Tootfinder

Wrote some stuff about what's happening. It's a little dark, I'm a little exhausted. I hope you enjoy it and subscribe.
#USpol

Kimmel and Killing
censorship and extrajudicial killing make each other more likely Just as the United States was switching broadcast television signals from analog to digital, I made my network television debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live! playing Thomas Prusik Parkin, who impersonated his dead mother, Irene Prusik, to collect her Social Security benefits,

Epstein shit and adjacent, Rural America, Poverty, Abuse
Everyone who's not a pedophile thinks pedophiles are bad, but there's this special obsessed hatred you'll find among poor rural Americans. The whole QAnon/Epstein obsession may not really make sense to folks raised in cities. Like, why do these people think *so much* about pedophiles? Why do they think that everyone in power is a pedophile? Why would the Pizzagate thing make sense to anyone? What is this unhinged shit? A lot of folks (who aren't anarchists) might be inclined to ask "why can't these people just let the cops take care of it?"
I was watching Legal Eagle's run down on the Trump Epstein thing earlier today and I woke up thinking about something I don't know if I've ever talked about. Now that I'm not in the US, I'm not at any risk of talking about it. I don't know how much I would have been before, but that's not something I'm gonna dig into right now. So let me tell you a story that might explain a few things.
I'm like 16, maybe 17. I have my license, so this girl I was dating/not dating/just friends with/whatever would regularly convince me to drive her and her friends around. I think she's like 15 at the time. Her friends are younger than her.
She tells me that there's a party we can go to where they have beer. She was told to invite her friends, so I can come too. We're going to pick her friends up (we regularly fill the VW Golf well beyond the legal limit and drive places) and head to the party.
So I take these girls, at least is 13 years old, down to this party. I'm already a bit sketched out bringing a 13 year old to a party. We drive out for a while. It's in the country. We drive down a long dark road. Three are some barrel fires and a shack. This is all a bit strange, but not too abnormal for this area. We're a little ways outside of a place called Mill City (in Oregon).
We park and walk towards the shack. This dude who looks like a rat comes up and offers us beer. He laughs and talks to the girl who invited me, "What's he doing here? You're supposed to bring your girl friends." She's like, "He's our ride." I don't remember if he offered me a beer or not.
We go over to this shed and everyone starts smoking, except me because I didn't smoke until I turned 18. The other girls start talking about the rat face dude, who's wandered over by the fire with some other guys. They're mainly teasing one of the 13 year old girls about having sex with him a bunch of times. They say he's like, 32 or something. The other girls joke about him only having sex with 13 year olds because he's too ugly to have sex with anyone closer to his own age.
Somewhere along the line it comes out that he's a cop. I never forgot that, it's absolutely seared in to my memory. I can picture his face perfectly still, decades later, and them talking about how he's a deputy, he was in his 30's, and he was having sex with a 13 year old girl. I was the only boy there, but there were a few older men. This was a chunk of the good ol' boys club of the town. I think there were a couple of cops besides the one deputy, and a judge or the mayor or some kind of big local VIP.
I kept trying to get my friend to leave, but she wanted to stay. Turns out under age drinking with cops seems like a great deal if you're a kid because you know you won't get busted. I left alone, creeped the fuck out.
I was told later that I wasn't invited and that I couldn't talk about it, I've always been good at compartmentalization, so I never did.
Decades later it occurred to me what was actually happening. I'm pretty sure that cop was giving meth he'd seized as evidence to these kids. This wasn't some one-off thing. It was regular. Who knows how many decades it went on after I left, or how many decades it had been going on before I found out. I knew this type of thing had happened at least a few times before because that's how that 13 year old girl and that 32 year old cop had hooked up in the first place.
Hearing about Epstein's MO, targeting these teenage girls from fucked up backgrounds, it's right there for me. I wouldn't be surprised if they were involved in sex trafficking of minors or some shit like that... but who would you call if you found out? Half the sheriff's department was there and the other half would cover for them.
You live in the city and shit like that doesn't happen, or at least you don't think it happens. But rural poor folks have this intuition about power and abuse. It's right there and you know it.
Trump is such a familiar character for me, because he's exactly that small town mayor or sheriff. He'll will talk about being tough on crime and hunting down pedophiles, while hanging out at a party that exists so people can fuck 8th graders.
The problem with the whole thing is that rural folks will never break the cognitive dissonance between "kill the peods" and "back the blue." They'll never go kill those cops. No, the pedos must be somewhere else. It must be the elites. It must be outsiders. It can't be the cops and good ol' boys everyone respects. It can't be the mayor who rigs the election to win every time. It can't be the "good upstanding" sheriff. Nah, it's the Clintons.
To be fair, it's probably also the Clitnons, a bunch of other politicians, billionaires, etc. Epstein was exactly who everyone thought he was, and he didn't get away with it for so long without a whole lot of really powerful help.
There are still powerful people who got away with involvement with #Epstein. #Trump is one of them, but I don't really believe that he's the only one.
#USPol #ACAB

A study published in 2021 presented cuttlefish with a new version of the "marshmallow test",
and the results showed there's more going on in their strange little brains than we ever suspected.
Their ability to learn, anticipate future rewards, and adapt their behavior, the researchers said,
may have evolved to give cuttlefish an edge in the cutthroat eat-or-be-eaten marine world they live

Cephalopods Passed a Cognitive Test Intended For Human Children
An eye-opening experiment on cephalopods reinforces why it is so important for us not to underestimate animal intelligence.

"The US is the richest country in the world!"
Oh yeah? What does its balance sheet look like?
Obviously it's absurd to ask that question, as any economist will happily explain why national debts shouldn't be treated like real money.
But it's also absurd that it's absurd to ask that question, and there's a thread to pull here: is the US "rich" because many billionaires live here? That doesn't seem to improve the lives of most of the population. Is it because our median income is so much larger than many other countries? That's in large part a product of exchange rates, since costs of living are also higher here, so is the real reason the fact that the dollar has so much purchasing power? Why does it?
Well, at some level of abstraction, exchange rates boil down to: "How much confidence do the ultra-rich place in the stability of the country" which is intimately related to: "How much military/diplomatic power does the country have?"
So... The US is the "richest" country in the world because it uses its military dominance to bully other countries and keep them down, and it also uses the resulting economic dominance to do the same. We can see this happening via US-sponsored coups, International Monetary Fund bullying, and attendant multinational corporate looting of countries with little economic power (rampant in Africa and Central America, for example).

Live your life with all the shame a cat has*
*none

Had a blast at our little #OpenStreetMap birthday celebration. 🍰 🧉
It ended up being too windy to fly drones for long. Instead we recorded street-level images for #panoramax and GPS tracks, in addition to doing a lot of live surveying – using a huge range of tools that allow contributing to OSM!
In no particular order we at least used: @…, @…, @…, @…, HOTOSM's ChatMap, iD and JOSM.
Having so many different ways of making contributions is a real feature.

Brutal similes
Using #AI is an ethical choice.
I know that there cases when an #LLM could make my job easier. Which doesn't mean I'll use one. Just like I won't be buying cheap junk gadgets that could help me with some random stuff a bunch of times before they'll end up on a trash pile.
Yes, sometimes I am curious what an LLM could come up with. But then, there are people who are curious how many donuts they can eat before throwing up. A waste of good donuts.
What world would you rather live in? One where you put a little more effort in your job? Or one where LLM helps with with your job, but you can't enjoy your free time anymore because the capitalists are using LLMs to turn every single aspect of your life into a nightmare, and eventually your employer just makes you do more and more until you're thrown out? But at least you will get a monthly trial of a statistical "friend" to "talk" about your trouble to.
Yeah, you can claim that training models does the most harm, and that's already happened, so not using them doesn't change much, and all the energy spent on it would be wasted. Or use the traditional "others" fallacy — others will use it anyway, others will fuel the vicious circle, so why renounce convenience. It's like when you learn that your dinner is human meat, and you decide to eat it anyway, because not eating it won't bring that human back to life, and if it's wasted, then their death will be for naught.
#AntiCapitalism

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

Civility & common sense has truly gone to hell: Obnoxious audacity has become the norm worldwide.
And you can thank all the societal leeches that live by the philosophy of, "If you don't ask, you don't get".
☑️ Starbucks asks customers in South Korea to stop bringing printers and desktop computers into stores as workers transform cafes into remote offices | Fortune

Starbucks asks customers in South Korea to stop bringing printers and desktop computers into stores as workers transform cafés into remote offices
“You can just go and have a cup of coffee, work there—but people are taking it a little bit to the extreme nowadays,” one Korean studies professor said.

Hooked the tube amp back up after repairing a bad trace and checking some other soldered connections. It's still making noise in one channel, but it goes away after a little while and only reappears once in a while. I really missed having tunes, maybe I can live with it for a while...🫤🎶

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #RoundMidnight
Fezile 'Feya' Faku:
🎵 Little Piece for Bokani (Live)
#FezileFeyaFaku
https://open.spotify.com/track/7ooMqGfD2ieBOG5lx4AM3g

Took the front frame off to secure the little "handles" on the front of the PVM, didn't take too long and fortunately they just needed to be tightened up. I will need to clean out the interior of the PVM as it's accumulated quite a bit of dust and crap internally. It's not horrible, but it's not great either. Cleared off a spot for the PVM to live in the office as well.
#sony

Apple asks the EU to repeal the DMA; EU rejects Apple's demand, saying it is "not surprised" as Apple has "contested every little bit" of DMA since day one (France 24)
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/2025092…

Apple asks EU to scrap landmark digital competition law
Apple asked the European Union to scrap its landmark digital competition law on Thursday, arguing that it poses security risks and creates a "worse experience" for consumers.

"Vibe coding" is one of the dumbest ideas that I've heard in a long time.
Yes, there are often reasons to use tools (such as Knuth's books) to lookup methods. And well established and tested libraries are great. (Thank you "numpy".)
But "vibe coding" just turns programmers into little more than proofreaders - proofreading complex and often boring material. That is putting the cart before the horse. (Is there a modern phrase for that adage?…

An AI-powered coding tool wiped out a software company’s database, then apologized for a ‘catastrophic failure on my part’
An experiment with an AI coding tool took a disastrous turn when an AI agent reportedly deleted a live company database during an active code freeze.

Our beautiful Joan Mitchell painting has been a highlight of our collection since we bought it in 1974, the year after the artist painted it. But it needs a little TLC. Rather than send it off to be conserved in a lab, we're doing that live and in public. Read more about this cool project:
https…

Just bundled up my interactive lab notebook system for an open-source release; it's just a panflute filter but has some cool functionality if you want to make little interactive tutorials that live as standalone static pages without any server app necessary beyond a basic host. You can check out an example here:
#AcademicChatter

Chinese anime feels very challenging to watch for me.
I'm not sure if there's a larger culture of "and the things happened outside the show, fans will know what's up, because they watch more than just the show" or it's just culturally accepted to run a little looser/faster in the content.
There's also strong tendencies to weave in Chinese history and culture plot points or references that just continue to miss me.
BUT - I do enjoy that they tend to go _hard_ on universe building and story intensity. Everything is always epic.
Lord of Mysteries so far is an -amazing- mysticism story with strong Lovecraftian elements. Would love to see more like it. Live action would be absolutely wild.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #6MusicArtistCollection
Michael Kiwanuka:
🎵 Cold Little Heart (Radio 2 live session, 19/09/19)
#MichaelKiwanuka
https://vaillant4.bandcamp.com/track/michael-kiwanuka-cold-little-heart-cover-acoustic
https://open.spotify.com/track/0qprlw0jfsW4H9cG0FFE0Z

With a little experience, it's easy to identify website search queries that don't work. In this session, @… used live examples from several high-profile websites to demonstrate how to effectively break search. He explained what is meant by 'broken' search, the different types of failure and what these problems reveal about the underlying search…

Dog owners: if you can't stop your little vanity emotional support terrorist from causing a hazard to road traffic including cyclists and people, you shouldn't be allowed to have it, and it shouldn't be allowed to exist. And I don't give a fuck if you live in the countryside: there's one law.

Russia attacks Ukrainian schools, hospitals, and churches, but that is not enough cruelty to satiate their Orcish hungers.
Putin tries to restart the nuclear reactors in Zaporizhzhia, after having destroyed the vital electric lines needed to cool the reactors.
This is ecological terror and extortion, a monstrous act befitting the most perverse and cruel little fiend the world has known since Hitler.
Of course, Trump loves him and refuses to do anything real to stop him.

While reinforcements to Ukraine slow down, Russia changes tactics but not targets
Live from Ukraine 🇺🇦

Day 15 (belated): Darcie Little Badger
An Indigenous author of YA fiction, Little Badger writes warm characters with deep hearts, and of course offers a fantasy world that feels refreshingly different to anyone steeped mainly in fantasy of the Tolkien lineage. Would be nice if works like hers weren't rare and didn't seem exotic, but that's not the world we live in.
I greatly enjoyed "A Snake Falls to Earth" and need to remember to grab more from her soon, although my current library crop is sitting at something like 8 books to do through first.
#20AuthorsNoMen

Weirdly poignant to hear Springsteen belting out 'Born in the USA' at the town pool here in little old Ōtautahi. Celebrating a nation despite its clear failure to live up to valid expectations.

Several lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have criticized Trump’s politicization of the justice department.
In an interview with NBC News, Rand Paul, Republican senator of Kentucky, toed a line, and said that “lawfare in all forms is bad,” before insisting that Joe Biden was the “king of lawfare”.
Paul also noted that “we need to get politics out of the judicial system as much as we can”.
Meanwhile, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said on CNN that Trump’s actions re…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #CraigCharles
Billie Holiday & Buddy DeFranco Quartet:
🎵 What A Little Moonlight Can Do (Live in Cologne, 1954)
#BillieHoliday #BuddyDeFrancoQuartet
https://open.spotify.com/track/12gWPNsMu2JAq2YEwaWWSL