Tootfinder

The US military has always had a massive global advantage against enemies by having bases all over the world. There are bases in every NATO country. This would appear to be a powerful threat to anyone willing to oppose American hegemon, and under normal conditions it would be.
But a lot of those kids serving on those bases joined, not because they love America but, because they needed a ticket out of poverty. They joined for the education, for the money, maybe a bit for the adventure, but, more than anything, to escape the ghetto or podunk backwater that trapped them. Under normal times, this is the best deal they could expect. Maybe they risk their lives, usually they sit around being bored for a few years, and they get to come out with respect and paid college.
But what they are being offered is normal in most of the countries they're stationed in. Free healthcare, cheap or free education, is just what citizens in a lot of countries have come to expect. If the US attacked a NATO country, how many would snap up citizenship if they were given a chance to defect? Bonus points for taking some hardware with you, I'm sure.
But there are some who love their country. There are some patriotic Americans on those bases. Some of them joined specifically to protect the US from all enemies, foreign *and* domestic. Given a chance to fulfill that oath or violate international law, what happens?
There are a good number of former military folks too who now are unsafe in the countries they served, who would do just about anything for citizenship in any EU country and almost any NATO ally. Some of those folks know things they swore an oath to never share, but the country they swore an oath to has betrayed them. Today there's no value in leaking those secrets, but in a war between the US and NATO allies things would be different. Some of those former military folks still believe in their oath, and know exactly who the real enemy is. What happens when there's a real threat of war, when they can use their knowledge to fulfill that oath to protect the US against those domestic threats?
There are a bunch of civilian tech workers who have become targets of the regime. Some of them had clearance, or know about the skeletons in the closet. They know about critical infrastructure, classified systems, all sorts of things that would be extremely valuable to an opponent. But the opponents of the US have always been a frightening *other*, never familiar societies these folks look up to, have visited, have thought about moving to, are trying to escape to.
All I'm saying here is that invading Venezuela and kidnapping the president has a very different calculus than does attacking Greenland. I don't know if Trump or his people are able to understand that, but if he and his folks aren't then I hope European leaders are. But more than that, I hope it never comes down to finding out.
But perhaps we should all think about what we would do to make sure things ended quickly if American leadership ever made such an incredible mistake.

Added a category manager and category state section to the Exocortex Log app.
Have now organized and cleaned up the categories in my ten year database and so we can get some views of the time spent in each category.
We see that through September and October I was in a routine of work and slack with a bit of social a couple of times a week, until the end of November when I went away for social at a conference all weekend. I saw a demo there of a person using Shakespeare, and then when I got back started doing some vibe-coding, shown in in Red.
A break from that to go away at the weekend to a long social party then finish it off and publish a few days ago, since when Vibe Coding has dropped off a little.
#lifeLog #app #exocortexLog

we truly out here binch #fedifc

Yesterday, I had the honor to deliver an invited talk with the title "Convenience vs Competence: the Evolving Role of Foundational Knowledge in AI-Driven Research" at the new year's receiption of the computer science faculty at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. Very happy to be at the place again, where I did my first PostDoc more than 20 years ago and meeting many old friends. :)
@…

Or one could use LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice and not be dependent on some distant service provider.
Online office suites confuse me. It’s unclear what *modern* problem they address. Sharing files is a solved problem. Common data formats exist. https://mastodon.social/@DevOpsPink/11

Tatiana Mikhaleva (@DevOpsPink@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image Proton rolled out Proton Sheets - a spreadsheet Google can’t peek into. Gemini: “Show me your data?” You: “No.” Sheets: also no, but in Swiss.🇨🇭🔐 End-to-end encryption, zero-knowledge, even file names get the Swiss-bank treatment. You open a spreadsheet - Big Tech immediately cries. Somewhere in California, an AI whispers: “But… my training data…” Privacy 1 : 0 AI https://proton.me/blog/sheets-proton-drive #Proton #Privacy #Encryption #CyberSe…

One early morning in November, on my way to bird watching...
(There're actually hundreds of birds on that lake, just out of view, but I wanted to capture that quiet mood and surreal light first...)
#MorningWalk #Autumn

This has allowed me to make clear something that's been at the back of my mind. Something that is at the heart of so much blind stupidity in big tech.
It's the assumption that we will change one thing and all else will be the same.
In this case, we will fire lots and lots of employees all over the world and we will make lots of profit. We're smart enough to make the AI, and we're dumb enough to think that there will only be one consequence. 1/n

Having depression is kinda like being a shitty werewolf. When you feel okay, you have to remember the depression is still in there, and can try to jump out at any time. Even with meds. Even on my most medicated days, I can still feel the depression in there, clawing to come to the surface

hey wanna hear something surreal?
when i called 911 [on 9th of December] to report "a stalker being actively in my home right now", the cop on the phone spent like a minute trying to figure out if my ethnicity was "white - british" or "white - other"
lord only knows what they wanted that data for

Bedroom is done! Well. Builders are finished anyway. I still have to buy a bed and stuff to put in it, and since I've spent all my money that'll have to wait until payday. And then it's nearly xmas so probably better to wait until January.
There's a clasp missing to hold the window shutters shut. The one we had was too big. Should be able to screw one in myself tomorrow.
Doing all the lights and stuff will takes months and months probably.
But I can go back to sleeping in late instead of getting up to let the builders in every day.