Tootfinder

Here’s my 35th “Long Links” outing, curation of long-form offerings, which assume that nobody has time to read all this stuff but one or two of the pieces might brighten your day. This one is mostly political but some of the politics are from France and China. Plus a way-cool analytical history of blogging and a section labeled “wonderful things”.

“the only way is up!”
Good morning!
(High energy courtesy of jet lag and my urban hipster hotel in Berlin that has a free coffee machine)

Deep in the primeval forest of, um, Burnaby, BC.
#Photography

Crazy that the same people answer these 2 questions like this.
https://mstdn.ca/@CanadianPolling/115742985914702440
https://

Green light.
#photography

I’m a strong believer in SDD
Sticker Driven Development
And this has a lot of potential.
[contains quote post or other embedded content] https://bsky.app/profile/bmann.ca/post/3m5u3zinvys2d

From https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/trump-gives-himself-an-enormous-out-on-the-epstein-files
I hope we're not clutching at straws and we should bear in mind that a rat is most dangerous when cornered. But still…

“Signal For Help” basics:
https://canadianwomen.org/signal-for-help/

Signal For Help | Use Signal to Ask for Help | Canadian Women's Foundation
The Signal for Help is a one-handed sign someone can use to silently indicate they need someone to check in with them safely.

“Yikes”: Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices, FTC says - Ars Technica https://share.google/ukrEc6jZFaKueb6N6

“Yikes”: Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices, FTC says
FTC sued Ticketmaster and Live Nation for turning “blind eye” to scalpers.

Ok so Meetup and Eventbrite are both owned by the same PE firm now.
As I have been saying for many years now … both of those platforms are no go any more.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/02/bending-spoons-agrees-to-buy-eventbri…

Bending Spoons agrees to buy Eventbrite for $500M to revive stalled brand | TechCrunch
The acquisition price for the events marketplace is a fraction of the $1.76 billion valuation it achieved during its 2018 IPO.

@… hi there Jordi, thanks so much for composer, it’s amazing.
Is it possible to add to the autoloader in a pre autoload script? I’m trying to dynamically add some classes so they’re in the autoload.php
I tried using a class loader and calling the auto generator in my script but those efforts didn’t work.
Any guidance would be appreciated.

@… explains why Mastodon feels like it has a much brighter future than legacy social media really well here:
https://cosocial.ca/@timbray/115560976942889…

I'm old enough to remember the unraveling of the Watergate cover-up, and the Epstein story has a very familiar stench. #USpol

I miss the limits. Forces concise communication. Long posts/threads should be a post on your site. https://mastodon.social/@randahl/115733189272793078

Nobody should be allowed to get out of fifth grade without demonstrating their mastery of reply-all.

I just enabled the AP compatibility of the #DWebYVR Ghost site, which can be followed at @…
You can also subscribe by email on the website https://

DWeb Vancouver
Decentralized web and community collaboration in Vancouver|

@… on dev.phanpy, I can't set "anyone can quote" it just switches back to "only you can quote". This a TBD?

TIL 2 things about Slack that surprised me:
PSA 1: Slack doesn’t have a “Block” function. It does however have a “Hide” function.
PSA 2: By default, Slack includes everyone’s email address in the info you get when you right-click on them and view their profile. Thankfully, this can be turned off.

Wardley: Not a Fan of ChatGPT https://blog.bmannconsulting.com/3m3dmlo7t7k2t

Wardley: Not a Fan of ChatGPT - 3lxsr74rnk22h
Large language models are coherence engines not truth engines, we don't teach the critical thinking needed to properly evaluate the outputs.

News flash: There’s lots of really good new music out there! Here’s some of it: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/10/15/Current-Music
Featuring: Kwashibu Area Band (Ghana), New Eves (UK), The Good Ones (Rwanda), Alfa Mist (UK), Sona Jobarteh (UK/Gambia)…

Final talk of the day, Adam Wiggins Local-first software: pragmatism vs idealism #SyncConf

5%.
#Bitcoin
https://cosocial.ca/@timbray/115567154884128760

Only 3 #laravel devs listed in #yvr?
Gotta be more of us than that.
https://phpc.social/@denniskoch/115554

We just transitioned CoSocial from an ad-hoc combo of AWS, OVH, and DO to @…, see https://fedihost.co, a Managed Fediverse Hosting outfit based in Canada and with no US dependencies. Already fe…

FediHost - Managed Fediverse Hosting
FediHost is a managed fediverse hosting service. With a couple of clicks you can be up and running with your own Mastodon or Peertube instance.

The title is “DC’s Access Journalists Turned the News Into a Luxury Good” and I for one hadn’t realized how true this is until I read https://talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25/dcs-access-journalists-turned-the-news-into-a-luxury-good

DC’s Access Journalists Turned the News Into a Luxury Good
Before the internet, what would today be called a “paywall” was just...

And great timing! Reading group post is up and got posted to the @… account
https://dwebyvr.org/dwebyvr-reading-group-first-meeting/

Love this, the tech community I’m in, #statamic, is a Personal Business with a fabulous community. https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/115553315179343269

Btc down 2.2% so far today.
#bitcoin

Sitting here writing, idly watching the #Bitcoin bulls&bears dragging the price back and for across the said-to-matter $90K line. I don’t know who these people are but I’m sure there are chat-rooms where the ones who can influence the price (bulls mostly) strategize on how best to do so.
There’s a line of thought that says that the value of Btc cannot naturally be steady; too many holders…

What I’d love to see: An in-depth wide-ranging review of the various “workspace” tools - docs, sheets, calendars - that are options for people who want to de-Google themselves. I know about Proton, Fastmail, etc, but not from people who've daily-driven more than one of them.
#degoogle

Tax the billionaires. https://mastodon.social/@greenpeace/115718518283533635

Greenpeace International (@greenpeace@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image A picture is worth a thousand words... or in this case, it's worth 139 billion 😒 Here's a visualisation of Jeff Bezos' wealth by scale: https://eattherichtextformat.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ #TaxTheRich #MakePollutersPay

I’m excited to see the return of Steam Machine.
With my experiments of using the Linux Desktop mode with the Steamdeck … this absolutely puts a full Linux server in a lot of homes.
A good spot for a PDS, Tailscale, and a bunch of other things.
https://bsky.app/profile/jaypeters.net

Jay Peters (@jaypeters.net)
If you want some video of the new Steam Controller and Steam Machine (a Valve-made PC for the living room!), check out this that @seanhollister.bsky.social and I made together!

In which Nick Radcliffe goes very deep for a month with Claude Code and reports back. I’m convinced by some but not all of what he says, and found the whole thing a stimulating read: https://checkeagle.com/checklists/njr/a-month-of-chat-oriented-programming/…

They could solve world hunger, but instead do this
https://mastodon.social/@amalia22/115552322301509094

I’ve been looking for this as a feature - offline feed reading in @himmel.app (haven’t tried the app myself yet)
[contains quote post or other embedded content] https://bsky.app/profile/bmann.ca/post/3m6wr2o3pbs2b

Boris (@bmann.ca)
I’ve been looking for this as a feature - offline feed reading in @himmel.app (haven’t tried the app myself yet) [contains quote post or other embedded content]

Flowers!
#Photography #bloomscrolling

Calico flowers.
#caturday #photography

I wish mastodon had a “throttle” feature. https://merveilles.town/@lrhodes/115379960146577252

I joined the BC Green party because there's no other option around here if you care about the earth. My first ever political convention!
@…
#bcgreen #GreenParty

Myself and Todd will be packing new @… and Automerge stickers at #SyncConf tomorrow
Looking forward to seeing everyone!

He’s coming to Vancouver as well: #enshittification

39. Cory Doctorow: Enshittification - Granville Island Stage - Vancouver - Oct 23, 2025
EVENT DESCRIPTION At last, a word has been coined that encapsulates our modern era, that eloquently sums up the pressing issues of our times: Enshittification. The term—which creator Cory Doctorow describes as a diagnosis about the state of exploitative online services, and the disheartening digital world as a whole—resonated so strongly that the American Dialect Society named it the 2023 Word of the Year, and it was cited as an inspiration for the 2025 season of Black Mirror. With incisive…

RE: #Fediverse are being remorselessly crawled by mindless brute-force bots. If your instance…

Thank you @etherdiver.bsky.social for your "Other People's Music" blogs that helps me find great new-to-me music!
https://blog.bmann.ca/3m6pzjjct722k

eleven dance songs I made by imaginary prisons - Boris Blog
Another Other People's Music find via Ether Diver

#Mariners got the #BlueJays right where they want ’em.
#mlb

Neat post on removing "needed" dependencies like Livewire, Inertia, GraphQL, instead doing it all in Laravel.
https://raheelshan.com/posts/livewire-without-livewire-inertia-without-inertia-graphql-wit…

Raheel Shan | Livewire without Livewire, Inertia without Inertia, GraphQL without GraphQL. And all with plain Laravel
Why pile frameworks on top of Laravel when Blade, DTOs, and AQC already give you everything? Build dynamic, SEO-friendly, single-page-like applications using plain Laravel—no Livewire, no Inertia, no GraphQL—just simplicity done right.

Much thanks and heartfelt support to @… for writing up the kind of article that I, too, have been dreading to have to write: that absolutist OSS is bad and we protect the commons with fair licensing, non-commercial and otherwise

There’s this place we walk by pretty regularly that’s semi-abandoned. The owner replaces parts when they fall off and there are lights at night, but the front and back have been left to return to nature. This chunk of land is worth ~$2.5M Canadian, so an odd situation. Anyhow, I enjoy watching the progress of the informal small-scale rewilding.
#Photography

Quoth @… in https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/15/note-on-sms-marketing: “But there are an infinite number of things in life that ca…

A Note on Current SMS Marketing Practices
Link to: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/15/note-on-sms-marketing

Arriving at @syncconf.bsky.social
That’s @f0a.org taking a picture, who will be speaking later #SyncConf

Brutal.
Aristotle on Democracy - Existential Comics
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/633

Aristotle on Democracy
A philosophy webcomic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also Jokes

Went for a weekend walk in QE park; the colors of autumn are fading, but there are still treats for the eye.
#Photography #Vancouver

LinkedIn notifications.
(I’d rather my air carrier not be using AI but here we are.)

Love seeing people get excited over silly things: https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/1ploig7/consistency_is_what_makes_the_difference_and/
Gotta take your moments of joy

Over on #Bluesky there was a bit of a controversy over the suspension of Sarah Kendzior. I thought it was an interestingly nontrivial moderation problem, so I wrote up a little case study on how this would have been handled on Mastodon: http…

Kendzior Case-Study

Yes, digital sovereignty for all things in Canada is a good idea.
That doesn’t mean insulating us from the world: open collaboration with others still fits with this.
Buying from a vendor with nothing of our own (especially from an American vendor) is not the way.
https://bsky.app/profile/nicktser…

Nick Tsergas (@nicktsergas.ca)
omg. Meta clearly trying to polarize the issue of digital sovereignty by running this in the Hub.

Whole lotta Canadians swallowed their boycott-the-USA principles and may currently be found in Seattle.
#mlb

Why, how do you transport yours?
#caturday

Where should we recommend events & community host long videos that isn't YouTube?
* Vimeo - paid, embeds work, recently acquired is a bad sign
* @… - free, no embeds
* BunnyCDN - paid, lots of options including APIs, no embeds
* Peertube - self-hosted, no embeds
Full write up in the forum

Video on Demand (VOD) options for ATProto
We were discussing video hosting for later playback aka “video on demand” VOD for videos from ATProto events to embed on web pages and attach to posts. Note: Stream.place is great for streaming! VOD is on the roadmap. What options are there for storing and playback of videos? Hosted Vimeo Has been a good platform for many years. Recently bought by Bending Spoons, so likely going to get worse. Might be OK for the short term. Example from EuroSky Live “showcase” page: Videos are …

News flash: Billionaires are unpopular. But, the strength of the sentiment and how fast the needle has moved were both surprises to me. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/opinion/billionaires-politics-money.html

Opinion | The Billionaires Have Gone Full Louis XV
The first rule of dark money is to quit blabbing about it. Did they think people would thank them for it?

Mastodon *does* have an algorithmic feed if you want one. It’s identified by different names in different clients but “Trending” is usually part of the name. I think it works well, hit the “Trending posts” and “Trending links” (called “News” in the Masto web client) once a day or so to get a feel for what’s happening in the world.
As with many other things, PhanPy is really good at presenting this stuff..

Did you know that SpaceShip .com, who is a Domain Registrar plus a bunch of other hosting services, has something called "Alf AI"?
Yes, I am going to bug them to sponsor ATmosphereConf - what a perfect match!
https://www.spaceship.com/alf-ai-assistant/

Yellow maples, not many leaves left.
#Photography #Autumn

Great to see @… running with #ProtocolsForPublishers
Chad is a huge open protocols advocate, and fortunately he's not completely engineering brained and has been spending time at the Internet Governance Forum and other important venues that are m…

Good NYT piece (gift link). Tl;dr: Financial whiz kids want to get their hands on mainstream retirement & insurance money so it can be plowed into unregulated private-debt markets and crypto. What could go wrong? https://www.

The Rules of Investing Are Being Loosened. Could It Lead to the Next 1929?
A group of financiers is trying to convince the public to invest heavily in private equity and crypto — a risky gambit with some real 1920s vibes.

Blaine's talk is SO GOOD @… - I'm going to get his slides too, and we should embed the hertzog video.
Speaking of great talks, will we have more or less tears at this year's #ATmosphereConf?

Anybody know anyone on #Vancouver City Council? Because they’re talking about seeking alternatives to Xitter: https://bsky.app/profile/jmcelroy.bsky.social/post/3m7qmxxutss24

Justin McElroy 🇨🇦 (@jmcelroy.bsky.social)
An update on how the City of Vancouver provides real-time text updates and information about its council meetings. Currently, the only way you can get that information is by having an account on X, the very fun website that everyone loves. Yesterday, they passed a motion to explore alternatives.

World Cup ticket prices.
#worldcup

I must be weird, am one of the apparently 0.02% for whom #Pluribus isn’t doing much, 6 episodes in (haven’t seen latest). I mean Rhea Seehorn is great but she’d be greater if they gave her a chance to be anything but angry-and-rude for even a minute here or there. Also, how about another character with a character? Will watch the last 3 shows despite massive suspension-of-disbelief failure, hopin…

Gone but not forgotten.
#Photography

In which, on the occasion of my 3-year migration anniversary and the release of Mastodon 4.5, I assemble all my arguments as to why Mastodon is great and why anyone else on a service that’s becoming less fun/safe/useful should migrate to Mastodon and do it now, in late 2025: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When…

Time to Migrate

Things are shitty out there. But not all the things. Here are three publications that focus on finding and delivering good news.
1. Reasons to be cheerful: https://reasonstobecheerful.world (founded by David Byrne, green focus)
2. Positive.news:

Home
A tonic for tumultuous times.

Hello from the Pacific Northwest during a major rain event, distinguished by a more or less complete absence of any actual freaking light or color. So here’s something I snapped a couple days ago, by way of eye therapy.
#Photography

Marine Museum interior
#Photography #NovaScotia

@… Feature request: When I'm looking at a profile page, a way to search within that profile - yeah, I could include the "from:" in my search but for your handle, for example, that's 29 keystrokes.

On this Remembrance Day, let us bow our heads thinking of, along with those who died in yesterday’s wars, the ones who will die today in today’s wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_con…

List of ongoing armed conflicts - Wikipedia

Graffiti written on sand. I think there’s a metaphor here struggling to get out…
#photography #graffiti

1/2 In which I cover a couple of the weird/scary aspects of the #genAI bubble and try to get a feel what the post-bubble hangover will feel like. Tl;dr: Not like the dot-com bust. https://www.tbray.org/ong…

After the Bubble

Among all the (entirely justified) rhetoric about “affordability” I find a striking lack of discussion of half the problem. It’s not just that the rent is too damn high (it is) it’s that the pay is too damn low.

Pot lights are a mistake, an architectural foible that’s ubiquitous because it makes a place look glamorous when you’re walking through thinking of renting/buying it. Looks good in photos too. And they’re fine for cooking or reading because you’re looking down. But for activities like conversation or chilling in front of the screen, they glare annoyingly. Nice glass wall or ceiling light fixtures are way easier on the eyes.

This, from Marc Brooker, seems self-evident to me: “AI is going to be most effective in problem spaces where there are what the authors call reliable verifiers.” For example, quality test suites and benchmarks. https://brooker.co.za/blog/2025/10/12/barbarians.html

That time of year.
#photography #autumn

Ed Zitron offers 15K words on whether Nvidia is like Enron (or several other famous fraudsters) or not. It's amusing and erudite and most people just won't have time to plow through it. Which is a pity, because 80% of the way through there’s a section called:
“Is NVIDIA Shipping Millions Of GPUs And Putting Them In Warehouses? Where Are The 6 Million Shipped Blackwell GPUs?”
His findings are absolutely shocking. Tl;dr: That headline just above.

NVIDIA Isn't Enron - So What Is It?
If you enjoy this free newsletter, why not subscribe to Where's Your Ed At Premium? It's $7 a month or $70 a year, and helps support me putting out these giant free newsletters! At the end of November, NVIDIA put out an internal memo (that was leaked to Barron's reporter

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…

O rly? Given that Alberta & Ottawa united to shove the TMX pipeline down the throat of the BC & Vancouver governments and several indigenous nations. And given that Carney has been saying “build all the pipelines”. ?!?!?
If my cynicism is misplaced I heartily apologize and salute in the direction of Minister Hodgson.

Alberta will need B.C. government’s backing to build proposed pipeline: energy minister | CBC News
Canada’s energy minister says Alberta will need to get its neighbouring province on board in order to see its proposed pipeline project to the West Coast come to fruition.

Here is some useful and wise advice for living in the 21st-century surveillance-state epoch: https://aphyr.com/posts/395-geoblocking-multiple-localities-with-nginx

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@coop/115688210893772046
I think this is absolutely the right approach. I think that there's a nice business opportunity in Mastodon-Instances-as-a-Service (MIaaS?), where by “nice” I mean “you can make a nice living” but totally not “…

Wikipedia’s rejoinder to Ted Cruz is entirely fair and accurate, but don’t kid yourself that Cruz is interested in fairness or accuracy, he’s just pushing back against the tendency of factual reporting to exhibit a liberal bias.
#wikipedia

Ted Cruz doesn’t seem to understand Wikipedia, lawyer for Wikimedia says
Wikipedia host’s lawyer wants to help Ted Cruz understand how the platform works.

TIL about the Octobass as a result of my random YouTube-live-music feed stumbling into a performance of Gounod’s “Messe Solonelle” which is pretty good and, well, has an octobass in the orchestra.
#music

Summer in Autumn! (We moved and had to replace a lot of the back-yard topsoil, didn’t get that done till July, so we planted the spring flowers then and they think it’s midsummer.)
#Photography #bloomscrolling

Render Rails Pages Without a Server. Clever!
https://intertwingly.net/blog/2025/12/03/Render-Rails-Pages-Without-Server.html

After all, why shouldn’t electrical-transmission towers take the form of giant ethereal robots? https://choishine.com/Giants.html
(h/t @… )

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…

https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2025/10/07/these-numbers-show-how-2-years-of-war-have-devastated-palestinian-lives-in-gaza/

These numbers show how 2 years of war have devastated Gaza
Numbers alone cannot capture the toll the Israel-Hamas war has taken on the Gaza Strip.

Cafe life (look close).
#photography #mystery

And if you go watch that video, which isn’t bad, YouTube will queue you up some, um, surprising follow-ups.
https://cosocial.ca/@aeisenberg/115325492154916206

Huh… CIRA runs the .ca TLD. Not high-profile but… seem to be OK?
[Tl;dr: They’re offering a free DNS resolver, Canadian-built and -run.]
https://cosocial.ca/@kgw/115503438874192927

Lots of goodies: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/mastodon-4.5/

Mastodon 4.5
Quote posts, the end of missing replies, new tools for admins and better emojis. All of these and more, in our latest release.

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated
Fa la la la la.