Tootfinder

“Of course we care about people, that’s why we promote privacy for … governments [and the police, military, etc.]” is one helluva take.
Let me break it down for those of you whose salaries depend on conflating people with corporations and governments because it isn’t hard:
Privacy is a human right.
Not a corporate right. Not a governmental right. Not a law enforcement right. Not a military right. A *human* right.
Corporations, governments, police departments, militari…

Free speech is the power to criticize your government without fear of prosecution. It is a basic human right.
It is not about getting away with hurting your neighbor who never caused you any harm. Dignity is a human right.
That is also what "love your neighbor" is about.
It's just a sensible thing to do.
Do not tolerate hate speech.
There is no (need for a) "freedom to hate".
Be kind to one another. 🧡

I think what helps in arguing with friends and family members is realizing that you don't have the pandering ideologically set far right influencer in front of you, but just a regular human being, even though they may on a surface level peddle the same beliefs.
The far right has been in the offense more than anything, people will have heard of certain obvious far right talking points, yet do not have a consolidated ideological opinion from which that point emerges, but rather …

‘AI will be the end of us’ – is Colm Tóibín right about the threat to creative writing? https://theconversation.com/ai-will-be-the-end-of-us-is-colm-toibin-right-about-the-threat-to-creative-writing-275898

‘AI will be the end of us’ – is Colm Tóibín right about the threat to creative writing?
AI will continue to affect writers existentially and economically – but does the human touch still matter to us more?

Ukrainians warned for years that Europe's human rights chief was a Kremlin conduit. The Epstein files just proved them right. - Euromaidan Press
https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/02/04/ukrainians-warned-for-years-that-europes-human-rights-chief-was-a-kremlin-conduit-the-epstein-files-just-proved-them-right/

The little crescent on the right is Earth. Moon in the middle. Artemis/Integrity on the left. Every human being is in this picture.
#humanity #artemis #moon

Human Traces III ⛩️
人类踪迹 III ⛩️
📷 Zeiss IKON Super Ikonta 533/16
🎞️ Lucky LUCKY SHD 400 (6x6)
If you like my work, Support by buying me a coffee or a roll of film from PayPal https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/ydcdingsite

No human in my lifetime has been as far away from Earth as the Artemis II astronauts are right now. No one since Apollo 17 in 1972.
They are right now in an orbit that takes them up to 74,000 km high. In comparison, the ISS is in an orbit 400 km high.
Once this phase is over, their trip leaving Earth orbit and traveling to the Moon starts.
#artemis2

https://resist.bot/petitions/PWLVGM

Congress must act: Healthcare is a human right
Text SIGN PWLVGM to 50409 to send this to your officials.

Happening now in North Minneapolis somewhere just southwest of 2nd Ave N and Van White Memorial Boulevard, police ordering more people with nowhere to go to leave otherwise-unused land by 1pm today. The City of Minneapolis has been using violence (physical force or the threat of physical force) to shove unhoused people around constantly since the destruction of community-supported encampments, and so long as this is allowed, the human right to housing will never be fulfilled. See you there…

My moment of clarity in the last few weeks was coming back to “Oh right, copyright is a hack, and one that is not serving us, particularly us on the margins”
The moral rights of authorship and the way we situate our legal process of ownership are, actually, kinda at odds. And it entirely misses the idea of a commons, both as community and as a cultural base to draw from.
I've long believed that we, collectively, should own our culture — to have modern myths be Copyright 1972 LucasFilm, the traditional songs we sing Copyright 1922, now owned by Warner/Chappell Music is one of the things I find repugnant about the situation we find ourselves in.
That said, reconciling that with the behavior of the AI companies, _particularly_ the American ones? It's hard. Google abuses its monopoly position; Microsoft has forced harmful and terrible tooling on people at every turn; OpenAI is run by someone who actively despises art and does not understand it; and Anthropic is run by a guy who is trying to make sure the apocalypse has a pleasant demeanor and doesn't offend any corporations on the way. All of the above have scraped the web with no active consent — and that's largely fine, that's what putting things in common _is_, that's the beauty of the open information world we have the remnants of — but also actively evading measures people put in place to stop it and with absolutely no willingness to engage with the process. Extracting from the commons _is_ the tragedy of the commons.
It does not mean that enlarging the commons with the resulting tools is bad. The doctrine of original sin is a Christian concept I do not subscribe to. The concept of 'fruit of the poisonous tree' is a legal tool to fix power relations not a moral stance. They're worth understanding, but they are not absolute moral stances that are self-evident.
These are not harmless tools, but so too putting hard regulation and corporate, legalistic scrutiny on everything has a vastly negative impact: it is a yoke on human creativity and community to the reins of capital.
And, so too, disruption has huge costs. We are, apparently, committed to doing things the worst possible way. One can just hope that we capture the good too, because the ride has started and it's rather late to get off.

From David Suzuki
“Aboriginal rights in Canadian law do not give Indigenous people rights — they merely recognize Crown obligations.” Indigenous people have inherent rights that are fundamental to treaty, human and constitutional rights.
We have a chance to do things right in Canada. Let’s put aside the fearmongering, push back against the pushback and continue our journey forward together.

Progress, pushback and Indigenous rights
As seatbelt and smoking regulations — and many other examples — show, people eventually adapt. Uncertainty shouldn’t be used to frustrate progress.

I kinda like living among lions (mountain lions). I wish we heard (or saw) them more often. We have plenty of deer for them to eat.
(We have had mountain lions come right up to our front door, and we have heard them - they sound like a cross between a human baby crying and a domestic cat.)
There also used to be bears - both black and brown (grizzle) around here. The black bears have returned to the mountains south of us, so maybe they will return here.
It is reported tha…

Big cats, bigger protections: Santa Cruz County mountain lions now listed as threatened
Mountain lions in Santa Cruz County recently gained new protections under the California Endangered Species Act after years as candidates for listing. Protecting six distinct puma populations around the state is a win for many dedicated researchers, but the move heightens the concerns about potential land-use and livestock impacts for developers, ranchers and farmers.

Since my job is stable now and I have saved up some money, I have decided to stop accepting donations via GitHub Sponsors and Ko-fi. I would like to thank everyone who helped me over the years. There are people who need the help much more than me right now.
If you needed a suggestion, @… is doing a lot more than me for #Gentoo these days and will certainly appreciate your help. He's also way nicer than I'll ever be.
https://github.com/sponsors/thesamesam
https://ko-fi.com/thesamesam
To the best of my knowledge, Gentoo project does not need extra money right now, but there are other awesome projects such as Disroot or many Fediverse instances that would definitely use some help. However, in general I'd suggest towards supporting individuals rather than projects: people need money to live, and can use your donations directly, while projects are often bound by red tape.
Finally, please support human artists and craftspeople (and I'm counting human software developers in that). Donate to projects and people who resist enshittification and who refuse to use LLMs. They need the money.
Once again, thanks for all.

Reminder that the historic Artemis II (human fly-by of the moon) mission launch is scheduled ~7.5h from now (at 18:24 EDT, which I think is UTC-4). Always subject to changes and could even scrub (this is the first opening of the launch window).
Looks like it's on, as of right now.
I'll probably watch Everyday Astronaut's coverage which is usually pretty good for these things:

Everyday Astronaut
Rocket science. A term we all use to describe something incredibly difficult. Trying to grasp all of the concepts involved in rocket science can be incredibly intimidating. My name’s Tim Dodd but I'm better known as the Everyday Astronaut. Recently I fell head over heels in love with spaceflight. My appreciation and curiosity for the subject grew into an obsession. Before you knew it, all I wanted to do was learn more and more... the more I learned, the more I wanted to share what was making…

You know you're an Internet old timer if you remember Gene Ray, self described "Cubic and Wisest Human"
That's right, the infamous Time Cube! Look it up and try to comprehend such simple math with your oneist brain noobs :-)

Now, what? Can’t I sleep in the sunbeam in peace?
#Mastodog #DogsOfMastodon

This becomes especially interesting when you understand the history of the church as a quasi-revolutionary organization. One could describe early church history as a mostly-successful attempt to overthrow the Roman empire. I say mostly successful because, in the end, the Roman state mutated the church for it's own ends and basically pulled a Lenin.
The early church was a religion of women and slaves that set up alternative institutions. See, the Roman economic system basically ran through the temples. Temples were basically the banks of their day (thus money changers in the temples and all that). So when the church set up their own institutions, they were actually attacking the economic system of the Roman empire. *That* is why the empire tried to destroy them. The Romans didn't really care about the gods. They would just mutate their beliefs to pull other pagans in. No, it wasn't about the gods. The Christian were fucking with the money.
The whole church as an institution was about dual power, and Paul (one of the early founders of the church) was central to organizing this into a political machine that could actually threaten the dominant order. One could argue that he saw the potential of the church, and used it to solidify his own power.
It all basically worked, right up until Constantine figured out how to flip the whole thing against the most radical elements. He had his people collect up different books of the Bible and modify them in such a way that it favored Rome. The trick here was to highlight the existing antisemitic threads of early church, and destroy the anti-Roman ones. Anti-authoritarian sects were killed as heretics, and centralized sects became aligned under the church.
This strategy of controlling internal dissent probably feels quite familiar. It's basically how the US works.
But this whole time, during the whole lead up to this, Christianity was illegal and it was continuing to grow as a system of dual power. When Romanism merged with Christianity, it created the most authoritarian institution in human history that brutally destroyed all opposition. Even still, several hundred years later it's power broke.
Today Liberalism has separated banking and the church, and has created the illusion of separation of church and state. But the same dual power strategy that allowed the first church to gain enough power to merge with the Roman power structure have now allowed Christian Nationalism to fully merge with Americanism into the Christian Fascism we see today...

RE: https://mastodon.social/@rex0n/116294577811967738
“If I can’t harass people, it’s censorship.”
Fuck off.
Last I checked “freedom to harass” wasn’t a fundamental human right.

Some City Some Nature V 🏙️🪾
一些城一些自然 V 🏙️🪾
📷 Nikon F4E
🎞️ ERA 100, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

In a recent interview with conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, Donald Trump drew a link between immigration, violent crime, and genetics, stating,
“we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” 
Comments such as these are not new.
Claims regarding genes and human behavior have long been used to perpetuate social harm.
Understanding this history shows just how pervasive and harmful Trump’s comments are.
They also illustrate how influential they …

The Alarming History Behind Trump’s “Bad Genes” Comments : The Hastings Center for Bioethics
In a recent interview with conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, Donald Trump drew a link between immigration, violent crime, and genetics,

If I understand information theory right, then, given "Socrates is human" and "all humans are mortals", there is no information in "Socrates is mortal", as it can be derived from the given statements. But what about the computational cost of deriving conclusions from statements? Does information not capture or consider that at all?
Aquinas said that angels immediately know all the consequences of their knowledge. But humans do not.
1/2

Muddled.
'Value' has specific meanings in Marxist political economy.
It isn't the appropriate term for what Boillier is discussing.
'Wealth' is closer but still not right.
It's a matter of standpoint: the abundance of nature isn't purely for human use, so those two terms don't apply well, or at all.
Toward a New Theory of Value (and Meaning): Living Systems as Generative - resilience

Toward a New Theory of Value (and Meaning): Living Systems as Generative
The bounty brought by rainfall, fertile soil, and biodiversity cannot truly be expressed through quantitative proxies, prices, algorithms, or markets because this “wealth” doesn’t exist in static, objectified forms or essentialist identities

Let me tell you a parable.
There was a student who was given as assignment of writing an essay. The student found 10 similar essays online. He copied selected bits of different essays. He tediously reworded the result, removed some sentences, added some adjectives and adverbs, shifted some more sentences, added some glue — all with the single-minded goal of covering up the tracks. Eventually, a voluminous essay was complete.
The student has put a lot of effort into this; possibly even more that if he had written it himself. He did learn a bit about essays, though he didn't really practice writing one. He did practice some skills that would be useful in a future bullshit job, though. The essay passes all #plagiarism checks, even though it immediately raises red flags to any human reading it: the sudden style changes, contradictory statements, sentences that don't make much sense in their context. And if he was asked to defend it, he might be in trouble.
So, the student put an effort (though not the right kind of effort), produced a mediocre essay and learned something (though bullshit skills rather than creative skills). Now let's consider a different situation: rather than doing all that himself, the student paid somebody else to do it; and not to *write* an original essay, but to do all the shenanigans described above.
That's precisely what using LLMs is. You tell them to write an essay, so they find and mix random stuff, and produce a mediocre essay. You don't put an effort, you don't learn anything, perhaps you don't even read "your" essay. And it passes all the plagiarism checks.
#AI #LLM #NoAI #NoLLM #chardet

The Uphill Battle of Navigating a Broken Immigration System - Progressive.org https://progressive.org/magazine/the-uphill-battle-of-navigating-a-broken-immigration-system-sanzum-20260209/

The Uphill Battle of Navigating a Broken Immigration System
Seeking asylum is a human right. But in the United States, this path to citizenship is long, confusing, and treacherous.

Very proud and excited to vote in the NDP leadership race today!!
This is not the first time I've voted in a Federal leadership race... more on that later but first, my choices! I considered only voting for two people, but I ended up filling in all 5 choices.
#1: Tanille Johnston @…
#2: Avi Lewis @…
#3: Heather McPherson
#4: Tony McQuail
#5: Rob Ashton
Why?
You might ask why I would publicize my choices. I don’t expect others to of course. It is a privilege and a right in Canada to exercise your democratic choice freely and privately, but I also think there is value in knowing how others voted.
#1 why Tanille? #electoralReform and proportional representation myself, I didn't just want to pick my top two. I wanted to make a statement on each of these candidates an influence each one.
To be blunt, Heather is #3 because she is the middle-of-the-road candidate. She is an excellent representative as MP and has gathered the support of other MPs including my own, but while I would be OK with her leadership, I would see her as a continuation of the status quo, and that is not what the NDP needs as a party, nor is it what Canada needs as a country.
We desperately need a vigorous and clear alternative to the Centre-but-mostly-Right Liberals, and the MAGA-wannabe Conservatives. The only way to do that is to catch the attention of Canadians and inspire them. I am not sure that Heather has the ability to do that, and if we continue with the same leadership crew in the NDP, I am not confident that the policy choices will be strong enough to inspire and attract Canadians.
That is why Tanille and Avi are far better options.
#4 Why Tony:

Tony is the real deal. Honestly, I would have loved to rank him higher. He represents the true life blood of rural, socially progressive, environmentally aware, Canadians. You should go check out his platform. I am so glad that he was able to participate fully in the race and we need his voice in the NDP.
#5 Why not Rob?
I have been an active member in my Union for more than 10 years. Unionism is The Way. Rob is representing a division within the union movement that claims that working people can't have jobs if the environment is put first. This is a lie.
We need union leaders that look to the future and speak honestly to people. We need union leaders who are genuinely progressive, not ready to do the bidding of corporate masters to the benefit of a few.
Working people need honesty, and when an industry is on decline, a clear path to new, excellent, union, jobs!
#CanPoli #CdnPoli #Liberal #CPC #Canada #Democracy #NDP

Sometimes I feel that I could have my introduction much better. So I'll leave another piece here, and maybe one day I'll be able to find it again and use somewhere…
I'm a radical. I believe that every human has a right to dignity in life. Yes, even these people who allegedly "are too lazy to work".
I believe that everyone deserves safety, that nobody should be cold or starve, that everybody should be able to use a toilet or wash themselves, have access to healthcare and public transportation.
I think that restricting access to drinking water and toilets is a crime against humanity. The latter is also plain stupid, because it only leads to people using other places as toilets.
I'm so tired of the postsoviet labor cult (a kind of Polish thing). Seeing labor as a value in itself. Everyone must work, and it doesn't matter whether the work is actually beneficial, or outright harmful.
And last of all, I can't tolerate smokers. There is no excuse to harm yourself and everyone around you, just to satisfy your stupid addiction. And I'm also talking of all the random people who breathe all the toxins because smokers think they deserve to smoke everywhere, all the time.

Okay, this Kagi translation tool is pretty entertaining (and an absolute gem as a guerilla marketing tactic, by which I mean it be a fine way to plunder more business, me hearty!)
https://translate.kagi.com/?from=en&to=LinkedIn speak

I'm sorry to say that I actually wrote it:
"The pinnacle of enshittification, or Large Language Models"
#AI #LLM #NoAI #NoLLM