Tootfinder

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

The question is not whether they "consider themselves" above the law. A system is what it does; if the elites are able to exist beyond legal repercussions then it doesn't matter what they claim in public.
This will only change when the people at the top are thrown in jail, and the fear of being thrown in jail for decades makes them behave differently.
As the Eagles said, we haven't had that spirit here since 1969. @…

ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) on Threads
being us president should not be a primary opportunity for personal enrichment. americans’ dissatisfaction with a two tier system of justice will only grow in the face of trump’s latest billions. in midterms and 2028, voters will demand leaders who do not consider themselves above the law.

I'm told that you can get some very weird behaviour from the latest #ai model from #anthropic. Say "See the below". Then leave a blank or line of dashes, then something maybe hinting at what it shouldn't do. It responds with strange fragments of text.

“Art can convert our troubled lives into something that holds the potential for joy. The past isn't dead, it isn't even past. It lives in us and it's up to us what we do with it.” - Paul Duane
https://www.patreon.com/weirdandconfusing/posts/david-milch…

Now, I don't especially like the term "church" so I may use something else... like "coven." You can do what you want. But I happen to have already mapped out an example. (It is exactly that, just an example, so take if it's useful, change if you need, and don't stick to anything too closely.) Oh, this mapping also means that you would, for religious reasons, only be allowed to work under capitalism 4 days a week instead of 5.
Given the increases in productivity over the last 100 years, a 4 day work week is a completely reasonable expectation. If we have to annex Monday for the weekend by force of religion, so be it. It is rightfully ours anyway. If enough people try it, this will probably work. If it doesn't work, it just needs more people.
The Practice of Worship:
It is recommended to break down worship in to three sections: the functional, the communal, and the spiritual. It is also recommended to break these across multiple days. A common structure for some Christian churches is to take 10-15 minutes for announcements (Functional), an hour or two for services (Spiritual), followed by (Communal) coffee, tea, and cookies for an unspecified time up to two hours after. When starting or working with limited time a single compressed model like this may work, but it's not optimal.
- The Functional
The purpose of this section is to address the functional needs of the coven. Block out time (less than 90 minute blocks is recommended) to go through reports and updates from those involved in the Dispensary, Library, Works Committee (infrastructure), and Services Committee (providing services internally and, potentially, externally). Talk through any additional announcements, including those from other covens you may be federated with.
It is helpful to include unstructured communal time, such as shared meals, during or after functional meetings. As the federation grows, more time will be needed. It is recommended to break functional meetings, work parties, and such across multiple days. When a federation becomes sufficiently large, it is recommended to take every Monday, on top of Saturday and Sunday, as a third day of community and worship.
The scope of the functional spans 3 realms (which may be more-or-less fluid): the personal or family, the coven and federation, and humanity itself. It is up to each coven and individual to negotiate how to allocate the three days of the weekend once we have liberated Monday from the work week, but it is important to reserve it for one of these three. However, some people must work on weekends. Medical personnel, for example, cannot conform to a standard work week. While the work week should be universally restricted, which specific days are used will be up to the specific coven and their members.
A functional meeting can start with an agenda like the following:
Functional Invocation
Announcements
Report Backs
Dispensary
Inventory Check
What is low
What is empty
What is expiring
What is needed
Funds status
Library
Inventory Check and Items needing return
Library acquisition requests
Funds status and budget check
Works Committee
Upcoming projects
Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
New committee formations
Funds status
Services Committee
New capabilities announcements
New needs requests
Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
New committee formations
Funds status
Task Check
Breaking the Circle
This agenda is a suggestion for those who don't know where to start. It can be adapted or ignored as appropriate.
- The Spiritual
Spirituality is necessarily an undefined space. It is deeply personal. Each individual taking time to share their own personal spiritual experiences can help each connect with each other. This experience of connection can itself be a spiritual experience. It may also be useful to read esoteric, mystical, or philosophical texts together as type of "book club" and share thoughts. Others may draw from their own knowledge or traditions. This is something that must be defined together within a group.
- The Communal
The communal aspect of the practice of worship bind the coven and federation together. Within the community we find joy and release, connection and comfort. The coven is where we turn in times of need, and where we share our hopes and dreams.

Semi-subtoot: there's a certain kind of anti-genocide narrative that draws comparisons between the Gaza genocide and the genocide of Jews, queer, and disabled people during WW2, with an incredulous overtone, the subtext of which is: if the good nations invaded Germany to stop the Nazis' evil in WW2, it's hypocritical for this nations not to take action to protect Gazan civilians now. There are a couple of problems with this line of reasoning, but the most obvious from an anarchist perspective (which sees "good nation" for the oxymoron it is) is that it's ahistorical. The reasons for the various allies' entrance into WW2 are varied, but they weren't about good and evil, and in fact the full depth of the evils of the Holocaust *was not known* in allied countries until after the war. Nations never really do things to "fight evil" like some humans might; they always act out of a kind of (imperfect) self-interest. The motivations for many of the allies were simply "we don't want Germany to conquer and destroy us" (and the imperfection in that motive is amply evident in the appeasement that preceded the war). America was of course not swayed by that motive, and it was the Japanese that (thinking the issue would have to come to a head eventually and that a surprise attack was worth speeding it up) put America in a situation where it joined for similar reasons.
Why is this extra relevant right now? Because neither the US nor any European country is existentially threatened by Israel (or threatened at all in fact, quite the opposite they're all benefiting economically from the situation in Gaza). The lesson of history isn't "brave, good nations will stand up to fight against anyone who commits genocide or other major evils", it's "nations act in their narrow and twisted and often mistaken self-interest (the interest of the national entity, which is often counter to the interest of it's citizens), and they always mythologize their actions after the fact as having been a fight against evil, which sometimes by luck is partially true."
To double down on this point: in the European theater the U.S. war actions were pretty good overall, defeating an evil opponent through military force and being a fairly gracious victor to the civilian populations there. In contrast, in the Pacific theater the U.S. was one of two evil empires duking it out for global dominance at the expense of civilians on both sides. The Japanese empire was a vile regime and perpetrated horrors in China, Korea, and across southeast Asia. The U.S. was barely better, between Japanese internment camps at home, and mass targeting of civilians on Japan, both with the firebombing of Tokyo and especially the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So if your model of how we stop genocide is "convince the good guys to invade (or exert political pressure) and save the day", your model is wrong. That's not what happened in WW2. I'm not confident I know the perfect solution, but I do think it involves a mass of people making increasingly disruptive protest so that the cost *to rich companies and thus politicians* of falling to intervene is too high to stomach. That's a large part of what succeeded in South Africa, for example. Thankfully, there is already a vibrant protest movement to end the genocide in Gaza, and even though they haven't been fully successful yet, I'm optimistic that as things naturally (and through hard work) fall apart for various fascists politically, that movement will be able to succeed.
#gaza #genocide

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

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

New on #blog (this time with quotes from Fedi): "Why Gentoo?"
#Gentoo is perceived by the wider public, the non-users. What probably stands out most is compiling. Almost everyone who heard of Gentoo knows it has something to do with compiling everything. And why are we doing that? Well, besides being hardcore, the common sentiment goes for performance. So yeah, Gentoo users must be some kind of hardcore ricers who try to squeeze every last bit of their system performance.
To be honest, I don’t think that’s a good way to describe Gentoo. Yes, compiling is at the core of it. But performance? I don’t think so, at least not in the obvious, -O9999 -fzomg-fast way. The world has moved on, CPUs have gotten faster, optimizations have gotten smarter, and distributions have started optimizing more aggressively. Optimization-wise, I suspect your average Ubuntu package with generic optimizations may be no slower than the equivalent Gentoo package fine-tuned for your CPU. And if it’s not, then it probably won’t make a real difference anyway.
There’s much more to Gentoo than that. Yes, some of it comes from building from source: the flexibility. But a lot of it comes from the wider Gentoo philosophy, the philosophy that brought us all together. The idea that Gentoo is the distribution we’re making for ourselves and people who enjoy Gentoo. So if I were to make a few arguments for Gentoo, I’d focus on that. And this is what I’d like to do here.
"""

Hey folx! You probably see a lot of stuff from other social networks mirrored to Mastodon, how about we do it the other way around?
Recently, I've starred to mirror my posts to Instagram, Reddit, and other platforms, and I've had quite the success. My biggest post on Instagram, which is just one screenshot of a Mastodon post, has 44.5k likes and 256k views. My

Erik Uden on Instagram: "Babe, wake up. New man-made horrors beyond comprehension dropped!! In the end of the day, these companies probably realized that, just like with AI, they can somehow use scare tactics to attract venture capital. It's still a horrifying thing to think of, but possibly overblown to get money. The headline of the Science article reads: Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing By restoring some functions to intact brains from deceased donors, the startup Bexorg hopes to create a better drug development test bed for neurodegenerative diseases, written by Sara Reardon, published on the 20th of May 2026. Though, reading this Science article made me think: aren't we the brain? Am I missing something here? Now, of course the devil lies in the detail and the article makes it clear that this startup only restores “some functions”, which is certainly more complex in action than it is in theory written here, but certain language of the article makes me question the author's understanding of what is a human. The article writes: “Just a day ago, the brain was in a living person. Now, hours after its owner died, it sits on a cart draped in tubes [...]” What do you mean “it's owner” — isn't the brain it's owner? Isn't that where it's owner is? I mean, certainly the brain had no more activity, the person must've been declared brain dead by all standards before being sent to this startup, still it's odd hearing someone donated their brain instead of saying they've donated... themselves? Also “using a set of proprietary brain-sustaining machines” is a terrible sentence I always thought the people who don't donate their full body to hospitals are religious lunatics, but this is the first time I wrote something on my organ donor card. They can take my brain, but not as one piece."
45K likes, 971 comments - erik.uden on May 21, 2026: "Babe, wake up. New man-made horrors beyond comprehension dropped!! In the end of the day, these companies probably realized that, just like with AI, they can somehow use scare tactics to attract venture capital. It's still a horrifying thing to think of, but possibly overblown to get money. The headline of the Science article reads: Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing By restoring some functions to inta…

So one of the authors is Nicholas Carlini, who works for Anthropic. This is basically an ad for the three letter agencies to use Claude. It massively over-promises compared to what the actual paper says.
But, it is important. First, this is really about silencing people. The threat of identification is designed to make people afraid to talk online. There's a massive asymmetry between the fascists and the people. The fascists are weird racists and pedophiles who are obsessed with control. No one likes them. No one likes their ideas, because their ideas are creepy and bad.
When they talk about their ideas, that people should be murdered or kidnaped based on their skin color, that there should be a national dress code, that people's sex lives should be monitored, that children should be treated like objects that are owned by the parent (specifically, one parent), that people with different skin color or uteri should be considered as livestock, people fucking hate it because it's awful. When we talk about our ideas, that everyone should be able to eat and take care of themselves, that people who can't take care of themselves should be taken care of, that we should live in a society that values life, that we should live in harmony with nature, people like those ideas. When fascists out us for talking about those ideas, people support us. When we out people who are working as fascist goons those people have to face social consequences.
Everyone hates these people. The US government is currently less popular than it has ever been. The only way they can keep power is by making everyone think that they aren't extraordinarily unpopular. The only way to do that, the way authoritarian have always done it, is to make everyone afraid to talk.
But, yes, what this paper is saying is actually kind of bad. It looks like people who don't take any precautions at all in separating identities can be identified about 30% of the time (based on the results). It's unclear how this will actually work in the real world. Larger corpses will probably have more data, making connecting things easier.
This isn't as good as a human trying to dox someone. It's not going to work as well. It may only work in a small number of cases. There will be false positives (just like there are with people doing the work). It's probably not cheaper than hiring people. But it does mean that you can just dump money into a machine that has no ethical framework and get data out. That's the point. It's hard to find humans who will do evil shit like help dictatorships target human rights activists, but if a machine can do it for twice the price then it's a better deal for the dictatorship.
For most people, you just shouldn't care. This isn't for you. As long as you keep doing what you're doing, and you can keep everyone else doing what they're doing, then there aren't enough resources to actually target you. Even if they know who you are, there are just too many people who hate them and too few goons.
For people who might actually be targeted, there are a lot of things. First, keep in mind what you're putting into anonymous accounts. Any feature that's connected to your real life is a feature that can be extracted to identify you. This has always been true, it just may be easier to find now. Your identities should be totally siloed. It's also harder to identify you if you're writing anonymously as a collective. Collectives are better anyway because they can help check your thinking. When you write as a collective, you can help clean up each other's personal details and language. A collective develops its own voice, which is distinct from individual contributors. If you do this, and you also present your work as being from one "person," then it becomes even harder for anyone (systems or individuals) to really figure it out.
I'm not going to do a full deep dive on this because I just don't have time, but your existing threat model should *already cover these threats* if you need to make sure your writing remains anonymous.
This paper doesn't present any novel methodologies. It just extracts a bunch of features, which a human would extract as notes, and tries to correlate those between identities, which is how human researchers work. Linguistic forensics were mentioned (not by name) in the paper, but the actual methodology doesn't actually seem to use them.
So a thing with less ethics can do a worse job for more money (when adjusted for the real, not investor deflated, price of tokens). It's worth knowing. It's not the end of the world, but it is a good reminder to check your threat model and make sure it's up to date.

Joseph P. Swelterpants 🤣 writes
"CALLING ALL PATRIOTS!!! The next This Machine is scheduled for July 5th!!! What better way to celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the United States of America than with a protest!!!! It's red, it's white, it's blue, it's what we do!"
#Greenbelt, #MD

I'll be running a hands-on two-hour workstop on #firmware analysis at #DO_BYTE: https://fahrplan.do-byte.de/do-byte-20

- Definite and distinct ecclesiastical government
This is explicitly defined in your legal documents. It's the way in which you "govern" things that are legally owned by the "church." If you're going to start a church with some people, you need to have a way of working together. The more formal you are about writing all this stuff out, the easier it will be when you *inevitably* have conflict. (Conflict is normal, so everyone should expect it.)
I also wrote something up about this. Again, it's an example (using the term "coven", because I like it more) so take it for what it's worth:
Group agreements are collectively defined rules that describe how members should interact. They may function to simplify interactions, ensure access needs are met, or to protect against the emergence of hierarchical behavior.
You can use the following prompts, or define your own:
- How should we interact with each other?
- What are your access needs?
- What would help you feel safe and respected?
- How should we deal with conflict?
- How do we deal with unanswerable questions?
- What is the process by which we update these agreements?
Write down these agreements. Edit them until you reach consensus. If it isn't possible to reach a consensus, the group may need to break apart to form separate covens.
Keep these available to refer to as they may be needed during services. These agreements will change over time. Keep them updated and be sure to check in regularly, perhaps even through a specific yearly ritual, to make sure they all still apply and no more are needed.

#Entomology
Fedimind: what has happened to this moth? Its abdomen is flexed sharply up so that it protrudes from beneath the wings and over the thorax; it has been motionless like this for many hours. We do not use any poisons in our house. I'm guessing it's a Silver Y moth?

What happens when your body stops cooperating?
We shifted from judging bodies by looks to celebrating what they can do. But that still leaves out a lot of people.
Disability is not a separate category. It is everyone's future if we live long enough.
I wrote about treating my body like a partner I cannot divorce.
What does your relationship with your body actually look like?

body acceptance still has some big problems
celebrating what your body can do for you eventually breaks down

I riffed on the news a bit, hoping it would get the angst out of me. Instead I have this short article and a headache. Oops.
#USpol

War's Going Great
Brilliant gambit: the U.S. will now allow Iran to hit some of what they shoot at because that will surely lead Iran to capitulation. It has nothing to do with the fact we are running of of air defense interceptors (that's exactly what it is). Thankfully, the U.

#Artillery have been doing thrash the proper way since 1982. No nonsense, no apologies, just riffs. This week we let them have their way with our eardrums, and honestly, we'd do it again.
Check it out and see what we had to say about the song and the band behind it. Don't forget to follow us for more curated song picks from across the epic world of

Artillery - Khomaniac
One awesome, hand picked song from the world of rock and metal, showcased every week. Nothing more, nothing less! 🤘

RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116946142636186759
So very much this: Even if you think AI is net-positive, we have a duty to expand well, not on top of the most marginalized as always.
The way we do it now is the way of paving natural beauty, discarding entire communities, and taking what is often limited resources from those who need them to live.
It is possible to build data centers that do not have these problems. It is possible to power with solar, to cool with a refrigeration cycle instead of evaporating water.
It just costs more energy. And therefore is only viable if we invest in solar, heavily, and require it.
One of the fundamental tenets embedded in capitalism is that if you can't represent it in the market, it doesn't have to be taken into account. Community and ways of life are those things.

Lately I've been thinking about how #Gentoo is perceived by people. So often they're stuck in the "ricer" mindset: Gentoo is being built from source, so it must be ZOMG fast. And if it isn't, then what's the point?
If I were to make four points for Gentoo (to stop myself from making more), they would be:
1. Gentoo is independent.
There is no company behind Gentoo. There is no business plan. It's made and maintained by volunteers. Driven by passion and not profit incentive. And we want to keep it that way.
2. Gentoo aims to be secure.
We are maintaining our own infrastructure to reduce the risk of being hijacked. We're securing our distribution channels and mirrors using OpenPGP. We're only using Codeberg (which we really appreciate) and GitHub as mirrors (with OpenPGP commit signatures) and contribution channels. We have a dedicated security team, who works with the developers to keep packages free of vulnerabilities and our users informed.
3. Gentoo is made by humans.
We banned LLM contributions two years ago, and never regretted it. We didn't "wait and see", we took decisive action, and if we got left behind, it's only for the better. Unfortunately, in today's LLM-ridden world we can't stop slop software from being packaged in Gentoo without sacrificing our commitment to keep packages up to date, but we try to keep the worst offenders (like copywashed chardet) at bay.
4. Gentoo supports sustainability.
This may sound ironic when so many of us build everything from source, but we're actually trying to make computing sustainable. Gentoo's source-first nature makes it inherently flexible. We try our best to support a plethora of older and less common hardware. We go against the flow and still try to provide a workable system on hardware that is not supported by Rust or V8. And on top of that, we do our best to provide binary packages for a variety of configurations.
Of course, that's not all. I want Gentoo to be reliable and stable, to be oriented towards privacy by default, to be welcome and respectful.
And all these things ultimately depend on people working on Gentoo, and contributing to Gentoo. We always need more people that share these principles and want to help us achieve them.
What do you appreciate in Gentoo?

Last year, we featured a lengthy interview with tech journalist/science fiction author
Cory Doctorow about his book,
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It.
The prolific Doctorow is back with a provocative new book that serves as a follow-up of sorts,
focusing on AI and related issues:
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.
Doctorow doesn’t actually enjoy talking about AI, but he’s constantly being asked to comme…

How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots
Sci-fi author/tech journalist Cory Doctorow on his new book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.

- Formal code of doctrine and discipline
This is just "what your objectives are." It can be as simple as ULC's "Do That Which is Right" or it can be much more complicated. You would figure that out with your group.
Personally, I would choose something like, "make life as easy as possible for caretakers." I've talked about this in the past. If you focus on care taking then you are feminist by default, you help everyone *at least once*, almost everyone twice, and most people 3 or 4 times:
- Children with supported caretakers do better
- Elderly people with supported caretakers will have a better quality of life
- Parents always need help and will do better when they have it, and the more kids the more support they need
But hey, I'm not here to tell you what to do. You can figure your own things out. (Technically, that last sentence could also be a legitimate formal code or doctrine, so we can move on.)

What my problem with AI is, you ask?
It's not the math, or the science¹ or the technology, it's not even the data collection.
If you want one word: Techbros.
It's the way AI is applied and promoted and forced upon people, how it damages society and culture, how it exploits.
It is capitalism.
__
¹I am working at an AI chair, we do ML on our machines and discuss CNNs in our meetings and papers

“Colonialism, warned Martinican author Aimé Césaire, ‘works to decivilise the coloniser, to brutalise him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism.’ The horrors of western imperialism – with its dehumanisation and violence – were, he argued, ultimately redirected into Europe in the form of fascism.” @…

The Fediverse, however, has *all* of the idiots too horrible for X and Meta, but they only federate with each other, mostly. @… https://

Bill Cole (@scconsult.com)
I'm considering blocking anyone who posts content from Meta platforms, as I already do for X content. It's always just rage-farming. People, mostly, are idiots. As a result, a big chunk of what we say is junk. Meta and X thankfully have more than their share of the worst idiots, so I avoid them.

Classical Acceptance Is Not Hybrid Authentication: Measuring X.509 Verifier Semantics in Post-Quantum Migration
Taesung Kim, Boheung Chung, Keonwoo Kim, Yousung Kang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20800 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.20800 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.20800
arXiv:2607.20800v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A relying party validating a hybrid X.509 certificate --- carrying both a classical and a post-quantum credential --- must distinguish whether its accepting judgment rests on the post-quantum evidence or only on the classical path. To preserve compatibility, the separable designs place that evidence where classical path validation may ignore it. A verifier can then validate the classical path and accept while the post-quantum evidence never bears on the decision --- a valid classical result silently promoted to a hybrid conclusion it did not establish. We measure this across eight path-validation stacks (seven independent codebases), in nine validation modes, over six certificate schemes. Under a hybrid-required policy, nearly every stack parsing a separable hybrid certificate accepts on the classical path without making the post-quantum evidence outcome-bearing; one enforcing mode instead fractures interoperability over a signature-input encoding not yet interoperably profiled; and stacks that verify post-quantum signatures still do not enforce the binding by default: the gap is structural, not explained by missing primitive capability alone. Under lifecycle desynchronization the downgrade is realized: when a bound post-quantum credential is revoked while the classical certificate stays valid, the default path still accepts, because the bound credential lies outside the decision's scope. Binding success is not authentication success. We contribute a specification-derived verifier model and an executable, policy-parametric reference contract --- what a verifier must recognize, verify, make outcome-bearing, and check before reporting a validation as hybrid --- with a diagnosis of why standards do not require it.
toXiv_bot_toot

Some of these are pretty reasonable! If you allow them for anyone, you probably make it so to compete at all requires everyone to follow suit. That's bad when those things have life-altering health implications.
But all of these things ultimately shape who is allowed to compete at the peak levels.
it's not always good! Honestly baseball is way less interesting to watch in the majors because everyone's great, all the plays are maximal capability, and it's kinda predictable. You don't end up with many of those "holy shit what just happened? that was awesome!" plays that are so much fun to watch. So as a spectator, these rules aren't always great. Sometimes you want to nerf the peak performance until the game is interesting. Sometimes you don't.
In F1, a huge part of the game is the nerding out about the rules and how to evade them cleverly to get peak performance. And the inside baseball on that is way more fun to watch than the race. The race is just cars going zoom and occasionally crashing, interrupted by amazing choreography in the pits.
There's a reason women's soccer is so much more fun for me to watch than men's. It's not been optimized so hard that the game isn't predictable in kind if not outcome. Plus the camaraderie shown is great.
But looking at all this, we gotta ask, what's sport's function in our societies? Why do we do this?

The "AI Industry" (to the degree that it exists) has burned billions of dollars with no real hope of recuperating that. Models offered by services, charging huge amounts for inference, don't really offer much, if anything, above open source models run locally. Many of the claims made by these companies, and their supporters, have turned out to be lies. It seems as though the whole thing is a huge grift.
Investments will likely never be recovered. We've already seen a bail out in the form of military contracts. We will see much more public money dumped in to these technologies. In fact, threatening workers and suppressing labor strength is so strategically valuable that I expect LLMs to just be publicly funded (by being folded into the military industrial complex).
On these grounds, it can be easy to reject the technology outright. After all, how can anything useful not be profitable?
Even for radicals, capitalism can cloud our lens. The fact is, the dominant technologies of our age tend to not be profitable. Or rather, they are "publicly funded, privately profitable" (/hums in propagandhi/). Just like oil.
Outside of Saudi Arabia, oil is mostly not profitable to get out of the ground. Even there, it had only historically been profitable because of massive global military investments. The oil-centric world we have today is largely built on, and kept in place by, massive government subsidies. Roads, street parking, and direct subsidies to oil companies are all massive investments that tie populations to the resource at the heart of the military industrial complex: oil.
Oil was strategically important, because you can't run a modern military without it. The fossil fuel economy doesn't exist because fossil fuels are so cheap, but because modern militaries are only really possible by militarizing the population.
Unprofitable things *are made profitable* to serve the strategic interests of authoritarian systems. Though we have better alternatives to most oil-based products, it would be hard to argue that oil is not a useful resource. We can acknowledge it's strategic importance while also recognizing that the elimination of oil is essential to the survival of humanity.
Returning to "AI," we're seeing the same type of thing but it's more obvious. After the crypto grift, this seems to just be another way to transfer money into the pockets of the rich.
But crypto wasn't exactly a grift. It had a strategic function to power. It wasn't what we were told it was. It didn't free us from central banks. It wasn't a new way to invest. It wasn't anonymous. But it did create a new way to bribe politicians. It did make it easier to funnel public money into the pockets of the far right.
"AI" can similarly be mostly a grift. It can fail to do most, or all, of the things it claims, and it can still fulfill strategic functions. If we dismiss it as "just another grift," I think we miss a lot. "Just a grift" isn't something sustainable. It is something that will die out. It's something we don't need to resist because it is self limiting. But a strategy is something different. A strategy is more complex. A strategy will be sustained, at any cost. A strategy must be actively resisted.

An LLM generated “book” of “crochet” “patterns” (it contained ONE pattern)
JFC
https://dialup.space/@TechTangents/116567890237371075

Since it was relevant to a discussion I just had on here and is something most people probably haven't thought about much (unless you've taken one of a handful of philosophy classes), I thought I'd try to lay out a key piece of Descartes' Meditations (#philosophy

Gradually making my way through Dwarkesh Patel's oral history of Generative AI.
Big picture: Many AI designers seem to believe that because their software is smarter than they expected, it will inevitably become smarter than them.

I find the whole theism vs atheism fight somewhere between uninteresting and aggressively uninteresting, and Dawkins has always been like nails on a chalkboard for me. I care less about what people •say• they believe than I do about how people actually •inhabit• this world, how they treat it and themselves and each other. I’m quite comfortable with both theism and atheism, but arrogant certitude really gets my hackles up. There’s just too much we don’t and can’t know for us to let our human heads get that big.
3/3

Morning all!
🎧 It's #podcast publication day, and the latest episode features an interview with an expert in #SelfCompassion. We explore why it's hard to be kind to ourselves, why it matters to our wellbeing and performance at work, and what we can do to bring self-co…

Reaching out to Microsoft support for a OneDrive server side issue, and it lets me understand better that why ISO deifnes a standard for date format. Like what day was you meant to say by [09/05/26] and [09/05/29]…, and what’s with the square brackets?

A #math #conjecture posted in a paper means two things.
1. We want to know if that statement is true or not.
2. We want to highlight that area of maths and draw human attention to it.
If you post a conjecture on the arXiv today and you have not checked if the latest AI can do it, you will have an e-mail tomorrow by some dude from the valley saying
"I'm not a mathematician but I put your conjecture into xyz and here is a counterexample, please check it".
So what do we do with this? 1/2

Science mainly is not about what we know but how we try to figure it out – and how to avoid fallacies¹ on the way.²
And why “I did my own research”³ is a red flag and has nothing to do with scientific research.
We fail to teach⁴ all of this in school⁵.
__
¹ok, at least how to make it less easy to fall for them and to correct them later
²ok, and how to write the right buzzwords in the right combinations into research proposals and reports to get money for doing res…

Put your name on your work and find like-minded people to share credit with. It is now on you to build not your brand, but the demonstration that you know what's going on.
It is going to be very hard to get a job by printing a list of skills at the top of your resume and hoping to get noticed. It already was and now it's worse than ever.
Be a person on the internet and by that I mean do not hide your person-hood. Your curiosity, your learning, your willingness to consider angles. Professional polish is something the clankers do better than us, because they are trained on all of us doing it.
If not putting your name on your learning, put a stable pseudonym out there. Be known by the work you do and even the mistakes you make and reconsider. Showing that your knowledge has _depth_ is now one of the most important things. We can all vibe up to a basic understanding. It's the people who can see where they went wrong, and course-correct that really are going to carry the day.
You no longer get to be perfect and only show what's finished and polished. And you're gonna have to show your work.

I had an interesting chat with a friend who mentioned a book called "The Living Company." Apparently Shell was one of the few companies that saw the 1970's oil crisis coming and was able to adapt. They did it by talking to a bunch of people randomly about the future, identifying patterns, and coming up with possible future scenarios. They then formed clear plans for these future scenarios, where those plans would cover as many related scenarios as possible.
This was actually really familiar to me, though I hadn't read the book, because that's very close to what the Seattle GDC disaster prep committee did. We identified possible disaster scenarios, then identified preparedness steps that served multiple purposes. We got boxes of n95 masks in 2018 and 2019 for wildfire smoke and did a bit of work building box-fan air purifiers. Over the years we handed out these masks to houseless folks who were most exposed to the smoke. When the pandemic hit, we were able to take some of those boxes to first responders just as manufacturing in China dropped because of their lockdowns and as others started PPE hoarding. We focused on N95 because that was one of the overlap points between the unexpected but catastrophic "flu pandemic" that we knew was possible, and the regular "wildfire smoke" problem we were just getting used to.
The book sounds like it's at least partially influenced by cybernetics. There's this Dutch cybernetics connection that I haven't quite figured out. Anyway, this guy talked about how a company needs to be sustainable and all that. My dude, you worked for an oil company. That is categorically not sustainable. All this aside, I think there are a lot of things we can and should take from capitalists (or take back, in some cases). This practice is one of them.
So maybe get together with friends and talk about what you think might happen. We live in a world of crisis, so I'll always recommend disaster preparedness. But there's more than that.
What do you think will happen in the next 5 years?
Assuming that happens, what actions would you take to push that towards the most positive outcome?
I'm listening to Revolutions and reminded of how much effort monarchies put in to preventing revolutions. Corporations can be even more advanced in their planning and preemption. What would it look like if we planned like that?

Judith Curry is possibly the most confusing and infuriating scientist in the entire climatological arena. She contributed to major understandings around the changes in the jet stream, the Arctic, and other processes that helped explain the impact climate change has already had on our day to day weather.
But then she left academia and essentially became a mouthpiece for Neo-denialism, claiming others were being “alarmist” and that while CO2 was the main cause, we really shouldn’t be spending money on reducing emissions.
Her final blog announcing its retirement is an interesting combination of declaring victory, mostly thanks to Trump and his acolytes (like Carney) who have pivoted fully into the arms of the fossil fuel industry, and declaring she was tired of it all and just wants to be in her garden and stop the flow of now $16,000 (!!) to maintain her Wordpress blog for the past 15 years.
She has done real damage to efforts to stop CO2 emissions. But another part of me wonders if this is an admission of guilt. Very often people come to a point, even subconsciously, where they realize they’re in with the wrong crowd.
I wonder if she has had that moment with Trump. She probably thinks it’s all irrelevant and out of her hands now. Other players, namely the oil industry, Trump, Putin, etc. will decide what happens and scientists like her will have no impact.
I am glad she is tapping out, as so many deniers inevitably do, but it is clear she is doing it because she thinks she’s won, and that is very very bad for the world.
#climateChange #carney #cdnpoli #canpoli #climateEmergency #climateDenial #science #JudithCurry #theAmericanFascist

"Some designs of emojis are very different for the same codepoint, especially the ones depicting emotions/reactions. Examples coming to mind are 😨, 🔫. What are your thoughts on this?" - The (water) pistol 🔫 was originally a hand gun which looked a lot more real. In response to its frequent use in criminal or other unsavory contexts (e.g., as a threat), most platforms replaced it with the colorful plastic toy gun design in 2018. (In 2024, Elon Musk had it turned back into a realistic hand gun for the Twemoji design 🙄)
I'm torn. On the one hand, I don't think we can stay on top of all potential uses of emojis (or should even try to limit them) and people who want to use emojis for threats probably can still do so. On the other hand, I do find it rather hard to imagine that the green plastic 🔫 could be used as a threat... so... I guess good job, designers/tech firms? #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay
https://emojipedia.org/pistol#designs

LLMs can do a lot of the work people are tasked with doing on a regular basis, because a lot of the work people do is bullshit. The majority of what we do isn't to achieve any goal, it's a way to distribute just enough wealth to keep things calm while keeping us all too busy to actually make things better.
We aren't paid to make stuff or do things. We're paid not to riot. Elites used to know that. The fact that they've forgotten how the machine works is evident in its current implosion, and will only become more obvious as they forget the one thing that actually keeps them safe.

The gist is though, ignoring the baggage they come with like the investment bubble, the stolen intellectual property, the environmental footprint, economic and social impact, the weird boosterism ("AGI!") and the weird doomerism ("The Terminator!")—
—can what they actually do (using statistics to generate text) be a thing that's useful in the sense that it's better than what we had until now? (If not, why? If so, how?)

My pitch if I ran a TV production company would be something like:
Twelve episodes a year of 3-episode serials: That keeps the number of sets you have to construct down. It gives each story the complexity of a movie and time to breath without the frantic pace. You can have one every season of the year.
You gotta remember to focus on the companion. This isn't really a story about The Doctor, it's about the companions asking the question, Doctor Who?
Episodes should generally start with a companion's face or escapade coz they're the ones we're identifying with as we figure out who the doctor is.
At some point in 2027 you'll cast and announce a new doctor.
This is when you call Billie Piper in to film and release a webisode which is just the regeneration into Billie so far: her going "Oh, hello?" Then shaking her head and saying "oh hell no" and shaking harder until she shakes the face off into the new man or woman you picked who says "Oh, that was close".
That change into the Bad Wolf Doctor was just bad without a capstone xmas episode. So a one minute tik-tokable short to announce the newbie frees you of it.
Then you can start ep1 filming and released nearly a year later on the 65th anniversary with a story that focuses on the companion getting into trouble and meeting The Doctor.
Cast nobody famous. The production is about making stars not finding them I don't want anyone having preconceived notions about the character from seeing the actor in that other show even it it was a really good one and they're great.
Earthbound cross-time time-travel story for serial one to pick up new companion, intervene in an aliens vs aliens space-war in serial two, go screw up history and fix it for the third and aliens endangering companion's family for the fourth.
When they're 3-episode serials you only need four a year. Different writer for each.
Cliff-hangers between episodes in each serial of course, with stories about the nature of time and space and getting along with other cultures and running up and down corridors and scary monsters and of course the question "who is The Doctor and how can they fix this without guns or violence with just a screwdriver and two hearts worth of compassion".
The Doctor is some weird looking older dude, more importantly vivid and strange and scholarly than handsome. He has a big coat and no question marks. Then he can change clothes but with the same coat always have the same look. He needs to be able to do a good arrogant rant at himself while he thinks.
The companion is curious and brave and young enough to be naive and surprised and energetic. Doesn't do what she's told. Wonders off against orders. Maybe sometimes bombs things.
Obviously you keep the blue box and the tune and make a new style screwdriver.
You need to do the behind the scenes shows too. Not sure if they make or cost money but they are brilliant for the geeky fandom. That may be why it came back last time.
Anyway. Sadly I don't own a production company.
I cancelled the TV license in the mean time. Give the money to Big Finish instead. These audio things are expensive. I've bought bundles before. Anyone have favorites? I lose track of which one's I've heard.
#doctorWho

"AI" has introduced whole new ways to be incredibly rude and our social habits have not yet adapted.
If you're feeling frustrated by only having "that's unethical" as a thing to push back on AI, consider "that's incredibly rude what you just did". Not all use is rude, but start paying attention to it.
A concrete example from this morning: Calling someone with a somewhat odd communication style "AI". That should be a thing that is kind of a grave accusation to make, and should be treated as incredibly rude if it's not coming with the evidence that sort of gravity demands.
Another one is prompting LLMs for others, that I've mentioned before.
Another is citing the LLM as an authority. "Claude says..." as a way to win an argument on authoritative rather than factual grounds.
You CAN get good information out of an LLM. But it requires the epistemic humility to do, and if you're not bringing that, it's pretty damn rude. "I believe because Claude says..." is not terrible. At least then we're talking about your belief and not Claude as authority.
Adding a bot to a channel without a chance for the people in it to push back is incredibly rude.
(It's not lost on me that a lot of things that are normal in business to inflict unilaterally on teams are things I consider extremely rude.)

It's also important to recognize that tech oligarchs won't let this die. It's too important to them. This is part of the boss fight right here. They will take everything from us to coerce us into making LLMs profitable, to deskilling our labor and selling (skewed) human knowledge back to us at a premium. They will take away every benefit the state has, kill as many people as it takes to funnel every penny of government subsidy into this. They will burn every drop of subsidized oil. Those ICE camps are gonna be used for something. If it takes right wing death squads, they'll do it.
They will kill every last one of us to realize total domination. We have to be ready for that, and prepare accordingly. As many lives as have been taken by people with similar ideologies, those ideologies have always lost. If we know what's coming and prepare for it then they will lose faster, and at a lower cost.

RE: #ThomasPiketty does, however, show in continental Europe now and then, taunting with crazy notions like:
"A report coordinated by the economist suggests: it is possible to eliminate poverty, reduce working hours by half and curb global warming. Prerequisites: frontal attack on inequality and political and economic transformation. What are the paths?"
#postcapitalism

Just finished "Hammajang Luck" by Makana Yamamoto. It's lovely in a lot of ways and was quite fun to read, even if there were some aspects I disliked. It's an #OwnVoices queer romance heist set in a dystopian future space station with megacorporations and brain implants and all that jazz. I actually liked the tech aspects of it (despite a few physics warts) and the romance was both sweet and dramatic; even though it failed the consent test I was just talking about, it had some reasons to do so (not that that makes a perfect excuse). The heist plot was good to my mind (but I haven't read a lot of the genre). The biggest thing I didn't like was the treatment of prison as a redemptive force, and the police as a semi-neutral entity with real principles, rather than what we know them to be in real life.
More and more these days in science fiction I'm especially looking at whether and how appeals to law or governments (especially the nice "league of worlds" that steps in to save characters from a corrupt local government) function, and to the degree they are mechanisms of real justice, In disappointed. To be fair, even Le Guin does this to some extent... In any case, this isn't a totally fair criticism because that's not really what this story is about, just something that bothers me whenever I see it.
Overall, the book was great.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

I fully support the Leiden Declaration (and have signed it)
https://leidendeclaration.ai/
In the past months I've come to the conclusion that the biggest danger with AI is that it is simply not used for good, but for lazyness and cutting corners.
This is exactly the opposite of what we need in science and mathematics. I would hope that new technology would be used to do something great, something that is better than what would be possible without the technology.
🧵1/n

RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aeva/116526002579057799
First professional bug I ever found was an XML bomb. My first day, my manager is like, "oh yeah, so this is XML. We've been testing, you can hop on and throw some stuff at it. See what you can do."
I crashed the test environment with an XML bomb on a Friday evening.

#FLOSS ecosystem.
I don't think we have a clear idea yet of what's to come, but a recurring image in our conversations is that of feudal age alchemists: closed, hermetic, underground groups, sharing knowledge in tight secret circles, never with the wide public... it's certainly not a pretty picture, but it might be the "rational" conclusion for many.
When we see the threat of big corporations (or just petty unimaginative people) stealing our work, what can we do, when collective action has been labelled as criminal activity, other than hide or risk the severe consequences of being combative?
#ai #generativeAI #fuck_ai

Summer Social with work, which is more than two dozen people now. So much bigger than it used to be.
Enjoyable enough. The boss picks pretty good people, all of whom I'd otherwise not meet at all really being remote. Beats working for a day.
This time a painting session. Drawing a picture. Here's how we draw this particular picture.
Everyone's painting ends up much the same, within a pretty tight variance. All end up with something that's not displeasing, even though hardly anyone paints normally, even the graphics people.
The key here I think is the subject of the image. Something easy to draw is key. Very few curves, mostly straight lines, easy vivid colors. Easily identifiable subject even if it's drawn badly.
If your lines and form are wobbly and weirdly angled then yeah, that's indeed what these trees are like. You just draw a slightly different tree.
Sky, haze, and ground in acrylic. Then chalk up the tree-trunks for some reason, before painting 'em white. Add some trunk-shade and flecks, do grass then flowers.
Easy recipe. Everyone gets a passing grade. Nobody's embarrassed coz they can't draw a nose.
Good first painting session since school. Maybe I'll do another one in another 30 years.
#art #painting #acrylic