Tootfinder

Went for a weekend walk in QE park; the colors of autumn are fading, but there are still treats for the eye.
#Photography #Vancouver

Yes.
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Boris (@bmann.ca)
Yes. [contains quote post or other embedded content]

OK folks, looking for a nice desk lamp, any recommendations?
Price < $200 CAD
#fedibuy #fedihelp

Stre-e-e-tch.
#caturday

Thread viewer as a @leaflet.pub embed. Excellent.
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Boris (@bmann.ca)
Thread viewer as a @leaflet.pub embed. Excellent. [contains quote post or other embedded content]

1/2 In which I cover a couple of the weird/scary aspects of the #genAI bubble and try to get a feel what the post-bubble hangover will feel like. Tl;dr: Not like the dot-com bust. https://www.tbray.org/ong…

After the Bubble

Learned a neat git thing today. Reverting changes to ONE file in a PR
`git checkout origin/main -- config/services.php`
Revert the changes to `services.php` in my current branch/PR.
#git

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@coop/115688210893772046
I think this is absolutely the right approach. I think that there's a nice business opportunity in Mastodon-Instances-as-a-Service (MIaaS?), where by “nice” I mean “you can make a nice living” but totally not “…

Great to see @… running with #ProtocolsForPublishers
Chad is a huge open protocols advocate, and fortunately he's not completely engineering brained and has been spending time at the Internet Governance Forum and other important venues that are m…

A collegue and I have been doing a lot of testing with Opus 4.6 since yesterday. I spent $23 in a single prompt using /fast btw, insane! Anyway, the agent team functionality is cool to see, but I was underwhelmed by the quality.
Overall, I haven't noticed much improvement against Opus 4.5 at individual tasks. But when using agent teams, the quality is more like Sonnet 4.5's. It is not that smart.

Ed Zitron offers 15K words on whether Nvidia is like Enron (or several other famous fraudsters) or not. It's amusing and erudite and most people just won't have time to plow through it. Which is a pity, because 80% of the way through there’s a section called:
“Is NVIDIA Shipping Millions Of GPUs And Putting Them In Warehouses? Where Are The 6 Million Shipped Blackwell GPUs?”
His findings are absolutely shocking. Tl;dr: That headline just above.

NVIDIA Isn't Enron - So What Is It?
If you enjoy this free newsletter, why not subscribe to Where's Your Ed At Premium? It's $7 a month or $70 a year, and helps support me putting out these giant free newsletters! At the end of November, NVIDIA put out an internal memo (that was leaked to Barron's reporter

In discussion with some speakers we are looking to recruit for #ATmosphereConf, I said we have lots of really great tech talks, but also "how do we shine a path on the road ahead and equip community & builders with some approaches and mindsets"

Nothing hurts my head more than reading about time. https://mastodon.social/@h4ckernews/115688679152089280

The Summoning of Bertrand Russell: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/641

The Summoning of Bertrand Russell
A philosophy webcomic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also Jokes

Blaine's talk is SO GOOD @… - I'm going to get his slides too, and we should embed the hertzog video.
Speaking of great talks, will we have more or less tears at this year's #ATmosphereConf?

BC Greens will let their deal with the NDP govt lapse next month for what seem to me pretty good reasons: https://bcgreens.ca/leaders-statement-will-not-renew-carga/
Current seats (out of 93): NDP 47, Conservatives 39, Green 2, right-wingnuts 5. So Eby’s gotta manage…

Leader’s Statement: BC Greens Will Not Renew CARGA
Emily Lowan states the BC Greens will not renew CARGA with the BC NDP, highlighting their legislative majority. Read more!

My 2018 Nissan Leaf has had no maintenance needed in 7 years (besides the usual tire rotation, brake check, etc).
Love it so much we bought a 2024 as well. https://mas.to/@carnage4life/115691608937085271

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@timbray/116036407755063167
The smallest largest dictionary for any language is for Toki Pona, which has only 181 headwords. It's a constructed language that's only been around for 25 years.

That #Superbowl pre-game show was kind of, um, woke.

Majority of the people I see recommending moving to Matrix are running on the main home server.
Which is fine, it's the easy path to get started but be aware that roots your identity in that homeserver.
My _personal_ take is that I consider public community chat to be ephemeral, which is why I've never been particularly concerned about using Discord.
Other than encouraging use of a forum for long form & persistent writing that can be discovered / linked over tim…

Looking forward to getting translation of all the Bad Bunny words. Good show, immense cultural leverage. OMG Liam. #Superbowl

RE: https://eupolicy.social/@jmaris/115860595238097654
Almost nobody needs a truck. And those that do don’t need big ones. Love this C15 and there’s also that Japanese truck.
Big trucks are for dicks.

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@hyphacoop/115685327547429897
They likely won't like my answers. 😅
FWIW a 7B param LLM costs around 55MWh to train and test, and about 300Wh per query. Then factor that 52% of the answers are unusable, so like Lay's potato chips, NOBODY does only one prompt.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Mrfunkedude/115872195652061942
I followed @… when I got on here and quickly found my p…

After all, why shouldn’t electrical-transmission towers take the form of giant ethereal robots? https://choishine.com/Giants.html
(h/t @… )

RE: https://mastodon.social/@andrewstroehlein/115869757494629163
When Musk bought it and banned 3rd party clients

Just ran across https://openwebsearch.eu/news/ for the first time. A small number of years ago I would have called the idea ridiculous. Now I think that, if you got the right people together, it could have a good outcome.

Hmmm. #ATmosphereConf wrapped, is this anything?
@olof-loves-ai.bsky.social will you join us in Vancouver in March? Would love to have you submit to the CFP: news.atmosphereconf.org/3m6z2b7ovyk2i
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Boris (@bmann.ca)
Hmmm. #ATmosphereConf wrapped, is this anything? @olof-loves-ai.bsky.social will you join us in Vancouver in March? Would love to have you submit to the CFP: news.atmosphereconf.org/3m6z2b7ovyk2i [contains quote post or other embedded content]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@emilylowan/116042802063757102
Oh, and here's Green leader Lowan.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/115870261362157967
Yup this is sooo dumb

TFW you notice that your Synology-local-backup to cloud-backup hasn't been working since you moved in October 2024 because you’d stupidly hardwired the Synology DNS to the former residence’s now-wrong 192.168. Would have been sad if the house burned down. Would have been nice if the Synology had complained.
Discovered this in the course of a search for a non-US (ideally Canadian) Synology-friendly cloud backup. Promising: eazyBackup and ionos.ca HiDrive.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@cultofmac/115866958248122010
Back when Apple was fun

I did not know the Semble logo was a cairn.
Now I want a pet rock mascot. With googly eyes.
(I should make sure we have googly eyes at the conference)
Also a very good post by @wesleyfinck.org on naming in interfaces and products.
https://notes.wesleyfinck.org/3m6mpbihiy22o

Laurie Penny is very near the top of my list of favorite living writers. She has started a how-to-write-well series, entitled (for obvious reasons) “How to Write Like A Person”; intro here: https://open.substack.com/pub/lauriepenny/p/ho…

How to Write Like A Person
Announcing a new seminar for 2026.

Oh, today is my iTunes Match-iversary. I pay Apple ~$30CAD annually for them to store and sync my 30 year old digital music collection of like ... 100GB and counting.
Looks like I wrote about it last year.
Most of my music purchases are Bandcamp/indie these days and uploaded to my home Ampache. https://bsky.ap…

Boris (@bmann.ca)
Oh, today is my iTunes Match-iversary. I pay Apple ~$30CAD annually for them to store and sync my 30 year old digital music collection of like ... 100GB and counting. Looks like I wrote about it last year. Most of my music purchases are Bandcamp/indie these days and uploaded to my home Ampache.

RE: https://mstdn.ca/@davidakin/116036872766920155
David has a fabulously intelligent, informative daily political newsletter. He knows Substack ain’t great, but doesn’t know of any options.
Are there some?

RE: https://mastodon.social/@emilylowan/115680142012960012
Continuing to be impressed by the direction Ms Lowan and the BC Greens are taking. Old-school forestry just doesn’t work any more, creative destruction is the only way forward.

Not obvious that the numbers mean the same thing or are comparable, but still: Wikipedia, “List of dictionaries by number of words”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number_of_words

RE: https://phpc.social/@ramsey/115840508587895842
Samesies

RE: https://flipboard.social/@coffeegeek/115946586003362286
Must-read.

RE: https://mas.to/@kissane/115771219606234540
A thoughtful consideration of thoughtfulness. With earthquakes and tsunamis. Recommended.

Is there a “quick” to follow all the folks i follow on bluesky, over here? I know about the bridging bot, but is there a way to automate that?
Related, is there a way to automate reaching out to bsky folks that I follow that aren’t bridged with that bridging bot?

FreeScout is AGPL licensed shared inbox,with one-time-purchase AGPL modules https://freescout.net/modules-faq/#license
I got the chance to try out buying / installing a module for FreeScout, adding CRM features
I run it on Cloudron, and after paying $16.99CAD and entering the lic…

Congrats! The @… team hit their initial “maintenance” goal. The next unlock is working on federated groups.
Help fund their campaign!
https://indieweb.social/@bonfire/11566

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@kgw/116026567123149891
Extreme, but beautiful drives in Canada

Cat was unimpressed by the Opening Ceremony. Me too.
#Olympics

When we were planning the August edition of @protocolsforpublishers.com we knew that being in the US wasn’t going to work for a lot of people.
@chadkoh.com is running with it & now has set a date for London in early February.
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Boris (@bmann.ca)
When we were planning the August edition of @protocolsforpublishers.com we knew that being in the US wasn’t going to work for a lot of people. @chadkoh.com is running with it & now has set a date for London in early February. [contains quote post or other embedded content]

Another dispatch from the implementing-regular-expressions front lines. Probably of interest to very few, but who knows. Includes thoughts on coding while old.
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/01/01/Quamina-2026

Regexp Lessons

Yes. A personal search engine, visualizer, and interface builder.
“look, the way grok is integrated into X is gross and stupid and bad, but i do believe having an LLM familiar help you navigate the dark forest of the internet is going to be the future — ideally this is on your device or through a trusted and secure host, but it will be immensely helpful”

dame (@dame.is)
look, the way grok is integrated into X is gross and stupid and bad, but i do believe having an LLM familiar help you navigate the dark forest of the internet is going to be the future — ideally this is on your device or through a trusted and secure host, but it will be immensely helpful

RE: https://mastodon.social/@dansup/116029936042827639
He’s very smart, this is a great idea

The year is 2026 and I just fixed some broken Perl code. Living in the future, baby.
#perl

I mean, spam sucks obviously, but occasionally one leaks through the filters that makes me smile.
There’s a URL in the signature which I whimsically followed, the headline there is: “The place where you can build and buy a whole qubit.”
#xml

Hey, I'm in the Epstein files! Er, in a "Popular in your network" email from <info@twitter.com> in February 2016. The redirect URLs are broken so I can’t even figure out what I said that was popular: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet 11/EFTA0…

Age Verification | United States Department of Justice

Yup my daughter had a trans guide in her unit.
Lovely organization. https://tech.lgbt/@Natasha_Jay/115662255521498194

Natasha Jay 🇪🇺 (@Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt)
Attached: 1 image Statement by the Canadian Girl Guides Association. 🇨🇦 #Trans #Transrights

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated
Fa la la la la.

Neat article on why southern Australia has no cities. https://www.ryanjhite.com/2025/12/02/the-great-australian-void-why-an-entire-coastline-has-no-cities/

Why the Great Australian Bight Has No Cities: Full Geographic Breakdown
Discover why a 1,000-km stretch of Australian coastline remains empty. Explore the Nullarbor, Bunda Cliffs, and the geography that prevents cities here.

Didn’t think it was possible that my contempt for FIFA could increase, but I was wrong.

One of the neatest things to do, come at low tide, then high tide. https://mas.to/@Canadian_Eh/115664962761563504

Sharing bits of Canada 'eh🇨🇦 (@Canadian_Eh@mas.to)
Attached: 1 image Hopewell Rocks: Walk the Ocean Floor in New Brunswick 🌊 At low tide, visitors to the Bay of Fundy can walk on the ocean floor around the towering Hopewell Rocks. These flowerpot-shaped formations are sculpted by the world's highest tides—a must-see marvel! 🇨🇦 #Canada #Geography #NewBrunswick #NatureWonders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopewell_Rocks

What the headline says: “Sleepy Mountain Lion Wakes Up Right in Front of Trail Camera” - several amusing px. https://petapixel.com/2026/02/04/sleepy-mountain-lion-wakes-up-right-in-front-of-trail-camera/

GOOSEFISH
Community mascot options just expanded.
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Boris (@bmann.ca)
GOOSEFISH Community mascot options just expanded. [contains quote post or other embedded content]

One of my top guilty Internet pleasures: Wonkette: #USpol

Jesse Watters Pretty Sure Going MAGA Makes Women Hotter
It's literally true if you consider that they look like melted Bratz dolls.

Long interview with Steven Guilbeault about his protest resignation from Carney’s cabinet, Canada’s carbon-emissions story, and #ClimateChange in general. It’s a Bloomberg podcast but there’s a transcript:
https://

On compute as a commodity “people might be open to a new bespoke pickle vendor. So we're pickling some compute and selling that.”
And
“Our mission is to spread the joy of programming, both in people's personal lives and at work.”
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Boris (@bmann.ca)
On compute as a commodity “people might be open to a new bespoke pickle vendor. So we're pickling some compute and selling that.” And “Our mission is to spread the joy of programming, both in people's personal lives and at work.” [contains quote post or other embedded content]

“Welcome to the first Long Links of this so-far-pretty-lousy 2026. I can’t imagine that anyone will have time to take in all of these, but there’s a good chance one or two might brighten your day.” https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/02/03/Long-Links
This ti…

Long Links

RE: https://mastodon.social/@grrlscientist/116017318966751543
Man pays $50M for a wedding but lays off journalists.
Fucking rich people.

We’re looking at global aggregation of blog tags again. Send your suggestions to @leaflet.pub
@kevinmarks.com any opinions or learnings you’d like to share from the Technorati days?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technorati
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Saskatchewan
#photography

And all of those App Stores could be using an app Lexicon, and get curated for unique needs, with social signals and ownership details.
https://bsky.app/profile/davatron5000.bsky.social/post/3m6fkly5krk2w

@… my mentions are like completely fucked up now 😂

RE: https://chaos.social/@slothrop/115665760748320616
Not just road test but load test. Climb aboard!

I suggest we call this “The Epstein Files War”.
#Epstein #Venezuela

Not a huge fan of David “LNG” Eby but I’m with him on this one. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/eby-alberta-separatist-group-treason-9.7071107?cmp=rss

B.C. premier doubles down on calling Alberta separatist movement seeking U.S. support 'treason' | CBC News
Calgary-based data analyst John Santos warns that that kind of language could push people toward separatism.

Haha, sorry MAGA, turns out you can’t power all those aspirational AI data centers without renewables. Wow, if they built a bunch of renewable infra and then the bubble popped, that’d be just (*snicker*) terrible… https://www.

Yawn, another Btc-down-5% day. For those who watch this space closely, the spot price is regularly drifting down below the average price of the Btc in the MicroStrategy treasury. There’s a certain smell in the air…
#bitcoin

In which I write about the pretty-awesome experience of attending the MLS quarter-final game with my son and 53,095 other good friends, and how getting interested in fútbol has had the side-effect that I’ve lost most of my interest in football (as in NFL). https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/20<…

For those of us shaking our heads over the Carney/Smith deal, this seems relevant and… not terrible? https://www.readtheline.ca/p/ken-boessenkool-carney-and-smith
Yes, I know Carbon Capture is not actually useful (unless something changed?)
Yes, I know they'…

Ken Boessenkool: Carney and Smith adopt the Trudeau-Notley plan
I apologize in advance for the acronym hell you are about to read.

Optimism about US democracy, with sports metaphors and statics nerdery: https://open.substack.com/pub/natesilver/p/dont-discount-american-democracys?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Don't discount American democracy's resilience
The U.S. has a highly popular democratic tradition, even as it battles an authoritarian element.

Qobuz’s policy on AI-generated music.
#music #genAI

Saskatchewan winter study.
#photography

@… Does this screenie exhibit a bug? Note the lonely "Followers" text at the bottom.
Best of the New Year to you and yours, and thanks for all the fine work!

AWS Lambda Managed Instances: Serverless, only with servers!
Would like to see some app scenarios with detailed cost breakdown.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-aws-lambda-managed-instances-serverless-si…

Introducing AWS Lambda Managed Instances: Serverless simplicity with EC2 flexibility | Amazon Web Services
Run Lambda functions on EC2 compute while maintaining serverless simplicity—enabling access to specialized hardware and cost optimizations through EC2 pricing models, with AWS handling all infrastructure management.

Having been a (light but regular) Wikipedia editor for many years has made me reflexively disbelieve anything I read or hear that includes a number but doesn’t provide a citation to back it up. I think this is a good habit?

From the excellent Standard Ebooks, “Read 20 of the best books entering the public domain in 2026”. Seriously, check ’em out.
https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-domain-day-2026

Gambier Island in Átl'ka7tsem/Howe Sound.
#Photography

1/ I hate Bitcoin with a probably-unhealthy intensity and have a hook set up so I get notified on big moves (e.g. down 5.3% today). When they come in I glance at the chart and occasionally get stuck for a few minutes. Stock markets have been explained as an argument between buyers & sellers as to the correct value of the underlying real-world thing. But…
#Bitcoin

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@timbray/115639842170295353
OMG it turns out this is due to the Mac APFS filesystem’s default case-mapping behavior, so things like SSH and LS work (bleccch).
(h/t @stoey.bsky.social over on bsky)

Learning #GarageBand. The learning curve is steep but not that tall. Does what I need. Downside: Listening to playback of my playing, all I can hear is everything that’s wrong.

Amazon Employees for Climate Justice strike again! https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-employees-open-letter-artificial-intelligence-layoffs/?emci=8691…

Amazon Workers Issue Warning About Company’s ‘All-Costs-Justified’ Approach to AI Development
Amazon Employees for Climate Justice says that over 1,000 workers have signed a petition raising “serious concerns” about the company’s “aggressive rollout” of artificial intelligence tools.

Grumpy at America; If you weren’t so dysfunctional I would go to Miami to see the MLS final, where Vancouver’s #VWFC is hoping to topple Messi and co.

Blocking the work of MSF is absolutely depraved. Israel continues to fumble its way out of the community of civilized nations.
https://apnews.com/article/gaza-israel-hamas-palestinians-ceasefire-war-news-286106d7a5a911704cdcf1c93…

Israel to halt operations of several humanitarian groups in Gaza starting in 2026
Israel says it will suspend several humanitarian organizations for failing to meet its new rules to vet international organizations working in Gaza. The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs said on Tuesday that the organizations that will be banned on Jan. 1 did not meet its new requirements for sharing staff, funding and operations information. It accused Doctors Without Borders, known as MSF by its French acronym, of failing to clarify the roles of some staff that Israel accused of cooperation with H…

Idly working on my Quamina state-machine-based pattern matcher. (https://github.com/timbray/quamina)
Hit a bug that smells like an infinite loop. Looked closer. Hmm, seems like my code traversing a dinky little 4-state automaton thinks it needs to consider 25,165,824 possible state transitions. Need …

GitHub - timbray/quamina: Home of Quamina, a fast pattern-matching library in Go
Home of Quamina, a fast pattern-matching library in Go - timbray/quamina

Good lord, Usenet still exists?!? https://newsgrouper.org/tops

Excellent lazy-Sunday reading: “Asteroids that spin really fast” by astrophysicist Stacy McGaugh: https://tritonstation.com/2026/02/01/asteroids-that-spin-really-fast/
The Vera Rubin scope is discovering huge numbers of asteroids and some of them are weird. …

Hey @… here's a screenie of a page linked from masto in Phanpy. How do I get it to open in a real browser so I can come back to it later? This is totally fatal to the way I work.

Daring Fireball: The Names They Call Themselves
#USpol

The Names They Call Themselves
*Fascist* and *Nazi* weren’t slurs that were applied to the Italians and Germans by their political or military opponents. That’s what they called themselves. The job won’t be done, this era of madness will not end, until we make *the names Trump’s regime calls themselves* universally acknowledged slurs.

#genAI

Pipeline projects such as the one being promoted by Carney and Smith typically end having to skirt the Hecate Strait (see https://paddlingmag.com/stories/columns/still/hecate-strait/) after hitting saltwater at Kitimat (see

Crossing Canada's Most Dangerous Waterway By SUP
What it takes to cross Hecate Strait and live to tell the tale.

Guilbeault quits Carney’s cabinet over energy deal with Alberta | CBC News
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/guilbeault-quitting-cabinet-9.6995299

Guilbeault quits Carney’s cabinet over energy deal with Alberta | CBC News
Liberal MP Steven Guilbeault has quit cabinet over the federal government signing Thursday’s memorandum of understanding with Alberta.

Blacksky is interesting: https://blackskyweb.xyz
Also, they have transparent finances, which I care about really a lot: https://opencollective.com/blacksky

Build Community Online with Decentralized Tools | Blacksky
Decentralized tools to build community online. The intercommunal net where communities govern, pool funds and stay safe on their own terms.

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mpjgregoire/115617463612803295
MG is our own Tory exemplar — a Royalist even — keeping his head above Mastodon’s progressive river somewhere near the right bank.
Hey MG, your tribe needs a hashtag,