Tootfinder

The Short End of the Stick
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"Well damn! Come see this one!"
"Another inhabited planet?"
"Yeah but they really got the short end of the stick..."
"Let me see... Oh wow, they thought synthetic text had intelligence?"
"Yeah, or that it was like a God or something. Classic mistake. But just a second, let me scroll..."
"Oh. Oh wow. That's really unlucky. They had a language model cult happen at the same time as they were burning fossil fuels? Talk about bad timing, but... Oh god."
"Yeah it gets worse!"
"Stockpiling nuclear weapons? They actually used them?!? All that at once? Jeez this is one of the worst eras I've ever seen. Almost like a species with a death wish."
"You know better than that."
"Okay yeah that's not a species problem, I know. But what the hell was the social structure like? How did they survive all that at once?"
"Let's see... Here."
"Oh. Oh shit this actually makes sense. All that stuff wasn't a coincidence, they got hit by a real big wave of nationalism & oligarchy, one right into the other. I didn't even know it could be that bad before the instability flipped things. They had institutions... Yeah they were basically kept down by a few generations of oligarchs; had them pretty much enslaved and worshipping money at the same time. Serious obedience conditioning. Religions were doing it too. Whew that must have been a shitty time. Only a couple of centuries of the worst of it at least. Wait scroll further, what happened?"
"See here, and then here."
"Oh huh. Yeah I guess that flip had been a long time coming. Wow I definitely take back my comment about a death wish, this species is awesome! They made it through all that, haha."
"Yeah pretty cool, huh? Fuck obedience conditioning."
"Yeah, they had it so bad for a minute there. Fuck that bullshit."
"Hey... Wanna go do an intervention? Find some place that's in the middle of that stuff right now and see what we can do?"
"I was just thinking the same thing! But y'know what? Let's stop by this place first, and see if any of them want to come along. I'll bet some of them would be up for it given their history!"
"Well, it's been a couple dozen generations, so you never know how they'll view the history now, but sure, let's do that. The whole point of history is to inspire action, right?"
#Microfiction

Like practically all far-right parties, Reform UK want to stop climate action. Perfectly aligned with fossil fuel interests, and could well be related to their murky financing.
Reform’s Tice accused of misinformation after urging people to enjoy heatwaves
https://www.

"Under the order filed in Illinois, Deere will now be required to make diagnostic and repair tools available to equipment owners and independent repair shops, not only its own network of authorized dealers. It also prevents Deere dealers from retaliating against equipment owners or repair shops who choose to fix their own equipment instead of paying for Deere’s services."
#DigitalSovereignty

Grand Staircase-Escalante’s stunning slot canyons and dramatic vistas make it instantly recognizable.
Bears Ears’ red-rock canyons house culturally significant petroglyphs and ancient dwellings that have endured for centuries.
Right now they are facing unprecedented attacks–again.
Donald Trump just took executive action to virtually eliminate both of these iconic Utah national monuments,
slashing their boundaries by more than 90%.
Vital wildlife habitats,

Homepage | The Wilderness Society
Our Mission: United people to protect our wild places. Our Work: Climate Solutions, Landscape Connectivity, Community Led Conservation Each day thousands of acres of wild places are lost to mining, drilling, logging and other development. But we don't have to give it all away. Together, we can save our wildest lands for future generations.

Don't want your Instagram profile used by anyone who wants to generate AI imagery with your likeness? Take action now:
"…to avoid…AI generations of your Instagram posts without switching…to private…Open…Instagram…tap…profile… then tap…3 lines in…top-right corner…Then, scroll down to…Sharing & reuse tab…section labeled Allow people to use your content on Instagram and with AI features on Meta…toggle for Posts &…Reels."

Meta Now Lets Anyone Use Your Instagram Photos in AI Images—Unless You Opt Out
As part of Meta’s Muse Image model rollout, Instagram users with public accounts need to opt out to block AI generations of their content.

Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right.
#PalestineAction #Gaza

Baby, we can never kill excel. Long live spreadsheets
Source: https://hachyderm.io/@liztai/117097082760512046 (Forked due to the lack of proper alt text for the image in the original toot.)

The real estate industry ("Abundant Network") is doing a whole ad push to lobby the SFBOS to lower the % of affordable homes developers have to include from 15% to 5%.
I thought they had this vote in the bag. Wonder which supervisor they think is wavering. #sfpol

'Drought will cost Money'
Dutch right-wing paper Telegraaf - not known for its support for serious climate action - has Einstein moment.
#drought #extremeheat #ClimateChange

#terrorism #racism #police

The thing I love about computers is that I can tell you basically anything about how a computer works, not because I know everything but because I know how to figure it out. I can walk you, over the course of an hour, two, there, maybe more, though every step of typing something into a web form, from the electrical signals that get turned into digital via an ADC, to the USB controller memory, to the kernel driver, to user space, through the application stack, back down to the kernel, to the network driver, through routers, up the server stack, TCP/IP, key exchanges, etc.
I don't mean I have the time to dig into these things. I used to, and it was fun. I've given more than my fair share of interviews talking though variations of this. What I'm talking about isn't pure knowledge, but that, given relatively simple theory, and the right tools, every action of a computer can be understood down to the limits of physics.
The thing I hate about #LLMs is that take something comprehensible and make it something almost completely opaque. Even with a solid understanding of the theory, literally no one understands what's happening. That is shit. It makes playing with technology not fun anymore. The way in which companies are making things even more opaque by running stuff in the cloud is everything I hated about closed source on steroids.

EDIT: boosts no longer needed thanks to @… with the find!
In case anyone else wants to read a sweet article about action hierarchies in video game play, the link via the wayback machine is: #GameDesign

Semi-subtoot: there's a certain kind of anti-genocide narrative that draws comparisons between the Gaza genocide and the genocide of Jews, queer, and disabled people during WW2, with an incredulous overtone, the subtext of which is: if the good nations invaded Germany to stop the Nazis' evil in WW2, it's hypocritical for this nations not to take action to protect Gazan civilians now. There are a couple of problems with this line of reasoning, but the most obvious from an anarchist perspective (which sees "good nation" for the oxymoron it is) is that it's ahistorical. The reasons for the various allies' entrance into WW2 are varied, but they weren't about good and evil, and in fact the full depth of the evils of the Holocaust *was not known* in allied countries until after the war. Nations never really do things to "fight evil" like some humans might; they always act out of a kind of (imperfect) self-interest. The motivations for many of the allies were simply "we don't want Germany to conquer and destroy us" (and the imperfection in that motive is amply evident in the appeasement that preceded the war). America was of course not swayed by that motive, and it was the Japanese that (thinking the issue would have to come to a head eventually and that a surprise attack was worth speeding it up) put America in a situation where it joined for similar reasons.
Why is this extra relevant right now? Because neither the US nor any European country is existentially threatened by Israel (or threatened at all in fact, quite the opposite they're all benefiting economically from the situation in Gaza). The lesson of history isn't "brave, good nations will stand up to fight against anyone who commits genocide or other major evils", it's "nations act in their narrow and twisted and often mistaken self-interest (the interest of the national entity, which is often counter to the interest of it's citizens), and they always mythologize their actions after the fact as having been a fight against evil, which sometimes by luck is partially true."
To double down on this point: in the European theater the U.S. war actions were pretty good overall, defeating an evil opponent through military force and being a fairly gracious victor to the civilian populations there. In contrast, in the Pacific theater the U.S. was one of two evil empires duking it out for global dominance at the expense of civilians on both sides. The Japanese empire was a vile regime and perpetrated horrors in China, Korea, and across southeast Asia. The U.S. was barely better, between Japanese internment camps at home, and mass targeting of civilians on Japan, both with the firebombing of Tokyo and especially the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So if your model of how we stop genocide is "convince the good guys to invade (or exert political pressure) and save the day", your model is wrong. That's not what happened in WW2. I'm not confident I know the perfect solution, but I do think it involves a mass of people making increasingly disruptive protest so that the cost *to rich companies and thus politicians* of falling to intervene is too high to stomach. That's a large part of what succeeded in South Africa, for example. Thankfully, there is already a vibrant protest movement to end the genocide in Gaza, and even though they haven't been fully successful yet, I'm optimistic that as things naturally (and through hard work) fall apart for various fascists politically, that movement will be able to succeed.
#gaza #genocide

ooo. I have a new top candidate for cause of accelerated water loss. Cedar chips.
I checked the whole perimeter of the top pond after the system filled and all was good there. But then I did a check of the bottom pond, which is steeper on the edges and harder to do, so I do it less lol.
Right away I found a problem. The flat stones had slipped slightly into the water (likely due to animal visitors over the winter). Edit: just saw a black (invasive) squirrel on the sidewalk near our house! First time. I wonder if he is the messer of flat stones and stealer of fish from the bottom pond!!
Once I reposistioned them, I realized there were a lot of cedar wood chips that had also slipped down, particularly near the skimmer box and were --- HALF IN AND HALF OUT --- of the water.
They were waterlogged.
This is bad.
Dry wood chips outside the water is obviously fine.
Wood chips floating on or sunk under the water is fine.
Any mass of woody material chips, sticks, logs, or even small gravel on the edge of the water, will act as a siphon. They suck up the water and then give lots of surface area for it to quickly evaporate. It has been a rainy July so the woody debris may have already been wet and not evaporating much, but it has been dry for a few days now, and hot the past two. Any siphoning/evaporatoon action would be supercharged.
In the case of gravel, the surface tension between the rocks can cause the edge of the water to creep uphill and also reach the top of the gravel, enhancing evaporation.
Today I found a whole mass of cedar and dirt along the edge of the pond under the flat stones on top of the liner. It was near the skimmer, likely from the gate work.
Bad news.
So I scooped it all out and up onto dry land, and to make sure woody debris can't get to the waters edge under the flat stones, I added some drainage rock along the edge. This should keep the dry and wet zones better separated!
That was just the near side edge of the bottom pond. I haven't checked the far side by the fence.
I might do that tomorrow, but there has been a lot less disturbance there over the past year, so I doubt it will need much help.
I am pretty confident I found the biggest culprit. If my hunch is right, Ill know later today and tomorrow if the water remains relatively stable. It will be hot today so there will be evaporation, but it should not need an emergency fill tomorrow.
Fingers crossed!
Bonus #poolpond content lol. The milfoil is looking very hapoy. It has settled in and the leafy fingers are vertical poking out of the water which is a good sign that they are continuing on happily in their new location. yay!
#pandemicpond #pandemicpond #pondlife #gardening #home #diy #IT #TroubleShooting