Tootfinder

Worked on some more #Gentoo global #jobserver goodies today.
Firstly, Portage jobserver support patch: #PyTest jobs will also be counted towards total job count.
Again, it's not a perfect solution, but it works reasonably. The plugin still starts -n jobs as specified by the arguments, but it acquired job tokens prior to executing every test, therefore delaying actual testing until tokens are available. It doesn't seem to cause noticeable overhead either.

Srsly, fuck this timeline. Can someone give 45 an Oculus and a world simulator so he stops screwing up the real world?
https://flipboard.social/@newsguyusa/115850233260885949

The rolling grasslands and rocky beaches of
"Vandenberg Space Force Base",
— home to more than a dozen at-risk species,
easily could pass for a peaceful nature preserve
— but that's an illusion.
The nearly 100,000-acre base was a testing ground in the 1960s for early-generation ballistic missiles,
and today it's a launch site for satellites, classified missions and other payloads key to a new type of war: one fought far above the Earth.

"Tenants in rent-controlled apartments have the right to move back at their prior rents once renovations are completed. After fires, however, landlords often seize the opportunity to make more significant changes... unnecessary for a tenant to reoccupy.
"That extends the construction timeline by months or years... and landlords often hope tenants will just give up. Then, rent for new tenants goes up to market rates."

After years of alleged neglect, their Mission building caught fire. Will suing help them return? 
Tenants at 2782 Folsom St. lost their homes due to a fire they say could've been prevented. Can the code assure them a return to their unit?

New York-based Sword Health, which develops AI-powered tech for managing pain and offers remote physical therapy, agrees to acquire rival Kaia Health for $285M (Henrique Almeida/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

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.

Lorsque les craintes liées au cancer du poumon ont émergé dans les années 1950, Kent a équipé ses cigarettes d'un filtre élaboré Š base ... d'amiante.
Assurément « la meilleure protection sanitaire dans l'histoire de la cigarette »

EU aims to agree by Friday to long-term freeze of Russian central bank assets (Jan Strupczewski/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/eu-aims-agree-by-friday-long-term-freeze-russian-central-bank-assets-2025-12-11/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251211/p45#a251211p45

European forces arrive in Greenland as Trump threatens to acquire island by force: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/15/european-forces-arrive-in-greenland.html

Cynicism, "AI"
I've been pointed out the "Reflections on 2025" post by Samuel Albanie [1]. The author's writing style makes it quite a fun, I admit.
The first part, "The Compute Theory of Everything" is an optimistic piece on "#AI". Long story short, poor "AI researchers" have been struggling for years because of predominant misconception that "machines should have been powerful enough". Fortunately, now they can finally get their hands on the kind of power that used to be only available to supervillains, and all they have to do is forget about morals, agree that their research will be used to murder millions of people, and a few more millions will die as a side effect of the climate crisis. But I'm digressing.
The author is referring to an essay by Hans Moravec, "The Role of Raw Power in Intelligence" [2]. It's also quite an interesting read, starting with a chapter on how intelligence evolved independently at least four times. The key point inferred from that seems to be, that all we need is more computing power, and we'll eventually "brute-force" all AI-related problems (or die trying, I guess).
As a disclaimer, I have to say I'm not a biologist. Rather just a random guy who read a fair number of pieces on evolution. And I feel like the analogies brought here are misleading at best.
Firstly, there seems to be an assumption that evolution inexorably leads to higher "intelligence", with a certain implicit assumption on what intelligence is. Per that assumption, any animal that gets "brainier" will eventually become intelligent. However, this seems to be missing the point that both evolution and learning doesn't operate in a void.
Yes, many animals did attain a certain level of intelligence, but they attained it in a long chain of development, while solving specific problems, in specific bodies, in specific environments. I don't think that you can just stuff more brains into a random animal, and expect it to attain human intelligence; and the same goes for a computer — you can't expect that given more power, algorithms will eventually converge on human-like intelligence.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, what evolution did succeed at first is achieving neural networks that are far more energy efficient than whatever computers are doing today. Even if indeed "computing power" paved the way for intelligence, what came first is extremely efficient "hardware". Nowadays, human seem to be skipping that part. Optimizing is hard, so why bother with it? We can afford bigger data centers, we can afford to waste more energy, we can afford to deprive people of drinking water, so let's just skip to the easy part!
And on top of that, we're trying to squash hundreds of millions of years of evolution into… a decade, perhaps? What could possibly go wrong?
[1] #NoAI #NoLLM #LLM