Tootfinder

Day 18: Mark Oshiro
Having just learned that Oshiro is nonbinary, they're an instant include on this list. In veering extremely heavily towards YA, and losing a spot that would have gone to an absolutely legendary mangaka, anime writer, or feminist philosopher, but "Anger is A Gift" and "Each of us a Desert" are just that good, and I'm trying to steer a bit towards towards lesser-known authors I respect.
I already mentioned "Anger is a Gift" above, but to recap, it's a painful, vivid, and beautifully honest story of queer love, loss, and protest against an oppressive system. CW for racist police murder, intergenerational trauma, and police brutality against highschool students. It's a book a lot of Americans could benefit from reading right now, and while it's fiction, it's not fantasy or sci-fi. Besides the themes and politics, the writing is just really solid, with delicate characterization and tight-plotted developments that are beautifully paced.
To me "Each of us a Desert" is maybe even more beautiful, and Oshiro leaps into a magnificent fantasy world that's richly original in its desolation, dark history, lonely characters, and mythical magic. Particularly the clearly-not-just-superscription but ambiguously-important/powerful magical elements of Oshiro's worldbuilding are a rare contrast to the usual magic-is-real-here's-how-it-works fare, and pulling that off a all as they do is a testament to their craft. The prose is wonderful, probably especially so if you speak Spanish, but I enjoyed it immensely despite only knowing a few words here and there. The rich interiority of the characters, their conflicts both with each other and within themselves, and the juxtaposition of all that against origins in cult-like ignorance allows for the delivery of a lot of wisdom and complex truths.
Between these two books, so different and yet each so powerful, Oshiro has demonstrated incredible craft and also a wide range of styles, so I'm definitely excited to read more of their work and to recommend them to others.
I'm also glad to have finally put a nonbinary author on this list; the others I had in mind won't make it at this point because there's too much genre overlap, although I'll include them in my didn't-make-it list at the end. I've now got just 2 slots left and have counted up 14 more authors that absolutely need to be mentioned, so we'll see what happens.
#20AuthorsNoMen

me: "Yeah, this 'no screens' punishment thing isn't working."
A: "And [the 8yo] is using screens responsibly! Right now she's using an app to learn Korean."
8yo: "See? You should let me have screens."
me: "We need to come up with a better punishment! Maybe we should pull out her fingernails?"
8yo: "Hey!"
A: "But that will only work for 10 days"
me: "Oh yeah, good point"

Good evening! Just a daily mountain photo for you ;-) I took it on my hike last weekend.
At this point I thought that it might have been beneficial if I would also have brought gaiters, then I would have walked a bit more into the snow.
But it was still a great day.
the #video of the hike is here:

Boosted second moment method in random regular graphs
Bal\'azs Gerencs\'er, Viktor Harangi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12600 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

Boosted second moment method in random regular graphs
Determining the asymptotic independence ratio of random regular graphs is a key challenge in the area of sparse random graphs. Due to the interpolation method, very good upper bounds are known, which are actually known to be sharp for sufficiently large degrees. This paper provides explicit lower bounds for given degrees $d$, beating the previous best bounds for $d \geq 10$. The starting point is a second moment argument that we can boost by arguing that the obtained independent set has a cer…

Ok, I’m procrastinating downloading a bunch of vids with yt-dlp and at this point I’m already reaching the tabs limit on this Safari profile
What’d be the best way of downloading a bunch of videos with yt-dlp while still keeping a good control of what failed and what succeeded? (this is basically impossible from its output if you feed it a bunch of links in a single go)
I was wanting a webui I could selfhost and it’d show progress and status for each video it’s downloading (and let me pass custom options to the yt-dlp command, such as filename), but should I just make a script with a for loop for each URL instead?

I've filed a report about a minor problem with a #Python package, namely that the source distribution contained some trailing junk that breaks GNU #tar. On one hand, I'm happy that upstream took the issue seriously. On the other hand, I'm terrified of how much #AI slop was involved in the response.
I mean, my short bug report yielded a few walls of text of #LLM analysis of what the cause of the problem might be, of suggested solutions… and praise of the author's fix. These are interspersed with short comments from the author, all pasted under their own personal account. And the linked pull request is also huge, with "verification code" that's quite sloppy (bits that don't do anything, conditions that will never be true… but at least it seems to do what it was supposed to do).
Honestly, I don't know what to do. Not that I ever planned using this package, but at this point I will definitely stay away from it. It's in #Gentoo, and I'll have to continue maintaining it for the sake of reverse dependencies, but I feel like it's unfair to expose our users to packages that have clearly proven to accept AI slop without reviewing it properly. Or rather, AI slop that's being reviewed… by AI. How can anyone think this a good idea?!
There were multiple times in my life when I've considered retiring from Gentoo, for variety of reasons. There were also multiple times when I wanted to get away from computers altogether. Unfortunately, we're living in a truly fucked up world, and there is no escape. The best you can do is put an ever increasing effort to keep fixing all that crap that will just keep piling on faster and faster.
#FreeSoftware #OpenSource

Good examples in that article for why a prompt-based system for system administration seems odd: You type a hundred-word question and are told by the AI to use apt when the Fedora system doesn’t use that package manager at all. https://mstdn.social/@osnews/115702679695335298

Adding another post. This one is a bit less polished, but I want to get it out. As things get harder for everyone, I'm seeing a greater tendency to want to grasp onto revolutionary fiction such as #Andor. I think there's value in that, but it has to come with an informed critique.
> We are so thirsty for hope that we will drink it up, even when that hope comes from a fiction and the truth behind the hope is poison. In Andor, we see the worst elements sacrifice themselves for some of the best. The revolution goes through a process of purification, the complicated elements weeding themselves out to make room for the simplified good, as the rebellion unifies. In reality, this tends to be the opposite how things actually work.
> [...]
> [The Urban Guerilla movement of the 60's through the 80's] centered militant revolution. In doing so, they omitted or cut themselves off from the logistic support needed to sustain such revolutionary activity. The trauma of carrying out violence further isolated and radicalized them. Lacking infrastructure for trauma healing, their decay escalated and became unrecoverable. Ultimately, their revolutionary movements both emulated and reinforced the status quo they were trying to resist.
> There emerges a strange historical parallel that is difficult to see from within the dominant paradigm. The competitive politics of electoralism derives from heroic competition, where people (typically men) compete (often violently) for control over a territory or people. Thus the insurrectionary enters into the very same competition as a challenger, not against the system of domination but for control over it. The success of the revolution, then, does not abolish the system of violent domination but changes rather replaces its management.
> Many modern anarchists will be quick to point out the disconnect between ends and means. While authoritarian projects often assert that "the ends justify the means," and Andor implies the same, anti-authoritarian projects assert the ends and the means are not only united but are, in fact, the same.
This is still very much something I'm actively editing, but I'd still love feedback to help me refine it to it's final form. Typo catches and clarifying questions welcome.
#USPol

Just finished "The Raven Boys," a graphic novel adaptation of a novel by Maggie Stiefvater (adaptation written by Stephanie Williams and illustrated by Sas Milledge).
I haven't read the original novel, and because of that, this version felt way too dense, having to fit huge amounts of important details into not enough pages. The illustrations are gorgeous and the writing is fine; the setting and plot have some pretty interesting aspects... It's just too hard to follow a lot of the threads, or things we're supposed to care about aren't given the time/space to feel important.
The other thing that I didn't like: one of the central characters is rich, and we see this reflected in several ways, but we're clearly expected to ignore/excuse the class differences within the cast because he's a good guy. At this point in my life, I'm simply no longer interested in stories about good rich guys very much. It's become clear to me how in real life, we constantly get the perspectives of the rich, and rarely if ever hear the perspectives of the poor (same applies across racial and gender gradients, among others). Why then in fiction should I get more of the same, spending my mental bandwidth building empathy for yet another dilettante who somehow has a heart of gold? I'm tired of that.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

Whatever happens to our democracy, history will remember our 3 good SCOTUS justices as a voice of clarity when civil society was unraveling around them.
Future generations will point to their writing and say, “Look at this. It’s not like people didn’t understand what was happening at the time. They knew perfectly well.”
EDIT: I said Sotomayor at first; this is Jackson!! “What would you do with a brain if you had one, Paul?” I’m sure I have no idea.
https://journa.host/@chrisgeidner/115504618482036124

“I think a lot of it is looking at the world today and realizing capitalism has just taken over, and it really is the thing that’s causing the most pain for people. I just wanted to really kind of drive that point in the game, in a kind of humorous, sarcastic way, that this capitalism is not good.”
Ron Gilbert about his latest game
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/12/after-40-years-of-adventure-games-ron-gilbert-pivots-to-outrunning-death/

Series D, Episode 03 - Traitor
AVON: Ah well. Tarrant is brave; young; handsome. [Chuckles] There are three good reasons for anyone not to like him.
SOOLIN: He has a point all the same.
AVON: About Tarrant?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/403/109 B7B2

🌍 The climate crisis demands urgent action. But which actions are best?
Decision makers face tough trade-offs:
Policy A lowers emissions at home but increases reliance on imports.
Policy B cuts emissions long-term but raises unemployment short-term.
Policy C boosts jobs now but increases emissions in the near term.
None of these choices are simple. A policy that looks good locally may increase global emissions, or its effects may depend on what other countries d…

'writing is more than just the process by which you obtain a piece of text, right? it's also about finding out what you wanted to say in the first place, and how you wanted to say it. this post existed in my head first as a thought, then it started to gel into words, and then i tried pulling those words out to arrange them in a way that (hopefully) gets my point across. ... i alone can get the thought out and writing is how i do that.'

I tend to talk to kids like they are regular human people. A small child said to me "You're phone is little." and I replied:
"Yes, this phone is 5 years old. It still works, so there's no reason to replace it. There's really no good reason for people to get a new phone every year or two except for consumerism gone out of control. You see, the more money you put into the pockets of big tech, the more..."
The small child walked away at that point, bu…

A Fixed Point Framework for the Existence of EFX Allocations
S. Rasoul Etesami
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04915 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04915

A Fixed Point Framework for the Existence of EFX Allocations
We consider the problem of the existence of an envy-free allocation up to any good (EFX) for linear valuations and establish new results by connecting this problem to a fixed point framework. Specifically, we first use randomized rounding to extend the discrete EFX constraints into a continuous space and show that an EFX allocation exists if and only if the optimal value of the continuously extended objective function is nonpositive. In particular, we demonstrate that this optimization problem …

Case study of anti-marketing in the A.I. Age: The "summaries" that google puts at the top of most searches are such trash that you probably haven't noticed that the "AI Mode" you get clicking on this button is astonishingly good: whenever I ask "I read a paper that came to such and such a conclusion" it gives me that paper within the first three results.

After #Trump finally crashes and burns (I'm still saying I don't think he makes it to the mid terms, and I think it's more than possible he won't make it to the end of the year) we'll hear a lot of people say, "the system worked!" Today people are already talking about "saving democracy" by fighting back. This will become a big rally cry to vote (for Democrats, specifically), and the complete failure of the system will be held up as the best evidence for even greater investment in it.
I just want to point out that American democracy gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile, who, before being elected was already a well known sexual predator, and who made the campaign promise to commit genocide. He then preceded to commit genocide. And like, I don't care that he's "only" kidnaped and disappeared a few thousand brown people. That's still genocide. Even if you don't kill every member of a targeted group, any attempt to do so is still "committing genocide." Trump said he would commit genocide, then he hired all the "let's go do a race war" guys he could find and *paid* them to go do a race war. And, even now as this deranged monster is crashing out, he is still authorized to use the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
He committed genocide during his first term when his administration separated migrant parents and children, then adopted those children out to other parents. That's technically genocide. The point was to destroy the very people been sending right wing terror squads after.
There was a peaceful hand over of power to a known Russian asset *twice*, and the second time he'd already committed *at least one* act of genocide *and* destroyed cultural heritage sites (oh yeah, he also destroyed indigenous grave sites, in case you forgot, during his first term).
All of this was allowed because the system is set up to protect exactly these types of people, because *exactly* these types of people are *the entire power structure*.
Going back to that system means going back to exactly the system that gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile *TWICE*.
I'm already seeing the attempts to pull people back, the congratulations as we enter the final phase, the belief that getting Trump out will let us all get back to normal. Normal. The normal that lead here in the first place. I can already see the brunch reservations being made. When Trump is over, we will be told we won. We will be told that it's time to go back to sleep.
When they tell you everything worked, everything is better, that we can stop because we won, tell them "fuck you! Never again means never again." Destroy every system that ever gave these people power, that ever protected them from consequences, that ever let them hide what they were doing.
These democrats funded a genocide abroad and laid the groundwork for genocide at home. They protected these predators, for years. The whole power structure is guilty. As these files implicate so many powerful people, they're trying to shove everything back in the box. After all the suffering, after we've finally made it clear that we are the once with the power, only now they're willing to sacrifice Trump to calm us all down.
No, that's a good start but it can't be the end.
Winning can't be enough to quench that rage. Keep it burning. When this is over, let victory fan that anger until every institution that made this possible lies in ashes. Burn it all down and salt the earth. Taking down Trump is a great start, but it's not time to give up until this isn't possible again.
#USPol

The Road to the Closest Point is Paved by Good Neighbors
Sariel Har-Peled, Benjamin Raichel, Eliot W. Robson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23966 https://arxiv…

The Road to the Closest Point is Paved by Good Neighbors
$\renewcommand{\Re}{\mathbb{R}}$Given a set $P$ of $n$ points in $\Re^d$, and a parameter $\varepsilon \in (0,1)$, we present a new construction of a directed graph $G$, of size $O(n/\varepsilon^d)$, such that $(1+\varepsilon)$-ANN queries can be answered by performing a greedy walk on $G$, repeatedly moving to a neighbor that is (significantly) better than the current point. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first construction of a linear size with no dependency on the spread of the po…

Long but very good:
"An essay on wank"
It names and identifies one of my least favorite genre of posts – finally I have a proper term for it!
I'm sure I've been guilty of it too in the past, so it's useful for self-regulation, too.
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/essay_

Wow. I've dealt with various toxic personalities in software development, but a good portion of the time those toxic personalities were at least extremely knowledgeable in their (often, very limited) domain.
AI, however, seems to be enabling toxic personalities *who are completely clueless*. Impressive!
https://github…

What is a Linux distribution?
Good question.
FreeBSD – up to position 26 (seen in this Linux Renaissance video) is:
― a distro
― a talking point
― a gift.
<https://youtu.be/G5lUyt3pM90?si=yRDYHcOMUaOpkp0o&t=75>

The Smithereens anthology 'From Jersey it Came' was released in September 2004. In 2004 I was 24. The Smithereens had been my favorite band for a while at that point, so this was a treat for a megafan like me. If you ignore the roughness of their super early stuff here, this is a really good primer for some of the Smithereens' best songs. It starts off with ones from their early days like their first single "Girls About Town" and it also includes basically all their lat…

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

I tend to talk to kids like they are regular human people. A small child said to me "You're phone is little." and I replied:
"Yes, this phone is 5 years old. It still works, so there's no reason to replace it. There's really no good reason for people to get a new phone every year or two except for consumerism gone out of control. You see, the more money you put into the pockets of big tech, the more..."
The small child walked away at that point, bu…

If I didn't need iOS 26 for testing, I’d have waited a few point releases. Fixing years of tech debt is good, but has to frustrate those who updated but might have wanted to wait.
“Apple to focus on ‘quality and underlying performance’ with iOS 27 next year: report”
https://

Apple to focus on 'quality and underlying performance' with iOS 27 next year: report - 9to5Mac
This past year, Apple overhauled its design language across all of its major software platforms with the introduction of Liquid...

An investor has calculated a poverty line of $137k/y "for a family of four to afford housing, health care, child care and other necessities", which is four times the current line. While I think location matters here, this national figure is still a good reminder of American wealth inequality.
https://wapo.st/44ymv6f

An investor called $140,000 the new poverty line. Experts disagreed but said he had a point.
Michael Green’s tally of the costs of raising a family in the U.S. today is going viral, even if some economists scoff at his math.

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).

Day 11: Bee Johnson
As promised, back to printed books, and since I hadn't yet done any authors of picture or board books, here's one. It looks like Johnson is primarily an illustrator and has only written a single kids' book, but it's a magnificent one: "What Can A Mess Make?"
Naturally, the illustrations are rich and evocative, but it's also got one of my favorite formats (just a few lines per page, with consistent meter and rhymes throughout) and has the incredibly charming theme of two sisters who are constantly making messes, except it highlights the fun (and other emotions) they get out of their messy play, reminding parents cleaning up messes that there's a benefit to letting your kids make the mess in the first place, which is an idea that's stuck with me as I clean up my own kids' messes. This book checks *all* of my boxes for a good picture book (which is kinda hard).
#20AuthorsNoMen
P.S. at this point, I think I've exhausted the range of "author" definitions I wanted to include in my list, and I've now got the unenviable task of balancing between genres and trying to hit some of my favorite authors before we get to 20. We'll see how that goes...