Tootfinder

Very decent year-end reading recommendations, featuring the contradictions of capitalism and whodunnits: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-12-30/capitalism-and-crime-books-that-got-me-through-the-year

#NewGuineans and #Aboriginal #Australians descend from two groups who arrived 60,000 years ago, research suggests

New Guineans and Aboriginal Australians descend from two groups who arrived 60,000 years ago, research suggests
A collaboration between the University of Huddersfield's Archaeogenetics Research Group and the University of Southampton's Center for Maritime Archaeology, has clarified the first settlement of New Guinea and Australia by modern humans, Homo sapiens—refining our understanding of the origins of seafaring and maritime mobility.

No Peace: A Community Hardcore Show to Benefit Immigrants
Desmadre Media Hosts
👉 Feb. 28 Fundraiser Featuring Music, Printmaking, Tattoos, and Tacos
This weekend brings a chance for the community to party for a good cause,
with Desmadre Media’s “No Peace” hardcore show and fundraiser
👉 at Foundation Press
38 Depot Road
in Old Town Goleta
on Feb. 28.
The event will include bands from the Central Coast, live printmaking, tattoos, and food …

No Peace: A Community Hardcore Show to Benefit Immigrants
Desmadre Media is hosting a February 28 fundraiser featuring music, printmaking, tattoos, and tacos.

This becomes especially interesting when you understand the history of the church as a quasi-revolutionary organization. One could describe early church history as a mostly-successful attempt to overthrow the Roman empire. I say mostly successful because, in the end, the Roman state mutated the church for it's own ends and basically pulled a Lenin.
The early church was a religion of women and slaves that set up alternative institutions. See, the Roman economic system basically ran through the temples. Temples were basically the banks of their day (thus money changers in the temples and all that). So when the church set up their own institutions, they were actually attacking the economic system of the Roman empire. *That* is why the empire tried to destroy them. The Romans didn't really care about the gods. They would just mutate their beliefs to pull other pagans in. No, it wasn't about the gods. The Christian were fucking with the money.
The whole church as an institution was about dual power, and Paul (one of the early founders of the church) was central to organizing this into a political machine that could actually threaten the dominant order. One could argue that he saw the potential of the church, and used it to solidify his own power.
It all basically worked, right up until Constantine figured out how to flip the whole thing against the most radical elements. He had his people collect up different books of the Bible and modify them in such a way that it favored Rome. The trick here was to highlight the existing antisemitic threads of early church, and destroy the anti-Roman ones. Anti-authoritarian sects were killed as heretics, and centralized sects became aligned under the church.
This strategy of controlling internal dissent probably feels quite familiar. It's basically how the US works.
But this whole time, during the whole lead up to this, Christianity was illegal and it was continuing to grow as a system of dual power. When Romanism merged with Christianity, it created the most authoritarian institution in human history that brutally destroyed all opposition. Even still, several hundred years later it's power broke.
Today Liberalism has separated banking and the church, and has created the illusion of separation of church and state. But the same dual power strategy that allowed the first church to gain enough power to merge with the Roman power structure have now allowed Christian Nationalism to fully merge with Americanism into the Christian Fascism we see today...

@… will be the new leader of the Federal NDP!!
I am so proud of @… coming in 3rd!! Hooray Tanille!! 🎉 🎉
As it was a first ballot victory for Lewis with 56% of the vote we will never know how folks ranked the rest of the field, but for Tanille to have come in third in that first vote ahead of the “union” candidate Rob Ashton really speaks to the work she put in. Well done my friend!!
I would have loved to see her come in 2nd but McPherson was a very strong candidate and showed it with 29.5% of the vote.
I am very very happy that a true leftist candidate has been victorious! We must try as Canadians something different.
Tanille and Avi and Tony were that difference and 64% of the voting NDP members have declared that a strong socialist movement is what they want the NDP to try to counter the Liberals and Conservatism. This is the correct decision! This is the hard path, but the one that can bear the most fruit for the party and all Canadians.
I hope all candidates and all members of the NDP can move forward now as one unstoppable force and show Canadians a real alternative to the regressive Conservatism, Austerity, and Hopelessness of the Liberal and Conservative status quo.
We need policies for all people, for all workers.
We need to rebalance our economy to favour citizens over corporations and working people over billionaires.
We need a government that will be bold enough to present a the real alternatives to oil and gas and instil the confidence in those provinces like Alberta and BC that there is a future in other industries that can start immediately and lead to prosperity and security.
But most of all, we need humanity, strength, and dignity to face down the threats against Canada. We can do this together and I believe Avi and all of these candidates will be able to make it happen if we give them the chance!
#canpoli #cdnpoli #ndp #avilewis #socialism #democracy #cpc #alberta #bcpoli

Snow, Silence, and the Difficult Question of How We Die
A winter storm slowed the world to an eerie quiet, blurring time and routine. In that silence, my thoughts drifted from snow and preparation to harder questions about death, dignity, and whether we should have more control over how life ends.
https://…

Snow, Silence, and the Difficult Question of How We Die – Bob Mueller
A winter storm brings silence and reflection, leading to difficult but necessary thoughts on death, dignity, and medical aid in dying.

On Electric Vehicle Energy Demand Forecasting and the Effect of Federated Learning
Andreas Tritsarolis, Gil Sampaio, Nikos Pelekis, Yannis Theodoridis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20782 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.20782 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.20782
arXiv:2602.20782v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The wide spread of new energy resources, smart devices, and demand side management strategies has motivated several analytics operations, from infrastructure load modeling to user behavior profiling. Energy Demand Forecasting (EDF) of Electric Vehicle Supply Equipments (EVSEs) is one of the most critical operations for ensuring efficient energy management and sustainability, since it enables utility providers to anticipate energy/power demand, optimize resource allocation, and implement proactive measures to improve grid reliability. However, accurate EDF is a challenging problem due to external factors, such as the varying user routines, weather conditions, driving behaviors, unknown state of charge, etc. Furthermore, as concerns and restrictions about privacy and sustainability have grown, training data has become increasingly fragmented, resulting in distributed datasets scattered across different data silos and/or edge devices, calling for federated learning solutions. In this paper, we investigate different well-established time series forecasting methodologies to address the EDF problem, from statistical methods (the ARIMA family) to traditional machine learning models (such as XGBoost) and deep neural networks (GRU and LSTM). We provide an overview of these methods through a performance comparison over four real-world EVSE datasets, evaluated under both centralized and federated learning paradigms, focusing on the trade-offs between forecasting fidelity, privacy preservation, and energy overheads. Our experimental results demonstrate, on the one hand, the superiority of gradient boosted trees (XGBoost) over statistical and NN-based models in both prediction accuracy and energy efficiency and, on the other hand, an insight that Federated Learning-enabled models balance these factors, offering a promising direction for decentralized energy demand forecasting.
toXiv_bot_toot

A winter storm slowed everything down—quiet house, lost sense of time, strange stillness. That silence turned into a reflection on death, dignity, and medical aid in dying. New post is up. ❄️🕯️
https://www.bobmuellerwriter.com/snow-silence-and-the-diff…

Snow, Silence, and the Difficult Question of How We Die – Bob Mueller
A winter storm brings silence and reflection, leading to difficult but necessary thoughts on death, dignity, and medical aid in dying.

Mastodon, a decentralized, open source social media platform and alternative to centralized social media apps like X and Threads,
announced on Wednesday its plans to make its platform more approachable for newcomers
while also targeting creators with the launch of new features.
The changes follow the expansion of Mastodon’s core development team over the past 18 months
to include people with experience across web and mobile and back end,
as well as the hiring o…

Mastodon, a decentralized alternative to X, plans to target creators with new features | TechCrunch
Mastodon is looking to grow its open source, decentralized social network with new features aimed at creators.