Tootfinder

#LB Lindíssimo este desenho. Esse @… é mesmo muito talentoso.
https://

I think this is a good call!
”The presence of Expert Generalists crossing the competency boundaries can also increase knowledge transfer between competency groups, increasing everyone's sympathy for related domains. This mechanism also encourages specialists to explore the Expert Generalist skill for themselves.”
https://

Expert Generalists
Being an Expert Generalist should be treated as a first-class skill, one that can be assessed and taught.

Air quality map of the entire planet. Apparently Earth is mostly not a good place to breathe right now.
Is this…normal? I haven’t seen this kind of simultaneous global AQI map before, and wonder how typical this is for August (in the past decade, century, millennium).
(Source: https://www.iqair.com/us/air-quality-map Turn off stations & fires on the right side to get the image below.)

> [Miyamoto] views games as ‘products,’ not ‘works of art.’ I think [his] perspective is what leads to game development that’s more aligned with the user.
Interesting lens to view art vs product: my interpretation is that art is for the artist with emphasis on the act of creation whereas a product is for the end user and the emphasis on the final experience.

Tom Brady roasts Jets fans during Patriots statue ceremony https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6543432/2025/08/09/tom-brady-patriots-statue-jets-roast/

Nuclear Throne on mobile is just as good as consoles. Even with my big dumb hands. Very responsive.
#NuclearThrone #roguelites #TwinStickShooters

Bad things are happening, but so are good ones. Demonstrations and protests across the country this last weekend did not get much press coverage from large outlets, but they happened. People are showing up. And they show us that Americans are not going gently into that good night, but are raging against the dying of the light. And more and more people each day are organizing and pushing back against this autocratic breakthrough.

Presidential Incapacity
We know already he can't do good things. Wag the Dog is a movie that was being made as Bill Clinton was doing the things he would later be impeached for. The impeachment timed out as taking place roughly when the movie came out. The movie depicts an American President

At first hearing of this place the dog-phobic in me noped out but it looks like they’ve got some good rules/policies in place. Milwaukee dog people who eat sandwiches this one’s for you.
https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2025/07/05/dining-rileys-offers-up-s…

Dining: Riley’s Offers Up Sandwiches, Space for Fido
Dog-friendly business has a clear niche in Third Ward.

The five genders:
Misses
Mister
Good day
Mr. Diverse
Mrs. Diverse

Long; central Massachusetts colonial history
Today on a whim I visited a site in Massachusetts marked as "Huguenot Fort Ruins" on OpenStreetMaps. I drove out with my 4-year-old through increasingly rural central Massachusetts forests & fields to end up on a narrow street near the top of a hill beside a small field. The neighboring houses had huge lawns, some with tractors.
Appropriately for this day and this moment in history, the history of the site turns out to be a microcosm of America. Across the field beyond a cross-shaped stone memorial stood an info board with a few diagrams and some text. The text of the main sign (including typos/misspellings) read:
"""
Town Is Formed
Early in the 1680's, interest began to generate to develop a town in the area west of Natick in the south central part of the Commonwealth that would be suitable for a settlement. A Mr. Hugh Campbell, a Scotch merchant of Boston petitioned the court for land for a colony. At about the same time, Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton also were desirous of obtaining land for a settlement. A claim was made for all lands west of the Blackstone River to the southern land of Massachusetts to a point northerly of the Springfield Road then running southwesterly until it joined the southern line of Massachusetts.
Associated with Dudley and Stoughton was Robert Thompson of London, England, Dr. Daniel Cox and John Blackwell, both of London and Thomas Freak of Hannington, Wiltshire, as proprietors. A stipulation in the acquisition of this land being that within four years thirty families and an orthodox minister settle in the area. An extension of this stipulation was granted at the end of the four years when no group large enough seemed to be willing to take up the opportunity.
In 1686, Robert Thompson met Gabriel Bernor and learned that he was seeking an area where his countrymen, who had fled their native France because of the Edict of Nantes, were desirous of a place to live. Their main concern was to settle in a place that would allow them freedom of worship. New Oxford, as it was the so-named, at that time included the larger part of Charlton, one-fourth of Auburn, one-fifth of Dudley and several square miles of the northeast portion of Southbridge as well as the easterly ares now known as Webster.
Joseph Dudley's assessment that the area was capable of a good settlement probably was based on the idea of the meadows already established along with the plains, ponds, brooks and rivers. Meadows were a necessity as they provided hay for animal feed and other uses by the settlers. The French River tributary books and streams provided a good source for fishing and hunting. There were open areas on the plains as customarily in November of each year, the Indians burnt over areas to keep them free of underwood and brush. It appeared then that this area was ready for settling.
The first seventy-five years of the settling of the Town of Oxford originally known as Manchaug, embraced three different cultures. The Indians were known to be here about 1656 when the Missionary, John Eliott and his partner Daniel Gookin visited in the praying towns. Thirty years later, in 1686, the Huguenots walked here from Boston under the guidance of their leader Isaac Bertrand DuTuffeau. The Huguenot's that arrived were not peasants, but were acknowledged to be the best Agriculturist, Wine Growers, Merchant's, and Manufacter's in France. There were 30 families consisting of 52 people. At the time of their first departure (10 years), due to Indian insurrection, there were 80 people in the group, and near their Meetinghouse/Church was a Cemetery that held 20 bodies. In 1699, 8 to 10 familie's made a second attempt to re-settle, failing after only four years, with the village being completely abandoned in 1704.
The English colonist made their way here in 1713 and established what has become a permanent settlement.
"""
All that was left of the fort was a crumbling stone wall that would have been the base of a higher wooden wall according to a picture of a model (I didn't think to get a shot of that myself). Only trees and brush remain where the multi-story main wooden building was.
This story has so many echoes in the present:
- The rich colonialists from Boston & London agree to settle the land, buying/taking land "rights" from the colonial British court that claimed jurisdiction without actually having control of the land. Whether the sponsors ever actually visited the land themselves I don't know. They surely profited somehow, whether from selling on the land rights later or collecting taxes/rent or whatever, by they needed poor laborers to actually do the work of developing the land (& driving out the original inhabitants, who had no say in the machinations of the Boston court).
- The land deal was on condition that there capital-holders who stood to profit would find settlers to actually do the work of colonizing. The British crown wanted more territory to be controlled in practice not just in theory, but they weren't going to be the ones to do the hard work.
- The capital-holders actually failed to find enough poor suckers to do their dirty work for 4 years, until the Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, were desperate enough to accept their terms.
- Of course, the land was only so ripe for settlement because of careful tending over centuries by the natives who were eventually driven off, and whose land management practices are abandoned today. Given the mention of praying towns (& dates), this was after King Phillip's war, which resulted in at least some forced resettlement of native tribes around the area, but the descendants of those "Indians" mentioned in this sign are still around. For example, this is the site of one local band of Nipmuck, whose namesake lake is about 5 miles south of the fort site: #LandBack.

Series D, Episode 04 - Stardrive
DAYNA: Vila. This place is like some kind of underground maze.
VILA: We seem to have hit on some sort of a hangar. This is not a good place to be, Dayna.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/404/263 B7B2

I'm watching The Good Place 3x04 "Jeremy Bearimy" on Go because it's missing on NETFLIX #netflix #TheGoodPlace #trakt

About a year too late I'd say, but I'm sure she made a good buck running the place deep into the ground…
https://www.turing.ac.uk/news/dr-jean-innes-step-down-ceo-alan-turing-institute

Well, the good news is that it’s over. Run/walk staying in HR zone 2 and I think I was walking more than running. My fitness is 💩 right now. The humidity about killed me, even at 0730. I should have gone out earlier.
I’m at my in-laws place in Tennessee for the holiday weekend, of which this beautiful neighborhood has so few mature trees. As such, the sun gleefully poured out its angry menace upon me the entire time and I suffered. I am meant for cold weather.

So many people are scared of underwater sea creatures. Only place with good chances to house alien life in our solar system is the moon Europa, under countless of layers of ice in an entirely underwater world awaits.
We are absolutely not ready.

What you truly need to vibe and thrive is simple, some good food to nourish your body, clean water to keep your spirit flowing, a little movement to keep the energy dancing, and a cozy spot to rest your head. When you’re living in community, sharing the love and looking out for each other, all that falls beautifully into place.
What you don’t need is a giant screen flashing noise at you, the newest shiny gadgets or games, or getting caught up in the endless swirl of political drama. Re…

I've been playing through "Haiku, the Robot" recently and seeing this message in the Catacombs got a good laugh out of me. No, Dylan, sadly it's not! 😅
#HaikuTheRobot #HollowKnight

I can't tell you how annoying this was to write. I sacrificed a lot of features I had already implemented (colour-coding of VM state, context-sensitive menus, etc.) because I just could not get the UI to repaint after returning from the virtual serial console with them in place. Even something as simple as adding shortcut prompts to the actions menu broke things. Extremely annoying, but console access is much more important, so I went with the MVP: good is the enemy of adequate.

America Is a Good Place and Worth Fighting For (Jonathan V. Last/The Bulwark)
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/america-is-a-good-place-and-worth-fighting-for
http://www.memeorandum.com/250718/p70#a250718p70

@… IMO it *should* in an ideal world reside somewhere entirely outside of any nation state. Like DC is supposed to not be in any state.
But barring our leaders ever actually getting together and figuring that out (Fat chance), outside the U.S. would be a good place to start.

@… ohh yeah! good stuff

Just wrote an article about Presidential Incapacity, and you can read it (and while you're there, please subscribe to get articles and satire and other good stuff I write and make first).
https://stuff.davidaugust.com/presidential-incapacity/

Presidential Incapacity
We know already he can't do good things. Wag the Dog is a movie that was being made as Bill Clinton was doing the things he would later be impeached for. The impeachment timed out as taking place roughly when the movie came out. The movie depicts an American President

I'm going on a 4 day vacation to the north sea tomorrow and I think I'm taking the @… phone.
The 25.06 release is the one where finally everything clicks into place for me. It's super stable. I can even take pictures! Not the prettiest, but good enough to capture memories.

Chris Arnade was one of my favorite followers on the old place. One of the very few people who thinks very deeply, but also outside of their own silos, to create a cross-disciplinary theory of the world. One of the few people who is truly willing to see the world as it is.
The solutions to our problems will never come from one realm of expertise, but only by synthesizing a strategy from a more holistic world view.

How to Build the Perfect City
Epsilon Theory contributor and all-around good human Chris Arnade pauses from walking the world to take a first cut at a grand unified theory of

Good morning from a rainy place! Friday morning, the weekend is near!

We took a break from unpacking and organizing and did tour of local greenhouses and garden centres. We came across this humble establishment in Bradford that takes up 10 acres of growing and retail space. My wife said she has found her new favourite place. The Bad News - it's too close, only 15 minutes by car. The Good News - we have a tiny yard, so we might not go broke.
#Gardening #Zone5a

Explicit formulas for the Bessel models: odd general spin groups
Yu Xin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03278 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03278

Explicit formulas for the Bessel models: odd general spin groups
Let $F$ be a non-archimedean local field of characteristic zero. In this work, we study the Bessel model for $\GSpin_{2n+1}$, extending a result of Bump, Friedberg and Furusawa. In particular, we obtain explicit formulas for the unramified Bessel functions. These formulas have a global application to a Rankin--Selberg integral of the $L$-function for $\GSpin_{2n+1} \times \GL_n$, generalizing a construction of Furusawa. We compute the local factor of the global integral at a good place. Moreove…

I'm pretty sure that we are in the part of The Good Place where Jason figures out that they are in the bad place.

@… my friend should be bridged from @kaludiasays.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy but they do not appear! I can't find a good place to ask why and track down nay issues.

Went to a pizza place in the Bronx that I had never been to before to get a calzone. After paying for it, the guy said, "See you tomorrow!" as if he knew me & I went there all the time. The calzone was very good... Maybe he knows something I don't.

Security measures for Gen #AI seem to increase all around, which is overall good.
It's just sad to think about WHY statements like "Gemini 2.5 Flash Image does not currently support editing images of children" are necessary in the first place.
#nanobanana

If #AI is allegedly so good for worker productivity and improving efficiency across organizations, why are the AI companies making their own employees work 72 hour workweeks?
If the tech actually helped them get more done faster, wouldn’t they have SHORTER workweeks? Why aren’t they using their own tools to help their employees?
Context: #Anthropic earlier this year, and they told me that this is a job with far longer work hours than any other place they’ve worked at.
They are also pulling 60 hour weeks there, they have zero tolerance for remote work, because the culture is “you don’t want to be left behind”. This person basically disappeared from social life once they took this job. I had never seen them so tired before.

Good luck to those receiving their A-level results today. From personal experience - if you don't get the place you hoped for, you could still get the place that's best.
#AlevelResults

Just read this post by @… on an optimistic AGI future, and while it had some interesting and worthwhile ideas, it's also in my opinion dangerously misguided, and plays into the current AGI hype in a harmful way.
https://social.coop/@eloquence/114940607434005478
My criticisms include:
- Current LLM technology has many layers, but the biggest most capable models are all tied to corporate datacenters and require inordinate amounts of every and water use to run. Trying to use these tools to bring about a post-scarcity economy will burn up the planet. We urgently need more-capable but also vastly more efficient AI technologies if we want to use AI for a post-scarcity economy, and we are *not* nearly on the verge of this despite what the big companies pushing LLMs want us to think.
- I can see that permacommons.org claims a small level of expenses on AI equates to low climate impact. However, given current deep subsidies on place by the big companies to attract users, that isn't a great assumption. The fact that their FAQ dodges the question about which AI systems they use isn't a great look.
- These systems are not free in the same way that Wikipedia or open-source software is. To run your own model you need a data harvesting & cleaning operation that costs millions of dollars minimum, and then you need millions of dollars worth of storage & compute to train & host the models. Right now, big corporations are trying to compete for market share by heavily subsidizing these things, but it you go along with that, you become dependent on them, and you'll be screwed when they jack up the price to a profitable level later. I'd love to see open dataset initiatives SBD the like, and there are some of these things, but not enough yet, and many of the initiatives focus on one problem while ignoring others (fine for research but not the basis for a society yet).
- Between the environmental impacts, the horrible labor conditions and undercompensation of data workers who filter the big datasets, and the impacts of both AI scrapers and AI commons pollution, the developers of the most popular & effective LLMs have a lot of answer for. This project only really mentions environmental impacts, which makes me think that they're not serious about ethics, which in turn makes me distrustful of the whole enterprise.
- Their language also ends up encouraging AI use broadly while totally ignoring several entire classes of harm, so they're effectively contributing to AI hype, especially with such casual talk of AGI and robotics as if embodied AGI were just around the corner. To be clear about this point: we are several breakthroughs away from AGI under the most optimistic assumptions, and giving the impression that those will happen soon plays directly into the hands of the Sam Altmans of the world who are trying to make money off the impression of impending huge advances in AI capabilities. Adding to the AI hype is irresponsible.
- I've got a more philosophical criticism that I'll post about separately.
I do think that the idea of using AI & other software tools, possibly along with robotics and funded by many local cooperatives, in order to make businesses obsolete before they can do the same to all workers, is a good one. Get your local library to buy a knitting machine alongside their 3D printer.
Lately I've felt too busy criticizing AI to really sit down and think about what I do want the future to look like, even though I'm a big proponent of positive visions for the future as a force multiplier for criticism, and this article is inspiring to me in that regard, even if the specific project doesn't seem like a good one.

I have a herring gull with a broken leg sheltering in my rear garden. It's found a soft place in the shade to rest and has the bad leg stretched out behind it (perhaps like a kind of natural splint?). I gave it a good feed and there's water, so I hope it will recover.

After turning on both users and advertisers, tech companies only had one more place to go: employees. Individual productivity (AI-powered or otherwise) will not save you, because the issue is not performance.
In return, employees rightly stopped caring.
But unless you care, you can't do good design.
https://

Fear vs Play
Fear is choking out thoughtfulness in tech, and it can't be replaced with "more productivity" — because productivity is not what motivates corporate layoffs.

Interesting observation by Langdon Winner regarding technological transformation: “by the time the issue of ‘use’ comes up for consideration at all, many of the most interesting questions involved in how technologies are constituted and how they affect what we do are settled or sub-merged.”
This is happening right now with #GenAI .

Try not to laugh reading #Trump's words about #ElonMusk:
"I'm amazed that he's endorsing me because that can't be good for him. I'm abolishing the EV mandate."
"He got a little bit strange."
✅ Puzzled Trump Says He Has No Idea Why Musk Support…

Puzzled Trump Says He Has No Idea Why Musk Supported Him in the First Place
Fresh off his feud with former ally Elon Musk, president Donald Trump has once again said the quiet part out loud. 

"How Should Diamond Open Access Work for Books?" @ Katina Magazine: https://katinamagazine.org/content/article/open-knowledge/2025/how-should-diamond-oa-work-for-books

"Ultimately, engaging the public enriches our scholarship. It pushes us to think more carefully about clarity, ethics, and relevance. It also ensures that the knowledge we produce contributes to a wider societal good, affirming the role of the university not just as a place of knowledge production, but also of public service."
#OpenScience
https://social.edu.nl/@Bibliothecaris/114833640819292319

I believe I have managed to prove my ID in order to comply with the new laws that say I have to prove my ID to own the business I own that I'm sure already asked me to prove my ID when I registered it.
First we tried the on-web version, but that apparently relies upon the corporates having managed to profile and track me, because it told me they had no questions upon which to base identification. Good I guess? My avoid-tracking systems must be working at least a bit?
Next we tried the android app, but apparently the phone I tried that with is too old and the app won't install.
So next option is turning up at a post office with a printed letter. I don't own a printer though, so had to have them post that to me.
Took the letter and a driving licence up to the post office today and "It's not going through" they said, pointing to a stalled progress bar on an android app on a tablet.
Um. Okay. So?
Just wait longer apparently. About ten minutes and it finally proceeded and the post office man took a photograph of me after asking me to disrobe of my robe, strip down to a teeshirt and jeans.
Not sure in what sense this has proven my ID any more than it was already proven to get the driving licence or company registration in the first place?
Apparently I now have government logins for "One Login" and for "government gateway" and they are not the same thing? But sort of are the same thing?
Can't say I really understand it. Expect they'll introduce a third government login when they do these Digital ID cards they're talking about.
God knows how I'm supposed to know which to use when the company tax records need updating in a few months.
#id #government #oneLogin

he's going to get taken out by a TRAIN?
guess that's as good a place as any to end this
#Monsterdon

Hey, just wanted to share this again. I took it last autumn at one of the last warm weekends.
I want to go to the same place again for a longer walk along a nice ridge. - Anyways, this was a really good day with a nice chat with a fellow hiker and great views.
Enjoy.
#mountains #hiking

How popular media gets love wrong
Okay, so what exactly are the details of the "engineered" model of love from my previous post? I'll try to summarize my thoughts and the experiences they're built on.
1. "Love" can be be thought of like a mechanism that's built by two (or more) people. In this case, no single person can build the thing alone, to work it needs contributions from multiple people (I suppose self-love might be an exception to that). In any case, the builders can intentionally choose how they build (and maintain) the mechanism, they can build it differently to suit their particular needs/wants, and they will need to maintain and repair it over time to keep it running. It may need winding, or fuel, or charging plus oil changes and bolt-tightening, etc.
2. Any two (or more) people can choose to start building love between them at any time. No need to "find your soulmate" or "wait for the right person." Now the caveat is that the mechanism is difficult to build and requires lots of cooperation, so there might indeed be "wrong people" to try to build love with. People in general might experience more failures than successes. The key component is slowly-escalating shared commitment to the project, which is negotiated between the partners so that neither one feels like they've been left to do all the work themselves. Since it's a big scary project though, it's very easy to decide it's too hard and give up, and so the builders need to encourage each other and pace themselves. The project can only succeed if there's mutual commitment, and that will certainly require compromise (sometimes even sacrifice, though not always). If the mechanism works well, the benefits (companionship; encouragement; praise; loving sex; hugs; etc.) will be well worth the compromises you make to build it, but this isn't always the case.
3. The mechanism is prone to falling apart if not maintained. In my view, the "fire" and "appeal" models of love don't adequately convey the need for this maintenance and lead to a lot of under-maintained relationships many of which fall apart. You'll need to do things together that make you happy, do things that make your partner happy (in some cases even if they annoy you, but never in a transactional or box-checking way), spend time with shared attention, spend time alone and/or apart, reassure each other through words (or deeds) of mutual beliefs (especially your continued commitment to the relationship), do things that comfort and/or excite each other physically (anywhere from hugs to hand-holding to sex) and probably other things I'm not thinking of. Not *every* relationship needs *all* of these maintenance techniques, but I think most will need most. Note especially that patriarchy teaches men that they don't need to bother with any of this, which harms primarily their romantic partners but secondarily them as their relationships fail due to their own (cultivated-by-patriarchy) incompetence. If a relationship evolves to a point where one person is doing all the maintenance (& improvement) work, it's been bent into a shape that no longer really qualifies as "love" in my book, and that's super unhealthy.
4. The key things to negotiate when trying to build a new love are first, how to work together in the first place, and how to be comfortable around each others' habits (or how to change those habits). Second, what level of commitment you have right now, and what how/when you want to increase that commitment. Additionally, I think it's worth checking in about what you're each putting into and getting out of the relationship, to ensure that it continues to be positive for all participants. To build a successful relationship, you need to be able to incrementally increase the level of commitment to one that you're both comfortable staying at long-term, while ensuring that for both partners, the relationship is both a net benefit and has manageable costs (those two things are not the same). Obviously it's not easy to actually have conversations about these things (congratulations if you can just talk about this stuff) because there's a huge fear of hearing an answer that you don't want to hear. I think the range of discouraging answers which actually spell doom for a relationship is smaller than people think and there's usually a reasonable "shoulder" you can fall into where things aren't on a good trajectory but could be brought back into one, but even so these conversations are scary. Still, I think only having honest conversations about these things when you're angry at each other is not a good plan. You can also try to communicate some of these things via non-conversational means, if that feels safer, and at least being aware that these are the objectives you're pursuing is probably helpful.
I'll post two more replies here about my own experiences that led me to this mental model and trying to distill this into advice, although it will take me a moment to get to those.
#relationships #love

Epstein shit and adjacent, Rural America, Poverty, Abuse
Everyone who's not a pedophile thinks pedophiles are bad, but there's this special obsessed hatred you'll find among poor rural Americans. The whole QAnon/Epstein obsession may not really make sense to folks raised in cities. Like, why do these people think *so much* about pedophiles? Why do they think that everyone in power is a pedophile? Why would the Pizzagate thing make sense to anyone? What is this unhinged shit? A lot of folks (who aren't anarchists) might be inclined to ask "why can't these people just let the cops take care of it?"
I was watching Legal Eagle's run down on the Trump Epstein thing earlier today and I woke up thinking about something I don't know if I've ever talked about. Now that I'm not in the US, I'm not at any risk of talking about it. I don't know how much I would have been before, but that's not something I'm gonna dig into right now. So let me tell you a story that might explain a few things.
I'm like 16, maybe 17. I have my license, so this girl I was dating/not dating/just friends with/whatever would regularly convince me to drive her and her friends around. I think she's like 15 at the time. Her friends are younger than her.
She tells me that there's a party we can go to where they have beer. She was told to invite her friends, so I can come too. We're going to pick her friends up (we regularly fill the VW Golf well beyond the legal limit and drive places) and head to the party.
So I take these girls, at least is 13 years old, down to this party. I'm already a bit sketched out bringing a 13 year old to a party. We drive out for a while. It's in the country. We drive down a long dark road. Three are some barrel fires and a shack. This is all a bit strange, but not too abnormal for this area. We're a little ways outside of a place called Mill City (in Oregon).
We park and walk towards the shack. This dude who looks like a rat comes up and offers us beer. He laughs and talks to the girl who invited me, "What's he doing here? You're supposed to bring your girl friends." She's like, "He's our ride." I don't remember if he offered me a beer or not.
We go over to this shed and everyone starts smoking, except me because I didn't smoke until I turned 18. The other girls start talking about the rat face dude, who's wandered over by the fire with some other guys. They're mainly teasing one of the 13 year old girls about having sex with him a bunch of times. They say he's like, 32 or something. The other girls joke about him only having sex with 13 year olds because he's too ugly to have sex with anyone closer to his own age.
Somewhere along the line it comes out that he's a cop. I never forgot that, it's absolutely seared in to my memory. I can picture his face perfectly still, decades later, and them talking about how he's a deputy, he was in his 30's, and he was having sex with a 13 year old girl. I was the only boy there, but there were a few older men. This was a chunk of the good ol' boys club of the town. I think there were a couple of cops besides the one deputy, and a judge or the mayor or some kind of big local VIP.
I kept trying to get my friend to leave, but she wanted to stay. Turns out under age drinking with cops seems like a great deal if you're a kid because you know you won't get busted. I left alone, creeped the fuck out.
I was told later that I wasn't invited and that I couldn't talk about it, I've always been good at compartmentalization, so I never did.
Decades later it occurred to me what was actually happening. I'm pretty sure that cop was giving meth he'd seized as evidence to these kids. This wasn't some one-off thing. It was regular. Who knows how many decades it went on after I left, or how many decades it had been going on before I found out. I knew this type of thing had happened at least a few times before because that's how that 13 year old girl and that 32 year old cop had hooked up in the first place.
Hearing about Epstein's MO, targeting these teenage girls from fucked up backgrounds, it's right there for me. I wouldn't be surprised if they were involved in sex trafficking of minors or some shit like that... but who would you call if you found out? Half the sheriff's department was there and the other half would cover for them.
You live in the city and shit like that doesn't happen, or at least you don't think it happens. But rural poor folks have this intuition about power and abuse. It's right there and you know it.
Trump is such a familiar character for me, because he's exactly that small town mayor or sheriff. He'll will talk about being tough on crime and hunting down pedophiles, while hanging out at a party that exists so people can fuck 8th graders.
The problem with the whole thing is that rural folks will never break the cognitive dissonance between "kill the peods" and "back the blue." They'll never go kill those cops. No, the pedos must be somewhere else. It must be the elites. It must be outsiders. It can't be the cops and good ol' boys everyone respects. It can't be the mayor who rigs the election to win every time. It can't be the "good upstanding" sheriff. Nah, it's the Clintons.
To be fair, it's probably also the Clitnons, a bunch of other politicians, billionaires, etc. Epstein was exactly who everyone thought he was, and he didn't get away with it for so long without a whole lot of really powerful help.
There are still powerful people who got away with involvement with #Epstein. #Trump is one of them, but I don't really believe that he's the only one.
#USPol #ACAB

I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir on the Fediverse, but Audiobookshelf is just so good. I have a ton of audiobooks I purchased on various platforms over the years that are now in one place, and when I have the ePub version as well, I can upload it and reference back to passages when I want.
https://www.audiobookshelf.org/

Good Morning #Canada
Summer may be over, at least emotionally, but there's lots of nice weather as we enter Fall Fair season in Canada. Canada has incredible agricultural potential in every province - and maybe we need a series of posts on that - and fall is when rural communities celebrate the harvest with demonstrations and competitions. But city folk are invited and encouraged to visit your local event and get acquainted with plowing matches, the price of a new tractor, cattle judging, and who has the biggest watermelons. Here's a small list of some of the most prominent Fall Fairs out of the hundreds that take place annually.
BTW - In my only plant submission to one of these festivals (Erin Fall Fair), I got 3rd place for the tallest sunflower. Rookie mistake, I cut my plant at ground level, and it was 11.5 feet high. The winners ahead of me dug out the roots and submitted the entire plant. I was robbed!
#CanadaIsAwesome #FallFairs #Farming
https://www.mapquest.com/travel/the-12-best-fall-fairs-in-canada/

Craig Mod is an incredibly writer and I am amazed how good this is!
https://craigmod.com/ridgeline/212/

Eating Linoleum in Karuizawa
Went looking for a peaceful walk, didn't find one

I got an email from the local chain pizza place, advertising $0.34 pizzas, thought that might be a good treat for lunch, and then realized that I need to spend $14 on breadsticks to get that. I really don't need that much carby food.

Going to lament about the changes on Drive World in Roblox, because somehow they somehow do the "you get some, you lose some" updates every time.
Who thought that it is a good idea to change the trucking and delivery system? Now that all of this is replaced with the "Daniel" system (finding trailers on the wild and delivering it to a place), it is now harder to do them.
#DriveWorld

I'm migrating my articles and blogging, and you can kind of follow my process.
I just posted this, which includes this line: "Building your goals in someone else’s sandbox alone is not ideal, a little like building a castle on sand."
https://davaug.medium.com/online-longe

Online Longevity - David August - Medium
I am shifting my article posting and blogging to a new place: https://davidaugust.ghost.io (I signed up for the 14 day trial… not sure yet if investing in paying monthly or annually is a good idea)…

This is very good!
„Phones Ruined Everything“
Big Data Big Business Big Brother = The Big Machine
https://youtu.be/aZfPzKfiSOQ

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

The unsettling rise of athlete stalkers, plus an NFL QB debate https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6548086/2025/08/12/the-unsettling-rise-of-athlete-stalkers-plus-an-nfl-qb-debate/

Great stuff in this article but I do not know if unplugging from the broligarch's platforms is the solution to end their delusional grandeur.
It is the same with the climate crisis. This cannot hinge on the individual to solve but the whole system has to change. Individual action is good but that is not enough.
(For all its shortfalls the EU is regulating parts of the tech industry, but there has to be more.)

What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
Why Elon Musk and other tech billionaires have a different perspective

On reflection, I think the big mistake is the conflation of #AI with #LLM and #MachineLearning.
There are genuine exciting advances in ML with applications all over the place, in science, (not least in my own research group looking at high resolution regional climate downscaling), health diagnostics, defence etc. But these are not the AIs that journalists are talking about, nor that are really related the LLMs.
They're still good uses of GPUs and will probably produce economic benefits, but probably not the multi- trillion ones the pundits seem to be expecting
#AIbubble is that I agree with so much of it.
I'm now wondering if I've missed something about #LLMs? The numbers and implications for stock markets are terrifyingly huge!
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

Just saw this:
#AI can mean a lot of things these days, but lots of the popular meanings imply a bevy of harms that I definitely wouldn't feel are worth a cute fish game. In fact, these harms are so acute that even "just" playing into the AI hype becomes its own kind of harm (it's similar to blockchain in that way).
@… noticed that the authors claim the code base is 80% AI generated, which is a red flag because people with sound moral compasses wouldn't be using AI to "help" write code in the first place. The authors aren't by some miracle people who couldn't build this app without help, in case that influences your thinking about it: they have the skills to write the code themselves, although it likely would have taken longer (but also been better).
I was more interested in the fish-classification AI, and how much it might be dependent on datacenters. Thankfully, a quick glance at the code confirms they're using ONNX and running a self-trained neural network on your device. While the exponentially-increasing energy & water demands of datacenters to support billion-parameter models are a real concern, this is not that. Even a non-AI game can burn a lot of cycles on someone's phone, and I don't think there's anything to complain about energy-wise if we're just using cycles on the end user's device as long as we're not having them keep it on for hours crunching numbers like blockchain stuff does. Running whatever stuff locally while the user is playing a game is a negligible environmental concern, unlike, say, calling out to ChatGPT where you're directly feeding datacenter demand. Since they claimed to have trained the network themselves, and since it's actually totally reasonable to make your own dataset for this and get good-enough-for-a-silly-game results with just a few hundred examples, I don't have any ethical objections to the data sourcing or training processes either. Hooray! This is finally an example of "ethical use of neutral networks" that I can hold up as an example of what people should be doing instead of the BS they are doing.
But wait... Remember what I said about feeding the AI hype being its own form of harm? Yeah, between using AI tools for coding and calling their classifier "AI" in a way that makes it seem like the same kind of thing as ChatGPT et al., they're leaning into the hype rather than helping restrain it. And that means they're causing harm. Big AI companies can point to them and say "look AI enables cute things you like" when AI didn't actually enable it. So I'm feeling meh about this cute game and won't be sharing it aside from this post. If you love the cute fish, you don't really have to feel bad for playing with it, but I'd feel bad for advertising it without a disclaimer.

„She is excited to go home and keep dreaming her American Microdream (a new trend where Gen Z workers, instead of using their salaries to buy homes and support a family, hope to someday pay off their student loans.) She sighs. The Microdeath cannot come soon enough.“
This piece is very good!
„Are you sure these are new workplace trends? Are you sure you aren’t just describing a routine phenomenon in an alarmed way?“

Baltimore, Penn State and the pressure of being oh so close https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6563329/2025/08/20/ravens-penn-state-football-the-pulse/

Finally finished throwing together a central place for my own posts on the AI Hype Movement plus links to other good stuff. If you need a central place to point someone curious as to why you don't use AI and/or why they shouldn't, feel free to send people here:
#AI #LLMs #GenAI

Good Morning #Canada
Finally... the moment you have been waiting for. It's Day #1 of #BeaverWeek. Who knows what fascinating facts of Castor Canadensis we will discover together this week. Our Beavers fought back from near extinction because their fur made awesome hats to become an increasingly important mammal restoring water conservation in an era of global warming. The odd double entendre, totally unintentional, of course, might slip into the conversation.
The best place to start is with this highly interesting Canadian Geographic article that provides some history and habitat info on our beloved Beaver.

#CanadaIsAwesome #ClimateChange
https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/rethinking-the-beaver/

Good Morning #Canada
It's #FridayThe13th, which is a lucky day for me as 13 is my favourite number. 13th place was also Canada’s rank in the 2024 Happiest Country study, but unfortunately, we fell to 18th place in 2025. IMO, having #PeePee trash Canada and the government incessantly for the past few years has contributed to that drop. We also have a lot of work to do to match the happy Nordic countries in social and economic support.
#CanadaIsAwesome #BeHappy
https://gfmag.com/data/happiest-countries/