Tootfinder

The comic / graphic novel will be ending soon and then the wait for the final Netflix movie will start. #Heartstopper 🏳️‍🌈
#LGBTQ #AliceOseman

Of course, economic pressure isn't the only tool we have. Diversity of tactics is critical. I'm not going to tell anyone not to throw buckets of screws into the parking lots and driveways of ICE facilities or blockading facilities with burning dumpstes. Even if i don't promote those types of tactics, we should all STFU if we see people doing them. We all have a place. There are things we can all do. Everything is on the table and it should be, because ICE agents will intimidate you, steal your car, and even murder you for just filming them.
You can cower in fear, or you can stand up and fight with everything you have. Which or those do you want to remember yourself doing?

Series C, Episode 04 - Dawn of the Gods
AVON: We will do nothing to counter the force acting upon the Liberator. We then plot the Liberator's course on the main battle computer flight predictor to see exactly how she is behaving. Once we understand how the force is operating we may be some way toward defeating it.
TARRANT: Strange. The Liberator's following a curve. Traction beams produce straight-line motion. Zen, I want a prediction of the Liberator's course based …

Yesterday Cory Doctorow argued that refusal to use LLMs was mere "neoliberal purity culture". I think his argument is a strawman, doesn't align with his own actions and delegitimizes important political actions we need to make in order to build a better cyberphysical world.
EDIT: Diskussions under this are fine, but I do not want this to turn into an ad hominem attack to Cory. Be fucking respectful

Acting ethically in an imperfect world
Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somewhere but your employer will not accept another mode of transportation, you want to eat vegan but are […]

#Memphis: there’s a free brake light repair clinic this Saturday! Don’t be giving #Trump’s #tAsKfOrCe nazis a reason to pull you over; make sure your lights are good.
Volunteers will be replacing brake and…

Dozens of unions, community and faith organizations are calling on every Minnesotan to take a stand on January 23rd.
The ICE “surge” that cost the life of Renee Nicole Good is violating the Constitutional and human rights of Americans and our neighbors.
On January 23rd there will be a unified, statewide pause in economic activity.
We are demanding:
🔸ICE must leave Minnesota now.
🔸The officer who killed Good must be held legally accountable.
🔸No additiona…

As I mentioned in a prior post the House - with many D's in support! - passed HR 7006, a bill to fund various parts of the Federal government.
The house should have voted it down - but they chose to feed the trump beast in an act of abject appeasement.
I am sure that Congress critters will say "these are benign things that ought to be funded". And in that they are mostly right.
But we know that trump will simply grab any funds and apply them elsewhere. Congre…

"Aspiring American authoritarians will only win if they are allowed to do so. None of this has to happen. Both of these terrible possibilities, land war and self-terrorism, are signs of weakness rather than strength. They can be prevented, but only if we name them, and use their horror as the first step to describe something much better."
http…

Land War or Self-Terrorism?
Trump's Likely Next Step

#America is going to ruin us. the only choice we have is: Are going to be feudal countries to them or are we going to choose freedom.
We will loose a lot of our wealth either way, but at least we should choose freedom from America over slavery to America.

Uncontrolled power will turn even saints into savages. And we can all
be counted on to live down to our lowest impulses.
-- Parmen, "Plato's Stepchildren", stardate 5784.3

Oh the joys of a mainframe upgrade.
Defining what type of testing is needed and specific test cases to verify that all functionality for the system is available.
Also, a short briefing note for the upcoming board meeting to describe what is being done, why, when, where the backup will be running from, who is doing what portions and how we verify that it all went smoothly.
It should go smoothly (famous last words), but we will verify that the upgrade was completed and comp…

Good Morning #Canada
Today is a Public Service Announcement for all our non-Canadian Mastodonians. I know you're sad that you aren't Canadian but please don't hate us because we're awesome. This video will teach you a little bit about Canada and by practicing some of these phrases you can feel like one of us. Watch with caution as you might develop a love for mullets, maple syrup, and beavers. You've been warned.
#CanadaIsAwesome #Culture
https://youtu.be/evvzG0Xz69Q

Chicago is getting a place for sickos
#fedifc

Cynicism, "AI"
I've been pointed out the "Reflections on 2025" post by Samuel Albanie [1]. The author's writing style makes it quite a fun, I admit.
The first part, "The Compute Theory of Everything" is an optimistic piece on "#AI". Long story short, poor "AI researchers" have been struggling for years because of predominant misconception that "machines should have been powerful enough". Fortunately, now they can finally get their hands on the kind of power that used to be only available to supervillains, and all they have to do is forget about morals, agree that their research will be used to murder millions of people, and a few more millions will die as a side effect of the climate crisis. But I'm digressing.
The author is referring to an essay by Hans Moravec, "The Role of Raw Power in Intelligence" [2]. It's also quite an interesting read, starting with a chapter on how intelligence evolved independently at least four times. The key point inferred from that seems to be, that all we need is more computing power, and we'll eventually "brute-force" all AI-related problems (or die trying, I guess).
As a disclaimer, I have to say I'm not a biologist. Rather just a random guy who read a fair number of pieces on evolution. And I feel like the analogies brought here are misleading at best.
Firstly, there seems to be an assumption that evolution inexorably leads to higher "intelligence", with a certain implicit assumption on what intelligence is. Per that assumption, any animal that gets "brainier" will eventually become intelligent. However, this seems to be missing the point that both evolution and learning doesn't operate in a void.
Yes, many animals did attain a certain level of intelligence, but they attained it in a long chain of development, while solving specific problems, in specific bodies, in specific environments. I don't think that you can just stuff more brains into a random animal, and expect it to attain human intelligence; and the same goes for a computer — you can't expect that given more power, algorithms will eventually converge on human-like intelligence.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, what evolution did succeed at first is achieving neural networks that are far more energy efficient than whatever computers are doing today. Even if indeed "computing power" paved the way for intelligence, what came first is extremely efficient "hardware". Nowadays, human seem to be skipping that part. Optimizing is hard, so why bother with it? We can afford bigger data centers, we can afford to waste more energy, we can afford to deprive people of drinking water, so let's just skip to the easy part!
And on top of that, we're trying to squash hundreds of millions of years of evolution into… a decade, perhaps? What could possibly go wrong?
[1] #NoAI #NoLLM #LLM

For the love of all you hold sacred.
Can we please adopt a UNIVERSAL standard for generating a new line in a web text box - sometimes its cmd-enter, sometimes its shift-enter sometimes you just can’t do it 😡
rest assured if you invoke the wrong key combo, there is a 99.999% probability that the form will be submitted with potentially disastrous results.

Series B, Episode 11 - Gambit
JARRIERE: [Shakes his head]
SERVALAN: The secret of Star One's location is of no use to a criminal like Krantor. However, that knowledge can bring about his death. Not only that. With any luck the Federation will be finally convinced, as I have argued for years, that we can no longer tolerate this pestilential rathole so close to our own territories. Freedom City will be finally burnt out.

Just a reminder that #Putin in his yearly petition-the-tsar-bash said that there will be no peace in #Ukraine until the "root causes" are adressed. We all know that the root cause is that Putin can not abide an independent

BBC News hires Lindsay McIntosh, previously Head of News at The Sunday Times, as its Executive News Editor (BBC Press Office on LinkedIn)
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7407013484615409664

We are delighted to announce Lindsay McIntosh as the new Executive News Editor, BBC News.    As Executive News Editor, Lindsay will be at the heart of the BBC newsroom – driving the BBC’s editorial… | BBC Press Office
We are delighted to announce Lindsay McIntosh as the new Executive News Editor, BBC News.    As Executive News Editor, Lindsay will be at the heart of the BBC newsroom – driving the BBC’s editorial agenda and working across BBC News to ensure we continue to deliver high quality, distinctive news across our platforms.   Lindsay joins us from The Sunday Times where she is currently the Head of News and oversees its award-winning political and investigative journalism across digital and pr…

2026 NFL schedule rumors: Tracking all international games that've been revealed, including Cowboys in Brazil

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/2026-nf

We don't need no stinking atmosphere.
From: @…
https://flipboard.com/@thenewsdesk/news-i8koidj5z/…

Present thought
Mastodon's the right model. But to be truly *useful* politcally - the Bluesky/Mastodonian idea of "we will make our safe space over here" might be pleasant for many and that's fine
But they're not healthy for useful political discourse, which is often ugly, but generates the necessary talk.
The discussions I'm seeing on Twitter/threads e.g. left v. liberal are finally getting "good." (among others)

Irgendwie der Soundtrack dieser Tage:
You'll be back, time will tell
You'll remember that I served you well
Oceans rise, empires fall
We have seen each other through it all
And when push comes to shove
I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love
[…]
So don't throw away this thing we had
'Cause when push comes to shove
I will kill your friends and family
To remind you of my love
You'll be bac…

Linus: I guess it's wrong always to be worrying about tomorrow. Maybe
we should think only about today.
Charlie Brown:
No, that's giving up. I'm still hoping that yesterday will get
better.

"Austria’s military has already dumped Microsoft and moved to open-source services hosted in Europe, and some German regional governments have done the same. Danish schools were told to abandon Google laptops by the Danish data protection authority in 2024. The new Dutch government says digital sovereignty will be a national priority"
#DigitalSovereignty

I've been railing about the need to restructure SCOTUS for rather a while now. (I've added a couple of URLs after the Guardian opinion link.)
Here is an opinion piece that says something similar.
It adds something that I missed - that SCOTUS and Congress are filled with people who think that if El Cheato goes away that his mess will also go away.
I don't think so. The maga-klan is too deeply embedded into our judiciary and administrative agencies. It's go…

Here’s the best info I have (which seems to be corroborated despite the scammy “CRIME” account name): now reported to be just one person hit, in the thigh. My guess is that the press will be picking up now and we won’t get really clear info until the dust has settled.
Will stop posting more from the chat rumor mill at this point unless I hear a really important correction.

Series A, Episode 02 - Space Fall
DAINER: Now, that's better.
VILA: Not bad, is it, eh? One for you -
NOVA: [To Blake] How will we know when he's made it?
BLAKE: The lights on the scanner - when that goes off we're on our way.
VILA: - one for me.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/102/259

A: "Oh my god, he is *you*. If you were mayor, the first two things you'd do is fill on a pothole in a bike lane, and install bidets in your office."
Me: "pretty much, yep!"
#NYC #Mamdani

RE: https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/116087233502113204
While I don't think this will change things, I do think it's nice to be reminded that we are not alone. Direct action is always better than asking nicely for the horrible thing to stop. We are powerful enough to stop it.

But there is also a theatrical element to politics that's easy to forget. The "show" of something like this can be inspiring, and can inspire others who have been afraid.

"We also found that the evidence presented for examples of climate benefit, regardless of AI type, tend to be weak whether from companies or organisations like the IEA. The potential benefits are overstated, in surprising and significant ways."
(Original title: NEW REPORT – The AI climate hoax)
https://

NEW REPORT – The AI climate hoax
A new report on AI greenwashing, analysing the rhetoric and evidence behind the idea big tech will solve climate change

In October last year, US chip giant Qualcomm acquired Italian open source electronics and software pioneer Arduino. Not everyone was happy.
https://www.computing.co.uk/interview/2026/arduino-ceo-we-will-always-be-open-source

Arduino CEO: We will always be open source
In October last year, US chip giant Qualcomm acquired Italian open source electronics and software pioneer Arduino. Not everyone was happy.

This will be the easiest way to go after this administration once it's over.
It will be the equivalent of getting Capone for tax evasion.
But it will be enough, especially if we can sweep the funders with them.
https://bsky.app/profile/bloomberg.com/post/3mcid2hfs…

Bloomberg News (@bloomberg.com)
Donald Trump’s social-media empire is muscling into Wall Street, entering the $14 trillion US ETF market with five new “Made in America” funds. https://bloom.bg/3NLRx4V

This has allowed me to make clear something that's been at the back of my mind. Something that is at the heart of so much blind stupidity in big tech.
It's the assumption that we will change one thing and all else will be the same.
In this case, we will fire lots and lots of employees all over the world and we will make lots of profit. We're smart enough to make the AI, and we're dumb enough to think that there will only be one consequence. 1/n

Sticker collection for 39C3 is complete. 500 of each iso8601ultras, "We do not test on animals, we test in production" and a large stack "Nett hier. Aber waren Sie schon mal in Ankh-Morpork?"
Will be distributed in trading boxes/stacks/heaps
#39c3 #stickers

»Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days:
Let’s Encrypt will be reducing the validity period of the certificates we issue. We currently issue certificates valid for 90 days, which will be cut in half to 45 days by 2028.«
The @… halving the validity of the keys makes the web more secure (not more anonymous).
🔐

Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days
Let’s Encrypt will be reducing the validity period of the certificates we issue. We currently issue certificates valid for 90 days, which will be cut in half to 45 days by 2028. This change is being made along with the rest of the industry, as required by the CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements, which set the technical requirements that we must follow. All publicly-trusted Certificate Authorities like Let’s Encrypt will be making similar changes. Reducing how long certificates are valid …

Just listened to the current episode of @… and heard @… you'd like to attend 40C3, would be awesome to have you there!
We've been running the Open Source Firmware assembly for a handful of years now, will happily welc…

Summit (aka Deft, aka ServerCentral):
"In our Elk Grove Village location, our CAM costs increased by 11% [...]  We will be passing this increase through [...]
We have also renewed our lease at Elk Grove Village resulting in increased costs of 30%. This renewal reflects the impact of high demand and increasing costs in the data center space.  This renewal is effective on July 1st, 2026 and we will be passing this increase through"

Just started to read a #VOX article about the glorious AI future but I had to quit right away at this nugget: „we could all be so much more wealthier than we can even imagine today…AI and robots will be able to produce a lot more goods and services than when we have in today’s economy.“
Yeah. Because the lack of stuff that is churned out of factories and the artificial scarcity of digital goods…

So the Canada - China trade deal just announced is interesting, particularly regarding Electric Vehicles. It was primarily about restoring our agricultural trade with China by allowing their EVs to access our market. But it will likely, despite the limited amount that will hit our shores, jumpstart the EV market in Canada. Cars that are feature rich and cost less, like the one reviewed in the YT video linked below, will push current manufacturers in Canada to up their game.
Doug Ford abandoned his Captain Canada persona and selfishly attacked the deal because of potential impact on Ontario's auto industry. Part of his statement demanded that the Federal government cancel their Electric Vehicle mandates because it was too costly for manufacturers to build them. I think Toyota and Honda, long time Canadian partners, may be concerned about the deal, but U.S. manufacturers are abandoning EVs and Canada. Hey Doug, I thought we were Open for Business?
#CanPoli #GlobalTrade
https://youtu.be/Mb6H7trzMfI

#today I am in at uni, likely the last time this year, for #JournalClub this morning. We will be reviewing the Monsanto glyphosate safety paper #retraction:

The BBC says "as we have made clear previously, we will be defending" against Trump's defamation lawsuit and "we are not going to make further comment" (Christal Hayes/BBC)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpvd81470v1o

BBC says it will defend Trump defamation lawsuit over Panorama speech edit
The US president is requesting $5bn (£3.7bn) in damages, according to court documents filed in Florida.

"To future historians—not just of computing, but of humanity—the current period will be a dark age.
How was Facebook used by students in the 2010s? We cannot show you, that version of Facebook is not hosted anywhere.
What correspondence did Vint Cerf have as president of the ACM with other luminaries of computing industry and research? We do not know; Google will not publish his emails."

The Digital Dark Ages
There are three interesting things to do with a computing museum. Museum directors and curators should be aware of all three and design galleries, present information, and make archives available to address them all.

The fact that “AI Companies” have slurped up all of the inventory of various tech commodities indicates that we are in for some fierce inflation, and it won’t be contained to tech products and services. I will extend to every vendor that uses tech products and service. Not many of those, eh…

"Anyhow, there will be a crash and a hangover. I think the people telling us that #genAI is the future and we must pay it fealty richly deserve their impending financial wipe-out. But still, I hope the hangover is less terrible than I think it will be."
@… in: …

One of the things that made organizing a lot easier with the GDC was a thing called "GDC in a box." It was a zip file with all kinds of resources. There was a directory structure, templates for all kinds of things like meetings and paperwork you had to file (for legal reasons) and "read me" files.
We had all kinds of support. There were people you could talk to who had been there. There were people you could call to walk through legal paperwork (taxes). Centralized orgs are vulnerable and easy to infiltrate. They're easy for states to shut down. But there are benefits to org structures.
I think it's possible to have the type of support we had with the GDC, but without the politics of an org (even the IWW). I hope this most recent essay has some of the same properties. I hope that it makes building something new, something no one has really imagined before, easier.
This whole project is something a bit different. It's a collective vision and collective project, from the ground up. Some of it has felt like a brain dump, just getting things that have been swimming around in my head down somewhere. But I hope this feels more like an invitation.
Everything thus far written is all useless unless people do things with it. Only from that point does it become a thing that lives, a thing with its own consciousness that can't be controlled by any individual human.
Tech billionaire cultists want to bring a new era of humanity with AGI. That is definitely not possible with LLMs, and may not be possible at all. But there is a super intelligence that is possible, though it's been constrained by capitalism: collective human intelligence.
The grand vision of the tech dystopians is that of the ultimate slave that can then enslave all humans on their behalf. I think we can build a humanity that can liberate itself from their grasp, crush their vision, and build for itself a world in which people will never be enslaved again. Not only do I think it's possible, I think it's necessary. I think there are only two choices: collective liberation or death.
And that's what I plan to write about next time to wrap this whole project up. Today things often feel impossible. But people talked about the Middle Ages as though they were the end of the world, and then everything changed in unimaginable ways. Everything can, and will, change again.
"The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."

"WE ARE two weeks into 2026, and less than a fortnight from the resetting of the Doomsday Clock a year after it was set at 89 seconds to midnight — the closest in its 78-year existence. How close will it be as Trump continues to attack the oil-producing nations that have turned their face to China and their backs on the petro-chemical dollar, threatening the foundations of the house of cards on which the US economy is built?"

🥳 New Kitten release
The release I pushed a few minutes ago brings preliminary Web Numbers support to Kitten.
What are Web Numbers? Well, they’re just a friendlier name for IP Addresses, now that we can deploy secure sites at them. They’re also a cornerstone of how I’m implementing the Small Web.
https://ar.al/2025/06/25/web-nu…

Web Numbers
Domains? Where we’re going, we don’t need domains! Until the end of this year, the only way to have a secure web site is to have it accessible via a domain name. That, however, is changing. And the design of the Small Web will be changing along with it. IP addresses are about to make a comeback on the web in a big (ok, small) way, thanks to upcoming support for security certificates for IP addresses by Let’s Encrypt.

Process creates friction, so we got rid of process. But that friction was necessary for holding workslop at bay.
Because without slowing down, we can't ask "is this good? is this right?" We can only ask "when will it be done?" And that's a world where #LLM outputs will always beat people.
Fortunately, an "optimized" process moves slowly, because prod…

The myth of "no design process"
Process can add friction, but trying to get rid of friction by getting rid of process dooms design to irrelevance.

I would like to go on record to say that I don't hate LLMs. That would be like disowning maths.
I hate how people sell it with promises that are simply lies and urging people to use it for things that it is unsuitable for, with the commercial LLMs how they train models on stolen data, how users talk themselves into believing they're talking to a human or something human-like while deskilling themselves, how institutions and organizations shoehorn it into every fucking thing, the way it is usurping computing resources and increasing prices for personal computing, how the big companies underhandedly continuously threaten everyone with "if we don't invest enough the Terminators will get us" and how it is used for very obvious large-scale financial fraud. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Series A, Episode 13 - Orac
CALLY: [Returning.] Blake, I think I've found enough for everybody.
BLAKE: Oh good, at least the others will be all right.
ENSOR: Well, I'm ready, shall we get started?
BLAKE: Well, wait a minute. There is something else.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/113/290

All kinds of issues and adjustments are popping up and will be popping up as we go through AI integration into our lives. This was an interesting read: https://x.com/MarcJSchmidt/status/2009688028931875156
This was especially interesting: Look at Tailwind: "75 million d…

Marc (@MarcJSchmidt) on X
All my new code will be closed-source from now on. I've contributed millions of lines of carefully written OSS code over the past decade, spent thousands of hours helping other people. If you want to use my libraries (1M+ downloads/month) in the future, you have to pay. I made

So there has been a school shooting in British Columbia - and I guess since I spent so much time living and working in the states, I forgot that these are horrifying and traumatizing events - which may just be down to the coverage in the media in the US versus Canada.
That's not to say that the coverage here has been good - quite the opposite in fact - but I will get to that at the moment.
I will qualify this in that I will freely admit that I have no expertise in either mass …

Thinking about future release plans for ngscopeclient.
There have been massive performance improvements and some significant bug fixes since v0.1.1 and the ThunderScope dev edition units are going to manufacture so we'll be getting a lot of additional users in ~2 months.
But there's also a lot of ongoing backend refactoring and changes to filter graph blocks that won't be strictly backwards compatible (old filter graphs will need updating) and while I freely break sof…

It's another Sunday in suburbia.
We've been for our coffee walk and on the way popped into one of the local IGA stores to pick up something on special.
I've done the washing and cleaned the bathroom.
That's my entire list done for the day.
Husband will be making hamburgers on the bbq for lunch.
I really like Sundays.
#Sunday

So, I think we are really, really close to a 1.0 release of https://www.drupal.org/project/config_warning that adds a nice little warning to admin pages that will alter the running configuration.
It would be really, really good to get more people testing it on their

Raiders pre-game notes: It will all soon be over, Raider Nation https://raiderramble.com/2026/01/04/raiders-pre-game-notes-it-will-all-soon-be-over-raider-nation/

European countries should make very clear, what the government of Greenland says:
"Greenland says it cannot accept US takeover ‘under any circumstances’" , a clear red line must be drawn. If Trump doesn't listen we can create an economic armaggedon for him (and also for ourselves sadly). But if you don't stand for something you will go for anything...

Greenland says it cannot accept US takeover ‘under any circumstances’
Self-governing island stresses it is member of Nato, which is looking at improving Arctic defences, through Denmark

Since we had temperatures of -15/-13℃ (5℉) the past few nights, I was planning to go on an early morning shoot of one of my favorite waterfalls, but decided against it due to severe black ice warnings and likely ensuing road chaos today... Hope there will be more cold nights this winter...
So instead, some close-up detail shots of ice structures at the same waterfall from exactly 364 morning ago. Enjoy!

Gifts to the US President are generally considered to be the property of the United States rather than of the president as a person or the president as an office.
So it seems to me that the US National Archives is now the proud owner of a the physical object of a Nobel Peace Prize.
(Of course, el cheato will try to retain physical possession and we will have to pry it from his cold dead fingers, a task that , I suspect, many of us would find rather appealing.)

@… One of the big lies is about how everyone needs to rush to get [somewhere] before [China or whatever villain they've made up] does because no one will ever be able to catch up!
(and this argument is made on behalf of or by Google and Facebook, notorious not-first-to-market “success" stories)
We'd be in a better place with all of th…

Adobe Re-Animate 😁

Worked on some more #Gentoo global #jobserver goodies today.
Firstly, Portage jobserver support patch: #PyTest jobs will also be counted towards total job count.
Again, it's not a perfect solution, but it works reasonably. The plugin still starts -n jobs as specified by the arguments, but it acquired job tokens prior to executing every test, therefore delaying actual testing until tokens are available. It doesn't seem to cause noticeable overhead either.

“removing the Pride flag from Stonewall is not a minor change. It is erasure. It is an act of exclusion. It sends a message that LGBTQ visibility is negotiable, even at the very site where our community fought back. Stonewall is sacred ground. The Pride flag is not partisan. It is history. It is belonging. And we will not be intimidated into silence.”
'Political stunt': Trump admin rages at NYC for directly defying his Pride flag order - Alternet.org
https://www.alternet.org/trump-admin-pride-flag/

Peyton Manning's 2013 success will never be repeated https://insidethestar.com/peyton-mannings-2013-success-will-never-be-repeated

If civilization—as we know it—should happen to survive there will definitely be dramatizations made of the shit show for the entertainment of the survivors. Let’s imagine it’s all resolved in the next 10-15 years, and imagine further that what emerges is acceptable to a majority of fediversians. Who among the currently known performers would you pick to play the parts of the actual political participants today?

"‘If we wait it will be too late’: Why 500 scientists are backing this urgent climate declaration"
#Climate #ClimateChange

‘Act now and act fast’: 500 scientists back urgent climate declaration
The Dartington Declaration calls for ‘unprecedented’ cuts to emissions to prevent global temperatures exceeding 1.5℃.

there may be insects in your room. If insects are found in your room, we will quickly exterminate them. However, we are afraid we will not be able to offer refunds.

Just flew to to the UK, will be here for a while spending time in Weymouth Dorset with my (ancient, in-care) parents, and fixing up an old house we’re buying. Keeping the US house, and supporting friends and family, but sad that we don’t feel safe there nowadays…

Good. That report from NINE YEARS AGO needs to be examined closely and the recommendations need to be put in place. Ideally, we'd end the death penalty, given the state's record with putting innocent people on death row, but I'm not hopeful Oklahomans will ever come to their senses about that.

A lot of people will call shunning Amazon, Meta, etc "purity politics". According to them, since no company is perfect, we should just give up having lines, since there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
Alternatively, it can be seen as exercising whatever little direct power we have, as individuals, to stop funding the machines that are killing us and making us poorer. It's not enough, but it's certainly a start.

Artist #BoramieSao will be visiting campus on January 24. We're putting up her painting that's part of our collection AND borrowing its companion piece as part of the exhibition "We, Too, Are Made of Wonders." The two paintings are mirror images, one dark, one light. Read on to learn a little more about the artist and her work.

Fucking yes… finally! Thank you, Ireland, Spain, and Netherlands!
“Ireland will not participate in next year’s Eurovision Song Contest, and it will not be broadcast on RTÉ, after organiser the European Broadcasting Union confirmed today that Israel will be allowed to take part … Spain’s national broadcaster RTVE and the Netherlands’ AvroTros also announced that they would boycott the contest.”
Maybe we should rename it to the Genocidevision Song Contest?
Now… any more Euro…

I’d like to see all these institutions get out ahead of this. ICE •will• provoke direct confrontations at schools. The question is not whether but who: who is confronting them? Who is on the line? How prepared are they? How have they prepared?
There •will• inevitably be some kind of active defense — and if that defense comes ad hoc, in a panic, in a moment of crisis, we will all be the worse for it.
/end

So this is percolating and the results so far are not surprising.
I'd vote NO, for the following reasons:
- oil demand continues to decline and risk is high we'll end up with an expensive underutilized pipeline. Therefore high risk we'll end up subsidizing any private entity that builds this thing.
- why would we invest public dollars to support infrastructure for a product where 75% of the profit leaves Canada? There has to be a net benefit, beyond steel sales and jobs, for this project to be considered.
- Indigenous land rights must be respected. They will be left with the rusting pipeline decades in the future, and it's impact on the land.
- the B.C. government must also have a final vote as they have to give up land and provide support.
- we don't need additional oil tankers on our west coast.
- and most importantly, with this MOU, Canada pretty much declared we aren't serious about protecting the environment or fighting climate change. We're oil whores. Harsh but....
#CanPoli #ClimateAction

There are a lot of takeaways from this:
1. Organizing locally gives you a massive advantage because you will always know your local area better than ICE ever can.
2. Be agile. You can always change tactics faster than a centralized organization.
3. Organize now. The sooner you build your networks, the sooner you can learn.
4. Identify ICE facilities and organize monitoring them directly.
But I think the most interesting one that's not explicitly in there, one that's hinted at the last one, is to go on the offensive. ICE is already afraid. If we all take the anger we have at the murder of #ReneGood, find the local ICE facility that they'll stage from, and bring that anger to #OccupyICE we might be able to just shut the whole thing down preemptively. Completely stop all ICE operations across the US. If they want to fight, they can fight *with everyone, all at once.*
Shut down their ability to operate at all. They have a logistics pipeline. They need cars, they need oil in those cars, they need to be able to move those cars to target areas. They also need money to pay those agents. All of those can be disrupted.
The regime needs your money and labor to maintain the illusion of legitimacy. They chose a bad time because you can hit both of those at once *right now* with a combination of #GeneralStrike and #TaxStrike, and then #BoycottEverything.
The regime is weaker than it's ever been. It's flailing. Their own base is demanding the release of the #EpsteinFiles. Their last gasp attempt to prevent the radical change that's coming is just to ethnically cleanse the US back to the 50's (which is what they always meant by "Make America Great Again"). Trump will do anything to stay in power, even if it means killing everyone on Earth in the process. But Americans can end it now by going on the offensive.
Now is the time.
#USPol

How will we remember the 2025 Patriots? As their most fun team in a generation https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7029590/2026/02/10/patriots-2025-super-bowl-60-fun/

We can be sure there will be no strikes on Venezuela before december 5th, when there is a big FIFA event in Washington. Trump will be praised there so he doesn't want to spoil that i think....
https://www.fifa.com/en/tournaments/mens/w

And this is working, but it's slow progress.
Mastodon in particular has UX problems that will be very hard to overcome that prevent mass adoption, foremost is that actual conversations (aka replies) are unreliable and slow due to the way posts are distributed. Quote post support was a huge first step to remedy this. I hope we'll see more updates on it.
Bluesky got a big chunk of former Twitter users, especially in some niches like for scientists and activists; they have great performance, reliable threading and replies and really amazing featuers like fully custom feeds—but suffer from intransparent moderation and frankly insufferable leadership (still leagues better than Twitter or Facebook though).
(There's more than these, but these are what I use.)

Nearly 13 months into Trump’s second term, the most terrifying attribute of his regime is its utter contempt for the United States,
and how blithely willing they are to destroy our nation and its people (let alone other nations).
With most of the Trump Show
— which began in 2015
— now in the rearview mirror,
and his mind and body rapidly decaying before our eyes,
one might think Trump would be thinking about the “legacy” he will be leaving behind in a few …

We are all passengers in Trump’s death cab
The nihilism of the regime is its most terrifying attribute.

Dallas Cowboys predicted to make $120 million offseason mistake https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/dallas-cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-predicted-make-120-million-offseason-mistake/2e8edd4c6f162772b475edab<…

#Blakes7 Series D, Episode 05 - Animals
SERVALAN: Make for the ridge. Its a natural vantage point. Captain, I want you to make sure we're ready to lift off this mud ball at the first sign of trouble.
CAPTAIN: We will be, Commissioner.
https://

I •think• the most important people for MN residents to call right now are MN Gov Walz and MN AG Ellison. Those numbers again:
Gov: ‭(651) 201-3400€
AG: ‭(651) 296-3353€
My points when I call:
- We don’t trust Trump’s FBI
- We want an independent MN-based investigation of the killing of Good
- Thank you for steps you’re already taking in this direction
- Do more, try harder
- Do so in outright defiance of the FBI if necessary
(To be clear, this is all just from Paul; if I get better guidance from more informed folks, I will share/update.)

There's something cruel in how our culture treats in-between times.
We have words for achievement
and words for burnout,
but we lack vocabulary for the necessary pauses that precede new growth.
If you say you're
"between projects," people assume you've been cast aside.
The idea that you might be in a natural winter,
that you might be dormant in a way that's preparatory rather than pathological,
doesn't compute …

The Harvest Will Come
I spent most of my twenties believing that purpose was something you found once and then held onto. A winning lottery ticket you kept in your wallet forever. The self-help industry reinforced this: find your passion. Discover your why. Land on the thing that makes you leap out of bed

“4% of GitHub public commits are being authored by Claude Code right now. At the current trajectory, we believe that Claude Code will be 20% of all daily commits by the end of 2026. While you blinked, AI consumed all of software development.”
Must-read article, even if you can disagree with the analysis

Claude Code is the Inflection Point
What It Is, How We Use It, Industry Repercussions, Microsoft's Dilemma, Why Anthropic Is Winning

Folks, I’m just putting the finishing touches on an update to the Gaza Verified site that will make signing up for verification as easy as signing in with your Mastodon account (with none of the manual adding of the verification link to your profile that proved to be a stumbling block for many).
I’ll be reopening sign ups today once I’m done with that.
In the meanwhile, please remember that there are folks in Gaza who are suffering through an ongoing genocide at the hands of Isra…

Gaza Verified
We’ve personally had video conversations on Signal with the people from Gaza whose Mastodon accounts on the fediverse are listed here and we verify that their accounts are genuine. – Joy & Aral Balkan

ICE: Finally, here comes warmer weather, soon it will be above freezing and all this crud will melt and we can drive at freeway speeds on every tiny side street like we keep trying to
MSP: *snrk*
ICE: what
MSP: nothing
ICE: WHAT
MSP: nothing
MSP: …
MSP: …*(potholes)*…
ICE: What? Why are you whispering? What did you just say???
MSP: Nothing!
ICE: <glares>
MSP: “Assholes.” We called you assholes
ICE: …OK then
MSP: hehe *snrk*

My initial thoughts as I read through the Canadian summary:
- While it mentions a political revolution in the U.S., with Trump removing or ignoring controls on his powers, it doesn't talk about how critical their midterms are.
- If the Democrats fail to take control of the House and Senate, then 2027 and beyond will be worse. Trump, senile and aging badly, will be a puppet for the worst elements in the U.S government.
- There's a real possibility that midterms could get canceled outright as Trump seeks absolute power.
- Smaller risks, in terms of impact, are food and health safety.
- The U.S. is removing all restrictions on profit in their food chain. Inspection agencies are being dismantled and legislation eliminated. Yet we continue to import goods from them.
- The anti-vaccine strategy at the very top is leading to surges in COVID, flu, measles and more. How long until that spills over our border.
#CanPoli

FPS is the biggest available channel that I'm aware of to funnel Academi into ICE/CBP enforcement operations. The point of using FPS to support ICE agents is that FPS is stocked full of troops from EriK Prince's private army (now called "Academi" but formerly called "Blackwater"). This means that carrying out ethnic cleansing can dump money directly into the pockets of America's version of the Wagner Group (side from, of course GEO Group).
The Erik Prince angle also means that there can be an alternative chain of command that exists outside of official channels. ICE is already bad enough, but similar people have worked as mercenaries for a long time. Having an established chain of command over armed occupiers, one based entirely on economic incentives, one that can't be legally monitored or audited, one that's completely outside of the government, should be especially worrying.
I don't believe we've ever seen a clear explanation of who was kidnaping people off the streets, but I know that Academi had a contract (I believe with FPS) in Portland at the time. We also don't know who is on the ground in US cities right now, because they're wearing masks.
The bit reason J6 didn't go as planned is that Erik Prince wasn't behind it. Now there are troops with experience occupying American cities who can be called directly via Erik when Trump wants to make sure he doesn't lose again. And Erik won't back out at the last minute this time, because he's already seen that there will be no consequences for participating in a coup... if the time comes.
#USPol

Wouldn't it be great if Starlink satellites would start falling on cars repeatedly violating parking laws? I mean, it's a gain-gain-gain situation: carbrains get punished, we get rid of shit from the orbit, and perhaps someone will finally get to Elon's ass.
#CarBrain

11 experts predict the 2026 NFL season: Early Super Bowl picks, MVP favorites and more https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/47878802/2026-nfl-predictions-mvp-super-bowl-offseason-moves-breakout-candidates

Last night was a very good night to be among fellow Democrats from across the county. Here is what we did:
Eileen Higgins blew out the Miami Mayor’s race, winning by 19 points, 59.5%-40.5%.
In the last two years we’ve flipped Florida’s two largest cities, Jacksonville and Miami, and Mayor-Elect Higgins will be the first Dem in this office in almost 30 years
In a Georgia state house special election our candidate Eric Gisler flipped a Trump 12 district, 51%-49%
Albuque…

Dems Have Another Very Good Night, Trump Is Dangerously Unwell, Rep. Haley Stevens Kicks Off Campaign to Remove RFK
Greetings from Los Angeles!

The thing that Renee Good now knows, that Tortuguita knows, that Heather Heyer knows, that I only know because I glimpsed for a second, is that when you die fighting oppression you live forever in that memory of resistance. When we carve their names into a monument, along with all the other names of the murdered and disappeared, that will stand, perhaps, across from the statue of Willem in the park where the Northwest Detention Center once stood, they will always be reminders of what it looks like to sacrifice everything in order to be on the right side of history.
The names of those who resist live as ghosts, summoned by name to haunt future oppressors, summoned by name to awaken our own conscience to the call. Martyrs, whispered like the White Rose or yelled as a threat like John Brown, cannot die so long as any of us with a bit of spine carries even an ounce of humanity.
It is possible to die knowing you did the right thing, and I have felt it. There is an acceptance that is impossible to imagine without being there, without feeling it for yourself. You have nothing to fear in resisting, even if it ends you. But you will never forget the shame of doing nothing if you fail to.

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

European countries may have to start shooting down Russian aircraft and drones that violate NATO airspace if Moscow keeps testing the alliance's resolve,
Czech President Petr Pavel said in an interview with the Sunday Times of London published Dec. 7.
"I believe there will be a moment,
if these violations continue,
where we will have to use stronger measures,
including potentially shooting down a Russian airplane or drones,"
Pavel  told the T…

Czech president says Europe may need to shoot down Russian aircraft, drones violating NATO airspace
Czech President Petr Pavel warned that repeated Russian airspace violations may eventually force Europe to shoot down Russian aircraft and drones, and said European countries must be ready to fight and win a war on their own if the U.S. is tied up elsewhere.

Series C, Episode 12 - Death-Watch
TARRANT: Yes, I'm afraid they will.
DAYNA: The electronic warriors strike again. That'll be four of Servalan's ore ships we've let through without a fight.
AVON: To FIGHT them we have to catch them.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/312/39

Trump’s narrow support among the public has vanished.
Despite his aggressive attacks on the press, his administration continues to leak like a sieve
and what is discovered in those leaks is reported, however unfavorable it may be to him.
Heavy-handed attempts are met with social revolts, ranging from mass protests to grand juries to consumer boycotts.
Ordinary American citizens are filming, berating, and obstructing masked ICE thugs,
often not as a matter of …

We Are Going to Win
Trump's revolution will fail, but we still have a long and painful road ahead of us.

I explained something for a friend in a simple way, and I think it's worth paraphrasing again here.
You cannot create a system that constrains itself. Any constraint on a system must be external to the system, or that constraint can be ignored or removed. That's just how systems work. Every constitution for every country claims to do this impossible thing, a thing proven is impossible almost 100 years ago now. Gödel's loophole has been known to exist since 1947.
Every constitution in the world, every "separation of powers" and set of "checks and balances," attempts to do something which is categorically impossible. Every government is always, at best, a few steps away from authoritarianism. From this, we would then expect that governments trand towards authoritarianism. Which, of course, is what we see historically.
Constraints on power are a formality, because no real controls can possibly exist. So then democratic processes become sort of collective classifiers that try to select only people who won't plunge the country into a dictatorship. Again, because this claim of restrictions on powers is a lie (willful or ignorant, a lie reguardless) that classifier has to be correct 100% of the time (even assuming a best case scenario). That's statistically unlikely.
So as long as you have a system of concentrated power, you will have the worst people attracted to it, and you will inevitably have that power fall into the hands of one of the worst possible person.
Fortunately, there is an alternative. The alternative is to not centralize power. In the security world we try to design systems that assume compromise and minimize impact, rather than just assuming that we will be right 100% of the time. If you build systems that maximially distribute power, then you minimize the impact of one horrible person.
Now, I didn't mention this because we're both already under enough stress, but...
Almost 90% of the nuclear weapons deployed around the world are in the hands of ghoulish dictators. Only two of the countries with nuclear weapons not straight up authoritarian, but they're not far off. We're one crashout away from steralizing the surface of the Earth with nuclear hellfire. Maybe countries shouldn't exist, and *definitely* multiple thousands of nuclear weapons shouldn't exist and shouldn't all be wired together to launch as soon as one of these assholes goes a bit too far sideways.

Series B, Episode 13 - Star One
CALLY: Are we fanatics?
BLAKE: Does it matter?
CALLY: Many, many people will die without Star One.
BLAKE: I know.
CALLY: Are you sure that what we're going to do is justified?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/213/77 B7B5