Tootfinder

Amid US public media funding cuts, a look at how the model of private donations can lead to an audience that's older, whiter, and richer than average Americans (Sarah Scire/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/11/funding-c…

Funding cuts may make public radio more reliant on old, rich, white donors
After years of interviews, research, and writing, Laura Garbes submitted the final draft of her book on public radio in December 2024. By the time Listeners Like Who? Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry published last month, a lot had changed. Following Trump’s election and fede…

And speaking of @… , send an email to their president robin.sparkman@propublica.org with text similar to the following:
Dear Robin Sparkman,
I am writing to you in solidarity with the ProPublica Guild. It is past time that you agree to a fair contract, complete with the protections these workers need to continue producing award-winning journalism…

To ChatGPT: At the time of writing, there is not a single mass media article comparing Neuralink Blindsight with The vOICe. Why? #BCI

ChatGPT - Neuralink vs The vOICe
Shared via ChatGPT

If you are an anti-fascist, you are against petroleum. Petroleum funds fascism globally. It is at the heart of the military industrial complex driving global imperialism, from both the US and Russia. Motonormitivity is fascist, both in it's elitist roots and in it's ties to historical fascism (Hitler hated bikes, just on principle). Oil is militarism.
Oil is the dominant resource which drives war, both in terms of it being the primary spoil wars are fought over and in terms of fueling the military vehicles and weapons that carry out those wars. Practically every war since (and including) WWII has been over oil. Genocides are carried out to secure oil. Gaza is over oil, in more ways than one.
Oil is the absolute enemy, and AI is simply an extension of that: an attempt to atomize us so we can't resist the oil-centric global order, one last grasp at the control over our lives oil has given to those whose power is now threatened by a solar punk future.
"I haven't written for a few weeks now. As I write the closing chapter and begin rewriting previous sections, everything feels both more distant and more immediate. The working title [Kairos] has only continued to feel more and more resonant, both during the writing and during my pause."
Now is the time to resist by making something different, by creating a world fundamentally opposed to these systems of oppression.
This is the last in my Kairos series. From here on out I'll be editing to try and make it more of a book than a series of posts. Thanks to everyone who has helped so far. All editing is welcome (typos, spell checks, questions and challenges). Between ADHD and dyslexia, it's always hard for my brain to notice mistakes in my own text so I always appreciate the support of those who can.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/kairos

After writing some questionable `rust` code for #adventofcode Day 8, I've managed to get the right answers in a reasonable amount of time which has taken far, far longer than I'd care to admit. I'll jump on the Python and Nim solves later because my brain is absolutely fried at the moment.
Solution:

I spent way too much time writing up this Terms of Service for my website.
By viewing this website, you agree that I have permission to inject words, images, and other content into your brain. 1400 words - 7 minutes
https://felix.dognebula.com/art/terms-of-service.html…

"Bitcoin is crashing hard, reaching historic lows of well below the $70,000 mark. At the time of writing, the token is hovering just above $63,000, levels we haven’t seen since October 2024."
"According to Coindesk, the average cost to mine one Bitcoin is currently around $87,000 — far higher than its current going rate, making it an extremely unprofitable proposition."
🥳🥳🥳

Bitcoin Is Crashing So Hard That Miners Are Unplugging Their Equipment
Bitcoin's plunge has made it far less economical to mine the digital token. Some companies are starting to unplug their equipment.

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

"The relationship between power, poverty, inequality, and lack of political participation is mirrored in the damage to the natural world. They cannot be divorced from each other."
—Yale School of the Environment professor Gerald Torres ’77 J.D. writing in the new issue of Reflections https://

Have you ever wondered to what extend LLMs are used to support writing of scientific publications? Here is a chart indicating the fraction of LLM-modified sentences in scientific publications over time.
c.f. Liang et al, Mapping the Increasing Use of LLMs in Scientific Papers (2024)
https://arxiv.org/html/2404.01268v1

My toots are getting too long and I sometimes want to share more than just (but also) my tech ramblings.
With all that metal running just fine, it's time to do sth else. And more.
The two excellent write-ups below pushed me over the brink, website and blog time!
Thanks to @… and @…

from my link log —
Writing an async runtime in Rust.
https://michaelhelvey.dev/posts/rust_async_runtime
saved 2026-02-03 https://

Writing an Async Runtime in Rust
If you’ve used Rust to build anything for the web (or anything that needs to talk to something else over a network), more than likely you’ve encountered async / await syntax. You’ve probably had to install an async runtime (more than likely tokio ). Most of the time, things like tokio d...

What’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.

We watched the Joker ironically and then went on YouTube to watch whatever people made about the movie there back in the day, landed in the worst slop bubble, and dug so deep until we hit “JOKER QUOTES ABOUT WOMEN” and these videos could be classified as performance art, they're pure gold

'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.'

Much thanks and heartfelt support to @… for writing up the kind of article that I, too, have been dreading to have to write: that absolutist OSS is bad and we protect the commons with fair licensing, non-commercial and otherwise

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

In 1588, Galileo had not yet looked through a telescope.
Microscopes, pendulum clocks, barometers, and steam pumps were decades away.
Francis Bacon,
a member of parliament still in his twenties,
was only beginning his writing on science.
Robert Boyle wouldn’t be born for another 39 years,
Isaac Newton for another 55.
But a subtle shift in perspective was already taking place,
heralding the
‘culture of growth’
that would blossom i…

The Renaissance book that heralded growth - Works in Progress Magazine
Long before modern science, Europeans learned to see their own time as an age of invention rather than decline.

Sonic CD: comparing time periods
When playing through Sonic CD, there are frequently ledges that seem inaccessible, or slopes that seem to stop abruptly. I noted when writing about my completion of the game that the level design felt a little bit off in places, preventing you from getting up too high a speed; on reflection this may well be another deliberate puzzle, to work out how to time travel, but I thought it might also be where the levels had been adjusted for…

Do Not Put Your Site Behind Cloudflare if You Don't Need To
At the time of writing 12:43 UTC on Tue 18 Nov, Cloudflare has taken many sites down. I'm trying to browse the web, but about half of the sites show an error.
🤦 https://huijzer.xyz/posts/123/do-not-p

A few pages is better than no pages. Structural Edit. Slow. Mind unwilling to focus for any period of time. I keep drifting, having to pick up the thread and reread what I just did.
Tomorrow will be a better day for writing. #writing #grief

Don’t get me wrong - while using the fountain pen I am still trying to maintain good writing posture and I’m continuing to do my regular hand stretches.
But for a sense of the difference: before, I was happy with the fact that I managed to develop a good pain management routine to allow me to write like 2-3 pages at a time without convulsing in pain.
And now I can write 6 pages nonstop without even thinking or feeling anything. A short 5–10 minute rest and I can come back for more.
This is such a big deal to me. I was able to draw yesterday with a relaxed hand after spending hours writing notes. Before I’d only be able to do one or the other in a day!
And then I finished the evening by writing out a chapter of my novel by hand.
And today my hand is totally fine!!

The chat interface was a marketing bet. Selling #AI as if it is not auto complete. It still is.
"#ChatGPT shifted the user’s relationship to text, moving the prompt from a ‘piece of writing for the model to finish’ to a ‘question calling for an answer’."

What Was ChatGPT?
A Chatbot Optimized for Social Distance Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, we can finally speak in hindsight about what it was and how it came to be. Its meteoric rise shocked the world, gathering more users in less time than any product launch in history. But that specific

So I was going to write a short piece about this, but I'm so plumb out of time, and it would be so weird to put this in Metacurity as a special report that I'm writing a social media thread instead.
Last summer, I wrote a piece about the Coinbase breach based on an extensive conversation I had with the exchange's CSO, Philip Martin, who has serious chops as a cybersecurity guy.

Behind the Coinbase breach: Bribery emerges as enterprise threat
Coinbase’s breach shows how bribery schemes — long used for SIM swaps — can be a potent enterprise attack vector. Experts urge security leaders to add bribery training and red-teaming to their cyber defense toolkits.

Can I complain about required, subject-agnostic university writing courses? Part of the crisis in the humanities is that our institutions appear to have decided that we don't teach writing. But we do. Or maybe their problem is that we also teach troublesome substance? I haven't seen any evidence that the writing courses on my campus pay any attention to ideas, it seems to be all form all the time.

More than math. I have noticed for years a decline in reading, writing and grammar. I may not be the best, but at least most of the time I can compose a grammatically correct note that doesn't have spelling errors. I can (usually) read documents and I am capable of writing an executive summary.
https://flip.it/hiBh8X

I spent some time this weekend sitting at a proper coffee shop with a proper cup of tea, working on writing code examples for @… and it makes me happy to know that there are at least a dozen more ideas in the hopper for future weekends.

In 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.

Writing unit tests for my random number generation library continues to be difficult. My tests are failing because the bias in the distribution exceeds my expectations, but I'm wondering whether I should just repeat the test more times and permit it to exceed expectations some of the time (as long as it does it symmetrically/rarely/etc. My gut tells me that second-order expectations aren't any better than first-order expectations, but another part of me disagrees.
Thinking more as I write this (writing is thinking): second-order tests can at least give me better info to work with towards fixing things I think! So maybe I'll invest in them.
#coding

Finished “People Like Us” by Jason Mott.
I will admit that there were moments early where I struggled, trying to puzzle out the dual narratives. You have to accept it as experimental writing with a plurality in scope. When I surrendered and just READ, I absolutely loved it!
What is it about? So much. Gun violence. Where home is. America. Race. Writers. Trauma & coping. Time travel. Peacocks.
So much to say, but for spoilers 🤐
5/5 ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

People Like Us
The riveting new novel by the author of the 2021 Nation…

from my link log —
Hosting SQLite databases on Github Pages (or any static file hoster).
https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2021/hosting-sqlite-databases-on-github-pages/
saved 2021-05-02

"Spiritual humility and ecological wisdom alike teach us that it’s time to let go of anthropocentrism—the idea that human beings are the center of the universe. Instead, we can rejoice that all creatures belong to Jesus … "
—Professor and alum Carolyn Sharp ’94 M.A.R., ’00 Ph.D. writing in the new issue of Reflections, in her piece "Let There Be Life! A Sermonic Call to Ecological Witness"

New background finished, and I think it turned out better than it should have. I really enjoy writing, but trying to write background for characters that are very, very different than yourself are also very, very difficult. However, I'm gonna call it done for the time being and just relax.
#pathfinder2e

Along the way I learned how to create a nice document from all the Markdown files I have written in Obsidian. With Pandoc and LaTeX stitching the chapters together as one PDF or EPUB. And of course I lost way too much time solving the last typesetting problems, reading documentation of either Pandoc or templating for Latex. It was a fun ride.
#pandoc #latex #obsidian #writing