Tootfinder

I've said it before and I'll say it again: #CongestionPricing is too little, too late. It's even worse since Hochul watered down the fees.
But pedestrianizing huge portions of Manhattan? Now *that* is the shit!

Google makes Gemini 3 Flash the default model in Gemini app and Search's AI mode; it scored 33.7% without tool use on Humanity's Last Exam vs. GPT-5.2's 34.5% (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/17/goog

Google launches Gemini 3 Flash, makes it the default model in the Gemini app | TechCrunch
Google is making Gemini 3 Flash the default model in the Gemini app and oAI model for Search

Just finished "I'm Awful, Thanks" by Lara Pickle. A good story that serves as a guide to managing emotions, although it's actually a cute story too, not just framing for the mental health discussion.
That said, I feel like it doesn't get far enough into the details of accepting self-control as our only form of real control vs. understanding that some events outside our control aren't fair or are others' attacks, and trying to manage our own emotions as our only response is a disservice to ourselves and others. Even further, I suspect that the HR resolution depicted here, while not impossible, is less frequent than much worse outcomes, which is part of a larger pattern of systemic assaults on our mental health that aren't totally solvable with individual emotional regulation.
Sure, leveling up one's control of ones own emotions and learning to accept and manage a range of emotions is super useful and it's a good thing overall, but the systemic problems of late stage capitalism are real, and making it seem like everyone is responsible for managing their own mental health in the face of these problems helps avoid confronting them.
Still, it's a good book overall, with vibrant art and a well-structured plot.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

This sentiment expressed by @… below and the aspect of slowing down is also very much part of my own reasoning for getting back into analog print making. The other large part is the conceptual overlap with (and my love of) process-based art in general. It was exactly that what has drawn me to generative/algorithmic/procedural/kinetic approaches/concepts for most of my l…

Christopher Cookson (@figwit@pixelfed.nz)
Another hand coloured #cyanotype, this time of kōwhai flowers. I'm not sure whether this counts as #fineart or #adultcolouring but it is definitely a unique reproduction of one of my photos. What really draws me to this #altprocess for #photography reproduction is that it takes time, and even though I can produce multiple prints from the same negative, each one will be visibly unique. In an age where billions of photos are taken but most will never leave a digital device, slowing down and impo…

Holy cow, that's a big dog!!

"This is a new reality that we are dreaming and weaving together."
This is either the last or second to last section of Kairos I'm writing. This is the most specific so far. After that it's editing and making it feel more like a single consistent text than a bunch of essays. I hope it's worth the read.
Feedback is always welcome, especially editing (typos, grammar, etc), and questions.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/a-solarpunk-fractal-creating-a-viable-system-91h5

“Sometimes the decision making criteria that the leadership uses to make a decision is different than the decision making criteria that might be reflected in scoring, but that really gets to the heart of it,” he said. 
That sounds a lot like #RFKJr's reasoning - Don't trust experts, I'm the one that knows what the right answer.

Lurie doubles down on S.F. permitting contract despite questions of deputy’s impropriety 
Lurie’s policy chief Ned Segal awarded contract to preferred firm despite report finding it "shouldn’t be considered."

“Sometimes the decision making criteria that the leadership uses to make a decision is different than the decision making criteria that might be reflected in scoring, but that really gets to the heart of it,” he said. 
That sounds a lot like #RFKJr's reasoning - Don't trust experts, I'm the one that knows what the right answer.

Lurie doubles down on S.F. permitting contract despite questions of deputy’s impropriety 
Lurie’s policy chief Ned Segal awarded contract to preferred firm despite report finding it "shouldn’t be considered."

"It was a hell of a move for a mayor who will next year be asking the city’s voters for more power, including the ability to unilaterally hire and fire people."
Yes, and if he's dumb enough to still put that on the ballot, the city's voters need to say no. Again.
…

The making and unmaking of Beya Alcaraz: A strange and terrible saga
A near-total vetting failure by the mayor’s office put a political neophyte in an impossible position. It was a crucial misstep for Daniel Lurie.

"Microsoft was an early investor in many of the latest AI companies. It ended up with a serious stake in OpenAI and benefited from early access to its models, creating Bing Chat and Copilot when Google, Meta, and Anthropic were just getting started. But now its momentum has stalled, and like everyone else, it's not making much money from its AI products. That's because no one is buying them, and that is because very few people actually find them useful, The Information reports."
https://www.tumblr.com/teledyn/803134194609979392?source=share

My profession (software design, programming) makes me so sad currently.
A speedrun to rock bottom chasing non-existing sand sentience with ever more abstruse magical thinking while whole swaths of my peers are masturbating to fascism in hopes of striking it rich.
I hope after the bubble pops and the boomers are gone there will be a reckoning and a reset to making software that actually strives to make human lives better.

Series B, Episode 02 - Shadow
AVON: Obviously.
HANNA: That's why we haven't been killed yet. He's making an example of us.
BEK: Oh, shut up Hanna, Its none of their business.
GAN: Isn't it? I mean if they're making an example of you...
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/202/220

Why the Jaguars want Trevor Lawrence to play free and 'cut it loose' https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46993626/why-jacksonville-jaguars-playoff-hopes-depend-trevor-lawrence-cutting-loose

ICE has used the pretext of combating antisemitism to target dissidents.
A branch of the agency previously used to target drug smugglers and human traffickers has reportedly been directed to scan social media for posts sympathetic to Hamas.
Though ICE is ostensibly still bound by constitutional limits,
the way it has been operating bears the hallmarks of a secret police force in the making.
They typically meet five criteria:
they’re a police force targeting pol…

How ICE is becoming a secret police force under the Trump administration
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement meets most criteria that have defined secret police forces in authoritarian regimes. And the worst may be yet to come.

CNN plans to launch its All Access streaming subscription tier on October 28 for $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year in the US (Ted Johnson/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2025/10/cnn-subscription-service-launch-1236588685/

CNN’s Subscription Service To Launch October 28 At $6.99 Per Month
CNN is making another go of it with a subscription service, announcing an Oct. 28 launch for its “all access” service at a price of $6.99 per month. Subscribers will have access to live and on demand content, as well as digital journalism.  “It’s an essential step in CNN’s evolution as we work to give […]

Bengaluru-based e-commerce platform Meesho is up 95% from its IPO offer price, valuing it at nearly $11B and making it India's best-performing major IPO of 2025 (Ashutosh Joshi/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Yeah! How hard would it be anyway to get thousands of volunteers who work on a completely free project to emulate these other commercial entities with full time employees who are making stuff that they sell for actual money? Just, like, commit to some schedule, folks! What? No, I can't use something else that suits me better. I like your thing.

Hey guys! two more #schwarzwald #photos! And I found them a perfect fit for #FootpathFriday as well.
This day's hike was so diverse. narrow trails, ferns and moss, a lake, some heat…

#Decarbonization #Greenwashing This #Hydrogen has no Color
Peregrine Hydrogen has an unusual idea for making clean Hydrogen, one that it says fits into existing industrial processes. One of the wor…

This Hydrogen has no Color
Peregrine Hydrogen has an unusual idea for making clean Hydrogen, one that it says fits into existing industrial processes. One of the world's largest Phosphate mining companies is interested.

A new idea about how to make clean Hydrogen that fits into an existing industry? ✨🌱💧
Clean Hydrogen🌱💧 will be more difficult than we might've hoped, but we still need it. Just decarbonizing the fossil🦖 Hydrogen industry is a massive undertaking. New ideas are welcome.
I recently learned about Peregrine Hydrogen. They make Hydrogen, but also something else: Sulfuric Acid🧪. They need ~½ the electricity⚡ compared to conventional electrolysis by utilizing a 2nd input.
🧵

This Hydrogen has no Color
Peregrine Hydrogen has an unusual idea for making clean Hydrogen, one that it says fits into existing industrial processes. One of the world's largest Phosphate mining companies is interested.

A bunch of last-minute issues at work tracing a path back to “We didn’t know that they understood differently.”
Our company culture is “async by default,” which is making it even harder to evaluate “how are they understanding this?”

"These were the times of Justine Ezarik opening a box containing the 300 pages of her first AT&T bill. Of Joe Hewitt releasing the iUI framework. Of Steve Ballmer laughing at the iPhone. Of James Duncan Davidson’s iconic photo of the iPhone inside a glass screen.
The iPhone SDK and the App Store did not come alone. They were accompanied by an infamous NDA that lasted until October 2008. It prevented devs from asking questions on a new website called “Stack Overflow”."

Erica Sadun
Developers new to the iOS platform are completely (and thankfully) unaware of its rocky start during its initial years. The first iPhone was announced on January 9th, 2007, and was released in the United States on June 29th that year. The iPhone SDK was announced by Steve Jobs in October 2007, and released in March 2008. But even before the official SDK was first announced, people were already "jailbreaking" the device, and thereby making applications for the iPhone. First-generation iPhone and…

The {cli} package makes it easy to show pretty and informative messages to the user of your code. #rstats #terminal

GitHub - r-lib/cli: Tools for making beautiful & useful command line interfaces
Tools for making beautiful & useful command line interfaces - r-lib/cli

Have all us Australians hit the tromboncino/cucuzza/zucchini glut yet? Or just me? https://witcheskitchen.com.au/tromboncino-or-zucchini-bake-making-it-up-as-you-go/

Tromboncino (or Zucchini) Bake (making it up as you go)
Tromboncino or zucchini, cheese, eggs, onion of some kind, something tart, something salty, something aromatic, little bit of flour, salt and pepper. Mix together, top with grated cheese, bake. Ser…

Don Whoreleon
bot by @…
No laws were broken in the making of this bot: let's leave the extrajudicial killing out of it.
#satire #potus45

Why put effort into writing your thesis when you can put in the same amount of effort into making it look as if you had written it?
#AcademicChatter

This fits my theory that enthusiasm for LLMs is proportional to how far are people from undestanding how it works (few researcher exceptions notwithstanding)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/22/ai-workers-tell-family-stay-away

"Cody Kociemba, the developer behind the Hack/House project, has taken it upon himself to maintain these aging devices. The solution is called "No Longer Evil," or “NLE” for short. It's an open-source project designed to give decommissioned Nest Thermostats a second life."
ht…

Google killed old Nest thermostats, but hackers are making them work again
A clever workaround restores lost functionality, but is it ready for prime time?

Mission Local and Joe Eskenazi are on this!
The unmaking of Supervisor Alcaraz: A strange and terrible saga https://missionlocal.org/2025/11/the-making-and-unmaking-of-beya-alcaraz-a-strange-and-terrible-saga/

The making and unmaking of Beya Alcaraz: A strange and terrible saga
A near-total vetting failure by the mayor’s office put a political neophyte in an impossible position. It was a crucial misstep for Daniel Lurie.

VW plans to end vehicle production at its Dresden plant, which opened in 2001, and convert it into a research hub focused on AI, robotics, and chip design (Gregory Schmidt/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/business/volkswagen-dresden-factor…

Volkswagen to End Production at German Plant, a First in Company History
The auto giant stopped making cars at the plant in Dresden, which opened in 2001, as it faces weaker demand and steep U.S. tariffs.

This survey question is rich. This is from one of the BigMoneySF groups trying to make it harder for the rest of us to put stuff on the ballot.
But they will never ban paid signature gathering, the one thing that would most effectively keep crap off the ballot. They just want to raise the signature threshold for the rest of us. It would still be easy for billionaires to abuse the system and qualify any ballot measure they like, just hard for anyone else.

Managed to put the new Pi music player together before leaving work today. Got it set up with remote control and a quick test of playback. Next stop: Speaker mounting and figuring out if I should bet on physical security through obscurity by making it not easily visible or using a moderately long RCA cable. What’s a reasonable cable length with decent quality cables?

And you don't need to accept the trap of authoritarian masculinity on logic alone, the proof is right there in male influencers like Andrew Tate and their followers. These dipshits get so obsessed with gatekeeping they don't realize that the gates they're tending keep them in, that the more walls they put up to protect their privilege, the smaller their identity can be. They huddle in tiny pens, terrified of crossing imaginary bounds that they imposed *on themselves.*
They have built their own torture chambers and locked themselves inside, and for what? They turn themselves into dragons, hoarding what they see as valuable while repressing every emotion including joy. And if they let themselves experience joy, they would, perhaps, realize that all these privileges are inconsistent with it. They might, perhaps, recognize that they have built up these privileges so they don't have to admit that their suffering and fear are not, in fact, admirable. They might have to face the fact that they have lived lives that are deeply pathetic, might have to face the fact that only empathy can give one access to deep satisfaction, might have to face the fact that they have lived their whole lives on a treadmill, going nowhere.
But I assume that they won't ever do that, because to do so would force them to face the enormity of the emotional debt, the pain and suffering they have inflicted on the world, and those are big feelings. It's far easier to hide in a hole, forever alone, making up silly rules to keep everyone inside scared and keep everyone outside from seeing in.

Thinking about making a new live coding language that I don't talk or write about until I've performed with it for a year. (Hopefully this will be the first and last time I break this rule.) #normaliseintrospectivecreativity

Texas is making a list of transgender Texans using DMV data | KUT Radio, Austin's NPR Station https://www.kut.org/politics/2025-12-15/texas-trans-transgender-drivers-license-id-list-privacy

Texas is making a list of transgender Texans. It’s using driver's licenses to help.
A year after the state blocked transgender Texans from updating their state IDs, it has collected information on more than 100 people who have tried. Officials won’t say what they’re using the list for.

Chicago is in Cook County and now courts are safer.
"Cook County’s top judge signed an order barring ICE from arresting people at court."
"...bars the civil arrest of any “party, witness, or potential witness” while going to court proceedings. It includes arrests inside courthouses and in parking lots, surrounding sidewalks and entryways."

Cook County judge's order bars ICE from arresting people at court in Chicago area
Cook County’s top judge signed an order barring ICE from arresting people at court. The county includes Chicago, which has seen a federal immigration crackdown in recent months. Detaining residents outside courthouses has been a common tactic for federal agents, who have been stationed outside county courthouses for weeks, making arrests and drawing crowds of protesters. The order, which takes effect Wednesday, bars the civil arrest of any “party, witness, or potential witness” while goin…

Weekend #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
Most cladocerans have a bivalve carapace, but one genus is very different. Leptodora is globally distributed in the north, large (~2 cm), elongated, and effectively transparent, leading it to be coined "ghost flea" by a colleague. It is a primitive genus and is the only cladoceran with a nauplius stage. Highly predaceous with a huge eye, it preys on juv…

Instagram overhauls the app for teen users with age-gating, including showing age-appropriate content to Teen Accounts by default, guided by PG-13 movie ratings (David Ingram/NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/instagram-says-making-…

Instagram says it's making the app more 'PG-13' for teens
After outrage over teens’ well-being on Instagram erupted, the company said it would adopt the film industry’s approach and give teens a PG-13 experience.

Google AI, damn you.
When I say, e.g., "wake me up at quarter to five", it always messes it up - making 18:45 out of it. Seven and five do not sound that similar, and I speak clearly.
"Wake me up in three and a half hours", OTOH, works fine. But then I always need to calculate.
Good grief.
That is one of the very few features that I use and expect to work really well. *sigh*

Six degrees of #Wikipedia is a site that lets you type in two different topics and then shows how many Wikipedia pages apart they are. It also displays a visual chart for each pair of topics you enter.
The chart includes the two topics you entered, and all the other ones that build bridges connecting the two.
And while you’re at it, consider making a donation to help support wiki.

Six Degrees of Wikipedia
Find the shortest hyperlinked paths between any two pages on Wikipedia.

In case you were wondering whether you should cancel your Paramount subscription…
“Ellison’s [spawn of the Oracle billionaire] goal is to turn Paramount into a MAGA-friendly environment, with content in the TV and movie divisions expected to be more ‘America-centric’ and geared toward ‘the middle of the country.’”

Paramount Has Blacklist for Stars Deemed “Overtly Antisemitic” — World of Reel
It sure looks like the likes of Javier Bardem, Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, and Mark Ruffalo won’t be making movies for Paramount in the foreseeable future.

Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
.
.
.
I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading

'the focus on creating is just the little capitalist devil sitting on our shoulders telling us to produce more.
...
the most radical act today is to just make something. Especially if you are not good at it or if it’s a bit of a struggle. Draw if you’re not good at it. Play the piano even though you’re not great. Make something just for the fun of being in this world, touching it, being in it. Becoming you. Let this radicalize you a bit.
Fuck creation. Love making.'<…

Something from nothing
I am not a talented person, I’ve never been called “gifted” or anything like that. Anything I can do, anything I achieved took a lot of work and stubbornness to achieve. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that I’m “selfmade” and that my position in society, my access to resources, etc. had nothing […]

Epstein's brother has to be lying right?
Article:
#Bubba

🫧 Cleaner air may be accelerating warming by making clouds less reflective
#atmosphere

Cleaner air may be accelerating warming by making clouds less reflective
Earth is reflecting less sunlight, and absorbing more heat, than it did several decades ago. Global warming is advancing faster than climate models predicted, with observed temperatures exceeding projections in 2023 and 2024. These trends have scientists scrambling to understand why the atmosphere is letting more light in.

KnowRL: Teaching Language Models to Know What They Know
Sahil Kale, Devendra Singh Dhami
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11407 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11407

KnowRL: Teaching Language Models to Know What They Know
Truly reliable AI requires more than simply scaling up knowledge; it demands the ability to know what it knows and when it does not. Yet recent research shows that even the best LLMs misjudge their own competence in more than one in five cases, making any response born of such internal uncertainty impossible to fully trust. Inspired by self-improvement reinforcement learning techniques that require minimal data, we present a simple but powerful framework KnowRL that strengthens a model's intern…

Syndicalism is the idea that workers should organize themselves into unions within their industries and use those unions to take control of workplaces, so workers—not bosses or shareholders—run things directly and democratically.
Think of it like everyone at your job working together to decide how things are made, what gets done, and how profits are shared, rather than having one boss making all the choices and getting the biggest share.

All right, if I'm making you ANOTHER bookcase at least I'm getting some more clamps out of it.
#woodworking

The vote on Chat Control has been postponed, but the “fight isn’t over” yet – here's what we know
https://ground.news/article/the-vote-on-chat-control-has-been-postponed-but-the-fight-isnt-over-yet-heres-what-w…

The vote on Chat Control has been postponed, but the “fight isn’t over” yet – here's what we know
The move comes as Germany officially joined the opposition, making it impossible again to reach the needed majority. Yet, the EU is still working on the proposal.

For my #HamRadio tunable elevated radial project, I want to isolate them from the earth and the mast, and I'm not finding an isolating mount that goes into a normal ½" "light stand". So I've come up with this design to build. (Yay, I can't just buy it, so I have an excuse to spend some shop time!)
From 1" 6061 aluminum stock and 1" POM:

• An aluminum stem/spigot that fits…

A few remarks on "AI" usage and the narrative surrounding it. I think it's about the difference between disconnected creating and embodied making.
(Original title: Something from nothing)
https://tante.cc/2025/12/12/something-from-nothing/

Something from nothing
I am not a talented person, I’ve never been called “gifted” or anything like that. Anything I can do, anything I achieved took a lot of work and stubbornness to achieve. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that I’m “selfmade” and that my position in society, my access to resources, etc. had nothing […]

Climate funding isn't reaching the people who need it most. The Global South House is changing that.
This coalition of locally rooted funds puts Indigenous Peoples, traditional communities, and youth at the center of decision-making. Their approach: democratic, transparent, and built from the ground up—ensuring resources actually reach frontline communities.

Interview: Putting global South communities at the centre of climate and nature funding conversations
As COP30 kicks off, Juliana Tinoco, who conceived the idea of the Global South House, a platform for philanthropic actors, sets out her ambition for the platform and the stronger global South leadership she hopes will come out of it

@… @… Good, making money in the open web was always crappy.
Either that universal wage, or even more nearly free hosting options and tooling around them. Because for those with very little money, it's easier to spent it on …

King Flaccid the First
bot by @…
No laws were broken in the making of this bot: let's leave the extrajudicial killing out of it.
#satire #potus45

I just made an optician's appointment, which I've been putting off for a while. 😞
Making it 29 years in the software industry without glasses seems like a reasonable innings. (I was needing to use A11y "large text" settings on this desktop, which suggested it might be time...)

making inappropriate and insensitive "jokes" about something as an expression of bitterness over it all

Players react to NFL's efforts to halt team report cards: 'Fact that there's pushback shows it's working' https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46995326/nfl-players-nflpa-reaction-2025-league-grievance-team-re…

Finishing up Blood Glacier, as I thought I'd seen it and was making sure (I haven't, I've just seen something similar). This one's weird and maybe a little cheesy.. I only noticed partway through that unfortunately, it's badly dubbed in English- like, VERY badly. I hate dubbed stuff. Wish it was subbed, but there's no choice for that on Tubi. Just this weird dubbed version. But I'm just here for the gore anyway 😂 which this one's delivering, a little.

Blood Glacier (2013)
At a climate research station in the Alps, the scientists are stunned as the nearby melting glacier is leaking a red liquid. It quickly turns to be very special juice — with unexpected genetic effects on the local wildlife.

Instead of sleeping, I'm making ChatGPT write Linux tutorials in Old Frisian. It's...actually not terrible.

The Robustness of Differentiable Causal Discovery in Misspecified Scenarios
Huiyang Yi, Yanyan He, Duxin Chen, Mingyu Kang, He Wang, Wenwu Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12503 ht…

The Robustness of Differentiable Causal Discovery in Misspecified Scenarios
Causal discovery aims to learn causal relationships between variables from targeted data, making it a fundamental task in machine learning. However, causal discovery algorithms often rely on unverifiable causal assumptions, which are usually difficult to satisfy in real-world data, thereby limiting the broad application of causal discovery in practical scenarios. Inspired by these considerations, this work extensively benchmarks the empirical performance of various mainstream causal discovery a…

I've just discovered (super late, I know) that Tommy Guerrero's spent much of the past several decades making music. It's really good. I'm imagining whole new soundtracks for the old Bones Brigade videos.
https://tommy-guerrero-too-good.bandcamp.com/album/a…

Low-maturity #tech orgs fetishize ideas.
Their process goes like this: a senior stakeholder has an idea, then the engineers build it. Only then can the team go and "validate" it.
The main outcome of this process is ANXIETY, because people know they are making a huge bet, but the risks aren't being acknowledged.
Subscribe to the Product Picnic, and be the first to rea…

The Product Picnic
Writing on UX and product management to connect today's discourse with classic insights that the industry forgot.

EReLiFM: Evidential Reliability-Aware Residual Flow Meta-Learning for Open-Set Domain Generalization under Noisy Labels
Kunyu Peng, Di Wen, Kailun Yang, Jia Fu, Yufan Chen, Ruiping Liu, Jiamin Wu, Junwei Zheng, M. Saquib Sarfraz, Luc Van Gool, Danda Pani Paudel, Rainer Stiefelhagen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12687

EReLiFM: Evidential Reliability-Aware Residual Flow Meta-Learning for Open-Set Domain Generalization under Noisy Labels
Open-Set Domain Generalization (OSDG) aims to enable deep learning models to recognize unseen categories in new domains, which is crucial for real-world applications. Label noise hinders open-set domain generalization by corrupting source-domain knowledge, making it harder to recognize known classes and reject unseen ones. While existing methods address OSDG under Noisy Labels (OSDG-NL) using hyperbolic prototype-guided meta-learning, they struggle to bridge domain gaps, especially with limited…

🚨An email pops up: “Quick! Can you upload the contract here? My VPN’s down!”
It looks like your colleague. It feels urgent. But is it real? 👀
Smishing messages like these exploit trust and urgency, making us act before we think.
It’s easy to slip into autopilot when we’re busy.
But #digitalmindfulness means slowing down, even if for just a few seconds.
🔗 W…

Instagram unveils updates to overhaul the app for teen users, including age-gating inappropriate content, in a bid to make its content similar to PG-13 movies (David Ingram/NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/instagram-says-making-ap…

Instagram says it's making the app more 'PG-13' for teens
After outrage over teens’ well-being on Instagram erupted, the company said it would adopt the film industry’s approach and give teens a PG-13 experience.

Good Morning #Canada
I finished my breakfast this morning only to discover that it's National Maple Syrup Day. A missed opportunity but at least I can share some important facts about Canada's sweet and sticky sauce.
- Indigenous People taught early Canadians how to harvest maple sap and boil it down into a sugary liquid.
- A maple tree can yield sap for up to 100 years, but the trees must be roughly 45 years old before it’s first tapped for syrup making.
- It takes roughly 40 gallons (150 litres) of tree sap to produce 1 gallon (3.8 litres) of syrup.
- Quebec produces 72% of the world’s maple syrup. In 2021, that equaled 133M lbs from Quebec.
- The big bottle of Costco Maple Syrup is from Quebec.
- Maple Syrup only has 1 ingredient. Sap.
- Maple Syrup has an indefinite shelf life but should be frozen if storing for more than 2 years.
And regarding the great Maple Syrup heist, this is still the best report on that famous crime.
#CanadaIsAwesome #MmmmSyrup #MapleSyrup
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/12/maple-syrup-heist?srsltid=AfmBOoq7fMx3GguT20T9cNrpZgrtVue4leiYZpZibZT_7S9WHWDfI0Ln

"An SNP victory in May’s Holyrood contest would hardly be an earthquake, after 18 continuous years of nationalist government. It would, though, signal a remarkable comeback from a period of eclipse, and from an often dismal record on public services. For Labour, which did so well in Scotland in the 2024 general election, it would signal a crisis moment, imperilling Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership"
#UKPol

Oh it seems I'm lacking a bit behind with all the #photos from the #schwarzwald . Well, I don't want to flood you with all the forest. 😄
These photos are from another hike to another hike though the Black Forest and to one of those very cool black lakes. This time I brought my pol…

HackWorld: Evaluating Computer-Use Agents on Exploiting Web Application Vulnerabilities
Xiaoxue Ren, Penghao Jiang, Kaixin Li, Zhiyong Huang, Xiaoning Du, Jiaojiao Jiang, Zhenchang Xing, Jiamou Sun, Terry Yue Zhuo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12200

HackWorld: Evaluating Computer-Use Agents on Exploiting Web Application Vulnerabilities
Web applications are prime targets for cyberattacks as gateways to critical services and sensitive data. Traditional penetration testing is costly and expertise-intensive, making it difficult to scale with the growing web ecosystem. While language model agents show promise in cybersecurity, modern web applications demand visual understanding, dynamic content handling, and multi-step interactions that only computer-use agents (CUAs) can perform. Yet, their ability to discover and exploit vulnera…

Lingxi: Repository-Level Issue Resolution Framework Enhanced by Procedural Knowledge Guided Scaling
Xu Yang, Jiayuan Zhou, Michael Pacheco, Wenhan Zhu, Pengfei He, Shaowei Wang, Kui Liu, Ruiqi Pan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11838

Lingxi: Repository-Level Issue Resolution Framework Enhanced by Procedural Knowledge Guided Scaling
Driven by the advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs), LLM-powered agents are making significant improvements in software engineering tasks, yet struggle with complex, repository-level issue resolution. Existing agent-based methods have two key limitations. First, they lack of procedural knowledge (i.e., how an issue is fixed step-by-step and rationales behind it) to learn and leverage for issue resolution. Second, they rely on massive computational power to blindly explore the solution sp…

Who is a Better Matchmaker? Human vs. Algorithmic Judge Assignment in a High-Stakes Startup Competition
Sarina Xi, Orelia Pi, Miaomiao Zhang, Becca Xiong, Jacqueline Ng Lane, Nihar B. Shah
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12692

Who is a Better Matchmaker? Human vs. Algorithmic Judge Assignment in a High-Stakes Startup Competition
There is growing interest in applying artificial intelligence (AI) to automate and support complex decision-making tasks. However, it remains unclear how algorithms compare to human judgment in contexts requiring semantic understanding and domain expertise. We examine this in the context of the judge assignment problem, matching submissions to suitably qualified judges. Specifically, we tackled this problem at the Harvard President's Innovation Challenge, the university's premier venture compet…

Shemar James setting Cowboys' records; bright spot for struggling defense https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/shemar-james-setting-cowboys-records-bright-spot-for-struggling-defense

Hillbilly state cancels PBS:
https://apnews.com/article/arkansas-public-television-sever-ties-56ec111ffcc4de431d6fd06ba0df8e40

Trump allowed Israel to almost completely destroy Gaza, kill tens of thousands innocent civilians, now we should praise him for making "peace" on the rubble that is left. Meanwhile in his own country, democracy and the rule of law are in fast decline. The breakdown of the values the USA once stood for is almost complete. Next will be the further destruction of US economy and society, it will not be a pretty sight I am afraid.

Remember the Photoshop competitor that didn't require a monthly subscription? #AffinityPhoto
You can no longer download/purchase their software and they are giving away the iPad version for free until the end of the month. And they are teasing something "big" coming up with a bunch of marketing-speak. Whenever a company talks about freedom, be weary.

In the field of dynamical glaciology, this would be DeConto and Pollard, 2016.
I think it's dead wrong, but it's certainly led to some very interesting studies.and some real advanced in the otherwise moribund calving dynamics sub-field.
Would love to hear other suggestions from #climate (or adjacent) fields..
#science

Anthropic's Skills for Claude, which are conceptually very simple, may become a bigger deal than MCP, whose high token usage is its most significant limitation (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/

Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
Anthropic this morning introduced Claude Skills, a new pattern for making new abilities available to their models: Claude can now use Skills to improve how it performs specific tasks. Skills …

The mainstream media loves making it seam like dysfunction in Washington is coming from both parties.
Hello?
Much of the GOP no longer accepts the rule of law, or the norms of democracy, or the legitimacy of the opposing party.
Enough of the false equivalence.
https://bsky.app/profile/rbr…

Robert Reich (@rbreich.bsky.social)
The mainstream media loves making it seam like dysfunction in Washington is coming from both parties. Hello? Much of the GOP no longer accepts the rule of law, or the norms of democracy, or the legitimacy of the opposing party. Enough of the false equivalence.

Well, Apple, making Safari 26.0.1 run like a dog’s breakfast on macOS Sequoia while also *not* providing a download for Safari 18.6¹ is definitely a choice.²
No way I’m breaking nearly half the apps I rely on daily by upgrading to Tahoe just to fix Safari so I guess I’ll be making Chromium my default (I use Orion a lot, especially since I pay for Kagi, but it has its issues like 1Password not working, etc.) And don’t get me started on Firefox³.
So, Apple, how about a little less …

Re: discourse about #FediSoWhite
I'm a white man. Was on Twitter throughout #BLM and gained an awful lot of free education from Black folks on there. That was the start of me consciously following diverse folks which is a strategy that's improved my life immensely.
Back on Twitter before the Muskening, there was a lot of diversity. Black Twitter was a thing, and not just first-world (anyone else remember "O jewa ke eng?"). When I went looking for people to follow to diversify my feed, I found them in abundance.
That's why it's so clearly false to me when people claim that the fediverse is secretly diverse, and why anyone making that claim sounds suspect to me. Sure there are a ton of great Black and other POC folks you can find on here, if you look hard. But it's nowhere near the levels of diversity and community that were on Twitter. Which you would know had you been following those people before, so now I have to assume you weren't, and wonder why you feel qualified to make statements about diversity even though you haven't made an effort to engage with diverse voices before?
Also, if you were actually following some of the excellent POC voices on here, you'd know that across different servers and interest groups, almost every group has had a discussion of #FediSoWhite at some point. If all the Black people you follow are independently talking about the lack of community and diversity here, you've either got to believe them or start putting on your clown makeup, and the later is absolutely a choice.

Ok, yeah, I'm not done processing my anger over liberals doing shit like this. So this historian sees a rise in right wing violence, sees the US government carrying out ethnic cleansing, sees a rise in white supremacist terrorism, and then says, "oh yeah... this reminds me of a time right around the 1920s. Hum... yeah, ANARCHISTS fighting the government! Yeah, that's the same thing."
FFS, IT'S THE RED SUMMER! If you want a parallel between today and some horrible time in US history, TALK ABOUT THE RED SUMMER. The point of the language of dehumanization that the right uses, the point of all the anti-black and anti-emigrant rhetoric, is that it leads to genocide. Trump already carried out an act of genocide (#USPol

Looking for other people here who're interested in analog "alt process" photography (especially Kallitype & salt prints in general) and who are also making their own prints. There used to be a few more such people in my TL, but they all seem to have vanished or stopped posting in the past year, and generally it feels there's precious little interest in this topic on Mastodon... (I too have a feeling, either my own photography went drastically downhill over the past 3-4 …

AdImpact: the US DHS has spent $51M in 2025 on ads thanking President Trump for securing the border, making it the most expensive political ad campaign in 2025 (Brittany Gibson/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/15/trump-self-deportation-ads-noem

2025's big ad spender: The U.S. taxpayer
The next closest ad campaign is the $41 million effort to support California's redistricting measure.

Governor JB Pritzker:
"You just heard a tidal wave of lies from the VP.
It's a bit shocking.
And you heard over & over him just making things up.
There's a reason why the judge here in federal court said that they admin lacks credibility
and why even the Nobel committee chair said the admin lacks integrity."

Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com)
Pritzker: "You just heard a tidal wave of lies from the VP. It's a bit shocking. And you heard over & over him just making things up. There's a reason why the judge here in federal court said that they admin lacks credibility and why even the Nobel committee chair said the admin lacks integrity."

hey! here are the last four #photos from our walk in the #schwarzwald . There were some pretty beautyful trails and - also a little blister-issue. But thanks to being prepared, it was easy to fix and we could enjoy the rest of the walk.
Some more photos and a short clip are on the blog:

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

♻️ Making it easier to recycle your house
#buildings

Making it easier to recycle your house
According to Statistics Norway, an average of approximately 1,100 detached houses have been demolished each year in Norway over the course of the past decade. However, only 7% of the wood from these buildings was recycled.

@… @… we need to go back to self hosted blogs and get rid of making money with it. That was peak

“In a recent meeting where BBC studio executives again voiced problems, I realised my choices. Obedience and being quieter to remain making Monkey Cage, or resign and have the freedom to speak out against what I believe are injustices. I chose the latter. It broke my heart.”
– @…
Told you folks he’s a good egg :)

Jaguars eye bigger offensive role for Hunter https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46605459/jags-eye-bigger-offensive-role-travis-hunter-exploit-speed

"Permitting Parking in Driveways" is at Monday's SFBOS land use committee.
I plan to comment against this. It seems to allow driveways to be unlimited width and to remain even after garages are converted to ADUs. This is nakedly an inducement to more driving at the expense of green space, stormwater drainage, active transportation, and public transit.

Been in-depth studying the PDF file format spec for the past few days... it's mind boggling that this format with its capacity for monstrous complexity managed to become the de-facto standard for modern documents. So many questionable decisions & undue flexibility in there (in the wrong places) making even a simple task of reliable metadata extraction (for example) incredibly hard... I understand and value flexibility, but not at this cost! Guess I will have to keep on using one of t…

Read every embarrassing thing about felon trump into the congressional record.
Make it a weekly night event on the floor for cspan and advertise it.
Make a bingo game out of it.
Read off the court transcripts trump and his ilk.
Enjoy yourselves while you do this.
Bullies hate being mocked.
If the GNP (Grand Nazi Party) wants to stop you, make them own the chamber 24/7.
Tell them you will stop making them own the space when they start to push bac…

Solve Intelligence, which offers generative AI tools to law firms for IP and patent law work, raised a $40M Series B, bringing its total funding to $55M (Mike Butcher/Pathfounders)
https://pathfounders.com/p/generative-ai-is-coming-for-ip

Generative AI is coming for IP and patent law, as Solve Intelligence raises its Series B
It looks like a swathe of older legal tech platforms are about to be hit by Generative AI startups. But are VCs using 'king-making' tactics to back the winners?

Time for a social experiment. I have 5 questions:
- What should we work towards as a society?
- What's one thing that doesn't exist now in your community but should?
- What's one action you could take in the coming year to align your life with that goal?
- What's one thing you could achieve in the coming year to get closer to making that thing exist?
- Imagine that we changed everything and you're living in the world you want to see exist. What does the world look like?
I've asked variations of these already (and am still getting great responses), but this time there's a catch. Get together some of your friends (3-5 people) and ask these questions of the group. Come up with *one* answer that everyone in the group agrees on and post it here, then write a bit about your experience.
If you don't know people locally (or otherwise can't do this in person), tag some folks in here or wherever your people are at digitally. Just add some info on if it's online or in person.
For anyone bold enough to actually do this, let me know if you'd be OK with me putting this in an upcoming entry (https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/).

Here's what the doctor ordered https://mstdn.social/@mcnado/115709466867787148

I've had a few of these thoughts stuck in my craw all day because I watched this liberal historian talk about the Galleanisti.
https://youtube.com/shorts/93yHEn8BYE4
Basically, she says that "of course the government had the right to target them." Then she goes on to talk about how it became an excuse to carry out a bunch of attacks on other marginalized people. Now, the Galleanisti had been bombing the houses of politicians and such. I get where she's coming from saying that one of their targets "was in the right" to try to catch them. But there's some context she's not talking about at all.
These were Italian anarchists, so they were not white and they were part of an already marginalized political group. Basically all of Europe and the US was trying to wipe out anarchists at the time. Meanwhile, the sitting president at the time showed the first movie in the White House. That movie was KKK propaganda, in which he was favorably quoted. The US was pretty solidly white supremacist in the 1920's.
Like... A major hidden whole premise of the game "Bioshock: Infinite" is that if you went back to the US in the 1920's, and you had magic powers, you would absolutely use them to kill as many cops as possible and try to destroy society. There's a lot of other stuff in there, I don't want to get distracted, but "fuck those racists," specifically referring to the US in the 1920's, was a major part of a major game.
Those Italian anarchists were also stone cutters. They carved grave stones. But the dust from that can kill you, much like black lung for coal miners. So they were dying from unsafe working conditions, regularly raising money to support dying coworkers and then carving gravestones for those same coworkers.
Now, I personally think insurrectionary anarchism is a dead end. I disagree with it as a strategy. We've seen it fail, and it failed there. But of course it makes sense that they wanted to blow up the government.
...And that's the correct way to structure that. When you say, "of course they were in the right" you're making a very clear political statement. You could easily say, "the cops in Vichy France had every right to hunt down the French Resistance." You would technically be correct, I guess. But it would really say something about your politics if you justified the actions of Nazi collaborators over those fighting against the Nazis.
And you may say, "oh, but the Nazis didn't have justification for anything. They invaded a sovereign nation, so their government wasn't legitimate anyway."
To which I would reply, "have you considered a history book about the US?"