Tootfinder

Sleepwalking into a fascist hell.
UK now.
#UKPol

George Monbiot (@georgemonbiot.bsky.social)
No sudden rupture is now required for the far right to take power in this country. For what we're seeing is a steady normalisation of extremists by the Conservative and Labour Parties, BBC, Telegraph, Mail and others. A shift once considered unthinkable beings to look acceptable, even inevitable.🧵

ProToM: Promoting Prosocial Behaviour via Theory of Mind-Informed Feedback
Matteo Bortoletto, Yichao Zhou, Lance Ying, Tianmin Shu, Andreas Bulling
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05091

ProToM: Promoting Prosocial Behaviour via Theory of Mind-Informed Feedback
While humans are inherently social creatures, the challenge of identifying when and how to assist and collaborate with others - particularly when pursuing independent goals - can hinder cooperation. To address this challenge, we aim to develop an AI system that provides useful feedback to promote prosocial behaviour - actions that benefit others, even when not directly aligned with one's own goals. We introduce ProToM, a Theory of Mind-informed facilitator that promotes prosocial actions in mul…

Just finished "Look on the Bright Side" by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann. Sequel to "Go With the Flow" about a group of highschool friends who become activists to get their school to stock free mensuration products. I really enjoyed the first book, and this one was also great, with some discussion of LGBTQI issues and a but more focus on romance. As with the first book, there's a layer of explicit pedagogical material included that makes summer scenes a but less natural, but that's fine and useful. As with the first book, it models making & growing past mistakes, which is great.
I find myself drawing a comparison to "Does my Body Offend You?" by Mayra Cuevas. Both deal with highschool friends doing feminist activism to change their schools, by where Cuevas deals more directly with topics like sex, sexual assault, and racism, Williams & Schneemann avoid those topics while still including a lot of the same friendship struggles.
#AmReading

"""
[…] Paradoxically, the more a population grew, the more precious it became, as it offered a supply of cheap labour, and by lowering costs allowed a greater expansion of production and trade. In this infinitely open labour market, the ‘fundamental price’, which for Turgot meant a subsistence level for workers, and the price determined by supply and demand ended up as the same thing. A country was all the more commercially competitive for having at its disposal the virtual wealth that a large population represented.
Confinement was therefore a clumsy error, and an economic one at that: there was no sense in trying to suppress poverty by taking it out of the economic circuit and providing for a poor population by charitable means. To do that was merely to hide poverty, and suppress an important section of the population, which was always a given wealth. Rather than helping the poor escape their provisionally indigent situation, charity condemned them to it, and dangerously so, by putting a brake on the labour market in a period of crisis. What was required was to palliate the high cost of products with cheaper labour, and to make up for their scarcity by a new industrial and agricultural effort. The only reasonable remedy was to reinsert the population in the circuit of production, being sure to place labour in areas where manpower was most scarce. The use of paupers, vagabonds, exiles and émigrés of any description was one of the secrets of wealth in the competition between nations. […]
Confinement was to be criticised because of the effects it had on the labour market, but also because like all other traditional forms of charity, it constituted a dangerous form of finance. As had been the case in the Middle Ages, the classical era had constantly attempted to look after the needs of the poor by a system of foundations. This implied that a section of the land capital and revenues were out of circulation. In a definitive manner too, as the concern was to avoid the commercialisation of assistance to the poor, so judicial measures had been taken to ensure that this wealth never went back into circulation. But as time passed, their usefulness diminished: the economic situation changed, and so did the nature of poverty.
«Society does not always have the same needs. The nature and distribution of property, the divisions between the different orders of the people, opinions, customs, the occupations of the majority of the population, the climate itself, diseases and all the other accidents of human life are in constant change. New needs come into being, and old ones disappear.» [Turgot, Encyclopédie]
The definitive character of a foundation was in contradiction with the variable and changing nature of the accidental needs to which it was designed to respond. The wealth that it immobilised was never put back into circulation, but more wealth was to be created as new needs appeared. The result was that the proportion of funds and revenues removed from circulation constantly increased, while that of production fell in consequence. The only possible result was increased poverty, and a need for more foundations. The process could continue indefinitely, and the fear was that one day ‘the ever increasing number of foundations might absorb all private funds and all private property’. When closely examined, classical forms of assistance were a cause of poverty, bringing a progressive immobilisation that was like the slow death of productive wealth:
«If all the men who have ever lived had been given a tomb, sooner or later some of those sterile monuments would have been dug up in order to find land to cultivate, and it would have become necessary to stir the ashes of the dead in order to feed the living.» [Turgot, Lettre Š Trudaine sur le Limousin]
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

What are you going to do when the regime falls? After calling all your friends, after the great memes, after the parties, what are you going to do to make sure it never happens again? What world should we create?
Taxing billionaires is great and all, but we could build systems where billionaires are impossible. Is hoarding wealth and using it to control people even something we should consider part of a functional and humane system? Any system where one group of people doesn't have rights means that anyone can be stripped of their rights, like has happened with all the US citizens who've been illegally detained and deported by ICE. Does the concept of "rights" that must be defended with violence, that can be stripped away by people who can exercise more violence, even make sense? Or should the bedrock of a functional system be the obligations that we have to each other and to society, that cannot be severed or taken from us, that tell us we *must* defend regardless of whether systemic oppression will impact us or not?
Americans have been so restricted by the limitations of the two party system, only able to choose between options acceptable to different sections of the capitalist class. Would we even be able to imagine what we could do if those restrictions went away?
The fall of the Berlin wall was a surprise. The fall of Assad was faster than anyone expected. One day the government of Nepal was an unrepentant oligarchy, the next it was on fire. Everything can change in an instant, faster than anyone expects. No one can predict revolutionary change. Will you be ready if the opportunity presents itself?
The US cannot be fixed. The economic system is a ponzi scheme that has been patched again and again, but has finally run out of options. Racism, sexism, and Christian nationalism are baked into the system at every level. Trump gutted the system of soft power that held the US economy together, now there is only a slow decline. Even after he's gone, the damage is done. Once we let go of how to fix something that cannot be fixed, we can start to imagine something that cannot be achieved within the current system.
This is a time of opportunity. Do not burrow so deep in terror that you miss your chance to dream.
#USPol

this starts slow but I think gets pretty good.
How to Protest The Trump Regime Like The Civil Rights Movement by Offline with Jon Favreau
#uspol

🦠 Metabolism of Terephthalic Acid by a Novel Bacterial Consortium Produces Valuable By-Products
#bacteria

Why America refuses to fix anything:
#uspol

The Number Go Up Rule: Why America Refuses to Fix Anything
In the Booming Twenties, all decision-making is about protecting the value of financial assets held by older people. Therefore, the number must go up. And nothing else matters.

Circuit & Chisel, whose ATXP protocol enables AI agents to make autonomous payments, raised a $19.2M seed led by Primary Venture Partners and ParaFi (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/09/22/stripe-crypto-alum-agentic-ai-payments-cir…

Stripe crypto alum raise $19.2 million to power agentic payments through ATXP protocol
ATXP wants to create the first useful generation of AI agents through its HTTP-like protocol.

Really hoping to see some One Piece flags in the pictures from the next #NoKings Day protests. I also hope everyone has brotherd to check the notes from Nepal. Regimes can collapse faster than expected. Sometimes it can be a total surprise.
I know things feel impossible right now, but you need to have a plan for when you win because it might surprise you. The other good thing about having a plan is that it gives you something to fight for instead of just something to fight against.
#USPol