Tootfinder

Just got these messages from @seengoals@mastodon.social, one of the members of Gaza Verified, basically accusing me of running a fundraiser for Gaza and keeping the proceeds (I have no fundraiser on any fundraising site anywhere) and extorting me to share his fundraiser or he’ll apparently go public with it.
So here’s what’s going to happening instead: Nabil has been removed Gaza Verified (

“It will be a Cambrian explosion of democratizing making software!”
A thing I rarely hear about in the hype about all this: what do people actually want?
Like, I wouldn’t want to make my own shoes even if it was easy to learn how. I just don’t care. Someone else can make them better and I just give them money for it. 99.99% of people think about software like this.

I've seen a bunch of "the CA age verification law is the best way to do a bad thing and so we shouldn't oppose compliance" takes, which others are rightly pointing out is a bad stance because it's blindingly obvious that compliance now sets the stage for compliance later and the clearly set up later is mandatory verification of age data. Even if you think that, for example, California's current "progressive" government won't go there, we're all currently seeing just how easy it is for a new government to pick up the oppressive tools the "good" government was using "restraint" with and put them to worse ends.
On the other hand, I'll freely admit that distros *do* need a way to shield themselves from liability right now. The clear (to me; IANAL) correct solution is to say on your website "don't download this OS if you're in a jurisdiction where it's not legal for us to provide it."). Assuming this does put you in the clear liability-wise, it has several positive effects:
- Stops zero people from downloading it.
- Makes it clear that your project will not collaborate with fascists/oppressive regime enjoyers.
- Means that when the next law makes verifying user ages mandatory (and/or explicitly requires using Palantir-adjacent services to do so) you've already got a strategy in place and there's no need for a "debate" in your "community" about compliance.
- Gets users more practice with "the law is malicious/needlessly bureaucratic/oppressive; let's ignore it" which to be honest people in general clearly desperately need at this point.
- Is the most effective political move if you want to resist the way things are going. Forcing the other side to explain why "California bans Linux" is good rhetorical strategy. Make *them* try to explain "well it's actually not so harmful since we let users set it themselves" and answer your follow-up "but what if next year the requirements change; I just refuse to go along with this slippery slope stuff and I'm not bothered if that means you want to *ban* me."
#AgeVerification

For caturday here is an elderly kitty who thinks she owns the sofa. Periodically I need to go out and show her the heating pad is on so she stops howling. If I just click it and do not show her the green light she will begin to howl again shortly after I leave the room. Her main goal in life appears to be sleeping on a warm heating pad.
I want to teach her what a squirt gun is for but the wife will not allow it. Says she is to old to train. OK at 20 she is technically older than m…

You tell us that we have to use a piece of software weekly or it will be uninstalled and if we want to use it then install it...
Guess what? I automated a script to run every Monday to launch that piece of software just in case I don't use it that week.
Guess what again? I told every team member how to do it and provided the script.
Depending on my workload and tasks I might not use it for over a week and I WILL NOT PUT UP with having to install it again and have a fo…

Alright, the internet is all too much right now. I'm gonna take a break for a bit and work on some projects. I have some organizing to do and some bugs to find.
The horrible things in the world don't change what we have to do. Our work is and has always been the same. They may make it easier to get other folks on board, they may make it more obvious that we were right all along, but they don't change our job.
We will do our work of building community, supporting each other, and creating the world we want to see. It will take as long as it takes to do. None of the news changes any of that. So I'm gonna take my break and hopefully come back after I've gotten some of that shit done.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Remember that when you start to feel guilty about taking a breath.

Reading algorithmic feeds is a crazy thing to do: abandoning control over your own influences to a robot programmed by advertisers to manipulate you?
Madness.
I will not allow a robot programmed by advertisers and surveillance capitalists to determine what I read.
I don’t read any robo-feeds and don’t recommend anyone else does.
But people do:
Top five highest reaching smart phone apps:
All designed to harvest data from your phone, three of them owned by one creepy billionaire, and most people use them by looking at a robo-feed suggesting to them what to read and watch or filter.
I don’t use any of them.
I watch some Youtube, but not though their app. Uninstalled that from my phone as soon as I got it. It’s an awful downgrade of just playing in a browser page. I subscribe to some channels there in my RSS reader like a boss. Never watch what their recommendation algorithms suggests.
I tell them what I want to watch, I don’t let them tell ME what to watch, and frankly I wish all those videographers would start a peertube instance or something instead of posting their work on a corporate surveillance site.
I say you should avoid that algorithm stuff, it’s crazy manipulative.
But people should be free to do what they want.
I’m free to block Facebook! And I do: and I encourage everyone else to do so too.
Edit your DNS, block their domain names. Do it.
But if governments or corporations have the power to mandate those choices for everyone, it will go badly.
Prohibitions always do.

Series C, Episode 04 - Dawn of the Gods
AVON: We will do nothing to counter the force acting upon the Liberator. We then plot the Liberator's course on the main battle computer flight predictor to see exactly how she is behaving. Once we understand how the force is operating we may be some way toward defeating it.
TARRANT: Strange. The Liberator's following a curve. Traction beams produce straight-line motion. Zen, I want a prediction of the Liberator's course based …

I just took Leadnow's survey to share my thoughts on CBC cuts.
Misinformation is rising & local news coverage is disappearing, the federal government is proposing to cut the CBC’s budget by $192m next year. Funding decisions for the CBC will be made in the coming months so there’s still a chance to fight back against these funding cuts. Leadnow’s power comes from our community. We want to hear from you to help decide what to do. Take the quick 4-question survey now.

I always ask people who want to build some nonsense:
- how will you know that it worked?
- what can you do if it didn't?
The answer is usually: we won't, and nothing. It never occurs to them that the idea might not be an inevitable success, despite ALL prior experience to the contrary.

"Hero? No! We're pirates! I love heroes but I don't wanna be one! Do you know what heroes are? Say there is a chunk of meat. Pirates will have a banquet and eat it but heroes will share it with other people. I want all the meat!"
Monkey D. Luffy, One Piece, ep. 554.
#quote #OnePiece

I keep seeing Americans who want to do something about the state of our #politics, but feel like no action they can take will do enough to fix things, so it’s not worth trying.
It’s easy to feel nihilistic. So I’d like to propose an alternative - a 10% improvement approach to political change, of sorts.
It comes from my #PTSD treatment: the idea that no one approach, skill, or intervention can make the #trauma just go away instantaneously. So instead, us humans are left with 10% solutions - things that help a little bit, for some amount of time.
The key to healing is to develop an ongoing set of multiple different solutions that you rotate through based on what feels feasible on any given day / moment. Each one helps a bit. 10%, 5%, 1%. But eventually, you get to making big changes that felt impossible at the start.
The same works for political change and activism. Sure, going to any one protest, or calling your representative, or boycotting a brand, or changing one person’s mind, or donating to one fundraiser won’t fix the entire broken political regime. But it will help A LITTLE.
And if a lot of us continue to find ways to do things that help a little, it will end up doing a lot more.
A movement starts with a thousand little steps that don’t look like much on their own.
Take that little step. Then another.
#USPol #activism #socialChange

One of my VR Lighthouses died last month. These things are gyroscopically spinning 24 hours a day for, what, a decade now? Nearly.
No wonder. Mostly the industry seems to be settling on using head-mounted cameras rather than sweeping infra-red beams and receptors on the head anyway.
It is true that lighthouses give accurate positioning, but means I can't easily take the headset next door, say. Or to a party.
So inside-out, as they call it, is fine for the headset now and mostly okay for the hand-controllers.
But it offers no solution at all for the foot-trackers and hip-tracker that I need for puppetting the characters in the #vr #slimeVR #trackers

I see no sign of any recognition from those who would want such a ban that they see any of the collateral damage a successful ban would have on the majority of kids who are not falling for this bullshit. That they are banning any good at all along with the bad.
Under 18s only
I see that the lobbying for these laws are funded by the absolute worst companies on the internet, those who will be entrenched by the legal compliance costs, that will cement themselves as the arbitrators of who is allowed to access the internet.
It’s a gift to Palantir and other surveillance companies. The very people running these algo-feeds are the ones who benefit from IDing every user and stalking them across the internet on their government-approved internet-licence IDs.
I don’t think even a successful ban on social media for kids would actually address the issue of kids being exposed to sexism and misogony or reduce the kids alienation and depression.
A ban can’t help, will make many things worse, won’t address the problem, and will make competing with the worst surveillance capitalists on the planet more difficult.
Going to war with every internet site and advice forum and making internet access harder won’t fix anything, and will have massive collateral damage against everyone seeking support from strangers or trying to learn things their parents won’t teach them.
But I see we are going to do it anyway.
The direction is clear.
Those companies do get what they lobby for, and they are lobbying hard for ID checks on every website, wrapping their desire to enclose the internet commons for themselves in a faux concern for children’s welfare.
And governments wish to monitor and control the internet, so they will pass these laws.
I wonder how many parents have a family group-chat that they’re going to accidentally ban their kids from using, not realizing that ‘social media’ might include Whatsapp? 😆
It won’t fix anything, it will make the situation for kids worse, impose costs and rents and hacks and exploits on all of us, and increase government and corporate power.
Many will lose access to their networks of support and help.
So it goes.
We will build a better more censorship resistant internet. It’s already here really: Briar. Matrix. Nostr. Bitchat. Veilid. Spritely. And the rest.
The laws may push us there faster.
The race will go on.

There are a lot of takeaways from this:
1. Organizing locally gives you a massive advantage because you will always know your local area better than ICE ever can.
2. Be agile. You can always change tactics faster than a centralized organization.
3. Organize now. The sooner you build your networks, the sooner you can learn.
4. Identify ICE facilities and organize monitoring them directly.
But I think the most interesting one that's not explicitly in there, one that's hinted at the last one, is to go on the offensive. ICE is already afraid. If we all take the anger we have at the murder of #ReneGood, find the local ICE facility that they'll stage from, and bring that anger to #OccupyICE we might be able to just shut the whole thing down preemptively. Completely stop all ICE operations across the US. If they want to fight, they can fight *with everyone, all at once.*
Shut down their ability to operate at all. They have a logistics pipeline. They need cars, they need oil in those cars, they need to be able to move those cars to target areas. They also need money to pay those agents. All of those can be disrupted.
The regime needs your money and labor to maintain the illusion of legitimacy. They chose a bad time because you can hit both of those at once *right now* with a combination of #GeneralStrike and #TaxStrike, and then #BoycottEverything.
The regime is weaker than it's ever been. It's flailing. Their own base is demanding the release of the #EpsteinFiles. Their last gasp attempt to prevent the radical change that's coming is just to ethnically cleanse the US back to the 50's (which is what they always meant by "Make America Great Again"). Trump will do anything to stay in power, even if it means killing everyone on Earth in the process. But Americans can end it now by going on the offensive.
Now is the time.
#USPol