Tootfinder

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.

🧲 We tested if a specialized magnetic powder could remove microplastics from drinking water: The answer is yes
https://theconversation.com/we-tested-if-a-specialised-magnetic-powder-could-remove-mi…

We tested if a specialised magnetic powder could remove microplastics from drinking water: the answer is yes
Researchers developed a new method to remove microplastics from water.

Addiction (Speculatve)
Kind of a fucked-up metaphor, but I was thinking yesterday that parenting is a lot like addiction. If you separate me from my child, I'll take completely irrational and desperate actions to get them back, driven by a deep instinct that goes well beyond "love." I'll also make self-disadvantageous long-term decisions like forgoing sleep, working an extra job, or quitting a job to do some combination of providing for and/or being present with my child.
Even in parenting situations where love is absent, and beyond, I think, the possessiveness that sometimes festers in those situations, there's often (although not always) a craving for simple presence of the child.
In a healthy relationship, there's a whole lot more than this, but it's interesting to me that the same obsessive craving and absolute priority that we think of as diseased and/or monstrous in someone addicted to a hard drug can be healthy in the right context (that is, when it doesn't contribute to abusive or twisted parental relationships but instead exists alongside a healthy amount of love and respect).
Makes me wonder if there are ways to have a truly healthy drug addiction, although I recognize the answer might well be "no" and that even if it's "technically/theoretically yes" it might still be harmful to hype up or even merely discuss that possibility since it might help addicted people in harmful addictions more easily justify inaction. At minimum I think any "yes" answer here involves assuming utopian-level differences from our current society.
#Parenting #Addiction

Which is easier:
Reversing DRAM init binaries or setting up MFA with O365?
(I am forced to, thank you HostEurope...)
Can't access my damn email now, great, -(2**31)/10, cannot recommend.
Yes, the answer is the former. 😱

A new take on district heating and #flexibility: can dynamic pricing help reduce overall heating costs? The short answer is yes, and automatic controllers would reinforce this effect. Peak heat demand, sometimes also from fossil sources, can thus be reduced.

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Which is easier:
Reversing DRAM init binaries or setting up MFA with O365?
(I am forced to, thank you HostEurope...)
Can't access my damn email now, great, -(2**31)/10, cannot recommend.
Yes, the answer is the former. 😱

AI Agents for Photonic Integrated Circuit Design Automation
Ankita Sharma, YuQi Fu, Vahid Ansari, Rishabh Iyer, Fiona Kuang, Kashish Mistry, Raisa Islam Aishy, Sara Ahmad, Joaquin Matres, Dirk R. Englund, Joyce K. S. Poon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14123

AI Agents for Photonic Integrated Circuit Design Automation
We present Photonics Intelligent Design and Optimization (PhIDO), a multi-agent framework that converts natural-language photonic integrated circuit (PIC) design requests into layout mask files. We compare 7 reasoning large language models for PhIDO using a testbench of 102 design descriptions that ranged from single devices to 112-component PICs. The success rate for single-device designs was up to 91%. For design queries with less than or equal to 15 components, o1, Gemini-2.5-pro, and Claude…