Tootfinder

Random thought: humans view trees as vulnerable because they can't move out of the way of danger. But consider:
1. A single tree can produce tens of thousands of offspring.
2. Many of those seeds can remain dormant and viable for millennia.
3. Some living trees survive fit millennia themselves.
4. Trees vastly outnumber humans, maybe up to 100:1.
5. Many seeds die, but those that don't have found a niche that supplies them everything they need without having to move.
In contrast, humans:
1. Only produce a few dozen offspring at most. Barely replace their own population.
2. Cannot remain dormant once birthed.
3. Only survive for a century tops. Can only reproduce for maybe half that time.
4. So few of us. Individual humans live hundreds of feet apart, or at least dozens even in the densest cities.
5. Need to constantly burn energy moving around for their next meal. Could starve and die at any time in just a few days if they can't find water.
At a species level, the survival of humans begins to look much more perilous than the survival of many tree species.
Also I forgot to add:
6. Humans kill *each other* all the time. What the fuck humans?!? We have made ourselves our own biggest threat.
Trees do compete locally for water and sunlight and thus do kill each other, but only via circumstance, not intentionally.

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.

The wooden full-size mock-up unveiled at New Haven’s Union Station on November 24
represents the interior of half of a coach, with seats, finishes and a wheelchair-accessible toilet.
Visitors can tour it on Tuesdays until January 6.
The first of the coaches are expected to be delivered in late 2026.

Connecticut commuter train coach mock-up on show
USA: Connecticut Department of Transportation has unveiled a mock-up of coaches to be supplied by Alstom for CTrail commuter rail services.

“You will recall that at the recent and lengthy meeting about the selection of prefects, the remark by a colleague that Farage was a ‘fascist but that was no reason why he would not make a good prefect’ invoked considerable reaction from members of the [staff] common room.”

There had been a patent on mask ROMs and it finally expired just a few months ago.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050254280A1/en

Lastly, whenever I do work with people through a specific case of them having felt like they needed to rely on an LLM, it often goes like this.
They feel guilty and ashamed.
They explain how impossible getting that task done felt with their time and energy constraints.
Yet when I talk them through other ways of solving the same problem, often we end up completing the work much quicker than it even took them to prompt the damn LLM to begin with.
And at the end, I have often seen relief - as if the person has forgotten that there are ways to work quickly while trusting their own brain, getting help in collaboration with another person rather than from a machine.
I do kind of love seeing someone realize that the AI they thought was saving them time actually caused more hassle and stress than it was worth. And that there’s a better way.

Gravis Robotics, which adds cameras, sensors, and AI to heavyweight construction machines so they can operate autonomously, raised $23M led by IQ and Zacua (Beatrice Nolan/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/11/28/gravis-robotic…

Exclusive: Gravis Robotics raises $23M to tackle construction’s labor shortage with AI-powered machines
The Swiss startup is aiming to automate construction equipment as the industry faces a severe shortage of skilled operators and surging demand.

"I’m sure she’ll take it under consideration and look at it seriously. …
Trump hasn’t made a secret about the retribution that he is asking some of his U.S. attorneys to take against his perceived enemies.
It is an extraordinary request, but maybe this is an extraordinary situation."
— Professor Carl Tobias of the University of Richmond School of Law,
in comments given to Law.com, concerning a request made by ex-CIA Director John Brennan’s lawyers
to Ch…

Lawyers Try To Bench Aileen Cannon From Case, Arguing She’s Been In Trump’s Corner One Too Many Times
Attorneys think Cannon’s pattern of deference to Trump has destroyed any appearance of neutrality.

With Trump struggling to stay awake at meetings, the prevailing image is of a driver asleep at the wheel.
Opinion polls suggest that Americans are turning against him.
Republicans are heading for the exit ahead of congressional contests next November that look bleak for the party.
“He came into office and, like a blitzkrieg,
was violating laws and the constitution,”
said Larry Jacobs,
director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the…