Tootfinder

"The Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex (MDSCC) in Robledo de Chavela was evacuated on July 24 due to the wildfires. All personnel are safe following the passage of the fire through the area. [...] Mission operations have been transferred seamlessly to the Goldstone Complex (California). This ensures service continuity and uninterrupted support for spacecraft communications." From the thread #DeepSpaceNetwork

Raiders have the talent but now comes the pressure https://raiderramble.com/2026/07/25/raiders-have-the-talent-but-now-comes-the-pressure/

Just finished "The Terraformers" by Annalee Newitz (@…). It was recommended as a "solarpunk" book, and I'm currently on a quest to find more speculative fiction as good as Le Guin or Butler, so I was eager to dig in. Having tagged the author (hi) I'll try to be polite here, but I'll admit I was disappointed.
Newitz clearly has a powerful imagination and there's lots of great stuff in the book, but it's not at all pushing boundaries in terms of imagining future societies. I think the message and intent was good in a lot of places, but off or self-contradictory in others. I absolutely adore the relatively small point made at the end about revolutions being complicated and not boiling down to heroes and battles, but despite the book's attempt to avoid that, I think it still falls into that pattern. Without too many spoilers, the way that some big problems are resolved near the end leans too much on a legal framework without questioning how it's enforced, and that resolution then means that a few heroic acts are enough to tip the balance, which undermines the point about messy histories.
The biggest contradiction of the book to my mind though is with a central theme. The book really explores a world in which "anyone of any species can be a person, as long as we just bioengineer them to be intelligent enough," and it tries to make a point about how engineering limited intelligences is cruel. At several points characters comment about how personhood shouldn't depend on intelligence. There's even a brief quote about how maybe rivers could be people... But... the point could have been "anyone can be a person, regardless of intelligence." This would have made for much more interesting philosophical territory to explore IMO (how do we then bound personhood; how do we reconcile predator/prey relations between persons, etc.). These are also questions that the indigenous traditions Newitz draws on (and consulted about, as mentioned in the acknowledgements) has interesting answers for, but we don't get to explore them through Newitz' world, and because the question of personhood regresses to the question of intelligence, it feels like the moral philosophy of the ERT folks isn't any better than the "InAss" they disparage.
It's not a bad book overall, even if it doesn't engage with the questions I'm hungry to see others engage with. Newitz' efforts to sketch out a more vibrant and diverse future are still monumental and inspiring in a lot of ways. I'm just still looking for something more. Ultimately, I think it lives up to the "solar" but not very much to the "punk."
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

I tried to write something up to talk about an idea, but it didn't quite work. I have a lot more I need to put into it. But I want to get an idea out, and, after talking with a person who pointed out some of the flaws in what I wrote, I think I can maybe write down the kernel of the idea here.
An acquaintance of mine did a deep dive on Operational Art and wrote his thesis (which prompted an earlier set of posts and an article I wrote for my professional-ish blog) on the intersection of the OODA loop and critical philosophy. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about Kilcullen's Three Pillars model (after watching Andrewism's wonderful video) and Beer's VSM. The TL;DR of it is that there's a much better insurgency model. Of course, the insurgency model also works for a bunch of other things, because cybernetics lets you do all kinds of cool abstraction like that.
So as I was reading the essay of a comrade the other day, that model popped back into my head and I'm going to try to share what I can of it.
When colonizers came to the Salish region, they saw what they believed to be an untouched wilderness. They failed to see the ways in which Salish people tended the land. Indigenous fire practices were common on the northwest coast, and the suppression of those practices remains a problem. There is an interrelationship between an environment and the systems within it. Systems, like people, animals, and cultures, adapt to the environment. In doing so, those systems will also change the environment.
Social technology was invisible, so colonizers defaulted to either some kind of Rousseauvian or Malthusian model of these people. They were not, for the colonizers, people who had developed advanced social technologies to live in harmony with their world. They were, rather, people in "a state of nature."
The European influenced left continues to draw this Rousseauvian model, which continues through a lot of Anarchist revolutionary thought. European anarchists were heavily influenced by observations and theories around the behavior of indigenous people. The remnants of this thought still exist in the idea that the system must only be destroyed for us to be free.
This is the same obliviousness to social technology, that social technology actually exists, often informs both early colonizers and modern radicals.
It is through this obliviousness that we fail to recognize how capitalism is a social technology that is managed into existence and maintained, and how changes in the environment can threaten institutions that have become over-adapted to a specific version of that environment.
We can extend Kilcullen's metaphor of a "conflict ecosystem" through cybernetics into a much more rich model, populated by viable systems. The ecosystem itself has a fitness function, which drives adaptation within the environment. But all actors in the environment also affect it. Some try to manage the environment. Revolutions are often over who manages a social ecosystem, over who controls the social technology and what it does.
Once we see this dynamic at play, calls of "riot" and "revolution" make a whole lot less sense. Rather, the question becomes, "how do we change the ecosystem in such a way that it cannot be 'managed' at all?"
Graeber/Wengrow talked about Turtle Island indigenous social technologies in Dawn of Everything, such as the system of moieties and clans described in the book. So I have a good reading list as I think through this model, but I hope the "ecosystem" model is helpful (if not completely fleshed out).
I'd be interested in any critiques or thoughts to help develop this idea more.

So why, all the sudden, would it be really high in nutrients?
My guess is they refilled it with city water.
Washington DC like most major metropolitan areas, adds orthophosphate to the water for lead corrosion control.
It works beautifully for this,
but orthophosphate is also a bioavailable form of phosphate,
aka algae food!

I saw this and I instantly thought of @… because somehow he had become the most salient reference node for revolting arthropods and we all know why.
https://www.instagram…

Pelfs Pets on Instagram: "To answer some questions from the first reel! No, she will not eat these babies and she will not be eaten by them. Only a very few South American species practice matriphagy and she is not one of them. Yes, she will spend every last second from the time she lays eggs until they molt and leave her standing gaurd protecting and constantly cleaning them. At this stage mold growth can take them out very easily and thats why you see her constantly licking them clean. We have about 20 more days before their first molt and then theyll start wonder away from her. Thats when I'll separate them all and give them their first meal!!! Thanks for watching please feel free to ask questions and LIKE SHARE AND FOLLOW for more amazing centipede content!!!"
18K likes, 277 comments - wvcentipedeguy on May 31, 2026: "To answer some questions from the first reel! No, she will not eat these babies and she will not be eaten by them. Only a very few South American species practice matriphagy and she is not one of them. Yes, she will spend every last second from the time she lays eggs until they molt and leave her standing gaurd protecting and constantly cleaning them. At this stage mold growth can take them out very easily and thats why you see her cons…

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116713587055769588
I was actually using LLMs a couple of years ago for text classification. Before that I pushed hard for resources to support automation. I helped build an automation team where none existed. I pushed to use transformer models to solve problems before LLMs existed. I used simple ML to make predictions and classify issues. I've been on the cutting edge for a long time.
I *should* be an early adopter of the modern LLM thing. But tech oligarchs transformed themselves into reverse ouroboros (infinitely shoving their heads up their own asses). The oligarchs never really believed that other people had free will, but I think they had been too scared to let that slip. After the lockdowns, I think they just snapped and here we are.
As much as I trash LLMs, I've had a nuanced critique for a while (wiring about this now). The lack of consent is so huge. The oligarchs have plans for us, and it doesn't involve our consent.
Under different conditions, I do actually think there could be revolutionary elements to this tech (not so much LLMs themselves as LLM MCP, and not for the things they think). But without consent, I think (and hope) the friction will overcome the momentum.
"AI" is already more expensive than humans. It will never be profitable as long as people resist. There are multiplying problems, and I don't see those being fixed without collective effort. I have a lot of thoughts, but "consent" (or the real or implied lack thereof) is central to so many aspects of LLMs.
The oligarchs want to force LLM tech onto all of us without our consent. Ultimately, they want to replace us all with obedient machines. The mistake they made was assuming we would be as obedient as the LLMs with which they have become so obsessed.

OH! I forgot the whole "out of band" thing. Let me get into that.
When you put all this together you have a business owned by a church (or, in the Dutch case, an FFI) to interface with capitalism and then a community that's collectively controlled via the legal entity of a "church." (Again, I like the word "coven," but I'm trying to use the legal definition here.)
This gives you a community that exists partially outside of the dominant system. If this seems like a new idea, it is absolutely not. There are very insular religious communities all over. Many are really oppressive cults (go watch Wild Wild Country), others are insular religious communities (for which there is a lot of legitimate criticism, but I'm only talking about decipherability here) such as Haredim or Mennonites. In some ways Tribes match this also, with various tribal governments organizing things for members.
In all of these cases, there exists an element that is outside of the dominant system. This becomes somewhat "invisible." How well do you understand the inner workings of an Amish community? How much do you think a CEO cares or thinks about them?
There are many hidden worlds that only become revealed when they become a problem (such as when a cult leader tries to take over a county by spraying e. coli on a bunch of salad bars.) This can be good if you're trying to build a new society without attracting the attention, but insular communities can also permit abusive dynamics that could otherwise be identified by the larger society. So keep the risks in mind, and be active about preventing them. Hierarchy is dangerous, but hierarchy in hidden groups can be especially dangerous.