Tootfinder

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

"When we say monumental, you had better believe it; the 500 pages of this volume, laid out with astonishing detail (and a very small font size) summarize the history and evolution of computers from 1945 to 1990. Throughout these pages, Waldrop reveals that the backbone, the axis, the arrow, the orientation, the mastermind of all that history was none other than Lick himself: he was the incarnation of the phrase “being at the right place at the right time”."

What a beautiful game, I will surely play it again, I beat this game on real hardware in monochrome back in the day but this ROM hack is so good. The image bring me a lot of nostalgia :'). Kudos for the author \o/
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3784/

Sums along the edges of random regular graphs
Itai Benjamini, Georgii Zakharov, Maksim Zhukovskii
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01138 https://

Sums along the edges of random regular graphs
Let $G$ be a graph on $n$ vertices and $(H,+)$ be an abelian group. What is the minimum size ${\sf S}_H(G)$ of the set of all sums $A(u)+A(v)$ over all injections $A:V(G)\to H$? In 2012, Alon, Angel, the first author, and Lubetzky proved that, for expander graphs and $H=\mathbb{Z}$, this minimum is at least $Ω(\log n)$, and this bound is tight -- there exists a regular expander $G$ with ${\sf S}_{\mathbb{Z}}(G)=O(\log n)$. We prove that, for every constant $d\geq 3$, the random $d$-regular gra…

In an article entitled While the Media Chases Trump’s Distractions, Here’s the Story They’re Not Telling You,
Lev Parnas discloses that he hasn't slept in two days.
"I’ve been on the phone nonstop, speaking to sources across the globe" he said, noting that
"what the media isn’t reporting is even worse" than what journalists are currently disseminating.
They’re not asking the real question:
Why now?" he asked.
"They’re not ta…

Trump's former 'trusted operative' spills Iran story 'they're not telling you'
A man who was once Donald Trump's "trusted operative" spilled details he said you won't find on CNN or MSNBC.Author and former Trump insider Lev Parnas, who has reported on Trump's purported "humiliation" by Russia's Putin, on Sunday wrote about his take on Trump's military strike on Iran's soil.Par...

from my link log —
Thoughts on hashing in Rust.
https://purplesyringa.moe/blog/thoughts-on-rust-hashing/
saved 2024-12-13

Thoughts on Rust hashing
In languages like Python, Java, or C++, values are hashed by calling a “hash me” method on them, implemented by the type author. This fixed-hash size is then immediately used by the hash table or what have you. This design suffers from some obvious problems, like: How do you hash an integer? If you use a no-op hasher (booo), DoS attacks on hash tables are inevitable. If you hash it thoroughly, consumers that only cache hashes to optimize equality checks lose out of performance.

I am struggling with how to deal with very long articles on topics I'm interested about but at a different level than the author.
1. I'm acknowledging that "very long" is a "very" subjective matter. I'd say that for me that's usually what goes beyond 5min read time.
2. I'm also acknowledging that it's quite impossible to find the perfect match of the level of details provided by an article and the level of detail I'm interested.
1. If I save the article for later, I know I won't read it.
2. Many times listening to the article (using ElevenReader) provides a solution.
3. I am starting to use AI summarization more often. Not Safari's which is useless.
I don't feel quite right about this last approach.

Truth here.
#Readers, if an author has ever made you feel like this, let them know. That kind of message is what keeps us going.

Back in 2018-19, the movie #Burning was a critical hit — for some reason. It was a #Korean psychological thriller #movie that reached breakthrough status in the west, and that implies it was better than most Korea…