Tootfinder

Gripped by a terrible #drought now entering its 💥sixth year,
#Iran’s cities are on the brink of what its meteorological organisation calls
♦️“water day zero”:
the boundary beyond which supply systems no longer function.
🔥This was crossed by

How ‘day zero’ water shortages in Iran are fuelling protests
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/15/how-day-zero-water-shortages-in-iran-are-fuelling-protests?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

How ‘day zero’ water shortages in Iran are fuelling protests
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/15/how-day-zero-water-shortages-in-iran-are-fuelling-protests?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

I've been giving some thought to what needs to happen in the US once the current political and human rights nightmare comes to an end. It's pretty obvious that all of the guard rails we had in place to keep power from concentrating into one person's hands failed, miserably. It will eventually end, history kind of shows that, but the big question is will it end peacefully or violently?
A symbolic source of contention is the way that Trump has slapped his name and image on ev…

new rule: any AI assistant with "human oversight" needs to inject some deliberate mistakes. if the human oversight misses the deliberate mistakes, the batch is sent to another team for re-evaluation, and the humans get erased and upgraded to a better model.

Satya Nadella says the industry needs to move past slop-vs-sophistication arguments and view AI as a cognitive amplifier, not a human substitute (Satya Nadella/sn scratchpad)
https://snscratchpad.com/posts/looking-ahead-2026/

Looking Ahead to 2026
As I reflect on the past year and look toward the one ahead, there’s no question 2026 will be a pivotal year for AI. Yes, another one. But this moment feels different in a few notable ways.

The abominations by #ICE continue to increase. #CHN_Action has simple letter to Congress asking them not provide more funding to ICE and DHS until they take responsibility for their abusive behavior - and change their approach. It's easy to send to your Congresspeople; it's easy to customize. You …

Demand Congress stop funding DHS’ and ICE’s inhumane and lethal tactics amidst ongoing investigations.
Reckless disregard for human life is rampant in the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants and their neighbors and supporters. From Chicago to California, immigrants have been killed during ICE raids and traffic stops. And there have been at least eleven non-fatal shootings by ICE and Border Patrol agents in places around the country, including another two victims in Portland, Oregon.   The killing of Renee Nicole Good by ICE agents in Minneapolis is not an isolated tragedy, bu…

The abominations by #ICE continue to increase. #CHN_Action has simple letter to Congress asking them not provide more funding to ICE and DHS until they take responsibility for their abusive behavior - and change their approach. It's easy to send to your Congresspeople; it's easy to customize. You …

Demand Congress stop funding DHS’ and ICE’s inhumane and lethal tactics amidst ongoing investigations.
Reckless disregard for human life is rampant in the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants and their neighbors and supporters. From Chicago to California, immigrants have been killed during ICE raids and traffic stops. And there have been at least eleven non-fatal shootings by ICE and Border Patrol agents in places around the country, including another two victims in Portland, Oregon.   The killing of Renee Nicole Good by ICE agents in Minneapolis is not an isolated tragedy, bu…

Any social internet worth thinking about needs to be built on the idea of care.
- care for the wellbeing of the people on the network (moderation)
- care for those doing extra work (like moderation)
- care for each other (add alt-texts to images, thinking about inclusivity etc)
- care to make running infrastructure sustainable (in all respects)
The social Internet needs to be a web of human care.

Actually, I do want to come back to masculinity under patriarchy and whiteness under white supremacy because I think it's worth talking more about. The "man" under patriarchy (at least "Western" patriarchy) is represented as power and independence. The man needs nothing and thus owes nothing to anyone. The man controls and is not controlled, which is intimately related to independence as dependence can make someone vulnerable to control. The image of "man" projects power and invulnerability. At the same time "man" is a bumbling fool who can't be held accountable for his inability to control his sexual urges. He must be fed and cared for, as though another child. His worst behaviors must be dismissed with phrases such as "boys will be boys" and "locker room talk." The absurdity of the concept of human "independence" is impossible to understate.
Even if you go all Ted Kaczynski, you have still been raised and taught. This is, perhaps, why it is so much more useful to think in terms of obligations than rights. Rights can be claimed and protected with violence alone, but obligations reveal the true interdependence that sustains us. A "man" may assert his rights. Yet, on some level, we all know that the "man" of patriarchy acts as a child who is not mature enough to recognize his obligations.
White violence and white fragility reflect the same dichotomy. "The master race" somehow always needs brown folks to make all their shit and do all the reproductive labor for them. For those who fully embrace whiteness, the "safe space" is a joke. DEI shows weakness. Yet, when presented with an honest history adults become children who are incapable of differentiating between criticism and simple facts. *They* become the ones who must be kept safe. The expectation to be responsible for one's own words and actions, one of the very core definitions of being an adult, is far too much to expect. Their guilt needs room, needs tending, needs caring. White people cannot simply "grow the fuck up" or, as they may say of slavery, "fucking get over it."
And again, interestingly, it is *rights* that they reference: "Mah Freeze PEACH!" I find it hard to distinguish between such and my own child's assertion that anything she doesn't like is "not fair!" No, these assertions fail to recognize the fundamental fabric of adult society: the obligations we hold to each other.
At the intersection of all privilege is the sovereign, the ultimate god-man-baby. Again, referencing the essay (https://hexmhell.writeas.com/observations-on-domination-and-trump)
> This is where it becomes important to consider the ideology behind the sovereign ritual. Participation within the sovereign ritual denotes to the participants elements of the sovereign. That is, all agents of the sovereign are, essentially, micro dictators. By carrying out the will of the sovereign, these micro dictators can, by extension, act outside of the law.
While law enforcement is the ultimate representative of sovereign violence, privileges allow a gradated approximation of the sovereign. Those who are "closer" in privilege to the sovereign may, for example, be permitted to carry out violence against those who are father away. The gradation of privilege turns the whole society, except for the least privileged, into a cult that protects the privilege system on behalf of the most privileged. (And immediately Malcolm X pops to mind as having already talked about part of this relationship in 1963 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf7rsCAfQCo.)

I want to write century bot: it searches through recent posts looking for those that are on 99 likes, and likes them. It needs a human name, though, so people don't feel cheated.

Say what you will about consumerism, but at least ripping people off is a form of having an actual relationship between human beings. An awful, sick relationship, but a relationship! Sales and marketing require that, at some level, you still view customers as people with thoughts and needs and desires and inner lives.
Now increasingly we run into things like the OP where even ripping people off is more acknowledgement of humanity than a company is willing to give.
5/

Richard Murphy, who previously advocated green growth, gets there in the end.
"The real challenge we face is not how to restart a growth engine that has already driven us to the edge of environmental collapse. It is how to redesign the economy so that the resources we already have are used to meet human and ecological needs.
Growth is not coming back — and nor should our democracy depend upon it."

Growth is not coming back — and nor should our democracy depend upon it
Martin Wolf has (once again) declared in the Financial Times that the fate of democracy rests on economic growth. As he said, in advance of the Budget: [Reeves'] first priority must be to get whatever growth she can.  Growth made democracy possible, he claims, and only growth can now save it, in...

Do you have the ability to write code for Apple platforms? Do you know what MDM / device management is? Do you understand what Compliance is? Do you care about being able to use a Mac or iPad or iPhone for work or school?
Does the idea of dealing with the bugs that can crop up from things like "this needs to be reliably managed like a server, but a human randomly sleeps it mid-process and when it wakes up it's in a different country!" sound interesting to you?
If so - come be my direct co-worker!
Need to be able to be based in/work within the US, but the team itself is fully remote. Multiple positions open.
Feel free to DM me with questions
https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200628824-0836/software-engineer-test-infrastructure

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made it clear that he’d prefer we all quit the term "AI Slop".
“We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication,”
Nadella wrote in a rambling post flagged by Windows Central, arguing that humanity needs to learn to accept AI as the
“new equilibrium” of human nature.
Going on, Nadella said that we now know enough about
“riding the exponentials of model capabilities”
as well as managing AI’s
“‘jagged’ …

Microsoft CEO Begs Users to Stop Calling It “Slop”
In a year-end writeup on the state of AI, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made it clear he'd really like us to stop saying "slop."

Wow. I've dealt with various toxic personalities in software development, but a good portion of the time those toxic personalities were at least extremely knowledgeable in their (often, very limited) domain.
AI, however, seems to be enabling toxic personalities *who are completely clueless*. Impressive!
https://github…

People should have a damn place to live, food to eat, and clothes to wear without having to bleed for it.
But no, capitalism makes you pay just to exist, turning human needs into profit and calling it freedom.
#Socialism #Capitalism