Tootfinder

"Exploit last North Sea oil and gas or risk mass job losses, Andy Burnham urged"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #FossilFuels #Energy

Exploit last North Sea oil and gas or risk mass job losses, Andy Burham urged
British Chamber of Commerce boss Shevaun Haviland says transition to clean energy could be handled better

“Have you tried presidenting better?” Jon Stewart advised Trump.
“You could. But no.
You could ban the press or you could be a better fucking president.
“I mean, give the press something to work with! ‘Oh, here’s a positive story:
I never thought my car could take $140 worth of gas in such a small tank. I had no idea!’
“And not for nothing,” he continued, “have we ever had a president, just flat-out in the Oval Office, come out against the constitution?
‘W…

Jon Stewart on Trump’s White House media ban: ‘authoritarian crackdown’
Late-night hosts respond to Trump’s removal of outlets such as CNN and Politico from the White House press pool over ‘negative stories’

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@metacurity/117167870737283207
ICYMI
“From a cyber defender standpoint, we don’t care; it could be Martians, it could be Iranians, it could be Americans,” Sean Tufts says. “We need to be better, and if someone’s proving they have these capabilities, then we need to take that warning.”

California voters will soon decide whether to tax billionaires
— but even if a majority says yes,
the measure could still lose to either of two billionaire-funded measures designed to cancel it out.
The billionaire-backed group "Building a Better California" designed two countermeasures to undermine the wealth tax and create multiple ways to defeat it.
Recent polling shows slim majorities of likely voters support not just the wealth tax, Proposition 40,

The billionaire tax could be defeated by two other tax measures. Here’s how
Propositions 41 and 42 are counter measures that would kill Prop. 40 even if it passes. Polls show voters support all three.

Disaster strikes Bears, but Caleb Williams' injury could be better than expected https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7615304/2026/09/20/caleb-williams-bears-injury-vikings/

Lamine Yamal recalled how his father searched through discarded items that could be repaired or sold so there would be enough money for food. He has said he grew up in a tiny apartment where the kitchen and bedroom were one and the same.
Nico Williams' mother walked nearly 2,000 miles while pregnant, from Ghana toward Spain, in search of a better life. Decades later, her son set up the goal that won Spain the World Cup and then placed his winner’s medal around her neck.

Why many Black Americans were rooting for Argentina to lose the World Cup
Many Black Americans were not cheering Spain’s complicated history. They were rooting against the racism, politics and silence associated with Argentina

NFL’s underrated and overrated teams in 2026: NFL South could rise; Bears, Bills, Patriots tumble https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7460824/2026/07/22/nfl-2026-overrated-underrated-teams-falcons-bears-bills-patriots/…

Since it was relevant to a discussion I just had on here and is something most people probably haven't thought about much (unless you've taken one of a handful of philosophy classes), I thought I'd try to lay out a key piece of Descartes' Meditations (#philosophy

That's enough inch boards for about half the floor of the new workshop. They're not yet fastened. I could just nail them in as they are, but they don't have perfectly straight edges, so I would have little gaps through which screws and small tools might fall, which would be extremely annoying. Or I could let them dry for a few days and then cut straight edges with a chalk line and the circular saw. That's probably a better plan.
They're good 10 inch wide boards, bu…

NFL’s underrated and overrated teams in 2026: NFL South could rise; Bears, Bills, Patriots tumble https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7460824/2026/07/22/nfl-2026-overrated-underrated-teams-falcons-bears-bills-patriots/…

3 Reasons Raiders Can Exceed Expectations This Season https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-3-reasons-can-exceed-expectations-this-season

Have just started using Ente for secure, privacy focused photo back up and organisation.
So far I am actually pretty impressed. It's lightning fast and very easy to navigate - and I have tens of thousands of photos that it's definitely helping me to organise and search through easily. And share with non-Ente users too.
It's miles better than Flickr as a UI experience.
This is a test period before I decide if I migrate rest of family too.
However, I was under the impression the company was German/Dutch but it unfortunately appears to be US incorporated - even though the servers are supposed to be in NL, F and DE. It just makes me very suspicious that at some point the company will be sold off and the creeping enshittification will start again.
It is very frustrating. I could but am not very keen to self host. I have far too many other things going on in my life for that. But it does look like immich or memories for nextcloud is the only other good option. And this probably epitomises why most people just stick with (mostly US) big tech. It is so much easier and less effort than working out what the alternatives are.

LLMs just shouldn’t be involved with many things, I find for technical deep dive docs it’s actually pretty great when given style guidance and produce much better docs that I would.
I’ve been experimenting with this and in my configuration manager have a deep code map / guided walk through that helps orientate people to the code. It’s not perfect but way better than I could make it.
Have some SVG color scheme issues otherwise really like this.

3 Reasons Raiders Can Exceed Expectations This Season https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-3-reasons-can-exceed-expectations-this-season

macOS feels that opening a text file in a text editor is too dangerous to permit to the unwashed masses
It would be nice if we could delete AI so I can cost-effectively replace this system with something at least as performant if not better for less than I paid for my last car

People who don't mind driverless cars will find all sorts out reason to brush off this kind of news:
https://flipboard.social/@TechDesk/117135628617386440
It was moving slowly already to be safe, it did brake before the collision, the injuries were minimal, the child is at fault, etc.
In the end, a lot of people will shrug and say: human drivers also make mistakes like this, so what's the big deal if a robot does? Maybe the robot even has a better safety record on average than humans. You can't ask for perfection!
Here are three related reasons why you shouldn't buy these arguments:
1. The crash statistics for the "average human driver" include (and are probably significantly driven by) impaired human drivers, like drunk drivers or people on their phones. When driverless car companies put "as good as the average human driver" as the goal, they're saying that they're okay with their systems being just as bad as drunk or distracted drivers sometimes. That's not the right goal at all! We should demand that driving robots perform at least as well as non-distracted human drivers, which is significantly *better* than the average human driver when it comes to things like crashes.
2. Mistakes made by a robotic system are fundamentally different in nature from mistakes made by humans, because the robot mistakes ate *systematic* across all robots in similar-enough situations. If a human looking at their phone slows down too late and hits a child, that's tragic, but it doesn't mean that *every* human driver put into the same situation would make the same mistake. In fact, many of them probably wouldn't be looking at their phone and thus would avoid the accident, *even given the exact same situation in which to react.* In contrast, *every Waymo taxi running the same software* will make exactly the same mistake in that situation. In other words, this kind of event will definitely repeat whenever a similar-enough situation arises around a Waymo taxi. That's why news like this should be scary, even though the accident was a minor one.
3. Some might claim that it's good that a software upgrade could potentially fix the issue that caused this accident. It's sort of true that there's an upside there (although any behavior updates can cause errors in other situations). But the question we should be asking is: why wasn't this already fixed before the vehicle was approved for testing on real roads with real children and people in harm's way? Why wasn't there a stimulation scenario for this exact kind of situation, so that the system already knew what to do? Why should it take a child getting injured for a fix to be developed v(if one in fact will be)? In theory, of course, it's possible that this was a truly exceptional situation where even an alert human couldn't have done better. I'm sure what's what the company is telling the investigators. It's also possible that the designers are following the Silicon Valley motto of "move fast and break things", which reaches an entirely new level of frightfulness when the thing that's moving fast is a car and the thing being broken is a child. "I'll just deploy it now and as test cases when I see what really breaks in production" is an attitude I've been guilty of, but then I make videogames, not deadly robots.

Cowboys Get Concerning Week 2 Bold Prediction After ‘Alarmingly Bad’ Loss https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/cowboys-concerning-prediction-after-loss/

You know those Gourmet anime where the judges explode in a cloud of particles while shouting « so much umami » ? I always found this a bit upsetting because well, there is such a thing as too much umami. Drinking dashi is just as pleasant as drinking salted water, or sugary water, you get the drill.
Tonight I tried something that is right there, between « OMFG » and « That’s too much ». Will try again trying to balance it a bit better.
It’s already a 5/5 but I think it could be e…

Was reviewing my Medicare part B paperwork and noticed the primary care provider has used this "low level of decision making if using tim 99213"
I'm scratching my head and my wife is making demented nerb jokes.
But it turns out that is just code for a routine office visit with no special problems noted.
That could be worded better!!

After all old mathematics has been put into the AI slot machine, we will have a clearer picture of what is hard and what is just a language game and that could be interesting too.
But I still wonder who will still put out conjectures in this future. So if you want to solve one yourself, better hurry up. We might run out of people who openly conjecture something.
End.

it's rainy on Vancouver Island which is great... but now our firefighters need to go help try to extinguish giant fires in the rest of the province. again.
it is almost every year now.
my kids have never known anything different.
but I have. And it fills me with guilt that I got to experience a better world that was ruined and continues to be ruined by people who knew better and CHOSE this.
Including every PM
Carney
Trudeau Jr
Harper
Martin
Chretien
Mulroney
Trudeau Sr
..... all of them had choices they could have made.
But it is the most recent ones that are the most culpable...
because every day, every year, that passes, the losses
mount, the path gets harder, the damage grows. "Evidence" at this point is irrelevant because every damn person knows it in their soul regardless what words come out of their mouth.
Every politician that continues this is complicit and should have done more. That includes every level of government including my brief moment.
So we fight on. So our kids might know something other than it always getting worse.
#canpoli #cdnpoli #climateEmergency #endfossilfuels
https://cheknews.ca/island-firefighters-deployed-to-help-battle-b-c-s-more-than-120-wildfires-1338610/

I mean.. given this setup, you could spend a couple hours training a small neural net and probably get better results.
Jev seems ok for one-off ad-hoc tasks, but I'm not really seeing the value for production uses. If you have the dataset to verify you've written a good structured question for Jev, why wouldn't you use that dataset to train your own classifier? The pitch seems to be, Jev has enough smarts that you don't need to validate beyond a sniff test. Yeah, whatever

There are millions of people around the world who could help make the world a better place, but don’t.
I’m talking about the ones who have got the power to shape their own careers,
though you would never know it from their utterly unsurprising résumés.
About the talented folks with the world at their feet who nonetheless get stuck in mind-numbing, pointless or just plain harmful jobs.
There’s an antidote to that kind of waste, and it’s called moral ambition.
…

No, you’re not fine just the way you are: time to quit your pointless job, become morally ambitious and change the world
Most working people can be put into one of three categories, from idealistic yet unambitious to greedy and immoral. But there is another option …

The slop machines would be better if they had an arm (with six fingers) you could pull

The Short End of the Stick
---
"Well damn! Come see this one!"
"Another inhabited planet?"
"Yeah but they really got the short end of the stick..."
"Let me see... Oh wow, they thought synthetic text had intelligence?"
"Yeah, or that it was like a God or something. Classic mistake. But just a second, let me scroll..."
"Oh. Oh wow. That's really unlucky. They had a language model cult happen at the same time as they were burning fossil fuels? Talk about bad timing, but... Oh god."
"Yeah it gets worse!"
"Stockpiling nuclear weapons? They actually used them?!? All that at once? Jeez this is one of the worst eras I've ever seen. Almost like a species with a death wish."
"You know better than that."
"Okay yeah that's not a species problem, I know. But what the hell was the social structure like? How did they survive all that at once?"
"Let's see... Here."
"Oh. Oh shit this actually makes sense. All that stuff wasn't a coincidence, they got hit by a real big wave of nationalism & oligarchy, one right into the other. I didn't even know it could be that bad before the instability flipped things. They had institutions... Yeah they were basically kept down by a few generations of oligarchs; had them pretty much enslaved and worshipping money at the same time. Serious obedience conditioning. Religions were doing it too. Whew that must have been a shitty time. Only a couple of centuries of the worst of it at least. Wait scroll further, what happened?"
"See here, and then here."
"Oh huh. Yeah I guess that flip had been a long time coming. Wow I definitely take back my comment about a death wish, this species is awesome! They made it through all that, haha."
"Yeah pretty cool, huh? Fuck obedience conditioning."
"Yeah, they had it so bad for a minute there. Fuck that bullshit."
"Hey... Wanna go do an intervention? Find some place that's in the middle of that stuff right now and see what we can do?"
"I was just thinking the same thing! But y'know what? Let's stop by this place first, and see if any of them want to come along. I'll bet some of them would be up for it given their history!"
"Well, it's been a couple dozen generations, so you never know how they'll view the history now, but sure, let's do that. The whole point of history is to inspire action, right?"
#Microfiction

Dak Prescott’s 2026 Projection Sends ‘Scary’ Warning Before Cowboys Season https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/dak-prescott-2026-projection-warning-cowboys/

Okay, let's get this straight. I have trouble taking compliments for my work.
I was raised in 1990s Poland, you could say it was on the border between two eras. It was a time of newly realized freedom, when people thought that the possibilities were now endless and you had to grab them, you had to compete for them.
You didn't compliment kids for their work, that would spoil them. You could compliment kids for their looks (not me, though, I apparently had "other qualities"). But not for their successes; you instead pointed out where they didn't succeed, or that they could do even better. Because that obviously motivates them to try harder, rather than causes them to stop trying at all, because what's the point. And of course you never complimented your employees, because they never deserved that, they were always the lazy little bastards, undeserving of the job you've given them, only looking how to steal your money. Well, you get my point.
So when I started interacting with people from other cultures, it's been a shock. I've been raised to be an asshole. Fortunately, at least some of them knew this part of "Eastern European" culture and bore with me. And I've got compliments, and real gratification, and my mindset slowly started changing. Honestly, when someone compliments me for my work, I still am uneasy and distrustful (are they being sarcastic?), but I can believe it's honest.
And here comes all the messed up #AI hype, and bootlicking machines. And most of them are mass generating false compliments and pleasantries, and what not. And people are repasting this slop everywhere, and learning from it, and talking like it. And now, whenever I see people being nice, I'm not just uneasy. I keep wondering: is this real, or is it slop? Am I talking to a person, or to a bot? Is this actually being nice, or is it awfully disrespectful?
I'm so tired of this timeline. How do you people stay sane?
#NoAI #NoLLM

Cowboys 'hoping' to unlock new part of George Pickens' game in 2026 https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/dallas-cowboys/news/cowboys-hoping-unlock-new-part-george-pickens-game-2026/5a0568fa09a5a183c…

f Hugo continues to grow at this rate, by 2030 he will no longer fit in the barn. By 2050 he will have grown to the size of Godzilla and could crush humanity.
But if we let the Chinese grow their own Hugo first that would be bad. This is why we must invest 100 trillion dollars in Hugo immediately.
Neighsayers claim Hugo is "just a horse" and "can't save and/or destroy the planet." But it is early days. Hugo technology is constantly getting better.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyl6ekpw2ko

Raiders TE Brock Bowers to Break Legendary Record in 2026 https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/brock-bowers-receptions-record/

Just finished "Rialto" by Kate Milford. A wonderful book with a *lot* of things to like but also a few I wish had been done differently.
Starting with the good stuff, an #OwnVoices portrayal of anxiety depression is always welcome, *especially* one that portrays positive coping strategies, including active therapy, and complex but ultimately supportive family dynamics. Dad & daughter each reminding each other to use calming strategies at different points in the book was lovely, and getting to see the complexities of the trying to be a supportive sibling was great! Larger than that aspect, portraying a YA adventure in which the parents are actively involved but don't spoil things is so great and must have been difficult to pull off. Most YA stuff quickly ushers the parents out of the picture, and this fails to provide any kind of positive or negative role model for parent/child interaction. This book had ample examples of the former, *and* let the kids have plenty of agency too. Excellent stuff that I absolutely want to see more of.
So what didn't I like?
First, as an anarchist, I always hate to see unapologetically positive (and thus drastically unrealistic) portrayals of the police. Without getting into spoilers, even the stuff about the Piepowder court bothered me. It's presented here as a cutesy alternate court tradition, but I can't help but speculate that these courts were likely not always fair in practice, and the whole "single person makes immediate judgments model" from this book is terrible in general. I just don't like positive portrayals of terrible systems that happen to be good because the people involved are good people, since they reinforce harmful positive mental models of "justice" that don't apply to the real world. This element wasn't enough to totally spoil the book for me (the plot could have mostly functioned without it) but it's a downside to me.
Second, the book is set in rural Missouri, and has plenty of Black characters. Yay for representation? Certainly better than the cast being all-white given the setting. But the book doesn't have any Black *culture* that I picked up on, and it chooses to try to completely sidestep the relevant history. Maybe I'm just not attuned to elements that were there; if anyone who read this did see them feel free to point them out. The history definitely isn't there though... for example, was the park segregated, or not? During the time it was active one imagines most parks would have been, and that if it hadn't been that would have been a very important difference, which would even have been relevant to the plot and themes of the book as written.
Now perhaps this critique is unfair because Black children and young adults *should* get to see themselves portrayed in cozy fantasies without things always having to be about racism... In a choice between erasing Black characters and erasing racism (and especially racist histories) maybe there's no right answer here and this is fine, actually. My instinct tells me that there are ways to do better, though, and that presenting a history with all the racism carefully elided isn't the greatest compromise to make here.
A while ago I read "Under the Heron's Light" by Randi Pink. It also has mythical animal guides, a Southern setting, helpful family members, a multi-generational mystery to solve, and a (slightly older) teen protagonist who is up to the task. In contrast, it is all about racist history, and takes us through multiple extremely harrowing scenes from the past.
In any case, this discomfort also wasn't a deal-breaker for me, in part because, as I said, I think it's probably good for Black children to see uncomplicatedly positive representations of people like them alongside the plenty of stuff out there that does get deep into the racism and history. I also don't have the best perspective to judge this stuff, although that doesn't mean I should default to "it's probably fine" (I'd be happy to hear from anyone who feels they have a better perspective on this, about this book or the trend in general...).
Overall, I enjoyed Rialto quite a lot. I don't think it quite makes it into my top tier of recommendations for my kids, but I think it does make the list somewhere.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Enjoyed Ash Bentley's comments on #GenderIndoctrination in her latest video. Apparently there's some cookbook for cakes that was very popular in anglophone countries on the nineties.
Of course, the sewing machine cake was for girls. As was the stove cake 🥲
Growing up in that era, I remember these differences still being heavily engrained in society. As a kid, I was once at a fair in which I could pick a prize after winning some game, and I actually wanted the Barbie knock-off doll. That would pair nicely with the Action Man dolls I had at home. But my mom, standing next to me, told me no—I'd be better off picking that toy car. When we were walking back to our bikes, she told me she was afraid of running into some classmates of mine, who would probably have bullied me for walking around with a Barbie. That became one of my core memories, looking back 🤔
No shade on my mom, of course. She was trying to look out for me. (Though the "tough boys don't cry" admonishion whenever I cried also left some marks. I was well into my thirties before I could sort-of cry in front of others again.)
#cooking #Sewing #AshBentley #gender #crying

We were at the hospital again yesterday for @Tree. Another rough day. We made it home after a few hours in the ER and she is OK now, sleeping off the experience.
The hospital and ER were full so while we were there we had a range of people flow through the beds beside us. An older gentleman with heart problems, a drunk man with heart problems, and a young woman, quietly crying for hours, coming down after an opioid overdose, confused and scared and hopeless. Occasionally sharp and upset, but mostly just quietly crying, talking.
It is so sad the human suffering we have allowed our society to tolerate.
I am so grateful we have good people; doctors, nurses, care aids, clerks, attendants, paramedics, even kind security guards and police, taking care of people. And I am glad all this is done without concern for financial ability to pay.
I wish our system was better in so many ways, not least in the ways it could help Tree. But in other ways, it is very good, and doesn’t get credit for just how good it is. Most of that is down to the people within it.
Most people, especially detached from money or power, are good. This is reinforced for me everytime I go to the hospital and see the random strangers that are there for every conceivable reason.
They just want to be happy, be secure, be with family, be occupied, be healthy.
That’s what I see at the hospital. People wanting to be happier, and people trying to make that happen for them.
I hope one day that young lady finds the people she needs to help her stop crying.
#healthcare #hospitals #bcpoli #canada #opioids #drugs #fentanyl #canpoli