Tootfinder

I’ve worked over the past year to reduce the amount of noise in my consciousness on a daily basis.
By that I mean - information noise, not literal sounds “noise”. (That problem was solved long ago by some good earplugs and noise canceling earphones.)
I’ve gotten used to spending less time on social media, regularly blocking most apps on my devices (anything with a feed news, most work communication apps, etc.), putting my phone and other devices aside for extended periods of time. Often go to work places with my iPad explicitly having its WiFi turned off and selecting cafes that don’t offer WiFi at all.
Negotiated better boundaries at work and in personal life where I exchange messages with people less often but try to make those interactions more meaningful, and people rarely expect me to respond to requests in less than 24 hours. Spent a lot of time setting up custom notification settings on all apps that would allow it, so I get fewer pings. With software, choosing fewer cloud-based options and using tools that are simple and require as few interruptions as possible.
Accustomed myself to lower-tech versions of doing things I like to do: reading on paper, writing by hand, drawing in physical sketchbooks, got a typewriter for typing without a screen. Choosing to call people on audio more, trying to make more of an effort to see people in person. Going to museums to look at art instead of browsing Pinterest. Defaulting to the library when looking for information.
I’m commenting on this now for two reasons:
1. I am pretty proud of myself for how much I’ve actually managed to reduce the constant stream of modern life esp. as a remote worker in tech!
2. Now that I’ve reached a breaking point of reducing enough noise that it’s NOTICEABLE - I am struck by the silence. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to navigate it and fill it. I made this space to be able to read and write and think more deeply - for now I feel stuck in limbo where I’m just reacquainting myself with the concept of having any space in my mind at all.

In a dream last night I was trying to write a post. I kept being interrupted and when I returned I'd find what I wrote had changed. The keyboard kept changing as I was typing to be "helpful." I put down my phone and picked it up again to find the app had "helpfully" filled my screen with Nazi shit. Then I realized the app was an AI post assistant, so I uninstalled it and used the website.
The post I was trying to write was, "I want to be able to have the confidentiality of cheap hot dog meat in the 90's: no one should know who or what I actually am."
It feels like a relevant manifestation of the anxiety of existing on the internet today.

genetic_multiplex: Multiplex genetic interactions (2014)
Multiplex networks representing different types of genetic interactions, for different organisms. Layers represent (i) physical, (ii) association, (iii) co-localization, (iv) direct, and (v) suppressive, (vi) additive or synthetic genetic interaction. Edge direction (i,j) indicates gene i interacting with gene j.
This network has 155 nodes and 188 edges.
Tags: Biological, Gene regulation, Protein interactions, Unweigh…

Day 26: Emily Short
If you know who Short is, you know exactly why she's on this list. If you don't, you're probably in the majority. She's an absolutely legendary author within the interactive fiction (IF) community, which gets somewhat pigeonholed by stuff like Zork when there's actually a huge range of stuff in the medium some of which isn't even puzzle-focused, and Short has been writing & coding on the bleeding edge of things for decades.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to Short's work in graduate school, where we played "Galatea" as part of an interactive fiction class. Short uses a lot of clever parser tricks to make your conversation with a statue feel very fluid and conversational, giving to contemporary audiences a great example of how vibrant interaction with a well-designed agent can be in contrast to an LLM, if you're willing to put in some work on bespoke parsing & responses (although the user does need to know basic IF conventions). While I didn't explore the full range of Galatea's many possible outcomes, it left a strong impression on me as a vision for what IF could be besides dorky puzzles, and I think that "visionary" is a great term to describe Short.
If you'd like you get a feel for her (very early) work, you can play Galatea here: #30AuthorsNoMen

Sure it's on linkedin, but I think this will resonate with everyone building internal tooling #tech #softwaredevelopment

The difference internal tooling makes
“The impact is harder to see.” This is what a fellow product manager once told me when I shared that I work on internal tooling.

TIL that there's an Internet movie airplane database.
https://impdb.fandom.com/wiki/Richard_III

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/115578233117718180
On second thought Internet Explorer 5.5 seems way too new for this laptop—I might reinstall basic Windows 95 again and only add Office '95.
Interesting though that it seems to run fine.

STM32MP2 bringup progress: I have a "FSBL" (really my whole firmware) image booting from QSPI flash, doing some very low level init, then hanging before it starts the UART.
But it's able to open up debug access without needing ST's wrapper. I hard code a few pointers for SFRs that I don't have structs for but it's enough that I can get gdb attached and the code isn't TOO ugly.
Now I need to figure out why Timer::Sleep() is being derpy in BSP_InitUART…

qa_user: User interactions on Q&A websites (2016)
Networks of interactions among users from four online Q&A sites: Stack Overflow, Math Overflow, Super User, and Ask Ubuntu. A directed edge (i,j) indicates a user i responded to user j's post. Edges are timestamped. For each Q&A site, four differently defined networks are provided, based on the definition of an edge: (i) a user answered a question, (ii) a user commented on a question, (iii) a user commented on an answer…

Thank you all for 3,000 followers on here! Here’s a photo of Danny to celebrate the occasion ☺️
3 years into being part of Mastodon, I continue to be impressed with how wonderful the people here are and how much this social network actually FEELS social. People replying to one another, having conversations, learning things, sharing moments of joy, making friends.
Mastodon brought my business clients, helped me gain confidence in my own voice, freed me from dependence on big tech and algorithms, rekindled my interests, introduced me to incredible people and projects, and served as a source of hope in humanity in the times when cynicism and nihilism felt all but inevitable.
I love our little corner of the internet, and am so glad that it’s still here despite everyone who professed it was doomed to fade into irrelevance.
Thank you to everyone reading these words for being here on the Fedi. The world is a little better thanks to your choice to support an independent web.