Tootfinder

I mean what?
What?
I don't have any idea how you'd embed 7 tablet screens into a semi-circular pine table, let alone also have some kind of telescopic central column?
Even if I knew how I don't have the money for seven individual in-console embedded tabled place-settings.
This is madness. I should be asleep.

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

Yesterday I finished "The Other Side of Tomorrow" written by Tina Cho and illustrated by Deb JJ Lee. Lee's "In Limbo" was an excellent graphic memoir, and this similarly has wonderful art, although I didn't make the connection until checking the authors after reading to the end.
This book is a realistic fictional account of two childrens' escape from North Korea via China, Laos, and ultimately Thailand where they could declare themselves refugees at a US embassy and get sponsored to live in America. Along the way they're helped by various members of the Asian Underground Railroad. I'll avoid spoilers but yet definitely encounter difficulties along the way.
The ending definitely hits different now (while also accentuating my disgust with the current US regime). Like "Libertad" that I also finished recently, the "escape to the US at the end" plot line is going to become less prevalent going forward, although Libertad involved a good measure of complexity around that point.
I was a bit disappointed in one of the later plot points where a different and more-real-world-probable turn of events could have served as a better message for society, with the "lucky" outcome as written reinforcing regressive notions of family, and as an ex-Christian the Christian elements of the story made me feel a way. I'm an agnostic, not an atheist though, and can respect the idea that those willing to risk torture and death for their faith have every right to stand by it and take inspiration from it. Most (very valid) critiques of big western Church institutions just don't apply to underground churches in northern China who are helping people escape the horrors of deep fascism.
Overall a really good book.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

I post a lot here and on Maker Forums Discourse, and have kind of not gotten around to blogging for a while. But today I had time to reflect on my first full year of #HamRadio — this new hobby has surprised me in a lot of (good) ways.

According to sociologist
Tressie McMillan Cottom,
the AI future is for the rich.
Cottom’s contention is a bleak one — the idea that the most powerful billionaires in the world are using AI to seize total control of humanity
But she isn’t short on hope.
“I think refusing is actually the more hopeful, expansion vision of the future...
That’s my daring idea."

Professor Warns That the Wealthy Are Trying to Use AI to Seize Control of Everything
Renowned sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom says that AI is a tool for the rich to cement control over society.

Like all the rest of the nerds, I did a bit of tech support on family computers.
They're all popping up windows from scam virus scanners lying that subscriptions need to be renewed or machines are unprotected. People don't know how to remove these things. Luckily they also don't really know how to pay the subscription.
Their phones are updating on them. Changing where buttons used to be. Removing options. Forcing people to register to use they things they have been doing for years.
They don't know how to register.
Things pop up asking for passwords and they have no idea who is asking or which password to use.
I tell them that I don't really understand why they keep using Windows now it is so shitty and awful. They say they don't know how to use anything else. The fact they don't really know how to use windows either doesn't seem to register.
The tech corporations have given up completely on being user friendly. They are all deliberately user hostile and exploitative now.
Corporate tech is terrible. The industry is failing it's users, abusing them. People don't even know there is any other way. They are just giving up on achieving their tasks until someone can fix the pop-ups and subscription boxes and passwords and 2fa for them.
Tech sucks now. Sucks hard.
#tech #christmasTechSupport

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…

I think this seems like a good idea.
Should the Bureau of Justice Statistics Report UCR Stats?
https://open.substack.com/pub/jasher/p/should-the-bureau-of-justice-statistics?utm_campaign=post-expanded-sh…

Should the Bureau of Justice Statistics Report UCR Stats?
That and other questions raised by a policy brief.

One day during his first term, Donald Trump summoned a top aide to discuss a new idea.
“Trump called me down to the Oval Office,”
John Bolton, national security adviser in 2018, told the Guardian.
💥“He said a prominent businessman had just suggested the US buy #Greenland.”
It was an extraordinary proposal.
And it originated from a longtime friend of the president who would go …

You see a detective on the TV and he’s interviewing all the suspects asking them what they were doing on the night of the murder a month ago last Tuesday night.
And on the TV, the suspects all know. Right away.
If you asked me ten years ago though, I’d have had barely any clue. If you’re lucky it’d have been something planned in my calendar but mostly, dunno. Watching TV maybe? No idea what show. Was that a night I was in the pub?
As we all get older this problem increases I’m told. Eventually full on senility sets in.
But what if you have already built the habit to record what you’re doing? To be able to look back and revise and review how you spent your days? An external aid as a crutch to your own forgetful brain’s cortex?
So I started this Exocortex Log over a decade ago and now I can answer: Ten years ago on Tuesday I was having dinner with the guitarist from my band and his girlfriend and they burned the pudding.
The app has been half finished and barely able to even record let alone review for most of that time, but now it’s ready enough that someone else might use it too if they want.
Try it out: #lifeLog #app #memoryAid

🔊 #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

"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

Socrates has the right idea...
#llm #ai

AI Socrates
A philosophy webcomic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also Jokes

I get that surveillance cameras can do a lot of good, and this case is just one illustration. But I don't think I'll ever get comfortable with the idea of government-owned surveillance gear like this. When the government owns it, qui custodes custodiet?
Cameras helped ID suspect in Tepe killings. But how effective are they?
https://archive…

#resist #ICE #immigration #LAVA

Interesting article from The Guardian about the idea of distinct phases or eras of human brain development.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/nov/25/brain-human-cognitive-development-life-stages-cambridge-study

“There is no conceivable way America can claim, although no doubt it will, that the action was taken in self-defence. If you are going to use self-defence you have to have a real and honest belief that you are about to be attacked by force. No one has suggested that the Venezuelan army is about to attack the United States … The idea that [Maduro] is some sort of drug supremo cannot prevail against the rule that invasion for the sake of regime change is unlawful.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/03/is-there-any-legal-justification-for-the-us-attack-on-venezuela-trump-maduro?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

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