Tootfinder

The first record of the parable commonly known as the "Blind Men and the Elephant" showed up around 2500 years ago, in a Buddhist text from India. At this point it's pretty commonly known. I assume that most folks reading this will be familiar with some variation of it.
If not, it's essentially a story about people who have limited information making assertions about something: one man grabs a tail and says, "it's like a rope," another the trunk and says, "it's like a snake," a third the leg saying, "it's like a tree," and so on. Later variations are less kind to the men, having them not simply report their findings, but fight over them. The first English translation draws a parallel to religion.
This comes to mind for me, because social media has a tendency to incentivize us to make those hard assertions, to dig in, to argue our perspective as part of a spectacle. Free and federated social media isn't structurally that different from corporate media, so the incentive models built to maximize engagement by maximizing conflict tend to leak through the similarities in the user experience and the conditioning of other platforms.
I didn't really come here to critique the fediverse, but rather to remind everyone, "no one sees the whole fucking elephant." We are limited and there are necessarily some things so big they will never be individually comprehensible. Any system that relies on us all agreeing cannot possibly respond to those big things.
We can see that concretely if we look at the difference between "democratic unity" and "diversity of tactics." In the first model, everyone either agrees or gets forced to behave as though they agree (at least on some issues). That's how liberal democracy works. Diversity of tactics (which systematically described, for example, in the "St Paul Principles"), on the other hand, let's people align on goals without needing to agree on exactly how to achieve them. The reality being that often there are multiple "correct" paths, and sometimes those paths can only work if multiple paths are taken in unison.
No one sees the whole elephant. We won't even see the elephant later. People will still be arguing about the elephant long after it's gone. But if you want to get rid of the elephant, you're gonna need to accept that you can't comprehend it all and you're gonna have to figure out a way to work together that doesn't require a unified approach.

The reasons we consider plagiarism to be cheating in school and malpractice in professional contexts are many of the same reasons that LLMs are not going to replace all knowledge-based human labor. (Details left as an exercise for the reader.)
And yes, a whole lot of what LLMs do •would• count as plagiarism if one of my students did it manually, and •should• count as plagiarism just the same if they use a machine to do it — not just in a “that’s cheating!!” sense, but more importantly in a “that’s not really doing the work” sense.
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Documents: Meta's internal AI incubator is developing an AI model router, similar to OpenRouter's, to cut costs by sending some AI tasks to lower-cost models (Jyoti Mann/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/me

Meta’s AI Incubator Is Developing an OpenRouter Rival to Cut Coding Costs
Meta Platforms’ internal incubator for AI-powered products and tools is developing a version of the OpenRouter service that would help cut costs by sending some AI tasks to lower-cost models. The incubator, called AAI Labs, is part of Meta’s Applied AI Engineering team, which Meta set up in ...

the "Deal man" from the Dover Museum sure looks familiar #stonks
https://www.dovermuseum.co.uk/Information-Resources/The-Collection/The-Deal-Man.as…

The Olympics made viral stars out of Paul and Gary O’Donovan in 2016, the rowing brothers from Ireland best known for their colourful post-race assessments,
and again in 2024 with Yusuf Dikec, the shooter from Turkey who pitched up in Paris for the Olympics with no equipment beyond his pistol.
That both of those stories ended with a silver medal, rather than gold, was lost in the fun.

Vozinha and 14million reasons why the World Cup can change lives overnight
The transformation of a previously unknown veteran goalkeeper into a global star could only happen at the World Cup

A #unicycle tip that most unicyclists already know but is always worth a reminder. If your laces look like Picture 1, tuck them in like Picture 2. This will prevent them getting caught on your crank ends (Picture 3) and tying your feet to the unicycle.
This can happen on a regular bike but it is worse on a uni because they are generally "fixies" and balance is more … umm… &q…

Season: A Letter to the Future (PC/PS5, xp'd on PS5) Your best friend in the village has a dream that the Season is about to end. You decide to leave the village and go out into the world on your bike to catalog as much as you can so that the future might remember this Season.
This is a short (9h to credits for me) "walking sim" that, if I'm honest, is rather melancholic. In this alternate universe, there are purple crystals that have affects on people's memor…

50 days until the 2026 NFL season: Here are 50 under-the-radar players who could shape it

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/nfl-under-the-radar-players-2026-season/

On October 31, 1803 the frigate USS Philadelphia hit a reef and ran aground chasing Barbary pirates near Tripoli, Libya.
All 307 members of its crew were captured and held hostage by the Barbary states.
Rather than pay tribute to the pirates, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson sent U.S. frigates to intervene and free the hostages.
The first of two wars against the Barbary pirates, the scourge of shipping for decades, hastened the building of the U.S. Navy
and began a lon…

The Slow Death of the Global Commons
Hormuz is a sign of worse things to come.