Tootfinder

After the whole Adam Something "dating advice for leftist men" thing, I realized I should probably write something about that. I didn't, but I realized I should. Here I am sort of getting around to it.
I had a friend call me an "elder" at one point. I was like 35 at that time, but like... a lot of old leftists are just dead or in prison, so we take what we can get I guess. Being also an elder in the sense that I'm an elder millennial, who is also a parent and married for almost 10 years and all that, I guess I'm technically qualified.
So here it is, dating advice for (straight cis) leftist men:
1. Don't.
That's it, actually. That's the whole thing. Let me explain a bit.
First of all, this is dating advice for neuroatypical folks. We're way overrepresented in both extremes because this system wasn't built for us. And that's who is *the most* confused by all the relationship stuff, and most likely to try to apply all this masculinity/manosphere bullshit. I'm also talking a bit from experience here, as a neruo-spicy trying to "figure out" how to date within a paradigm entirely built around neurotypicals and their relationships. It's garbage. Throw it out. There's nothing worth saving.
His video had some line comparing not having sex to your house being on fire. I'm not gonna bother to quote it because I'm busy with actual life. But like, that's exactly what I'm talking about. I recognize that and it's horribly destructive. Men who buy in to patriarchy actually believe this, because those men value themselves based on (hetro) sex. Yeah, if you think you're worthless because you aren't "getting laid" then yeah, you're gonna feel like that's an emergency.
"Dating" as a paradigm turns humans into roles. It dehumanizes us all, and thus makes human connection much harder. It is a game that, like thermonuclear war, can only be won by not playing.
When you abandon "dating" and just act like a human, everything starts to be easier. There's no such thing as being "friend zoned" because you're just friends. Sometimes friendships become other things, sometimes they don't. It doesn't actually matter, because if you're actually there for friendship then you don't *need* anything else.
My grandma, at 98 I think, gave me some advice. My grandparents always got along well, and were married for enough decades that I listened really closely. She told me I should just do things I loved to do and everything else would work itself out.
And it kind of did.
I understand the fear, the idea that you'll die alone. I get that. I get the loneliness. It all hits a lot harder when you have ADHD emotions and past trauma. I get that. But that fear is self-manifesting. When you build your confidence, when you don't *need* to be "in a relationship," you have more room to actually build relationships. For me, dating was dehumanizing. When I abandoned that, I was able to actually be a good partner, and I was able to find my partner.
I would advise against marriage as well, but we did get married for legal reasons. It can still be hard to maintain that, to see each other as people rather than roles. That becomes extra hard as parents. But the times that we cut through that are the times we're closest. Those are the times when it becomes easier to remember that we're both humans and all human relationships need tending.
Roles don't need to be tended because they are classifications. Classifications are static. But relationships between humans are not. Humans are messy and chaotic. Humans have all kinds of complex needs and desires.
So yeah, don't date. Just be a human and see what happens. Maybe google "relationship anarchy" and see where it takes you.
If you have ADHD, it can be especially useful to understand that relationships with neurotypical folks can be especially difficult. Assume you're incompatible with 90% of the population as your baseline, and you'll start to understand why the standard "dating" thing has made you feel so alienated and miserable.
Neurotypical folks generally have no idea that atypicality exists, much less how it impacts relationships. Having to conform to a neurotypical relationship just adds additional mental strain unless you find someone (really special) who can do at least some of the work.
The ADHD thing was especially important for me. There were so many things I was told to do in specific ways by neurotypicals that never worked for me. Their advice always made me feel like a failure. When I was finally diagnosed, I realized they were just giving advice for the wrong type of brain. It was advice I could never use. Basically all dating advice I ever got fell into this same category.
That's my braindump. Maybe I'll develop it more in the future, but I'm busy so maybe not. I hope it helps someone who is struggling like I was.

In a conversation at this year's
Billionaire's convention
—aka the World Economic Forum
—Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned that AI will lose public support
unless it's used to "do something useful that changes the outcomes of people and communities and countries and industries."
"We will quickly lose even the social permission to take something like energy,
which is a scarce resource,
and use it to generate these tokens,

Lockdown Mode is a backstop for people who either do dangerous things or are specifically targeted by high-resource threat actors. Almost no one can *actually* benefit from it but people who need it really need it.
I don’t need it. However, I have it enabled in part to understand what it does to the UX. It interferes with a minority of sites. It forces me to think about whether I REALLY trust the site I’m interacting with & how valuable my interaction really is.

Sometimes, people with a large audience let it go to their heads. When they are shitty, they feel the need to justify it with fancy rhetoric because they're above the rest of us.
We all take shortcuts, we all cheat on the diet, we all hit the snooze button for another 5 mins of sleep, we all do the thing we think we can get away with (and then feel guilty about it later) because no one was looking. We're human. Sometimes you've just gotta be honest and own up and say "…

Seriously I’ve been trying to buy a specific old digital camera for years and every single time people list it as working and I get it and it doesn’t work.
I always get a full refund (eventually).
Like do these sellers think people won’t test what they buy? Do they enjoy making a loss and wasting their time?

“Clawdbot can execute Terminal commands, write scripts on the fly and execute them…”
I don’t even trust myself to do those things before 9am most days!
I just do not think I can be convinced I need a “digital assistant” in my life or on my computers (with elevated permissions, no less). https://mastodon…

"Trump told right-wing anchor Katie Pavlich on NewsNation, “I don’t think it is [time to invoke it] yet. It might be at some point. **It does make life a lot easier. You don’t go through the court system. It’s just a much easier thing to do.**”
Trump just let slip the real reason he wants to use the Insurrection Act: analyst - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-insurrection-act-2674975261/

"Only you can be you. What a privilege! Nobody can reach what you can if you do it. So do it. We need your best, your voice, your body."
—Stella Adler
#acting #coaching #inspiration

I am guessing no one here can confirm or deny this #java #JVM crash-on-keystore-decrypt which, if true, is a VERY SERIOUS BUG that could not be trusted in a production environment, and then has gone unfixed for decades? That does not seem very likely, does it?
As it is, keytool says there is nothing wrong with my keystore or its password, and watching the process launch I see after the init, it sits, idle, a few seconds later its Time value in top only increments the millisecs, and within a minute, it is gone, voom, not a trace in any logs as to why.
I do, truly, LOATH this technology. It is so fucking fragile; a life-sentence for the sr developers and sysadmins in production systems (that's why they often don't get holidays)

2025 NFL Draft do-over: How would all 32 picks in Round 1 play out now? https://www.nfl.com/news/2025-nfl-draft-do-over-how-would-all-32-picks-in-round-1-play-out-now

TalkBack does not offer an option to use computer vision & LLMs (“AI” for the scope of this thread) to describe images lacking alt text.
If you do it in Chrome, it overwrites all the good alt text with, well, crap.
Try it on this page:
https://srt.csb-cde.ca.gov/jaws/jaws-l

One more thought...
One of the more toxic elements of the whole "manosphere" thing relative to dating is the application of game theory to relationships. They've got people trying to "maximize their dating potential" or whatever, trying to find the "most attractive march" (which is it's own fucked up thing I'm not even going to dig in to). But that whole mindset is basically going to always leave you miserable.
Oh, you're single? You need a partner. Oh you have a partner? Could you get a "better" one?
It turns relationships into the endless pointless grind of capitalism. Fuck that. None of that shit makes sense. No matter how "well" you do in that game, you always feel like a loser. Everyone does. Fuck that game. Quit.
The constant desire makes you miserable and your misery makes you unlikable. When you let go of it, you leave room to experience what is instead of constantly imagining what could be.
You will always be able to imagine a better "could be" than what is now. By comparing your situation now to that "could be" you will always see your situation as bad because it's worse than your yardstick.
Is your situation good for you? Is it serving you? It can be good and it can also be possible to make it better. When was the last time you just experience your life instead of trying to strategize your way into "something better."
Throw away the yardstick. Something something Buddha.
Edit: all this is of course aside from the whole objectification thing, which is it's own whole set of fucked up. But yeah... All that shit is real bad news.

What @… says is what a lot of us have been lamenting since the ICE invasion started. Shouldn’t local police protect citizens from ICE?? Why this hasn’t happened is a really good question. Factors to consider:
- “Obstructing a federal agent” is illegal, and local police / politicians feel constrained by that (even if the agents themselves don’t seem constrained by the actual law at all, only by what they think they can get away with)
- Police can in theory cite federal agents for e.g. traffic violations or illegal plate swapping after the fact, as long as they’re not “obstructing” the agents — but how do you cite a masked person with fake plates who refuses to give ID?
- Some police are visibly supportive of ICE, chumming it up with them and giving literal fist bumps; a nontrivial subset are outright closet Nazis. A lot of people don’t really see any need to go past “ACAB” as a full explanation for all of this — and certainly The ACAB Hypothesis is…um, not really being proved false right now in Minneapolis.
- I think some police quietly resent ICE for stepping on their turf, but that does not seem to have boiled up into actual confrontation in MSP. One police leader here painted it in early Dec as “some people want to instigate a confrontation between Minneapolis Police, and that’s not going to happen.” Police culture says that police should be a neutral party in a dispute between ICE and residents, and actually protecting residents would be taking sides. (Duh, yes, taking sides that way is your literal job, you dumbasses…but I digress.)
- Some police (especially leadership) really want to get on the community’s good side after the murder of George Floyd, and see this as an opportunity, but unfortunately this has materialized entirely as non-interventionist support: “We responded to a 911 call and help a distressed resident after her husband was abducted!” “We transported children left parentless on the streets by ICE safely back to their home!” “Our officers volunteered at the food shelf!” OK, nice, good for you buddy.
So yeah, I’m wondering this too, and am bitter about it. https://tilde.zone/@n1xnx/115928447564126393

Objectively USA is already allowed to do anything it wants militarily on Greenland, Rutte probably "repackaged" it into a framework, well done
#greenland #nato #rutte

Raiders pre-game notes: Do you want a win or loss vs. the Texans? https://raiderramble.com/2025/12/21/raiders-pre-game-notes-do-you-want-a-win-or-loss-vs-the-texans/

"Staffing problems caused by DOGE resulted in the Defense Information Systems Agency warning of “extreme risk for loss of service” across the military."
DOGE Cuts “Unexpectedly and Significantly Impacted” Critical Pentagon Unit
https://theintercept.com/2026/01/19/do

If you wish to remain men, do not be soldiers; if you cannot stand humiliations do not don the uniform. If, however, you have already committed the imprudence of clothing yourselves therewith, and some day you find yourselves in the situation of being unable to control your indignation, then neither insult nor strike your superiors; LET DAYLIGHT THROUGH THEM! You will pay no more for it.
---- - Jean Grave - ----

Nu devas esti ke okazus. Vikipedio priskribis la indikilojn, kiujn ili uzas por malkovri tekston kaj artiklojn, kiujn AI kreis. Do iu faris liston pri instrukcioj donotaj al AI dirante ke ĝi devas eviti tiujn konstruaĵojn.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/…

Anybody familiar with the details of how thread local storage on aarch64 is implemented abi wise?
Like if I'm working on a bare metal embedded platform with two cores and i want some data to be private per core using gcc thread local attributes how do i actually make that work so accesses to that data get a pointer to a per core context object and look it up as an offset into it etc?

I stopped wearing my #Apple watch last week, replacing it with a simple digital Casio.
Observations so far:
- I miss tapping to pay with my wrist, but the phone is honestly pretty easy to use too.
- Missing notifications has not been a problem even when I’m leaving my phone in the other room. Nothing has been so urgent that I needed to see it immediately
- My ability to focus is already tangibly improving. Yesterday I sat and read Shakespeare for 1.5 hours without interruption - I don’t remember last time I could do something like that!
- I keep instinctively reaching for the charger in the evening thinking I need to take off my watch
- I have tried to swipe down on the Casio to see notifications at least 3 times…
#SmartWatch

I just bought this rug, but it turns out to be very bitey. What should I do?

We might think of the 1963 March on Washington when we talk about organizing and civic change
-- but smaller networks are equally important.
Find many small groups of people you trust,
as small as 2-5 other people.
Use encrypted communications,
like Signal.
Meet in person and break bread,
if you can, building trust slowly.
Be a bridge-builder between trusted colleagues, where appropriate.
Appreciate the beauty of all that can be achie…

Christopher Marquis on the academics in the Epstein files:
"Universities and academics like me need to face a hard truth about our own desires. The job is supposed to be about ideas, teaching and public knowledge. Epstein offered something else: prestige without peer review, and attention without consequence. Too many people – even those who were not involved directly in exploitation – took the deal because it was easy to do and because it felt good."

Remember the first time you wrote $(document).ready()?
It’s hard to believe it has been 20 years since John Resig first introduced a Javascript library called jQuery. It completely changed the way we approached the DOM and standardized the web for a generation of developers.
A few days ago, the jQuery team announced the release of jQuery 4.0.0! 🚀

A week or two ago, I saw a youtube video where someone was claiming that the adult thing to do was to get your coats dry cleaned at the end of the winter season, so that they are ready for next year. I briefly thought that it would be a nice gift for future you. Fast forward to this past Monday and I ended up dropping my coat off at the dry cleaners in an attempt to get cat pee out of it. I've used laundry services before but not a dry cleaner. I'm curious to see what $40 buys me.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@fesshole/115757049842593909
I don't care if she ordered you to do it, it's going to ruin the laptop.

Series A, Episode 10 - Breakdown
KAYN: Oh, yes, sorry. One thing I will say for the Federation, when they decide to do a thing, they do it. [Blake and Kayn exit.]
VILA: I didn't like the sound of that much.
AVON: One of the many faces of neutrality.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/110/395…

Moving services to the EU
Like a lot of Europeans, I realise that the US isn't a reliable partner anymore.
I am just talking about myself here, and not my employer, or my family.
I do use a lot of services that are based in the US, and some I will probably not migrate in the near future.
But when I receive a bill, it is a good moment to consider if it is a candidate for migration.

My "grow plants everywhere" mod for #Luanti is progressing!
I just built a routine to do blobby weight regions as the intersection of a bunch of parabolas, where weight increases logarithmically from the edge of the parabola with an adjustable edge region, and we use the geometric average of these weight values within the intersection region. Then I spent a few hours hunched over a biomes vornoi diagram approximating different broad regions like "arid_grasses" and "temperate_trees" so you can just name some combination of these regions (with custom per-region multipliers) and have your plant definition apply within those regions. I was using rectangular min/max heat/humidity values before, but they were pretty awkward to work with.
If anyone on here who plays Luanti wants to check it out let me know and I can prioritize publishing what I've got. I've got growth definitions for most but not all VoxeLibre plants and it wouldn't be hard to put them together for another game. No trees yet, but that's pretty much the next thing to work on.

The appeal of it is that it doesn’t do a great job at any of the things it’s designed for 😅

keytool decodes the keystore, the cert passes tests and while sslchecker.com says it is missing Org, it says the same about every cert we've used the past three years.
I do, I truly, honestly and with all my heart loath this industry that has eaten my life for 50 years with shit like this. Always shit like this, ten million variables where just one is off by a little bit, go fish. I fucking hate it, I want out.
But I also hate to leave a friend in a lurch, out of business, for reasons unknown, so torn between "fuck it" and "crying".
I was just updating a fucking certificate.

Well, yesterday I did take my recycling in to the coup. It was a good ride, but it was tough — occasional flurries of snow, and stiff wind. Today I'm very tired, and it's 3.7° *inside* the house. So I think I'm going to light the stove, which I normally don't do in daytime because I can't really afford the wood, and have an easy day.

Do it for Trump: Treasury pushes businesses, wealthy people to contribute to 'Trump Accounts' (Brian Faler/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/20/treasury-hopes-to-juice-trump-accounts-with-appeals-to-philanthropists-corporations-00698179
http://www.memeorandum.com/251220/p34#a251220p34

Why do @… have a Fediverse account?
They obviously just cross post to it without ever coming to reply to the comment or see what's going on.
I look out for the Editor-In-Chief social media accounts only found X, linkedlin and Facebook...
Maybe they could GTFO at this point?

So this is a weird one... I am working on a device that has two different things, and one needs 4.5v and one needs 1.5v.
Is there any reason I could not just solder a wire in place to just get power from one cell and also use the existing wire to provide 4.5v elsewhere?
I know this isn't the best way to do it, but it's a quick hack to make something work... I can't find an issue with it under that condition. Can you?

Does someone know how to hide the "Unknown" and "Ignore" sections from the Thumbnails view in the face recognition feature of Digikam?
Or at least put them at the bottom of the view?
I mean I ignore those faces for a reason, why do they need to be at the top?
In addition, how can you view the albums as a collection of thumbnails instead of a tree? I can assign an image as the album's thumbnail but it is basically useless because it is so tiny.
…

Not gonna get into it right now (gotta go to bed) but labeling criticism of LLM based "AI" as "purity culture" and that one can just legitmize using any and all tech if one just somehow creates "free and open" versions of it is not a good take. Really not. Refusing to use LLMs on ethical grounds is also not a claim that problems are solved "by shopping carefully". That's a lot of straw men just to legitimize using an LLM to do spellcheck. Maybe jus…

The administrator winding down Do Kwon's Terraform Labs sues Jump Trading for $4B, alleging it unlawfully profited from and contributed to Terraform's collapse (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.

If I were voting today in D4 I'd rank Jeremy Greco first because he's the only pro–Sunset Dunes candidate and seems cool generally; he's a longtime co-op worker at Other Avenues and wants to make it easier to start co-ops.
I'd rank Natalie Gee second. It sucks she wants to turn the park back into a highway, but so do all the non-Jeremy candidates, and she's the only one I trust to tax the rich to build affordable housing.

My color memory is a 35.0/50. Please do worse so I feel better. https://dialed.gg/?c=RUQP9F

Oddly enough, I feel the same way, albeit with an antipodean arsebackwardness: the nights will get longer again. *sigh* https://mstdn.social/@dabertime/115754561123667224

Russia: Oh, no, we're in demographic decline! We should do something about it
Also #Russia : OK, let's go die by the hundreds of thousands because our dictator has a tiny dick.
https://en.zona.media/a…

Analyzing the Cowboys' defensive roster: Do they bring back Jadeveon Clowney? https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6983855/2026/01/20/cowboys-defensive-roster-analysis/

'k3b' is a CD/DVD burner with audio ripper - now, I'd have to say I've not actually burnt a disc in many years, but I do still use the CD audio ripping. It's got some nice settings for retrying slightly tired discs.
https://apps.kde.org/en-gb/k3b/

There are some really useful suggestions in this article as to what #GLAM|s can do in the #Wikiverse / on #wikidata (it's pretty straightforward to get started):

The bill HR7006 that passed the House funds such things as:
$31million for the US Selective Service (the draft).
About $100million to repair/maintain the white house - which is odd given that trump has just unlawfully torn down our (it belongs to us, not trump) East Wing. So we are paying for all that Versailles-like fake gold trim.
etc.
Congress is providing a crown and ermine robes to trump rather than trying to rein in his reign.
I do not think that our Cong…

I somehow missed this at the time, but I discovered tonight and it was the sardonic medicine I needed.
https://theonion.com/ice-confirms-agents-do-not-have-faces-beneath-masks/

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MiddayShow
Amyl and the Sniffers:
🎵 Do It Do It
#AmylandtheSniffers
https://amylandthesniffers.bandcamp.com/track/do-it-do-it
https://open.spotify.com/track/6JidDid8504WnsIQVKPY4j

Oh, also, sign the petition to impeach him. I know it won't do anything, but I do think it would be funny for it to be a super popular petition.
https://c.org/8CGTb5cwV4

As I did a quick search on SCAR, and some of it's members - I can't help but feel that the driving force is that they feel they do not receive
"The deference due
To a man of pedigree"
Texas congressional candidate with extremist views backed by hard-right donors
https://…

As I did a quick search on SCAR, and some of it's members - I can't help but feel that the driving force is that they feel they do not receive
"The deference due
To a man of pedigree"
Texas congressional candidate with extremist views backed by hard-right donors
https://…

"They just want to torture and punish transgender people because they don’t like them, period. It has nothing to do with kids or women’s rights or anything else. They just hate the very idea of transgender people and want to make it impossible for them to function in society or even make it criminal. So much for freedom."
Did You Think It Was Just About Girls’ Sports? – Digby's Hullabaloo
https://digbysblog.net/2026/02/19/did-you-think-it-was-just-about-girls-sports/

«Is End-to-End Encryption Optional For Large Groups?
One of the recent topics in Messaging App Discourse is whether it makes sense to prioritize End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) when searching for an alternative to Discord.»
— by @…
Encryption rarely has anything to do with secrecy, but with the reality of the source and the trust in their data.

Slightly dramatic day. Husband has a scary fall in the bathroom. Help him up, provide ice pack for his wrist and a cuppa while he regains his equanimity. Wee one is here so try to keep him occupied while looking after husband. Hospital is at least 5 hour wait. Rush to walk-in clinic before x-ray closes. X-ray taken but no one in attendance who is officially qualified to read it. WrIst is splinted. We go home. Grand-dog arrives. 3 hours later - phone call from clinic - DO NOT REMOVE SPLINT. T…

The best part is that any one of these grocery food chains could just choose to do this, and it wouldn't even be a fraction of their budget for a single social media post—in other words, it'd be good marketing @…

I was interviewed by Marcos Marcolin for the Brazilian #PHP community. It's a long interview, but I had fun with it. 🙂
https://www.marcosmarcolin.com.br/blog/php-30-years-la…

Unfortunately it's the stupid Walk For Life in SF this Saturday. Business owners: Please, please, DO NOT SERVE!

For caturday here is an elderly kitty who thinks she owns the sofa. Periodically I need to go out and show her the heating pad is on so she stops howling. If I just click it and do not show her the green light she will begin to howl again shortly after I leave the room. Her main goal in life appears to be sleeping on a warm heating pad.
I want to teach her what a squirt gun is for but the wife will not allow it. Says she is to old to train. OK at 20 she is technically older than m…

Sudan: Stop the stoning!
One woman is a mother of 9. Her husband says one isn’t his. The other woman’s husband abandoned her after she gave birth to their first baby – 7 years ago. Now he’s back and accusing her of adultery.
For these ‘crimes’, courts sentenced them to a cruel and painful death by stoning – after a sham trial where the women didn’t even have lawyers.
Sign the petition

”My argument is that the current structure of public conversation has the same effect on human cognition that a botnet has on a web server. It's simply exhausting you. And an exhausted mind defaults to heuristics and tribal allegiances, aka whatever position allows it to conserve the most cognitive energy.”

”What I do know is that the feeling of being overwhelmed, of never being able to keep up, of having strong opinions about everything and confident understanding of nothing, is n…

Twenty minutes ago, I sent what I hoped could be my last private message to a moderator. The closing word there was "Respect"; I'll continue this respect by not addressing him in this toot.
@… it's certainly not a bad attitude – if you know a background that most people do not. Consider this quote from the subsequent comment:
＂… S…

VAR does its job, but I think its very presence allows the referee to underwhelm on the initial decision. He’s got cover, so why extend? It’s not supposed to be used in that manner, but I can understand why they do.
The natural question is if they are “clear and obvious errors”, how does an overturn affect PGMOL’s evaluation of a referees performance? I think it doesn’t, because PFMOL is corrupt and has no desire to improve. Just gaslight, baby. Gaslight.

The first elements of the Russian Orbital Station, or ROS, were to launch in 2027
so it would be ready for human habitation in 2028.
Upon completion in the mid-2030s, the station would encompass seven shiny new modules,
potentially including a private habitat for space tourists.
It would be so sophisticated that the station could fly autonomously for months if needed.
Importantly, the Russian station was also to fly in a polar orbit at about 400 km.
Thi…

Woody: Hey, Mr. Peterson, what's up?
Norm: The warranty on my liver.
-- Cheers, Breaking In Is Hard to Do
Sam: What can I do for you, Norm?
Norm: Open up those beer taps and, oh, take the day off, Sam.
-- Cheers, Veggie-Boyd
Woody: What's going on, Mr. Peterson?
Norm: Another layer for the winter, Wood.
-- Cheers, It's a Wonderful Wife

Awww, #Claude, why you gotta do me this way! 14 hrs?!?! What am I supposed to do... sleep?!
Funny enough, we just finished coding my project and now I'm all ready for code review and testing.

I would love to post more often but just can't post happy / interesting stuff with this moron in the office of US president and the shit that he is pulling off. The country is run by a large collection of grifters and complete imbeciles and so far there is no way out of this... at best it will be full four years of idiocy but you know they won't stop there. Sigh, sometimes you wonder what to do. #USpol

Passage Land: What Do the Living Owe the Dead?
Some questions cannot be answered. They can only be inhabited. For sixteen decades, three families have occupied the same stretch of Nebraska prairie, and for sixteen decades they have been asking variations of the same question: what do the living owe the dead? Passage Land is my attempt to inhabit that question long enough to understand why it refuses resolution.

Warning: kissing fascist ass may result in liquid glass.
So my phone tricked me into updating to iOS 26 (nice one, asshats). And wow: it really is a case study in form over function. Gratuitous, meaningless aesthetics and motion. Decoration, not design. “Look what I can do!”
Oh well, if it gets me using my phone less, that’s a good thing, I guess.
But the next time you hear someone from Apple talking about design, please feel free to laugh in their damn faces. What a sad j…

Do you have a device with an AMD Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that you actively use? I could use your help testing support for monitoring AMD NPUs in Resources!
I'd really appreciate it if you'd check out the amdxdna-support branch of Resources' GitHub repository and check if NPU utilization correctly shows up in Resources.
You can find more info in this GitHub issue:

A terrible rail tragedy near Cordoba. At least 39 dead.
We won't know the causes for weeks yet. However, it's a reminder that all risks do increase with speed. The derailment of the first train, into the path of the second, seems to have happened very shortly before arrival of the second, with no time for even the most sophisticated system to stop it.

"Let's just…admit…if your wrists get in the way of ICE zip ties, if your lungs dare to breathe…our chemical weapons without written permission in advance, or if your body and face get in the way of ICE munitions, that was illegal of you. So if you're really honest with yourself, you deserved it and have no one to blame but yourself. People who follow laws don't get targeted by ICE, as being a target is a clear indication of criminality on the part of the target."
…

If you look at it's history you can count on Russian intelligence services to do everything they can to increase the violence and polarisation in France, using the existing anger and unrest to the max...
#hybridwarfare #russia

Unfortunately, it look like Senate Democrats might have less latitude to block ICE funding than we’d hoped:
https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/i-need-to-correct-an-error
I say make those calls anyway. I want all of them desperate to stop ICE, up sleepless at night trying to figure out what they can do even if there’s nothing they can do.

Well, I think that's all of the bigger fires put out and I'm back to playing IT guy in the lab doing lots of overdue maintenance.
Of 43 real or virtualized systems, all but 7 are now on the latest OS release. One of the 7 is our home Minecraft server which hasn't been used for years and is still on debian 11 but I want to get it updated before it falls further into bitrot since I do want to play more in the future.

If Denmark refuse Trump's offer to buy Groenland (they will) do you think the POTUS will launch a military attack to get it by force?

I keep going back and forth between "These are just vanity metrics. Please stop." and "I would probably do this if I were them. It shows that you used their service more than you think you did." 🤷‍♂️

'xmllint' is a general XML utility; I mostly use it for pretty-printing huge machine generated, single line XML files into an indented hierarchy that's almost readable so I can figure out what's wrong with them.
It can also do schema validation etc.
It's part of Gnome's libxml2.
https://

"It's disappointing someone working in this space felt the need to have to use this garbage, particularly when it violates their employer's own policies. As this whole mess has shown, the tech simply cannot do the most basic things the people selling it keep claiming it can."
(Original title: Story About AI (Being Mean) Gets Pulled Because Journalist Used AI (That Made Mistakes))

I was horrified to read Avaaz's email about the 2 Sudanese sentenced to death by stoning. Unlike the war, this is an issue where public pressure might help - Please sign the petition at opposing this brutality at https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/stoning_in_sudan_loc/…

I was horrified to read Avaaz's email about the 2 Sudanese sentenced to death by stoning. Unlike the war, this is an issue where public pressure might help - Please sign the petition at opposing this brutality at https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/stoning_in_sudan_loc/…

Is building an LLM inherently problematic? Not necessarily, but there's no good way to do it under capitalism. Is using an local LLM funding these evil companies? No. It's not.
Spelling and grammar checking is one of the few uses of LLMs that is not based on fundamentally failing to understand what an LLM actually is. A statistical model is gonna be *really good* at flagging things that are probably typos (low probability areas). There will be false positives, which is fine if you're actually paying attention...

I need to up my calzone game a bit. I haven’t made one in years, so I’m doing a bit of reading & watching how others do it before I try again.

@… Enphase? We just have solar but no battery, it's hard to do in a multi-unit building.

I am trying to renew my US passport. I sent in an application via their online renewal system. It worked well - except that it is picky about photographs.
Well, the rejected the application because they now do not like the photograph that they had accepted.
And now they tell me dimensions - e.g. head 1.38 inches high. Well, I sent 'em a digital photo and unless they tell me the pixel resolution of their printers I can't tell 1.38 inches from a hole in the ground.

A: "I don't understand how you're so relaxed when you don't hear from the kids. Everyone in my family is like, 'msg me right when you get home!'"
me: "Ah, [13yo] is fine. He went home and is 100% watching videos when he's not supposed to be, hoping we forgot about him so that he can get away w/ as much screen time as he can. If he were stuck on the subway or something, he'd have messaged. Actually, I'd be more worried if he DID message.&qu…

here's an Apache #Tomcat #Java thing I'd never heard before and although a tech gave it as an excuse, I do wonder if it is true. Apparently, if a Tomcat app receives an HTTPS request and it cannot decrypt the keystore, the entire JVM crashes. I've been using Tomcat since its debut and Java since it was Oak, and I ain't never heard of THIS one before. True?
Tomcat9 on Java8 if that matters.

A •lot• of people have asked what you can do from afar to help us here in Minneapolis, and I have one thing for you. You can do it from home, from wherever you’re sitting, but it’s not necessarily easy.
First, I want to think about where your red lines are. Everything is so outrage-inducing, so outrageous, it’s kind of numbing. It becomes easy to just start letting it all happen.
So, that thing you can do to help: picture a red line for you that the regime hasn’t already crossed, so that you can have a reaction that is actually •action• if and when they cross it.
2/

Now that I have that loops account, I look at the "short video" instead of trying to disable them.
Although I am not very active on those site - I rarely post things - but I do like or sometime comment on thing so the algo know at least a bit about me and my preference.
Since the type of content I interact with is the same on all platforms, they should propose me similar things right?
Youtube is relatively right most of the time and is rarely inappropriate. (but it's …

I still need to spend more time learning TrueNAS and how to get container applications running properly. It's much more complex than OpenMediaVault.
Some applications do just work, but many seem to need a lot more care and configuration to get working as desired.
#trueNaS #selfHosting

Advies sourcing IT-Infrastructuur, SVB
#AcICT

Protecting public health abroad benefits Americans.
In a globalized world, diseases and their social and economic impacts do not stay within national boundaries.
Increased rates of untreated HIV in any part of the world increase the risk of transmission for U.S. citizens.
Changes made in the first year of Trump’s second term to address the global HIV epidemic won't keep Americans safe.
In September 2025, the U.S. Department of State announced its "America First…

Of course, economic pressure isn't the only tool we have. Diversity of tactics is critical. I'm not going to tell anyone not to throw buckets of screws into the parking lots and driveways of ICE facilities or blockading facilities with burning dumpstes. Even if i don't promote those types of tactics, we should all STFU if we see people doing them. We all have a place. There are things we can all do. Everything is on the table and it should be, because ICE agents will intimidate you, steal your car, and even murder you for just filming them.
You can cower in fear, or you can stand up and fight with everything you have. Which or those do you want to remember yourself doing?

We need to start contemplating this. It’s not easy to picture; if it is easy, you’re doing it wrong. But we need to do it. We need to imagine this while we still have the capacity to imagine.
We need to make sure that there is, somewhere in this authoritarian noise, a red line whose crossing actually matters because we •make• it matter.
If enough people know where their red line is, and if enough people are prepared to take action if the regime crosses it, well, •that• helps Minnesota — and the whole world.
/end

Trump’s takeover of the
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
reached its inevitable apogee on Thursday afternoon
when it was announced that the center’s board of trustees had voted to rename it
the Trump-Kennedy Center.
Even though Mr. Trump had already been calling it that for months in trollish posts online,
he acted shocked that his handpicked board had thought to do this for him.
Trump had called into a meeting of the board, which is no…

In the time I've been offline, I've been doing a lot and feeling a lot more mentally healthy. I've been exploring nomadnet a bit, looking at reticulum. I'm definitely going to go back to my break and being online much less regularly.
I actually totally forgot about the anniversary of the shooting, which is the first time that's happened since... uh... the shooting, I think.
I've definitely realized that, on some level, I've definitely used Mastodon (and formerly Twitter) as a coping mechanism, often in order to deal with the stressful things that I've found out about on Mastodon or Twitter.
But, again, none of those things really change our core job: build community. And that's part of what I've been neglecting, and what I can focus on more when I'm not spending as much time talking to people all over the world indirectly. Like, I can just chat directly with folks and talk about this shit.
Yeah, I do think there's value in this community. I don't think it's really screaming into the void (at least, not most of the time). But I know that I need the balance to be way farther on the side of direct engagement with comrades doing and building.
So that's what I'm gonna go back to. I feel as though it's a good sign that with all the writing about getting shot that I've been doing, and all the thinking about that, that the actual anniversary of the shooting I'm actually just thinking about bread.
And that seems like a good note to leave on. I'm gonna go back to some hacker shit.

One of the things that made organizing a lot easier with the GDC was a thing called "GDC in a box." It was a zip file with all kinds of resources. There was a directory structure, templates for all kinds of things like meetings and paperwork you had to file (for legal reasons) and "read me" files.
We had all kinds of support. There were people you could talk to who had been there. There were people you could call to walk through legal paperwork (taxes). Centralized orgs are vulnerable and easy to infiltrate. They're easy for states to shut down. But there are benefits to org structures.
I think it's possible to have the type of support we had with the GDC, but without the politics of an org (even the IWW). I hope this most recent essay has some of the same properties. I hope that it makes building something new, something no one has really imagined before, easier.
This whole project is something a bit different. It's a collective vision and collective project, from the ground up. Some of it has felt like a brain dump, just getting things that have been swimming around in my head down somewhere. But I hope this feels more like an invitation.
Everything thus far written is all useless unless people do things with it. Only from that point does it become a thing that lives, a thing with its own consciousness that can't be controlled by any individual human.
Tech billionaire cultists want to bring a new era of humanity with AGI. That is definitely not possible with LLMs, and may not be possible at all. But there is a super intelligence that is possible, though it's been constrained by capitalism: collective human intelligence.
The grand vision of the tech dystopians is that of the ultimate slave that can then enslave all humans on their behalf. I think we can build a humanity that can liberate itself from their grasp, crush their vision, and build for itself a world in which people will never be enslaved again. Not only do I think it's possible, I think it's necessary. I think there are only two choices: collective liberation or death.
And that's what I plan to write about next time to wrap this whole project up. Today things often feel impossible. But people talked about the Middle Ages as though they were the end of the world, and then everything changed in unimaginable ways. Everything can, and will, change again.
"The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."

Dr Thomas Hartung is an environmental toxicologist at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, who has spent his career trying to replace animal testing with specialised tissue cultures called organoids
and, more recently, with artificial intelligence.
Last May, he announced his most ambitious endeavour yet
—to create a "Human Exposome Project".
It is ambitious because it aims to do for environmental influences on the body what the "Human Genome Project…

I'm going to go back to my social media break, but before I do I'm going to leave you with a thought experiment.
Imagine we're in the middle of the second American Civil War. What do you wish you had done to prepare? What do you wish you had done to bring the regime down faster? What do you wish you had done to avoid this ever happening?
Got some ideas? Think about them. Talk them over with friends. Ok... Now what can you do right now? Ok, now do it.
#USPol