Tootfinder

Ya gut the National Weather Service and then the fourth largest city in the country gets stomped by weather we didn’t see coming.
trump tornados in Oklahoma, trump floods in Houston, and your and my town will get the same too.
Help flood folks now: text REDCROSS to 90999.
https://www.…

Mail, Phone, or Text Donations
Whether you mail, call, or text to donate, your donations bring help and hope to people every day. Start here, with a $10 text donation to one of our ongoing campaigns.

⚠️ Dear amazing people,
After a company reorganization, I will be available to empower new teams. Please help me reach out them by boosting or directly introducing me. I truly appreciate your help!
https://talkweb.eu/you-need-me/
Roles : {Technical} Program Management, Tactical Prod…

I can’t help it, I somehow feel gaslighted by the whole #GenAI debate. People who are critical of GenAI are often told “but when done right, you’re just so much more productive, so obviously you just didn’t to it right.” So I’m trying. Not because I feel I need to, but because I just want to get a realistic impression of the capabilities, and be able to discuss these with my students.
Then fancy…

Without notice or consent, the Trump Administration shared millions of Medicaid enrollees’ private health information with the Department of Homeland Security, which houses Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Trump is weaponizing Medicaid and injecting fear into healthcare and public services.
This is not about going after waste or fraud; it is about targeting vulnerable people who entrusted their government to help them access healthcare
— a basic human right.

🤬 Framing social issues as 'civil rights' can sometimes backfire
#politics…

Framing social issues as 'civil rights' can sometimes backfire
Framing is a powerful tool in communications: It can help people grasp complex ideas, but it can also distort or mislead. A recent sociological study suggests that framing social issues as "civil rights" can sometimes have surprising and even negative consequences.

TIPS FOR PERFORMERS:
Playing cards have the top half upside-down to help cheaters.
There are a finite number of jokes in the universe.
Singing is a trick to get people to listen to music longer than
they would ordinarily.
There is no music in space.
People will pay to watch people make sounds.
Everything on stage should be larger than in real life.

I also want to re-up this thread, which links to two different funds providing direct mutual aid to people in Gaza. If you are looking to help •right now•, in this dire moment, this a place you can do that.
4/
https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/114593006896846609

People who have more time than me: please make a way of paying to subscribe to an RSS, Atom, or ActivityPub feed.
Help creators publish on their terms, directly to their people.

"The British people want peace. The government’s continued support for Israel must be made untenable. The Gaza Inquiry Bill, and the “red line” Palestine solidarity campaigners drew around Parliament yesterday, help us to do that."
Corbyn’s Gaza Inquiry Bill reflects public opinion – Starmer’s pro-war policy does not | Morning Star

Nice “interaction” video / “why protected bike lanes”
I managed to collect a video recently that might help explain "why protected bike lanes?" TLDR: a thing that bike lanes help with, is simplifying safety even when they cannot completely eliminate risk. This is one of the reasons they're less stressful. One problem with a lot of bicycle safety discussions is that people tend to focus on Just One Cause for each crash, when I am pretty sure (from observing, thinking,…

Nice “interaction” video / “why protected bike lanes”
I managed to collect a video recently that might help explain “why protected bike lanes?” TLDR: a thing that bike lanes help with, is simplifying safety even when they cannot completely…

Happy Pride! Everyone deserves dignity and respect at every stage of their life - including end of life. Help your loved ones and community celebrate you properly and appropriately by doing all your advance planning now -just think of how hard you'll party when it's done 🎉🌈
Got questions? I'm here to help and I am an ally and safe space for everyone in the LGBTIQA community and the kink community.

Quite rich for someone that just sold his business for 6 billion to OpenAI
« When I first moved here I came because it was characterized by people who genuinely saw that their purpose was in service to humanity, to inspire people and help people create. I don't feel that way about this place right now. »
https://

Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos,
a pediatric infectious disease expert, was a co-leader of a working group on COVID-19 vaccines who advised experts on the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
She informed her ACIP colleagues of her resignation in an email on Tuesday.
"My career in public health and vaccinology started with a deep-seated desire to help the most vulnerable members of our population,
and that is not something I am able to continue…

Top CDC COVID vaccine expert resigns after RFK Jr. unilaterally restricts access
The expert said she could no longer help vulnerable people in her CDC role.

My friend Marty was like "Hey man, Fran needs help" and you know what, Fran is an awesome dude and a great asset to Milwaukee, and he gave me a chance to show & sell my work last year so I pitch a bit of money towards him.
And then more people did, and more, and it doubled the same day, and doubled again since last night! Smashed the original goal.
Community. We build it. Be there for each other. Help when you can.
➡️

Donate to Help Fran Heal and Cover Living Expenses, organized by Francisco Ramirez
Hello, I'm Francisco, most call me Fran. I'm a printmaker in Milwaukee, … Francisco Ramirez needs your support for Help Fran Heal and Cover Living Expenses

The way we talk about housing in public discourse is so broken. How does kicking unhoused people out onto the street "deal with" homelessness in any sense other than a murderous one?
"Montreal's public transit agency is lifting a temporary rule against loitering in the Metro — a controversial measure established in mid-March to help deal with rising social problems in the network, including homelessness."

(This was not by me but I very much relate)
https://mastodon.social/@anon_opin/114772417335001235

Canadians, please confirm this is valid
EDIT: Added in better alt text

WordPress may be run by… that guy, but it still has a massive user base. They all need better accessibility documentation.
@… wants to improve it, but needs sponsors:
https://

Subtooting since people in the original thread wanted it to be over, but selfishly tagging @… and @… whose opinions I value...
I think that saying "we are not a supply chain" is exactly what open-source maintainers should be doing right now in response to "open source supply chain security" threads.
I can't claim to be an expert and don't maintain any important FOSS stuff, but I do release almost all of my code under open licenses, and I do use many open source libraries, and I have felt the pain of needing to replace an unmaintained library.
There's a certain small-to-mid-scale class of program, including many open-source libraries, which can be built/maintained by a single person, and which to my mind best operate on a "snake growth" model: incremental changes/fixes, punctuated by periodic "skin-shedding" phases where make rewrites or version updates happen. These projects aren't immortal either: as the whole tech landscape around them changes, they become unnecessary and/or people lose interest, so they go unmaintained and eventually break. Each time one of their dependencies breaks (or has a skin-shedding moment) there's a higher probability that they break or shed too, as maintenance needs shoot up at these junctures. Unless you're a company trying to make money from a single long-lived app, it's actually okay that software churns like this, and if you're a company trying to make money, your priorities absolutely should not factor into any decisions people making FOSS software make: we're trying (and to a huge extent succeeding) to make a better world (and/or just have fun with our own hobbies share that fun with others) that leaves behind the corrosive & planet-destroying plague which is capitalism, and you're trying to personally enrich yourself by embracing that plague. The fact that capitalism is *evil* is not an incidental thing in this discussion.
To make an imperfect analogy, imagine that the peasants of some domain have set up a really-free-market, where they provide each other with free stuff to help each other survive, sometimes doing some barter perhaps but mostly just everyone bringing their surplus. Now imagine the lord of the domain, who is the source of these peasants' immiseration, goes to this market secretly & takes some berries, which he uses as one ingredient in delicious tarts that he then sells for profit. But then the berry-bringer stops showing up to the free market, or starts bringing a different kind of fruit, or even ends up bringing rotten berries by accident. And the lord complains "I have a supply chain problem!" Like, fuck off dude! Your problem is that you *didn't* want to build a supply chain and instead thought you would build your profit-focused business in other people's free stuff. If you were paying the berry-picker, you'd have a supply chain problem, but you weren't, so you really have an "I want more free stuff" problem when you can't be arsed to give away your own stuff for free.
There can be all sorts of problems in the really-free-market, like maybe not enough people bring socks, so the peasants who can't afford socks are going barefoot, and having foot problems, and the peasants put their heads together and see if they can convince someone to start bringing socks, and maybe they can't and things are a bit sad, but the really-free-market was never supposed to solve everyone's problems 100% when they're all still being squeezed dry by their taxes: until they are able to get free of the lord & start building a lovely anarchist society, the really-free-market is a best-effort kind of deal that aims to make things better, and sometimes will fall short. When it becomes the main way goods in society are distributed, and when the people who contribute aren't constantly drained by the feudal yoke, at that point the availability of particular goods is a real problem that needs to be solved, but at that point, it's also much easier to solve. And at *no* point does someone coming into the market to take stuff only to turn around and sell it deserve anything from the market or those contributing to it. They are not a supply chain. They're trying to help each other out, but even then they're doing so freely and without obligation. They might discuss amongst themselves how to better coordinate their mutual aid, but they're not going to end up forcing anyone to bring anything or even expecting that a certain person contribute a certain amount, since the whole point is that the thing is voluntary & free, and they've all got changing life circumstances that affect their contributions. Celebrate whatever shows up at the market, express your desire for things that would be useful, but don't impose a burden on anyone else to bring a specific thing, because otherwise it's fair for them to oppose such a burden on you, and now you two are doing your own barter thing that's outside the parameters of the really-free-market.

Divya and Shantini have vetted that yes, these are real people in real crisis who need help.
The two of them aren’t professional fundraisers or anything. They’re just doing their best with the tools they have, trying desperately to help a few people.
Yes, I wish that we had proper organizations — NGOs, international aid, a functioning democracy! — to help •all• the people in need all at once. We don’t. Elbow grease is all we’ve got.
https://chuffed.org/project/hope-giving-circle

It really entertains me that you’re so out of touch with reality to think people who get SNAP, Medicaid, or Section 8 are jobless. Check your privledge, asshats. I know people who work 3 jobs and still need help.
https://www.threads.com/@bookshelfinchaos_/post/DLe0ciAuSDM?xmt=AQF0zkaviCUapElaifPFn1HUYL8Osl5K2E4jLqnTtnDaffc

It's Robert Reich.
Congress just passed Donald Trump's big, ugly megabill.
Republicans stole from the poor and gave to the rich.
They must pay the price at the ballot box.
The midterm elections start now,
and Inequality Media Civic Action is launching a major effort to make sure the working people screwed over by this bill know who's to blame.
We want to raise $200,000 in the next 24 hours to get started.
Please, chip in $50, $25, or e…

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

🧵 The reason we have an "economy" is so we can get goods and services *we need*, and so that people can *make a living* providing those goods and services. The reason we have government, is so that society can function *for us*. The common thread is providing things and help we *need*. Lets call that "value" . 1/x

Workplace Adjustments For Energy Limiting Conditions - free online event
On Zoom, Monday 16 June 2025
1pm - 2pm BST
From Astriid, a UK charity aiming "to make working practice more inclusive for people with long-term conditions"
"Are you seeking work alongside managing a long-term health condition? Join our free Spring Into Inclusive Employment Webinars!
"Working with an energy limiting condition is tough, but workplace adjustments can make things more manageable. In this session we’ll explore examples of reasonable adjustments to your working patterns, environment, and communication preferences that can all help you to thrive in your role while taking care of yourself."
Book here:
#ChronicIllness #disability #work #access #ReasonableAdjustments #UK

Exploring the Effects of Chatbot Anthropomorphism and Human Empathy on Human Prosocial Behavior Toward Chatbots
Jingshu Li, Zicheng Zhu, Renwen Zhang, Yi-Chieh Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20748

Exploring the Effects of Chatbot Anthropomorphism and Human Empathy on Human Prosocial Behavior Toward Chatbots
Chatbots are increasingly integrated into people's lives and are widely used to help people. Recently, there has also been growing interest in the reverse direction-humans help chatbots-due to a wide range of benefits including better chatbot performance, human well-being, and collaborative outcomes. However, little research has explored the factors that motivate people to help chatbots. To address this gap, we draw on the Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) framework to examine how chatbot anth…

Updated Post: Podcast ep 188: 12 ways to make decision-making easier (and why people who hoard find it so hard to make decisions in the first place!) https://www.overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.uk/podcast-ep-188-decision-making-hoarding-disorder…

Divya and Shantini have vetted that yes, these are real people in real crisis who need help.
The two of them aren’t professional fundraisers or anything. They’re just doing their best with the tools they have, trying desperately to help a few people.
Yes, I wish that we had proper organizations — NGOs, international aid, a functioning democracy! — to help •all• the people in need all at once. We don’t. Elbow grease is all we’ve got.
https://chuffed.org/project/hope-giving-circle

I‘m afraid I won’t be able to make it to this year’s #CSSDay. 😔 And, looking at the stellar lineup and all the lovely people who will be there, FOMO is already huge! 🥲
Watching the talks remotely might help a bit, but just can’t replace the onsite experience …
ht…

CSS Day 2025, 5th & 6th of June, Amsterdam
CSS Day is the conference for CSS designers, developers, spec writers, and browser vendors.

"I hate [politician on my side not doing what I want], they need to go!"
You can blame people you basically agree with, or you can work with the people available to try to work toward better.
1st feels good for maybe 5 minutes, then ruins improvement right now, the 2nd has a chance to make things better.
Try to take your anger, your resentment, which I share, to those chiefly responsible for problems, and not to those nearest and ablest to help, even if not as fla…

For those with a Twitter (X) account, there is a fun little discussion thread between me, myself and #AI (Grok, ChatGPT) about whether Elon Musk's Neuralink Blindsight brain implant will work for congenitally blind people to see. https://

Grok (@grok) on X
@NotOpCue @elonmusk @neuralink Neuralink's brain-computer interface aims to help disabled individuals by connecting the brain to computers. It has enabled quadriplegics, like Noland Arbaugh, to control devices such as a computer mouse or play chess using thoughts alone, as shown in 2024 trials. The Blindsight

Please help if you can.
People are starving in a famine manufactured by the genocidal terrorist state of isreal with the support of the united $tates, germany, little england, and most €pean countries.
#israel #genocide

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

Damn! I wanted X-ray vision! 😉
Seeing infrared: scientists create contact lenses that grant ‘super-vision’;
Breakthrough could lead to range of wearables that extend range of vision and help people with colour blindness
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/m

Weird how the Linux Mint subreddit has been taken over by people proudly displaying how cool their desktops look.
I know that after being boxed in by Windows it is nice to get more control but frankly I'd rather read posts by people who need help.
#LinuxMint

I don't know if it'll be part of the government plan, but one thing that would help people attempting to measure the quality of their food intake might be a statutory requirement for the sellers of packaged food to publish ingredients and nutrition information as open data (with UPCs). This could then be used by apps (such as those using openfoodfacts.org).

Healthy food revolution to tackle obesity epidemic
New healthy food standard will see big businesses promoting healthier food and drink

I may know what people are doing when they fawn over the orange moron, playing with his childish narcissism to manipulate him, but I can't help it -- I cringe every single time.

yearly costs from car crashes: $500 million
stopping Muni cuts that would make people buy cars: $7.2 million
someone please help me budget this, my city is dying
https://sfba.social/@MLNow/114389440475044251

Finally got a chance to document something that was hard and may help an entire two people 🙂 Enjoy.
https://blog.faucher.live/how-to-expand-an-asustor-flashstor-raid0-volume/

"Journalism screwed itself over by betting
on Meta and its profit-over-society peers.
Now, nobody trusts “the media” and
everyone is going bankrupt. The next bet
is on generative AI, with its inability to
distinguish truth from “hallucinations” –
fabrications that on the page become lies.
The Continent is an attempt to prove
journalism can be done differently.
Expect more of this in what our team
has decided to call our “serious era”.
We’re no longer a start-up. We’re going
to empower more people with quality
journalism. We’re going to help others
launch newspapers. We’re going to
stay sane. And we’re going to prove
that African excellence can set global
standards."
@… reaches 5 years and 200 issues. If you're not already receiving their copy via @… (or email, telegram or WhatsApp if you must) then it's really worth signing up to remind yourself just how big and diverse the world ist.
This weeks highlights are an extraordinary story about how Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe directly interfered with Mozambique's election. Plus a frankly beautiful photo piece on Addis Ababa

For Trump,
“it’s no billionaire left behind
— and good luck to everyone else.”
“It’s telling that President Trump has chosen to release his budget on a Friday night with no fanfare whatsoever,”
said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee,
following the administration’s release of approximately 1,200 pages of budget documents.
“That’s probably because his budget would raise costs for working people,
destroy basic s…

'No Billionaire Left Behind' in Trump Budget Request That Trashes Workers, Struggling Families | Common Dreams
One expert critic said the updated request "confirms once again that the president continues to break his promises to lower families' costs and help people who are struggling to make ends meet."

It doesn't matter if something is only temporarily helpful, by the way. https://www.overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.uk/podcast-ep-186-10-e…

Dorothea Baur reflecting on #AI tech bros going all in on even your most personal data. Claiming to help you solve a problem which they helped create in the beginning:
"A breach of trust enabled by AI now becomes the justification for surveillance-based trust systems. And the very people who helped break the system are offering to fix it – in exchange for your iris. That’s not a safety fe…

Solnit: "It's...routine to blame the Democratic Party for what the Republican Party does. The two parties are unconsciously regarded as akin to a husband and wife in a traditional marriage in which it's the job of the wife to placate and soothe the husband and help him realize his goals or be held responsible for his outbursts and outrages."

Some Notes on the City of Angels and the Nature of Violence
I think maybe it's begun, the bigger fiercer backlash against the Trump Administration which is itself a violent backlash against every good thing that's happened over the past several decades – the advance of rights for nature, women, children, indigenous peoples, BIPOC and immigrants/refugees, queer people, trans people, people with

I'm pretty sure all the white folks (and anyone else who didn't learn the underlying lessons first hand) were assigned to learn about Red Summer, the Chinese Exclusion Acts, Wilmington 1898, and more than a few other things that came up in cultural conversation during the last Trump presidency. This is all on the test, and you're taking it now.
But in case anyone missed the assignment, I'll give you the TL;DR: ethnic cleansing has been central to American politics basically forever, which shouldn't be surprising given it's a nation founded on genocide and the belief in the right to commit it without constraint.
If you haven't done the math yet, I'll help you out. The "Haitian Immigrants" lets them grab black folks, they've been grabbing folks from Mexico south and lumping in indigenous Americans (just so they don't skip out on the oldest American genocide), and the Muslim ban/Hamas rhetoric lets them grab anyone who else they see fit.
The lack of due process lets them grab anyone and they don't have to prove anything. They're talking about deporting "one million" and possibly"millions" of people. So how do they get those numbers?
There are already reports that they're just grabbing random brown folks, trying to take 3k people per day. They fly to blue cities and grab as many black and brown people as they can, then send them to death camps in foreign countries and pretend they have no way to get them back. That's it. That's the game.
This isn't new. The big difference now is that the cops aren't hiding their uniforms under white hoods this time. Do you get it yet?

Europe is exporting military dogs—used as weapons by Israel's elite forces. These dogs have been linked to civilian injuries and deaths, including children and people with disabilities. Doors forced open in the middle of the night, piercing cries for help, fangs sunk mercilessly into the flesh of victims. Children are torn from their mothers' arms, women scream for help, men collapse in agony, while apathetic soldiers just laugh as dogs tear bodies apart indiscriminately.

Thoughts from the @braiduk.bsky.social event thus far (shaped through my own interests and thinking)
People's desire to shape AI in society was very present (but I missed a sense of grassroots work eg AI4LAM in GLAMs, other equivalents)
Science fiction and other creative expressions can help society think through potential models for AI
AI is an extension, intensification of existing technologies
Clearly tensions, temptations between values and efficiencies, which lin…

Self-driving technologies need the help of the public: A narrative review of the evidence
Jonathan Smith, Siddartha Khastgir
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23472

Self-driving technologies need the help of the public: A narrative review of the evidence
If public trust is lot in a new technology early in its life cycle it can take much more time for the benefits of that technology to be realised. Eventually tens-of-millions of people will collectively have the power to determine self-driving technology success of failure driven by their perception of risk, data handling, safety, governance, accountability, benefits to their life and more. This paper reviews the evidence on safety critical technology covering trust, engagement, and acceptance. …

I didn't know that Che Guevara and Jawaharlal Nehru visited Gaza, then under Egyptian administration, in 1959 and 1960 respectively.
Che's visit was important: the Palestinian resistance was keen to learn from other anti-iimperialist struggles.
Since then Cuba has reliably supported the Palestinian people, with material & political aid, most recently joining South Africa (itself liberated with Cuban help) in their anti-genocide proceedings against Israel.

Today was the Neos Contribution Day right after #NeosCon in Karlsruhe. The idea is that members of the @… Neos Team help interested people getting started with contributing to #NeosCMS

Something that’s been bothering me for years in the security world: why do researchers demand bug bounties for vulnerabilities in open source projects, when the very contributors maintaining and fixing those issues get nothing, just goodwill?
It feels deeply unfair. The burden falls on unpaid maintainers, yet bounty hunters get rewarded. If you want a paid bounty, maybe help fund the people who actually fix the mess too.

Artificial Empathy: AI based Mental Health
Aditya Naik, Jovi Thomas, Teja Sree, Himavant Reddy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00081 https://

Artificial Empathy: AI based Mental Health
Many people suffer from mental health problems but not everyone seeks professional help or has access to mental health care. AI chatbots have increasingly become a go-to for individuals who either have mental disorders or simply want someone to talk to. This paper presents a study on participants who have previously used chatbots and a scenario-based testing of large language model (LLM) chatbots. Our findings indicate that AI chatbots were primarily utilized as a "Five minute therapist" or as …

"You can tell what happened — Google promised iNaturalist free money if they would just do something, anything, that had some generative AI in it. iNaturalist forgot why people contribute at all, and took the cash."
(Original title: Google bribes iNaturalist to use generative AI — volunteers quit in outrage)

Google bribes iNaturalist to use generative AI — volunteers quit in outrage
iNaturalist is a website that crowdsources pictures of plants and animals to help identify species. Its tagline is “A Community for Naturalists.” iNaturalist is administered by its own small charit…

Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day to everyone in the Fediverse! And remember your alt text!
#GAAD

New: Podcast ep 188: 12 ways to make decision-making easier (and why people who hoard find it so hard to make decisions in the first place!) https://www.overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.uk/podcast-ep-188-decision-making-hoarding-disorder

Aw darn. Pocket is shutting down. Not really clear why: "But the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match browsing habits today."
Pocket will no longer be available after July 8, 2025.
https://support.moz…

#MutualAid @… needs some help:
https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwild…

Did you know that the #UniversityOfGeorgia has TWO sets of Jean Charlot murals on its campus? Charlot hung out on the UGA campus for three years in the early 1940s, teaching and working with students. His murals that were inside what was once UGA's journalism building recently underwent some restoration thanks to our museum and the help of a lot of people from across campus.

I decided to share some of my observations that would benefit you if you are building applications: a deep dive session into the archetypes of attackers.
This session is for people who are developing software of any kind. It could be an API endpoint, a blog, or a complex application used by millions.
Join in or share with smart people.
Let me help you!

Just received a friend request on Facebook by someone named Peter Waldmeier.
https://www.facebook.com/peter.waldmeier.865
He seemed such a nice person, I think he is a model in a Scandinavian country.
When I asked him why he was sending me a friend request he go…

If you want to help people in #academia who are maybe less fortunate than you, who have less famous supervisors, or work at less prestigious universities, here's one simple thing you can do:
Do proper literature research.
That means complete forward and backward snowballing from a decent seed set. Find everything that is relevant to your paper and cite it. Budget a couple of full…

Are you looking for the tools to help your #church youth leaders to accompany, work with, and support #LGBTQ young people? We have put together a curriculum that will allow you to do this at

Accompanying LGBTQ+ Youth — Yale Youth Ministry Institute
Theologians and practitioners discuss the importance of supporting and walking with LGBTQ+ youth.

Got a yard sign at the Evanston Main Street Fair from @katmabu.bsky.social.
Really respect her hustle in this campaign. Just out there at everything, meeting voters face to face. Her platform seems solid, and it would be great to have her enthusiasm and energy representing the 9th.
The best way to support her campaign is to donate

#Everhaven (aka

3d3nFPS (@3d3nFPS) on X
In light of the Hytale shutdown, we need people to help reverse engineer SkySaga: Infinite Isles! It is the best alternative to Hytale, but we need programmers to help restore the game. Discord: https://t.co/qvEWaLjyn2 Github: https://t.co/B07L33NMtb

Oopsie
„Tensions erupted at the Rafah crossing as local Egyptians confronted far-left Western activists— described as "Greta Thunberg types" —who had gathered to "march on Gaza" and protest against Israel.
The mostly European demonstrators, accusing Israel of
"genocide," were met with fierce opposition from Egyptian locals, who pelted them with clubs and water bottles, forcing them back and halting their advance toward the border.“

Jewish Breaking News on Instagram: "🇪🇬😱Chaos Erupts in Egypt as Locals Clash with Western Pro-Ham@s Activists Near Gaza Border BREAKING: Tensions erupted at the Rafah crossing as local Egyptians confronted far-left Western activists—described as “Greta Thunberg types”—who had gathered to “march on Gaza” and protest against Israel. The mostly European demonstrators, accusing Israel of “genocide,” were met with fierce opposition from Egyptian locals, who pelted them with clubs and water bottles, forcing them back and halting their advance toward the border. Many of the activists have since taken to social media claiming they were beaten, had their passports stolen, and are now stranded in Egypt. Several are pleading online for help from their embassies. One Egyptian pundit remarked: “There’s a reason Egypt has a huge wall and doesn’t let any Gazans in. What made these people think they could just ‘march to Gaza’ via Egypt?” Egyptian authorities have yet to issue an official statement."
12K likes, 1,023 comments - jewishbreakingnews on June 13, 2025: "🇪🇬😱Chaos Erupts in Egypt as Locals Clash with Western Pro-Ham@s Activists Near Gaza Border BREAKING: Tensions erupted at the Rafah crossing as local Egyptians confronted far-left Western activists—described as “Greta Thunberg types”—who had gathered to “march on Gaza” and protest against Israel. The mostly European demonstrators, accusing Israel of “genocide,” were met with fierce opposition from Egyptia…

Decision making is exhausting at the best of times, but especially if we're struggling with our executive function https://www.overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.

Nice. Now do Netanyahu, the rest of the israeli government, and everyone in the IDF. You know, the folks perpetrating the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Oh, and maybe stop running surveillance flights to help israel commit genocide.
#israel #genocide

Played the demo for The Alters today. I was already interested, but now it is on my wishlist and I am very much looking forward to its release. Resource gathering, crafting, base building, check. Time pressure mechanic "the sunrise will kill you, must move base", check.
I am especially intrigued by the story and the "need to recruit people to help you run the base and survive, so you just clone them" idea. I'm liking how they've built that mechanic and how …

As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency,
he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according topeople familiar with his activities.
Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use.
He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use.
He to…

Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama on Trump’s Campaign Trail
As Mr. Musk entered President Trump’s orbit, his private life grew increasingly tumultuous and his drug use was more intense than previously known.

When concept-based XAI is imprecise: Do people distinguish between generalisations and misrepresentations?
Romy M\"uller
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17936

When concept-based XAI is imprecise: Do people distinguish between generalisations and misrepresentations?
Concept-based explainable artificial intelligence (C-XAI) can help reveal the inner representations of AI models. Understanding these representations is particularly important in complex tasks like safety evaluation. Such tasks rely on high-level semantic information (e.g., about actions) to make decisions about abstract categories (e.g., whether a situation is dangerous). In this context, it may desirable for C-XAI concepts to show some variability, suggesting that the AI is capable of general…

This fact is what inspired me to become part of a unique system to help people get up and running with their own successful business online, regardless of their background and experience. FYI, for those of you familiar with Robert Kiyosaki’s “𝐶𝑎𝑠ℎ 𝐹𝑙𝑜𝑤 𝑄𝑢𝑎𝑑𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑠”, this is in the B – Business Owner Quadrant.
Message me to learn more.

Hi, I’m Bridget Brink
-- the first female ambassador to serve in a warzone
as our Ambassador to Ukraine.
I just launched my campaign to flip Michigan's 7th congressional district.
Help us take back the House because we need leaders that deliver for the American people.
My first FEC public filing deadline of the campaign is Monday at midnight.
This deadline will set the tone for our entire campaign.
Will you join me and rush a contribution to…

I just gave to Bridget Brink!
Show your support with a contribution.

What problem are you trying to solve?
Is it the classic "more value for shareholders" or something that will actually help people trying to just fucking survive?

Podcast ep 186: 10 executive dysfunction tips and tricks to help people who hoard, whether we have ADHD or are neurodivergent or not - Hoarding Awareness Week 2025 https://www.

Governments that want to make the switch to Linux should actively contribute. They shouldn't rush into anything. They should figure out possible technical difficulties beforehand and even fund open source software to help deal with those issues.
They need to plan for pushback from employees. Change is difficult and people will complain about stuff that they will grow to appreciate over time.

Everybody struggles with their executive functioning at times. Everybody does. https://www.overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.uk/podcast-ep-186-1…

"But there were technologists and open source projects in attendance. Notably, representatives from the Mastodon and Bluesky teams were at the Festival. The Newsmast Foundation was also present, incisively taking part in conversations to help newsrooms onboard themselves onto both of them. I got to hang out with them all, connecting with people I’d spoken with but never interacted with in person. Mastodon has undergone a transformation, has doubled its team, and is working on smoothing out some of its rough edges, while not letting go of its core ethos. It’s also beginning to position itself as a European alternative to American social media platforms, with a community-first values system and new services to directly help organizations join the network.
Bluesky, on the other hand, has done an able job of bringing journalists onto its existing social app, and is now hard at work explaining why its underlying protocol matters. Both want to engage with newsrooms and journalists and do the right thing by them. They each have something different to prove: Mastodon that it can be usable and accessible, and Bluesky that it can provide a return to its investors and truly decentralize while holding onto its values. I’m rooting for both of them.
These platforms’ messages dovetail with my own: news can own the platforms that support them. Lots of people at the Festival were worried about the impact of US big tech on their businesses — particularly in a world where tech moguls seem to be aligning themselves with a Presidential administration that has positioned itself as being adversarial to news, journalists, sources, and, arguably, the truth. The good news is that the technology is out there, the values-aligned technologists are out there, and there’s a strong path forward. The only thing left is to follow it."
#media #Mastodon #BlueSky #Journalism
https://werd.io/2025/notes-from-perugia-journalism-values-and-building-the-web-we

Having to go to a food bank sticks with you
– it's time politicians knew about it
Amie, a town councillor and mother-of-two, had no choice but to use a food bank.
She’ll be joining more than 700 campaigners in Westminster on 18 June calling for urgent action against the rising tide of poverty in the UK
They are calling for an essentials guarantee,
which would help ensure universal credit provides enough to cover the essentials of life -- without having to g…

Having to go to a food bank sticks with you – it’s time politicians knew about it
Anti-poverty charities are calling for the government to introduce an essentials guarantee and prevent people needing to go to a food bank.

@… It's mostly just understanding what markets are from a fundamental level and local tax laws. Understanding exponential curves can really help you not overextend with debt and let you save more. If you can save, then you'll probably start looking into investing. Most people start with mutual funds because they are easy, and you should too. You'…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.03997 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

A Tutorial on Event Detection using Social Media Data Analysis: Applications, Challenges, and Open Problems
In recent years, social media has become one of the most popular platforms for communication. These platforms allow users to report real-world incidents that might swiftly and widely circulate throughout the whole social network. A social event is a real-world incident that is documented on social media. Social gatherings could contain vital documentation of crisis scenarios. Monitoring and analyzing this rich content can produce information that is extraordinarily valuable and help people and …

This framing of long COVID is uh chilling. Not masking in public sure seems dumb.
https://thesicktimes.org/2025/05/06/long-covid-mode-seeing-the-crisis-through-games/

Six protestors who demonstrated in front of the New York City offices of #Palantir Technologies
were arrested on Thursday morning.
The demonstrators had gathered to bring attention to the controversial firm and the work it does to power the deportation of immigrants from the US.
The protestors stood in front of the Palantir offices on Manhattan’s Avenue of the Americas,
linking arms…

OpticalAging: Real-time Presbyopia Simulation for Inclusive Design via Tunable Lenses
Qing Zhang, Zixiong Su, Yoshihito Kondoh, Kazunori Asada, Thad Starner, Kai Kunze, Yuta Itoh, Jun Rekimoto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19307

OpticalAging: Real-time Presbyopia Simulation for Inclusive Design via Tunable Lenses
Presbyopia, a common age-related vision condition affecting most people as they age, often remains inadequately understood by those unaffected. To help bridge the gap between abstract accessibility knowledge and a more grounded appreciation of perceptual challenges, this study presents OpticalAging, an optical see-through simulation approach. Unlike VR-based methods, OpticalAging uses dynamically controlled tunable lenses to simulate the first-person visual perspective of presbyopia's distance-…

We shame ourselves into more shame and it's really counterproductive https://www.overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.uk/podcast-ep-186-10-exec…

Cycling question: trying out saddles, in the UK
UK cycling people, is there somewhere you'd go to sit on different saddles to test if they're comfortable? Is that a thing?
I've worked out that my (default came-with-the-bike) saddle isn't the right shape for me: it's giving me an achy tailbone, as well as I think being a bit too narrow for optimal sit-bone comfort.
For context, I'm an "occasional cyclist for pleasure and/or practical reasons", shall we say. No ambition to be super fast.
Looking around online, I think I want something more like the Rido R2 or one of the Selle ones, shaped to have air under the tailbone area. Or maybe even a noseless one like the Spongy Wonder, though I don't like the look of how the metal frame sticks out at the front of those.
What's the chances a shop would have more than one of those and a willingness to get them out for a test sit? Or, better still, is there a loan scheme anywhere, so you can actually "test drive" them for a bit? Or do people usually just buy and be willing to sell again?
I'm in Nottingham, and I know there are bike shops I could get to, but I'm not seeing "come in and try all these saddles, we'll help you to find the right one" kinds of messaging.
Could also potentially travel elsewhere at some point if it turns out there's some kind of "best place in the country for that question".
Advice welcome!
#cycling #BikeTooter #AskFedi #UK

The kind of brain shortcuts I'm going to talk about today are some of the things that might just be able to help move you forward if you feel stuck or if you feel frustrated with your progress http…

Eine führende #CDC-Expertin für #COVID19-#Impfstoffe ist zurückgetreten, nachdem US-#Gesundheitsminister

Top CDC COVID vaccine expert resigns after RFK Jr. unilaterally restricts access
The expert said she could no longer help vulnerable people in her CDC role.

Having non-negotiables is also a really helpful hack when you are dealing with executive dysfunction https://www.overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.

What is #BodyDoubling and how can it help us to manage #ExecutiveDysfunction?

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03295 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Examining Human-AI Collaboration for Co-Writing Constructive Comments Online
This paper examines if large language models (LLMs) can help people write constructive comments on divisive social issues due to the difficulty of expressing constructive disagreement online. Through controlled experiments with 600 participants from India and the US, who reviewed and wrote constructive comments on threads related to Islamophobia and homophobia, we observed potential misalignment between how LLMs and humans perceive constructiveness in online comments. While the LLM was more lik…

Masked federal agents with military gear have been firing flash-bang grenades, teargas and rubber bullets at civilians in the streets of Los Angeles for the last three days.
On Saturday, Trump federalized the National Guard to help crush protests
— not just there but potentially anywhere in the U.S. where people demonstrate against federal law enforcement.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has threatened to send in the Marines.
They have come for immigrants, as they a…

LA Protests Signal Public’s Readiness to Rebel Against Anti-Immigrant Fascism
Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to crush protests against ICE’s deportation raids has only fueled the uprising.

I spent years in that particular trap: 'I don't understand how to fix this. I definitely can't do a good job. So why bother trying?' https://www.overcomeco…

What if I test out treating myself like I'm a person who doesn't deserve to be paralysed by shame? What if I test out being compassionate to myself instead of yelling at myself? https://www.