Tootfinder

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.

Future progress in artificial intelligence: A survey of expert opinion
Vincent C. M\"uller, Nick Bostrom
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11681 https://arxi…

Future progress in artificial intelligence: A survey of expert opinion
There is, in some quarters, concern about high-level machine intelligence and superintelligent AI coming up in a few decades, bringing with it significant risks for humanity. In other quarters, these issues are ignored or considered science fiction. We wanted to clarify what the distribution of opinions actually is, what probability the best experts currently assign to high-level machine intelligence coming up within a particular time-frame, which risks they see with that development, and how f…

Well that was a first.
Went to grab my ESD shoes at the entrance of the lab (which I only wear when doing chemical work or other potentially hazardous operations, normally I'm just in socks), gave them the usual upside down tap out of habit...
And some tiny little six or eight legged critter actually fell out and scurried off. I've been shaking them before putting them on just in case for years and this is the first time anybody had been lurking in them.
Guess I'…

On our Tesla we have noticed that the design and construction has tried new methods to save weight, but that those methods have not withstood the test of time (or weather).
For example we've had to replace some of the ball joints in the front suspension because they were not water proof and ended up corroding - a problem solved back in the 1960s by other car makers.
And now there's this...
"Half of Tesla Model 3s Failed Their Mandatory Inspections in Finland&qu…

Half of Tesla Model 3s Failed Their Mandatory Inspections in Finland
The Tesla Model 3, Model S, and Model X all ranked among the bottom five performers in Finland's mandatory vehicle inspections of 4-year-old cars

A new Artificial Analysis benchmark, focusing on OpenAI's gpt-oss-120b, shows how open-weight LLMs exhibit inconsistent performance across hosting providers (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/15/inconsistent-performance/…

Open weight LLMs exhibit inconsistent performance across providers
Artificial Analysis published a new benchmark the other day, this time focusing on how an individual model—OpenAI’s gpt-oss-120b—performs across different hosted providers. The results showed some surprising differences. Here’s the …

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Nacirema people is their insistence that they do not participate in practices of which they clearly do. Equally unusual is the fact that, unlike other sacrificial cultures who raid neighboring tribes for victims, both slaves and victims for human sacrifice are only taken from within the society. In fact, there is a very strong cultural taboo against sacrificing or enslaving those from other tribes.
They are aware of the rituals of human sacrifice in other tribes, but claim such rituals to be inconsistent with their society. Yet their human sacrifice rituals are some of the most elaborate in the world. These rituals are so important that there is a whole part of Nacirema society dedicated specifically to arguing about who should and should not be sacrificed, restraining and feeding the potential victims for the years during which these arguments take place, and ultimately preparing and administering the ritual poison.
This is strangely similar to their approach to slavery. Both human sacrifice and slavery were once a much larger part of Nacirema society. Their human sacrifice rituals now take far longer and happen far less often, but at no point have they ever recognized these ritual sacrifices as such. Meanwhile, the Nacirema do acknowledge that slavery was part of their culture once. During the time when they did recognize their practice of slavery, they did raid other tribes for slaves. Now they follow the same complex ritual for slavery as they do for human sacrifice.
It is strange that, by following this ritual and only choosing victims from within their society, they seem to become incapable of seeing their behavior for what it is.

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.

D-party congress critters ought to begin drafting bills to dismantle DHS.
DHS, including its highly nazi-flavored name, was constructed by a Congress and president (bush) who were terrified after 9/11.
It is time to pull the pieces of DHS apart, retaining some parts, deleting other parts (such as ICE), and reshaping the rest.
There is a rule of thumb that suggests that if one wants to re-form an entity to change its internal culture that no more than 10% of the staff should…

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

A lot of things have changed in the 7 years since I took this video on a perfectly still lake in Eden Vermont.
Back then, I’d take a September solo trip to pick up a friend’s Collected Works allotment at Hill Farmstead. That programme doesn’t exist anymore, and COVID kind of ruined some of the things I loved about Vermont… and now… a different kind of ruining, I guess.
I deeply miss what were simpler times—and we didn’t even know it, then.

Hmmmm… here is a problem I did not anticipate.
Every time I empty the main pond hole of water, (the actual hole under the liner) water returns within an hour or two. I’ve done it 4 times now, and it keeps filling back up with water.
Obviously there is water underground infiltrating into the pond hole, and/or the water table itself is above the bottom of the hole. It is not coming from either of the other holes because they both have the same amount of water in them as they did this morning.
I have “watered” the blueberry patch and hazelnut tree a lot with the water that I have been cleaning the filter with… and we also had lots of water flying around outside the liners yesterday as I tested the pump. So it is quite possible that the ground around the pond is simply well saturated.
I think I am going to have to just keep removing the water (and putting it into the sewer) until it does not refill. We have a week of hot weather coming. Surely that will be enough time for everything to dry out completely.
Otherwise I might run into some issues if the rains return before I can anchor down the pond liner with gravel and get the plumbing in!
How is time already running short!?
Never underestimate the ability of water to find a place where it is not wanted. 😆
#poolpond #backyardProject #diy

Time to discover some new music on Bandcamp and fill my wishlist with fresh finds!
Whether you’re an active user or simply appreciate the platform’s role in supporting independent artists, you can follow me here.
https://bandcamp.com/discover/progressive-psytrance

Tidal For Streaming
I know that Spotify is considered to have the best algorithm for suggesting new music. However, the sound quality isn’t there. Therefore, I use Tidal for lossless hi-res playback (of at least some of the library). Today, I’ve found that Tidal does a pretty good job suggesting other tracks I would like to listen to after playing an album. Some time back, it was just suggesting rap, and other stuff I didn’t care to listen to.

Tidal For Streaming
I know that Spotify is considered to have the best algorithm for suggesting new music. However, the sound quality isn’t there. Therefore, I use Tidal for lossless hi-res playback (of at least some …

See the sleep that rests upon
The quiet street we're standing on
Is it time to go away?
And try again some other day?
These are the words we use to say goodbye
These are the words you use to say goodbye
https://open.spotify.com/track/5BLFYfJY79vG1qNWsebaUS

Say Goodbye
Beck · Morning Phase · Song · 2014

Actually, I do want to come back to masculinity under patriarchy and whiteness under white supremacy because I think it's worth talking more about. The "man" under patriarchy (at least "Western" patriarchy) is represented as power and independence. The man needs nothing and thus owes nothing to anyone. The man controls and is not controlled, which is intimately related to independence as dependence can make someone vulnerable to control. The image of "man" projects power and invulnerability. At the same time "man" is a bumbling fool who can't be held accountable for his inability to control his sexual urges. He must be fed and cared for, as though another child. His worst behaviors must be dismissed with phrases such as "boys will be boys" and "locker room talk." The absurdity of the concept of human "independence" is impossible to understate.
Even if you go all Ted Kaczynski, you have still been raised and taught. This is, perhaps, why it is so much more useful to think in terms of obligations than rights. Rights can be claimed and protected with violence alone, but obligations reveal the true interdependence that sustains us. A "man" may assert his rights. Yet, on some level, we all know that the "man" of patriarchy acts as a child who is not mature enough to recognize his obligations.
White violence and white fragility reflect the same dichotomy. "The master race" somehow always needs brown folks to make all their shit and do all the reproductive labor for them. For those who fully embrace whiteness, the "safe space" is a joke. DEI shows weakness. Yet, when presented with an honest history adults become children who are incapable of differentiating between criticism and simple facts. *They* become the ones who must be kept safe. The expectation to be responsible for one's own words and actions, one of the very core definitions of being an adult, is far too much to expect. Their guilt needs room, needs tending, needs caring. White people cannot simply "grow the fuck up" or, as they may say of slavery, "fucking get over it."
And again, interestingly, it is *rights* that they reference: "Mah Freeze PEACH!" I find it hard to distinguish between such and my own child's assertion that anything she doesn't like is "not fair!" No, these assertions fail to recognize the fundamental fabric of adult society: the obligations we hold to each other.
At the intersection of all privilege is the sovereign, the ultimate god-man-baby. Again, referencing the essay (https://hexmhell.writeas.com/observations-on-domination-and-trump)
> This is where it becomes important to consider the ideology behind the sovereign ritual. Participation within the sovereign ritual denotes to the participants elements of the sovereign. That is, all agents of the sovereign are, essentially, micro dictators. By carrying out the will of the sovereign, these micro dictators can, by extension, act outside of the law.
While law enforcement is the ultimate representative of sovereign violence, privileges allow a gradated approximation of the sovereign. Those who are "closer" in privilege to the sovereign may, for example, be permitted to carry out violence against those who are father away. The gradation of privilege turns the whole society, except for the least privileged, into a cult that protects the privilege system on behalf of the most privileged. (And immediately Malcolm X pops to mind as having already talked about part of this relationship in 1963 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf7rsCAfQCo.)

There is a (very) old joke:
Two haberdashers were on an oceanliner, which sank. As the only survivors, they ended up in a lifeboat with lots of food and water, which was good, because they were not rescued for a very long time.
It all worked out well for them. When they were rescued, they were both very wealthy, having successfully traded hats with each other at a great profit.

There is a (very) old joke:
Two haberdashers were on an oceanliner, which sank. As the only survivors, they ended up in a lifeboat with lots of food and water, which was good, because they were not rescued for a very long time.
It all worked out well for them. When they were rescued, they were both very wealthy, having successfully traded hats with each other at a great profit.

Day 5 - sore butt, but the fish was fresh
It was a horrible night in a capsule hotel, if you can actually call it that. The whole night felt like I was in some kind of theme park attraction. Two boxes stacked on top of each other, and every time the person below me exhales, my box starts to emulate a light earthquake.
Luckily, I found this very nice little café with lots of pastries and bread. I asked the barista what kind of breakfast she had, and she kindly took the time to ex…

I wasn't having much luck with my Stanley #4 when flattening this table top. Out of desperation, I grabbed one of my Japanese planes. I've never had much luck with it in the past even though I tried it several times.
Man, that thing ate through the top and flattened it in no time. I hit it with the Stanley for good measure when I was done.
#woodworking

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
Should AI coding be taught in undergrad CS education?
1/2
I teach undergraduate computer science labs, including for intro and more-advanced core courses. I don't publish (non-negligible) scholarly work in the area, but I've got years of craft expertise in course design, and I do follow the academic literature to some degree. In other words, In not the world's leading expert, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about course design, and consider myself competent at it, with plenty of direct experience in what knowledge & skills I can expect from students as they move through the curriculum.
I'm also strongly against most uses of what's called "AI" these days (specifically, generative deep neutral networks as supplied by our current cadre of techbro). There are a surprising number of completely orthogonal reasons to oppose the use of these systems, and a very limited number of reasonable exceptions (overcoming accessibility barriers is an example). On the grounds of environmental and digital-commons-pollution costs alone, using specifically the largest/newest models is unethical in most cases.
But as any good teacher should, I constantly question these evaluations, because I worry about the impact on my students should I eschew teaching relevant tech for bad reasons (and even for his reasons). I also want to make my reasoning clear to students, who should absolutely question me on this. That inspired me to ask a simple question: ignoring for one moment the ethical objections (which we shouldn't, of course; they're very stark), at what level in the CS major could I expect to teach a course about programming with AI assistance, and expect students to succeed at a more technically demanding final project than a course at the same level where students were banned from using AI? In other words, at what level would I expect students to actually benefit from AI coding "assistance?"
To be clear, I'm assuming that students aren't using AI in other aspects of coursework: the topic of using AI to "help you study" is a separate one (TL;DR it's gross value is not negative, but it's mostly not worth the harm to your metacognitive abilities, which AI-induced changes to the digital commons are making more important than ever).
So what's my answer to this question?
If I'm being incredibly optimistic, senior year. Slightly less optimistic, second year of a masters program. Realistic? Maybe never.
The interesting bit for you-the-reader is: why is this my answer? (Especially given that students would probably self-report significant gains at lower levels.) To start with, [this paper where experienced developers thought that AI assistance sped up their work on real tasks when in fact it slowed it down] (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089) is informative. There are a lot of differences in task between experienced devs solving real bugs and students working on a class project, but it's important to understand that we shouldn't have a baseline expectation that AI coding "assistants" will speed things up in the best of circumstances, and we shouldn't trust self-reports of productivity (or the AI hype machine in general).
Now we might imagine that coding assistants will be better at helping with a student project than at helping with fixing bugs in open-source software, since it's a much easier task. For many programming assignments that have a fixed answer, we know that many AI assistants can just spit out a solution based on prompting them with the problem description (there's another elephant in the room here to do with learning outcomes regardless of project success, but we'll ignore this over too, my focus here is on project complexity reach, not learning outcomes). My question is about more open-ended projects, not assignments with an expected answer. Here's a second study (by one of my colleagues) about novices using AI assistance for programming tasks. It showcases how difficult it is to use AI tools well, and some of these stumbling blocks that novices in particular face.
But what about intermediate students? Might there be some level where the AI is helpful because the task is still relatively simple and the students are good enough to handle it? The problem with this is that as task complexity increases, so does the likelihood of the AI generating (or copying) code that uses more complex constructs which a student doesn't understand. Let's say I have second year students writing interactive websites with JavaScript. Without a lot of care that those students don't know how to deploy, the AI is likely to suggest code that depends on several different frameworks, from React to JQuery, without actually setting up or including those frameworks, and of course three students would be way out of their depth trying to do that. This is a general problem: each programming class carefully limits the specific code frameworks and constructs it expects students to know based on the material it covers. There is no feasible way to limit an AI assistant to a fixed set of constructs or frameworks, using current designs. There are alternate designs where this would be possible (like AI search through adaptation from a controlled library of snippets) but those would be entirely different tools.
So what happens on a sizeable class project where the AI has dropped in buggy code, especially if it uses code constructs the students don't understand? Best case, they understand that they don't understand and re-prompt, or ask for help from an instructor or TA quickly who helps them get rid of the stuff they don't understand and re-prompt or manually add stuff they do. Average case: they waste several hours and/or sweep the bugs partly under the rug, resulting in a project with significant defects. Students in their second and even third years of a CS major still have a lot to learn about debugging, and usually have significant gaps in their knowledge of even their most comfortable programming language. I do think regardless of AI we as teachers need to get better at teaching debugging skills, but the knowledge gaps are inevitable because there's just too much to know. In Python, for example, the LLM is going to spit out yields, async functions, try/finally, maybe even something like a while/else, or with recent training data, the walrus operator. I can't expect even a fraction of 3rd year students who have worked with Python since their first year to know about all these things, and based on how students approach projects where they have studied all the relevant constructs but have forgotten some, I'm not optimistic seeing these things will magically become learning opportunities. Student projects are better off working with a limited subset of full programming languages that the students have actually learned, and using AI coding assistants as currently designed makes this impossible. Beyond that, even when the "assistant" just introduces bugs using syntax the students understand, even through their 4th year many students struggle to understand the operation of moderately complex code they've written themselves, let alone written by someone else. Having access to an AI that will confidently offer incorrect explanations for bugs will make this worse.
To be sure a small minority of students will be able to overcome these problems, but that minority is the group that has a good grasp of the fundamentals and has broadened their knowledge through self-study, which earlier AI-reliant classes would make less likely to happen. In any case, I care about the average student, since we already have plenty of stuff about our institutions that makes life easier for a favored few while being worse for the average student (note that our construction of that favored few as the "good" students is a large part of this problem).
To summarize: because AI assistants introduce excess code complexity and difficult-to-debug bugs, they'll slow down rather than speed up project progress for the average student on moderately complex projects. On a fixed deadline, they'll result in worse projects, or necessitate less ambitious project scoping to ensure adequate completion, and I expect this remains broadly true through 4-6 years of study in most programs (don't take this as an endorsement of AI "assistants" for masters students; we've ignored a lot of other problems along the way).
There's a related problem: solving open-ended project assignments well ultimately depends on deeply understanding the problem, and AI "assistants" allow students to put a lot of code in their file without spending much time thinking about the problem or building an understanding of it. This is awful for learning outcomes, but also bad for project success. Getting students to see the value of thinking deeply about a problem is a thorny pedagogical puzzle at the best of times, and allowing the use of AI "assistants" makes the problem much much worse. This is another area I hope to see (or even drive) pedagogical improvement in, for what it's worth.
1/2

Amidst the mayhem of the Johnson/Truss/Sunak years I once posted on X that I could not tweet as fast as new scandals occurred.
I feel the same about Trump’s America today
– where every day brings some new outrage, that would normally be enough to bring any other President down.
Republican members of Congress would be baying for blood if a Democrat President committed even a fraction of the outrages which Donald Trump seems to get away with, time and again.

The Madness of King Donald
After the recent bewildering slew of Trump administration outrages, Alexandra Hall Hall questions conservative commentator and fierce Trump critic Bill Kristol

🤔 Thinking about writing a bot that deletes mastodon posts after some time for me.
For example I'd like to remove selfies earlier than other posts. Like the 24h stories on Instagram.
🤔 Shouldn't be too difficult.

5 Surprising Phrases That Are Rooted in Animal Exploitation https://veganfta.com/blog/2025/09/12/5-surprising-phrases-that-are-rooted-in-animal-exploitation/?utm_source=Mastodon

5 Surprising Phrases That Are Rooted in Animal Exploitation
Some of our most commonly used expressions come from hunting, farming, and other forms of animal exploitation. Here are five phrases that might make you think twice the next time you drop them into…

Good reminder that, like any community, the opinion of one member should probably not be extrapolated to be that of the group:
https://tweesecake.social/@pixelate/115124657274396868
Skills, experience, comfort, etc. are as varied as in the larger population.

The next time some know-it-all informs you that The Slippery Slope Is A Fallacy, just remember that it only took a generation for the UK to slide from the heights of Monty Python to Ofcom wanting to ban SpongeBob clips to protect the children

Nonequilibrium steady state in Lindblad dynamics for infinite quantum spin systems
Kenji Shimomura, Nagisa Hara, Seiichiro Kusuoka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07448 https://

Nonequilibrium steady state in Lindblad dynamics for infinite quantum spin systems
We consider Lindblad dynamics of quantum spin systems on infinite lattices and define a nonequilibrium steady state (NESS) and a time-averaged nonequilibrium steady state (TANESS) on the basis of $C^*$-algebraic formalism. Generically, the NESS on an infinite system does not equal the thermodynamic limit of NESSs on finite systems. We give a sufficient condition that they coincide with each other, in terms of both a condition number, which quantifies the normality of a Liouvillian, and some spe…

Messing the whole weekend with the WordPress instance of a friend. He's been using an old plugin for multiple languages. The plugin is abandoned since 2015 and doesn't support newer PHP versions. Wordpress and the other plugins is about to no longer support the old PHP version.
At first I thought about writing a conversion tool to another plugin. Spend some considerable time setting up a test environment as well. Eventually it turns out group of people forked the problematic p…

Ok, yeah, I'm not done processing my anger over liberals doing shit like this. So this historian sees a rise in right wing violence, sees the US government carrying out ethnic cleansing, sees a rise in white supremacist terrorism, and then says, "oh yeah... this reminds me of a time right around the 1920s. Hum... yeah, ANARCHISTS fighting the government! Yeah, that's the same thing."
FFS, IT'S THE RED SUMMER! If you want a parallel between today and some horrible time in US history, TALK ABOUT THE RED SUMMER. The point of the language of dehumanization that the right uses, the point of all the anti-black and anti-emigrant rhetoric, is that it leads to genocide. Trump already carried out an act of genocide (#USPol

Little trip not far from Glasgow, next to #LochVoil
#Scotland #ScotlandIsBeautiful

Before and after of my latest bit of mending! An old towel rejuvenated at a smaller size!
I _could_ have just retired this one and used it as scraps to patch another one. But on the other hand, past-me put in some time and effort to add that loop for hanging it up, and I was thinking that if I could turn it back into a good towel, that'd eke out some more use of _that_ bit of work. So that's what I decided to do.
#sewing #mending

Hiord: An Approach to the Specification and Verification of Higher-Order (C)LP Programs
Marco Ciccal\`e, Daniel Jurjo-Rivas, Jose F. Morales, Pedro L\'opez-Garc\'ia, Manuel V. Hermenegildo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17233

Hiord: An Approach to the Specification and Verification of Higher-Order (C)LP Programs
Higher-order constructs enable more expressive and concise code by allowing procedures to be parameterized by other procedures. Assertions allow expressing partial program specifications, which can be verified either at compile time (statically) or run time (dynamically). In higher-order programs, assertions can also describe higher-order arguments. While in the context of (C)LP, run-time verification of higher-order assertions has received some attention, compile-time verification remains rela…

A Late-Time Rise in Planet Occurrence Reproduces the Galactic Height Trend in Planet Occurrence
Christopher Lam, Sarah Ballard, Sheila Sagear, Kathryne J. Daniel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21250

A Late-Time Rise in Planet Occurrence Reproduces the Galactic Height Trend in Planet Occurrence
While stellar metallicity has long been known to correlate with planetary properties, the galactic metallicity gradient alone does not account for the trend. It is therefore possible that there exists some time-dependent component to planet occurrence in the Milky Way over Gyr timescales, driven by something other than the metal enrichment of the ISM. In this paper, we investigate the observable effect of a time-dependent planet occurrence rate upon a Kepler-like sample of stars. Using a novel …

Just a reminder. There is not a cutoff time for our #HashTaggames to expire. Some games play for days. If you miss the first phase starting at 9PM est, it's ok to play at other times.
New games actually play in phases, or rushes, for the first 12 to 18 hours as people settle down and get online where they live.
Play any game you want, at anytime.
All games are easi…

accidental-turned-intentional selfie as hands-among-flowers
#photography #selfie #selfPortrait

I made a whole functional social network style web app, front and back end, a couple years ago. The code is super ugly to my current standards, but I'm very proud of it!
Some features:
Account creation and logging in, Searching and following/unfollowing other users,
Making, seeing, deleting, and "liking" text and image posts,
and Notifications for user interactions.
I really want to share the project, but I want to make time to reorganize the code fir…

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

LSM and CPT
Nathan Seiberg, Shu-Heng Shao, Wucheng Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17115 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17115…

LSM and CPT
We study a number of 1+1d lattice models with anti-unitary symmetries that simultaneously reflect space and reverse time. Some of these symmetries are anomalous, leading to Lieb-Schultz-Mattis-type constraints, thus excluding a trivially gapped phase. Examples include a mod 8 anomaly in the Majorana chain and various mod 2 anomalies in the spin chain. In some cases, there is an exact, non-anomalous lattice symmetry that flows in the continuum to CPT. In some other cases, the CPT symmetry of the…

Self-assessment approach for resource management protocols in heterogeneous computational systems
Rui Eduardo Lopes, Duarte Raposo, Pedro V. Teixeira, Susana Sargento
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02202

Self-assessment approach for resource management protocols in heterogeneous computational systems
With an ever growing number of heterogeneous applicational services running on equally heterogeneous computational systems, the problem of resource management becomes more essential. Although current solutions consider some network and time requirements, they mostly handle a pre-defined list of resource types by design and, consequently, fail to provide an extensible solution to assess any other set of requirements or to switch strategies on its resource estimation. This work proposes an heuris…

@… @… I've recently learned that this is common behavior, but still it's utterly broken. Their RAs promised that you can have the prefix for some time. A local power outage or other brief service interrupt…

Time is running out for wild salmon in the Columbia River Basin in the Pacific Northwest.
Their populations, as well as those of some other native fish, have been declining for decades.
Now, Donald Trump is attacking the progress that had been made to restore those once-abundant salmon runs.
In June 2025, Trump signed a memorandum signaling his administration’s unwillingness to abide by the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement signed in December 2023 after two years of neg…

Tribes Condemn Trump for Backing Out of Columbia River Deal for Salmon Recovery
Tribal leaders and environmental advocates warn salmon populations will go extinct without remediation efforts.

I've had a few of these thoughts stuck in my craw all day because I watched this liberal historian talk about the Galleanisti.
https://youtube.com/shorts/93yHEn8BYE4
Basically, she says that "of course the government had the right to target them." Then she goes on to talk about how it became an excuse to carry out a bunch of attacks on other marginalized people. Now, the Galleanisti had been bombing the houses of politicians and such. I get where she's coming from saying that one of their targets "was in the right" to try to catch them. But there's some context she's not talking about at all.
These were Italian anarchists, so they were not white and they were part of an already marginalized political group. Basically all of Europe and the US was trying to wipe out anarchists at the time. Meanwhile, the sitting president at the time showed the first movie in the White House. That movie was KKK propaganda, in which he was favorably quoted. The US was pretty solidly white supremacist in the 1920's.
Like... A major hidden whole premise of the game "Bioshock: Infinite" is that if you went back to the US in the 1920's, and you had magic powers, you would absolutely use them to kill as many cops as possible and try to destroy society. There's a lot of other stuff in there, I don't want to get distracted, but "fuck those racists," specifically referring to the US in the 1920's, was a major part of a major game.
Those Italian anarchists were also stone cutters. They carved grave stones. But the dust from that can kill you, much like black lung for coal miners. So they were dying from unsafe working conditions, regularly raising money to support dying coworkers and then carving gravestones for those same coworkers.
Now, I personally think insurrectionary anarchism is a dead end. I disagree with it as a strategy. We've seen it fail, and it failed there. But of course it makes sense that they wanted to blow up the government.
...And that's the correct way to structure that. When you say, "of course they were in the right" you're making a very clear political statement. You could easily say, "the cops in Vichy France had every right to hunt down the French Resistance." You would technically be correct, I guess. But it would really say something about your politics if you justified the actions of Nazi collaborators over those fighting against the Nazis.
And you may say, "oh, but the Nazis didn't have justification for anything. They invaded a sovereign nation, so their government wasn't legitimate anyway."
To which I would reply, "have you considered a history book about the US?"

"""
[…] Paradoxically, the more a population grew, the more precious it became, as it offered a supply of cheap labour, and by lowering costs allowed a greater expansion of production and trade. In this infinitely open labour market, the ‘fundamental price’, which for Turgot meant a subsistence level for workers, and the price determined by supply and demand ended up as the same thing. A country was all the more commercially competitive for having at its disposal the virtual wealth that a large population represented.
Confinement was therefore a clumsy error, and an economic one at that: there was no sense in trying to suppress poverty by taking it out of the economic circuit and providing for a poor population by charitable means. To do that was merely to hide poverty, and suppress an important section of the population, which was always a given wealth. Rather than helping the poor escape their provisionally indigent situation, charity condemned them to it, and dangerously so, by putting a brake on the labour market in a period of crisis. What was required was to palliate the high cost of products with cheaper labour, and to make up for their scarcity by a new industrial and agricultural effort. The only reasonable remedy was to reinsert the population in the circuit of production, being sure to place labour in areas where manpower was most scarce. The use of paupers, vagabonds, exiles and émigrés of any description was one of the secrets of wealth in the competition between nations. […]
Confinement was to be criticised because of the effects it had on the labour market, but also because like all other traditional forms of charity, it constituted a dangerous form of finance. As had been the case in the Middle Ages, the classical era had constantly attempted to look after the needs of the poor by a system of foundations. This implied that a section of the land capital and revenues were out of circulation. In a definitive manner too, as the concern was to avoid the commercialisation of assistance to the poor, so judicial measures had been taken to ensure that this wealth never went back into circulation. But as time passed, their usefulness diminished: the economic situation changed, and so did the nature of poverty.
«Society does not always have the same needs. The nature and distribution of property, the divisions between the different orders of the people, opinions, customs, the occupations of the majority of the population, the climate itself, diseases and all the other accidents of human life are in constant change. New needs come into being, and old ones disappear.» [Turgot, Encyclopédie]
The definitive character of a foundation was in contradiction with the variable and changing nature of the accidental needs to which it was designed to respond. The wealth that it immobilised was never put back into circulation, but more wealth was to be created as new needs appeared. The result was that the proportion of funds and revenues removed from circulation constantly increased, while that of production fell in consequence. The only possible result was increased poverty, and a need for more foundations. The process could continue indefinitely, and the fear was that one day ‘the ever increasing number of foundations might absorb all private funds and all private property’. When closely examined, classical forms of assistance were a cause of poverty, bringing a progressive immobilisation that was like the slow death of productive wealth:
«If all the men who have ever lived had been given a tomb, sooner or later some of those sterile monuments would have been dug up in order to find land to cultivate, and it would have become necessary to stir the ashes of the dead in order to feed the living.» [Turgot, Lettre Š Trudaine sur le Limousin]
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Dynamical equilibria of fast neutrino flavor conversion
Jiabao Liu, Lucas Johns, Hiroki Nagakura, Masamichi Zaizen, Shoichi Yamada
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26418 https://

Dynamical equilibria of fast neutrino flavor conversion
Dense neutrino systems, which display collectivity mediated by the weak interaction, have deep parallels with mean-field kinetic systems governed by other fundamental forces. We identify analogues in fast flavor conversion (FFC) of some time-honored nonlinear phenomena in plasmas and self-gravitating systems. We focus in particular on nonlinear Landau damping and collisionless equilibria, which are likely important pieces of the unsolved puzzle of neutrino oscillations in core-collapse supernov…

Picture the human body. Zoom in on a single cell. It lives for a while, then splits or dies, as part of a community of cells that make up a particular tissue. This community lives together for many many cell-lifetimes, each performing their own favorite function and reproducing as much as necessary to maintain their community, consuming the essential resources they need and contributing back what they can so that the whole body can live for decades. Each community of cells is interdependent on the whole body, but also stable and sustainable over long periods of time.
Now imagine a cancer cell. It has lost its ability to harmonize with the whole and prioritize balance, instead consuming and reproducing as quickly as it can. As neighboring tissues start to die from its excess, it metastasizes, always spreading to new territory to fuel its unbalanced appetite. The inevitable result is death of the whole body, although through birth, that body can create a new fresh branch of tissues that may continue their stable existence free of cancer. Alternatively, radiation or chemotherapy might be able to kill off the cancer, at great cost to the other tissues, but permitting long-term survival.
To the cancer cell, the idea of decades-long survival of a tissue community is unbelievable. When your natural state is unbounded consumption, growth, and competition, the idea of interdependent cooperation (with tissues all around the body you're not even touching, no less) seems impossible, and the idea that a tissue might survive in a stable form for decades is ludicrous.
"Perhaps if conditions were bleak enough to perfectly balance incessant unrestrained growth against the depredations of a hostile environment it might be possible? I guess the past must have been horribly brutal, so that despite each tissue trying to grow as much as possible they each barely survived? Yes, a stable and sustainable population is probably only possible under conditions of perfectly extreme hardship, and in our current era of unfettered growth, we should rejoice that we live in much easier times!"
You can probably already see where I'm going with this metaphor, but did you know that there are human communities, alive today, that have been living sustainably for *tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years*?
#anarchy #colonialism #civilization
P.S. if you're someone who likes to think about past populations and historical population growth, I cannot recommend the (short, free) game Opera Omnia by Stephen Lavelle enough: https://www.increpare.com/2009/02/opera-omnia/

Since leaving the US, things have gotten a lot better for me but it's still hard existing under capitalism. Just being a human is hard enough, but parenting is an order or magnitude harder.
Even here, with all the complexity of being an immigrant, it's somehow still less emotionally challenging than being in the US.
I wrote up a reflection on some of my feelings before leaving tangled up with some of the challenges I still have. I hope this helps some folks feel less alone, or makes it easier for other folks to understand why some parents are having a hard time.
CW: just.... Lots... Death, gun violence, trauma, etc
#USPol

Refugees, intergenerational trauma, child death, abusive family
Also just finished "The Best We Could Do" by Thi Bui, which is the second memoir I've stumbled upon recently that deals with the Vietnamese exodus after the end of the war (House Without Walls by Ching Yeung Russel is the other one, which is written in verse, not illustrated). Bui traces more of the political landscape and history of Vietnam through the stories of both of her parents, and also unpacks a lot of intergenerational trauma, but has less focus on the boat trip out and refugee camp experience, presumably because hers were easier than Russel's.
My thoughts after reading this return repeatedly to all of the impacts that patriarchy and toxic masculinity had on her father, from setting up his father and grandfather to be abusive towards him and the women in their lives, to pushing him deep into depression when he feels unable to fulfill the role of a protective husband, ironically leaving his wife to pick up the slack and ultimately ruining their relationship, to how it teaches him to despise and shirk the caregiver role he's left with, ultimately passing on some measure of trauma to his children. For sure war, abusive family, and child death can happen in the absence of patriarchy and those are in some ways perhaps bigger factors here, but at the same time, Bui's mom copes with most of the same factors in healthier ways.
#AmReading

It's time to lower your inhibitions towards just asking a human the answer to your question.
In the early nineties, effectively before the internet, that's how you learned a lot of stuff. Your other option was to look it up in a book. I was a kid then, so I asked my parents a lot of questions.
Then by ~2000 or a little later, it started to feel almost rude to do this, because Google was now a thing, along with Wikipedia. "Let me Google that for you" became a joke website used to satirize the poor fool who would waste someone's time answering a random question. There were some upsides to this, as well as downsides. I'm not here to judge them.
At this point, Google doesn't work any more for answering random questions, let alone more serous ones. That era is over. If you don't believe it, try it yourself. Between Google intentionally making their results worse to show you more ads, the SEO cruft that already existed pre-LLMs, and the massive tsunami of SEO slop enabled by LLMs, trustworthy information is hard to find, and hard to distinguish from the slop. (I posted an example earlier: #AI #LLMs #DigitalCommons #AskAQuestion

Now that we have had our brief bit of fun with the #poolpond, it’s time to drain it so work on completing it can continue! It took just over 12 hours for my little spare pond pump to empty the main pond of about 80% of its water.
It will be empty by morning. I will empty the filter and intake bay as well just to clean everything out. The movement of the past couple weeks through the system will have loosened up a bunch of the gunk still on the various rocks in the filter so a full pump out should remove all that.
I will then concentrate on finishing the piping in the bottom of the main pond for the intake for the second pond and the “periscope” for the bottom returns.
Then I can work on building the rock wall to line the inside of the pond. Or at least experimenting to see if it will work at all!
If it *does* work and I have enough rock to at least start on the bottom layers of the inside wall, then I’ll be able to achieve another milestone: placing the final pebble on the bottom. Important, because that will prevent any groundwater from infiltrating and causing the rubber liner to bubble out.
Really really want to get past that mark before the autumn rains come! For obvious reasons! ☔️
Other jobs that need to be done before winter:
- finish the manifold for the second pump to distribute water to the sprayers and filter and figure out how and where to house and conceal it.
- Dig the electrical trench from the house all the way around the long side of the pond to the back tool shed so we can start wiring it in.
- Clipping the wires on the pumps and adding extension wire to them so they can reach said electrical supplies.
- permanently shore up/modify the borders of the ponds where they were found to be low.
- make a few other minor terraforming modifications for the stream and some of the edges so the water goes a little more where I want it to and a little less where I don’t.
#poolpond #backyardProject #portalberni #ponds #watergarden

Epstein shit and adjacent, Rural America, Poverty, Abuse
Everyone who's not a pedophile thinks pedophiles are bad, but there's this special obsessed hatred you'll find among poor rural Americans. The whole QAnon/Epstein obsession may not really make sense to folks raised in cities. Like, why do these people think *so much* about pedophiles? Why do they think that everyone in power is a pedophile? Why would the Pizzagate thing make sense to anyone? What is this unhinged shit? A lot of folks (who aren't anarchists) might be inclined to ask "why can't these people just let the cops take care of it?"
I was watching Legal Eagle's run down on the Trump Epstein thing earlier today and I woke up thinking about something I don't know if I've ever talked about. Now that I'm not in the US, I'm not at any risk of talking about it. I don't know how much I would have been before, but that's not something I'm gonna dig into right now. So let me tell you a story that might explain a few things.
I'm like 16, maybe 17. I have my license, so this girl I was dating/not dating/just friends with/whatever would regularly convince me to drive her and her friends around. I think she's like 15 at the time. Her friends are younger than her.
She tells me that there's a party we can go to where they have beer. She was told to invite her friends, so I can come too. We're going to pick her friends up (we regularly fill the VW Golf well beyond the legal limit and drive places) and head to the party.
So I take these girls, at least is 13 years old, down to this party. I'm already a bit sketched out bringing a 13 year old to a party. We drive out for a while. It's in the country. We drive down a long dark road. Three are some barrel fires and a shack. This is all a bit strange, but not too abnormal for this area. We're a little ways outside of a place called Mill City (in Oregon).
We park and walk towards the shack. This dude who looks like a rat comes up and offers us beer. He laughs and talks to the girl who invited me, "What's he doing here? You're supposed to bring your girl friends." She's like, "He's our ride." I don't remember if he offered me a beer or not.
We go over to this shed and everyone starts smoking, except me because I didn't smoke until I turned 18. The other girls start talking about the rat face dude, who's wandered over by the fire with some other guys. They're mainly teasing one of the 13 year old girls about having sex with him a bunch of times. They say he's like, 32 or something. The other girls joke about him only having sex with 13 year olds because he's too ugly to have sex with anyone closer to his own age.
Somewhere along the line it comes out that he's a cop. I never forgot that, it's absolutely seared in to my memory. I can picture his face perfectly still, decades later, and them talking about how he's a deputy, he was in his 30's, and he was having sex with a 13 year old girl. I was the only boy there, but there were a few older men. This was a chunk of the good ol' boys club of the town. I think there were a couple of cops besides the one deputy, and a judge or the mayor or some kind of big local VIP.
I kept trying to get my friend to leave, but she wanted to stay. Turns out under age drinking with cops seems like a great deal if you're a kid because you know you won't get busted. I left alone, creeped the fuck out.
I was told later that I wasn't invited and that I couldn't talk about it, I've always been good at compartmentalization, so I never did.
Decades later it occurred to me what was actually happening. I'm pretty sure that cop was giving meth he'd seized as evidence to these kids. This wasn't some one-off thing. It was regular. Who knows how many decades it went on after I left, or how many decades it had been going on before I found out. I knew this type of thing had happened at least a few times before because that's how that 13 year old girl and that 32 year old cop had hooked up in the first place.
Hearing about Epstein's MO, targeting these teenage girls from fucked up backgrounds, it's right there for me. I wouldn't be surprised if they were involved in sex trafficking of minors or some shit like that... but who would you call if you found out? Half the sheriff's department was there and the other half would cover for them.
You live in the city and shit like that doesn't happen, or at least you don't think it happens. But rural poor folks have this intuition about power and abuse. It's right there and you know it.
Trump is such a familiar character for me, because he's exactly that small town mayor or sheriff. He'll will talk about being tough on crime and hunting down pedophiles, while hanging out at a party that exists so people can fuck 8th graders.
The problem with the whole thing is that rural folks will never break the cognitive dissonance between "kill the peods" and "back the blue." They'll never go kill those cops. No, the pedos must be somewhere else. It must be the elites. It must be outsiders. It can't be the cops and good ol' boys everyone respects. It can't be the mayor who rigs the election to win every time. It can't be the "good upstanding" sheriff. Nah, it's the Clintons.
To be fair, it's probably also the Clitnons, a bunch of other politicians, billionaires, etc. Epstein was exactly who everyone thought he was, and he didn't get away with it for so long without a whole lot of really powerful help.
There are still powerful people who got away with involvement with #Epstein. #Trump is one of them, but I don't really believe that he's the only one.
#USPol #ACAB