Tootfinder

I've finally finished pushing the latest update for #Gentoo Distribution Kernels, and requested their stabilization. This includes upstream releases 7.0.9, 6.18.32, 6.12.90 and 6.6.140; and Gentoo patch bumps 6.1.173_p1, 5.15.207_p1 and 5.10.256_p1.
All of these contain the v5 #Fragnesia patch. And yes, while the exploit is in the wild, upstream still hasn't merged a fix to the mainline kernel, let alone all the LTS branches. Of course, the patch keeps covering more holes, but it would really be preferable to do that as a followup instead of leaving people vulnerable and forcing us to keep rebasing it.
They also include a few reverts in 6.18 and 6.6 for broken PowerPC backports that upstream didn't apparently test. 🤷
We're doing our best, but I'd still recommend running the latest 7.0.x kernel, or LTS 6.18.x, because upstream is far from reliable with the backports.
#Linux

Pramaana Labs, which uses the LEAN programming language to build a deterministic verification layer on top of LLMs, raised a $27M seed led by Khosla Ventures (Russell Brandom/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/pram

Pramaana Labs raises $27M seed round from Khosla Ventures to bring formal verification to AI | TechCrunch
Pramaana will focus on highly sensitive verticals like law, drug discovery, and tax preparation — where errors can be costly and reliability is at a premium.

With every company announcement event, I get even more nervous because #enshittification is a strong trend these days. 🫣
It's a really good announcement when there's actually not too much news.
Upcoming anxiety: #Google actively killing the healthy ecosystem of

Progress! I found that FIREFLY, one of my other lab machines, had the same issue but less severe.
I pulled and reseated the NIC, moved to another slot, cleaned the contacts with IPA, no luck.
But using setpci commands to forcibly downgrade it to gen3 x16 instead of gen4 fixed it. So it seems like due to some combination of card/CPU aging, dirt, loss, or damage somewhere in the system it can't reliably maintain a link at gen4 speeds but works fine at gen3 (and is able to comfo…

Spatial transcriptomics on an expanded dataset at the brain-electrode interface: exploration of variability and identification of novel biomarkers https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2026.1852774/full "…

Frontiers | Spatial transcriptomics on an expanded dataset at the brain-electrode interface: exploration of variability and identification of novel biomarkers
The foreign body reaction to implanted electrodes in the brain has long been recognized as a major challenge impacting the performance and reliability of ind...

🚯 Junkyard Computing: Repurposing Discarded Smartphones to Minimize Carbon
#computing

Junkyard Computing: Repurposing Discarded Smartphones to Minimize Carbon
1.5 billion smartphones are sold annually, and most are decommissioned less than two years later. Most of these unwanted smartphones are neither discarded nor recycled but languish in junk drawers and storage units. This computational stockpile represents a substantial wasted potential: modern smartphones have increasingly high-performance and energy-efficient processors, extensive networking capabilities, and a reliable built-in power supply. This project studies the ability to reuse smartphon…

from my link log —
What the Code of Hammurabi can teach us about software liability.
https://danielmiessler.com/blog/what-the-code-of-hammurabi-can-teach-us-about-hardware-and-software-liability/
saved 2019…

What The Code of Hammurabi Can Teach Us About Hardware and Software Liability
The Information Security community has been debating software reliability for decades. Some say software is too advanced to place guarantees on it. And others s

I spent some more time working on Retort, ran a lot of experiments and tuned the output evaluator to measure what I think is important. Did the LLM implement the full spec? Is there good test coverage and working tests? How long did it take, and how much did it cost? Easy to run your own experiments, and test on your own code, with statistical (ANOVA) modeling of the results.

How reliable, fast and expensive is each version of Claude Code (Sonnet through Opus 4.8-fast)
Every few weeks a new frontier model tops the leaderboards, and the implicit advice is “upgrade.” Sites like llm-stats.com rank models well…

Well that sucks for those in Gatineau. For me I cannot use any of those locations as we are required to be at our office location. I hope they keep the others open for everyone else as on too many days the transit system is less than reliable, there is NOT enough space for parking (at least where I work) and there is NOT enough cubicles for all of us.
Sadly, I have a rolling office in a bag just-in-case I bring in every day. If I don't get a cubicle I have all of the basics to …

Synergistic entrainment: a multiscale neurodynamic framework for closed-loop cross-modal neuromodulation https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11571-026-10503-6 Similarly, opt for timed hybrid use of brain implant and sensory substitution?

Synergistic entrainment: a multiscale neurodynamic framework for closed-loop cross-modal neuromodulation - Cognitive Neurodynamics
The brain’s higher cognitive functions rely on the dynamic integration of multimodal information, supported by coordinated neural oscillations. However, current neuromodulation approaches often fail to reliably control these dynamics due to high inter-individual variability and limited mechanistic grounding. To address this challenge, we introduce the Synergistic Entrainment Framework, which conceptualizes the brain as a dynamical system in which neural oscillations create periodic windows of…