Tootfinder

I have an idea, hear me out: Instead of letting Elon Musk launch 1,000,000 data centres into orbit, why don’t we launch Elon Musk into orbit as a warning to all the other Bond-villain billionaires in the world.

The United Arab Emirates has opened talks with the U.S. about obtaining a financial backstop in case the Iran war plunges the oil-rich Persian Gulf state into a deeper crisis, U.S. officials said.
U.A.E. Central Bank Gov. Khaled Mohamed Balama raised the idea of a currency-swap line with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Treasury and Federal Reserve officials in meetings in Washington last week, the officials said

My moment of clarity in the last few weeks was coming back to “Oh right, copyright is a hack, and one that is not serving us, particularly us on the margins”
The moral rights of authorship and the way we situate our legal process of ownership are, actually, kinda at odds. And it entirely misses the idea of a commons, both as community and as a cultural base to draw from.
I've long believed that we, collectively, should own our culture — to have modern myths be Copyright 1972 LucasFilm, the traditional songs we sing Copyright 1922, now owned by Warner/Chappell Music is one of the things I find repugnant about the situation we find ourselves in.
That said, reconciling that with the behavior of the AI companies, _particularly_ the American ones? It's hard. Google abuses its monopoly position; Microsoft has forced harmful and terrible tooling on people at every turn; OpenAI is run by someone who actively despises art and does not understand it; and Anthropic is run by a guy who is trying to make sure the apocalypse has a pleasant demeanor and doesn't offend any corporations on the way. All of the above have scraped the web with no active consent — and that's largely fine, that's what putting things in common _is_, that's the beauty of the open information world we have the remnants of — but also actively evading measures people put in place to stop it and with absolutely no willingness to engage with the process. Extracting from the commons _is_ the tragedy of the commons.
It does not mean that enlarging the commons with the resulting tools is bad. The doctrine of original sin is a Christian concept I do not subscribe to. The concept of 'fruit of the poisonous tree' is a legal tool to fix power relations not a moral stance. They're worth understanding, but they are not absolute moral stances that are self-evident.
These are not harmless tools, but so too putting hard regulation and corporate, legalistic scrutiny on everything has a vastly negative impact: it is a yoke on human creativity and community to the reins of capital.
And, so too, disruption has huge costs. We are, apparently, committed to doing things the worst possible way. One can just hope that we capture the good too, because the ride has started and it's rather late to get off.

On TikTok and Instagram, young people are diving into the joys of Chinese culture – from drinking hot water to playing mahjong – all under the banner of “Chinamaxxing”.
On the Chinese internet, however, the US is losing its decades-long grip on soft power, and is instead being replaced by a darker trend: "the kill line".
The kill line is a dangerous place to be.
In gaming, the term refers to the point at which a player’s strength is so depleted that one more blo…

Found a real-world difference between Claude Haiku 4.5 and Sonnet 4.5 today. As an experiment, I posed a question to it that I had gotten wrong a couple years ago. The question requires knowledge of TLS protocol details and thinking through their implications. Sonnet 4.5 caught the trap immediately (faster than I did back when I had the idea), Haiku 4.5 missed it, even when explicitly asked to think about the details of the TLS protocol.
So, yeah, it's not just differences in abstr…

One of my VR Lighthouses died last month. These things are gyroscopically spinning 24 hours a day for, what, a decade now? Nearly.
No wonder. Mostly the industry seems to be settling on using head-mounted cameras rather than sweeping infra-red beams and receptors on the head anyway.
It is true that lighthouses give accurate positioning, but means I can't easily take the headset next door, say. Or to a party.
So inside-out, as they call it, is fine for the headset now and mostly okay for the hand-controllers.
But it offers no solution at all for the foot-trackers and hip-tracker that I need for puppetting the characters in the #vr #slimeVR #trackers

In *Leviathan and the Air Pump*, S Shapin recounts the 1600s controversy between Hobbes, who held that true knowledge always originates in pure solipsistic reasoning (“ratiocination”) and Boyle, who argued that knowledge required external confirmation via physical evidence. We’re still at it.
Privileged psyches in particular hate giving up on the idea that what they conclude on their own, without checking it by the world, is true.

In lecture at Brown, Yann LeCun discusses a new approach to AI
No stranger to controversy, AI pioneer Yann LeCun told a capacity crowd that large language models are not the future of AI and that a new approach is needed if machines are to achieve human-like intelligence.

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#TheEssay
- Vivaldi in a Warming World
The artist Nikita Gale shares why she considers the role of the season as a unit of measurement increasingly arbitrary – an idea she explored in her work Other Seasons.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0025lpb

There's a whole dystopian sci-fi plot prompt hidden here about a world that mirrors company stores, where everyone is paid partially in LLM tokens which they have to use for everything including work... Work, where they basically gamble the tokens away, always ending up in debt, needing to take out loans to buy tokens to then work for more tokens.
The story would be called "Sixteen Tons." Maybe I'll write it, but not unless it can be written as solarpunk instead of cyberpunk because the new rule is "don't write 'The Torment Nexus' because someone will think it's a good idea and implement it."

OH: "Pretty sure that anybody who watches the Turning Point “alternative“ has a pretty good idea of the market price for catalytic converters." #Overheard

"Yet the idea that human beings joining crowds become helpless childlike and suggestible persisted, and still persists. It informed the mid-twentieth century's third major growth industry, after psychology and fascism: public relations."
- Dan Hancox in Multitudes. How Crowds Made the Modern World
Worth a read, a defence of crowds against regressive ideas #2026reads

But the idea here is to keep kids safe!
No: the idea is to assign identity to every user and try to monitor and control the internet though corporate means.
That’s the only reason we’re talking seriously about the laws that government and capital are trying to pass.
That lobbying money is not being spent to protect kids.
The Epstine-class oligarchs doing this don’t give a damn about your children’s safety let alone some useless counter productive methods of ensuring it.
I don’t trust the government with totalitarian power nor the companies they would employ to run their age-gate for them, nor the companies currently running social media.
They are the ones running the algorithms that are pushing propaganda at your kids right now.

Lots of national population numbers are total fiction. We don't know how many people live in Papua New Guinea, or Nigeria, or even India.
https://davidoks.blog/p/a-lot-of-population-numbers-are-fake

#resist #ICE #immigration #LAVA

Jesus. Spring Breakers have no actual idea who we’re at war with.
(courtesy of Pod Save the World)
https://youtube.com/@podsavetheworld

What is “social media”?
What do you actually want to ban?
Does Github count?
Does an anorexia-support forum count?
Does a queer-support forum count?
Does the schools own homework-submission system count?
Does Whatsapp, which the kids use to talk to family and to bully each other?
How about Telegram that the kids use to talk to their drug dealers?
How is it different?
Are we really saying nobody under 18 can watch youtube, and expecting that to make life better for those kids rather than worse?
How are you going to define ‘social media’ such that you’ll ban the harm you think you see without also banning any chance of support for a person looking to learn to program, or cope with their abusive parents, or seek advice about being anorexic or queer?
Is it really a good idea to attach a label to every child account for all the websites they visit? You want the kids to all have a big “Child” tag on them as they wonder the net? Might that not increase rather than decrease their vulnerability?

For WWBC this week, I tackled a fun question with a slightly paranoid answer: I’m glad time travel isn’t real.
Between timeline paradoxes, unintended world wars, and the possibility of dragging forgotten diseases across centuries… maybe fiction is safer.
#WWBC

Back to Now: My Case Against Time Travel – Bob Mueller
For WWBC, I explain why time travel is one fictional idea I’m glad isn’t real—paradoxes, pandemics, and all.

Unfortunately, neither the accusations nor the idea that he's doing so well in his campaign surprise me at all. This is Louisiana, after all.
https://www.propublica.org/article/hugo-holland-louisiana-judge-race-controversies

He Compared a Black Child to a Dog and Withheld Evidence in Death Row Cases. Now He’s Running for Judge.
Holland, who once compared a Black child to a dog, has had a career mired in controversy. That hasn’t stopped him from becoming the de facto frontrunner of his judicial race.

Yep, as expected, out of wallpaper before even attempted the doors at all. Gonna be next weekend before I can do much more really.
It is.... Not great. Wallpapering curved surfaces is tricky and I have no idea what I'm doing.
Might re-try some large chunks of what is done once there's spare to re-try with.
Will need cualk on all the joins which will be as time-consuming as the self-adhesive wallpaper in the first place.
Most of the remaining things could use the walls being finished first ideally. Maybe I could do the carpet tomorrow. If I accept the black instead of the red.
Might be better to have things dark in there so you can't see so well how terrible much of the wallpaper is.
#diy #vanLife

Ohhhhhkay so is there just no good-hardware phone with good #postmarketOS support that’s still selling out there anymore?
I mean, porting to the fairphone 6 or something sounds fun but I have no idea how to even begin with stuff like this and if people with years of experience take a long time doing this there’s no way my procrastinator ass would be able to do it lmao
Ugh I really want to get rid of iOS it sucks

In our ever-evolving world, innovation is the keystone of progress. Embracing an entrepreneurial mindset breaks conventional limits and fuels creativity. As Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Let's envision new possibilities and redefine success — one visionary idea at a time! #Innovation #EntrepreneurSpirit 🌟💡

Mum wants to upgrade the phone package, but doesn't realize she had a password or an account to log in with. Doesn't know that logging into the website is how you do that. Does at least know the name of the phone company.
And when we to log in and password reset, the large-font size she has set so she can actually read anything has screwed up every page there.
Half the buttons are hidden. The page can't be pinched to zoom out.
It's trying to trick us into an 18 month contract instead of just more data. She has no idea how much 100Gb is.
The actual accept-and-pay-button is unclickable because its mostly off the screen because the increased actually-readable-for-her font size. We can't really be sure if it's a confirm-what-you-asked-for button or this agree-to-upselling proposal on the top of the screen.
We give up and do it on my phone which I'm old enough to have to squint to see but don't up the font size usually yet.

My god the state of the software industry is insane. The companies that should be helping people understand and use their machines are instead viciously exploiting and tricking them, bamboozling them with impossible levels of complexity they can't handle.
My brother's machine is popping up adverts from strange domains through Edge several times a minute. They all lie that his machine is infected with viruses. He has no idea what they are or why they're there or how to get rid of them or if his machine is in fact virus riddled. Does he need a new one?
Looking. Are these push notifications? I never have used Edge or Push-notifications or even modern Windows much really, so I dunno what they're like.
I think that's what they are?
I would never accept a push notification from a website, even the ones that some people like sound horrible. I don't want websites messaging me! Interrupting me! But of course, cookie-popups have trained people to just immediately click 'accept' on anything.
I think I cleared all the permissions that Edge had been granted with a reset but I dunno what I'm doing with Edge on Windows either really. The lie about viruses seemed to stop.

One machine decided literally today when booting that it's bit-defender key was invalidated and refused to boot.
I thought bit-defender was a password manager? No idea why the machine has decided secure boot changed and it needed this key which nobody has ever heard of, even me a computer professional.
I think maybe Bit Defender is a boot-disk encryption system not a password manager after all?
It suggests checking with your Microsoft account to get the key. Nobody thinks they have a microsoft account, even though they do. Nobody knows any passwords for them.
Password reset, sure, but nobody knows their email password either. They never use email.
Google once lied to them that their password was wrong, and made them change it. But banned them from changing it to any old one that they actually know. It must be a new one they don't know. They wrote some down, but probably these are old ones and there's several different ones written down.
We get through all that with recovery methods for email address, luckily one phone was still logged in to read a reset email.
This bit defender key is attached to the account and I have to hand-type a 32 digit number from one screen to another.
My god.
If you only have one computer, then fuck you I guess.

Signal is on my dads phone but he doesn't know it's on his phone and I can't find it on his phone. I'm stumped and confused. Play store says it's installed, but can't find it anywhere.
Apparently you can hide apps in Samsung's Android? No idea how to do so. Certainly nobody has done so on purpose. On finding the list of hidden apps I find unhiding them didn't even work.
Apparently you have to scroll down to a hidden 'done' button.