Tootfinder

Inside NFL owners meetings: International Super Bowl talk, Rashee Rice fallout, Seahawks sale buzz and more

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/nfl-owners-meeti…

Trump self-deals, lies and seems to fall asleep in meetings. The media treats it all as 'priced in' (Margaret Sullivan/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/22/trump-mainstream-media-coverage
http://www.memeorandum.com/260522/p22#a260522p22

This is a great thread on remote work. The notes about having to be 💯 while on camera made me realize that all my clients are fine if people have their cameras off (mine is almost always off), and how much that really makes doing meetings easier.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:svvjd

Snitty (@clofsnitville.bsky.social)
Matt and @ed3d.net have offered up some interesting thoughts on making remote work more workable with both technology and camera-facing skills, but I'll throw in my two cents about the limits of technology and why some *workers* still prefer to be in-person. [contains quote post or other embedded content]

#today I did several hours of QA work for a new uni BA course (as one paticipant in a Teams meeting), which was pleasant and interesting, and I think that I managed to jam sustainability a bit more firmly into the new course! Tomorrow is meetings with friends but also I really really ought to do work on my #buildingModel

Friday Links 26-20
This week was weird. Something happened to my RSS reader.
Anyway ... still some good stuff — the interview with Kelsey Hightower, and the piece on how Meta is messing up its culture.
https://christof.damian.net/2026/06/friday-links-26-20.html

Source: Demis Hassabis plans to hold meetings with US policymakers in Washington next week about his proposed US-based Standards Body for "Frontier-class" AI (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

The ACT Integrity Commission is conducting a major inquiry into lobbying and political influence in the Territory.
This is an important opportunity for us to strengthen transparency and accountability – and push back against corporate influence in politics.
We’re making a submission calling for stronger lobbying laws, including:
Public disclosure of lobbying meetings
A lobbying ban for former ministers
Independent oversight and enforcement
We’re inviting A…

Sign on to our ACT lobbying submission
Working together for a fairer democracy

Folks, this is why I'm perpetually on mute during your Teams meetings.
#humor

Bishop William J. Barber, II and Rev. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove will travel to Berlin, Germany, at the end of June for meetings with church leaders and German citizens who are concerned about global authoritarian movements that are degrading the rules-based order put in place after the Holocaust.
Watch the event in person or on Zoom:

Don’t Do Team Meetings
Regular team meetings are often treated as a default part of work. They are seen as a sign of coordination, alignment, and healthy communication. In practice, they often reveal the opposite.
A recurring team meeting where everyone goes around the room to explain what they did last week is usually not a good use of time. It turns communication into a performance instead of a real exchange of useful information. If the team needs a formal meeting just to lear…

Don’t Do Team Meetings
Personal webpage of Alexandre Dulaunoy - from information security to open source and art

Tipp: Plaud-AI-Aufnahmegerät abschalten
Mit den Plaud-KI-Geräten kann man Meetings oder Präsentationen aufzeichnen, sie transkribieren und zusammenfassen lassen. Doch wie dreht man die Hardware ab?
https://www.

Tipp: Plaud-AI-Aufnahmegerät abschalten
Mit den Plaud-KI-Geräten kann man Meetings oder Präsentationen aufzeichnen, sie transkribieren und zusammenfassen lassen. Doch wie dreht man die Hardware ab?

“You can do it either way. We don’t have to pay you, and you just go off and do how you normally do. Or, we can pay you, but we get more control over it.” They then offered him “£100 for every story that is successfully published (national or trade)”.
In meetings with the reporter, the CT Group employees proposed he chair a roundtable for the company for £500 and pitch pieces to national and trade papers.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/22/david-cameron-firm-adviser-pays-journalists-favourable-pieces-boris-johnson?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

"Top White House officials believe New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan obtained audio recordings of Situation Room meetings for their forthcoming book, “Regime Change.” Such a taped leak would be a shocking breach of one of the most secure settings on Earth. Independent recording devices in the Situation Room are forbidden."
My Bet’s On JD – Digby's Hullabaloo
https://digbysblog.net/2026/06/14/my-bets-on-jd/

MoCoLUG will be having our first meeting on June 20th, at the Silver Spring Library.
#Linux

Sources: WH officials believe NYT's Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan obtained audio recordings of Situation Room meetings for their upcoming book Regime Change (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/14/trump-situation-room-tapes-haberman-swan-regim…

Scoop: Trump aides fear Haberman and Swan obtained Situation Room tapes for "Regime Change"
No one knows which conversations were caught.

The mainstream media largely shrugged off the slush-fund story,
depicting it as politics as usual
– no cause for alarm or sustained coverage.
The NBC evening newscast by Wednesday had moved on,
focusing instead on Raúl Castro’s indictment, the California wildfires and a car explosion in lower Manhattan.
And Fox News, home to the fervid Maga base, offered cursory coverage both on the air and online,
giving an obligatory nod to Democratic lawmakers who voic…

Quick recap of Belém, Salzburg, and what's coming next:
http://anitagraser.com/2026/07/11/belem-salzburg-and-onwards/

Belém, Salzburg, and onwards
It’s been a couple of busy weeks, with the QGIS 4.2 release and meetings and conferences all over the place before a few, hopefully quieter, weeks of summer break. QGIS First, the Austrian QG…

Your #Onboarding Is a Hazing Ritual and You Call It Agile
https://dhung.dev/blog/onboarding-hazing-ritual

What my problem with AI is, you ask?
It's not the math, or the science¹ or the technology, it's not even the data collection.
If you want one word: Techbros.
It's the way AI is applied and promoted and forced upon people, how it damages society and culture, how it exploits.
It is capitalism.
__
¹I am working at an AI chair, we do ML on our machines and discuss CNNs in our meetings and papers

Biden DOJ targeted parents at school board meetings despite FBI, sheriffs' objections, memos show (Nicholas Ballasy/Just The News)
https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/afl
http://www.memeorandum.com/260615/p87#a260615p87

Who was the jack hole who thought 10 AM on a Tuesday was the right time to silently start installing a Teams update? Like, no. That's when meetings are happening.
Don't make a tool mission-critical, then think you can take it down at the moment when it is most needed.
#MicrosoftAnnoyances

#TNC26 side meetings were in full swing today. But tomorrow, everything changes.
Tomorrow, the main conference doors open.
Tomorrow, more than 900 people from across our global R&E networking community will come together in Helsinki 🇫🇮.
Tomorrow, the real magic of #TNC26 will begin. …

Your company is a MACHINE for turning MEETINGS into REPORTS. Too bad no one reads those reports.
You also have dashboards, which one might skim before doing what they were gonna do anyway.
Tech orgs have all the data in the world, but have lost the ability to read it, understand it, or act on it.
https://

The illiterate organization
Even the most actionable insight will never be acted upon when coherence has broken down.

Sources: execs from Meta, Google, and Amazon met with Vatican officials in April, as part of a quiet lobbying push ahead of Pope Leo XIV's first AI encyclical (Océane Herrero/Politico)
https://www.politico.eu/article/pope-leo-xiv-ai-meetings-silicon-valle…

Silicon Valley takes its AI pitch to the pope
As Leo XIV prepares his first encyclical, technology firms and Western diplomats have worked to make their case inside the Vatican. 

Now, I don't especially like the term "church" so I may use something else... like "coven." You can do what you want. But I happen to have already mapped out an example. (It is exactly that, just an example, so take if it's useful, change if you need, and don't stick to anything too closely.) Oh, this mapping also means that you would, for religious reasons, only be allowed to work under capitalism 4 days a week instead of 5.
Given the increases in productivity over the last 100 years, a 4 day work week is a completely reasonable expectation. If we have to annex Monday for the weekend by force of religion, so be it. It is rightfully ours anyway. If enough people try it, this will probably work. If it doesn't work, it just needs more people.
The Practice of Worship:
It is recommended to break down worship in to three sections: the functional, the communal, and the spiritual. It is also recommended to break these across multiple days. A common structure for some Christian churches is to take 10-15 minutes for announcements (Functional), an hour or two for services (Spiritual), followed by (Communal) coffee, tea, and cookies for an unspecified time up to two hours after. When starting or working with limited time a single compressed model like this may work, but it's not optimal.
- The Functional
The purpose of this section is to address the functional needs of the coven. Block out time (less than 90 minute blocks is recommended) to go through reports and updates from those involved in the Dispensary, Library, Works Committee (infrastructure), and Services Committee (providing services internally and, potentially, externally). Talk through any additional announcements, including those from other covens you may be federated with.
It is helpful to include unstructured communal time, such as shared meals, during or after functional meetings. As the federation grows, more time will be needed. It is recommended to break functional meetings, work parties, and such across multiple days. When a federation becomes sufficiently large, it is recommended to take every Monday, on top of Saturday and Sunday, as a third day of community and worship.
The scope of the functional spans 3 realms (which may be more-or-less fluid): the personal or family, the coven and federation, and humanity itself. It is up to each coven and individual to negotiate how to allocate the three days of the weekend once we have liberated Monday from the work week, but it is important to reserve it for one of these three. However, some people must work on weekends. Medical personnel, for example, cannot conform to a standard work week. While the work week should be universally restricted, which specific days are used will be up to the specific coven and their members.
A functional meeting can start with an agenda like the following:
Functional Invocation
Announcements
Report Backs
Dispensary
Inventory Check
What is low
What is empty
What is expiring
What is needed
Funds status
Library
Inventory Check and Items needing return
Library acquisition requests
Funds status and budget check
Works Committee
Upcoming projects
Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
New committee formations
Funds status
Services Committee
New capabilities announcements
New needs requests
Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
New committee formations
Funds status
Task Check
Breaking the Circle
This agenda is a suggestion for those who don't know where to start. It can be adapted or ignored as appropriate.
- The Spiritual
Spirituality is necessarily an undefined space. It is deeply personal. Each individual taking time to share their own personal spiritual experiences can help each connect with each other. This experience of connection can itself be a spiritual experience. It may also be useful to read esoteric, mystical, or philosophical texts together as type of "book club" and share thoughts. Others may draw from their own knowledge or traditions. This is something that must be defined together within a group.
- The Communal
The communal aspect of the practice of worship bind the coven and federation together. Within the community we find joy and release, connection and comfort. The coven is where we turn in times of need, and where we share our hopes and dreams.

GuMo Masto! I had a fantastic dinner with most of the people working on TelemetryDeck yesterday, but now I’m tired and wish to sleep longer.
Alas, I have already set up meetings, fool that I am.

For management in companies to believe so much in AI being the future, they sure seem slow on having their own work be done with AI.
Imagine how productive their meetings could be if it was all done by AI. :stallman_thaenkin:
Making important decisions on the company can take seconds with all-knowing AI instead of hours deliberating by inferior meatbags!
What are you waiting for?
Surely you wouldn't mind the huge increase in productivity, riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight? :ya…

from my link log —
Don't make my mistakes: common infrastructure errors i've made.
https://matduggan.com/mistakes/
saved 2021-12-03 https://dota…

A low-slung building in Garden Grove California is the home of the Women's Civic Club, a community group that's been around since 1921.
Once a month for nearly 20 years, it was also home to meetings for the California Coalition for Immigration Reform (CCIR),
one of the influential voices in the anti-immigrant movement during the 1990s and 2000s,
and one whose legacy is still felt today.
The group originally started as Citizens for Action Now,
headed by…

The OC Community Center That Launched a National Anti-Immigrant Sentiment
A small community center became the unlikely launching pad for multiple extremist movements that profoundly changed American politics.

Geht ja noch morgen 🙈🫪

First day of #SIGWriting2026 is done: opening, keynote, sessions, business meeting, welcome reception
There were 70 people at the business meeting! 70! We have 90 members, conferences usually attract 200 researchers. But there were times when we were 7 people at the business meetings (the 3 coordinators already included)
SIG Writing now has two new honorary members: Gert Rijl…

The next big release of our software is codenamed "Moose".
We have the following milestones:
- Moose (August)
- Moose Beta (July)
- Moose Beta Limited (Late june)
- Moose Beta Limited Beta (early June)
- Moose Limited (May)
- Moose Limited Beta (early May)
>:(
I keep asking in meetings when Moose Beta Limited Limited Beta Alpha is, but noone appreciates it. These people have no idea what they're doing.

Corporate lawyers say AI-transcribed meeting notes may not have attorney-client privilege, making otherwise protected conversations discoverable in lawsuits (Sarah Kessler/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/…

All Those A.I. Note Takers? They’re Making Lawyers Very Nervous.
A trendy productivity hack, A.I. note takers are capturing every joke and offhand comment in many meetings. They could also potentially waive attorney-client privilege.

Dear Zoom,
In what world would you think I would want an “AI Companion” panel *taking up almost half the application screen*? And that apparently *I cannot turn off* in the application settings itself… and instead have to login to the Zoom website to go into the settings *there* to turn off this panel?
This is the kind of behavior toward users that is turning people off to all things related to #AI

I never cease to be mystified by this common work-from-home complaint.
I’ve been 100% wfh aside from a half-dozen short trips to NJ for “all-hands” meetings since 2008. Last one of those was 2016.
I consider solitude when working one of the great positive features of wfh. Having people forcibly interrupt me by their physical presence gained me a ‘prickly’ reputation in my last office.

How much do these companies spend on tokens just to have their LLM workers attend meetings?

The loss of widespread, real, meatspace, physically-coincident user group meetings is actually a terrible loss to computing culture in general and creative computing specifically

Man mag von diesem Digital Independence Day halten was man will, das eigentlich Tolle sind die Meetings/Workshops/Aktionen. Da ist nicht ein Boris, der in der AOL-Werbung „bin ich schon drin?“ und „das ist ja einfach“ in eine Kamera strahlt, und all die anderen kommerziellen Angebote, die damals dazu beitrugen, daß im Eternal September¹ Usenet und überhaupt kollaboratives Internet erodierten und später dann kommerzielle wallet garden Social Media Portale mit auf­merksamkeits­getriebenen Algo…

meetings melting away from my agenda like snow under the sun are the best

Sources: the Trump administration has been happier talking to Anthropic lately after Dario Amodei was replaced by cofounder Tom Brown in meetings about Fable 5 (Hugo Lowell/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/the-trump-white-house-is-over-anthropics-dario-am…

The Trump White House Is Over Anthropic's Dario Amodei
At high-stakes meetings with the White House, Anthropic's CEO—a "weirdo," per one official—has been replaced by cofounder Tom Brown.

Fox host admits Trump naps in meetings – but begs viewers to 'please stop' highlighting it - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-sleeping-2676971194/

In the state department of past administrations,
how to respond to an incendiary event such as the murder of the British student Henry Nowak would have required deliberations, memos and meetings.
Given how it has roiled the UK and inflamed tensions over migration and race, the cautious diplomats at Foggy Bottom probably would have said nothing at all.
Now they tweet from the hip.
“Ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing are glaring symptoms of civilizational…

Sources: Beijing recently held meetings with Alibaba, ByteDance, Z.ai, and others to discuss restricting overseas access to advanced open and closed AI models (Fanny Potkin/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/beijing-is-l

Trump Has Given Up -- Another day of many errands and meetings, so another short, informal post. (Paul Krugman)
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-has-given-up
http://www.memeorandum.com/260603/p21#a260603p21

- Recognized creed and form of worship
The practice of "worship" is not necessarily theistic. There are plenty of secular churches, such as some of those from some Buddhist sects and Secular Humanist ones. You just need something that says what you believe.
Perhaps, what you believe is that "the system is dying and we must work together to create an alternative system." That's kind of all you need. Now, if you're reading this, then I might recommend your "practice of worship" look a whole lot like the "housing coop that looks like a convent/monastery," with a library and dispensary managed by the "Church" and "regular services" (we'll get to that) which are just the types of general assemblies/organizing meetings that you need to keep such things going. But I'm not here to tell you what to believe and how to practice it. ;)

People across the United States are increasingly pushing for moratoriums on new datacenters and trying to oust elected officials approving such projects.
Perceived secrecy surrounding a proposed datacenter
prompted residents to pack public meetings that sometimes lasted more than four hours.
They expressed outrage at officials in the Republican-led rural municipality 40 miles (64km) north of Detroit
and submitted a petition seeking to recall four members of the Leno…

US residents angry at datacenters ‘being shoved down our throats’ are recalling officials
People across the country are pushing for moratoriums, and electeds who approve projects are being punished

It looks like Kash Patel’s major meltdown over The Atlantic’s humiliating report on his excessive drinking and unexplained absences has only made things worse for the embattled FBI director.
Last weekend, The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick reported that Patel was known to drink in excess,
routinely delayed meetings and time-sensitive operations,
and was often unreachable,
raising concerns about the potential for foreign coercion and other national security risks.

Kash Patel’s Atlantic Lawsuit Is Already Biting Him in the Butt
The reporter who wrote the story says she has gotten a host of new sources ready to dish dirt on Patel.

Accused rapist Graham Platner convenes crisis meetings with Maine Senate campaign brass as he holds 'livid' Dems hostage (New York Post)
https://nypost.com/2026/07/08/us-news/accused-rapist-graham-platner-convenes-crisis-meetings-with-campaign-brass-as-he-holds-livid-dems-hostage/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260708/p89#a260708p89