Tootfinder

I wanna jump one more time on the whole "distraction" framing, because this is a point that needs to be hammered home (and I need a reminder to write something longer).
Attacks on trans youth are not a distraction from other types of coercion, they are central to it. Attacks on trans youth come from a conceptualization of children as property, which is literally patriarchy in the Roman sense of the legal objectification all people who share a household as belonging to a man. This legal structure, Roman slave law, continues to be the root of property rights and therefore the foundation of capitalism.
But colonialism also extends from it through the infantalization of colonized people as a justification for oppression. This can also be turned inward again manifesting as the justification for police (that is, some people "can't handle themselves and need external authority to act right").
The #Epstein stuff isn't some weird thing that rich people get away with, it's core to how wealth works. Money isn't useful by itself, it's a proxy for power. One manifestation of power is being able to violate laws that constrain others (this is the "freedom of the monarch" that Graeber talks about in Dawn of Everything). The war in Iran, especially the threats of nuclear weapons and genocide is not a distraction from the #EpsteinFiles, but rather a manifestation of the same thing.
Power must be demonstrated to affirm that it is real. War is a demonstration power. Violating the law without consequences is a demonstration of power. The most taboo things are using nuclear weapons and child sexual abuse. He has already done one of those, and he is going to do everything he can to do the other.
These are not distractions, these are all manifestations of the underlying thing that we need to fight. But we need to make sure we're fighting it as a single thing. We have to tie these things together, because if we do not then we risk reproducing the same thing again but worse.

Following federal cuts to history-focused organizations, the president of the Canadian Historical Association, Colin Coates, sent this letter to Marc Miller, the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture.
One thing might not be obvious: Coates's reference to Carney's recent Quebec City speech suggests Canadians' need for historical context right now. He doesn't agree with Carney's claims. In fact, most Canadian historians would dispute them.

If a not-for-profit for-profit privacy-protecting company funded by surveillance capitalism isn’t trustworthy, I don’t know what is. @… https://polymaths.social/@c…

Home Insulation Works: Barriers to Installation (2023) - Doing the right thing is hard, and insurers do not help! #insulation #netZero #futureReady -

Home Insulation Works: Barriers to Installation (2023)
Doing the right thing is hard, and insurers do not help! #insulation #netZero #futureReady

The people on top are good in one thing: getting to the top and staying there. This can help for some of the work that needs to be done but is a kinda one-sided qualification.
We should try to get people on top that know how to do the work that needs to be done – and allow them to do their work¹.
In politics as in companies.
__
¹which does not mean to let them do what they want to. It is important monitor those in power, but we should learn to stop them for the right re…

Free speech is the power to criticize your government without fear of prosecution. It is a basic human right.
It is not about getting away with hurting your neighbor who never caused you any harm. Dignity is a human right.
That is also what "love your neighbor" is about.
It's just a sensible thing to do.
Do not tolerate hate speech.
There is no (need for a) "freedom to hate".
Be kind to one another. 🧡

Hangin' With The 'Boys: Push the Money https://www.dallascowboys.com/podcast/hangin-with-the-boys-push-the-money

Browns should do the right thing and let Jim Schwartz go https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7022298/2026/02/05/browns-jim-schwartz-todd-monken/

I've seen a bunch of "the CA age verification law is the best way to do a bad thing and so we shouldn't oppose compliance" takes, which others are rightly pointing out is a bad stance because it's blindingly obvious that compliance now sets the stage for compliance later and the clearly set up later is mandatory verification of age data. Even if you think that, for example, California's current "progressive" government won't go there, we're all currently seeing just how easy it is for a new government to pick up the oppressive tools the "good" government was using "restraint" with and put them to worse ends.
On the other hand, I'll freely admit that distros *do* need a way to shield themselves from liability right now. The clear (to me; IANAL) correct solution is to say on your website "don't download this OS if you're in a jurisdiction where it's not legal for us to provide it."). Assuming this does put you in the clear liability-wise, it has several positive effects:
- Stops zero people from downloading it.
- Makes it clear that your project will not collaborate with fascists/oppressive regime enjoyers.
- Means that when the next law makes verifying user ages mandatory (and/or explicitly requires using Palantir-adjacent services to do so) you've already got a strategy in place and there's no need for a "debate" in your "community" about compliance.
- Gets users more practice with "the law is malicious/needlessly bureaucratic/oppressive; let's ignore it" which to be honest people in general clearly desperately need at this point.
- Is the most effective political move if you want to resist the way things are going. Forcing the other side to explain why "California bans Linux" is good rhetorical strategy. Make *them* try to explain "well it's actually not so harmful since we let users set it themselves" and answer your follow-up "but what if next year the requirements change; I just refuse to go along with this slippery slope stuff and I'm not bothered if that means you want to *ban* me."
#AgeVerification

Yesterday, I've read a vibe coded script for the first time in my life, and I've cried.
It wasn't ugly. "Ugly" is not the right term. It was as if someone wasn't able to comprehend beauty, but badly tried to mimic it. It felt like "malicious compliance" to beauty. The kind of awful verbose pedantry that feels wrong every step of the way.
It's the kind of code you'd expect in a corporate environment when you know that the code would be read by the top suits who have no idea about coding, but judge it by the volume and expect science fiction level of make-believe.
It's the kind of code is abstracted away into the tiniest details. Every function returns a complex dataclass explaining precisely what it did, for no reason at all. What would be two lines of code is a function. What would be a function is a whole module. It's a caricature of good programming practices.
I was supposed to add modifying a second field on the same object via GitHub API. I've guessed it would take me about an hour to figure out the code enough to be able to do that — what ought to be 2-3 extra lines. I suspected I'd discover that most of the code does precisely nothing. Just meaningless API exchanges that are absolutely unnecessary. It felt like the kind of parody of bureaucracy where you have to file 10 forms to do something, and only one of them actually means anything.
What used to be "do one thing well" became "doing ten totally random things is fine, as long as one of them happens to be what I need, and the whole thing doesn't blow anything up in an obvious way".
Perhaps it's just because this way a throwaway script. Maybe "production" stuff takes more, err, prompt refining? Maybe it actually can produce stuff that's comprehensible.
But if that code was any indicator, then I'm not going to believe that any big LLM contributions are actually reviewed by humans. A review will take more time than rewriting from scratch. This is a ticking time bomb. That LLM-generated code isn't introducing exploits right now is either a statistical accident, or it's just that nobody bothers.
Clarification: I didn't "prompt" it or request one. I'm not a hypocrite.
#NoAI #NoLLM #AI #LLM

Last week, far-right streamer
Nick Fuentes openly called for the mass criminalization of women
and girls.
During an episode of his America First livestream on Rumble,
Fuentes declared,
“Just like Hitler imprisoned Gypsies, Jews, communists
— all of his political rivals
— we have to do the same thing with women …
They go to the gulag first.
They go to the breeding gulags.”

Far Right Streamer Nick Fuentes Says Women Should Be Put in “Breeding Gulags”
Fuentes is the “more energetic and undiluted voice of the American right,” writer Shane Burley says.

I’ll raise a quiet glass to Robert Mueller here. In the public mind, he was first the messianic savior of democracy and then an emblem of inadequacy and institutional failure — and both those visions did him a disservice.
He tried to do the right thing in a principled way. His effort failed, and we’ve paid dearly for that failure. The failure was his, but also all of ours to share: for every one of his choices that I can second-guess, I can name half a dozen places where others failed to hold up their/our end of the bargain, took the work he handed off and dropped it flat.
He failed, but he tried his damndest — and that’s more than I can say for a lot of folks in the USA over the last 10 years.

Some years ago I wanted to do a thing and for reasons client didnt want it - we guessed like 6 months or whatever to get it built right.
I still have the spec I wrote for the protocol and some thoughts on how it might look.
Twice a year or so I try to get a LLM to build it.
So yesterday was the first time in a while, blew my Claude Max token allowance in one sitting and just...finished it in one go? Just works, easy to use, does what I wanted.
Fuck.

I explained something for a friend in a simple way, and I think it's worth paraphrasing again here.
You cannot create a system that constrains itself. Any constraint on a system must be external to the system, or that constraint can be ignored or removed. That's just how systems work. Every constitution for every country claims to do this impossible thing, a thing proven is impossible almost 100 years ago now. Gödel's loophole has been known to exist since 1947.
Every constitution in the world, every "separation of powers" and set of "checks and balances," attempts to do something which is categorically impossible. Every government is always, at best, a few steps away from authoritarianism. From this, we would then expect that governments trand towards authoritarianism. Which, of course, is what we see historically.
Constraints on power are a formality, because no real controls can possibly exist. So then democratic processes become sort of collective classifiers that try to select only people who won't plunge the country into a dictatorship. Again, because this claim of restrictions on powers is a lie (willful or ignorant, a lie reguardless) that classifier has to be correct 100% of the time (even assuming a best case scenario). That's statistically unlikely.
So as long as you have a system of concentrated power, you will have the worst people attracted to it, and you will inevitably have that power fall into the hands of one of the worst possible person.
Fortunately, there is an alternative. The alternative is to not centralize power. In the security world we try to design systems that assume compromise and minimize impact, rather than just assuming that we will be right 100% of the time. If you build systems that maximially distribute power, then you minimize the impact of one horrible person.
Now, I didn't mention this because we're both already under enough stress, but...
Almost 90% of the nuclear weapons deployed around the world are in the hands of ghoulish dictators. Only two of the countries with nuclear weapons not straight up authoritarian, but they're not far off. We're one crashout away from steralizing the surface of the Earth with nuclear hellfire. Maybe countries shouldn't exist, and *definitely* multiple thousands of nuclear weapons shouldn't exist and shouldn't all be wired together to launch as soon as one of these assholes goes a bit too far sideways.

I've changed my mind -- Google and YouTube can't be trusted to do the right thing and must be reined in (Rand Paul/New York Post)
https://nypost.com/2026/01/19/opinion/rand-paul-ive-changed-my-mind-google-and-youtube-cant-be-trusted-to-do-the-right-thing-and-must-be-reined-in/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260120/p88#a260120p88

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 …

"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/

Home Insulation Works: Barriers to Installation (2023) - Doing the right thing is hard, and insurers do not help! #insulation #netZero #futureReady -

Home Insulation Works: Barriers to Installation (2023)
Doing the right thing is hard, and insurers do not help! #insulation #netZero #futureReady

@… similarly boring, in a pleasant silent Sunday way:
– using pkgbase with FreeBSD 14 to work around a bug involving freebsd-update, which is not yet compatible with base packages.
Using pkgbase to put things right is the natural thing to do, when someone demands abandonment of pkgbase 😺
📦

I'm sorry to say that I actually wrote it:
"The pinnacle of enshittification, or Large Language Models"
#AI #LLM #NoAI #NoLLM

Electing Belichick, Kraft to Hall of Fame would've been awkward ... and right thing to do https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7008482/2026/01/30/bill-belichick-robert-kraft-hall-of-fame-2/

The BBC running damage control on its own broadcast is wild to witness. The most egregious part of the affair to me is that no one from BAFTA or the BBC even bothered to apologize to Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo when they got off the stage, let alone tell *them* what was going to be done about it. There was no effort to bring the three people involved together for resolution at the time of the incident, nothing.
But the other part of this that just grates on me with every article is the BBC trying to defend itself by saying “that another racial slur had been edited out of the broadcast.”
#BBC #BAFTA #Racism #FreePalestine #Israel #Gaza #Palestine #misinformation #disinformation #complicity
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/09/1165835

There are a lot of takeaways from this:
1. Organizing locally gives you a massive advantage because you will always know your local area better than ICE ever can.
2. Be agile. You can always change tactics faster than a centralized organization.
3. Organize now. The sooner you build your networks, the sooner you can learn.
4. Identify ICE facilities and organize monitoring them directly.
But I think the most interesting one that's not explicitly in there, one that's hinted at the last one, is to go on the offensive. ICE is already afraid. If we all take the anger we have at the murder of #ReneGood, find the local ICE facility that they'll stage from, and bring that anger to #OccupyICE we might be able to just shut the whole thing down preemptively. Completely stop all ICE operations across the US. If they want to fight, they can fight *with everyone, all at once.*
Shut down their ability to operate at all. They have a logistics pipeline. They need cars, they need oil in those cars, they need to be able to move those cars to target areas. They also need money to pay those agents. All of those can be disrupted.
The regime needs your money and labor to maintain the illusion of legitimacy. They chose a bad time because you can hit both of those at once *right now* with a combination of #GeneralStrike and #TaxStrike, and then #BoycottEverything.
The regime is weaker than it's ever been. It's flailing. Their own base is demanding the release of the #EpsteinFiles. Their last gasp attempt to prevent the radical change that's coming is just to ethnically cleanse the US back to the 50's (which is what they always meant by "Make America Great Again"). Trump will do anything to stay in power, even if it means killing everyone on Earth in the process. But Americans can end it now by going on the offensive.
Now is the time.
#USPol

This is Doug Ford’s moment of truth… do you side with the fascist to protect auto manufacturers that have abandoned us already or, are you on Team Canada for good and looking to the future where we do business with all?
I think he knows you don’t bend down to a bully… he’ll do the right thing.
#canpoli #cdnpoli #usa #tariffs #onpoli #cars