Tootfinder

TL;DR: spending money to find the cause of autism is a eugenics project, and those resources could have been spent improving accommodations for Autistic people instead.
To preface this, I'm not Autistic but I'm neurodivergent with some overlap.
We need to be absolutely clear right now: the main purpose is *all* research into the causes of autism is eugenics: a cause is sought because non-autistic people want to *eliminate* autistic people via some kind of "cure." It should be obvious, but a "cured autistic person" who did not get a say in the decision to administer that "cure" has been subjected to non-consensual medical intervention at an extremely unethical level. Many autistic people have been exceptionally clear that they don't want to be "cured," including some people with "severe autism" such as people who are nonverbal.
When we think things like "but autism makes life so hard for some people," we're saying that the difficulties in their life are a result of their neurotype, rather than blaming the society that punished & devalues the behaviors that result from that neurotype at every turn. To the extent that an individual autistic person wants to modify their neurotype and/or otherwise use aids to modify themselves to reduce difficulties in their life, they should be free to pursue that. But we should always ask the question: "what if we changed their social or physical environment instead, so that they didn't have to change themselves?" The point is that difficulties are always the product of person x environment, and many of the difficulties we attribute to autism should instead be attributed to anti-autistic social & physical spaces, and resources spent trying to "find the cause of autism" would be *much* better spent trying to develop & promote better accommodations for autism. Or at least, that's the case if you care about the quality of life of autistic people and/or recognize their enormous contributions to society (e.g., Wikipedia could not exist in anything near its current form without autistic input). If instead you think of Autistic people as gross burdens that you'd rather be rid of, then it makes sense to investigate the causes of autism so that you can eventually find a "cure."
All of that to say: the best response to lies about the causes of autism is to ask "What is the end goal of identifying the cause?" instead of saying "That's not true, here's better info about the causes."
#autism #trump
P.S. yes, I do think about the plight of parents of autistic kids, particularly those that have huge struggles fitting into the expectations of our society. They've been put in a position where society constantly bullies and devalues their kid, and makes it mostly impossible for their kid to exist without constant parental support, which is a lot of work and which is unfair when your peers get the school system to do a massive amount of childcare. But in that situation, your kid is in an even worse position than you as the direct victim of all of that, and you have a choice: are you going to be their ally against the unfair world, or are you going to blame them and try to get them to confirm enough that you can let the school system take care of them, despite the immense pain that that will provoke? Please don't come crying for sympathy if you choose the later option (and yes, helping them be able to independently navigate society is a good thing for them, but there's a difference between helping them as their ally, at their pace, and trying to force them to conform to reduce the burden society has placed on you).

There is variation in everyone, but society / context / environment makes that variation more burdensome for some than for others. “Neurotypical” is not a thing that anyone •is•, but rather an archetype that human systems are designed for / evolved around.
When we recognize that “neurotypical” is an archetype and not an actual person, we can reach the same insight that the Air Force reached: you don’t build things to some single optimal set of “normal” dimensions; you make things more adjustable, flexible, accommodating of variation.
/end

https://bsky.app/profile/codingchaos.bsky.social/post/3lzhhag4xxk2k
(2 post thread)

Sarah Higley (@codingchaos.bsky.social)
Adrian is wrong about exactly one thing in his post, which is that “when the caret is no longer a stick” is an *excellent* pun. Added to this: in my experience running user tests with low vision users, customizing the caret is actually pretty common as an accessibility affordance. [contains quote post or other embedded content]

Outcomes-over-outputs is one thing — but even outcomes aren't always impactful.
Investing in any outcome carries opportunity cost. Any effort you expend means not spending that effort elsewhere.
And when there's a bottleneck in the system, effort upstream of the bottleneck has diminishing returns. Typically, that bottleneck is your process.
Since the process is made up of people, technical solutions won't help.

All your problems are people problems (Don't Just Do Things, Part 2)
If you want to do strategy, you must be willing to do process transformation first.

Yea I can’t imagine why anyone thought this dipshit was defending rape…I mean aside from the over half a dozen posts where he defended rape as “not immoral”, literally said “No. In fact, the word "rape"…didn't even exist until the 1800s.” and arguing that being “owned”* wasn’t “horrific”
Complete mystery why people went after him, must be some weird BlueSky thing. 😂
JFC

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to
do and always a clever thing to say.
-- Will Durant

from my link log —
What to do once you admit that decentralizing everything never seems to work.
https://hackernoon.com/decentralizing-everything-never-seems-to-work-2bb0461bd168
saved 2019-08-31

What to do once you admit that decentralizing everything never seems to work | HackerNoon
Lots of tech projects these days, especially crypto-networks, aspire to decentralization. Or their evangelists say they do, because they feel they need to. Decentralization is the new disruption—the thing everything worth its salt (and a huge ICO) is supposed to be doing. Meanwhile, Internet progenitors like Vint Cerf, Brewster Kahle, and Tim Berners-Lee are trying to re-decentralize the Web. They respond to the rise…

My brain seems to have two modes:
1. time-unaware, that slightly chaotic relaxed flow state where I just do the next thing that feels right
2. time-aware, which is always a bit tense and stressful because I need to force myself to keep to a calendar, and execute tasks in specific times.

The thing is, he knows he's a fascist (and a racist, and a criminal, and and and..). It's the fucking media that tiptoes around these labels.
"Trump's latest actions has some questioning free speech issues.." Go fuck yourself, I hope your newspaper or tv channel goes out of business.

The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social)
Q: “Are you affirming you think Trump is a fascist?” TRUMP: “That’s ok, you can just say yes.” ZOHRAN: “Ok. Yes.”

It’s wild that YouTube is basically only usable with extreme blocking – and I’m not even talking about the ads. It’s just so full of Shorts in the interface that it’s hard to find things you actually want to see. Good thing there are filters and clients that get rid of Shorts entirely, but I worry about discoverability and feasibility of quality content for the masses. It’s just hard to find now.

Amazing how many people are really convinced that "following the news" is a real thing that has impact. What have you done with that information? Voted once every four years in a state that gives all its electoral votes to the other party, perhaps? Put the phone down and go outside

The outages channel in teams says that the hot water is out today. It's a good thing that I work from home.

Series C, Episode 05 - The Harvest of Kairos
AVON: Cally. [Grasps her by the arms]
TARRANT: [Enters] Is this the time or the place? That thing has warped your reason, Avon. It's even warped your notorious instinct for looking after number one. We are in danger, can't you understand that?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/3…

One thing that's working in the Dutch energy transition (although further development of wind and solar is now slowing down). And we're not far from seeing this happen globally either.

The clever thing about Duolingo is that it was programmed so abysmally from the start that you don't even notice the impact of AI.

The Epstein file is the only thing Trump has ever taken his name off of
-- Senator Ron Wyden
https://bsky.app/profile/zacheverson.com/post/3maeof45cfp25

Zach Everson (@zacheverson.com)
🚨 "The Justice Department redacted the names and identifiers of victims. Fox News Digital has learned that the same redaction standards were applied to politically exposed individuals and government officials. " h/t @kleinmatic.bsky.social https://www.foxnews.com/politics/epstein-files-explode-open-doj-details-discovery-powerful-figures-more-than-1200-victims

One thing I wasn't ready for on the bike commute was the bugs. Riding next to the river in summer is wonderful, but now when I head home the bugs are out, and they are tiny little bastards that fly into my face and my arms and get stuck on me. I do not love it. Hoping this works.
#biking #bikeTooter

In light of "Antifa" being designated a "terrorist organization," a (very mildly) good thing that anyone can do is say publicly: "I am antifa."
Antifa is *already* a decentralized non-organization, but throwing up enough chaff that dragnet "surveillance" of online spaces becomes useless is a good thing. I promise you really don't want to live in the world in which whoever the president considers "antifa" has been hunted down and locked up, but thankfully, the president doesn't have the resources to make that happen without lots of local police cooperation. Local police are generally champing at the bit to bash leftists under the flimsiest of pretexts and already have programs doing undercover surveillance of leftist spaces, but they also don't want to look like fools or be mocked by their communities, so a strong public response indicating sympathy for and/or real solidarity with "antifa" could influence things right now.
#Antifa

Upgraded my old ThinkPad X220 with a 1TB SSD drive now. Running Debian with Cinnamon desktop. It's fast enough for everyday work even with the just 8GB of RAM. I might upgrade that to 16GB. Most annoying bit is the dead battery and the small screen. I might eventually get a new battery so the thing won't turn off at every wiggle of the power cable. But apart from that, still a perfectly fine machine. It's from around 2011 ...

Is there such a thing as a USB to 50 pin SCSI adapter? I have a HD from a Mac SE/30, before I destroy it I wonder if there is anything on it? Its the drive from my wife's Mac when we met and got married so umm.. its old. I know Linux could read these formats years ago, not sure if that is still the case. #RetroComputing

Panel asking what nostr doesnt fix?
Relay centralisation could enable censorship, and the UI asking users to manage private keys is tricky.
Could one app become a centralisation choke point? They say no. Agreed. Nostr has very good migration here, if one app goes bad it's easy to move.
Privacy is not solved here, since almost all content is public anyway, by design. But since so users have public keys, it's a step towards enabling privacy. Agreed, and at least clients won't generally spy on every mouse click and scroll pause.
No mention of the thing I think most important, that censorship resistance means poor moderation that means bullying, spam, and harassment. That's tricky to solve I think. The fediverse model seems more suitable for good moderation.
#nostr #nostrshire

I think there is just as much chance of Half-Life 3 launching as there is of the rapture happening. Plot twist: I don’t see either happening.
https://www.ign.com/articles/why-is-everyone-posting-about-a-half-life-3-announcement-soon

I think the thing that bothers me the most about phone #spam is how often there is no one on the line right when I answer, and often not even after a couple seconds of grace.
I think this is actually most common with charity and political callers, who know that they are exempt from TCPA and simply have no capacity to demonstrate the most trivial level of respect for people who they are about to a…

Is there a decent / standard way to convert bike lights from a rubber-strap mount to a rack's rear reflector / tail light mounting tab? (What is that thing even called?)
I'd consider a short length of pipe bolted to the tab - is that a janky mess? Should I just buy a different light?
#BikeTooter #question

This is not just some random thing that crossed my TL. I keep boosting these because @… and her sister are conducting personally vetted fundraisers for people they are in touch with. The people are real, the need is real, and you can help. https://techhub.social/@shantini/115424777414791916

The only thing that avoiding tylenol during pregnancy prevents is the release of the Epstein files.

I watched this and at the beginning I was like “Why is he talking about that?!” but I whole-heartedly believe in the conclusion! 🧠
„And here's the one thing I know about #leadership. If you're the boss and you have to order someone to do something, you've already failed.“
„Why doesn't everyone just explain and justify their decisions? *Because they can't…

Here’s my 35th “Long Links” outing, curation of long-form offerings, which assume that nobody has time to read all this stuff but one or two of the pieces might brighten your day. This one is mostly political but some of the politics are from France and China. Plus a way-cool analytical history of blogging and a section labeled “wonderful things”.

On RNZ right now, they're talking about how the software used by pharmacists is not even remotely fit for purpose. Imagine that. Why isn't that sort of thing being sorted by a publicly funded, openly licensed (available to all) system developed by a consortium of companies - that can be scrutinised by anyone - because it's too important to be entrusted to the proprietary gain of any one company. This stuff is a no-brainer. Some things are far too important to be dependent on a pr…

Node.js devs, so picture this: you run `npm install` and you get a bunch of packages with audit errors.
The only thing I want to know at that point is what’s the root package that these dependencies belong to? (Running npm audit fix is a last resort as I don’t like it fiddling around with the dependencies of nested packages.)
It’s also not a straightforward thing to do, but it’s nothing jq and a bit of piping can’t fix:
```bash
npm audit --json | jq -r '.vulnerabil…

It seems odd just to pick out one thing in a long rambling speech full of falsehoods, but the suggestion that China doesn't use wind power is absolutely not correct.

Perhaps the good thing about The vOICe vision BCI is that it is not easy but hard, preventing AI brain rot #AI

One important thing I need to keep in mind with LibreWolf is that when something does not work I need to check if it works in Firefox.
For instance the TrueNAS shell was not working, and I realized that TrueNAS wasn't broken, LibreWolf was just "protecting" me...
Which again, is a good thing, but it's sometime a bit too much protection for those of us who know what we are doing.

Cowboys-Dolphins Trade Pitch Sends Speedy Youngster to Dallas https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/dolphins-trade-pitch-speedy-youngster-dallas/?adt_ei=[email]

The most honest thing we can say about the future is that it's filled with infinite possibilities. We don't know if it will get better or worse, but that's the beauty of it. The unknown is a space of endless potential and opportunity. How do you feel about embracing the unknown?

But here’s the thing: if you spray paint the top of your loaf with a lovely layer of golden brown paint, that doesn’t mean the loaf is now fully baked! You have to actually •do the work• until you see that perfect golden brown.
As I read it, the much-cited 3.5% figure from that study is •not• the thing that magically stops the authoritarian slide. It is an •indicator• that all of the important but semi-invisible things that can topple an authoritarian are actually happening.
3/

I think we can actually prove that this constraint is the *only* constraint that can preserve freedom:
1. There will exist actors in a system who will wish to take advantage of others. Evolution drives survival and one strategy for increasing survival in an altruistic society is to become a parasite.
2. Expecting exploitative dynamics, a system needs to have a set of rules to manage exploitation.
3. If the set of rules is static it will lack the requisite variety necessary to manage the infinite possible behavior of humans so the system will fail.
4. If the system is dynamic then it must have a rule set about how it's own rules are updated. This would make the system recursive, which makes the system at least as complex as mathematics. Any system at least as complex as mathematics is necessarily either incomplete or inconsistent (Gödel's incompleteness theorem). If the system is incomplete, then constraints can be evaded which then allow a malicious agent to seize control of the system and update the rules for their own benefit. If constraints are incomplete, then a malicious agent can take advantage of others within the system.
5. Therefore, no social system can possibly protect freedom unless there exists a single metasystemic constraint (that the system must be optional) allowing for the system to be abandoned when compromised.
Oh, you might say, but this just means you have to infinitely abandon systems. Sure, but there's an evolutionary advantage to cooperation so there's evolutionary pressure to *not* be a malicious actor. So a malicious actor being able to compromise the whole system is likely to be a much more rare event. Compromising a system is a lot of work, so the first thing a malicious actor would want to do is preserve that work. They would want to lock you in. The most important objective to a malicious actor compromising a system would be to violate that metasystemic constraint, or all of their work goes out the window when everyone leaves.
And now you understand why borders exist, why fascists are obsessed with maintaining categories like gender, race, ethnicity, etc. This is why even Democrats like Newsom are on board with putting houseless people in concentration camps. And this is why the most important thing anarchists promote is the ability to choose not to be part of any of that.

why is the linux input subsystem so fucking bad
i've _never_ had installing libinput fix anything. the only thing it does is break shit that worked before

The unwrap thing is the equivalent of ignoring the return value of C functions that can fail.
I still prefer the Rust syntax for this, at least ignoring the error is explicit text in code.
In C ignoring a possible error is silent. To spot the error one would need to know the function signature and documentation in advance.
Side note: exceptions are even worse in my humble opinion. They have the advantage of giving more information about an error than just a null or a negativ…

#Xubuntu's #WordPress site is still on 5.9.3 which released in April 2022.
Autoupdates _are_ a thing that can be enabled.

Just so you can guess where the "AI" thing is headed, look at this listing from a local community college
"AI made simple for everyday life"
... And look at what comes next:
"Flaggers certification"
The exciting thing (for bosses) is the idea that knowledge workers will be as interchangeable (and precarious) as DOT flaggers
#YouDeserveAUnion

A pretty deeply conservative friend of mine told me that the only thing they get on tiktok is videos about people bragging about abusing Food Share. They finally sent me an example (somebody talking about how they don't know how to use the $5,000 per month that they get) and I had to explain to them why there is a "Sora" watermark on it.

When you claim the unilateral authority to pay troops out of money specifically allocated for other purposes,
surprising things happen in the law.
https://bsky.app/profile/ridleydm.bsky.social/post/3m3ljygk7qs24

D.M. Ridley (@ridleydm.bsky.social)
It follows, however, that every single thing that is closed, and every person who is not paid, is Trump's and only Trump's fault. By his own logic, he could pay them, and he has decided not to.

Colleges are visiting my kid's school today, and each one does their best to make their name stand out.

One thing for me, the older I get, when setting up and organizing our place, functional ALWAYS trumps decor for me. I dig decor stuff, but the bottom line is always going to be that I'm going to go for a functional setup first. The decor can go around things. Gotta have things together, clean and accessible.

Listening to "What the world Needs Now (is love)" by the great Dionne Warwick, and the lyrics ring so true.

What the world needs now is love, sweet love. It's the only thing that there's just too little of.
The world needs a lot more love, of every kind. We need to stop judging how and who people love and celebrate the fact that they are loving and folks are getting loved.
So go out there and spread as much love as you can. Whether it is platonic, brotherly, neighborly or roma…

What the World Needs Now (Is Love)
Dionne Warwick · Here Where There Is Love · Song · 1967

"Before we go into what is missing, let us take a moment to understand why this partial story is so popular. Many software engineers do not engage with the broad “software engineering literature” very much: through the act of reading this magazine you are placing yourself at the pinnacle of software engineering curiosity!"
https…

The Other Side Of The Card
If you ask many developers what a "user story" is, you will be told that it is a software requirement expressed using a prescribed formula: "As a category of person, I want to do a thing so that some goal is attained."

The thing about "AI summaries" on YouTube videos that I really don't understand is: it's basically spoilers for the video and now I don't want to watch it anymore.
Is that really what they want people to do on that site? Deliberately adding a feature that's expensive to run and that reduces engagement?

Firefox is jumping the shark with this AI thing. A web browser helps you browse the web. it doesn't steal and summarize web content in order to prevent you from visiting web sites.
I think it's barely less disgusting than the blockchain web nonsense. But I acknowledge that it is possible that it is actually even more disgusting.

After GPUs and RAM, what is the next hardware thing that generative AI is going to monopolise?

Is there such a thing as a Cortex-A with TCM?
Like a dedicated region of SRAM that's essentially L1 cache with single cycle latency, but not backed by any other memory

This is a subtweet...
People who are not anti-capitalist sometimes wonder: "Why is there a monopoly on X life-critical thing?" (E.g., epipens, insulin, web search).
This one is really simple actually: because monopolies are more profitable than competition, and the foundation of capitalism is that capital = power.
Various societies have recognized the necropolitical outcomes of monopolies and have tried to erect barriers to monopoly; we all know that monopolies are bad, death-and-suffering-causing things. But since these societies mostly remain capitalist, they allow these barriers to be eroded by the power of capital (to do otherwise would be to repudiate capitalism because it puts a limit on the power of money). The barriers are ineffective, and the capital = power equation holds, and monopolies result and get to do their killing & maiming thing (remember: even things like social media monopolies that you wouldn't expect to pay for political assassinations like a mining company still profit from inciting genocides). *Sometimes* there are oligopolies instead of monopolies, but instances of really competitive markets are pretty rare for things that are widely sought-after.
The "government will manage the markets to prevent bad outcomes like monopolies" strategy has failed repeatedly, spectacularly, and almost universally. To actually prevent monopolies you need a population that no longer believes that money should equal power, it's that simple. Sadly, it's actually not that simple, since all of the alternatives which equate something else to power, like "the king" or "party loyalty as judged by the supreme leader" have the same problems or worse. The attitude you need to cultivate is "nobody should have power," which is hard because *all* of the power-systems we have constantly propagandize against this attitude in myriad ways. Still, in the future once we've broken free of this age where hierarchy is accepted, people will look back and wonder whether the historical records are even credible given how much needless death and suffering were endured with little resistance.
#anarchy #capitalism

I'm in Australia right now. I can boot my home PC via Wake On LAN to access my files if I have to. I placed a webcam in front of it so that I can verify that it actually does so.
It's weird seeing my computer 16.500 km away from me. It feels like my own little Mars mission. Especially with how SSH feels at 300-400 ms latency.
And yes, that's a drinking glass I forgot on my desk.
#HomeLab

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."

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

@… re: #670 Overtime segment on TVs. I currently have an HD Homerun that gets a signal from an OTA antenna that works pretty good. I too use Channels ✅
One thing that rarely gets mentioned when talking about streaming sports - if you're watching live, or close to live you CANNOT skip commercials. My fav use case is to start a FB 45 min late and skip commerc…

🎄 🎁 ⛄
I don't post a lot at Christmas
There is just one thing I do
Parody Mariah Carey
Hoping that she doesn't sue.
I just want a little fun
Bring some joy to everyone
Make my wish come true.
Add another stanza, or two.
#SongParody
#AllIWantForChristmas
#JoinIn

@…
One thing that i use for this king of stuff is O&O ShutUp10 ( https://www.oo-software.com/fr/shutup10 )
It deactivate a lot of…

actually i think the important thing here is that if C (univalent) is equivalent to a strict category then C is itself strict (hence gaunt)

""[…] There is only one correct metric that should be counted when dealing with software, and that is the user's cognitive load. […] If my Windows/Python/Notepad setup is more ubiquitous, understandable, intuitive and replicable than your obscure Arch/Hyprland build with its hundred painstakingly typed-out customizations for every single software in it, then my setup is better and more minimalist than yours. Full stop. […]""

What does it tell us that AI scrapers are ignoring the more intelligent way of scraping data despite all the indications towards it?
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/stop-crawling-my-html-you-dickheads-use-the-api/
I don't think the answer is …

Series D, Episode 02 - Power
GUNN SAR: Put that thing back where it came from. Use his glove.
[On the hillside]
PELLA: The one being held by the Hommiks is called Avon.
KATE: Well, does he concern us?
PELLA: Our future depends on him. Dorian is dead.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/402/207

@… explains why Mastodon feels like it has a much brighter future than legacy social media really well here:
https://cosocial.ca/@timbray/115560976942889…

In appreciation of all great work being done on 15, I decided to go with 14.3, with the 'latest' branch. All pkgs available, my dots for River working flawlessly, very happy with all that.
Not always is the latest thing the best thing to happen for you.
#freebsd

The first elements of the Russian Orbital Station, or ROS, were to launch in 2027
so it would be ready for human habitation in 2028.
Upon completion in the mid-2030s, the station would encompass seven shiny new modules,
potentially including a private habitat for space tourists.
It would be so sophisticated that the station could fly autonomously for months if needed.
Importantly, the Russian station was also to fly in a polar orbit at about 400 km.
Thi…

Russia is about to do the most Russia thing ever with its next space station
“Russia, meanwhile, will be left to carry on the legacy of the ISS, with all its problems.”…

Appreciate the nod that spatial data viz is hard, @…!
The motivation part about expensive GIS tools is a little off though 💸 :qgis:
https://m…

I just woke up from a dream. For every parent there is a time when, with shame, we have to explain how the world actually works... when they become a little too old to keep saying, "I'll explain it when you're older."
Amsterdam is full of reminders of the occupation, of the Holocaust. It's impossible to pretend there hasn't been a great evil here... One that's not in the past, but still very alive in the present.
At some point things will have to change because fascism can't last forever. It is a thing which necessarily contains its own downfall. We will, at that point, have an opportunity to make the world one that we can be proud to tell our children we created. We can stop short and reestablish the status quo that got us here, or we can build a world that we will no longer have to explain to each new generation in shame.
What would it look like?
(Shout out to the comrade who prompted me to be thinking about this.)
There was also a sign in my dream that said, "we created the bike, therefore we can do anything." This may or may not be related.

One thing I keep seeing is code that talks to an API and just assumes that the response will be a 200 with a body that matches the form it expects.
I would love to have that confidence.

What even IS a "grand" jury? Halligan got an indictment by way of a minor jury, surely that's the same thing right? Something something a jury of one's peer (singular).

Ugh the new Funeral Vomit got pushed to December 19 from the 10th. Which makes more sense, probably, since it's a Friday and not the Wednesday of the 10th, but it'll bump my favorite 20 of the year list to the next week in December probably. At least til after I've heard it.
The crazy thing is, I already have five things I'm looking forward to in January of the new year 🤯

The thing this reply guy doesn’t get, the thing that’s so crucial to this moment, is that being correct about the law counts for absolute diddly shit in the moment. The law is slow. The law comes later…if ever. With these people on our streets right now, the only thing that matters in the moment is what people believe: what they believe the law is, what they believe is safe, what they believe they can get away with, what they believe they are capable of doing.
The law is slow. The law catches up later. Belief is •now•.

So my car has been complaining I should put some exhaust emissions neutralizing fluid in it. A thing they call AdBlue I believe.
Bought a big 10l drum of the stuff ready to fill up.
But when I look at where I expect to find the hole for filling it, I just find a capped off tube and a warning sticker "See the GM Citreon Berlingo Blaze manual" for the adblue refilling hole.
Only user manual I have is the one telling me to expect it there.
The car was converted for wheelchair access at some point in its life. I think they are referring to the wheelchair-adaption manual, which the seller did not give me.
🤔
Have been looking around the car as much as I can for a couple of hours this morning to no avail. Where have they hidden this hole to fill up adblue?
Maybe it's under the engine or something now and you have to put the thing on stilts to find it?
🤷
Asked my mechanic about it and he says to bring it in on Monday. Gonna be a pain if I have to rip up the floorboards or something every year to refill that.
#mechanic #car #diesel

What a $10M bribe rumor says about Trump, Middle East peace, and America’s fall
The thing about being a 79-year-old president is that sometimes you just blurt stuff out, with no filter as to whether your words might be embarrassing, undiplomatic — or potentially incriminating.
Consider the case of Donald John Trump, the 47th U.S. president and the oldest one on the day of his election. Last week, in what may prove to be a fleeting moment of triumph as Trump celebrated a Gaza peac…

Did a $10M bribe break the soul of America? | Will Bunch Newsletter
Plus, an inside look at who really went to “No Kings.”

One thing I enjoy doing in public transport is riding standing without holding on to anything. It's what I imagine surfing must feel like.
This is absolutely no fun in Singapore, where the trains are so broad and so steady that all you need to do is just…stand.

However wrong all that vibe-reading guesswork in the previous post might be, one thing is clear:
Yesterday was not what a country in the grip of an established autocrat looks like. No faits here are accompli. Nothing looks inevitable.
And that’s the most important thing: autocrats seize power by creating the widespread illusion that they •already have• seized power, that it’s inevitable, that you have to go along to survive. Yesterday made that illusion a lot harder to maintain.

What’s it with Dutch people trying to explain to me that they never hit their skulls on the pavement while riding a bicycle because they’re somehow superior at riding them and therefore don’t need a helmet.
Occam’s razor:
Option 1. An entire nation is magically superior in bicycle riding than anyone else on Earth and never has potholes, train track or slippery roads.
Option 2. The government tried to get more people to bike (a good thing) and for decades downplayed the inherent risks (not a good thing), and now people actually believe that “good infrastructure is just as good as helmets”.
🤔

The #IWW #GDC as an antifascist organization was always kind of a hack. It was a beautiful hack and it worked well for what it did.
In 2016, as Trump was rising, I found info from the Twin Cities GDC. They were super organized, building an amazing community defense organization. When we (Seattle) went to set up our chapter, following their lead, they were extremely supportive. When I got shot, Twin Cities folks were at my house keeping my partner safe. They literally flew people out to support us. They very much remain in my mind when I think about what mutual aid looks like.
Unionism is an important strategy of a larger fight. But it's important to realize that it's not the other way around. The GDC was built to defend the union, because there wasn't something larger to do that work. It filled a gap.
When we organized against Trump, we tried to make the GDC the greater thing. We tried to make the GDC into the vehicle for social revolution against the fascist threat... And it sort of worked. We were able to do a lot.
But that was never what it was built to do. It was always built as an appendage of the IWW. This contains its own problem. If Unionism is the revolutionary movement, then it becomes impossible to build a truly revolutionary society. Unionism centers "workers" which implicitly decenters those who can't work in the traditional sense (the young, the elderly, those physically or mentally able to work). It also decenters care labor that hasn't yet been widely commodified. Sure, there are all types of hacks to patch the holes, but the fundamental construction starts from the wrong assumptions.
It felt, for a while, like things could go another way. Like that our ability to bring members in could shift things a bit, maybe set the GDC on more equal footing with the core focus of the IWW. But that was always an illusion, far less important to think about than the crushing terror of the regime we were fighting.
Now, I will absolutely trash talk the IWW on occasion but in the end I do think they're doing good and important work. Any criticism I have should be taken with a grain of salt... And I know I do have a lot of salt. Again, Unionism is an important strategy. It's useful both in improving immediate material conditions and as part of the most powerful weapon we have against the capitalist system: the general strike. It's important, I can't say that enough. But it's not sufficient.
I've been thinking about this a bit recently, and I wonder if there are any other GDC organizers or former organizers who might be feeling the same. Feel free to DM me. I'd like to get some more perspectives and see if my understanding from several years ago deviates significantly from what other folks are feeling right now.
I'd also like to bounce some ideas around that come from my own organizing experience.

Just finished "I'm Awful, Thanks" by Lara Pickle. A good story that serves as a guide to managing emotions, although it's actually a cute story too, not just framing for the mental health discussion.
That said, I feel like it doesn't get far enough into the details of accepting self-control as our only form of real control vs. understanding that some events outside our control aren't fair or are others' attacks, and trying to manage our own emotions as our only response is a disservice to ourselves and others. Even further, I suspect that the HR resolution depicted here, while not impossible, is less frequent than much worse outcomes, which is part of a larger pattern of systemic assaults on our mental health that aren't totally solvable with individual emotional regulation.
Sure, leveling up one's control of ones own emotions and learning to accept and manage a range of emotions is super useful and it's a good thing overall, but the systemic problems of late stage capitalism are real, and making it seem like everyone is responsible for managing their own mental health in the face of these problems helps avoid confronting them.
Still, it's a good book overall, with vibrant art and a well-structured plot.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

Is laparoscopic surgery for buildings a thing?
Like a steerable borescope with a manipulator that you can attach a tool to or something to squeeze into a tight spot and perform a repair in an otherwise inaccessible location.

I like to check the Register comments for something that usually boils down to "I did this thing on my own without a problem, so why can't a massive organisation do something I consider to be analogous?"
A new classic of the genre:

Our collective intellectual culture seems to have calcified around a cohort of thinkers who achieved prominence roughly ten years ago and have been coasting ever since. 
This isn't about Malcolm Gladwell specifically, though he'll appear as a recurring character. 
The Gladwell formula, if you haven't encountered it, goes something like this:
take a subject that seems simple,
complicate it with research that seems to undermine common sense,
then re…

Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation
Wander into any bookstore (I dare you.)  The non-fiction table will be all but dominated by the usual suspects: Malcolm Gladwell's latest exploration of how some counterintuitive thing is actually the opposite of what you'd expect, a David Brooks meditation on character and virtue, something by Michael Lewis about how

I keep coming back to the mirror dualities of the oppressed and oppressor under authoritarianism.
The oppressed is portrayed as both weak and godlike. The stereotypes are always some variation on sloth and incompetence, but yet somehow also a menace capable of destroying the "pure" society. To use the most relevant current example, Antifa being both little femme soy boys who would always get beat up by "real men" while also being an international terrorist organization on the brink of overthrowing the US government, the unarmed presence of whom makes the heavily armed agents of ICE flee for their lives. Antifa is both having absolutely no impact on ICE, and also having such an impact on ICE that the military needs to come in to protect them. The contradiction is obvious but never seems to occur to those who hold both to be true at the same time.
But few talk about the duality of the oppressor. The sovereign throughout history has always been both a ruler above the law, sometimes even the representative or incarnation of a divine force. Yet, this same superhuman/god-man is also a baby who needs constant care. This is absolutely a through line from the very earliest records of sovereign cults to modern cult leaders, CEOs, and Trump today. Power, for these people, is expressed both as the ability to force others to enact their will and in the ability to compel others to care for them. Can any of these "men" cook? Can they fix anything themselves? They are driven everywhere, cooked for all the time, constantly protected from danger. Kings are still dressed, at least for rituals. I could dissect masculinity here, but that's a whole thing.
It is as though the drive to care for our children, who must be taught to behave within acceptable norms, is hijacked by "leaders" who demand our care and attention... even at the expense of our literal children. And recently we've seen some of those very CEOs, with LLMs and return to office demands, show that their judgment is also little better than children, making decisions while pretending to understand a subject.
The oppressed are portrayed as both god-like and impotent and are, in fact, neither. Meanwhile the rulers portray themselves only as invulnerable and are, in fact, childish in their ability to survive without constant support. Their greatest fear from the collapse of society is figuring out how to make sure people keep taking care of them.
It just keeps rattling around in my head.
#USPol

@… just FYI this kind of thoughtful thread on anarchism is exactly the kind of thing people would miss if you weren't on here. Please feel free to tell me to shut up and go away if my engagement is unwanted or feels like a burden, but I hope you're in a better headspace now than earlier. You're valuable and worthy as a person regardless of what you post here, but this is something I can point to concretely and say "I appreciate that" so that the beginning of this long sentence isn't just a platitude. ^.^;

Ok, yeah, I'm not done processing my anger over liberals doing shit like this. So this historian sees a rise in right wing violence, sees the US government carrying out ethnic cleansing, sees a rise in white supremacist terrorism, and then says, "oh yeah... this reminds me of a time right around the 1920s. Hum... yeah, ANARCHISTS fighting the government! Yeah, that's the same thing."
FFS, IT'S THE RED SUMMER! If you want a parallel between today and some horrible time in US history, TALK ABOUT THE RED SUMMER. The point of the language of dehumanization that the right uses, the point of all the anti-black and anti-emigrant rhetoric, is that it leads to genocide. Trump already carried out an act of genocide (#USPol

The one thing that does seem clear to me is that this is deeply entangled with the ultra-concentration of wealth and power, something which is both a cause •and• an effect of creators not sharing properly in the rewards of their creations.
If you talk to me about antitrust law with teeth or ending regulatory capture or a wealth tax, well, I don’t know how we get there — but you have my attention.
/end

My "grow plants everywhere" mod for #Luanti is progressing!
I just built a routine to do blobby weight regions as the intersection of a bunch of parabolas, where weight increases logarithmically from the edge of the parabola with an adjustable edge region, and we use the geometric average of these weight values within the intersection region. Then I spent a few hours hunched over a biomes vornoi diagram approximating different broad regions like "arid_grasses" and "temperate_trees" so you can just name some combination of these regions (with custom per-region multipliers) and have your plant definition apply within those regions. I was using rectangular min/max heat/humidity values before, but they were pretty awkward to work with.
If anyone on here who plays Luanti wants to check it out let me know and I can prioritize publishing what I've got. I've got growth definitions for most but not all VoxeLibre plants and it wouldn't be hard to put them together for another game. No trees yet, but that's pretty much the next thing to work on.

So I'm listening to the most recent episode of Executive Disorder and they're talking about how Trump is going to make a big announcement that could be to actually declare war on Venezuela. I know they record on like Wednesday or Thursday so I ask my partner if I missed Trump declaring war on Venezuela. My partner's like, "no, he just interrupted TV to ramble incoherently."
Now, I feel like it should never be a good thing to hear that the guy who has the power to launch the world's largest nuclear weapon arsenal is just going on a senile rant, but sometimes your assumptions can be upended in the most unexpected ways.

Old enough to remember 2013-02-07 when any web page that included a Facebook-supplied javascript resource (to enable the, once ubiquitous, Facebook Connect) redirected users to Facebook.
(It's the event that most informed my suspicion in using third-party javascript - without SRI.)
It's 2025: Facebook is retiring external like buttons, but Cloudflare is breaking captchas.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Nacirema people is their insistence that they do not participate in practices of which they clearly do. Equally unusual is the fact that, unlike other sacrificial cultures who raid neighboring tribes for victims, both slaves and victims for human sacrifice are only taken from within the society. In fact, there is a very strong cultural taboo against sacrificing or enslaving those from other tribes.
They are aware of the rituals of human sacrifice in other tribes, but claim such rituals to be inconsistent with their society. Yet their human sacrifice rituals are some of the most elaborate in the world. These rituals are so important that there is a whole part of Nacirema society dedicated specifically to arguing about who should and should not be sacrificed, restraining and feeding the potential victims for the years during which these arguments take place, and ultimately preparing and administering the ritual poison.
This is strangely similar to their approach to slavery. Both human sacrifice and slavery were once a much larger part of Nacirema society. Their human sacrifice rituals now take far longer and happen far less often, but at no point have they ever recognized these ritual sacrifices as such. Meanwhile, the Nacirema do acknowledge that slavery was part of their culture once. During the time when they did recognize their practice of slavery, they did raid other tribes for slaves. Now they follow the same complex ritual for slavery as they do for human sacrifice.
It is strange that, by following this ritual and only choosing victims from within their society, they seem to become incapable of seeing their behavior for what it is.

Re: discourse about #FediSoWhite
I'm a white man. Was on Twitter throughout #BLM and gained an awful lot of free education from Black folks on there. That was the start of me consciously following diverse folks which is a strategy that's improved my life immensely.
Back on Twitter before the Muskening, there was a lot of diversity. Black Twitter was a thing, and not just first-world (anyone else remember "O jewa ke eng?"). When I went looking for people to follow to diversify my feed, I found them in abundance.
That's why it's so clearly false to me when people claim that the fediverse is secretly diverse, and why anyone making that claim sounds suspect to me. Sure there are a ton of great Black and other POC folks you can find on here, if you look hard. But it's nowhere near the levels of diversity and community that were on Twitter. Which you would know had you been following those people before, so now I have to assume you weren't, and wonder why you feel qualified to make statements about diversity even though you haven't made an effort to engage with diverse voices before?
Also, if you were actually following some of the excellent POC voices on here, you'd know that across different servers and interest groups, almost every group has had a discussion of #FediSoWhite at some point. If all the Black people you follow are independently talking about the lack of community and diversity here, you've either got to believe them or start putting on your clown makeup, and the later is absolutely a choice.

The First Amendment in the US says — wisely — that we should avoid giving the government the power to determine with the force of law what beliefs are unacceptable. That is •not• because all beliefs are acceptable, however; it is because giving the government such power opens the floodgates of authoritarianism.
Here’s the thing: some beliefs •are• unacceptable. We deny the government the power to determine which ones with the understanding that we •must• do that job ourselves, through social negotiation.

Feeling helpless? Don’t. All of this resistance makes a real and concrete difference. Honestly, the fact that this huge chunk of local residents is giving a visible, sustained “HELL NO” all the time is basically the •only• thing holding them back at this point — but it •is• making a difference.
If there were a sense of blanket permission, a sense that nobody is watching and nobody cares, a sense that there will never be consequences…we’d be in a whole different circle of hell right now.

The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol

Day 20: bell hooks.
Despite having decided to continue to 30, number 20 feels important, and hooks gets the spot in part because I haven't yet included a non-fiction feminist author, which feels like an obvious thing to include on such a list. The one category of author being bumped out of the first 20 here is anime writers, but I'll follow up with one of them, along with more academics and mangaka who I've been itching to include.
In any case, hooks is absolutely legendary as a feminist writer for good reason, and as a teacher I've especially appreciated her writing on pedagogy like "Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom" and "Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom". These have challenged me to teach at a higher level, and while I'm not sure I've completely succeeded, they're important to me. They also pair well with Paolo Friere's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed", but hooks always seems to be focused on very practical advice and it's incredibly direct in her writing, even though her advice isn't always straightforward to implement. In fact, that's one of the things I value about her writing: when the truth is complicated or the real work is messy interpersonal relationships that need to be negotiated with each student, she's not afraid to say so and give good advice for navigating those waters instead of trying to dispense simple-seeming platitudes or formulas for success that paper over the deeper issues. Her concern has always been truth, rather than simplicity or audience comfort and the popularity it might seem to entail, which I think is part of why her legacy endures so well.
#20AuthorsNoMen
#30AuthorsNoMen

Dang it, PostgreSQL is so good.
I did a data export thing. The options I needed were there. Then I needed more options, and then they were also there. They worked the way I guessed. It was fast. It was reliable. Then I thought “oh, what about sequences?!?”, but they already had that covered. My seemingly easy task turned out to be…easy.

I keep saying the same thing over and over with my kids: you don't make decisions with your voice, you make them with your body.
"I want to go to the park."
"Ok, put your shoes on."
"I want to go on my play date."
"Put on a jacket and get in the bike."
"I don't want to be late to school."
"I don't control time, if you don't want to be late you have to brush your teeth."
There's a fundamental truth underlying this concept though, one that I hadn't really thought about. On some level, I feel as though, any choice you can't make with your body isn't a real choice. If you're begging someone to do something for you, it's ultimately not something you control.
As I'm compelled, by threat of violence against my family, to pay for war against my comrades and to kill people I don't even know, I think about that. How far is our concept of freedom from the police state we are taught to imagine as the global beacon of liberty. My participation in the violence had always been compulsory.
Perhaps we could do better than just #NoKings.
#USPol

The reason for my OP here is just that it seems highly notable that these people •do• seem to sense that their market is shifting. I have the strong sense that the MAGA Titanic has already hit the iceberg.
The thing is, the actual Titanic took •hours• to sink; this one could take •years•. The question is how much damage it does on the way down, how much damage we can prevent, how much we can help it sink faster.
Courage, not complacency.

Now, for any person with a shred of moral dignity, there's some time during US history where you would have to admit that an insurrection or rebellion was necessary. Only complete scum bag fascists would try to argue that a slave revolt wasn't an absolute good, and that it was a bad thing when those revolts were crushed. Anyone with a shred of moral decency has to admit that there is at least one point in US history where the nation was doing something so incredibly evil, that it would have been good if people would have rose up and stopped it.
Today we're talking about the displacement and genocide of people in Gaza. We can look at any number of genocide on US soil carried out by the US government. Who, with any moral clarity, wouldn't point to those and want to believe that they would have resisted, violently if necessary, against those slaughters. Who, that today condemns slavery, could look at John Brown and not wish to have the moral integrity to fight and die along side of him?
Every liberal who actually believes in justice, who isn't just virtue signaling out of guilt, should be able to point to a time in history where they would absolutely agree with the most militant resistance. For those folks, I always wonder, when did that evil end? Where is your line? Have you thought about that?

This is a really good question from @…. The first thing I keep telling everyone in other cities who wonders how they can help, what they can do:
Get organized NOW. Meet your neighbors NOW. Get your neighbors set up with secure messaging NOW. Form multiple hyper-local neighborhood social groups NOW. Organize a block picnic or community craft night or repair workshop or whatever NOW. Get contact info for the human beings who physically show up for neighborhood events NOW.
Form all those local connections ASAP, so that they’re there when you need them. The hardest lines of communication to establish will be the ones with the people closest to you. If you get local lines open in advance, you’ll be in a far, far better place.
https://infosec.exchange/@mathaetaes/115731104851949153