Tootfinder

My moment of clarity in the last few weeks was coming back to “Oh right, copyright is a hack, and one that is not serving us, particularly us on the margins”
The moral rights of authorship and the way we situate our legal process of ownership are, actually, kinda at odds. And it entirely misses the idea of a commons, both as community and as a cultural base to draw from.
I've long believed that we, collectively, should own our culture — to have modern myths be Copyright 1972 LucasFilm, the traditional songs we sing Copyright 1922, now owned by Warner/Chappell Music is one of the things I find repugnant about the situation we find ourselves in.
That said, reconciling that with the behavior of the AI companies, _particularly_ the American ones? It's hard. Google abuses its monopoly position; Microsoft has forced harmful and terrible tooling on people at every turn; OpenAI is run by someone who actively despises art and does not understand it; and Anthropic is run by a guy who is trying to make sure the apocalypse has a pleasant demeanor and doesn't offend any corporations on the way. All of the above have scraped the web with no active consent — and that's largely fine, that's what putting things in common _is_, that's the beauty of the open information world we have the remnants of — but also actively evading measures people put in place to stop it and with absolutely no willingness to engage with the process. Extracting from the commons _is_ the tragedy of the commons.
It does not mean that enlarging the commons with the resulting tools is bad. The doctrine of original sin is a Christian concept I do not subscribe to. The concept of 'fruit of the poisonous tree' is a legal tool to fix power relations not a moral stance. They're worth understanding, but they are not absolute moral stances that are self-evident.
These are not harmless tools, but so too putting hard regulation and corporate, legalistic scrutiny on everything has a vastly negative impact: it is a yoke on human creativity and community to the reins of capital.
And, so too, disruption has huge costs. We are, apparently, committed to doing things the worst possible way. One can just hope that we capture the good too, because the ride has started and it's rather late to get off.

Yale Divinity School contributes powerfully to the nation’s strength and the common good. We do this through the religiously trained leaders we send into churches and communities across America, through the direct provision of educational resources to lay leaders and lifelong learners, and through the creation of deeper knowledge of God and the application of theology to the pressing issues of our day.
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Imagine a system where contributing to the common good is our yardstick for success, not personal enrichment by any means possible.
Such a system would not extract a “cost of living.” A dignified life with access to modern housing, healthcare, etc., would be considered a human right. Furthermore, everyone would have a basic income they can use however they wish. Imagine the progress we could make as a species if more of us could contribute to science, to art, to all aspects of human kn…

from my link log —
A preview of Coalton 0.2, a statically-typed Lisp.
https://coalton-lang.github.io/20260312-coalton0p2/
saved 2026-03-14 https:/…

Completely Artemis-pilled but I cannot divorce this from the current administration of Nazis. Again, if this were a just country, a just world, the people in power would take the symbolism of a ship named Integrity traveling around The Fucking Moon and make some changes for the common good.

While chatting the other night, it came up "send me the logo for Warlock and I'll update the registry"
That got me thinking, we didn't actually have a logo yet... We were just using the font-awesome icon as a placeholder! So after doing some work to get Invoke running so I could put my AMD 7900XTX to good use, we came up with this!
Since the platform is called Warlock, what better than a Warlock's hat?
Oh yeah, and we have preliminary support for ins…

Good Morning #Canada
You never know what the #Algorithm will shove into your feed, and sometimes you wonder just how closely the #TechBros are tracking you. So as someone who admittedly uses too much butter, it was interesting that this YouTube video just randomly showed up in my feed. There's some good info here on butter in general and specifically on pricing, even if most of it is common knowledge. And it's Canadian focused so that's a bonus.
Remember, butter is a dairy product, like cheese and ice cream, so it's obviously very healthy when consumed in bulk...
#CanadaIsAwesome #MmmButter
https://youtu.be/DkNfQqlg1cE

So I wanted to write a longer #NoAI piece but apparently my blog is down (and this time, miraculously, it might not be #AI scrapers), so I'll give you a sneak peek of what I wanted to say in the more hyperbolic part on how the #LLM discourse has all the common features of libertarian discourse.
"According to Google, LLM-backed searches don't consume much more energy than regular searches" [ignoring model training, surely.]
− According to carbrains, cars are actually cheaper than public transport, provided that you compare gasoline cost with ticket prices, and ignore the cost of buying and owning a car. Not to mention all the indirect costs of space waste (roads, parking lots, garages), environment pollution, accidents…
"AI is just a tool, people decide if it's used for good or bad."
− Ah, yes, and "guns don't kill people."
"AI has its uses."
− So does asbestos.
"Let's not judge contributions by whether they were created using AI, but on their actual quality."
− "Let's not judge contributions by whether they were created using slave work…"
"I do not use AI myself, but I don't want to block others."
− "I do not keep slaves myself…"
#NoLLM #hyperbole

With the eight week improv course ending last week, I timed it well to start a new group with a new set of eight sessions this week.
The Free Association seem more serious than Hoopla. They have 50% longer classes for a start. Three hours rather than two.
More instruction and notes rather than just positive encouragement. Clearer aim even from the early levels. More like a classroom than a playground.
First couple of sets of eight at Hoopla are just aimed at getting you to lose your decorum and allow yourself to be free and spontaneous. All really short form games, lightning rounds. Parlor games rather than theater.
But the Free Association's aim from the start is to get you building scenes and then stories. Their first set of lessons is titled "intro to long form". This one "Scene work".
Not so much the one minute parlor games, more focus on acting and characters and drama.
In vague terms at early stages that is. I mean, they have more in common than different. Plenty of short games in warm-up at FA and I just finished a whole set on drama and story with Hoopla.
Three hours is pretty long though. Starts half an hour earlier, ends half an hour later. Good thing it's also much much closer for me. Ten minute walk instead of 40 minutes on the bus.
We did lots and lots of first-scene head-to-head, mostly concentrating on trying to get specific. Check that after two minutes the audience knows where you are and who you are and how you know each other and what you're doing and none of the players are unsure either. Make it all specific as soon as possible, ambiguity is the enemy.
And everyone got that and exercised it pretty much flawlessly right away. So good group.
#theFreeAssociation #improv #london

Good Morning #Canada
Most of us are celebrating a long weekend because of #FamilyDay, except Quebec and Newfoundland Labrador. Those two provinces will answer the phones while the rest of Canada is off gallivanting across the country. Family Day was first introduced by Don Getty, Premier of Alberta in 1990. Critics pointed out that he launched the new holiday to distract voters from the fact his son was in trouble with the law, accused of selling cocaine to an undercover narc in an Edmonton motel room. Whatever... we now get a break between January 1st and the May 24 long weekend.
It's a good day to look back on the past 30 years of marriage and family trends. Common-law unions are up while traditional marriages are down. Divorces, particularly among younger couples, has decreased, and we have more single parents today. There is no available data on the impact of Family Day on teenage sons selling illegal drugs.
#CanadaIsAwesome #Parents
https://vanierinstitute.ca/resource/then-and-now-a-30-year-look-at-family-structures-in-canada/