Tootfinder

"TikTok, Do Your Thing": User Reactions to Social Surveillance in the Public Sphere
Meira Gilbert, Miranda Wei, Lindah Kotut
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20884

"TikTok, Do Your Thing": User Reactions to Social Surveillance in the Public Sphere
'TikTok, Do Your Thing'' is a viral trend where users attempt to identify strangers they see in public via information crowd-sourcing. The trend started as early as 2021 and users typically engage with it for romantic purposes (similar to a ''Missed Connections'' personal advertisement). This practice includes acts of surveillance and identification in the public sphere, although by peers rather than governments or corporations. To understand users' reactions to this trend we conducted a quali�…

@… I appreciate that you’re passing on the message. 😄
I read a book called “Why We Sleep” a while back, which went into the science, and I found it fascinating, but still… I’ve always got one more thing I want to do first.
I like your phrasing of “a present” because it makes me think of it as self-care, which is something I’m bad at, but would li…

Subtooting since people in the original thread wanted it to be over, but selfishly tagging @… and @… whose opinions I value...
I think that saying "we are not a supply chain" is exactly what open-source maintainers should be doing right now in response to "open source supply chain security" threads.
I can't claim to be an expert and don't maintain any important FOSS stuff, but I do release almost all of my code under open licenses, and I do use many open source libraries, and I have felt the pain of needing to replace an unmaintained library.
There's a certain small-to-mid-scale class of program, including many open-source libraries, which can be built/maintained by a single person, and which to my mind best operate on a "snake growth" model: incremental changes/fixes, punctuated by periodic "skin-shedding" phases where make rewrites or version updates happen. These projects aren't immortal either: as the whole tech landscape around them changes, they become unnecessary and/or people lose interest, so they go unmaintained and eventually break. Each time one of their dependencies breaks (or has a skin-shedding moment) there's a higher probability that they break or shed too, as maintenance needs shoot up at these junctures. Unless you're a company trying to make money from a single long-lived app, it's actually okay that software churns like this, and if you're a company trying to make money, your priorities absolutely should not factor into any decisions people making FOSS software make: we're trying (and to a huge extent succeeding) to make a better world (and/or just have fun with our own hobbies share that fun with others) that leaves behind the corrosive & planet-destroying plague which is capitalism, and you're trying to personally enrich yourself by embracing that plague. The fact that capitalism is *evil* is not an incidental thing in this discussion.
To make an imperfect analogy, imagine that the peasants of some domain have set up a really-free-market, where they provide each other with free stuff to help each other survive, sometimes doing some barter perhaps but mostly just everyone bringing their surplus. Now imagine the lord of the domain, who is the source of these peasants' immiseration, goes to this market secretly & takes some berries, which he uses as one ingredient in delicious tarts that he then sells for profit. But then the berry-bringer stops showing up to the free market, or starts bringing a different kind of fruit, or even ends up bringing rotten berries by accident. And the lord complains "I have a supply chain problem!" Like, fuck off dude! Your problem is that you *didn't* want to build a supply chain and instead thought you would build your profit-focused business in other people's free stuff. If you were paying the berry-picker, you'd have a supply chain problem, but you weren't, so you really have an "I want more free stuff" problem when you can't be arsed to give away your own stuff for free.
There can be all sorts of problems in the really-free-market, like maybe not enough people bring socks, so the peasants who can't afford socks are going barefoot, and having foot problems, and the peasants put their heads together and see if they can convince someone to start bringing socks, and maybe they can't and things are a bit sad, but the really-free-market was never supposed to solve everyone's problems 100% when they're all still being squeezed dry by their taxes: until they are able to get free of the lord & start building a lovely anarchist society, the really-free-market is a best-effort kind of deal that aims to make things better, and sometimes will fall short. When it becomes the main way goods in society are distributed, and when the people who contribute aren't constantly drained by the feudal yoke, at that point the availability of particular goods is a real problem that needs to be solved, but at that point, it's also much easier to solve. And at *no* point does someone coming into the market to take stuff only to turn around and sell it deserve anything from the market or those contributing to it. They are not a supply chain. They're trying to help each other out, but even then they're doing so freely and without obligation. They might discuss amongst themselves how to better coordinate their mutual aid, but they're not going to end up forcing anyone to bring anything or even expecting that a certain person contribute a certain amount, since the whole point is that the thing is voluntary & free, and they've all got changing life circumstances that affect their contributions. Celebrate whatever shows up at the market, express your desire for things that would be useful, but don't impose a burden on anyone else to bring a specific thing, because otherwise it's fair for them to oppose such a burden on you, and now you two are doing your own barter thing that's outside the parameters of the really-free-market.

Please raise your hand if you've disabled PowerShell 2.0 on your Windows systems. What? Didn't know that was a thing you should do? PowerShell 2.0 does not have any of the modern logging and security features that newer versions like v5.1 or 7.x have. But if you don't remove or disable the old 2.0 version, it can be used and abused by malware, info stealers, ransomware operators, etc. Here's an article that provides you with several ways to remove it from you systems (while k…

How to Disable PowerShell 2.0 Effectively
Discover how to disable PowerShell 2.0 effortlessly. This succinct guide leads you through essential steps for securing your systems.

I often run into web pages that make me think "I wonder if this is the worst page on the Internet today."
Today's candidate is Bell's outages checker. The javascripty text box thing for the address is a mess, and reloading the results page (you know, a thing people might want to do to get an update on their ISP's current failure) makes you go through the address dance every time.
Maybe avoid piling on the back-breaking straws here, broken ISP…

I had ONE meeting that required my physical presence at work today.
That one meeting got cancelled 10 minutes after I got to work.
I could be at home right now being x2 productive in my pajamas with coffee that doesn't suck.
Me:

If you want to show solidarity with Los Angeles, the best thing to do is organize protests against ICE tonight/tomorrow in your own cities.
Search the web for ICE rapid response networks in your own city / state and sign up. Help your neighbors.
https://bsky.app/profile/chadloder.bsk

There have been many instances documented, do a damn web search.
But forget that for a moment: What I’m doing is the same as what Netanyahu is doing? My opposing genocide is the same as a fucker perpetrating genocide?
Fuck you, Alfred.
Get some fucking perspective. https://mastodon.social/@amsz…

If you want to help people in #academia who are maybe less fortunate than you, who have less famous supervisors, or work at less prestigious universities, here's one simple thing you can do:
Do proper literature research.
That means complete forward and backward snowballing from a decent seed set. Find everything that is relevant to your paper and cite it. Budget a couple of full…

today I actually got to use the phrase "[system] can't do that because it requires a higher level of the Chomsky Hierarchy than we've got available"
**and it was the right answer to a product problem**
feels like the core plot arc of The Last Starfighter
"this apparently useless thing you've spent your life practicing? turns out, *today's the day*"

“I will kill you” — overused, no longer threatening
“I will create your WikiFeet page” — horrifying, a real thing anyone can do, to most the name is self-explanatory yet has terrible implications

The full formula for the probability of "success" is:
p = {
1/(2^(-n 1)) if n is negative, or
1 - (1/(2^(n 1))) if n is zero or positive
}
(Both branches have the same value when n is 0, so the behavior is smooth around the origin.)
How can we tweak this?
First, we can introduce fixed success and/or failure chances unaffected by level, with this formula only taking effect if those don't apply. For example, you could do 10% failure, 80% by formula, and 10% success to keep things from being too sure either way even when levels are very high or low. On the other hand, this flattening makes the benefit of extra advantage levels even less exciting.
Second, we could allow for gradations of success/failure, and treat the coin pools I used to explain that math like dice pools a bit. An in-between could require linearly more success flips to achieve the next higher grade of success at each grade. For example, simple success on a crit role might mean dealing 1.5x damage, but if you succeed on 2 of your flips, you get 9/4 damage, or on 4 flips 27/8, or on 7 flips 81/16. In this world, stacking crit levels might be a viable build, and just giving up on armor would be super dangerous. In the particular case I was using this for just now, I can't easily do gradations of success (that's the reason I turned to probabilities in the first place) but I think I'd favor this approach when feasible.
The main innovation here over simple dice pools is how to handle situations where the number of dice should be negative. I'm almost certain it's not a truly novel innovation though, and some RPG fan can point out which system already does this (please actually do this, I'm an RPG nerd too at heart).
I'll leave this with one more tweak we could do: what if the number 2 in the probability equation were 3, or 2/3? I think this has a similar effect to just scaling all the modifiers a bit, but the algebra escapes me in this moment and I'm a bit lazy. In any case, reducing the base of the probability exponent should let you get a few more gradations near 50%, which is probably a good thing, since the default goes from 25% straight to 50% and then to 75% with no integer stops in between.

Calamus 27 O love!
Odd little poem. On the surface it's a celebration of reinvention, of metaphorically dying and leaving your corpse behind, "always living". I don't find it particularly compelling but it's a mood.
I can't honestly find a particularly gay reading here. Broadly speaking maybe, "coming out" is a kind of reinvention gay people do, leaving our old closeted persona dead and gone. I wouldn't argue Whitman is talking about that though.
One odd thing is the 1860 poem starts "O love!", but there's no love mentioned in the rest of the text. Whitman removed this line in later versions. So who or what is the love referring to?

At the risk of stating the obvious, please do state the obvious! In two separate meetings this week it seemed like someone was arguing against a proposed change and in both cases, they were actually very supportive of the idea, and had already moved on to talk about what else could be done. Stop. Express your support (you can thank the suggester if you like!) so that it's clear, and THEN you can build on the original suggestion.
In both cases, we nearly ended up not doing the original thing!

Remarkable healing on that ear too.
#USpol #assassination #Columbo #meme

If LLMs were so good at writing code, they wouldn’t need a new thought leader yelling about them every day.
They might be. At this point, I do not care. Lots of people (including, most recently, Ptacek, Yegge, etc.) are trying to sell me something and I have no interest in listening.
If your thing is good, show, don’t tell.
But it’s not, is it?
These articles… you’re not trying to convince me, you’re trying to convince yourselves.
So please: keep them to yoursel…

The liberal obsession with optics serves the right and persuades no one. There is literally an active ethnic cleansing happening in the US right now, and the only thing that matters is making that as hard as possible to carry out.
Anarchists destroying intelligence assets saves lives. Every escooter thrown at a cop car is one less escort for a goon too afraid to kidnap random brown people without being flanked by a branch full of bad apples. Spray paint is not violence. Vandalism is not violence. Community self defense in all forms is legitimate.
Make no mistake, these raids are about changing demographics. Demographic trends have been shifting blue for a long time, and the right has, for a long time, been blaming "white replacement." Conspiracy theory aside, Democrats have also been relying on the growth of black and brown voters as a block. The nuances of whiteness as an identity are lost on the current administration and their supporters. They see that "white people will be a minority by 2050" and equate that with the "end of Western Civilization."
The only way to "save Western Civilization" is to change those demographics. Forced birth and forced removal are two sides of the same white nationalist objective. Of course they can't have due process, because they need to be able to kidnap anyone who they see as a threat to their demographic future.
They don't care about optics. The plan is to murder away any threat and flood everyone else with propaganda. There is no mythical middle. There's no one unconvinced. They know this, but they win when democrats buy that myth and save the police the work of policing the protests.
If your protest is 90% "peaceful," they'll take pictures of the 10% that isn't. If it's 99% peaceful, they'll shoot rubber bullets and teargas until someone throws a brick and take 100 pictures from a dozen angles. If its 100% "peaceful" and no one can be provoked, they'll generate pictures with AI or photoshop like they did during the George Floyd uprising and the pictures from the CHOP/CHAZ. Do you have literally no memory?
#USPol #FiftyFiftyOne #50501movenent #resistance #NoKingsDay #NoKingsDayOfAction

This week’s pick is a solid ‘90s #alt-rock gem from Spacehog. Catchy, fuzzy, and one of those tracks you probably know but don't know - definitely worth a listen.
Check it out, read our take, and let the nostalgia do its thing.
Don't forget to follow us for your weekly dose of #rock and …

Spacehog - In The Meantime
One awesome, hand picked song from the world of rock and metal, showcased every week. Nothing more, nothing less! 🤘