Tootfinder

“Stupid weather,” I grumble to P on a walk. P gently urges me to redirect my frustration. “The weather is just responding to what capitalism has done to it, it’s just trying to adjust. Of course it’s going to be a little erratic.” I soften immediately and apologize to the wind, the cool in the air. It doesn’t owe any of us a gentle transition; it’s allowed to remind us that the level of destruction it's endured will inevitably result in a violent response. That’s how trauma works.
[...]
These are the questions I’m sitting with. I don’t have answers, but I know that some of it starts with more people taking seriously the possibility of other ways of being. The annoying but necessary demand that we consider that if we can’t get the state to stop funding a genocide (or killing Black people and poor people or denying care to trans people or pregnant people), then we have to stop the state."
~ Raechel Anne Jolie
This is a beautiful text, that gave me hope, even though at the end they forgot to list the disabled and chronically ill people, who are being denied care on an epic scale in this ongoing, yet normalized pandemic.
https://raechelannejolie.substack.com/p/impossible-conditions

About life and feelings, gloomy and private
The feelings we get from the activities we do could be classified as neutral, positive and negative.
Let's take developing #Gentoo as an example. It's something that makes me happy — but you can't (or at least I can't) just get the happiness and reject everything else. Most of the Gentoo work is basically neutral, even bland — a duty that takes a lot of time and effort, and probably a little of your health. It's statistically probable that you're going to get some positive feelings out of it — the joy of success, satisfaction, appreciation, awareness that you've done something good. But you also get negative feelings — from failures, frustration, negative interactions.
My hiking trips are like that too. My family believes that "I do it for pleasure" — but it's a harmful oversimplification and it only tells me that they even aren't trying to understand me. In fact, it's mostly a necessity, a way of solving specific problems that works for me — halting diabetes-related problems, coping with emotions. Of course there's a positive side to it — good mood, energy to survive another day, something the joy of visiting a new place, seeing something beautiful, finding a solution to a vexatious problem, positive interactions with people. But there are also negative feelings — anger and sadness from failure, stress from problems, negative contacts with people. Sometimes you end up slowly charging your social battery for a whole week, just to have one person destroy it all.
If you think about it, life's something like that. It's mostly a bland effort to survive every following day, sometimes interspersed with positive or negative moments.
#ActuallyAutistic

At the hospital ER today some angry dude walked out of the waiting room and up to the nurse at the triage desk:
“I've been here for 25 minutes! How long is this going to take? ____ is not feeling any better!!”.
The nurse, who was very nicely helping us check in, and had helped the dozen or so others there, turned off the smile and just looked at him... dead pan stare… and said.
"Yes?”
Angry-dude said some other stuff, then turned around and went back to the w…

The Billionaires in Texas Politics - by Chris Tackett #Texas

The Billionaires in Texas Politics
Forbes released their 2024 list of the Richest People in the World. I thought it would be interesting to see how many are investing in Texas politics, how much, and to who. And turns out the answers are a lot, a lot, and mostly Republicans.See It. Name It. Fight It. is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Last time I reported an earlier version as a scam, FB reply was "meets our standards". I don't click as I have no idea what is running, and I suspect the questions would be of a type you use as a security question.

The Boston-area Covid sewage RNA counts have not improved in a year
I've been copying the Covid RNA-in-sewage measurements from the MWRA's website for a few years now, mostly so I could replot it on a log scale, but also to answer (vaguely, sort of, with caveats) questions about how we are doing.  The short answer is we are not doing any better than we were last year, and have been behind more or less since mid-December.

The Boston-area Covid sewage RNA counts have not improved in a year
I’ve been copying the Covid RNA-in-sewage measurements from the MWRA’s website for a few years now, mostly so I could replot it on a log scale, but also to answer (vaguely, sort of, wit…

42 ... is not the answer to everything but the hours that have passed since the last (and only moderately detailled) update on the status of and crucial communications effort with #Odysseus on the Moon - not good given the total lifetime of the lander of one week in the best case: almost three of these days have now passed. To ease our nerves here are some #snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis) pictures I just took in my neighborhood in #Bochum, Germany ...

Understanding LLMs Requires More Than Statistical Generalization
Patrik Reizinger, Szilvia Ujv\'ary, Anna M\'esz\'aros, Anna Kerekes, Wieland Brendel, Ferenc Husz\'ar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.01964

Understanding LLMs Requires More Than Statistical Generalization
The last decade has seen blossoming research in deep learning theory attempting to answer, "Why does deep learning generalize?" A powerful shift in perspective precipitated this progress: the study of overparametrized models in the interpolation regime. In this paper, we argue that another perspective shift is due, since some of the desirable qualities of LLMs are not a consequence of good statistical generalization and require a separate theoretical explanation. Our core argument relies on the…

On a question of Kwakkel and Markovic
Sergei Merenkov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02176 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.02176

On a question of Kwakkel and Markovic
A question of F. Kwakkel and V. Markovic on existence of C^1-diffeomorphisms of closed surfaces that permute a dense collection of domains with bounded geometry is answered in the negative. In fact, it is proved that for closed surfaces of genus at least one such diffeomorphisms do not exist regardless of whether they have positive or zero topological entropy.

Google Pushes Unpopular Chrome Update
"After an update in June this year, a feature called the WebRequest API will be removed, and the adblockers and tracker blockers that depend on this feature will stop working. Since the business model of Google is to track your online activity and then show you personalised ads, it is not difficult to see why this feature is removed.
(...) they are forcing the same update on all Chromium browsers as well."