Tootfinder

I do think that this framing isn't fully correct. "Open Source" often has a libertarian (and therefore explicitly non-left) bend. It can be put into left thinking and politics but it works just as well in more right-wing logics. (See Golumbia, Cyberlibertarianism)
https://mastodon.mallegolhanse…

"A mileage-based charge for electric and plug-in hybrid car drivers from 2028 and a short-term freeze in fuel duty are among the key changes announced in the Autumn Budget 2025"
So am I right in thinking that this #budget has penalised electric cars and benefited fossil fuel vehicles?
That seems... Highly counter-productive.

Real conspiracies tend to come out, but some of them take a while. Information on the Iran/Contra scandal broke out about 5 years after the conspiracy started. That would have taken several hundred people to carry out, so it was somewhat hard to hide. Even so, they largely got away with it.
The moon landing conspiracy theory would have taken thousands of people, so it would have come out more quickly. Since we have an example of a real secret program of a similar scale as what would be required to fake a moon landing (that is, the Manhattan project), we know that the fake moon landing conspiracy theory is not true. (There's also the literally tons of evidence in the form of rocks and other samples, and all kinds of other ways to debunk the claim.)
Could Kash Patel's FBI have been trying really hard to entrap people into carrying out terrorist attacks in order to justify #Trump's occupation of DC? Could they have helped a guy plan an attack then just failed to arrest him? There are reasonable scenarios that fall in between malice and incompetence while still indicating some level of false flag.
Could someone have just snapped and ambushed some guardsmen without any involvement from the FBI? Yeah, totally. The US is a country full of guns with a completely non-functional mental health system. Someone coming from a country that the US destroyed, twice, could have a lot of untreated trauma. Might they see the national guard as a threat (even if that wasn't totally true)? Yeah, they were deployed to threaten people (even when they were just picking up trash). The point was to incite this kind of response. It's completely reasonable to believe that the FBI would not need to be involved at all, that this would just be the stochastic response they were looking for.
So the point here is that everything is on the table, nothing is really known, nothing should be surprising, and no matter what it's Trump's fault. This is exactly the escalation he was looking for. If he didn't get it naturally, he would also have had ways of making it happen.
He will use this in exactly the same way as the Reichstag fire, to drive a wedge between liberals and radicals. Don't fall for it.
Edit:
There are plausible reasons to not believe the official narrative at all right now, or maybe ever. The official narrative is also plausible, but there are plausible reasons to disagree with the response even if the official story is true. It is unnecessary to resort to conspiracy thinking in order to account for what happened and to disagree with the response. But it is also understandable why someone might jump immediately to a conspiracy given the circumstances.

Thinking of starting a Blame as a Service (BaaS) called "Blame Khalid”. For a monthly fee, you can blame all your #dev woes on me.
When your boss asks why you're behind.... Khalid
When your stakeholders ask why the feature is broken... Khalid
When you miss deployment deadlines… You guessed it, Khalid!
Reach out to find the right service plan for you and your team. Ther…

It's been a while since I last posted to my "Thinking out loud" series on #FineArtsPedagogy. Right now, I've been delving into the nature of creativity, which brings together both my work at The Norwegian Film School and the emerging work at MishMash - Centre for AI & Creativity.
I have been troubled by understandings of creativity that emphasize product and …

I've been thinking about the idea of building a new house instead of buying a new house in a few year. A lot of the homes in the neighborhood are at the back of the lot (right up against the alley). You keep the old house where it is, get the city to call in an Accessory Dwelling Unit, and then build a new house in the front of the lot.

thinking of vibe-coding a microwave oven. that seems like the right level of complexity. toaster is too simple, car is too complicated.

Base Models Know How to Reason, Thinking Models Learn When
Constantin Venhoff, Iv\'an Arcuschin, Philip Torr, Arthur Conmy, Neel Nanda
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07364 https…

Base Models Know How to Reason, Thinking Models Learn When
Why do thinking language models like DeepSeek R1 outperform their base counterparts? Despite consistent performance gains, it remains unclear to what extent thinking models learn entirely new reasoning capabilities or repurpose pre-existing base model ones. In this work, we propose a hybrid model where we activate reasoning mechanisms in base models at the right time to elicit thinking-model-level reasoning chains, implying that thinking models exploit already existing capabilities. To ground o…

Not-really-hot take:
Thinking `<button role="link">` is ever acceptable in place of `<a href>` is dogmatic transubstantiation belief nonsense.
Does not…
• fire on Space;
• show URL in status bar;
• have right-click options;
• etc.
It is never meat. Er, I mean, a link.

OK fedi hivemind... I'm looking for a flat square of material about 1cm on a side and maybe 1mm thick that is going to survive being boiled in hot nitric/sulfuric acid for a couple of minutes, then rinsed in acetone and water.
I'm thinking a glass or ceramic, but don't have a source for ready made chunks of the right size (microscope coverglasses are too fragile).
You can get pre-diced silicon wafers with chunks the right size (e.g. Ted Pella 16006) but that's ann…

This framing doesn’t even touch the crucial forces of ego and identity formation and craving for belonging that are the bedrock of fascist movements like MAGA. Others are thinking productively about that, and it’s at least as important here!
That belief-as-identity phenomenon is also time-based. Somebody posted about those Young Republicans and their Telegram messages grooming and being groomed for fascism, and that’s right: it’s not just the existence of the fascist space; it’s the sustained process of drawing people in over time.
5/

Anyone try Oracle Cloud "always free" tier for their projects? Thinking I'll migrate my masto instance over to it.
I doubt it'll truly be free, because "cloud" but wondering if it's at least cheaper than getting a VPS I pay monthly for.
Right now, I'm on Azure trying out their free credits. After a month, it'll cost me around $30 a month to run my self hosted single user instance. Way too much imo.

RE: https://amicale.net/@franceinfo/115537222299492269
About f*cking time that any-but-far-right pols started thinking about not posting on a far-right-adjacent website owned and hands-on managed by someone actively trying to de-stabilise many European poli…

And here I was thinking Waymos don't pull into the curb. To prove me wrong, they're doing it in a bus stop.

And here I was thinking Waymos don't pull into the curb. To prove me wrong, they're doing it in a bus stop.

Essay trying to explain the rise of populism.
It's about an "appeal to common sense" instead of allowing for elitist analytical thinking and theorizing.
https://josephheath.substack.com/p/populism-fast-and-slow

Populism fast and slow
It is natural that a person who is both concerned by the rise of right-wing populism and possessed of a bookish disposition might turn to the academic political science literature in search of a better understanding of the phenomenon.

OHHHHHHHHHHH I just got that Outside Write is a pun on outside right which I only realized bc the account that posts all of the #claptoncfc goal gifs is called outside_left
ok. I am very smart. I go back to sleep now bc thinking a thought so smart was very tiring

Finally made macaroni cheese tonight after days of thinking about it and added in leftover broc and cauli, craftily making macaroni cauliflower cheese. I think my cooking mojo might be stirring back into life. I love cooking and am right into nutrition, but if I'm tired or overwhelmed, and I've been both the last few weeks, it's the first thing to fall by the wayside.

You may be thinking that trying to get through to a support function in some company is filled with hurdles designed to make you give up, and you would be right.
Another great 99% Invisible episode.
https://podcasts.apple.com/dk/podcast/99-invisibl…

Eagles' Lane Johnson wants offense to be 'less predictable' after loss to Giants https://www.nfl.com/news/eagles-lane-johnson-wants-offense-to-be-less-predictable-after-loss-to-giants

I have red this blog again and i am thinking about it's implications. I think @… is right and i am someone who is optimistic about AI and it's technological capabilities....
Or are there any counter arguments?
Financial AI Armageddon is near...

The #IWW #GDC as an antifascist organization was always kind of a hack. It was a beautiful hack and it worked well for what it did.
In 2016, as Trump was rising, I found info from the Twin Cities GDC. They were super organized, building an amazing community defense organization. When we (Seattle) went to set up our chapter, following their lead, they were extremely supportive. When I got shot, Twin Cities folks were at my house keeping my partner safe. They literally flew people out to support us. They very much remain in my mind when I think about what mutual aid looks like.
Unionism is an important strategy of a larger fight. But it's important to realize that it's not the other way around. The GDC was built to defend the union, because there wasn't something larger to do that work. It filled a gap.
When we organized against Trump, we tried to make the GDC the greater thing. We tried to make the GDC into the vehicle for social revolution against the fascist threat... And it sort of worked. We were able to do a lot.
But that was never what it was built to do. It was always built as an appendage of the IWW. This contains its own problem. If Unionism is the revolutionary movement, then it becomes impossible to build a truly revolutionary society. Unionism centers "workers" which implicitly decenters those who can't work in the traditional sense (the young, the elderly, those physically or mentally able to work). It also decenters care labor that hasn't yet been widely commodified. Sure, there are all types of hacks to patch the holes, but the fundamental construction starts from the wrong assumptions.
It felt, for a while, like things could go another way. Like that our ability to bring members in could shift things a bit, maybe set the GDC on more equal footing with the core focus of the IWW. But that was always an illusion, far less important to think about than the crushing terror of the regime we were fighting.
Now, I will absolutely trash talk the IWW on occasion but in the end I do think they're doing good and important work. Any criticism I have should be taken with a grain of salt... And I know I do have a lot of salt. Again, Unionism is an important strategy. It's useful both in improving immediate material conditions and as part of the most powerful weapon we have against the capitalist system: the general strike. It's important, I can't say that enough. But it's not sufficient.
I've been thinking about this a bit recently, and I wonder if there are any other GDC organizers or former organizers who might be feeling the same. Feel free to DM me. I'd like to get some more perspectives and see if my understanding from several years ago deviates significantly from what other folks are feeling right now.
I'd also like to bounce some ideas around that come from my own organizing experience.

The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol