Tootfinder

Great reframing by Malcolm Harris at 52:50 here: When a capitalist says they need more profit to invest in something socially beneficial like housing, that profit is a fee they collect from the public, and a blockage that exists *because* there's a capitalist class that controls the money we need. That's really insightful and I'd never thought of it that way.

Sen. Cruz Endorses Chip Roy for Texas Attorney General (Edgertonbuild/Ted Cruz For Senate)
https://www.tedcruz.org/sen-cruz-endorses-chip-roy-for-texas-attorney-general/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250824/p9#a250824p9

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #ElSonido
Titšn:
🎵 El Rey Del Swing
#Titán
https://open.spotify.com/track/32Li90yobvScs5MuxRxw3u

Tansu Çiller, and the corruption of her neoliberal government, was one of the primary drivers of the neoliberalism-to-fascism pipeline* in Turkey that exacerbated inequality, alienated and marginalised huge swaths of the population, and eventually led to Erdoğan’s fascist/Islamist takeover.
Carve her name, indeed; right next to Margaret Thatcher’s.
* Sound familiar, Americans?
#tansuCiller

CarveHerName (@CarveHerName@mstdn.social)
Attached: 1 image #OnThisDay, 25 June 1993, Tansu Çiller wins a vote of confidence to become prime minister of Turkey. She was the first woman to hold the post. #WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory

Sturz aus 3. Stock - Todesrätsel um schöne Flugbegleiterin in Wien #News #Nachrichten

Indirect CW: religious abuse, divorce
Just finished "Visitations" by Corey Egbert, a really powerful fictionalized graphic autobiography about a kid growing up in a cult-adjacent situation. It's more about his specific parent than the Mormon Church, but of course his mom's problems are symbiotic with and amplified through faith.
Spoilers:
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Has a positive ending, thank goodness.
#AmReading

Winiarski: Tidigare löften om skydd har varit värdelösa https://www.dn.se/varlden/michael-winiarski-tidigare-loften-om-skydd-mot-rysk-aggression-har-varit-vardelosa/

Kan vaga säkerhetsgarantier skydda Ukraina mot Ryssland?
Toppmötet i Washington resulterade inte i några synbara steg mot en fredslösning i Ukraina.

Hulk Hogan ist tot mit 71 http://qmde.de/163137

Hulk Hogan ist tot
Die TV-Legende stirbt mit 71 Jahren. Die Todesursache ist ein Herzstillstand.

Just finished "Barda" by Ngozu Ukadi. I don't normally grab classic comics or their modern successors from the library, and this exception to that rule has reminded me why I prefer to stick with other stuff, especially indie graphic novels: the stories are just so blocky & uninspired. I don't say "childish" since there are plenty of great books in the kids graphic novel section that I've enjoyed. It's also true that *some* of the classic stuff is deeper than the rest. But the average "comic" is not going to be very high on my list of stuff I enjoy, and this, while passable, was no exception to that generalization.
Still might look for other stuff by this author, since I'm pretty sure a lot of the issues with mainline comics can be publisher-dictated.
#AmReading

Just saw this:
#AI can mean a lot of things these days, but lots of the popular meanings imply a bevy of harms that I definitely wouldn't feel are worth a cute fish game. In fact, these harms are so acute that even "just" playing into the AI hype becomes its own kind of harm (it's similar to blockchain in that way).
@… noticed that the authors claim the code base is 80% AI generated, which is a red flag because people with sound moral compasses wouldn't be using AI to "help" write code in the first place. The authors aren't by some miracle people who couldn't build this app without help, in case that influences your thinking about it: they have the skills to write the code themselves, although it likely would have taken longer (but also been better).
I was more interested in the fish-classification AI, and how much it might be dependent on datacenters. Thankfully, a quick glance at the code confirms they're using ONNX and running a self-trained neural network on your device. While the exponentially-increasing energy & water demands of datacenters to support billion-parameter models are a real concern, this is not that. Even a non-AI game can burn a lot of cycles on someone's phone, and I don't think there's anything to complain about energy-wise if we're just using cycles on the end user's device as long as we're not having them keep it on for hours crunching numbers like blockchain stuff does. Running whatever stuff locally while the user is playing a game is a negligible environmental concern, unlike, say, calling out to ChatGPT where you're directly feeding datacenter demand. Since they claimed to have trained the network themselves, and since it's actually totally reasonable to make your own dataset for this and get good-enough-for-a-silly-game results with just a few hundred examples, I don't have any ethical objections to the data sourcing or training processes either. Hooray! This is finally an example of "ethical use of neutral networks" that I can hold up as an example of what people should be doing instead of the BS they are doing.
But wait... Remember what I said about feeding the AI hype being its own form of harm? Yeah, between using AI tools for coding and calling their classifier "AI" in a way that makes it seem like the same kind of thing as ChatGPT et al., they're leaning into the hype rather than helping restrain it. And that means they're causing harm. Big AI companies can point to them and say "look AI enables cute things you like" when AI didn't actually enable it. So I'm feeling meh about this cute game and won't be sharing it aside from this post. If you love the cute fish, you don't really have to feel bad for playing with it, but I'd feel bad for advertising it without a disclaimer.