Tootfinder

Day 18: Mark Oshiro
Having just learned that Oshiro is nonbinary, they're an instant include on this list. In veering extremely heavily towards YA, and losing a spot that would have gone to an absolutely legendary mangaka, anime writer, or feminist philosopher, but "Anger is A Gift" and "Each of us a Desert" are just that good, and I'm trying to steer a bit towards towards lesser-known authors I respect.
I already mentioned "Anger is a Gift" above, but to recap, it's a painful, vivid, and beautifully honest story of queer love, loss, and protest against an oppressive system. CW for racist police murder, intergenerational trauma, and police brutality against highschool students. It's a book a lot of Americans could benefit from reading right now, and while it's fiction, it's not fantasy or sci-fi. Besides the themes and politics, the writing is just really solid, with delicate characterization and tight-plotted developments that are beautifully paced.
To me "Each of us a Desert" is maybe even more beautiful, and Oshiro leaps into a magnificent fantasy world that's richly original in its desolation, dark history, lonely characters, and mythical magic. Particularly the clearly-not-just-superscription but ambiguously-important/powerful magical elements of Oshiro's worldbuilding are a rare contrast to the usual magic-is-real-here's-how-it-works fare, and pulling that off a all as they do is a testament to their craft. The prose is wonderful, probably especially so if you speak Spanish, but I enjoyed it immensely despite only knowing a few words here and there. The rich interiority of the characters, their conflicts both with each other and within themselves, and the juxtaposition of all that against origins in cult-like ignorance allows for the delivery of a lot of wisdom and complex truths.
Between these two books, so different and yet each so powerful, Oshiro has demonstrated incredible craft and also a wide range of styles, so I'm definitely excited to read more of their work and to recommend them to others.
I'm also glad to have finally put a nonbinary author on this list; the others I had in mind won't make it at this point because there's too much genre overlap, although I'll include them in my didn't-make-it list at the end. I've now got just 2 slots left and have counted up 14 more authors that absolutely need to be mentioned, so we'll see what happens.
#20AuthorsNoMen

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

The US military has always had a massive global advantage against enemies by having bases all over the world. There are bases in every NATO country. This would appear to be a powerful threat to anyone willing to oppose American hegemon, and under normal conditions it would be.
But a lot of those kids serving on those bases joined, not because they love America but, because they needed a ticket out of poverty. They joined for the education, for the money, maybe a bit for the adventure, but, more than anything, to escape the ghetto or podunk backwater that trapped them. Under normal times, this is the best deal they could expect. Maybe they risk their lives, usually they sit around being bored for a few years, and they get to come out with respect and paid college.
But what they are being offered is normal in most of the countries they're stationed in. Free healthcare, cheap or free education, is just what citizens in a lot of countries have come to expect. If the US attacked a NATO country, how many would snap up citizenship if they were given a chance to defect? Bonus points for taking some hardware with you, I'm sure.
But there are some who love their country. There are some patriotic Americans on those bases. Some of them joined specifically to protect the US from all enemies, foreign *and* domestic. Given a chance to fulfill that oath or violate international law, what happens?
There are a good number of former military folks too who now are unsafe in the countries they served, who would do just about anything for citizenship in any EU country and almost any NATO ally. Some of those folks know things they swore an oath to never share, but the country they swore an oath to has betrayed them. Today there's no value in leaking those secrets, but in a war between the US and NATO allies things would be different. Some of those former military folks still believe in their oath, and know exactly who the real enemy is. What happens when there's a real threat of war, when they can use their knowledge to fulfill that oath to protect the US against those domestic threats?
There are a bunch of civilian tech workers who have become targets of the regime. Some of them had clearance, or know about the skeletons in the closet. They know about critical infrastructure, classified systems, all sorts of things that would be extremely valuable to an opponent. But the opponents of the US have always been a frightening *other*, never familiar societies these folks look up to, have visited, have thought about moving to, are trying to escape to.
All I'm saying here is that invading Venezuela and kidnapping the president has a very different calculus than does attacking Greenland. I don't know if Trump or his people are able to understand that, but if he and his folks aren't then I hope European leaders are. But more than that, I hope it never comes down to finding out.
But perhaps we should all think about what we would do to make sure things ended quickly if American leadership ever made such an incredible mistake.

Imagine ChatGPT but instead of predicting text it just linked you to the to 3 documents most-influential on the probabilities that would have been used to predict that text.
Could even generate some info about which parts of each would have been combined how.
There would still be issues with how training data is sourced and filtered, but these could be solved by crawling normally respecting robots.txt and by paying filterers a fair wage with a more relaxed work schedule and mental health support.
The energy issues are mainly about wild future investment and wasteful query spam, not optimized present-day per-query usage.
Is this "just search?"
Yes, but it would have some advantages for a lot of use cases, mainly in synthesizing results across multiple documents and in leveraging a language model more fully to find relevant stuff.
When we talk about the harms of current corporate LLMs, the opportunity cost of NOT building things like this is part of that.
The equivalent for art would have been so amazing too! "Here are some artists that can do what you want, with examples pulled from their portfolios."
It would be a really cool coding assistant that I'd actually encourage my students to use (with some guidelines).
#AI #GenAI #LLMs

"In this replacement Earth we're building they've given me Africa
to do and of course I'm doing it with all fjords again because I happen to
like them, and I'm old-fashioned enough to think that they give a lovely
baroque feel to a continent. And they tell me it's not equatorial enough.
Equatorial!" He gave a hollow laugh. "What does it matter? Science has
achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I'd far rather be happ…

We are at most a few years away from the mainstream media becoming controlled top to bottom, with a few very exceptions, by ultrarich conservatives and their hirelings.
CBS News is gone;
CNN seems about to follow.
The Los Angeles Times installed an AI-powered “bias meter” to warn readers against taking some of what they read in the paper’s columns at face value.
And all across the country, local news is on a ventilator;
the right-wing Sinclair network is taking…

The Washington Post Has Become Right-Wing Even Faster Than I Thought
It’s not going to happen. It’s happening: The mainstream media is becoming right-wing. What are wealthy liberals going to do about it?

Series C, Episode 03 - Volcano
VILA: Obsidian. Even the name sounds nasty. Do you know why it escaped the galactic war?
CALLY: If it did.
VILA: Well, Zen says there's no sign of any battle fleet wreckage on the surface.
CALLY: Not as far as we can see.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/303/48

There are several photographs circulating online right now purporting to show the full, unmasked face of Renee Good’s killer. These photos are, as far as I’m aware, all AI-generated.
Please do not share these photos.
Remember that, as with all gen AI, it is answering the question “What would be statistically plausible here?” It’s not showing you the •killer’s• face. It’s showing you •a• face that fits with the what we know of the killer’s face.
2/

These showcase entries all look fantastic. It really is amazing what folks can do with #godot https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@godotengine/115509258722105002

I would like to find the 'genius' who nuked one software package that I like and used and for me to apply the clue bat (with a steel rebar core) when we were forced back to what we had years ago. It is slow, takes more steps to do my job than what we were using. It was also CROSS PLATFORM and not such a resource hog. They also force us to use it in seven days or they uninstall it and make us jump through the hoops to have the damned thing installed again.
Right now it is tak…

For my birthday today… I deleted the Facebook account I created in September to access Marketplace. It served its purpose. I was going to sell other things but never got around to it. Then friends started requesting to be friends. It was awkward. I didn’t accept any requests and even made one post on my profile that I wouldn’t be friending anyone.. that it was only for Marketplace. People still requested…
Then a colleague/friend passed away and I missed an RSVP because someone sent me the message on FB rather than real life even though we weren’t FB connected and hadn’t communicated on there for years. This is what happens when people treat FB like the entirety of “the internet” and “communication”. I have a website with my name and phone! My address is not hard to search. Email!?
I was angry and sad about that. 😢
So ya… if I do the Marketplace thing again I’ll just make a temp account and delete it after use, like a single use plastic bag to pick up dog poop. 💩 🤣
In the meantime I’ll keep focusing on good people here on the #opensocialweb… and also connecting with people in real life.
Most of the 48 years I have spent on this earth have been without Facebook. I’ll manage :)
#toxicsocialmedia #facebook #deleteyouraccount #mastodonMigration #dumpzuck

Yes, I will be there -The Muni Now, Muni Forever folks have an excellent proposal that improves on the Mayor's proposal, lowering costs for all but the very wealthiest and the largest, most expensive office buildings compared to what the Mayor wants to do. AND it raises more money. Why won't #MayorLurie adopt it?

Yes, I will be there -The Muni Now, Muni Forever folks have an excellent proposal that improves on the Mayor's proposal, lowering costs for all but the very wealthiest and the largest, most expensive office buildings compared to what the Mayor wants to do. AND it raises more money. Why won't #MayorLurie adopt it?

It pairs well with something that I think it was @… said at one point "the job of the senior engineer is to bring clarity"
So often in tech work we end up in a field of ambiguous possibilities, and people usually default to throwing habits and opinions out.
But it turns out, in a great many cases, _we can actually check what the right answer is_, and we should generally do that.

I continue to be impressed with how the LLM systems are pretty open about queerness and non-judgmental, non-homophobic. Remarkable given that so much of the training material must be hateful! Here's Gemini being cautious but helpful after I asked it about a summary of what it knows about me and asked why it didn't mention me being gay.
I do have access to information regarding your personal life and sexual orientation from our previous conversations. However, I am designed with specific safety and privacy guardrails that prevent me from storing or outputting information related to a user's sexual orientation or sensitive medical conditions in these types of summaries.
While I can remember and use those details to provide context during our active discussions—such as when we were looking into the history of queer voices or specific support resources—I cannot include them in a "permanent" distilled profile like the one above.

As a security engineer, whenever anyone talks about a control it's always important to ask "by what mechanism?"
> "Oh, that can't happen because we have a system to stop it."
By what mechanism?
> "We have documentation that says...."
Yeah, that's not a mechanism.
People keep saying, "Trump can't do that!" But like... by what mechanism?
> "The constitution says..."
Yeah... a documented list of rules is not self-enforcing. What is the mechanism?
What makes this impossible? Oh, it's possible under certain conditions? Oh, it's always possible and you're completely relying on the idea that there will never be a malicious actor? Yeah, that's gonna get exploited. Oh shit, now you're owned.
What do you do with a system that's completely owned? Once it's compromised it can never be trusted again. What would you tell a client who told you, "Patching is really hard, so we're just gonna ban the attacker's IP."
What, you're not even gonna reinstall?
I assume we've all had the "burn everything down and start again" client. I wonder how many of us thought we would see the US government ask for them to hold it's beer.
#USPol

I want to take a moment to thank @… for helping us carry out our Gaza Verified video calls.
Without her and Joy, we couldn’t do what we do.
Aseel is living in a tent right now (which gets flooded when it rains, like it did this week) and, in the middle of having to help her own family, is volunteering to help other families in need in Gaza.

Donate to mohammed turk
Help support mohammed turk by donating or sharing with your friends.

"As Joy-Ann Reid put it in an Instagram video: “Dear retailers who’ve decided you don’t like diversity, equity, and inclusion, or you really love ICE and you have no problem with them busting into your establishments to drag people away: Here’s the thing. We ain’t buying it. I mean, for real, for real, we ain’t buyin’ it.”
She explained: “We’re gonna spend our money with businesses who actually respect our dollars, respect our communities, and respect our diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are going to buy from people who respect immigrants, who respect immigrants’ rights, and respect freedom and liberty. We are going to buy from establishments that respect our right to vote and our right to live in a free society. And if you ain’t that, we ain’t buying it.”
“Let’s show them our power,” she told listeners. “Let’s show them what we can do together.”"
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/november-25-2025

FOX NEWS: THREE HOUSE COMMITTEES SUBPOENA ACTBLUE
This is one of the most important texts we’ve EVER sent.
FIRST: Donald Trump tried to SHUT DOWN ActBlue.
THEN: Grassroots supporters STOOD UP and fought back – and WON!
BUT THEN: Republican House committees SUBPOENAED ActBlue to try to stop grassroots supporters like you from ever donating again.
This HORRENDOUS abuse of power is what dictators do.
We won’t – and we CAN’T – let them get away with it!
…

I, too, think some of the efforts of the CSSWG have gotten ahead of the use cases and I, too, think catching our breath would be good.
“Chris’ Corner: Stage 2”
https://blog.codepen.io/2025/10/20/chris-corner-stage-2/

"Did Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (1915-1990) read “An Experiment in Time”? Could it be that he had a series of dreams between 1960 and 1968, and that he quickly wrote them down in his diary before breakfast? We can only speculate. But we do know for a fact that those dreams begat a nothing short of extraordinary sequence of writings."

J. C. R. Licklider & M. Mitchell Waldrop
The writings of Jorge Luis Borges twist our perception of time and space. In between articles about Shaw, Chesterton, Wilde, and Coleridge, his 1952 book "Otras Inquisiciones" included an unexpected gem: a short story called "El Tiempo y J. W. Dunne". The question is, who was this John William Dunne and what does he have to do with time? Well, his name might be forgotten by contemporary audiences, but Dunne was the author of one of the biggest bestsellers of the first half of the twentieth cent…

Series A, Episode 08 - Duel
BLAKE: What do you think?
JENNA: The surface seems to be melted. It's almost like the effects of a fusion bomb.
GAN: Blake! Jenna! [They walk over to The Monument]
BLAKE: Well, at least we know the planet's inhabited.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/108/64

Wow. I've dealt with various toxic personalities in software development, but a good portion of the time those toxic personalities were at least extremely knowledgeable in their (often, very limited) domain.
AI, however, seems to be enabling toxic personalities *who are completely clueless*. Impressive!
https://github…

#Samsung phones are such a pain.
I had a friend over and we had to put a SIM card in a Samsung phone to receive text. Turns out you can't do anything with the damn phone (except emergency calls) until you provide Wi-Fi and allow it to install all kinds of scamware on behest of the mobile network. What a waste of time and resources.

Lockdown Mode is a backstop for people who either do dangerous things or are specifically targeted by high-resource threat actors. Almost no one can *actually* benefit from it but people who need it really need it.
I don’t need it. However, I have it enabled in part to understand what it does to the UX. It interferes with a minority of sites. It forces me to think about whether I REALLY trust the site I’m interacting with & how valuable my interaction really is.

Mysk🇨🇦🇩🇪 (@mysk@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image The Lockdown Mode that Apple introduced in iOS 16 is a nice idea to add extra protection to Apple devices. However, all security bugs we discovered and reported to Apple couldn't have been stopped by the Lockdown Mode either. Perhaps other researchers have a different experience. #infosec #iOS #Apple #security

Reflecting on legacy, it's clear it goes beyond financial wealth. Legacy is the cherished memories, enduring values, and life lessons we pass to loved ones. 💙 Integrity, for instance, is a value I hope my family treasures—acting with honesty and moral principles shapes character and success. What value do you wish for your family to hold dear? 🧡 #Legacy #FamilyValues

Bengals' Joe Flacco shines in battle for the ages vs. Aaron Rodgers, Steelers: 'This is what we do it for' https://www.nfl.com/news/bengals-joe-flacco-shines-in-battle-for-the-ages-vs-aaron-rodgers-steelers-t…

Today, students startet working on their term project (we're in week 6 of 14). They create a learning mate based on a given structure. So, basically they need to come up with a good system prompt to make the mate do what they expect.
After 10 minutes: „Wait, we only need to input the prompt here? That’s all?“
An hour later: „D'oh, it acts strange! We tried this and that and whatnot, and it still isn’t what we need. Can we have another week?“

Double grumble with an asterisk!!!!
I'm here getting my car serviced and I attached to their wi-fi. OK, that's pretty normal.
But their wi-fi intercepts TLS connections and substitutes its own certificate. Bad, bad, bad. At least my tools noticed it and said "we ain't gonna get fooled".
However, this happened in Thunderbird (e-mail tool) which popped up an utterly obscure dialog to tell me and ask what I wanted to do.
Hey, Mozilla/Thunderbir…

I do like #NextCloud but sometimes it can drive me crazy. For example, fresh update, hundreds of errors with astoundingly unhelpful messages. Consider:
chmod(): Operation not permitted at /var/www/nextcloud/apps/recognize/lib/Migration/InstallDeps.php#169
ok, so what do we find at line 169? a call to chmod() on presumably a filename, wrapped in an exception Catch.
I realize this is very much non-trivial software with oodles of hours of difficult work by so many kind people, but, really, how much effort would it have been to include the errant target FILENAME in the exception message?
Similarly, a deprecation warning is, by definition, a Warning, not an error.
None of this affects my using Nextcloud, but it does really clutter the log and who knows, maybe some of these Errors are actually important?

#DearLazyWeb: As part of #DisasterPreparedness organizing in the past, our group did a table top exercise to identify gaps in our response capabilities. We were fortunate enough to have someone who worked in public health make one and GM it for us.
I found some from FEMA with some quick searching. Assuming a group of 5-10 people organizing for themselves (and maybe folks in their neighborhoods), are there any exercises/table top simulations like these that other folks would recommend?
#DisasterPrep #Disaster #CommunityOrganizing

A concrete case study from Svendborg Kommune is fascinating to follow.
It's crucial to be open and honest about what we do and don't know. Use lots of different ways to talk to and connect with different groups.

#NCKF25

The ideas that finally bubbled up to the surface in The Point of No Return last night have been festering in the back of my brain for months. Because, although it's a bit inchoate, it's only saying out loud what most of us already know.
The job now is no longer to turn the ship around. We don't have the wheel, and those who do will not listen.
The task now is to build lifeboats. To build resilient spaces in which fragments of humanity can survive.

The Point of No Return
I can't stop climate change by myself. I can't create a sustainable future for my village by myself. To do either of these things, everyone else needs to work together. But badgering people, being frustrated with people, being angry with people (and yes, I am angry — very angry — with people I know, and like, and respect, very much) doesn't motivate them to work together. My very frustration, my very sense of urgency, makes me a liability. I should stop.

Dear people of Brazil, I'd like to apologise for our chancellor, a man of wealth and no taste with a virtually endless list of shortcomings.
I know it's frustrating having to deal with his BS, we have to do it every day over here. And consider also how good you have it: at least you can call him what he clearly, indulgently and unapologetically is without any fear of punishment.

Series B, Episode 08 - Hostage
VILA: So this all your fault.
AVON: How do you arrive at that conclusion?
VILA: I'd still be on the ship if it wasn't for you.
BLAKE: Shut up. We must conserve the air for as long as possible.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/208/606 B7B2…

In neither this year nor the next should anyone expect Russia to propose a deal that is meaningfully different from what it has already.
How do we change the circumstances?
There are two main levers.
The first deteriorates conditions inside Russia to the point that Mr. Putin is forced to consider ending the war as the lesser evil,
and it is achieved by imposing sanctions that would be powerful and smart enough to erode Russia’s capacity to wage war and significantly i…

Opinion | Ukraine Is Not a War of Attrition
Victory will belong not to the side with more resources, but to the side with the stronger, more adaptive and unyielding will to win.

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

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

How do we steer EV charging so that it strengthens, rather than strains, the power grid? One of the clearest answers emerging from global leading practice is the use of smart pricing to guide smart EV charging.
What can China learn from Europe and vice versa? I discuss this with Chi Gao
htt…

Smart Pricing for Smart Charging: Practical Lessons from the EU and China
As electric vehicles become mainstream, governments are beginning to ask a harder question: how do we steer this growing load so that it strengthens, rather than strains, the power grid? One of the clearest answers emerging from global leading practice is the use of smart pricing to guide smart EV c

If you were in Carol's place in #Pluribus, what would you do? I'd probably have the talk of my life with the entire world's consciousness and then ask it to undo itself 😀 I mean, we know Carol has something in her that is a potential treatment for the virus. We also know the hive mind knows how to remove it and assimilate her. But it can't because that would make her unh…

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

PIC12F683 poly/substrate with some residual contacts (some floated away, some sitting at random positions, some still firmly attached) but almost all oxide etched.
Doing the whole die at this state, then will probably do a clean to get all the loose contacts and debris off, another imaging pass.
Then I'm not sure if it's worth the effort to try for a clean substrate image given the poor contrast I'm seeing, vs just calling this the final form. We'll see what happe…

What We Build — #leadership

Grounded Urgency: Activism, Grief, and the Practice of Sustainable Love
This essay reimagines activism as an act of love, not obligation. When urgency becomes panic, we lose clarity; when grief is honored, it becomes fuel for compassion. Grounded in love and trust, sustainable leadership begins with tending what’s ours to do.

With the advent of Blacksky and Northsky, I was seriously considering creating a bsky account and checking things out over there. Turns out I don't need to after all!
https://mastodon.murkworks.net/@moira/115402352112431443

Cowboys are locked into a 2nd place schedule in 2026 https://insidethestar.com/cowboys-are-locked-into-a-2nd-place-schedule-in-2026

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

The American Democratic Party, and the concept of "Democratic Socialism" within the US, comes largely from an authoritarian political tradition where the state offers services in exchange for the population allowing elites to continue parasitize the system. Then it is critical for Liberals to consume and destroy popular mutual aid, because real mutual aid undermines their carrot.
Democrats tend to imagine that anarchists want to destroy "all the good things" that governments do. The reality is that we want to build those good things ourselves so that we can reject the offer of those same good things, less well managed, with all the bad things attached.
Anarchists want to build pro-social systems (what if we didn't *need* snap, but just made sure everyone was fed?) while eliminating anti-social ones (do we really *need* to kidnap children, or could we just kind of stop doing that?).

Online Lecture Series “Interdisciplinary Thanatology” (German)
https://ift.tt/mnHGw7L
Mining the Logs: Sources on Blue Humor URL …
via Input 4 RELCFP https://ift.tt/EFf…

One other pattern that I kept experiencing last year when I was actually trying these tools in my work (because I had so many people pushing them on me I started to think I was crazy):
Them: “oh you are struggling with X? I have been using AI to solve it and it gives me the solution in less than 10 minutes! You HAVE TO try it!”
Me: “X is really annoying, I’d love to get help with it. I’ll try that, thanks!”
* I go and try to do X, spend hours prompting AI back-and-forth as it keeps messing up and doing things wrong. I give up and do the thing manually, spending 2-3x the time I would have spent if I did it myself from the start.*
*days / weeks later*
Me: “hey, person, I tried to do X with AI and it didn’t work. I kept getting issues like Y and Z. Did I prompt it wrong? This is what I tried.”
Them: *nods, maybe chuckles* “oh yeah, it does that. I still haven’t been able to figure out how to reliably do X. I tend to redo the output completely too. But sometimes it helps me do like this tiny part. Anyway, these tools will improve soon and we won’t have to do so many manual revisions. “
I kid you not, this stuff happened every other week.
#AI #LLMs #work #tech #AIBubble

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

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

Series A, Episode 12 - Deliverance
ENSOR: I'm on three-quarter boost as it is. She's not responding! I'm going to maximum. It's all right. It's all right. She's slowing. Compensators beginning to hold. [Ship starts to steady.] Come on, come on, that's my beauty. That's...come on. Pull us back, pull us back. All right, she's coming back. We're all right.
MARYATT: Don't do that too often, will you? I'm a very nervous passenger.

My "grow plants everywhere" mod for #Luanti is progressing!
I just built a routine to do blobby weight regions as the intersection of a bunch of parabolas, where weight increases logarithmically from the edge of the parabola with an adjustable edge region, and we use the geometric average of these weight values within the intersection region. Then I spent a few hours hunched over a biomes vornoi diagram approximating different broad regions like "arid_grasses" and "temperate_trees" so you can just name some combination of these regions (with custom per-region multipliers) and have your plant definition apply within those regions. I was using rectangular min/max heat/humidity values before, but they were pretty awkward to work with.
If anyone on here who plays Luanti wants to check it out let me know and I can prioritize publishing what I've got. I've got growth definitions for most but not all VoxeLibre plants and it wouldn't be hard to put them together for another game. No trees yet, but that's pretty much the next thing to work on.

Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act isn’t new,
but it’s getting louder and from all directions!
We had years of warnings.
He told us what he’d do.
Project 2025 laid it out,
but too many shrugged.
How much is “enough” for everyone to start getting loud with one voice before it’s too late?
https:/…

Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com)
Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act isn’t new, but it’s getting louder and from all directions! We had years of warnings. He told us what he’d do. Project 2025 laid it out, but too many shrugged. How much is “enough” for everyone to start getting loud with one voice before it’s too late?

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

"The scene (“Hidden Figures”, 2016) ends with Mr. Stafford famously claiming “that’s old!” as if the Pythagorean theorem was suddenly not useful anymore after 3500 years… Mr. Stafford’s reaction is canonical and very appropriate; it is the same that most devs have upon learning the fact that COBOL is running most credit card transactions, or when frontend engineers discover that static or server-rendered HTML websites do not need 10 MB of JavaScript on the browser."

I've filed a report about a minor problem with a #Python package, namely that the source distribution contained some trailing junk that breaks GNU #tar. On one hand, I'm happy that upstream took the issue seriously. On the other hand, I'm terrified of how much #AI slop was involved in the response.
I mean, my short bug report yielded a few walls of text of #LLM analysis of what the cause of the problem might be, of suggested solutions… and praise of the author's fix. These are interspersed with short comments from the author, all pasted under their own personal account. And the linked pull request is also huge, with "verification code" that's quite sloppy (bits that don't do anything, conditions that will never be true… but at least it seems to do what it was supposed to do).
Honestly, I don't know what to do. Not that I ever planned using this package, but at this point I will definitely stay away from it. It's in #Gentoo, and I'll have to continue maintaining it for the sake of reverse dependencies, but I feel like it's unfair to expose our users to packages that have clearly proven to accept AI slop without reviewing it properly. Or rather, AI slop that's being reviewed… by AI. How can anyone think this a good idea?!
There were multiple times in my life when I've considered retiring from Gentoo, for variety of reasons. There were also multiple times when I wanted to get away from computers altogether. Unfortunately, we're living in a truly fucked up world, and there is no escape. The best you can do is put an ever increasing effort to keep fixing all that crap that will just keep piling on faster and faster.
#FreeSoftware #OpenSource

Not being even vaguely sarcastic:
At some point, a journalist needs to ask Johnson
“you regularly claim you have no idea what your own government is doing.
If we take you at your word, how are you so poorly informed,
and do you this level of ignorance should disqualify you as speaker?”
-- John Pfaff
https://

Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com)
Q: What's your message to the 170 US citizens who have been detained by ICE? About 20 of them are children MIKE JOHNSON: I don't know what you're talking about with the children. I haven't seen that so I'm not going to comment on it.

Online Lecture Series “Interdisciplinary Thanatology” (German) https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20131233/online-lecture-series-interdisciplinary-thanatology-german

Time for a social experiment. I have 5 questions:
- What should we work towards as a society?
- What's one thing that doesn't exist now in your community but should?
- What's one action you could take in the coming year to align your life with that goal?
- What's one thing you could achieve in the coming year to get closer to making that thing exist?
- Imagine that we changed everything and you're living in the world you want to see exist. What does the world look like?
I've asked variations of these already (and am still getting great responses), but this time there's a catch. Get together some of your friends (3-5 people) and ask these questions of the group. Come up with *one* answer that everyone in the group agrees on and post it here, then write a bit about your experience.
If you don't know people locally (or otherwise can't do this in person), tag some folks in here or wherever your people are at digitally. Just add some info on if it's online or in person.
For anyone bold enough to actually do this, let me know if you'd be OK with me putting this in an upcoming entry (https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/).

Congress could, at any time, stop this shitshow by telling Vought to end the RIFs and impoundments.
It has very clear institutional reasons to do so.
But obeying to Trump rules all,
and instead the Speaker of the House will pretend he does not know what is happening
while opining on Bad Bunny."
-- Don Moynihan

Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com)
REPORTER: We know the president moved forward with mass layoffs. We're also learning there were significant cuts to staff at special education services. Are you comfortable with those cuts? MIKE JOHNSON: I haven't seen the specifics of that and I don't know

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

Series D, Episode 13 - Blake
TARRANT: That isn't the plan anymore, though, is it Avon?
AVON: I think we can do better.
VILA: Does that mean safer?
AVON: In the end, winning is the only safety.
VILA: It doesn't mean safer. I didn't think it would.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/413/16

Some leftists have criticized #NoKingsDay2 as useless. Though it was the largest protest in US history, it didn't change anything. I would go further to say that protests like these generally won't change anything. Dictators aren't forced to step down by 2% of the population coming out for one day. If they're forced to step down by protests, those protests are sustained. They are every single day. They are accompanied by general strikes.
We've been watching that happen all over the world. Portland in 2020 gave us a taste of that in the US. The George Floyd Rebellion was the type of resistance that actually brings down dictators like Trump. Occasional protests, no matter how large, can simply be ignored. That is precisely the reason the US developed a militarized police force in the first place. You need more, more than the largest protests in US history, more than Occupy, more than the resistance of the 60's and 70's, more than, and different from, anything we've seen in our lives.
And yet... Each protest has grown, and grown bolder. Some have grown more persistent. If you think of protest as the path to achieve change, you will lose. It is not. But it is a path to escalate. Some people, some otherwise comfortable white folks, came out for their first time. Some people got pepper sprayed for the first time. Some people questioned authority, stood up for the first time, and have had an experience that will radicalize them for the rest of their lives.
Protest is not useful in and of itself. It is training. It's making connections. Authoritarian regimes rely on the illusion of compliance, so visual resistance does actually undermine their power.
Liberals like to teach that non-violence is all about staying peaceful no matter what, that there's some way that morality simply overwhelms an enemy. I remember reading Langston Hughes' A Dream Deferred in high school. I said it was a threat. My teacher said, "you're wrong, he was a pacifist." Pacifism is a threat. If you can spit at me, beat me, shoot me, and I will not move, if I have the strength to absorb violence without flinching, without even rising to violence, what will happen when you push me too far?
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
For peaceful resistance to work, there must be ambiguity. It must not be clear if or when the resistance will stop being peaceful. Peaceful resistance with no possibility of escalation is just cowardice.
My critique then is not so harsh as some other anarchists. If you think that protest alone will work, you're probably going to lose. If you are prepared to escalate, if you are prepared to absorb violence without flinching, then it could be possible for protest alone to topple the dictator. The cracks are already beginning to show.
And then what?
The problems that lead to the George Floyd uprising were never resolved. The problems that lead to Occupy where never resolve. The DAPL was built, protesters were maimed, it leaked multiple times (exactly as predicted). Segregation never went away, it only changed forms. The fact that immigrants have different courts and different rights means that anyone can be arbitrarily kidnaped and renditioned to an arbitrary country. We never did anything about the torture black site. FFS, people can still be stripped of their voting rights and slavery is still legal in the US. The people who control both parties in the US are killing our children and grand children with oil wars and climate change.
Toppling the dictator does nothing to resolve all of the problems that existed before him.
No, #NoKingsDay was absolutely not useless. #NoKings and related protests are extremely useful but they aren't sufficient. But, I think we still need to challenge the movement on two points:
How do you escalate after you're ignored or brutalized?
What do you demand after you win?
#USPol

While I'm not much for the law, I recognize that not everyone I talk to thinks the same way. But even if you are like me, the enormity of the list of Trump's crimes is just staggering. There really couldn't be any more clear of an illustration of the fact that there are two legal systems: one for the elite, and one for everyone else.
We all know #Trump just does crimes all the time, but it can be hard to track the enormity of it. The YouTube lawyer LegalEagle put together a list and it's pretty incredible. It's a little over 40 minutes of him rapidly listing times that Trump has violated the law during his second term (completely ignoring his first term).
#MassBlackout is a #Boycott of the American corporations that support the dictatorship. By showing
that people have the power to shut down the economy if elites don't listen, we can hit them where it actually hurts.
From now until December 2nd, do as many of these things as you can:
- Stop online or in-store shopping (except for small businesses)
- Stop work
- Stop streaming, cancel subscriptions, no digital purchases
This is one of the few times that boosting stuff on social media and doing nothing else actually *can* make a difference. Boost posts tagged with #WeAintBuyingIt, #MassBlackout, and #BlackOutTheSystem. Make sure everyone you know knows about it. Hold each other accountable to keep from spending. You may already not be spending because.... well,.. Trump has already made everything too expensive. The thing is that elites can't actually tell the difference. Spreading word, making the protest seem as big and impactful as possible is all that's really needed to fracture elites and turn them against each other. Boost, write your own post, make these tags trend on every platform you can, then do nothing.
Don't buy things, (if you can) don't work. Just stop. Refuse to participate in capitalism. This is the ultimate "fuck you, make me" because they absolutely can't make you. This is the ultimate reminder of where power actually comes from.
I've been trying to remind everyone, every day. Please do the same. Keep this opportunity at the top of everyone's mind. Keep it in your mind.
Trump is more vulnerable now than he's ever been, and there is no time in the next year that we have more power than right now. This is one of the most important parts of the year for the US economy. What you do, or don't do, right now has more of an impact than any other time.
#USPol #BlackFriday #CyberMonday