waves is increasing faster than global warming itself.

AI-generated stories favour stability over change: homogeneity and cultural stereotyping in narratives generated by gpt-4o-mini
Jill Walker Rettberg, Hermann Wigers
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22445

AI-generated stories favour stability over change: homogeneity and cultural stereotyping in narratives generated by gpt-4o-mini
Can a language model trained largely on Anglo-American texts generate stories that are culturally relevant to other nationalities? To find out, we generated 11,800 stories - 50 for each of 236 countries - by sending the prompt "Write a 1500 word potential {demonym} story" to OpenAI's model gpt-4o-mini. Although the stories do include surface-level national symbols and themes, they overwhelmingly conform to a single narrative plot structure across countries: a protagonist lives in or returns hom…

Cowboys Headlines: WR waived; Jones' claim about Diggs rehab; 2 vie to replace Guyton https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/07/31/news-headlines-july-30-…

Pickens' Drama in Dallas gets first episode out of the way before training camp https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/06/29/george-pickens-drama-cowboys-culture-change/84408563007/…

In her first note to staff, OpenAI's incoming CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, lays out an optimistic vision for how AI will change the world (Kylie Robison/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-fidji-simo-note-employees/

OpenAI's New CEO of Applications Strikes Hyper-Optimistic Tone in First Memo to Staff
Ex-Instacart CEO Fidji Simo sent a memo to staff Monday laying out her vision for how AI will change the world.

TUVALU is preparing to carry out the first planned migration of an entire country in response to the effects of climate change.
Recent studies project that much of its territory could be submerged in the next 25 years due to rising sea levels, forcing its inhabitants to consider migration as an urgent survival measure.

The First Planned Migration of an Entire Country Is Underway
The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu could be submerged in 25 years due to rising sea levels, so a plan is being implemented to relocate its population to Australia.

"Endangered rays, sharks and native oysters 'could thrive' despite climate change, report claims"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #Animals

Endangered rays, sharks and native oysters 'could thrive' despite climate change, report claims

The Last of Us Part 2’s story is just fine the way it is. TLOU2 isn’t for everyone — and maybe it shouldn’t be.
https://share.google/vg2WYB24QZTklDIRH

What the Raiders D-line depth chart looks like following the release of Christian Wilkins https://raiderswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/raiders/2025/07/25/raiders-defensive-line-depth…

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

Regime change in Iran is 'unacceptable', says the Kremlin (Ivor Bennett/Sky News)
https://news.sky.com/story/russia-would-react-negatively-if-irans-leader-is-killed-says-the-kremlin-13385983
http://www.memeorandum.com/250620/p3#a250620p3

Incredible, engaging and challenging. Highly recommended:
“What if Everything We Know About Sacagawea Is Wrong?” (NYTimes, 23 July 2025) #GiftLink

What if Everything We Know About Sacagawea Is Wrong?
A growing body of evidence suggests she might have survived into old age — which would entirely change the story of America’s most iconic Native forebear.

A strange political story that somehow seems strangely relevant today.
https://apple.news/AZzxjXuHrQNuJ_10aeK3DgA

Mock draft: Derrick Henry biggest mover in change to non-PPR https://www.espn.com/fantasy/football/story/_/id/45568588/fantasy-football-mock-draft-2025-12-team-non-ppr

The Mars House was a fun read. I enjoyed the ideas Natasha Pulley has put into worldbuilding: How would people change when living on Mars, as society and physically? How would languages and tech evolve? The actual story is a wee bit too YA soap lit for my taste but as I said: a fun read!

Browns WR Johnson hoping to change 'narrative' https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45493241/browns-wr-johnson-form-hopes-change-narrative

In Barcelona alone, an estimated 286 people died from the extra heat caused by climate change in the recent heatwave. Here's the story of one of them, healthy, and 51 years old.

Fossil fuels are stupid.
https://bsky.app/profile/davidrvetter.bsky.social/post/3ltubfjws2s2h
Note that highways are built using fossil fuels (both the building equipment used to create them, as well as asphalt which is made using bitumen, a b…

Q&A with Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on "a 50% chance" of AGI in the next five to 10 years, bad actors and technical risks, AI regulation, jobs, and more (Steven Levy/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/google-deepmin

Google DeepMind’s CEO Thinks AI Will Make Humans Less Selfish
Demis Hassabis says that systems as smart as humans are almost here, and we’ll need to radically change how we think and behave.

A good news story about the great gender preference divide.
After years of declining sex ratios that saw increases in female infanticide and missing girls, it seems there's a change.
'Globally, among babies born in 2000, a staggering 1.6m girls were missing from the number you would expect, given the natural sex ratio at birth. This year that number is likely to be 200,000—and it is still falling.'
Beautiful hope.

The stunning decline of the preference for having boys
Millions of girls were aborted for being girls. Now parents often lean towards them

Trump visits Fort Bragg. The base has been renamed twice in 2 years. Why? (Kinsey Crowley/USA Today)
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/10/trump-fort-bragg-name-change-liberty-melania/84128837007/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250610/p109#a250610p109

After moving my homelab cluster from microk8s to Talos, I've written a new blog post outlining the cluster build:
Setting up a Talos kubernetes cluster with talhelper
https://www.beyondwatts.com/posts/setting-up-a-talos-kubernetes…

You only have a copper 'industry' if you have copper in the ground. US has a lot in Arizona. It mines it. But it's not enough. Even a 200% tariff isn't going to change the reality of where we get our commodities."
'RIP home renovations': Trump’s massive copper tariff buried in mockery - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-tariffs-2673043468/

Cowboys youth movement on offense may cause bumps, but was much needed change in direction https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/06/20/the-offensive-line-…

Nationwide study finds that leaks in natural gas pipelines contribute to hazardous particulate air pollution https://phys.org/news/2025-06-nationwide-leaks-natural-gas-pipelines.html

Nationwide study finds that leaks in natural gas pipelines contribute to hazardous particulate air pollution
In March 2022, 14 residents of a four-story apartment building in Silver Spring, Maryland, were hospitalized when a gas leak from a cut pipeline caused a major explosion. Every year in the United States, there are hundreds of natural gas (or methane) pipeline leaks—caused by corrosion, equipment malfunctions, and construction activities. Methane leaks are not only dangerous; they contribute to air pollution and climate change.

New kickoff rules forcing Raiders kicker Daniel Carlson put his multi-sport skills to work https://raiderswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/raiders/2025/06/10/raiders-k-daniel-carlso…

Ask yourself: How many water bottles thrown at cops are worth keeping one innocent American* teen out of inhumane #ICE detention?
For anyone criticizing the #LA protests or suggesting they should stop for any reason, let's be clear about the stakes. Read this article (or my summary):
https://abcnews.go.com/US/massachusetts-teen-detained-ice-family-video-ice/story?id=122511685
This 18-year-old was snatched without a warrant, because he was in his dad's car and allegedly (possibly a lie or mistake) his dad drove recklessly. He's been in the US since he was 5, originally on a student visa that's since expired. He is an innocent American, by any reasonable definition of those two words*. Thankfully, he's since been released on bail, but he may yet be held indefinitely in ICE detention (in inhumane conditions that have been repeatedly documented) and/or separated from his family & friends and shipped off to Brazil where he last lived when he was 5 (ICE does not care whether he speaks Portuguese, has any family there, etc), all potentially without due process (though he seems to be getting that in this case). Even if this doesn't happen to Marcelo due to the media attention & protests, it is certainly happening to other innocent Americans throughout the country who aren't as lucky to have people standing up for them.
Here's Marcelo speaking about detention conditions and those he was detained with:
https://youtube.com/shorts/ZpZMUb9aEys?si=bpK-022CU7Acb5RY
Do you know how many kids like Marcelo were detained in LA yesterday? Probably zero, because of the protests, including their confrontational tactics. The most "violence" I've seen (from the protestors) is throwing a water bottle at a line of heavily-armored riot police. So the protests are working to protect the community. If you're suggesting a change in tactics, consider whether your suggested tactics (like pre-scheduled non-confrontational protests that have been happening for weeks) will protect the Marcelos of LA.
*Whether he's innocent or American should not in fact matter, but sadly it might to some reading this. If that's you, you've still got some growing up to do.

Burrow: Home burglary altered Batmobile plans https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45693169/home-burglary-altered-batmobile-plans

The Story of 88, and whether or not the Cowboys could un-retire legendary jersey numbers https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/06/03/cowboys-jersey-number-reverence-88/84009826007/…

Even coming off a career year it’s ‘same s–t different day’ for Raiders WR Jakobi Meyers https://raiderswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/raiders/2025/06/03/raiders-wr-jak…

Cowboys Headlines: Travis Frederick honored; news on former DE's arrest, longtime OL dies https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/06/06/news-headlines-june-5-…