Tootfinder

if you want to read the new translation of Capital, it's 50% off until May 31st, which means there is only half as much socially-necessary labor time embodied in it
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190075/capital

Waiting for issues (read them :-) to be resolved in 0.2.1 before I curl | sudo sh
https://unix.family/@farrokhi/114584340700417951

I know that one of these days I am going to cave in and agree to pay the Grauniad £3 a month to read their site, but the amount of money I have to pay for media is not large and it mainly goes to small indy podcasts by individuals or small groups. I do have a sub to @…, which is corporate media, but that's the only exception.
There are so many rea…

This Queer Online Zine Can Only Be Read Via an Ancient Internet Protocol https://www.404media.co/queer-online-zine-new-session-telnet/

I hate Windows: "Why does the Windows Portable Executable (PE) format have separate tables for import names and import addresses?, part 2".
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20231130-00/?p=109084

Why does the Windows Portable Executable (PE) format have separate tables for import names and import addresses?, part 2 - The Old New Thing
Keeping read-only data separate from read-write data.

Irgendetwas stimmt mit nvmi nicht :(

I only read this to see if it was David Mitchell (author) or David Mitchell (comedian).
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/david-mitchell-convicted-for-covering-road-with-potatoes-and-silt

David Mitchell convicted for covering road with potatoes and silt
Huge loss of soil from potato field costs farmer over £40,000 for polluting river, with potatoes and silt escaping into the road.

Just read Fat Girls Dance by Cathleen Meredith, yet another semi-random venture into the currently-popular novels section of my library, rather than my recent YA staples. It's excellent. Fascinating and well-written just as fiction, but also empowering and perspective-upgrading (and I'm a married white cis man who is only beer-belly fat, plus already well into #BodyPositive thinking).
It bridges really well with Mama by Nikkya Hargrove, and with Does My Body Offend You by Mayra Cuevas and Marie Marquardt, both of which I went through recently. Yet another home fucking run for #OwnVoices, which felt extra good to read after Dream State was so disappointing. It really digs into and helps the reader explore body positivity just like Does My Body Offend You does with feminism.
#AmReading

this might be one of the _least_ specific (but not completely non-specific) paragraphs in any specification i've ever read

InfoWorld contributor Joydip Kanjilal reviews a group of read-only data structures in .NET Core that are optimized to allow very fast thread-safe reads over their data in comparison to plain dictionaries, lists, and hash sets.
Namely: FrozenSet and FrozenDictionary.
He also shows benchmark results, and includes a tutorial written in C#.
"How to use frozen collections in C#"

Language learning has been part of me since high school. I'm solid in 2 non-English languages, crappy but survivable in 2 others. I've played with & started learning others many times.
I'm real busy rn, but language learning could be a fun thing to do for myself & make me feel like I'm still me.
But I'm stumped about my language picks. I learnt the obvious European languages in school; later tried key Asian languages. What do I want to do now?
African languages? I won't be getting a chance to use them much in Aus, & I'm unlikely to get to a stage where I can read literature.
I tried Slovenian/Slovene on a whim & really love it, but I'll never go there. Is the practical but unfun answer grind out more kanji/hanzi? Or is whimsically learning a language spoken by only 2.5 million people reasonable? I will continue struggling through with Ukrainian, 'cause I think it's important.
#LanguageLearning

I nearly missed the fact it's been a year since I translated @… Meta in Myanmar series to Polish.
A year later, I can confidently say that series radicalized me quite a bit.
I've hated Meta products for a while, so not much has changed in that department.
However, re-reading the story of Rohingya ethnic cleansing over and over again made me grow plenty of sheer anger within me.
Anger over general injustice in the world and stuff.
My third 'era' of photography, involving documenting local activism, with particular attention to oppressed or marginalized groups (tenants, Palestinians, Belarusians - to name just a few) wouldn't have happened if I hadn't had my moment of disillusionment about the whole system we live in.
All of that because I started noticing familiar patterns I haven't been aware before. All stories that involve oppression, genocide, ethnic cleansing or any other kind of systemic cruelty started rhyming to me. Only the context and the environment kept changing.
Literally everything about my current life has changed around April 2024 and only now I'm ready to take a look at that.
Anyway. To all of you who want to read that once again:
Full series in Polish:
https://blog.lukaszwojcik.net/pl/meta-w-mjanmie/
Web Archive copy of the above:
https://archive.org/details/meta-w-mjanmie-pl
Original in English:
https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series

I read this press release and I think the only thing I found interesting was the bit about improved accessibility...
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-supercharges-its-tools-and-technologies-for-developers/

Apple supercharges its tools and technologies for developers to foster creativity, innovation, and design
Apple announced new technologies and enhancements to its developer tools to help developers create more beautiful, intelligent, and engaging apps.

Browned & tattered, I found my old, fave #scifi graphic novel from the 1970s.
Being one of my only #comics, I read this thing 10x over. Missing the last page, I actually have no idea how the last story ends. 🤷
I should see if it's on the Internet so I can find out what happens... 40…

The original Jurassic Park flick was released in U.S. theaters today (June 11) in 1993. I was 13 at the time, and had actually read Crichton's book. I was psyched to see Jurassic Park in the theater, which I did, with my family. I loved it- it was wild. I was intrigued by dinosaurs then, and still am. But this was and still is the only JP movie I've seen- I never saw any of the sequels.
I've certainly had a crush on Laura Dern ever since 😍

@… I don’t know what the actual form looks like, but if this is what authors are actually asked, this is confusing at best, since it actually only applies to print, color figures in the PDF are free, and a read & publish agreement isn’t a “pre-agreed discount.”

@… I don’t know what the actual form looks like, but if this is what authors are actually asked, this is confusing at best, since it actually only applies to print, color figures in the PDF are free, and a read & publish agreement isn’t a “pre-agreed discount.”

Ooof, this is a really depressing read: Teachers commenting on how the use of LLMs by students is affecting not only their teaching but also students' learning.
https://www.404media.co/teachers-are-not-ok-ai-chatgpt/

Just read through "Sanctuary" by Paola Mendez & Abby Sher, which was electrifying as I read news about ICE kidnappings in local towns, including one in Waltham today where they left a kid alone on the sidewalk:
#ICE #kidnappings

There's only one week left until Berlin Buzzwords! We are looking forward to welcoming you to the 16th edition of #bbuzz at Kulturbrauerei from 15 to 17 June.
Read our blog post to find out everything you need to know about your Berlin Buzzwords experience, both onsite and online:

Get ready for bbuzz 2025
Learn everything you need to know for your Berlin Buzzwords experience, whether you're attending in person or online!   When & Where We look forward to welcoming you to our Barcamp on Sunday 15 June, from 2:30 pm CEST at Palais at Kulturbrauerei (Schönhauser Allee 36, 10435 Berlin – Prenzlauer Berg). On Monday, 16 June, [...]

@… You mean, once one user on an instance can see a post, every user can?
You would have to trust that “followers only” is respected, but that’s also true for everything else. Creators on Patreon trust that I don’t forward the emails to others, or give them read-only access to my mailbox.

The only documentation I can find about using the `:custom` keyword with use-package is "The :custom keyword allows customization of package custom variables."
I have no idea how to read that.
1. Can I do (recent-mode t)?
2. If I am to set a config option like dired-dwim-target to t do I write that: (dired-dwim-target t) or (setq dired-dwim-target t)?
#Emacs #UsePackage

@… I suspect Garmin detects that you move your hand to see the watch face and it keeps that notification view up in case you read something.
In any case, the only solution is to ensure a watch shows time, always. It was annoying on Apple Watch, is annoying on Garmin.

We in Game Workers Unite Ireland stand in solidarity with Animation Workers of Ireland, and the international trade union coalition happening to organise against the threat of AI in the animation industry, and we support their call to acton.
Join them Thursday 12 June at 14:00 at the Pâquier in Annecy!!
#Animation

Calamus 17 Of him I love day and night
A disturbing poem about death, the death of a lover, the death of a city, the death of the poet. And Whitman's own dismissal of death, or at least of memorializing it.
Reading this as someone who grew up in the 80s, I can only read this in reflection on the AIDS crisis. Of my own community's deaths.
And I found that every place was a burial-place,
The houses full of life were equally full of death
The poem doesn't offer any solace in this reading. It is just a marker of death and being exposed to so much death that we are inured to it.

Useful Firefox extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/android/addon/cookie-remover/
Cookie remover.
Now the Guardian can only be read by accepting biscuits, I do so then click the extension to immediately remove them.

Cookie Remover – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox Android (en-GB)
Download Cookie Remover for Firefox. Removes cookies for the current site

Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and this more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of manservant caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.

Over the last few months, I have filtered out most USA news, so I have basically a minimal knowledge of what is happening in that part of the world. To be honest, it's great! The same goes for tech, I work long 12-hour days and weekends as a sysadmin, and the last thing I want to see after those days is tech stuff. So, I read tech news through newsletters sent to an email address I only use for that purpose.
It’s making my life more relaxed not to care about what is happening on ot…

Day 8
TL;DR: Yesterday I took a break. Today I’m back – and permissions are under control :)
Spent the day designing a fine-grained permission model.
I now support 96 distinct permissions across 8 modules, 4 CRUD operations, and 3 scopes: self, group, global.
Three system roles bind these into meaningful sets:
admin: full global access (32 permissions)
supervisor: read self full group scope (32)
employee: read/update self only (16)
That's 80 rol…

Day#8 📊 Designing a Scalable Permission Model
Yesterday I took a break. Today I’m back – and permissions are under control, I hope. I’ve implemented a structured permission model tha...

Read "What went wrong with capitalism" by Ruchir Sharma.
A mildly interesting description of the major events in world an US economics in the last 50 years. Might
be a fair summary for anyone who didn't live through it or has a poor memory.
In short he thinks what went wrong was government bailing out failure leading to massive debts and increa
sed inequality.
Governments took over all the things instead of letting capitalism sort them out, he reckons, and wheneve
r a big industry or company fails you just get socialism for the rich and a bail-out from new printed money.
Easy cheap money, constant bail-outs, government intervention, leading to zombie companies racking up every larger debt to exist, billionaires who can't fail due to government support, and a stock market that's up-only bringing a flood of inefficiently-allocated capital.
Is he right? I mean, maybe, sort of. But when an industry really can't be allowed to fail, say water supply and waterway management, allowing private capital to extract maximum resources from it isn't the best method to manage it in the first place. No wonder they need bail-outs. Capitalism fails here because capitalism isn't the right solution here. We need publicly owned national services, not robber barons without
bailouts.
So, you know, half right. Perhaps these are some of the reasons why capitalism fails, but also we shouldn't even be trying to apply capitalism to every single thing in the first place.
#reading #capitalism #economics #RuchirSharma

Mixing up the two Swedish words "Godkänna" and "Gödkanna" in a project may seem like an innocent mistake, especially if you only speak English. However, they mean very different things... Read more to learn what.
#humor #language

Just finished "Statistically Speaking" by Debbie Johnson. It's coincidentally the second book dealing with adoption that I've just finished, though I suspect in both cases not #OwnVoices, which I also suspect matters somewhat. I was well-absorbed and enjoyed it immensely, but was left again with the reservation that I'm sure it may reflect only that small facet of real life which is pleasing and/or tolerable to a wide audience, and may thus in its own way make things more difficult for those whose realities it does not reflect. I find myself very glad to have also recently read Mama by Nikkya Hargrove, which is autobiographical and which as a result of having more real-world complexity drives its similar point about found family home with more force, to me (to be fair, Johnson's work has a decent amount of real life complexity, for a novel).
#AmReading

Mixing up the two Swedish words "Godkänna" and "Gödkanna" in a project may seem like an innocent mistake, especially if you only speak English. However, they mean very different things... Read more to learn what.
#humor #language