Tootfinder

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
Placebo:
🎵 Every You Every Me
#Placebo
https://xelimarecords.bandcamp.com/track/placebo-every-you-every-me-laekis-remix
https://open.spotify.com/track/2Srd8Jgif3kc6ou6Z4pSYJ

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

Every iPad Apple ever made, drawn to scale and shown in every colour.
#apple

Maxx Crosby’s warning to Fernando Mendoza every Raiders fan should hear https://raiderramble.com/2026/07/08/maxx-crosbys-warning-to-fernando-mendoza-every-raiders-fan-should-hear/

Sources: DeepSeek seeks to raise ~$7.3B in its first-ever funding round at a $50B valuation, with CEO Liang Wenfeng making a personal investment of ~$2.9B (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/deepseek-raise-7-billion-startu…

DeepSeek To Raise More than $7 Billion as Startup Plots Revenue Efforts
Liang Wenfeng, billionaire founder and CEO of DeepSeek, is planning to write the biggest check for the startup’s first-ever funding round, which the company now hopes will raise up to 50 billion yuan ($7.35 billion), according to two people with direct knowledge of the talks. That would make it ...

Watching all the posts go by on my social media feeds, it’s easy to lose myself in the flood-river. What to do?
For more than a year now I’ve been re-imagining and re-writing some of the posts I encounter — it’s a form of play that reclaims my attention and sense of self.
https://salrandolph.substack.c…

Every Sound I Can Now Hear - writing back to the social media feed
In which I re-imagine and re-write posts from Blue Sky and other social media.

The final movement of Beethoven’s piano sonata No. 32 – his very last – is one of the most beautiful and divine pieces of music ever written. Just incredible. And @…’s interpretation is simply beyond anything you’ll ever hear. 🖤

Ever wonder why wearing masks is so common in #Japan every spring? A post-WWII reforestation policy to plant just two types of fast-growing trees has triggered a mass-allergy crisis. My latest for @bbc looks at the roots of this 70-year-old blunder and the massive challenge of fixing it.

Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame
A decision made 70 years ago to reforest vast swathes of Japan with just two kinds of tree has come back to haunt the country.

Now, I have a lot of reasons to hate vibe coding, but one of them is that I just think more easily in code. I reason by writing the code. It's not something I can easily disentangle.
Architectures tend to live in my head as pictures that change as I write. The words are code. There's no intermediate. So the offer of being able to skip the poc phase is just not interesting. "Oh, cool, I can skip the part where I preemptively identify problems? Great. That's gonna work out well." Vibe coding can give you working proof of concepts that self destruct when you try to grow them (much like any poc code you just try to use without actually engineering).
I don't know that this problem will ever get fixed. Even if it does, I don't know that this fix will ever rival human engineering. I don't think it's actually possible to know that yet, there are too many factors at play. It's definitely lowered the bar for writing proof of concepts. Now a business idiot can make a proof of concept, which even further distorts their understanding of what engineering actually looks like.
In order to go back to work, I'm basically expected to be ramped up on LLM stuff. But it all keeps reminding me of the feeling of powerlessness when we organized against Trump, when we organized against the rally at UW, when I tried to stop someone from pepperspraying people and I got shot. It's all the same ideology of rapists and pedophiles forcing their entire world on us against our will, thinking they can dangle "the Epstein files" in front of everyone and then yank them away like nothing ever happened... Like no one knows they implicate the entire power structure.

I have some sketches of an essay that I need to write, but I think it's worth brain-dumping a bit more in the mean time.
#LLMs are an attempt to make tech grow forever. But like, how many "your mom/a friend, but done by a precarious worker instead" apps do we really need? Everything right now is in the AI grift hole, but there's almost nothing of interest (even if you ignore the ethical concerns). Like, no, I don't fucking want a robot to lie to me about my groceries. That doesn't sound like a useful feature. There's a lot of useless shit being pumped out to prop up the bottom line, and a lot of people just want to be able to use their old phone for more than a couple of years.
No one is happy with this. No one wants this. Except the billionaires who are forcing us all to drink the capitalism koolaid, because they'd rather exterminate life on earth than live in a world where they experience consequences.
Nothing grows forever. That's not how literally anything in reality works, or has ever worked, at all in history. Some people think that the universe itself may work like that, but that's only an educated guess. Finite things don't grow forever. Every organism, every society, every technology, every dynamic and adaptive system we have ever known goes through a growth phase and then goes in to a stabilization phase. Or, following a Malthusian pattern, grows until it reaches a catastrophic point and collapses. Like lemmings. Or reindeer. Or cancer.