Tootfinder

Just finished "The Raven Boys," a graphic novel adaptation of a novel by Maggie Stiefvater (adaptation written by Stephanie Williams and illustrated by Sas Milledge).
I haven't read the original novel, and because of that, this version felt way too dense, having to fit huge amounts of important details into not enough pages. The illustrations are gorgeous and the writing is fine; the setting and plot have some pretty interesting aspects... It's just too hard to follow a lot of the threads, or things we're supposed to care about aren't given the time/space to feel important.
The other thing that I didn't like: one of the central characters is rich, and we see this reflected in several ways, but we're clearly expected to ignore/excuse the class differences within the cast because he's a good guy. At this point in my life, I'm simply no longer interested in stories about good rich guys very much. It's become clear to me how in real life, we constantly get the perspectives of the rich, and rarely if ever hear the perspectives of the poor (same applies across racial and gender gradients, among others). Why then in fiction should I get more of the same, spending my mental bandwidth building empathy for yet another dilettante who somehow has a heart of gold? I'm tired of that.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

In a world with kings, our only agency is to beg “please, sir, be kind.”
#apple #BigTech

20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple
Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse. Can you help? Email paris AT paris.id.au (and read on for the details). ❤️ Here’s how Apple “Permanently” locked my Apple ID. I am writing this as a desperate measure.

Jesus fucking christ.
https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple
Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse. Can you help? Email paris AT paris.id.au (and read on for the details). ❤️ Here’s how Apple “Permanently” locked my Apple ID. I am writing this as a desperate measure.

Just finished The Way of Kings.
while the writing was good and the characters were good it's such a poorly plotted book that it becomes unenjoyable.
Very little happens over 800 pages and while I love character development it's no excuse for how slow this moves. I would have enjoyed this at 500 pages. At 1000 I don't even want to read more.
#books

I guess no-one should ever buy Apple gift cards. https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

"Iyengar told me she isn’t worried about Musk ruining D&D.
Musk is welcome to waste his money on “trying to make everyone play the version of D&D that he thinks should exist in the world,” Iyengar said. “That’s never been how that works. Everyone will play it how they want, or they’ll play something else.”
https://

"20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple" – Paris Buttfield-Addison
https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

Just finished "The Word for World is Forest" by Ursula K. Le Guin. Can't believe I didn't read this one earlier, and this strengthens my resolve to finish off the rest of her stuff I have yet to read sooner. I think it benefits somewhat from having read it after "Four Ways to Forgiveness" which gives more of the Hainish context. Certainly none of the blurbs I had read about it did it any measure of justice, which is one reason I hadn't prioritized it. More than being about colonization, it's about a solution to the paradox of tolerance, and both the price and imperfections of that solution. As usual with Le Guin's science fiction, it's a rich companion to anarchist thought.
I think the typical objection to seeing it as an answer to the warlord question would be that it serendipitously positions the indigenous population with more power and a less ruthless opponent than in the imagined scenario, and it uses the League of Worlds as a sort of deus ex machina to foreclose further retribution. Ultimately that's why I think it's more about the paradox of tolerance than anything else, but I also think in regards to the warlord problem that we are too quick to underestimate just how numerous and enthusiastic the opponents of a warlord might be, and to overestimate the strength of technological weapons wielded by frail (and psychologically unarmored) humans.
In any case, Le Guin gives this book's alien humans yet another fascinatingly credible capability, and getting to see the introduction of ansible technology with all its implications is pretty cool too. Maybe not

My initial thoughts as I read through the Canadian summary:
- While it mentions a political revolution in the U.S., with Trump removing or ignoring controls on his powers, it doesn't talk about how critical their midterms are.
- If the Democrats fail to take control of the House and Senate, then 2027 and beyond will be worse. Trump, senile and aging badly, will be a puppet for the worst elements in the U.S government.
- There's a real possibility that midterms could get canceled outright as Trump seeks absolute power.
- Smaller risks, in terms of impact, are food and health safety.
- The U.S. is removing all restrictions on profit in their food chain. Inspection agencies are being dismantled and legislation eliminated. Yet we continue to import goods from them.
- The anti-vaccine strategy at the very top is leading to surges in COVID, flu, measles and more. How long until that spills over our border.
#CanPoli

The Washington Post's former letters editor, Alyssa Rosenberg, reflects on her role as a professional listener, offering readers a rare chance to feel heard (Alyssa Rosenberg/NOTUS)
https://www.notus.org/per…

The Washington Post Got 21,000 Emails After It Didn't Endorse. I Read Them All.
Reading and editing letters gave me a theory about what is wrong with America — and how it could be fixed.

I wrote a short story, a sort of parable, and you can read it first if you subscribe (for free) to my ghost. I'll release it to subscribers later today. I am titling it "To Sea."
Subscribe here: https://stuff.davidaugust.com/

David August
Stories, serious articles, satire, tech trends, how to guides and ideas from David August. Actor. Writer. Acting coach.

Two screenshots of the lock screen on my iPhone 17 Pro whose difference confounds me. In one the contrast is good and I can read the numbers on the pad, but the time and battery status are hidden. In the other, the key pad is pretty much invisible but I can see the time and battery. I have no idea how to trigger the contrastier one; it just sometimes does this.
Is this phenomenon known? Explicable? It's as if the new UI is sometimes ashamed to show how unreadable it is and compensates before hiding again.
Somebody made this happen. Any idea why?

I read "The Gift of Not Belonging: How Outsiders Thrive in a World of Joiners"
by Rami Kaminski
I certainly am otrovert. What about you?

"Voyager 1 was launched the day after I celebrated my 4th birthday. I watched Cosmos on Canal 13 when I was in 1st grade. I saw Voyager 2’s pictures of Uranus in the pages of the Argentine edition of the "Muy Interesante" magazine as I was heading towards high school. Years later, I read Sagan’s "Dragons of Eden" and "Pale Blue Dot" books while studying physics in college. Carl Sagan passed away shortly before I began a career in software."

Carl Sagan
The news of a software patch uploaded to the Voyager probes reminded me of a 1980 book telling precisely the story of how their journey began 46 years ago. When said book hit the publishing press, Voyager 1 had just finished its flyby of Saturn, a planet which Voyager 2 was about to survey a few months later. Assisted by gravity slingshots, the latter probe would reach Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. Both Voyagers would cross the Heliopause decades later, one in 2012, and the other in 2018.…

@… you seem to misunderstand the nature of the Fediverse, where people write something and other people might, or might not, read that thing.
Serendipity.
I can''t recall how your toot became visible. That's how it is.

As a Discordian Pope I sometimes shall give guidance, so:
If you are looking for the important scripture¹ of the Discordian Church teaching you morale and ethics and humanity just read Terry Pratchett².
/cc @…
__
¹the Holy Book is the “Principia Discordia or How I Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her: The Magnum O…

I saw snippets of this “interview,” how much more does it need to remove Trump from the office as he is clearly unfit? It's much more than “I don’t care.” He won’t face any consequences as he will most probably be declared not responsible for his actions due to his mental-medical status. I just hope someone took the red button away from him and they only let him play with golden Lego bricks all day long

Things I could do without when editing:
-Pretentiousness (luckily quite rare). Dude, we get it, you're really smart. But most of us are more impressed by good ideas than pompous prose.
-Passive voice. How have you made it this far as a writer while attributing action to the universe instead of people? Buildings don't just get built. Books don't just get written.
-Footnotes. You've written 10k words that three reviewers like. I bet you could read the style guide…

The most important lesson that one can learn about technology writ large. RTFM. @… https://eigenmagic.net/@daedalus/115839190423202974

Who can help explain how to read this info from Apple Weather? If the chances to rain tomorrow are 85% what do the hourly chances show?
I honestly don’t know how to understand this information.

Here's a very interesting read about life as an academic and how you're never "good enough":
Under pressure: Becoming the good enough academic
By Milena Tekeste. Some quotes below (I removed citations for smoother reading):
"I learned publishing in specific journals would lead to tenure. It was the first time that anyone had sat me down and explained “…

So I've read a lot of both academic and "popular" criticism of AI; spanning decades from the 1940s to now.
I think both things are good and proper and needed.
And further than that I posit that you actually need at least some bombastic and "flashy" writers in order to reach more people
What's kind of funny is that in many of the academic critiques of AI the authors comment on how their colleagues came belligerent and hostile towards them because "they aren't writing seriously"—this is found all over Weizenbaum, Dreyfus, Anders, etc.
Anyway, READ MORE OLD BOOKS :)

I’ve worked over the past year to reduce the amount of noise in my consciousness on a daily basis.
By that I mean - information noise, not literal sounds “noise”. (That problem was solved long ago by some good earplugs and noise canceling earphones.)
I’ve gotten used to spending less time on social media, regularly blocking most apps on my devices (anything with a feed news, most work communication apps, etc.), putting my phone and other devices aside for extended periods of time. Often go to work places with my iPad explicitly having its WiFi turned off and selecting cafes that don’t offer WiFi at all.
Negotiated better boundaries at work and in personal life where I exchange messages with people less often but try to make those interactions more meaningful, and people rarely expect me to respond to requests in less than 24 hours. Spent a lot of time setting up custom notification settings on all apps that would allow it, so I get fewer pings. With software, choosing fewer cloud-based options and using tools that are simple and require as few interruptions as possible.
Accustomed myself to lower-tech versions of doing things I like to do: reading on paper, writing by hand, drawing in physical sketchbooks, got a typewriter for typing without a screen. Choosing to call people on audio more, trying to make more of an effort to see people in person. Going to museums to look at art instead of browsing Pinterest. Defaulting to the library when looking for information.
I’m commenting on this now for two reasons:
1. I am pretty proud of myself for how much I’ve actually managed to reduce the constant stream of modern life esp. as a remote worker in tech!
2. Now that I’ve reached a breaking point of reducing enough noise that it’s NOTICEABLE - I am struck by the silence. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to navigate it and fill it. I made this space to be able to read and write and think more deeply - for now I feel stuck in limbo where I’m just reacquainting myself with the concept of having any space in my mind at all.

I‘m from West Germany, I never learned Russian or even how to read Cyrillic script. But since Russia‘s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 I must have had so much much exposure that I can now read this important message on a sign at #39C3. Learning through osmosis in times of crisis.

Somehow I've got that problem that just reading a book feels like I'm neglecting "important" work. My task list is long and there is always some "productive" stuff I could do. I intellectually understand that reading is important and not just a recreational activity. Also I understand recreation is important. Still there is this nagging feeling when I pick up a book and read.
Do you have the same issue? How did or would you address it?

I think I need to get more involved in OpenSCAD, or maybe just try to learn more about how to best us it, and improve my own workflow. I read a few things today that will really help me out. I will probably write up a blog post about it as well. (I already donate monthly because I use it so much!)
#OpenSCAD

„Just for shits and giggles, you can de-sham the chronostatiomatrix by running —()()(]]asdg a=-do —cd go cd stay —sususudododo baby shark—][] but that’s optional.“
https://infosec.exchange/@masek/115824312054188754

I wrote up how I set up #ty with #helix, with a focus on finding third-party packages (a.k.a. virtualenvs, which I keep on a central location!)
https:/…

Using ty with the helix editor · Technical inconsistencies blog
The folks at Astral have released ty, which they define as: An extremely fast Python type checker and language server, written in Rust. You can read more in the blog post announcing it. Today, I set it up with helix. To make it work, we first have to install it. Using uv, it’s as easy as typing: uv tool install ty@latest Then, edit your ~/.config/helix/languages.toml and add the following: [language-server.ty] command = "ty" args = ["server"] [[language]] name = "python" scope = "source.p…

So I think I'll need to read up on it a bit. I understand that "Passkeys" try to do something similar as SSH pubkeys.
But do you know a good technical explainer of what's going on and how it works?
(Yes, I could search myself but I am looking for recommendations of articles you have read that you found helpful and clear.)
EDIT: https://

Passkeys.io – A Real-World Passkey Demo & Info Page
Try a Realistic Passkey Demo Login and User Profile. Browse the Passkey Directory and Find Websites With Passkey Support. Learn About Device Compatibility and Technical Details.

In the last, guttering hours of the year, it’s tradition to look back on the last 12 months’ #TTRPG activity and reflect. You can read last year’s summary at https://dice.camp/@davej/113747664699824381…

While trying to understand why the American middle class feels poorer each year despite healthy GDP growth and low unemployment,
I came across a sentence buried in a research paper:
“The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”
I read it again.
Three times the minimum food budget.
I felt sick.

Part 1: My Life Is a Lie
How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America

Most English poems
I read on the Internet
Are just sentences
That don’t rhyme. How come?
(Not to deride the very cute xmas poem here but serious question. Do I have a bad sample size? Is this rhyming just for song lyrics and rap now? Or was non-rhyming poetry always bigger in English than in other languages?) https://

In my latest @… blog post, I've covered how to refresh the image cache in #Sylius after moving files to a different server.
Full read here:

Refresh Sylius Image Cache | bitExpert
Learn how to refresh the image cache in Sylius after transferring images between instances, ensuring proper frontend display. Use the liip:imagine:cache:resolve command to generate the image cache.

Things I have read in major newspapers and cyber publications over the past week that are just really fiction, totally false, and yet have become conventional wisdom among cyber journos:
--TP-Link routers are a US security threat. (not more than any other router)
--The SEC's settlement with SolarWinds is evidence of how little Trump cares about cyber (utterly false -- fed judge pooped on the SEC's legality in 2024 and much more).
--Coinbase is playing fast and loose…

Coworker is using a multi-billion-dollar coding assistant to read regression-test error messages back to them
... error messages that I wrote specifically so that they could be interpreted by a non-expert, including suggestions about "what to do if you see this message"
so now they're bragging about how they're "increasing efficiency with AI tools" and SOMEHOW IT'S MY FAULT AND I'M NOT GETTING THE CREDIT AT THE SAME TIME
*ahem*
anyw…

He doesn't know what tariffs are or how they work, and how the Constitution works.
Great choice of leader Texas.
#USpol #TXpol #tariffs

Just finished "It's Lonely at the Center of the Earth" by Zoe Thorogood.
CW: Frank/graphic discussion of suicide and depression (not in this post but in the book).
It feels a bit wrong to simply give it my review here as I would another graphic memoir, because it's much more personal and less consensual than the usual. It feels less like Thorogood has invited us into her life than like she was forced to put her life on display in order to survive, and while I selfishly like to read into the book that she benefited in some way from the process, she's honest about how tenuous and sometimes false that claim can be. Knowing what I've learned from this book about Thorogood's life and demons, I don't want her to feel the mortification of being perceived by me, and so perhaps the best thing I could do is to simply unread the book and pull it back out of my memories.
I did not find Thorogood's life relatable, nor pitiable (although my instinct bends in that direction), but instead sacred and unknowable. I suspect that her writing and drawing has helped others in similar circumstances, but she leaves me with no illusion that this fact brings her any form of peace or joy. I wonder what she would feel reading "Lab Girl" or "The Deep Dark," but she has been honest enough to convey that such speculation on my part is a bit intrusive.
I guess the one other thing I have to say: Zoe Thorogood has through artistic perseverance developed an awe-inspiring mastery of the comic medium, from panel composition, through to page layout and writing. This book wields both Truth and Beauty.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

Phanpy doesn't support quoots yet, so I'm using Mastodon's stock web interface and.. it's bad. Compare how busy it looks with unnecessary stuff (do I really need a "post" input form on screen at all times? Do I need a link to "favorites" visible at all times?), but also - the fonts are bad. Bad, bad, bad. Just so much harder to read. And the timeline toots just kind of run together, rather than being clearly delineated by whitespace in phanpy.

The title is “DC’s Access Journalists Turned the News Into a Luxury Good” and I for one hadn’t realized how true this is until I read https://talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25/dcs-access-journalists-turned-the-news-into-a-luxury-good

DC’s Access Journalists Turned the News Into a Luxury Good
Before the internet, what would today be called a “paywall” was just...

With the emergence of more processors with 64 cores or more, I'm thinking more about whether it makes sense to implement a hypercube virtualised on a single chip with a single vector of memory, or as a literal hypercube of 64 (say) RP2350s. I understand the problems of transferring data across a hypercube, but I don't have a good feeling of how the bus contention on a multicore processor scales. What should I read?

Implementing post scarcity hardware
Prototype work towards building a post-scarcity software system

Everyone on the British left should read this from @meadwaj
"...it is the Greens today who, under the energetic new leadership of Zack Polanski, are setting the pace. Given the uncertainties of the Your Party narrative, it is the Greens who will continue to step up and set that pace. They are, as I have said, the leading force on the English left."
"[The leadership of other left forces] ave a serious responsibility not to get in the way of this advance"
…

The Green Way
At the end of a politically hectic year, the Green Party under Zack Polanski is one of the few genuine success stories on the British left. How much potential is there in a future Red-Green alliance?

Just read this long post on "the current state of Cara" https://cara.app/post/2e0d29d3-a57a-4b70-b0d0-9cefc15176ca
🤔 "Not having an algorithmically recommended feed is the biggest reason why people dropped off from Cara after we went viral. In a chronolog…

Jingna Zhang (@zemotion) | Cara - Artist Social & Portfolio Platform
About the current state of Cara— Hi all, I’d like to address some users' concerns about Cara’s stability, algorithms and reach, and why we don’t actively promote Cara and recruit new users. I have touched on most of these before through other posts, but I’ll like to go over the main points and put them in one place since they often come up as recurring questions: — Cara’s longevity/stability > "A few weeks ago, after learning how much Jingna was struggling with her personal l…

Did you know if you leave the pumpkin guts in the fridge until they get a little squishy you can just rinse all the guts off instead of picking out seeds one-by-one? Happy this experiment worked out. (Was actually intentional, btw. 🙂 I read about how farms that produce pumpkin seeds just leave the pumpkins out in the field for a bit and thought I'd try the fridge version.)

I just read a fascinating and understandable article that gave me a better understanding of LLMs and how they operate.
LLMs Are Randomized Algorithms
A surprising connection between the newest AI models and a 50-year old academic field
by Udayan Kanade
Nov 13, 2025
18 min read
#LLM #AI #algorithms

Time publishes [Atmosphere: 100 Must-Read Books of 2025](https://time.com/collections/the-100-must-read-books-of-2025/7329475/atmosphere/).
I am not reading a book every 3.5 days.
Thus I am wondering how I could use this list.

....Huh.
https://buttondown.com/monteiro/archive/how-to-avoid-listening-to-radiohead/

What great news! Now that is something I've been on the lookout for 🥳
At the time @… wrote a nice blog post about how, together with @… , the port was submitted. Read it here:

Any #Python newbies out there? (Or experts that need to teach Python)
Would you have a specific online tutorial to recommend for someone who wants to learn Python without any prior programming experience? One that also explains how to install it ?
I was thinking of something like this:

Welcome To The Python Tutorial
Learn to program with this free Python tutorial for beginners. It's free, easy to read and lets you practice with in-browser code examples.

I am working on my next article, and so far its title is, “The Case for Local Law Enforcement to Arrest Feds.”
You can read it first by subscribing (for free) to my ghost at: https://stuff.davidaugust.com/
Thank you in advance!

David August
Stories, serious articles, satire, tech trends, how to guides and ideas from David August. Actor. Writer. Acting coach.

Indirect CW for teen pregnancy, rape, death.
Just finished "Girls Like Us" by Randi Pink. Pink has a knack for telling stories that capture the grim but also vibrant nuances of African-American history. I previously read "Under the Heron's Light" which has more elements of magical realism and connects more directly to the history of enslavement; "Girls Like Us" is more historical fiction, with a bridge at the end to contemporary times (circa 2019, when the book was published). It tells the story of a disparate group of mostly-Black teens who are pregnant in 1972, and shows a range of different outcomes as varied as the backstories of the different girls. Rather than just separate vignettes, the girls' stories are women together into a single plot, and Pink is a expert at pulling us in to deeply contemplate all the complexities of these girls' lives, showing rather than telling us truths about the politics of teen pregnancy and abortion, and how even though the choices involved don't have simple answers, taking those choices out of the hands of the people they most intimately affect is cruel and deadly.
#AmReading #ReadingNow