Tootfinder

Low-Power Control of Resistance Switching Transitions in First-Order Memristors
Valeriy A. Slipko, Alon Ascoli, Fernando Corinto, Yuriy V. Pershin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15620

Low-Power Control of Resistance Switching Transitions in First-Order Memristors
In many cases, the behavior of physical memristive devices can be relatively well captured by using a single internal state variable. This study investigates the low-power control of first-order memristive devices to derive the most energy-efficient protocols for programming their resistances. A unique yet general approach to optimizing the switching transitions in devices of this kind is introduced. For pedagogical purposes, without loss of generality, the proposed control paradigm is applied …

I saw the price for a half a hog at the farmers market and I'm kind of curious how much processing would cost.

Series C, Episode 10 - Ultraworld
TARRANT: So you know our names. What about you?
ULTRA 1: We are the Ultra.
TARRANT: So you said.
ULTRA 1: Our sole function and purpose is to gather and accumulate information.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/310/162 B7B2

Mutter, Kind verletzt - Familie drohte mit Auto abzustürzen: Stau-Chaos! #News #Nachrichten

An old friend's research is in the news. It's the kind of environmental science which is terrible and horrible to think about, but I'm glad someone is doing it.
Collecting those statistics on cetacean strandings is key if you want to know why it happens.
🌊🧪🦈🐟🐋🐳
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgkr84d02ego

‘Unlike any other kind of fear’: wildfires leave their mark across Spain #Spain

#ENISA #Publication May 2025
Handbook for Cyber Stress Tests
site:
https://enisa.eur…

A map of #Fediverse shows every instance and the connections to all the other instances it’s connected to, as a snapshot or live-action. Non-federated instances might or might be shown, depends what you’re looking for and how you’re looking. A wire-frame map could show different skins maybe, to suit the purpose. Kind of like a wire-frame diagram of a brain’s network of synapses and shit.

How terrible would it be to organise a hackathon where you speedrun your best-worst programming idea until it gets to the point where you hate it?
I kind of want to do this. https://mastodon.functional.computer/@samir/114716755497591537

Collective action gets the goods, yet again.
It seems that the government didn't think Section 107 would hold up in court (at least not with this strike), and the Air Canada employees effectively called their bluff. This is exactly the kind of stand that needs to be taken to keep labor rights from being rolled further and further back.
(Also, I didn't realize just how tightly connected the government is with Air Canada)

Strike 'Ends Unpaid Work' As Union Reaches Deal With Air Canada – The Rover
Low wages and unpaid labour led to flight attendants using food banks, sleeping in cars.

Whatever’s going on in the employment market, it feels like there’s some kind of fever that needs to break — as bubbles bursting, as a recession, •something• — and it’s only after it does that in hindsight we’ll have some measure of clarity.

Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Edit: fixed some typos.
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and thus more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of management caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.

Musing again about some kind of lightweight vector graphics format as an intermediate between (a subset of) SVG and ImDrawList. Probably YAML based since we already have yaml-cpp as a dependency.

I have a herring gull with a broken leg sheltering in my rear garden. It's found a soft place in the shade to rest and has the bad leg stretched out behind it (perhaps like a kind of natural splint?). I gave it a good feed and there's water, so I hope it will recover.

My favorite kind of #git bisect is when the breaking commit is somewhere near the middle, so you keep getting both "good" and "bad" commits, and don't have to start worrying that you've messed up.
Well, unless it turns out your reproducer is bad, and it doesn't always reproduce the failure…

Brilliant!

This house we've rented for like 10 years now is so strange. In form AND function. It's like this odd, moving creative space that kind of becomes whatever as it needs to be. Some days it feels truly bizarre, but I like it. On my better days, I really like it.

Mutter, Kutter, Kind
https://www.ardmediathek.de/film/mutter-kutter-kind-oder-tv-drama/Y3JpZDovL2Rhc2Vyc3RlLmRlL211dHRlci1rdXR0ZXIta2luZA(89min)
Leuke film.
Begon om 20:30, maar is g…

Series B, Episode 13 - Star One
DURKIM: Why would I want to do that?
SERVALAN: 'Why' is always the most difficult question. At the moment I am more concerned with 'how'.
DURKIM: Is she involved?
SERVALAN: You know her?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/213/116 B…

@… hey, great Jeopardy show! Is there any documentation on what kind of hardware and software you were using for it?

I love that particular kind of keen student who insists on reproducing historical typography. It always breaks my heart a little to have to tell them that, even when directly quoting, we write "business" these days instead of "buſineſs."

Einstein manifolds under cone conditions for the curvature operator of the second kind
Haiqing Cheng, Kui Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11226 https://arx…

Einstein manifolds under cone conditions for the curvature operator of the second kind
It is established in [6, 14, 23] that any closed Einstein manifold with two-nonnegative curvature operator of the second kind is either flat or a round sphere. In this paper, we refine this result by relaxing the curvature condition to a cone condition (strictly weaker than two nonnegativity) proposed by Li [18]. Precisely, we prove that any closed Einstein manifold of dimension $n=4$ or $n=5$ or $n\ge 8$, if the curvature operator of the second kind $\mathring{R}$ satisfies \begin{align*} (�…

Google Search AI is trying to cheer me up by making up the most silly summaries.
It is kind of working.

Trump und von der Leyen zur Notlage von Kindern
US-Präsident Donald Trump und EU-Kommissionspräsidentin Ursula von der Leyen haben über das Schicksal der im Ukraine-Krieg verschleppten Kinder gesprochen. Jedes einzelne von Russland entführte ukrainische Kind müsse zu seiner Familie zurückkehren, schrieb von der Leyen auf dem Kurznachrichtendienst X nach einem Treffen mit Trump in Washington.
Der US-Präsident sprach auf seine…
📑

Ukraine-Liveblog: ++ Rutte nennt Gipfel "sehr erfolgreich" ++
NATO-Generalsekretär Rutte hat den Gipfel in Washington als sehr erfolgreich bezeichnet. Laut Finnlands Präsident Stubb sind Sicherheitsgarantien für die Ukraine binnen einer Woche möglich.

The year is 2027.
Google: "Should we remove HTML from the web platform?
You know it's kind of old and we have barely any resources to keep it running, and there's chatbots anyway."
People: "What?!"
Google: "Well, clearly you don't have anything to say." [deletes code]

There’s a specific kind of cognitive dissonance that comes from watching a woman of color who seemed to have been intellectually reared in progressive circles endear herself to this iteration of the Republican Party
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/20

The One Thing You Need to Know to Understand Usha Vance
Usha Vance isn’t a mystery.

Krugman outlines a constellation of possible causes around a core theme: extreme uncertainty.
“What does a business do in the face of this kind of uncertainty? It tries to avoid making commitments that it may soon regret.”
Krugman tries to tie it all to Trump’s recent actions, which is dubious: the post-college job market has been crap since 2022 or 2023; Krugman’s own graph suggests it started worsening circa 2018. The larger theme of uncertainty, however, fits that timeframe.

Epstein shit and adjacent, Rural America, Poverty, Abuse
Everyone who's not a pedophile thinks pedophiles are bad, but there's this special obsessed hatred you'll find among poor rural Americans. The whole QAnon/Epstein obsession may not really make sense to folks raised in cities. Like, why do these people think *so much* about pedophiles? Why do they think that everyone in power is a pedophile? Why would the Pizzagate thing make sense to anyone? What is this unhinged shit? A lot of folks (who aren't anarchists) might be inclined to ask "why can't these people just let the cops take care of it?"
I was watching Legal Eagle's run down on the Trump Epstein thing earlier today and I woke up thinking about something I don't know if I've ever talked about. Now that I'm not in the US, I'm not at any risk of talking about it. I don't know how much I would have been before, but that's not something I'm gonna dig into right now. So let me tell you a story that might explain a few things.
I'm like 16, maybe 17. I have my license, so this girl I was dating/not dating/just friends with/whatever would regularly convince me to drive her and her friends around. I think she's like 15 at the time. Her friends are younger than her.
She tells me that there's a party we can go to where they have beer. She was told to invite her friends, so I can come too. We're going to pick her friends up (we regularly fill the VW Golf well beyond the legal limit and drive places) and head to the party.
So I take these girls, at least is 13 years old, down to this party. I'm already a bit sketched out bringing a 13 year old to a party. We drive out for a while. It's in the country. We drive down a long dark road. Three are some barrel fires and a shack. This is all a bit strange, but not too abnormal for this area. We're a little ways outside of a place called Mill City (in Oregon).
We park and walk towards the shack. This dude who looks like a rat comes up and offers us beer. He laughs and talks to the girl who invited me, "What's he doing here? You're supposed to bring your girl friends." She's like, "He's our ride." I don't remember if he offered me a beer or not.
We go over to this shed and everyone starts smoking, except me because I didn't smoke until I turned 18. The other girls start talking about the rat face dude, who's wandered over by the fire with some other guys. They're mainly teasing one of the 13 year old girls about having sex with him a bunch of times. They say he's like, 32 or something. The other girls joke about him only having sex with 13 year olds because he's too ugly to have sex with anyone closer to his own age.
Somewhere along the line it comes out that he's a cop. I never forgot that, it's absolutely seared in to my memory. I can picture his face perfectly still, decades later, and them talking about how he's a deputy, he was in his 30's, and he was having sex with a 13 year old girl. I was the only boy there, but there were a few older men. This was a chunk of the good ol' boys club of the town. I think there were a couple of cops besides the one deputy, and a judge or the mayor or some kind of big local VIP.
I kept trying to get my friend to leave, but she wanted to stay. Turns out under age drinking with cops seems like a great deal if you're a kid because you know you won't get busted. I left alone, creeped the fuck out.
I was told later that I wasn't invited and that I couldn't talk about it, I've always been good at compartmentalization, so I never did.
Decades later it occurred to me what was actually happening. I'm pretty sure that cop was giving meth he'd seized as evidence to these kids. This wasn't some one-off thing. It was regular. Who knows how many decades it went on after I left, or how many decades it had been going on before I found out. I knew this type of thing had happened at least a few times before because that's how that 13 year old girl and that 32 year old cop had hooked up in the first place.
Hearing about Epstein's MO, targeting these teenage girls from fucked up backgrounds, it's right there for me. I wouldn't be surprised if they were involved in sex trafficking of minors or some shit like that... but who would you call if you found out? Half the sheriff's department was there and the other half would cover for them.
You live in the city and shit like that doesn't happen, or at least you don't think it happens. But rural poor folks have this intuition about power and abuse. It's right there and you know it.
Trump is such a familiar character for me, because he's exactly that small town mayor or sheriff. He'll will talk about being tough on crime and hunting down pedophiles, while hanging out at a party that exists so people can fuck 8th graders.
The problem with the whole thing is that rural folks will never break the cognitive dissonance between "kill the peods" and "back the blue." They'll never go kill those cops. No, the pedos must be somewhere else. It must be the elites. It must be outsiders. It can't be the cops and good ol' boys everyone respects. It can't be the mayor who rigs the election to win every time. It can't be the "good upstanding" sheriff. Nah, it's the Clintons.
To be fair, it's probably also the Clitnons, a bunch of other politicians, billionaires, etc. Epstein was exactly who everyone thought he was, and he didn't get away with it for so long without a whole lot of really powerful help.
There are still powerful people who got away with involvement with #Epstein. #Trump is one of them, but I don't really believe that he's the only one.
#USPol #ACAB

Context for Yury’s #EuroPython talk: https://x.com/hynek/status/755319513227362308 🤣

Hynek Schlawack (@hynek) on X
@1st1 um you’re kind of being missed in your own talk :)

Open Street Map of the 400 Grade II listed telephone boxes in London.
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/29YN

New preprint!
User-space library rootkits revisited: Are user-space detection mechanisms futile?
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07827

Der Blick, wenn andere Eltern immer erzählen, dass ihr Kind eher mit 7 statt mit 6 in Schule kommt und sie das dann versuchen zu rechtfertigen und ich nur sage: "ist doch super, ein Jahr weniger arbeiten bis zur Rente"...
#Fedieltern @…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #RoundMidnight
Kenny Wheeler:
🎵 Kind Folk
#KennyWheeler
https://open.spotify.com/track/1hQVhG6ElJUfrUdA1sTSAX

Ich habe als älteres Kind mehrere Filme mit Bud Spencer und Terence Hill gesehen. Das war Anfang der 1980er. Wenige Jahre später habe ich so gut wie aufgehört, Filme mit Schießereien, Schlägereien oder Gewaltdarstellungen zu schauen. Diese Abneigung (und Vermeidung) hält bis heute an. Mir sind sogar manche Tatorte zu blutig.

An Annotated Translation of D. Bernoulli's "A New Theory on the Motion of Waters Through Channels of Any Kind"
Sylvio R. Bistafa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14905

An Annotated Translation of D. Bernoulli's "A New Theory on the Motion of Waters Through Channels of Any Kind"
This paper presents an annotated English translation of Daniel Bernoulli's 1727 work A New Theory on the Motion of Waters through Channels of Any Kind, originally published in the Commentarii Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae. Written over a decade before his renowned Hydrodynamica (1738), this early treatise reveals D. Bernoulli's foundational approach to fluid motion based on the conservation of vis viva-the kinetic energy of moving bodies-at a time when the principle was still …

Happy #InternationalCatDay :3

montreal: Montreal street gangs (2007)
Network representing relationships between gangs, obtained from Montreal Police’s central intelligence database, spanning 2004 to 2007. Nodes are gangs, and an edge represents some kind of relationship between two gangs (as elicited from interviews with gang members).
This network has 35 nodes and 78 edges.
Tags: Social, Affiliation, Unweighted

“Noor, who made so many friends on Bluesky since she started an account there in the summer of 2023, had her account suddenly suspended on Friday. Bluesky did not send a reason for the suspension, so while she wrote an appeal, she did not know what actions she was appealing, so as of now it's still suspended. She’s been silenced, and effectively disappeared.”

A Future for Noor and Her Children
Hello! I'm Meave, a U.S. citizen sponsoring this fundraiser on behalf of my dear friend Noor Hassan and her children. Noor and her son Abdul Rahman are kind, generous people; though their original fundraiser succeeded last summer, supporting themselves and their extended family cost them everything. This fundraiser will allow them to support themselves and save up to buy passage to Egypt and pursue a better future.

Calamus 35 To you of New England
Honestly I find this Whitman entreaty to national unity kind of tedious. It's charming and American but it's just so earnest. And this poem doesn't have much music.
Stretching for a gay reading...
a superb friendship, exalté, previously unknown,
... it waits ... latent in all men.
Once again his calls for unity are partly rooted in relationships between men: "friendship" here, the least sexual of his words. But it's also a sort of hidden connection, unknown, latent, and that's a little queer-coded to me.

Daffodil in Ithaca's concrete jungle in the second week of April; my dirty secret is I'm sitting on hundreds if not thousands of undeveloped photos of daffodils -- I'll post plenty of them in next year's daffodil season, but why wait?
#photo #photography

Absolutely no reason at all why we should be looking at this book right now. Pure coincidence.
https://www.brown.edu/news/2025-08-11/george-orwell-1984-manuscript

This succinctly crystallizes my hitherto inchoate thoughts on basically all big LLM efforts https://mastodon.social/@glyph/114840612040237978

At the beginning of the blockchain hype or bubble (more then 10 years ago) i bought a very small amount of cryptocurrency. That amount has been a kind of "money tree" that objectively keeps giving, i take some money away when the value peaks, it grows again in value and so on....
I can see why some people have become insanely rich throug crypto. On the other hand i wouldn't advise to seriously invest in crypto (to avoid misunderstandings).

‘Unlike any other kind of fear’: wildfires leave their mark across Spain
#Spain

Also so langsam wünsche ich mich, als Kind der 80er, fast in die Zeit des kalten Krieges zurück.
Es lief zwar vieles grundsätzlich falsch und es gab immer diese nervöse Hintergrundschwingung ... Aber zumindest musste ich mich nicht jeden Tag aufs neue fragen, ob denn die Welt nicht noch mehr n Rad ab hat.
Jeden Tag irgend ne neue Irrsinnigkeit 🙈
#uspol

Back from vacation on a kind of new job (I've been working in this department some years ago). Got my first assignment - the impossible kind that I like. This will be fun!

The iPad really is a kind of miracle device when you think about it: an unbrickable, essentially virus-proof, simple computer for computer-illiterate people and the elderly. A UNIX system you can give to your great-grandma and she can use comfortably without having to worry about some update breaking it or some other random change rendering it strange and foreign. (I haven't turned mine on in years, mind you, but the point stands.)

Gene therapy can restore hearing in adults, first-of-its-kind trial shows https://www.sciencealert.com/gene-therapy-can-restore-hearing-in-adults-first-of-its-kind-trial-shows Surprisingly, younger was not always better in…

Gene Therapy Can Restore Hearing in Adults, First-of-Its-Kind Trial Shows
Up to three in every 1,000 newborns has hearing loss in one or both ears.

Series A, Episode 03 - Cygnus Alpha
BLAKE: [Whispers] Vila. [Pause, then louder] Vila. [Pause] Gan. [Pause] Gan.
GAN: [Moves to bars] Blake.
BLAKE: What is it? What's the matter with everybody?
GAN: How did you get here?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/103/377 …

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

My favourite kind of cloud.

Wahlwerbung, die fehlt:
Sichere Schulwege, damit Dein Kind selbstständig und sicher zur Schule kommt.
Wahlwerbung, die echte:
Wähle uns für einen sicheren Parkplatz vor deiner Haustür.

To conclude the first evening of Berlin Buzzwords, Gregor Bransky invites you to join a tour of c-base. Afterwards, you can unwind at one of its recreational areas, enjoying a refreshing beverage by the waterside of the Spree.
A travel group will form during the Get-Together.
📅 When: Today – 7 pm
📍 Where: c-base, Rungestraße 20 | 10179 Berlin
Learn more:

So, Altman’s superintelligence will allegedly do away with millions of jobs, but don’t worry kids, after graduating you “could be leaving on some kind of mission to explore the solar system on a spaceship.”
“Some kind of a mission,” huh? That’s a nice way of saying that he’ll shoot useless people into space.
This level of stupidity and arrogance is sickening.

I realize I'm doing that horrible "post every once in a while and interact very little with other posts" thing, as if I were some kind of hotshot.
I apologize for this. It's shit behavior and it's not even helping my mental state.
Sorry.

Hate to bring up HP but no other book has given me as close a feeling as when I read HP. Truly a joy to read with the world feeling both real and magical.
#books #fantasy

some kind of really loud explosion in the financial district just now, every car alarm around is going off.

Building my favorite kind of UI today

BugGen: A Self-Correcting Multi-Agent LLM Pipeline for Realistic RTL Bug Synthesis
Surya Jasper, Minh Luu, Evan Pan, Aakash Tyagi, Michael Quinn, Jiang Hu, David Kebo Houngninou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10501

BugGen: A Self-Correcting Multi-Agent LLM Pipeline for Realistic RTL Bug Synthesis
Hardware complexity continues to strain verification resources, motivating the adoption of machine learning (ML) methods to improve debug efficiency. However, ML-assisted debugging critically depends on diverse and scalable bug datasets, which existing manual or automated bug insertion methods fail to reliably produce. We introduce BugGen, a first of its kind, fully autonomous, multi-agent pipeline leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to systematically generate, insert, and validate realisti…

Sabine Hossenfelder is just great!❤️
"These are souls trapped in AI."🤦
We are doomed, as human kind, we are doomed.
"AI" will kill us, but not in the way ANYONE expected.
We will kill each other, because "AI" said we should do it.😬
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWZRQsejtfA…

Zwei Stunden lang Lego sortieren hat mir große Freude bereitet. Kategorien identifizieren und Prozesse optimieren mag mein autistisches Hirn. Wenn der chaotische Haufen vollständig wegsortiert ist, sprudelt es nur so in mir.
Ich habe die Kiste von meinen Eltern geholt, damit ich alleine und mit dem Kind bauen kann. Das Kind hat direkt Gefallen an den hydraulischen Elementen gefunden. Die habe ich früher auch geliebt. Ich bin gespannt, ob ich heute mehr aus dem programmierbaren Ding rau…

Coordinate recognition: General theory, Groups, and other surprises
I. Farah, K. Gannon, P. Touchard
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13673 https://

Coordinate recognition: General theory, Groups, and other surprises
A class of structures recognizes coordinates if any reduced product of structures from said class witnesses a certain kind of rigidity phenomena. We provide several equivalent characterizations of this property. This property has (at least) two remarkable consequences, one set-theoretic and one model-theoretic, for reduced products of structures of the said class. First, under appropriate set-theoretic assumptions every isomorphism between such reduced products associated with the Fr\' echet id…

Periodicity and Dynamical Systems of Dickson Polynomials in Finite Fields
Wayne Peng, Yen-Ju Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08621 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

Periodicity and Dynamical Systems of Dickson Polynomials in Finite Fields
This paper investigates the dynamical properties of Dickson polynomials over finite fields, focusing on the periodicity and structural behavior of their iterated sequences. We introduce and analyze the sequence \( [D_n(x, α) \mod (x^q - x)]_n \), where \( D_n(x, α) \) denotes a Dickson polynomial of the first kind, and explore its periodic nature when reduced modulo \( x^q - x \). We derive explicit formulas for the period of these sequences, particularly in the case when \( n \) is coprime t…

Kyren Williams on his contact extension: 'This is the day that I kind of worked for my whole life' https://www.therams.com/news/kyren-williams-on-his-contact-extension-this-is-the-day-that-i-kind-of-worked-for-my-…

"Your school, like your country, is made up of Americans of many different races, religions & national origins.
So if you hear anybody talk against a schoolmate or anyone else because of his religion, race or national origin, don't wait: Tell him that
THAT KIND OF TALK IS UN-AMERICAN."
- #Superman

I wish I had a good reason to get the new Commodore 64. Talented engineers behind it, reasonable price too. I just… kind of have too much already.

Interesting that some who replied to my post on tax and GDP growth yesterday missed the point.
The point isn't to debate whether tax -> growth (it might, with a tail wind).
The point is that
1) Growth won't happen like it used to.
2) That is good because GDP growth is ecologically and socially lethal.
3) So our leaders (sic) had better adapt to the new reality and use taxation and other measures to build a better, fairer future.
More here:

Getting Real about the Crises Facing the UK | Stop the Damage! Build a Better Future!
Britain and the rest of the world face a set of almost intractable challenges, ecological (including climate), economic and social. Yet political leaders with few exceptions are failing to propose the actions and policies that could address the scale of this pancrisis. Here though is an alternative initiative, a kind of alternative manifesto with a portfolio of illustrative policies...

Blender Studio Releases Free New Game 'Dogwalk' to Showcase Its Open Source Godot Game Engine
#FLOSS

Blender Studio Releases Free New Game 'Dogwalk' to Showcase Its Open Source Godot Game Engine - Slashdot
"Steam quietly welcomed another indie game this week, but this one is distinctly different for a lot of reasons," writes Notebookcheck: Dogwalk, which debuted on July 11, is the kind of short, gentle experience that almost forces you to smile. Developed by Blender Studio, the game introduces playe...

ColdPress: Efficient Quantile-Based Compression of Photometric Redshift PDFs
Antonio Hern\'an-Caballero
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12481 https://

ColdPress: Efficient Quantile-Based Compression of Photometric Redshift PDFs
ColdPress is a Python module that compresses photometric redshift probability distribution functions (PDFs) by encoding quantiles of their cumulative distribution. For a fixed packet size (the default is 80 bytes per PDF), ColdPress attains a reconstruction accuracy comparable to the sparse-basis representation method implemented in the pdf_storage module of Carrasco-Kind & Brunner (2014), yet reduces the computational cost by a factor of ~7000. I describe the implementation and quantify its co…

Robust and efficient multiple-unit switchback experimentation
Paul Missault, Lorenzo Masoero, Christian Delb\'e, Thomas Richardson, Guido Imbens
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12654

Robust and efficient multiple-unit switchback experimentation
User-randomized A/B testing has emerged as the gold standard for online experimentation. However, when this kind of approach is not feasible due to legal, ethical or practical considerations, experimenters have to consider alternatives like item-randomization. Item-randomization is often met with skepticism due to its poor empirical performance. To fill this gap, in this paper we introduce a novel and rich class of experimental designs, "Regular Balanced Switchback Designs" (RBSDs). At their co…

People hired for their skill are openly using ChatGPT and I wondered, what the long term strategy is?
(Original title: So what are you saying?)
https://tante.cc/2025/07/06/so-what-are-you-saying/

So what are you saying?
I had a conversation with a friend who described sitting in a workshop where clients and the people they hired were working on problems. As you do. Happens in every consultingy kind of job. But what has totally become normalized is for the people hired, the “experts” to use ChatGPT and similar services to come […]

Engine Yard, which I think I haven’t used in almost 15 years:
"As part of a scheduled maintenance upgrade to improve security and performance, we’ve reset access credentials across the platform.”
Right. Totally scheduled. *wink* *WINK*
Pretty sure I dislike being lied to more than I dislike the security event that caused them to send this kind of email to dormant users.

Ohne Feuerwerk bei der Feier ist das Kind nicht richtig eingeschult. ☝️

Complex scaling for open waveguides
Charles L. Epstein, Tristan Goodwill, Jeremy Hoskins, Solomon Quinn, Manas Rachh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10263 https…

Complex scaling for open waveguides
In this work we analyze the complex scaling method applied to the problem of time-harmonic scalar wave propagation in junctions between `leaky,' or open dielectric waveguides. In [arXiv:2302.04353, arXiv:2310.05816, arXiv:2401.04674, arXiv:2411.11204], it was shown that under suitable assumptions the problem can be reduced to a system of Fredholm second-kind integral equations on an infinite interface, transverse to the waveguides. Here, we show that the kernels appearing in the integral equati…

18th Century Gold Mourning Ring Discovered by Metal Detectorist is ‘One of a Kind’ British Treasure https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/18th-century-gold-mourning-ring-discovered-by-metal-detectorist-is-one-o…

18th Century Gold Mourning Ring Discovered by Metal Detectorist is ‘One of a Kind’ British Treasure
A metal detectorist who discovered a gold mourning ring dating from the 18th century is overjoyed after it was declared a British treasure.

I've noticed more Russian propaganda bots that just appear and get reported and banned within a few hours. The accounts tend to be around for a few days. They often have super obvious AI generated avatars, no posts of their own, and copy and paste replies with little to no actual content. The propaganda doesn't even seem like it's trying. Just the same painfully obviously false stuff about #Ukraine.
Meanwhile, LLMs exist that can make those types of attacks far more subtle. Has anyone seen an analysis of Russian bot behavior over time? It seems like they're getting worse, but it's hard to know if there isn't something else going on.
From my perspective, it just kind of looks like the whole machine is falling apart. It's really pathetic to see how even Russian propaganda, which is like... their main thing, seems to have collapsed. They used to try, now it seems like even the troll farms are phoning it in. At some point you gotta wonder how long Putin has left before he gets the Gaddafi treatment.

“Did #Wordle ever have this kind of problem? Yes, of course you did, you saucy minx.”
#Wordle1454 4/6*
⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨
🟨🟨🟨⬜⬜
⬜🟩🟨🟩⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Finally finished this piece, which was brilliant enough that I couldn't scroll my timeline further until I had finally read all 13,000 words.
It pretty much encapsulates everything I've seen in the United States for the last 20 years, the mentality of some of the people I deal with in course of playing music for a living, and in the organizations that I have to be a part of.

The Era Of The Business Idiot
Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize. Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 Vic Listen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of idiot. The

Certain kinds of gut microbes absorb toxic Pfas
“forever chemicals”
and help expel them from the body via feces,
new first-of-its-kind University of Cambridge research shows.
The findings are welcome news
as the only options that exist for reducing the level of dangerous Pfas compounds from the body are bloodletting and a cholesterol drug that induces unpleasant side effects.
The microbes were found to remove up to 75% of some Pfasfrom the gut of mice.

James Baldwin Was Not Your Figurehead
#literature

James Baldwin Was Not Your Figurehead
there's a kind of violence in posthumously drafting a man famously resistant to joining anything into your political movement

After way too long (starting to notice a pattern!), I’m writing the next installment of my newsletter!
If you want more insight into what I’ve been up the in the past *checks calendar* FOUR MONTHS 😱 – or want to see some cute dog photos, make sure to subscribe:
https://buttondown.com/hynek

Hynek Did Something
Greetings friend! This is a list for those who’d like to be notified whenever Hynek Schlawack does or publishes something noteworthy, somewhere. Examples are new blog posts, YouTube videos, and talks, or significant updates to existing work. It does not include announcements about new software releases. As a thank you for your trust, the emails aren’t just links to content. They contain a kind of “director's commentary”, explaining what I did and why – written as if I’d be explainin…

Burning of fossil fuels caused 1,500 deaths in recent European heat wave, study estimates #Europe

Burning of fossil fuels caused 1,500 deaths in recent European heat wave, study estimates
Human-caused climate change is responsible for killing about 1,500 people in last week's European heat wave, a first-of-its-kind rapid study found.

Openreach (who operates a big chunk of internet access in the UK) collects a lot of data about end-user internet use and can generate press releases based on analysis of it.
This is like an advert for VPNs.
https://www.openreach.com/news/how-do-you-

How do you broadband? Openreach reveals UK hotspot map
Whether it’s online shopping, gaming or TV super streaming, your most likely broadband habits depend on where you live in the UK, Openreach reveals today.In the first research of its kind to mark 25 years of home broadband in the UK, Openreach, has combined its own data with extensive consumer research to map the UK cities by their online acti...

To conclude the first evening of Berlin Buzzwords, Gregor Bransky invites you to join a tour of c-base. Afterwards, you can unwind at one of its recreational areas, enjoying a refreshing beverage by the waterside of the Spree.
A travel group will form during the Get-Together.
📅 When: June 17, 2025 – 7 pm
📍 Where: c-base, Rungestraße 20 | 10179 Berlin
Learn more:

Satellite Events
Satellite Events Find out what other open source events and meet-ups are taking place around Berlin Buzzwords.You are hosting a meetup, get-together, workshop or other kind of event at the same time? Get in touch, and we’ll happily add your event to our list! MICES EU 2025 Our partner conference, MICES - Mix-Camp E-Commerce Search, takes [...]

Ukraine: Kind stirbt bei Angriff in Charkiw
Bei den russischen Angriffen auf die Ukraine in der Nacht hat es mehrere Tote gegeben. Im nordostukrainischen Charkiw starb nach Polizeiangaben ein achtjähriger Junge, als eine Drohne ein Auto traf. Ein Vierjähriger und ein 40 Jahre alter Mann seien bei dem Angriff verletzt worden, hieß es. Die Behörden in der umkämpften Region Cherson im Süden des Landes meldeten am Morgen außerdem…
📑

Ukraine-Liveblog: ++ Steinmeier sagt Litauen Hilfe bei Verteidigung zu ++
Bundespräsident Steinmeier hat Litauen die Unterstützung Deutschlands bei der Verteidigung seiner Freiheit zugesichert. Bei russischen Drohnenangriffen sind laut Ukraine nördlich von Kiew mehrere Menschen verletzt worden.

Series D, Episode 04 - Stardrive
DAYNA: Shut up! Be quiet! [Sound of engines approaching] What is it?
VILA: How should I know? [Two Space Rats approach on three-wheeled ATV's.]
DAYNA: What are they?
VILA: THEY are the Space Rats.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/404/209 B7…

stackoverflow: Stack Overflow favorites (2011)
A bipartite network of users and the posts they have favorited, from the online Q&A site Stack Overflow. An edge (i,j) connects a user i to a post j if that user "favorited" that post (a kind of a rating). Edges are timestamped.
This network has 641876 nodes and 1301942 edges.
Tags: Economic, Preferences, Unweighted, Timestamps

As world heats up, U.N. cools itself the cool way: with water
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/environment/2025/05/13/climate-change/un-water-cooling-pipes/
🆓

As world heats up, U.N. cools itself the cool way — with water
As more and more people want to stay cool in a planet that is steadily heating up, energy experts point to this kind of water-based system as a good alternative.

Series B, Episode 02 - Shadow
AVON: The explosion in the planet's atmosphere would have provided the rest.
BLAKE: Yes, I hadn't thought of that.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/202/602 B7B5

Fear of flying therapy is about reframing the flight experience;
if my mind’s eye squints,
I can almost interpret my sweating palms and pounding heartbeat as a kind of buzz.
But this requires repeated, strenuous effort,
and the result is a mental exhaustion that makes the worst-case scenario appealing:
succumbing to my fears and never flying again.
I imagine this as analogous to what many Americans, aerophobic or not, are feeling.
It’s simply easier…

Winging It | Noelle Mateer
For those trying to overcome their fears of flying, it’s been . . . a challenging time to say the least.

@… I kind of like it. 😄

This kind of user-centered design was utterly baffling to the people steeped in the pre-iPhone mobile market. The shop where I’d being doing that mobile app work set out to make their iPhone app. We’d try to create clear, simple, information-focused UX that was a pleasure to •use• for its intended purpose, not just a pleasure to •look at• in a demo, and…
…we’d get pushback. Soooooo much pushback. “Can you add more graphics?” “It looks too boring!” “Shouldn’t it do something when you shake it?”
3/

stackoverflow: Stack Overflow favorites (2011)
A bipartite network of users and the posts they have favorited, from the online Q&A site Stack Overflow. An edge (i,j) connects a user i to a post j if that user "favorited" that post (a kind of a rating). Edges are timestamped.
This network has 641876 nodes and 1301942 edges.
Tags: Economic, Preferences, Unweighted, Timestamps

#Blakes7 Series A, Episode 09 - Project Avalon
GUARD: Sir.
TRAVIS: Good. Stay alert.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/109/262 B7B1

Series C, Episode 13 - Terminal
CALLY: We've got to help them!
TARRANT: No. It's too late. There's nothing we can do. [The links rip at Reeval and Toron's clothing.]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/313/274 B7B3

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

#Blakes7 Series C, Episode 08 - Rumours of Death
HOB: I believe we're lost unless we stick together. If killing Servalan is what it takes, then she's more use to us dead.
SULA: Alive, Servalan can order her forces to disarm. Alive, Servalan can announce that she's standing down in favour of the People's Council, which you and the others will lead. Alive, Servalan c…