Tootfinder

It’s going to be hard for the press to get their arms around everything going on. Honestly, it’s hard to get my head around it here on the ground: people are marching downtown, people are protesting at the airport, people are holding neighborhood protests, people are holding block parties out in the bitter cold…. It’s hard to even know where to be!
Good news is it will get up to -10°F / -23°C this afternoon.

AI is McDonald’s. That Will Be Good, Bad, and Catalytic for Civil Rights Advocacy. | TechPolicy.Press https://techpolicy.press/ai-is-mcdonalds-that-will-be-good-bad-and-catalytic-for-civil-rights-advocacy

AI is McDonald’s. That Will Be Good, Bad, and Catalytic for Civil Rights Advocacy.
The current trajectory of AI may have similar effects on how people engage with computers as fast food has on how we engage with eating, writes David Brody.

I find it quite fascinating to watch the development of Starbucks and how it's crushed by some competitors.
I believe, for years, the cornerstone of the Starbucks business model was this: many people want coffee with reasonably good quality, they want it often, and they're willing to pay very high prices for it. I'm saying this as being one of those people. ☕ 🧵

🦻 Good listeners connect more easily with strangers, study finds
#social

Good listeners connect more easily with strangers, study finds
With many people now heavily relying on electronic devices to communicate with others, connecting on a deeper level with others, particularly face-to-face, can prove challenging. Recent nationwide surveys and psychological studies suggest that today many people feel lonely, socially isolated and/or disconnected from others living in their same geographical area.

I've mentioned it before, and I'm sure I will again, but, as much as there's a reason why I reject Christianity, there were also a lot of good things. Churches have governing bodies (with varying degrees of democratic representation) that guide the ministry (preaching and actions) as well as managing logistics (building maintenance, accounting, etc). This provides opportunities for self-governed collective action.
Quakers are the most radical in terms of this, and are basically anarchists. Quaker circles often meet at people's houses and can be as small as 3 people. There is often no leadership. A Quaker service could easily just be everyone sitting in a circle and someone talking at one point.
I grew up in a Presbyterian church, and one of my first jobs (at 11 or 12) was landscaping there. Within the church there were a lot of different trades, which meant that you could volunteer time and learn basically any kind of maintenance. Basically everything that needed to be done was done in-house. This also meant that if you needed a plumber, an electrician, etc, that you could pick one from within the church.
I remember painting the church, learning how to paint, with a bunch of other members of the congregation at a work party. I also remember being volunteered for child care during choir. There were a few rooms around that were used for different things, such as music practice. But these rooms could be made available for any type of community activity. This can actually include community organizing. In fact, Seattle GDC was offered an occasional space for organizing in a church (we didn't take it, but appreciated the offer), and that same church hosted a lot of other community events. I actually went to a queer relationships skills class once hosted in a church, which was great.
What I'm saying is that churches often act as a kind of parallel society up-to-and-including acting as dual power structures....

Nice day today at #FediMTL. Good talks and good people. Met some folks I only knew from the Internet. Hope I can go again next year.

To celebrate our #dayoftruthandfreedom, I wanted to share a moment of levity with ya'll from this week. I'm waiting in line to get into constitutional observer training. In front of me, a petite white woman in her seventies leans over to the black middle-aged security guard.
Woman: Good to see all of these white people out to help, right?
Guard: I love white peop…

When an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in south Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026,
what happened next looked familiar, at least on the surface.
Within hours, cellphone footage spread online and eyewitness accounts contradicted official statements,
while video analysts slowed the clip down frame by frame to answer a basic question:
Did she pose the threat federal officials claimed?
What’s changed since Minneapolis became a g…

Filming ICE is legal but exposes you to digital tracking – here’s how to minimize the risk
Federal agents have pepper-sprayed, tackled and detained people recording their actions. If you post your recordings of agents, you also risk the feds tracking you and those around you.

> for a large share of actual product work, the person who can say "here is what done looks like, prove it without seeing my rubric" is more valuable than the person who can write the code.
> Implementation is what AI is getting good at. Knowing whether the result actually solves the real problem is not an engineering judgment call, it is a domain judgment call.
Reposting to call out those two quotes and agree that this matches my experience as a staff developer…

The hardest part of being a moderator (of any community online or off) isn't dealing with the trolls, spammers, and assholes.
It's dealing with the personality conflicts between *mostly* well-meaning but not-handling-it-well people. It's the human aspect.
That doesn't scale to a billion-person platform, or allow for mods to be interchangeable cogs. Humans are hard, yo.
It takes time to train good mods for a particular community, and not everyone is up for t…

RE: https://mastodon.scot/@lindseylavender/116120093040525559
This kind of art will be enormously important in the future, when people wonder how we lived in the 21st century, what our houses and cities looked like. A good investment!

- For those with severe tinnitus -
I'm really not very good at speaking into a camera, and this is far from an excellent presentation. At the same time, when I was in the throes of severe tinnitus, I longed to find accounts of people who had experienced a type as intense and reactive as mine, yet had learned, to some degree, to live with it. So I offer this spontaneous testimony just in case it helps anyone else…🙏

Claiming a former FBI head who _LET POTUS SLIDE_ hurt innocent people is ghoulish. Perhaps Mueller hurt us all by failing to jail or stop potus.
#USpol

Donald J. Trump: "Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt in...
Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP

This is a Good Thing™ for Oklahoma Death Row inmates. Incarcerated people, even those under a death sentence, are still human beings. The definition of "custody" includes the concept of caring for the inmate, including their mental health.
https://reason.com/2026/02/23/okl…

Oklahoma ends indefinite solitary confinement for most death row prisoners
“These men have not been able to touch grass and feel the warmth of the sun for the first time in ten years.”

I’d easily believe 20k–30k, but…I’m pulling numbers out of thin air there. Curious to see some good aerial video once I’ve warmed up a bit.
The tone was notable. Still plenty of witty signs: “Stay salty, melt ICE,” Noem’s head on Cruella de Ville’s body, that sort of thing. But lots of people just had “Fuck ICE.” Nobody was really laughing.
One sign said “ICE will melt in hell.” That kind of captures the mood.
#MInneapolis #MinneapolisProtests #ICEout

I was involved in web development in the early days. (The 1990s!) It was fun, exciting, it was good. What ruined it was people who did not love the web getting involved. People who didn’t use the web like they loved it, people who didn’t understand it, people who cared more about money than the web.
The web got wrecked because we let too many assholes get involved & call the shots but it’s not too late. We can still take back the web for us. We can continue to build out the web we…

Agents shot and killed a 37-year-old US citizen at about 9am on Saturday,
with other observers watching and videotaping their actions,
in an area called Eat Street,
a corridor of largely immigrant-owned restaurants and businesses.
Footage appears to show the moment man is shot dead by federal agent in Minneapolis – video
It’s the second killing in the city after 37-year-old Renee Good was shot and killed by a federal agent in south Minneapolis on 7 January.

"Welcome to Nordstrom
We’re glad to have you with our Company. Our number one goal is to provide outstanding customer service. Set both your personal and professional goals high. We have great confidence in your ability to achieve them. So our employee handbook is very simple.
We have only one rule: Use good judgment in all situations..."

I've seen a bunch of "the CA age verification law is the best way to do a bad thing and so we shouldn't oppose compliance" takes, which others are rightly pointing out is a bad stance because it's blindingly obvious that compliance now sets the stage for compliance later and the clearly set up later is mandatory verification of age data. Even if you think that, for example, California's current "progressive" government won't go there, we're all currently seeing just how easy it is for a new government to pick up the oppressive tools the "good" government was using "restraint" with and put them to worse ends.
On the other hand, I'll freely admit that distros *do* need a way to shield themselves from liability right now. The clear (to me; IANAL) correct solution is to say on your website "don't download this OS if you're in a jurisdiction where it's not legal for us to provide it."). Assuming this does put you in the clear liability-wise, it has several positive effects:
- Stops zero people from downloading it.
- Makes it clear that your project will not collaborate with fascists/oppressive regime enjoyers.
- Means that when the next law makes verifying user ages mandatory (and/or explicitly requires using Palantir-adjacent services to do so) you've already got a strategy in place and there's no need for a "debate" in your "community" about compliance.
- Gets users more practice with "the law is malicious/needlessly bureaucratic/oppressive; let's ignore it" which to be honest people in general clearly desperately need at this point.
- Is the most effective political move if you want to resist the way things are going. Forcing the other side to explain why "California bans Linux" is good rhetorical strategy. Make *them* try to explain "well it's actually not so harmful since we let users set it themselves" and answer your follow-up "but what if next year the requirements change; I just refuse to go along with this slippery slope stuff and I'm not bothered if that means you want to *ban* me."
#AgeVerification

Damn it, Donald, you stole the line I had prepared for you.

I posted this yesterday, and it got a pretty good response, but I know many people (myself included) bankrupt their unread feeds after a busy weekend, so here it is again because I think it's fun—especially for the #Montreal crowd. https://

Cory Doctorow sounds like he has been chatting to his chatbot therapist and they decided together it's a good idea to publish an article that attacks people for having valid criticisms about LLMs and the AI industry.
How dare he. This is such poor judgment.

Nick Fuentes suggests ICE killing Renee Good is "probably a good thing" because the "future is at stake, whether white people exist as a race" (Media Matters for America)
https://www.mediamatters.org/nick-fuentes/nick-fuentes-suggests-ice-killing-renee-good-probably-good-thing-because-future-stake
http://www.memeorandum.com/260116/p53#a260116p53

OK, #Zig language people, where's a good place online to ask dumb newbie questions about Zig?
What I'm thinking of trying to build as an experiment is this:
https://git.journeyman.cc/simon/post-s

paged space objects
Paged space objects will be a generalisation of cons space objects. A page — all pages will be of the same size — will comprise a header, followed by an array of objects. All the objects in a given page will be of the same size. The number of objects in a page is simply the number of ...

The Masters Of Ceremonies
Are you after your footy fix with a side of good laughs, good people and terrible analysis...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/the-masters-of-ceremonies/

"I learned that Renee Good still had a pulse eight minutes after she was shot by an ICE agent," Klein said. "And yet the offer to administer aid from a physician on the scene was denied. I can't say how much that stirs the blood of everyone behind me here as we try to fulfill our oath and duty to care for the people of Minnesota."
Calls mount to 'rise up' as doctors speak out against 'grotesque' ICE acts - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-ice-2674914793/

Every time I post a bunch about crazy inner layer rework I get a couple of reactions from people who think that being this good at bodging boards makes me some kind of EE god.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
You know how you get this good at fixing board design errors? Yeah, exactly how you'd think. Making a lot of them :P

If you are looking for a good #scifi read: I just red "Derelict" by @… and I enjoyed all about it. I recommend it very much!
It is about young people, finding their own, struggle in a space faring world, music, hacking and... well independence and direction I have to say, an…

If you need some *good* stories about *good* people to lift your spirits...
▶️ Finding People with No Customers, Then Buying Them Out - Steven Schapiro
https://youtube.com/watch?v=IpkQ20i5qhs&si=GoCEFR1hvjH2B5gm

Whoever runs their account does more harm than good to their brand.

Without intending to do so, the orange shit bag gave us a gift today. Worried about how you might be criticized for your post about a certain special person’s death? Save this message as the template you can use. If you follow this wording exactly, not a single soul can object to your message.
#POTUS47

Throughout the story of the ICE invasion of Minneapolis, it’s been the helpers who’ve most captured international attention: the people keeping watch, the people delivering groceries, the people marching and raising their voices. There’s a lot of us.
Mr. Rogers said “look for the helpers,” and yes, that’s good advice. But in this case, it needs a second thought: don’t look so hard for the helpers that you forget the people we’re helping.

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good,
you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
-- Howard Aiken

Christopher Marquis on the academics in the Epstein files:
"Universities and academics like me need to face a hard truth about our own desires. The job is supposed to be about ideas, teaching and public knowledge. Epstein offered something else: prestige without peer review, and attention without consequence. Too many people – even those who were not involved directly in exploitation – took the deal because it was easy to do and because it felt good."

Me, 2021, on Max Verstappen: Pfft. Crashstappen is a valid name.
Me, 2022-2024, on Max: He’s good, but… he knows people are scared
Me, 2025, on Max: A Goat. He’s on another level
Me, 2026, on Max: can he be in every racing series? dudes got skills.

black lives matter crowd cares about renee good
“all lives matter” people justify her killing
Very interesting

Well. This does not seem like a good thing: «AI systems are built to function in ways that degrade and are likely to destroy our crucial civic institutions. The affordances of AI systems have the effect of eroding expertise, short-circuiting decision-making, and isolating people from each other. These systems are anathema to the kind of evolution, transparency, cooperation, and accountability that give vital institutions their purpose and sustainability. In short, current AI systems are a de…

An apparent disinformation campaign falsely identified Steve Grove, CEO/publisher of The Minnesota Star Tribune, as the ICE agent who shot a Minneapolis woman (David Gilbert/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/people-are-using-ai-to-f…

People Are Using AI to Falsely Identify the Federal Agent Who Shot Renee Good
Online detectives are inaccurately claiming to have identified the federal agent who shot and killed a 37-year-old woman in Minnesota based on AI-manipulated images.

A federal judge has accused the #Trump administration of
⚠️terrorizing immigrants and recklessly violating the law
in its efforts to deport millions of people living in the country illegally.
Citing the deaths of Renee #Good and Alex #Pretti

Federal judge slams Trump administration's immigration crackdown in scathing decision
A federal judge has accused the Trump administration of terrorizing immigrants and recklessly violating the law in its efforts to deport millions of people living in the country illegally. Citing the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, the judge said in a scathing decision late Wednesday that the White House had also “extended its violence on its own citizens.” U.S. District Judge Sunshine Sykes in Riverside, California ordered the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to prov…

One more thought...
One of the more toxic elements of the whole "manosphere" thing relative to dating is the application of game theory to relationships. They've got people trying to "maximize their dating potential" or whatever, trying to find the "most attractive march" (which is it's own fucked up thing I'm not even going to dig in to). But that whole mindset is basically going to always leave you miserable.
Oh, you're single? You need a partner. Oh you have a partner? Could you get a "better" one?
It turns relationships into the endless pointless grind of capitalism. Fuck that. None of that shit makes sense. No matter how "well" you do in that game, you always feel like a loser. Everyone does. Fuck that game. Quit.
The constant desire makes you miserable and your misery makes you unlikable. When you let go of it, you leave room to experience what is instead of constantly imagining what could be.
You will always be able to imagine a better "could be" than what is now. By comparing your situation now to that "could be" you will always see your situation as bad because it's worse than your yardstick.
Is your situation good for you? Is it serving you? It can be good and it can also be possible to make it better. When was the last time you just experience your life instead of trying to strategize your way into "something better."
Throw away the yardstick. Something something Buddha.
Edit: all this is of course aside from the whole objectification thing, which is it's own whole set of fucked up. But yeah... All that shit is real bad news.

Good. Hopefully it means that they hired a few good admins.
The worst thing to happen to email was providers of other services bundling email at prices less than it should cost to provide high quality service.
It has deprofressionalized email. The pressure on email operations to cost nothing has squeezed out high competence admins and left the largest operations mysterious black boxes to the people who run them.

Ars Technica (@arstechnica@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image Rackspace raises email hosting prices by as much as 706 percent Rackspace tells Ars that hosted email is still a part of its "mission." https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/rackspace-raises-email-hosting-prices-by-as-much-as-706-percent/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Troubling signs that the Linux demographic at the Register is now made up of people yelling at the clouds.
https://linuxmom.net/@vkc/115867723149851024

I was thinking this morning, there should be more things like Goodwill, more thrift stores like that everywhere, for even LESS things going to landfills. Just people getting together, even as a trade or barter system, things like flea markets or garage sales-- people do some of this already.
Reusing things is so important, and repair, when possible-- I've been seeing some cool self-repair fix-it meetups on here, too.
As I was talking to my wife about it, and I remembered thi…

Okay here's my hot elitist opinion for the moment.
If you need the more expensive models, you're either not a very good programmer, or you're being lazy. (and sometimes there's good reasons to be lazy, I'm sure)
But it's _amazing_ how much better the cheaper, lighter, more economical and ecologically friendly LLMs are when you're actually working to craft a test environment, good guardrails and a solid inner developer loop.
You know: the same skills that make a safe, speedy environment for experimentation for people.
It's almost like throwing more brute force a things is actually brute force.

"Saturday night, a federal judge prevented the Trump administration from revoking “parole” as many as 15,000 people who don’t have legal immigration status but have been permitted to remain in the U.S. for family reunification."
- Joyce Vance

For people that use LLMs regularly this is probably not a surprise. In my own environment i have seen examples where for example Gemini 3.1 (paid version) is very good in creating math excercises, customized to your need/demand. There is large potential for GenAI in education.
"Our work provides large-scale field evidence that student-chatbot interactions provide valuable signals for proactively optimizing and personalizing student learning."

What @… says is what a lot of us have been lamenting since the ICE invasion started. Shouldn’t local police protect citizens from ICE?? Why this hasn’t happened is a really good question. Factors to consider:
- “Obstructing a federal agent” is illegal, and local police / politicians feel constrained by that (even if the agents themselves don’t seem constrained by the actual law at all, only by what they think they can get away with)
- Police can in theory cite federal agents for e.g. traffic violations or illegal plate swapping after the fact, as long as they’re not “obstructing” the agents — but how do you cite a masked person with fake plates who refuses to give ID?
- Some police are visibly supportive of ICE, chumming it up with them and giving literal fist bumps; a nontrivial subset are outright closet Nazis. A lot of people don’t really see any need to go past “ACAB” as a full explanation for all of this — and certainly The ACAB Hypothesis is…um, not really being proved false right now in Minneapolis.
- I think some police quietly resent ICE for stepping on their turf, but that does not seem to have boiled up into actual confrontation in MSP. One police leader here painted it in early Dec as “some people want to instigate a confrontation between Minneapolis Police, and that’s not going to happen.” Police culture says that police should be a neutral party in a dispute between ICE and residents, and actually protecting residents would be taking sides. (Duh, yes, taking sides that way is your literal job, you dumbasses…but I digress.)
- Some police (especially leadership) really want to get on the community’s good side after the murder of George Floyd, and see this as an opportunity, but unfortunately this has materialized entirely as non-interventionist support: “We responded to a 911 call and help a distressed resident after her husband was abducted!” “We transported children left parentless on the streets by ICE safely back to their home!” “Our officers volunteered at the food shelf!” OK, nice, good for you buddy.
So yeah, I’m wondering this too, and am bitter about it. https://tilde.zone/@n1xnx/115928447564126393

Some of you people are just so good. 😁

You could literally name your company “Evil Corp” and people would be like “Oh cool yeah, I like Evil, they make some good products”
https://helvede.net/@jwcph/116090564917522653

Yep - we very much need to nip this in the bud: https://bendigo.nz
Multinational mining corporations suck. Universally. They're *never* good for the places they go. Not even a little bit. Never. Ever. The people running them are self-selected for being among the worst of our species.
These extractive indu…

The People Are Turning Against ICE. Will the Politicians Take Notice? (The Bulwark)
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-people-are-turning-against-ice-democrats-senate-trump-minnesota-good-machado-nobel-prize?triedRedirect=true
http://www.memeorandum.com/260116/p44#a260116p44

Good Morning #Canada
The Severn River, #19 on our #CanadaRivers countdown, flows for 982 km, from Deer Lake near Kenora to Fort Severn on the shore of Hudson's Bay. It's the same length as the Albany River (next on our list) and both are the longest rivers entirely within Ontario. The Severn River drainage basin area is 102,800 km2 , a small portion of which is in Manitoba, and it has a modest volume of 645 m3/s as it meanders northeast. Historical records state that the mouth of the river was located by the English in 1631, but I'm pretty sure Indigenous people discovered it a few thousand years before that. Fort Severn was established as a trading post in 1689 by the Hudson's Bay Company but was captured by Pierre le Moyne, sieur d'Iberville in 1690. The post, rebuilt in 1759, has been in continuous operation to this day making this community one of the oldest European settlements in Ontario.
#CanadaIsAwesome #HBC
https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/settlement-immigration/the-founding-of-fort-severn

Liam’s mom dressed him in all those layers to keep her little boy warm and safe in this frigid weather,
packed his book-bag w/ everything he’d need for a good day at school,
and then our govt stole him out of their driveway.
Used her little boy as bait.
These people are monsters.
-- @thetirednurse.bsky.social

If you're using an LLM to generate passwords, STOP. For one, your chat logs are a matter of record and are open to people within the company! For another, LLMs aren't smart and don't know what they're doing, so that password isn't guaranteed to be any good. Just use apg or something

“Asking an AI chatbot a question consumes a great deal more energy than finding the answer via simple web search or calculator. It adds extra demand for no good reason... a bit like driving to the shops in an SUV instead of riding your bike.”
Or driving any kind of car. AI, like cars, aims to reconfigure everyday life in a way that’s vastly more energy-hungry and polluting… and profitable for a few.

It's been quite a day today. Quite ... challenging. But with a good end.
The mood of this photo is now exactly what I needed: a calm, chill hike in low hanging clouds. Just a few people - no stress, no expectations, no talking, no phone ...
#landscape #photo

RE: https://mastodon.social/@AltTextHealthCheck/116043212772197701
In my experience, people who care about accessibility are usually good folks. So if you’re looking for a good Mastodon instance to join, this is likely a good guide.

This piece by @… just hits different. So good.
“The "problem" was that creating art—real, human, meaningful writing—is slow. It is expensive. It is unpredictable. And it is diverse. It requires dealing with people. People with traumas, people with political opinions, people with voices that don't fit into a corporate style guide. [……

Good message on using fear as a guide. And even people you think are fearless can also have anxiety being in public / public speaking.
A little bit uncomfortable
In hindsight, these scary (and occasionally terrifying) moments are the ones that we all learn the most from. - DR. Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com
https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2025/12/a-little-bit-uncomfortable.html

Graney: Klint Kubiak wins people over with hard work, not words https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/sports-columns/ed-graney/graney-klint-kubiak-wins-people-over-with-hard-work-not-words-3618343/

In Good Hands: Conversations With A Fertility Surgeon
Dr Alex Alexander will use expertise in his three fields — fertility, gynaecology and obstetrics —to give some clarity and hope to people facing infertility, as well as share his experience with managing high-risk pregnancies and complex gynaecological concerns...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory:

Why do people use cocksucker as an insult? Don’t tempt me with a good time.

Hyattsville residents protest ICE murder of Renee Nicole Good
https://streetcarsuburbs.news/hyattsville-residents-protest-ice-shooting-of-minneapolis-driver/

Hyattsville residents protest ICE shooting of Minneapolis driver
Sunday, Jan. 11, Hyattsville residents gathered to hold a vigil and demonstration in memory of Renee Nicole Good and read the names of 30 others who they said died at the hands of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or in ICE detention in recent years. Organizers say 350 people gathered at the empty Prince […]

A lot of arguments in community chats broke out about who was supposed to be where, about what community was asking for people to show up or steer clear, about age-old militant vs. pacifist debates that have basically been stuck on loop since the 1960s (and are, IMO, just •incredibly• boring at this point, sorry).
But that’s organizing. It’s messy. People argue. People find consensus. People chaotically self-organize despite lack of consensus. People make good things happen.
And in the end, the people who believe in inclusion and reaching across differences and •building• community instead of destroying it — they have an intrinsic advantage.
7/

Yesterday I finished "The Other Side of Tomorrow" written by Tina Cho and illustrated by Deb JJ Lee. Lee's "In Limbo" was an excellent graphic memoir, and this similarly has wonderful art, although I didn't make the connection until checking the authors after reading to the end.
This book is a realistic fictional account of two childrens' escape from North Korea via China, Laos, and ultimately Thailand where they could declare themselves refugees at a US embassy and get sponsored to live in America. Along the way they're helped by various members of the Asian Underground Railroad. I'll avoid spoilers but yet definitely encounter difficulties along the way.
The ending definitely hits different now (while also accentuating my disgust with the current US regime). Like "Libertad" that I also finished recently, the "escape to the US at the end" plot line is going to become less prevalent going forward, although Libertad involved a good measure of complexity around that point.
I was a bit disappointed in one of the later plot points where a different and more-real-world-probable turn of events could have served as a better message for society, with the "lucky" outcome as written reinforcing regressive notions of family, and as an ex-Christian the Christian elements of the story made me feel a way. I'm an agnostic, not an atheist though, and can respect the idea that those willing to risk torture and death for their faith have every right to stand by it and take inspiration from it. Most (very valid) critiques of big western Church institutions just don't apply to underground churches in northern China who are helping people escape the horrors of deep fascism.
Overall a really good book.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

Last year Congress voted unanimously to force Trump to end his illegal cover up and release the Epstein files in one of the most significant rebukes of American President in our history.
In recent months both Houses of Congress voted to repeal his illegal, destructive tariffs.
Yesterday the Supreme Court ended his ridiculous “Liberation Day” tariffs
and reminded him their were limits to his powers.
The people of Minnesota have been standing up for their neighbors, …

The State Of The Union Is That We've All Had Enough Of Trump's Bullshit
We had a very good week everyone. Congratulations! Let's make next week even better

Robin Vos has finally done something good for the people of Wisconsin. He’s announced his retirement. The announcement has brought joy to so many.

In the time I've been offline, I've been doing a lot and feeling a lot more mentally healthy. I've been exploring nomadnet a bit, looking at reticulum. I'm definitely going to go back to my break and being online much less regularly.
I actually totally forgot about the anniversary of the shooting, which is the first time that's happened since... uh... the shooting, I think.
I've definitely realized that, on some level, I've definitely used Mastodon (and formerly Twitter) as a coping mechanism, often in order to deal with the stressful things that I've found out about on Mastodon or Twitter.
But, again, none of those things really change our core job: build community. And that's part of what I've been neglecting, and what I can focus on more when I'm not spending as much time talking to people all over the world indirectly. Like, I can just chat directly with folks and talk about this shit.
Yeah, I do think there's value in this community. I don't think it's really screaming into the void (at least, not most of the time). But I know that I need the balance to be way farther on the side of direct engagement with comrades doing and building.
So that's what I'm gonna go back to. I feel as though it's a good sign that with all the writing about getting shot that I've been doing, and all the thinking about that, that the actual anniversary of the shooting I'm actually just thinking about bread.
And that seems like a good note to leave on. I'm gonna go back to some hacker shit.

“This workforce has been fundamentally traumatized in the way that this leadership team said that they intended to do at the outset,”
Max Stier, Partnership for Public Service’s CEO, told Government Executive.
“That’s not good for anyone. It’s bad for the workforce, it’s fundamentally bad for the American people, and it will lead to us to be less safe, healthy and prosperous as a society.
The things that we want and need from government are not what we’ll get.”
The su…

Defense workers' morale has plunged under Trump, survey finds
Only 9% of Army civilians found Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s leadership motivating.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@boztek/115885366031881432
It’s so good to sometimes read about people with a true moral compass that stand for what the believe in. It’s uplifting to see people do the right thing even when it’s difficult.

Battery tech people: do Energizer Ultimate Lithium AA batteries contain any kind of internal protection / fusing mechanism like good 18650s do? Or do they ever fail short or something?
Just pulled four out of a device. Three tested good at 1.5V and the fourth measured absolutely zero. Not like low, no voltage at all.

Mark's fight against cancer has been tough & now he faces even more challenges. Mark & his wife are the quintessential dance parents. They've been a part of the APA family for years & they're good people. Please do what you can to help. #DanceDad #dancefamily

me: *low whistles*
me: "Damn, check out THOSE bollards!"
8yo: "What?"
me: "These metal things. they're nice, aren't they? No drivers parking on this sidewalk!"
8yo: *lays down on one*
8yo: "Yeah, they're good, I guess."
#SafeStreets

Legal activist Emily Galvan Almanza chronicles the many ways in which the justice system targets the poor.
It’s not news that judicial outcomes are often tied to the wealth and influence of a defendant:
Not only do the well-to-do have the resources to hire good lawyers,
but juries themselves tend to be made up of older, wealthier, white people.
A predictable result, writes Galvin Almanza, is that defendants of color, represented by appointed public defenders, pull lo…

THE PRICE OF MERCY | Kirkus Reviews
A legal activist chronicles the many ways in which the justice system targets the poor.

Jonathan E. Ross, 43, who murdered Renee Nicole Good, is an Enforcement and Removal Operations agent with ICE.
He has been granted “absolute immunity” by the fascist USian regime.
There’s a reason we have a system of courts and laws for dispensing justice. It’s to stop people from dispensing it using the barrel of a gun.
🤷‍♂️

Who is Jonathan Ross? The ICE agent who killed Renee Good
The man who shot Renee Nicole Good is a 43-year-old firearms instructor who appears to have defended white supremacists online.

Safeguarding Venezuelan Oil Revenue for the Good of the American and Venezuelan People (President Donald J. Trump/The White House)
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/01/safeguarding-venezuelan-oil-revenue-for-the-good-of-the-american-and-venezuelan-people/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260110/p56#a260110p56

The people building LLMs are trying to kill all humans. Literally. They are exterminationists who want to replace human life with AI and upload their brains to the cloud. They're AI death cultists.
They are the enemy. Anything that empowers them, at all, in any way, is unethical and suicidal.
I don't think admitting that there can be good use cases for LLMs does that, because the use cases are not being served by all this training. The *reason* they keep training is that they're trying to make LLMs do something that isn't possible.... because they're cultists.
That's the point, IMHO.

Regardless this good blog about the many aspects that make the midterms difficult to manipulate, I am not as optimistic as the author. The bottomline is Trump and his allies will pay with their freedom and personal wealth if democrats win the midterms and the elections after that, they simply can't allow that to happen... It puzzles me that after everything that already happened under Trump some people don't see this.

Worry, Don't Panic, Over Trump's Efforts to Subvert the Elections
America's system is quite foolproof but he can still try to delegitimize it

Good Morning #Canada
It's a balmy -22°C here in beautiful Belle Ewart Ontario. Apparently, with the wind chill, it would feel like -26°C if I were to stupidly wander outside. Now before you start reporting colder temperatures in your area - it ain't a competition people - let's remember our country's coldest day in history.
Canada's coldest recorded temperature was a staggering -63°C in Snag, Yukon on February 3, 1947. The temperature was so extreme it broke thermometers and made Snag famous for the record for North America's coldest spot, caused by stalled Siberian air. Other extremely cold locations included Fort Vermilion, AB (-60.6°C) and Old Crow, YT (-59.4°C). Nobody was tonguing steel poles that day.
#CanadaIsAwesome #Weather
https://www.readersdigest.ca/travel/canada/coldest-day-in-canadian-history/

RE: https://vis.social/@infobeautiful/116092915176228917
Last time I posted this, I got a little spate of exceptionally low-quality replies about how it’s actually a good thing to misrepresent risk and old people will die anyway and who cares if they do.
I hope those people see this again and get even angrier.

FBI opened probe on Minneapolis shooting; -- but none exists now, Justice Dept. says
An agent in Minnesota conducted an initial review of the shooting of Renee Good and determined that sufficient grounds existed to open a civil rights probe into the actions of Jonathan Ross -- the officer who shot Good,
according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The existence of the civil rights investigation stands in sharp contra…

FBI opened probe on Minneapolis shooting; none exists now, Justice Dept. says
After the death of Renée Good in Minneapolis, FBI agents launched a civil rights probe into the shooting. The Justice Department says no such case now exists.

Francesca Hong interview…
“This campaign is about reclaiming the power of sewer socialism — how much it delivered for communities in terms of climate and clean water and investing in public education. This was a time where people saw that there can be a government for good.”
https://jacobin.…

Francesca Hong Is a Socialist Running for Wisconsin Governor
In Wisconsin, state assembly member and democratic socialist Francesca Hong has announced she is running for governor. We spoke to her about the campaign.

After the whole Adam Something "dating advice for leftist men" thing, I realized I should probably write something about that. I didn't, but I realized I should. Here I am sort of getting around to it.
I had a friend call me an "elder" at one point. I was like 35 at that time, but like... a lot of old leftists are just dead or in prison, so we take what we can get I guess. Being also an elder in the sense that I'm an elder millennial, who is also a parent and married for almost 10 years and all that, I guess I'm technically qualified.
So here it is, dating advice for (straight cis) leftist men:
1. Don't.
That's it, actually. That's the whole thing. Let me explain a bit.
First of all, this is dating advice for neuroatypical folks. We're way overrepresented in both extremes because this system wasn't built for us. And that's who is *the most* confused by all the relationship stuff, and most likely to try to apply all this masculinity/manosphere bullshit. I'm also talking a bit from experience here, as a neruo-spicy trying to "figure out" how to date within a paradigm entirely built around neurotypicals and their relationships. It's garbage. Throw it out. There's nothing worth saving.
His video had some line comparing not having sex to your house being on fire. I'm not gonna bother to quote it because I'm busy with actual life. But like, that's exactly what I'm talking about. I recognize that and it's horribly destructive. Men who buy in to patriarchy actually believe this, because those men value themselves based on (hetro) sex. Yeah, if you think you're worthless because you aren't "getting laid" then yeah, you're gonna feel like that's an emergency.
"Dating" as a paradigm turns humans into roles. It dehumanizes us all, and thus makes human connection much harder. It is a game that, like thermonuclear war, can only be won by not playing.
When you abandon "dating" and just act like a human, everything starts to be easier. There's no such thing as being "friend zoned" because you're just friends. Sometimes friendships become other things, sometimes they don't. It doesn't actually matter, because if you're actually there for friendship then you don't *need* anything else.
My grandma, at 98 I think, gave me some advice. My grandparents always got along well, and were married for enough decades that I listened really closely. She told me I should just do things I loved to do and everything else would work itself out.
And it kind of did.
I understand the fear, the idea that you'll die alone. I get that. I get the loneliness. It all hits a lot harder when you have ADHD emotions and past trauma. I get that. But that fear is self-manifesting. When you build your confidence, when you don't *need* to be "in a relationship," you have more room to actually build relationships. For me, dating was dehumanizing. When I abandoned that, I was able to actually be a good partner, and I was able to find my partner.
I would advise against marriage as well, but we did get married for legal reasons. It can still be hard to maintain that, to see each other as people rather than roles. That becomes extra hard as parents. But the times that we cut through that are the times we're closest. Those are the times when it becomes easier to remember that we're both humans and all human relationships need tending.
Roles don't need to be tended because they are classifications. Classifications are static. But relationships between humans are not. Humans are messy and chaotic. Humans have all kinds of complex needs and desires.
So yeah, don't date. Just be a human and see what happens. Maybe google "relationship anarchy" and see where it takes you.
If you have ADHD, it can be especially useful to understand that relationships with neurotypical folks can be especially difficult. Assume you're incompatible with 90% of the population as your baseline, and you'll start to understand why the standard "dating" thing has made you feel so alienated and miserable.
Neurotypical folks generally have no idea that atypicality exists, much less how it impacts relationships. Having to conform to a neurotypical relationship just adds additional mental strain unless you find someone (really special) who can do at least some of the work.
The ADHD thing was especially important for me. There were so many things I was told to do in specific ways by neurotypicals that never worked for me. Their advice always made me feel like a failure. When I was finally diagnosed, I realized they were just giving advice for the wrong type of brain. It was advice I could never use. Basically all dating advice I ever got fell into this same category.
That's my braindump. Maybe I'll develop it more in the future, but I'm busy so maybe not. I hope it helps someone who is struggling like I was.

I'm sure algorithms designed by people with biases and an agenda, based on data from people with biases and an agenda, marketed by people with biases and an agenda and used by people with biases and an agenda will act perfectly neutrally!
Anyway here's a good read on epistemic vigilance in [commercial] LLMs (tl;dr it's not possible) https://bsky.app/profile/mjcrockett.bsky.social/post/3mfrbukoy5c2s

DHS Officer Seen on Video Kicking Memorial Candle for Renee Nicole Good, Woman Killed by ICE: 'Don't Give a F--' (Liam Quinn/People)
https://people.com/dhs-officer-seen-kicking-over-candle-at-memorial-for-renee-nicole-good-11881658
http://www.memeorandum.com/260108/p102#a260108p102

It was when ICE murdered some of those helpers that our city catapulted to the front of global news.
But •who• were they helping? Don’t forget them.
We’re not just here to get justice for Renee Good and Alex Pretti. We’re here to get justice for all the people they died trying to protect.

The U.S. Department of Justice said Sunday it is investigating a group of protesters in Minnesota who disrupted services at a church where a local official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement apparently serves as a pastor.
A livestreamed video posted on the Facebook page of Black Lives Matter Minnesota -- one of the protest’s organizers -- shows a group of people interrupting services at the Cities Church in St. Paul by chanting
“ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good.”

DOJ vows to press charges after activists disrupt church where Minnesota ICE official is a pastor
The U.S. Department of Justice says it is investigating a group of protesters in Minnesota who disrupted services at a church where a local official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement apparently serves as a pastor. A livestreamed video posted on the Facebook page of Black Lives Matter Minnesota shows a group of people interrupting services at the Cities Church in St. Paul by chanting “ICE out.” The protesters allege that one of the church’s pastors also leads the local ICE fiel…

Adelaide Festival board resigns and Adelaide Writers’ Week cancelled after 180 authors pull out in protest of Zionist board decision to disinvite Palestinian author.
Remember this, if you’re a Zionist: like the Nazis before you, you are committing genocide, you are on the wrong side of history, and – as long as there are people of good moral character and conscience to oppose you – you will not succeed. Your only allies are the MAGAs of the world and those too spineless to stand up to …

Adelaide Writers' Week cancelled after week of escalating controversy around author Randa Abdel-Fattah
The remaining members of the Adelaide Festival board will step down and this year's Writers' Week event has been cancelled, after days of furore regarding the decision to cancel a scheduled appearance by Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah.

wonder how these people who vague-reply “why would you use Apple products” when you post about good or bad things with Apple products fare at parties

The fascist who killed Heather Heyer at Unite the Right helped turn the tides against the last Trump administration. He said there were "very fine people on both sides." The resistance grew, antifa doxxing fascists started getting those fash fired.
But some of those fash didn't stop. They kept organizing their terror cells. The fash who killed Heyer was with a group called Vanguard America. Patriot Front is a Nazi group that split off from Vanguard America. They started terrorizing people by loading up in box trucks and piling out for spontaneous marches.
That box truck tactic probably sounds familiar. Patriot Front basically disappeared at the same time that ICE started recruiting hard.
Let me make it more clear. The very same Nazis from UTR who killed Heather Heyer, who Trump called "very fine people," are now employees of DHS. They've been carrying out the ethnic cleansing they always dreamed of, and they're being paid by the government, *with your tax dollars*, to do it. And now, just like in Charlottesville, they've murdered an unarmed protestor.
This feels similar because it is. These are the same people killing daughters and mothers. Killing unarmed protestors, out of rage not fear, then lying and claiming self defense. This is the same tactic it's always been. This is the same thing they've always done.
It seems like we may have reached the Heather Heyer point of this administration early with Renee Good. Now would be a good time for everyone to get into the streets and stay there until this is over. Everyone turned the tides before, and now he's so much weaker.
This can all be over if we fight like hell to end it.
#USPol

As Trumpism and technology erode our shared understanding of the world,
ordinary people in Minneapolis put their lives on their line to record the truth.
https://www.theverge.com/policy/859055/minneapolis-renee-good-ice-shooting

Reality still matters
Technology and Trumpism have been eroding our shared reality. The killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis shows ordinary people still believe truth is worthwhile.

What Fabio said…
(If you see the antisemitic Zionist meme accounts Fabio is talking about – yes, they’re about as antisemitic as you can get as they conflate being Jewish with supporting Israel and the genocide of the Palestinian people – please report them for antisemitism. Good rule of thumb to remember: Zionism is – and always has been – antisemitic. Let’s make sure we implement a zero tolerance policy on the fediverse for genocide deniers and antisemitic Zionists.)

Fabio Manganiello (@fabio@manganiello.eu)
@hydra0179 https://factually.co/fact-checks/military/israel-thermal-weapons-gaza-evaporated-palestinians-mk-84-217fc9You abhorrent propaganda asset polluting the Web with dumb memes, don’t you feel...

Money drives people nuts.
So can families.
Together they are combustible,
need and greed mixing with primal resentments and rivalries.
This is why, like the “marriage plot”, the inheritance plot is sometimes a staple of fiction.
Today’s tetchily unequal age is one of those times:
witness
“How to Make a Killing”,
a droll film released in America on February 20th and elsewhere soon.

'How to Make a Killing' Review - A Smart Yet Somewhat Familiar Social Class Thriller
Glen Powell weaponizes his good looks and charm for nefarious deeds in John Patton Ford's clever class warfare thriller, How to Make a Killing.

I was in the process of writing a short story when all this talk of #LLM spellchecking came up. So I wrote a story that you can't actually use an LLM spellchecker on because it breaks them:
#Writing #Fiction #SolarPunk

This general category of question from @… is something I wonder about a lot. For many/most human beings, hearing good information and even •knowing• it to be true just doesn’t seem to outweigh having bad information in one’s face over and over.
I know there will a Mastodonian urge to reply with “well ••I•• never succumb to that” or “Here’s how I avoid that,” and…good for you, I guess? (Also, really?) But not the question. The question is how we communicate to people who •are• succumbing.
1/ https://soc.mod-12.com/@griotspeak/116076433717237685

Meta is putting a "Name Tag" feature in Ray-Bans
- facial recognition through the glasses' camera.
You look at someone, AI tells you who they are.
In an internal document, the company wrote that the timing is good
because civil society groups are busy with politics
and won't cause problems.

Lukasz Olejnik (@lukaszolejnik.bsky.social)
First they'll give it to blind people, because who's going to attack technology for the blind, or people with hearing problems (like me)? I admit that! Privacy risk review procedures have been loosened. 15, 10, 5 years ago this would have been a major controversy. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-recognition-smart-glasses.html

Over the past year, the biggest victories against Trump have come
not from the elites or institutions,
but from college kids and office workers, cat ladies and Uber drivers.
When Trump tried to censor Jimmy Kimmel, it was the pumpkin latte drinkers whose ire forced ABC to bring him back on.
When the president sent National Guard troops to terrorize cities like Portland, D.C., Los Angeles and Chicago, people who still wear skinny jeans turned off Netflix, inflated the…

Resistance moms will save us
Renee Good's courage shows our best hope lays with ordinary people

Increasingly the victims of the administration's campaign of terror are people just trying to survive when their daily life is upended by the presence of masked federal agents.
Those agents are ambushing immigrants after court appearances,
crashing into drivers while trying to escape protestors,
or abducting children if they seemingly impede the arrest of their own parents by dint of simply existing;
The people in the cities in which this is happening are just t…

When Everyday Life Becomes Domestic Terrorism | Defector
People are back out on the streets of Minneapolis again, they are barricading the roads and tending curbside memorials, and they are asking for someone to make sense of a reckless and unnecessary death at the hands of law enforcement. On Wednesday, Renee Macklin Good was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement…