Tootfinder

5 free must-have Kontakt libraries for pop music | Native Instruments Blog https://blog.native-instruments.com/free-pop-libraries-kontakt/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_content=muz4…

7 free must-have Kontakt libraries for pop music | Native Instruments Blog
Discover seven free Kontakt libraries that will inject fresh inspiration into your music production. From lush pads to punchy drums, find your next go-to sound right here.

3 years after car-free JFK/Overlook/Middle/MLK was made permanent, the signage for the non-JFK parts of the route is still so bad. No one but us nerds knows a car-free path to the beach even exists!
There should be a big banner on this overpass telling you to turn left then right. Instead there’s a tiny sign no one will see and even if you do it’s unclear (this isn’t “slow streets,” it’s car-free!)

I have my share of issues with Parkrose Permaculture, but she has a lot of things I do strongly agree with. I can't stress enough that you never dehumanize your enemies. You can respond appropriately to violence. You can defend yourself from them by any means necessary. But you do not dehumanize them. You always limit your response to the minimum necessary to defend yourself.
There are a number of former Nazi skins who became antifascists after realizing they were wrong. Those folks tend to be some of the most dedicated because they feel a debt, and some of the most knowledgeable because they were there. Coming out of these types of cults, police included, is hard and takes time. A lot of us don't have the ability to work with them. But some do.
By repeatedly humanizing your opponent, you can break some of them. The #Seattle Police Department was not defunded but saw a massive reduction in numbers because their morale was destroyed. Some people will never change. Some people are broken and feel like they need the power. But if you change one person's mind, even give them something to think about, it's a crack. If even one cop quits, that's one less trained gun pointed at you in the future.
The 18 year old marines and federalized national guard troops out there are literally kids. A lot of them came from poor communities. They are being used in a way they haven't been trained to do, doing things they (should) have been told are not legal. They joined to get out of poverty, to go to college, or to "defend the American people" (regardless of how misguided that is). Few, if any, of them joined to abuse people. They will be especially open to persuasion.
Remind those troops that they are carrying out illegal orders, that they are being called on to violate their oath to protect the constitution, that they are suppressing the free speech of the fellow Americans they swore to defend. Remind them that the people they could be illegally arresting now are just like their parents, their neighbors, their families, the friends who didn't join. Remind them that this is the first step. They will be called on to kill Americans if they let this keep going.
Remind them ICE sleeps in hotels while they sleep on the ground. Remind them that their drunk and incompetent leadership thinks of them as disposable tools. Remind them that some of these people are out protesting *for them* against cuts to the VA and other services. Remind them that the people they're defending refuse to make college free so they can recruit from poor schools. Remind them that they will always be welcome when they're ready to join the side of freedom and justice.
When you dehumanize your enemies, you unify them. When you humanize your enemies, you can divide them. There is no weapon available to us right now so powerful as compassion.
https://youtu.be/YtWOYUDMsBw

The main value of having different browsers on iOS is to get extra free credits for paywalls.
I will not be taking questions at this time.

TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?

"Freedom of speech is skeptical power: it is always a challenge. And it affirms truth: it is always a search. Without skepticism of power and affirmation of truth, we will not have freedom of speech. The me speakers push us to embrace their power and treat everything they say as truth. They will call this “free speech.”
https://

Free Speech and Me Speech
A helpful distinction

Tesla rolls out Grok to some vehicles with an AMD infotainment chip; Grok comes pre-installed on new vehicles and cannot issue commands to the vehicle itself (Simon Alvarez/TESLARATI)
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-debuts-grok-ai-update-2025-26-what-you-…

Tesla debuts hands-free Grok AI with update 2025.26: What you need to know
All new Tesla vehicles delivered on or after July 12, 2025, will include Grok AI out of the box

To the genocide-loving German from mastodon.social who reported @… for being antisemitic:
Fuck you, you genocide-loving piece of shit, opposing genocide isn’t antisemitism. What you’re doing – conflating being anti-genocide with being antisemitic – is the greatest antisemitism as you’re de facto stating that all Jews are pro-genocide.

Cowboys $3 Million Free Agent RB Predicted for ‘Career Year’ After Struggles https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/running-back-javonte-williams-breakout-season/?adt_ei=[email]

New Mexico is making child care free.
Beginning in November, it will be the first state in the nation to provide child care to all residents regardless of income, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced this week.
The state has been working to lower child care care costs since 2019, when it created the Early Childhood Education and Care Department

New Mexico will be the first state to make child care free
The program, which is expected to save families $12,000 per child annually, is available to all residents regardless of income.

I missed today's protest because I had client work but clients paying me for work helps fuel the efforts in put into the community.
I got a bunch of supplies recently to make more unhoused person care packages and I purchased art from marginalized people that will be made available in the Free Little Art Gallery.
We all gotta do what we can, when we can, in the ways we can.
#resist

Gelernt: Nach Greenwashing gibt es jetzt auch Privacy-Washing.
Die Good News Gruppe will angeblich Gutes tun.
"We are now making a bold move by declaring our web search will be 100% ad-free and independent of Big Tech."
Scheinbar eine Lüge, meint @…
https://
fedifreu.de/@chpietsch/1150106
37790766266

How Safe Will I Be Given What I Saw? Calibrated Prediction of Safety Chances for Image-Controlled Autonomy
Zhenjiang Mao, Mrinall Eashaan Umasudhan, Ivan Ruchkin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09346

How Safe Will I Be Given What I Saw? Calibrated Prediction of Safety Chances for Image-Controlled Autonomy
Autonomous robots that rely on deep neural network controllers pose critical challenges for safety prediction, especially under partial observability and distribution shift. Traditional model-based verification techniques are limited in scalability and require access to low-dimensional state models, while model-free methods often lack reliability guarantees. This paper addresses these limitations by introducing a framework for calibrated safety prediction in end-to-end vision-controlled systems…

I have seen toots warning about this and wanted to comment on it.
They are impersonating the Mastodon team to require users to ‘verify their account’ and saying that until they do this their account is suspended.
Verification on mastodon is free and you can do it yourself without giving any personal information and it is TOTALLY OPTIONAL.
No server/instance is going to require verification.
I have my verification with my neocities page, on tkz.one, misskey.social and …

Since last Friday I am temporarily the support team. This coming Monday the team is back online. Unexpected issues meant they were away leaving me the sole person doing the work of three (and originally a team of seven).
1. Priority list of tasks. Triaged the incoming workload. Sorry, if you are not in the list then when there is free time I will get to you.
2. Outlook rules. I have using this for years. Organized the INBOX by sender or subject. I also put a special soun…

Free speech advocates are sounding the alarm about a bill in the US House of Representatives that they fear could allow Secretary of State Marco Rubio to
strip US citizens of their passports
based purely on political speech.
The bill, introduced by Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), will come up for a hearing on Wednesday

New Bill Would Allow Rubio to Strip US Citizens’ Passports Over Political Speech
The legislation would allow the Secretary of State to strip anyone’s US passport with no legal due process.

#EU: you can't abuse DRM to charge 30% for what costs 3% on the free market
Apple: but we've bundled it with nice features!
EU: price‑gouging is illegal, unbundling it is your problem
Apple: ok, have the 3% fee, but we add a 27% fee for using our mandatory DRM
EU: no
Apple: ok, we'll keep the DRM, and demand different fees that will cost Fortnite 30% of their…

#NewMexico will be the first state to make #childcare free
The program, which will start in November and is expected to save families $12,000 per child annually, is available to all residents regardless of income.

Cowboys Predicted to Target 1,000-Yard, 12-TD Running Back in Free Agency https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/running-back-tyler-allgeier-free-agent/?adt_ei=[email]

Polish people: "no, we can't shorten the work time, the economy will fall, there will be crying and gnashing of teeth!"
Also Polish people: "a new holiday? but of course, another day free of work is great news."
So, rather than 4-day work week we need to pursue 3-day weekend!

A penalty-free quantum algorithm to find energy eigenstates
Nannan Ma, Heng Dai, Jiangbin Gong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09148 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.…

A penalty-free quantum algorithm to find energy eigenstates
Finding eigenstates of a given many-body Hamiltonian is a long-standing challenge due to the perceived computational complexity. Leveraging on the hardware of a quantum computer accommodating the exponential growth of the Hilbert space size with the number of qubits, more quantum algorithms to find the eigenstates of many-body Hamiltonians will be of wide interest with profound implications and applications. In this work, we advocate a quantum algorithm to find the ground state and excited stat…

Netflix teams up with #NASA to show live rocket launches and spacewalks https://www.theverge.com/news/695342/nasa-plus-netflix-partnership

The Senator Will Not Yield -- REVIEW: 'Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation' by Zaakir Tameez (H.W. Brands/The Washington Free Beacon)
https://freebeacon.com/culture/the-senator-will-not-yield/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250810/p18#a250810p18

Important for discussions about agency and free will:
Hermida M, Ladyman J (2025): Physical Explanation and the Autonomy of Biology. Philosophy of Science :1–18.
DOI: 10.1017/psa.2025.10115
#neuroscience #consciousness

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #DriveTime
Caribou:
🎵 Your Love Will Set You Free
#Caribou
https://caribouband.bandcamp.com/track/your-love-will-set-you-free
https://open.spotify.com/track/2MARVRoAyo476CmEKqBWuP

Will Kolton Miller's Contract Remain an Issue For Raiders? https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-training-camp-kolton-miller-pete-carroll

Envy-Free but Still Unfair: Envy-Freeness Up To One Item (EF-1) in Personalized Recommendation
Amanda Aird, Ben Armstrong, Nicholas Mattei, Robin Burke
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09037

Envy-Free but Still Unfair: Envy-Freeness Up To One Item (EF-1) in Personalized Recommendation
Envy-freeness and the relaxation to Envy-freeness up to one item (EF-1) have been used as fairness concepts in the economics, game theory, and social choice literatures since the 1960s, and have recently gained popularity within the recommendation systems communities. In this short position paper we will give an overview of envy-freeness and its use in economics and recommendation systems; and illustrate why envy is not appropriate to measure fairness for use in settings where personalization p…

Why is Wall Street brushing off Trump’s escalating tariff threats?
Investors feel free to continue bidding up stock prices because they assume TACO Trump will always back down from his most costly tariff plans, market analysts said.
But Trump views stocks’ steady rise as a license to intensify his trade threats,
acting out the economic policy equivalent of his 2016 quip that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without paying a price.
His…

Why Wall Street is brushing off Trump’s escalating tariff threats
President Donald Trump’s escalating tariff threats have not deterred Wall Street, with the stock market continuing to rise despite trade policy uncertainty.

Gap metrics for stationary point processes and quantitative convexity of the free energy
Martin Huesmann, Bastian M\"uller
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08659 https://

Gap metrics for stationary point processes and quantitative convexity of the free energy
In this article, we are interested in convexity properties of the free energy for stationary point processes on $\mathbb R$ w.r.t.\ a new geometry inspired by optimal transport. We will show for a rich class of pairwise interaction energies A) quantified strict convexity of the free energy implying uniqueness of minimizers B) existence of a gradient flow curve of the free energy w.r.t. the new metric converging exponentially fast to the unique minimizer. Examples for energies for which A …

10 Gluten-Free Dessert Ideas #plantbased

10 Gluten-Free Dessert Ideas
These gluten-free dessert ideas will keep you coming back for more. These 10 plant-based sweet treats are must-tries.

As part of the Paramount-UFC deal, premium fights will be available for free to Paramount subscribers, ending the pay-per-view model present on ESPN (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/92c52ee3-f6e9-465b-98ca-17a1adfe26ba

Whoa. My @… talk was accepted. Come and join the only talk that will not be recorded.
https://pretalx.linuxdays.cz/linuxdays-2025/talk/KGHCKC/

FOSS tools to fight back! LinuxDays 2025
Everyone is trying to control your communication. The reasons vary from simple curiosity to pure commercial interest, all the way to using it to control one's thoughts. Are there any ways to fight back, and why are free software and open-source tools a good alternative to the ones you use? As cypherpunks, do we have the obligation to help people be ready for the worst, or should we only take care of ourselves? In this talk, I will cover my experience with fighting back against #chatcontrol …

This week I’m hard at work finishing a book manuscript and planning exciting changes for Free Words, so here’s just a little personal news. If by chance you are in New York, come say hi at the New York Art Book Fair! If you’re especially curious about the new work, I’ll read some on Sept 18th at Unnameable books in Brooklyn.
https://

News! Come find me!
dispersed holdings, will be tabling at the New York Art Book Fair Sept 11-14 at MoMA PS1, and I'm reading on September 18 at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn.

It's Robert Reich.
The final vote on the fate of public broadcasting is happening NEXT WEEK.
Donald Trump is demanding that Congress ❌ claw back a whopping $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the agency that funds public radio and television. 
Trump is hell-bent on taking away these funds as part of his authoritarian assault on the free press.
He can only afford to lose 3 Republican senators.
4 have publicly said they oppose the defun…

Help Robert Reich get the truth out.
Anything you can give will help us spread the truth, keep you informed, and stop our slide towards fascism.

Fascinating:
Asset managers make business judgements that, say, fossil fuels are a risky business investment.
And then "anti-woke," allegedly pro free-market, pro-smaller government people say, "no, your business and investment decisions will now be made by us, the 'freely elected' (in gerrymandered elections) representatives of the fossil business interests that own us."
Neat and tidy.

Cowboys linked to former 1,000-yard RB in 2026 NFL free agency https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-linked-former-1000-yard-running-back-2026-nfl-free-agency

Speaking up against the actions of the rich and powerful, or openly resisting them, has always come with dangers, can we turn that tide now?
https://euobserver.com/Rule of Law/arefa5c374

Court attacks and defunding NGOs: a growing pattern of silencing protest in Europe
This week, Greenpeace had its first hearing in a Dutch court to use the EU’s new protections against these types of spurious lawsuits to shut down free speech – the first time this EU law will be put into action.

Oh, wanted to share I'm getting a free bike!
Literally for free, a #Bicycle, my grandmother's hiking friend has never used it for the past 10 years, and he can't see very well.
Its also in very good condition, and so I'm excited, will probably pick it up tomorrow or the day after, I love bicycles.
I'm against

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, But It Will Be Optimized (Presented in Beta)
"5) Conflict-Free Engagement
No shouting. Just push notifications: 'You may be complicit. Tap to learn more.'"
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/art…

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, But It Will Be Optimized (Presented in Beta)
Gone are the days of storming the gates. In this new era of resistance, we A/B test the gates, analyze the bounce rate of our demands, and push our...

You’ve been given free access to this article from The Economist as a gift. You can open the link five times within seven days. After that it will expire.
Britain is already a hot country. It should act like it
https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/07/03/britain-is-already-a-hot-country-it-should-act-like-it?giftId=5f3749d8-a0fc-46fe-ac93-69f1a875e5bb&utm_campaign=gifted_article

Doesn't apply if you buy it from 3rd party resellers like Amazon, but still... wow: A mandatory subscription just for free delivery?
✅ Anker Will Force You to Sign Up for a $10/Month Subscription If You Buy Its Newest Power Bank
https://www.

Anker Will Force You to Sign Up for a $10/Month Subscription If You Buy Its Newest PowerBank
Companies love to get customers to sign up for monthly subscriptions. Anker is taking it too far.

Um petroleiro chamado... Vilamoura?! 🤪
https://mstdn.social/@Free_Press/114777787333496781

Aure Free Press :verified: (@Free_Press@mstdn.social)
Attached: 1 image A tanker that called at the Russian ports suffered an explosion while near Libya The Vilamoura, hauling 1 million barrels of oil, is being towed to Greece, where damage will be assessed upon arrival. The cause of the blast is unclear, but it caused water intake and the vessel's engine room is flooded. Four other vessels have suffered explosions this year, all had recently docked at Russian ports #AureFreePress #News #press #headline #Ukraine #Russia #Putin #EU #NATO

Internal OpenAI code suggests a tiered GPT-5 rollout: free users get basic GPT-5, Plus users get advanced reasoning, and Pro gets research-level performance (Alexey Shabanov/TestingCatalog)
https://www.testingcatalog.com/leaked-details-revea…

Leaks reveal GPT-5 Pro with research-level AI for ChatGPT
What we know so far: Free users will get access to GPT-5, Plus to GPT-5 with reasoning, while Team and Pro users will get GPT-5 Pro with a research-grade intelligence.

Event: Religion and Democratic Ideals: Reproductive Healthcare Access and White Nationalism
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2024, 6 – 7:30PM This event is free and open to the public. A liberal democracy should produce societies that are inclusive, equitable, dynamic, and responsive to the needs of citizens. This series will focus on where religion intersects with democratic ideals and institutions. We will discuss the outcomes we want from a democratic system and how such an…

Baton: Compensate for Missing Wi-Fi Features for Practical Device-free Tracking
Yiming Zhao, Xuanqi Meng, Xinyu Tong, Xiulong Liu, Xin Xie, Wenyu Qu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05597

Baton: Compensate for Missing Wi-Fi Features for Practical Device-free Tracking
Wi-Fi contact-free sensing systems have attracted widespread attention due to their ubiquity and convenience. The integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technology utilizes off-the-shelf Wi-Fi communication signals for sensing, which further promotes the deployment of intelligent sensing applications. However, current Wi-Fi sensing systems often require prolonged and unnecessary communication between transceivers, and brief communication interruptions will lead to significant performance d…

Me IRL
https://piefed.blahaj.zone/post/278694

You think ICE is going to “bring the jobs back?” Bullshit. They’re gearing up to sell imprisoned immigrants back to employers as slave prisoners who work for free. You think your wages are going up? You’re a sucker. Your wages are going down.
You think ICE is going to sell you imprisoned immigrants as cheap labor? Bullshit. They’re too beholden to the radical white supremacist extremists. Those people will •never• let those immigrants stay in the country. ICE is going to steal your labor force and you won’t get them back.
8/

So they call it "driver engagement", huh... wtf is going on...
https://www.theverge.com/news/771917/qualcomm-bmw-snapdragon-ride-pilot-adas

Qualcomm teams up with BMW for hands-free driving
Qualcomm jointly developed a hands-free driving system with BMW that will make its debut in the iX3 in 2026.

Infrared foundations for quantum geometry II: Catalogue of all torsion-like theories including new ghost-tachyon-free cases
Will Barker, Carlo Marzo, Alessandro Santoni
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05349

Infrared foundations for quantum geometry II: Catalogue of all torsion-like theories including new ghost-tachyon-free cases
The construction of consistent effective field theories in the infrared demands that models be defined by their underlying gauge symmetries, rather than by an arbitrary tuning of couplings or a cherry-picking of operators which may not be stable against radiative corrections. Adhering to this principle, we systematically derive all linear, parity-conserving models that propagate a pair-antisymmetric rank-three field on a Minkowski background. Such models are relevant not only to torsion, but to…

Yes, I'm sure if you're tired of being ridiculed as a public figure things will go much better for you in the *checks notes* United Kingdom...
https://mstdn.social/@Free_Press/115099995291652362

Aure Free Press :verified: (@Free_Press@mstdn.social)
Attached: 1 image Musk Move To UK Ridiculed in the US, Elon Musk sets his sight on the UK Musk says he "would like to help fund legal actions against corrupt officials who aided and abetted the rape of Britain, per the official government inquiry." #AureFreePress #News #press #headline #UK #Musk #Twitter #x #Fediverse #socialmedia #Politics

Ndamukong Suh wants you to learn how the sharpest minds in sports manage their money https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6462219/2025/07/02/ndamukong-suh-no-free-lunch-podcast/

"What works in #India will scale better everywhere else. Naturally, the country is a battleground for #AI search."
This is fishing for data and the next #enshittification to roll ou…

"French Car Brand Renault To Go Completely Leather-Free By The End Of 2025"
#Renault #Cars #Vehicles

French Car Brand Renault To Go Completely Leather-Free By The End Of 2025
Renault has said that all of its cars will be completely leather-free by the end of 2025, following discussions with PETA France

Very interesting talks at the #SolarEclipse Conference - https://www.vvs.be/subsite/sec-2025/programme - in Belgium I am attending online: here is the key result by Luca Quaglia who had reported his work in great detail in the papers https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4365/ac1279 (2021), https://www.iota-es.de/JOA/JOA2022_2.pdf#page=3 (2022) and https://www.iota-es.de/JOA/JOA2024_4.pdf#page=3 (2024) already. There seems to be NO way by now to escape the conclusion the the solar - i.e. photospheric - diameter used by many in the past (and various eclipse map calculations sites still today) is too small. So everyone should use Quaglia's free precision tools at https://www.besselianelements.com instead to get the real length of totality at one's observing spot. And when you are observing at the edges of the totality zone the tools will tell you where the actual border is: traditional maps can the off by some margin! 1/n

On the chromatic number of random triangle-free graphs
Clayton Mizgerd, Will Perkins, Yuzhou Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01376 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

On the chromatic number of random triangle-free graphs
We study the chromatic number of typical triangle-free graphs with $Θ\left( n^{3/2} (\log n)^{1/2} \right)$ edges and establish the width of the scaling window for the transitions from $χ= 3$ to $χ= 4$ and from $χ= 4$ to $χ= 5$. The transition from $3$- to $4$-colorability has scaling window of width $Θ(n^{4/3} (\log n)^{-1/3})$. To prove this, we show a high probability equivalence of the $3$-colorability of a random triangle-free graph at this density and the satisfiability of an inst…

Some states manage to lead, while others talk about how they are leaders. I'm impressed.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/carbon-free-buildings/new-york-finalizes-gas-ban

New York becomes first state to commit to all-electric new buildings
The state finalized rules ensuring most new edifices will install electric heat pumps and stoves instead of gas appliances, lowering costs and improving…

Some states manage to lead, while others talk about how they are leaders. I'm impressed.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/carbon-free-buildings/new-york-finalizes-gas-ban

New York becomes first state to commit to all-electric new buildings
The state finalized rules ensuring most new edifices will install electric heat pumps and stoves instead of gas appliances, lowering costs and improving…

Join us for a casual Scrappy Hour bike ride on Sunday, August 31st. 🚴‍♀️
We'll roll out from Rocket Baby just after 9am and head to the Domes... There's about four or five of us so far but we welcome anyone to join us! 🚴
https://www.instagram.com/p/DNvbxVRXHS1/

Scrappy Hour on Instagram: "It’s that time of year again! Ya, you know it! It’s Scrappy Hour BBQ BABY!!! Maybe it will be hot and we can all go swimming. Or maybe it will rain and we can all cower together. Or maybe it will be perfect and we’ll lay in the grass eating hot dogs till we have to roll us out of there. Here’s how it’s going to go down. First we’ll do a ride. We’re gonna do the Domes again, because it’s fun. Meet ups: BAY VIEW Cactus Club- meet 8:30a; wheels up 9:00a EAST SIDE/RW The Daily Bird-meet 9:00a; wheels up 9:15a TOSA Rocket Baby- meet 9:00; wheels up 9:15a Then, we SHBBQ at South Shore Park! We’ll bring some dogs and veggie alternatives. A couple sides. And a cooler of mixed bevies. We’ll bring a couple grills too. Last year our gang showed up with some really delightful offerings! There was homemade bread, and baked goods and side salads. It ruled. So feel free to bring what ever you would like to share with everyone. It will be much appreciated. Bring a baseball mitt and we’ll have a catch. Have a frisbee, bring that too. If it’s hot, good luck keeping me out of that lake, so bring your suit. If you have any questions, as always hit us up and we’ll try to answer. All our love, SH ✌️🚲🏃‍♂️☕️ #coffeeoutsidemke #scrappyhourmke"
107 likes, 8 comments - scrappyhourmke on August 24, 2025: "It’s that time of year again! Ya, you know it! It’s Scrappy Hour BBQ BABY!!! Maybe it will be hot and we can all go swimming. Or maybe it will rain and we can all cower together. Or maybe it will be perfect and we’ll lay in the grass eating hot dogs till we have to roll us out of there. Here’s how it’s going to go down. First we’ll do a ride. We’re gonna do the Domes again, because it’s fun. Meet ups: BAY VIEW …

Discovering Cataclysmic Variables from the Rubin Observatory LSST
D. A. H. Buckley (South African Astronomical Observatory, University of the Free State, University of Cape Town), Y. Tampo (South African Astronomical Observatory, University of Cape Town), P. Szkody (University of Washington), M. Motsoaledi (University of Cape Town), S. Scaringi (Durham University, INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Cap), M. Lochner (University of the Western Cape), N. Rawat (South African Astronomical Ob…

Discovering Cataclysmic Variables from the Rubin Observatory LSST
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will provide a windfall of new transients and variable sources. Here we have performed mock observation simulations to understand LSST's expected detection rates for cataclysmic variables (CVs) with known large amplitude variations. Under the thin-disk approximation for the distribution of CVs in our Galaxy, we found that only 20% of WZ Sge-type dwarf novae systems, representing the most energetic disk-driven outbursts in CV…

Anyone need a #summerfest ticket for tonight (free of charge)? DM me and I will transfer them to you. I have more than I need.
#Milwaukee

Qualcomm debuts Snapdragon Ride Pilot, a hands-free driver assistance system that is launching with the BMW iX3 and has been validated for use in 60 countries (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/771917/qualcomm-bmw-snapdragon-ride-pilot-a…

Qualcomm teams up with BMW for hands-free driving
Qualcomm jointly developed a hands-free driving system with BMW that will make its debut in the iX3 in 2026.

Metacurity is pleased to offer our free and premium subscribers a weekly digest of the best long-form (and longish) infosec-related pieces we couldn't properly fit into our daily news crush.
This week's selection includes
--Will the US rival China in dystopian surveillance?,
-- Trump cedes disinformation territory to US adversaries,
--When piracy tools cause infrastructure threats,
--AI is wearing down democracy,
--AI engineers who get paid $100 mil…

Best infosec-related long reads for the week of 6/21/25
Will the US rival China in dystopian surveillance?, Trump cedes disinformation territory to US adversaries, When piracy tools cause infrastructure threats, AI is wearing down democracy, AI engineers who get paid $100 million

You are cordially invited to the Fall 2025 Chicago-Kent Law Review Symposium, "Unsealing Schedule A."
The conference will be held via Zoom on Friday, Sept. 26.
Registration is free and open to the public: https://studentorgs.kentlaw.iit.edu/ck…

Louise Haigh, Angela Rayner: which (somewhat left) woman will the tabloids go for next? Probably Bridget Phillipson
Meanwhile Nigel Garage (thank you spellchecker) gets a free pass.

‘I take full responsibility’: Angela Rayner’s resignation letter in full | Angela Rayner | The Guardian
https:…

Domain size asymptotics for Markov logic networks
Vera Koponen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04192 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04192

Domain size asymptotics for Markov logic networks
A Markov logic network (MLN) determines a probability distribution on the set of structures, or ``possible worlds'', with an arbitrary finite domain. We study the properties of such distributions as the domain size tends to infinity. Three types of concrete examples of MLNs will be considered, and the properties of random structures with domain sizes tending to infinity will be studied: (1) Arbitrary quantifier-free MLNs over a language with only one relation symbol which has arity 1. In this c…

Who will Raiders prioritize of their pending free agents? https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/raiders/who-will-raiders-prioritize-of-their-pending-free-agents-3390235/

Bipartite entanglement in a nuclear spin register mediated by a quasi-free electron spin
Marco Klotz, Andreas Tangemann, David Opferkuch, Alexander Kubanek
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05255

Bipartite entanglement in a nuclear spin register mediated by a quasi-free electron spin
Quantum networks will rely on photons entangled to robust, local quantum registers for computation and error correction. We demonstrate control of and entanglement in a fully connected three-qubit $^{13}\mathrm{C}$ nuclear spin register in diamond. The register is coupled to a quasi-free electron spin-1/2 of a silicon-vacancy center (SiV). High strain decouples the SiVs electron spin from spin-orbit interaction reducing the susceptibility to phonons at liquid helium temperature. As a result, th…

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.

10 Oil-Free Vegan Recipes – From Peanut Curry To Banana Bread #plantbased

10 Oil-Free Vegan Recipes - From Peanut Curry To Banana Bread
If you want to eat more oil-free vegan dishes, these 10 recipes will make great additions to your weekly meal plan

Car Free Days return to Metro Vancouver with expanded lineup
Car Free Days are back and bigger than ever with nine events across the region. From Maple Ridge to North Vancouver, streets will transform into pedestrian-only spaces, filled with art, music, food trucks, and local vendors.
Car Free Days invite residents to experience their vibrant neighbourhoods without cars — encouraging walking, cycling, and transit as greener, more sustainable ways to get around.
1/2

A new zero-density estimate for $\zeta(s)$ and the error term in the Prime Number Theorem
Chiara Bellotti
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02041 https://arxiv.or…

A new zero-density estimate for $ζ(s)$ and the error term in the Prime Number Theorem
We will provide a new type of zero-density estimate for $ζ(s)$ when $σ$ is sufficiently close to $1$. In particular, we will show that $N(σ,T)$ can be bounded by an absolute constant when $σ$ is sufficiently close to the left edge of the Korobov-Vinogradov zero-free region. As a consequence, we provide the optimal error term in the prime number theorem of the form $$ ψ(x)-x \ll x\exp \left\{-(1-\varepsilon) ω(x)\right\},\qquad ω(x):=\min _{t \geq 1}\{ν(t) \log x+\log t\}, $$ where $ν(t…

WESLEY GUILD HOSPITAL IS FREE AT LAST GLORY BE TO GOD

It’s truly remarkable that we exist at all. Each of us breaks free from the chains of history and authority to experience life anew. Today, countless souls will awaken to their first love, their first union, or the birth of new life. Others will face heartbreak or part ways.
This moment, this very act of being alive and conscious, is a quiet act of rebellion against the forces that seek to suppress our humanity. To exist freely for the first time is the most radical and beautiful thing…

Defiant DHS Says Wrongly Deported Dad Will 'Never Go Free' (Jack Silvers/The Daily Beast)
https://www.thedailybeast.com/dhs-spokesperson-tricia-mclaughlin-says-kilmar-abrego-garcia-will-never-go-free/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250623/p143#a250623p143

Combinatorial Aspects of Weighted Free Poisson Random Variables
Nobuhiro Asai, Hiroaki Yoshida
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01143 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.…

Combinatorial Aspects of Weighted Free Poisson Random Variables
This paper will be devoted to study weighted (deformed) free Poisson random variables from the viewpoint of orthogonal polynomials and statistics of non-crossing partitions. A family of weighted (deformed) free Poisson random variables will be defined in a sense by the sum of weighted (deformed) free creation, annihilation, scalar, and intermediate operators with certain parameters on a weighted (deformed) free Fock space together with the vacuum expectation. We shall provide a combinatorial mo…

Gannett says the Detroit Free Press' joint operating agreement with The Detroit News, signed in 1989, will be dissolved at the start of 2026 (Neal Rubin/Detroit Free Press)
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/mic

Detroit Free Press, Detroit News to end joint operating agreement at end of 2025
The Detroit Free Press and Detroit News’ joint operating agreement combined the two newspapers’ business operations since 1989.

It's the last week of the California Legislative session, and there are a number of #climate & #environment bills awaiting action in the California Senate.
PLease help! #350BayArea has an eas…

Solutions that our communities need - Support these bills!
As Californians concerned about global warming and the climate crisis, it is up to us to make sure that our legislators listen to us and enact legislation that will do everything possible to fight climate change, and to mitigate its effects on all communities, especially those communities most directly affected. Please add your voice to this effort by signing this letter to your State Senator. Feel free to add your experiences and your thoughts about why your Senator needs to support this cl…

It's the last week of the California Legislative session, and there are a number of #climate & #environment bills awaiting action in the California Senate.
PLease help! #350BayArea has an eas…

Solutions that our communities need - Support these bills!
As Californians concerned about global warming and the climate crisis, it is up to us to make sure that our legislators listen to us and enact legislation that will do everything possible to fight climate change, and to mitigate its effects on all communities, especially those communities most directly affected. Please add your voice to this effort by signing this letter to your State Senator. Feel free to add your experiences and your thoughts about why your Senator needs to support this cl…

"One giant leap for bettongs released into sanctuary as wildlife conservancy aims to operate on 5% of Australia"
#Australia #Animals #Wildlife

oh no I bought books from her at Adobe. such a kind person and a sad loss
https://missionlocal.org/2025/07/eyevee-woods-dies-24/

Eyevee Woods, free-spirit calling the Mission home, dies at 24
The Louisiana native will be remembered for her generosity, infectious spirit and devotion to the San Francisco subculture.

Another essential thread from @… ...
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/114733317506784669
pluralistic@mamot.fr - A major problem with letting billionaires decide how your country is run is that they will back whichever psycho promises the lowest taxes and least regulation, no matter how completely batshit and unfit that person is:
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/nations-are-people
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/23/billionaires-eh/#galen-weston-is-a-rat
1/

Microsoft makes Windows 10's extended security updates free for an extra year for users who sync PC settings via a Microsoft Account and the Windows Backup app (Zac Bowden/Windows Central)
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-ap

Microsoft makes Windows 10 security updates FREE for an extra year — but there's a catch, and you might not like it
Windows 10 users will have the option to continue receiving security updates for free beyond October 2025, so long as they sync their PC settings data with the cloud via a Microsoft Account.

Yeah, I knew some lovely people who worked at Twitter too. And did you know they once had unfettered API access and anyone could create their own client? Some of us loved that so much we built things that helped legitimise them as an open platform. And then one day they just switched that off.
Legitimacy is gold to venture-capital-funded startups. They need people with it to convince everyday folks that this latest iteration of the same old rug pull is different. Until they’ve grown s…

Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr)
Attached: 1 image I can't wait to use Bluesky, but I will not be joining Bluesky. As much as I trust and respect the Bluesky executives and board members I am acquainted with, I believe the service itself is insufficiently enshittification-resistant to trust: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: h…

Antarctic summer sea ice is at record lows. Here's how it will harm the planet, and us #Antarctic

Antarctic summer sea ice is at record lows. Here's how it will harm the planet, and us
On her first dedicated scientific voyage to Antarctica in March, the Australian icebreaker RSV Nuyina found the area sea-ice free. Scientists were able to reach places never sampled before.

One Free Agent WR the Raiders Should Add https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-keenan-allen-chicago-bears-jakobi-meyers

Supreme Court will hear challenge to limits on political party spending
The Supreme Court will hear a significant campaign finance case next term
that will examine whether it violates the Constitution to restrict the amount of money that political parties can spend in coordination with individual candidates.

The national Republican senatorial and congressional committees,
then-Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio)
and then-Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) filed suit over the limits…

Supreme Court will hear challenge to limits on political party spending
The Republicans who sued are asking the Supreme Court to lift restrictions on how much political parties can spend on candidates, saying they violate free-speech protections.

NASA says its NASA live programming will be available on Netflix starting this summer; it will be still available on NASA's app and site for free without ads (Lauren E. Low/NASA)
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-is-coming-to-netflix-this-summer/…

NASA+ is Coming to Netflix This Summer - NASA
NASA announced Monday its latest plans to team up with a streaming service to bring space a little closer to home. Starting this summer, NASA+ live

Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Edit: fixed some typos.
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and thus more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of management caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.

Google launches Pixel Care , replacing Preferred Care and Fi Device Protection in the US, with upgrades but slightly higher pricing than the previous offering (Will Sattelberg/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2025/08/27/google-p…

Google Pixel Care+ replaces Preferred Care, includes free screen and battery repairs
Google is upgrading its legacy Preferred Care warranty plan to Pixel Care+, with some big new perks including $0 repairs.

Tonight!
Mayor Lurie doesn't have the authority to overturn car-free Market Street. This is only a temporary violation of car-free Market Street, one we can and will reverse!

$2.7 million fan favorite facing roster extinction after free agency flood at his position https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/07/06/dallas-cowboys-player-profile-t-j-bass/84422845007/

Australia’s Seven Network to stream Raiders 2025 preseason games https://www.raiders.com/news/australia-s-seven-network-to-stream-raiders-2025-preseason-games

Walmart members will get free access to Peacock Premium, in addition to Paramount Essential, and be able to switch between the two services every 90 days (Jaewon Kang/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-0…

When your opponent is Donald Trump you escalate in response to threats;
you don’t try to appease him.
Jerome Powell must do everything in his power to compel the conventional wisdom of market traders to more adequately “price in” the degradation of the rule of law.
This must include tying the rule of law and the threats to the constitution to the credibility and standing of the Federal Reserve itself.
Powell’s term expires in less than a year anyway.
If defe…

Powell Will Hang Separately: The Federal Reserve Has Already Failed its Duty to Lisa Cook and the Constitution
This is a free Notes on the Crises article. A reminder to readers that the various activities run out of the still-new Notes on the Crises office cost money, while an enormous amount of time and effort goes into my writing and my constant dedication to refresh and deepen my

Mailbag: Can Cowboys afford 2026 free agents? https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/mailbag-can-cowboys-afford-2026-free-agents

Supercell makes Brawl Stars available on WeChat and says Clash Royale is "currently being developed" for a September launch on the WeChat mini-game platform (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/3315…

Tencent-owned Supercell to launch titles like Clash Royale as WeChat mini games
The video game Brawl Stars is already available within WeChat, while Clash Royale will exclusively launch on the messaging app in September.

The Federal Reserve System has not been the most craven of the powerful institutions who have attempted to placate Trump to defend themselves,
but it has not been the bravest institution either.
They were quick to concede to Trump on financial regulatory issues in the hopes that would get Trump off their back.
They also ignored the attack on the legal architecture propping up independent administrative agencies in the hopes that other agencies would receive the brunt of Tru…

Powell Will Hang Separately: The Federal Reserve Has Already Failed its Duty to Lisa Cook and the Constitution
This is a free Notes on the Crises article. A reminder to readers that the various activities run out of the still-new Notes on the Crises office cost money, while an enormous amount of time and effort goes into my writing and my constant dedication to refresh and deepen my

Q&A with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on why he thinks AI chatbots imperil the web and journalism's future, his company's pay-per-crawl initiative, and more (Fred Vogelstein/Crazy Stupid Tech)
https://crazystupidtech.com/2025/08/30…

Cloudflare's Matthew Prince has a plan to get Google and the AI oliigarchs to pay for your content even though many are used to getting it for free. He might have enough leverage to make them.
AI chatbots are blowing up the 30-year economic relationship publishers have had with search engines. Many think this will kill the web if not addressed. Google needs to change first. It's resisting. Cloudflare's Matthew Prince is going to try and make them.

Hi, this is EDF Action Votes.
Donald Trump is ordering NASA to shut down its
carbon-monitoring satellites
— the very tools we use to track carbon emissions, plant health, wildfire risk, and extreme weather patterns.
This is not about saving money.
It’s about blinding America to the truth of climate change.
If Trump gets his way, we’ll be flying blind in the face of rising disasters
— and Big Polluters will have a free pass to keep hiding the damag…

I just gave to EDF Action Votes!
EDF Action votes is doing everything they can to elect environmental champions who will take climate action.