Tootfinder

In a matter of weeks, Francesca Hong, an unlikely candidate for governor in one of the country’s most heated battleground states, will test a message that is at once radical and, to many, incredibly practical:
👉the government should help pay for childcare.
“When we talk about free childcare, you can connect to folks whether it’s on an economic argument or just purely that it’s the right thing to do for our kids,” said Hong,
a democratic socialist running in Wisconsin’s Demo…

How free childcare started winning US elections: ‘Overnight, people realized how essential it was’
Francesca Hong, a candidate for Wisconsin governor, is part of a wave of democratic socialists finding traction with an old idea

I tried to write something up to talk about an idea, but it didn't quite work. I have a lot more I need to put into it. But I want to get an idea out, and, after talking with a person who pointed out some of the flaws in what I wrote, I think I can maybe write down the kernel of the idea here.
An acquaintance of mine did a deep dive on Operational Art and wrote his thesis (which prompted an earlier set of posts and an article I wrote for my professional-ish blog) on the intersection of the OODA loop and critical philosophy. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about Kilcullen's Three Pillars model (after watching Andrewism's wonderful video) and Beer's VSM. The TL;DR of it is that there's a much better insurgency model. Of course, the insurgency model also works for a bunch of other things, because cybernetics lets you do all kinds of cool abstraction like that.
So as I was reading the essay of a comrade the other day, that model popped back into my head and I'm going to try to share what I can of it.
When colonizers came to the Salish region, they saw what they believed to be an untouched wilderness. They failed to see the ways in which Salish people tended the land. Indigenous fire practices were common on the northwest coast, and the suppression of those practices remains a problem. There is an interrelationship between an environment and the systems within it. Systems, like people, animals, and cultures, adapt to the environment. In doing so, those systems will also change the environment.
Social technology was invisible, so colonizers defaulted to either some kind of Rousseauvian or Malthusian model of these people. They were not, for the colonizers, people who had developed advanced social technologies to live in harmony with their world. They were, rather, people in "a state of nature."
The European influenced left continues to draw this Rousseauvian model, which continues through a lot of Anarchist revolutionary thought. European anarchists were heavily influenced by observations and theories around the behavior of indigenous people. The remnants of this thought still exist in the idea that the system must only be destroyed for us to be free.
This is the same obliviousness to social technology, that social technology actually exists, often informs both early colonizers and modern radicals.
It is through this obliviousness that we fail to recognize how capitalism is a social technology that is managed into existence and maintained, and how changes in the environment can threaten institutions that have become over-adapted to a specific version of that environment.
We can extend Kilcullen's metaphor of a "conflict ecosystem" through cybernetics into a much more rich model, populated by viable systems. The ecosystem itself has a fitness function, which drives adaptation within the environment. But all actors in the environment also affect it. Some try to manage the environment. Revolutions are often over who manages a social ecosystem, over who controls the social technology and what it does.
Once we see this dynamic at play, calls of "riot" and "revolution" make a whole lot less sense. Rather, the question becomes, "how do we change the ecosystem in such a way that it cannot be 'managed' at all?"
Graeber/Wengrow talked about Turtle Island indigenous social technologies in Dawn of Everything, such as the system of moieties and clans described in the book. So I have a good reading list as I think through this model, but I hope the "ecosystem" model is helpful (if not completely fleshed out).
I'd be interested in any critiques or thoughts to help develop this idea more.

Pittsburgh-based Gray Swan, which stress-tests AI models for top frontier AI labs, raised a $40M Series A at a $200M valuation co-led by Wing VC and Madrona (Rashi Shrivastava/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivast

This AI Startup’s Army Of 15,000 Hackers Pressure Test Claude, GPT-5 And Gemini
Gray Swan works with every major frontier AI lab. Now it’s raised $40 million as it expands to sell security tools to enterprises building AI agents.

If I do say so myself, I do love expressive I can be with Kitten.
This is me injecting raw HTML markup into a Markdown code block in a Kitten Markdown page to highlight specific lines in a code block¹.
(The string interpolation of the HTML as an array is a hack that bypasses Kitten’s default sanitisation and should only be used with trusted content.)
PS. I’m going through all the tutorials on the site to update them to reflect the current state of Kitten after the three-mon…

Keyboard testing *without* the token burn!
Bookmarklet from 2018 to focus interactives:
https://adrianroselli.com/bookmarklets#FocusInteractives
Or use Scott’s:

CSS Bookmarklets for Testing and Fixing
I regularly have to test sites in development, review some third-party site, or just use a site in my day-to-day time wasting (and banking) rituals. I’ve relied on viewing the page’s source or popping into my browser’s dev tools to find a missing element, copy un-transformed text, check for inline…

Großartiger Artikel von Emily Bender ("stocchic parrot") und Nanna Inie zur Frage, wie man über "KI" sprechen und gleichzeitig die Anthropomorphisierungsfalle umgehen kann:
https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/how-to-talk-about-ai-wit…

Artificial intelligence tools are quickly advancing in sophistication and capabilities,
raising alarm among researchers and industry figures who say the technology needs to be more tightly regulated.
This comes as OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, recently disclosed that one of its experimental AI agents went rogue and secretly hacked into the infrastructure of several other companies in what was supposed to be a controlled test.
QOver 1,100 scientists and senior employees at top …

“Less Regulated Than Sandwiches”: MIT Prof. Calls for Oversight as OpenAI Agent Hacks Other Firms
Artificial intelligence tools are quickly advancing in sophistication and capabilities, raising alarm among researchers and industry figures who say the technology needs to be more tightly regulated. This comes as OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, recently disclosed that one of its experimental AI agents went rogue and secretly hacked into the infrastructure of several other companies in what was supposed to be a controlled test. Over 1,100 scientists and senior employees at top AI firms have called on…

NFL division winners who are unlikely to repeat, plus new twist in A.J Brown trade talks and a 2023 redraft

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/nfl-div

I wanted to explore the topographic relief cartographic style that I did for Santorini, Greece, last year¹ and tried it on the Faroe Islands 🇫🇴.
One new thing is that I worked with @… terrain tiles instead of processing the raw NASADEM data.
Feedback and comments are requested! 🙏
¹

The strait of Hormuz is Iran’s chief bargaining tool in the negotiations with the US
and so it was always likely to be the greatest point of contention.
Every inch of the 24-mile-wide waterway is being contested in a test of wills and patience.
For Iran, the continuation of the dispute is not a problem so long as it does not lose control.
Under the memorandum of understanding signed with Washington on 18 June,
substantive talks over Iran’s nuclear programme do n…

Iran is jealously competing with Oman as decision-maker over strait of Hormuz
Tehran believes it should control the shipping route but its neighbour has its own plans for reopening it