Tootfinder

Oh, here it is (July 2018). It's nice that this report back didn't include any names or initials so I didn't need to sanitize it:
Meeting Notes:
Table-top exercise scenario topic was state and far-right repression.
Responses:
Strong networks require redundancy, so no one person is a social connection, skills, or resource gatekeeper. These people are often targeted by the state, and if they get burned out and leave, it also weakens and jeoprodizes groups.
Ways to strengthen our networks:
Mentoring/sharing responsibility. Creating a culture of mentorship and support so new people learn skills, take on responsibilities, and are introduced to other folks. Reducing burden on a few key people too.
Chaos Monkey exercise: ask central people to step back from communications/organizing to see what happens.
Regular check-ins! & Delegates check-in with new members they sign up
Ask well connected folks to introduce people to build social redundancy.
Gaming (D&D, board games, etc) committee could support a more fun, and socially robust network.
Practical safety tool:
Burner phone. Not everyone needs one, but good to have access to.
TO DO LIST:
Make regular announcements at each meeting for people to check-in with folks they know (especially those they haven’t heard from in awhile!)
Start google doc for disaster preparedness zine
Why you should prepare (ideological argument)
What people should have (the basics)
How to prepare
Frame as questions, so people can find the answer that best suits themselves.
Such as “what are you preparing for?”
Where do you spend most of your time? (home? Office? car?)
Make it as easy as possible for folks to get the basics (list locations for supplies, etc.)

Since it was relevant to a discussion I just had on here and is something most people probably haven't thought about much (unless you've taken one of a handful of philosophy classes), I thought I'd try to lay out a key piece of Descartes' Meditations (#philosophy

The environmental toll of the artificial intelligence boom continues to mount
as tech companies use ever more power to run their data centers
and enormous amounts of water for cooling.
A new investigation by U.N. scientists warns that AI’s water use in 2030 will match the needs of 1.3 billion people,
while its power use will be triple that of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria combined
— countries with a total population of 650 million.
“Most people underst…

“New Form of Imperialism”: Renowned U.N. Scientist on AI Boom’s Huge Water, Carbon & Land Footprint
The environmental toll of the artificial intelligence boom continues to mount as tech companies use ever more power to run their data centers and enormous amounts of water for cooling. A new investigation by U.N. scientists warns that AI’s water use in 2030 will match the needs of 1.3 billion people, while its power use will be triple that of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria combined — countries with a total population of 650 million. “Most people understand AI as a digital technology, as…

I had an interesting chat with a friend who mentioned a book called "The Living Company." Apparently Shell was one of the few companies that saw the 1970's oil crisis coming and was able to adapt. They did it by talking to a bunch of people randomly about the future, identifying patterns, and coming up with possible future scenarios. They then formed clear plans for these future scenarios, where those plans would cover as many related scenarios as possible.
This was actually really familiar to me, though I hadn't read the book, because that's very close to what the Seattle GDC disaster prep committee did. We identified possible disaster scenarios, then identified preparedness steps that served multiple purposes. We got boxes of n95 masks in 2018 and 2019 for wildfire smoke and did a bit of work building box-fan air purifiers. Over the years we handed out these masks to houseless folks who were most exposed to the smoke. When the pandemic hit, we were able to take some of those boxes to first responders just as manufacturing in China dropped because of their lockdowns and as others started PPE hoarding. We focused on N95 because that was one of the overlap points between the unexpected but catastrophic "flu pandemic" that we knew was possible, and the regular "wildfire smoke" problem we were just getting used to.
The book sounds like it's at least partially influenced by cybernetics. There's this Dutch cybernetics connection that I haven't quite figured out. Anyway, this guy talked about how a company needs to be sustainable and all that. My dude, you worked for an oil company. That is categorically not sustainable. All this aside, I think there are a lot of things we can and should take from capitalists (or take back, in some cases). This practice is one of them.
So maybe get together with friends and talk about what you think might happen. We live in a world of crisis, so I'll always recommend disaster preparedness. But there's more than that.
What do you think will happen in the next 5 years?
Assuming that happens, what actions would you take to push that towards the most positive outcome?
I'm listening to Revolutions and reminded of how much effort monarchies put in to preventing revolutions. Corporations can be even more advanced in their planning and preemption. What would it look like if we planned like that?

netscience: Scientific collaborations in network science (2006)
A coauthorship network among scientists working on network science, from 2006. This network is a one-mode projection from the bipartite graph of authors and their scientific publications.
This network has 1589 nodes and 2742 edges.
Tags: Social, Collaboration, Weighted, Projection

“I don’t think it’s totally percolated into the popular consciousness that birds are dinosaurs,” said Prof Steve Brusatte.
“They are real, true dinosaurs. This is not a turn of phrase.”
“It’s not like a T rex mutated into a chicken one day, and that’s how you got a bird from a dinosaur,” says Brusatte.
“It was a long, gradual process of evolution through natural selection.”
As Brusatte notes, features including feathers and wings initially had nothing to do with flight…

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.

dblp_coauthor_snap: DBLP authors (2012)
A coauthorship network extracted from the DBLP computer science manuscript database, in 2012. This network is a one-mode projection from the bipartite graph of computer scientists and their publications.
This network has 425957 nodes and 1049866 edges.
Tags: Social, Collaboration, Unweighted, Metadata, Projection

dblp_coauthor_snap: DBLP authors (2012)
A coauthorship network extracted from the DBLP computer science manuscript database, in 2012. This network is a one-mode projection from the bipartite graph of computer scientists and their publications.
This network has 425957 nodes and 1049866 edges.
Tags: Social, Collaboration, Unweighted, Metadata, Projection

dblp_coauthor_snap: DBLP authors (2012)
A coauthorship network extracted from the DBLP computer science manuscript database, in 2012. This network is a one-mode projection from the bipartite graph of computer scientists and their publications.
This network has 425957 nodes and 1049866 edges.
Tags: Social, Collaboration, Unweighted, Metadata, Projection