Tootfinder

Today’s battle lines are not simply between people who struggle to survive under increasingly degraded and costly conditions
and an oligarch class thinking of ever more ludicrous ways to waste their wealth.
They are more cosmological than that.
On one side are those of us who have no escape plan, no bunker in the sky or underground,
and who therefore are committed to staying right here, in the complexity of our earthbound reality, with one another.
We know we ne…

The end times fascists are plotting their escape from our world. Our mission is clear
An unholy alliance is working toward an apocalyptic future from which only a chosen few will emerge unscathed. It’s becoming clear how we stop them

My office right now.
A reasonable person could be forgiven for thinking I'm a kindergarten teacher, and not preparing materials for a college introduction to programming course.
(Let me know if you're interested in what those activities are...)
(And also a Foundations of AI course, but first, the intro course.)
#teaching

Hot tip for Danish dwellers and visitors alike: Tivoli has a *brilliant* summer classical music series. Some of the best soloists in the world perform *right in the centre of #Copenhagen*.
Tickets include entry to #Tivoli park and aren't even very expensive. The concerts are very very rarely at capacity, which given the Stars they invite would unlikely be true in London or Amsterdam.
This evening was the *fantastic* Aristo Sham performing Beethoven, Chopin and Rachmaninov. Stunningly good evening I'm still thinking about. So if you're in the city in July and August, check it out.
#mastodk
https://www.tivoli.dk/program/sommerklassisk

And the cycle of gullible UK electorate thinking this new politician is the one who isn’t going to be a utter piece of self serving shit and then inevitably being disappointed continues right on schedule

Republicans are all abuzz about socialism because the party’s political prospects look dire this fall.
Donald Trump’s approval ratings are in the thirties,
Americans are experiencing surging energy prices,
and Trump and other Republicans are engaged in open corruption while cutting vital government programs.
They need something, and in a pinch, socialism has always been the go-to emergency button for the right to push.

Why the GOP loves to use ‘communism’ as an attack
Explaining the Right this week explores why Republicans keep trying to scare people into thinking Democrats want communism.

I read Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger", mostly by the pool or the beach while on holiday last week.
It isn't really about her being confused with Naomi Wolf, except on a surface level. Or even really about Wolf moving from left feminism towards right wing conspiracy theory.
Really it's about how political culture has changed as the world has moved more online and suffered the consequences of a pandemic and the often wrongheaded political responses to that.
Conspiracy thinking and a whole culture concentrating on reticence and reactionary thinking instead of evidence and logic.
While reading it I was hanging out with some folks who are much more right wing than I generally do. Here's some things they said:
I don't believe in Sunscreen. Isn't it funny how skin cancer rates have gone up as sunscreen becomes more popular.
I don't believe in COVID.
Carbon Warming models don't even take into account the sun.
I thought Chemtrails were a conspiracy theory, but came to believe it.
Claiming to believe in freedom while also wanting a crack-down on asylum-seekers, thinking they are destroying society.
So it's easy to believe Klein's basic thesis here, the worry that reactionary conspiracy thinking is breaking the entire body politic.
I don't think it's that people have lost all rationality. It's that people are wearing their conspiracy theories as badges, identifying them as a member of a group. Like religious beliefs that bind a group, the more stupid and outrageous they are the more those badges work to identify the ingroup from the outgroup.
The worry is always when they decide the outgroup need punishing for not taking on those conspiracy beliefs and turn to suppression and violence.
#reading #books #worldPol

The Short End of the Stick
---
"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

.
#Monsterdon
#JourneyToTheCenterOfTime
you'd think diamonds would get bigger over the next million years, not smaller. also you'd think that they would form where there was high pressure not right at the surface, so thats what you get for thinking.

RE: https://todon.eu/@CrimethInc/117162698930485347
There was a time, 4 or 5 years ago, when my partner and I had a conversation. We had already fought last time, and now we had kids. We had the ability to leave, so we decided that we would if things got bad enough. We had to make a decision about when that would be, about what the trigger would be. It was Roe being overturned. It had happened in the past. We left as soon as we could.
If you haven't left, or can't leave, you need to make another decision. You need to decide if you're going to fight or hide. I'll tell you now, your best chance is if you fight before it's too late. If you try to keep your head down the best outcome you can hope for is to survive in shame.
If you decide to fight, then you need to decide when. I don't know what your life looks like, so I can't tell you where that line is. But you need to know what it is, because not knowing is the same as hiding. You need to talk to other people and know when they'll fight, because your best chances are together. Everyone should have a breaking point. A lot of folks may have blown right past it and not noticed, because it's all too overwhelming, because life is already too much without adding more. I understand, but without thinking about it you're making a different choice.
This is an extremely common platform for leftists. I remember my old roommate and their autistici email address. I have an account with them for organizing I did in the past. If you've ever listed to anything on the Channel Zero network, you've probably run across someone reading out a noblogs domain. This is an explicit attack on the left, and specifically on anarchists. This provides the legal framework for mass arrests targeting anarchists.
Will they do that? I don't know. They know they're unpopular and they know anarchists are a big part of the fight. Will they use those warehouses? They'll do what they can get away with.
What will you do to stop them? What will you do when they escalate? Figure out your escalation plan. What would it take to get you in the street? What would it take to get you on the barricades? If you don't have a plan, if you haven't at least thought about it, and maybe even talked about it, then you're deciding to let them do whatever they want.
Fascism is like a dying star that gets bigger even as it consumes itself before exploding. It has to have an enemy, so it will make enemies to feed on. You may be used to being safe when the state cracks down like this, but you never really were. Your turn was just so far off it seemed impossible. But now we're at the end. No one will be safe until this is over. So at the very least, make plans for when they come after you.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the gulf between people who think LLMs can cut 90% of the cost of software development or whatever and people who think that’s a pile of catastrophes balanced on top of a nonsense wish.
I think a lot of that chasm boils down to the fact that software is already •terrible•, and people have very different feelings about that. I don't just mean “Liquid Glass is ugly” terrible; I mean “it’s broken and insecure and unreliable and just doesn't flipping WORK” terrible, like Arbiter Sports.
We are right now in a war between people who think software should treat humans humanely and people who are perfectly willing to offload their development costs onto captive users in the form of wasted time, anger, anxiety, and other forms of personal harm even more severe than those. That war was raging well before LLMs entered the picture, but LLMs drove it to fever pitch. I’m extremely skeptical of the idea that LLMs make any significant positive contribution to the long-term speed or cost of writing •good• software, but they clearly have the potential to lower the floor for •bad• software to unheard-of levels at unheard-of speeds. How you feel about that fact probably predicts a lot about how you feel about the “LLMs can 10x software dev!” hype.
3/3

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/117309282155310011
Regardless of what you think about LLMs, you should understand this.
If you do, you can then use LLMs (if you so desire) to do actually useful things. Due to their nature they have limited applications, but in the right context can be helpful tools. Perhaps you can even do so ethically with an open model locally[1].
If you don't understand what LLMs actually do and how they work and you ascribe magical properties to them—you have already let the marketing hype propaganda take over your thinking.
[1] it's kind of bleak out there, though https://crfm.stanford.edu/fmti/December-2025/index.html)

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

The crisis of software development comes from two contradictory rules:
- Up-front thinking is Waterfall; we must only learn by shipping
- There's no time for rework, so everything needs to be done right the first time
Bosses thought #AI could break this contradiction. But synthetic insights and vibe code don't actually enable faster discovery & delivery. They are a (poor) alternative to doing these things AT ALL.
#tech #softwareDevelopment #UX #UXDesign #llm