Tootfinder

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal on what is #god:
#SMBC

@helmet91@mastodon.social These people are literally faced with genocide and famine and you’re out here acting like a dollar-store Sherlock Holmes.
I’ve told you several times now that I’ve had live video conversations over Signal with Nouran and her brother Yousef.
I don’t know what your problem is but what you’re doing by spreading this FUD is deplorable. I just saw that you wrote this blog post also:

How not to get scammed
Give yourself a chance before you become a prey.

🌽 To get that perfect ear of corn, weather has to cooperate. But climate change is making it dicier
#corn

To get that perfect ear of corn, weather has to cooperate. But climate change is making it dicier
Robb Rynd and his brother grew up farming and wanted to do more of it outside their day jobs, so they went in together on what's now a little over 200 acres of corn, soybeans, wheat and sorghum. Last year was a good year, and Rynd said he enjoyed walking the fields with his kids to see how the corn was doing.

Really BlueSky? Are you really going to make we look up what a "groyper" is? I'm not sure that's a good idea. I'm not going to enjoy finding out, am I?
Tell you what, I'll go and have a cup of tea and discuss cats and cybersecurity and climate change and hiking with good views and great book recommendations over on mastodon this evening.
You can tell me when it's safe to come back in....

Sad and hilarious: China twists Trump’s arm into giving up on his plans to go after Chinese students in the US, and he capitulates in order to…just get back to what he already had before he started his trade war.
“This is a Chinese TACO” says one trade expert.
https://mastodon.social/@thejapantimes/114674231825128493

Initial NESessity NESRGB guide up, will probably change over the next few days during the install/verification.
https://blog.jamesthebard.net/posts/nesrgb-and-nesessity-install/

A good friend of mine was railing against the Baby Boomers what they've created for us and this was my response:
Keep in mind it's the Ruling Class who runs things, not your average Baby Boomer. Just think about your average Gen X or Millennials, and what power they possess to create huge societal change. (Sure, some do... but most do not.)
That isn't to say we can't do good things, and keep trying, and keep fighting.
1/2

I was trying to package #FlexiBLAS for #Gentoo, and to be honest, it doesn't look that good.
The first red flag is lack of an open bug tracker. Apparently, there is the tracker on GitLab that's limited to "members of their group and selected external contributors", but it doesn't seem to be used much. So it's "send us an email", and wonder how many people sent us the same bug report before.
The git repository is currently at something tagged 3.4.80 that seems to be prerelease, and its build system is quite broken. Not exactly the best path to verify that the bugs you are hitting are still there.
Now, upstream seems to insist on either using vendored netlib #LAPACK, or statically linking to the system library (we don't install the static libraries). Apparently I can specify the shared libraries instead, but it doesn't work — and it's unclear to me whether it doesn't work because I'm using the shared libraries, or because it doesn't support my LAPACK version. If I build LAPACK without deprecated symbols, it refuses to load it at runtime because of missing symbols. And if I build it with deprecated symbols, it fails to find some symbols at CMake time.
Honestly, I feel like I've spent too much time on this project already, especially given that its future is entirely unclear to me — the current git is quite broken, I have no clue how many issues were reported already and whether my bug reports will receive any reply. It definitely doesn't fare well for a package that we might start to rely heavily on. We don't want a cathedral there.
https://www.mpi-magdeburg.mpg.de/projects/flexiblas
https://gitlab.mpi-magdeburg.mpg.de/software/flexiblas-release

So I'm watching a Japanese YouTube Short and it plays auto-dubbed English. Annoying, but no big deal. I can tap “⋮” -> “Audio Track” -> “Japanese original”.
Except... that saves a language preference! Next time I watch an English short, it gets auto-dubbed into Japanese!
So I have to keep switching.
As far as I can tell, YTLitePlus (https://

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy