Tootfinder

The existence of Israel is a manifestation of European antisemitism, both historically justifying the project of Zionism and European governments continuing to fund Israel instead of addressing the core role of antisemitism in maintaining (at least) the conservative elements of the neoliberal order.
If antisemitism props up Israel, then a core part of dismantling Israel (and thus saving the lives of Palestinians) is addressing European antisemitism. There are Israeli Jews who would leave if they felt safe to do so. There are Jews demanding Israel be armed, because they don't feel safe anywhere else.
Protest, boycott, take whatever action you feel is appropriate. There is a limit to your ability to convince governments to stop funding genocide, but you can learn about antisemitism and you can work to fight it, especially within "The Left." You can learn to distinguish between legitimate critiques of Israel, and antisemitic ones, and you can stand and call out antisemitic ones.
Honestly, this is some of the easy work that I think a lot of people don't consider even doing, don't even realize it is a thing that can be done.
I'm talking to Israeli folks who identify as being on the Left. It's hard because they've been through a lot of propaganda. Israel is a cult that terrorizes its members. This is important work that can have a huge impact, because it focuses on dismantling the networks of support that reinforce what's happening now.
Meanwhile, I still run into wild things like "Rothschild" conspiracy theories among people who identify with the idea of supporting Palestinians.
Not only can you support the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinian people while opposing antisemitism, but you must actually do both in order to do either. They are exactly the same fight, and anything short of both is thrashing against oneself.

Cynicism, "AI"
I've been pointed out the "Reflections on 2025" post by Samuel Albanie [1]. The author's writing style makes it quite a fun, I admit.
The first part, "The Compute Theory of Everything" is an optimistic piece on "#AI". Long story short, poor "AI researchers" have been struggling for years because of predominant misconception that "machines should have been powerful enough". Fortunately, now they can finally get their hands on the kind of power that used to be only available to supervillains, and all they have to do is forget about morals, agree that their research will be used to murder millions of people, and a few more millions will die as a side effect of the climate crisis. But I'm digressing.
The author is referring to an essay by Hans Moravec, "The Role of Raw Power in Intelligence" [2]. It's also quite an interesting read, starting with a chapter on how intelligence evolved independently at least four times. The key point inferred from that seems to be, that all we need is more computing power, and we'll eventually "brute-force" all AI-related problems (or die trying, I guess).
As a disclaimer, I have to say I'm not a biologist. Rather just a random guy who read a fair number of pieces on evolution. And I feel like the analogies brought here are misleading at best.
Firstly, there seems to be an assumption that evolution inexorably leads to higher "intelligence", with a certain implicit assumption on what intelligence is. Per that assumption, any animal that gets "brainier" will eventually become intelligent. However, this seems to be missing the point that both evolution and learning doesn't operate in a void.
Yes, many animals did attain a certain level of intelligence, but they attained it in a long chain of development, while solving specific problems, in specific bodies, in specific environments. I don't think that you can just stuff more brains into a random animal, and expect it to attain human intelligence; and the same goes for a computer — you can't expect that given more power, algorithms will eventually converge on human-like intelligence.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, what evolution did succeed at first is achieving neural networks that are far more energy efficient than whatever computers are doing today. Even if indeed "computing power" paved the way for intelligence, what came first is extremely efficient "hardware". Nowadays, human seem to be skipping that part. Optimizing is hard, so why bother with it? We can afford bigger data centers, we can afford to waste more energy, we can afford to deprive people of drinking water, so let's just skip to the easy part!
And on top of that, we're trying to squash hundreds of millions of years of evolution into… a decade, perhaps? What could possibly go wrong?
[1] #NoAI #NoLLM #LLM

"I can't help but wonder if the US economy backs itself so hard into a corner funding these research labs, and if these research labs receive a bailout, what does that mean for China? Why is China releasing these models for free?" https://ghuntley.com/warfare/

AI as economic warfare
People often ask me how I feel about open-source models, and to be clear, I'm very supportive of them. But I can't help pondering about the following... Open source always was and always will be a financial weapon by design. You see, one of the primary goals of open source

I'm anticipating a lot of grief in 2026 after a hard end to 2025, so I'm not looking forward to the many January conversations about everything to look forward to in 2026
You can't skip processing grief and jump straight into hope. The grief will consume you and turn into despair, or you'll internalize and repress the trauma and metabolize it into despair via a different path.
Or, I don't know, maybe some people can grieve and hope at the same time, but I know…