Tootfinder

The assumption is that one day large language models and other related AI technologies fostered by Google Gemini and OpenAI ChatGPT actually will be a great and infallible productivity tool for genuine work.
It already is decent for providing basic overviews of highly-covered, well-sourced topics, even as hallucinations and sycophancy continue to dog the tech, particularly in situations where accountability is more critical.
Despite today's downsides,
many companies ar…

Computer programmers be like:
1. LLMs generate code for me and sometimes it even works
2. This is also true when I write code manually
3. Computer programming is clearly the hardest of all possible human endeavors, you have to be a complete genius like I am to it because it is really, really hard
4. Therefore LLMs are geniuses
5. They will certainly work really well for all these lesser fields you don’t have to be genius for like I am, like writing summaries of text or medical research or making art or…

OpenAI is a loss-making machine, with estimates that it has no road to profitability by 2030 -- and will need a further $207 billion in funding even if it gets there (Jez Corden/Windows Central)
https://www.windowscentral.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-chatgpt/analysis-openai-is-a-loss-making-machine
http://www.memeorandum.com/251130/p9#a251130p9

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

Interesting article, “ Lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services – which most people would imagine was the principal business of a bank – amounts to about 3 per cent of that total.’”
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n17/jo

It is unfortunate that someone is making it so easy to run a Fediverse site that any child can do it. @… https://decayable.ink/objects/46f47332-ab06-44e5…

Just to repeat / recap what others have said already.
"No politics in my #OpenSource project" is a political statement. It's a statement of "I'm fine with the status quo, and I don't want to be bothered by people who are hurt because of it."
"Neutrality" doesn't make you look professional. It makes you either look ignorant or complacent.
The whole #FreeSoftware movement is a political movement. So is the idea that you can freely use, modify and redistribute software.
So you should really think where you want to stand. Do you really want to be the complacent fascist enabler, or do you want to actually try making a difference?

> “almost everyone at Vimeo was laid off,” including the entire video team
Capitalism, working as designed.
Oh, you thought it was about making shiny, fun things for you play with? Oh, my sweet, summer child, no… capitalism is about fuck you.
Why?
Because. @…

When I build a website, I always focus on the backend first, making sure everything works. I always start with the most difficult part and leave the frontend for last because, in theory, it's easier. And it's always the same: 25% of the time is spent on the backend and 75% on the frontend.
How is this possible? JS and PHP are really tough, and HTML with CSS is a piece of cake, right? Right?!

Prediction market Kalshi raised $1B led by Paradigm at an $11B valuation, up from $5B after raising $300M in October 2025, making its co-founders billionaires (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/business/dealb…

"OpenAI a pris des engagements financiers colossaux, Š hauteur de 1400 milliards de dollars, pour répondre Š ses besoins informatiques prévisionnels, alors que son chiffre d'affaires annuel n'atteint que 20 milliards de dollars.
Pour mettre les choses en perspective, ces 20 milliards de dollars ne représentent que 1,43 % des 1400 milliards de dollars d'engagements financiers. C'est un écart vraiment incroyable."

Inside you are two wolves.
One is Jon Stewart making fun of people for wearing masks.
The other is this guy: https://bird.makeup/users/pacoonpause/statuses/2004657157560827919

Please remember them. Remember them, and then remember what they died for: fighting a much larger danger. Remember what they were fighting, •see• it, and •act•.
Do not let their deaths be in vain by making their deaths the only thing you see.
/end

Hierarchies 😩... One of the biggest recurring time-consuming issues I sometimes encounter is making decisions about _where_ to put some (new or exisiting) code/feature, i.e. in which package, new or existing, considering: functional fit (topic), structural fit (pre-existing data format conventions with the rest of a package), and if possible, not introducing new dependencies as a result of new feature... Sometimes these three aspects are mutually blocking each other and it's so time cons…

Badly played Heather. I've somehow allowed the situation to arise where the cats have got into the same bag as my #knitting 😱 Tails is sitting on it now so I risk making things far worse if I try to rescue it. It'll be treat time soon so I'll rescue it then.

The White House's "media bias" page has "Media Offender of the Week" and "Hall of Shame" sections, with CBS News making the inaugural Media Offenders list (Dominic Patten/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2025/11/trump-media-offender…

I've rebuilt kwin_wayland three times now, making more drastic cuts each time, and I still haven't managed to evict the gestures. What am I missing? The patch applies fine manually. Am I misunderstanding how to declare the patch in the spec file? Do I need to declare it as a Patch rather than a Source? Am I not supposed to provide the .patch file extension? Some previously-unconsidered fourth thing?
It's half past midnight. I guess I'll knock off and read this again to…

The western US is in a snow drought. Here's how a storm made it worse
https://theconversation.com/the-western-us-is-in-a-snow-drought-and-storms-have-been-making-it-worse-272549

from my link log —
Saving Skylab.
https://www.airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/saving-skylab
saved 2025-11-30 https://

@… They Bleed Pixels is a pretty sweet game! Thanks for making it.

Real conspiracies tend to come out, but some of them take a while. Information on the Iran/Contra scandal broke out about 5 years after the conspiracy started. That would have taken several hundred people to carry out, so it was somewhat hard to hide. Even so, they largely got away with it.
The moon landing conspiracy theory would have taken thousands of people, so it would have come out more quickly. Since we have an example of a real secret program of a similar scale as what would be required to fake a moon landing (that is, the Manhattan project), we know that the fake moon landing conspiracy theory is not true. (There's also the literally tons of evidence in the form of rocks and other samples, and all kinds of other ways to debunk the claim.)
Could Kash Patel's FBI have been trying really hard to entrap people into carrying out terrorist attacks in order to justify #Trump's occupation of DC? Could they have helped a guy plan an attack then just failed to arrest him? There are reasonable scenarios that fall in between malice and incompetence while still indicating some level of false flag.
Could someone have just snapped and ambushed some guardsmen without any involvement from the FBI? Yeah, totally. The US is a country full of guns with a completely non-functional mental health system. Someone coming from a country that the US destroyed, twice, could have a lot of untreated trauma. Might they see the national guard as a threat (even if that wasn't totally true)? Yeah, they were deployed to threaten people (even when they were just picking up trash). The point was to incite this kind of response. It's completely reasonable to believe that the FBI would not need to be involved at all, that this would just be the stochastic response they were looking for.
So the point here is that everything is on the table, nothing is really known, nothing should be surprising, and no matter what it's Trump's fault. This is exactly the escalation he was looking for. If he didn't get it naturally, he would also have had ways of making it happen.
He will use this in exactly the same way as the Reichstag fire, to drive a wedge between liberals and radicals. Don't fall for it.
Edit:
There are plausible reasons to not believe the official narrative at all right now, or maybe ever. The official narrative is also plausible, but there are plausible reasons to disagree with the response even if the official story is true. It is unnecessary to resort to conspiracy thinking in order to account for what happened and to disagree with the response. But it is also understandable why someone might jump immediately to a conspiracy given the circumstances.

»Massive AI Chat App Leaked Millions of Users Private Conversations:
Chat & Ask AI, which claims 50 million users, exposed private chats about suicide and making meth.«
On the one hand, I don't understand the people who use it, but on the other hand, a company that people don't care about because people are a product.
🙄

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

Where to watch Super Bowl 2026: Seahawks vs. Patriots kickoff time, TV channel, live stream and prediction

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/where-to-watch-super-bowl-2026-seahawks…

Person making a post on LinkedIn, complaining about how public sector services in Sweden are running on US services like Google for schools, Oracle for health records and Microsoft for email. Emphasising the risks of that. Ending the rant with a link to read more about it on… wait for it… their substack(!) Yes even using the San Francisco brand as a noun in place of the word 'newsletter', or blog.

It made me chuckle.

So close to making a point. 🙃

"Meta’s business is both supporting and profiting from organized crime, and at 10% of its revenue, it’s also kind of dependent on it... I can find no analyst commentary on Meta making sixteen billion dollars on fraud, because it doesn’t matter to them"
#Kleptocracy
#Enshittification

Still, even before this the only reason I didn’t refund this game is that I left it open while having lunch and when I thought about refunding it was already 1 hour past Steam’s 2h limit
Like, from the very start of the game you’re told to “uncover the code” of the revolution and then “the code” is a fucking huge blue arrow. I’m all for making things clearly visible, but at this point just use quest markers?

Wow, seems the people farmers of surveillance capitalism have fully embraced scammer techniques now.
Ran into this new flow on a number of sites just now (Indiewire, Variety, and RollingStone) delivered by the colossal douchebags at html-load.com who run report-error.com.
They make it look like a browser error has occurred and then tell you to disable your tracker/ad blocker.
To the asshole developers who built this for them instead of refusing: Fuck you for making everyone…

I crave knowledge, mother :neocat_book:

Popular media shows Santa's sleigh as red no matter which way it's flying, or even when it's standing still.
It's not. When it's parked, it's green. But most observers only see it flying away after making a delivery, hence the red shift.
And if you're lucky to see it inbound it's blue with a hint of UV-A. Wear sunglasses.

Credo just dropped its 2025 ESG report, and it's all about making AI infrastructure greener.
The connectivity tech company is tackling one of AI's biggest challenges: massive energy consumption in data centers. Their solution? High-speed connectivity hardware designed for lower power use and reduced waste.
Beyond products, they're investing in education, health, and local communities.

Cowboys Predicted to Cut Ties With Starter in $20 Million Cap Move https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/cowboys-predicted-to-cut-ties-with-starter-in-20-million-cap-move/

Good article about that there is more then just Generative AI, where all the hype is, but that we are making great and steady progress in the field of predictive AI.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/1

I made pizza rolls today… not like the Totino’s kind, more like “cinnamon rolls but make it pizza with sauce and cheese” and damn if they were not delicious! I will definitely be doing this again.

From The Conversation
Canada’s long history with public service media offers a useful model for thinking about how AI could serve the public.
A publicly funded AI system could draw on public-domain materials, government datasets and openly licensed cultural content. It could be offered as an open-source system, making it widely available to researchers, developers and everyday users alike.

her: "Whatever you do, don't come downstairs!"
me: "why?"
her: "I'm making questionable life decisions.."

what the fuck does this diagram mean
what does it mean for two 128-bit values to "converge together"
edit: oh i guess they aren't 128-bit. but this isn't helping much
edit2: ohhh, they're making it possible to get less than 128 bits out in the last ciphertext block

The LLMs are useful for some tasks, I'm currently tidying up, proof reading and editing a document written by many international co-authors.
The LLM I'm using can very quickly correct grammar and spelling mistakes and produces much easier to understand text from occasionally tortured paragraphs. It still needs an experts eye (mine!) to check no mistakes have been introduced or complexities over-simplified.
This is actually the first time I've used an LLM for this task. It's making it much faster and less painful.
It also explains a lot about academic publishing lately..

Huh, think I might've figured out why one (but only one) of my NextCloud instances loses contact with the OnlyOffice instance on the same host... Figured out it *might* be because of frequent polling that's resulted in the Mailcow instance (also on the host, as I'm trying to economise) is seeing it as making too many connections and is temporarily fail2banning it nightly. I've added the host's IP(v4&6) to the Fail2Ban whitelist... 🤞 it's still connected tomorrow!<…

Just finished "Juliet Takes a Breath" by Gabby Rivera. A truly amazing novel about queer Latina feminist self-discovery which shows off a vibrant range of feminisms and their contradictions. Reminded me of "Does my Body Offend You?" in terms of how it uses fictional but realistic situations to really grapple deeply with feminist and queer theory while making everything very accessible and direct.
The plotting, pacing, and characters are great, and Juliet serves as a vibrant and active main character rather than just a lens through which to explore theory.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

#Biodrones: Russian company successfully tests remote-controlled pigeons with brain implants https://www.notebookcheck.net/Company-succes…

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

I have a habbit of making (too) many (small) packages for functionality that might be reused in different context. {box} might be an alternative by making scripts into modlues that can be loaded: #RStats <…

"I'm an average user, so I don't need all the options and apps the programme has to offer. But, to be honest, #Microsoft is making it increasingly attractive to switch. Now that the company is putting #AI in everything, everything is becoming more annoying to use."
Can Dutch

The whole thing is optimized for scams, deception and other criminal behavior:
- user interface that deceptively pretends it's a human you're talking to
- claims from companies highly exaggerate capabilities
companies and "experts" constantly hype "AGI" which they (funnily enough) do to both make investors greedier and spread fear and as a distraction because these algorithms can't actually do what they keep promising
- large-scale accounting and financial fraud (e.g. what Nvidia is doing with circular selling)
- biggest case of copyright infringement in history
Note: I think the underlying technology is really cool, and definitely has use cases and can be used for actually good things. But: some technology just has more downsides than upsides, and some should only be used by experts in controlled environments. Leaded gasoline, asbestos and chlorofluorocarbon are also all really cool technology.
In this case perhaps the techology itself doesn't do anything inherently bad, however the people making it are lying about what it can do, the people selling it are motivated purely by greed and the people using it (often forced to do so) are being deceived.

Cloudflare says it mitigated a 31.4 Tbps DDoS attack from the Aisuru/Kimwolf botnet in December 2025, making it the largest attack ever disclosed publicly (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ais…

The Yellowhead Institute, an Indigenous-led think tank at Toronto Metropolitan University, has released a new version of its treaty map along with an education guide including material designed for Grade 8 through post-secondary. Check it out.
https://treatymap.yellowheadinstitute.

This is what BBC news articles look like nowadays: Every single sentence is its own paragraph, and I absolute cannot stand this “style” at all. I suspect the editors only care about making articles look nice in the mobile app.
IMHO, paragraphs are specifically meant to intuitively communicate which sentences belong together because of content/meaning. Just separating any sentences is what full stops do. If actually no two consecutive sentences belong together, the article is just incoh…

Another year in which we've been making the climate crisis worse faster. And the role of aviation continues to grow nastier: probably good for 1/6 of the increase this year, caused by a small minority of the global population.
https://news.m…

3 (of our 4) cats saw me making something on the counter and were like, "oh hey, is that for us? is it food? is it treats? gimme gimme gimme!"
So once I finished preparing my instant pho, I sat down on the floor with it and their "oh my GOD what IS THAT?? GROSS!" reaction was absolutely hilarious.

We're making an live code/algorithmic music release in aid of humanitarian relief in Palestine. We're collecting recordings over this weekend, to release it on (Bandcamp) Friday. If you'd like to join please DM me and I'll share the upload info, thanks!

A chilly 36°F (2.2°C) but with sustained 19 mph (30.5 kph) winds gusting to 38 mph (61 kph) making it feel like 26°F (-3.3°C). Once or twice, I came around a corner and was nearly stopped in my tracks. I do love this chilly weather and saw several other runners also on #TeamShorts
Ran/walked 4/1 min intervals again, which feels mostly right at the minute — although I was fading to somethin…

pet peeve: "good intentions".
if the intentions consistently cause bad things, then they just aren't very good. yeah, it's based on bad reasoning/understanding. it always is, that's how evil happens.
how else are these intentions supposed to be "good"? by making people feel good about themselves?
even people who think they "do evil on purpose" are just semantically confused. they still act according to their own values. though their…

The climate crisis wasn't caused by ordinary people—so why are they footing the bill?
Two activists in France are pushing to change that. Their "Tax Their Billions" campaign is shifting public opinion toward making billionaires pay their fair share for climate solutions.
It's about accountability and justice in the transition we desperately need.

Denver Broncos' Internal Turmoil Could Impact the Raiders Immensely https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-denver-broncos-internal-turmoil-could-impact-immensely

Dear critics of LLM coding, there's tons to criticize.
However, if your argument is an analog to “Wine is terrible! I tasted a Four Loko, and it was awful!” you are in fact making bad arguments and should stop.

Amidst all the buzz around things like Gas Town and Ralph, etc. there are some bits of actual substance that promise to actually empower coders — and potentially shift the power dynamic away from Big AI, while making it easier to create software just by describing ideas in plain text. I've been thinking of the idea as "codeless" software creation, for lack of a better term (the jargon doesn't matter, I just needed a name to talk about it) and would love your thoughts!

This is one of the ones I have been making for decades. Overwhelming number of times it turns out. The one I was trying didn't get the temperatures right and they said to use whipping cream (1 full cup at that) instead of milk. For cooling I put my pot on a rack and let it slowly chill. The recipe said to put it in a bowl of ice cold water which I did and let it get to 115 before beating like they called for. They also said to get it to 240 before chilling. They should have been r…

I spent much of today cleaning my office. It's amazing how messy it gets due to ongoing projects (my own and client projects) and so much paper. I was saving a lot of it for paper making but I've still got plenty of pulp in the fridge to use.
On Friday, the plan is no shopping, just cleaning the basement getting rid of cruft, maybe finding some things to donate or give away if possible.

I can help but feel this "feature" should raise more concerns than it does alleviate them.
"Accelerated recovery for managing public DNS records addresses this need by targeting DNS changes that customers can make within 60 minutes of a service disruption in the US East (N. Virginia) Region."

"How sewage can be used to heat and cool buildings"
#Sewage #Heating #Energy

George Pickens is making it harder for Jerry Jones to not sign him https://insidethestar.com/george-pickens-is-making-it-harder-for-jerry-jones-to-not-sign-him

“Acting like a tough guy, posting it around the world. Making lots of content, like a little teenage girl.” #TV #SouthPark

What I really do like about the #Meshcore app is the ability to tell whether my messages are making it to the mesh. There are multiple ways to tell.
First is the display of heard repeats. That indicate that x number of repeaters have received and repeated the message.
The second is the explicit delivery confirmation in private message chats.
Thirds is the new way to di…

So in another dream I just woke up from, I was talking to someone about "the idea problem" (that it's becoming harder to monitize ideas, from a vox article written by an AI cooked reporter).
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/executive-disorder-white-house-weekly-46-313675864/
Basically, I was arguing that the majority of inventions target men because patriarchy puts economic control in men's hands. As men have started to help more with childcare, there have been more inventions related to childcare. (I don't have any idea if this is true. Seems legit, but I'm just relating my dream. I think I was also oversimplifying a bit to "men" and "women" because of my audience, but anyway it was a dream.) There's actually more low-hanging fruit, I pointed out, related to making care work easier.
So I argued that the real problem was a failure to invest in research into solving that problem. Today there are all these boondoggles built around killing people. What if, instead of all this government research into killing people, we dumped a ton of money into making it easier to support a household? That would be great for the economy. (Being asleep, I seem to have forgotten that working people need money.)
In the blur of being just awake I started thinking about how you could kickstart the US economy by taking the money from the AI boondoggle and other autonomous murder bots and create something like a program to build robots for housekeepers. You'd still be funding tech with government money, so the same horrible people get paid, but you're now actually solving real problems. It wouldn't even matter if it was a boondoggle, honestly. Just dumping money into something other than murdering people is good enough.
I imagined first if there was a program to fund a robot housecleaner, like robot dog with AI some laundry pickup, that would be provided, free of charge, to help people with children. It would work the same as the military boondoggle where a private company makes the government buy a piece of hardware from them and then also pay them to service it for some number of years. But instead of that hardware sitting around waiting to kill someone, it would be getting brought to people's houses to help them.
Then I thought, hey, you could even boost the economy more if you just had government funding for doulas and housecleaners and paid them a living wage. Hey, you could really kickstart the economy by nationalizing healthcare and including doula support as part of all births. Oh, and you could also just include the optional household help for families with children until the kids turn 18.
None of this is perfect (I don't actually think most of this is possible from any state), but the point is that it's actually wildly easy to figure out all kinds of ways to invest in the economy and monitize ideas as long as you aren't entirely focused on the same old "make money from spying on people and killing them." Funny that. Like they said in the podcast, maybe "finding ideas" isn't the problem.
Hope you enjoyed the weird semi-awake brain dump/rant.

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015047-green-pea-guacamole?unlocked_article_code=1._08.vb4Y.PPRlZgE39rS0&smid=share-url

It seems likely that Justice Alito’s past recusals may have been motivated in part by the negative attention he was receiving at the time for his previous conflicts of interest.
So we must keep making as much of a racket as we possibly can on this.
https://c.im/@cdarwin/115628249866259307

Ever notice how the most influential people aren't always the bosses?
They're the ones everyone trusts. The ones whose ideas somehow become the plan. The ones people actually want to follow.
That influence doesn't come from a title. It comes from showing up consistently. Making things clearer. Being the same person in every room.
Read more about building influence without needing permission:

The {conflicted} package makes sure that namespace conflicts are solved explicitly and prevents unpleasent surprises: #rstats

I beg you, wherever you are, to show some kind of solidarity with Minneapolis-St. Paul this Friday:
(1) SHUT DOWN NORMAL: Whatever your normal Friday is, find a way to pause it, interrupt it, halt it…even if only a little. Normal life cannot continue unabated while this is happening. It is intolerable, and we must not tolerate it.
(2) TAKE ACTION: Whether it is marching, yelling, organizing, forming that Signal group, taking that observer training, making connections with neighbors, just having a potluck…do •something•.
Please.

🐘 Drones: An ally in the sky to help save elephants
#animals

While I'm not much for the law, I recognize that not everyone I talk to thinks the same way. But even if you are like me, the enormity of the list of Trump's crimes is just staggering. There really couldn't be any more clear of an illustration of the fact that there are two legal systems: one for the elite, and one for everyone else.
We all know #Trump just does crimes all the time, but it can be hard to track the enormity of it. The YouTube lawyer LegalEagle put together a list and it's pretty incredible. It's a little over 40 minutes of him rapidly listing times that Trump has violated the law during his second term (completely ignoring his first term).
#MassBlackout is a #Boycott of the American corporations that support the dictatorship. By showing
that people have the power to shut down the economy if elites don't listen, we can hit them where it actually hurts.
From now until December 2nd, do as many of these things as you can:
- Stop online or in-store shopping (except for small businesses)
- Stop work
- Stop streaming, cancel subscriptions, no digital purchases
This is one of the few times that boosting stuff on social media and doing nothing else actually *can* make a difference. Boost posts tagged with #WeAintBuyingIt, #MassBlackout, and #BlackOutTheSystem. Make sure everyone you know knows about it. Hold each other accountable to keep from spending. You may already not be spending because.... well,.. Trump has already made everything too expensive. The thing is that elites can't actually tell the difference. Spreading word, making the protest seem as big and impactful as possible is all that's really needed to fracture elites and turn them against each other. Boost, write your own post, make these tags trend on every platform you can, then do nothing.
Don't buy things, (if you can) don't work. Just stop. Refuse to participate in capitalism. This is the ultimate "fuck you, make me" because they absolutely can't make you. This is the ultimate reminder of where power actually comes from.
I've been trying to remind everyone, every day. Please do the same. Keep this opportunity at the top of everyone's mind. Keep it in your mind.
Trump is more vulnerable now than he's ever been, and there is no time in the next year that we have more power than right now. This is one of the most important parts of the year for the US economy. What you do, or don't do, right now has more of an impact than any other time.
#USPol #BlackFriday #CyberMonday

I came home and my partner said "So I was moving something in the basement and a cord flew into this 'thing' and it started making noise..."
The 'thing' was the NAS and the cord flew into the front part where the drives are than I never made a cover for.
I guess this weekend I should get around to moving the NAS to a better location!

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

This is an essential read from @… – well worth your time to understand the points he’s making fully as he’s spot on and the excellent analogies will make it easier for you to discuss the topic with others.

"Mothers, Fathers, Sisters, and Brothers need to show the battle lines are drawn, and stand together to fight for the future of victims.
Is protesting the answer? I dont know. But we’ve got to start somewhere.
To all survivors and those protesting. We stand with you in solidarity and know the fight is not over!"
-- It takes incredible courage to face down the sexual predators who have abused you.
Which is why WC, in this broken year, has selected a broken …

A look at Detroit's Apple Developer Academy, launched after the BLM protests, which spends $20K per student, nearly 2x the budget of local community colleges (Paresh Dave/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-app-making-course-michigan-state-university/<…

"the assets of British banks ‘mostly consist of claims on other banks. Their liabilities are mainly obligations to other financial institutions. Lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services – which most people would imagine was the principal business of a bank – amounts to about 3 per cent of that total.’"
It's not for nothing that the medieval church -- like modern Islam -- considered

Cowboys Send Strong Message on Jadeveon Clowney’s Future Ahead of Giants Game https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/schottenheimer-stephen-jones-jadeveon-clowney-future/

The Gustav Klimt portrait of Elisabeth Lederer,
which was looted by the Nazis and nearly destroyed in a fire during the second world war,
sells for $236.4m,
making it the second most expensive artwork ever sold at auction

Seriously I’ve been trying to buy a specific old digital camera for years and every single time people list it as working and I get it and it doesn’t work.
I always get a full refund (eventually).
Like do these sellers think people won’t test what they buy? Do they enjoy making a loss and wasting their time?

All these breathless articles about people forming weird relationships with LLMs, ruining marriages or going down psychological rabbit holes because of the emotionally compulsion-forming quality of having something that always says yes to you?
I think that’s happening to people in management, too, in their professional lives — and they’re making purchase decisions around it.
9/

Apparently "Girls' Night" consists of my wife and 8yo daughter standing at the kitchen counter, eating chicken cutlets w/ their hands (not a plate in sight) and making lots of chewing and "nom nom nom" noises.
I'm not allowed back downstairs after asking them to use plates.

"Dispensing false information in a confident tone, rather than offering no answer when none is readily available, is a major flaw of generative AI, experts say. An audit of the top 10 generative AI model... by the media literacy non-profit NewsGuard revealed that the non-response rates of chatbots went down from 31% in August 2024 to 0% in August 2025. At the same time, the chatbots’ likelihood of repeating false information almost doubled from 18% to 35%"

Not linking to it, but why do news outlets keep amplifying “AI” propaganda from companies making chatbots without at the very least some basic vetting?
(No, statistical algorithms on calculators don’t have feelings. Never have, never will.)

The TikTok deal is the worst of all possible outcomes, shifting ownership of TikTok to Trump's allies, while maintaining the supposed problematic links to China (Karl Bode/Techdirt)
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/12/19/tiktok

omg that mushroom from the tv show Common Side Effects, it's real https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260121-the-mysterious-mushroom-that-makes-you-see-tiny-people

Underlings are so annoying!
Sometimes you can make this problem go away by exploiting weak labor power (see: factories, agriculture, sanitation).
Sometimes you can create a toxic org culture when information •only• flows down the hierarchy, so no pushback can ever reach your sensitive ears. (Public school administrations are rife with this.)
Sometimes you can do it by making your catastrophic failures look like a string of successes to the people up the chain. (Large corporations are swimming in this.)
5/

Measles is often seen as a routine childhood illness
— a fever, a rash, and recovery
— but complications are common.
Even when it doesn’t kill,
measles can cause lasting damage.
It weakens the immune system,
making people vulnerable to other infections for months or years.
That means children who seem to recover may still face serious health risks long after the illness is gone.
In some countries, measles has re-emerged in recent years,
…

Any sufficiently advanced disaster preparedness is indistinguishable from revolutionary dual power. This essay is a bit of a transition between the theory I've written earlier, and more concrete plans.
Even though I only touched on my life on the commune, it was hard not to write more. These are such weird spaces, with so much invisible opportunity. But they're also just so unique and special. For all the stress and uncertainty of making sure you stayed on Lorean's (the head priestess), there were also those long summer nights with the whole community (except the old lady) gathered around a fire, talking and drinking. There was almost a child-like play to the whole time.
There were so Fridays I'd come home with a couple of gallons of beer from the real world, folks would bring things from the garden, someone would grill a steak, everyone who didn't cook would clean up, and we'd just hang out and have fun. So many evenings I'd go over to Miles place with a guitar, or with his guitar, and we'd pass it around over a few beers, talking about philosophy, Star Wars, or some book or other. It's hard not to write about the strange magic of that space.
My partner and I bonded over similar experiences, mine on a weird little religious commune in California and theirs as a temporary worker at Omega Institute. Both had exploitation, people on weird power trips, frustrating dynamics, but also a strange magic and freedom. Both were sort of fantasy worlds, but places that let us see through this one, let us imagine something that something else is possible behind the veil.
There are many such veils.
Perhaps it's fitting that this is more meandering, as a good wander can help the transition between lots of hard thinking and lots of hard working.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/evaluating-options
Editing feedback (especially typos, spelling, grammar) is always welcome, as are questions and even wider structural advice. I've been adding the handles of folks who provide feedback to the intro in a "thank you" section. If you do help and wouldn't like to be added, please let me know.

Revolut reaches a $75B valuation in its latest share sale led by Coatue, Greenoaks, and others, up from $45B in 2024, making it Europe's most valuable startup (Jennifer Surane/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

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

OpenAI rolls out an update to let users adjust ChatGPT's characteristics, including how warm or enthusiastic it is, and its use of headers, lists, and emojis (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/848435/openai-chatgpt-characteris…