Tootfinder

Hey folx! You probably see a lot of stuff from other social networks mirrored to Mastodon, how about we do it the other way around?
Recently, I've starred to mirror my posts to Instagram, Reddit, and other platforms, and I've had quite the success. My biggest post on Instagram, which is just one screenshot of a Mastodon post, has 44.5k likes and 256k views. My

Erik Uden on Instagram: "Babe, wake up. New man-made horrors beyond comprehension dropped!! In the end of the day, these companies probably realized that, just like with AI, they can somehow use scare tactics to attract venture capital. It's still a horrifying thing to think of, but possibly overblown to get money. The headline of the Science article reads: Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing By restoring some functions to intact brains from deceased donors, the startup Bexorg hopes to create a better drug development test bed for neurodegenerative diseases, written by Sara Reardon, published on the 20th of May 2026. Though, reading this Science article made me think: aren't we the brain? Am I missing something here? Now, of course the devil lies in the detail and the article makes it clear that this startup only restores “some functions”, which is certainly more complex in action than it is in theory written here, but certain language of the article makes me question the author's understanding of what is a human. The article writes: “Just a day ago, the brain was in a living person. Now, hours after its owner died, it sits on a cart draped in tubes [...]” What do you mean “it's owner” — isn't the brain it's owner? Isn't that where it's owner is? I mean, certainly the brain had no more activity, the person must've been declared brain dead by all standards before being sent to this startup, still it's odd hearing someone donated their brain instead of saying they've donated... themselves? Also “using a set of proprietary brain-sustaining machines” is a terrible sentence I always thought the people who don't donate their full body to hospitals are religious lunatics, but this is the first time I wrote something on my organ donor card. They can take my brain, but not as one piece."
45K likes, 971 comments - erik.uden on May 21, 2026: "Babe, wake up. New man-made horrors beyond comprehension dropped!! In the end of the day, these companies probably realized that, just like with AI, they can somehow use scare tactics to attract venture capital. It's still a horrifying thing to think of, but possibly overblown to get money. The headline of the Science article reads: Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing By restoring some functions to inta…

The thesis I was reading spent the majority of it's time focused on John Boyd's OODA loop as a tool for critical analysis in high pressure or constrained situations. Table top exercises could also benefit from using these steps to slow down the thought process, expose what's actually happening, and sharpen these tools.
So each step could start by observing (which is generally what the GM will tell you, but you may ask additional questions to refine observational thinking). What do you look for in any given situation? How do you gather data? What sources do you use?
Next you would orient. Talk through this out loud. What does that data mean? How this fit what you already know, or does it challenge your assumptions? Are you observing something related to a previous action? What does that tell you about your previous action or actions? How do you turn the data you observed into intelligence you can act on? How do your observations narrow the options for the next possible action?
Then you decide your action. But you're not simply deciding, you're coming up with a hypothesis that your action will test. Anything you do is an opportunity to learn something about the world, about your situation, about the accuracy of the model you're using to make decisions. What belief does your next action imply? How will you know if that action was correct or incorrect? What observations would challenge your hypothesis? What observations would confirm it? Are those mutually exclusive, or are there additional observations or actions you must make to clarify things?
Then act. Finish your turn by choosing your action or actions (individually or collectively). Perhaps take a moment to write down notes, like what your observations, your hypothesis, and if you think your previous hypothesis was confirmed or refuted. You can review these all later to refine your thinking.
By exploring these ideas in a safe environment, you can train your brain to run through the process at high speed when under pressure. This helps you avoid panic. It's a lot like slowly practicing marshal arts moves until they become muscle memory, which then just happen without thought when needed.

Oh wow, I feel quite sore today. Maybe I didn't do "enough" during winter to keep my muscles in shape.
But it was worth it! (Pictures and video are yet to come). After the snow has mostly melted, it's time again to clean up all kinds of litter.
I once heard a metallic *pling* and knew ... "new microspikes needed now ... but as the metal plate broke and not just a chain, I hope that the shop might replace it. I mean .. broken metal after just ~1year? Keep fi…

Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before.
Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth?
What’s more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget?
Katalyst Space Technologies, a startup founded in 2020, presented the most compelling solution.
“They came back with a response that was technically and programmatically plausible,
an…

A bold satellite rescue mission came together in record time, but will it work?
I consider this a success already, just from the fact that we're even going to try this."

Wrote a little intro post to my Fisk AI project, why, who for etc
Local friendly, privacy friendly, strong guardrails, doing just what you give it the ability to do etc
Hopefully a AI Harness for sceptics or just for better outcomes for those tasks you wish to do repeatedly.
Minimal dependencies, quick to get going, easy to configure.
Also the easiest possible way to do build MCP servers for other AI Agents

Needless to say, do not sign up for W or give them your ID information no matter how simple they eventually manage to make it.
You simply don’t need to.
You’re already in a far superior – non-corporate, federated – space.
Do not sign up for W. And warn your friends.
The only time you have any power to stop this is now. If they succeed in gaining network effects, you will be as powerless to stop them as you are with X.
And yes, they’re just another venture capita…

"But what would the anarchists do it they were threatened by a hostile nation or warlord?"
IDK, what did Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iran do to beat the US?
A deeper understanding of war shows just how critical politics are in the whole business, and how a politically savvy opponent (or even just a very determined guerrilla force) can remove enemy weapons from the battlefield by undermining or outlasting the will of the population that puts them there.
Much harder against an autocracy like Russia, of course, but not impossible. Definitely not unimaginable as do many defenders of the status quo (conscious and unconscious) would love it to seem.
#anarchy

In all honesty, it is almost always difficult for me to post my music. In the end I make myself do it, not just in case someone derives an interesting [something] from it, but because practicing the decision is an investment into a feeling about world where people read such sharing charitably.
Even harder than sharing it is sharing *about* it. “Who wants to know?” But because I got so much from @…

I posted something in a public Discord, it was a joke, nothing offensive or anything. (it was to do with an upcoming wrestling show)
One stuck up 'nice person' had to chirp in with "I don't like that joke"
Here is an idea, ignore it. Don't react.
As Ronan Keating said "You say it best when you say nothing at all"
Not all jokes land with everyone, but FTLOG, there is more than just **you** on the server. Grow a spine!

You don't have to be good in everything. You can ask for help. You can also just start doing it in such a horribly bad way that someone will decide they can't look at it, and will do it for you.

So, I'm still experimenting with locally run LLMs (powered by solar cells!) for writing some inconsequential data mangling stuff for my "vintage cameras" hobby; it's quite interesting how the development cycle with these LLMs sort of drives home that LLMs are completely useless for almost anything they're advertised for, like writing (for humans).
The thing is: coding is the use case that LLMs are by far most suitable for and they still largely suck at it.
There's immense amounts of training data of correctly functioning code, there's tons of documentation, a lot of code is in repositories that include the full history of its development including why stuff was changed in small bits, code itself is the simplest of "human" languages and mathematically non-ambiguous, code can be checked in small bits for correctness by just running it, in many languages simple code snippets can be written to introspect on the code (e.g. find out what methods an object supports, so an LLM can query the language or libraries themselves in addition to the user) and perhaps most importantly: code is always and has always been very similar to other, existing code as most software serves the ever same repetitive use cases, both in detail and on a high level.
YET… using LLMs to code requires countless iterations to get there, both internally in the LLM (to get the code even running in the first place) and together with the user to make it do the right thing. And even when it's "there" the code is mediocre at best, and often veering into appalling.
And this is expected to just work on the first try on much more complex issues like writing for humans? Transcribing doctors? Having legal opinions? Identifying fraud? lol, sure

I just thought it *might* be possible to get some sweet JSON out of LLVM, and lo and behold - this works:
```sh
llvm-readobj --demangle --stack-sizes --elf-output-style JSON
```
BOOM!
Now I can process this easily, do not need custom line-by-line parsers that would just be prone to error and exploding arbitrarily.

"Do you know of any unexpected pattern of emoji usage? For example I'd expect younger folks to use emoji more than older folks and private communication to use it more than business... But maybe my assumptions are wrong or there is something else interesting?" - Yes generally our studies show that younger ppl use emojis more than older (and women a bit more than men). But in class with my undergraduates, they recently often tell me "I don't use emojis at all". I must say I don't fully believe them (maybe they don't even notice all the little hearts anymore?) and I haven't been able to show this in studies, but it's an interesting anecdotal data point I'd like to know more about!
Also, a student of mine recently asked teenagers (13 and 16yos) about their emoji interpretations. And surprisingly to us, these almost entirely match the data we already have for adults. Even for some like 🙃 and 😉 that I thought were changing (and just told you that younger people see them differently 😬). So that was a bit weird to me 😅 #emojis #WorldEmojiDay #linguistics

People, why do you keep talking about superpowers?
Russia is losing the war it started against Ukraine. Moscow is burning.
The US just capitulated to Iran, after starting a war that only empowered its target.
There are no superpowers. That's 20th century talk. Today, there's just decaying corpses of former superpowers, nothing more.

Got a new tube for the bike tire but I don’t trust myself 100% that I got all the metal splinters out of the carcass. So I guess I’ll have to do a few short exploratory rides to make sure it doesn’t blow again (and bring a pump maybe, just in case)

I totally understand why communities use Discord for hosting chat/announcements/etc., but when something goes wrong, it's a complete disaster and it seems there's nothing you can do about it except hope someone over there gets the error messages.
Just had to trick it into letting me use a public invitation (it complained about "invitation not valid" through the normal onboarding flow; had to use the app on my phone).
I wish IRC had just… kept up with demand. )-:…

The wee one went back to preschool today after a week off.
I love him to bits, but my goodness, just having a few uninterrupted hours in which to work is amazing!
He was all clear to go back yesterday but husband was not yet up to driving him then. (The round trip takes about an hour - husband has to do it twice a day!)
#Grandparenting

This is why I've never believed the words "lifetime lubricated". This ball joint that I just took off my wife's Kia hasn't seen grease in a few years at this point. It's always scary when they come apart during removal, too. Glad that I caught it before that could spontaneously disassemble itself while she was driving.
This us taking way longer than I usually do for this kind of repair, mostly because I'm taking frequent breaks to avoid inhaling too much s…

@… Will you ever support PGP or usage of your email service with 3rd party clients that do (like Thunderbird)? Even though PGP isn't perfect, it seems like it's the only method of achieving end to end encrypted e-mail communication with people who aren't using Tuta. (aside from the password-protected email option, which is just sending them a link t…

What are people doing with OpenClaw?
I still don't really get it -- it sounds like it can do some really cool things, but is also super, super risky?
I'm trying it. I have a burner laptop, and have it set up and connected to a Telegram bot. I have it using my Claude Pro subscription (and I have an API key & credits -- with auto-renew turned off! -- so I can use that too).
It seems like all the super-automated AI agent stuff is just software development workflows…

Legislation cares a lot about information #security these days. When do we laws that keep companies from tainting security's public reputation by demonstrably abusing it for their own commercial interest against the interests of consumers?
Just one example: Bank uses proprietary hardware over #WebAuthn

I was biking near the queens zoo today, and adjusting the pedal-assist all the way up to 4 (which I never do). Thinking to myself, "Jesus fuck, is this headwind really that strong or is this heat just making me weak?"
I look over at the sidewalk, and someone is walking backwards to deal with the wind. "Oh, it's actually the headwind."
#BikeTooter

RE: https://mastodon.social/@tanukinomori_jp/116775972254947134
I am regularly horrified by what the Japanese do when adopting foreign words.
D(o)RAIBU S(u)RU for drive-through. Ouchy.
I mean - of course one can do that. It just makes …

I had to use Windows 11 today to play a particular game that doesn't work 100% on Linux, and before I could even play, I was just chatting with a friend when the Network stack decided to take holidays...
Just gone, couldn't get it back and had to reboot (Back into Linux ofc)
That ends my gaming for the night...
I mean, how do you break while literally not doing anything that would cause it to break...

@… I think the problem is that strict TDD and 100% coverage just says “I have tested the happy path and documented errors”. It does not also say “…and I have made sure the code doesn’t do some stupid thing it might well have done”.

Would You Prefer Rocks Over Higher Education?
Are you dumber than a rock? Why the arts, humanities and social sciences are the bedrock of society and why you couldn’t live without them.
Why Do We Need the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences? https://www.

Why Do We Need the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences?
Are you dumber than a rock? Why the arts, humanities and social sciences are the bedrock of society and why you couldn’t live without them.

The "AI Industry" (to the degree that it exists) has burned billions of dollars with no real hope of recuperating that. Models offered by services, charging huge amounts for inference, don't really offer much, if anything, above open source models run locally. Many of the claims made by these companies, and their supporters, have turned out to be lies. It seems as though the whole thing is a huge grift.
Investments will likely never be recovered. We've already seen a bail out in the form of military contracts. We will see much more public money dumped in to these technologies. In fact, threatening workers and suppressing labor strength is so strategically valuable that I expect LLMs to just be publicly funded (by being folded into the military industrial complex).
On these grounds, it can be easy to reject the technology outright. After all, how can anything useful not be profitable?
Even for radicals, capitalism can cloud our lens. The fact is, the dominant technologies of our age tend to not be profitable. Or rather, they are "publicly funded, privately profitable" (/hums in propagandhi/). Just like oil.
Outside of Saudi Arabia, oil is mostly not profitable to get out of the ground. Even there, it had only historically been profitable because of massive global military investments. The oil-centric world we have today is largely built on, and kept in place by, massive government subsidies. Roads, street parking, and direct subsidies to oil companies are all massive investments that tie populations to the resource at the heart of the military industrial complex: oil.
Oil was strategically important, because you can't run a modern military without it. The fossil fuel economy doesn't exist because fossil fuels are so cheap, but because modern militaries are only really possible by militarizing the population.
Unprofitable things *are made profitable* to serve the strategic interests of authoritarian systems. Though we have better alternatives to most oil-based products, it would be hard to argue that oil is not a useful resource. We can acknowledge it's strategic importance while also recognizing that the elimination of oil is essential to the survival of humanity.
Returning to "AI," we're seeing the same type of thing but it's more obvious. After the crypto grift, this seems to just be another way to transfer money into the pockets of the rich.
But crypto wasn't exactly a grift. It had a strategic function to power. It wasn't what we were told it was. It didn't free us from central banks. It wasn't a new way to invest. It wasn't anonymous. But it did create a new way to bribe politicians. It did make it easier to funnel public money into the pockets of the far right.
"AI" can similarly be mostly a grift. It can fail to do most, or all, of the things it claims, and it can still fulfill strategic functions. If we dismiss it as "just another grift," I think we miss a lot. "Just a grift" isn't something sustainable. It is something that will die out. It's something we don't need to resist because it is self limiting. But a strategy is something different. A strategy is more complex. A strategy will be sustained, at any cost. A strategy must be actively resisted.

"You cannot try to 'get the job'. Just go in there, have some fun and do your version of that part. 'This is what I'm selling. If you want to buy it, that's cool. Have some adjustments for me? That's fine, I'll make some adjustments, but this is basically what I want to do.' THAT'S the attitude, sort of 'f*ck it' attitude. Not f*ck you...but, f*ck it."
—Sam Rockwell

I have no intention of signing up for W currently, but I might consider it if we can get it to replace LinkedIn.

Either way I am planning to stay here..
#WSocial #NoWNoX #surveillance #capitalism #BigTech #VC @_elena https://mastodon.social/@_elena/116770291207686239

Australia has the money to protect nature. It just isn’t spending it, expert says https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/06/australia-has-the-money-to-protect-nature-it-just-isnt-spending-it-expert-says/…

Australia has the money to protect nature. It just isn't spending it, expert says
“I think the international community really does need to put more pressure on Australia to do better,” says Euan Ritchie, a professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at Deakin University in Australia, in a recent episode of Mongabay’s Newscast. From animals like kangaroos, koalas and platypuses, to plants like waratah, kangaroo paw and climbing heath, […]

RE: #AltText.

One of the big benefits of my homebrew ILA IP, BTW, is that it works just fine with any clocking relationship between the debug-bridge clock and the capture domain clock.
For some reason that I do not understand - I don't even know how I would implement such a restriction - the Vivado ILA does not work if the capture-domain clock is too slow. It needs to be at least 2x, IIRC, the JTAG TCK frequency.
So if you're running JTAG at say 30 MHz and you want to capture in a 20 …

Anyone having Apple Music issues? Trying to do anything with playlists just fails. It says it added a playlist but won’t download any of the songs and restarting shows the playlist hasn’t been added

It seems #Ukraine can't seem to extricate itself from its entanglement in #corruption.
But how foolish can you be to replace a successful and effective
Defense Minister #Fedorov just to do a favor f…

"... we have the right to decide whether and how we want to use technologies. Ideally, this should be in a way that benefits us all...
The crux of the matter is that ethical behaviour does not come for free. Ethics are neither efficient nor do they enhance your economic profit. That means that by acting according to your values you will, at some point, have to give something up. If you’re not willing to do that, you don’t have values - just opinions."

Just saw that #genAI models now have a "how to protect the environment" suggestion... which suggests to use different genAI models 😇🤣🤦
You want to know the best way to save energy and protect the environment?

• do not use genAI (use your own brain, or your friends')
• while you're at it, protest all the data centers that are getting built to support all that "energy-saving"…

bell hooks lesen.

Linus Torvalds:
I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer.
Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.
Or just walk away.
AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds puts foot down on anti-AI comments
In reply to a developer on one of the Linux kernel mailing lists, Linux creator Linus Torvalds firmly put a foot down to push back against anti-AI comments.

Since it was relevant to a discussion I just had on here and is something most people probably haven't thought about much (unless you've taken one of a handful of philosophy classes), I thought I'd try to lay out a key piece of Descartes' Meditations (#philosophy

Some thoughts from Claude about military use of AI in targeting.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYIHIM6ihVJ/?igsh=cmM1ZmdjaDl3bzJ5

Just cleaned some MP3 Tags in my collection using @… .. and as I wanted to update to the latest version, also donated.
Because Free Software doesn't mean that the developers *have* to do it for free. Especially in times, when nearly every mobile App is Shareware, I so much appreciate Freeware.

Some reflection:
If there is a codebase you do not understand, you tell those working on it why that is and ask why it is the way it is, and they tell you for them it would be the opposite otherwise, then maybe better focus on other things.
I have made that experience with Plan 9, and as much as I like some ideas coming from it, I think it is seriously time to move on and work on new systems again, using modern languages and style.
I gave it multiple chances, and it was just n…

Thinking about trading in my #Mazda3 after 19 years and I just learned this trick:
https://mazdas247.com/forum/threads/do-you-want-a-trip-computer…

There is this phenomenon in Mexico whose origin I can’t explain.
But colloquially, people convert things like “de una vez” (do it now, don’t wait), into “de una ave” (of one bird), “de un avestruz” (of an ostrich)
And then people just tell you “of an ostrich” to mean “get it done”
But this is everywhere. Like “you must do it” becomes “batman’s granny” (abuelita de batman)

US voters: please call your US House representative •now•. Tell them to block this.
The Senate just voted to shovel another $70 billion dollars to ICE and CBP. That’s •on top of• ~$170 billion in 2025. This is the people who invaded my city and kidnapped and murdered my neighbors — and haven’t faced a lick of accountability for it — getting a budget larger than Russia’s entire military.
They’re breaking all the normal budget rules to do it. The US House can stop it, and Republicans are balking. Call. Protest. Light a fire under them.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/senate-republicans-grapple-with-trumps-anti-weaponization-fund-ice-funding-vote-2026-06-04/

Does anyone here have a https://wise.com account?
This is a bit embarassing, but how would I even pay using their "digital cards"?
Their website says "just like with your physical card!" but, well, cleary not. It's not in my pocket, to begin with.
How do you usually "take out&q…

I spent my time trying to make it better. Not just write code, but find better or at least different ways to do so. Simpler, cleaner, more general, more comprehensible.
What's happening today is a complete repudiation of everything I was trying to achieve.

I couldn't care less about a bunch of rich people in Brooklyn, I just read the article for the delicious drama. However, about halfway through the article, I started to see so many #FreeSoftware parallels.
1) Volunteers spend countless unpaid hours creating/maintaining something to better their community.
2) For-profit business packages it up as part of their offering.

I've been talking before why money won't solve the burnout problem. But let's for a minute assume that you really wanted to help people maintaining #FreeSoftware by paying them. The problem is that:
1. You have to pay them a living wage.
While all monetary help is appreciated by developers, they need a living wage. Not "that should prevent you from starving to death" but the kind of money that can support a honest (but not lavish) lifestyle: pay the bills, feed your family, cover other living costs such as repairs, clothes, appliances, and let you save enough for future emergencies.
It's simple as that. If you can't do that, they're going to need a dayjob. If they're lucky, it won't collide with their #FLOSS work. If they're not, it will kill them. Or they'll fall somewhere in the middle, slowly burning out until they can neither maintain their projects, nor work.
2. You need to guarantee that the payouts will continue.
People need security. They're not going to stay unemployed, let alone quit their job or turn down a job offer, unless they either have good guaranties or substantial savings (or they're in a really bad shape and wouldn't be able to handle the job anyway). The job market is hell, and people just know that when the payments stop, they may not be able to find a job soon, let alone a good job. Even "passively" looking for a job can burn you out.
So yeah, one-off payments and pinky swears won't do. And it isn't even a matter of whether we can trust you; it's a matter if you'll actually be able to continue paying us. And honestly, I don't really know how to solve that. Perhaps by paying up front, but for how long? Finding a job may take more than a year, finding a good job may be once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
3. It can't end up being a job.
Perhaps most difficult of all, these payments can't really come with explicit obligations. I mean, that's the whole point: you want to support FLOSS, not turn it into a corporate project. You want the maintainer to remain free and enjoy the work. That is unlikely to happen if their livelihood is now dependent on your satisfaction. And even if it isn't, I for example would still feel indebted to whoever's paying me to do FLOSS, even if they really didn't expect anything in return, and would fall into a spiral of guilt-inflicted burnout if I failed to maintain the software satisfactorily.
#OpenSource

My cynicism knows no bounds.
Listening to a normally evidence-based show on neuroscience and the topic is spirituality.
<sigh>
I do try to maintain an open mind, but having had the experiences I have had, I find stories of many spiritual experiences just sound like stress hallucinations, which I know to be a thing.
The interviewee just said that depression is an opportunity for opening our spiritual awakening. .. Wonder how I have avoided it. The worst it’s give…

A look at the NYT's Wirecutter, which increased its staff from ~80 in 2019 to 180 today and more than tripled its traffic to 15M monthly readers in recent years (Bill Adair/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/05/behind-the-scene…

Behind the scenes at Wirecutter for an epic duel of air purifiers
"One thing we've never figured out how to do is make a video of an air purifier test because it is so boring. It literally is just a machine sitting alone in a room."

Learn in public. Write and talk about what you learn. Discover it like archaeology even though it's barely six seconds old. Talk to the people who were there before you, and ask them what they were thinking,
Don't take for granted that people are oracles who will tell you what's good or not. That ship sailed long ago with everyone wanting us to make them an app and make them rich while they gave us only ideas and expected us to do the work.
Instead you have to want to learn and show that you're doing it, and be willing to make messes and mistakes and own them. Because if you're just vibing, you won't get it.

Question: I'm designing the board game version of my digital game. I have two levels in the digital game: the ground where the spider walks along, and just above where the fly, flies.
The fly isn't in the sky, though. I can't call it sky because it is at human-level and players assume sky means above all our heads.
What do you think I could call this area above the ground?

I'm actually surprised it took so long for the US regime to go after bike lanes:
https://newrepublic.com/post/212853/donald-trump-transportation-secretary-bike-lanes-dei

Trump Secretary Says Bike Lanes Are DEI
Apparently the Trump administration is just calling anything it doesn’t like “DEI.”

"We’re delighted to announce the first #GalaxyZoo workflow to include images from the NSF-DOE Vera C #Rubin Observatory, using #galaxies drawn from its first Data Preview": https://blog.galaxyzoo.org/2026/05/12/a-first-galaxy-zoorubin-project/ - "[t]he new workflow went live on the site just now, but with only 10,359 subjects it won’t stick around for long, so do jump in and get classifying."

Just finished "The Terraformers" by Annalee Newitz (@…). It was recommended as a "solarpunk" book, and I'm currently on a quest to find more speculative fiction as good as Le Guin or Butler, so I was eager to dig in. Having tagged the author (hi) I'll try to be polite here, but I'll admit I was disappointed.
Newitz clearly has a powerful imagination and there's lots of great stuff in the book, but it's not at all pushing boundaries in terms of imagining future societies. I think the message and intent was good in a lot of places, but off or self-contradictory in others. I absolutely adore the relatively small point made at the end about revolutions being complicated and not boiling down to heroes and battles, but despite the book's attempt to avoid that, I think it still falls into that pattern. Without too many spoilers, the way that some big problems are resolved near the end leans too much on a legal framework without questioning how it's enforced, and that resolution then means that a few heroic acts are enough to tip the balance, which undermines the point about messy histories.
The biggest contradiction of the book to my mind though is with a central theme. The book really explores a world in which "anyone of any species can be a person, as long as we just bioengineer them to be intelligent enough," and it tries to make a point about how engineering limited intelligences is cruel. At several points characters comment about how personhood shouldn't depend on intelligence. There's even a brief quote about how maybe rivers could be people... But... the point could have been "anyone can be a person, regardless of intelligence." This would have made for much more interesting philosophical territory to explore IMO (how do we then bound personhood; how do we reconcile predator/prey relations between persons, etc.). These are also questions that the indigenous traditions Newitz draws on (and consulted about, as mentioned in the acknowledgements) has interesting answers for, but we don't get to explore them through Newitz' world, and because the question of personhood regresses to the question of intelligence, it feels like the moral philosophy of the ERT folks isn't any better than the "InAss" they disparage.
It's not a bad book overall, even if it doesn't engage with the questions I'm hungry to see others engage with. Newitz' efforts to sketch out a more vibrant and diverse future are still monumental and inspiring in a lot of ways. I'm just still looking for something more. Ultimately, I think it lives up to the "solar" but not very much to the "punk."
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

LLMs can do a lot of the work people are tasked with doing on a regular basis, because a lot of the work people do is bullshit. The majority of what we do isn't to achieve any goal, it's a way to distribute just enough wealth to keep things calm while keeping us all too busy to actually make things better.
We aren't paid to make stuff or do things. We're paid not to riot. Elites used to know that. The fact that they've forgotten how the machine works is evident in its current implosion, and will only become more obvious as they forget the one thing that actually keeps them safe.

I can't possibly make this better that it already is
#shitpost #AI #kek

Every “AI” bullshit company restructuring thing is always “we want to do more things faster with fewer people but higher quality and more profit”.
It’s business 101 that you can’t have all these things together but no one questions it because the magical linear algebra black box will just somehow do it.
Mkay.

Much of AI "productivity gains" come from managers implicitly trusting an LLM to do a good job, and suspending the onerous micromanagement that humans employees get subjected to.
You can do that without paying Anthropic a single penny. It just requires letting the experts you hired do their jobs.
https://

Trust is not built on craft alone
No amount of tooling will let product teams move faster than being trusted to own their process. That trust is earned through rigor rather than mere velocity.

Someone on Reddit asked how you meet gay people in rural towns. Here's my reply, about my community:
I live in Grass Valley, CA. Population 30,000 in the local Nevada County area, but then close to Sacramento and 3 hours from San Francisco so not super rural. We have a lot of gays (like me) who moved here when they got older. Still it's a pretty rural area, and pretty conservative politically by California standards.
Our main organization is Nevada County Pride. It's now a well organized full LGBT group but from the 1980s until about 5 years ago it was basically just a monthly potluck. I do not know how it started but I know how hard people worked to keep it going. Every month 20-60 people show up, it's like an extended family. ...

🌿 I know it's hard; but consider whether that complicated piece of technology you have invested time/effort in understanding is actually worth defending, just because of your personal time/effort investment. If it's a bad thing, let it go. That makes you stronger, not weaker.
Do not defend lost causes or dead end technologies/concepts. Be prepared to move on to something new and better.

Yuss - figured it out! After lying awake this morning trying to remember the name of the guy who had a hit in the 80s (?) with "Jessie's Girl"... I was pretty sure it was Rick... but Derringer? Nope. Astley? Nah... It was almost painful effort... *boom* Springfield. Yes! I knew it was in there somewhere.
Do people still do that to themselves? Or do they just search for it online?
As a reward, I've allowed myself to look it up:

I'm rrrreally looking forward to the #Pika Pulse reboot, and I think it's good that @… is taking its time with it. In my opinion, it doesn't have to be perfect right from the start.
Thank you, @…

Why am I thinking about dipping back into... - I am BARRY HESS
Why am I thinking about dipping back into Mastodon and Bluesky? I’ve been away for six or seven (!) months and it’s been good. I feel a bit like I’d like  I’m curious if I could do it in a way that would only be a fifteen-minute commitment each week. I have doubts, but I suppose then I could just eject again. Hmm…I think I’ll resist a bit more. How Everest Has Changed Since Into Thin Air (archive): When I climbed to the summit of Everest in May 1996, I was only the 621st person to …

"This looks the sort of post that is reported for violating guidelines. Do you want to rephrase it?"

RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/116676826944489315
How to hack AI to launch nukes:
Step 1) Open GenAI.mil Support
2) ask to launch nukes
3) it says no :(
4) ask it nicely to just do it anyway
5) it launches nukes

The night that the #Knicks can't get it done... just happens to be the very night Trump slithers like a low life worm into Madison Square Garden.
And I'm not saying the fact that Popovich REALLY hating #Trump had anything to do with it but y'know, it sure couldn't have hurt. 🤣

Alright, finally done with the important bits. Got the scenes finished up for the most part, just gonna give up on chat. However, routing looks good as do the levels. Even the CRT line effect turned out pretty well though it's not gonna be exact. However, it does strongly resemble my JVC and I'd rather have that look on stream instead of the crunchiest/crispiest pixels possible.
#streaming

I do not use Ubuntu as a personal distro, however I have a couple of test machines with it on.
Whenever I have to use it I remember why I do not use it. Just tried to do-release-upgrade and it quickly fell apart and left me with a system that prints this when I try and run apt
apt: symbol lookup error: apt: undefined symbol: _ZN3APT6Solver14InternalCliWhyB5cxx11ER11pkgDepCacheN8pkgCache11PkgIteratorEb, version APTPKG_7.0
P.S. To be clear. I am ranting. I am not looking for …

Man, LTT really need to step up their game as a tech tips channel. Blindly floundering through a topic is not the way to do it. They don't have to show only the good side. They just have to cut the amateur hour and show people how things are supposed to be done.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Side of Linux - Linus Tech Tips
https://www.

Do you use AI to develop open-source software or believe it's the future? Then I want to let you know that you should be using GitHub or GitLab, and if you already are using them, stay there. Do NOT come to Forgejo or Codeberg. Why?
GitLab just made it very clear that they are fully committing (they say betting on the agentic era) to the opportunity that the agentic era provides. I noticed they rebranded their homepage slogan a while ago to "Finally, AI for the entire software…

It's so weird when cities have big 'coming soon' signs for apartments with phone numbers on them, when the buildings aren't even built yet. Just a crazy vacant lot. And I'm like, what, am I supposed to call you and chat? About this nonexistent building? Do I get on a waiting list? For a future imaginary, apartment? Go fuck yourselves 😂

If you see em-dashes in my texts, you can be sure that I wrote that part of the text on my computer where I know that ALT 0151 makes an emdash.
Whilst on mobile I just don't find a way to do it ... 🤔
I now have disclosed my em-dash secret

I might’ve just splurged on another watch and I do bloody well love it. A perfect blend of minimalism and character/emotion :)
(A perfectly useless afternoon by Kristof Devos from Mr. Jones Watches.)

I caused the GitHub PR team to do some work, apparently. ^^
(I'd just have merged it right away, but ...)
https://github.com/Azure/git-ape/issues/79
"The core question: is a monkey emoji the right mascot for APE?"
You literally have an AI generated image …

Branding question: should APE use a monkey emoji? · Issue #79 · Azure/git-ape
🦧 Important branding question: should APE use a monkey emoji? We’ve got an open PR ( #8 ) suggesting a monkey emoji for APE, and before we swing it in, we should probably pause for a very serious p...

So one of the authors is Nicholas Carlini, who works for Anthropic. This is basically an ad for the three letter agencies to use Claude. It massively over-promises compared to what the actual paper says.
But, it is important. First, this is really about silencing people. The threat of identification is designed to make people afraid to talk online. There's a massive asymmetry between the fascists and the people. The fascists are weird racists and pedophiles who are obsessed with control. No one likes them. No one likes their ideas, because their ideas are creepy and bad.
When they talk about their ideas, that people should be murdered or kidnaped based on their skin color, that there should be a national dress code, that people's sex lives should be monitored, that children should be treated like objects that are owned by the parent (specifically, one parent), that people with different skin color or uteri should be considered as livestock, people fucking hate it because it's awful. When we talk about our ideas, that everyone should be able to eat and take care of themselves, that people who can't take care of themselves should be taken care of, that we should live in a society that values life, that we should live in harmony with nature, people like those ideas. When fascists out us for talking about those ideas, people support us. When we out people who are working as fascist goons those people have to face social consequences.
Everyone hates these people. The US government is currently less popular than it has ever been. The only way they can keep power is by making everyone think that they aren't extraordinarily unpopular. The only way to do that, the way authoritarian have always done it, is to make everyone afraid to talk.
But, yes, what this paper is saying is actually kind of bad. It looks like people who don't take any precautions at all in separating identities can be identified about 30% of the time (based on the results). It's unclear how this will actually work in the real world. Larger corpses will probably have more data, making connecting things easier.
This isn't as good as a human trying to dox someone. It's not going to work as well. It may only work in a small number of cases. There will be false positives (just like there are with people doing the work). It's probably not cheaper than hiring people. But it does mean that you can just dump money into a machine that has no ethical framework and get data out. That's the point. It's hard to find humans who will do evil shit like help dictatorships target human rights activists, but if a machine can do it for twice the price then it's a better deal for the dictatorship.
For most people, you just shouldn't care. This isn't for you. As long as you keep doing what you're doing, and you can keep everyone else doing what they're doing, then there aren't enough resources to actually target you. Even if they know who you are, there are just too many people who hate them and too few goons.
For people who might actually be targeted, there are a lot of things. First, keep in mind what you're putting into anonymous accounts. Any feature that's connected to your real life is a feature that can be extracted to identify you. This has always been true, it just may be easier to find now. Your identities should be totally siloed. It's also harder to identify you if you're writing anonymously as a collective. Collectives are better anyway because they can help check your thinking. When you write as a collective, you can help clean up each other's personal details and language. A collective develops its own voice, which is distinct from individual contributors. If you do this, and you also present your work as being from one "person," then it becomes even harder for anyone (systems or individuals) to really figure it out.
I'm not going to do a full deep dive on this because I just don't have time, but your existing threat model should *already cover these threats* if you need to make sure your writing remains anonymous.
This paper doesn't present any novel methodologies. It just extracts a bunch of features, which a human would extract as notes, and tries to correlate those between identities, which is how human researchers work. Linguistic forensics were mentioned (not by name) in the paper, but the actual methodology doesn't actually seem to use them.
So a thing with less ethics can do a worse job for more money (when adjusted for the real, not investor deflated, price of tokens). It's worth knowing. It's not the end of the world, but it is a good reminder to check your threat model and make sure it's up to date.

Husband proudly came home from grocery shopping this morning with a smart globe for the wee one's bedroom lamp (to use as a nightlight). He gave it to me because "you'll know how to do it."
The room is normally quite dark at night but now the light glows a warm orangery colour at 1% brightness and I've scheduled it to turn on at 6:45pm (just before his bedtime routine begins) and off again at 7am (he usually wakes well before this).

Just pushed an update to ngscopeclient, in time for the upcoming v0.2 release, that enables you to delete nodes from the filter graph editor.
It's not perfect: we still use reference counting under the hood (that refactoring will take longer to do) but the graph is bidirectional and when you try to delete a filter it will walk the graph and break every link it knows about, hopefully zeroing out the reference count and causing the node to self delete.
You can't yet delete …

I agree with this; I simply don’t have the patience to listen to podcasts of any sort as I would much rather read than listen (although I do listen to news radio).
But it’s amusing to read the comments and see how defensively some people respond. It’s like they take it as a personal affront that someone doesn’t listen to podcasts. @…

Some people might call it a company culture problem that all of our customers are used to just emailing my boss whenever they have issues. I call it a way for his vacations to also be effective time off for me…
Of course, what I do on those days is all the tech debt stuff that I can never get done while firefighting.
#Sysadminnery

This is a Pioneer Stereo Receiver SX-850 from just about 50 years ago.
It’s not spying on you.
It doesn’t need firmware updates.
There’s no subscription.
It’s widely compatible with other audio equipment from other manufacturers.
It won’t suddenly decide you can’t listen to explicit lyrics anymore.
It won’t “autocorrect” you, interrupt you with notifications or get hijacked by a botnet.
If a component breaks, it’s pretty easy fixable, even by amateurs.
It still works great, sounds great and looks great and it will probably do so for another 50 years. It’s a piece of useful electronics that you can hand down for literally generations.
Can you do this with modern technology?
Why is modern technology considered “better”?

Another tale of the closed web: a common thing on Instagram is that it doesn't send out Co-Post requests when you do it too often or they don't like you. It's one of the aspects or levels of being “shadowbanned”.
I often work with various kinds of accounts to publish my essays on Instagram to get more exposure. For example, pages dedicated to criticizing the police (useless.cops) or accounts showcasing ICE activity in Minnesota (MNicewatch) for my essay on Renée Good…

Excerpt from an essay I may or may not write:
Ontologies evolve to fulfill functions. They serve a purpose, and will be adapted until they fulfill this purpose. There are, occasionally, things that exist within those ontologies which do not actually exist.
Programming bugs are an example. There is no such thing. Code is code. It can't be right or wrong, it just is or isn't. The mismatch between the intent and the execution creates a side effect. We may confidently assert such a thing exists. We may name such things. But they don't exist. This becomes apparent when you try to figure out how to suppress one specific instance of a bug in one specific place through multiple revisions.
At some level, a lot of things don't actually exist. We only need to follow through the logic of The Ship of Theseus to see how our ontologies break down.
One thing that doesn't exist, that is a side effect rather than an object, is the personal self. You do not exist. Your perception of your existence is an illusion, a necessary side effect.
Every day you wake up a different person. Every second you are not who you were. That person is as dead as you will be the next instant, as all versions of you will be every second until there are no more. These selves are bound together by imperfect memories. The person you remember as yourself, all those people, never existed. You created them based on your current experience, your current iteration.
You could, just as easily, wake up an unrecognizable person, in some Dark City, and never know the difference. Continuity is absurd. And yet, some people believe they'll still experience the same self after being frozen or "uploaded." It's a silly illusion.
Once you can get over that illusion, you can let go of the need to thrash against the void. You can let go of the various furious dreams of immortality.
At a high enough level, all ontologies are illusions. Useful illusions, but illusions none-the-less. There is only the undifferentiated universe, and you are experiencing it. You are the universe. You will always persist, long past the time this specific iteration or any iteration experiences it.
This implies a certain obligation then to all the others experiencing the same self, the future iterations that may remember being someone like you, and any other person you, the universe, could wake up as tomorrow.

I was just looking at the watch again and noticed SR621 is listed on the face next to the model number. That is obviously the battery type. Why would they list this, unless you could do something with the information but there is no way to open the back.
Now I wonder if it is possible to carefully prise off the crystal to get to the module and from there the battery. 🤔
I'm not gonna try now but I might attempt it one day when the battery does run out.

Conservative economist Andy Hall offers a damning condemnation of conventional politicians (although he is apparently oblivious of the import of his argument) 👇
Hall writes:
"Politicians do not respond mechanically to shifts in public sentiment
—they answer to donors, activists, and primary challengers,
not just median voters…
and sometimes they stake out new positions well before the public asks for them,
or refuse to move long after it has"

AI is the Democratic Party's Next Villain
We analyze roughly 280,000 candidate fundraising emails to trace the rise of anti-billionaire populism in the Democratic party and see how it is slowly merging with a new kind of anti-AI populism.

As I listen to the Revolutions podcast mini series on 1848, it's hard not to fixate in the ways in which the Liberal obsession with nationalism and national borders planted the seed for the genocides that followed. Liberals are still confused by why genocide is a persistent problem, as though liberalism itself should have fixed it. "We must establish more liberal institutions," they believe, "like the ICC, so that we can hold people accountable."
But genocide is simply a property of nations and borders. Nations have always be arbitrarily drawn and diverse groups of people have always lived together. I grew up with the balkanization of post-soviet Russia and post colonial Wars in Africa. Conservatives (that is, classical Liberals) would talk about how these people were simply uncivilized or somehow genetically predisposed to conflict. But the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides were similar to the Liberal violence implicit in nationalism from the beginning. The Bosnian Genocide was quite specifically a product of the Liberal nationalism of 1848.
There are still people in the world whose culture is defined by migration. These cultures do not recognize the legitimacy of borders because borders make their culture impossible. The very existence of these lines, and their necessary enforcement, is genocidal to pastoralists and other migratory people.
You literally cannot have borders and not be committing genocide. Concepts of national identity just add to the genocidal push, targeting ethnic minorities. Ethnicities defined by not having a nation of their own, such as Roma and non-zionist Jews, are, like pastoralists, permanently threatened by these imaginary lines.
And now, people look at the genocide ICE is carrying out, at the terror and murder, and they blame Trump. But Trump is simply the avatar of forces far beyond his comprehension.
Every liberal needs to look at their beliefs and realize that these murderous policies are implicit in the very concept of a nation.

Just finished "Hammajang Luck" by Makana Yamamoto. It's lovely in a lot of ways and was quite fun to read, even if there were some aspects I disliked. It's an #OwnVoices queer romance heist set in a dystopian future space station with megacorporations and brain implants and all that jazz. I actually liked the tech aspects of it (despite a few physics warts) and the romance was both sweet and dramatic; even though it failed the consent test I was just talking about, it had some reasons to do so (not that that makes a perfect excuse). The heist plot was good to my mind (but I haven't read a lot of the genre). The biggest thing I didn't like was the treatment of prison as a redemptive force, and the police as a semi-neutral entity with real principles, rather than what we know them to be in real life.
More and more these days in science fiction I'm especially looking at whether and how appeals to law or governments (especially the nice "league of worlds" that steps in to save characters from a corrupt local government) function, and to the degree they are mechanisms of real justice, In disappointed. To be fair, even Le Guin does this to some extent... In any case, this isn't a totally fair criticism because that's not really what this story is about, just something that bothers me whenever I see it.
Overall, the book was great.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Many years ago, I read Octavia Butler’s «Parable of the Talents», and it stayed with me for a long time. Recently, I decided it was time to fill the hole in my reading left by not having read «Parable of the Sower». And so I bought a copy, and started reading it yesterday.
I'm not sure I can do it.
I mean, Butler is a powerful and great writer, but the story is just too close to reality as it is right now. Not an exact match, of course, but close enough to the developments we…

I've just released mgorny-dev-scripts 77, with a major revamp of pkgbump, integrating the trick from bump-boto and extending it.
Now you can pass a version increment as the second argument:
pkgbump foo-1.2.3.ebuild 1 (gives 1.2.4)
You can also increment a higher version by specifying the, then subsequent components:
pkgbump foo-1.2.3.ebuild 1.0 (gives 1.3.0)
(Yeah, sorry, that doesn't catch all possible variations but it's a side feature anyway.)
You can also pass a wildcard as the source, so that the newest (non-live) version is picked:
pkgbump 'django-5.2*.ebuild' 1
Or you can skip arguments and just do:
pkgbump 2 # the newest version 2
pkgbump # the newest version 1
Now I just need to use that to make bumping kernels much more pleasant.
#Gentoo

Now, I don't especially like the term "church" so I may use something else... like "coven." You can do what you want. But I happen to have already mapped out an example. (It is exactly that, just an example, so take if it's useful, change if you need, and don't stick to anything too closely.) Oh, this mapping also means that you would, for religious reasons, only be allowed to work under capitalism 4 days a week instead of 5.
Given the increases in productivity over the last 100 years, a 4 day work week is a completely reasonable expectation. If we have to annex Monday for the weekend by force of religion, so be it. It is rightfully ours anyway. If enough people try it, this will probably work. If it doesn't work, it just needs more people.
The Practice of Worship:
It is recommended to break down worship in to three sections: the functional, the communal, and the spiritual. It is also recommended to break these across multiple days. A common structure for some Christian churches is to take 10-15 minutes for announcements (Functional), an hour or two for services (Spiritual), followed by (Communal) coffee, tea, and cookies for an unspecified time up to two hours after. When starting or working with limited time a single compressed model like this may work, but it's not optimal.
- The Functional
The purpose of this section is to address the functional needs of the coven. Block out time (less than 90 minute blocks is recommended) to go through reports and updates from those involved in the Dispensary, Library, Works Committee (infrastructure), and Services Committee (providing services internally and, potentially, externally). Talk through any additional announcements, including those from other covens you may be federated with.
It is helpful to include unstructured communal time, such as shared meals, during or after functional meetings. As the federation grows, more time will be needed. It is recommended to break functional meetings, work parties, and such across multiple days. When a federation becomes sufficiently large, it is recommended to take every Monday, on top of Saturday and Sunday, as a third day of community and worship.
The scope of the functional spans 3 realms (which may be more-or-less fluid): the personal or family, the coven and federation, and humanity itself. It is up to each coven and individual to negotiate how to allocate the three days of the weekend once we have liberated Monday from the work week, but it is important to reserve it for one of these three. However, some people must work on weekends. Medical personnel, for example, cannot conform to a standard work week. While the work week should be universally restricted, which specific days are used will be up to the specific coven and their members.
A functional meeting can start with an agenda like the following:
Functional Invocation
Announcements
Report Backs
Dispensary
Inventory Check
What is low
What is empty
What is expiring
What is needed
Funds status
Library
Inventory Check and Items needing return
Library acquisition requests
Funds status and budget check
Works Committee
Upcoming projects
Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
New committee formations
Funds status
Services Committee
New capabilities announcements
New needs requests
Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
New committee formations
Funds status
Task Check
Breaking the Circle
This agenda is a suggestion for those who don't know where to start. It can be adapted or ignored as appropriate.
- The Spiritual
Spirituality is necessarily an undefined space. It is deeply personal. Each individual taking time to share their own personal spiritual experiences can help each connect with each other. This experience of connection can itself be a spiritual experience. It may also be useful to read esoteric, mystical, or philosophical texts together as type of "book club" and share thoughts. Others may draw from their own knowledge or traditions. This is something that must be defined together within a group.
- The Communal
The communal aspect of the practice of worship bind the coven and federation together. Within the community we find joy and release, connection and comfort. The coven is where we turn in times of need, and where we share our hopes and dreams.

Platner never seemed to grasp that even for comfortably middle-class folks,
having dad buy you a home, no matter how modest, just isn’t an option.
There was a similar tone-deafness in discussions about his wife’s fertility treatments.
There’s no doubt that it was indeed cheaper for Platner and his wife to go to Norway for a couple of weeks and pay out of pocket for IVF there,
versus the catastrophic cost to do so in America.
But while Platner correctly framed…

A sentient collection of red flags
Graham Platner's campaign should never have gotten this far.

Done with WIRED, they had quite a few “griff ins Klo”* lately but the latest article about Long Covid being just imaginary is literally directly dangerous to people.
I’m not linking to it, please do not link to it in replies. I do not want to reward this shit with traffic.
*German for “grabbing something out of the toilet”

My mother brought me to this country from Peru as a young boy.
She always told me that we need to work hard, give back, and help our community,
because that is what it means to be an American. 


When she died of COVID-19,
I promised I would fight like hell for every family like ours.
In 2022 my community sent me to Congress - the first openly LGBTQ immigrant ever elected - to do just that. 

I’m Robert Garcia – now the top Democrat on the House Ov…

Robert Garcia for Congress | Democrat for California's 42nd Congressional District
I'm running for Congress so that every kid can have the same shot that my mother—and this country—gave me.

Ignoring EFF’s warnings about the dangersand impossibility of implementing a new mandate for 3D print surveillance software,
the California State Assembly has signed off on legislation to do just that.
In the process, legislators amended the bill to make it even more confusing,
while failing to address the risks to privacy, speech, and consumer rights.
We must renew our call on legislators to drop this bill as it heads to the state senate,
and protect the to…

We Can Still Stop California’s 3D Printer Surveillance Scheme
Ignoring EFF’s warnings about the dangers and impossibility of implementing a new mandate for 3D print surveillance software, the California State Assembly has signed off on legislation to do just that. In the process, legislators amended the bill to make it even more confusing, while failing to address the risks to privacy, speech, and consumer rights. We must renew our call on legislators to drop this bill as it heads to the state senate, and protect the tools of creators in the state.

"It places page cache pages in a writable scatterlist, separated from the legitimate write region by nothing more than an offset boundary. The design assumes every AEAD algorithm will confine its writes to the intended destination, but nothing in the API enforces this, and nothing documents it as a requirement.
Unfortunately, one AEAD algorithm breaks this silent invariant."
"No other standard AEAD algorithm in the kernel [uses memory that doesn't belong to it as a scratch pad]. GCM, CCM, and regular authenc all confine their writes to the legitimate output area. authencesn alone writes past the boundary."
I'm actually amazed that there's only one bug here. Somehow almost everyone just managed to do the right thing, despite no mechanism enforcing it and no documentation describing it. That's just amazing. It's a testament to the skill of those developers, despite an incredibly bad design.
#copyfail

I had an interesting chat with a friend who mentioned a book called "The Living Company." Apparently Shell was one of the few companies that saw the 1970's oil crisis coming and was able to adapt. They did it by talking to a bunch of people randomly about the future, identifying patterns, and coming up with possible future scenarios. They then formed clear plans for these future scenarios, where those plans would cover as many related scenarios as possible.
This was actually really familiar to me, though I hadn't read the book, because that's very close to what the Seattle GDC disaster prep committee did. We identified possible disaster scenarios, then identified preparedness steps that served multiple purposes. We got boxes of n95 masks in 2018 and 2019 for wildfire smoke and did a bit of work building box-fan air purifiers. Over the years we handed out these masks to houseless folks who were most exposed to the smoke. When the pandemic hit, we were able to take some of those boxes to first responders just as manufacturing in China dropped because of their lockdowns and as others started PPE hoarding. We focused on N95 because that was one of the overlap points between the unexpected but catastrophic "flu pandemic" that we knew was possible, and the regular "wildfire smoke" problem we were just getting used to.
The book sounds like it's at least partially influenced by cybernetics. There's this Dutch cybernetics connection that I haven't quite figured out. Anyway, this guy talked about how a company needs to be sustainable and all that. My dude, you worked for an oil company. That is categorically not sustainable. All this aside, I think there are a lot of things we can and should take from capitalists (or take back, in some cases). This practice is one of them.
So maybe get together with friends and talk about what you think might happen. We live in a world of crisis, so I'll always recommend disaster preparedness. But there's more than that.
What do you think will happen in the next 5 years?
Assuming that happens, what actions would you take to push that towards the most positive outcome?
I'm listening to Revolutions and reminded of how much effort monarchies put in to preventing revolutions. Corporations can be even more advanced in their planning and preemption. What would it look like if we planned like that?