Tootfinder

I decided to support something for which the only support mechanism is "buymeacoffee" with a monthly donation — so I created a login at buymeacoffee, and now it won't let me go any further without creating a page with my photo, name, link, and a short essay to "Explain how contributions can make a difference in your work" and just no! All I want to do is set up a small monthly donation and be able to manage that in the future!
This isn't hard on liberapay or patreon or…

Hearing talk of how AI is causing software quality to plummet, the most disturbing thing for me is that software quality—when considered next to other engineering disciplines—has never been very good.
I’ve long said “If we built bridges like we build software, people would die.” but more and more, people depend on software to work in critical situations just like we depend on bridges to not kill us when the wind blows too hard.
Relatively, this software quality slide is even more…

Repository-Aware File Path Retrieval via Fine-Tuned LLMs
Vasudha Yanuganti, Ishaan Puri, Swapnil Chhatre, Mantinder Singh, Ashok Jallepalli, Hritvik Shrivastava, Pradeep Kumar Sharma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08850

Repository-Aware File Path Retrieval via Fine-Tuned LLMs
Modern codebases make it hard for developers and AI coding assistants to find the right source files when answering questions like "How does this feature work?" or "Where was the bug introduced?" Traditional code search (keyword or IR based) often misses semantic context and cross file links, while large language models (LLMs) understand natural language but lack repository specific detail. We present a method for file path retrieval that fine tunes a strong LLM (Qwen3-8B) with QLoRA and Unslot…

How hard is it to verify a classical shadow?
Georgios Karaiskos, Dorian Rudolph, Johannes Jakob Meyer, Jens Eisert, Sevag Gharibian
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08515 https://

How hard is it to verify a classical shadow?
Classical shadows are succinct classical representations of quantum states which allow one to encode a set of properties P of a quantum state rho, while only requiring measurements on logarithmically many copies of rho in the size of P. In this work, we initiate the study of verification of classical shadows, denoted classical shadow validity (CSV), from the perspective of computational complexity, which asks: Given a classical shadow S, how hard is it to verify that S predicts the measurement …

It's Going to Be Really Hard to Work Out How Much the Shutdown Hurt the Economy (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/economy/government-shutdown-economic-impact-2fb5e27a
http://www.memeorandum.com/251111/p78#a251111p78

"It feels like hard work trying to talk to it": Understanding Older Adults' Experiences of Encountering and Repairing Conversational Breakdowns with AI Systems
Niharika Mathur, Tamara Zubatiy, Agata Rozga, Elizabeth Mynatt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06690

"It feels like hard work trying to talk to it": Understanding Older Adults' Experiences of Encountering and Repairing Conversational Breakdowns with AI Systems
Designing Conversational AI systems to support older adults requires more than usability and reliability, it also necessitates robustness in handling conversational breakdowns. In this study, we investigate how older adults navigate and repair such breakdowns while interacting with a voice-based AI system deployed in their homes for medication management. Through a 20-week in-home deployment with 7 older adult participant dyads, we analyzed 844 recoded interactions to identify conversational br…

During five months of covering ICE raids, LA Public Press added legal training for staff, digital security protocols, threat assessment policies, and more (Michelle Zenarosa/Poynter)
https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2025/la-public-press-…

When your local reporter needs the same protection as a war correspondent - Poynter
Five months of covering ICE raids taught our small LA newsroom hard lessons — and we're still figuring out how to sustain it

If you're cocktail minded and in #Glasgow I'd head to this! I know how much hard work has gone in to it and can vouch for how skilled the lads are.
https://www.

Collective of bartenders to host birthday cocktail pop up for east end this weekend
Bartender collective called Flat Five are hosting their first birthday event this weekend (Friday, Octonber 10 to Sunday, October 12) at Mesa on Duke Street in Dennistoun.

I've probably mentioned that I'm working on switching #Gentoo from our half-broken eselect-ldso logic to #FlexiBLAS. This also involves a transition period where both setups would be supported.
A good thing is that the switch is ABI-compatible with the previous state (or at least it's supposed to be — we're working with upstream on fixing function coverage). Since libblas.so, liblapack.so and the rest are replaced by symlinks, programs that link to them will simply start using FlexiBLAS. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, switching the other way doesn't work as well. Stuff newly built against our libblas.so & co. symlinks naturally reads FlexiBLAS's SONAME from them, and links to libflexiblas directly. So should you decide to switch back, some packages will stay linked to FlexiBLAS and will need to rebuilt.
In order to avoid this, I would have to replace the symlinks with wrapper libraries, having libblas.so.3 and so on SONAMEs, and linking to libflexiblas. Unfortunately, a dummy wrapper isn't going to work — the linker will complain about using indirect symbols from libflexiblas.so. So I would probably have to "reexport" their symbols somehow, and ideally split into appropriate libraries, so that `-Wl,--as-needed` wouldn't drop some of them. But how to do that?
Well, let's look at the existing logic for eselect-ldso — clearly both BLIS and OpenBLAS create some wrappers. So I've spent some time investigating upstream Makefiles, and literally couldn't find the respective targets. I mean, these are quite complex Makefiles, but I'm grepping hard and can't find even a partial match.
As it turns out, these Makefile targets are added by Gentoo-specific patches. And these patches are just horrible. In case of OpenBLAS, they create the wrapper libraries by linking all the relevant .o files from OpenBLAS build, plus the shared OpenBLAS library. So the OpenBLAS symbols relevant to each interface end up duplicated in libblas.so, liblapack.so, etc., and apparently the symbols needed by them are taken from libopenblas.so. The individual interface libraries aren't even linked to one another, so they expose their own duplicate symbols, but use the implementation from OpenBLAS instead.
BLIS is even worse — the patch is simply creating libblas.so and libcblas.so, using all BLIS objects directly, plus symbol visibility to hide symbols irrelevant to the library. So yes, libblis.so, libblas.so and libcblas.so are roughly three separate copies of the same library, differing only in symbol visibility. And of course libcblas.so doesn't use libblas.so.
Truly #GSoC quality.

#WritersCoffeeClub Dec
6. How has your past writing shaped your present writing?
7. What future writing goals are you working towards with your present work?
8. How does your work compare to the earliest work in your genre?
---
6. Typically, the more you write, the better you write. 10k hours and all that.
Beyond that, hard to say.
7. Reaching audience to s…

If anyone needs to know (you probably all knew this already, right?):
Balena #Etcher didn't work on #Windows11 no matter how hard I shot at the built-in security software it came with.

I followed the step-by-step instructions here and got stuck creating the bootable usb drive:

I really feel sorry for @…, and how hard they have to work to be more ridiculous than reality.
https://heartlandsignal.com/2025/12/01

Republican mayor in Kansas facing deportation over voter fraud
Joe Ceballos, a longtime Republican and small-town mayor in Kansas, is facing felony voter fraud charges and possible deportation from the presidential administration he voted for.

When I design physical objects, I think in boxes and simple, usually circular-section curves. This has been true when I freehand build physical objects, as well as when I model things on the computer. Fillets are about as crazy as I get.
I'm in awe of artists whose design imaginations extend to "organic" shapes.
Reminds me of music a bit. I was a reasonably good high school musician. Played multiple instruments; did fine in music competition on several of them. That's just en…

Love how you can tell people your actual hands-on experience and they will still tell you that you're wrong because it conflicts with what they have read of in theory.
It's like with USB storage. Loads of people will tell me "but the specs! It should work!" and it does, right up until it doesn't. But they won't be told. They have to experience the pain personally first.

Yeah! How hard would it be anyway to get thousands of volunteers who work on a completely free project to emulate these other commercial entities with full time employees who are making stuff that they sell for actual money? Just, like, commit to some schedule, folks! What? No, I can't use something else that suits me better. I like your thing.

Let's be honest. I've been a strong supporter of #OpenPGP (or #PGP in general) for a long time. And I still can't think of any real alternative that exists right now. And I kept believing it's not "that hard" — but it doesn't seem like it's getting any easier. The big problem with standards like that are tools.
#WebOfTrust is hard, and impractical for a lot of people. It doesn't really help how many tools implement trust. I mean, I sometimes receive encrypted mail via #EvolutionMail — and Evolution makes it really hard for me to reply encrypted without permanently trusting the sender!
The whole SKS keyserver mess doesn't help PGP at all. Nowadays finding someone's key is often hard. If you're lucky, WKD will work. If you're not, you're up for searching a bunch of keyservers, GitHub, or perhaps random websites. And it definitely doesn't help that some of these may hold expired keys, with people uploading their new key only to a subset of them or forgetting to do it.
On top of that, we have interoperability issues. Definitely doesn't speak well when GnuPG can't import keys from popular keyservers over lack of UIDs. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Now with diverging OpenPGP standards around the corner, we're a step ahead from true interoperability problems. Just imagine convincing someone to use OpenPGP, only to tell them afterwards that they've used non-portable tool / settings, and their key doesn't work for you.
That's really not how you advocate for #encryption.

#WritersCoffeeClub Nov
18. Do you include real-world quotations in your work?
19. What's something (even if fantastical!) which could improve your process?
20. How did you find your writerly voice?
---
18. I did once. Now my settings are mostly fictional so real-world quotes are immersion-breaking and rarely appropriate.
It's not so hard to reforge them.…

#WritersCoffeeClub
13. Talk about the joy writing has brought you.
14. Why do you write in the form you do? Why not in another format? (poem, short story, novel, etc)
15. How do your immediate surroundings influence your work?
---
13. A usual mix on neuromediators, I believe. Not sure if there's anything special about it. Hard to describe.
14. Trivial: that&…