Tootfinder

Little pic from the Green Fair today!
(renamed from Green Fest to acknowledge the lack of the political stalls, see up-thread)
I was glad I went. Had a few good little chats with people I didn't know. Left at the right time too, before the rain got going :-)
#Nottingham #GreenFest

"""
But there is no certainty that madness was content to sit locked up in its immutable identity, waiting for psychiatry to perfect its art, before it emerged blinking from the shadows into the blinding light of truth. Nor is it clear that confinement was above all, or even implicitly, a series of measures put in place to deal with madness. It is not even certain that in this repetition of the ancient gesture of segregation at the threshold of the classical age, the modern world was aiming to wipe out all those who, either as a species apart or a spontaneous mutation, appeared as 'asocial'. The fact that the internees of the eighteenth century bear a resemblance to our modern vision of the asocial is undeniable, but it is above all a question of results, as the character of the marginal was produced by the gesture of segregation itself. For the day came when this man, banished in the same exile all over Europe in the mid-seventeenth century, suddenly became an outsider, expelled by a society to whose norms he could not be seen to conform; and for our own intellectual comfort, he then became a candidate for prisons, asylums and punishment. In reality, this character is merely the result of superimposed grids of exclusion.
The gesture that proscribed was as abrupt as the one that had isolated the lepers, and in both cases, the meaning of the gesture should not be mistaken for its effect. Lepers were not excluded to prevent contagion, any more than in 1657, 1 per cent of the population of Paris was confined merely to deliver the city from the 'asocial'. The gesture had a different dimension: it did not isolate strangers who had previously remained invisible, who until then had been ignored by force of habit. It altered the familiar cityscape by giving them new faces, strange, bizarre silhouettes that nobody recognised. Strangers were found in places where their presence had never previously been suspected: the process punctured the fabric of society, and undid the familiar. Through this gesture, something inside man was placed outside of himself, and pushed over the edge of our horizon. It is the gesture of confinement, in short, which created alienation.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Act now! Federal tax credits for energy-efficient home upgrades are disappearing by 2025. Make the switch to induction stoves and heat pumps to save money and reduce waste. #climatechange #climatesolutions

Federal tax credits for home appliance upgrades are disappearing — here's how to take advantage before they're gone for good
Realtor.com issued a reminder to homeowners that savings for energy-efficient appliances are available until the end of 2025.

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

The Market Effects of Algorithms
Lindsey Raymond
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09513 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09513

The Market Effects of Algorithms
While there is excitement about the potential for algorithms to optimize individual decision-making, changes in individual behavior will, almost inevitably, impact markets. Yet little is known about such effects. In this paper, I study how the availability of algorithmic prediction changes entry, allocation, and prices in the US single-family housing market, a key driver of household wealth. I identify a market-level natural experiment that generates variation in the cost of using algorithms to…

What began as a silent infiltration into one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency mining pools has now been confirmed as
the biggest crypto theft in history.
The LuBian mining pool, once a dominant force in the Bitcoin network, quietly lost over 127,000 Bitcoins in 2020.
The breach was only uncovered in 2025 by Arkham Intelligence, revealing a staggering $14.5 billion worth of stolen assets that had remained untouched and undetected for half a decade

The biggest heist of all time involved over $14 billion of crypto being stolen - and it went undetected for five years
Five years of silence before exposure

As I'm learning Dutch, I'm reminded that the idea that there are people who believe that the bible is to be taken literally. The idea that a several hundred year old translation of a collection of texts in multiple languages, that were themselves translated multiple times between languages, before the whole thing was translated to Latin, then being translated to English, could somehow perfectly reflect the original text... Yeah, it's only possible to believe that if you have no idea how languages work and have never learned another language.
Like, just from linguistic drift alone if the bible were written in King James English you're losing *so* much context. But Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek translated to Latin, then to English, then to English again?
There are so many things that erg can't be translated, even as a beginner. Dutch and English are two of the closest languages that exist, they're both Germanic languages and they're the closest to each other (other than Friesian). You can't really be much closer, and yet, there are so many things you can't mutually represent. Hebrew and Latin, Aramaic and Latin, Latin and English, Greek and English, these aren't even the same families at all... They're extremely distant. There's absolutely no way to represent concepts from one to another without another book's worth of explanation.
And that ignores all the cultural context, which is mostly lost and a library and decade of education to get the stuff that we *do* know.
Only monolingual Americans could come up with an idea so incredibly asinine.

Your periodic reminder
(like, every time he opens his mouth):
Matthew Whitaker's primary claim to fame
before getting senior Trump admin. posts
was that he worked for a company shut down for fraud by the FTC marketing special toilets for men.
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/p

How popular media gets love wrong
Okay, my attempt at (hopefully widely-applicable) advice about relationships based on my mental "engineering" model and how it differs from the popular "fire" and "appeal" models:
1. If you're looking for a partner, don't focus too much on external qualities, but instead ask: "Do they respect me?" "Are they interested in active consent in all aspects of our relationship?" "Are they willing to commit a little now, and open to respectfully negotiating deeper commitment?" "Are they trustworthy, and willing to trust me?" Finding your partner attractive can come *from* trusting/appreciating/respecting them, rather than vice versa.
2. If you're looking for a partner, don't wait for infatuation to start before you try building a relationship. Don't wait to "fall in love;" if you "fall" into love you could just as easily "fall" out, but if you build up love, it won't be so easy to destroy. If you're feeling lonely and want a relationship, pick someone who seems interesting and receptive in your social circles and ask if they'd like to do something with you (doesn't have to be a date at first). *Pursue active consent* at each stage (if they're not interested; ask someone else, this will be easier if you're not already infatuated). If they're judging you by the standards in point 1, this is doubly important.
3. When building a relationship, try to synchronize your levels of commitment & trust even as you're trying to deepen them, or at least try to be honest and accepting when they need to be out-of-step. Say things and do things that show your partner the things (like trust, commitment, affection, etc.) that are important in your relationship, and ask them to do the same (or ideally you don't have to ask if they're conscious of this too). Do these things not as a chore or a transaction when your partner does them, but because they're the work of building the relationship that you value for its own sake (and because you value your partner for themselves too).
4. When facing big external challenges to your commitment to a relationship, like a move, ensure that your partner has an appropriate level of commitment too, but then don't undervalue the relationship relative to other things in life. Everyone is different, but *to me*, my committed relationship has been far more rewarding than e.g., a more "successful" career would have been. Of course worth noting here that non-men are taught by our society to undervalue their careers & other aspects of their life and sacrifice everything for their partners, which is toxic. I'm not saying "don't value other things" but especially for men, *do* value romantic relationships and be prepared to make decisions that prioritize them over other things, assuming a partner who is comfortable with that commitment and willing to reciprocate.
Okay, this thread is complete for now, until I think of something else that I've missed. I hope this advice is helpful in some way (or at least not harmful). Feel free to chime in if you've got different ideas...
#relationships #love

As of September 2025, the domains gup.pe and immers.space
seem to have expired
and a.gup.pe has been replaced with a WordPress installation full of SEO-targeted content about Mastodon.
Is this the end of Guppe Groups as a service?
If so, I would like to remind you that there are still monthly and annual financial donors to the service via Guppe Groups on OpenCollective.
...
upstream registry sold it off before it expired. My registrar said I had till 9/15…

Guppe is dead? · Issue #118 · immers-space/guppe
Hey @wmurphyrd 👋 I notice as of September 2025, the domains gup.pe and immers.space seem to have expired and a.gup.pe has been replaced with a WordPress installation full of SEO-targeted content ab...