Tootfinder

‘Cocoa fever’ in Liberia’s Grand Gedeh is wiping out native forests https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/08/cocoa-fever-in-liberias-grand-gedeh-is-wiping-out-native-forests/

‘Cocoa fever’ in Liberia’s Grand Gedeh is wiping out native forests
Until 2020, 99% of Liberia’s Grand Gedeh county was covered by natural forests. Since then, cacao farms have rapidly encroached on those forests, reports Mongabay’s Ashoka Mukpo. Grand Gedeh in southeastern Liberia borders Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest exporter of cacao beans. Much of Côte d’Ivoire’s forests have been cleared for cacao and many of its cacao […]

The federal government took a major step forward Friday toward opening more than 2,800 acres of Ohio’s only national forest to oil and gas development.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced a lease sale scheduled for Sept. 15 of 41 parcels of land in the Wayne National Forest totaling 2,840 acres.
Although some bureaucratic hurdles remain, a lease sale brings fracking the forest for the first time
– the subject of political effort since at least 2016
– far clos…

Feds advance plan to open Ohio’s Wayne National Forest to fracking
The U.S.

SF-based Humble Robotics, which is developing an electric, self-driving cabless freight truck with 200 miles range and 55 mph max speed, raised $24M (Caroline Petrow-Cohen/Los Angeles Times)
https://www.latimes.com/bu…

This startup wants to bring driverless freight trucks to California's roads, but drivers are pushing back
Founded in 2025, Humble Robotics is building self-driving freight trucks with no steering wheel, driver's seat or gas pedal.

A look at Human Generative Workflows, a framework developed by a group led by Kathleen Kennedy, in which AI use in Hollywood stays under human creative control (Richard Rushfield/The Ankler)
https://theankler.com/first-look-hollywoods-secret-ai-talks-go-…

First Look: Hollywood’s Secret AI Talks Go Public. Here’s the Plan - The Ankler
Kathleen Kennedy quietly convened Oscar winners, actors, studio execs, Silicon Valley — and me. Now our first public framework draws a line in favor of human-controlled AI

Meanwhile, in the US of A :floofSad:
https://aflegal.org/press-release/america-first-legal-files-formal-complaints-with-the-tr…

America First Legal Files Formal Complaints with the Trump Administration Demanding Investigations Into Three School Districts Ahead of Superintendents’ Testimony Before Congress
America First Legal (AFL) has sent formal complaints to the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Education detailing serious violations of federal law by Chicago Public Schools, San Francisco Unified School District, […]

Wie kann man #Fruchtfliegen mit einfachen Hausmitteln loswerden? 🍎🐜
Mit einer Mischung aus #Essig, Wasser und #Spülmittel in einem Glas kannst Du eine wirksame Falle bauen. Alternativ …

Fruchtfliegen bekämpfen mit Hausmitteln
Im Handel gibt es diverse Fiegenfallen zu kaufen, die dann auch wieder nur Müll verursachen. Fruchtfliegen kann man aber auch mit Hausmitteln beikommen.

The first record of the parable commonly known as the "Blind Men and the Elephant" showed up around 2500 years ago, in a Buddhist text from India. At this point it's pretty commonly known. I assume that most folks reading this will be familiar with some variation of it.
If not, it's essentially a story about people who have limited information making assertions about something: one man grabs a tail and says, "it's like a rope," another the trunk and says, "it's like a snake," a third the leg saying, "it's like a tree," and so on. Later variations are less kind to the men, having them not simply report their findings, but fight over them. The first English translation draws a parallel to religion.
This comes to mind for me, because social media has a tendency to incentivize us to make those hard assertions, to dig in, to argue our perspective as part of a spectacle. Free and federated social media isn't structurally that different from corporate media, so the incentive models built to maximize engagement by maximizing conflict tend to leak through the similarities in the user experience and the conditioning of other platforms.
I didn't really come here to critique the fediverse, but rather to remind everyone, "no one sees the whole fucking elephant." We are limited and there are necessarily some things so big they will never be individually comprehensible. Any system that relies on us all agreeing cannot possibly respond to those big things.
We can see that concretely if we look at the difference between "democratic unity" and "diversity of tactics." In the first model, everyone either agrees or gets forced to behave as though they agree (at least on some issues). That's how liberal democracy works. Diversity of tactics (which systematically described, for example, in the "St Paul Principles"), on the other hand, let's people align on goals without needing to agree on exactly how to achieve them. The reality being that often there are multiple "correct" paths, and sometimes those paths can only work if multiple paths are taken in unison.
No one sees the whole elephant. We won't even see the elephant later. People will still be arguing about the elephant long after it's gone. But if you want to get rid of the elephant, you're gonna need to accept that you can't comprehend it all and you're gonna have to figure out a way to work together that doesn't require a unified approach.

new Nepali language textbook from a great team including Indigenous Himalayan scholars. the article is worth a read --
"working in a team where none of us had Nepali as our only or first language, but where all of us still had strong connections to it in different ways. That mix shaped a collaborative process drawing on different experiences and approaches to the language. More importantly, bringing those different relationships to  language into the same space helped us create s…

US moves to open vast tracts of pristine forests to logging #UnitedStates

US moves to open vast tracts of pristine forests to logging
President Donald Trump's administration on Tuesday proposed a rule change that would open 44 million acres (about 68,750 square miles) of wild, undisturbed forest for road construction and logging.

Intel and Fortinet partner to co-develop the Fortinet Security Processor 6, making Fortinet the first named external customer for the Intel 4 process node (Luke James/Tom's Hardware)
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry

Intel to co-develop and manufacture Fortinet's next-gen firewall ASIC on Intel 4 — node gets its first named external customer
The agreement makes Fortinet the first cybersecurity vendor on Intel's manufacturing customer list.