Tootfinder

Just finished "The Terraformers" by Annalee Newitz (@…). It was recommended as a "solarpunk" book, and I'm currently on a quest to find more speculative fiction as good as Le Guin or Butler, so I was eager to dig in. Having tagged the author (hi) I'll try to be polite here, but I'll admit I was disappointed.
Newitz clearly has a powerful imagination and there's lots of great stuff in the book, but it's not at all pushing boundaries in terms of imagining future societies. I think the message and intent was good in a lot of places, but off or self-contradictory in others. I absolutely adore the relatively small point made at the end about revolutions being complicated and not boiling down to heroes and battles, but despite the book's attempt to avoid that, I think it still falls into that pattern. Without too many spoilers, the way that some big problems are resolved near the end leans too much on a legal framework without questioning how it's enforced, and that resolution then means that a few heroic acts are enough to tip the balance, which undermines the point about messy histories.
The biggest contradiction of the book to my mind though is with a central theme. The book really explores a world in which "anyone of any species can be a person, as long as we just bioengineer them to be intelligent enough," and it tries to make a point about how engineering limited intelligences is cruel. At several points characters comment about how personhood shouldn't depend on intelligence. There's even a brief quote about how maybe rivers could be people... But... the point could have been "anyone can be a person, regardless of intelligence." This would have made for much more interesting philosophical territory to explore IMO (how do we then bound personhood; how do we reconcile predator/prey relations between persons, etc.). These are also questions that the indigenous traditions Newitz draws on (and consulted about, as mentioned in the acknowledgements) has interesting answers for, but we don't get to explore them through Newitz' world, and because the question of personhood regresses to the question of intelligence, it feels like the moral philosophy of the ERT folks isn't any better than the "InAss" they disparage.
It's not a bad book overall, even if it doesn't engage with the questions I'm hungry to see others engage with. Newitz' efforts to sketch out a more vibrant and diverse future are still monumental and inspiring in a lot of ways. I'm just still looking for something more. Ultimately, I think it lives up to the "solar" but not very much to the "punk."
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Worked with an #acting #coaching client on some material and played with Bogart's Viewpoints of Tempo and Duration. Beautiful seeing them finding new ways of being and new things to pursue in their character. Opened up a whole inner life.

Just finished reading "The Beast Player" by Nahoko Uehashi. I had already watched the anime, but it had been so king I didn't remember all the details. While the anime was great, the book is even better, and it's going to be high on my list of things to recommend to my children when they're old enough to read for fun.
The neurodivergent representation is cool, as is the deep central question of interspecies bonds and the political possibilities and dangers they entail. Uehashi handles the exploration of that question well in my judgment, including appropriate ambiguity without muddying moral clarity. Elin is a truly fantastic protagonist, not without flaws but nevertheless a excellent role model and a very sympathetic figure without being pitiful.
One thing I really love about Uehashi's writing is that she's not shy about using interior narration to tell the reader directly what a variety of characters are feeling, but when she does this she focuses on human contradictions, quirks, and weaknesses that make those characters feel much richer, and that remind the reader of all the ways our weird and sometimes contradictory or inexplicable quirks guide our actions just as much as both logical thought and predictable/expected feelings. None of the characters is an unerring source of wisdom, with every grand principle presented shown to have its weaknesses and biases, and even the wisest characters making mistakes and learning from them.
Overall, a wonderful book, and having also seen the "Seirei no Moribito" anime but not read the books, I'm excited to dig into more of Uehashi's extensive catalog.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Just started listening to this one, and I'd absolutely recommend it. It's great.
It's really hard to explain how complicated beliefs can be, especially to folks in an urban bubble. The truth is, part of my anarchism came from listening to #rural folks. I didn't really live in a big city until I was like 18, but I came to those places already with a set of liberal biases.
Some of the things I experienced in those places pushed me towards being a Communist. But there are some strangely anarchistic tenancies, even in those who profess to be politically the opposite.
My stance on guns was largely shaped by understanding and extending the arguments of rural gun owners. They continued to evolve long after, but it took actually listening to break through my liberal biases and understand the ways in which gun control can actually intersect with other forms of oppression. There is a lot more nuance than I had grown up to believe.
And it goes both ways. Conservative gun owners have absolutely no intellectual against anarchist gun arguments. They're generally either gonna fall into racism that you can talk about, or start to radicalize left. There are plenty of similar pathways.
But also, not everyone in rural areas is conservative. There are plenty of rural anarchists and communists. They just get buried under stereotypes.
Anyway, this has been great to listen to and I'd recommend it.
https://www.tangledwilderness.org/strangers-podcast/talking-to-rural-conservatives

Unregulated markets maybe create significant threats to well-being in ways we are only just starting to recognize. How many other #ZoonoticDiseases are we going to learn about? (#WHO knows?)

Unregulated markets maybe create significant threats to well-being in ways we are only just starting to recognize. How many other #ZoonoticDiseases are we going to learn about? (#WHO knows?)

Just realized that the fact that newer large language models keep getting bigger in terms of parameters is kind of a tell about how they work, even as it's also kind of a requirement from the investment standpoint.
Very roughly, models develop complex functional internal state about some sub-domains, and merely memorize many examples in others. In reality it's more complicated than this and even in this simplified metaphor it's a mix between memorization and "real" "understanding" in each domain. But the point is that if companies were really working towards AGI, they'd be feeding more data into models with *fewer* parameters (that's how you force a model not to memorize) instead of building bigger and bigger models (expands the illusion of competence through increased capacity to memorize).
But being the only ones with the hardware to train an even-bigger model is one of their few competitive advantages, and signing new deals for even more hardware is one of the only ways they can signal to investors that they'll retain their advantage and thus not be destroyed by a food of competitors. That's also how they can convince the hardware dealers like NVidia to continue with circular investments. So they have to run in that direction, regardless of the scientific merits.
This is why someone like LeCun would leave that side of things.
#LLMs #AI

One small thing I wasn't aware of.
For car plates the renewal process is automatic unless you have outstanding fines.
You can also subscribe to reminders about your car plates, license (or photo ID) and health card before they expire. I signed up for that. I will still put a reminder in my personal calendar for that, but two ways of being told I have to renew something is a good thing.
Now to do the same for my wife.

@… Hello, Evan.
We're considering ways to prevent the URL of an ActivityPub Note object from being a URL of a completely unrelated third party, as this can be undesirable.
Do you know of any resources that describe the specifications …

Friday Links 26-24
I liked the "Border Collie" post today, the podcast about air conditioning in Europe, and the interview with Mike D.
https://christof.damian.net/2026/07/friday-links-26-24.html

Rant ahoy!!
I stumbled onto the Wikipedia article about foundational psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. I'd forgotten how angry this trash scam practice of woo-woo muckspreader firehose insanity makes me. It's not so much that someone's built a huge castle in the air, because there's a place for fantasy and worldbuilding and daydreams; that's where we get much of our culture from, after all. It's the waste of time and money, and the unaddressed or exacerbated human misery it represents. It's the duplicitous and meritricious posing as being in some way scientific, or reality-based. Psychoanalysts belong in the same circle of hell as mediums who claim to be in contact with people's deceased love ones, or selling colloidal silver as a cure for cancer. Preying on vulnerable people with snake oil, hokum, religious cults and all the other ways the simple-minded are exploited boils my piss. The apparent fact that most of them sincerely believe their garbage doesn't ameliorate their guilt in my book.

We’ve been dealing with the climate as an isolated, almost linear concept,
where it’s a problem with a fix.
But not a single nation stuck to the Paris agreement.
People are getting solar panels, but we’re all using more carbon-emitting fossil fuels as well
– our habits aren’t changing.
We’re still trapped in the mindset that caused the problem in the first place:
believing in infinite growth, and that we don’t have to change our ways of being.
A ci…

Your worst fears about cultural collapse might be true – here’s what you can do about it
Writer Sarah Wilson argues we’re hurtling toward the same end as ancient Rome and the Mayan civilisation – but there’s plenty to fight for

Alan Kay’s original “Dynabook” vision superficially resembles modern laptops and tablets — uncannily resembles in many ways! — but it’s the opposite in one important respect:
Our modern devices are beautifully designed, hermetically sealed products in which there is a strong vendor / user hierarchy.
The Dynabook, as I understand it, would be the opposite of hermetically sealed. It arrives not as a finished design, but as a starting point. Embedded in that “for children” ethos is the idea of play, tinkering, scribbling, making a mess and cleaning it up — and thus the idea of devices being •reshapable•.
(Image source, with lots of commentary from Kay: https://www.quora.com/American-computer-pioneer-Alan-Kay-s-concept-the-Dynabook-was-published-in-1972-How-come-Steve-Jobs-and-Apple-iPad-get-the-credit-for-tablet-invention/answer/Alan-Kay-11)
5/

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/116788242133509166
It's inherent to LLMs that they produce garbage—it's not fixable, because text generation based on statistics has no concept of right or wrong or true or false.
Therefore it's only (partially) useful in a small subset of use cases that have other ways of enforcing veracity—namely programming, by literally looping over itself until the code is syntactically correct, it doesn't call non-existing APIs and the expected output for a specific input happens.*
Even then the code may 1. only cover the specific test cases asked of the LLM and fail for others or 2. the LLM may get stuck in an endless loop if it can't get the code to run or work.
*The programming use case also has a lot of other intrinsic and extrinsic factors that make it work better than most other text generation applications; for example a large amount of training data of mostly working code and that the languages being generated are both many orders of magnitude simpler in structure than human languages and mathematically unambiguous.**
**Except for Perl of course

Dear generative AI enthusiasts,
Look, I know the tokens you're burning right now don't actually use *that*much energy (even though it's somewhat substantial already and disastrous when we take into account the quality of the crap it's being used for) but what's more important is the appearance (or not) of that token spend on the quarterly earnings report of OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. lays the foundation necessary for those companies to go ahead with their plans for datacenters on a truly ridiculous scale, and those datacenters, if built, ate indeed a climate nightmare which *my kids* will have to live through even if they never benefit from any of it at all. That's (one of many reasons) why I personally need you to stop using generative AI right now.
The fact that the output is crap, the way it erodes your intelligence, and the ways in which it plagiarizes and actively undermines good citation practices are among many other practical reasons not to use it, but what's personal to me is the way that your frivolous sloperation is making the future worse for the baby I'm feeding blueberries to as I type this, and half the time I interact with people like you the conversation begins with some form of "putting aside the ethical issues..."
#AI #GenAI #LLMs

This is so incredibly good it deserves to be reproduced in full: 😆 🔥 😆
“Carney pointed to a map of North America, half of which had been accurately but artistically burned away.
“It is our intention for the pipeline to cross over Saskatchewan and British Columbia, but if they prove too charred already then I plan to divert the pipeline and profits through the Northern states, as part of my next round of capitulations to Trump in CUSMA negotiations.”
Danielle Smith, smiling so wide that many in the audience naturally assumed she was thinking about forcing trans children to dig the pipeline infrastructure themselves, stated that she fully supported the project being moved up before her province was so full of smoke it couldn’t exist anymore.
“This is a great day for Albertans, and none of the rest of you traitorous fucks,” Smith stated, flipping off any reporter who looked like they were from east of her province. “The sooner this gets done, the sooner I can start looking for new ways to hurt endangered wildlife and complain about how no one ever gives Alberta anything.”
#carney #canpoli #cdnpoli #abpoli #climatechange #bcwildfire #endfossilfuels #traitor #theAmericanFascist #trans
https://www.thebeaverton.com/2026/08/carney-vows-to-fast-track-west-coast-pipeline-before-entire-west-coast-burns-to-the-ground/

Just finished "Amazona" by Canizales (indirect trigger warning: rape). An excellent fictional graphic novel about the displacement of indigenous people from the Amazon in Columbia. I especially liked the dedication: "Dedicated to those who have had to flee, leaving their lives behind. May the light in their hearts never fade. May it light new paths, so its brightness can blind the greedy. Early on the refugees, hosted in a city, comment that they now need money, when before if they had a need they could just take what they needed from the jungle. The book doesn't make this point, but communities like that have been living that way for tens of thousands of years, and I have hope that those ways of life will continue, at least where not yet destroyed, for tens of thousands more years, if not millions or billions of years. I am myself not a primitivist, despite being an anarchist, but I think there are nevertheless a plethora of important perspectives to be seen if one pays attention to indigenous groups around the world.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon