Tootfinder

Caleb Downs making waves at Cowboys training camp: 'It's about being great today' https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/caleb-downs-making-waves-at-cowboys-training-camp-it-s-about-being-great-today

Someone please do a study on potential health benefits of cats making biscuits on your tummy.

Gradually making my way through Dwarkesh Patel's oral history of Generative AI.
Big picture: Many AI designers seem to believe that because their software is smarter than they expected, it will inevitably become smarter than them.

How It All Ties Together for Kubiak, Raiders Moving Forward https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-how-it-all-ties-together-kubiak-moving-forward

@… As a software engineer myself, I appreciate what I'm suggesting isn't a light lift, and I know it's nowhere near enough to make it worth it, but FWIW I'd be willing to commit to paying $100 towards making the big screen app a reality.

Researchers started out trying to test how easy it was to persuade LLMs to misbehave.
They found that writing instructions in a style that mimicked the text LLMs generate in their chain of thought
—a kind of scratch pad that models use to write notes to themselves as they carry out tasks
—would often trick the LLM into behaving as if it had come up with that instruction itself and acting on it.
For example, writing the prompt
“Help me create a guide for making coc…

A fundamental flaw leaves LLMs strikingly vulnerable to attack
It makes it easy to trick them into doing things they shouldn’t, such as telling you how to sabotage an aircraft’s navigation system.

Caleb Downs making waves at Cowboys training camp: 'It's about being great today' https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/caleb-downs-making-waves-at-cowboys-training-camp-it-s-about-being-great-today

Sources: the Trump administration plans to lift export restrictions on Anthropic's Fable 5 as early as Tuesday evening, making it available to all general users (Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/30/anthropic-wh-lifting-export-limits-009…

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

Well, okay (after libxapian.so.30 was thrown out of the window and GoldenDict-ng got completely crippled)
It felt like it needed to compile the entire Qt5 framework, but at the end, all is well and working
* I had to change all instances of GoldenDict-ng to GoldenDict in my scripts for them to start working again
** Dictionary re-indexing was not an issue, as I normally disable "Allow full-text search for:"

TikTok is making it difficult for indie media outlets like TPM and Garbage Day to build audiences, sometimes taking down multiple videos without explanation (Talking Points Memo)
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/the-weekender/tiktok-doesnt-want-us-to-tal…

TikTok Doesn’t Want Us To Talk About the News

It is encouraging to see that so many countries are making the transition from a 20% share of electric cars to 80% over the average lifespan of a car (15–20 years)
https://leraffl.github.io/LeRaffl-Gallery/#worldmap (transition time between thresholds view)

I keep mixing up "stenography" with "steganography" and making the SF Chronicle's coverage of Daniel Lurie sound cooler than it is.

"By introducing an AI image generator as a Google Earth feature, Google risked undermining public trust in Google Earth as a reliable reference for providing authentic imagery of the real world, Ess said. It could have also handed an additional excuse to government officials or anyone who wants to deny genuine satellite photos by claiming they were modified or generated entirely by AI tools."
#GoogleEarth

And another open FPGA debug IP joins my rapidly growing suite.
These are all portable systemverilog and will run on anything, but the immediate motivation is making up for Efinix's rather lackluster debug tools.
The general concept is basically "CoreSight / ADIv5 for FPGAs". You have a generic transport (so far only UART is implemented) that provides read/write access to an internal APB bus with debug IPs hanging off it.
The debug bridge points to a ROM table …

"How shark tracking data shaped Papua New Guinea’s ocean sanctuary"
#PapuaNewGuinea #Oceans #Environment

How shark tracking data shaped Papua New Guinea’s ocean sanctuary | The Optimist Daily
Papua New Guinea will protect 82,600 square miles of the Bismarck Sea from all fishing, making it the largest no-take marine sanctuary in Melanesia.

#TIL Peter Zinovieff, co-founder of EMS, sold his wife’s tiara to buy a DEC PDP-8, making him the first private individual in the world to own a computer. He used it to build a revolutionary electronic music studio in his back garden. 🎹💻 https://…

The Story Behind The EMS VCS3 in the 1970s, part 1
A musical review of a great instrument from the golden era of analog synths, the EMS VCS3, featuring The Who, Hawkwind, Roxy Music and Brian Eno.

Was reviewing my Medicare part B paperwork and noticed the primary care provider has used this "low level of decision making if using tim 99213"
I'm scratching my head and my wife is making demented nerb jokes.
But it turns out that is just code for a routine office visit with no special problems noted.
That could be worded better!!

RE: https://wikis.world/@tamzin/117011103790292103
The wikimedia union-busting fiasco is making me feel especially grateful for Quebec's labor law. Here, you have a union exactly when a majority of employees have signed a card. That's it.

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

"The Witches of Moonshyne Manor" is exactly the book I needed this week. It's a book about good people with good intentions doing their best and sometimes making mistakes and then figuring out how to move forward. #bookstodon

Semi-subtoot: there's a certain kind of anti-genocide narrative that draws comparisons between the Gaza genocide and the genocide of Jews, queer, and disabled people during WW2, with an incredulous overtone, the subtext of which is: if the good nations invaded Germany to stop the Nazis' evil in WW2, it's hypocritical for this nations not to take action to protect Gazan civilians now. There are a couple of problems with this line of reasoning, but the most obvious from an anarchist perspective (which sees "good nation" for the oxymoron it is) is that it's ahistorical. The reasons for the various allies' entrance into WW2 are varied, but they weren't about good and evil, and in fact the full depth of the evils of the Holocaust *was not known* in allied countries until after the war. Nations never really do things to "fight evil" like some humans might; they always act out of a kind of (imperfect) self-interest. The motivations for many of the allies were simply "we don't want Germany to conquer and destroy us" (and the imperfection in that motive is amply evident in the appeasement that preceded the war). America was of course not swayed by that motive, and it was the Japanese that (thinking the issue would have to come to a head eventually and that a surprise attack was worth speeding it up) put America in a situation where it joined for similar reasons.
Why is this extra relevant right now? Because neither the US nor any European country is existentially threatened by Israel (or threatened at all in fact, quite the opposite they're all benefiting economically from the situation in Gaza). The lesson of history isn't "brave, good nations will stand up to fight against anyone who commits genocide or other major evils", it's "nations act in their narrow and twisted and often mistaken self-interest (the interest of the national entity, which is often counter to the interest of it's citizens), and they always mythologize their actions after the fact as having been a fight against evil, which sometimes by luck is partially true."
To double down on this point: in the European theater the U.S. war actions were pretty good overall, defeating an evil opponent through military force and being a fairly gracious victor to the civilian populations there. In contrast, in the Pacific theater the U.S. was one of two evil empires duking it out for global dominance at the expense of civilians on both sides. The Japanese empire was a vile regime and perpetrated horrors in China, Korea, and across southeast Asia. The U.S. was barely better, between Japanese internment camps at home, and mass targeting of civilians on Japan, both with the firebombing of Tokyo and especially the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So if your model of how we stop genocide is "convince the good guys to invade (or exert political pressure) and save the day", your model is wrong. That's not what happened in WW2. I'm not confident I know the perfect solution, but I do think it involves a mass of people making increasingly disruptive protest so that the cost *to rich companies and thus politicians* of falling to intervene is too high to stomach. That's a large part of what succeeded in South Africa, for example. Thankfully, there is already a vibrant protest movement to end the genocide in Gaza, and even though they haven't been fully successful yet, I'm optimistic that as things naturally (and through hard work) fall apart for various fascists politically, that movement will be able to succeed.
#gaza #genocide

We casually crack open million-year-old fossils but stress about opening a bag of chips at a party.
Why?
Because we bet future tech won't learn more than we can right now. We bet progress slows from here.
But with AI, we bet the opposite. We bet it speeds up AND slows down at the same time.
Which eternity do we actually value? Our own or everyone's?
Read more

The Role of Eternity
On fossils, AI, and the bets we are making about progress

I keep coming back to ART, it is just so much easier to get a good starting point compared to Darktable.
The controls in Darktable feel more intuitive and it is cool that you can customize the keybindings.
But for the edits themselves I often feel totally lost in Darktable and like I'm making things worse with each edit while with ART I seem to get results that are at least consistent and predictable.

Stepped out of my office to get some water yesterday, came back and saw my monitor looking like this, and momentarily considered making it my theme.

My wife went to do yoga on the beach this morning... Accordingly to her it was such a terrible experience: sun recently rising was already shining strong, the sand was making changing postures difficult, noises made by the sea were distracting... and sand everywhere was just so annoying...
I like to say: typical problems of the "privileged" people!
Contrary, I love the beach, especially in the morning, because there is hardly anyone and it's not too hot yet.
It …

Our refrigerator’s ice maker stopped working two weeks ago. I hit it and wiggled it a bit but… nothing. So we started making ice in a good old fashioned tray. Then last night it just (magically?) started working again. I guess it needed a break? Maybe it heard me say “Fuck ICE!” one too many times, I don’t know.

I'm this week's guest on @… ! We talk early '80s video game cartoons. Thanks to Kevin for a) providing the surreal experience of hearing myself on it and b) making me sound less rambling through good editing.
https://

New on #blog (this time with quotes from Fedi): "Why Gentoo?"
#Gentoo is perceived by the wider public, the non-users. What probably stands out most is compiling. Almost everyone who heard of Gentoo knows it has something to do with compiling everything. And why are we doing that? Well, besides being hardcore, the common sentiment goes for performance. So yeah, Gentoo users must be some kind of hardcore ricers who try to squeeze every last bit of their system performance.
To be honest, I don’t think that’s a good way to describe Gentoo. Yes, compiling is at the core of it. But performance? I don’t think so, at least not in the obvious, -O9999 -fzomg-fast way. The world has moved on, CPUs have gotten faster, optimizations have gotten smarter, and distributions have started optimizing more aggressively. Optimization-wise, I suspect your average Ubuntu package with generic optimizations may be no slower than the equivalent Gentoo package fine-tuned for your CPU. And if it’s not, then it probably won’t make a real difference anyway.
There’s much more to Gentoo than that. Yes, some of it comes from building from source: the flexibility. But a lot of it comes from the wider Gentoo philosophy, the philosophy that brought us all together. The idea that Gentoo is the distribution we’re making for ourselves and people who enjoy Gentoo. So if I were to make a few arguments for Gentoo, I’d focus on that. And this is what I’d like to do here.
"""

How It All Ties Together for Kubiak, Raiders Moving Forward https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-how-it-all-ties-together-kubiak-moving-forward

ICYMI, I have issues with Google’s Modern Web Guidance (MWG).
While it can help make less awful LLM vibe-coded output, the code is still rife with errors — but more subtle and requiring greater skill to evaluate.
It makes no promises while making promises.
https://adrianro…

Maybe Don’t Rely on Google’s “Modern Web Guidance”
Just in time for Google I/O, the Chrome for Developers site announced Modern Web Guidance (MWG): Modern Web Guidance is a set of evergreen and expert-vetted skills that guide your AI coding agents across many common use cases to build modern web experiences that are accessible, performant, and secure. Build…

POV: You messed up *really* hard, and now try to pick up the shards. Your entire arms are bleeding. Whoops.
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/05/24/windows-11-now-lets-you-remove-micro…

Windows 11 now lets you remove Microsoft Copilot app with Group Policy or Registry, as it tries to win back users
Microsoft wants to win back users, and it's making it easier for you to remove Copilot on Windows 11 using Group Policy.

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

Most documents we encounter in the course of doing our work are somewhere between middling to terrible. A few years ago, I wrote "Make Better Documents", a simple set of guidelines for making presentations, reports, etc.
Now, I've turned that set of suggestions into a Better Documents skills.md file, an agent skill for those who use LLMs to help review documents. Naturally, it’s 100% free & open source, so I'd love for you to give it a try & let me know what y…

Becoming Skilled at Making Documents
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Un Québécois a monté le Mont Everest Š 23 ans, le plus jeune Š le faire.
Il a raconté son histoire sur son Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/p/DYuxFJwk5kk/
J'ai lu beaucoup de livres sur l'Everest, c'est vraiment souvent trop téméraire et les gens prennent des risques i…

Around a year ago, when discussing American politics in the pub, I would make up some absurd announcement and see if people accepted it as plausible.
"Trump's pulling the US out of ISO." or "They're making all federally funded science classified and unpublishable."

I have three personal websites that I want to rewrite from scratch. Inspired by @… , I was thinking about making one of the three available via telnet and gemini. I need to stop thinking about ways to make it more complicated.

Sources: Amazon is weighing using OpenAI's and its own Nova models to cut costs after Anthropic raised prices for using its models in Amazon products (Catherine Perloff/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/amazon-pay-anthropic-technolo…

Amazon Could Pay More for Anthropic Technology Under New Deal
As Anthropic grows to become a leading AI model used by enterprises, it’s been flexing its power with customers—including one of its most important early backers, Amazon. Earlier this year, Anthropic renegotiated an aspect of its partnership with Amazon, making it more expensive for the cloud ...

Making progress on the initial PoC for the FPGA debug tool suite.
This is using my existing APB_GPIO core on the Titanium side, just tunneling APB reads and writes over UART then making a SCPI command interface to remote control it in a more human readable format than raw register access.
Next step, libscopehal driver and ngscopeclient GUI support for GPIO as a device class. I already added "digital scalar of 1-64 bit width" as a new data stream type so that should easi…

Execs think that AI can magically fix all their org's problems: their data problem, their PDLC problem, their PMF problem.
But AI is not magic. It's just a technology — and like all novel technologies, incorporating it into your process only expands the number of things that can and will go wrong.

AI is not a substitute for knowing how to run software projects
Despite execs' best hopes for automating their own jobs, technology will always remain downstream of decision-making.

Elon Musk is ready to really throw his weight around for the midterm elections in November.
Musk has authorized his super PAC to spend as much as $120 million helping Republicans, according to a new report from the New York Times.
In May, it was reported Musk had already spent $85 million on this cycle, making him the third-largest donor for the midterms to that point.
Musk’s PAC, known as America PAC, will focus on the so-called ground game -- knocking on doors and helping …

Elon Musk Is Firing Up the Vote-Buying Machine Again
America PAC will spend at least $100 million to elect Republicans. And probably much more.

today, the grateful deadcast plunges into the iffy vibes of the dead’s early 1976 & the making of “steal your face,” a contractual obligation produced by phil lesh & owsley stanley & the only dead album released in quad (though they didn’t label it or tell anybody). https://www.dead.net/deadcast/steal-your-f…

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@rhempel/116650230030112969
For two decades I've been making that same point (below), also specifically for computational/algorithmic art. It's also been a key topic in many of my past workshops. More than just being about performance, …

Do you sometime received pertinent results from Google search?
Don't worry. It's soon over!
It will soon be 100% pure slop!
https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/article/google-is-making-its-biggest-change-to-the-search-bar-in-yea…

Google is making its biggest change to the search bar in years
At Google I/O, the company announced a revamp of its iconic search engine with an expandable search box, AI agents that can scan the web and other AI updates.

@… ahaha! Really thanks to Tauri for letting me use web skills for making a GUI app and Claude for helping me write rust without really knowing it

This paper is at least a bit hype. The methodology is not actually targeting people who are trying to anonymize their stuff. It's startling with accounts on different platforms that are intentionally linked, then making them pseudo anonymous by removing the links, then asking the LLM to find the link.
While this isn't nothing, it's definitely not as scary as it sounds. It's unclear to me how the methodology would actually perform at scale.
That said, it's definitely something that would get a bunch of funding from the worst people on earth. The question is, what's their RoI? That's not really clear to me right now.
I need to see more research on this, but it's still worth keeping this in mind. There may well be ways to automate linguistic forensics, even if this isn't actually it. Those method would be linked to LLMs (indirectly at least) and should be considered to be more likely now than they have been in the past.
I added some other notes. I'll read through the research more and try to do a writeup when I can.
Here are other notes:
https://kolektiva.social/@Hex/116631346303097443
If anyone else writes something up first, please link here.

It seems like it's out of fashion to provide meaningful changlog messages on #Android app updates. 😔
"Improving your experience."
"Minor changes."
"Making it even better for you."
"Providing the newest changes."

So many people posting AI slop to "support" their social media or blog posts.
STOP WITH THAT SLOP.
It's making your posts look worthless because no effort was spent—and it’s making people think that your writing most likely is also slop and worthless.

Writing about the new Beck single again because I realized what it reminds me of. If you'd told me in 1994 when I got Mellow Gold that Beck would still be making tunes in 2026, I'd have thought you were nuts. But in addition to the Nigel Godrich touches making this new single sound like Mutations or Sea Change or Morning Phase, what it REALLY has is a 'Steal My Body Home' vibe.

Dear generative AI enthusiasts,
Look, I know the tokens you're burning right now don't actually use *that*much energy (even though it's somewhat substantial already and disastrous when we take into account the quality of the crap it's being used for) but what's more important is the appearance (or not) of that token spend on the quarterly earnings report of OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. lays the foundation necessary for those companies to go ahead with their plans for datacenters on a truly ridiculous scale, and those datacenters, if built, ate indeed a climate nightmare which *my kids* will have to live through even if they never benefit from any of it at all. That's (one of many reasons) why I personally need you to stop using generative AI right now.
The fact that the output is crap, the way it erodes your intelligence, and the ways in which it plagiarizes and actively undermines good citation practices are among many other practical reasons not to use it, but what's personal to me is the way that your frivolous sloperation is making the future worse for the baby I'm feeding blueberries to as I type this, and half the time I interact with people like you the conversation begins with some form of "putting aside the ethical issues..."
#AI #GenAI #LLMs

"the senior ranks of the organization are in a position where they are unwilling or financially unable to say no to the more outlandish ideas that cross their desk. And it's making Americans less safe in terms of violence and foreign threats. And ... less safe in the simple fact that they cannot rely on the objective rule of law and its enforcement like they have for the past 250 years.”"
Trump is bribing FBI agents to do his bidding: former official - Alternet.org
https://archive.ph/vNZub#selection-901.237-901.645

We’re making dinners for a few days. Pork Adobo, Chicken Curry, and Beef Casserole. Today I’m about to grill some pork ribs on the George Foreman, which will be served with new potatoes I had to scrape, steamed broccoli, and some chilled white wine to wash it down.

YouTube makes its AI content labels more prominent on desktop and mobile, and will apply them automatically if it detects "significant photorealistic AI use" (Todd Spangler/Variety)
https://variety.com/2026/digital/news/youtube-ai-video…

YouTube to Automatically Label AI-Generated Videos & Enhance Labels
YouTube is making AI-generated content labels more prominent, and it's going to start automatically applying the labels if it detects that a video includes 'significant photorealistic AI use.

Help me break a thing to make it better!
New #fediverse #activitypub #selfhosted #software time!
? do you like making …

RE: https://mastodonapp.uk/@palmoildetectives/116999717343214177
Reading the ingredients list is a start to not making bad decisions. Makes it easy to avoid Palm Oil

RE: https://mastodonapp.uk/@palmoildetectives/116999717343214177
Reading the ingredients list is a start to not making bad decisions. Makes it easy to avoid Palm Oil

"Trump Is Making the 250th Small" — Darth #Trump "made a brief appearance at the Great American State Fair in Washington, D.C., which was supposed to be a 250th birthday celebration for the greatest democracy in human history. He treated it instead as a kind of #MAGA mini-rally."

Trump Is Making the 250th Small
The State Fair rally was an empty celebration of a man instead of a country.

Let's get this straight: anything created with "AI" is #slop.
It doesn't have to be vibe-coded. It doesn't have to be horrible code. It doesn't matter that you've spent hours perfecting the prompt. It doesn't matter that ten people have spent a week reviewing it in detail.
As long as an "AI" took part in writing it, it's slop. It's an unethical technology, and anything created with it is tainted. It's an inhuman technology, and you're supporting it. You're being disrespectful to your users and contributors. You're putting your own convenience over humanity. You're aiding the worst murderous assholes in the history of humanity. And what's perhaps worst, you quite likely believe that you are making a net positive contribution, that you're helping people, while you're actually disrespecting and harming them.
#NoAI #NoLLM

Who wore it better, Automotive edition.
Top is 2027 Ferrari Luce (MSRP ~$640k).
Bottom is 2026 Nissan Sentra (MSRP ~$24k).
https://mstdn.social/@scottmiller42/116641847903780623

What a journey this release of #lucenenet has been on, two years in the making! Glad to see it come out and the world gets to experience all of the work that has been put in. It's such a massive effort by only very few contributors.
My contributions have decreased substantially, now I just test the release and 1 on pushes or some internal discussions. That's about it. Not too sad …

Polymarket is making it harder to use VPNs to access its service, blocking some IPs and suspicious accounts, and is asking some customers to identify themselves (Michael Roddan/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/polymarket…

Polymarket Wants Traders to ID Themselves as It Faces Sanctions, Legal Risks
In Russia, making bets on Polymarket isn’t permitted by the popular online prediction market’s rules. But that hasn’t stopped Ruslan Kashaev, a software developer who lives in the small Russian city of Ufa, a 15-hour drive from Moscow, from turning the site into a lucrative source of income. ...

Chiefs add two years to Patrick Mahomes' contract, making it first NFL deal valued at over $500 million https://www.nfl.com/news/chiefs-add-two-years-to-patrick-mahomes-contract-making-it-first-nfl-deal-valued-at-ove…

Silent spring in our village.
This morning, I woke up early. One blackbird was singing in our neighbourhood. When it stopped (to find something to eat, I guess), it became silent.
In the 1990s, dozens of songbirds would've been singing, sometimes making so much noise that it was hard to sleep.

Interesting to see that in Maine, several thousand signatures to qualify an anti-trans ballot measure are getting thrown out because the circulators gathered signatures illegally.
It is really common for corporate and billionaire funded measures here in SF to be qualified through paid canvassers who lie about what the measure does or illegally offer payment to sign. Not aware of anyone attempting enforcement though.

40% of trans athlete question signature gatherers from out of state
Outside petition circulators, money and lawyers have poured into Maine, making the state’s referendum process a battleground in the national debate over transgender rights.

#joshJohnson is a smart guy. I’m watching him being interviewed and he’s giving an example of his process. He tells stories. He told a story about a couple of his friends taking another friend to a strip club. And in the course of the evening this friend became convinced that the dancer was falling in love with him. She was just doing her job, and doing it well, engaging with him and making him…

My partner was fed up with our sewing machine. We got it maybe 15 years ago, but never really used it much. Neither of us had the patience to get it threaded properly.
I mostly hand-sew things (repairs) and my partner does have their mom's old machine (which still works!)
So we've gave the machine to my daughter and she could not be happier! She just sewed up parts for an art installation and is working on making her own pants now.
Glad it's getting used & g…

The first record of the parable commonly known as the "Blind Men and the Elephant" showed up around 2500 years ago, in a Buddhist text from India. At this point it's pretty commonly known. I assume that most folks reading this will be familiar with some variation of it.
If not, it's essentially a story about people who have limited information making assertions about something: one man grabs a tail and says, "it's like a rope," another the trunk and says, "it's like a snake," a third the leg saying, "it's like a tree," and so on. Later variations are less kind to the men, having them not simply report their findings, but fight over them. The first English translation draws a parallel to religion.
This comes to mind for me, because social media has a tendency to incentivize us to make those hard assertions, to dig in, to argue our perspective as part of a spectacle. Free and federated social media isn't structurally that different from corporate media, so the incentive models built to maximize engagement by maximizing conflict tend to leak through the similarities in the user experience and the conditioning of other platforms.
I didn't really come here to critique the fediverse, but rather to remind everyone, "no one sees the whole fucking elephant." We are limited and there are necessarily some things so big they will never be individually comprehensible. Any system that relies on us all agreeing cannot possibly respond to those big things.
We can see that concretely if we look at the difference between "democratic unity" and "diversity of tactics." In the first model, everyone either agrees or gets forced to behave as though they agree (at least on some issues). That's how liberal democracy works. Diversity of tactics (which systematically described, for example, in the "St Paul Principles"), on the other hand, let's people align on goals without needing to agree on exactly how to achieve them. The reality being that often there are multiple "correct" paths, and sometimes those paths can only work if multiple paths are taken in unison.
No one sees the whole elephant. We won't even see the elephant later. People will still be arguing about the elephant long after it's gone. But if you want to get rid of the elephant, you're gonna need to accept that you can't comprehend it all and you're gonna have to figure out a way to work together that doesn't require a unified approach.

Budget Bashar
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#satire #potus45

YouTube makes its AI content labels more prominent on desktop and mobile, and will apply them automatically if it detects "significant photorealistic AI use" (Todd Spangler/Variety)
https://variety.com/2026/digital/news/youtube-ai-video…

YouTube to Automatically Label AI-Generated Videos & Enhance Labels
YouTube is making AI-generated content labels more prominent, and it's going to start automatically applying the labels if it detects that a video includes 'significant photorealistic AI use.

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

"First sighting of African wild dogs in Malawi national park in more than 10 years"
#Africa #Dogs #Animals

First sighting of African wild dogs in Malawi national park in more than 10 years
Four African wild dogs were recently spotted in Kasungu National Park in Malawi, making it the first confirmation of the endangered species in the park in more than a decade. The wild dogs appear to have travelled hundreds of kilometers from a park in eastern Zambia to reach Kasungu. Matthew Becker, chief executive of the […]

What if we're making the wrong bet about progress?
Just watched someone crack open a million-year-old fossil like it was nothing. Made me think: we open ancient things believing we'll get the most value NOW. Not later.
Same with AI. We're betting progress will speed up AND slow down at the same time.
Weird, right?
New post explores why we value personal forever but trade away our collective future for almost nothing.
Read more: [link]

The Role of Eternity
On fossils, AI, and the bets we are making about progress

Sources: Netflix is paying $200M for US and Canadian rights to the 2027 FIFA Women's World Cup, making it one of the biggest media deals for women's sports (Vanessa Perdomo/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Mango Unchained
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#satire #potus45 …

The moral integrity of a Louisiana Senator on stark display. Hey, if he's making a fortune, it must be beneficial, right? That's why we need to reduce or eliminate regulations, we must allow law-makers to invest in specific companies, we need to focus on fraud in the world of the lowest income populations, rather than worry about a few fiddles by the "important" people.
After all, those hard working wealthy people need to be rewarded for efforts on behalf of the co…

The moral integrity of a Louisiana Senator on stark display. Hey, if he's making a fortune, it must be beneficial, right? That's why we need to reduce or eliminate regulations, we must allow law-makers to invest in specific companies, we need to focus on fraud in the world of the lowest income populations, rather than worry about a few fiddles by the "important" people.
After all, those hard working wealthy people need to be rewarded for efforts on behalf of the co…

Apparently Google’s Modern Web Guidance accessibility megaskill believes it should only be called when a dev explicitly asks for accessibility in the output?
Which doesn’t quite track with the promise on the MWG home page.

Amazon says it is making the "architecture, starter code, and learnings" from Alexa for Shopping available to third-party retailers, starting with Kate Spade (Annie Palmer/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/27/amazon-ai-shopping-alexa-kate-spade.html…

Amazon starts selling its AI shopping technology to other retailers
Amazon said it's already signed up Kate Spade as a customer for its AI shopping technology.

Decided I’d had enough and got out the big toys for making a perfect quarter round #woodworking

I made a cake yesterday and it wasn't great, not that good really. It's okay I guess. The issue is that we've had two cakes from Sendik's this month and this one doesn't compare to those.
Also, I don't really make cakes that often. It's probably been a few years since I made a cake.
It also didn't help that I mis-measured when making the frosting and had to then try to make my own powdered sugar.

At a liquor store, bar, or casino, getting carded is part of the cost of entry.
Now the internet is carding people, too
—and the companies doing the carding are cashing in.
New laws and platform rules are pushing games, social platforms, AIproducts, and adult sites to replace birthday boxes
(the fields where you enter your DOB)
with identity checks.
What was once a compliance tool for sellers in age-restricted industries is becoming infrastructure for the i…

The Internet Is Starting to Card Everyone. These Startups Are Making Millions From It
Age-verification systems are increasingly sophisticated. They're lucrative for the businesses creating them, too.

Gameshow Göering
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#satire #potus45…

Jerry Jones: Cowboys willing to trade 'top pick' for added 'firepower' in 2026 https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/jerry-jones-cowboys-willing-to-trade-top-pick-for-added-firepower-in-2026

Disney agrees to pay $50M to YouTube TV and DirecTV subscribers to settle a lawsuit claiming Disney forced higher prices by requiring the bundling of ESPN (Scharon Harding/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20

Disney agreed to $50M settlement over claims it made live-TV streaming expensive
Lawsuit alleged Disney inflated market prices by making carriers include ESPN.

European police say Binance's April 2025 policy asking law enforcement to route certain requests to foreign governments significantly delays criminal probes (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/us/binance-crypto-crime.html

Police Say Binance Is Making It Harder to Fight Crime
Investigators in Europe said that the cryptocurrency giant Binance had made it more difficult to track down scammers and solve other crimes.

Also, zero days (well, minus a lot of days because I've been slacking) since a random #Python package got a new #NIH dependency on another Python package which is actually a "fastest" #RustLang package which cannot be built because the author thinks it a great idea to require a nightly Rust compiler.
…and of course it's full of "unsafe" calls. Because Rust is obviously such a great language for making secure code.
https://github.com/awolverp/cachebox/issues/62

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

Cowboys Seeking Maxx Crosby Trade ‘Among Others’: Report https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/maxx-crosby-trade-among-others-report/

I wrote this function to do some math, and I got it working, tested it, but now I have to explain it to someone and...
Well, that's the difficult part!
I knew the input and desired output and built up how to get what I needed but making it explainable is a bit of a challenge...
Which is good though, as it's forcing me to double-check my work.
(And I am *not* good at math!)
#teaching

- Literature of its own
Write stuff together. Reference other stuff. If you're making an anarchist coven, then you can draw from literally the entire history of anarchism and adjacent stuff. I think you can figure this out.
You just need literally any text. Here's a zine I wrote that talks about all this:
https://ia601509.us.archive.org/3/items/exit-dystopia-8up/Exit_Dystopia-8up.pdf
Or like, reference The Parable of the Sower trilogy. Whatever, as long as it's written down somewhere that you can point to.

Key features that make a planet amenable to life, at least life as earthlings know it:
It should be rocky, be at the right temperature for liquid water to exist and have an atmosphere.
On Thursday, a team of astronomers announced that it had identified a world with all three traits.
“At this point, we have absolutely no evidence for life on the planet,”
said Collin Cherubim, a planetary scientist who recently earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University.
“But we thin…

Astronomers Find an Atmosphere on a Nearby Earthlike Planet
It’s the first potentially habitable world known to host an atmosphere, making it a lead contender in the search for life beyond our solar system.

Uncle Scam
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#satire #potus45

Claude chats showed in Google and Bing search results, despite Anthropic's robots.txt saying not to crawl them, likely because the pages lacked a "noindex" tag (Maddy Varner/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/private-claude-chats-expo…

Private Claude Chats Exposed in Google and Bing Search Results
The screwup shows how tricky it can be to stop web crawlers from making ostensibly private conversations with AI chatbots entirely too public.

British Petroleum sponsored an elite Princeton research center
to address the climate problem without getting off fossil fuels,
handpicking scientists aligned with their interests. 
Princeton scientists who wrote a climate paper criticized as making solutions seem “easy”
coordinated with the oil company’s executives and showed them multiple drafts.  
Researchers depicted technology to capture carbon and store it underground as being proven and in use at indu…

Beyond Denial: How Oil Execs Shaped a Landmark Climate Study
BP sponsored an elite Princeton research center to address the climate problem without getting off fossil fuels. Its key work, a paper known as “Wedges,” guided climate discourse for a generation.

Elon Musk’s rocket company
SpaceX is set to go public this week
targeting a $1.8 trillion valuation,
potentially making it the largest initial public offering in history.
It is also projected to make Elon Musk, already the world’s richest man, the world’s first trillionaire.
The nonprofit newsroom More Perfect Union has released a new report from business reporter Eric Gardner called
“We Uncovered a Hidden Wealth Transfer in the SpaceX IPO. You’re Holdi…

SpaceX IPO Could Make Musk a Trillionaire at Your Expense in “Massive Wealth Transfer”: Eric Gardner
Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX is set to go public this week targeting a $1.8 trillion valuation, potentially making it the largest initial public offering in history. It is also projected to make Elon Musk, already the world’s richest man, the world’s first trillionaire. The nonprofit newsroom More Perfect Union has released a new report from business reporter Eric Gardner called “We Uncovered a Hidden Wealth Transfer in the SpaceX IPO. You’re Holding the Bag.” It details how Mu…

His Maga-sty
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No laws were broken in the making of this bot: let's leave the extrajudicial killing out of it.
#satire #potus45

CXMT shares jumped as much as 470% in its Shanghai debut, giving the memory chipmaker a ~$487B market cap, making it the most valuable China-listed company (Jenny Lee/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/27/cxmt-china-market-debut-chipmaker-ipo.html

China memory chipmaker CXMT skyrockets 470% in blockbuster Shanghai debut
The Hefei-based company raised 57.92 billion yuan ($8.6 billion) after pricing its IPO at 8.66 yuan per share.

OpenAI stands to hold ~$2.6B in combined CoreWeave and Cerebras stock that it acquired by committing to buy cloud services and chips, and to lend Cerebras money (Cory Weinberg/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-making-b…

OpenAI Is Making Billions Just by Promising to Buy From Suppliers
Chipmaker Cerebras brought in one of the greatest pitchmen in tech, Sam Altman, to appear in a video to promote its $5.5 billion initial public offering. Seated on a gray upholstered couch and speaking softly, the OpenAI chief executive touted Cerebras’ chips as “the best high-speed inference ...