Tootfinder

#ScribesAndMakers for July 3: When (and if) you procrastinate, what do you do? If you don't, what do you do to avoid it?
I'll swap right out of programming to read a book, play a video game, or watch some anime. Often got things open in other windows so it's as simple as alt-tab.
I've noticed recently I tend to do this more often when I have a hard problem to solve that I'm not 100% sure about. I definitely have cycles of better & worse motivation and I've gotten to a place where I'm pretty relaxed about it instead of feeling guilty. I work how I work, and that includes cycles of rest, and that's enough (at least, for me it has been so far, and I'm in a comfortable career, married with 2 kids).
Some projects ultimately lose steam and get abandoned, and I've learned to accept that too. I learn a lot and grow from each project, so nothing is a true waste of time, and there remains plenty of future ahead of me to achieve cool things.
The procrastination does sometimes impact my wife & kids, and that's something I do sometimes feel bad about, but I think I keep that in check well enough, and for things my wife worries about, I usually don't procrastinate those too much (used to be worse about this).
Right now I'm procrastinating a big work project by working on a hobby project instead. The work project probably won't get done by the start of the semester as a result. But as I remind myself, my work doesn't actually pay me to work during the summer, and things will be okay without the work project being finished until later.
When I want to force myself into a more productive cycle, talking to people about project details sometimes helps, as does finding some new tech I can learn about by shoehorning it into a project. Have been thinking about talking to a rubber duck, but haven't motivated myself to try that yet, and I'm not really in doldrums right now.

N.B.: I don’t know whether Wendy can play poker, but the one thing I KNOW about poker is that you NEVER play against someone who insists that they’re lousy. https://infosec.exchange/@wendynather/114955733770668316

Series D, Episode 02 - Power
PELLA: Can you walk?
AVON: Very likely. [stands up] But just at the moment I can't think of too many places to go.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/402/289 B7B6

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

I have taken to looking for Copilot AI in GitHub responses before filing issues. If it’s there, I don’t file. Feeling a bit validated here:
https://hails.org/@hailey/114752144098708214
(limited alt to come, but if you want more ask OP…)

Hailey (@hailey@hails.org)
Attached: 2 images Sent a pull request to Audacity fixing a crash bug I'd been running into frequently. The cause was an out-of-bounds memmove. Classic C++ areas. Anyway I got a fucking copilot review on my PR which left two comments, both completely wrong, one of which suggesting I reintroduce the out of bounds memory access. I'm furious!

Quenching of excitons at grain boundaries in C60 thin films
Rysa Greenwood, Bradley G. Guislain, MengXing Na, Alexandra B. Tully, Sergey Zhdanovich, Jerry Icban Dadap, Sydney K. Y. Dufresne, Vanessa King, Jiabin Yu, Giorgio Levy, Arthur K. Mills, Matteo Michiardi, Andrea Damascelli, Sarah A. Burke, David J. Jones
https://arxiv.o…

Quenching of excitons at grain boundaries in C60 thin films
Exciton lifetimes play a critical role in the performance of organic optoelectronic devices. In this work, we investigate how the presence of multiple rotational domains, and therefore grain boundaries, impacts exciton dynamics in thin films of C60/Au(111) using time and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (TR-ARPES). We find that films with multiple rotational domains exhibit shorter exciton lifetimes and evidence of exciton-exciton annihilation, even when one domain predominates. Scanni…

You cannot be a full EU citicen if you have not accepted the Google TOS. Instead of doing things our own, we still create new dependencies to us tech gigants. Don't believe? Look: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui/issues/10

Do not add Google Play Integrity integration · Issue #10 · eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui
In the README, the following is listed: App and device verification based on Google Play Integrity API and Apple App Attestation I would like to strongly urge to abandon this plan. Requiring a depe...

Digital and Robotic Twinning for Validation of Proximity Operations and Formation Flying
Aviad Golan, Gregory Zin, Zahra Ahmed, Emily Bates, Toby Bell, Pol Francesch Huc, Samuel Y. W. Low, Juergen Bosse, Simone D'Amico
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20034

Digital and Robotic Twinning for Validation of Proximity Operations and Formation Flying
In spacecraft Rendezvous, Proximity Operations (RPO), and Formation Flying (FF), the Guidance Navigation and Control (GNC) system is safety-critical and must meet strict performance requirements. However, validating such systems is challenging due to the complexity of the space environment, necessitating a verification and validation (V&V) process that bridges simulation and real-world behavior. The key contribution of this paper is a unified, end-to-end digital and robotic twinning framework t…

Series D, Episode 02 - Power
VILA: By the stress pattern.
PELLA: I don't see anything.
VILA: Not without this you won't. [Picks up an instrument]
PELLA: Oh, I see. And what does that tell you?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/402/134 B7B2

Memoirs of the CP/M creator released:
“Our father, Gary Kildall, was one of the founders of the personal computer industry, but you probably don’t know his name. Those who have heard of him may recall the myth that he ‘missed’ the opportunity to become Bill Gates by going flying instead of meeting with IBM. Unfortunately, this tall tale paints Gary as a ‘could-have-been,’ ignores his deep contributions, and overshadows his role as an inventor of key technologies that define how compute…

In His Own Words: Gary Kildall
Gary Kildall was a pioneer of personal computer software. He wrote programming language tools, including assemblers (Intel 4004), interpreters (BASIC), and compilers (PL/M). He created a widely-used disk operating system (CP/M). He and his wife, Dorothy McEwen, started a successful company called Digital Research to develop and market CP/M, which for years was the dominant operating system for personal microcomputers. Thousands of programs were written to run under it, and a million or more peo…

On many issues, Americans are deeply polarized.
War with Iran isn’t one of them.
An Economist/YouGov poll of U.S. adults taken in the days after Israel’s attack last Friday found that Democrats opposed entering the conflict by a margin of 50 points and Republicans opposed entering it by a margin of 30 points.
Given these numbers, you might think Democratic leaders would be doing everything they can to prevent President Trump from striking Iran without the approval of Cong…

Opinion | Schumer and Jeffries Need to Step Up and Challenge Trump on War Powers
Failing to aggressively defend Congress’s role in authorizing war would be a serious blunder for Democrats.