Tootfinder

To my mind the following article suggests that the present day "AI" approach is very wrong.
Why? Because biological RI (Real Intelligence) out performs CI (Computer Intelligence) by orders of magnitude on many dimensions: power required (perhaps 20 to 50 watts for the human brain), weight, size, cooling, and ability to innovate in new ways.
Our present digital computer approach to intelligence seems about as apt as trying to power passenger airplanes using onboard coal…

OpenAI Signs $38 Billion Cloud Computing Deal With Amazon
After signing agreements to use computing power from Nvidia, AMD and Oracle, OpenAI is partnering with the world’s largest cloud computing company.

Donald Trump signed into law this month a measure that 👉 prohibits anyone based in China and "other adversarial countries" from accessing the Pentagon’s cloud computing systems.
The ban, which is tucked inside the $900 billion defense policy law,
was enacted in response to a ProPublica investigation this year that exposed how Microsoft used China-based engineers to service the
Defense Department’s computer systems for nearly a decade
— a practice that left s…

Trump Signs Defense Bill Prohibiting China-Based Engineers in Pentagon IT Work
The measure, which emerged in response to a ProPublica investigation, bars Microsoft engineers in China and other adversarial countries from servicing sensitive Pentagon cloud computing systems.

@… draw for me a black and white scetch of a man in a suit looking stressed out in front of his computer. The upper part of his head is gone and it comes a muschroom cloud out of his head. The background is a cluttered office space

I'm back.
My new work computer is on Todyl which has a problem with Mastodon. I finally got around to using my NAS as a proxy for non-work related traffic.
What did I miss?

"Spoiler alert: unless there happens to be some breakthrough in physics that will drive more gigahertz to our CPUs, more crypto to those GPUs, more watts to our batteries, and more money to cloud providers, we most probably will not see any difference between the computer you are using today and the one you will receive as a gift in Christmas 2033. Get used to this fact."

Return to Innocence
The pages of this magazine have often orbited around the subject of retrocomputing. Take, for example, the editions about sustainability, computer museums, hardware, hobbies, gaming, operating systems, or the one about BASIC published last summer. If you pay attention, you most probably have realized how much retrocomputing has grown in popularity in the past few decades, with more and more people learning on YouTube or TikTok how to replace the batteries or leaking capacitors from the motherbo…

The cloud is an excellent tool for many workloads, I won't deny that.
But it is important to remember that “The Cloud” is still, essentially, "Someone Else’s Computer."
That means your data exists inside someone else’s jurisdiction, logs, metadata, and access paths.
And in the age of AI, being aware of that matters more than ever.

🥵 Reservoir thermal energy storage offers efficient cooling for data centers
https://techxplore.com/news/2025-12-reservoir-thermal-energy-storage-efficient.html

Reservoir thermal energy storage offers efficient cooling for data centers
The rise of artificial intelligence, cloud platforms, and data processing is driving a steady increase in global data center electricity consumption. While running computer servers accounts for the largest share of data center energy use, cooling systems come in second—but a new study by researchers at the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR), formerly known as NREL, offers a potential solution to reduce peak energy consumption.

Okay, here's the promised follow-up with more authors I respect who didn't make it onto this list. I won't do deep dives but I'll list at least one work per author:
YA novelists:
- Randi Pink ("Girls Like Us")
- Louisa Onomé ("Twice as Perfect")
- Emery Lee ("Meet Cute Diary")
- Robin Benway ("Far from the Tree")
- Angela Velez ("Lulu and Milagro's Search for Clarity")
Children's book authors:
- Jacqueline Davies ("Bubbles Up")
- Freya Hartas ("Slow Down in the Park")
Novelists:
- Rimma Onoseta ("How You Grow Wings")
Graphic novelists:
- Linda Medley ("Castle Waiting")
- 🖋️Magsalene Visaggio 🖌️Paulina Ganucheau ("Girlmode")
- Ursula Vernon ("Digger")
- SJ Sindu ("Tall Water" w/ Dion MBD)
- Hope Larson ("Be That Way"; "Salt Magic" w/ Rebecca Mock)
- Lily Williams Karen Schneemann ("Go With the Flow")
- Maia Kobabe ("Gender Queer")
- Kay O'Neill ("Tea Dragon Society")
- Marjane Satrapi ("Persepolis")
Mangaka:
- Kaoru Mori ("Young Bride's Stories")
- Ryoko Kui ("Delicious in Dungeon")
- Natsuki Takaya ("Fruits Basket")
Anime writers/directors and/or Japanese light/fantasy/SF novelists:
- Nahoko Uehashi ("Moribito")
- Sayo Yamamoto ("Michiko & Hatchin"; "Yuri!!! On Ice")
- Mari Okada ("Ano Hana: The Flower we Saw That Day"; "Toradora!")
Game designers/programmers:
(Upon review I was pretty remiss in skipping over a few of these people, some of whom I wasn't aware of but most of whom I just didn't remember when writing my short list. Subconscious misogyny in action. Short & Thorson probably would have squeezed out some of the YA authors I included, although I have no real regrets.)
- Junko Kawano ("Suikoden")
- Elizabeth LaPensée ("When Rivers Were Trails")
- Momo Pixel ("Hair Nah")
- Zoë Quinn ("Depression Quest"; narrative designer on "Solar Ash")
- Kellee Santiago ("Cloud"; "Flower")
- Tanya X. Short ("Moon Hunters")
- Kim Swift ("Portal")
- Maddy Thorson ("Celeste")
- Andi McClure @… ("Jumpman")
Note: I haven't included composers or artists here, but there's a deep bench.
Games journalists/steamers:
- Tanya DePass @… (#/INeedDiverseGames; twitch streams)
- Anita Sarkeesian (Feminist Frequency)
Game/play scholars:
- Mary Flanagan ("Critical Play")
- Tracy Fullerton ("Game Design Workshop")
- Brenda Laurel ("Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System")
- Janet Murray ("Hamlet on the Holodeck"l
- Susana Tosca ("A Pragmatics of Links")
- Jichen Zhu ("Agency Play: Dimensions of Agency for Interactive Narrative Design")
- Magy Seif El Nasr ("Design patterns to guide player movement in 3D games")
- Kate Compton ("Causal Creators"; also "Spore")
P.S. upon consideration I've decided not to include any authors who are men in this coda.
There are definitely others who probably deserve to be here that I'm forgetting...
#GsmeDesign #Authors

I like to check the Register comments for something that usually boils down to "I did this thing on my own without a problem, so why can't a massive organisation do something I consider to be analogous?"
A new classic of the genre: