Tootfinder

Some photos from today's hike in the mountains. To escape the fog.
It was very very icy at the bottom. And I was super happy to have my micro spikes.
The way up was pretty calm. Right the #silentsunday I had desired. At the summit there were a bit too many people and I didn't see proper motives. So I just enjoyed the view and the really warm temperature.
On the wa…

Trump is addicted to military force.
Congress should act to curb him
Even before the raid to seize Nicolšs Maduro in Caracas, Venezuela, on Jan. 3,
Trump had already attacked as many countries (seven) in 2025 as he did during his entire first term.
After the Maduro operation, which Trump said he watched “like ... a television show,”
he has threatened to take military action in many more places,
including Iran, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, Greenland — and no…

Trump is addicted to military force. Congress knows what is missing.
A dilemma confronts the Trump administration in Iran. It needs the U.S. soft power it eviscerated.

The Trump administration’s decision to brand Anthropic as a “supply chain risk” could force CISOs into a position few have faced before: preparing to identify, isolate, and potentially remove a specific AI technology from across their organizations without a clear understanding of where it resides or how deeply it is embedded.
Check out my latest CSO piece that examines how organizations need to get ready for identifying where in their systems AI resides.
Many thanks to Tom Pace …

Anthropic ban heralds new era of supply chain risk — with no clear playbook
Pentagon guidance on how to remove Anthropic shows what enforcement could look like, but most organizations lack the visibility and consensus needed to respond to what the Trump administration describes as a new category of supply chain risk.

Roadtrip Radiance
(July 2021, the blinding evening light stopped us in our tracks to take it all in, also a rare image of @…... Been creating more print proofs last night, slowly preparing myself for offering limited edition toned kallitype prints of my images... A phone image of this print doesn't really do it justice, but this is fresh from the drying…

Filing: the Pentagon says Anthropic's use of foreign workers, including from China, poses security risks and that its case is "different" from other companies' (Maria Curi/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/03/19/pentagon-anthropic-foreig…

Pentagon: Anthropic's foreign workforce poses security risks
The Defense Department is raising red flags about a key element of the AI industry — its reliance on global talent — as it moves to dismiss Anthropic's lawsuit.

Quoted (but not named) in this guardian piece for posting about some freezers on reddit.. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/feb/18/the-sheffield-supermarket-going-viral-for-the-symphonic-sound-of-its-freeze…

Oh wow, oh lol 😁

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

I read this fascinating thread while listening to Qobuz and by sheer coincidence, this track came on and it seems horribly appropriate:
#IfYouTolerateThisYourChildrenWillBeNext Manic Street Preachers on Qobuz https://open.qobuz.com/track/55341288
https://mastodon.social/@sellathechemist/116075306722957554
@… - The Russians cannot be trusted. At best the Russians will buy time, and then have another go.
When will European governments call a spade a spade and really push to disconnect from Russian oil and gas? If that means buying it from the US interim so be it. But then really push hard for energy and military security.
Russia is NOT going away. Nor is its hatred of Europe which is why the've been waging war on us in myriad ways for the last 20 years.
4/end
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/14/alexei-navalny-poisoning-death-russia-frog-toxin

A very frozen and snow covered Red River of the North, from January; looking south-ish from Grand Forks, #NorthDakota. Rail bridge in the distance. The plume in the far distance is from the Crystal Sugar beet processing plant on the #Minnesota side.