Tootfinder

Literal #enshittification of everything. As far as I can tell, it’s not April 1st today. https://boingboing.net/2025/10/23/kohler-toilet-camer…

People have made electronics out of the strangest things.
Has anyone ever made a literal ham radio? There has to be some way to make a vaguely nonlinear junction between cured meat and a semiconductor or something right?

For your Thanksgiving reading pleasure, check out Metacurity's selection of the week's best infosec-related long reads that cover
--Scammers who go to unbelievable lengths,
--How to expose a DPRK hacker seeking IT work,
--A Kiwi hacker conference installed a literal anti-virus system,
--Trump is turning his back on supercharged disinformation,
--How the EU and the US acted differently to the Collins Aerospace hack
Sign up for a free subscription to…

Best infosec-related long reads for the week of 11/15/25
Scammers who go to unbelievable lengths, How to expose a DPRK hacker seeking IT work, A Kiwi hacker conference installed a literal anti-virus system, Trump is turning his back on supercharged disinformation, How the EU and US acted differently to the Collins Aerospace hack

Republicans are literal Nazis https://indieweb.social/@rickf/115765336223728652

This week's #climate solutions digest 💖 I send this email out every Thursday to my (literal) 3 subscribers! It is truly a labor of love.
If you have been wanting some positivity in your life, I am here for you. 🌈🌞🌊
https://www…

Weekly Climate Solutions Digest
Welcome Late October light sits lower on the day, turning sidewalks to amber and orchard leaves to copper. Across marshes, geese draw their careful V, a moving stitch that makes the sky feel hand sewn. This week carries the same feeling of stitching things together. Power systems link up across

Chiefs star Travis Kelce's latest venture is literal roller-coaster https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6738088/2025/10/21/travis-kelce-jana-partners-six-flags-investment/

minimizing the literal nazi talk from a potential key Trump person… again.
I don't think the American media will ever learn. The day they 'resist' as they are taken off the air by the fully authoritarian regime they'll probably say something like:
"today, in a controversial act, the administration declared that this news channel broadcast license has been changed. The new license will only allow reruns of the Presidents past speeches to play 24/7. After an immediate stay was requested by this station, the Supreme Court has ruled the change to be lawful. Goodnight America.”
#trump #TheAmericanFascist
https://flipboard.com/@npr/politics-v8m4p3ukz/-/a-L0fqOCw2R9S7wUBllP74TQ:a:3195441-/0

I’ve worked over the past year to reduce the amount of noise in my consciousness on a daily basis.
By that I mean - information noise, not literal sounds “noise”. (That problem was solved long ago by some good earplugs and noise canceling earphones.)
I’ve gotten used to spending less time on social media, regularly blocking most apps on my devices (anything with a feed news, most work communication apps, etc.), putting my phone and other devices aside for extended periods of time. Often go to work places with my iPad explicitly having its WiFi turned off and selecting cafes that don’t offer WiFi at all.
Negotiated better boundaries at work and in personal life where I exchange messages with people less often but try to make those interactions more meaningful, and people rarely expect me to respond to requests in less than 24 hours. Spent a lot of time setting up custom notification settings on all apps that would allow it, so I get fewer pings. With software, choosing fewer cloud-based options and using tools that are simple and require as few interruptions as possible.
Accustomed myself to lower-tech versions of doing things I like to do: reading on paper, writing by hand, drawing in physical sketchbooks, got a typewriter for typing without a screen. Choosing to call people on audio more, trying to make more of an effort to see people in person. Going to museums to look at art instead of browsing Pinterest. Defaulting to the library when looking for information.
I’m commenting on this now for two reasons:
1. I am pretty proud of myself for how much I’ve actually managed to reduce the constant stream of modern life esp. as a remote worker in tech!
2. Now that I’ve reached a breaking point of reducing enough noise that it’s NOTICEABLE - I am struck by the silence. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to navigate it and fill it. I made this space to be able to read and write and think more deeply - for now I feel stuck in limbo where I’m just reacquainting myself with the concept of having any space in my mind at all.

Literal Potty Police Demand IDs In Texas Capitol - Joe.My.God.
https://www.joemygod.com/2025/12/literal-potty-police-demand-ids-in-texas-capitol/

Donald Trump is worried that Republicans aren’t as afraid of him as they used to be.
Despite his self-billing as a dealmaker,
the president has only ever had one tool to control his party: fear.
GOP politicians have been afraid of career damage and literal physical harm if they crossed him.
Trump is not above reminding elected officials that he has unhinged followers who are known to be violent.
But as his approval ratings fall and the 2026 midterm elections …

Republicans are quiet quitting on Trump
The White House chief of staff says the president has “an alcoholic’s personality”

Heritage Foundation in revolt over Tucker Carlson defense after controversial Nick Fuentes interview: 'Footsie with literal Nazis' (Josh Christenson/New York Post)
https://nypost.com/2025/11/03/us-news/heritage-foundation-in-revolt-over-tucker-carlson-defense-after-controversial-nick-fuentes-interview-footsie-with-literal-nazis/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251103/p137#a251103p137

Today I Learned that Google Docs is very insistent that a/path/to/anything/whatever.json.gz should be rendered as "a/path/to/anything/whatever.json.gz" — turning the literal "whatever.json.gz" at the end of the path into a link to a fake TLD. I'm having to do a lot of "break link" extra clicks while working on a document today and it's quite the waste of my time.
I feel like I must

This is cool to learn, I came to the word via Niven and I had always assumed that “futz” was, like many words out there, a workaround to say a more profane word, in this case, “fuck”.

my solution to the nightmare that is "SPI modes"

Exordia (2024) by Seth Dickinson is a fun romp on trolley problems if your idea of fun includes "nuke Kurdistan or else we nuke the world". Obama is president, and an alien appears in Central Park to drag some broken people into a battle over an artifact that can change the universe. These aliens have actual Original Sin, and visibly so. Humans freak out at the alien wrongness, a metaphysical brand that shows the entire alien race is doomed from birth to go to a literal hell when t…

bro what even HAPPENED
#fedifc #vasco

With the emergence of more processors with 64 cores or more, I'm thinking more about whether it makes sense to implement a hypercube virtualised on a single chip with a single vector of memory, or as a literal hypercube of 64 (say) RP2350s. I understand the problems of transferring data across a hypercube, but I don't have a good feeling of how the bus contention on a multicore processor scales. What should I read?

Implementing post scarcity hardware
Prototype work towards building a post-scarcity software system

I keep coming back to the mirror dualities of the oppressed and oppressor under authoritarianism.
The oppressed is portrayed as both weak and godlike. The stereotypes are always some variation on sloth and incompetence, but yet somehow also a menace capable of destroying the "pure" society. To use the most relevant current example, Antifa being both little femme soy boys who would always get beat up by "real men" while also being an international terrorist organization on the brink of overthrowing the US government, the unarmed presence of whom makes the heavily armed agents of ICE flee for their lives. Antifa is both having absolutely no impact on ICE, and also having such an impact on ICE that the military needs to come in to protect them. The contradiction is obvious but never seems to occur to those who hold both to be true at the same time.
But few talk about the duality of the oppressor. The sovereign throughout history has always been both a ruler above the law, sometimes even the representative or incarnation of a divine force. Yet, this same superhuman/god-man is also a baby who needs constant care. This is absolutely a through line from the very earliest records of sovereign cults to modern cult leaders, CEOs, and Trump today. Power, for these people, is expressed both as the ability to force others to enact their will and in the ability to compel others to care for them. Can any of these "men" cook? Can they fix anything themselves? They are driven everywhere, cooked for all the time, constantly protected from danger. Kings are still dressed, at least for rituals. I could dissect masculinity here, but that's a whole thing.
It is as though the drive to care for our children, who must be taught to behave within acceptable norms, is hijacked by "leaders" who demand our care and attention... even at the expense of our literal children. And recently we've seen some of those very CEOs, with LLMs and return to office demands, show that their judgment is also little better than children, making decisions while pretending to understand a subject.
The oppressed are portrayed as both god-like and impotent and are, in fact, neither. Meanwhile the rulers portray themselves only as invulnerable and are, in fact, childish in their ability to survive without constant support. Their greatest fear from the collapse of society is figuring out how to make sure people keep taking care of them.
It just keeps rattling around in my head.
#USPol

Russia advances through the literal fog in Ukraine.
In the "Fog of War" we find that Russia is copying Ukraine's efforts with drone warfare - and they are enjoying robust support from China, and in some cases, the west as well.
Giorgio reports from the trenches of democracy in Ukraine. He reports the ugly truths that corporate media choose to bury. He provides evidence of war crimes that will be used in court someday.
Giorgio shares the friend link so the worl…

Into the Fog That Shrouds Ukraine
Live from Ukraine 🇺🇦

PayPal kept my account locked, rejecting all the documentation I was sending, not even notifying me after each reject, for like a month. I got pissed when they rejected a document for "not having a logo or a footer" when it very clearly did and I called. After fighting the damn voice menu thing I got a real human and he fixed it in a literal minute. He straight up told me this happened cause their AI misses shit all the time 💀

I might buy these just to encourage companies. The literal only time I care about noise cancellation is sitting on a plane/train, and I don't care if they are wireless at that point.
Come on you cowards, now make them good!
https://gizmodo.com/belki…

Belkin’s SoundForm ANC Wired Earbuds Are No Threat to AirPods
Wired earbuds are trendy again, but don't throw your wireless ones out just yet.

Just watched Monster Squad (1987). Virtually all of the protagonists (most of whom were 12 years old) were literal sex pests, throwing around slurs and celebrating arbitrary police violence. We were 100% rooting for the monsters by like 20 minutes in.

I'm not sure I should be surprised, sad, or just bemused at how often the literal wildcard, e.g. '*.domain.example' shows up in queries at my auth servers. Something(s) out of Hetzner seems to love doing this a lot.

I think the root of the “AI” evil is when AI researchers in the 1960s recognized that they outrageously underestimated the complexity of the human mind.
They became humiliated by their promises that AGI was just a few years away—and then went full goblin mode that’s lasting to this day.
Some of the OG researchers took it quite badly that they stalled and weren’t in the limelight anymore.
‣ Marvin Minsky (co-founder of MIT AI lab and arguably the most important early AI bro) went on to visit Epstein’s island multiple times.
‣ Karl Steinbuch, who came up with the German term for computer science ("Informatik")—who also was a literal Nazi (and likely war criminal) in World War II—later wrote articles in ultra-right magazines about things like “equal rights rob women of their children”.
‣ John McCarthy (inventor of Lisp, co-authored document that coined the term “Artificial Intelligence”) was a staunch Republican who years later claimed (in a serious article) that “thermostats have beliefs”.
[one moment, I am receiving more information]
‣ There’s a second Epstein Island AI pioneer? Who also was Chief Learning Officer at… Trump University? That would be Roger Schank (founded one of the first AI companies in the 1980s AI boom, it even had an IPO. Of course the 1980s AI bubble burst).
Obviously all of the above received all the awards in computer science and are very revered people.

What you get in other fields is papers being under submission for literal years. That sort of thing can kill a carer if it happens early on.
The nice thing about conferences a venues is that you get a definite reply by a deadline. Sure, it's a bit of a scramble, but you do get a few months.
I don't think there's much of an incentive to be overly critical. On 10k submissions, it won't do you much good to kill the 10 papers you're assigned.

I hold deep contempt for the adult, powerful, wealthy politicians who saw the opportunity to single out four children in the entire state of #Utah and keep them from enjoying their sport.
This is a story that radicalized me, and whenever I'm reminded by the bullies gloating over the pain of literal children, I'm going to share it again.

Embedding the Teacher: Distilling vLLM Preferences for Scalable Image Retrieval
Eric He, Akash Gupta, Adian Liusie, Vatsal Raina, Piotr Molenda, Shirom Chabra, Vyas Raina
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12014

Embedding the Teacher: Distilling vLLM Preferences for Scalable Image Retrieval
Text--image retrieval is necessary for applications such as product recommendation. Embedding-based approaches like CLIP enable efficient large-scale retrieval via vector similarity search, but they are primarily trained on literal caption-like text--image pairs and often fail to capture abstract or persona-driven attributes common in product recommendation applications (e.g., ``a gift for a mother who loves gardening''). In contrast, state-of-the-art vision--language models (vLLMs) can align t…

Trump Throws Literal, Actual 'Great Gatsby' Halloween Party As Food Aid Runs Out For Families Nationwide
https://www.wonkette.com/p/trump-throws-literal-actual-great

#TuneTuesday this week asks for #AnimalCalls, songs with animal sounds or about animals. I'll go literal. This tune - the first off the first album by the best ever Québec trad group (on se bat-tu ?) - features a loon right off the top.

Only started reading Katabasis, but if there ever was a book about the literal dark side of academia, this sharp-tongued novel should be considered.

A quick call for help: many moons ago I've seen a rage-style comic on Twitter that shows the diff btw junior & senior developers (happy, listening to EDM, shipping vs old man w/ long beard, sitting in dark, next to a tower of literal shit, bleary eyes).
I can't find it anymore – any clues?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQvDEahDeXE
also the actual literal most racist football club in the world is an israeli team and we are all surprised

Steven Spielberg's "Artificial Intelligence" (2001) was on Netflix and I had never seen it. I had heard that the final act is very sappy and... spoilers... yes it has issues in my opinion (voice-over narration *and* an alien for exposition dumps?!) but the act works well in the context of the movie: I wasn't aware that this is a modern Pinocchio's tale and the movie is quite literal about it.
But what really blew me away were the animatronic robots:

@… Awesome, in the literal sense.

Are BabyLMs Deaf to Gricean Maxims? A Pragmatic Evaluation of Sample-efficient Language Models
Raha Askari, Sina Zarrie{\ss}, \"Ozge Alacam, Judith Sieker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04764

Are BabyLMs Deaf to Gricean Maxims? A Pragmatic Evaluation of Sample-efficient Language Models
Implicit meanings are integral to human communication, making it essential for language models to be capable of identifying and interpreting them. Grice (1975) proposed a set of conversational maxims that guide cooperative dialogue, noting that speakers may deliberately violate these principles to express meanings beyond literal words, and that listeners, in turn, recognize such violations to draw pragmatic inferences. Building on Surian et al. (1996)'s study of children's sensitivity to viol…

Today I switched to my winter blanked made of yak hair. Shout-out to the literal yak shavers out there!

Question for the ether: I have an *old* WordPress site backed up. Not sure on exact version, but from 2009. I have all of the files, but no database (or at least no .SQL export file; I may have the literal files of the db, not sure).
I want to run the site locally on Windows, so that I can see what it looked like. Don't really need content, just mainly the layout and page structure, CSS, basically the theme is what I want to recover. Is this possible? #wordpress #indieweb

Anybody want to spend a few minutes drawing up a sign / logo for "Andrew's Back Room Semiconductor FA Lab" that I can use (with credit) in an upcoming blog or something?
The sketchier the better, I'd love to see what people come up with. "Literal sharpie on a piece of cardboard" is the level of effort I'm looking for.

This is a good thread on Bluesky wrt to enabler-brain and why some people (who you'd think are decent people) suddenly, out of the blue defend objectively terrible people and behavior.
(The reason is it makes them feel better—even when they know they side with literal racists.)
https://bsky.app/profile/amyhoy.bsky.social/post/3lzytgqdqbk2l

NeuroBridge: Using Generative AI to Bridge Cross-neurotype Communication Differences through Neurotypical Perspective-taking
Rukhshan Haroon, Kyle Wigdor, Katie Yang, Nicole Toumanios, Eileen T. Crehan, Fahad Dogar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23434

NeuroBridge: Using Generative AI to Bridge Cross-neurotype Communication Differences through Neurotypical Perspective-taking
Communication challenges between autistic and neurotypical individuals stem from a mutual lack of understanding of each other's distinct, and often contrasting, communication styles. Yet, autistic individuals are expected to adapt to neurotypical norms, making interactions inauthentic and mentally exhausting for them. To help redress this imbalance, we build NeuroBridge, an online platform that utilizes large language models (LLMs) to simulate: (a) an AI character that is direct and literal, a …

Finished "Count Zero" (1986) by @… and have to buy the sequel ebook, "Mona Lisa Overdrive". Just staggering works of #SciFi.
A) where's the fairest place to buy ebooks I can read on my phone;
B) dude was (is?) a literal prophet…