Tootfinder

For any of my comrades who are using SNAP, I wish I had something better to say than "if you crush 4 buckeyes with a hammer and tie the pulp in a sock you can wash a good sized load of laundry." English Ivy also has saponins, but I've never been able to make soap from it myself.
Ivy is everywhere. Buckeyes (Horse Chestnuts) are common in city parks (there are a ton in Seattle).
Yucca is also a good source of saponins, but it also has silica. That makes it a good scrubby soap. You can find these plants all over they're pretty common to find in yards.
If you can find acorns still (it's a bit late, but who knows), acorn grits are great and something you can survive on for a bit. Acorns need processing (it's easy to look up, but feel free to ask or check out one or Black Forager's videos on it).
If you've been following me for a bit, you probably already know all this. But if you don't, I hope it helps.
Any other forager folks are welcome to drop hints here that might be useful to folks in the city.
#Foraging

Sonnet 121 - CXXI
'Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed,
When not to be receives reproach of being;
And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed
Not by our feeling, but by others' seeing:
For why should others' false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses re…

got home in the dark last night and left in the dark this morning but there has been #poolpond progress in my absence!
The fence builders started!
They augered post holes. They managed to not cut any pipes or wires in the frontyard pond... the holes are BIG.
Glad the fence is happening though. The rains have come with a vengeance and the ponds are filling fast! I wil feel much better knowing no one can get into the yard and be in danger of falling in.
#building #portalberni #diy #gardening

I don't think I'm ever going to enjoy gifts.
I can get why people would give them to children. After all, children don't have their own budget. However, I'm talking about occasional gifts, not a new toy every second week, because "we must outcompete the other grandparents". But to adults?
Once I've heard that you should gift people with what they won't buy themselves. Well, that's won't work for me. I'm a minimalist. If I don't need something, I don't want to have it. Unnecessary junk is only emotional burden to me.
I can get why you'd enjoy something handmade. But something people bought? If I need something, I can buy it myself, when I need it. And I definitely don't need people to prove to me that they never cared to learn who I am, and just buy whatever they like or whatever is "fashionable"; which usually means exactly the opposite of what I'd prefer (i.e. something minimalistic). Or even worse, I don't need people manipulating me through gifts.
Sweets? Besides my diabetes, I don't really enjoy expensive shit that people generally buy because it's what's advertised. For the money they waste on it, I'd buy three times as much sweets I'd actually enjoy.
Gift cards? Oh yes, "you aren't supposed to give money, so let's just give the equivalent of money that's actually worth less than money". Actual money? And here we reach the true nonsense; we exchange the same amount of money, so it's just pointless gesture. Unless one of us gives less money…
What I'd really like, as a gift? Maybe that people would finally bother accepting me as who I am. The absolute minimum of caring that I hate consumerism, and not fueling it "for me".
#AntiCapitalism #minimalism #ActuallyAutistic

Gemini co-lead Oriol Vinyals says Gemini 3's gains come from better pre-training and post-training, contradicting the idea that pre-training gains are falling (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-unseats-anthropic-…

Google Unseats Anthropic With Gemini 3
Before we get to Gemini 3, we want to highlight this morning’s news that former Harvard University President Larry Summers has resigned from OpenAI’s board of directors following a congressional committee’s release of emails showing a personal correspondence between him and convicted sex ...

Writing unit tests for my random number generation library continues to be difficult. My tests are failing because the bias in the distribution exceeds my expectations, but I'm wondering whether I should just repeat the test more times and permit it to exceed expectations some of the time (as long as it does it symmetrically/rarely/etc. My gut tells me that second-order expectations aren't any better than first-order expectations, but another part of me disagrees.
Thinking more as I write this (writing is thinking): second-order tests can at least give me better info to work with towards fixing things I think! So maybe I'll invest in them.
#coding

This applies to all of us #Researchers - why do we keep flying all around the world just to give (or watch) some talks that could have been given or watched online???
Yes, in-person conferences are slightly better for "networking"... but is this really worth destroying the planet?!
Quoting @…

Memory lane.
Many of my generation remember that feeling. When you had to go to school all day, only to come home, open MSN to talk to your friends, use a buzzer to get their attention, open your mailbox to find out there was no email, and share that computer with your whole family. Or when you got your first mobile phone—most likely a Nokia 3310—which you might still have after 20 years, with one block of battery remaining. Remember when you had to ask for directions to a street you’d…