Tootfinder

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.

This has allowed me to make clear something that's been at the back of my mind. Something that is at the heart of so much blind stupidity in big tech.
It's the assumption that we will change one thing and all else will be the same.
In this case, we will fire lots and lots of employees all over the world and we will make lots of profit. We're smart enough to make the AI, and we're dumb enough to think that there will only be one consequence. 1/n

I've emailed him to suggest that he takes a look at the Fediverse.
How I've learned that certainty is the thing to really fear - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1w5z1d447lo

Maxx Crosby Is Focusing on One Thing During Raiders Offseason https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-maxx-crosby-is-focusing-on-one-thing-during-offseason

Re “apply the pressure anyway:” that’s advice I got from…Keith Ellison.
I was part of a citizen group pressuring him to vote for the ACA when he was in the House. He met with us, and gave us an impassioned speech about universal care and how the ACA was a good first step but insufficient, relating it to the less-remembered civil rights acts of the 1950s that laid the groundwork for the big one in 1964.
Somebody from the group finally asked him, “Why are we meeting with you? You’re already convinced!”
He replied (paraphrasing here): “I •need• your pressure. I need it even if I already agree. If you’re pressuring me, then I can get on the floor of the House and say ‘My constituents are beating down the doors of my office! This has tremendous support!’ I can tell my colleagues in private about how agitated voters are. If you apply pressure, I can pass that pressure forward. I need you to do it! •That• is why you’re meeting with me.”
And now Keith Ellison is MN Attorney General. He’s already started doing the right thing. Follow his advice, and apply that pressure!

The people on top are good in one thing: getting to the top and staying there. This can help for some of the work that needs to be done but is a kinda one-sided qualification.
We should try to get people on top that know how to do the work that needs to be done – and allow them to do their work¹.
In politics as in companies.
__
¹which does not mean to let them do what they want to. It is important monitor those in power, but we should learn to stop them for the right re…

Trump Lays Out a Vision of Power Restrained Only by His Own Hubris
On topic after topic, Trump made clear that he thinks he is the arbiter of any limits to his authorities, not international law or treaties.
"My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
“I don’t need international law,”
he added.
“I’m not looking to hurt people.”
When pressed further about whether his administration needed to abide by international law,
Trump said,

Is there a term for that thing when you ask someone to send you something because you need a piece of text and then they send you a screen shot and you have to retype the text from the image?
There should be a word or phrase for that.

One way to identify if something is a fad or bubble is if the hypers and the doomers are actually the same people.
Neither are actually talking about the thing.
The hypers ceaselessly tell you that you will look bad if you don’t use the thing.
The doomers spin tales on how it will end your way of life or worse.
They both work to keep the thing in your mind while never actually talking about the thing, in an endless parade of manipulating your emotions.

The ephemeral nature of digital music and "albums" is a bit annoying. You can listen to an album today that has more or fewer songs than it had two days ago.
Also, artists can republish the same song on the same album, effectively replacing the original over time. Next thing you know, your folk album is a dubstep nightmare (hyperbole).

Rest in Peace
US Constitution
Effective March 4, 1789
Terminated January 8, 2026
On January 8, 2026 trump declared himself dictator (but avoided using that word):
'In a new interview with the New York Times, Trump said the only constraint to his power as president of the US is “my own morality, my own mind”.'
<…

The fascist who killed Heather Heyer at Unite the Right helped turn the tides against the last Trump administration. He said there were "very fine people on both sides." The resistance grew, antifa doxxing fascists started getting those fash fired.
But some of those fash didn't stop. They kept organizing their terror cells. The fash who killed Heyer was with a group called Vanguard America. Patriot Front is a Nazi group that split off from Vanguard America. They started terrorizing people by loading up in box trucks and piling out for spontaneous marches.
That box truck tactic probably sounds familiar. Patriot Front basically disappeared at the same time that ICE started recruiting hard.
Let me make it more clear. The very same Nazis from UTR who killed Heather Heyer, who Trump called "very fine people," are now employees of DHS. They've been carrying out the ethnic cleansing they always dreamed of, and they're being paid by the government, *with your tax dollars*, to do it. And now, just like in Charlottesville, they've murdered an unarmed protestor.
This feels similar because it is. These are the same people killing daughters and mothers. Killing unarmed protestors, out of rage not fear, then lying and claiming self defense. This is the same tactic it's always been. This is the same thing they've always done.
It seems like we may have reached the Heather Heyer point of this administration early with Renee Good. Now would be a good time for everyone to get into the streets and stay there until this is over. Everyone turned the tides before, and now he's so much weaker.
This can all be over if we fight like hell to end it.
#USPol

RE: https://phpc.social/@syntaxseed/115863080846737985
Exactly. I don't care too much about the "unicorns", I want small to medium companies that do one thing really well, everyone is fairly compensated and can go home early on Friday.

If the only thing in an officer's mind between dialogue and deadly force is getting brushed to the side by a vehicle doing less than 5mph driven by a smiling mother in a red sweatshirt and pullover then I wonder about that officer's suitability for his job.
The new video from the murdering officer's phone makes it pretty damn clear there was no intent to harm and no risk of harm from anyone except the officer holding the camera and gun.
#Minneapolis #reneegood
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/09/ice-agent-minneapolis-bodycam-footage?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1

Thoughts on keeping parts (assets *and* #nix code) of your public :nixos: #NixOS config private?
https://dis…

So this is percolating and the results so far are not surprising.
I'd vote NO, for the following reasons:
- oil demand continues to decline and risk is high we'll end up with an expensive underutilized pipeline. Therefore high risk we'll end up subsidizing any private entity that builds this thing.
- why would we invest public dollars to support infrastructure for a product where 75% of the profit leaves Canada? There has to be a net benefit, beyond steel sales and jobs, for this project to be considered.
- Indigenous land rights must be respected. They will be left with the rusting pipeline decades in the future, and it's impact on the land.
- the B.C. government must also have a final vote as they have to give up land and provide support.
- we don't need additional oil tankers on our west coast.
- and most importantly, with this MOU, Canada pretty much declared we aren't serious about protecting the environment or fighting climate change. We're oil whores. Harsh but....
#CanPoli #ClimateAction

New report from Palo Alto’s Unit42 on sophisticated attacks with long dwell times by one or more Chinese threat groups. There is a lot going on in this article and much of it likely doesn’t apply to my organization, but I try to learn from reports like this at least one thing that I can bring to my organization to improve our security posture. In this case I learned about DumpIt — a new-to-me free multiplatform forensics tool. I’m going to add that to an upcoming threat hunt and will build d…

Regime change in Iran could also weaken Russia further, so we have a clear European interest here, also with regard to the war in Ukraine. But ofcourse the most important thing is that the Iranian people with their rich history and culture can enjoy more freedom.
#iranprotests #geopolitics

@… you seem to misunderstand the nature of the Fediverse, where people write something and other people might, or might not, read that thing.
Serendipity.
I can''t recall how your toot became visible. That's how it is.

Terence Tao, the famous mathematician, cited by @kityates.bsky.social, at https://kityates.substack.com/p/can-we-really-claim-to-know-what

"One thing we’ve learned from using AIs is that if you give them a goal, they will cheat like crazy to achieve the…

And 2026 isn’t looking all that promising either.

In the closing days of the Biden administration, deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology Anne Neuberger warned,
“China is targeting critical infrastructure in the United States.”

That sounds like the sort of thing the U.S. government might want to do something about.
But apparently not;
On Dec. 3, the Financial Times reported that the Trump administration had
“halted plans to impose sanctions on China’s Ministry of State Security

Excellent words from @…, shared here with permission:
❝My favorite piece of advice for protests has been, “accept side quests”. Sure, you can show up, shout a bit, and go home - there's value in just uncorking some frustration. But don't look past meeting your like-minded neighbors. If you're an introvert, like me, that may induce anxiety just thinking about it. But there's all sorts of easy conversation starters - people spent time on their signs, and chances are they would love to talk about them - how they made them or what they were inspired by. Viola! Now you're talking! Everybody at a protest is looking for something - whether it is a word of encouragement or witty comment, a pointer to a place to go or a thing to join, that something may be you!❞

Every so often I remember that this is my favourite thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D01sh868VGg

> The other thing I notice about the #Epstein case but also the case that concern me and my friends is that, the general public is much more interested in by the Predators and their compromised network than by helping the victims.
https://

It is silly and ludicrous to lump privacy-preserving webpage translation with GenAI and chatbots and LLMs. While I don't _regularly_ use the translation feature, I absolutely appreciate that the alternative would be something like Google Translate, a materially worse outcome. And, as others have pointed out, bundling a translation tool into the browser makes the web more accessible for people who do not know English. That is a good thing!

@… Plus there is small thing to consider - in cold temps charger needs to reduce charging voltage to not damage batteries. Usually in below freezing temps you should still get ~80% (of those 50%, so ~160Wh), but charging with too high voltage might heavily reduce that - so again, needed even bigger buffer for winter...

There are charging cont…

Minor petty thing, but it is disgusting how news reports will talk about "ICE agents" interactions with people who resist, observe, or interfere. When the objective experience of these people is that they are dealing with *armed, masked men in unmarked cars*. And these supposedly official representatives of the US government are never named, yet the civilians assaulted and detained are.

I just gave my Geschlechtseintragsänderungsabsichtserklärungsanmeldeformular to the Standesamt Essen. Damn that building is not just a mad house, it is the saddest thing I've ever seen.

This article by @… squarely hits in the feels, names and articulates what's happening in the tech industry, and points towards pragmatic things we can do.
Notably — and I cannot sufficiently underscore how crucial this is — Anil spells out that power by its very definition is fundamentally requisite to enact any influence on the direction of tech. We cannot cha…

The person in charge for the institutional webpages informed me last week that there’s something strange when opening the CSV file in Excel where registration information from the event shop is stored. Veeeeery strange symbols in words probably containing umlauts, etc. But, I should not worry about it, they got a super helpful tip from—check notes—ChatGPT, one has to do this and that so to make this string appear: “UTF-8”. Fun thing, but it solves the issue
And now I feel veeeery old…

Basically, what the US has announced, rather unambiguously, is that the only way its actions can regulated is through superior military might.
This is a very dangerous thing to announce in a world when you are one of approximately 200 countries. Regardless of whether you currently have the most lethal military of not.
Anyone know what happens to that one asshole at a game of Monopoly if the rest of the players decide to team up against him?
Not saying it will happen. But re…

Review of the last* Scottish election before the Holyrood election in May.
"an utterly crushing result for the Conservatives. ... the kind of thing that could take them from 12 MSPs... to just 3; i.e. one per region outside Glasgow, where they risk wipeout."
https://ballotbox.scot/result-bearsden

Facts •do• matter. The thing is, vibes matter too.
This thread was prompted by this story (ht @… and @…), which is •so• tantalizing and so aligned with what I •want• to be true that all my skepticism alarm bells are going off:
https://www.rawstory.com/jeffrey-epstein-2675132346/
If if we’re holding a trial or writing a history, well…I’ll wait for the dust to settle, expecting this not to hold up. Facts matter. But — no, not “but”…AND…
5/

There's this viral video thing going around where the CEOs of fast food companies eat their own burgers on camera and (pretend to) enjoy it. But the real tragedy here is that the people who prepared these burgers weren't able to lace them with some kind of instantly lethal poison

You've been told to pick one thing and stick to it.
But what if your curiosity across many areas is not a problem to fix?
What if it's actually a signal?
In a world that can automate execution, imagination is the real constraint.
And imagination does not live in narrow corridors.
New piece on staying whole in a system that wants you smaller.
What parts of yourself have you been told don't fit?

The Grinch's heart grew three sizes... and medically that's not a good thing...

RE: https://tilde.zone/@kirch/116173116339319897
Geezus, even as someone who sees the machine as not _inherently_ a plagiarism machine, and who sees the copyright regime as a means to an end and not a moral good itself, this is just gross. Instructing the machine to plagiarize _and then relicensing for easier exploitation_ is just so gross.
(And I say this as someone who's mucked around with machine porting from one language to another. But I'm absolutely assuming that it legally should be under the same license, and morally is _absolutely_ taking what someone else has released and building on it, not _my_ thing.)

Well. So this is where we are now, is it? I mean, I’ve read a lot of dystopian science fiction and so this is not unexpected—but so soon? I thought we had a couple of more years. @… https://

I've started reading "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graebar, and it makes me think a lot.
One thing I'm particularly thinking about is my parents' generation. How they keep criticizing all the social support ("there is no money for that", "undeserving people get it"), combined with taking advantage of any social support they can get without much effort ("others use it", "we deserve it"). And of course criticizing subsequent generations (because my parents had it so rough, with all the social support given by the quasi-socialist People's Republic of Poland, and now everything is so great under late-stage capitalism and people "are just lazy and don't want to work").

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Viss/115590880988013530
There is no such thing as a device that can "find" cameras or GPS sensors because they're passive: they don't emit anything (Air Tags etc do, so they can be detected, but they're also ~responsibly engineere…

'I am scared to live in a society whose members are incapable of having deep discussions and arguments'
From: @…
https://scholar.social/@gedan…

Here's the thing (wrt chardet).
The "clean room" statement is weakened by putting the new "independent" code in the same git repo/tree. I do think that this does imply a level of dependency/relationship that goes beyond pattern matching strings.
He didn't generate chardet-ng or rename the old version "chardet-legacy" and created a new repo for the claude version. I do think that that as a form of communication/statement matters.

The interesting thing about Venezuela and Trump, is that we still want to see all the Epstein files.

It Can Now Be Plainly Said:
Trump Is Planning a November Coup d’État
During the campaign, it was kind of hard to picture the specifics of how Trump might pull such a thing off.
Alas, it’s getting less hypothetical by the week.
Back in 2024, Kamala Harris and the Democrats struggled to convince voters that a second Donald Trump term would constitute a serious threat to democracy.
We can debate the effectiveness of her, and their, rhetoric.
But on a cert…

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116176593553985025
I actually think the Neo is amazing value especially considering the screen and battery life; I don’t think there’s other laptops at that price that really can compete with that.
Sure it’s a budget machine and has some serious downsides (8GB memory), but this one thing (no support for Apple’s own displays) seems a cut down too far and is going to cause confusion.

#Blakes7 Series D, Episode 13 - Blake
SOOLIN: Just like that.
AVON: More or less. He is strongly identified with rebels, you see, and very popular with rabbles. They will follow him, and he will fight to the last drop of their blood. [smiles] Idealism is a wonderful thing. All you really need is someone rational to put it to proper use.

#ListeningClub That ambient dub thing is from a 12-inch by False Aralia who may or not be the same person who is in Purelink. https://falsearalia.bandcamp.com/album/false-06-borgesia…

As salty as I am about it, there's also another way to think about this. For anyone who still has connections to folks on the right (which is perhaps unlikely for anyone on this server, I digress), the cult that has consumed them thrives on isolation and grievance.
The words "you were right" have the potential to cut through the programming and open up an opportunity for reconnection. The modern conspiratorial cult of the Right has been built partially around people who were told they were wrong or were crazy. In the vast majority of cases, they were wrong and even when they were right they completely misunderstood why, but we'll skip that for now. Liberals making fun of them (even the times when they definitely earned it) has pushed them further and further into their ideological hole.
The thing about those words, "you were right," in this context is that the way they offer reconnection also requires them to take one little step of betraying their ideology to accept them. So they must choose between maintaining allegiance to a pedophile or finally getting to feel superior after years of living in an illusion of persecution.
Under the ideology of the Right, admitting one is wrong is a weakness. It is admitting defeat. They have to "own the libs" by saying things, things that they know aren't true, in order to feel dominant. But these things are often so absurd that they end up being made fun of, feeling even more weak and pathetic, reinforcing their fear and alienation.
Offering what they're looking for can offer a way out, but only if they're willing to start to recognize the thing they've supported for what it is.
And they were right about some things. They were right that Bill Gates was a terrible person. I've had plenty of liberals defend him based on his philanthropy washing, but he's awful and always has been. The Epstein links make that blatant. They intuitively recognized him and didn't trust him, even if they were wildly off base about *how and why* he shouldn't be trusted... Even if their correct mistrust was leveraged into one of the most destructive conspiracy theories ever (vaccine denial and COVID vaccine avoidance).
They were right about Bill Clinton. He was always shady as fuck. Sure, the people who attacked him at the time turned out to be even more shady but that's not the point right now. He was connected to Epstein and that was always creepy as fuck.
And the Epstein thing was an open secret that liberals ignored for a long time. It was seen as some weird thing that right wing nutjobs believed about the Clintons. But it was true. Not all of it, and there has always been an antisemitic element to the right wing interpretation or Epstein stuff, but his whole pedophile conspiracy was always kind of real.
The whole "Illuminati"/deep state thing is a vast oversimplification, an attempt to make comprehensible an incredibly complex set of interlocking and emergent behaviors. But Epstein did very much want to remake the world, to create a new world order, and he absolutely played a part in it.
The Right wing nutjobs talked about global authoritarianism, Blackhawks flying over American cities, masked men with guns disarming and executing legal gun owners in the streets. That's all happening right now.
The "FEMA concentration camps" are not actually that far off. ICE and FEMA are sister agencies, both under DHS. I'd be more than happy to call that one "close enough" in order to hear some MAGA admit that ICE is, in fact, building concentration camps.
There was always a huge millennialist element to these things. They tended to be connected to "the antichrist." It was absurd, especially for me as someone who no longer identifies as a Christian. But I'll even acquiess that to a degree. The "the number of the Beast" is 666. That's just the sum of the Hebrew spelling of "Nero." Revelations focuses a lot on Nero coming back to life after his death. His death that involved a head wound, thus the line from Revelation 13:3:
> And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world marveled and followed the beast.
The parallels between Trump and Nero are easy to draw, and Trump's ear wound feels pretty on-the-nose for this. I don't believe in "prophecy" in this way. I think that there are patterns, and useful patterns can become encoded in beleif systems. But I will, again, happily call this one "close enough" for anyone on that side willing to also acknowledge it. I'm happy to meet on that common ground, because anyone who accepts it must recognize that their duty is to fight against it.
A lot of these correct nuggets are embedded in a framework of religious extremism and antisemitism. The vast majority of the beliefs holding these together are wildly wrong and incredibly toxic. But by giving some room to feel validated, listened to, understood, can give some room to admit things that were wrong.
Cult de-programming starts with an opening. People have to talk through their own thoughts, hear their own inconsistencies. Guiding questions can help them untangle these things for themselves. And it all starts by having enough room to feel safe, to not feel cornered, to not feel stupid. Admitting mistakes means being vulnerable, and the MAGA cult is built on fear. It's built on exploiting vulnerability and locking it away.
De-programming takes a long time. It's not easy. It takes patience. But every person who comes out does so with a powerful perspective, a deep understanding, that can be turned back against it. The best people at getting people out of cults are former members. Some of the most dedicated antifa are former fascists who understood their mistakes and dedicate their lives to fixing them.

Today three years ago. oh boy that was a nice tour. But also one of my first longer snowshoe tours where I learned how much energy this can drain :-D
But it was worth the walk!
And this "today x years ago" is one of my favourite features of image galleries like (in this case) #immich.
The curiousity each day "oh has there been some cool thing I did a couple of yea…

How embarrassing for us. We need to buy our bike share system. https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:fr6j3klgg6t5gqk5dvocurnj/post/3mdtj7yfqhs2q

There is a pernicious trend in leftwing discourse where a person correctly notes that somebody is being given privileged treatment, but then immediately implies that the right course of action is to take that privilege away.
More often, the right thing to do would be to afford everybody the privilege and encode it as a right.

"With the two historical parties of government now reduced to a single two headed animal, they no longer have access to the pretence of decrying the party in power (while largely doing the same thing if they get in). Now they both have to argue that everything that is happening is the best possible thing and nothing that is different can be better."

Was there a massive leak of a dangerous greenhouse gas in Iceland🇮🇸 in 2011 - or was it just a data📈 reporting error? European emission databases show that the Norðuršl aluminium factory🏭 in Iceland released 60 tons of SF₆ in 2011 — but no such emissions in any other year. It's so much that it is hard to believe this really happened. And that is not the only odd thing I found in emission databases.

The thing about formative experiences is that sometimes (and more often than one would like to believe) they're mostly or wholly DEformative.

#Letterboxd does this weird thing. It waits for the year to end before they make a big deal about the stats for that year. Or maybe the strange thing is that some services do this in early December.
They say I watched 377 movies last year and I say we are in a disagreement about what should be counted as a movie. I have a list over there of the 106 movies I saw at the cinema last yea…

One thing that is a pain about dropbox on ubuntu is if you are re-setting up dropbox you can't point it at an existing folder that was previously downloaded. you need to re-download everything, which is a bit silly.

When asked why he needed to possess Greenland, he said: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/us/politics/trump-interview-power-morality.html

The other thing I would say is that Robbo and Ekitike being out really hurt the side. Watching Kerkez continually piledrive blind crosses to nobody is painful. Robbo's touch and accuracy would have been a massive difference.
#LFC

Not sure I like this…
I
t seems like @… has conformed to Mastodon quote-toot format, which includes a non-removable @ to the OP.
I understand why that is a default and is a good default.
The thing is, *I* don’t want the quiet quote to dunk on OPs. *I* just am inspired to shitpost about things other people have trenchant wisdom about withou…

Did you see that thing about the whistleblower engineer exposing how a food delivery company exploits its drivers? It turned out to be a hoax:
https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax-debunked/
The thing is, I don’t doubt that companies •do• in fact do stuff like what the whistleblower described, if not in such cartoonish terms. But this story is apparently fake, and that matters.

The thing nearly all media commentators have missed (because nobody knows nothin’ about energy in media) is that Venezuela has a lot of oil alright, but it’s heavy sour, hard to produce, hard to refine, and hard to transport, requiring:
• Conventional drilling artificial lift
• Diluent blending (to move viscous heavy crude)
• Upgraders and partial refining for export markets
• Enhanced recovery techniques where feasible
• Specialized infrastructure to handle sour…

While discussing his ongoing military campaign against Islamists in Nigeria,
Trump summed it up this way:
“When Christians come under attack, they know [their attackers] are going to be attacked violently
and viciously by President Trump.
I know it’s not a nice thing to say, but that’s the way it is.”
That 'violently' and 'viciously' isn’t just rhetorical window-dressing.
This is the service Trump explicitly offers to conservative Christ…

Grr and argh.
The people who make government websites generally tend to do a halfway decent job of meeting the spec, but they really really need to learn to push back when the spec is FUCKING STUPID.
Having just completed my "Annual Filing" with Companies House - and why is that even a thing, we're not posting fucking vellum to Victorian clerks who scurry up ladders to deposit the sacred paperwork in the appropriate filing cabinet any more - I got a new scary emai…

@… Rust is awesome :D It's one thing that I miss in my work, that I actually don't have it in any project, and usually gets back off in corporate environment where proposing that :)

https://youtu.be/TGfQu0bQTKc?si=DXUmk2GaMjl1kDiP

I agree with the wish expressed here, that this year will bring a reckoning to Trump and the other named. Let’s add Putin to that list, too.
But one thing that frightens me — I suspect there people in Trump’s circle who know that US voters are unlikely to turn on their own president in wartime, and one sure-fire way for an unpopular president to turn the tide is to lead the nation in a righteous battle against an obvious enemy.
It could be Venezuela, it could be Iran, it could be…

❝“Free speech culture” becomes bad and unserious when it starts telling us that speech is morally neutral, that we should not make value judgments against it, and that there is no moral component to promoting it. I am committed to the defense of the legal right to speak, but the defense of speech does not require us to refrain from speaking frankly about moral truths.
Giving Wax [a bigot] a platform to be a bigot is morally distinguishable from saying she should be free to be a bigot. “The only immoral thing you can say is that someone else’s speech is immoral” is not an ethos worthy of respect.❞
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/the-fashionable-notion-of-free-speech

Now that people have told me that #Whalebone is the company behind #DNS4EU and not just some random scam suddenly sending me mail that they've created an account for me I've never asked for, I've checked the status about my false positive reports. Both have gotten an automated response that I'm going to get an answer in 24 hours.
While the second one could be explained by holiday period, the first one is waiting since November 10th. This whole thing is a huge mistake.

After the whole Adam Something "dating advice for leftist men" thing, I realized I should probably write something about that. I didn't, but I realized I should. Here I am sort of getting around to it.
I had a friend call me an "elder" at one point. I was like 35 at that time, but like... a lot of old leftists are just dead or in prison, so we take what we can get I guess. Being also an elder in the sense that I'm an elder millennial, who is also a parent and married for almost 10 years and all that, I guess I'm technically qualified.
So here it is, dating advice for (straight cis) leftist men:
1. Don't.
That's it, actually. That's the whole thing. Let me explain a bit.
First of all, this is dating advice for neuroatypical folks. We're way overrepresented in both extremes because this system wasn't built for us. And that's who is *the most* confused by all the relationship stuff, and most likely to try to apply all this masculinity/manosphere bullshit. I'm also talking a bit from experience here, as a neruo-spicy trying to "figure out" how to date within a paradigm entirely built around neurotypicals and their relationships. It's garbage. Throw it out. There's nothing worth saving.
His video had some line comparing not having sex to your house being on fire. I'm not gonna bother to quote it because I'm busy with actual life. But like, that's exactly what I'm talking about. I recognize that and it's horribly destructive. Men who buy in to patriarchy actually believe this, because those men value themselves based on (hetro) sex. Yeah, if you think you're worthless because you aren't "getting laid" then yeah, you're gonna feel like that's an emergency.
"Dating" as a paradigm turns humans into roles. It dehumanizes us all, and thus makes human connection much harder. It is a game that, like thermonuclear war, can only be won by not playing.
When you abandon "dating" and just act like a human, everything starts to be easier. There's no such thing as being "friend zoned" because you're just friends. Sometimes friendships become other things, sometimes they don't. It doesn't actually matter, because if you're actually there for friendship then you don't *need* anything else.
My grandma, at 98 I think, gave me some advice. My grandparents always got along well, and were married for enough decades that I listened really closely. She told me I should just do things I loved to do and everything else would work itself out.
And it kind of did.
I understand the fear, the idea that you'll die alone. I get that. I get the loneliness. It all hits a lot harder when you have ADHD emotions and past trauma. I get that. But that fear is self-manifesting. When you build your confidence, when you don't *need* to be "in a relationship," you have more room to actually build relationships. For me, dating was dehumanizing. When I abandoned that, I was able to actually be a good partner, and I was able to find my partner.
I would advise against marriage as well, but we did get married for legal reasons. It can still be hard to maintain that, to see each other as people rather than roles. That becomes extra hard as parents. But the times that we cut through that are the times we're closest. Those are the times when it becomes easier to remember that we're both humans and all human relationships need tending.
Roles don't need to be tended because they are classifications. Classifications are static. But relationships between humans are not. Humans are messy and chaotic. Humans have all kinds of complex needs and desires.
So yeah, don't date. Just be a human and see what happens. Maybe google "relationship anarchy" and see where it takes you.
If you have ADHD, it can be especially useful to understand that relationships with neurotypical folks can be especially difficult. Assume you're incompatible with 90% of the population as your baseline, and you'll start to understand why the standard "dating" thing has made you feel so alienated and miserable.
Neurotypical folks generally have no idea that atypicality exists, much less how it impacts relationships. Having to conform to a neurotypical relationship just adds additional mental strain unless you find someone (really special) who can do at least some of the work.
The ADHD thing was especially important for me. There were so many things I was told to do in specific ways by neurotypicals that never worked for me. Their advice always made me feel like a failure. When I was finally diagnosed, I realized they were just giving advice for the wrong type of brain. It was advice I could never use. Basically all dating advice I ever got fell into this same category.
That's my braindump. Maybe I'll develop it more in the future, but I'm busy so maybe not. I hope it helps someone who is struggling like I was.

It's wild to me how funding in our country works. Untold billions (if not trillions) for police and ICE. Billions in funding for the dumbest of AI ideas. But basic science? My wife is scrambling to get less than a million dollars of funding to do studies on heat waves that could help save millions of lives.
Remember heat waves? The kind of thing that will only become more frequent and deadly as we fail to curb our carbon emissions?

iOS 26 made me use my devices less, it might be a good thing that Liquid Glass is such a piece of shit

As several replies have noted, Hilton‘s national leadership is trying to distance themselves from the whole thing — “We welcome everyone! Please don’t come at us!” — and are making it clear this was a local decision.
The problem is that now Hilton is in the spotlight, and if they force the local Hilton to let ICE back in, they’ll put themselves smack in the middle of a national firestorm (like the one Target still hasn’t recovered from…or worse).

AI companies are raising at valuations that require them to grow at rates that are only achievable by chasing the broadest possible market with the most generic possible product.
A company that raises at a $500M valuation needs to show a path to billions in revenue,
which means it can't afford to be a niche tool that does one thing brilliantly for a specific audience.
It has to be a platform, horizontal, aimed at enterprise, built for no one in particular.
Ever…

Sometimes I feel that I could have my introduction much better. So I'll leave another piece here, and maybe one day I'll be able to find it again and use somewhere…
I'm a radical. I believe that every human has a right to dignity in life. Yes, even these people who allegedly "are too lazy to work".
I believe that everyone deserves safety, that nobody should be cold or starve, that everybody should be able to use a toilet or wash themselves, have access to healthcare and public transportation.
I think that restricting access to drinking water and toilets is a crime against humanity. The latter is also plain stupid, because it only leads to people using other places as toilets.
I'm so tired of the postsoviet labor cult (a kind of Polish thing). Seeing labor as a value in itself. Everyone must work, and it doesn't matter whether the work is actually beneficial, or outright harmful.
And last of all, I can't tolerate smokers. There is no excuse to harm yourself and everyone around you, just to satisfy your stupid addiction. And I'm also talking of all the random people who breathe all the toxins because smokers think they deserve to smoke everywhere, all the time.

I don't get the "I failed to fact-check what the LLM generated when I was doing research/collating information for my article I am writing as a professional journalist" excuse.
First and most obviously, how about not using LLMs for this—because it is well established that they don't actually work for research, summarizing or collating data (that needs to be accurate).
But also: you need to fact-check anything and anyone as a journalist. It's not an optional thing to do, it's literally _what you do as a journalist_. You journal facts. It's like a cook forgetting to boil the pasta and serving it uncooked.

We are at untold levels of delusional cope right now.
These words are indistinguishable from the lofty dreams of being welcomed as liberators within Iraq back in 2002.
You should never listen to a single thing these pundits say lmfao this is incredible.
Ahistorical commentary is worthless!
-- @Mako69@bsky.social

#DeadLazyweb: Is anyone aware of a "no AI" marketplace or something? I just had to go through a hidden menu to disable "AI" on my dryer because it's not possible to buy a dryer without wifi and "AI" features (whatever the ambiguous fuck they mean by AI). I want dumb thing.
I don't want a "smart tv," I want an OLED that exposes HDMI and nothing smarter. I don't want a smart dryer. Thanks, I have enough attack surface in my house and I don't want to fight with a machine to make it just dry my laundry. Honestly, I don't even really want a smart phone anymore, but you can't really make Signal work on a Nokia brick.
If such a thing doesn't exist, I'd consider working on it but I don't want to re-invent a wheel if one already exists.

Ty Cobb, an employee of the first Trump administration and a now outspoken critic of the president,
told The Beat on MS NOW Tuesday that the recent shift in Trump’s psychological condition was “palpable.”
That day alone, Trump spent a 90-minute press briefing mumbling to himself over a stack of papers,
alleging that “pirating ships” is the only thing that Somalis succeed at,
claiming that “God is very proud” of his first year back in office,
and alleging that a …

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.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116168074749844628
The best thing about this is that there’s two different types of Thunderbolt 5 port here

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.

One truly mind-blowing thing about the ICE invading cities is how •little• actual violence there’s been against ICE agents. Observing, filming, making noise, warning neighbors? Yes. Violence, physical assault? Hardly any. At the level of people throwing snowballs.
Imagine, just imagine, the kind of principled self-restraint it takes for basically the entire population to respond to all this ongoing terrorizing and kidnapping following the constitutional principles that these agents themselves are flouting.
Cities? Cities are bastions of peace if you ask me.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116171339797022986
I don’t care if someone calls stuff “spaceflight” (though that usually includes portions of actual flight through air).
But if it’s for a scientific or technology discussion it’s hugely inaccurate and misleading.
In space, things always move in orbits, which is essentially more or less perpetually falling.
To make things go places (e.g. make a thing go to Mars), you change how it’s falling.
Play some Kerbal Space Program some time!

“This is the most complicated thing that you could possibly imagine,” said Mike Williams, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“In fact, you can’t even imagine how complicated it is.”
The proton is a quantum mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities until an experiment forces it to take a concrete form.
And its forms differ drastically depending on how researchers set up their experiment.
Connecting the particle’s many faces has …

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

All other (valid and invalid) arguments aside—the worst thing about "AI for coding" is that no one ever even mentions how this is better for the people who end up using the software produced.
(Spoiler: It isn't.)
No, what it's used for is product managers offloading product design decisions on programmers, because "with AI they can now just churn out features" and "we'll keep what sticks". (The first feature they're forced to churn out is to add useless LLM-based crap to applications. You know the feature: the one that all power-users of the software desperately go to Reddit for in an exercise of futility trying to find out how to permanently turn it off.)
It's a self-feeding feature creep and software bloat moloch—eating programmers and users.

Deputy Attorney General Blanche in video:
"I expect that we're going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks."
This is a violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Smells like more of a coverup
Here's the LAW:
https://bird.makeup/users/atrupar/…

The wild thing about this farcical thread from @… is that it gets at the truth of things better than a lot of what calls itself journalism right now
https://sfba.social/@bitterkarella/115838455575046248

It’s only February, and the November elections are already in peril.
When I think back to the days and weeks before Jan. 6, 2021, one thing that’s clear is that many of us suffered from a failure of imagination.
We knew President Trump’s lies and conspiracy mongering were dangerous,
but it’s hard to think of a single person who predicted that a MAGA mob would storm the Capitol.
Very few people anticipated the sheer scale and scope of the effort to overturn the electi…

Something that just drives me up the wall about this particular area of Git (merge conflicts) is that, beyond the all-too-typical Git problem of sloppy terminology, this is bad feature design. In most situations, “use ours” and “user theirs” are •both• the wrong answer! There are two doors, and they’re •both• trapdoors.
If you have a merge conflict, that means that you changed something •and• somebody else changed something, and your job is to •synthesize• both changes. To use one is to discard the other, which is usually not what you want!
The thing Git (and every Git GUI) ought to surface is a three-way merge: show me what I changed and what they changed ••relative to the nearest common ancestor••. Yes yes yes, I know it’s possible to finagle that into view with Git. It should be the danged default. It is what I should see first. It is what I should see if I have no idea what I’m doing.
1/ https://hachyderm.io/@jeremydmiller/115741417416659492

One of the things that made organizing a lot easier with the GDC was a thing called "GDC in a box." It was a zip file with all kinds of resources. There was a directory structure, templates for all kinds of things like meetings and paperwork you had to file (for legal reasons) and "read me" files.
We had all kinds of support. There were people you could talk to who had been there. There were people you could call to walk through legal paperwork (taxes). Centralized orgs are vulnerable and easy to infiltrate. They're easy for states to shut down. But there are benefits to org structures.
I think it's possible to have the type of support we had with the GDC, but without the politics of an org (even the IWW). I hope this most recent essay has some of the same properties. I hope that it makes building something new, something no one has really imagined before, easier.
This whole project is something a bit different. It's a collective vision and collective project, from the ground up. Some of it has felt like a brain dump, just getting things that have been swimming around in my head down somewhere. But I hope this feels more like an invitation.
Everything thus far written is all useless unless people do things with it. Only from that point does it become a thing that lives, a thing with its own consciousness that can't be controlled by any individual human.
Tech billionaire cultists want to bring a new era of humanity with AGI. That is definitely not possible with LLMs, and may not be possible at all. But there is a super intelligence that is possible, though it's been constrained by capitalism: collective human intelligence.
The grand vision of the tech dystopians is that of the ultimate slave that can then enslave all humans on their behalf. I think we can build a humanity that can liberate itself from their grasp, crush their vision, and build for itself a world in which people will never be enslaved again. Not only do I think it's possible, I think it's necessary. I think there are only two choices: collective liberation or death.
And that's what I plan to write about next time to wrap this whole project up. Today things often feel impossible. But people talked about the Middle Ages as though they were the end of the world, and then everything changed in unimaginable ways. Everything can, and will, change again.
"The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."

The Trump Administration Is Losing The Support Of Local Law Enforcement
The thing with an invasion is that it makes enemies of everyone being invaded,
-- even those who may nominally support the end goal.
Law enforcement officers and officials are no exception,
especially when they see the invading force creating problems they shouldn’t be expected to solve.

ICE continues to terrorize MSP. It continues to be distressing and exhausting; the incredible volume of counter-organizing and community action continues to give me heart.
One thing that’s not surprising but I haven’t seen covered much: ICE is redlining. They swarm over very specific neighborhoods; the abductions (so far) happen almost entirely within clear boundaries. Those boundaries don’t entirely correspond to where immigrants live. They do, however, seem to correspond pretty closely to •political• boundaries that are / are not heavily white.
1/2

…crucially, I’d argue that (2) is •not• the only cause of (1): narrowing the problem space was not the only thing Hypercard did that lowered the barrier to entry. There have been other tools that also aggressively narrowed the problem space yet did not catch on the way Hypercard did.
Narrowing the class of problems is •part• of Hypercard’s barrier-removing success, to be sure! For example, I mentioned UI layout upthread. Hypercard stacks aren’t resizable. Layout involved absolute positioning, end of story (mostly).

A good thing the republicans just gerrymandered texas assuming theyd keep the latino voters they picked up in 2024 forever!
https://bsky.app/profile/isilanor.bsky.social/post/3mdrjno2ngs2f

And people keep being suprised by the regular genocides that *keep fucking happening*. And yes, call what ICE is doing what it is. It is a gencoide. Even if it's not killing millions of people (yet), the "genocide" doesn't mean "killing logs of people" it means "trying to wipe out a specific ethnic, racial, or religious group." What the fuck is ICE trying to do? They're carrying out ethnic cleansing. It's genocide.
Genocide in Gaza, genocide in Syria, genocide in Turkey, China, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Serbia... why the fuck does it keep happening? I'll tell you why. It's states.
People like to think of countries and ethnic reagions as the same thing, but they aren't. They never have been. There's never been clear divisions between ethnic groups. But the existence of the state depends on a shared identity. When the truth is more complicated, the state must find a way to fix that. The solution is genocide. You can't separate the two. There can be no state without genocide. The mechanism to carry ou the kind of mass murder and the incentive to do so are really not easy to put together without the state. The state makes genocide viable, and the state demands genocide to protect it's own existence.
Every election is a dice roll. Every state is on a clock, waiting for the luck to run out. And the worst people possible are just waiting for their chance to win and carry out those genocides in order to lock in their power.
Never again means nothing unless you are attacking the root of genocide: the state.