Tootfinder

As salty as I am about it, there's also another way to think about this. For anyone who still has connections to folks on the right (which is perhaps unlikely for anyone on this server, I digress), the cult that has consumed them thrives on isolation and grievance.
The words "you were right" have the potential to cut through the programming and open up an opportunity for reconnection. The modern conspiratorial cult of the Right has been built partially around people who were told they were wrong or were crazy. In the vast majority of cases, they were wrong and even when they were right they completely misunderstood why, but we'll skip that for now. Liberals making fun of them (even the times when they definitely earned it) has pushed them further and further into their ideological hole.
The thing about those words, "you were right," in this context is that the way they offer reconnection also requires them to take one little step of betraying their ideology to accept them. So they must choose between maintaining allegiance to a pedophile or finally getting to feel superior after years of living in an illusion of persecution.
Under the ideology of the Right, admitting one is wrong is a weakness. It is admitting defeat. They have to "own the libs" by saying things, things that they know aren't true, in order to feel dominant. But these things are often so absurd that they end up being made fun of, feeling even more weak and pathetic, reinforcing their fear and alienation.
Offering what they're looking for can offer a way out, but only if they're willing to start to recognize the thing they've supported for what it is.
And they were right about some things. They were right that Bill Gates was a terrible person. I've had plenty of liberals defend him based on his philanthropy washing, but he's awful and always has been. The Epstein links make that blatant. They intuitively recognized him and didn't trust him, even if they were wildly off base about *how and why* he shouldn't be trusted... Even if their correct mistrust was leveraged into one of the most destructive conspiracy theories ever (vaccine denial and COVID vaccine avoidance).
They were right about Bill Clinton. He was always shady as fuck. Sure, the people who attacked him at the time turned out to be even more shady but that's not the point right now. He was connected to Epstein and that was always creepy as fuck.
And the Epstein thing was an open secret that liberals ignored for a long time. It was seen as some weird thing that right wing nutjobs believed about the Clintons. But it was true. Not all of it, and there has always been an antisemitic element to the right wing interpretation or Epstein stuff, but his whole pedophile conspiracy was always kind of real.
The whole "Illuminati"/deep state thing is a vast oversimplification, an attempt to make comprehensible an incredibly complex set of interlocking and emergent behaviors. But Epstein did very much want to remake the world, to create a new world order, and he absolutely played a part in it.
The Right wing nutjobs talked about global authoritarianism, Blackhawks flying over American cities, masked men with guns disarming and executing legal gun owners in the streets. That's all happening right now.
The "FEMA concentration camps" are not actually that far off. ICE and FEMA are sister agencies, both under DHS. I'd be more than happy to call that one "close enough" in order to hear some MAGA admit that ICE is, in fact, building concentration camps.
There was always a huge millennialist element to these things. They tended to be connected to "the antichrist." It was absurd, especially for me as someone who no longer identifies as a Christian. But I'll even acquiess that to a degree. The "the number of the Beast" is 666. That's just the sum of the Hebrew spelling of "Nero." Revelations focuses a lot on Nero coming back to life after his death. His death that involved a head wound, thus the line from Revelation 13:3:
> And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world marveled and followed the beast.
The parallels between Trump and Nero are easy to draw, and Trump's ear wound feels pretty on-the-nose for this. I don't believe in "prophecy" in this way. I think that there are patterns, and useful patterns can become encoded in beleif systems. But I will, again, happily call this one "close enough" for anyone on that side willing to also acknowledge it. I'm happy to meet on that common ground, because anyone who accepts it must recognize that their duty is to fight against it.
A lot of these correct nuggets are embedded in a framework of religious extremism and antisemitism. The vast majority of the beliefs holding these together are wildly wrong and incredibly toxic. But by giving some room to feel validated, listened to, understood, can give some room to admit things that were wrong.
Cult de-programming starts with an opening. People have to talk through their own thoughts, hear their own inconsistencies. Guiding questions can help them untangle these things for themselves. And it all starts by having enough room to feel safe, to not feel cornered, to not feel stupid. Admitting mistakes means being vulnerable, and the MAGA cult is built on fear. It's built on exploiting vulnerability and locking it away.
De-programming takes a long time. It's not easy. It takes patience. But every person who comes out does so with a powerful perspective, a deep understanding, that can be turned back against it. The best people at getting people out of cults are former members. Some of the most dedicated antifa are former fascists who understood their mistakes and dedicate their lives to fixing them.

PUTIN'S soldiers in UKRAINE live for 12 minutes! – Sunday Times #shorts: https://benborges.xyz/2026/02/24/putins-soldiers-in-ukraine-live.html

Ukrainians remain RESILIENT and find a way out even in times of crisis #shorts: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/26/ukrainians-remain-resilient-and-find.html

from my link log —
The asymptotic cost of address translation on memory access time.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0703
saved 2020-10-21 https://dotat.at/:…

The Cost of Address Translation
Modern computers are not random access machines (RAMs). They have a memory hierarchy, multiple cores, and virtual memory. In this paper, we address the computational cost of address translation in virtual memory. Starting point for our work is the observation that the analysis of some simple algorithms (random scan of an array, binary search, heapsort) in either the RAM model or the EM model (external memory model) does not correctly predict growth rates of actual running times. We propose the …

A gray wolf wandered into
Los Angeles county
for the first time in more than a century on Saturday morning.
“This is the most southern verified record of a gray wolf in modern times,”
Axel Hunnicutt, gray wolf coordinator for the California department of fish and wildlife, said.
The three-year-old black coat female, known as #BEY03F, crossed into LA county around 6am on 7 Febru…

A look at Cloverleaf, which strikes deals with utility companies and secures land for AI companies and their data center needs; the company has raised $300M (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/technology/ai-data-centers-land-c…

Demand for AI Data Centers Sends Prospectors Hunting for Land and Power
Brian Janous, a former Microsoft executive, and his firm Cloverleaf have become modern-day land men, packaging electricity and land for data centers.

❗️ PUTIN's surname is mentioned 1,056 times in the EPSTEIN files #shorts: https://benborges.xyz/2026/02/02/putins-surname-is-mentioned-times.html

My god the state of the software industry is insane. The companies that should be helping people understand and use their machines are instead viciously exploiting and tricking them, bamboozling them with impossible levels of complexity they can't handle.
My brother's machine is popping up adverts from strange domains through Edge several times a minute. They all lie that his machine is infected with viruses. He has no idea what they are or why they're there or how to get rid of them or if his machine is in fact virus riddled. Does he need a new one?
Looking. Are these push notifications? I never have used Edge or Push-notifications or even modern Windows much really, so I dunno what they're like.
I think that's what they are?
I would never accept a push notification from a website, even the ones that some people like sound horrible. I don't want websites messaging me! Interrupting me! But of course, cookie-popups have trained people to just immediately click 'accept' on anything.
I think I cleared all the permissions that Edge had been granted with a reset but I dunno what I'm doing with Edge on Windows either really. The lie about viruses seemed to stop.

WHERE are hundreds of "FLAMINGOS"and why are surgical strikes MANY TIMES more effective?: https://benborges.xyz/2026/02/15/where-are-hundreds-of-ampquotflamingosampquotand.html

Good Morning #Canada
The Assiniboine River is 1,070 km long and runs through the prairies of Western Canada in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The #16 emtry on our #CanadaRivers countdown, the Assiniboine is a typical meandering river with a single main channel embanked within a flat, shallow valley in some places and a steep valley in others. It drains a reasonably sized watershed of 182,000 km2 but a weak flow averaging 45 m3/s means it has changed course numerous times over past centuries, following its modern course for approximately 700 years. Flood control dikes and dams have been added to the upper steeper sections of the Assiniboine to reduce damage during spring melt and runoff.
Where the Red & Assiniboine rivers meet, in the heart of Winnipeg, is a area known as The Forks. It has played a complex role in the history of the region, as a meeting place for Indigenous People for 6,000 years and later as the 1st colonial settlement in western Canada.
#CanadaIsAwesome #Geography
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/the-forks

President Aliyev accuses Russia of deliberately striking Azerbaijan’s embassy in Kyiv three times: https://benborges.xyz/2026/02/15/president-aliyev-accuses-russia-of.html

Prune, Don't Rebuild: Efficiently Tuning $\alpha$-Reachable Graphs for Nearest Neighbor Search
Tian Zhang, Ashwin Padaki, Jiaming Liang, Zack Ives, Erik Waingarten
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08097 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.08097 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.08097
arXiv:2602.08097v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vector similarity search is an essential primitive in modern AI and ML applications. Most vector databases adopt graph-based approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search algorithms, such as DiskANN (Subramanya et al., 2019), which have demonstrated state-of-the-art empirical performance. DiskANN's graph construction is governed by a reachability parameter $\alpha$, which gives a trade-off between construction time, query time, and accuracy. However, adaptively tuning this trade-off typically requires rebuilding the index for different $\alpha$ values, which is prohibitive at scale. In this work, we propose RP-Tuning, an efficient post-hoc routine, based on DiskANN's pruning step, to adjust the $\alpha$ parameter without reconstructing the full index. Within the $\alpha$-reachability framework of prior theoretical works (Indyk and Xu, 2023; Gollapudi et al., 2025), we prove that pruning an initially $\alpha$-reachable graph with RP-Tuning preserves worst-case reachability guarantees in general metrics and improved guarantees in Euclidean metrics. Empirically, we show that RP-Tuning accelerates DiskANN tuning on four public datasets by up to $43\times$ with negligible overhead.
toXiv_bot_toot

Ukrainian ombudsman gets over 6,000 complaints against enlistment officers in 2025 — 333 times more than at all-out war's start: https://benborges.xyz/2026/02/09/ukrainian-ombudsman-gets-over-complaints.html

Zelensky says Russia has tried to kill him multiple times and he’s grown used to it: https://benborges.xyz/2026/02/05/zelensky-says-russia-has-tried.html

Caught me some "Schäfflertanz", a dance custom dating back to 19th century coopers (makers of bins, barrels, etc.) of Old #Bavaria, #Germany. Performances in modern times are apparently on a 7-year cycle.
#dance #Deutschland #tradition #photography #amateur