Tootfinder

So the answer is that the value is in the idea that they can scare you into compliance. If you can't be scared, if you're already ready, then you remove the value. "AI" for mass surveillance is still mostly a grift, where the worst people in the world are being conned by the other worst people in the world.

So one of the authors is Nicholas Carlini, who works for Anthropic. This is basically an ad for the three letter agencies to use Claude. It massively over-promises compared to what the actual paper says.
But, it is important. First, this is really about silencing people. The threat of identification is designed to make people afraid to talk online. There's a massive asymmetry between the fascists and the people. The fascists are weird racists and pedophiles who are obsessed with control. No one likes them. No one likes their ideas, because their ideas are creepy and bad.
When they talk about their ideas, that people should be murdered or kidnaped based on their skin color, that there should be a national dress code, that people's sex lives should be monitored, that children should be treated like objects that are owned by the parent (specifically, one parent), that people with different skin color or uteri should be considered as livestock, people fucking hate it because it's awful. When we talk about our ideas, that everyone should be able to eat and take care of themselves, that people who can't take care of themselves should be taken care of, that we should live in a society that values life, that we should live in harmony with nature, people like those ideas. When fascists out us for talking about those ideas, people support us. When we out people who are working as fascist goons those people have to face social consequences.
Everyone hates these people. The US government is currently less popular than it has ever been. The only way they can keep power is by making everyone think that they aren't extraordinarily unpopular. The only way to do that, the way authoritarian have always done it, is to make everyone afraid to talk.
But, yes, what this paper is saying is actually kind of bad. It looks like people who don't take any precautions at all in separating identities can be identified about 30% of the time (based on the results). It's unclear how this will actually work in the real world. Larger corpses will probably have more data, making connecting things easier.
This isn't as good as a human trying to dox someone. It's not going to work as well. It may only work in a small number of cases. There will be false positives (just like there are with people doing the work). It's probably not cheaper than hiring people. But it does mean that you can just dump money into a machine that has no ethical framework and get data out. That's the point. It's hard to find humans who will do evil shit like help dictatorships target human rights activists, but if a machine can do it for twice the price then it's a better deal for the dictatorship.
For most people, you just shouldn't care. This isn't for you. As long as you keep doing what you're doing, and you can keep everyone else doing what they're doing, then there aren't enough resources to actually target you. Even if they know who you are, there are just too many people who hate them and too few goons.
For people who might actually be targeted, there are a lot of things. First, keep in mind what you're putting into anonymous accounts. Any feature that's connected to your real life is a feature that can be extracted to identify you. This has always been true, it just may be easier to find now. Your identities should be totally siloed. It's also harder to identify you if you're writing anonymously as a collective. Collectives are better anyway because they can help check your thinking. When you write as a collective, you can help clean up each other's personal details and language. A collective develops its own voice, which is distinct from individual contributors. If you do this, and you also present your work as being from one "person," then it becomes even harder for anyone (systems or individuals) to really figure it out.
I'm not going to do a full deep dive on this because I just don't have time, but your existing threat model should *already cover these threats* if you need to make sure your writing remains anonymous.
This paper doesn't present any novel methodologies. It just extracts a bunch of features, which a human would extract as notes, and tries to correlate those between identities, which is how human researchers work. Linguistic forensics were mentioned (not by name) in the paper, but the actual methodology doesn't actually seem to use them.
So a thing with less ethics can do a worse job for more money (when adjusted for the real, not investor deflated, price of tokens). It's worth knowing. It's not the end of the world, but it is a good reminder to check your threat model and make sure it's up to date.

Sometimes you need to know the exact color used in a picture, or you might want to make a pallet from a foto. Check out {eyedroppeR} by @…: https://gradientdescending…

Select colours from an image in R with {eyedroppeR} - Dan Oehm | Gradient Descending
Click on an image to extract the hex code of the selected pixel and return it all within R

If anyone wants to do real research, it would be useful instead to use an actual anonymous data set with high quality answers like antifa doxxing of fascists.
I don't know how well the proposed methodology would stack up against real research, but that's actually something that would be useful to answer.

Yes, also EVs.

Ban cars.
#FuckCars

RE: https://mastodon.me.uk/@ChrisMayLA6/116811916966370492
This, but the Children of Kali version from Ministry for the Future.

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@Hex/116174990803755172
Oh hey, this keeps getting more relevant.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
Chrome:
🎵 Hex (feat. Gui)
#Chrome

I wonder if we're actually edging close to the computability ceiling:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12559-012-9124-9

IDA 9.4 Beta 1 has been published (with some features of my own on it):
#hexrays

IDA 9.4 Beta | Hex-Rays Docs

RE: https://todon.eu/@CrimethInc/116800863729420473
Anyone not familiar with the Haymarket Martyrs, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Seattle Grand Jury Resisters, etc, might want to spend a bit of time learning about how history has drawn a pretty straight and unchanging line.
The murder and torture carried out by the state in the past cannot be undone, but there is still time to prevent yet another flood of injustice.
We can all look backwards and clearly see the mistakes of the past. But can be so much harder see the present clearly, even when it's so incredibly stark as this.

Nostr Key Converter - Convert npub/nsec to Hex - NostrDeck
#nostr #key

Cars* fund fascism.
* Yes, all cars.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@harrysintonen/116616660520565984
I'd definitely be interested to see if this is legit, but don't have enough context to know. Looking at this person's CVE list suggests it probably is.

The security industry is somewhat unique. It's probably the only industry created by the worker as a threat. If you talk to hackers who were in the scene before Operation Sundevil, you'll realize that it's always been a Bullshit Job.
Folks in L0ft and cDc were hacking companies and basically blackmailing them into paying for their services. Operation Sundevil "straightened up" the industry. Some people went to prison, some people build security services companies. Pretty much anyone who actually believed in the manifesto was locked up or edged out.
Using the Graeber framework here, hackers are partially duct tapers and partially goons. The critical thing here is that the industry was basically created to give money to people who would otherwise destroy the system.
Neuroatypical folks have always been forced to the margins of society, but computers gave us a super power. Now we were extremely dangerous. Tech, especially hackers, have always been paid a lot to minimize the risk of developing a class consciousness.
Graeber talked about this. Kings and nobles would often find some job or title that they could bestow on potential enemies in order to keep them close, to defang them. What better role than sheriff, a type of goon, for a rebel?
We turned it in to a whole thing. Not only did hackers make their own industry and force everyone else to accept it, we even created a whole parallel box ticker industry of "compliance" as a side effect.
The Hacker's Manifesto was decontectualized and made a fun artifact of the past. We were sold a story of "good hackers" who "protected grandma from the bad hackers." But the whole industry always existed to keep us on a leash. The funny thing is that it was a leash that we made ourselves.
But now we're seeing massive layoffs in tech, even in security. Now that we're this far in, everyone has forgotten the history. Leadership doesn't understand what security people do, so they think that LLMs can replace us. But the people in the industry now, the ones who came to it as a career, don't understand the history.
There was always a split for these weird outsiders, these people who couldn't fit in to the system but now had power over it. Some wanted in and they were willing to use extortion to get in, and others wanted to destroy the system to set everyone free.
Operation Sundevil, and the industry that evolved out of it, existed to neutralize those revolutionary elements by offering extortionists a safe entry. Extortionists trusted the capitalists to not stab them in the back the same way capitalists have stabbed everyone in the back through all of history. Now my LinkedIn feed is full of Meta layoffs, and I wonder if that class consciousness is starting to click for anyone yet.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@hex_m_hell/116603232724527092
Trying to get my technical writing back up too.

I want Mike Duncan's "Revolutions" but covering the Spanish Civil War, China, Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam, and the various anti-colonial struggles, then come back to France for May 1968, and a few others, maybe ending with the Zapatistas, Rojava/DAANES, the Gen Z uprisings, and maybe introducing Myanmar.

This is a pretty good rundown on why the #GenerativeAI bubble isn't like the #DotComBubble but *far worse.*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3-vf78ZwTc

For reference (more of "Cars are Racist," with some "Cars are Settler Colonialist," and "Cars are Ecocidal"):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s19okTYl8MA

Hexara (PC) Hey so if you're old enough to have any kind of fond memories of the game Hexic on the 360, this is basically an exact clone of it available on Steam. It's got the same exact gameplay without straight up stealing the assets. Also the dev responded to my (and another) review mentioning repetitive music by patching in more tracks of chillout tunes, bonus. Was an easy 1st day buy, and cheap. Even has a leaderboard (I'm currently in 2nd place woo)

Sealioning cultists are swarming like muggen and earn the same treatment.

Our resources are controlled by a cult that's demanding that we have faith in their impossible god.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12559-012-9124-9

Listening to the Revolutions podcast and there are so many things that happened based on some mistake or misinterpretation then cascade faster than anyone expects. Honestly, after all the evil shit the oligarchs are doing, I really think it'll end up being some obscure parody or just misinformation that kicks off the insurrection in the US.

I'm going to deviate a bit from my normal audience and focus in on #tech (especially #Security folks). I came across the practice from public health and emergency management and brought it into work. They seemed to have never heard of it. I'm curious how common my experience is. (Please boost for visibility)
Have you ever used table top exercises in your work (such as, to verify a runbook would work as expected)?
Yes, and I work in tech
No, and I work in tech
Yes, and I don't work in tech
No, and I don't work in tech

HEX DRUMS KLAXON part 2
#TOTP

It's worth nothing that oil, the dominant funder of both political parties, the industry that ultimately maintains veto power over both parties political platforms, is not profitable without massive state investment. Roads, parking, and infrastructure grants, all put money in the pockets of the industry that is destroying the planet. That money then comes right back into the political sphere to control the frame of debate around climate change and how to address it.

Logistics in the technical sense (part of supply chain management) is a subset of logistics in the vernacular sense ("the handling of the details of an operation"). You can explore this second and more general sense, and thereby build an understanding of the first and more technical sense, by iteratively asking the question, "how does one make that happen" and follow questions from there.
A big part of organizing is figuring out the (vernacular) logistics (and helping others figure it out). You want to organize a seed swap? Ok. How does one make that happen? Well, you need seeds, people, a place, and perhaps a time. How does one make that happen? You can forage seeds or you can buy seeds for a garden and swap extras. How do you get people to come? Well, figure out where you want people to come from and choose an accessible place. What's the easiest thing to do? Get people from your neighborhood. How does one make that happen? Well, maybe put up flyers. How does one make that happen? Well, print them on your printer if you have one, or at a library, then go post them up. Etc.
Keep asking questions until you either find a roadblock that you can't find a way around, or you find things you can do yourself (one of those things you can do yourself is asking friends to help).
If you practice the exercise of thinking about how things happen, you can start to find things that you can do yourself. You can start to understand what exists now, and you can imagine what's possible. By thinking about logistics, you can figure out how to replace things when they collapse or are dismantled. You can also identify things that can't easily be replaced, and try to figure out alternatives.
This practice is good for figuring out how to build, but it can also be a valuable practice for figuring out how to resist. Concentration camps and ethnic cleansing also require logistics. Mass displacement means moving people. How does one do that? People are generally going to be moved in planes or buses. How does one do that? Well, people get loaded on to planes or buses in specific places. Planes and buses need fuel. Planes are fueled at their airports, which may well be the same places where people are loaded on to them. There is a fuel depo and a fuel truck that makes flying people out of a specific place possible. How does the fuel get to that fuel depo? Well, that fuel is probably also delivered by truck. Someone drives those trucks. Someone fuels those planes. Someone clears the planes for takeoff. Someone fuels those busses. Someone drives those busses. And so on.
Logistics networks can be highly complex. The more complex the operation, the more possible points of failure and more possible points where pressure can be applied, where operations can be disrupted. Ethnic cleansing is a complicated operation. The logistics of disrupting complicated things tend to be much less complicated than the logistics of the complicated things themselves.
The Right has exploited this fact for a long time. Centralized social services are logistically complex. Public infrastructure is logistically complex. By destroying these things, they can loot public resources by privatizing the infrastructure and functionality.
But the things that support the Right are even more logistically complex. Oil, cars, AI data centers, internal paramilitary, these are extremely complicated and fragile. There are numerous pressure points, all of which can respond to numerous strategies.
If we want to win, we should reduce the influence of politics over the things we care about. We should focus on building distributed mutual aid networks that don't rely on state funding and aren't subject to the whims of politicians. This is also known as "dual power." That is, creating counter-institutions outside of the dominant political system. The Right already does this in the form of churches and corporations.
As we reduce our complexity, we can then press our complexity advantage against the things for which the Right *needs* the state: the apparatus of violence needed to maintain capital and enforce the dominant order.

Also, anyone doing #Anarchist #Writing (in German or English) submissions are open!
https://en.scrappycapydistro.info/submissions

There were people then doing everything they could. Some of them survived, a lot of them didn't. They were heroes, and we should spend more time reflecting on their sacrifice and the bravery of their resistance.
There are people today resisting. They are also heroes. We will never know all their names.
If you are doing all you can, you are doing what you're supposed to do. Some of those people are also calling for new Neurenberg Tribunals. That's also worth keeping in mind.

I'd like to remind anyone calling for a new Neurenberg Tribunal that the original one was only necessary because Germans didn't respond appropriately to the evil shit Nazis were doing, when they were doing it. The tribunals essentially asserted that the German people would have been justified in using any force necessary to stop the Nazis, and that all who didn't try to use such force were complicit.
Sit with that for a bit and ponder the implications.

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@scrappy_capy_distro/116595476430224824
Oh hey! I've been part of a writing group and this recent edition has our work in it. I'm pretty happy with it, and everyone else's work is great. Really excited to be in this.

The thesis I was reading spent the majority of it's time focused on John Boyd's OODA loop as a tool for critical analysis in high pressure or constrained situations. Table top exercises could also benefit from using these steps to slow down the thought process, expose what's actually happening, and sharpen these tools.
So each step could start by observing (which is generally what the GM will tell you, but you may ask additional questions to refine observational thinking). What do you look for in any given situation? How do you gather data? What sources do you use?
Next you would orient. Talk through this out loud. What does that data mean? How this fit what you already know, or does it challenge your assumptions? Are you observing something related to a previous action? What does that tell you about your previous action or actions? How do you turn the data you observed into intelligence you can act on? How do your observations narrow the options for the next possible action?
Then you decide your action. But you're not simply deciding, you're coming up with a hypothesis that your action will test. Anything you do is an opportunity to learn something about the world, about your situation, about the accuracy of the model you're using to make decisions. What belief does your next action imply? How will you know if that action was correct or incorrect? What observations would challenge your hypothesis? What observations would confirm it? Are those mutually exclusive, or are there additional observations or actions you must make to clarify things?
Then act. Finish your turn by choosing your action or actions (individually or collectively). Perhaps take a moment to write down notes, like what your observations, your hypothesis, and if you think your previous hypothesis was confirmed or refuted. You can review these all later to refine your thinking.
By exploring these ideas in a safe environment, you can train your brain to run through the process at high speed when under pressure. This helps you avoid panic. It's a lot like slowly practicing marshal arts moves until they become muscle memory, which then just happen without thought when needed.

Just another work of fiction, completely unrelated to the current moment.
https://hexmhell.writeas.com/the-snatchers

RE: https://mstdn.social/@MaryAustinBooks/116936000385533547
Best be ready to back up those words with more than votes or they're gonna get ignored.

Multiple times, apparently...
https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/111/#r1427

It's also worth thinking about interpersonal conflict between marginalized people with different experiences. Who mediates? How? How do you account for your existing biases when mediating people with different experiences of oppression than your own?
Practice can help answer those questions before you have to "do it live." I'd personally love resources on this, because I had to "do it live" as an organizer, and that was awful.

RE: https://mefi.social/@MissConstrue/116587674238145868
Motohegemony requires a very specific set of conditions to exist. It relies on an incredibly complex supply chain, and a fragile framework of political and financial support. Leaders have been largely competent (though, perhaps, malevolent), and have prioritized systemic stability over all else.
The conditions that made that system viable have collapsed. Your best bet to avoid being consumed by that collapse is to fight for bike infrastructure and mass transit, and to abandon cars as much as possible.
You will have to adapt to a life without cars. There is no question of "if" that will be necessary, but "under what conditions." Will you choose the time, or will the time be chosen for you?

And yet another hex drum kit. Maybe circles had been banned by the Musicians Union along with synths.
#TOTP

They have done similar stuff with warehouse workers in the past:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-under-fire-for-software-that-recommends-firing-workers/

Huh, there's a deleted article claiming that Amazon has been firing people with AI:
https://web.archive.org/web/20251201000000*/https://www.yeetmagazine.com/at-amazon-employees-are-now-fired-by-artificial-intelligence-the-future-of-work-or-just-cold-tech/

The Amazon "replacing HR with AI" stuff is also public knowledge:
https://www.fastcompany.com/91565321/amazon-is-taking-human-out-of-hr-ai-chatbot-app-aza

I know Amazon has been frantically replacing HR with AI, and I know that they have also been firing otherwise top performers who are on medical leave. But it seems like it would be difficult to figure out if they did exactly the same thing without a similar leak.
https://www.reuters.com/world/meta-used-ai-target-workers-with-medical-conditions-layoffs-former-employees-2026-07-14/

Why yes, I *am* writing that bicycle anarchist manifesto and I am on the section about how American motonormitivity reinforces white supremacy. Why do you ask?

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@Hex/116891026406639288
Yeah, I'm not done with this. How dystopian is it that so many people are physically trapped in their houses, that a whole society feels like it's just fine to wholesale sacrifice the safe mobility of children, the elderly, and people with disabilities, so everyone who can drive is able to sit and wait in long lines of giant metal boxes that pump out fumes that are literally making huge parts of the planet uninhabitable for humans.
What the fuck is this shit?? But yeah, sure, cameras are the problem here.

I need to write that "Bicycle Anarchist Manifesto" I've had in my notes for a while.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@theleftistlawyer/116545503922049830
Any meeting you organize, do this. Always. That includes your office if you work in one.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #NickGrimshaw
Aphex Twin:
🎵 minipops 67 [120.2][source field mix]
#AphexTwin
https://nanoplex.bandcamp.com/track/aphex-twin-minipops-67-nanoplex-genx-remix

There's probably some fancy brand name for the hex drum kit, isn't there.
#TOTP

I had a dream I was watching a documentary called "A History of Genocide" that basically had this premise. There's an Öcalan quote in Democratic Confederalism that I'm gonna have to track down again where he said something along the lines of "States are easier to rule when they only have one culture, so there's an implicit force driving all states towards genocide."

As I listen to the Revolutions podcast mini series on 1848, it's hard not to fixate in the ways in which the Liberal obsession with nationalism and national borders planted the seed for the genocides that followed. Liberals are still confused by why genocide is a persistent problem, as though liberalism itself should have fixed it. "We must establish more liberal institutions," they believe, "like the ICC, so that we can hold people accountable."
But genocide is simply a property of nations and borders. Nations have always be arbitrarily drawn and diverse groups of people have always lived together. I grew up with the balkanization of post-soviet Russia and post colonial Wars in Africa. Conservatives (that is, classical Liberals) would talk about how these people were simply uncivilized or somehow genetically predisposed to conflict. But the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides were similar to the Liberal violence implicit in nationalism from the beginning. The Bosnian Genocide was quite specifically a product of the Liberal nationalism of 1848.
There are still people in the world whose culture is defined by migration. These cultures do not recognize the legitimacy of borders because borders make their culture impossible. The very existence of these lines, and their necessary enforcement, is genocidal to pastoralists and other migratory people.
You literally cannot have borders and not be committing genocide. Concepts of national identity just add to the genocidal push, targeting ethnic minorities. Ethnicities defined by not having a nation of their own, such as Roma and non-zionist Jews, are, like pastoralists, permanently threatened by these imaginary lines.
And now, people look at the genocide ICE is carrying out, at the terror and murder, and they blame Trump. But Trump is simply the avatar of forces far beyond his comprehension.
Every liberal needs to look at their beliefs and realize that these murderous policies are implicit in the very concept of a nation.

Fuck Robert Moses. I'm not saying it for any particular reason, other than that I was reminded that it is a thing that should be said, at least daily, by at least one person, for the foreseeable future.

I will never not boost this. He traded so many lives for his own.

I'm not even the first person to say things along this line either:
"Another motivation for reducing the steel intensity of modern society is to limit the consequences of geopolitical conflicts. The more steel we produce for peaceful purposes, the more steel becomes available for war and destruction. Remarkably, the production of military equipment is absent from modern steel statistics, and if mentioned, its share is very low. However, in times of war, steelmaking facilities switch to producing steel for military purposes. The steel industry can thus be converted into a weapons industry at any moment, and there is now a lot more steel production capacity available than there has ever been in history."
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2024/03/how-to-escape-from-the-iron-age/ buried in the last footnote.
Oh, and that article also shows the math that proves that there is no way to move to EVs without absolutely blowing through the carbon budget. You have to switch to bikes and trains. There's literally no other way to keep an even close to habitable planet.

That's not even getting into my perennial favorite thing to point out: civilian reliance on cars unifies the interests of the population with the military.
US military domination of other countries *relies on cheap oil.* (And also the petrodollar, so oil use globally). If your life is dependent on cheap oil, then you are more likely to support invasions that promise cheaper oil, or oil subsidizes to drive down prices.
But wait, there's more. The auto industry itself is a fungible asset for the military industrial complex. Factories that make cars can pivot to making tanks and aircraft during war time (as they have). The existence of this infrastructure increases the probability of war.

Orwell's dystopia was walkable. He could not have imagined anything as bad as a society built for cars instead of people.
And, FFS, oil literally funds global fascism. It is the lifeblood of the movement. Hitler's obsession with making every German a driver and getting rid of bikes was not a coincidence. He *hated* bikes. Fascists almost universally hate bikes and mass transit while praising cars. This shit is actually extremely bad and makes for a society that's easier to control. And people still seem to think Elon Musk's mobile surveillance boxes will save the world. Cars are fascism all the way down.
Bikes and bike infrastructure makes for a society where you see and interact with other humans *all the time.* Cars and car infrastructure makes for a society where you interact with machines instead of humans. Cars make people more isolated, which makes people easier to control.

While billionaires try to build #AGI, it's absolutely clear that, were it built, it could not possibly be controlled.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.00913
Given their obsession, this seems like bad news (it's old news). Fortunately, probably it can't be built.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12559-012-9124-9
So that's fun. It's interesting that the second is older than the first. It would be interesting to actually read the second rather than just the abstract.
Billionaires are killing us with climate change in order to create an evil god that they can't control, even though they never bothered to check if creating that god was even possible in the first place. So that's all fun.

Excerpt from an essay I may or may not write:
Ontologies evolve to fulfill functions. They serve a purpose, and will be adapted until they fulfill this purpose. There are, occasionally, things that exist within those ontologies which do not actually exist.
Programming bugs are an example. There is no such thing. Code is code. It can't be right or wrong, it just is or isn't. The mismatch between the intent and the execution creates a side effect. We may confidently assert such a thing exists. We may name such things. But they don't exist. This becomes apparent when you try to figure out how to suppress one specific instance of a bug in one specific place through multiple revisions.
At some level, a lot of things don't actually exist. We only need to follow through the logic of The Ship of Theseus to see how our ontologies break down.
One thing that doesn't exist, that is a side effect rather than an object, is the personal self. You do not exist. Your perception of your existence is an illusion, a necessary side effect.
Every day you wake up a different person. Every second you are not who you were. That person is as dead as you will be the next instant, as all versions of you will be every second until there are no more. These selves are bound together by imperfect memories. The person you remember as yourself, all those people, never existed. You created them based on your current experience, your current iteration.
You could, just as easily, wake up an unrecognizable person, in some Dark City, and never know the difference. Continuity is absurd. And yet, some people believe they'll still experience the same self after being frozen or "uploaded." It's a silly illusion.
Once you can get over that illusion, you can let go of the need to thrash against the void. You can let go of the various furious dreams of immortality.
At a high enough level, all ontologies are illusions. Useful illusions, but illusions none-the-less. There is only the undifferentiated universe, and you are experiencing it. You are the universe. You will always persist, long past the time this specific iteration or any iteration experiences it.
This implies a certain obligation then to all the others experiencing the same self, the future iterations that may remember being someone like you, and any other person you, the universe, could wake up as tomorrow.

It makes a solid case for the latent fascism of cars, but I would argue that cars actually play an even more active role in creating fascism. Which, I am actually arguing in the essay that I need to get back to writing.

Oh look, someone wrote the "cars are fascist" essay I wanted to write and it's pretty good:
https://brockpress.com/editorial-is-the-automobile-fascist/

Humans should not operate cars. They are too dangerous. But it's been so normalized that everyone thinks they just have the inalienable right to fling their murder box around everyone else.

Like, actually fuck cars. They have always been bad for everyone. They have been Orwellian shit for a long time, but it's always the rest of us that suffer.
I actually think this is a good wake up call. These things will *always* be a problem. Cars being perfect for controlling people is a geometry problem. The technical element just makes the rest easier.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/116890719090826544
Maybe it's time to build society in a way that doesn't require you use giant, people crushing, mobile surveillance units that require legal documentation to operate, every time you want to go get milk.

The next time you make a liberal very confused by saying that "Zionism is antisemitic," you can show them this:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ICzPBrrwL1I
It's Ezra Klein. Liberal fucking *love* Ezra Klein.

And yeah, just for the record, my perspective on guns is different from most folks. I disagree with both individual gun ownership and government regulation of firearms. But that's a whole different thread that I'm not gonna expand on.

Just started listening to this one, and I'd absolutely recommend it. It's great.
It's really hard to explain how complicated beliefs can be, especially to folks in an urban bubble. The truth is, part of my anarchism came from listening to #rural folks. I didn't really live in a big city until I was like 18, but I came to those places already with a set of liberal biases.
Some of the things I experienced in those places pushed me towards being a Communist. But there are some strangely anarchistic tenancies, even in those who profess to be politically the opposite.
My stance on guns was largely shaped by understanding and extending the arguments of rural gun owners. They continued to evolve long after, but it took actually listening to break through my liberal biases and understand the ways in which gun control can actually intersect with other forms of oppression. There is a lot more nuance than I had grown up to believe.
And it goes both ways. Conservative gun owners have absolutely no intellectual against anarchist gun arguments. They're generally either gonna fall into racism that you can talk about, or start to radicalize left. There are plenty of similar pathways.
But also, not everyone in rural areas is conservative. There are plenty of rural anarchists and communists. They just get buried under stereotypes.
Anyway, this has been great to listen to and I'd recommend it.
https://www.tangledwilderness.org/strangers-podcast/talking-to-rural-conservatives

I had an interesting chat with a friend who mentioned a book called "The Living Company." Apparently Shell was one of the few companies that saw the 1970's oil crisis coming and was able to adapt. They did it by talking to a bunch of people randomly about the future, identifying patterns, and coming up with possible future scenarios. They then formed clear plans for these future scenarios, where those plans would cover as many related scenarios as possible.
This was actually really familiar to me, though I hadn't read the book, because that's very close to what the Seattle GDC disaster prep committee did. We identified possible disaster scenarios, then identified preparedness steps that served multiple purposes. We got boxes of n95 masks in 2018 and 2019 for wildfire smoke and did a bit of work building box-fan air purifiers. Over the years we handed out these masks to houseless folks who were most exposed to the smoke. When the pandemic hit, we were able to take some of those boxes to first responders just as manufacturing in China dropped because of their lockdowns and as others started PPE hoarding. We focused on N95 because that was one of the overlap points between the unexpected but catastrophic "flu pandemic" that we knew was possible, and the regular "wildfire smoke" problem we were just getting used to.
The book sounds like it's at least partially influenced by cybernetics. There's this Dutch cybernetics connection that I haven't quite figured out. Anyway, this guy talked about how a company needs to be sustainable and all that. My dude, you worked for an oil company. That is categorically not sustainable. All this aside, I think there are a lot of things we can and should take from capitalists (or take back, in some cases). This practice is one of them.
So maybe get together with friends and talk about what you think might happen. We live in a world of crisis, so I'll always recommend disaster preparedness. But there's more than that.
What do you think will happen in the next 5 years?
Assuming that happens, what actions would you take to push that towards the most positive outcome?
I'm listening to Revolutions and reminded of how much effort monarchies put in to preventing revolutions. Corporations can be even more advanced in their planning and preemption. What would it look like if we planned like that?

RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aeva/116526002579057799
First professional bug I ever found was an XML bomb. My first day, my manager is like, "oh yeah, so this is XML. We've been testing, you can hop on and throw some stuff at it. See what you can do."
I crashed the test environment with an XML bomb on a Friday evening.

I'm also glad their next interview is about rural organizing.

I gave the Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness crew the significant challenge of trying to make me sound coherent in this interview with Inmn Neruin. I was managing some pretty significant sleep deprivation and a mild cold, but I think it turned out pretty good (despite my best efforts).
But I did talk a lot about my trauma related to some of my experience living in #rural areas, and in doing that I was definitely not as careful as I could have been to talk about that as a trauma experience rather than as reality. Some people get trapped in rural areas, but other folks live there because they find beautiful things.
Not only is #RuralOrganizing critical (Trumpism grew out of areas neglected by "the left"), but rural living can be beautiful and rewarding. I briefly mentioned growing up throwing knives. A friend of mine lived way out in the woods, and there's something special about having a playground that spans several square miles. Intertwined with the old settler colonialism, antisemitism, *phobias, and isolation, that is at the heart of a lot of my personal rural misery, there's also a joyous and feral thing that taught me a lot and, I think, helped me organize more fearlessly. That thing is both individualist and collectivist, in different ways, and I don't think it's well understood without experiencing it. There's far more nuance than I was able to offer (and I definitely could have been more careful not to play into anti-rural stereotypes).
I think I said, "no one wants to live there." People do. You do. So let me try to fix that by giving you a chance to talk about that. I also talked about how slow things move, how nothing changes, but there are also sometimes opportunities to change things in huge ways specifically because structures don't exist to stop those changes. So while I'm bumping this zine and interview, also I want to use this as an opportunity to welcome my rural comrades to help fill in the gaps:
What draws you to where you are?
Do you choose to live in a rural area vs urban, and why?
Is there any other thing I've said that you would like to correct?
What other things should folks know?
https://www.tangledwilderness.org/features/near-death

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@hex_m_hell/116665145783070924
While the target audience of this security program managers, and the series I'm writing is focused on developing secure products in a world of exploding complexity, this is working towards a cybernetic threat model informed by counterinsurgency theory.
A lot can be done with such a model, if one is adept at adapting concepts across domains.

I've always just really hated the framing of LLMs "stealing" culture. That's such a capitalist framing.
But maybe I'm making a connection that's too abstract or doesn't feel aligned for people who have more direct experience. So if you have a more direct experience and this feels off, please let me know.

The thing about training an #LLM on human culture and then renting that culture back isn't that it's "Intellectual Property Theft." There's nothing wrong with sharing. There is something wrong with framing LLMs as piracy. That's a completely different concept.
When a powerful group of people takes the writing, the art, the music, various parts of a culture and then make some bland reproduction that lacks all the meaning and essence in the original, then those powerful people profit off that mess while the people who made the original stuff are erased, marginalized, and made to suffer, there is a different term for that.
The term everyone is looking for is "appropriation."
I'm not saying this is the same as other forms of cultural appropriation, but there are definitely enough shared elements that we should revisit that conversation. Perhaps some folks who thought the idea was silly when the idea first came up may feel differently now.

The whole #LLM ROI thing reveals something interesting. It's basically impossible to figure out the ROI of an LLM. That makes it impossible for bean counters to make a comparison between human work and LLM work, or human work without an LLM and LLM-assisted work, to determine if the incredibly high price is worth it. But it's also impossible because you can't measure the ROI of a human, especially for skilled labor.
You can't measure the ROI of a human, because managers have no idea what people do. There's an eternally expanding amount of work designed to address this problem. But no matter how closely people are surveilled, interrogated, analyzed, there's never any real answer.
I've talked in the past about in relation to medical care. One of the dirty secrets of hospitals is that they have no way to figure out how much individual treatment costs. It's easy to understand at scale. You can know exactly how much something costs society. You can even identify patterns, using public health models, and decrease costs for society by trying to get people to avoid risky behavior (stop smoking, use protection during sex, etc). But it is absolutely not possible, at all, in any way, to figure out how much a single visit costs. This is similar to the problem of predicting climate change vs predicting the weather tomorrow in Amsterdam at 15:00. One is possible, the other is simply not.
But what is becoming painfully clear now is that this is true *everywhere*. It's trivial to know how much an industry costs. It's possible to figure out it's ROI for society. It is not possible to figure out how much value any individual worker provides. LLM ROI and cost comparison is an instance of this larger problem.
This is a problem for capitalism because it shows that the fundamental assumptions behind capitalism, that product value and labor value are quantifiable, that people can actually make comparisons between competing products, etc, are completely bullshit. The capitalist apologetics that makes up so much of economics, the lies that are told that hold this system together, are crumbling before our eyes.
If you make a lot of money, it's because you've been lucky. You have the right social networks, you have become good at convincing people to give you money. There is absolutely no way to connect that to actually providing value to society. If you make a lot of money, internalize that. Understand that you are not special, and things can change. If you don't make a lot of money, it's not because you don't provide value. Don't forget that. The system is a lie built to destroy you. Don't let it.
The ideology is sick, something something time of monsters and all that, we are together in this dying machine. We need to understand the lies. Your value can never be quantified. The way we have always figured out how to do the right thing for each other is through each other. Social connection has always guided us. But now the most socially disconnected people on the planet have hijacked the system. They direct the resources of the world, and game the system to avoid personal responsibility.
We have to build a system where everyone is accountable. We can't use abstract numbers and lies to figure things out for us. We have to build systems around people and accountability. There is no other solution.

That said, this is fucking hilarious and does remind me of the 90's where you just login to some unattended chat server and take over because they left it open to the internet with the default creds:
https://github.com/cyberpapiii/chipotlai-max?tab=readme-ov-file

It's not even just incomprehensibly that's a problem. I know I'm probably not going to understand lattice based cryptography. That's fine. There's a little black box on the corner that will bug me, but I have to accept that. I know that *there are people who know how it works.* I can go talk to a cryptographer and ask about it. They will explain it. I won't understand. But I know *someone* knows.
None of these black boxes will suddenly start spitting out gremlins, literal gremlins, where the patch is to tell the black box to stop talking about goblins, gremlins, and raccoons. That's just wild. All the bat shit patches people have done in the past and, "I donno, I guess we tell it to stop talking about gremlins" is where we're at? Fuck that.
https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/

And, you know, *all of the other problems.*

Also the fact that the UX is modeled on slavery is extremely fucking gross and creepy, but I've said that before.

The thing I love about computers is that I can tell you basically anything about how a computer works, not because I know everything but because I know how to figure it out. I can walk you, over the course of an hour, two, there, maybe more, though every step of typing something into a web form, from the electrical signals that get turned into digital via an ADC, to the USB controller memory, to the kernel driver, to user space, through the application stack, back down to the kernel, to the network driver, through routers, up the server stack, TCP/IP, key exchanges, etc.
I don't mean I have the time to dig into these things. I used to, and it was fun. I've given more than my fair share of interviews talking though variations of this. What I'm talking about isn't pure knowledge, but that, given relatively simple theory, and the right tools, every action of a computer can be understood down to the limits of physics.
The thing I hate about #LLMs is that take something comprehensible and make it something almost completely opaque. Even with a solid understanding of the theory, literally no one understands what's happening. That is shit. It makes playing with technology not fun anymore. The way in which companies are making things even more opaque by running stuff in the cloud is everything I hated about closed source on steroids.

And yes, substack. Unfortunately Urban Cycling Institute is on substack. =/

There is more to #SolarPunk than solar panels and bikes. What we are talking about is being part of a living world. The hegemonic culture is one of hierarchical domination.
But many of the the cultures that hegemony suppresses bring a vibrancy to life. I don't buy yeast from the store, sealed in a plastic packet, a coffin for a living thing. I feed my sourdough. I am obligated to it, in a relationship with it, as the culture is reliant on me for it's survival. It speaks to me, with smell and color. I must pay attention. I have to learn it's nature, how it grows and eats at different temperatures informed by different times of the year. Mushrooms, yeast, kiefer, plants, independent things, things I can't control, life that is intertwined with my own.
But even my #bicycle speaks to me, which is something I hadn't considered until reading this and thinking about that framing.
It is not simply that "we need a different economic system." What we are talking about is a fundamentally different interpretation and experience of the world, from the hierarchical structure of death to a web of life, where even "inanimate" things become imbued with agency.
https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=2936873&post_id=151655646

"Nobody connected the 2017 in-place optimization to authencesn's scratch writes or to the splice path's use of page cache pages. Each change was reasonable in isolation. The vulnerability exists at the intersection of all three, and has been silently exploitable for nearly a decade."
Basically, a 6 year old bit of code that was not vulnerable when written became vulnerable after multiple API changes. So this is really a tech debt problem.

Also, there's a bug in the Infosec.exchange metrics so the view count is way off. In this case, I'm fine with it because it's funny.

And that's basically it. You only need like 9 of these, and there are 11, so you have some flexibility. Wow, that was a lot to type.
Go find 3 other weirdos, put everything together, and see what happens. It's probably worth it to compare what you come up with to an existing legal church:
https://www.ulcseminary.org/irsqualifications.php
You could also just start a ULC church if you're so inclined. They have templates you can use already. It's up to you.
I'll drop more things here if anything comes to mind. Otherwise I'm gonna loop back with all the folks who reached out and make sure they're tagged.

Now, I don't especially like the term "church" so I may use something else... like "coven." You can do what you want. But I happen to have already mapped out an example. (It is exactly that, just an example, so take if it's useful, change if you need, and don't stick to anything too closely.) Oh, this mapping also means that you would, for religious reasons, only be allowed to work under capitalism 4 days a week instead of 5.
Given the increases in productivity over the last 100 years, a 4 day work week is a completely reasonable expectation. If we have to annex Monday for the weekend by force of religion, so be it. It is rightfully ours anyway. If enough people try it, this will probably work. If it doesn't work, it just needs more people.
The Practice of Worship:
It is recommended to break down worship in to three sections: the functional, the communal, and the spiritual. It is also recommended to break these across multiple days. A common structure for some Christian churches is to take 10-15 minutes for announcements (Functional), an hour or two for services (Spiritual), followed by (Communal) coffee, tea, and cookies for an unspecified time up to two hours after. When starting or working with limited time a single compressed model like this may work, but it's not optimal.
- The Functional
The purpose of this section is to address the functional needs of the coven. Block out time (less than 90 minute blocks is recommended) to go through reports and updates from those involved in the Dispensary, Library, Works Committee (infrastructure), and Services Committee (providing services internally and, potentially, externally). Talk through any additional announcements, including those from other covens you may be federated with.
It is helpful to include unstructured communal time, such as shared meals, during or after functional meetings. As the federation grows, more time will be needed. It is recommended to break functional meetings, work parties, and such across multiple days. When a federation becomes sufficiently large, it is recommended to take every Monday, on top of Saturday and Sunday, as a third day of community and worship.
The scope of the functional spans 3 realms (which may be more-or-less fluid): the personal or family, the coven and federation, and humanity itself. It is up to each coven and individual to negotiate how to allocate the three days of the weekend once we have liberated Monday from the work week, but it is important to reserve it for one of these three. However, some people must work on weekends. Medical personnel, for example, cannot conform to a standard work week. While the work week should be universally restricted, which specific days are used will be up to the specific coven and their members.
A functional meeting can start with an agenda like the following:
Functional Invocation
Announcements
Report Backs
Dispensary
Inventory Check
What is low
What is empty
What is expiring
What is needed
Funds status
Library
Inventory Check and Items needing return
Library acquisition requests
Funds status and budget check
Works Committee
Upcoming projects
Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
New committee formations
Funds status
Services Committee
New capabilities announcements
New needs requests
Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
New committee formations
Funds status
Task Check
Breaking the Circle
This agenda is a suggestion for those who don't know where to start. It can be adapted or ignored as appropriate.
- The Spiritual
Spirituality is necessarily an undefined space. It is deeply personal. Each individual taking time to share their own personal spiritual experiences can help each connect with each other. This experience of connection can itself be a spiritual experience. It may also be useful to read esoteric, mystical, or philosophical texts together as type of "book club" and share thoughts. Others may draw from their own knowledge or traditions. This is something that must be defined together within a group.
- The Communal
The communal aspect of the practice of worship bind the coven and federation together. Within the community we find joy and release, connection and comfort. The coven is where we turn in times of need, and where we share our hopes and dreams.