Tootfinder

I've worked on community groups for a long long time, and the only good thing I can say about most codes of conduct is that their existence proves the group fought past the army of dudes who think they get in the way of important things like letting them dominate the group.
But seriously, most codes of conduct are worth about one bit of information: "has cared at all (y/n)”
There's a single code of conduct document that was extremely influential by being designed to be copy-and-pastable: the document was given a specific name, work was done to propagate the idea that all you had to do was adopt it as-is. Drop in and ready to go!
The only problem there is that doesn't work. A long, legalistic set of rules about what's Not Allowed with no actual policy for enforcement invites a bunch of problems: a long list can be treated as exhaustive, so people will do things not on the list then cry foul when you tell them to stop. A lack of enforcement policy invites a binary approach: is a person good (did nothing on the list) or bad (did something on the list)? If they're bad, kick them out, if they're good, keep them.
This is bad.
The actual rules that will be enforced will be much more subtle, will favor people in positions of power, and will not yield results consistent with the stated values of various factions of the group. Arguments will ensue about whether or not something "really counts" as an item on the list, because often the actual decision being made but not explicitly stated is “do we kick out some important person to the group for some broken way they relate to others in the group?”
The other way they get used is "here's a person doing something some part of the group doesn't like, which rule can we use to kick them out?”
These are both broken approaches that don't actually reflect the relations of the group, and they lead to punitive and destructive methods of enforcement, rather than healing and reparative methods. This leads to conflict within the group being turned into a code of conduct violation while at the same time allowing outsiders to weaponize the code of conduct by provoking those conflicts.

I'm tempted to caveat that we should only create safety for people to make "harmless" mistakes.
I want to call out a critical distinction: It's not okay for mistakes to harm people — but rather it's important to create safety so that people **are not harmed** by mistakes. And that is part of creating safety for people to make mistakes.
Think about it like this: A hospital needs power for ventilators. They have redundant power sources so that any one power source can go out without harming patients.

I reread The Hour of the Thin Ox by Colin Greenland over the past few days. It's a picaresque novel that unpacks layers upon layers of culture, in opposition and composition with mutual ignorance between the three major cultures.
One of those cultures is part goat part hominid and seems the most primitive yet by using the environment around them they have all of the benefits of a technological culture without some of the drawbacks, but are at the right time as barbarous as the othe…

How I spent a bit of my day. Here, I am about medium skill, and have to pay attention, there's a lot going on. (Nobody yelled at me, not even once, so I've got that going for me.) Lots of people here have strong no-hands skills.

This from @… is almost certainly correct, or at least an important part of the story:
https://twit.social/@MisuseCase/112083143605522300

Personal, waiting through your life, ASD, sad
I suppose many people in the spectrum didn't have an easy childhood, especially if they lived in rural areas. Having difficulties bonding with peers, problems, solitude, bullying. However, the worst that you could have is having your parents tell the child that you just need to survive and wait, because one day you'll go a different school, meet new people and things will miraculously "be better". Because the child will take that literally, and make a point of their childhood to wait for this better day. It will believe that the problem is just a matter time, and then it will be solved.
Then comes the time for a higher grade school. And perhaps it will be a little better. But it won't be as great as it was promised. Perhaps you will cope better, perhaps you will find a better company, but you will never be neurotypical. And you will hear, once again, that you need to wait, and at the university things will definitely be just great.
Then comes the time for university. And again, it will be a little better, but never as good as it was promised. On the other hand, you will start realizing even more that you can't fit — that you've missed an important part of your life, that you lack the experiences that other people have, that you're a child that's suddenly ended up an adult between adults. And what will you hear? Of course, when you finally go to work, things will be even better.
And what's the truth? The future never brings anything better of its own accord. What it brings instead, is the realization that you've wasted the best years of your life waiting to be an adult. And then you are old, unhealthy and surrounded by people who sorted out their lives a long time ago. And people expect from you that you will work hard 5 days a week, and somehow manage to find more energy to sort out your own life at that.
And yes, as the old maxim says, you should just cope all these years and wait for retirement. Presuming you'll actually qualify for pension, that you'll be reasonably healthy and that the world won't burn completely by the time.
#ActuallyAutistic

One of the wildest part of LinkedIn are recruiters who blindly send job offers via DM and then they ghost me or pasive-aggressively say nope when I tell them that I'm a freelance developer and if it's compatible with contract.
Well, everything in my profile says "freelance", it's not my fault that you don't review profiles before blasting the Send button or that you don't use filters properly.

I've been baking (EXCELLENT!) bread for a while now and my entrepreneurial spirit is abuzz, and I'm ready to disrupt!
Here's the pitch:
Fresh bread is great but what if we took the boring part out of it? I'm envisioning a service (BaaS, if you will) that will bake your fresh bread for you and bring it to your door every day at the time you specify, for a low low price of $9.99/mo!
NOBODY THOUGHT ABOUT THIS!
I'm gonna call it "BREADR"! Whe…

Listen folks, I know most of you think libertarians are either crazy or evil, but that's not the truth. The truth is that the party with our name on it has been gutted by crazy, evil neocons in an intentional, orchestrated attack. The Libertarian party has not represented libertarians in half a decade, at least, and it was being subverted long before the actual takeover!

The Libertarian Party is collapsing. Here’s why
Racism seems to be part of libertarianism’s appeal to some Americans. It is easier to oppose government power if you don’t like what that power will be used for.

"YEA!!!!!!" comes the happy shout from upstairs! And it is repeated again!
Yes, indeed, today is a SNOW DAY here in our part of northwest Vermont! No school.
We haven't yet had a large amount of snow, but it's still coming down, there are high winds, and the message is that the roads are very slippery.
(Of course, for me as a remote worker this is just another day... as long as the power stays on. 😀)

The reason why Cowboys and Eric Kendricks was way too obvious pairing all along https://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/the_reason_why_cowboys_and_eric_kendricks_was_way_too_obvious_pairing_all_alo…

The reason why Cowboys and Eric Kendricks was way too obvious pairing all along
The Dallas Cowboys are finally on the board! It took them until Day 3 of the 2024 NFL free agency but they've made somewhat of a splash with their first outside signing of the year. A big part of why it can be considered a "splash" is the fact that linebacker Erick Kendricks had already reportedly agreed to terms with the San Francisco 49ers before the Cowboys flipped him. Per The Athletic, Kendricks is signing a two-year deal with the Cowboys. Zimmer's fit with the Cowboys was way too obvious …

How I spent a bit of my day. Here, I am about medium skill, and have to pay attention, there's a lot going on. (Nobody yelled at me, not even once, so I've got that going for me.) Lots of people here have strong no-hands skills.

Memory, nostalgia, personal
Today I've reached the part of Szczecin that I haven't visited for 15 years or so. I have to say: memory is interesting.
I only had minimal recollections before, some place names I've visited, some associations, maybe a few rough visual memories. Looking at the map helped uncover a bit more but not much.
Today, walking (unknowingly following a similar route), memories returned in bulk. "I've been here before", "I totally forgot about these plane trees", "I remember this fence", "we sat somewhere over there". Even some images returned.
I was hit by nostalgia too. After all, all that was important to me. I was in love, and for the first time in my life everything was going just right. These were the good memories.
So what's the issue? Perhaps it is that it's easier to cherish good memories when the present is good as well, or at least you're convinced that it's going to go in the right direction. Perhaps you need precisely that to avoid perceiving these memories as the good old days that are never coming back.
Or perhaps it's an autism spectrum thing. Perhaps these memories will always represent attachment to a person that's no longer a part of my life. Dreams that didn't come true. Good times that has passed, and that I didn't cherish as much as I wish I would. Memories made together that remain important to me, but not to anyone else. And these memories that I've lost, though they remain present at the edge of conscience, reminding of their existence, but ever unreachable.
#ActuallyAutistic

Touchscreen controls on a car are pure laziness on the designers' part. It's a cheap way of being able to say you have cutting edge tech (design the interface after designing the car) and much easier than designing controls that have to be physically implemented.
See also this:
https://www.som…

So there it is. This is the part that blocked me for 22 years. Check with the DOS if a disk has changed and act on it.
Was it worth it? Maybe not. The burst sector read is fast but comparable to what BSW wrote originally for GEOS. It's even slightly slower.
There is a FASTLOAD burst command, but it needs filename while GEOS operates on track&sector level. However if I could inject initial track and sector instead of the filename that has some potential for speedup.
…

Here's their press release from this morning:
Alt text here instead of in images due to length:
NEWS RELEASE Embargoed until April 24, 7:00am PST
Divest From Death USA
Media Contact: Media Liaisons, USC Divest From Death Coalition USCSolidarityOccupation@protonmail.com
USC Divest From Death Coalition to Begin Gaza Solidarity Occupation in University of
Southern California Campus
LOS ANGELES. (April 24, 2023) — USC Divest From Death Coalition today announced theit occupation of USC's Alumni Park, where the increasingly controversial 2024 Commencement is currently set to take place. The students taking part in the Gaza Solidarity Occupation are planning to occupy USC until their demands are met. The coalition joins other students groups across the country in the National Students for Justice in Palestine's "Popular University for Gaza," a coordinated mass movement of students, faculty and staff that disrupts universities, creating climates that push universities to answer community and international calls for full divestment from the Zionist entity, and all of the industries that sustain it.
1. End War Profiteering and Investment in Genocide. USC must fully disclose and divest its finances and endowment from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine, including the US Military and weapons manufacturing. USC must comumit to accountability through full transparency of their financial investments.
2. Complete Academic Boycott of Israel. USC must end its study abroad programs at Hebrew University's Rothenberg International School and Reichman University and sever all academic ties and research cooperation with Israeli universities.
3. Protect free speech on campus and provide full amnesty to all students, staff, and faculty disciplined, penalized, or fired for their pro-Palestine ackivism. USC must abide by their self- proclaimed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion values and implement material policies protecting the safety of its marginalized students.
4. Stop the Displacement, from South Central to Palestine. No land grabs, whether in South Central, Tongva territory, or Palestine. Cease expansion, provide reparations, and support housing for low-income South Central residents. No development by USC without genuine community control.
5. No Policing on Campus. End the targeted repression and harassment of Black, Brown, and Palestinian students and their allies on and off campus, including through university disciplinary processes. Defund the Department of Public Safety and disclose and sever all ties with the LAPD.
6. End the Silence on the Genocide in Palestine. Release a public statement calling for an immediate, permanent ceasefire in Gaza, denouncing the ongoing genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people, and call on government officials o do so too.
"I'm participating in the Gaza Solidarity Occupation at USC to highlight and amplify the anti- zionist Jewish voice at USC and be in solidarity with the Palestinian fight for liberation," says a student organizer from USC's chapter of Jewish Voices for Palestine (JVP). "JVP USC feels our voice is especially important right now as many people at USC and across the country are equating zionism and Judaism, but we are here to say they are not the same! We stand by our belief of free speech, resistance to oppressive systems and solidarity with our valedictorian Asna and all other college campuses where pro-Palestine voices have been silenced."
The USC Divest From Death Coalition establishes the occupation mo st fundamentally in solidarity with the people of Palestine as they resist genocide and continue in their struggle for liberation. The occupation is also in resistance to attempts by USC and other universities to suppress the student movement for Palestine on its campuses, in resistance to the silencing of students that criticize the state of Israel, in resistance to the university administrators and boards of trustees who profit off the genocide of Palestinians; The students taking part are firm in their commitment to speaking out against the university's complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people.
"USC's funding of the ongoing genocide perpetuated by the zionist entity is reflective of maintaining imperialist interests abroad, as well as solidifying the shared ideology of amerikan and zionist institutions in preserving racialized oppression," says a student organizer of the Gaza Solidarity Occupation. "To not stand in opposition to the expressly racist violence here and abroad is to ignore the calls for solidarity demanded by the majority of the world. USC acts in accordance with these oppressions, and to call against this is to recognize both the inhumanity of these systems and our own humanity in opposing them."
We have chosen to use the word "occupation” instead of "encampment" to draw attention to USC as an occupying force on unceded Gabrieleno/Tongva land, an occupying force in South Central through its expansion into, gentrification of, and destruction of the existing community, and as a complicit power in Israeli occupation of Palestine.
About USC Divest From Death
In joining the national "Cut Ties with Genocide: Divest from Death" campaign, USC Divest From Death pushes our institutions to divest from companies complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, in all its iterations, alongside thousands of campuses. The coalition's push for the advancement of the key demand points on campus is the first steps towards the liberation of all people by ending the complicity of the University of Southern California in the violence enacted on our communities. Through the intentional act of coalition building, the students of USC realize that we are part of an interconnected fight for freedom taking place on campus, in our communities and homelands. We envision campuses free from militarism, occupation, and war through the implementation of divestment at USC
About Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)
The student movement for the liberation of Palestine first began in the 1950s through the formation of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS). From the U.S. to Palestine, GUPS chapters galvanized thousands of students towards a liberated Palestine. The 90s” wave of corrupt politicians and faulty deals changed the liberation movement as we knew it and many institutions, including the student movement, collapsed. In the absence of a Palestinian student movement, organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine emerged across occupied Turtle Island (U.S. and Canada) as a way to educate, advocate, and mobilize in support for Palestinian liberation. Nearly two decades after the formation of the first Students for Justice in Palestine, the movement for Palestine has taken colleges and universities across North America by storm. With over 200 campus Palestine solidarity organizations across the continent, students have been leaders in uplifting demands for freedom, Justice, and equality for the Palestinian people.

The reason why Cowboys and Eric Kendricks was way too obvious pairing all along https://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/the_reason_why_cowboys_and_eric_kendricks_was_way_too_obvious_pairing_all_alo…

The reason why Cowboys and Eric Kendricks was way too obvious pairing all along
The Dallas Cowboys are finally on the board! It took them until Day 3 of the 2024 NFL free agency but they've made somewhat of a splash with their first outside signing of the year. A big part of why it can be considered a "splash" is the fact that linebacker Erick Kendricks had already reportedly agreed to terms with the San Francisco 49ers before the Cowboys flipped him. Per The Athletic, Kendricks is signing a two-year deal with the Cowboys. Zimmer's fit with the Cowboys was way too obvious …

It's so wild that the govt response to the bottom part of this graph is "time to make women slaves again" rather than "workers should be able to afford to raise a family"

It's wild to me that there's a non-zero amount of people who don't want to be social on social media.
You don't have to be part of an "influencer" crowd to connect with people. That's called being human.
Some of these "influencers" should try being "human" every once in awhile. Talking TO people and not AT people does seem to be a good thing....🤦‍♂️

Today is "Curse the layers of bureaucracy that make your jobs worse"-Day.
My latest example is: Our venue gets to use a new parking lot that's automated with number plates. So new part of my job is to get the number plate for any band that plays here at least a week before the show. It's a small thing but it becomes layers upon layers of these small things. Get data to fill out forms to automate things because automation _seems_ so much more effective. Grindwork for a…

the thermostat in this place is wireless and talks to the boiler over radio... but something happened (?) and it's no longer working. and i noticed that i'm cold.
fortunately i had a recording of the thermostat's boiler-on and boiler-off commands on my flipper zero.
so now flipper zero is a key part of how i'm going to not freeze to death while asleep

If Russia would conquer a larger part of Ukraine, it can surely not control it (that's math, troops. territory etc.). So that possible scenario would mean decades of continous civil war in that region and central europe. Besides large additional refugee streams. Europe can't afford to let Russia win in Ukraine.
#Ukraine

Sources: US officials told AMD that the company's AI chip for the Chinese market was still too powerful and it must obtain a license in order to sell it (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-0…

AMD Hits US Roadblock to Sell AI Chip for China as Part of Tech Crackdown
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. hit a US government roadblock in attempting to sell an artificial intelligence chip tailored for the Chinese market, according to people familiar with the matter, part of Washington’s crackdown on the export of advanced technologies to the country.

I've been reading "On Green” (https://joecarlsmith.com/2024/03/21/on-green) and its following article, “On Attunement” with some interest today. I am uninterested in the ways he is focused on “AGI”, but that might actually be part of what he's saying and missing.
They talk about the philosophy of green in the "magic the gathering" sense, which has five core modes of things, and being a game, designed to balance. It's an attractive system and not without merit as a philosophical labeling system. In short: white, moral; blue, knowledge and rationality; red, passion and desire; black, power and achievement. And green. Green is the subject they can't identify clearly.
I don't think they really understand green. (They come from a very rationalist place, and that's not a good mode to understand Green)
Green is the domain of systems thinking and of ecology. It's one of flexible boundaries and hierarchies that vanish when you look at them for long. They talk about philosophical agents and try to fit a green philosophical stance into that framework, but it misses: the very idea of a self is nebulous in a green philosophy. Yes, it obviously exists, we are all separate from each other. But also we are inseparable from each other. Green is a philosophy of relationality and multiple perspectives and ever shifting viewpoints. It's not just yin, passive, permissive, but holistic. It's not that it lets the Other in, it's that it actively is in relation with the Other. The other is the self, the self is the other.
The essays also label green as conservative, and this is not quite true. It is not about being slow or regressive or traditional, but about being whole. They can't quite see that green's willingness to accept death and pain as things that happen and also its strong preservationist stance are not opposed to each other. It seems incoherent, but it's not: death and pain are things that happen to living parts of an ecosystem. They matter, but so too does the whole matter. Where so many blue rationalists see statistical and demographic counts of deaths and "sentient beings harmed”, green sees a whole ecosystem where some of that is deeply natural. It's unnatural, ecosystem-harming deaths that are disasters in the green philosophy. Wholesale extinctions. Protracted, painful deaths, as much for the wound they cause outside the individual as the individual suffering as well. But we all come to an end, and to change that wholesale would end so many kinds of relationship, so many things.
Green revels in the illegible, the incomplete, and the connected. It's easy to be green-blind, to ignore the subtle systemic effects. So many of us want simple cause and effect, rather than action and plurality of reactions.
Green's ability to embrace the illegible lets it deal with Red chaos; its resilience tempers red passion. It can ally with White philosophies into a pastoral, conservative, moralistic framework. It ends up at odds with the rationalist Blue and the power-hungry Black, because they drive disequilibrium, but more than just transition to new stable ecologies, they drive systems permanently out of stability, destroying relationships in their path. When confronted with this, they will deny it because the objects are still there. Preserved. Catalogued. Legible and accounted for. Perhaps used instrumentally. Perhaps wrecked for some "greater purpose” but only acknowledged as objects. The relationships between things remain illegible.

Chromium doesn't appear to have this, but everyone's aware that #Firefox includes a #PDF editor, right?

Don't let any denier or fossil fuel apologist ever tell you that renewables are "unreliable" or that batteries are "unsustainable”.
You can make batteries from water, sand, and other material to store electricity as heat. This is centuries-old technology that can power the 21st century and beyond.
No more excuses.
#EndFossilFuels

Source: last month, Sundial Media bought Refinery29 for ~$30M, or roughly its 2023 revenue; Refinery29 buys trade beauty show Beautycon to move away from ads (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/07/refinery29-beautycon-acquisition

Exclusive: Refinery29 will take over Beautycon
It's part of a broader plan to re-focus Refinery29's business toward more products that can be monetized.

After some weeks off while on Holiday today I published 3rd post about my infra rebuild. Today about Puppet, Choria and Server Management
It's a bit of a trash fire and annoying alas.
https://www.devco.net/posts/2024/04/07/lab-infra-rebuild-3/

the other thing is like, while it might possibly improve surgical outcome, reversers for that part of it don't exist for each drug? and the time to wear off is unpredictable per patient apparently?
and reversing it is very much a US thing vs an EU one?
rocuronium being reversed by sugammadex, for example.
no reversal for propofol because of quick metabolism
Flumazenil reverses benzodiazepines like midazolam (but midazolam has a higher half life) - this is also similar to how Naloxone reverses opiates... although due to the trauma of surgery I don't think you'd want to undo the fentanyl... lol
sev actually prolongs neuromuscular inhibition where propofol doesn't.
aparently sevoflurane doesn't have a reverser either so you time it for end of surgery and it's around... 10-ish minutes typically because anesthesiologists like to stick the landing

Why it matters: not all Republicans are #MAGA...and while he's not a moderate, he's listened to by the more...sane...part of the party
Paul Ryan says he won’t vote for Trump: ‘I’m gonna write in a Republican’ | The Hill

Paul Ryan says he won’t vote for Trump: ‘I’m gonna write in a Republican’
Former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Tuesday that he does not plan to vote for former President Trump in November, suggesting he would write in another candidate instead. “Character is too important to me,” Ryan, who left Congress in 2019, told Yahoo Finance at the Milken Global Institute Conference. “And it’s a job that…

Signing a petition this AM reading the letter that prompted it wonder when businesses started thinking parking directly in front of their business was what was kept them open? It's repeatedly shown to be false.
It happens all the time now. There are at least 1K public garage spaces not blocks, but w/in half a block. Maybe the most transit rich part of the city with lines coming from every direction dropping you right there. They're not concerned about parking they're conc…

On foundation of generative statistics with F-entropy: a gradient-based approach
Bing Cheng, Howell Tong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05389 https://

On foundation of generative statistics with F-entropy: a gradient-based approach
This paper explores the interplay between statistics and generative artificial intelligence. Generative statistics, an integral part of the latter, aims to construct models that can {\it generate} efficiently and meaningfully new data across the whole of the (usually high dimensional) sample space, e.g. a new photo. Within it, the gradient-based approach is a current favourite that exploits effectively, for the above purpose, the information contained in the observed sample, e.g. an old photo. …

Egypt has stepped up mediation efforts for a cease-fire deal in hopes of averting an Israeli ground assault on Rafah, which sits on Gaza’s border with Egypt.
A Hamas delegation was in Cairo on Monday for talks over the new proposal.
Talks have centered on a two-phase deal that would bring an initial halt in fighting with the release of some of the around 100 hostages Hamas is believed to still hold in return for the freeing of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, while talks are hel…

Israeli officials concerned about ICC warrants: Mideast tensions
The United States has stepped up pressure for a cease-fire deal in Gaza. Hamas officials are in Egypt to discuss the new proposal. Ahead of a new visit to Israel this week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says he pushed Hamas to accept the latest proposal, calling it “extraordinarily generous” on the part of Israel. Terms of the proposal were not made public, and it was not known if anything had changed on a main roadblock that mediators have repeatedly crashed against: the question …

Quicksand used to be a thing.... then disappeared. There's a fantastic episode of Radiolab that explores this - how it occupied a huge part of our "disaster scenario" media landscape, and then gradually disappeared. Great listen:
https://radiolab.org/podcast/quicksand

How bad is the Supreme Court now? It’s this bad:
“It’s a rogue court, a thoroughly corrupt one, one that is so far gone in its corruption that it feels free even from the practical obligation to clothe its corruption for the sake of appearances.”
(Josh Marshall, gift link.)

#OTD on the 24th of February 2020 the robotics club of Willow Glen High School, which I was a part of, prepared for the #FIRSTRobotics competition. We'd learn later that week that it was going to be cancelled due to the pandemic - I often forget how full of enthusiasm we were before that occurred.

I wish when you hit Ctrl-F to open up the Find feature within @… that you could hit Ctrl-F again to close that dialog.
While it's not a big deal to move the mouse and click the X to close that window, it's just a lot quicker and easier to hit Ctrl-F again to close it.

It's very strange, but there is a part of me that seems to rely on my parents more now than when I was 18 - at least as roots extending back or in some emotional aspect (my mum almost died at that age, and recently did for a second time.) How can that be? Perhaps when you're eighteen all seems possible, and everything extends forward, but later that changes. The future isn't what it used to be.

Daily Inspiration: "To be a part of tomorrow, you need to be a part of the journey!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
An organization will never successfully get to where it needs to go if it doesn't have the full support and understanding of its team - and in some cases, my role is to help build that support and understanding.
Here's a photo from when I was doing a stage check on Friday in Birmingham, England, before my keynote Saturday for service managers of KwikFit, an…

Odda's Chapel, Deerhurst. This is all #gloucestershire and #herefordshire
https://www.…

It is sad to see Lake Windermere #UK become eutrophic, with increased algal blooms. I don't doubt that tourism and wastewater are part of the problem, but #algalblooms almost always have multiple drivers. As scientists, we are very cautious of

Tourist influx turns Windermere green - report - BBC News
New research links algal blooming at England's largest lake with increased visitor numbers

There's no question that Congressional approval of aid to #Ukraine came too late for some people.
The question that remains is whether it came too late for a whole nation of people (or more).
"Lack of ammunition is forcing the outnumbered Ukrainian soldiers to pull back, one village after another, including three surrendered Sunday, as intense fighting roils the countryside sur…

Russia-Ukraine war: Poor defense lines leave Ukrainian soldiers worried against Russian advance
Ukrainian soldiers say they are worried fortifications are not being built quicky enough as Russian forces continue to advance along the front lines. Poorly built defensive lines, including trenches, foxholes and firing positions, are part of the reason outgunned Ukrainians forces have had to withdraw, because there is no safe retreat. Ukraine's government has allocated some $960 million to bolster three lines of defense, but Ukrainian forces and construction companies say they lack resources a…

It's wild to me that there's a non-zero amount of people who don't want to be social on social media.
You don't have to be part of an "influencer" crowd to connect with people. That's called being human.
Some of these "influencers" should try being "human" every once in awhile. Talking TO people and not AT people does seem to be a good thing....🤦‍♂️

"Wettbewerb der Antriebsarten!" "Competition of propulsion!" sounds like an opera. The competition is over and everyone agrees that there's a clear winner in terms of economics and physics. Trying to change the rules after the game is over is the tragic part of this opera. And it's sung in German.
https://…

BMDV (@bmdv@social.bund.de)
Attached: 1 image Auto fahren, aber klimafreundlich?🚗Wir können es schaffen, indem wir uns nicht auf eine Technologie beschränken. "Wenn mehr klimaneutrale Antriebsarten zueinander in Konkurrenz stehen, schafft das Innovation", so Volker Wissing. Um Elektromobilität weiter voranzubringen, bauen wir weiterhin schnell Ladeinfrastruktur auf! Wir haben schon 1 Mio.+ Ladepunkte in 🇩🇪 gefördert (80% in Betrieb) & damit Laden so einfach wird wie Tanken, kommen 1.000 neue Schnellladepunk…

so, there is this this space filling curve called a Gosper curve, which got some neat property like forming a fractal island that can tile the plane.
however, the best part of it is that it's also called a flowsnake 😃.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosper_curve

Gosper curve - Wikipedia

It's that time of the year again: if you support users online, and more so if you're part of an open source community, please take a deep breath and read @… "How to be helpful online" guide

Ronna's lack of integrity is just part of the problem. News organizations should not be siphoning off money that should be spent on journalism and using it to subsidize politicians. How did we get here? It all started with Rupert Murdoch's corruption. His damage of journalism is exceeded only by what he has done to democracy in every nation where he operates.

Singularity Structures of Linear Inviscid Damping in a Channel
Wenjie Lu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04673 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.…

Singularity Structures of Linear Inviscid Damping in a Channel
This paper studies singularity structures of the linear inviscid damping of two-dimensional Euler equations in a finite periodic channel. We introduce a recursive definition of singularity structures which characterize the singularities of the spectrum density function from different sources: the free part and the boundary part of the Green function. As an application, we demonstrate that the stream function exhibits smoothness away from the channel's boundary, yet it presents singularities in …

Imagine being a time metereologist and part of a task force that has to decide if and when we need a negative leap second to align our timekeeping with the Earth's rotation. A decision that could cause many critical computer systems to malfunction.

And then, because of the magnitude of that decision, being semi-relieved that the decision can be delayed by approximately 3 years because… wait for it.… the melting polar ice is slowing down the planet's rotation as it is moving mas…

I'm getting a lot of anecdata about the ChangeHealthcare hack: it seems that at least part of the reason it's taking so long to recover is that there are a lot of MSPs who serve medical providers who had ChangeHealthcare as a single point of failure in billing processes and who are now switching away from them.
Is this true? Not true? How many of the small medical providers out there used an MSP as a unified point of contact for all technical needs including billing?

lol. what? Denise O'Sullivan of the NC Courage is doing part time as a barista at a real place because it's a skill she wants to learn. THAT'S WILD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FGpeIZwopQ

Oh man, Biz Stone.
you_blew_it_up_god_damn_you_planet_of_the_apes.gif
Praise be for the Fedi projects that aren't Mastodon, I guess.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/04/mastodon-forms-new-u.s.-non-profit/

It appears it's "old leftwing terrorists show up" month https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/28/satoshi-kirishima-dna-test-japan

Attempting to Prove the Riemann Hypothesis through the Reflection Formula
Farid Kenas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05347 https://arxiv.…

Attempting to Prove the Riemann Hypothesis through the Reflection Formula
The Riemann Hypothesis, originally proposed by the eminent mathematician Bernard Riemann in 1859, remains one of the most profound challenges in number theory. It posits that all non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function ζ(s) are concentrated precisely along the critical line where the real part equals 1/2. In this paper, our aim is to present an attempt to prove this conjecture. Our approach relies on the use of the reflection formula. By applying this tool with precision and insight, we…

We’re getting to that point with personal computers and phones too.
We've largely reached the point of most people having quite enough computing power at the ready for their personal use and entertainment. Even if hardware and software can keep advancing as it has in recent decades, we don't have the capacity to do anything directly with that extra power. …

Series B, Episode 03 - Weapon
CLONE 2: All life is linked. [Laces his fingers]
COSER: You use it like a gun and it projects a potential, an unstable molecular potential in the part of the victim that you hit. The beauty of it is that unless they see you do it, or you tell them you've done it, they don't even know it's happened.
https://blake.torpidity.net/s/203/414 📺

I absolutely love this post, and I agree with just about everything in it, except for one small thing—making mobile apps can also often be part of the dead-end “creator economy”.
In today’s App Stores, there are, generally speaking, two broad kinds of apps: a. apps that deliver your actual content or services that live *outside* the app (Uber, newspapers, podcast players, airline booking), and b. apps that deliver value by the mere fact that it is installed (productivity apps, photo/vi…

I’m attending The Democratic National Committee’s event, “All Aboard: the Training Series - What's at stake with the extreme MAGA GOP agenda” – sign up now to join me! https://events.democrats.org/event/607046/?

All Aboard: the Training Series - What's at stake with the extreme MAGA GOP agenda · The Democratic National Committee
As Joe and Kamala say, it's time to “finish the job!” All aboard! We are thrilled to invite you to the last of a three part training series on messaging and having effective conversations on the phones, at the doors, and with our friends and family about the upcoming election. This third session will focus on how to have persuasive conversations with voters that show what's at stake with the extreme MAGA GOP agenda this year. Please RSVP to receive Zoom details. **Check out the other…

Hey #Svengoolie fans, gear up for tonight's classic horror flick The Invisible Man's Revenge. This was the 5th part of the saga from Universal. It digs deep and has a pretty dark revenge plot. 🎬👻
#Svenpals

Information sharing is a normal part of human interaction, but it's a part of us that can be manipulated and used to gain access to resources or locations by bad actors.
This is known as #SocialEngineering.
How would a room full of #security professionals behave when we invite t…

Let me hack you: a different kind of social engineering | GÉANT CONNECT Online
Do you know my birthdate? Or my mother’s maiden name? Would I trust you enough to tell you this information? Does it matter if you know, and does it pose a security risk? Most of us accidentally reveal specific information about ourselves in any social interaction – it’s natural to talk about your family, where

They have a blog to reassure their users about the changes.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/02-22-2024-open-social-web
A summary of some ways Bluesky differs from Mastodon:
A focus on the global conversation
Which is to say, manipulating the things you are shown such that you are broadcast to from megastars rather than talking to a community.
Your Mastodon server is part of your username, and becomes part of your identity.
I am not a handle! I am a free man! I guess that means on Bluesky you're stuck with the one identity and can't transition into a new identity 😆
breaking news, viral posts, and algorithmic feeds
Ugh.
Composable moderation.
Which is to say hiding the nazis instead of deleting them. Putting up a veil instead of addressing a problem.
Composable feeds:... there are currently over 40,000 algorithmic feeds to choose from!
It's just like TV!
Your Mastodon timeline is only made up of posts from accounts you follow
Damn right.
Moving hosting services should be like changing your cell phone provider — you should be able to keep your identity and data.
I'm leaning more towards auto-delete after a month lately, but that still hasn't quite overcome my inner archivist.
Losing an account when a server went down is indeed a good chunk of why I started a server.

Court filings from FTC lawsuit against Meta show Instagram made $32.4B in ad revenue in 2021, which is more than YouTube's $28.8B in ad revenue that year (Peter Kafka/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-ads-revenue-y…

Instagram makes more ad money than YouTube, court filings show
Meta bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012. Now it's a giant part of Mark Zuckerberg's empire.

Roche's R&D rethink hits 20% of molecules as cancer drugs axed
"Roche has split programs into three categories:
- highly promising prospects it wants to accelerate;
- assets that don’t warrant further investment because they are unlikely to be first or best in class; and
- molecules that need to generate more data to show whether they are a priority."

Roche's pipeline rethink hits 20% of new molecules as cancer candidates join discard pile
Roche has performed a little light spring cleaning, sweeping (PDF) a pair of phase 1 solid tumor drugs and an early-st | Roche has performed a little light spring cleaning, sweeping a pair of phase 1 solid tumor drugs and an early-stage psychiatric disorder prospect out of the door as part of its update for the first quarter. The culls are part of a broader refocusing that has removed 20% of new molecules from the pipeline in recent quarters.

"Nothing in the contract requires outlets to label the articles created with these tools to let readers know how they were produced."
Google created an AI tool to rip off news outlets, and it's paying other outlets to use it
htt…

Google created an AI tool to rip off news outlets, and it's paying other outlets to use it
Google has created a new suite of AI tools—tools that have reportedly not yet been released to the public, but that are being provided to news outlets as part of the Google News Initiative . ...

In classic British suburban stylee we live at the end of a cul-de-sac. It's Easter Sunday and the sun is shining so that means all the local children will be running around in an hour or so as part of a communal egg hunt.
As per usual I'll stand and watch and smile and think how cute and sweet they all look, after which I'll go back to my usual misanthropic "I bloody hate kids" state for the rest of the year.

Total strangers or "bullied off the network". #Mastodon turns out to be no island of happiness. Everyones network costs a sight of a public space or forum that is disparate and ensemble. The great welcoming of this part of the Fediverse seems to rely on "internal knowledge that’s not really written down anywhere". Practise and text, law?, are informal in terms of open reading. Don&…

Content Nation Backlash Highlights Mastodon's Toxicity
It turns out, if people in an online community really don't like what you're doing, they can turn to harassment, threats, or worse to try to shut you down.

There's an AI angle to the story, but it's just the kind of AI that we should all be excited for: someone comes up with a cool idea (at any moment being able to orient yourself to the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy) and the AI part is just that the person could turn that idea into reality. And no businesses involved, nothing commercial, just a cool idea, which is enough when things become easier to build.

New app always points to the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy
iPhone compass app made with AI assistance locates the heart of the Milky Way.

TIL. The "buck" in "pass the buck".
Thanks ChatGPT for the info, but it is sad I've to cross-check the info with other AIs. 😥
#til #chatGPT #Copilot

I keep my browser's base font size a little larger by default, for my own readability's sake, and it's a great way to discover which sites assumed pixel-perfect layouts with no font size increases or reflow.
(Check the bottom right to see what I'm talking about)

He'll make the announcement at 10.00 am BST. Elsewhere I read that his party expects him to resign.
It's part of a widespread approach by the far right to spread unfounded lies about left and centre left political figures.
Spanish opposition step up #Sánchez attacks as PM decides on his future | Spain | The Guardian

Sometimes I think about a few who I've interacted with here in the past and enjoyed interacting with, but who no longer interact with me for some reason.😔
I post a LOT, and most of the time what I say, I guess gets on people's nerves because I'm passionate about certain topics. Sometimes though, I make really meaningful connections (to me) and those people sometimes stop talking to me too and it feels terrible. Like ive lost a close friend cause I'm a piece of shit and said some dumb shit.
That last part is the worst because it's how I've felt my entire life. I almost have no filter, so I say what's in my head and that's not the "polite" and "easy-going" thing to do. I have one friend left in my entire life because friends just drop me when I piss them off accidentally...
Rejection sensitivity fucking sucks.

Happy Dental Care Day Canada!! (at least if you're over 70 without private insurance)
I hope that in time this will become part of universal single-payer healthcare (along with Drug Coverage) and eliminate private insurance for health needs, but it's a start at least. And it happened because a centre-left party, the NDP, has an agreement to work with the minority government.
#CdnPoli

Ok I risk the wrath of the Casio Cult but I decided to buy a Skmei "homage" (ok "rip off"). I wanted to do a comparison. I picked the F-94W style one because it is less common in this part of the world and I am not trying to pass this off as the real thing.
Visually it's very close in quality to the Casio and cost just $5.41🇺🇸 but not quite the same. The Casio LCD is clearer viewed at a range of angles. However, that lighting system is fantastic compared to the …

“We Are Not Afraid of You”: Voices from Inside the Growing Anti-War Movement Sweeping US Campuses https://itsgoingdown.org/voices-from-inside-the-growing-anti-war-movement/

Via Vincent Proce on Twitter on AI:
“This is making the rounds!” (On #AIArt)

I wish when you hit Ctrl-F to open up the Find feature within @… that you could hit Ctrl-F again to close that dialog.
While it's not a big deal to move the mouse and click the X to close that window, it's just a lot quicker and easier to hit Ctrl-F again to close it.

Daily Inspiration: "To be a part of tomorrow, you need to be a part of the journey!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
An organization will never successfully get to where it needs to go if it doesn't have the full support and understanding of its team - and in some cases, my role is to help build that support and understanding.
Here's a photo from when I was doing a stage check on Friday in Birmingham, England, before my keynote Saturday for service managers of KwikFit, an…

Court filings from FTC lawsuit against Meta show Instagram made $32.4B in ad revenue in 2021, which is more than YouTube's $28.8B in ad revenue that year (Peter Kafka/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-ads-revenue-y…

Instagram makes more ad money than YouTube, court filings show
Meta bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012. Now it's a giant part of Mark Zuckerberg's empire.

You know government is looking to increase control for control's sake when they call out the military to solve a problem that their stated purpose in being there won't solve!
"'For people who are thinking about bringing a gun or knife on the subway, at least this creates a deterrent effect.'"
Right, because most people who bring a weapon on the subway to commit a crime carry it in their *bag*?!?!?!?

New York will send National Guard to subways after a string of violent crimes
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is sending the National Guard to the New York City subway system to help police search passengers’ bags for weapons. Wednesday's move follows a series of high-profile crimes in the system. The Democrat says she will deploy 750 members of the National Guard and 250 state troopers and transit officers to help the New York Police Department check bags at subway entrances. It is part of a larger plan from the governor’s office to address crime on the subway. It includ…

So to let me explain, this is a Very Normal Typesetting task for a book. Make two column text, with an embedded figure. Keep the baseline rhythm uniform. That means the two columns next to each other will always have the same baselines.
Make the figure full column width.
Until this became available, I could not find a way to do this. It's a subtle reason that multicolumn layouts for text on the web never really took off. (horizontal scrolling and snapping is perhaps another reason, but the fact that it looked like crap is part of it.)
I've been hand-solving variations using context-specific hacks for my whole career: text under e-commerce product cards. Images on a product page with a caption with text next to them that don't have funky gaps where the text goes underneath. Images with captions inset in text, too. Marketing pages with two bits of copy next to each other.
Lack of little nuances like this is why the whole web lands on "well I guess we'll set it in 16 pixel Helvetica with one line margins between paragraphs”. It stifles making anything but Browser Default Text or variations on it look good.
Remember how fresh Medium looked when it came out? Even its relatively small shake-up of the dominant formula felt good. Of course now, big easy to read serifed type in a single column is the brand of "this is a newsletter”

WhatsApp told Delhi High Court last week that it will be forced to leave India if required to maintain "traceability" for messages as part of 2021's IT rules (Russell Brandom/Rest of World)
https://restofworld.org/2024/exporter-whatsapp-encryption-in…

WhatsApp gives India an ultimatum on encryption
Tracing the origins of messages is more complicated than it sounds.

Lower numbers in Flensburg🇩🇪 are always desirable - whether it's points for German drivers (traffic fines) - or district heating temperatures. By reducing the need for 95°C heat from 10 > 1%, it's much easier to let heat pumps take over most of the heat supply. That's what the local utility will do.

Transformation in Flensburg: low temperatures for efficient heat pumps
As an innovative public utility company, Stadtwerke Flensburg is committed to decarbonisation and CO2 neutrality. To achieve this goal, the municipal utility company is working with Gradyent to reduce temperatures in the district heating system. As part of the partnership, the two companies have found a way to reduce the necessary annual heat share with a temperature above 95°C from around 10% to 1%. This means that heat pumps can be used to a higher extent and operated efficiently.

lol. what? Denise O'Sullivan of the NC Courage is doing part time as a barista at a real place because it's a skill she wants to learn. THAT'S WILD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FGpeIZwopQ

Series B, Episode 03 - Weapon
CLONE 2: All life is linked. [Laces his fingers]
COSER: You use it like a gun and it projects a potential, an unstable molecular potential in the part of the victim that you hit. The beauty of it is that unless they see you do it, or you tell them you've done it, they don't even know it's happened.
https://blake.torpidity.net/s/203/414 📺 B7B6

Court filings from FTC lawsuit against Meta show Instagram made $32.4B in ad revenue in 2021, which is more than YouTube's $28.8B in ad revenue that year (Peter Kafka/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-ads-revenue-y…

Instagram makes more ad money than YouTube, court filings show
Meta bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012. Now it's a giant part of Mark Zuckerberg's empire.

"It’s always something. The furnace, the plumbing, part of your fence blowing away, vermin, a poorly placed tree growing into some piece of essential infrastructure — owning a home is a slowly simmering fight against eclectic natural forces that want to cleanse us off of the earth’s surface."
Owning A Home Isn't The American Dream, It's A Maintenance Nightmare, And It's Not Even A Good Store Of Value - Above the Law

Owning A Home Isn’t The American Dream, It’s A Maintenance Nightmare, And It’s Not Even A Good Store Of Value
It's a slowly simmering fight against eclectic natural forces that want to cleanse us off of the earth's surface.

Because people can't click a link and read it that way apparently, I'll post images from the Fediverse wiki page here that supports my claim that AP is the Fediverse. If anyone has anything else to say that isn't covered in these images, I'm willilng to entertain it.
But don't come into my replies saying "AP isn't the only protocol that's a part of the Fediverse" because I'm literally covering that right here, right now.
Sorry, I'm an…

Not getting into an argument over a #RandomPedantry point, but as a matter of objective fact, we are leaving our kids cleaner air on a global basis than we inherited with the exception of CO2 levels. Sulfur, fine particulates, NOx, etc. are all *down* in a multi-decadal scope.
Which is part of why we seeing a tipping point in temperatures. Fuel oil used in large ships has gotten much c…

it's a bit weird to sit down and consider that one of my open source projects had a total of over 6 billion, and another a total of almost 0.5 billion downloads, and i don't even consider either of them an important enough part of my work to talk about them at all or like try using them for self-promotion

Sometimes your brain invents a great quip in a dream and you just don't remember enough to make it great again and share it, so you're going to think about it most of the day and try to fill in the blanks.
Except that you know that:
1. Whatever you come up with won't be as good as the original.
2. Even if it's good, it would feel like a second hand idea.
3. In the end, the original probably wasn't that good at all, and you thinking it's any good was just part of the dream.

Google adds Photomath, which lets users solve math problems by taking a photo, to its Play Store and App Store publisher accounts, after buying the app in 2022 (Abner Li/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2024/02/29/photomath-google-app/

Photomath is officially Google’s latest app on the Play Store
In May of 2022, Google announced that it was acquiring a math solver app called Photomath, and it's now part of Google's Play Store...

Troy Aikman discusses Dak Prescott being blamed for Cowboys' playoff woes https://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/troy_aikman_discusses_dak_prescott_being_blamed_for_cowboys_playoff_woes/s1_13132_4005…

Troy Aikman discusses Dak Prescott being blamed for Cowboys' playoff woes
Dallas Cowboys legend, Hall of Famer and ESPN NFL analyst Troy Aikman spoke at a charity gala on Monday evening about if current Dallas quarterback Dak Prescott is criticized too much for his lackluster playoff record.  "I benefitted from the success of the teams that I was a part of in January," Aikman explained, according to Garrett Podell of CBS Sports. "I understand there's two sides to that coin. Until you do it, there's always the questions about whether or not you can."  While Aikman h…

Good morning #Fediverse
How is everyone doing today and how was the weekend?
It's a new week, a new Monday, so let's talk about what the day has in store for us as well as the week ahead.
For me, it's work stuff and of course there is a meeting at 12pm EST, but it should be a good one so nothing to stress over.
I have a work assignment due by end of da…

You might have heard Gig workers are taking time out of their day today to protest working conditions from companies like #Uber #Lyft #DoorDash

Troy Aikman discusses Dak Prescott being blamed for Cowboys' playoff woes https://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/troy_aikman_discusses_dak_prescott_being_blamed_for_cowboys_playoff_woes/s1_13132_4005…

Troy Aikman discusses Dak Prescott being blamed for Cowboys' playoff woes
Dallas Cowboys legend, Hall of Famer and ESPN NFL analyst Troy Aikman spoke at a charity gala on Monday evening about if current Dallas quarterback Dak Prescott is criticized too much for his lackluster playoff record.  "I benefitted from the success of the teams that I was a part of in January," Aikman explained, according to Garrett Podell of CBS Sports. "I understand there's two sides to that coin. Until you do it, there's always the questions about whether or not you can."  While Aikman h…

Oh the Martin Mars. ❤️ With gov. money dedicated, finally Hawaii will find a museum home in BC. Phillipine will hopefully retire in the USA.
It's all a shame though. These planes are still airworthy and can still fight massive fires like nothing else.
It's politics and corruption, not performance, that ended their careers. I'm glad I played a part in trying to keep them fighting.
There is a good video in the article but I’ll post my favourite.

I have come to be content with the fact that I am probably slightly crazy.
However bad that might sound, I have 850 followers...people apparently like slightly crazy people....
I love you all! Thanks for making some weirdo nerd with lots of issues, part of your day. I honestly feel it's what keeps me waking up every day.