Tootfinder

In my January 23, 2026, “The Universe” column,
I wrote about some of the biggest bangs the universe has to offer:
exploding stars, hiccupping magnetars, stellar disruptions and colliding black holes.
These all deserve deeper dives,
but perhaps black holes deserve one most of all because, technically speaking,
they do provide the deepest dive you can physically take.
They also make very big bangs indeed, with their collisions rapidly releasing almost inco…

Has there ever been a cooler term for the inhabitants of a space station?!? Or could we make some up: Salyutins, Mirages, ISSlings perhaps ... ;-) From #Skylab

General query: are you anticipating the return of 1974 gas lines and perhaps even/odd gasoline filling days?
(I am.)
By-the-way, when that was happening I would go fill my car at midnight - a time when it was ambiguous whether the day was an even one or an odd one.

Did I add fancy CSS scanlines effect to my website? Perhaps.
Did it take me a few months to recall the correct name for the effect? Definitely.
#nostalgia #retro

Series A, Episode 09 - Project Avalon
JENNA: It's all right, relax, I'll go and get it for you.
CALLY: You just rest for a while. Perhaps we could talk later. I've admired your work for the resistance for a long time. [Chevner looks strangely at Avalon.]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/109/329

@…

Indeed. And it's not just European politicians sane-washing Trump, also European media which is perhaps even more damaging.

Sadly, as we try to salvage it we need to work with the premise that NATO might already be doomed. So unfortunately European countries really need to invest more on defense and even mor…

Anecdotal information seems to suggest that the cost of posting a #preprint is less than 0.25% of the cost of a typical APC. In other words, publishing in a typical peer reviewed journal is some 400 times more expensive than posting a preprint. Does pre-publication peer review really improve scientific information by a factor of 400? Might post-publication perhaps offer more cost-efficient poss…

a reliable source has relayed that perhaps the flight attendant in fact said “infant life vests” which, in fairness to my ego, seems equally implausible

Raiders Receive Big Geno Smith Take for 2026 Season https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/big-geno-smith-take-2026-season/

There’s a lesson here, perhaps, about the tangled relationship between what is •typical• and what is •correct•, and what it is that LLMs actually do:
When medical professionals ask medical questions in technical medical language, the answers they get are typically correct.
When non-professional ask medical questions in a perhaps medically ill-formed vernacular mode, the answers they get are typically wrong.
The LLM readily models both of these things. Despite having no notion of correctness in either case, correctness is more statistically typical in one than the other.
3/

I'm ever so slowly working my way through some thoughts on the relationship between art and human society and evolution. Without succumbing to instrumentalism, I have come to see the capacity to create and enjoy art perhaps one of the defining essenses of being human.
In brief, art enables us to imagine the impossible—or, perhaps, our ability to imagine the impossible is first expressed through art—and thus enables innovation and change at both an individual and societal level. Als…

And this is exactly what I was afraid of. Maybe someone at #AMD should take a look at this. If currently they are not too busy sucking up to Microsoft and Sony.

What we're seeing with #theforkiverse has worked before and can work again. Community leaders have proven they can build communities in places like discord and it would be super cool if there were clear reasons for them to choose fediverse platforms.
Not sure if there are clear ways to promote it. Perhaps more focus on instance customization (tbh plugins would help).

Dumbest goal we've conceded this year? ✅
Unnecessarily fancy and perhaps a bit of showboating.
#LFC

Every few years, the tires on your car wear thin and need to be replaced.
But where does that lost tire material go?
The answer, unfortunately, is often waterways,
where the tiny microplastic particles from the tires’ synthetic rubber carry several chemicals that can transfer into fish, crabs and perhaps even the people who eat them.
Millions of metric tons of plastic waste enter the world’s oceans every year.
In recent times, tire wear particles have been found t…

Since the trumpies don't want to refund the illegal tariffs, perhaps we could pay our taxes with affidavits that say "pull the amount from my tariff refund"?

A new #Nextcloud adventure: having installed the new Social refactoring and passed the webfinger and ssl tests, was still unable to load some profiles and no interactions went out or came in.
Then I noticed PullRequest-5 - not knowing at all what I was doing - so I installed gh, authorized it, did the pull, composer, run sequence, and while the existing open tab for Social continued as before, 'Social' was now gone from the NC admin and menu!
"app": "core",
"method": "GET",
"url": "/settings/apps/list",
"message": "Could not read app info file for app \"social\""
Google/DDG are mute on what or where an app info file might be, and NC docs only say you can register an app and maybe perhaps the tarball will contain one? Perhaps the PR munged it? 🤷
So a new adventure begins …

#Shitpost #Shitposting #ShamelesslyStolenFromSomewhereElseOnTheInternetHonestlyICantKeepTrackOfThisStuffAnymore

The #UCL World Cancer Day: Public Lecture streamed on Youtube is very (over)optimistic about the role of AI in drug design and in silico clinical trials (ouch). Computer people always overestimate the reliability of data. One day, perhaps (and perhaps not).
https://www…

Machine Learning techniques are upending multiple scientific fields. Operational 5-day forecasting of air quality in 1 minute in this paper from Chinese researchers.
This is awesome work with very clear public health implications.
EDIT for clarity: I am.not suggesting LLMs have anything to do with this work, but many people hear AI and imagine LLMs. And many of them.are perhaps rightly sceptical of AI as a result.
But AI or ML techniques can be useful for lots of things, not just chatbots. And we should probably invest more in those.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10234-y

Opposing Forces
#poetry #poetrycommunity Yet another morning poem that started as a half-waking image. I thought of burning ice cream.If it exists, I do not know.If it does, perhaps it is brandyOn smooth vanilla cream thatThe waiter ignites with a wand.Or is it our country, in fie…

The thing that Renee Good now knows, that Tortuguita knows, that Heather Heyer knows, that I only know because I glimpsed for a second, is that when you die fighting oppression you live forever in that memory of resistance. When we carve their names into a monument, along with all the other names of the murdered and disappeared, that will stand, perhaps, across from the statue of Willem in the park where the Northwest Detention Center once stood, they will always be reminders of what it looks like to sacrifice everything in order to be on the right side of history.
The names of those who resist live as ghosts, summoned by name to haunt future oppressors, summoned by name to awaken our own conscience to the call. Martyrs, whispered like the White Rose or yelled as a threat like John Brown, cannot die so long as any of us with a bit of spine carries even an ounce of humanity.
It is possible to die knowing you did the right thing, and I have felt it. There is an acceptance that is impossible to imagine without being there, without feeling it for yourself. You have nothing to fear in resisting, even if it ends you. But you will never forget the shame of doing nothing if you fail to.

“Perhaps, nothing is abnormal about Operation Epic Fury. It’s what ‘forever wars’ America does; especially when led by a psychologically impaired president. Perhaps, however, something more disturbing is at issue. America is in decline … What is ‘epic’ about American ‘fury’ is that [it] is the murderous folly of a flailing, failing empire.”

Solak: The Bears are a second-half team, and you can never count them out https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/47574846/nfl-playoffs-wildcard-bears-packers-comeback-second-half-adjustments-williams-loveland

Clearly, Pam Bondi's performance was strategic.
It was part of her goal of deflecting attention away from Trump and the fact that his name appears more than a million times in files related to Jeffrey Epstein that were released by the Department of Justice, according to Raskin.
She beclowned herself and perhaps it worked.
Most headlines were a variation of the Daily News’: “Bondi shouts down Democrats in hearing on Epstein files release delays.” 
At one point, t…

I Watched 6 Hours of DOGE Bro Testimony. Here's What They Had to Say For Themselves https://www.404media.co/i-watched-6-hours-of-doge-bro-testimony-heres-what-they-had-to-say-for-themselves/

Perhaps LLMs can generate code because _writing 99% of code is trivial once you know what the software should do_.
But what do I know, I only have made software for 35 years.

Do we have a groundhog aggregator? A site where one can consult all the predictions, perhaps with an option to weigh each in relation to its distance from a certain point on the Earth's surface (I want to know what's coming exactly where I live)? Perhaps one that would also account for non-traditional responses and their meanings: dead or AWOL animals, bitten handlers, extreme weather?

Perhaps an MP could ask if the Ministry of Defence AI system would have access to, or control of, the UK military satellite network?
https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2026-02-03/110534/

After the Trump regime has been defeated, the people could perhaps subject their crimes to trials in an appropriate place:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg,_Pennsylvania?wprov=sfti1

"But should we be surprised by this chaos? As senior editor Jack Mirkinson writes, “The president is a congenital liar who loses a little more brain function with each passing day.” Perhaps there’s another reason we’re now at war, however: Israel has been longing for one. And “that has the potential to erode both the US-Israeli relationship and Israel’s already shaky standing with the American people,” Mirkinson notes."
#USPolitics

Part 3 - Moving forward
One of Mastodon's strengths is its decentralized structure. That also means no centralized marketing or development strategy focused on growth, particularly in Canada. Perhaps a volunteer group could take on that development plan and grow the Canadian user base.
- A vision of what an ideal future state would look like would benefit the planning and action steps. Collecting input from Canadian admins is recommended.
- We shouldn't burden existing admins beyond their current responsibilities. Volunteers would take actions like reaching out to politicians or government agencies.
Potential next steps:
1) Host a web meeting with interested Canadian admins to collect input on a shared vision for this project.
2) Collect volunteers who would be interested in reaching out to politicians or government agencies about creating a presence on Mastodon.
3) Select members of the group to be part of a steering committee.
4) Create a unique hashtag for this project for reporting and followers.

Recent #Mastodon releases have introduced new features, at the cost of growing web UI clutter. I hate the additional clicks required for the most common actions, but perhaps it's an acceptable cost?
https://github.com/mas…

Wouldn't it be great if Starlink satellites would start falling on cars repeatedly violating parking laws? I mean, it's a gain-gain-gain situation: carbrains get punished, we get rid of shit from the orbit, and perhaps someone will finally get to Elon's ass.
#CarBrain

RE: https://mastodon.social/@PeteTucker/116183179106456579
Perhaps this really is worthy of our attention and thought. Consolidation of power in a few hands has never turned out well.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@PeteTucker/116183179106456579
Perhaps this really is worthy of our attention and thought. Consolidation of power in a few hands has never turned out well.

if there is trouble with impersonation accounts being created en-masse, perhaps open registration is not a good idea?
#subtoot #mastodon #spam

"Even as the Earth is in peril, there is an absurd unwillingness to move beyond the status quo. Action must rise from the margins, as movements always do."
—Janet Smith-Rushton ’78 M.Div. writing in the new issue of Reflections, in her piece titled "Let’s Get Down to Earth Again."

So yeah, as @… is perhaps implying, part of the reason you don’t see it is that the mainstream press is under-covering everything that’s happening in Minneapolis.
BUT! There’s a second reason you might not know about this activity, equally important: the activity that followed the murder of George Floyd — rallies, protests, marches, police riots — was of a highly visible sort. What I see now is much more community infrastructure work: neighborhood organizing, watching for ICE, delivering food. That happened in 2020 too, but the scale of it now…!
https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/115857252713224712

SAP is perhaps the antithesis of flexibility, which is why it is often used in complex administrative systems, such as those found in many energy companies. So it's good news that there is now a module available to link Enode's flexibility engine, which works with a wide range of consumer devices.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@caseynewton/115845484404118608
GDI. I was in two minds about the original post, partly because it isn't hard to believe that Uber, DoorDash, GrubHub, etc are ruthlessly exploiting their workers (perhaps even going beyon…

#Blakes7 Series B, Episode 08 - Hostage
JOBAN: I supported your appointment. Perhaps I was wrong.
SERVALAN: Perhaps you were. There's a first time for everything, Joban.
JOBAN: I've always admired your willingness to take risks.
https:/…

What if every one of us signed up with ICE, (perhaps collecting a signing bounty), did the training, and then did nothing and waited for them to fire us?

Trump:
“I’ll avoid foreign military entanglements” ... “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” - January 20, 2025
“I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars.” - November 6, 2024
“Great nations do not fight endless wars… As a candidate for president, I loudly pledged a new approach. Great nations do not fight endless wars.” - February 5, 2019

"Solar farms can be havens for rare plants. Just ask the threecorner milkvetch."
#SolarPower #Energy #Renewables

I remember Dunblane shootings happening as clear as anything, I did not know that 2 opposing politicians, both with links to the town, were witness to the crime scene directly afterwards. I imagine this was key to get the legislation banning hand guns through.

Perhaps the US could learn from this approach when it comes to school shootings?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp9m8zmxe25o

We won't even bother to put this into Dataplane's extended weekly Internet Last Week report: A 46 second "major outage" on APNIC's WHOIS serving North America. Sounds like something automatically recovered quickly, perhaps from a software crash or routing anomaly?

(Perhaps the system should never be trusted and community protection should *always* be a community project.)

Apparently last week's improv class, which I missed, did indeed talk about a story spine, a template I first heard from a Pixar story course:
Once upon a time there was... And every day they would.. Until one day... And because of that... (repeat 'because' till end)...
And this week was concentrating mostly on the first bits: Playing out some scenes introducing characters, setting up their normal routine.
The nature of improv can be tricky here. Things spiral out of control quite fast. Things start happening immediately, without time to build that normal routine which you then break.
Take for instance the scene tonight at an airport. Lady rushes in: "Get me on a place as far away from here as possible, right now".
Its a great offer, but hardly a normal routine for a person. Can you really have a person whose daily routine is to fly to the furthest place they can get to immediately?
Perhaps a flashback to their normal routine then? Or perhaps make the staff the protagonist and their daily routine is to deal with crazy customers.
Character is key in the early scenes of a narrative really. Get the audience to identify with a protagonist. Who are these people, how do they know each other and what's their normal life like?
#improv #hooplaImpro #london

RE: https://newsie.social/@Tendar/115833199614876660
Perhaps because it was about oil and regime change?
And the "please, please, please, speak about ANYTHING but Epstein, please" factor?
🤔

What had the Lady Jessica to sustain her in her time of trial? Think you carefully on this Bene Gesserit proverb and perhaps you will see: "Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain."
- from "Muad'Dib: Family Commentaries" by the Princess Irulan

> I am watching ICE agents shoot a nurse in Minneapolis, and half the country believes the verified video of his previous encounter with federal agents is a deepfake. I am watching the infrastructure of verification get systematically dismantled by an administration that understands, perhaps better than anyone, that ambiguity is power. I am watching the epistemic commons burn while we argue about whether the fire is real....

GrapheneOS update no.1:
I'm sure my phone is much more secure without any fucking software on it, which was clearly the objective of these design decisions. In fact, why don't I smash it with a hammer and throw it in the pond? That'll be even safer. Perhaps I could even install OpenVMS first just to make sure nobody will be able to do anything with the remains. After all, the real purpose of a device is to be unusable by anyone, because that is the most secure possible post…

Perhaps the good thing about The vOICe vision BCI is that it is not easy but hard, preventing AI brain rot #AI

The Karpeles Museum,
a true hidden gem of downtown Santa Barbara
and an important free museum for all to visit,
is set to close because the building is being sold.
Perhaps some local collective or organization could buy the building and continue to lease the collection of documents and artifacts from the Karpeles family?
The building has an upstairs and courtyard that would be a perfect venue for all sorts of live events
— in the not-so-distant past the …

Question to #English speakers. I've heard a weird pronunciation of the Polish "PKP" initialiasm in the English passenger information on some PKP InterCity trains, and I'm wondering if anyone could explain it to me.
The Polish pronunciation is roughly "peh-kah-peh" /pɛ ka pɛ/. I imagined the English would pronounce it as "pee-kay-pee" /piː keɪ piː/. However, it is pronounced as "peh-kah-pey" /pɛ ka pɛɪ/. Any clue why the ending was changed like that?
[EDIT: it was immediately followed by "Intercity", so perhaps it made combining both easier.]

"We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves." 
https://www.tumblr.com/teledyn/804558448435068928?source=share

Local Computation Algorithms for (Minimum) Spanning Trees on Expander Graphs
Pan Peng, Yuyang Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07394 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.07394 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.07394
arXiv:2602.07394v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study \emph{local computation algorithms (LCAs)} for constructing spanning trees. In this setting, the goal is to locally determine, for each edge $ e \in E $, whether it belongs to a spanning tree $ T $ of the input graph $ G $, where $ T $ is defined implicitly by $ G $ and the randomness of the algorithm. It is known that LCAs for spanning trees do not exist in general graphs, even for simple graph families. We identify a natural and well-studied class of graphs -- \emph{expander graphs} -- that do admit \emph{sublinear-time} LCAs for spanning trees. This is perhaps surprising, as previous work on expanders only succeeded in designing LCAs for \emph{sparse spanning subgraphs}, rather than full spanning trees. We design an LCA with probe complexity $ O\left(\sqrt{n}\left(\frac{\log^2 n}{\phi^2} d\right)\right)$ for graphs with conductance at least $ \phi $ and maximum degree at most $ d $ (not necessarily constant), which is nearly optimal when $\phi$ and $d$ are constants, since $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$ probes are necessary even for expanders. Next, we show that for the natural class of \emph{\ER graphs} $ G(n, p) $ with $ np = n^{\delta} $ for any constant $ \delta > 0 $ (which are expanders with high probability), the $ \sqrt{n} $ lower bound can be bypassed. Specifically, we give an \emph{average-case} LCA for such graphs with probe complexity $ \tilde{O}(\sqrt{n^{1 - \delta}})$.
Finally, we extend our techniques to design LCAs for the \emph{minimum spanning tree (MST)} problem on weighted expander graphs. Specifically, given a $d$-regular unweighted graph $\bar{G}$ with sufficiently strong expansion, we consider the weighted graph $G$ obtained by assigning to each edge an independent and uniform random weight from $\{1,\ldots,W\}$, where $W = O(d)$. We show that there exists an LCA that is consistent with an exact MST of $G$, with probe complexity $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{n}d^2)$.
toXiv_bot_toot

Nobody uses this sanitized version. Perhaps a priest might.
https://fantastic.earth/@deobald/115766324222092369

Microsoft is working hard on making themselves irrelevant, doubling down on all the most hated shit in Windows 11.
Perhaps Linux will actually make it big now.
https://tech4gamers.com/windows-12-reportedly-relasing-2026-modular-ai-focused-os/

RE: #circadian component to daily growth rhythms in giant clam shells. Neat study!
I love seeing the biological clock (perhaps) recorded in a such a durable way in nature.

@… @… 1 to Anders as a very good standard middle aged dude sort of name.
For whatever reason, Bob also makes my mind jump straight to Bo. A tad more on the old school end, but perhaps just because it has similar soun…

@… I also think that as a stop gap it would help if both proects offered some official API to query what the latest version is and perhaps offered RSS/ATOM feeds of updates so that knowledgeable users could subscribe to that and be notified right away, direct from the source.

#Shitpost #Shitposting #ShamelesslyStolenFromSomewhereElseOnTheInternetHonestlyICantKeepTrackOfThisStuffAnymore

At the beginning of every new semester, I reflect on how much work I have that my professorial forebears did not. Email is perhaps the most obvious, and it certainly occupies more time than I'd like. Attention to the bureaucratic demands on syllabus composition is also way more demanding than it should be. Canvas is the one, though, that rankles the most in terms of time suck.
I can't imagine any of the crusty old men who taught at my university in the mid-20th century doing an…

Series B, Episode 03 - Weapon
RASHEL: Perhaps that creature drove the people away.
COSER: I doubt it. Raw materials ran out more like.
RASHEL: Perhaps that was the only one.
COSER: Perhaps, perhaps! Just get on with it, will you?!
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/203/397 B7B3<…

Do Trump and Netanyahu perhaps dream of an 'Endlösung' of sorts, absurd as it is?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/07/iran-trump-unconditional-surrender-war-masoud-pezeshkian?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Othe…

Browns' Jimmy Haslam confident Myles Garrett will 'break the sack record again' despite Jim Schwartz's exit https://www.nfl.com/news/browns-jimmy-haslam-confident-myles-garrett-will-break-the-sack-rec…

While JDVance allowed that perhaps Renee Good was not trying to ram the ICE agent,
Trump stated that she did it, and did it on purpose.
Noem also cast this as deliberate, calling it “an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents.”
This is not some minor, pedantic point.
The administration cast a woman who had just died as deliberately assaulting a law enforcement officer
and engaging in “domestic terrorism.”
Those are not small allegations, espe…

I recognize that the Sheriff is an independent agency, but you might suppose that people like the Mayor and Supervisors might demonstrate a little concern.
A month of cold showers and vomit in S.F. jail, arrestees say
https://missionlocal.org/2026/02/sf-jail-filth-cold-show…

I recognize that the Sheriff is an independent agency, but you might suppose that people like the Mayor and Supervisors might demonstrate a little concern.
A month of cold showers and vomit in S.F. jail, arrestees say
https://missionlocal.org/2026/02/sf-jail-filth-cold-show…

So, I kinda got wondering about the sequel of SpaceBalls that is being filmed.
I do hope they have some evil characters they can make fun of, perhaps in some sort of "Springtime for Hitler" dance number.
With an evil dance crew led by "Little Emperor Dump", his daughter "I Vahnt Ewe" and son-in-law "Harelip Cushion", sons "Dump (the dumpster) Jr." and "Whatshiz Name". With courtiers IShootem, IDeportem, and ImDrunk.)

Perhaps I'm not really using the right words.
I think I don't care about backups as much as I want seemless cloud file sync.
dropbox has not been seemless. Google drive does not seem to be working on KDE.
#ubuntu

Finding a crate of ancient but precious CD-R and DVD-R's is like finding a chest of scrolls in the basement of a temple that burned down. There's a welcome prize, but many frustratingly missing fragments.
Back in 1994 when asked about the (very popular) bank of Compaq gaming machines packed with latest CDROMs being a core of the Information Highway exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre (god rest its soul), I would explain that the CDROM was a proxy for the bandwidth that was to come.
I think I got that more right than I knew: the CD-R/DVD-R is a TRANSPORT media, and certainly absolutely NOT a STORAGE media. It's charm is transport over very very very slow baud rates of perhaps 4GB/20 years. 😅

Wonder why anyone in Aotearoa NZ is celebrating RocketLab's US launch in aid of the US military. For his own gain and glory, Peter Beck (I don't see justification for his honourific) betrayed the trust of the kaumātua of Mahia Peninsula and sold us all out to perhaps the least honourable country in the world these days. Here's the story if you haven't already seen it:

Venezuela, a thread 🧵:
It is simultaneously true that the US has never cared about international law *and* that the current action is egregiously bad, even for us. The first point is self-obviously true - not only from the general POV (Iraq and Afghanistan are perhaps my generation's most obvious examples) but from LatAm's POV as well (look up the list of coups and covert operations in North and South America over the last 70 years).
1/?

The US military has always had a massive global advantage against enemies by having bases all over the world. There are bases in every NATO country. This would appear to be a powerful threat to anyone willing to oppose American hegemon, and under normal conditions it would be.
But a lot of those kids serving on those bases joined, not because they love America but, because they needed a ticket out of poverty. They joined for the education, for the money, maybe a bit for the adventure, but, more than anything, to escape the ghetto or podunk backwater that trapped them. Under normal times, this is the best deal they could expect. Maybe they risk their lives, usually they sit around being bored for a few years, and they get to come out with respect and paid college.
But what they are being offered is normal in most of the countries they're stationed in. Free healthcare, cheap or free education, is just what citizens in a lot of countries have come to expect. If the US attacked a NATO country, how many would snap up citizenship if they were given a chance to defect? Bonus points for taking some hardware with you, I'm sure.
But there are some who love their country. There are some patriotic Americans on those bases. Some of them joined specifically to protect the US from all enemies, foreign *and* domestic. Given a chance to fulfill that oath or violate international law, what happens?
There are a good number of former military folks too who now are unsafe in the countries they served, who would do just about anything for citizenship in any EU country and almost any NATO ally. Some of those folks know things they swore an oath to never share, but the country they swore an oath to has betrayed them. Today there's no value in leaking those secrets, but in a war between the US and NATO allies things would be different. Some of those former military folks still believe in their oath, and know exactly who the real enemy is. What happens when there's a real threat of war, when they can use their knowledge to fulfill that oath to protect the US against those domestic threats?
There are a bunch of civilian tech workers who have become targets of the regime. Some of them had clearance, or know about the skeletons in the closet. They know about critical infrastructure, classified systems, all sorts of things that would be extremely valuable to an opponent. But the opponents of the US have always been a frightening *other*, never familiar societies these folks look up to, have visited, have thought about moving to, are trying to escape to.
All I'm saying here is that invading Venezuela and kidnapping the president has a very different calculus than does attacking Greenland. I don't know if Trump or his people are able to understand that, but if he and his folks aren't then I hope European leaders are. But more than that, I hope it never comes down to finding out.
But perhaps we should all think about what we would do to make sure things ended quickly if American leadership ever made such an incredible mistake.

This may be the only beautiful things coming out of the US in the dark times Americans face, its hidden, its underground, but ultimately that’s the real spirit, perhaps the living proof not all is lost.
❤️ https://www.patrickrhone.net/16950-2/

Chad Mizelle, a former chief of staff to Attorney General Pam Bondi,
hung an online help wanted sign for federal prosecutors last weekend
that perhaps explained 🔸why so many valuable Justice Department staff members have left, and 🔸why so few candidates want in.
Assistant U.S. attorneys are not typically recruited, as Mr. Mizelle sought to do, by a former federal employee who 👉asks potential candidates to send a private message to his X account.
Nor have they been ask…

Series C, Episode 10 - Ultraworld
DAYNA: Well, she looks all right. She's breathing normally. Perhaps the Ultras were telling us the truth.
TARRANT: I don't know. Avon?
AVON: They've presented no threat so far.
TARRANT: Maybe they're biding their time.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/310/245

For Marshawn Lynch, that Super Bowl play was about far more than 1 yard https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7026143/2026/02/06/marshawn-lynch-super-bowl-playcall-seahawks-patriots/

If you are a US voter, your Senator could perhaps stand to hear — again — that Schumer’s list is insufficient and abolishing ICE now has majority support.
Very soon the electoral stuff will become completely useless again, but for a hot minute here, until this budget fight ends and Schumer caves, those calls do help.

Perhaps a tad more slowly than the asteroid striking the earth some 66 million years ago, man striking oil less than 200 years ago may have a similar effect of eradicating three quarters of all living species. A few hundred years is an instant if seen on a geological time scale.

I realise on the fediverse this is maybe asking for a flaming, but yesterday out of sheer curiosity I tried Claude for a simpleish coding task that I'd been putting off (largely inspired by @… 's latest on #theclimatebrink). The performance of Claude was seriously impressive. I am convinced the AI cycle is more than hype (and have been for a while), the chatbots have been a huge attention hogger, misleadingly so, while the serious work has been done elsewhere. (We are developing ML tools to supplement parts of our climate model workflows).
Now I'm wondering if there is any serious EU competition to Anthropic? - Mistral's codestral perhaps?
Because this kind of performance changes everything and we can't afford to lag behind...
#AIcoding #ML
Edit: here is the climate brink post I mentioned
https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-ai-augmented-scientist

I can understand maybe not being able to comprehend this due to age (he's 79).
But there's a lot of young people who don't have problems with images like these which show wrong things, make up stuff that's weird, look creepy and misspell text.
I wonder if perhaps repeated COVID infections contribute to people's mental decline that is similar to age-related mental issues.

This is not a unique story. I saw this happen to a friend of mine in the Upper Fillmore 20 years ago; I've read this story repeatedly. Perhaps it's time to look at more than just asking landlords to move more quickly? A host of options come to mind: A fast track lane for permits, a revolving fund for financial assistance, and requirements on PG&E on the incentive side; perhaps eminent domain into small sites for a stick?
3 years after fire, tenants long to return to I…

This is not a unique story. I saw this happen to a friend of mine in the Upper Fillmore 20 years ago; I've read this story repeatedly. Perhaps it's time to look at more than just asking landlords to move more quickly? A host of options come to mind: A fast track lane for permits, a revolving fund for financial assistance, and requirements on PG&E on the incentive side; perhaps eminent domain into small sites for a stick?
3 years after fire, tenants long to return to I…

Dear Fedi, what should I do if my cat is awfully electrostatic? Should I get her some kind of grounding harness? Or perhaps one of these tapes that cars carry behind them?

Series B, Episode 08 - Hostage
AVON: Yes, it is. I don't trust him
VILA: Why.
AVON: When he saw Blake go, he had a limp. When he went back into the cave, he didn't have a limp.
VILA: Perhaps he's a fast healer.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/208/414 B7B3

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.

Decisions last year by the
Board of Immigration Appeals,
perhaps acting at the direction of Donald Trump,
have unleashed a torrent of cases on federal courts
where detained migrants are seeking a bond hearing
long seen as their right,
an El Paso federal judge said in an interview with El Paso Matters.
⭐️“The law has always been that they’re entitled to a bond hearing,
⛔️but last year, the immigration appeals court changed it,
just out of t…

Series A, Episode 02 - Space Fall
AVON: Have you ever met an honest man?
JENNA: [Glances at Blake] Perhaps.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/102/399 B7B2

I am mixed on this one...
On one hand I can see the risk of having Chinese people in China work on (which means "have access to", and often "have privileged access to") US DoD systems.
However, I don't see the other half of the issue - What do do about people who are not in China (perhaps in the US, even US citizens) who are, or have been induced, to use their access to promote the interests of a foreign power?
Given that under Cheato the US is dumbi…

Series A, Episode 08 - Duel
SINOFAR: Giroc, Giroc, I need you. You must come here to me now.
GIROC: All right, all right, I'm coming. [Giroc comes in. She is an elderly woman who clutches a six-foot staff of office, carved on it is a humanoid figure climbing toward the ball-shaped tip.] Have a little patience. We of all people should have learnt patience. I'm tired, I deserve some peace.

The Italian neurosurgeon
#Sergio #Canavero has been preparing for a surgery that might never happen.
His idea?
⚠️Swap a sick person’s head—or perhaps just the brain—onto a younger, healthier body.
Canavero caused a stir in 2017 when he announced that a team he advised in China had exchanged head…

Donald Trump announced he is pulling the National Guard from Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland,
although the troops already had a limited presence because those states had sued to block their deployment.

Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social that troops would return if “crime begins to soar again.”

The Trump administration has been battling lawsuits aimed at removing the National Guard from cities in blue states.

“We will come back, perhaps in a much differ…