Tootfinder

Anyone else having the problem that `byobu` takes ages to start up on a remote Linux server? I'm talking like 20-30 seconds here. The machine isn't under heavy load. :BoostOK:

Details of Cowboys, Donovan Ezeiruaku last-minute deal before training camp https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-donovan-ezeiruaku-rookie-contract-details-info

#bbuzz Barcamp 2025: What a start! A huge thank you to everyone who joined. Here are some first impressions of this amazing afternoon.
A huge thank you to Nick Burch for his fantastic job hosting the Barcamp.

Just received a friend request on Facebook by someone named Peter Waldmeier.
https://www.facebook.com/peter.waldmeier.865
He seemed such a nice person, I think he is a model in a Scandinavian country.
When I asked him why he was sending me a friend request he go…

Dignan analysiert: Apples KI-Rückstand ist so gravierend wie Microsofts „Mobile-Fail“. Perplexity als Allheilmittel? Kaum. Aber Tim Cook braucht dringend eine Story für den Kapitalmarkt—zur Not für 20 Mrd. Dollar. #TechDebatte #Apple

Why Apple should buy Perplexity and possibly keep going
Apple needs to jump start its AI strategy and the only way it's going to get there is through acquisitions. Here's why a purchase of Perplexity makes sense and why Apple may want to keep shopping. Bloomberg reported last month that Apple was discussing a purchase of the AI search startup. Let's look at why an Apple purchase of Perplexity, reportedly valued at about $14 billion or so, would make sense. Apple needs an AI strategy and story. Let's state the obvious: Apple is an AI laggard. Apple's…

How to Talk to Loved Ones About #Psychedelics
Do you think it's time for mom to #trip? Here's how to start the conversation.

Entent, which has received funding for 96 CCS chargers for heavy-duty vehicles, has now opened its first location in Rotterdam 🇳🇱. Interesting to see a newcomer in this space.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/entent-bv_entent-evcharging-em…

Today, we officially open the barriers on the 's-Gravenweg in Rotterdam. | Entent BV
Today, we officially open the barriers on the 's-Gravenweg in Rotterdam. A very special milestone for Entent and the start of our network of smart, business charging stations throughout Europe. Enough reason for a celebration, right? 🎉 Besides the official opening, there is plenty of room to toast during a nice networking reception with tasty snacks and drinks. And to bring a bit of Amsterdam to Rotterdam 😉, there will be a real Dutch herring cart with an accordion player. Here's to mor…

Details of Cowboys, Donovan Ezeiruaku last-minute deal before training camp https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-donovan-ezeiruaku-rookie-contract-details-info

Here's the start of an idea:
Those of us who end up directly getting a tariff payment demand on a purchase from overseas (especially if the purchase is from Brazil) might want to consider filing a personal Federal civil action against FFOTUS, as a private person, for recovery.
The basis would be an ultra vires government action, not authorized by law (this is why the Brazil path is particularly interesting, because there is no real way that this is in any way authorized by Co…

What TV channel is 49ers vs. Raiders on today? Time, TV schedule for NFL preseason game https://ninerswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/niners/2025/08/16/49ers-game-today-tv-channel-live-stream/85670876007/

You know it's coming, but you just never know. I was lucky to see Brian solo once, it was a magical show. RIP to this legend. I don't even know how to start with how much I love the Beach Boys. I've talked about it many times on here, how I really got into them in my teens, my parents had tapes (I wrote about my love for Wild Honey here:

Albums that made me
I heard about this great ‘albums that made me’ idea (that’s apparently been floating around other social media sites for a while now) via another Jake on Mastodon. So, big thanks …

NFL pre-camp observations, plus crazy NBA-style trade proposals and Buccaneers All-Pro to miss start of season

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/nfl-p…

My wife's Corsa replacement is finally here - a 2022 EQA. Good first impressions, though bemused that it doesn't appear to support deferred charge-start time in-car. Hoping it'll cope with the charger deciding when to start charging instead...

I keep posting about how the AI hype bubble makes it almost impossible to have a reasonable conversation about LLMs, and it’s only when the bubble bursts that we can start thinking realistically about what if anything LLMs are actually good for in writing code.
That seems to be what Fred is getting at here: the massive gap between the hype and the reality means that the affordances of these tools fit neither the task at hand nor the tool’s own capabilities.
6/

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

from my link log —
Alan Kay did not invent object-oriented programming.
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/alan-kay/
saved 2025-05-11 https://

they say if you want to elect politicians who are more supportive of transit, start building a bench.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco-mystery-benches/3908902/

What to know about mystery benches popping up in San Francisco
A rogue Bay Area group is making waves by making benches in San Francisco. Here's what we know.

The need for a unifying left Alternative Economic Strategy,
#AES.
Look, here's a start we made on it last year.
https://gettingreal.org.uk/full-report/ in case you STILL hav…

Full Report | Getting Real about the Crises Facing the UK
Read the full report The pdf version will open in your browser or pdf reader. Or Download the print version Complete wit

Ya gut the National Weather Service and then the fourth largest city in the country gets stomped by weather we didn’t see coming.
trump tornados in Oklahoma, trump floods in Houston, and your and my town will get the same too.
Help flood folks now: text REDCROSS to 90999.
https://www.…

Mail, Phone, or Text Donations
Whether you mail, call, or text to donate, your donations bring help and hope to people every day. Start here, with a $10 text donation to one of our ongoing campaigns.

Anyone using #JupyterHub (services.jupyterhub.enable=true) on :nixos: #NixOS? Then you should have run into the database migration issue here:

JupyterHub database migration
I am struggling hard to get my JupyterHub working again. After an update (longer ago), JupyterHub often requires a manual database migration and refuses to start: ❯ journalctl -efu jupyterhub ... Jun 04 22:10:41 yann-desktop-nixos jupyterhub[1038575]: Found database schema version 0eee8c825d24 != 4621fec11365. Backup your database and run `jupyterhub upgrade-db` to upgrade to the latest schema. ... Jun 04 22:10:42 yann-desktop-nixos systemd[1]: Failed to start Jupyterhub development server. …

I am ignorant on what it is to be trans or a woman or a world-class athlete, but I THINK the problem here is a doomed project of representing a multidimensional continuously variable attribute with a single Boolean https://infosec.exchange/@JessTheUnstill/114639211101368863

Been playing this game I dig on the Android tablet called Dungeon Raid. It's a card flipping dungeon crawler (the dev calls it an 'adventure card roguelike') that's fairly easy to figure out-- lots of strategy and replayability. At first, you can start out playing as either a knight or a vampire, delving down, trying not to die of hunger.
If a relic in a game you can choose is a fried egg, you can probably assume it's a game for me.
There's also Linux, M…

2025 NFL preseason Week 1: Six things to watch for Thursday night from Joe Burrow's rare start to a kicker

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/2025-nf

Calamus 25 The prairie-grass dividing
Whitman's celebration of simple men, of men from "inland America", of those who are unimpressed by Presidents and Governors. It's a romantic sentiment but in 2025 also feels a little naïve or condescending.
But as always I'm here for the gay stuff. Which starts explicitly enough
[I] Demand the most copious and close companionship of men
Well OK then! Me too. Maybe you could read that in a non-sexual way but then Whitman gets lusty
[I demand] Those with a never-quell'd audacity—those with sweet and lusty flesh, clear of taint, choice and chary of its love-power
My goodness, is that hot! At least to start, it's a shame he tames it seeking out men "chary of love-power". At least he recognizes their love power! I'll take the taint, thank you.

Fully-compensated ferrimagnetic metal in the electric-field-tuned $\mathrm{Hf_2S}$ monolayer
San-Dong Guo, Alessandro Stroppa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08609 https://

Fully-compensated ferrimagnetic metal in the electric-field-tuned $\mathrm{Hf_2S}$ monolayer
Fully-compensated ferrimagnet has garnered widespread attention due to its zero-net total magnetic moment and non-relativistic global spin splitting. In general, for a fully-compensated ferrimagnet, at least one spin channel should be gapped to ensure a zero-net total magnetic moment, which would lead to a fully-compensated ferrimagnetic semiconductor or half-metal, and appears to limit the existence of a fully-compensated ferrimagnetic metal. Here, we propose to start with a spin-degenerate tw…

So @… announced an upgrade for #ActionText with "No #Trix".

Jorge Manrubia
A huge editor upgrade is in the works for Action Text. No Trix, no House, no Tiptap, no ProseMirror. A drop-in replacement that will take rich text editing to the next level in Rails, and lay a foundation far better than anything we ever had with Trix. We will start using it internally in the new product this week. We’ll test, we’ll polish, and we’ll ship. (Yes, I’m shamelessly teasing here. And yes, I am VERY excited about this one)

Hello – my name is Nathan Sage, and I am the Democrat running for Senate against Republican Joni Ernst here in Iowa.
I was raised in a trailer park. Growing up, that got me called a lot of names. After enough times, it’s easy to start to believe it yourself.
We were poor. I never imagined a better life until a military recruiter said that I could maybe one day graduate college.
After I got home from Iraq, I worked nights to support my family while the GI Bill paid for colle…

Give now to help Nathan Sage defeat Joni Ernst and take back the Senate for Democrats!
Show your support with a contribution.

Generative flow-based warm start of the variational quantum eigensolver
Hang Zou, Martin Rahm, Anton Frisk Kockum, Simon Olsson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01726

Generative flow-based warm start of the variational quantum eigensolver
Hybrid quantum-classical algorithms like the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) show promise for quantum simulations on near-term quantum devices, but are often limited by complex objective functions and expensive optimization procedures. Here, we propose Flow-VQE, a generative framework leveraging conditional normalizing flows with parameterized quantum circuits to efficiently generate high-quality variational parameters. By embedding a generative model into the VQE optimization loop throug…

Spent a little while photographing an AKL-PT5 production sample to get some beauty shots for the Digikey page etc when I start making them in volume.
I'll probably downsample... The SEL90M28G macro lens did perhaps too good a job. You can see every little dust speck here lol.

Google's emissions are up over 50%, Amazon builds huge data centers powered by 75% natural gas.
Remember all those posts telling us that "AIs climate impact isn't that bad" supported by some really funky math/perspective and/or numbers Sam Altman invented?
Here's the actual impact.
"AI" is a fossil fuel technology.

At Amazon’s Biggest Data Center, Everything Is Supersized for A.I.
On 1,200 acres of cornfield in Indiana, Amazon is building one of the largest computers ever for work with Anthropic, an artificial intelligence start-up.

Jakorian Bennett: 'I'm here to work and show the coaches who I am' https://www.raiders.com/video/jakorian-bennett-defense-raiders-minicamp-presser-nfl-offseason-061025

People complaining do not become friends with each other...
I complain...you find it aggressive and you mute or block me...now I haven't blocked you nor muted you but when you also start complaining I go like:
"This guy/gal hates EVERYONE, including me"...ok I guess I'm muting or blocking.
I guess the reason my follower count has remained mostly stable recently is because I always throw in a complaint here or there...
just to make sure nobody likes m…

The new Mastodon version seems to shit itself on Safari? The Home/Trending/etc links don't work when clicked. And then after a few minutes they start working again, randomly. I only have this in the console.
Anybody using Safari here? v18.5
#mastodon

So I've found my answer after maybe ~30 minutes of effort. First stop was the first search result on Startpage (https://millennialhawk.com/does-poop-have-calories/), which has some evidence of maybe-AI authorship but which is better than a lot of slop. It actually has real links & cites research, so I'll start by looking at the sources.
It claims near the top that poop contains 4.91 kcal per gram (note: 1 kcal = 1 Calorie = 1000 calories, which fact I could find/do trust despite the slop in that search). Now obviously, without a range or mention of an average, this isn't the whole picture, but maybe it's an average to start from? However, the citation link is to a study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32235930/) which only included 27 people with impaired glucose tolerance and obesity. Might have the cited stat, but it's definitely not a broadly representative one if this is the source. The public abstract does not include the stat cited, and I don't want to pay for the article. I happen to be affiliated with a university library, so I could see if I have access that way, but it's a pain to do and not worth it for this study that I know is too specific. Also most people wouldn't have access that way.
Side note: this doing-the-research protect has the nice benefit of letting you see lots of cool stuff you wouldn't have otherwise. The abstract of this study is pretty cool and I learned a bit about gut microbiome changes from just reading the abstract.
My next move was to look among citations in this article to see if I could find something about calorie content of poop specifically. Luckily the article page had indicators for which citations were free to access. I ended up reading/skimming 2 more articles (a few more interesting facts about gut microbiomes were learned) before finding this article whose introduction has what I'm looking for: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3127503/
Here's the relevant paragraph:
"""
The alteration of the energy-balance equation, which is defined by the equilibrium of energy intake and energy expenditure (1–5), leads to weight gain. One less-extensively-studied component of the energy-balance equation is energy loss in stools and urine. Previous studies of healthy adults showed that ≈5% of ingested calories were lost in stools and urine (6). Individuals who consume high-fiber diets exhibit a higher fecal energy loss than individuals who consume low-fiber diets with an equivalent energy content (7, 8). Webb and Annis (9) studied stool energy loss in 4 lean and 4 obese individuals and showed a tendency to lower the fecal energy excretion in obese compared with lean study participants.
"""
And there's a good-enough answer if we do some math, along with links to more in-depth reading if we want them. A Mayo clinic calorie calculator suggests about 2250 Calories per day for me to maintain my weight, I think there's probably a lot of variation in that number, but 5% of that would be very roughly 100 Calories lost in poop per day, so maybe an extremely rough estimate for a range of humans might be 50-200 Calories per day. Interestingly, one of the AI slop pages I found asserted (without citation) 100-200 Calories per day, which kinda checks out. I had no way to trust that number though, and as we saw with the provenance of the 4.91 kcal/gram, it might not be good provenance.
To double-check, I visited this link from the paragraph above: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022316622169853?via=ihub
It's only a 6-person study, but just the abstract has numbers: ~250 kcal/day pooped on a low-fiber diet vs. ~400 kcal/day pooped on a high-fiber diet. That's with intakes of ~2100 and ~2350 kcal respectively, which is close to the number from which I estimated 100 kcal above, so maybe the first estimate from just the 5% number was a bit low.
Glad those numbers were in the abstract, since the full text is paywalled... It's possible this study was also done on some atypical patient group...
Just to come full circle, let's look at that 4.91 kcal/gram number again. A search suggests 14-16 ounces of poop per day is typical, with at least two sources around 14 ounces, or ~400 grams. (AI slop was strong here too, with one including a completely made up table of "studies" that was summarized as 100-200 grams/day). If we believe 400 grams/day of poop, then 4.91 kcal/gram would be almost 2000 kcal/day, which is very clearly ludicrous! So that number was likely some unrelated statistic regurgitated by the AI. I found that number in at least 3 of the slop pages I waded through in my initial search.

It's time for the #EV industry to hold itself to a higher standard when it comes to roaming. You can't have your cake and eat it. Make the cake bigger!
https://www.linkedin.com/…

I fully agree with Christian Weinberger's call here: Isn't it time we stop… | Jaap Burger
I fully agree with Christian Weinberger's call here: Isn't it time we stop pretending roaming works and start holding the ecosystem to a higher standard? As a fossil in this industry, I remember how EV roaming took off 15 years ago – it was a no-brainer from a user perspective and a logical step to ensure that the EV charging market could grow, benefiting everyone in the sector. As an early electric car driver eager to travel abroad, I spent a lot of time getting the right passes for local n…

Thanks for the thoughtful replies. Answers to questions:
Many people asked for the context. This is for college students using what they already know about the order of arithmetic operations to start analyzing the structure of code. In the activity, they visual code structures using these kind of diagrams. The important thing here is thus not just subtraction; it’s this way of visualizing the relationships — and there already is a sight-centeric word, “visualize!” But I suspect a blind reader could also use these spatial relationships as a learning tool…if there were a good way of conveying the spatial relationships.

Simple task: Which days of class should go on my syllabus?
❌ 4o-mini: shortened Nov break
❌ 4o: omitted days in Aug, Dec
✅ o3
❌ Claude 3-haiku: extended Oct break
❌ Claude 3.5 Sonnet V2: ext Oct br
✅ Claude 3.7 Sonnet
❌ Claude 4 Sonnet: extended Oct break
This is really unreliable AI performance.
#generativeAI

With Vauxhall finally able to acknowledge that the 3rd party warranty *that they sold us* is valid to start work on the OBC replacement, we get to pick up the car we traded the Corsa in for tomorrow!
(this was an epic journey of how not to do customer service - not Vauxhall's fault, but a franchised dealer here. I bet they don't treat their Ferrari customers like this...)

Understanding Reaction Mechanisms from Start to Finish
Rik S. Breebaart, Gianmarco Lazzeri, Roberto Covino, Peter G. Bolhuis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04052

Understanding Reaction Mechanisms from Start to Finish
Understanding mechanisms of rare but important events in complex molecular systems, such as protein folding or ligand (un)binding, requires accurately mapping transition paths from an initial to a final state. The committor is the ideal reaction coordinate for this purpose, but calculating it for high-dimensional, nonlinear systems has long been considered intractable. Here, we introduce an iterative path sampling strategy for computing the committor function for systems with high free energy b…

Series B, Episode 05 - Pressure Point
AVON: If I can fire at ground level, the beam radiation should be great enough to cut a narrow channel through the sensor mesh. That would give you eight seconds to get from here to the blockhouse. The mesh would start its repair cycle instantly. Take one step off the channel and you're dead. I know it's a slim chance, but it's the best I can come up with.
BLAKE: Let's try it.

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

I do follow God around here.
But I just had to add a personal note, otherwise I might even start believing in weird shit.

Ultra-high-gain water-window X-ray laser driven by plasma photocathode wakefield acceleration
Lily H. A. Berman, David Campbell, Edgar Hartmann, Thomas Heinemann, Thomas Wilson, Bernhard Hidding, Ahmad Fahim Habib
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06403

Ultra-high-gain water-window X-ray laser driven by plasma photocathode wakefield acceleration
X-ray free-electron lasers are large and complex machines, limited by electron beam brightness. Here we show through start-to-end simulations how to realise compact, robust and tunable X-ray lasers in the water window, based on ultra-bright electron beams from plasma wakefield accelerators. First, an ultra-low-emittance electron beam is released by a plasma photocathode in a metre-scale plasma wakefield accelerator. By tuning the beam charge, space-charge forces create a balance between beam fi…

Low key struggling in knowing what to wear for our weather here in the UK. It looked like rain earlier, so I put a thin jacket over my tee, and nope... it didn't rain, but became too hot for the jacket.
Didn't look like rain just now, so I put a thin hoodie on over my tee, and again... too hot.
I know that if I don't take some kind of hoodie or jacket out, it will suddenly rain or get super cold 😎 ⛄ 🌧 ​😕
Maybe it's time to start taking my pink Pusheen umbrella around with me ☔

Brownian motion near a soft surface
Yilin Ye (LOMA, LPMC), Yacine Amarouchene (LOMA), Rapha\"el Sarfati (CU), David S. Dean (LOMA), Thomas Salez (LOMA)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03403

Brownian motion near a soft surface
Brownian motion near soft surfaces is a situation widely encountered in nanoscale and biological physics. However, a complete theoretical description is lacking to date. Here, we theoretically investigate the dynamics of a two-dimensional colloid in an arbitrary external potential and near a soft surface. The latter is minimally modelled by a Winkler's foundation, and we restrict the study to the colloidal motion in the direction perpendicular to the surface. We start from deterministic hydrody…

There are days when autism feels overwhelming, and I find myself oversharing every thought and feeling that comes to mind.
But then, just as suddenly, my mood can shift. I’ll feel a surge of energy and want to shake things up.
That’s when I dive into my collection of anarchism memes and start posting my latest finds for everyone to enjoy!
We are here, unapologetically autistic and proud, and we refuse to be silenced!

The most underrated code comment continues to be:
// Start here tomorrow

I made a simple logic tree to help me work out if I want/desire #AI to be added to a site, application, program, OS, or literally any other thing in my life.
Start Here
⬇️
No, I don't want it.

What TV channel is Cowboys vs. Rams on today? Time, TV schedule for NFL preseason game https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/08/09/where-to-watch-cowboys-vs-rams-today-tv-channel-…

While editing my current #WIP, I've noticed I start the scene info-dumping and only after pages get to the action. Here's how I restructure the scene to be less info-dumpey.
#amediting #creativewriting

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

What TV channel is Cowboys vs. Rams on today? Time, TV schedule for NFL preseason game https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/08/09/where-to-watch-cowboys-vs-rams-today-tv-channel-…

Topological band insulators without translational symmetry
Shuo Wang, Jing-Run Lin, Zheng-Wei Zuo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03208 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

Topological band insulators without translational symmetry
In the research of the topological band phases, the conventional wisdom is to start from the crystalline translational symmetry systems. Nevertheless, the translational symmetry is not always a necessary condition for the energy bands. Here we propose a systematic method of constructing the topological band insulators without translational symmetry in the amorphous systems. By way of the isospectral reduction approach from spectral graph theory, we reduce the structural-disordered systems forme…

Calamus 14 Not heat flames up and consumes
A declaration of love, eroticism mixed with nature imagery. Something of a theme in Calamus! It didn't really grab me though, I think because so many of the lines start with negations and it distances me from the meaning.
The sexy line here:
the flames of me, consuming, burning for his love whom I love!
I also like the imagery of seeds wafted in the wind, then heading to "my Soul is borne through the open air".
This musical performance by the Erato Ensemble is a nice interpretation.

Treatment, evidence, imitation, and chat
Samuel J. Weisenthal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23040 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23040

Treatment, evidence, imitation, and chat
Large language models are thought to have potential to aid in medical decision making. We investigate this here. We start with the treatment problem, the patient's core medical decision-making task, which is solved in collaboration with a healthcare provider. We discuss approaches to solving the treatment problem, including -- within evidence-based medicine -- trials and observational data. We then discuss the chat problem, and how this differs from the treatment problem -- in particular as it …

Input-Driven Pushdown Automata with Translucent Input Letters
Martin Kutrib, Andreas Malcher, Matthias Wendlandt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15310 https://a…

Input-Driven Pushdown Automata with Translucent Input Letters
Input-driven pushdown automata with translucent input letters are investigated. Here, the use of translucent input letters means that the input is processed in several sweeps and that, depending on the current state of the automaton, some input symbols are visible and can be processed, whereas some other symbols are invisible, and may be processed in another sweep. Additionally, the returning mode as well as the non-returning mode are considered, where in the former mode a new sweep must start …

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
2/2
To address the bigger question I started with ("should we teach AI-"assisted" coding?"), my answer is: "No, except enough to show students directly what its pitfalls are." We have little enough time as it is to cover the core knowledge that they'll need, which has become more urgent now that they're going to be expected to clean up AI bugs and they'll have less time to develop an understanding of the problems they're supposed to be solving. The skill of prompt engineering & other skills of working with AI are relatively easy to pick up on your own, given a decent not-even-mathematical understanding of how a neutral network works, which is something we should be giving to all students, not just our majors.
Reasonable learning objectives for CS majors might include explaining what types of bugs an AI "assistant" is most likely to introduce, explaining the difference between software engineering and writing code, explaining why using an AI "assistant" is likely to violate open-source licenses, listing at lest three independent ethical objections to contemporary LLMs and explaining the evidence for/reasoning behind them, explaining why we should expect AI "assistants" to be better at generating code from scratch than at fixing bugs in existing code (and why they'll confidently "claim" to have fixed problems they haven't), and even fixing bugs in AI generated code (without AI "assistance").
If we lived in a world where the underlying environmental, labor, and data commons issues with AI weren't as bad, or if we could find and use systems that effectively mitigate these issues (there's lots of piecemeal progress on several of these) then we should probably start teaching an elective on coding with an assistant to students who have mastered programming basics, but such a class should probably spend a good chunk of time on non-assisted debugging.
#AI #LLMs #VibeCoding

The linked article here (ht @… for the link) is a really good list.
Fellow Fedi fans, quit splaining in people’s replies why these things are unfixable and/or Actually Good and start frigging thinking about how to fix them.
https://mas.to/@carnage4life/114711218316426969

the City just put in Stage 1 restrictions (we're very lucky here that we have abundant water resources, many places on Vancouver Island have restrictions almost immediately every summer)
So the clock is ticking! If we get to Stage 2 and I haven't filled the pond yet, I'll be prohibited from doing so until the rains come! We can only "top up" pools and ponds in Stage 2. And (god forbid) we get into Stage 3 or 4, the pond will have to be left to dry up. (at which point I would probably just use it as a watering source for the gardens)
I don't think we've ever reached Stage 3. The last time we got to Stage 2 was about 5 years ago I think, after the Heat Dome.
I would be surprised if we got to Stage 2 this year. It has been dry, but not excessively hot, so hopefully our resources can hold through August.
The good news is... I'm close to at least filling the intake bay and wetland filter.
Once the rest of the rock/pebble comes tomorrow I'll immediately start moving the rock into those two holes as quickly as I can, and once done, I'll start filling them with water so I can test out the pumps.
I might set up a temporary path for the water to recirculate through the intake bay and filter, avoiding the pond. That way those two parts can start to grow good-bacteria for the filter while I work on the big pond.
#pondlife #poolpond #backyardPrpject #diy #rock #labour

Let's start football season with some takes, plus the strangest walk-off win https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6506943/2025/07/22/nfl-power-rankings-the-pulse/

On Albion EU right now in "Highland Cross Marketplace" part of Martlock's beginner area
they are not selling T7 Pork Pies at all...so here presents itself an opportunity...
I could sell I dunno, depending on price, 20% the price I buy em with from Martlock. I could start at 50 items or less...and then we'll see...
25 in the chest and 25 that I put inside the marketplace...so now I'm going to Martlock...to buy and then return with the sell order...

Raiders Urged to Bring Back Former DT Amid Christian Wilkins Concerns https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/raiders-urged-to-bring-back-former-dt/?adt_ei=[email]

How popular media gets love wrong
Okay, my attempt at (hopefully widely-applicable) advice about relationships based on my mental "engineering" model and how it differs from the popular "fire" and "appeal" models:
1. If you're looking for a partner, don't focus too much on external qualities, but instead ask: "Do they respect me?" "Are they interested in active consent in all aspects of our relationship?" "Are they willing to commit a little now, and open to respectfully negotiating deeper commitment?" "Are they trustworthy, and willing to trust me?" Finding your partner attractive can come *from* trusting/appreciating/respecting them, rather than vice versa.
2. If you're looking for a partner, don't wait for infatuation to start before you try building a relationship. Don't wait to "fall in love;" if you "fall" into love you could just as easily "fall" out, but if you build up love, it won't be so easy to destroy. If you're feeling lonely and want a relationship, pick someone who seems interesting and receptive in your social circles and ask if they'd like to do something with you (doesn't have to be a date at first). *Pursue active consent* at each stage (if they're not interested; ask someone else, this will be easier if you're not already infatuated). If they're judging you by the standards in point 1, this is doubly important.
3. When building a relationship, try to synchronize your levels of commitment & trust even as you're trying to deepen them, or at least try to be honest and accepting when they need to be out-of-step. Say things and do things that show your partner the things (like trust, commitment, affection, etc.) that are important in your relationship, and ask them to do the same (or ideally you don't have to ask if they're conscious of this too). Do these things not as a chore or a transaction when your partner does them, but because they're the work of building the relationship that you value for its own sake (and because you value your partner for themselves too).
4. When facing big external challenges to your commitment to a relationship, like a move, ensure that your partner has an appropriate level of commitment too, but then don't undervalue the relationship relative to other things in life. Everyone is different, but *to me*, my committed relationship has been far more rewarding than e.g., a more "successful" career would have been. Of course worth noting here that non-men are taught by our society to undervalue their careers & other aspects of their life and sacrifice everything for their partners, which is toxic. I'm not saying "don't value other things" but especially for men, *do* value romantic relationships and be prepared to make decisions that prioritize them over other things, assuming a partner who is comfortable with that commitment and willing to reciprocate.
Okay, this thread is complete for now, until I think of something else that I've missed. I hope this advice is helpful in some way (or at least not harmful). Feel free to chime in if you've got different ideas...
#relationships #love

Cowboys injury report at halfway point of 2025 training camp in Oxnard https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-injury-report-halfway-point-2025-training-camp-oxnard

You picked the most overrated and underrated NFL teams https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6509332/2025/07/23/nfl-underrated-overrated-teams-the-pulse/

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

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

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

AI, AGI, and learning efficiency
My 4-month-old kid is not DDoSing Wikipedia right now, nor will they ever do so before learning to speak, read, or write. Their entire "training corpus" will not top even 100 million "tokens" before they can speak & understand language, and do so with real intentionally.
Just to emphasize that point: 100 words-per-minute times 60 minutes-per-hour times 12 hours-per-day times 365 days-per-year times 4 years is a mere 105,120,000 words. That's a ludicrously *high* estimate of words-per-minute and hours-per-day, and 4 years old (the age of my other kid) is well after basic speech capabilities are developed in many children, etc. More likely the available "training data" is at least 1 or 2 orders of magnitude less than this.
The point here is that large language models, trained as they are on multiple *billions* of tokens, are not developing their behavioral capabilities in a way that's remotely similar to humans, even if you believe those capabilities are similar (they are by certain very biased ways of measurement; they very much aren't by others). This idea that humans must be naturally good at acquiring language is an old one (see e.g. #AI #LLM #AGI