Tootfinder

One pattern you can always count on: if you ever explain a technology by describing how the human and social aspects matter more than the obscure technical details, a certain cohort of dudes who are inept at socialization will lash out about their insecurities by trying to condescend. Who here thinks I wrote ~5000 words on Markdown but I don’t know what plain text files are?

reality_mining: Reality mining proximity network (2004)
A network of human proximities among students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as measured by personal mobile phones. Nodes represent people (students from the Media Lab and the Sloan Business School) and an edge connects a pair if the two devices made a Bluetooth handshake at the time. Edges are timestamped.
This network has 96 nodes and 1086404 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted, Timestamps

RMS Hospitality Learning Labs
A practical webinar series from RMS that explore how technology can make hospitality simpler, smarter, and more human...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/rms-hospitality-learning-labs/

Reddit surpasses TikTok as the fourth most-visited social media service in the UK, likely driven by changes to Google's search algorithms and AI deals (Michael Savage/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/03/re…

"human fracking
The use of information technology to exploit human attention in ways that are net counterproductive to the persons thus exploited
" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/human_fracking

Just learned about the term, reading

“The actor achieved what we believe is the first documented case of a cyberattack largely executed without human intervention at scale—the AI autonomously discovered vulnerabilities in targets […]. Most significantly, this marks the first documented case of agentic AI successfully obtaining access to confirmed high-value targets for intelligence collection, including major technology corporations and government agencies.”
This is fine. 🔥

Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign
A report describing an a highly sophisticated AI-led cyberattack

Reddit surpasses TikTok as the fourth most-visited social media service in the UK, likely driven by changes to Google's search algorithms and AI deals (Michael Savage/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/03/re…

Qobuz’s policy on AI-generated music.
#music #genAI

Non-invasive technology can shape the brain's reward-seeking mechanisms https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/news/non-invasive-technology-can-shape-the-brains-reward-seeking-mechanisms Non-invasive ultrasonic neuromodulation of the human …

Non-invasive technology can shape the brain’s reward-seeking mechanisms
University of Plymouth news: New research led by the University of Plymouth has found that targeted ultrasound can be used to change the function of a...

The "prove you're not human" challenge?
What is Moltbook? The strange new social media site for AI bots
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/02/moltbook-ai-agents-soc…

The "prove you're not human" challenge?
What is Moltbook? The strange new social media site for AI bots
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/02/moltbook-ai-agents-soc…

Science That's Actually Interesting
A fun, light-hearted deep dive into topics from climate and environment to health, technology, space and human behaviour. Informative, entertaining and refreshingly human, this is science for curious listeners who love stories and want to stay curious about the world...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory:

The whole thing is optimized for scams, deception and other criminal behavior:
- user interface that deceptively pretends it's a human you're talking to
- claims from companies highly exaggerate capabilities
companies and "experts" constantly hype "AGI" which they (funnily enough) do to both make investors greedier and spread fear and as a distraction because these algorithms can't actually do what they keep promising
- large-scale accounting and financial fraud (e.g. what Nvidia is doing with circular selling)
- biggest case of copyright infringement in history
Note: I think the underlying technology is really cool, and definitely has use cases and can be used for actually good things. But: some technology just has more downsides than upsides, and some should only be used by experts in controlled environments. Leaded gasoline, asbestos and chlorofluorocarbon are also all really cool technology.
In this case perhaps the techology itself doesn't do anything inherently bad, however the people making it are lying about what it can do, the people selling it are motivated purely by greed and the people using it (often forced to do so) are being deceived.

reality_mining: Reality mining proximity network (2004)
A network of human proximities among students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as measured by personal mobile phones. Nodes represent people (students from the Media Lab and the Sloan Business School) and an edge connects a pair if the two devices made a Bluetooth handshake at the time. Edges are timestamped.
This network has 96 nodes and 1086404 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted, Timestamps

Lewis Perelman hatte es 1992 schon drauf:
„The mission of hyperlearning is not only vision but action. HL's purpose is to enhance the human user's ability to direct the potent technology of the smart environment, lest the human be reduced to technology's object.

A look at the humans employed to rescue robotaxis; Waymo uses the Honk app to pay $20 to $24 to manually close robotaxi doors and $60 to $80 to tow its cars (Lisa Bonos/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/12/25/waymo-robots-human-work…

When robot taxis get stuck, a secret army of humans comes to the rescue
Waymo robotaxis get stranded when a passenger leaves the door open. Tow truck operators can get paid $22 to close a door and set them free again.

Evidence that AI is normal technology include AI systems that are good enough to be useful but not good enough to be trusted, continuing to require human oversight that limits productivity gains;
prompt injection and security vulnerabilities remain unsolved, constraining what agents can be trusted to do;
domain complexity continues to defeat generalization, and what works in coding doesn’t transfer to medicine, law, science;
regulatory and liability barriers prove high enou…

What If? AI in 2026 and Beyond
The market is betting that AI is an unprecedented technology breakthrough, valuing Sam Altman and Jensen Huang like demigods already astride the world. The

A) good advice 😅
B) LLMs & technology always remind me that they exist to allow me not have to collaborate with another human. This is why technology inherently dehumanises us.
The earliest example I can think of in music is synths/drum machines, which enabled musicians not to have to form a band with others.
1/2
https:…

"I'm a technology writer, which means I'm supposed to be encouraging you to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at the money-losingest technology in human history, AI. No one has ever lost as much money as the AI companies."
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/not

"regardless of the underlying technology, the pursuit of artificial general intelligence is not necessarily the most efficient route to useful applications. Artificial specific intelligence (AI approaches focused on a specific domain, such as the Nobel prize-winning, protein-folding algorithm, AlphaFold2) gives more reliable and transparent results by combining the subtle pattern detection at which GenAI excels with explicitly encoded, domain-specific knowledge."

Elon #Musk 🏴‍☠️ is not, as Grok claims, “world history's greatest human”; he is simply and plainly an idiotic #sociopath.
https://w…

Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot ranks him as world history’s greatest human
Users on X shared examples of the “truth-seeking” AI chatbot praising its owner as “strikingly handsome,” a “genius,” and fitter than LeBron James. 

In what may be close to an impossible job,
the “head of preparedness” at OpenAI
will be directly responsible for defending against risks from ever more powerful AIs to human mental health, cybersecurity and biological weapons.
That is before the successful candidate has to start worrying about the possibility that AIs may soon begin training themselves amid fears from some experts they could “turn against us”.
“This will be a stressful job,
and you’ll jump into …

Some experts in the human-computer interaction field say making AI chatbots act humanlike creates cognitive dissonance for users over how much to trust them (Kashmir Hill/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/technol<…

Why Do A.I. Chatbots Use ‘I’?
A.I. chatbots have been designed to behave in a humanlike way. Some experts think that’s a terrible idea.

"Crickets munch on microplastics—especially if they have a big mouth"
#Crickets #Animals #Plastic #Microplastics

Crickets munch on microplastics—especially if they have a big mouth
To a human, microplastics are very small at less than 5 millimeters (mm) wide. But to an insect, microplastics might be the same size as the food they usually eat. Researchers reporting in the journal Environmental Science & Technology have shown that crickets can and will consume polyethylene microplastics if their mouth is larger than the plastic particle. The study suggests that crickets—and likely many other insects—cannot distinguish plastic from food.

"The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming" by David Wallace-Wells
is a stark, scientifically grounded "travelogue of the near future"
detailing the catastrophic, cascading effects of climate change beyond just rising seas and temperatures,
including widespread famine, refugee crises, disease, and extreme weather,
while also exploring how these changes will transform politics, culture, and technology,
serving as an urgent call for immediate…

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
Book — Non-fiction. By David Wallace-Wells. 2019. 320 pages. This book raises the alarm over the Earth's climate crisis and demands radical action to save human civilization as we know it.

What’s really amazing about vibe-coding is how people are replacing programming languages which are strictly deterministic with human speech which is highly ambiguous and expect programming to be faster and better.
“Well only use it when you’re already an expert!”
None of the people starting their careers using this technology are experts yet, nor will the ever be.
And within some finite amount of time nether will you, the expert, be an expert anymore.

Quoting the Resonant Computing Manifesto.
Five principles for the future of computing: 
private, dedicated, plural, adaptable, and prosocial.
(I've signed.)
https://resonantcomputing.org/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The Resonant Computing Manifesto
Technology should bring out the best in humanity, not the worst—a manifesto for resonant computing built on five principles that reject hyper-scale extraction for human flourishing.

reality_mining: Reality mining proximity network (2004)
A network of human proximities among students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as measured by personal mobile phones. Nodes represent people (students from the Media Lab and the Sloan Business School) and an edge connects a pair if the two devices made a Bluetooth handshake at the time. Edges are timestamped.
This network has 96 nodes and 1086404 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted, Timestamps