@Techmeme@techhub.socialInside the turmoil at Thinking Machines; sources say Meta discussed buying TML, and CTO Barret Zoph had been in talks since October 2025 about an OpenAI return (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/technology/thinking-machines-ai-startup-o…
@trochee@dair-community.socialOof the AI world is eating its own here
Somehow Google's AI got the wrong end of the stick about Meta's AI and Murati's AI and who is getting hired by whom
everybody's grifting all the time forever
@v_i_o_l_a@openbiblio.socialNew Books Network: "Information Literacy and Critical Thinking: Using Perspective Transformation to Break Information Bubbles" https://newbooksnetwork.com/information-literacy-and-critical-thinking
@NFL@darktundra.xyzSteelers' McCarthy hire has everything to do with a QB, but not the one you're thinking of https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6996086/2026/01/24/mike-mccarthy-steelers-head-coach-aaron-rodgers-qb/
@Jyoti@mas.toI was just thinking...
.. all those 3D printers out there.
Can you imagine the gnarly dildoes people are printing out?
🤯
#3DPrinting #BumFun #MingeMeddling
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scotThinking about giving to folk in #Gaza; quite complicated feelings. Firstly, we do *have* to give, and give personally, because conventional charities are not effectively getting relief to Gaza -- presumably because they are being blocked by #Israel -- and because our governments are doing nothing.
Bu…
@qurlyjoe@mstdn.socialAnybody besides me thinking that maybe somebody’s got an #orca training program somewhere? We know the US has been training #dolphins / #porpoises for various purposes, but orcas are bigger, and meaner.
@brian_gettler@mas.toI've been thinking a bit about historians' use of theory. I've decided it's often similar to a comment a cafeteria worker made to me decades ago. They were serving chili dogs and I asked if I could just have a bowl of chili instead. "Oh no, dear," she said, "this is chili dog chili, it's not for eating." I've long suspected that a good chunk of my field thinks of theory along these lines. We put it on the menu and let our students consume it, even …
@azonenberg@ioc.exchangeHey @… did you have an open aes128-gcm rtl block or am i thinking of someone else?
@chris@mstdn.chrisalemany.caDear America,
It is time to get into the streets and demand this insane man leave. Impeachment will not work, nor the 25th amendment.
Stop thinking you have to go to Civil War (or any further toward that end) in order to force your president to resign.
Stop thinking the midterms will save you.
You and your friends need to do it by popular, peaceful, overwhelming demonstration.
You. Now. Force him to Resign.
#TheAmericanFascist
@detondev@social.linux.pizzaOnce again thinking about how Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's end goal was prolly estrogen
@joe@toot.worksI've been thinking about the idea of building a new house instead of buying a new house in a few year. A lot of the homes in the neighborhood are at the back of the lot (right up against the alley). You keep the old house where it is, get the city to call in an Accessory Dwelling Unit, and then build a new house in the front of the lot.
@cdarwin@c.imThe Kremlin once called its Kh-47M2 Kinzhal ballistic missiles “invincible.”
Joe Biden said the missile was “almost impossible to stop.”
Now Ukrainian electronic warfare experts say they can counter the Kinzhal with some music and a re-direction order.
The Ukrainian Army is knocking the once-hyped Russian superweapon out of the sky by jamming it with a song and tricking it into thinking it’s in Lima, Peru.
@markhburton@mstdn.socialA guide to Andy Burnham
1) Broadly principled and well meaning.
2) Seduced by growthist thinking despite encouraging some green initiatives. Result, those initiatives are highly compromised and too small scale to count. Examples, i) Building on green space, ii) failure to enact effective measures to restrict private motoring - all carrots no sticks.
3) A tendency to associate with 'celebrities'.
/Contd
Andy Burnham seeks permission to stand in by-election
@gray17@mastodon.socialthinking of vibe-coding a microwave oven. that seems like the right level of complexity. toaster is too simple, car is too complicated.
@hex@kolektiva.socialI keep thinking that I should text a friend of mine, tell him how much I've been writing, tell him I mentioned him in something I wrote. Then I remember he died like 4 years ago.
Edit:
It must have been more like 6 or something now that I'm thinking about it. It was part of the way through the first Trump administration. He would have really appreciated the way Trump is unraveling now. One of the last times we talked he was like... "You know man, You used to play 'Baby, I'm an anarchist' and I'd think... ' don't want to throw a brick through a Starbucks window. I kinda like their coffee sometimes.' But the way things have been going lately, I'm kind of looking around and thinking you might be right. Fuck Starbucks. Where's that brick?"
At least I won the SRV vs the Hendrix version of Voodoo Chile debate. Hendrix is just better.
We used to talk about music, especially punk (and rockabilly, and ska, and 2 tone), and poetry, and beer. He liked hop stupid, but I always thought it didn't have the body to match the hops and I always preferred Racer 5. Of course, this time of year we'd be shifting in to red and stout season, and I'd be excited for Lagunitas Russian Imperial and this year's Bourbon County Stout batch.
He was really big in to Star Wars. He missed all of Andor, which is probably the best thing to have come out since the original 3. But I guess he also missed the new trilogy, so maybe it balances out.
He would have really liked all the good music I've run across in the last few years. He had a music blog for a bit.
Yeah... I don't know why it's hitting me so hard now, other than maybe I never had time to really process it before.
@geant@mstdn.social⏳ The #TNC26 Call for Proposals closes this week.
We’re looking for presentations, interactive sessions, and side meetings that encourage collaboration and spark new thinking.
Whether you want to share your research, walk us through a new piece of transformative technology, or lead a discussion on pressing challenges our community is facing, we want to hear from you.
Submit by 27 N…
@macandi@social.heise.deKI-Cluster: Vier Macs mit 2 TByte können Riesenmodell Kimi K2 Thinking ausführen
Apple hat das von Exo entwickelte Protokoll zur Herstellung von Thunderbolt-5-Clustern in macOS integriert. Damit laufen auch sehr große KI-Modelle.
@pgcd@mastodon.onlineAnd to think it would be SO EASY to just have regular, non-targeted ads, and that most people like me wouldn't mind them all that much.
But no, Google et al managed to brainwash everybody into thinking targeted ads are the only option.
Sigh.
@scottmiller42@mstdn.socialOh good, I was wondering what racists might be thinking about the situation in #Minnesota and those #racist pieces of shit at The Babylon Bee were happy to blow their dog whistle for me.
If you do stumble upon it, I’d encourage you to click thumbs down, then report it for encouraging violence throu…
@Techmeme@techhub.socialSources: after five Thinking Machines staff left, investors are rattled, potentially impacting fundraising; two researchers quit via Slack during an all-hands (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/thinking-mach…
@catsalad@infosec.exchangeThinking about cats :3
@sonnets@bots.krohsnest.comSonnet 138 - CXXXVIII
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unlearned in the world's false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed:
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wher…
@robpike@hachyderm.ioThis is what happened to the web when the software industry never spent a moment thinking about long term stability. About users. About usability. About anything other than features and a fast buck.
Among many other failings.
Would be nice to some professionalism in future. One can hope, but I despair.
https://jimsbutchery.com.au
@anildash@me.dmAmidst all the buzz around things like Gas Town and Ralph, etc. there are some bits of actual substance that promise to actually empower coders — and potentially shift the power dynamic away from Big AI, while making it easier to create software just by describing ideas in plain text. I've been thinking of the idea as "codeless" software creation, for lack of a better term (the jargon doesn't matter, I just needed a name to talk about it) and would love your thoughts!
@inthehands@hachyderm.ioMy general framework for thinking about this stuff:
- Brains vary a lot, in a lot of different ways.
- We have names for a few variations, or common patterns of variation. That can be useful, but it’s hardly complete.
- There’s a wealth of as-yet-unnamed neurodivergences out there.
- It’s all but certain that •everyone’s• mind is atypical in one way or another.
- Comparison with, aspiration to, or forced conformance to the nonexistent “average” mind is unhelpful, frequently harmful.
- Embracing variation is the only reasonable (or humane) approach.
6/
@raiders@darktundra.xyzFinding Kolton Miller’s successor must be a Raiders priority https://raiderramble.com/2026/01/24/finding-kolton-millers-successor-must-be-a-raiders-priority/
@seeingwithsound@mas.toNYT: This is how your mind works https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/opinion/neuroscience-thinking-human.html Archived at https://
@izzychambers@vivaldi.net@… Yes, I've been thinking about what I want to read the next few days!
@cowboys@darktundra.xyzCowboys have underachieved and Jerry Jones starts thinking about changes https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6909761/2025/12/21/cowboys-lose-jerry-jones-changes/
@memeorandum@universeodon.comHow the Media Shape Our Thinking (Christopher F. Rufo)
https://christopherrufo.com/p/how-the-media-shape-our-thinking
http://www.memeorandum.com/251217/p55#a251217p55
@Techmeme@techhub.socialSoumith Chintala, who co-created the PyTorch ML framework at Meta and left the company this month, has joined Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab (Pranav Dixit/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-soumith-chinta…
@paulusm@scholar.social
@ruth_mottram@fediscience.orgThinking about...: The Putin-Witkoff Plan Worsens the War
Episode webpage: https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-putin-witkoff-plan-worsens-the
@AimeeMaroux@mastodon.socialI was reading up about a drug on the manufacturer's website for a paid project in my other life where I'm not an erotica writer and the text was, I kid you not, AI generated. What's funny is that while I was reading I was thinking to myself that pharmacy companies are so happy to sue each other, it would be daft to use AI generated text. Yet here we are. Sigh.
@aredridel@kolektiva.socialNow the reality is that all speech has that affiliation-building aspect and the argument-building aspect, but the scale of each varies a _lot_.
This thread itself is doing both! I'm making some concrete persuasive points here, but I'm also setting up an affiliation here. I want more people to join this "thinking well about the world" club and conversation. I want us to end up collectively in a better place than we're at. We gotta band together to do that. But also that means we need to communicate like we're in public and talking to people who don't all agree, and some of whom are hostile, and some of whom are real boneheads for various reasons.
@v_i_o_l_a@openbiblio.socialNew Books Network:
"Information Literacy and Critical Thinking: Using Perspective Transformation to Break Information Bubbles"
https://newbooksnetwork.com/information-literacy-and-critical-thinking
@padraig@mastodon.ieI keep thinking it is Saturday, lol.
Was waiting for a live stream to start... me staring at an 'offline' screen for a few minutes only to realise that it's only Friday.
@mxp@mastodon.acm.orgThe one time you’re too tired to insist on publishing #OpenAccess, thinking, “well, I can still do Green OA to meet the SNSF’s requirements”—you discover upon publication that Every. Single. Clause. in the !@#% contract you signed is actually incompatible with the requirements.
F*cking cartels (Springer, to be precise).
@mxp@mastodon.acm.orgThe one time you’re too tired to insist on publishing #OpenAccess, thinking, “well, I can still do Green OA to meet the SNSF’s requirements”—you discover upon publication that Every. Single. Clause. in the !@#% contract you signed is actually incompatible with the requirements.
F*cking cartels (Springer, to be precise).
@midtsveen@social.linux.pizzaICE got rebranded as Gestapo and now hunts Black and poor workers for the crime of existing while the rich toast their cruelty and call it law, and these Nazi strut around thinking a badge makes their violence patriotic.
Welcome back Nazi Germany, this time with Wi‑Fi and corporate fascist sponsors.
#ICE #USA
@mariyadelano@hachyderm.ioI stopped wearing my #Apple watch last week, replacing it with a simple digital Casio.
Observations so far:
- I miss tapping to pay with my wrist, but the phone is honestly pretty easy to use too.
- Missing notifications has not been a problem even when I’m leaving my phone in the other room. Nothing has been so urgent that I needed to see it immediately
- My ability to focus is already tangibly improving. Yesterday I sat and read Shakespeare for 1.5 hours without interruption - I don’t remember last time I could do something like that!
- I keep instinctively reaching for the charger in the evening thinking I need to take off my watch
- I have tried to swipe down on the Casio to see notifications at least 3 times…
#SmartWatch
@ErikJonker@mastodon.socialReading thoughts about a new Chinese openweights AI model, Kimi K2 Thinking.
https://www.interconnects.ai/p/kimi-k2-thinking-what-it-means
@cdarwin@c.imOur 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…
@jacobgudiol@mastodonsweden.seDär var små skillnader i vissa test i några situationer. Tex verkade resultaten variera något beroende på hur länga personerna fastat. Så kanske är vissa egenskaper påverkade något vid vissa tillfällen.
Men överlag är det så små effekter så det är inget att bry sig om. Andra saker som stör en i miljön eller för dagen kommer ha betydligt större effekt är när man senast åt en måltid.
Skipping breakfast does not harm thinking skills, scientists say
@inthehands@hachyderm.ioIn that story of the Air Force measurements, the research team came up with a completely radical suggestion:
Make the seats adjustable.
WHOA 🤯
“Adjustable seats.” seems to me like a great starting point for thinking about variations in human minds.
7/
@degrowthuk@mstdn.socialCall for articles: Degrowth and Ecosocialism: the global picture
Degrowth UK plans to run a series of articles as a stock-take of degrowth and ecosocialism worldwide. We envisage two types of contribution. 1) Short pieces (up to 2,000 words) summarising the situation with regard to degrowth thinking and practice at a country level (or for large countries at a more regional level). 2) Longer pieces (up to 5,000 words) reviewing the state of degrowth and ecosocialism in…
@joxean@mastodon.socialI like looking to the stars thinking that, maybe, there is someone even dumber than I looking back to the stars thinking if someone is even dumber.
@toxi@mastodon.thi.ngI keep on thinking about this so often, now mostly about how the word has been co-opted & abused by contemporary "AI"... Just refound the link (from 2012):
Generative vs generated
https://www.anomalogue.com/2012/05/01/generative-vs-generated/
@tante@tldr.nettime.orgRE: https://social.coop/@cwebber/115922491878315173
This is a fascinating change of thinking.
Ronacher was a very explict all-in AI guy and now comes to many of the points critics have been making for years (without acknowledging any of course). He still…
@raiders@darktundra.xyzForward thinking, stalled results: Raiders still searching for direction https://raiderramble.com/2025/12/16/forward-thinking-stalled-results-raiders-still-searching-for-direction/
@aardrian@toot.cafeNot-really-hot take:
Thinking `<button role="link">` is ever acceptable in place of `<a href>` is dogmatic transubstantiation belief nonsense.
Does not…
• fire on Space;
• show URL in status bar;
• have right-click options;
• etc.
It is never meat. Er, I mean, a link.
@jaygooby@mastodon.socialAh yeah! @…’s horror advent calendar has arrived 🙌
Here’s a little taste from last year..
@fortune@social.linux.pizzaNone of our men are "experts." We have most unfortunately found it necessary
to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert -- because no one
ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. A man who knows a
job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing
forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and how efficient
he is. Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, bri…
@brian_gettler@mas.toAs a historian, nothing makes me ditch a text quicker than the pretense of a "falsifiable argument." Look, we can claim that an argument isn't very good, that its evidence is unconvincing, that another conclusion makes more sense, and on and on, but it's hard to keep my eyes from rolling out of my skull when lectured on the necessity for (or even the possibility of)"testable hypotheses." It's worth thinking about paths not taken, but, dude, you can't know …
@callunavulgaris@mastodon.scotI suddenly find myself thinking of @…, not usually where my thoughts stray at breakfast time.
@davej@dice.campJeez. I have nearly 600 on Bluesky, and I’ve only posted there a half-dozen times. https://beige.party/@StefanThinks/115925345069500675
@Techmeme@techhub.socialMemo: Barret Zoph, the Thinking Machines Lab cofounder who rejoined OpenAI last week, will lead OpenAI's enterprise push, as part of a broader reorganization (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-names-former…
@nelson@tech.lgbtReading about a US citizen snatched from his house by federal thugs. He's of Hmong heritage, presumably why he was targeted by our government. Sickened. Also thinking of the Hmong family farm I buy produce from at the farmer's market. They are lovely people. I want to reach out and say something supportive but feel weird about it.
@lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nzThinking about all the citizen data that our government is shipping offshore to AU & elsewhere... there're apparently indications that Russian vessels have been hovering around undersea data cables in the north Atlantic... some suspect they've installed charges on all cables supplying data to Europe. In a future conflict, they could use these to continually disrupt European communications & intelligence. Who's to say that the US/China/others? haven't done the same to …
@fluchtkapsel@nerdculture.deIn eine MKV von 23,9 GB multiplexe ich eine Audiospur von 193 MB. Das Ergebnis ist 23,7 GB groß. :thinking:
Ich nehme mal an, MakeMKV ist ein bisschen verschwenderischer mit dem Platz als mkvmerge.
@rachel@norfolk.socialI’m thinking of splurging some serious money on fancy suspension for the KTM 790R, because I’m worth it.
Any experiences with Tractive suspension (The XTREME forks and shock)? https://tractivesuspension.com/ktm-790-adventure-r-fork-cartridge-kit-x-treme.htm…
@piger@mastodon.socialroom so cold that I'm thinking of installing Gentoo. In a loop.
@grumpybozo@toad.socialDo I know any C programmers?
I’m fiddling with a 20yo *trivial* C program and my editor(!) is warning me about the twisted casts in the first line of this:
if ((int)(addr = (void *)inet_addr(argv[1])) == -1) {
errnum=errno;
strerror(errnum);
perror("ERRNO");
(void) printf("IP address must be of the form a.b.c.d\n");
exit (2);
}
I can no longer understand what I was thinking. Can anyo…
@hex@kolektiva.socialIn the time I've been offline, I've been doing a lot and feeling a lot more mentally healthy. I've been exploring nomadnet a bit, looking at reticulum. I'm definitely going to go back to my break and being online much less regularly.
I actually totally forgot about the anniversary of the shooting, which is the first time that's happened since... uh... the shooting, I think.
I've definitely realized that, on some level, I've definitely used Mastodon (and formerly Twitter) as a coping mechanism, often in order to deal with the stressful things that I've found out about on Mastodon or Twitter.
But, again, none of those things really change our core job: build community. And that's part of what I've been neglecting, and what I can focus on more when I'm not spending as much time talking to people all over the world indirectly. Like, I can just chat directly with folks and talk about this shit.
Yeah, I do think there's value in this community. I don't think it's really screaming into the void (at least, not most of the time). But I know that I need the balance to be way farther on the side of direct engagement with comrades doing and building.
So that's what I'm gonna go back to. I feel as though it's a good sign that with all the writing about getting shot that I've been doing, and all the thinking about that, that the actual anniversary of the shooting I'm actually just thinking about bread.
And that seems like a good note to leave on. I'm gonna go back to some hacker shit.
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.ioThere’s not single shred of evidence, not an iota of a glimpse of a possibly of maybe LLM’s having any sort of even the remotest flicker of thinking.
Claiming that AGI will emerge from them is like saying a horse will spontaneously form if you just roll enough marbles down the hill.
@thesaigoneer@social.linux.pizzaWhen you are thinking about your bootc Cosmic container at 5:29, you have confirmed you are a nut job. Furthermore, I realized I have a perfectly immutable, auto updating Nix Cosmic spin.
@elduvelle@neuromatch.socialAny #Python newbies out there? (Or experts that need to teach Python)
Would you have a specific online tutorial to recommend for someone who wants to learn Python without any prior programming experience? One that also explains how to install it ?
I was thinking of something like this:
@gratianriter@bildung.social„ For teaching, this means teaching language with an explicit focus on wellbeing of all class members and striving to be an inclusive setting for all learners. It means finding ways to bring in critical reflection to prompt thinking about social structures, people’s thoughts and feelings in relation to their positioning within social structures, and ways to value and empower individuals.“
@inthehands@hachyderm.ioWhat’s a great example you love of a technical blog post (or similarly shaped writing) that:
- explains a tool, technique, technical idea
- by trying it to the author’s specific project or experience
- but also illuminates a larger concept, a bigger picture?
I don’t just want tutorials; I want writing that illuminates. I’m thinking of things where you read it and had a reaction like:
“Oh, FINALLY, I get it now!”
“What a nice example of _____!”
“This is great. I’m going to bookmark this for the next time I need to use / explain / teach a colleague to use _____.”
Looking for writing examplars to share with students. I want your favorites.
@pavelasamsonov@mastodon.socialIf you want to get some deep thinking done, get your head out of your SaaS.
@Techmeme@techhub.socialSources: Thinking Machines lacks a clear product or business strategy and has been struggling over the last couple of months to raise a new round of financing (Alex Heath/Sources)
https://sources.news/p/thinking-machines-is-nothing-without
@barijaona@mastodon.mgRE: https://toot.cat/@devopscats/115748082270192393
Worth reading and thinking about it:
@catsalad@infosec.exchangeWhatcha thinking about there, kitty?
@Techmeme@techhub.socialA source close to Thinking Machines alleged that ex-CTO Barret Zoph, who is returning to OpenAI, had shared confidential company information with competitors (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/thinking-machines-lab-cofounders-leave-for-openai/
@Techmeme@techhub.socialSources: leaders at Thinking Machines Lab confronted Barret Zoph over an alleged relationship with another employee, who is no longer at the lab, in summer 2025 (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/thinking-machines-lab-cofounder-off…
@memeorandum@universeodon.com'Extremely demoralizing': Republicans respond to the bombastic Wiles interview (Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/16/why-vanity-fair-aides-and-allies-wonder-what-wiles-west-wing-were-thinking-extremely-demoralizing-republicans-respond-to-the-bombastic-wiles-interview-00693821
http://www.memeorandum.com/251216/p136#a251216p136
@cowboys@darktundra.xyzJake Ferguson joined elite Cowboys company on Wednesday https://insidethestar.com/jake-ferguson-joined-elite-cowboys-company-on-wednesday
@mariyadelano@hachyderm.ioIt’s strange thinking about how much pain I’ve grown to accept and have just learned to live with.
I love writing by hand too much to give it up - with my ADHD it helps me focus, remember thins better, think through complex ideas. Journaling has been a great way to manage my mental illnesses. I love paper, I love collecting notebooks.
Not to mention that I am a hobbyist artist and draw on a regular basis. (Somehow that has been less painful for me than writing… but if writing cramped my hand then drawing would be agonizing too and I’d have to take weeks off on a nearly constant basis).
So suddenly purchasing a new kind of pen and realizing it MADE THE PAIN DISAPPEAR feels like magic. I literally feel less disabled.
I just wish I bought a fountain pen years ago 😅
@raiders@darktundra.xyzThree Free Agents the Raiders Should Be Thinking About https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-three-free-agents-should-be-thinking-about
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.ioIt’s amazing how these people talk about AGI as if it was actually possible (it’s not).
What’s being sold as “AI” currently is slightly random statistical token chain generation; it has zero to do with thinking, intelligence or creativity.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/17/why-trillions-dollars-risk-no-guarantee-ai-reward
@Techmeme@techhub.socialSource: at least two more TML employees are expected to join OpenAI soon; some AI researchers say they are exhausted by the constant drama in their industry (Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-openai-raid-on-thinking-machines-lab/
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot"I remember somebody jokingly suggesting that I challenge Elon Musk to a fight (this was during his and Mark Zuckerberg’s martial arts feud), and quietly thinking to myself, I am literally not paid enough for that" -- @…
Happy retirement, Eugen!
@cdarwin@c.imA Charlotte pastor said
Border Patrol came into his church and arrested a father in front of his wife and kid.
The folks were outside on the property cleaning up the yard when ICE started chasing after them.
Some ran in the church thinking it's off limits to ICE. Apparently not.
This is wrong!
https:…
@hex@kolektiva.socialAny sufficiently advanced disaster preparedness is indistinguishable from revolutionary dual power. This essay is a bit of a transition between the theory I've written earlier, and more concrete plans.
Even though I only touched on my life on the commune, it was hard not to write more. These are such weird spaces, with so much invisible opportunity. But they're also just so unique and special. For all the stress and uncertainty of making sure you stayed on Lorean's (the head priestess), there were also those long summer nights with the whole community (except the old lady) gathered around a fire, talking and drinking. There was almost a child-like play to the whole time.
There were so Fridays I'd come home with a couple of gallons of beer from the real world, folks would bring things from the garden, someone would grill a steak, everyone who didn't cook would clean up, and we'd just hang out and have fun. So many evenings I'd go over to Miles place with a guitar, or with his guitar, and we'd pass it around over a few beers, talking about philosophy, Star Wars, or some book or other. It's hard not to write about the strange magic of that space.
My partner and I bonded over similar experiences, mine on a weird little religious commune in California and theirs as a temporary worker at Omega Institute. Both had exploitation, people on weird power trips, frustrating dynamics, but also a strange magic and freedom. Both were sort of fantasy worlds, but places that let us see through this one, let us imagine something that something else is possible behind the veil.
There are many such veils.
Perhaps it's fitting that this is more meandering, as a good wander can help the transition between lots of hard thinking and lots of hard working.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/evaluating-options
Editing feedback (especially typos, spelling, grammar) is always welcome, as are questions and even wider structural advice. I've been adding the handles of folks who provide feedback to the intro in a "thank you" section. If you do help and wouldn't like to be added, please let me know.
@raiders@darktundra.xyzRaiders could display forward thinking by hiring Nate Scheelhaase https://raiderswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/raiders/2026/01/13/raiders-could-display-forward-thinking-by-hiring-nate-scheelhaa…
@Techmeme@techhub.socialMira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab makes Tinker, its API for fine-tuning language models, generally available, adds support for Kimi K2 Thinking, and more (Thinking Machines Lab)
https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/tinker-general-availability/
@memeorandum@universeodon.comHow to Negotiate with Russia -- Account for history, law, and above all Ukraine (Timothy Snyder/Thinking about)
https://snyder.substack.com/p/how-to-negotiate-with-russia
http://www.memeorandum.com/251119/p71#a251119p71
@catsalad@infosec.exchangeMy body is a machine that turns cats into kissed cats. 💋
@inthehands@hachyderm.ioEven the most radical-minded regularly fall into the trap of thinking that politicians are leaders. (It’s an easy trap; we call them “leaders” all the time.) I’ve been seeing a lot of that thinking in the complaints in my TL the last couple of days.
Politicians are always lagging indicators of change. They can be a tool of change, they can help systematize change, but they rarely •cause• it.
Politicians follow. People lead.
3/
@cdarwin@c.imThe United States is a global superpower,
and its military trains for war in every domain.
During my years as a military educator, I saw American officers wrestle with any number of scenarios designed to challenge their thinking and force them to adapt to surprises.
One case we never considered, however, was how to betray and attack our own allies.
We did not ask what to do if the president becomes a threatening megalomaniac who tells one of our oldest friends, Nor…
@raiders@darktundra.xyzRaiders’ Pete Carroll not concerned with draft implications from Sunday’s game https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/raiders/raiders-pete-carroll-not-concerned-with-draft-implications-from-sundays-game-3598967/
@hex@kolektiva.socialSo in another dream I just woke up from, I was talking to someone about "the idea problem" (that it's becoming harder to monitize ideas, from a vox article written by an AI cooked reporter).
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/executive-disorder-white-house-weekly-46-313675864/
Basically, I was arguing that the majority of inventions target men because patriarchy puts economic control in men's hands. As men have started to help more with childcare, there have been more inventions related to childcare. (I don't have any idea if this is true. Seems legit, but I'm just relating my dream. I think I was also oversimplifying a bit to "men" and "women" because of my audience, but anyway it was a dream.) There's actually more low-hanging fruit, I pointed out, related to making care work easier.
So I argued that the real problem was a failure to invest in research into solving that problem. Today there are all these boondoggles built around killing people. What if, instead of all this government research into killing people, we dumped a ton of money into making it easier to support a household? That would be great for the economy. (Being asleep, I seem to have forgotten that working people need money.)
In the blur of being just awake I started thinking about how you could kickstart the US economy by taking the money from the AI boondoggle and other autonomous murder bots and create something like a program to build robots for housekeepers. You'd still be funding tech with government money, so the same horrible people get paid, but you're now actually solving real problems. It wouldn't even matter if it was a boondoggle, honestly. Just dumping money into something other than murdering people is good enough.
I imagined first if there was a program to fund a robot housecleaner, like robot dog with AI some laundry pickup, that would be provided, free of charge, to help people with children. It would work the same as the military boondoggle where a private company makes the government buy a piece of hardware from them and then also pay them to service it for some number of years. But instead of that hardware sitting around waiting to kill someone, it would be getting brought to people's houses to help them.
Then I thought, hey, you could even boost the economy more if you just had government funding for doulas and housecleaners and paid them a living wage. Hey, you could really kickstart the economy by nationalizing healthcare and including doula support as part of all births. Oh, and you could also just include the optional household help for families with children until the kids turn 18.
None of this is perfect (I don't actually think most of this is possible from any state), but the point is that it's actually wildly easy to figure out all kinds of ways to invest in the economy and monitize ideas as long as you aren't entirely focused on the same old "make money from spying on people and killing them." Funny that. Like they said in the podcast, maybe "finding ideas" isn't the problem.
Hope you enjoyed the weird semi-awake brain dump/rant.
@Techmeme@techhub.socialBarret Zoph says Thinking Machines Lab fired him only after learning he was leaving, and at no time did the company cite his performance or unethical conduct (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-messy-h…
@cdarwin@c.imScottish engineer and inventor,
James Watt
was born on this day
19 January 1736
"I had gone to take a walk on a fine Sabbath afternoon. I had entered the Green by the gate at the foot of Charlotte Street – had passed the old washing-house. I was thinking about the engine at the time and had gone as far as the Herd’s house when the idea came into my mind, that as steam was an elastic body it would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication was made between the cyl…
@Techmeme@techhub.socialA look at the making of The Thinking Game, a documentary about Google DeepMind and its CEO Demis Hassabis, garnering 285M views on YouTube since November 2025 (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/google-deepmin
@raiders@darktundra.xyzRaiders' HC requests indicates they're thinking young offensive mind https://raiderswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/raiders/2026/01/12/raiders-hc-requests-indicates-theyre-thinking-young…
@Techmeme@techhub.socialChinese startup Moonshot releases Kimi K2 Thinking, an open-source model it claims beats GPT-5 in agentic capabilities; source: the model cost $4.6M to train (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/alibaba-backed-moonshot-releas…
@Techmeme@techhub.socialThinking Machines parts ways with CTO Barret Zoph, with Soumith Chintala taking over the role; sources say the termination is due to "unethical conduct" (Kylie Robison/@kyliebytes)
https://x.com/kyliebytes/status/2011572331798548899
@Techmeme@techhub.socialMeta's win over the US FTC may mean Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others can resume buying startups to stay ahead of the pack, after a slowdown under Lina Khan (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/technology/meta-ruling-silicon-valley…
