Tootfinder

We could stop burning and overheating the planet. We could end world hunger. We could provide better health care and education to all the people.
We just don't want to. We decided against.
Because of profit, some laziness and the claim that others have not “earned it” and it would be unfair to make the world a better place for everyone.

Seahawks CB Tyriq Woolen on taunting penalty vs. Rams: 'I’ve got to be better with that' https://www.nfl.com/news/seahawks-cb-tyriq-woolen-on-taunting-penalty-vs-rams-i-ve-got-to-be-better-with-that

AI is transforming how we predict hurricanes. NOAA is now using machine learning to analyze billions of data points, making forecasts more accurate than ever.
The results? Better rapid intensification predictions and stronger decision support for coastal communities at risk. As hurricane season wraps, this tech could be a game-changer for saving lives.

NOAA chief plugs AI in forecasting as hurricane season wraps
While no hurricanes struck the U.S., Hurricane Melissa left behind devastation in the Caribbean.

Yeah, sure Google Gemini, sure.
PS: "Banoie" in Basque means "I'm leaving" in the dialect of Bizkaia.

Also want to say how wonderful #StarTrek #StarFleetAcademy is to again be transported to a society that is doing its best to make things better. To be based on science, facts, community, communication, trust and empathy.
And its set in San Francisco, just wish I could teleport up there right now…

After #Trump finally crashes and burns (I'm still saying I don't think he makes it to the mid terms, and I think it's more than possible he won't make it to the end of the year) we'll hear a lot of people say, "the system worked!" Today people are already talking about "saving democracy" by fighting back. This will become a big rally cry to vote (for Democrats, specifically), and the complete failure of the system will be held up as the best evidence for even greater investment in it.
I just want to point out that American democracy gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile, who, before being elected was already a well known sexual predator, and who made the campaign promise to commit genocide. He then preceded to commit genocide. And like, I don't care that he's "only" kidnaped and disappeared a few thousand brown people. That's still genocide. Even if you don't kill every member of a targeted group, any attempt to do so is still "committing genocide." Trump said he would commit genocide, then he hired all the "let's go do a race war" guys he could find and *paid* them to go do a race war. And, even now as this deranged monster is crashing out, he is still authorized to use the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
He committed genocide during his first term when his administration separated migrant parents and children, then adopted those children out to other parents. That's technically genocide. The point was to destroy the very people been sending right wing terror squads after.
There was a peaceful hand over of power to a known Russian asset *twice*, and the second time he'd already committed *at least one* act of genocide *and* destroyed cultural heritage sites (oh yeah, he also destroyed indigenous grave sites, in case you forgot, during his first term).
All of this was allowed because the system is set up to protect exactly these types of people, because *exactly* these types of people are *the entire power structure*.
Going back to that system means going back to exactly the system that gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile *TWICE*.
I'm already seeing the attempts to pull people back, the congratulations as we enter the final phase, the belief that getting Trump out will let us all get back to normal. Normal. The normal that lead here in the first place. I can already see the brunch reservations being made. When Trump is over, we will be told we won. We will be told that it's time to go back to sleep.
When they tell you everything worked, everything is better, that we can stop because we won, tell them "fuck you! Never again means never again." Destroy every system that ever gave these people power, that ever protected them from consequences, that ever let them hide what they were doing.
These democrats funded a genocide abroad and laid the groundwork for genocide at home. They protected these predators, for years. The whole power structure is guilty. As these files implicate so many powerful people, they're trying to shove everything back in the box. After all the suffering, after we've finally made it clear that we are the once with the power, only now they're willing to sacrifice Trump to calm us all down.
No, that's a good start but it can't be the end.
Winning can't be enough to quench that rage. Keep it burning. When this is over, let victory fan that anger until every institution that made this possible lies in ashes. Burn it all down and salt the earth. Taking down Trump is a great start, but it's not time to give up until this isn't possible again.
#USPol

The 2025 Web Almanac mistook me.
I did *not* say LLMs provide better image descriptions. I cited SeeingAI and Be My Eyes as tools for undescribed IRL uses.
I said LLM-generated captions could be better than craptions. I mentioned abstracts / reading-level changes, which could be summaries?
But “better” image descriptions is right out.

Yea I can’t imagine why anyone thought this dipshit was defending rape…I mean aside from the over half a dozen posts where he defended rape as “not immoral”, literally said “No. In fact, the word "rape"…didn't even exist until the 1800s.” and arguing that being “owned”* wasn’t “horrific”
Complete mystery why people went after him, must be some weird BlueSky thing. 😂
JFC

There's nothing to be said about Killer that thousands of other people have done a thousand times better than I ever could. So I'm just going to sit back and admire Seal at his total imperial finest. #TOTP

Apple might be in a better position than others to launch this successfully because it can build it on an established base (all iPhones out there). Still don‘t see the use cases though. And don‘t even mention privacy issues 🙄
Apple Developing AI Wearable Pin - https://apple.slashdot.org/s…

The NFL playoffs could not have gone better for the Cowboys https://insidethestar.com/the-nfl-playoffs-could-not-have-gone-better-for-the-cowboys

The problem here, as the students make very clear, is not whether or not AI can be used in teaching. It's that you're selling them something they can get much cheaper and better without you.
Even if AI was the perfect teacher, this would still be a racket.

A surprise benefit of mRNA vaccines could be better treatments for cancer, extending lives without the side effects of chemo? Yay for good news! https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/12/covid-mrna-vaccines-cancer-patien…

Lately, I’ve been feeling burned out by how much people in my life assume things about me and my beliefs, so let's talk about it.
I spend some parts (not all) of my evenings online, usually from around 20:00 to 22:00 or sometimes even until midnight (00:00), not because I am consumed by politics but because I like to learn and reflect on how society could be better. I enjoy exploring ideas about justice, solidarity, and human rights in a way that feels meaningful to me. For me, spe…

moving all my email newsletter/rss reading to mastodon, so I have a single source of random noise to suffocate. (@… is pretty useful)
(consolidating instead to an rss reader might be ok if I could get non-public mastodon posts in the reader. since I can't, this way seems better for now.)
(treating non-public as a separate thing might be ok, but I didn&#…

When "self-driving" cars were first getting some hype back in ~2015 or so, I told people who asked me that I didn't think they'd be safe, and that I wished the same money were being invested in driver-assistance systems instead.
At the time, advocates were claiming that self-driving cars would be safer than human drivers.
We now have both self-driving cars and some nifty new driver assistance things, and it turns out that the self-driving cars are in fact being developed by corporations whose attention to the bottom line results in danger to others on the road pretty regularly. I don't actually have stats here for whether they're "safer than human drivers" or not, but the opportunity for one bad software update to make *all* self-driving cars dangerous at once kinda makes me doubt that.
Here's an example of Waymo cars getting "more aggressive" as they try to balance between being too timid and obstructing traffic (including emergency vehicles) and being too dangerous:
https://archive.ph/JJuGv
Here's another example of passing stopped schoolbusses leading to a software recall:
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/waymo-issue-voluntary-software-recall-after-close-calls/story?id=128207776
In the first article, Waymo claims 91% fewer serious accidents per mile. Obviously an independent audit would be actually trustworthy, but even if we take that claim at face value, it's meaningless if an update tomorrow causes 100,000 accidents.
Note that they could be using better engineering practices, and the fact that they aren't shows that they don't care enough about the risks. They could be deploying new software versions incrementally and slowly, letting new versions rack up lots of miles only on a few vehicles before pushing them to a fleet. The should also have the equivalent of a simulation unit test for "schoolbus is stopped, what do?" and if a software version fails that test, it doesn't make it to the fleet. Clearly they don't have that.
I feel pretty vindicated in my earlier prediction that this tech is a bad idea in the hands of the current advocates.

Phone rep: Sorry, I talk to myself while entering things.
Me: Hey, it's better than awkward silence for 10 minutes like I usually get.
Rep: I could do that if you want, I can provide Awkward Silence As A Service.
My dude, you are way, way too intelligent to be answering phones for the state government. You did a great job, but still.

Big thanks to the Fediverse Friends who wished me well or even just commiserated at the pain I've been going through.
I am feeling a lot better today, but I don't want to forget that pain, because I need to be mindful of the pain people are in every day. It's a struggle, it's a battle, and I wish we could all live pain-free lives.

First came artists. They made art. You could've liked it or not, but it had an impact of some sort, felt or not.
Then came designers. They had to make good works. They studied what good means and tried to master it. They didn't always succeed but they got better with practice and rarely produced real embarrassments.
Finally came engines and models. They just produced content. It had to be coming out daily. Few bothered to read it, let alone assess or judge it.

I made a script for this, but then I thought a webui would be better so I could use it in my phone and stuff
I asked an LLM to generate a python webui to run server-side the script I wrote, and surprisingly it 100% worked first try. I was sure it wouldn’t work at all, but I didn’t touch that code and it works.
I can’t even say I “vibe coded” this bc I didn’t even read the code enough to know its vibes lmao. I’m surprised this even works, and it does work well. What the actual fuck.
Welp, not my favourite way to do things but I wasn’t in the mood to do python and figure out the extra libraries and stuff.
And it works so I’ll just use that. In a hardened systemd service to make sure it doesn’t like accidentally delete my whole system or something.

Upset alert in Week 12? Why these favorites could fall, including Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/upset-alert-week-12-patrick-mahomes-chiefs/<…

"Airbus prevailed because it was the least European version of a European industrial strategy project ever."
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-airbus-took-off/

How Airbus took off - Works in Progress Magazine
Airbus is an example of successful industrial policy and the rare European company that is better than its American rival. Could its success be copied elsewhere?

They have a great “big” point here about incrementalism but also: fiber, water, and even minimal activity specifically are great first steps towards feeling better.
I suspect that a lot of us 1st-worlders feel lousy in part because we’re each paving our own way to T2D, colon cancer, and heart disease. @…

I just discovered #NetNewsWire. It’s snappy. It’s uncomplicated.
If I could find a way to make the font bigger it would be even better. Help please !

Future Plans:
I have like ten years of data in my log, converted from those prior prototypes. I will be adding ways to more usefully compare and analyse data going this far back.
It could maybe use a milestone function, to track singular events which don't take actual time so don't spread on the grid. Snack tracking and the like.
It could likely use a flashcard system, with spaced repetition to review the flashcards, for better memory and recall.
Synching between devices might be nice, and lots will suggest doing that through Nostr, but Nostr is a bit public. Would need an encryption layer. Do nostr relays want to relay encrypted data from one user to themselves I suspect Veilid ( https://veilid.com/ ) would be a better option. The "no servers" ethos probably includes nostr relays.
Mostly I plan just more and better ways to view the ten years and growing of data I already have. And to do some other things for a bit so my log isn't just full of "Vibecoding Exocortex" like it is the last two weeks 😉

Finished our first room renovation! Tore out the old builtin wardrobe and minging carpet, replaced skirting board and coving, plastered where the old wardrobe was, laid new flooring, painted. Took ages but happy with it on the whole!
Learnt a lot! Surface on the teal wall is pretty poor due to bad surface prep and thinking paint was more forgiving than it actually is, so will redo that in the new year, and flooring could be laid a bit better with practice. But very happy on the whole!<…

Multi state neurons
Robert Worden
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08815 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08815 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.08815
arXiv:2512.08815v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Neurons, as eukaryotic cells, have powerful internal computation capabilities. One neuron can have many distinct states, and brains can use this capability. Processes of neuron growth and maintenance use chemical signalling between cell bodies and synapses, ferrying chemical messengers over microtubules and actin fibres within cells. These processes are computations which, while slower than neural electrical signalling, could allow any neuron to change its state over intervals of seconds or minutes. Based on its state, a single neuron can selectively de-activate some of its synapses, sculpting a dynamic neural net from the static neural connections of the brain. Without this dynamic selection, the static neural networks in brains are too amorphous and dilute to do the computations of neural cognitive models. The use of multi-state neurons in animal brains is illustrated in hierarchical Bayesian object recognition. Multi-state neurons may support a design which is more efficient than two-state neurons, and scales better as object complexity increases. Brains could have evolved to use multi-state neurons. Multi-state neurons could be used in artificial neural networks, to use a kind of non-Hebbian learning which is faster and more focused and controllable than traditional neural net learning. This possibility has not yet been explored in computational models.
toXiv_bot_toot

Projector is in place. Not as dumb as I usually like. Has an android OS and a Netflix app and things instead of just a HDMI input. But it has HDMI input too.
Screen is 1.9m wide by .92 high which is a 2.15m screen measured across the diagonal like they usually do.
Projection is keyed quite drastically with the right hand side being shrunk down vertically to square the image, which I suspect means pretty radically reduced resolution on the right hand side of the screen.
Maybe I could attach it to the bottom of the overhead cupboards more squarely onto the wall than the shelf is? Worth a though.
But working well. Will be even better when the main bedroom media PC arrives.

There were actually a lot of good recommendations from that Committee report, the one on PR was just the final one! Here's a few more.. including some that local #Fediverse proponents could dig into! @… was on the Committee.
—>FEDI ADVANTAGE<— “The Committee heard about a number of issues related to
the electoral information environment. Members recommend
that the provincial government collaborate with Elections
BC and the federal government to review existing legislative
and regulatory measures related to misinformation,
disinformation, and hate speech during elections, including
**mechanisms to ensure the timely removal of harmful content** (**emphasis added)”
—> FEDI ADVANTAGE<— “To better address challenges associated with social media and emergent technologies such as artificial intelligence, Members recommend establishing a working group to propose amendments to BC’s privacy and election legislation. To better protect all users, the Committee recommends requiring digital platforms to act with a duty of care and establish clear safety-related requirements such as data privacy, platform design, and content policy. The Committee also heard about concerns regarding foreign interference, and recommends that these be considered by the Electoral Integrity Working Group.”
—The Committee heard about the critical importance of
civic education to ensure the public’s understanding of
democratic institutions, processes, and participation. The
Committee recommends strengthening civic education
in the K-12 school system with input from experts and a
greater emphasis on applied learning.
— the Committee suggests enhancing data collection by requiring proactive enumeration on an annual basis and ensuring that registered parties and candidates can access poll-by-poll results. Elections BC should review and improve
voter registration practices and communication, as well as
access to and public awareness of voting opportunities. With respect to expanding voter eligibility, the Committee supports further examination of extending voting rights to 16- and 17-year-olds as well as permanent residents in BC.
— Committee Members recommend modernizing the candidate nominator verification process, requiring Elections BC to collect and share voters’ contact information with registered political parties and candidates, and strengthening measures related to access to multi-unit buildings for candidates and their campaigns.
Full report to the Legislature: #BCPoli #CanPoli #CdnPoli #ElectoralReform #Democracy #ProportionalRepresentation #Polarization