Tootfinder

(This is not some kind of false modesty. Most of what you’re hearing from me here is just me passing along information from community channels. My personal contribution has mostly been helping communication, helping people with tech issues, doing some volunteering, keeping watch, protesting, doing neighborhood support work — that kind of stuff. I don’t want to downplay the importance of any of that. It matters a •lot• that there are so many people doing all of those things! It matters that I’m one of them! Just…you know, I’m one among many, a small player who somehow ended up holding one of the mics on Mastodon, and that’s it. The courage you see is the courage of many.)

Senior CDC official: Loss of measles elimination status in U.S. would be 'cost of doing business' (Helen Branswell/STAT)
https://www.statnews.com/2026/01/20/cdc-measles-briefing-lost-elimination-status-cost-of-doing-business/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260121/p52#a260121p52

Vor zwanzig Jahren startete #Twitter.
Vor ein paar Tagen ging #twttr an den Start. Erinnerungen werden wach. 😏
---
twttr - what are you doing?
https://twttr.eu/…

Kav: Let's talk about the real world downstream consequences.
Wouldn't all the Trump appointees be immediately removed for cause by the next Dem president if we set this precedent you want?
What are we doing man?
Sauer: I can't predict what could happen
Kav: Come on, man, we all know
https://

AkivaMCohen (@akivamcohen.bsky.social)
Kav: Let's talk about the real world downstream consequences. Wouldn't all the Trump appointees be immediately removed for cause by the next Dem president if we set this precedent you want? What are we doing man? Sauer: I can't predict what could happen Kav: Come on, man, we all know

Of course it's gonna be privileged kids doing more activism! It's the fact they use their privilege, “pass the mic”, and fight for a world where their circumstances aren't a privilege but a right, that's what matters.
When conservatives point out the privilege of their political rivals, it's never to actually criticize a hierarchical society, but rather an expression of the wish that their opponents had as little of a voice as the groups they marginalize.

doing the “what’s in your bag” thing

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.

"The same industry that once called you family is now using the fruits of your labor to commit war crimes. [...]
The industry has decided what it wants to be."
(Original title: How to do the work)
https://buttondown.com/monteiro/archive/how-to-do-the-work/…

How to do the work
I’m paintings ducks. This week’s question comes to us from Tony: How do you keep doing a thing you love, that you’ve done for decades, when you hate what the...

Microsoft acknowledges complaints about Windows 11, promising a reduction of "unnecessary" Copilot integrations, more control over updates, and more (Ed Bott/ZDNET)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-users-are-angry-and-mi…

Microsoft announces sweeping Windows changes - but no apologies
Microsoft's Windows boss just sent out a long non-apology to frustrated Windows 11 users, promising big changes. Here's a translation of what you can really expect.

on the bright side, attrs is now doing half a BILLION downloads per MONTH
which is like 140 million too little for the pypi top 20. oh god i hope fastly never lets us down
https://pypistats.org/packages/attrs

Have you ever tried doing digital forensics using an SBOM or even just gathering evidence for a technical investigation from one?
No file hashes, a single cryptographic signature covering an arbitrary set of files, and often missing full paths or permissions.
Many SBOM standards need a serious revamp if they are to support DFIR use cases
#dfir

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.

student_cooperation: Student cooperation (2012)
Network of cooperation among students in the "Computer and Network Security" course at Ben-Gurion University, in 2012. Nodes are students, and edges denote cooperation between students while doing their homework. The graph contains three types of links: Time, Computer, Partners.
This network has 185 nodes and 360 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Multigraph, Unweighted

I'm listening to a sales talk for AI doing coding. They set up Zoom so you can see only your own comments in chat and in the Q&A. That censors any critical comments. You should be able to see the whole discussion! Commercial companies use Zoom badly.

"Everyone forgets comedians are actors. There's no question about it. A Robin Williams cannot say the same line every night for 40 weeks and make it sound fresh unless he's doing an acting job."
—Joan Rivers
#acting #coaching

✅ added a scheduled backup for my local forgejo
Everyone doing #selfhosting: think about your backups!

Germany is doing a real service here. Put this in a museum.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/germany-parade-floats-trump/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1771514189

Hey #dotnet folks doing #security. What have been your biggest challenges in building and modernizing the security of your applications?

Damn! I missed National Alien Abduction Day last Friday. As far as I can determine, this had nothing to do with ICE, but rather with aliens doing the abducting. https://www.casino.ca/ufo-hotspots-us-ca/

"With the two historical parties of government now reduced to a single two headed animal, they no longer have access to the pretence of decrying the party in power (while largely doing the same thing if they get in). Now they both have to argue that everything that is happening is the best possible thing and nothing that is different can be better."

The Gist: The Promise of No Change
For every action needed, why is there an equal and opposite inaction? This is the Gist.

📍 Kita no Donburi
Restaurant · Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
★★★★☆
Back in Vancouver and doing a last office day. Taking it slow.
Haven’t had sushi in like a month. My favourite take out place is closed so getting a big sushi combo.
#BeaconBits <…

Boris (@bmann.ca)
📍 Kita no Donburi Restaurant · Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada ★★★★☆ Back in Vancouver and doing a last office day. Taking it slow. Haven’t had sushi in like a month. My favourite take out place is closed so getting a big sushi combo. #BeaconBits

A novice was trying to fix a broken lisp machine by turning the
power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly,
"You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding
of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The
machine worked.

There have been like 20 fucking horror movies about the dangers of thawing ancient things out from ice, but I sure am glad scientists are doing it today https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/20/science/romania-ice-cave-resistance-antibiotics

Ancient bacteria strain discovered in ice cave is resistant to some modern antibiotics
In a cave in Romania, scientists found a bacterial strain entombed in ice that is resistant to 10 modern antibiotics. But it may also help fight superbugs.

Cataloging our old CDs which I have never done before. Naturally I'm doing in in a spreadsheet with an API call to pull the data from the bar codes (lot of my old ones don't have them) and then building out an #11ty page with the covers - sortable by year, artist and genre. What fun!

So many publications are reporting RansomHouse's claim that it had hacked a key Apple contractor, Luxshare. This morning I saw at least twelve publications reporting, so I posted about it too.
But as HackRead notes, it's just a claim by a criminal group with no confirmation. "Nevertheless, until Luxshare confirms an incident or the attackers release verifiable data, the claim remains just that."
I really wish cyber and tech publications would stop doing this --…

RansomHouse Claims Data Breach at Major Apple Contractor Luxshare
Follow us on Bluesky, Twitter (X), Mastodon and Facebook at @Hackread

Dumbass did dumbass things. Film at 11.
▶️ Trump's Timeline of Failure! & The Senate is Doing What?! | HIGNFYUS
https://youtube.com/watch?v=XwT5zZbsKLk&si=oatC3rtDhr1TBOtO

“Local” FM station WRPS has an adorable DJ doing a show called “quiet on set” and she just played “we’ll meet again” by Vera Lynn and was like “some folks will recognize from stranger things S3, but oldies will recognize it from gravity falls”
As I turn to dust and blow away (Dr. Strangelove)
😂😂

Q&A with YouTuber J.J. McCullough, who started his channel in 2015 and has 1M subscribers, on research, earning enough for a middle-class lifestyle, and more (Hanaa' Tameez/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/does-…

“Does this channel have more juice in it?” YouTuber J.J. McCullough on a “sustainable” life as a news creator
"I respect mainstream media a great deal. I think they're doing better work than a lot of new media people do. No one has really risen to dethrone them in terms of news-gathering."

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ErikJonker/116112834347138993
'Let that sink in. You scanned your European passport for a European professional network, and your data went exclusively to North American companies. Not a single EU-based subprocessor in the chain.
And look at who’s doing “Data Extraction and Analysis” — Anthropic, OpenAI, and Groqcloud.
....'

Eating dinner and doing Curling puzzles, like a good Canadian kid.
#curling

In case anyone missed it: POTUS has just threatened a gross war crime. The fact that Russia has been doing it for years in Ukraine doesn’t make it legal.
Any servicemember involved in executing such a mission would be violating both US and international law.

Blech, bit of a cold today (and on and off through the week) - sitting here watching Styropro's Epic battery video has been a useful way of not doing anything.

The art of procrastination is doing work without anything to show for it. Cuz I'm working on it in my head...

Feeling super “accelerated” as I sit here… patiently waiting… shitposting on the internet… instead of doing the work I could have been doing.
But hey, those tokens won’t use up themselves!

The fact that so many - including Wikipedia - rely on a shady website that (unsurprisingly?) is doing some really shady stuff recently shines a light on major shortcomings of newspaper websites: they want your data to share it with 900 "partners", are nevertheless full of ads and every redesign breaks deep links to their articles.
Like Napster/Limewire before, archive.today provides a service that solves an actual need of many Internet users.

@… hey, do you still operate #lobbyfacts? i noticed that the old data source we were milking is gone. are you still getting updates? if yes, from where? i've been doing privately daily snapshots over the years, and i noticed last year they stopped, w…

“My friend, we are completely aligned on Syria. We can do great things in Iran. I don’t understand what you are doing in Greenland”
– Macron to Trump in private message
My friend, we should be fucking over Brown people together like we always do, I don’t understand why you are trying to fuck over white people.

Trump shares private message from Macron offering G7 meeting in Paris
French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday offered to host a G7 summit in Paris in a private text message to US President Donald Trump, adding that he could invite “the Russians” on the sidelines. The US president then posted the message, which was authenticated on Tuesday morning by the French president's entourage, on his Truth Social platform.

Well, you know, fairly coursely-ground coffee is probably fine I suppose?

#BrandeRoderick as Leigh Dyer
with #JerryCroft who played himself on Baywatch 3 or 4 times. He published some magazines and liked doing bikini photoshoots.
Baywatch: Hawaiian Wedding (2003)

OK, why does MicroSucks wants to do 'discovery' when I tell it to to delete folders? Minutes wasted so it can delete files. Just walk through the damned FAT and mark them deleted.
Doing my monthly backup and purging old backups not needing to wait 15 minutes while it 'discovers' files/folders.

@… Is there a possibility of some blog posts this year? Hope you're doing well.

As I've been doing journalistic coverage of IT security quite a bit, I'm regularly getting PR pitches that often sound like this:
"Have you heard about this latest security incident at $(large company or institution)? Our CEO has nothing meaningful to add, but thinks that this really shows that IT security is important, and also, our product is very good (though completely unrelated to the latest security incident)."
I'm not sure why any journalist would react…

@… it was all new information! we were doing some conversation cards at dinner and one of them was about bullying

I feel the need to stress, even though it should go without saying, that the person who was kidnapped out of their car was not obstructing or interfering. They were doing nothing illegal, and nothing wrong. They were part of a caravan following ICE at a safe distance, driving legally, not even stopping their crimes, not even slowing them down — just making sure their crimes were recorded.

student_cooperation: Student cooperation (2012)
Network of cooperation among students in the "Computer and Network Security" course at Ben-Gurion University, in 2012. Nodes are students, and edges denote cooperation between students while doing their homework. The graph contains three types of links: Time, Computer, Partners.
This network has 185 nodes and 360 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Multigraph, Unweighted

„One tactic of fascism is to shift the scales of political alignment: centrists become stalwarts of the radical left; moms become ‚domestic terrorists.‘ Everyone with a whistle becomes antifa. And actually, that last part is correct—or at least it should be. A general strike has been called for Friday, January 23. With luck, thousands of Minnesotans will join in on what many further left are already doing: stopping business as usual and withdrawing their consent from fascism. Among many thin…

This is absolutely explosive news.
Impeachable and criminal.
Swift accountability must follow
-- Mueller She Wrote
https://skywriter.blue/pages/did:plc:x4g4laxkmsrczwvnvbbgsm7g/post/3mcxwt6vbhs2o

“…Treasury…authorized…purchase of Iranian oil…exempting buyers from…sanctions that…restricted…country's oil industry…”
Yet US strikes Iranian oil facilities and may launch ground invasion of island 90% of Iran’s oil transits.
Potus and kegsbreath have no idea what they’re doing.
h…

“The core idea is that your conversations with an AI assistant should be as private as your conversations with a person. Not because you’re doing something wrong, but because privacy is what lets you think freely.”
Moxie Marlinspike, Confessions to a data lake https://confer.to/blog/2025/12/confess

Graney: Josh McDaniels failed as Raiders head coach, but excels as Patriots OC https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/sports-columns/ed-graney/graney-josh-mcdaniels-failed-as-raiders-head-coach-but-ex…

Oh, Jings, my own execution traces are REALLY hard to read. It's my own fault: these are my traces in my software, there's no-one else to blame, but...
#Lisp

US hits 1 year of measles spread, CDC's No. 2 calls outbreaks 'cost of doing business' (Joseph Choi/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5697693-us-measles-elimination-status/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260120/p136#a260120p136

Judge Refers To War On Iran In Ruling That Slaps Down Pentagon’s Anti-Press Policy https://thedissenter.org/judge-refers-to-war-on-iran-in-ruling-that-slaps-down-pentagons-anti-press-policy/

“How many people does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
The answer – in SAPN’s case study – is an electrician, a plumber and software techs, who now all need to work together to ensure the home management system can control the proverbial lights.”
https://

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?

Ofcom fines 4chan £520K for OSA violations, including a £450K penalty for failing to implement age assurance checks, giving it until April 2 to implement them (Mizy Clifton/Politico)
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-online-safety-regulator-f…

4chan hit with £450,000 UK fine over age checks
4chan has until 2 April to implement age assurance, carry out a “suitable and sufficient” illegal harms risk assessment, and rewrite its terms of service or face a daily penalty of £200.

The fun side of going to India for a week for work is that my home rhythm is being up and about at 0630, doing things like hooking up cert manager to Hetzner for DNS01

Via xcancel.com we can find out what our politicians are still doing on X. Let's check on a few Dutch ones. 🧵

A kind person just praised my courage in a DM, and…
Don’t praise my courage. I’m a drop in the bucket. My contributions are tiny compared to what others are doing.
I have never, ever seen so many people so ready to take action, putting their lives on hold, stepping into danger because their neighbors are in danger. I have never seen so many •comfortable white people• stepping up to take action — and the people who are actually in the crosshairs now, well, their courage I cannot even fathom.

Found this meme as I took a second gumm... I meant doing self care.

student_cooperation: Student cooperation (2012)
Network of cooperation among students in the "Computer and Network Security" course at Ben-Gurion University, in 2012. Nodes are students, and edges denote cooperation between students while doing their homework. The graph contains three types of links: Time, Computer, Partners.
This network has 185 nodes and 360 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Multigraph, Unweighted

Every time I read the news:
Rich white men doing messed up shit again

I mean, I know he's only got a 25 word vocabulary, but I love the way TFG talks about "taking" and "doing" countries, like they're underage girls or something https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/trump-says-he-thi…

Navy vet responds:
"If I had done this to an enemy prisoner under my control in the warzone,
or if as an officer I had allowed this by any man under my command,
I would still be in prison right now.
This is the American government doing it to an American."
https://www.startribu…

That president of theirs doesn't seem to be doing them much good even after ours (who isn't doing us much good) gave him $20 billion...
In Argentina, locals are taking loans to buy food | Debt | Al Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/2/16/in-argentina-locals-are-taking-loans-to-buy-food

Conference: Doing American Studies outside the US - now https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/02/15/conference-doing-american-studies-outside-the-us-now

Now the reality is that all speech has that affiliation-building aspect and the argument-building aspect, but the scale of each varies a _lot_.
This thread itself is doing both! I'm making some concrete persuasive points here, but I'm also setting up an affiliation here. I want more people to join this "thinking well about the world" club and conversation. I want us to end up collectively in a better place than we're at. We gotta band together to do that. But also that means we need to communicate like we're in public and talking to people who don't all agree, and some of whom are hostile, and some of whom are real boneheads for various reasons.

I’m going to respond in a long thread to @… ’s “Ought You Use a Generative Model,” because doing so crystallizes a bunch of my thoughts on AI and ethics. Apologies for the extra thumb movements if you follow me and aren’t interested! 1/24

RE: https://republik.social/@republik_magazin/116096708108187775
I don’t know this publication but if Palantir is suing them, they’re doing something right and need our help.
Fediverse, do your thing :)
💕

Degrowth and socialist comrades, what should we be doing?
Ted Trainer* This is an attempt to clarify this discussion of degrowth strategy, a topic on which I think there is considerable confusion and mistaken approaches. Debate has recently been fuelled by Jason Hickel’s argument for a socialist position on both the goal and the means do it for degrowth. Liegey, Nelson and Leahy replied against Jason, defending the wide and diverse range of strategies now…

Degrowth and socialist comrades, what should we be doing?
Ted Trainer* This is an attempt to clarify this discussion of degrowth strategy, a topic on which I think there is considerable confusion and mistaken approaches. Debate has recently been fuelled b…

Am Podium fällt die Phrase "ins Doing kommen"

I Was Only Doing My Job: Australia's Military History
Instead of focusing on maps and dates, each episode is devoted to chronicling Australia's Military History through the individual stories of those who served; where they grew up, what they did, and invariably what happened to them...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory:

"ICE has been using “brake-checks” as pretense for detaining observers. Another observer car pulls up and my city council member steps out. He strides up to the Wagoneer, blowing his whistle. (Absolutely everyone is confronting ICE—I’ve encountered my old boss from the local cafe scuffling with agents, too.) Someone on the street starts filming and the bicyclist we know in the chat as “small fry” shouts at the agents to get out of Minneapolis."

ICE vs. Everyone | Erin West
What we’re doing now is this: The trainings have evolved into street medic workshops on protecting yourself from chemical weapons and lessons on digital security; there’s a meet-up to sew reinforced umbrellas as shields from mace and a collection spot for barricade materials. And this is what it’s like: Sometimes you’re chasing ICE off your street, maybe you’re buying groceries for a family, but a lot of the time you’re on your phone.

Tyler Booker Named Cowboys’ Most Underpaid Player https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/onsi/news/tyler-booker-named-dallas-cowboys-most-underpaid-player

All you folks doing computer-generated music better check your settings. https://boingboing.net/2026/03/19/the-first-recording-of-computer-music-was-playing-at-the-wrong-pitch-for-decades.html

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116085440408773572
Seriously. Every story of "AI will solve climate change" is a children's story to allow us to feel okay with not doing what we know needs doing to save the climate: Transform energy produc…

“Auto generate your tests” they say. “At least skip doing the boring part”:
1. The tests are the fun part of TDD, thank you very much.
2. These tests are… about what I would expect from a very junior dev. They cover *maybe* 20% of the actual code paths.

Was just reminded that I needed to kick in some more money to the BlackSky stuff.
Considering the money I’ve kicked in for great Mastodon clients and instances, the work Rudy and others are doing is well worth the same! https://mastodon.sandwich.net/@Sharksonaplane/114997406…

Doing the “Yogurt Challenge” but it’s just me trying to eat yogurt without the cat hearing me.

Watch What They're Doing: Trump Threatens to Make War on the States (Josh Marshall/Talking Points Memo)
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/watch-what-theyre-doing-trump-threatens-to-make-war-on-the-states
http://www.memeorandum.com/260116/p154#a260116p154

I also think it's worth just doing the math here. There aren't enough ICE agents to remove an occupation of more than a couple of facilities. They would have to rely on local police. A lot of police departments have been ordered not to support ICE activities. This means Trump would have to activate the military. If an occupation was peaceful, especially playful like Portland, deployment may not even be possible. Meanwhile, if ICE agents continue to be as violent as they are Governors may be forced to activate the national guard to protect citizens against ICE.
Forcing conflict when Trump is at his weakest, in a way that is non-violent, puts resistance in the best possible position.
At the same time, we are at a strange time of unity. Trump supporters are leaving over Epstein, some are even mad about the deportations, and he's otherwise systematically alienated basically his whole base (except literal Nazis working for ICE).
The AI bubble is, in a lot of ways, a fun house mirror reflection of the 2008 financial crash. The whole economy is held up by loans secured with "compute." Everyone hates this, and Trump's policies have made everything far worse.
#OccupyICE could actually have a lot of momentum and be difficult to stop, especially if folks went to ICE facilities in frog suits and Luigi bloc with banners demanding the release of the Epstein files.
At least, that's my impression from out here.

Conference: Doing American Studies outside the US - now https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/02/15/conference-doing-american-studies-outside-the-us-now

So we have mini Aussie shepherd service dog (for gluten detection!) and that breed has a lot of funny quirks like when he acts submissive he is doing this “grin” which is sort of hilarious and scary at the same time

OK, #Zig language looks usable, but it's going to be a learning curve, and I don't think auto-translating my existing C code to Zig is going to be either easy or worth doing, considering how dissatisfied I now am with both the design and the coding of the C code.
H'mmmm...

Oh the joys of a mainframe upgrade.
Defining what type of testing is needed and specific test cases to verify that all functionality for the system is available.
Also, a short briefing note for the upcoming board meeting to describe what is being done, why, when, where the backup will be running from, who is doing what portions and how we verify that it all went smoothly.
It should go smoothly (famous last words), but we will verify that the upgrade was completed and comp…

@… @… y’all are doing amazing work 🏆

RE: https://toot.community/@thezenlady/116257674184176512
If so, I applaud those brave saboteurs.
More of this, please.
The only way to crumble an empire is from the inside. (Although the Pedophile In Chief is already doing a pretty good job …

Cursor's recent experiment involved running hundreds of AI agents for nearly a week to build a web browser, writing 1M lines of code across 1,000 files (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/19/scaling-long-running-a…

Scaling long-running autonomous coding
Wilson Lin at Cursor has been doing some experiments to see how far you can push a large fleet of "autonomous" coding agents: This post describes what we've learned from …

“You need to let go of being a perfectionist”…
Yeah, because the software industry is sure *known* for our bang on reliability and stability right? We’ve been haunted by being too focused on perfection for too long!
Who cares if ~10% of insurance claims are incorrectly denied, or pedestrians run over by our autonomous vehicles.
That’s the cost of doing business baby!

It’s possible that this is nothing at all, and they’ll be back in full force today. Nobody, and I mean nobody, has suggested that maybe the worst is over.
But we took the days of relative rest anyway. Hmm, “rest” is wrong: mutual aid, food distribution, school observers, people doing laundry for those who can’t go to a laundromat — that continues unabated. But there’s a definite feeling of catching our breath for a moment.
3/

To review, I am not going quite so far as to saying the thing is “entirely without use”. I am saying:
* There’s a lot of FOMO around LLMs.
* There are money-men heavily invested in you using them *no matter* their efficacy.
* The ethics are… not good IMO.
* Building software is a lot more than writing code that “technically works”.
* There are definitely at least *some* times where doing it yourself is faster.
* I’m fucking tired okay.

It’s possible that the recent court order about how they can’t target observers is functioning as sand in their gears — which right now I think is all the courts and the law can be, sand in the gears. They’ve been leaning really hard on harassing, intimidating, attacking, tear-gassing, and detaining observers; they need that to function in the city.
Noem responded to that court order with a snotty “well we’re not doing anything wrong so this doesn’t change anything” kind of statement, but it’s possible agents have been told not to push it until they can get another court to overturn the order. That would fit with them focusing on the suburbs: observers are less organized there, and homes are more spread out.
2/

'What is he doing?': New threats emerge for Trump's economy as war drags on (Sam Sutton/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/19/threats-trump-economy-iran-war-inflation-fed-00833425
http://www.memeorandum.com/260319/p11#a260319p11

I •do• actually expect to see some kind of shift over the next week. I don’t think their “Victory! Now we’re leaving(ish)!” press conference last week was something we can take at face value, but I also don’t think it was just a ruse.
After they murdered Alex Pretti, the writing was on the wall. One killing of a white observer they could try to write off; two is a pattern. They’re losing support they desperately need — from politicians, from the press, from judges, from less-extreme right-wingers — and the longer they continue doing what they’ve been doing, the further they dig themselves in a hole. I’ve been expecting for a while that they would declare MISSION ACCOMPLISHED and change strategy.

The Putin regime may be sharing intelligence that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is using to target US troops, but President Trump is more mad at NATO. Sure, Trump’s adoration for Putin stopped being surprising a long time ago, but it’s notable that he’ll make excuses for the Russian strongman even if he has American blood on his hands.
Alas, in recent comments to the press, America’s aspiring strongman has been railing against our erstwhile allies for not being more eager to pu…

Making Russia strong again
Trump's war is doing Putin's bidding on multiple fronts.

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

“The point of doing the right thing isn’t to merely experience the catharsis of success—it’s to assert standards, uphold values; to acknowledge the existence of moral authority and answer its call for redress courageously.” https://mastodon.social/@GuyNamedBrian/115871819547625205