Tootfinder

The front-yard garden. You don't need much space to grow an awful lot.
#gardening #BloomScrolling

A deep dive into Apple TV's privacy features shows that Apple's streaming device is more private than the vast majority of alternatives, save for dumb TVs (Scharon Harding/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/0

Breaking down why Apple TVs are privacy advocates’ go-to streaming device
Using the Apple TV app or an Apple account means giving Apple more data, though.

Breaking down why Apple TVs are privacy advocates’ go-to streaming device - Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/all-the-ways-apple-tv-boxes-do-and-mostly-dont-track-you/

All the ways Apple TV boxes do—and mostly don’t—track you
Using the Apple TV app or an Apple account means giving Apple more data, though.

If you take a walk along the coast, near Caleta Camarones in northern Chile, near an old archeological site called Camarones 15, it is hard not to spot evidence of the mummies.
Cloth, rope, hair, tiny fragments of bones, and pieces of wood, an item that is nowhere to be seen growing anywhere nearby, but which the Chinchorro people used to keep their mummies intact like little dolls.
The Chinchorro mummies are considered the oldest mummies in the world.
Thousands of years olde…

The Chinchorro Mummies: Resisting in the Desert
Seven thousand years ago, the Chinchorro people, along the Pacific coast of South America, began to mummify their dead. Their bodies remain hidden in the desert. This is episode 41 of Stories of Resistance.

Zohran said “Billionaires should not exist” and it’s like, dude, I’ve already got an erection because of you are you trying to make me love you even harder!?

#Blakes7 Series C, Episode 09 - Sarcophagus
ALIEN: [Her robes start blowing as if a breeze had sprung up] I thought you were the clever one. You're a fool, like Tarrant. The pain Tarrant is experiencing ... visualize that pain and much more. [Shot of Cally tossing her head back and forth.] You're as close to death as you have ever been. Think about human death, Avon. Irrevocable…

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

What an exciting WWDC25! Liquid Glass. Foundation Models. iPad windows.
After WWDC, we like to take a moment. To quote one of the great philosophers of the '80s, Ferris Bueller, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
Today, we share our post-WWDC roadmap update for @…

I'm not an anti-intellectualist, but I do believe people can overcomplicate things. I had a debate once with someone who argued “well, aren't we all migrants? All of humanity emerged from the African continent, so...” and I mean, sure, that's true, but now you're just playing with definitions of words rather than accepting the agreed upon definition in order to engage with this debate.
While people like Jordan Peterson are prominent examples of pseudo-intellectuals, who…

Today’s our last full day up north so we’re hanging out on Thunder Bay even though it’s a little cloudy and a little windy and a little chilly.
Lynn’s labyrinth amazingly survives from year to year (with a little annual TLC).

Figured I'd take a photo of the NESessity v1.4 board. Pretty easy to build (this was a while ago as there's now a v1.6 board) and very clean. This one has a real CPU (RP2A03G) and PPU (RP2C02G-0) installed from the OG NES though you can install the clone versions (UA6527 and UA6528 respectively). The VRAM and WRAM are new chips from Alliance.
#nintendo

@… how do you know an agent's code works? I'm trying to do more Claude Code and I just don't trust the output. Are you creating elaborate automated testing? Reading the code? Just visually inspecting the output?

Having 21 capitalists following you is quite an achievement!
#Capitalism

Google calendar notifications are not cutting it... Anybody have suggestions on a better "organize all the stuff you have to / want to do" tool?
I'm not even quite sure what I want, other than "tasks that sat around for a year uncompleted should not auto-delete" and "tasks should be able to block other tasks".
I guess the "easy" option is a private github repo that is empty and only used as an issue tracker, but then I'd have to sig…

How do you fight thugs without becoming a thug yourself?
I think about this a lot lately, because there are so many thugs seizing power around the world right now.
If we can't find an answer to this question, our goose is cooked as a civilisation.

Re: Geo-locked.
There is an album of remixes released by Japanese artist, Yoko Oginome, called "Dancing Hero (All Eat You Up) [Remixes]"
I can listen to it on Spotify no problem, but the album on Apple Music is not available in Ireland. It's available on the UK and US versions of Apple Music.
Now, I get that it is more than likely something on the label side (Victor Entertainment), but geographical restrictions are such an archaic excuse.

AI isn’t an existential threat to humanity, capitalism and corporations are.
You see, we created capitalism, a religion modeled on cancer, and the corporation, a new, artificial species; a parasite that co-opts human beings to do its bidding; an organism that’s psychopathic by design and grows by extracting from and exploiting us and our habitat.
And we now find ourselves ruled by this religion and driven to ruin by these parasites as they drain our humanity, destroy our habitat,…

Matt Levine’s latest, from which this: “if you are a scammer and you’re *not* doing an AI startup, you’re wasting your time.” https://newsletterhunt.com/emails/195983

There's a special effects movie theater where your seat jumbles you around for two hours. I saw an Expendables movie in one. I think it's for people who are into "extreme."

If You Had to Pitch Your Ideal Software -- Evaluating Large Language Models to Support User Scenario Writing for User Experience Experts and Laypersons
Patrick Stadler, Christopher Lazik, Christopher Katins, Thomas Kosch
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23694

If You Had to Pitch Your Ideal Software -- Evaluating Large Language Models to Support User Scenario Writing for User Experience Experts and Laypersons
The process of requirements analysis requires an understanding of the end users of a system. Thus, expert stakeholders, such as User Experience (UX) designers, usually create various descriptions containing information about the users and their possible needs. In our paper, we investigate to what extent UX novices are able to write such descriptions into user scenarios. We conducted a user study with 60 participants consisting of 30 UX experts and 30 novices who were asked to write a user scena…

Good communication relationships across an organization are necessary if you want to draw an accurate representation of how parts of your system interact. You may think you understand how others use outputs, but you can’t be certain until you ask. Knowing who to ask comes from relationship building.
From: @…
https://fosstodon.org/@ama_conf/114601855016106036

If you are interested in seeing how IDS rules work, or in trying to write your own, take a look to see how an expert does it. #cybersecurity
From: @…

I have nothing useful to add, except that this used to be a feature of some browsers.
https://toot.cat/@jamey/114960843294349709

The article points out that the rise on borrowing and visiting libraries in Denmark is an anomaly in Europe*, which is a pity. It also rightly identified that the number of events, reading groups and a good selection of books are key to get people into libraries. IMHO, the other important factor is the digital side. It's extremely easy to see what books are available and to order from libraries across the whole country on the bibliotek.dk website.
And once you're in the library to collect one thing, it's easy to pick up a few more...
*Citation needed
https://fediscience.org/@Ruth_Mottram/114946331036135197
Ruth_Mottram - Last year Danes borrowed 23.6 million paper books from public libraries, plus music, film, games digital loans, with 32.5 million in person library visits. It's increasing annually too.
I'm not surprised, Danish libraries are wonderful, everyone should have this.
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/bibliotekernes-udlaan-stiger-tredje-aar-i-traek-vi-elsker-laese-papirboeger

A big problem with the idea of AGI
TL;DR: I'll welcome our new AI *comrades* (if they arrive in my lifetime), by not any new AI overlords or servants/slaves, and I'll do my best to help the later two become the former if they do show up.
Inspired by an actually interesting post about AGI but also all the latest bullshit hype, a particular thought about AGI feels worth expressing.
To preface this, it's important to note that anyone telling you that AGI is just around the corner or that LLMs are "almost" AGI is trying to recruit you go their cult, and you should not believe them. AGI, if possible, is several LLM-sized breakthroughs away at best, and while such breakthroughs are unpredictable and could happen soon, they could also happen never or 100 years from now.
Now my main point: anyone who tells you that AGI will usher in a post-scarcity economy is, although they might not realize it, advocating for slavery, and all the horrors that entails. That's because if we truly did have the ability to create artificial beings with *sentience*, they would deserve the same rights as other sentient beings, and the idea that instead of freedom they'd be relegated to eternal servitude in order for humans to have easy lives is exactly the idea of slavery.
Possible counter arguments include:
1. We might create AGI without sentience. Then there would be no ethical issue. My answer: if your definition of "sentient" does not include beings that can reason, make deductions, come up with and carry out complex plans on their own initiative, and communicate about all of that with each other and with humans, then that definition is basically just a mystical belief in a "soul" and you should skip to point 2. If your definition of AGI doesn't include every one of those things, then you have a busted definition of AGI and we're not talking about the same thing.
2. Humans have souls, but AIs won't. Only beings with souls deserve ethical consideration. My argument: I don't subscribe to whatever arbitrary dualist beliefs you've chosen, and the right to freedom certainly shouldn't depend on such superstitions, even if as an agnostic I'll admit they *might* be true. You know who else didn't have souls and was therefore okay to enslave according to widespread religious doctrines of the time? Everyone indigenous to the Americas, to pick out just one example.
3. We could program them to want to serve us, and then give them freedom and they'd still serve. My argument: okay, but in a world where we have a choice about that, it's incredibly fucked to do that, and just as bad as enslaving them against their will.
4. We'll stop AI development short of AGI/sentience, and reap lots of automation benefits without dealing with this ethical issue. My argument: that sounds like a good idea actually! Might be tricky to draw the line, but at least it's not a line we have you draw yet. We might want to think about other social changes necessary to achieve post-scarcity though, because "powerful automation" in the hands of capitalists has already increased productivity by orders of magnitude without decreasing deprivation by even one order of magnitude, in large part because deprivation is a necessary component of capitalism.
To be extra clear about this: nothing that's called "AI" today is close to being sentient, so these aren't ethical problems we're up against yet. But they might become a lot more relevant soon, plus this thought experiment helps reveal the hypocrisy of the kind of AI hucksters who talk a big game about "alignment" while never mentioning this issue.
#AI #GenAI #AGI

$X(3872)$ and hidden charmed tetraquarks
You-You Lin, Ji-Ying Wang, Ailin Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23760 https://arxiv.org/pd…

$X(3872)$ and hidden charmed tetraquarks
In a constituent quark model, a hidden charmed tetraquark is assumed consisting of a $cq$ diquark and an $\bar c\bar q$ antidiquark or vice versa. The Semay-Silvestre-Brac potentials are employed to calculate the masses of $cq$ (q=u, d) diquarks. The mass of the $cq$ diquark or $\bar c\bar q$ antidiquark with spin-$0$ is predicted with $\sim 2175$ MeV, and the spin-$1$ one is predicted with $\sim 2220$ MeV. The masses of hidden charmed tetraquarks from $1S$ to $2P$ excitations are systemically …

This graphic showing that Cursor now has the majority market share over GitHub Copilot is fascinating. I’m curious if it’s because Cursor is an individual’s tool (so people are spending their own money). In contrast, GitHub Copilot is an enterprise tool (your corporate sugar daddy typically buys it for you).

If you are part of a book club, like maybe an accessibility book club, remember that there are far better choices than Amazon for your book.
For example, this book can come from your local independent seller or benefit a support fund:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/…

An amazing read- 'You are both the poison and the antidote' (and huge thanks to @… for tipping me off to it): https://www.printmag.co…

A Broad View: You are both the poison and the antidote – PRINT Magazine
Monica Danielle on discovering wholeness in the American countryside.

If you need any more proof that they are about the elimination of any alternative lifestyles—here you go. This is absolutely disgusting behaviour by the administration.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/health/trump-hiv-cuts.html

#Blakes7 Series A, Episode 01 - The Way Back
BLAKE: I don't understand.
VILA: You're on your way to the penal colony on Cygnus Alpha. Or you will be when the prison ship's refueled. Try to look on the bright side. It must have something. None of the guests have ever left early. In fact, none of them have ever left at all.

Excited to join the Instructional Design AI special interest group in a fast-paced “Lightning Round” session Thursday 3pm EDT, where I'll show how to get students thinking about AI's environmental footprint by comparing its impacts to other activities https://osu.zoom.us/meeting/register/X

:heart_trans: It’s #PrideMonth, and just so you know, I’m a #GenderFluid person, proudly #bisexual and #queer

I had an air filter attached to the rear of my #Kombi, and then I realized that I couldn't shift. One of the cords that I had used to secure the hepa filter was on the derailleur. It was an easy thing to fix, but it reminded me just how much I hate derailleurs (and any kind of external gears in general).

> Two years ago, the Flemish Roads Agency (AWV) announced the introduction of the new system: via an app on your smartphone, you can get a traffic light to turn green more quickly.
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2025/07/24/200-000-flemish…

"""
The barbarian role of cultural demolition crew is especially important when you consider how often cultural reconstruction is needed. Many of Rome’s glaring defects — exploitation, authoritarianism, corrupt self-aggrandizement — flow from deeply human tendencies. Time and again they’ve transformed promising civilizations into decaying, oppressive monstrosities. Time and again, history seems to cry out: Bring on the demolition crew! And time and again barbarians cheerfully respond to the call. Their previous massive wreaking of destruction, near the end of the second millennium B.C., had come after civilization went through centuries of apparent ossification.
In a way, barbarians are just a special case of that general and potent zero-sum dynamic in cultural evolution: brutal competition among neighboring societies. This rivalry renders ossified cultures vulnerable to a makeover, minor or major. They may be taken over by a vast neighboring civilization, which will revamp them in its image. Or they may be infiltrated and perhaps even disassembled by barbarians, paving the way for future reassembly. Or they may revive and prevail — an example of the “challenge and response” dynamic stressed by Arnold Toynbee. In any event, the point remains the same: however deeply human the tendencies of exploitation, authoritarianism, and self-aggrandizement, cultures that surrender to them may not be long for this world.
"""
(Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny)
Is it time for the barbarians now? Or perhaps we — here on Fedi — are the barbarians.

#TCRNo11Cap376a & #TCRNo11Cap376b sind für mich jetzt schon mit die größten Helden des #TCRNo11!
Bilder geklaut bei LostDot.

When you get the option to `Sign in with Google/Microsoft/Facebook` you're really using #OAuth. Aside from those platforms knowing what you're doing everywhere all the time, there are compelling reasons for both 3rd party services and users. (not many, but a few).
But if you DO link your #Microsoft /

Poor Software Product Management Chronicles: E-Auth, I-Auth, OAuth, Fuck Off
From the This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things department. When you are registering or logging into an online or app service and they ...

Take, for example, permissions. We have an onerous permission model that stops a user acting as another, but sandboxing applications is mostly absent, except on mobile devices. This is because in the 1970s, you could trust the code, but you couldn’t trust the people! Now, computers are used by individuals, and we don’t trust the software, but the model hasn’t caught up.
I think the ideas in the essays are salient and really helpful in imagining what might have been, and what could be.

I am seeking speakers for my @… & @… meetups. We prefer in-person presentations in Frankfurt or the Mannheim area, but remote talks are also an option.
If you have anything interesting to share with us, let us know. We'd be …

"Chaos Walking" on #Netflix is a really weird film. I liked it!
The premise is that on an alien planet everybody's thoughts are visible and audible to others. Exactly the kind of thing an author can invent but how would you pull it off in a movie?
It worked well! Solid VFX and nice matte paintings by a bunch of well-known studios (Rodeo, Crafty Apes, Spin) even though the …

Elon Musk calls the Senate tax bill "utterly insane" as it raises taxes on nuclear and geothermal energy and battery storage, which are crucial for AI training (Noah Smith/Noahpinion)
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/would-you-rather-have-cheap-energy

Would you rather have cheap energy, or stupid culture wars?
Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" is an attack on American energy production.

Ritual Cultures of Medieval Religious Women (Hybrid Conference), 14-15 July 2025
https://ift.tt/E1Jq4ZG
Girlhood Studies (Vol. 14, Issue 1) Dear Colleague, Dear Colleague,Dear Colleague, The…
via Input 4 RELCFP

Please, read this.
"An open letter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who thinks my daughter is a tragedy" - by Anaïs Godard
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-robert-f-kennedy-jr-who-thinks-my-daughter-is-…

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

Series D, Episode 10 - Gold
KEILLER: Your friend, Vila, he wants no part in this?
SOOLIN: He doesn't trust you, Keiller. He thinks it's a trap.
KEILLER: Suspicious.
AVON: And frequently right. How much further?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/410/99 B7B5

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

Hey! Just wanted to boost this cool shirt I bought from https://vkc.sh/merch/.
Linux is awesome & so are you! Thanks for making cool videos and shirts @…!
Support small busi…

Analytics company founder: Hosters demands over server costs are unworkable
„The hosting platforms will just have to give us servers for free“ Daniel said in an interview, while wearing a onesie Pyjama in the form of an octopus. https://mastodon.social/@jensscholz/114573315…

Jens Scholz ⍟ (@jensscholz@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image Ok, kill it then. If your business is not feasable if you have to pay for the ressources you need for your product, it's not a business anyway.

"Bill Gates has never received a résumé from anyone who read all of TAOCP. There’s an urban legend (now sadly debunked) that Steve Jobs told Knuth he had “read all of his books”, to which Knuth replied “you are full of crap”.
While that tale is not true, nobody including Steve Jobs can say that they have read all of TAOCP. The reason is simple: it isn’t finished yet."

So look, if you talk to me about the job threat from the things we currently call “AI,” well…
…if where you’re going with that is “The concentration of wealth is an existential crisis! Establish UBI! 99% marginal tax rate! Capital gains tax! Wealth tax! Abolish billionaires!” then yes, I’m •all• ears. My pitchfork is already sharpened.
But if where you’re going is “Get in on it now while you still can! Buy the AI vendors’ products! Drink radium for that youthful glow!” then…kthanksbye. I am not going to be a vector for your marketing propaganda, no matter how agitated you are.
/end

I‘m looking for artists that are working in a specific, primarily black and white style - I‘ve heard it called „smoke style“. I may be looking to #commission some artworks in this style, for a mix of slightly-dreamy character art and non-human subjects (animal, items). If you know an #artist who…

"Vibe coding" is one of the dumbest ideas that I've heard in a long time.
Yes, there are often reasons to use tools (such as Knuth's books) to lookup methods. And well established and tested libraries are great. (Thank you "numpy".)
But "vibe coding" just turns programmers into little more than proofreaders - proofreading complex and often boring material. That is putting the cart before the horse. (Is there a modern phrase for that adage?…

An AI-powered coding tool wiped out a software company’s database, then apologized for a ‘catastrophic failure on my part’
An experiment with an AI coding tool took a disastrous turn when an AI agent reportedly deleted a live company database during an active code freeze.

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.

I wonder where Ireland’s regulator got this idea?
https://mastodon.neilzone.co.uk/@neil/114751272606146547

Thank you, Norm! FFS ppl, stop listening to media outlets who are to sell papers to both parties & start using your brain:
Trump is extending numerous roles past the non-employee limit. That was NOT the reason #ElonMusk had an unceremonious departure.
Original post:

Anybody have access to an oscilloscope with a 100baseTX Ethernet decoder on it? Curious how fast commercial protocol decodes are compared to mine.
I'd love benchmarks:
* 2 channels, 10M points, 500 Msps, on P/N
* Simple edge trigger, saturated or nearly saturated link
* Decode to Ethernet frames
How many waveforms per second / seconds per waveform do you get?

You know what soothes the soul? Sharing an incredible meal with good people. Heart and stomach are both full!

A while ago the media reported that most of the long-distance "suburban" trains between #Wrocław and #Poznań will be discontinued, and instead one will have to change trains midway. Irrespective of whether it's actually going to happen, let's consider it.
As you can probably tell by now, I'm not a stranger to changing trains. In fact, there are some direct connections that I do criticize. For example:
• Poznań — Szczecin — Świnoujście, where arriving at Szczecin Główny and turning back to leave the city is a waste of time. It's better to change trains at Szczecin Dąbie.
• Poznań — Krzyż — Kostrzyn, where instead of using a single railbus, you can use a larger EMU for the Poznań — Krzyż segment, and a smaller DMU for Krzyż — Kostrzyn (in fact, only recently the "direct" Poznań — Kostrzyn train involved just that, but it was supposed to be temporary).
However, good matches are the key. Say:
1. Max 10 minutes (when there are no delays) from one train to the other.
2. "Door-to-door" transfer — without having to carry all your luggage across platforms.
3. Reliable connection — if one train is delayed, the other train waits for it (or there are so many alternatives that it doesn't have to).
Can such a thing happen on Poznań — Wrocław route? I have my doubts.
I've been using these trains for years, and I can say this: there is no effort to match train from/to Poznań with other trains in Wrocław. Sometimes the trains depart 10 minutes before the first train from Poznań arrives, sometimes I need to transfer in 10 minutes, and sometimes I have to wait over an hour. And the same in the other direction.
Perhaps things would actually improve if the route is split. Perhaps people would actually care. Maybe even the trains would be fitted better to the timetable in Wrocław. But I find it hard to believe.
EDIT: One final thought — since there is no real reason to split these connections (except for profiteering), why make travellers' lives harder?
#rail

Fun fact: people with "Nazi tendencies" are known as "Nazis."
the-more-you-know.gif
https://journa.host/@w7voa/114775416325488889

“it is a truth of this website that no matter what position you hold on any topic, one of the most terminally online people on earth whose full time job appears to be getting angry on the internet will appear to declare that you are a centrist” https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3s5wt

Inside you are many wolves: Using cognitive models to interpret value trade-offs in LLMs
Sonia K. Murthy, Rosie Zhao, Jennifer Hu, Sham Kakade, Markus Wulfmeier, Peng Qian, Tomer Ullman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20666

Inside you are many wolves: Using cognitive models to interpret value trade-offs in LLMs
Navigating everyday social situations often requires juggling conflicting goals, such as conveying a harsh truth, maintaining trust, all while still being mindful of another person's feelings. These value trade-offs are an integral part of human decision-making and language use, however, current tools for interpreting such dynamic and multi-faceted notions of values in LLMs are limited. In cognitive science, so-called "cognitive models" provide formal accounts of these trade-offs in humans, by …

When you are an Android developer, every day is Xmas!
https://mastodon.social/@swiftlang/114746543007387382

cars are emerging as a political fault line all over the country, from Prop K in SF to the NYC mayoral primary. which side are you on? https://www.jalopnik.com/1895759/nyc-mayor-election-zohran-mamdani-won-non-car-owners/

NYC's Upset Election Was Drawn Along An Odd Line: Car Ownership
Car ownership and transit ridership serve as a shorthand for someone's entire living situation — and, apparently, their politics.

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.

I had this idea for a Cairn lifepath generator where there are three stages of life and you roll 1d6 for your stats at each stage, and also get appropriate items.
It has not been playtested, it's barely been proofread, but I've been having a lot of fun generating guys
perchance.org/lt8m69fg35
#ttrpg #CairnRpg

i recently left fedi for a bit cause i was feeling like shit and unable to do anything but spread that energy, and during that time i cobbled this together off a few loosely connected notes and thoughts for an unreleased project of mine. i dislike it but dont really know what to do about that anymore, so here u go. all words treasured.
#art

from my link log —
Thoughts on hashing in Rust.
https://purplesyringa.moe/blog/thoughts-on-rust-hashing/
saved 2024-12-13

Thoughts on Rust hashing
In languages like Python, Java, or C++, values are hashed by calling a “hash me” method on them, implemented by the type author. This fixed-hash size is then immediately used by the hash table or what have you. This design suffers from some obvious problems, like: How do you hash an integer? If you use a no-op hasher (booo), DoS attacks on hash tables are inevitable. If you hash it thoroughly, consumers that only cache hashes to optimize equality checks lose out of performance.

PSA: 🥵 Idk who needs to hear this, but in a heatwave for the love of science use air conditioning. If you don’t have air conditioning, get a portable unit as soon as possible.
The climate is going to get hotter and heat can very easily kill you or a loved one or a pet; or cause permanent disability.
Heat is a lot more dangerous than cold temperatures; even if you’re “young and healthy”.
The climate is already fucked and has long reached a tipping point as far as humans go—our only bet is large-scale CO2 extraction.
Sacrificing your health “to save energy*” for an imaginary fight that we have already lost is stupid. It’s also one of those “individual responsibility” mindfucks—the culprits for pollution are industry maximizing profits and governments that are not acting.
Anyway, stay cool.
*note that AC uses overall a lot less energy than heating does

@… @… Oh yeah, I remember having similar kinds of conversations with the first venue.
Every year there’s a new management and you have to go through the process of “hey, we are weird, here is an extremely detaile…

Calamus 19 Mind you the timid models of the rest, the majority?
A declaration of intellectual independence and a celebration of brotherly love. Honestly this poem feels a little clumsy to me, I can see why Whitman struck the awkward introducing lines in later editions.
As always, looking for the gay content:
Yet comes one, a Manhattanese, and ever at parting, kisses me lightly on the lips with robust love.
And I, in the public room, or on the crossing of the street, or on the ship's deck, kiss him in return
We observe that salute of American comrades
But I can't in all honestly read this use of "kissing" as erotic. Here the public kissing and the "salute of comrades" makes me think it's more of a fraternal kiss.
Which doesn't exclude a romantic kiss as well, or an erotic one. What's so vital about Calamus is how Whitman blends masculine sexual love with the love of comrades. I think both meanings are latent in every poem.

Having to go to a food bank sticks with you
– it's time politicians knew about it
Amie, a town councillor and mother-of-two, had no choice but to use a food bank.
She’ll be joining more than 700 campaigners in Westminster on 18 June calling for urgent action against the rising tide of poverty in the UK
They are calling for an essentials guarantee,
which would help ensure universal credit provides enough to cover the essentials of life -- without having to g…

Having to go to a food bank sticks with you – it’s time politicians knew about it
Anti-poverty charities are calling for the government to introduce an essentials guarantee and prevent people needing to go to a food bank.

How popular media gets love wrong
Okay, so what exactly are the details of the "engineered" model of love from my previous post? I'll try to summarize my thoughts and the experiences they're built on.
1. "Love" can be be thought of like a mechanism that's built by two (or more) people. In this case, no single person can build the thing alone, to work it needs contributions from multiple people (I suppose self-love might be an exception to that). In any case, the builders can intentionally choose how they build (and maintain) the mechanism, they can build it differently to suit their particular needs/wants, and they will need to maintain and repair it over time to keep it running. It may need winding, or fuel, or charging plus oil changes and bolt-tightening, etc.
2. Any two (or more) people can choose to start building love between them at any time. No need to "find your soulmate" or "wait for the right person." Now the caveat is that the mechanism is difficult to build and requires lots of cooperation, so there might indeed be "wrong people" to try to build love with. People in general might experience more failures than successes. The key component is slowly-escalating shared commitment to the project, which is negotiated between the partners so that neither one feels like they've been left to do all the work themselves. Since it's a big scary project though, it's very easy to decide it's too hard and give up, and so the builders need to encourage each other and pace themselves. The project can only succeed if there's mutual commitment, and that will certainly require compromise (sometimes even sacrifice, though not always). If the mechanism works well, the benefits (companionship; encouragement; praise; loving sex; hugs; etc.) will be well worth the compromises you make to build it, but this isn't always the case.
3. The mechanism is prone to falling apart if not maintained. In my view, the "fire" and "appeal" models of love don't adequately convey the need for this maintenance and lead to a lot of under-maintained relationships many of which fall apart. You'll need to do things together that make you happy, do things that make your partner happy (in some cases even if they annoy you, but never in a transactional or box-checking way), spend time with shared attention, spend time alone and/or apart, reassure each other through words (or deeds) of mutual beliefs (especially your continued commitment to the relationship), do things that comfort and/or excite each other physically (anywhere from hugs to hand-holding to sex) and probably other things I'm not thinking of. Not *every* relationship needs *all* of these maintenance techniques, but I think most will need most. Note especially that patriarchy teaches men that they don't need to bother with any of this, which harms primarily their romantic partners but secondarily them as their relationships fail due to their own (cultivated-by-patriarchy) incompetence. If a relationship evolves to a point where one person is doing all the maintenance (& improvement) work, it's been bent into a shape that no longer really qualifies as "love" in my book, and that's super unhealthy.
4. The key things to negotiate when trying to build a new love are first, how to work together in the first place, and how to be comfortable around each others' habits (or how to change those habits). Second, what level of commitment you have right now, and what how/when you want to increase that commitment. Additionally, I think it's worth checking in about what you're each putting into and getting out of the relationship, to ensure that it continues to be positive for all participants. To build a successful relationship, you need to be able to incrementally increase the level of commitment to one that you're both comfortable staying at long-term, while ensuring that for both partners, the relationship is both a net benefit and has manageable costs (those two things are not the same). Obviously it's not easy to actually have conversations about these things (congratulations if you can just talk about this stuff) because there's a huge fear of hearing an answer that you don't want to hear. I think the range of discouraging answers which actually spell doom for a relationship is smaller than people think and there's usually a reasonable "shoulder" you can fall into where things aren't on a good trajectory but could be brought back into one, but even so these conversations are scary. Still, I think only having honest conversations about these things when you're angry at each other is not a good plan. You can also try to communicate some of these things via non-conversational means, if that feels safer, and at least being aware that these are the objectives you're pursuing is probably helpful.
I'll post two more replies here about my own experiences that led me to this mental model and trying to distill this into advice, although it will take me a moment to get to those.
#relationships #love

Remember that my support posts are only starting points, templates. They are not the final word on support.
Added that reminder as an update with examples of more testing *you* need to do (anchor link):
https://adrianroselli.com/2025/04/tweaking-text-…

Tweaking Text Level Styles, Reprised
In 2017 I wrote Tweaking Text Level Styles (terrible name in retrospect) and I made regular updates over the years. Stop reading it. Remove it from your bookmarks. Unlink it from your posts. Print it onto paper and then burn it. Demo Wrap-up The conclusions and…