Tootfinder

If you know something about Basic Income, you may be aware that
👉one of the first proposals for a Basic Income came from Thomas Paine, hero of the American and French revolutions.
In 1797, after a stint in a French prison, Paine wrote the pamphlet 
"Agrarian Justice",
⭐️which sets out an argument for taxing land and distributing the proceeds among the population at large as compensation for landlessness.
Paine’s proposal to tax land and distribute the …

Thomas Paine’s 1797 call for a Basic Income: a New Paper Tells the Full Story
You may be aware that one of the first proposals for a Basic Income came from Thomas Paine, hero of the American and French revolutions.

I feel as though I should illustrate the difference that this one single constraint can make by two examples.
The rules of Simon Says are maximally authoritarian. You must perform any action ordered, with the only restriction that the authority must say "Simon says" first. Were you forced to stay in this system, it would be the most despotic autocracy possible. But it's not. It's a silly game because you can leave at any time.
Let's flip this and imagine a room. During a specific period of time you will have absolute control over everything in this room. In this room you have total freedom. This is not even the limited freedom, the coordinated freedom, the compromising freedom of civil society. You could, without consequence, perform any action you wish in this room. You could say anything, destroy or steal any object, order any individual to perform any action, kill any person in the room with you and take anything they own. This is the sovereign freedom, the absolute freedom, of dictators and kings. The only restriction is that you are not allowed to leave the room while you have this freedom. In fact, you really only have this level of freedom because the room is actually empty other than for you. I am, of course, talking about a form of torture still common in the US: solitary confinement.

I feel as though I should illustrate the difference that this one single constraint can make by two examples.
The rules of Simon Says are maximally authoritarian. You must perform any action ordered, with the only restriction that the authority must say "Simon says" first. Were you forced to stay in this system, it would be the most despotic autocracy possible. But it's not. It's a silly game because you can leave at any time.
Let's flip this and imagine a room. During a specific period of time you will have absolute control over everything in this room. In this room you have total freedom. This is not even the limited freedom, the coordinated freedom, the compromising freedom of civil society. You could, without consequence, perform any action you wish in this room. You could say anything, destroy or steal any object, order any individual to perform any action, kill any person in the room with you and take anything they own. This is the sovereign freedom, the absolute freedom, of dictators and kings. The only restriction is that you are not allowed to leave the room while you have this freedom. In fact, you really only have this level of freedom because the room is actually empty other than for you. I am, of course, talking about a form of torture still common in the US: solitary confinement.

Physics-Informed Inductive Biases for Voltage Prediction in Distribution Grids
Ehimare Okoyomon, Arbel Yaniv, Christoph Goebel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25158 https://

Physics-Informed Inductive Biases for Voltage Prediction in Distribution Grids
Voltage prediction in distribution grids is a critical yet difficult task for maintaining power system stability. Machine learning approaches, particularly Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), offer significant speedups but suffer from poor generalization when trained on limited or incomplete data. In this work, we systematically investigate the role of inductive biases in improving a model's ability to reliably learn power flow. Specifically, we evaluate three physics-informed strategies: (i) power-f…

I think it is a nice idea to highlight why we like working with #Nix and #NixOS to remind us, why we all are doing this in the end.
For me it is still the best experience in #freesoftware I…

"Converting debts into income streams for third parties is the true basis of the finance industry. It's the means by which socially useless intermediaries extract ever-mounting rents from the productive economy" -- @…

I'm stunned. It was already clear how much Sabine Hossenfelder's videos have decayed over time because of how much more profitable is to go for drama and appeal to science denialists instead of doing actual science divulgation...
But today she has crossed a line I was not expecting: to accept the sponsorship of a transhumanist criopreservation company while trying to preserve a facade of being objective.
I guess she passed the point of no return long ago and can't see any path towards being reasonable again without destroying her sources of income. Sad.

I have a refurb Thinkpad incoming and I can NOT decide which distro I want to put on it. Paralysis of choice. Do I need to buy five more laptops? - Because you know a VM just doesn’t feel right.

Hope and imagination aren't just a nice things. Authoritarianism is rooted in doom. Authoritarianism is naturally unstable. It's naturally weak. It's extremely complex and fragile. Authoritarian regimes often collapse rapidly and catastrophically. They keep people pinned in place by removing hope. They heap trauma on their victims because trauma destroys hope and reduces creativity. So hope and imagination are the most powerful weapons against authoritarianism.
The regime tells you that things can only get worse. The regime needs you to believe it. They want you to fight on their terms, so they can pick you off, or to run or freeze, so they don't have to fight you at all. Authoritarianism must kill the creativity of it's victims, because authoritarianism has already killed it's own creativity. When you respond with hope and creativity, the system cannot adapt.
It is not simply that we should imagine what could be because we may have the opportunity to create it. It is that hope manifests the opportunity to create what we've imagined.

The American Democratic Party, and the concept of "Democratic Socialism" within the US, comes largely from an authoritarian political tradition where the state offers services in exchange for the population allowing elites to continue parasitize the system. Then it is critical for Liberals to consume and destroy popular mutual aid, because real mutual aid undermines their carrot.
Democrats tend to imagine that anarchists want to destroy "all the good things" that governments do. The reality is that we want to build those good things ourselves so that we can reject the offer of those same good things, less well managed, with all the bad things attached.
Anarchists want to build pro-social systems (what if we didn't *need* snap, but just made sure everyone was fed?) while eliminating anti-social ones (do we really *need* to kidnap children, or could we just kind of stop doing that?).