Tootfinder

Netanyahu said:
“There’s so many false reports of conversations that never happened, and I’m not going to get into that.”
“But I can tell you, I think that we do what we need to do, we’ll do what we need to do.
And I think the United States knows what is good for the United States,”
Anonymous administration officials had claimed that the Israelis reported they had an opportunity to kill the top Iranian leader, and that Trump waved them off of the plan

'The Responsible AI Ecosystem: Seven Lessons from the BRAID Landscape Study'
Report just released: https://braiduk.org/the-responsible-ai-ecosystem-seven-lessons-from-the-braid-landscape-study

The Responsible AI Ecosystem: Seven Lessons from the BRAID Landscape Study

@… Yeah, that works less well. I’m running Nix for some stuff on Raspbian and you simply can’t do the good bits, such as managing services. So I use Ansible, begrudgingly.
Gonna get myself a little x86 box soon. The Pi was cool but ultimately a failure for me, specifically because of this.

How to Keep Up With New CSS Features | CSS-Tricks
https://css-tricks.com/how-to-keep-up-with-new-css-features/
Oh, the State of CSS survey is open... And ßmore good sources.

Do Raiders Make Sense As Ramsey Landing Spot? https://www.si.com/nfl/dolphins/news/do-raiders-make-sense-as-ramsey-landing-spot-01jxwnzfsv0e

Over the past few months, I've been building out a home server that was originally purely to run on-prem LLMs. Since I wanted it to run killer AI, I named it "Delores." Over the weekend, I received a Mac Mini in the mail that I got a good deal on and set it up to augment Dolores. I was trying to figure out what to name it and eventually went with "Teddy."
From my laptop, iPads, etc, I can remote into an Ubuntu VM, Windows VM, or (now) MacOS and do whatever I am looking to do.

I spent years in that particular trap: 'I don't understand how to fix this. I definitely can't do a good job. So why bother trying?' https://www.overcomeco…

The full formula for the probability of "success" is:
p = {
1/(2^(-n 1)) if n is negative, or
1 - (1/(2^(n 1))) if n is zero or positive
}
(Both branches have the same value when n is 0, so the behavior is smooth around the origin.)
How can we tweak this?
First, we can introduce fixed success and/or failure chances unaffected by level, with this formula only taking effect if those don't apply. For example, you could do 10% failure, 80% by formula, and 10% success to keep things from being too sure either way even when levels are very high or low. On the other hand, this flattening makes the benefit of extra advantage levels even less exciting.
Second, we could allow for gradations of success/failure, and treat the coin pools I used to explain that math like dice pools a bit. An in-between could require linearly more success flips to achieve the next higher grade of success at each grade. For example, simple success on a crit role might mean dealing 1.5x damage, but if you succeed on 2 of your flips, you get 9/4 damage, or on 4 flips 27/8, or on 7 flips 81/16. In this world, stacking crit levels might be a viable build, and just giving up on armor would be super dangerous. In the particular case I was using this for just now, I can't easily do gradations of success (that's the reason I turned to probabilities in the first place) but I think I'd favor this approach when feasible.
The main innovation here over simple dice pools is how to handle situations where the number of dice should be negative. I'm almost certain it's not a truly novel innovation though, and some RPG fan can point out which system already does this (please actually do this, I'm an RPG nerd too at heart).
I'll leave this with one more tweak we could do: what if the number 2 in the probability equation were 3, or 2/3? I think this has a similar effect to just scaling all the modifiers a bit, but the algebra escapes me in this moment and I'm a bit lazy. In any case, reducing the base of the probability exponent should let you get a few more gradations near 50%, which is probably a good thing, since the default goes from 25% straight to 50% and then to 75% with no integer stops in between.

K3 surfaces over small number fields and Kummer constructions in families
Stefan Schr\"oer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14732 https://

K3 surfaces over small number fields and Kummer constructions in families
We construct K3 surfaces over number fields that have good reduction everywhere. These do not exists over the rational numbers, by results of Abrashkin and Fontaine. Our surfaces exist for three quadratic number fields, and an infinite family of $S_3$-number fields. To this end we develop a theory of Kummer constructions in families, based on Romagny's notion of the effective models, here applied to sign involutions. This includes quotients of non-normal surfaces by infinitesimal group schemes …

Great stuff in this article but I do not know if unplugging from the broligarch's platforms is the solution to end their delusional grandeur.
It is the same with the climate crisis. This cannot hinge on the individual to solve but the whole system has to change. Individual action is good but that is not enough.
(For all its shortfalls the EU is regulating parts of the tech industry, but there has to be more.)

What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
Why Elon Musk and other tech billionaires have a different perspective

“The society said any judgments it issued that were potentially seen as political would do ‘more harm than good.’”
The Royal Society has already made a political announcement: that it is perfectly fine with fascism and having fascists as fellows. As far as political statements go, it doesn’t get any stronger than that. The only thing they could do to make their point clearer is if they hang a “Nazi Bar” sign above their headquarters.

Good idea, perhaps the Commission could put this vision into practice for #EV roaming, so that the #AFIR provisions do not remain a dead letter?
From: @…

European Commission (@EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu)
Attached: 1 image 🛬 Plane lands. Flight mode off. 💬 “Welcome to Italy! Use your mobile plan just like at home.” 8 years of free EU roaming – we've come a long way: → 2000s: €0.50–€1/min calls → 2007: roaming caps → 2017: the end of roaming charges → 2022: the improved “Roam like at home” pack extended to 2032, bringing: 🌐 Fast 5G access across the EU 💰 Protection from unexpected charges 🆘 Better access to emergency services Fair for opera…

Do everything you can to protest tomorrow.
If you can't, flood the socials with NOKINGS because the media, petrified of angering Emperor Trump, is going to downplay & minimize the protests to "tell both sides".
#Protests #NoKings

DO HO SUH: WALK THE HOUSE. This is startlingly good. Really worth a trip to see the exhibition at Tate Modern, if you are anywhere near. It's rare to come across innovative modern art that is so soothing, not shocking or disturbing. These rooms are all made from thin, translucent fabric held up on wire frame, complete with all the familiar fittings.
#art

I agree entirely with Rich.
BUT: there is a sound basis for not implementing mail functionality in systems that do not absolutely demand it. https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/114688068144011594

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings:
🎵 How Do I Let A Good Man Down?
#NowPlaying #SharonJones #TheDapKings
https://sharonjonesandthedapkings.bandcamp.com/track/how-do-i-let-a-good-man-down
https://open.spotify.com/track/4E3pn4V6cDAMRe6hXjQcXe

Do you know: if you don't post an image, pixelfed users will not see your post.
Time to bring back the good old transparent 1*1px gif/png
(Gif powered by #pixelfed

I’ve heard that the Trump admin is concerned that having the parade in the rain might be depressing the troops a bit and are looking for a way to cheer them up, apparently there’s one good suggestion on the table:

📌 Pinned Introduction
Hey, I’m Erik. I’m an anarchist with an embarrassingly massive crush on Rudolf Rocker’s syndicalist take. I’m also bisexual, autistic, and genderfluid because why not add some extra flavor?
I’m here to share my weird little world, build some solidarity, and maybe spark a little revolution along the way. No pressure, no drama, just good vibes and a lot of laughs. You do you and I’ll do me. Cool? Cool.

I need help. What would a viking say if he is disappointed by the fact that there is no any good loot in a room on a raid.
Something like 'f**k' . Do you know any Nordic experts? #Viking #help

Turns out that desktop computers don't survive a power outage the way laptops do. I suppose it's good to be reminded about things like that.

I believe I have managed to prove my ID in order to comply with the new laws that say I have to prove my ID to own the business I own that I'm sure already asked me to prove my ID when I registered it.
First we tried the on-web version, but that apparently relies upon the corporates having managed to profile and track me, because it told me they had no questions upon which to base identification. Good I guess? My avoid-tracking systems must be working at least a bit?
Next we tried the android app, but apparently the phone I tried that with is too old and the app won't install.
So next option is turning up at a post office with a printed letter. I don't own a printer though, so had to have them post that to me.
Took the letter and a driving licence up to the post office today and "It's not going through" they said, pointing to a stalled progress bar on an android app on a tablet.
Um. Okay. So?
Just wait longer apparently. About ten minutes and it finally proceeded and the post office man took a photograph of me after asking me to disrobe of my robe, strip down to a teeshirt and jeans.
Not sure in what sense this has proven my ID any more than it was already proven to get the driving licence or company registration in the first place?
Apparently I now have government logins for "One Login" and for "government gateway" and they are not the same thing? But sort of are the same thing?
Can't say I really understand it. Expect they'll introduce a third government login when they do these Digital ID cards they're talking about.
God knows how I'm supposed to know which to use when the company tax records need updating in a few months.
#id #government #oneLogin

A common comment I hear from AI fanbois is you need to refine your prompt, and need to ask many times. And so they do.
Each prompt consumes 16oz of water just to answer, maybe double if you used voice, and a massive amount of energy and natural resources, so conservatively, what does each and every prompt REALLY cost? We do know OpenAI spent $12M to extract $9M, so maybe $10/prompt?
How is this "good for business"?
https://anatomyof.ai

For people mad about MX flags 🇲🇽 in LA: do you know where Six Flags gets its name? (Hint: short for "Six Flags over Texas", referring to the six countries that governed TX. A good trivia question is what those are. Can't go far in TX w/out seeing the 6.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_flag

Six flags over Texas - Wikipedia

Sim, sim. Nada mais adequado neste momento do que morrer o gajo que compôs "Good Vibrations".
Perfeitamente em sintonia com o estado de tudo.
RIP, #BrianWilson

@…
Wow! I have a bunch of those Seattle Filmworks files. Do you plan to share your project? How will the results compare to just re-scanning the film with a good slide scanner? #seattleFilmWorks

I just don't understand why google thinks starting its search results with a big chunk of a bit containing total lies is at all reasonable, do they think it makes them look good?

"You must have a market for interesting jobs, good housing, and a market to switch partners. Because people do that too"
#sovereignity #North

Making good progress on the switch logic board layout. Still lots to do to get netlist-complete, plus a lot of cleanup once the initial routing is done, but it's getting there.
Added a fan cutout, slightly off center of the FPGA but that's fine (I also want to get hot air off the SFP28s and line cards south of this board).

Possible "small talk" question instead of asking about a person's job:
What charities do you donate to?
I just thought of it, I haven't tried it yet. Do you think that is a good option?
What questions do you like to use?

Let this be a lesson: my point about editing above goes deep. It's not just about writing words and editing words.
It's about decisions of any kind.
While deliberative paralysis is a thing, when you make "do" easier than "deliberate" (and increasingly tip the balance toward "do"), what happens is what's easy, not what's good. It is an accelerator for all kinds of things, a great many of them bad, and even more suboptimal.

Comparison of Rochester with Buffalo shows why cities should remove, not underground, their bad highways.
Draws one good lesson & one bad one:
Yes, plan in advance for what you want to do.
No, don't try to "build consensus". Build support. Consensus-seeking doesn't avoid "paralysis by analysis," it creates it.

Rochester gave up on a highway and filled it in. Should Baltimore?
Rochester gave up lanes of highway traffic to turn a trench into green space — and wants to do more.

The party that was supposed to be good at managing the nation's finances cancelled the second leg of #HS2. Apparently, to save £36 billion, which "would instead be allocated to infrastructure projects to provide better transport links across the north of England." Yet we still do not really know the cancellation cost, or whether anything will really be spent extra on the north of Englan…

"You are a software worker. And you are able to do your job in more or less good conditions only because you are standing on the shoulders of countless others. We are talking about the fact that if you have 20 days of holidays, if you only work 5 days a week, if you are able to take some days or weeks off after the birth of your child, it is because some others before you have sacrificed their lives so you can work in decent conditions."

For example:
- Telling apart photos of cats and dogs is “AI.”
- Making up fake but plausible facts on an arbitrary topic is “AI.”
- Walking is “AI.”
- Doing long multiplication is something we might call “intelligence” in humans, but it is not “AI” because computers have •always• been good at it.
- Winning at checkers •used• to be “AI” because computers didn’t used to be able to do that, but now it’s not “AI” because computers have been good at it for too long.
5/

Good, Bad, Wild Card: PFF's review of Cowboys' roster telling story with unknown finish https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/05/31/how-do-the-cowboys-stack-up-…

Today is #BandcampFriday! (thank you @… for the reminder: https://ravenati…

I'm afraid this is true. I already struggle to raise enough money to keep the very talented young scientists I have working with me (from many different countries already), finding funding for more will be difficult, and why should US scientists essentially queue jump just because of their nationality ? I know that sounds harsh, I have very good US colleagues, but I have to be fair to all, regardless of where they come from. OTOH, if you are a US scientist and you are interested in exploring possibilities in Denmark, give me a shout and we'll see what we can do.
https://mastodon.world/@davidho/114620044303457868
davidho@mastodon.world - Unless you’re a Nobel laureate, the brain drain will be away from science and not to other countries.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/us/trump-federal-spending-grants-scientists-leaving.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ME8.sh9q.qy7jX0S1ZrBa&smid=url-share

How to address questionable research practices, by considering why they come up?
Instead of thinking only of the bad ends of the scale (fraudulent behavior or incompetence) let's also consider the good ends. It can help us figure out what to do.
https://heidis…

"I do not deny scientific medicine’s power—its tools have saved my life and improved my functioning as much as its knowledge allowed. However, faith gives me a way of seeing and understanding the body as God’s good creation and sustained by God’s spirit."
—Hospice chaplain Aaron Klink ’05 M.Div. in his article for the new issue of Reflections, titled "Meds, MRIs, Miracles: A Hospice Chaplain Rereads Genesis"

A single paragraph buried deep in a spending bill that passed the GOP-controlled House of Representatives earlier this month is causing growing concern among democracy watchdogs
-- who warn the provision will make it so only the well-to-do would be in a good position to launch legal challenges against a Trump administration that has shown over and over again its disdain and disregard for oversight or judicial restraint of any kind.
Coming just about half-way through what Presiden…

'This Is What Autocrats Do': Concern Grows Over Single Paragraph Buried Deep in GOP Bill | Common Dreams
The provision would force those challenging Trump "to pay up in the form of a posted bond—something many people can't afford to do. That means only the wealthy will be able to even attempt to challenge the most powerful man in the country."

Calamus 16 Who is now reading this?
A funny little poem, omitted in later editions. On the surface it's a challenge to the reader and a chance for Whitman to establish himself as self-aware. Claiming his own flaws.
But the text drips with some latent queer meaning
as if I do not secretly love strangers!
(O tenderly, a long time, and never avow it ;)
A secret love that you can never avow? Hello! At least it's tenderly and a long time.
This seems as good a time as any to link Whitman's Boys, a good recent piece considering Whitman as a queer man and what that means to us in current times. It's a nice overview of some queer theory and is even-handed.

I have contributed a public statement in the currently open consultation on EU data retention plans: https://www.mayrhofer.eu.org/post/on-mass-data-retention/
You might want to do so as well.

On data retention laws: Why this is (still) not a good balance between mass surveillance and law enforcement | René Mayrhofer
The latest effort to legalize mass data retention of communication traffic metadata is still problematic. I try to make my most pressing argument why the balance between preventing harm and causing potential harm is not met.

Do people recommend any good, properly researched books/articles on Ukraine & Russia & their histories?
So that I can get to know the views of both sides (even if I'm biased to believe one side more than the other). I'm most interested in socio-cultural and political explanations, I'm not interested in military strategy etc

Hi friends!
I set my alarm to 5am and headed out for a nice walk. It was getting warm, so I started early. - and it was just so good to do so!
A nice 6h walk with lots of views, lots of photos and just enjoying being out. End the #summit just for me 😍
On the way up I noted all places where I could refuel later using my water filter. Seriously: why didn't I buy that waaays ear…

I wonder how many people understand that good organic farming practices do not contribute to this problem?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/03/climate-species-collapse-ecology-insects-nature-reserves-…

I wonder how many people understand that good organic farming practices do not contribute to this problem?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/03/climate-species-collapse-ecology-insects-nature-reserves-…

techno-political rant
Say what you want about using the right tool for each problem, but there are tools that suck no matter what.
I'm tired of people portraying legit technical criticism as "biased" and "religious", while at the same time they present themselves as tolerant and open-minded (spoiler: for the most part, they aren't).
Almost every day of my life I have to deal with the nasty consequences of ultra-dumb decisions made by the very same people who are obsessed with productivity and criticise all day long whoever pushes for any design that shows any minim amount of care and/or deep thought (mostly via strawmen arguments).
And, of course, unironically: this has a lot to do with capitalism, as many of our other social and economic problems.
They arrive, have a strike of super-productivity for a few weeks/months and then use that as a trampoline to raise through the ranks or abandon ship before having to face the consequences of their technical crimes.
Then others arrive and are obviously slower at that same job... so the uneducated observers start believing that these newcomers aren't as good as the class traitors who wrote the initial nasty code.
To make things worse, if any of these newcomers dare to speak openly about introducing good practices... this ends up creating a new mental association (in the minds of uneducated observers) between "good engineering" and "lack of productivity".
The ones trying to fix the mess are indeed slower, not because they try to do things the right way though, but because they have to waste vasts amounts of time fixing what is objectively broken besides doing the "visible" work.
Most of today's established "super-productive" ones, if they were starting today, would be probably "vibe coders", certainly not what we commonly understand as a programmer. Not because AI-coding is the future, but because they never cared about the trade at all. They were here only for the grift.

Stupidly, today I decided to play around with the DuckDuckGo ai (duck.ai) to see if I could get it to write the code for me to change the resolution of a dataset to the native model resolution.
I *knew* that LLM were bad at math. But I didn’t realize HOW bad.
I asked it to change a 0.25 by 0.25 georeferenced global array to 1 by 1.25 degrees.
Maybe I was naïve in thinking it would ‘know’ that there are 180 degrees of latitude and 360 degrees on longitude.
But I had to do 5 prompts to get that piece corrected. Admittedly, I did not correct it directly— I corrected it as I would a student by prompting that there was an error in a particular line. (And yes- I realize it isn’t human and this is the wrong approach.)
I think I’m done with AI for now. I would have failed a student taking a class with me who didn’t have this most basic of knowledge down the first 5 minutes of class.
I keep thinking that LLM are sewing machines. They do a lot of good in the hands of someone who knows how to make them work, but they are only marginally better than hand-stitching when given to someone like me.
Is there a LLM that can write code in FORTRAN?

If LLMs were so good at writing code, they wouldn’t need a new thought leader yelling about them every day.
They might be. At this point, I do not care. Lots of people (including, most recently, Ptacek, Yegge, etc.) are trying to sell me something and I have no interest in listening.
If your thing is good, show, don’t tell.
But it’s not, is it?
These articles… you’re not trying to convince me, you’re trying to convince yourselves.
So please: keep them to yoursel…

Reminder that pigs are intelligent and social, and even when exploited by humans, do a great service as food waste processors - they are too good to be used disparagingly when describing the brutishly stupid fascists being allowed to run various countries at the moments.
Pigs would never be fascists. (Urban Orwell, hanging out on a hobby farm his wife had to run so that he could write, has a lot to answer for.)

I must be using Microsoft #Copilot wrong. Most of the things I ask it to do end up screwed up. Example: I asked it to tell me all of the URL shorteners that use the .li TLD. It gave me a few and then pointed me to a list someone maintains on GitHub of URL shortener domains. Ok, good start. I ask it to pull all the .li domains from the list for me. It does that. But I spot checked the list and f…

Series C, Episode 07 - Children of Auron
TARRANT: Not that it'll do us much good without bracelets to get us up to the Liberator.
DAYNA: Could be. If they've somehow found out about Servalan's urge to breed.
VILA: But how?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/307/536

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

For example:
- Telling apart photos of cats and dogs is “AI.”
- Making up fake but plausible facts on an arbitrary topic is “AI.”
- Walking is “AI.”
- Doing long multiplication is something we might call “intelligence” in humans, but it is not “AI” because computers have •always• been good at it.
- Winning at checkers •used• to be “AI” because computers didn’t used to be able to do that, but now it’s not “AI” because computers have been good at it for too long.
5/

LoftyAssist got quite a decent bump in users this weekend, again, by my tiny standards. 41 accounts, 17 logged in over the last three days, 7 paid yearly subscription. That has to be some good ratio of paid to free, no?
And I still have a ton of things to add to help users do their research. I am very curious to see how far this will go.

"Unique Miami Recycling Company Gives Discarded Shoes New Traction"
#Recycling #Shoes #Clothes

Unique Miami Recycling Company Gives Discarded Shoes New Traction
It was seen as a more environmentally friendly way to do business, but second-hand shoes is a good gig—the only competition is the landfill.

My little dude always asking about weather and how it works and wants to see graphs.
So got a little Ambient Weather weather station and have to say it’s quite a nice thing. Enough detail, clearly presented, should be able to have some good times learning about the weather.
Also got grandad one about hours drive away by the coast so can do some comparisons
Has a nice indoor display too.

Benchmarking Time-localized Explanations for Audio Classification Models
Cecilia Bola\~nos, Leonardo Pepino, Martin Meza, Luciana Ferrer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04391

Benchmarking Time-localized Explanations for Audio Classification Models
Most modern approaches for audio processing are opaque, in the sense that they do not provide an explanation for their decisions. For this reason, various methods have been proposed to explain the outputs generated by these models. Good explanations can result in interesting insights about the data or the model, as well as increase trust in the system. Unfortunately, evaluating the quality of explanations is far from trivial since, for most tasks, there is no clear ground truth explanation to u…

Had a meeting scheduled on Tuesday, been kicked to the next day all week. Sat down this morning expecting it at 10:30, now been moved to... 10am Saturday?
Dear reader, 10am on Saturdays is not a good time for me to do things.

"But there were technologists and open source projects in attendance. Notably, representatives from the Mastodon and Bluesky teams were at the Festival. The Newsmast Foundation was also present, incisively taking part in conversations to help newsrooms onboard themselves onto both of them. I got to hang out with them all, connecting with people I’d spoken with but never interacted with in person. Mastodon has undergone a transformation, has doubled its team, and is working on smoothing out some of its rough edges, while not letting go of its core ethos. It’s also beginning to position itself as a European alternative to American social media platforms, with a community-first values system and new services to directly help organizations join the network.
Bluesky, on the other hand, has done an able job of bringing journalists onto its existing social app, and is now hard at work explaining why its underlying protocol matters. Both want to engage with newsrooms and journalists and do the right thing by them. They each have something different to prove: Mastodon that it can be usable and accessible, and Bluesky that it can provide a return to its investors and truly decentralize while holding onto its values. I’m rooting for both of them.
These platforms’ messages dovetail with my own: news can own the platforms that support them. Lots of people at the Festival were worried about the impact of US big tech on their businesses — particularly in a world where tech moguls seem to be aligning themselves with a Presidential administration that has positioned itself as being adversarial to news, journalists, sources, and, arguably, the truth. The good news is that the technology is out there, the values-aligned technologists are out there, and there’s a strong path forward. The only thing left is to follow it."
#media #Mastodon #BlueSky #Journalism
https://werd.io/2025/notes-from-perugia-journalism-values-and-building-the-web-we

The Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS/OCR) used to do a fairly good job of protecting patient's sensitive information. They did this by enforcing the HIPAA security rules and penalties for non-compliance included fines, mandatory compliance programs, and CEO liability.
No longer.
HHS/OCR has now been weaponized to enforce anti-DEI initiatives of the current administration. Here is the recent headline from HHS/OCR:
"OCR Inve…

"The good news is, those same software workers can still influence the state of the world in a positive light. In the pages of this magazine, now celebrating its fifth year of existence, we have tried to highlight the various ways they can do this:
By promoting a healthy dialogue between management and software engineers.
By showing empathy with one another and with mankind.
By unionizing and fighting against atrocious work conditions."

Looking at my calendar for today, I think the most difficult meeting is likely to be the meal planning meeting for the upcoming intergenerational family holiday.
On the plus side, I do feel that the eldest-daughter skillset was a good starting point for my leadership career 😆

Anyone have good suggestions on CompTiA network plus classes on YouTube? (or cheap online like Udemy or something). Since we have gone to Cisco phones, the phone people need to know way more about networking than they do presently. I was thinking a Network would get them the basics, and let the network folks off the hook for dealing with things that annoy them. (Like telecom people) The usual budget cuts are preventing me sending anyone to a class, and these folks are not 'read the manu…

Hi friends!
I set my alarm to 5am and headed out for a nice walk. It was getting warm, so I started early. - and it was just so good to do so!
A nice 6h walk with lots of views, lots of photos and just enjoying being out. End the #summit just for me 😍
On the way up I noted all places where I could refuel later using my water filter. Seriously: why didn't I buy that waaays ear…

I generally only do anything with those two garden beds once every 2 to 3 years. I have way too many garden beds on my property.
That turned out pretty good, though.

@… Yes, compose with existing tech!
GNU Parallel and Make do good job control.

Hm...
I guess a good way to prevent that would be to wipe out the whole fleet of Russian strategic bombers, eh? Too bad we can't do that beforehand...
Oh, wait. Someone else can.
https://mastodonapp.uk/@bbcnewsfeed/114609055478351645

Newark’s radar fiasco has been making headlines, and there was a wave of alarming incidents early in 2025 — but what’s the larger picture of air safety in the US right now?
Do we have good data on whether there have been more incidents or near misses across the country this year on an ongoing basis?

Reminder that pigs are intelligent and social, and even when exploited by humans, do a great service as food waste processors - they are too good to be used disparagingly when describing the brutishly stupid fascists being allowed to run various countries at the moments.
Pigs would never be fascists. (Urban Orwell, hanging out on a hobby farm his wife had to run so that he could write, has a lot to answer for.)

Series C, Episode 07 - Children of Auron
TARRANT: Not that it'll do us much good without bracelets to get us up to the Liberator.
DAYNA: Could be. If they've somehow found out about Servalan's urge to breed.
VILA: But how?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/307/536

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

While stuck in Ilulissat I have tried to deal with the email backlog (again). But they come in way faster than I can deal with them.
I love the idea of inbox 0 but would literally achieve nothing else if I practiced it, and work would be very boring.
Anyone have suggestions for good systems that work for overwhelming numbers of emails?
I receive around 50-60 a day, at least half of them need me to do something, often something substantial so they're not just for info. #LifeOfAScientist #Emails #EmailEttiquette

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #NightTracks
William Corkine & Jordi Savall:
🎵 Whoop! Do me no harm good man
#WilliamCorkine #JordiSavall
https://open.spotify.com/track/11ygfbRVzp2vg5ENMphkZ0

Brian Schottenheimer gives his thoughts on Dallas Cowboys Super Bowl drought https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/brian-schottenheimer-gives-thoughts-dallas-cowboys-super-bowl-drought

Let's say you find a really cool forum online that has lots of good advice on it. It's even got a very active community that's happy to answer questions very quickly, and the community seems to have a wealth of knowledge about all sorts of subjects.
You end up visiting this community often, and trusting the advice you get to answer all sorts of everyday questions you might have, which before you might have found answers to using a web search (of course web search is now full of SEI spam and other crap so it's become nearly useless).
Then one day, you ask an innocuous question about medicine, and from this community you get the full homeopathy treatment as your answer. Like, somewhat believable on the face of it, includes lots of citations to reasonable-seeming articles, except that if you know even a tiny bit about chemistry and biology (which thankfully you do), you know that the homoeopathy answers are completely bogus and horribly dangerous (since they offer non-treatments for real diseases). Your opinion of this entire forum suddenly changes. "Oh my God, if they've been homeopathy believers all this time, what other myths have they fed me as facts?"
You stop using the forum for anything, and go back to slogging through SEI crap to answer your everyday questions, because one you realize that this forum is a community that's fundamentally untrustworthy, you realize that the value of getting advice from it on any subject is negative: you knew enough to spot the dangerous homeopathy answer, but you know there might be other such myths that you don't know enough to avoid, and any community willing to go all-in on one myth has shown itself to be capable of going all in on any number of other myths.
...
This has been a parable about large language models.
#AI #LLM

The only thing wrong about today's attack on #Russia aviation is that you can only do it once.
Good thing its success was absolute, then.

The Python library "YFinance" decided to force an upgrade. They did this by making the old version report a rate-limit error on every request.
Confusing.
Would have been better if they reported a "old version not supported" error or something instead. So that wasted some time.
That upgrade had dependencies which have dependencies upon a newer version of Python, so needed a whole OS upgrade really.
Which failed. Bricking the Rasp PI it was running on.
Oh well, complete rebuild of the whole machine and software it runs from scratch then.
That took all day yesterday. At the end I notice that the touch-screen doesn't touch. Needs drivers.
The drivers haven't been upgraded in six years. They brick the machine again when trying to install them on Debian Trixie.
Luckily, I kept good notes and could rebuild it all again much faster with no mistakes and knowing what to do and all the required custom software changes already made and saved.
So now I spent a whole day on annoying upgrade work because a single Python library decided to break the old version, and my Rasp Pi has no touch-screen. Which isn't ideal for a machine mostly operating as a fancy light switch for all the LED strips in the house.
This happens all the time in software. Millions of man hours wasted, so much hardware dumped because the drivers get abandoned.

In other news: Microsoft abandons Windows 10 any day now. Good luck to everyone faced with doing that lap on the upgrade treadmill.
I still have more work to do to bring up this RaspPi's software to where it was, but it'll have to wait, other things to do. At least it's back to sending me the nightly finance report and controlling the LED strips. If without a touch screen now.
#software #upgradeTredmil #python #microsoft

Classifying and Clustering Trading Agents
Mateusz Wilinski, Anubha Goel, Alexandros Iosifidis, Juho Kanniainen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21662 https://

Classifying and Clustering Trading Agents
The rapid development of sophisticated machine learning methods, together with the increased availability of financial data, has the potential to transform financial research, but also poses a challenge in terms of validation and interpretation. A good case study is the task of classifying financial investors based on their behavioral patterns. Not only do we have access to both classification and clustering tools for high-dimensional data, but also data identifying individual investors is fina…

Whatever LLMs and gen AI may or may not •actually• be good for, whatever jobs they may or may not actually reshape or displace, right now we’re in the middle of a bubble. The sheer amount of money involved makes it almost impossible to think clearly about this, much less have a useful public discussion. Even well-founded hopes and fears for the tech fuel a fire that I very much do not want to fuel.
8/

People talk a lot about #SelfCare being a good thing, but what do we actually mean when we talk about it?

Whatever LLMs and gen AI may or may not •actually• be good for, whatever jobs they may or may not actually reshape or displace, right now we’re in the middle of a bubble. The sheer amount of money involved makes it almost impossible to think clearly about this, much less have a useful public discussion. Even well-founded hopes and fears for the tech fuel a fire that I very much do not want to fuel.
8/

Series A, Episode 12 - Deliverance
VILA: But did they do it?
AVON: "And the way was found." Does it go on?
MEEGAT: Deliverance was prepared. And Kashell the Wise was satisfied that it was good.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/112/357 B7B6

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

Drove through the Blackwall Tunnel to Greenwich and back to Islington yesterday.
South of the river it's all 30MPH speed limits and everything feels too fast and scary compared to the sedate and pedestrian-friendly 20MPH limits in the north.
Since I last went through it, it seems the Blackwall tunnel has added a toll.
The TFL website for setting up to pay the tolls is absolutely awful. Failed in Librewolf, Failed in Firefox. Failed because VPN. Took me four attempts in three different browsers to get it to take payment card details.
Demands *no* special characters in the password?!? And doesn't even tell you what the specific problem with the password is, just "doesn't meet the rules above"
Uses awful validation questions like "mothers maiden name". Bad enough practice to use them at all, but the "memorable date" question restricts to ddmmyy format so you can't even put in a date from outside this century.
For some reason asks for a PIN and and Password both!? Pointless. Then actually refuses the login form if you supply both!?

Setting up the auto-payment doesn't seem to have covered the charges added to the registration plate yesterday, so had to do the payment-details entering yet again to deal with yesterday's charges.
Email validation message contains the link only in the HTML of the email, not the text version, so viewed in Mutt it has no link.
And this all seems to be separate from the Dartford Crossing charge, which had a less crappy but still pretty crappy signup.
Good god council programmers suck at web-dev.
#driving #london #tfl #blackwallTunnel #greenwich

#Mexico forbids killing bulls and subjecting them to the most extreme forms of torture.
#Spain is, sadly, still far behind... but I suspect that Mexico's precedent will help, not just as a good example, but also because it will severely decrease the income of many of those bullfighters (toreros).
Toreros usually travel through many countries to participate in these bloody spectacles and make a living out of it. Removing Mexico from their list will be a big thing, so it is likely that many of them will have to do something else with their lives.

Series A, Episode 12 - Deliverance
VILA: But did they do it?
AVON: "And the way was found." Does it go on?
MEEGAT: Deliverance was prepared. And Kashell the Wise was satisfied that it was good.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/112/357 B7B6

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