Tootfinder

Willem challenged us to ask ourselves what we would do if we were living under Nazi occupation. Before all of this, I doubt anyone thought they would be complicit. I doubt anyone said to themselves, "nothing. I would cower in fear and do nothing."
But for 4 years or so we all answered that question again and again with our lives. Now here we are, answering it again... Every day. But it's no longer "what would you do during the rise of Hitler?" It's now, "what would you do after the invasion of Poland," and "what would you do after you knew about the concentration camps?"
For some people, the answer is still, "nothing."
But a lot of people have been brave in the face of it all. A lot of people have died, and a lot more will die. He will die, perhaps after a ruling by some court or other but, honestly, probably not. That's just how these things work out. Lots of people die, some for no reason, some because they stood up against injustice. A whole lot of people do nothing, until it's safe to claim victory... Until it's no longer safe to be on the other side.
That's just how these things go. Fascism is self-defeating, but it causes incredible harm on it's path of self-destruction. The more people who stand up, who risk themselves, the faster it collapses and the fewer it can hurt. That's also just how these things go. It's incredibly dangerous for everyone until enough people take some extra risk and make it safe for everyone again.
But that question still stands... Which one of those groups are you in? Are you proud of what you are doing, or will you look back with shame? Some of y'all have a lot to be proud of, but, if you're not, it's never too late to earn your way into that proud group.

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.

“OK, but what then?!” you ask me, “What are we supposed to do? What is your grand plan for ending this?? What more am I supposed to do?!”
I want you to know that I spent all of December and January here in Minnesota racking my brains with this very question, and I never found an answer. Nothing could possibly be enough. I had no idea what to do. We had no idea what to do. And we were already doing it.
The whole time, we were lost — and we were already doing it.
8/

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?

“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.” @…

Here's an answer for a life-changing technology that truly stands out:
"The Bicycle
Selected by Reshma Saujani
In the 1890s, the bicycle, as we know it today, finally let women go where they wanted, on their own, without asking permission. It even played a central role in the fight for women’s suffrage—a simple machine with outsized impact. Today, it reminds us what technology should do: expand freedom and opportunity. Millions of American women are still fighting f…

Imagine:
You are these parent of an adorable 4-year-old kid. They have made a toy airplane out of spare cardboard. Sadly, during play the wing has fallen off. You, a wise parent, produce a piece of duct tape and tape it back on. Your kid asks: "but what if the tape breaks, or the other wing falls off?" Dutifully, and with a completely serious manner, you duct tape the other wing, and then with a sharpie you write "Please DO NOT fall off!" on each wing. "There," you say, now the wings will not fall off. "
Your child happily returns to their play.
Imagine:
You are boarding a Boeing airplane for an intercontinental flight. Just the other day you were reading news about the emergency exit door falling off a Boeing airplane during flight. Thankfully nobody was injured in that incident, but a passenger could have been sucked out the gap and killed. As you walk down the aisle towards your seat at the back, you notice that around the emergency exit door of this plane, there are some scratch marks. It looks like it might not be 100% seated in place. You see several rolls worth of duct tape slapped onto the gaps between the door and the frame. In sharpie, someone has written "Please DO NOT fall off!" on the duct tape.
This is a post about #Agentic #AI.
To clarify: there are a host of reasons why using Claude Code is unethical in the first place, besides the fact that its a danger to its users. These make it unethical to use it even for a child's-toy-like application. But the source code we've just witnessed in the recent leak is *exactly* this level of "engineering." If you see an app that claims to be "programmed with AI" and it has any possibility of failing in a way that could harm you (for example, if it connects to the internet, meaning that poor programming could allow hackers to take over the device you run it on), my advice is: "Do not use it and warn your friends and family."
P.S. yes, this advice does apply to Microsoft Widows at this point, although that can be a tougher bullet to bite.

Signal and Proton Mail – What Private Information Can Law Enforcement Access?
On a regular basis I see questions being asked about the privacy of Signal and Proton Mail in terms of potential law enforcement access. It seems reasonable to me to be skeptical – we live with a large number of Internet vendor applications and services that do not respect our privacy and which capture information about us to sell to data brokers or advertisers. Some of companies pro-actively work with law e…

My moment of clarity in the last few weeks was coming back to “Oh right, copyright is a hack, and one that is not serving us, particularly us on the margins”
The moral rights of authorship and the way we situate our legal process of ownership are, actually, kinda at odds. And it entirely misses the idea of a commons, both as community and as a cultural base to draw from.
I've long believed that we, collectively, should own our culture — to have modern myths be Copyright 1972 LucasFilm, the traditional songs we sing Copyright 1922, now owned by Warner/Chappell Music is one of the things I find repugnant about the situation we find ourselves in.
That said, reconciling that with the behavior of the AI companies, _particularly_ the American ones? It's hard. Google abuses its monopoly position; Microsoft has forced harmful and terrible tooling on people at every turn; OpenAI is run by someone who actively despises art and does not understand it; and Anthropic is run by a guy who is trying to make sure the apocalypse has a pleasant demeanor and doesn't offend any corporations on the way. All of the above have scraped the web with no active consent — and that's largely fine, that's what putting things in common _is_, that's the beauty of the open information world we have the remnants of — but also actively evading measures people put in place to stop it and with absolutely no willingness to engage with the process. Extracting from the commons _is_ the tragedy of the commons.
It does not mean that enlarging the commons with the resulting tools is bad. The doctrine of original sin is a Christian concept I do not subscribe to. The concept of 'fruit of the poisonous tree' is a legal tool to fix power relations not a moral stance. They're worth understanding, but they are not absolute moral stances that are self-evident.
These are not harmless tools, but so too putting hard regulation and corporate, legalistic scrutiny on everything has a vastly negative impact: it is a yoke on human creativity and community to the reins of capital.
And, so too, disruption has huge costs. We are, apparently, committed to doing things the worst possible way. One can just hope that we capture the good too, because the ride has started and it's rather late to get off.

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…

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

Perhaps the main difference between myself and vibe coders is that we have completely different backgrounds.
I've learned coding as a kid, with no friends and no Internet. I didn't do it because it was cool; nerdy stuff was the exact opposite of cool and was likely to get you bullied. I didn't do it because it promised good salary; as a 10-year old, I didn't ponder much about my future, let alone salary. I did it because I was bored, and it was something interesting to do.
I didn't do specific exercises, but rather created whatever I've found interesting. I wasn't graded, I had all the time in the world, and I've enjoyed solving problems. Even if I had access to the Internet, I doubt I would start looking for ready solutions and copy-pasting them. My code was always mine, and I was proud of it; at least at the time.
Of course, nowadays I do stuff I don't enjoy as well. But I'm a grown man who takes responsibility for what I do. And even if my code is shit, it is my shit, and 100% eco.
#NoAI #NoLLM

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.

What will people do when AI can handle most current white-collar tasks?
I don't know.
And that's the whole point.
Nobody knew what displaced agricultural workers would do, either,
-- until they did it.
The absence of a visible next chapter isn't evidence that there won't be one.
It's evidence that we're bad at predicting what humans will invent when constraints shift.

Everything is awesome (why I'm an optimist)
February is the month the internet decided we're all going to die. In the span of about two weeks, Matt Shumer's Something Big is Happening racked up over 80 million views on X with its breathless comparison of AI to the early days of COVID, telling his non-tech friends and

What's next on the schedule for the Cowboys after the NFL Draft? https://insidethestar.com/whats-next-on-the-schedule-for-the-cowboys-after-the-nfl-draft

I've had ideas rattling around in my head for a while but not quite hitting coherence.
What does a "rich terminal" mean to you as a developer? We're in a really weird place right now with regards to UI and UX, with chat as a normal mode of operation being everywhere, yet we're constrained to two major paradigms: the terminal user interface, and the instant message. Both come with really weird limits to their affordances.
And there's prior art here — light table, jupyter notebooks, observable hq, rich REPLs — but they're usually this weird hybrid of not quite transcript not quite live program that I find somewhere between unsettling and frustrating.
I do however think it's well past time we abandoned monospaced type as the core way we think about source code, and at the same time, built better user interfaces than that allows, without going full "this is a program with its own interface”
It's weird uncharted territory.

Okay, so I've been talking about the ways that Big AI directly harms kids. But what can we *do* about it? Here are some things you can do, at work and and your kid's school, to take action today, complete with scripts to follow: https://www.anildash.com/2026/02/23/taking-action…

Taking action against AI harms
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

RE: https://dair-community.social/@timnitGebru/116332667717903322
I really think that we _are_ starting to build those tools. I'm party to a lot of discussions about how to use these tools well, and a lot of that starts to look like systems design: what are controls? What are the feedback loops? Where do we need to add new frictions? Where do we need to eliminate old bottlenecks?
We are still very, _very_ early in this.
But the work is getting done, and a lot of us 'haters' need to get in the drivers seat and start putting up useful critique like mttaggart's. I don't agree with the entire article, but it's solid work and solid case report. It’s very good stuff. We need a lot more of these conversations.
And we need to let people hate it. Not to be confused with obstinate blocking, but to have the feelings of hating it, of disliking the processes it engenders, of finding those new footings — or rejecting the bad ones. We can't look at this clearly unless we have the space to hate it.

Reminder that the historic Artemis II (human fly-by of the moon) mission launch is scheduled ~7.5h from now (at 18:24 EDT, which I think is UTC-4). Always subject to changes and could even scrub (this is the first opening of the launch window).
Looks like it's on, as of right now.
I'll probably watch Everyday Astronaut's coverage which is usually pretty good for these things:

Everyday Astronaut
Rocket science. A term we all use to describe something incredibly difficult. Trying to grasp all of the concepts involved in rocket science can be incredibly intimidating. My name’s Tim Dodd but I'm better known as the Everyday Astronaut. Recently I fell head over heels in love with spaceflight. My appreciation and curiosity for the subject grew into an obsession. Before you knew it, all I wanted to do was learn more and more... the more I learned, the more I wanted to share what was making…

It was never about AI (we are not our tools) - Big Think https://bigthink.com/the-long-game/it-was-never-about-ai-we-are-not-our-tools/

It was never about AI (we are not our tools)
Every generation has faced a version of this moment—the question has never been what our tools can do, but what we choose to do with them.

After the whole Adam Something "dating advice for leftist men" thing, I realized I should probably write something about that. I didn't, but I realized I should. Here I am sort of getting around to it.
I had a friend call me an "elder" at one point. I was like 35 at that time, but like... a lot of old leftists are just dead or in prison, so we take what we can get I guess. Being also an elder in the sense that I'm an elder millennial, who is also a parent and married for almost 10 years and all that, I guess I'm technically qualified.
So here it is, dating advice for (straight cis) leftist men:
1. Don't.
That's it, actually. That's the whole thing. Let me explain a bit.
First of all, this is dating advice for neuroatypical folks. We're way overrepresented in both extremes because this system wasn't built for us. And that's who is *the most* confused by all the relationship stuff, and most likely to try to apply all this masculinity/manosphere bullshit. I'm also talking a bit from experience here, as a neruo-spicy trying to "figure out" how to date within a paradigm entirely built around neurotypicals and their relationships. It's garbage. Throw it out. There's nothing worth saving.
His video had some line comparing not having sex to your house being on fire. I'm not gonna bother to quote it because I'm busy with actual life. But like, that's exactly what I'm talking about. I recognize that and it's horribly destructive. Men who buy in to patriarchy actually believe this, because those men value themselves based on (hetro) sex. Yeah, if you think you're worthless because you aren't "getting laid" then yeah, you're gonna feel like that's an emergency.
"Dating" as a paradigm turns humans into roles. It dehumanizes us all, and thus makes human connection much harder. It is a game that, like thermonuclear war, can only be won by not playing.
When you abandon "dating" and just act like a human, everything starts to be easier. There's no such thing as being "friend zoned" because you're just friends. Sometimes friendships become other things, sometimes they don't. It doesn't actually matter, because if you're actually there for friendship then you don't *need* anything else.
My grandma, at 98 I think, gave me some advice. My grandparents always got along well, and were married for enough decades that I listened really closely. She told me I should just do things I loved to do and everything else would work itself out.
And it kind of did.
I understand the fear, the idea that you'll die alone. I get that. I get the loneliness. It all hits a lot harder when you have ADHD emotions and past trauma. I get that. But that fear is self-manifesting. When you build your confidence, when you don't *need* to be "in a relationship," you have more room to actually build relationships. For me, dating was dehumanizing. When I abandoned that, I was able to actually be a good partner, and I was able to find my partner.
I would advise against marriage as well, but we did get married for legal reasons. It can still be hard to maintain that, to see each other as people rather than roles. That becomes extra hard as parents. But the times that we cut through that are the times we're closest. Those are the times when it becomes easier to remember that we're both humans and all human relationships need tending.
Roles don't need to be tended because they are classifications. Classifications are static. But relationships between humans are not. Humans are messy and chaotic. Humans have all kinds of complex needs and desires.
So yeah, don't date. Just be a human and see what happens. Maybe google "relationship anarchy" and see where it takes you.
If you have ADHD, it can be especially useful to understand that relationships with neurotypical folks can be especially difficult. Assume you're incompatible with 90% of the population as your baseline, and you'll start to understand why the standard "dating" thing has made you feel so alienated and miserable.
Neurotypical folks generally have no idea that atypicality exists, much less how it impacts relationships. Having to conform to a neurotypical relationship just adds additional mental strain unless you find someone (really special) who can do at least some of the work.
The ADHD thing was especially important for me. There were so many things I was told to do in specific ways by neurotypicals that never worked for me. Their advice always made me feel like a failure. When I was finally diagnosed, I realized they were just giving advice for the wrong type of brain. It was advice I could never use. Basically all dating advice I ever got fell into this same category.
That's my braindump. Maybe I'll develop it more in the future, but I'm busy so maybe not. I hope it helps someone who is struggling like I was.

Now Delta is helping tear families apart and placing people in concentration camps, and getting paid handsomely to do it. Delta is sadistic and probably criminal. Fly with them today!
https://www.cbsnews.com/atlanta/news/delta

FAFO-ing in the iOS app Loopy Pro, which is what I use to create midi controls on the iPad. Here I have used an XY controller widget to control delay mix/feedback.
We will see how fiddly that is in the heat of battle, but if it works I might do the same with reverb mix/decay.
The joke might be on me however; in iPadOS26 grabbing anything near the edge will resize the app 🤣😩

A rogue AI enrolls in your online class, then publicly shames you when you remove it. This just happened in a dev forum. Are we ready if it happens to our courses?
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonippolito_a-rogue…

What really makes me irate about how LLMs are marketed and sold is that if these companies instead spend their time and money to make highly specialized versions for them we could have amazing and actually helpful tools without the ick.
This could both work much better for many use cases (for example for correlating documents and giving a list of results like a search engine instead of tedious palaver) and they wouldn't need to steal data (Professor Bender calls it succinctly "datasets too large to care")[1].
But they're pursuing "AGI" (which is provenly impossible to do with LLMs) and endless growth.
[1] https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/116109627131276897

Getting back into training. Yay!
This past week I did a resilience session after not exercising consistently in a long time, and my normal work day ended up being one of the best I've had. My body felt relaxed and my mind sharp and focussed. I really feel we're made for intensity, or at least I enjoy it. Find what works for you, personally small group training with knowledgeable coaches that instruct has been life changing. I can be a workhorse if I'm told what to do. A dre…

I've seen a bunch of "the CA age verification law is the best way to do a bad thing and so we shouldn't oppose compliance" takes, which others are rightly pointing out is a bad stance because it's blindingly obvious that compliance now sets the stage for compliance later and the clearly set up later is mandatory verification of age data. Even if you think that, for example, California's current "progressive" government won't go there, we're all currently seeing just how easy it is for a new government to pick up the oppressive tools the "good" government was using "restraint" with and put them to worse ends.
On the other hand, I'll freely admit that distros *do* need a way to shield themselves from liability right now. The clear (to me; IANAL) correct solution is to say on your website "don't download this OS if you're in a jurisdiction where it's not legal for us to provide it."). Assuming this does put you in the clear liability-wise, it has several positive effects:
- Stops zero people from downloading it.
- Makes it clear that your project will not collaborate with fascists/oppressive regime enjoyers.
- Means that when the next law makes verifying user ages mandatory (and/or explicitly requires using Palantir-adjacent services to do so) you've already got a strategy in place and there's no need for a "debate" in your "community" about compliance.
- Gets users more practice with "the law is malicious/needlessly bureaucratic/oppressive; let's ignore it" which to be honest people in general clearly desperately need at this point.
- Is the most effective political move if you want to resist the way things are going. Forcing the other side to explain why "California bans Linux" is good rhetorical strategy. Make *them* try to explain "well it's actually not so harmful since we let users set it themselves" and answer your follow-up "but what if next year the requirements change; I just refuse to go along with this slippery slope stuff and I'm not bothered if that means you want to *ban* me."
#AgeVerification

A long time ago, when I was still going to school, I often thought about some class or other: "What's the point of this? I'm just wasting time on stuff I won't ever need. And my grades are going down because of it." So I supported all these bright ideas like having schools work the curriculum out with the industry.
Nowadays, I know better. The purpose of school is not to produce ready-made employees. It's to give people a wider perspective. Perhaps they won't use most of what they learn there, perhaps they'll have bad memories of some classes, but that doesn't really matter. What does matter is that you learn how to learn, how to reason, how to think.
I hate what's been happening to schools lately. They are becoming conveyor belts: we throw children on them, throw specific knowledge at them and see what sticks, we do exams and classify them. We expect to get a thoughtless laborer at the end, someone ready to take a specific job immediately.
A human whose only purpose in life is mindless labor and mindless consumption. Metaphorically, someone who's just going to spend their time off by drinking beer in the front of the TV and breeding more babies. Babies who will eventually become more cogs in the machine, fueling the infinite growth, trying to prevent this mindless system from falling apart.
#AntiCapitalism

canonical back on their bullshit again. nothing is sacred
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/the-future-of-ai-in-ubuntu/81130

You tell us that we have to use a piece of software weekly or it will be uninstalled and if we want to use it then install it...
Guess what? I automated a script to run every Monday to launch that piece of software just in case I don't use it that week.
Guess what again? I told every team member how to do it and provided the script.
Depending on my workload and tasks I might not use it for over a week and I WILL NOT PUT UP with having to install it again and have a fo…

“So I guess what I’m trying to say is, the new workday should be three to four hours.“
Yup! That's what every worker knows and should have been fighting for with solidarity for decades. Every neurodivergent person knows that we can't do concentrated work for more than 3 hours, and that extended hyperfocus blocks drain our energy for the next day. It's not sustainable.
Steve Yegge writes about how AI Capitalism creates an energy vampire

The AI Vampire
This was an unusually hard post to write, because it flies in the face of everything else going on.

“AI can make mistakes” might as well be the slogan of our era. Even boosters admit that you need to spin the vibe code slot machine a few times to get a jackpot.
An employee with that degree of consistency would be fired.
So how do we redirect some of that unlimited grace from machines to humans?

Corporations demand perfection from workers, but AI gets unlimited slack.
LLM users have bottomless patience for inconsistent tools, and no grace left for their colleagues. What if we could flip it around?

I noticed late last night, by way of discovering pooling water under the sink, that the garbage disposal had gone belly up.
And so today’s task is to replace it, which I don’t really relish doing, but:
"…so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." -Gandalf the Grey
And so, I’m off to the hardware store, having accepted the conditions are what they are and deciding ho…

This is as good a time as any for a thought experiment.
You're in Nazi Germany. You know about the camps, you know what they do, you see the ash fall, you smell it. People who resist alone are killed, some are sent to the camps too. You're afraid to even talk to people about it for fear that they'll turn you in.
You think back to when the camps were being built. You had all the warning signs, but you didn't know how to interpret them. You could believe it would happen. You thought you'd have a chance to vote him out. You thought there might be another way. You thought maybe things would turn out differently if you just sat tight, kept your head down, kept yourself safe.
You see a family being dragged from their home. You know they will be killed. You want to fight, not just for them but for yourself. You opposed Hitler, and at any point you know you could be on the list... Even if you do nothing.
You wish you could rise up, shoot the SS, open the gates, fight it all. You know you aren't alone, but you don't know how to connect with the people who want the same thing.
Using the knowledge we have now, what should you have done in the preceding months and years to connect, to build a community that would open up all paths of resistance?
There were people who resisted. We know it wasn't enough.
Gun laws in Nazi Germany were very similar to US laws in that Nazis were largely free to own guns and everyone else was not. Unlike the US, where "others" have historically controlled using the fear that they might be randomly executed, Germany did codify it. Red flag laws were one more step in the US towards that codification, and there will be more.
When Nazis were taking away those guns, the social networks didn't exist to make resistance possible for most folks. But some Jews were able to resist.
It wasn't the guns that made the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising possible, though they definitely helped. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was made possible by labor organizing in the precessing years.
If there were more uprisings like that, the Holocaust could have been stopped if not prevented. Social networks make resistance possible. Guns are only useful tools to resist authoritarianism *after* you build a community able to support that resistance, and they are only one of many tools made useful by that community.
Getting guns is easy, and not always necessary. Building community is hard. Guns won't keep you safe. Community will.
Single acts of resistance may slow the machine down, but to actually bring down a monster you need to be able to attack more than once. You need a society of resistance. If you are afraid now, build that. Talk to people while it's still safe to do so. Ask them where their red line is. Talk to neighbors. Figure out your network.
Take the steps you need now to keep your neighbors safe, to keep yourself safe.
#USPol

Well burning wood for power (currently what we do at Drax in the UK) doesn't make sense now and it seems it still won't make sense in the future, even with carbon capture:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/20/bur…

FYI, there's still time to register for this Thursday's #DefendResearch webinar with
PEN America
to learn about what's going on with academic #censorship and what we can do about it

“A lot of what we think of as privacy protection isn’t so much like something that’s written in the law,”
says Karen Levy, a professor of information science at Cornell University.
“It just has to do with how hard or how expensive it is to learn stuff about people.”
When mobile phones became widespread, gathering data about people got much cheaper,
-- but making use of that data remained difficult.
Powerful LLMs could change that.
Worries over how LLMs …

How LLMs could supercharge mass surveillance in the US
The technology could make commercially available bulk datasets even more of a privacy concern.

Mum wants to upgrade the phone package, but doesn't realize she had a password or an account to log in with. Doesn't know that logging into the website is how you do that. Does at least know the name of the phone company.
And when we to log in and password reset, the large-font size she has set so she can actually read anything has screwed up every page there.
Half the buttons are hidden. The page can't be pinched to zoom out.
It's trying to trick us into an 18 month contract instead of just more data. She has no idea how much 100Gb is.
The actual accept-and-pay-button is unclickable because its mostly off the screen because the increased actually-readable-for-her font size. We can't really be sure if it's a confirm-what-you-asked-for button or this agree-to-upselling proposal on the top of the screen.
We give up and do it on my phone which I'm old enough to have to squint to see but don't up the font size usually yet.

FYI, there's still time to register for this Thursday's #DefendResearch webinar with
PEN America
to learn about what's going on with academic #censorship and what we can do about it

Words I did not enjoy reading this week, from a leading artificial intelligence company:
“During our testing, we found that Mythos Preview is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser when directed by a user to do so.”

What Anthropic’s new nightmare means, in plain English
Anthropic shared with the world what it learned from its breakthrough model. Would China?

RE: https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/116064657955859408
I love the sentiment, but this is actually exactly what law enforcement has always been. It's always been political, always racist, always arbitrary, always genocidal.
ICE is just what happens when they think they can get away with it. The other abuses require a lot more investigation. Abolishing ICE is a good first step.
For all folks who have just now become enraged with the brutality of law enforcement agencies like ICE: I hope we can walk together, and learn from each other, until our ways part... But I do hope you'll walk a little farther with me after we achieve our shared goals.

BTW: The other day I tried to vibe-code exactly what they describe here: "We watermarked the PDF of each paper submitted with instructions, visible only to an LLM, instructing it to include the two selected phrases in the review. (A human reading the PDF would not directly see this watermark." While I could confirm that my tainted pdf did contain the watermark, using off-the-shelf Gemini would not act on my hidden instructions. The LLM seems to do pdf pre-processing and stick to visible text?

While I'm talking about new ways to structure computer programs, what does it look like to _push_ data into an LLM? Instead of making it natural language fetching, with huge privilege to do stuff, can we structure things to, say, have one system supply some data context, and push it into an LLM to arrange processing, and that in turn pushes to other systems for action? It's not quite “code and data are separate", but I think the inversion might help mitigate a lot of the lethal trifecta. It also puts humans in the artisan-director seat, rather than the wannabe slave-master's seat, metaphorically.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@samiamsam/116459688263848899
Rights are things you defend with guns. If you don't have guns, are not organized enough to defend them, or are unwilling to "go that far," then you don't have rights.
But I ultimately challenge the logic of "rights." The entire framing of "rights" is somewhat individualist though. Once you have the power to assert your rights, you really have no reason to support others... Which is exactly the situation we're in now.
I actually think it's worth throwing out entirely. Instead, I like the concept of "obligations." We all owe obligations to each other by way of all of our existences being intertwined. You can ignore your obligations, just like you can ignore any debt, but you can't really escape them.
They also don't require anything to exist. They exist on their own. You choose to act on those obligations or not, which again comes back to what you're willing to do... But from a different angle, and for *others* not for yourself.

I see no sign of any recognition from those who would want such a ban that they see any of the collateral damage a successful ban would have on the majority of kids who are not falling for this bullshit. That they are banning any good at all along with the bad.
Under 18s only
I see that the lobbying for these laws are funded by the absolute worst companies on the internet, those who will be entrenched by the legal compliance costs, that will cement themselves as the arbitrators of who is allowed to access the internet.
It’s a gift to Palantir and other surveillance companies. The very people running these algo-feeds are the ones who benefit from IDing every user and stalking them across the internet on their government-approved internet-licence IDs.
I don’t think even a successful ban on social media for kids would actually address the issue of kids being exposed to sexism and misogony or reduce the kids alienation and depression.
A ban can’t help, will make many things worse, won’t address the problem, and will make competing with the worst surveillance capitalists on the planet more difficult.
Going to war with every internet site and advice forum and making internet access harder won’t fix anything, and will have massive collateral damage against everyone seeking support from strangers or trying to learn things their parents won’t teach them.
But I see we are going to do it anyway.
The direction is clear.
Those companies do get what they lobby for, and they are lobbying hard for ID checks on every website, wrapping their desire to enclose the internet commons for themselves in a faux concern for children’s welfare.
And governments wish to monitor and control the internet, so they will pass these laws.
I wonder how many parents have a family group-chat that they’re going to accidentally ban their kids from using, not realizing that ‘social media’ might include Whatsapp? 😆
It won’t fix anything, it will make the situation for kids worse, impose costs and rents and hacks and exploits on all of us, and increase government and corporate power.
Many will lose access to their networks of support and help.
So it goes.
We will build a better more censorship resistant internet. It’s already here really: Briar. Matrix. Nostr. Bitchat. Veilid. Spritely. And the rest.
The laws may push us there faster.
The race will go on.

What is “social media”?
What do you actually want to ban?
Does Github count?
Does an anorexia-support forum count?
Does a queer-support forum count?
Does the schools own homework-submission system count?
Does Whatsapp, which the kids use to talk to family and to bully each other?
How about Telegram that the kids use to talk to their drug dealers?
How is it different?
Are we really saying nobody under 18 can watch youtube, and expecting that to make life better for those kids rather than worse?
How are you going to define ‘social media’ such that you’ll ban the harm you think you see without also banning any chance of support for a person looking to learn to program, or cope with their abusive parents, or seek advice about being anorexic or queer?
Is it really a good idea to attach a label to every child account for all the websites they visit? You want the kids to all have a big “Child” tag on them as they wonder the net? Might that not increase rather than decrease their vulnerability?