Tootfinder

It holds maybe 2% of our books 🫣
https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/115708869159516459

Clay Bennett cartoon: Why ice agents wear masks
https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2026/jan/12/the-masks/

A useful tidbit that stood out to me in this article:
“Noem [by lying] is training and testing the MAGA base”
Huh − “training and testing”
There’s a dance here: the regime is training its supports in how to think about and talk about current circumstances — but also testing the waters, seeing what sticks, what they’re willing to believe. Recognizing this as a bidirectional dance seems useful. Framing it as “training” instead of “telling” seems useful. Recognizing it as “testing” seems useful.
https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p/ice-noem-dangerous-playbook

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116064770547880143
today, 25 years later, you can put a thing in your pocket that needs Wi-Fi or 5G to access your entire music collection that's stored in a datacenter the size of several city blocks and you must pay rent to your cell phone provider and to your music datacenter landlord to access it!
now that's called progress!

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116063916168328402
It should also be noted that LLMs do not write code.
They assemble code from bits and pieces of a tokenized text corpus based on how they are statistically interrelated.
LLMs do not think, anticipate, cognize, abstract or have any theory of mind; they do not currently and will not ever have this ability.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/115883445350346364
I think the technology could be used responsibly for narrow use cases (e.g. writing code is a narrow use case), with the very important caveat that the training data needs to be properly licensed and authors properly compensated (unless they licensed stuff free for commercial use); as well as companies offering it being transparent and honest about what LLMs actually do.
Anyway, even if that’s the case (and that’s a big if and certainly not the case today) I have serious doubts concerning the long-term financial sustainability of companies like idk Anthropic.

Unpopular opinion, but Star Wars is mid and not worth giving these creeps money for.
https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/115701913433617021

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116052642108873770
“…what we’re witnessing is the express repetition of a project on the scale of the larger concentration camp systems in history—the Soviet Gulag, the Nazi concentration camps, and Chinese labor camps in the People’s Republic of China. The administration is actively aspiring to a system of that magnitude to reshape society to its racial, political and cultural preferences for generations to come.
This is not just a fantasy. It is something for which the administration has acquired the funding and a path forward. It lacks only the personnel and enough detention spaces.”