Tootfinder

One more thought...
One of the more toxic elements of the whole "manosphere" thing relative to dating is the application of game theory to relationships. They've got people trying to "maximize their dating potential" or whatever, trying to find the "most attractive march" (which is it's own fucked up thing I'm not even going to dig in to). But that whole mindset is basically going to always leave you miserable.
Oh, you're single? You need a partner. Oh you have a partner? Could you get a "better" one?
It turns relationships into the endless pointless grind of capitalism. Fuck that. None of that shit makes sense. No matter how "well" you do in that game, you always feel like a loser. Everyone does. Fuck that game. Quit.
The constant desire makes you miserable and your misery makes you unlikable. When you let go of it, you leave room to experience what is instead of constantly imagining what could be.
You will always be able to imagine a better "could be" than what is now. By comparing your situation now to that "could be" you will always see your situation as bad because it's worse than your yardstick.
Is your situation good for you? Is it serving you? It can be good and it can also be possible to make it better. When was the last time you just experience your life instead of trying to strategize your way into "something better."
Throw away the yardstick. Something something Buddha.
Edit: all this is of course aside from the whole objectification thing, which is it's own whole set of fucked up. But yeah... All that shit is real bad news.

Cynicism, "AI"
I've been pointed out the "Reflections on 2025" post by Samuel Albanie [1]. The author's writing style makes it quite a fun, I admit.
The first part, "The Compute Theory of Everything" is an optimistic piece on "#AI". Long story short, poor "AI researchers" have been struggling for years because of predominant misconception that "machines should have been powerful enough". Fortunately, now they can finally get their hands on the kind of power that used to be only available to supervillains, and all they have to do is forget about morals, agree that their research will be used to murder millions of people, and a few more millions will die as a side effect of the climate crisis. But I'm digressing.
The author is referring to an essay by Hans Moravec, "The Role of Raw Power in Intelligence" [2]. It's also quite an interesting read, starting with a chapter on how intelligence evolved independently at least four times. The key point inferred from that seems to be, that all we need is more computing power, and we'll eventually "brute-force" all AI-related problems (or die trying, I guess).
As a disclaimer, I have to say I'm not a biologist. Rather just a random guy who read a fair number of pieces on evolution. And I feel like the analogies brought here are misleading at best.
Firstly, there seems to be an assumption that evolution inexorably leads to higher "intelligence", with a certain implicit assumption on what intelligence is. Per that assumption, any animal that gets "brainier" will eventually become intelligent. However, this seems to be missing the point that both evolution and learning doesn't operate in a void.
Yes, many animals did attain a certain level of intelligence, but they attained it in a long chain of development, while solving specific problems, in specific bodies, in specific environments. I don't think that you can just stuff more brains into a random animal, and expect it to attain human intelligence; and the same goes for a computer — you can't expect that given more power, algorithms will eventually converge on human-like intelligence.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, what evolution did succeed at first is achieving neural networks that are far more energy efficient than whatever computers are doing today. Even if indeed "computing power" paved the way for intelligence, what came first is extremely efficient "hardware". Nowadays, human seem to be skipping that part. Optimizing is hard, so why bother with it? We can afford bigger data centers, we can afford to waste more energy, we can afford to deprive people of drinking water, so let's just skip to the easy part!
And on top of that, we're trying to squash hundreds of millions of years of evolution into… a decade, perhaps? What could possibly go wrong?
[1] #NoAI #NoLLM #LLM

I have written why local police, possibly SWAT, must engage, detain and arrest ice. The alternatives are all worse.
https://stuff.davidaugust.com/local-law-enforcements-challenge-uphold-the-law-even-against-the-feds/

Local Law Enforcement's Challenge: Uphold the Law, Even Against the Feds
in the absence of action, civilians will fill the void I do want to write something not so serious, maybe even funny, here soon. But today, I think the police have to do a very hard and necessary thing: defend Americans against their federal government. If any other group arrived

This is as good a time as any for a thought experiment.
You're in Nazi Germany. You know about the camps, you know what they do, you see the ash fall, you smell it. People who resist alone are killed, some are sent to the camps too. You're afraid to even talk to people about it for fear that they'll turn you in.
You think back to when the camps were being built. You had all the warning signs, but you didn't know how to interpret them. You could believe it would happen. You thought you'd have a chance to vote him out. You thought there might be another way. You thought maybe things would turn out differently if you just sat tight, kept your head down, kept yourself safe.
You see a family being dragged from their home. You know they will be killed. You want to fight, not just for them but for yourself. You opposed Hitler, and at any point you know you could be on the list... Even if you do nothing.
You wish you could rise up, shoot the SS, open the gates, fight it all. You know you aren't alone, but you don't know how to connect with the people who want the same thing.
Using the knowledge we have now, what should you have done in the preceding months and years to connect, to build a community that would open up all paths of resistance?
There were people who resisted. We know it wasn't enough.
Gun laws in Nazi Germany were very similar to US laws in that Nazis were largely free to own guns and everyone else was not. Unlike the US, where "others" have historically controlled using the fear that they might be randomly executed, Germany did codify it. Red flag laws were one more step in the US towards that codification, and there will be more.
When Nazis were taking away those guns, the social networks didn't exist to make resistance possible for most folks. But some Jews were able to resist.
It wasn't the guns that made the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising possible, though they definitely helped. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was made possible by labor organizing in the precessing years.
If there were more uprisings like that, the Holocaust could have been stopped if not prevented. Social networks make resistance possible. Guns are only useful tools to resist authoritarianism *after* you build a community able to support that resistance, and they are only one of many tools made useful by that community.
Getting guns is easy, and not always necessary. Building community is hard. Guns won't keep you safe. Community will.
Single acts of resistance may slow the machine down, but to actually bring down a monster you need to be able to attack more than once. You need a society of resistance. If you are afraid now, build that. Talk to people while it's still safe to do so. Ask them where their red line is. Talk to neighbors. Figure out your network.
Take the steps you need now to keep your neighbors safe, to keep yourself safe.
#USPol

With the eight week improv course ending last week, I timed it well to start a new group with a new set of eight sessions this week.
The Free Association seem more serious than Hoopla. They have 50% longer classes for a start. Three hours rather than two.
More instruction and notes rather than just positive encouragement. Clearer aim even from the early levels. More like a classroom than a playground.
First couple of sets of eight at Hoopla are just aimed at getting you to lose your decorum and allow yourself to be free and spontaneous. All really short form games, lightning rounds. Parlor games rather than theater.
But the Free Association's aim from the start is to get you building scenes and then stories. Their first set of lessons is titled "intro to long form". This one "Scene work".
Not so much the one minute parlor games, more focus on acting and characters and drama.
In vague terms at early stages that is. I mean, they have more in common than different. Plenty of short games in warm-up at FA and I just finished a whole set on drama and story with Hoopla.
Three hours is pretty long though. Starts half an hour earlier, ends half an hour later. Good thing it's also much much closer for me. Ten minute walk instead of 40 minutes on the bus.
We did lots and lots of first-scene head-to-head, mostly concentrating on trying to get specific. Check that after two minutes the audience knows where you are and who you are and how you know each other and what you're doing and none of the players are unsure either. Make it all specific as soon as possible, ambiguity is the enemy.
And everyone got that and exercised it pretty much flawlessly right away. So good group.
#theFreeAssociation #improv #london

Online Algorithm for Fractional Matchings with Edge Arrivals in Graphs of Maximum Degree Three
Kanstantsin Pashkovich, Thomas Snow
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07355 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.07355 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.07355
arXiv:2602.07355v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study online algorithms for maximum cardinality matchings with edge arrivals in graphs of low degree. Buchbinder, Segev, and Tkach showed that no online algorithm for maximum cardinality fractional matchings can achieve a competitive ratio larger than $4/(9-\sqrt 5)\approx 0.5914$ even for graphs of maximum degree three. The negative result of Buchbinder et al. holds even when the graph is bipartite and edges are revealed according to vertex arrivals, i.e. once a vertex arrives, all edges are revealed that include the newly arrived vertex and one of the previously arrived vertices. In this work, we complement the negative result of Buchbinder et al. by providing an online algorithm for maximum cardinality fractional matchings with a competitive ratio at least $4/(9-\sqrt 5)\approx 0.5914$ for graphs of maximum degree three. We also demonstrate that no online algorithm for maximum cardinality integral matchings can have the competitive guarantee $0.5807$, establishing a gap between integral and fractional matchings for graphs of maximum degree three. Note that the work of Buchbinder et al. shows that for graphs of maximum degree two, there is no such gap between fractional and integral matchings, because for both of them the best achievable competitive ratio is $2/3$. Also, our results demonstrate that for graphs of maximum degree three best possible competitive ratios for fractional matchings are the same in the vertex arrival and in the edge arrival models.
toXiv_bot_toot

The thing that Renee Good now knows, that Tortuguita knows, that Heather Heyer knows, that I only know because I glimpsed for a second, is that when you die fighting oppression you live forever in that memory of resistance. When we carve their names into a monument, along with all the other names of the murdered and disappeared, that will stand, perhaps, across from the statue of Willem in the park where the Northwest Detention Center once stood, they will always be reminders of what it looks like to sacrifice everything in order to be on the right side of history.
The names of those who resist live as ghosts, summoned by name to haunt future oppressors, summoned by name to awaken our own conscience to the call. Martyrs, whispered like the White Rose or yelled as a threat like John Brown, cannot die so long as any of us with a bit of spine carries even an ounce of humanity.
It is possible to die knowing you did the right thing, and I have felt it. There is an acceptance that is impossible to imagine without being there, without feeling it for yourself. You have nothing to fear in resisting, even if it ends you. But you will never forget the shame of doing nothing if you fail to.

Urban Spots II ✴️
城市噪点 II ✴️
📷 Nikon F4E
🎞️ Ilford HP5 Plus 400, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

I explained something for a friend in a simple way, and I think it's worth paraphrasing again here.
You cannot create a system that constrains itself. Any constraint on a system must be external to the system, or that constraint can be ignored or removed. That's just how systems work. Every constitution for every country claims to do this impossible thing, a thing proven is impossible almost 100 years ago now. Gödel's loophole has been known to exist since 1947.
Every constitution in the world, every "separation of powers" and set of "checks and balances," attempts to do something which is categorically impossible. Every government is always, at best, a few steps away from authoritarianism. From this, we would then expect that governments trand towards authoritarianism. Which, of course, is what we see historically.
Constraints on power are a formality, because no real controls can possibly exist. So then democratic processes become sort of collective classifiers that try to select only people who won't plunge the country into a dictatorship. Again, because this claim of restrictions on powers is a lie (willful or ignorant, a lie reguardless) that classifier has to be correct 100% of the time (even assuming a best case scenario). That's statistically unlikely.
So as long as you have a system of concentrated power, you will have the worst people attracted to it, and you will inevitably have that power fall into the hands of one of the worst possible person.
Fortunately, there is an alternative. The alternative is to not centralize power. In the security world we try to design systems that assume compromise and minimize impact, rather than just assuming that we will be right 100% of the time. If you build systems that maximially distribute power, then you minimize the impact of one horrible person.
Now, I didn't mention this because we're both already under enough stress, but...
Almost 90% of the nuclear weapons deployed around the world are in the hands of ghoulish dictators. Only two of the countries with nuclear weapons not straight up authoritarian, but they're not far off. We're one crashout away from steralizing the surface of the Earth with nuclear hellfire. Maybe countries shouldn't exist, and *definitely* multiple thousands of nuclear weapons shouldn't exist and shouldn't all be wired together to launch as soon as one of these assholes goes a bit too far sideways.

It's also probably worth bumping this post again:
https://infosec.exchange/@tinker/115832532498655940
I boosted the parent yesterday, but it's worth visiting again.
We are not powerless. There are things we can do. We don't have to shut down the whole thing all at once right now to make a positive change, but we do have to shut the whole thing down soon if we're going to survive.
Every act of resistance is important, no matter how small. We have lots of strategies, and we should support as many of them as possible.