Tootfinder

"The old world is dying,” Antonio Gramsci once wrote.
“And the new world struggles to be born.”
In such interregnums, the Italian Marxist philosopher suggested, “every act, even the smallest,
may acquire decisive weight”.
In 2025, western leaders appeared convinced they – and we – were living through one such transitional period, as the world of international relations established after the second world war crashed to a halt.
During such eras, Gramsci more f…

Series A, Episode 08 - Duel
BLAKE: Yes.
AVON: Then I agree. [Lets go of Blake]
JENNA: Deactivating.
BLAKE: Vila, Gan, Jenna: we're going for a ram, take out the command ship.
GAN: A ram?!?
BLAKE: I don't see that there's any other hope for us.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/108/173

I'm building webkit-gtk right now. It's one of these messy packages where a few source files need a lot of memory to compile, and ninja can randomly order jobs so that all of them suddenly start compiling simultaneously. So to keep things going smoothly without OOM-ing, I've been dynamically adjusting the available job count via steve the #jobserver.
While doing that, I've noticed that ninja isn't taking new jobs immediately after I increased the job count. So I've started debugging steve, and couldn't find out anything wrong with it. Finally, I've looked into ninja and realized how lazy their code is.
So, there are two main approaches to acquiring job tokens. Either you do blocking reads, and therefore wait for a token to become available, or you use polling to get noticed when it becomes available. Ninja instead does non-blocking reads, and if there are no more tokens available… it waits till one of its own jobs finish.
This roughly means that as other processes release tokens, ninja won't take them until one of its own jobs finish. And if ninja didn't manage to acquire any job tokens to begin with, it is just running a single process via implicit slot, and that process finishing provides it with the only chance to acquire additional tokens. So realistically speaking, as long as there are other build jobs running in parallel, ninja is going to need to be incredibly lucky to ever get a job token, since all other processes will grab the available tokens immediately.
This isn't something that steve can fix.
#Gentoo #NinjaBuild

The FCC approved Sinclair's acquisition of four local TV stations that Sinclair already operates in Michigan and New York; DirecTV initially challenged the move (Matthew Keys/TheDesk.net)
https://thedesk.net/2026/02/fcc-gives-sinclair-approval-to-acqu…

FCC approves Sinclair's acquisition of four local TV stations
The FCC has approved the transfer of four broadcast licenses to Sinclair over an objection filed by DIRECTV.

California reaches a $50M settlement with Meta to resolve claims that Facebook users were misled about their ability to limit who could see personal details (The San Francisco Standard)
https://sfstandard.com/2025/12/19/facebook-users-dec…

Meta, California agree to settle Facebook privacy case
Third parties harvested personal data even though the company claimed to offer privacy, a lawsuit says.

I'm with the auditors on this one! Companies deploying AI need more expert human auditing, not less, at least until fundamental flaws in 'AI' are addressed and it's reliably accurate
'KPMG gets money off its own audit by arguing AI makes accounting cheaper'

Filings: Tether-owned Northern Data sold its bitcoin mining unit, Peak Mining, for up to $200M to a group including companies controlled by Tether executives (Nikou Asgari/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/352fc0e3-0f0d-4e72-abe6-dd992b040caa

Lawmakers launch bipartisan, last-minute bids to force vote on ACA subsidies
Two bipartisan groups of House lawmakers launched last-minute bids Wednesday
to force votes on extending the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire at the end of the year.

The efforts, both using a legislative tool known as a
"discharge petition",
face long-shot odds:
At least 218 members of the House would first have to agree to consider the bills,

Bipartisan lawmakers launch last-minute bid to force vote on extending ACA subsidies
A bipartisan group of House lawmakers has launched a last-minute bid to extend the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire at the end of the year.

Series D, Episode 12 - Warlord
CHALSA: All right, all right, I agree. I accept. [Avon looks about at the others. Boorva nods. Avon gives a sickeningly sweet smile.]
AVON: Then are we all friends here, with one common enemy?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/412/81 B7B5

The Pentagon denied the AP and others access to a few news briefings, claiming they're orientation events for the new press corps, which now includes Matt Gaetz (David Bauder/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/pentagon-pre…

Outlets that reach millions denied access to rare Pentagon news briefings
It's not often Pentagon officials hold briefings for the press, but they are this week — although outlets that reach millions of news consumers have been denied access. Instead, press meetings with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and press representative Kingsley Wilson are being characterized by the Pentagon as part of orientation sessions for newly credentialed Pentagon press. Most mainstream outlets exited the Pentagon this fall rather than agree to rules they worried would restrict them fr…