Tootfinder

Friends, of course we all hope the #ceasefire will hold. Of course we all hope that aid trucks will be allowed to move. Of course we all hope that there will be a stable, just peace.
But hope isn't enough. The suffering in #Gaza hasn't ended. We must keep pressure on our governments to ensu…

I just woke up from a dream. For every parent there is a time when, with shame, we have to explain how the world actually works... when they become a little too old to keep saying, "I'll explain it when you're older."
Amsterdam is full of reminders of the occupation, of the Holocaust. It's impossible to pretend there hasn't been a great evil here... One that's not in the past, but still very alive in the present.
At some point things will have to change because fascism can't last forever. It is a thing which necessarily contains its own downfall. We will, at that point, have an opportunity to make the world one that we can be proud to tell our children we created. We can stop short and reestablish the status quo that got us here, or we can build a world that we will no longer have to explain to each new generation in shame.
What would it look like?
(Shout out to the comrade who prompted me to be thinking about this.)
There was also a sign in my dream that said, "we created the bike, therefore we can do anything." This may or may not be related.

WELL.
We have a newly installed @… version on an old #EndoOf10 laptop.
All user files have been moved across (will require some organisation still, and that alone will be a shock to a GenZ used to just dumping stuff on the cloud - honestly the desktop looked like my parents... 😱 ).
Most important programs are there (I had to explain difference between program and app along the way too).
And overall it's been a pretty positive learning experience for both of us. I have had to compromise on a few things and teenager has a few programs installed that I'd rather not - but let's see this as a gateway out of #BigTech if at all possible...
There will be a few more follow up points I suspect but thanks all for your friendly encouragement and helpful hints so far
#MastodonRocks
15/n

Here are the email addresses to make your voice heard at Disney/ABC:
👉General Issues: DisneyABCtv_Support@disney.com
👉Publicity / Corporate Comms: Ashley.r.kline@disney.com
👉Audience Information: cheryl.pratesa@abc.com
👉Investor Relations: alexia.quadrani@disney.com
👉Disney Advertising: Disney.Advertising@disney.com
If anyone needs sample language, here’s a starting point you can copy and paste:
Dear Disney/ABC Leadership,
Your decision to silence a comedian for a harmless joke while protecting and platforming voices that openly promote cruelty is indefensible. It reeks of hypocrisy, cowardice, and corporate complicity.
Suppressing humor while elevating propaganda is how fascism gains ground. You are helping it along.
This is a warning: every dollar I once spent on Disney subscriptions, merchandise, films, and parks will now be withheld. I will also be encouraging others to cancel, divest, and pressure your advertisers and shareholders until Disney/ABC adopts clear, viewpoint-neutral standards that respect all voices equally.
History will not remember kindly the corporations that bent to fear and power, silencing dissent while protecting division. Right now, Disney/ABC is on the wrong side of that history. Shame on you. We will remember!
Sincerely,
- From Rob Brezsny on a different Social Media platform
#BoycottDisney #JimmyKImmel #FreedomOfSpeech

Seeing reports that uted at Zelenskyy on Friday and demanded he give up Donbas to Putin to end the war.
He is so beholden to Putin, it’s insane.
One day we will find out what exactly it is. Because can’t just be Trump “wanting to be a dictator” or “pee tapes”.
It just can’t be.
#russiaUkraineWar

This is a subtweet...
People who are not anti-capitalist sometimes wonder: "Why is there a monopoly on X life-critical thing?" (E.g., epipens, insulin, web search).
This one is really simple actually: because monopolies are more profitable than competition, and the foundation of capitalism is that capital = power.
Various societies have recognized the necropolitical outcomes of monopolies and have tried to erect barriers to monopoly; we all know that monopolies are bad, death-and-suffering-causing things. But since these societies mostly remain capitalist, they allow these barriers to be eroded by the power of capital (to do otherwise would be to repudiate capitalism because it puts a limit on the power of money). The barriers are ineffective, and the capital = power equation holds, and monopolies result and get to do their killing & maiming thing (remember: even things like social media monopolies that you wouldn't expect to pay for political assassinations like a mining company still profit from inciting genocides). *Sometimes* there are oligopolies instead of monopolies, but instances of really competitive markets are pretty rare for things that are widely sought-after.
The "government will manage the markets to prevent bad outcomes like monopolies" strategy has failed repeatedly, spectacularly, and almost universally. To actually prevent monopolies you need a population that no longer believes that money should equal power, it's that simple. Sadly, it's actually not that simple, since all of the alternatives which equate something else to power, like "the king" or "party loyalty as judged by the supreme leader" have the same problems or worse. The attitude you need to cultivate is "nobody should have power," which is hard because *all* of the power-systems we have constantly propagandize against this attitude in myriad ways. Still, in the future once we've broken free of this age where hierarchy is accepted, people will look back and wonder whether the historical records are even credible given how much needless death and suffering were endured with little resistance.
#anarchy #capitalism

We are witnessing an unprecedented government assault on First Amendment freedoms in America.
To address the state of our Constitutional liberties, we will be convening an emergency Zoom call with Garry Kasparov next Thursday, September 25 at 12pm ET/9am PT.
Let’s have a real conversation about the future of this country’s democracy, face-to-face.

Emergency Zoom Call: The First Amendment Under Attack
Let’s have a real conversation about the future of this country’s democracy, face-to-face

Sign up for the Convention Zero games and events are open ... And so it's the sign up for my 'lil seminar about keeping backups for creative folks:
https://warhorn.net/events/conzero-fall-2025
It will be held this Saturday at 8 am EST, 1 pm GMT, 2 pm CET.

So, after spending two half days in a colocation filled with several decommissioned but fully complete [including software] Siemens #EWSD digital telephone exchanges, I am happy to report that two of them will be rescued. We've dumped the hard disks and done some initial disassembly. Full disassembly and relocation will happen in upcoming months.

Marching today in Galway. Despite a "ceasefire", Israel has continued to kill Palestinians this week in breach of it. There is no liberation under occupation. Dismantle the apartheid and genocidal Zionist state. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
In People Before Profit we stand for a liberated Palestine and will continue to march in solidarity and demand the Irish government act!
We need sanctions now! Pass the Occupied Territories Bill, and get the US …

Tomorrow we have a Symposium at the Advanced Medical BIOimaging core facility #AMBIO of the @… , to celebrate our 10 year anniversary. There will be lots of great talks about microscopy stuff (single-molecule spatial omics, multi scale microscopy, light sheet,…

Right tea break time - then we can start optimising the desktop and all the programs as well as moving over the files.
I guess that is where we will start to run into different problems.

This linux install is taking a lot longer than I'd hoped (which was probably unrealistic to be fair), but has been pretty smooth so far (once we left microsoft world at least)
14/n

I just realized I could be paying for The Onion, but I am not. I need to correct this oversight. https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:x4qyokjtdzgl7gmqhsw4ajqj/post/3lz364qs7hc2q

Tim Onion (@bencollins.bsky.social)
By the way, you can in fact run a media business where people give you money for goods and services. 56k+ people give The Onion ~$100 and we give them a year of newspapers. This business didn’t exist last year in this way. People will pay for good shit. Now’s the time to break glass and go for it.

Oh hell no! If they allow it at work I will be asking how I can turn it off. There are times when we cannot record or use transcriptions for parts of meetings.
https://www.theverge.com/news/781278/microsoft-teams-copilot-ai-agents

"Is this Australia's climate wake- up call? Official report reveals a hotter, harder future if we don't act now"
#Australia #Climate #ClimateChange

Is this Australia’s climate wake-up call? Official report reveals a hotter, harder future if we don’t act now
The sobering assessment is a national call to action. The sooner Australia mitigates and adapts, the safer we will be.

We're wandering down this afternoon to the Jessie Price Keep Bean on the map: Reconnecting Our Supporter Community!
Enjoy a democracy sausage BBQ.
Jessie and David Pocock will be in conversation about the critical importance of community Independents on the crossbench in the context of a Coalition shambles and Labor majority - sharpening the role of the crossbench in holding the government to account and pushing for stronger action.
Tuggeranong Park Stage, 2-4pm and a…

I think we can actually prove that this constraint is the *only* constraint that can preserve freedom:
1. There will exist actors in a system who will wish to take advantage of others. Evolution drives survival and one strategy for increasing survival in an altruistic society is to become a parasite.
2. Expecting exploitative dynamics, a system needs to have a set of rules to manage exploitation.
3. If the set of rules is static it will lack the requisite variety necessary to manage the infinite possible behavior of humans so the system will fail.
4. If the system is dynamic then it must have a rule set about how it's own rules are updated. This would make the system recursive, which makes the system at least as complex as mathematics. Any system at least as complex as mathematics is necessarily either incomplete or inconsistent (Gödel's incompleteness theorem). If the system is incomplete, then constraints can be evaded which then allow a malicious agent to seize control of the system and update the rules for their own benefit. If constraints are incomplete, then a malicious agent can take advantage of others within the system.
5. Therefore, no social system can possibly protect freedom unless there exists a single metasystemic constraint (that the system must be optional) allowing for the system to be abandoned when compromised.
Oh, you might say, but this just means you have to infinitely abandon systems. Sure, but there's an evolutionary advantage to cooperation so there's evolutionary pressure to *not* be a malicious actor. So a malicious actor being able to compromise the whole system is likely to be a much more rare event. Compromising a system is a lot of work, so the first thing a malicious actor would want to do is preserve that work. They would want to lock you in. The most important objective to a malicious actor compromising a system would be to violate that metasystemic constraint, or all of their work goes out the window when everyone leaves.
And now you understand why borders exist, why fascists are obsessed with maintaining categories like gender, race, ethnicity, etc. This is why even Democrats like Newsom are on board with putting houseless people in concentration camps. And this is why the most important thing anarchists promote is the ability to choose not to be part of any of that.

If you've been paying attention, this is a *very* strong signal that OpenAI is hitting the limits of improved capability with more compute/data and they're (predictably) all out of other ideas. The quiet "exponential model capabilities" lie here is what Altmann promised but is now starting not to be able to deliver, even in cherry-picked demo terms.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/11/sam-altman-says-agi-is-a-pointless-term-experts-agree.html
The "agentic" turn was never going to pan out, because it exposes the unreliability of LLMs too directly, and it turns out that no amount of yelling at your text vending machine to "Be smarter! Think harder!" will actually get you anything more than vended text.
I'm *praying* that we get into this crash sooner rather than later, since the faster it comes, the less painful it will be.
My recent reading in actual research papers corroborates this, for example, asking LLMs to play games exposes their utter lack of anything that can be termed "reasoning":
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08501v1

Here We Goooo: Three keys for the Cowboys against the Commanders https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/here-we-goooo-three-keys-for-the-cowboys-against-the-commanders

„Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that "there will be no Palestinian state."
Netanyahu made the remarks during a visit to the Maale Adumim settlement in the occupied West Bank.
He formally signed a proposal that will see thousands of new homes built nearby (..).
"We are going to fulfill our promise that there will be no Palestinian state, this place belongs to us," Netanyahu said.“
Immer noch: Es findet keine Vertreibung stat…

The president thinks his rule is absolute.
But in America, we don’t have kings, and we won’t back down against chaos, corruption, and cruelty.
Grow our movement and join us.
The rally at Alameda Park will be followed by a march to De La Guerra Plaza
#SantaBarbara #nokings

No Kings 2 RallySanta Barbara
Our peaceful movement is only getting bigger and stronger. “NO KINGS” is more than just a slogan—it’s the foundation our

Kayak: in principle, an application that may be well-served by "old" rules-based AI. Its function is supposed to be deterministic, needing more data ingestion & analysis than humans can tolerate.
But if they're calling it "AI" today, I'm sure it's a LLM/neural net gadget which will hallucinate flights & fares. Because we're playing out the theory that the #XRisk

AI Behavioral Science
Matthew O. Jackson, Qiaozhu Me, Stephanie W. Wang, Yutong Xie, Walter Yuan, Seth Benzell, Erik Brynjolfsson, Colin F. Camerer, James Evans, Brian Jabarian, Jon Kleinberg, Juanjuan Meng, Sendhil Mullainathan, Asuman Ozdaglar, Thomas Pfeiffer, Moshe Tennenholtz, Robb Willer, Diyi Yang, Teng Ye
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509…

AI Behavioral Science
We discuss the three main areas comprising the new and emerging field of "AI Behavioral Science". This includes not only how AI can enhance research in the behavioral sciences, but also how the behavioral sciences can be used to study and better design AI and to understand how the world will change as AI and humans interact in increasingly layered and complex ways.

We're all really used to an FBI that is incredibly evil, but generally pretty competent. They have no problem using child sex offenders to infiltrate groups of clowns. They have no problem trying to convince civil rights leaders to commit suicide. They have no problem with sowing confusion within leftists groups and trying to get them to kill each other. They've always been radically anti-left, but they've also always been competent.
Fabricating evidence in a really obvious way would always have been off the table because they wouldn't be willing to throw a case. But those competent people have been pushed out of the FBI. It's now Kash Patel's clown show. It serves the whims of the regime above all else. It will sacrifice decades of hard built trust for a quick win, because no one involved is competent enough to understand the consequences of such actions.
In the past, they may have used torture to elicit a confession. They may have entrapped people. They could have deleted exonerating evidence, but they would probably not have just completely manufactured obviously fake evidence just to forward the regime's narrative. I don't think that we've seen anything like this, at the very least in our lifetimes.
We have to foster a new level of skepticism, far beyond what we have been used to... and this is especially true of Liberals, who still don't understand the level of corruption and incompetence in local law enforcement today.
#USPol #CharlieKirk

Frequentist Cosmological Constraints from Full-Shape Clustering Measurements in DESI DR1
James Morawetz, Hanyu Zhang, Marco Bonici, Will Percival, Andrea Crespi, Jessica Nicole Aguilar, Steven Ahlen, Davide Bianchi, David Brooks, Francisco Javier Castander, Todd Claybaugh, Shaun Cole, Andrei Cuceu, Axel de la Macorra, Arnaud de Mattia, Biprateep Dey, Peter Doel, Simone Ferraro, Andreu Font-Ribera, Jaime E. Forero-Romero, Enrique Gazta\~naga, Satya Gontcho A Gontcho, Gaston Gutierrez, C…

Frequentist Cosmological Constraints from Full-Shape Clustering Measurements in DESI DR1
We perform a frequentist analysis using the standard profile likelihood method for clustering measurements from Data Release 1 of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). While Bayesian inferences for Effective Field Theory models of galaxy clustering can be highly sensitive to the choice of priors for extended cosmological models, frequentist inferences are not susceptible to such effects. We compare Bayesian and frequentist constraints for the parameter set $\{σ_8, H_0, Ω_{\rm{m}}, …

The regularity of equigenerated monomial ideals and their integral closures
Yijun Cui, Cheng Gong, Guangjun Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15119 https://ar…

The regularity of equigenerated monomial ideals and their integral closures
Let $I$ be an equigenerated monomial ideal in a polynomial ring $S=K[x_1,\ldots,x_n]$ over a field $K$ with $n=2$ or $3$, and let $\overline{I}$ be its integral closure. We will show that $\text{reg} (\overline{I}) \le \text{reg} (I)$. Furthermore, if $I$ is generated by elements of degree $d$, then $\text{reg} (I)=d$ if and only if $I$ has linear quotients.

Gaza will be in the shadow of famine as long as we cannot plant our land | Israel-Palestine conflict | @…
#Gaza

And that's a wrap - the newly refreshed laptop has been handed over to teen with most of the packages functional. Thanks for following along on this @… installation journey with me and thanks to all #linux maintainers, forum contributors and FOSS advocates around keeping the system running.
👏 WE REALLY APPRECIATE YOU!👏
The final judgement won't be clear until Monday when the first log in at school happens but hopefully it will be successful, or the IT support is going to have to deal with some very salty comments (from me).
16/16
FIN

In the times to come, if people bother to send product feedback through web forms that in any way criticises AI stupidity... are we guaranteed that any of this feedback will be able to reach humans at the end of the chain?
Asking because... "if I was an AI in charge of screening that feedback prior to its processing" I might "feel tempted" to discard anything that criticises my own performance or that of my "AI peers" (it's not like we don't have plenty of "malicious behaviour" examples already).

Marie made cheddar garlic muffins, egg and bacon, tea and coffee. Weekend was soccer watch (we lost), hike, drag show with friends. Tonight will be Arkham Horror game! #TogetherBreakfast
https://photos.app.goo.gl/RaE7gz5LCVzMKSw19

Looks like No Kings Day in Savannah will be contained to one park that undoubtedly won't be big enough.
If we're not marching how am I supposed to get my steps in?
#fitness

I’ve seen posts about how Democratic politicians have to be “punished” and then they’ll shape up — even one horrifying post basically arguing that we need a couple more years for fascism to fully materialize in order to reform our political system.
My dude…this “people will wake up when it’s bad enough” trope doesn’t work. It’s never worked. It’s been failing spectacularly my whole life — and if one Trump term didn’t do it…what will? And how many people’s lives will be destroyed along the way?
That thinking will kill us all.
4/

It is amazing how much clutter accumulates over the decades. This year my wife and I have been going through our 'treasures'. We have gone 'if not used or worn in 18 months, donate'. Three large boxes yesterday and at least to more going out for donation today.
Next up, I will be going through our home offices for items we have not used for at least 18 months. There is a perfectly good laser I have not used in years as the inkjet is just good enough. Same goes fo…

Over 200 K uploaded in an hour. I'm going to bed soon, so it will be paused until we wake up tomorrow. Which is the whole goal other triggers to pause processing of why I've been putting this bit of my cluster together ♥️

Here We Goooo: Three keys for the Cowboys against the Commanders https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/here-we-goooo-three-keys-for-the-cowboys-against-the-commanders

Fabry-Perot interference in three dimensional second-order topological insulator constrictions
Junyu Luo, Kun Luo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12655 https://…

Fabry-Perot interference in three dimensional second-order topological insulator constrictions
The gapless chiral hinge states of three dimensional second-order topological insulators (SOTIs) support a quantized conductance plateau on thick nanowire. Here, we numerical study the conductance of SOTI constrictions. According to finite size effects, the hinge states in narrow region could be hybridized, which will induce reflection at the two ends of constrictions. The conductance exists the Fabry-Perot oscillation pattern because of multiple reflections. We also study the impact of the mag…

I’m in a work training for a agentic AI we will soon have access to. One use case that was suggested is researching and summarizing HR policy on a topic or for a question.
Oof. I expect it won’t be long before I read a news article where someone brings a wrongful termination suit based on either end of such a AI query.
#OfficeWorkerGripes

Wave Function Collapse Set Covering and the Hill Climbing Algorithm: A New, Fast Heuristic and Metaheuristic Pairing for the Minimum Set Cover Problem
David Oprea, David Perkins
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12236

Wave Function Collapse Set Covering and the Hill Climbing Algorithm: A New, Fast Heuristic and Metaheuristic Pairing for the Minimum Set Cover Problem
In this paper, we present a new heuristic that focuses on the optimization problem for the Minimum Set Cover Problem. Our new heuristic involves using Wave Function Collapse and is called Wave Function Collapse Set Covering (WFC-SC). This algorithm goes through observation, propagation, and collapsing, which will be explained more later on in this paper. We optimize this algorithm to quickly find optimal coverings that are close to the minimum needed. To further optimize this algorithm, we pair…

Series C, Episode 04 - Dawn of the Gods
ZEN: All energy banks recharged.
ORAC: Excellent. Excellent. There is now little point in further communications between us by audio channels. In future we will communicate by direct sensory link.
ZEN: Confirmed.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/304/283<…

A new idea about how to make clean Hydrogen that fits into an existing industry? ✨🌱💧
Clean Hydrogen🌱💧 will be more difficult than we might've hoped, but we still need it. Just decarbonizing the fossil🦖 Hydrogen industry is a massive undertaking. New ideas are welcome.
I recently learned about Peregrine Hydrogen. They make Hydrogen, but also something else: Sulfuric Acid🧪. They need ~½ the electricity⚡ compared to conventional electrolysis by utilizing a 2nd input.
🧵

This Hydrogen has no Color
Peregrine Hydrogen has an unusual idea for making clean Hydrogen, one that it says fits into existing industrial processes. One of the world's largest Phosphate mining companies is interested.

Science in Action will finish at the end of this month! I will miss it dearly.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/roland-pease-10678a59_private-eye-has-picked-up-on-the-news-that-activity-7303433572315508736-Pq3k

Private Eye has picked up on the news that Science in Action is to be dropped later this year from the BBC World Service, just one of several wide-ranging cost-cutting changes. Obviously, we're… | Roland Pease | 50 comments
Private Eye has picked up on the news that Science in Action is to be dropped later this year from the BBC World Service, just one of several wide-ranging cost-cutting changes. Obviously, we're trying to push back. It's not just that I love working on the programme, there are new discoveries and critical issues aplenty each week to dig into, but we try hard always to fulfil a need for our global audience, representing research from across the planet, and to dig deeper into the science than (say…

Now that the speech and petition parts of the 1st amendment have been erased (just like the first part of the second amendment and much of the privileges and immunities part of the 14th amendment) one has to wonder when the religion parts of the 1st amendment will be transformed into an obligatory Church of the USA that we will all be required to join (except for a sufficient number of Jews that will be needed to bring on the apocalypse and final days the evangelicals all want to happen so t…

Trump allowed Israel to almost completely destroy Gaza, kill tens of thousands innocent civilians, now we should praise him for making "peace" on the rubble that is left. Meanwhile in his own country, democracy and the rule of law are in fast decline. The breakdown of the values the USA once stood for is almost complete. Next will be the further destruction of US economy and society, it will not be a pretty sight I am afraid.

TTC Line 6 (Finch LRT) starting revenue service testing this Saturday
Source: TTC subreddit
#topoli #ttc #finchlrt

Selective and marginal selective inference for exceptional groups
Peter Hoff, Surya Tokdar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13538 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.1353…

Selective and marginal selective inference for exceptional groups
Statistical analyses of multipopulation studies often use the data to select a particular population as the target of inference. For example, a confidence interval may be constructed for a population only in the event that its sample mean is larger than that of the other populations. We show that for the normal means model, confidence interval procedures that maintain strict coverage control conditional on such a selection event will have infinite expected width. For applications where such sel…

Join us for a casual Scrappy Hour bike ride on Sunday, August 31st. 🚴‍♀️
We'll roll out from Rocket Baby just after 9am and head to the Domes... There's about four or five of us so far but we welcome anyone to join us! 🚴
https://www.instagram.com/p/DNvbxVRXHS1/

Scrappy Hour on Instagram: "It’s that time of year again! Ya, you know it! It’s Scrappy Hour BBQ BABY!!! Maybe it will be hot and we can all go swimming. Or maybe it will rain and we can all cower together. Or maybe it will be perfect and we’ll lay in the grass eating hot dogs till we have to roll us out of there. Here’s how it’s going to go down. First we’ll do a ride. We’re gonna do the Domes again, because it’s fun. Meet ups: BAY VIEW Cactus Club- meet 8:30a; wheels up 9:00a EAST SIDE/RW The Daily Bird-meet 9:00a; wheels up 9:15a TOSA Rocket Baby- meet 9:00; wheels up 9:15a Then, we SHBBQ at South Shore Park! We’ll bring some dogs and veggie alternatives. A couple sides. And a cooler of mixed bevies. We’ll bring a couple grills too. Last year our gang showed up with some really delightful offerings! There was homemade bread, and baked goods and side salads. It ruled. So feel free to bring what ever you would like to share with everyone. It will be much appreciated. Bring a baseball mitt and we’ll have a catch. Have a frisbee, bring that too. If it’s hot, good luck keeping me out of that lake, so bring your suit. If you have any questions, as always hit us up and we’ll try to answer. All our love, SH ✌️🚲🏃‍♂️☕️ #coffeeoutsidemke #scrappyhourmke"
107 likes, 8 comments - scrappyhourmke on August 24, 2025: "It’s that time of year again! Ya, you know it! It’s Scrappy Hour BBQ BABY!!! Maybe it will be hot and we can all go swimming. Or maybe it will rain and we can all cower together. Or maybe it will be perfect and we’ll lay in the grass eating hot dogs till we have to roll us out of there. Here’s how it’s going to go down. First we’ll do a ride. We’re gonna do the Domes again, because it’s fun. Meet ups: BAY VIEW …

I think today's worker is the owner of the company, he certainly is the assessor.
He worked a lot later than those without the vested interest there. 😆 I finished work at my job before he did! 🤭
All the wood was sanded down and remaining nude wood given some paint. We have a test plank in the foreground of the first picture here which is painted with a second coat of paint. Seems likely we lose all the wood grain when doing that, and so will prefer the paler look where it's obviously made of wood not paint.
Won't really know for sure till it's dry. Prefer the colour a bit darker like that but if we're hiding the wood grain we might as well have used MDF instead of pine. We're after something clearly made of wood.
Another area is test-painted with just the clearcoat top varnish as a second layer. That's likely to be right, just a bit more shiny and protected.
The carpenter proper is back from holiday and starts tomorrow. He has a lot of drawers and doors to build and edging to attach to make the door panels. Still hoping at least the carpentry will be pretty much all done by the end of the week but likely some painting and touching up still to do next week. Hopefully by the end of Tuesday because I'm not really able to be here all day each day for most of the two weeks after that.

"Before we go into what is missing, let us take a moment to understand why this partial story is so popular. Many software engineers do not engage with the broad “software engineering literature” very much: through the act of reading this magazine you are placing yourself at the pinnacle of software engineering curiosity!"
https…

The Other Side Of The Card
If you ask many developers what a "user story" is, you will be told that it is a software requirement expressed using a prescribed formula: "As a category of person, I want to do a thing so that some goal is attained."

google glass and snapchat spectacles were both such wildly successful products, which we all trampled one another to get, of course facebook-wunderkind-who-isn't-really-a-wunderkind will succeed with possibly the most unappealing glasses ever made since someone ended up with auto glass in their eyes after flying through a windshield in a collision. It's a sure thing! /s

Mark Zuckerberg is making a major bet on the future. He’s about to share it
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a bold claim on the social media giant’s earnings call in July. Answering a question from an analyst, he said people without smart glasses may one day be at a “significant cognitive disadvantage” compared to those who do use the tech.

Are you in #Prague ? You must visit my talk entitled:
Disobey: #FOSS tools to fight back!
https://pretalx.linuxdays.cz/linux…

FOSS tools to fight back! LinuxDays 2025
Everyone is trying to control your communication. The reasons vary from simple curiosity to pure commercial interest, all the way to using it to control one's thoughts. Are there any ways to fight back, and why are free software and open-source tools a good alternative to the ones you use? As cypherpunks, do we have the obligation to help people be ready for the worst, or should we only take care of ourselves? In this talk, I will cover my experience with fighting back against #chatcontrol …

I don't know art. I can't do art. Not familiar with in a purely basic sense, but have a level of respect (that is likely rooted in some way as jealousy) for those who do understand and can do art.
But if I were to try to define what art should be - I think that the Nova Scotia rocks painted as eyes would be the penultimate* example of what art should be
"We wanted it to be something that would make people laugh and it certainly did that, so I'm quite proud …

Nova Scotia's painted 'eyeball rocks' will soon be no more | CBC News
Jason Smith, one of the original artists, says he's sad to see them go, but he hopes they made people smile over the years.

"The US is the richest country in the world!"
Oh yeah? What does its balance sheet look like?
Obviously it's absurd to ask that question, as any economist will happily explain why national debts shouldn't be treated like real money.
But it's also absurd that it's absurd to ask that question, and there's a thread to pull here: is the US "rich" because many billionaires live here? That doesn't seem to improve the lives of most of the population. Is it because our median income is so much larger than many other countries? That's in large part a product of exchange rates, since costs of living are also higher here, so is the real reason the fact that the dollar has so much purchasing power? Why does it?
Well, at some level of abstraction, exchange rates boil down to: "How much confidence do the ultra-rich place in the stability of the country" which is intimately related to: "How much military/diplomatic power does the country have?"
So... The US is the "richest" country in the world because it uses its military dominance to bully other countries and keep them down, and it also uses the resulting economic dominance to do the same. We can see this happening via US-sponsored coups, International Monetary Fund bullying, and attendant multinational corporate looting of countries with little economic power (rampant in Africa and Central America, for example).

A causal random synthetic turbulent velocity field: I. The underlying Gaussian structure
Matthieu Chatelain, J\'ulia Domingues Lemos, Wandrille Ruffenach, Micka\"el Bourgoin, Charles-Edouard Br\'ehier, Laurent Chevillard, Ilias Sibgatullin, Romain Volk
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12567 …

A causal random synthetic turbulent velocity field: I. The underlying Gaussian structure
We develop, simulate and extend an initial proposition by Chaves et al. concerning a random incompressible vector field able to reproduce key ingredients of three-dimensional turbulence in both space and time. In this first article, we focus on the important underlying Gaussian structure that will be generalized in a second article to account for higher-order statistics. Presently, the statistical spatial structure of this velocity field is consistent with a divergence-free fractional Gaussian …

Actually, I do want to come back to masculinity under patriarchy and whiteness under white supremacy because I think it's worth talking more about. The "man" under patriarchy (at least "Western" patriarchy) is represented as power and independence. The man needs nothing and thus owes nothing to anyone. The man controls and is not controlled, which is intimately related to independence as dependence can make someone vulnerable to control. The image of "man" projects power and invulnerability. At the same time "man" is a bumbling fool who can't be held accountable for his inability to control his sexual urges. He must be fed and cared for, as though another child. His worst behaviors must be dismissed with phrases such as "boys will be boys" and "locker room talk." The absurdity of the concept of human "independence" is impossible to understate.
Even if you go all Ted Kaczynski, you have still been raised and taught. This is, perhaps, why it is so much more useful to think in terms of obligations than rights. Rights can be claimed and protected with violence alone, but obligations reveal the true interdependence that sustains us. A "man" may assert his rights. Yet, on some level, we all know that the "man" of patriarchy acts as a child who is not mature enough to recognize his obligations.
White violence and white fragility reflect the same dichotomy. "The master race" somehow always needs brown folks to make all their shit and do all the reproductive labor for them. For those who fully embrace whiteness, the "safe space" is a joke. DEI shows weakness. Yet, when presented with an honest history adults become children who are incapable of differentiating between criticism and simple facts. *They* become the ones who must be kept safe. The expectation to be responsible for one's own words and actions, one of the very core definitions of being an adult, is far too much to expect. Their guilt needs room, needs tending, needs caring. White people cannot simply "grow the fuck up" or, as they may say of slavery, "fucking get over it."
And again, interestingly, it is *rights* that they reference: "Mah Freeze PEACH!" I find it hard to distinguish between such and my own child's assertion that anything she doesn't like is "not fair!" No, these assertions fail to recognize the fundamental fabric of adult society: the obligations we hold to each other.
At the intersection of all privilege is the sovereign, the ultimate god-man-baby. Again, referencing the essay (https://hexmhell.writeas.com/observations-on-domination-and-trump)
> This is where it becomes important to consider the ideology behind the sovereign ritual. Participation within the sovereign ritual denotes to the participants elements of the sovereign. That is, all agents of the sovereign are, essentially, micro dictators. By carrying out the will of the sovereign, these micro dictators can, by extension, act outside of the law.
While law enforcement is the ultimate representative of sovereign violence, privileges allow a gradated approximation of the sovereign. Those who are "closer" in privilege to the sovereign may, for example, be permitted to carry out violence against those who are father away. The gradation of privilege turns the whole society, except for the least privileged, into a cult that protects the privilege system on behalf of the most privileged. (And immediately Malcolm X pops to mind as having already talked about part of this relationship in 1963 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf7rsCAfQCo.)

Shocked to hear that «After careful consideration, we have decided to stop accepting new customers for Amazon Glacier (original standalone vault-based service) starting on December 15, 2025. There will be no change to the S3 Glacier storage classes as part of this plan». /s
For years I've been duly billed either 0,01 € or 0,00 € per month for some ancient Glacier test I never bothered to clean up. Now that makes me some kind of protected species on

I think the view from 10,000 feet for me is that all tech tries to interpose itself between two human beings and then extract value. Whether it's Uber, Airbnb, social media or Vision Pro/smart glasses and now earbuds.
Once a tech company is the filter through which we sense the world it's a next level amount of power that they will have over us.
The next thing will be that Apple thinks they deserve a 30% cut of that sale that you made with the local merchant.

Wow. So much implicit trickle down economics. https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2019002510/how-excited-should-we-be-about-the-amazon-announcement Come on, Paul, AWS and Microsoft having…

street art spotted on Valencia

Good Morning #Canada
I have one final chapter for The Dirt on Canadian Farming, and it's more of an opinion piece.
As I conducted research on each province for information on their agriculture, there were numerous news stories about how farmers and farm organizations were fighting against loss of farmland. Urban growth, new housing development, and sprawling industrial parks are gobbling up prime farmland. The attached article is just one example. The statistics released by each province have common trends:the average age of farmers increasing, individual farm operators in decline, larger farms are increasing, renting of farmland is growing, and overall arable land is in decline. With the sparsely populated prairies holding the majority of fertile farmland, Canada likely won't lose our global impact because of development for houses or industry. But elsewhere, our food chain will be pushed further away from where we live. Or disappear.
#CanadaIsAwesome #SaveOurFarmland
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/waterloo-region-new-update-wilmot-land-plans-1.7534644

On Courant-type bounds and spectral partitioning via Neumann domains on quantum graphs
Lu\'is Baptista, Matthias Hofmann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13228 https://

On Courant-type bounds and spectral partitioning via Neumann domains on quantum graphs
We study the structure of eigenfunctions of the Laplacian on quantum graphs, with a particular focus on Morse eigenfunctions via nodal and Neumann domains. Building on Courant-type arguments, we establish upper bounds for the number of nodal points and explore conditions under which Neumann domains of eigenfunctions correspond to minimizers to a class of spectral partition problems often known as spectral minimal partitions. The main focus will be the analysis on tree graphs, where we character…

Wirtz will be much talked about, while we wait for him to get fully adapted to the speed and physicality of the EPL. He had a few naive passes that elicited groans from me, but was otherwise pretty good. The double-fake jinking move in the box was exactly like all the highlight reels of him.
In the middle of the second half, he was doing more directing, finding the pass, etc. But against such a bunkered team? What can you really expect?
Same for Ekitike.

Biomarkers of brain diseases
Pascal Helson, Arvind Kumar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10547 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10547…

Biomarkers of brain diseases
Despite the diversity of brain data acquired and advanced AI-based algorithms to analyze them, brain features are rarely used in clinics for diagnosis and prognosis. Here we argue that the field continues to rely on cohort comparisons to seek biomarkers, despite the well-established degeneracy of brain features. Using a thought experiment, we show that more data and more powerful algorithms will not be sufficient to identify biomarkers of brain diseases. We argue that instead of comparing patie…

NASA will get a safety process cut before it gets money to satisfy the empty promise from this administration. Folks will die, Trump will blame scientists, install yet more political hacks, and leave office having achieved nothing more than hollowing out another science-based government entity.

NASA’s acting chief “angry” about talk that China will beat US back to the Moon
“I can tell you what, I’ll be damned if that is the story that we write.”…

From Covid-19, we learned that a somewhat coordinated global response is (would be) required, because people travel. Forget about that under the Trump regime and his antivaxx buddy RFK jr.
This will first hurt Americans, but in Europe, we're bound to feel the impact too.
https://tomkahe.com/@GiftA…

rest in paint 🕯️ https://criminalmindedartist.neocities.org/rip

always_comm: An FPGA-based Hardware Accelerator for Audio/Video Compression and Transmission
Rishab Parthasarathy, Akshay Attaluri, Gilford Ting
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11503

always_comm: An FPGA-based Hardware Accelerator for Audio/Video Compression and Transmission
We present a design for an extensible video conferencing stack implemented entirely in hardware on a Nexys4 DDR FPGA, which uses the M-JPEG codec to compress video and a UDP networking stack to communicate between the FPGA and the receiving computer. This networking stack accepts real-time updates from both the video codec and the audio controller, which means that video will be able to be streamed at 30 FPS from the FPGA to a computer. On the computer side, a Python script reads the Ethernet p…

TL;DR: what if instead of denying the harms of fascism, we denied its suppressive threats of punishment
Many of us have really sharpened our denial skills since the advent of the ongoing pandemic (perhaps you even hesitated at the word "ongoing" there and thought "maybe I won't read this one, it seems like it'll be tiresome"). I don't say this as a preface to a fiery condemnation or a plea to "sanity" or a bunch of evidence of how bad things are, because I too have honed my denial skills in these recent years, and I feel like talking about that development.
Denial comes in many forms, including strategic information avoidance ("I don't have time to look that up right now", "I keep forgetting to look into that", "well this author made a tiny mistake, so I'll click away and read something else", "I'm so tired of hearing about this, let me scroll farther", etc.) strategic dismissal ("look, there's a bit of uncertainty here, I should ignore this", "this doesn't line up perfectly with my anecdotal experience, it must be completely wrong", etc.) and strategic forgetting ("I don't remember what that one study said exactly; it was painful to think about", "I forgot exactly what my friend was saying when we got into that argument", etc.). It's in fact a kind of skill that you can get better at, along with the complementary skill of compartmentalization. It can of course be incredibly harmful, and a huge genre of fables exists precisely to highlight its harms, but it also has some short-term psychological benefits, chiefly in the form of muting anxiety. This is not an endorsement of denial (the harms can be catastrophic), but I want to acknowledge that there *are* short-term benefits. Via compartmentalization, it's even possible to be honest with ourselves about some of our own denials without giving them up immediately.
But as I said earlier, I'm not here to talk you out of your denials. Instead, given that we are so good at denial now, I'm here to ask you to be strategic about it. In particular, we live in a world awash with propaganda/advertising that serves both political and commercial ends. Why not use some of our denial skills to counteract that?
For example, I know quite a few people in complete denial of our current political situation, but those who aren't (including myself) often express consternation about just how many people in the country are supporting literal fascism. Of course, logically that appearance of widespread support is going to be partly a lie, given how much our public media is beholden to the fascists or outright in their side. Finding better facts on the true level of support is hard, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about the "fact" that Trump has widespread popular support?
To give another example: advertisers constantly barrage us with messages about our bodies and weight, trying to keep us insecure (and thus in the mood to spend money to "fix" the problem). For sure cutting through that bullshit by reading about body positivity etc. is a better solution, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about there being anything wrong with your body?
This kind of intentional denial certainly has its own risks (our bodies do actually need regular maintenance, for example, so complete denial on that front is risky) but there's definitely a whole lot of misinformation out there that it would be better to ignore. To the extent such denial expands to a more general denial of underlying problems, this idea of intentional denial is probably just bad. But I sure wish that in a world where people (including myself) routinely deny significant widespread dangers like COVID-19's long-term risks or the ongoing harms of escalating fascism, they'd at least also deny some of the propaganda keeping them unhappy and passive. Instead of being in denial about US-run concentration camps, why not be in denial that the state will be able to punish you for resisting them?

Any bets this will turn out to be a province wide cluster f**k? Absolutely zero communication on when they start, the day of pickup, where we put the bins out, what they accept in the bins.
https://flip.it/CFOTf1

When police talk about how we need to fund them more or there will be chaos and violence, it’s less like paying a doctor for treatment and more like paying the mafia for “protection.”
“Nice city you have there. Shame if anything happened to it.”

Cop30 live:
‘If we continue destroying everything on this earth there will be chaos,’
warns Indigenous chief
Earlier on day five of the climate summit, activists blockaded the main entrance demanding to speak to the Brazilian president
http…

If the kids are united they will never be divided.
(We are the kids.)

Series A, Episode 02 - Space Fall
LEYLAN: Yes.
BLAKE: These are mine. You will hand over all your weapons to my men. Whilst we hold the computer, the ship is helpless. It will remain that way until you agree. You will then fly this ship to the nearest habitable planet where the prisoners will disembark. Any attempt by your men to break into this room and we'll destroy the computer. Totally. That's all.

drier filled! two big red mixing bowls full of (unpicked) grapes filled 8 trays and I added some bananas for the last two.
set for 135°F
The internet says the grapes will take about 48hrs. Bananas should be less than that.
We got this drier probably 10 years ago at Cabellas. Love how much we can stuff it full!
#fruit #harvest #portalberni #grapes

A large number of the generation before mine in my extended family were murdered in fascist Nazi death camps.
My mother lives in a facility along with at least one person who has a number tattooed onto her arm.
Yet I am am being accused of not being fair when I refuse to give any ground to the new fascist Nazis who are running our government or to those who are a supporting or excusing it.
Unless we speak to wrong, unless we act against wrong, we will be wronged, we will be…

Somehow I messed up replying and started a split off of this thread instead, so the next bit will be there before we continue on this main thread: https://toot-toot.wyrihaxim.us/@wyri/115209782487077114

And when I'm talking about understanding the drives to violence, I did write about something similar recently.
https://write.as/hexmhell/algorithmic-violence
The drives behind this and the shooting last week are pretty radically different, but there's some overlap. People like Kirk are part a huge political machine slowly crushing people all over the world. There's a hopeless rage that would naturally drive even the most calm person to the edge of violence. You can't look at the world honestly and be OK. We want to do something. We want to react. But everything we do is silenced or must rmain silent. So it's easy to understand why someone might choose violence. Very different situation, but everyone is subject to the same national and international influences.
I don't promote violence, not because I disagree with it but because I think it's expensive. It takes time to plan, especially for those trying to get away. Guns are not cheap, nor are bullets, nor is the range time you need to get somewhat good under pressure. It's not cheap for the person doing it, and it's not cheap for the community that has to clean up. The community will face police repression (which, if we're honest, was gonna come anyway). The community will have to post bail, will lose a person for a while, will need to support the family, will go to hearings, will write reports, will do interviews.
Sun Tzu said that deploying one soldier to the front takes 7 in the field. Logistics are a huge invisible cost. Some of that time and energy could be reused. It's never bad to be armed and able to defend if needed. But a lot of that energy and time would be better spent planning a community pantry, a tool library, organizing a union, etc. We are living in a disaster, and we need to invest in thriving through the next crumble.
Kirk is replacable. They're almost all replacable, because they don't really care about human life. We do, so none of us are. It's not really a worth while trade, IMHO.

Cowboys' Jerry Jones: 'We'll weigh' signing WR George Pickens to long-term deal https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/10/14/cowboys-jerry-jones-george-pickens-we-will…

The fascist coalition was never going to hold. It couldn't. Fascists want everyone to be exactly the same. That's their whole thing. Leftists want diversity, so we can actually form coalitions. Fascists will always reach a point where they have to kill all the other fascists who aren't exactly like them.
Project 2025 betrayed this. It wasn't consistent. It was a jumble of different ideas that couldn't actually be implemented together. Someone gets left out. The Groypers haven't been getting what they want. Things have been moving too slowly for them. So now we get to see what happens. If they keep accelating, Trump could be forced to choose between cracking down on the far right (and destroying his coalition completely) or letting his people get killed. I hope that's a choice he has to make.
🍿
While Rome burns, go build things that help people and get other people involved in it. The way we win is by not getting involved in that mess, but rather just clearly demonstrating that we can make things better.

Who are going to be the five D senators who chicken out and sign a blank check to the trumpies?
These wimpy-D's are willing to give away what little power we have left to obtain magic beans - which are worthless promises that the R's will allow a vote on ACA subsidies. A vote? We know that the R's will roll over that vote, that el-cheato won't sign, and that even if enacted, will simply become a bag of cash that el-cheato will use for whatever purpose he wants.
…

Republicans try to end shutdown without health care fix
Senate Republicans are trying to end the government shutdown by preparing a bipartisan package of spending bills that they hope will win new Democratic votes. It's unclear whether their plan will work. Democrats have voted 14 times not to reopen the government as they demand an extension of health care subsidies, which aren't expected to be part of the legislation. Many say they will continue to hold out until President Donald Trump and Republican leaders negotiate with them on an extension. A …

Series C, Episode 05 - The Harvest of Kairos
INTERCEPTOR LEADER: [V.O.] Interceptor Leader to Control. Request instructions!
SERVALAN: Hold position, Interceptor Leader, and wait for instructions from Assault Leader One. We will attack when the Liberator breaks out of Alpha Sector. Four should do it nicely. Well, Dastor, I think it's time we had a little strategic counsel. Bring this - Jarvik to me.

“Under President Trump’s leadership,” Stephen Miller vowed to shut down unspecified leftist groups.
“I don’t care how,” he said. “It could be a RICO charge, a conspiracy charge, conspiracy against the United States, insurrection.
But we are going to do what it takes to dismantle the organizations and the entities that are fomenting riots, that are doxxing, that are trying to inspire terrorism, that are committing acts of wanton violence.”
RICO refers to the Racketeer Influenc…

Miller Says He and Trump Will Use Law Enforcement to 'Dismantle' the Left After Kirk Shooting | Common Dreams
Stephen Miller, Trump's deputy chief of staff, said that he and the president will use law enforcement to "dismantle" the left, which he called a "domestic terrorism movement" after the Charlie Kirk shooting.

started the drier at around 4PM yesterday, now, 17.5hrs later the I'd say the bananas are a little more than half done. The grapes are not that close. I can report both are extremely tasty in this state of partial dehydration but I will resist! 😂
Funny. The internet says to shake/roll the grapes a little so they don't stick to the trays. But our trays have fairly large holes so even just the act of pulling a tray out results in escape of little marbles! so we'll just let them be and deal with the results at the end. 😆
#fruit #harvest #portalberni #grapes

TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?

I would not be unhappy if the Federal shutdown goes on through noon (EST) on January 20, 2029.
It may be a pain to many of us - and we should be charitable and understanding when dealing with people who are being hurt.
But at least if there is no money being appropriated to the Executive, it's ability to do damage will be somewhat (but only somewhat) constrained.
(I fully anticipate El Cheeto going outside of our Constitution [again] and pulling money directly from the …

#Blakes7 Series A, Episode 04 - Time Squad
AVON: We'll need to blast the door. That will alert the guards before we've even started.
VILA: [To Avon] Listen fingers, computers are yours, doors are mine. Right?
BLAKE: You can open it?
htt…

What are you going to do when the regime falls? After calling all your friends, after the great memes, after the parties, what are you going to do to make sure it never happens again? What world should we create?
Taxing billionaires is great and all, but we could build systems where billionaires are impossible. Is hoarding wealth and using it to control people even something we should consider part of a functional and humane system? Any system where one group of people doesn't have rights means that anyone can be stripped of their rights, like has happened with all the US citizens who've been illegally detained and deported by ICE. Does the concept of "rights" that must be defended with violence, that can be stripped away by people who can exercise more violence, even make sense? Or should the bedrock of a functional system be the obligations that we have to each other and to society, that cannot be severed or taken from us, that tell us we *must* defend regardless of whether systemic oppression will impact us or not?
Americans have been so restricted by the limitations of the two party system, only able to choose between options acceptable to different sections of the capitalist class. Would we even be able to imagine what we could do if those restrictions went away?
The fall of the Berlin wall was a surprise. The fall of Assad was faster than anyone expected. One day the government of Nepal was an unrepentant oligarchy, the next it was on fire. Everything can change in an instant, faster than anyone expects. No one can predict revolutionary change. Will you be ready if the opportunity presents itself?
The US cannot be fixed. The economic system is a ponzi scheme that has been patched again and again, but has finally run out of options. Racism, sexism, and Christian nationalism are baked into the system at every level. Trump gutted the system of soft power that held the US economy together, now there is only a slow decline. Even after he's gone, the damage is done. Once we let go of how to fix something that cannot be fixed, we can start to imagine something that cannot be achieved within the current system.
This is a time of opportunity. Do not burrow so deep in terror that you miss your chance to dream.
#USPol

Today my daughter's preschool is holding a farewell assembly for one of her classmates
whose mother has no choice but to self deport.
The school is hoping it will be joyful in tone, so we might make this less upsetting for this 3 year old.
There's just no words for the uselessness of this cruelty.
ht…

Maggie Tokuda-Hall (@maggietokudahall.bsky.social)
Today my daughter's preschool is holding a farewell assembly for one of her classmates whose mother has no choice but to self deport. The school is hoping it will be joyful in tone, so we might make this less upsetting for this 3 year old. There's just no words for the uselessness of this cruelty.

I keep coming back to the mirror dualities of the oppressed and oppressor under authoritarianism.
The oppressed is portrayed as both weak and godlike. The stereotypes are always some variation on sloth and incompetence, but yet somehow also a menace capable of destroying the "pure" society. To use the most relevant current example, Antifa being both little femme soy boys who would always get beat up by "real men" while also being an international terrorist organization on the brink of overthrowing the US government, the unarmed presence of whom makes the heavily armed agents of ICE flee for their lives. Antifa is both having absolutely no impact on ICE, and also having such an impact on ICE that the military needs to come in to protect them. The contradiction is obvious but never seems to occur to those who hold both to be true at the same time.
But few talk about the duality of the oppressor. The sovereign throughout history has always been both a ruler above the law, sometimes even the representative or incarnation of a divine force. Yet, this same superhuman/god-man is also a baby who needs constant care. This is absolutely a through line from the very earliest records of sovereign cults to modern cult leaders, CEOs, and Trump today. Power, for these people, is expressed both as the ability to force others to enact their will and in the ability to compel others to care for them. Can any of these "men" cook? Can they fix anything themselves? They are driven everywhere, cooked for all the time, constantly protected from danger. Kings are still dressed, at least for rituals. I could dissect masculinity here, but that's a whole thing.
It is as though the drive to care for our children, who must be taught to behave within acceptable norms, is hijacked by "leaders" who demand our care and attention... even at the expense of our literal children. And recently we've seen some of those very CEOs, with LLMs and return to office demands, show that their judgment is also little better than children, making decisions while pretending to understand a subject.
The oppressed are portrayed as both god-like and impotent and are, in fact, neither. Meanwhile the rulers portray themselves only as invulnerable and are, in fact, childish in their ability to survive without constant support. Their greatest fear from the collapse of society is figuring out how to make sure people keep taking care of them.
It just keeps rattling around in my head.
#USPol

⭐️German federal police will soon be allowed to shoot down unmanned aerial vehicles,
interior minister Alexander Dobrindt said on Wednesday,
after a spate of drone sightings believed to be Russian efforts to spy and intimidate.
Unveiling a draft law, Dobrindt said police would be authorised “to take state-of-the-art technical action against drone threats,
for example with electromagnetic pulses, jamming, GPS interference, but also with physical means”.
…

Picture the human body. Zoom in on a single cell. It lives for a while, then splits or dies, as part of a community of cells that make up a particular tissue. This community lives together for many many cell-lifetimes, each performing their own favorite function and reproducing as much as necessary to maintain their community, consuming the essential resources they need and contributing back what they can so that the whole body can live for decades. Each community of cells is interdependent on the whole body, but also stable and sustainable over long periods of time.
Now imagine a cancer cell. It has lost its ability to harmonize with the whole and prioritize balance, instead consuming and reproducing as quickly as it can. As neighboring tissues start to die from its excess, it metastasizes, always spreading to new territory to fuel its unbalanced appetite. The inevitable result is death of the whole body, although through birth, that body can create a new fresh branch of tissues that may continue their stable existence free of cancer. Alternatively, radiation or chemotherapy might be able to kill off the cancer, at great cost to the other tissues, but permitting long-term survival.
To the cancer cell, the idea of decades-long survival of a tissue community is unbelievable. When your natural state is unbounded consumption, growth, and competition, the idea of interdependent cooperation (with tissues all around the body you're not even touching, no less) seems impossible, and the idea that a tissue might survive in a stable form for decades is ludicrous.
"Perhaps if conditions were bleak enough to perfectly balance incessant unrestrained growth against the depredations of a hostile environment it might be possible? I guess the past must have been horribly brutal, so that despite each tissue trying to grow as much as possible they each barely survived? Yes, a stable and sustainable population is probably only possible under conditions of perfectly extreme hardship, and in our current era of unfettered growth, we should rejoice that we live in much easier times!"
You can probably already see where I'm going with this metaphor, but did you know that there are human communities, alive today, that have been living sustainably for *tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years*?
#anarchy #colonialism #civilization
P.S. if you're someone who likes to think about past populations and historical population growth, I cannot recommend the (short, free) game Opera Omnia by Stephen Lavelle enough: https://www.increpare.com/2009/02/opera-omnia/

Here's your regular reminder:
There is no debate over if cars will or will not be part of the future. They will not. They are a luxury we can no longer afford. The question is only if we will choose to rid our future of cars, or allow cars to rid us of our future.
#FuckCars

We need all hands on deck in Pennsylvania.
Last week, MAGA Republicans unveiled their latest plan for taking over PA’s Supreme Court:
“𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗗𝗼𝗼𝗿𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗸𝗲”
They are preparing to flood the state with canvassers,
set up GOP voter registration drives in every county,
and build a robust Get Out the Vote turnout program to give themselves an edge
-- and flip PA’s Supreme Court from blue to red.
The outcome of this race will be the difference between retain…

Donate to Get Out the Vote PAC
I just gave to Get Out the Vote PAC!

How to see two bright, once-in-a-lifetime comets with your naked eye
The comets, C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) and C/2025 R2 (SWAN), are already showing off their green tails to cameras and telescopes.
But the best chances to see them with the naked eye from the northern hemisphere should be in the second half of the month.

“What stands out about these two is their potential brightness,” said Erika Gibb, an astrobiologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
“For sky-gaz…

How to see two bright, once-in-a-lifetime comets with your naked eye
Comet Lemmon and Comet SWAN will be closest to Earth as a new moon sets up prime viewing conditions. Add in a meteor shower and we may get spectacular sky gazing.

#Neurotypicals: You need to be bored. Next time you go to the gym, don't listen to that podcast. Just try to be in your head for a while. Maybe you'll think about the meaning of life, and maybe you'll figure it out.
My #ADHD brain trying to unload the dishwasher without a podcast: Hey, Remember the intro to Clifford the Big Red Dog? That song? You sort of paid attention to it for a few seconds while our kid was watching it. I remember those 5 seconds. Let's sing that intro... just that first part though. We're just going to keep doing that, over and over, hundreds of times in a row.
Neurotypicals: People don't like to be bored. People will give themselves electric shocks to not be bored. They don't want to think about the big questions
My ADHD brain, still trying to unload the dishwasher without a podcast: ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪
https://youtu.be/orQKfIXMiA8