Tootfinder

Ugh, what a dumbass. https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:f7utvjkqbgwfjonqtpfcf5fu/post/3luiljxdpdc2d
And yet, this is slightly better than "we're going to deport Mamdani".. I think?

So this is weird; I picked up a new Bluetooth adapter so I could better test Meshtastic devices and my AAC-only Bluetooth headphones just work with it.
Maybe the root of my issue was just an incompatible radio, though I wouldn't have expected that to make a difference.... I dunno.
Also I think I may try to do a video of the configuration and installation of my next radio, though it'll be a couple weeks for it to be delivered.
Bonus points if I can figure out how the…

Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Edit: fixed some typos.
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and thus more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of management caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.

“What if AI Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This?” – a pretty good summary for those who don't want to read Gary Marcus’s rather… elaborate… treatizes.
> I think it’s safe, at least for now, to turn your attention away from the tech titans’ increasingly hyperbolic claims
🧘‍♂️
https://ca…

What if AI Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This? - Cal Newport
In the years since ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, it’s been hard not to get swept up in feelings of euphoria or dread about the ... Read more

Mailbag: O-line built better for run or pass? https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/mailbag-o-line-built-better-for-run-or-pass

AWR6843 100x focus stacked scan finished. I need to get some better stacking software as I think there's potential to get more out of the raw dataset.
But I'll upload the initial stitch when I have it.
Which... might take a while.

Oh, no, I think it's *perfectly fine* that a white man is telling a black woman just how wrong she is on racism and how she doesn't understand it.
It's very good of him to explain it to her, he's so much better informed!
#WhiteSplaining
#FuckKeirStarmer

Q1’s –0.5% growth is already a bad look. But Apollo’s Torsten SlŸk points out that data-center construction alone added about a full percentage point. Remove it, and you’re staring at –1.5%.
Q2 looks so much healthier at 3.0%, or you would think so. Pantheon Macroeconomics sums up the first half of 2025 with some more sobriety: AI alone contributed about half a percentage point of GDP. Without it, the U.S. would be bumbling along at 1% growth. Still better than minus, but thin grass all the same.
One more stat for the better view: since 2019, investment in AI-sensitive sectors is up 53%, while everywhere else is basically flat – 0.3%.
https://www.turingpost.com/p/fod114?_bhlid=f437d028caabcb66cc36e677728d12aea2504a71

Finally getting around to playing with Typescript. Initial thoughts, I'm not sure how much value it really has over plain Javascript. I want to think it adds value, but I'm not sure that it does for the little i want to do with either. It "feels" better having types assigned, but the rare times I'm writing Javascript I'm thinking in types anyway and not really using libraries, plus always trying to go as minimal as possible. So I kind of doubt I'm catching many …

At the "wait five days for your domain name to transfer" stage of things. Which is coupled with "your domain name will stop working the moment it finally transfers because you screwed up the order of operations". No big deal in this case but I can't help but think all of this could work better.
(I'm trying out Porkbun on a test domain, to compare with Namecheap.)

Some developers say GPT-5 excels at technical reasoning and planning coding tasks and is cost-effective, but Claude Opus and Sonnet still produce better code (Lauren Goode/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/gpt-5-coding-review-software-engineering/

Developers Say GPT-5 Is a Mixed Bag
Software engineers are finding that OpenAI’s new GPT-5 model is helping them think through coding problems—but isn’t much better at actual coding.

Ooooh! The current Printables contest is for 3D printed bike gear!
#3Dprinting

Bike Gear | Contest theme | Printables.com
If you like to ride your bicycle, you know—there’s always something that could work better. This round is for 3D-printable parts and accessories that make cycling smoother, safer, or just more fun. Think mounts for lights or action cameras, bottle holders, custom tool clips, chain keepers, mudguards, storage solutions, or transport helpers. Or give your bike some personality with custom valve caps, spoke decorations, handlebar charms, or other small touches that turn it into the bike of you…

Somebody ate a bee this morning.
Mr. Boots fed her a Benedryl right away, & she’s looking a lot better than she did a few hrs ago, but she’s still swollen, & I think it still hurts a bit. *sigh*
#DogsOfMastodon #SpicyFly

We hoofed it up Mill Mountain before the heat ~really~ set in. The humidity did not wait, unfortunately, but we enjoyed it all the same.
We are now decamped in a coffee shop and pondering lunch options. I think we’re off to a bistro and bakery we’ve heard great things about. Their Better Than Sex cake is reputed to be true to its name.

Gemini, especially with "research" mode has this vibe of 2000 Internet where knowledge was right there, about nearly anything, without SEO bullshit and ads.
This time it's much faster and better, for the most part.
Unpopular: I think this will cause a renaissance of world wide web. All that bullshit SEO driven websites will die, those made by passionate people and specialists will prevail (because we don't care) and we will get even more traffic than now due t…

#Jacobin is really the king of commissioning older western white #leftists to write about the global south. This piece does no original reporting, has no Indonesian voices, and makes blanket statements.
It's not bad, but I can think of dozens of Indonesians who could have written a far better pi…

Indonesia’s Rulers Are Whitewashing the Crimes of Suharto
In the 1960s, the Indonesian dictator Suharto was responsible for one of the twentieth century’s bloodiest political massacres. Under the rule of Prabowo, the country’s government is suppressing the memory of Suharto’s crimes while vilifying the Left.

My wife is smarter than me and better than me at almost everything, except a couple things. One of them is regrets. I've been working on teaching her how not to regret anything, ever. Over a series of years. I think it's working fairly well. Sometimes. 😂

Interestingn post and replies.
I think that Apple’s incentives are just not aligned with developers in niche segments - purely a matter of scaling and managing the teams.
In most cases open source alternatives are vastly better.
But the question remains, how can you finance the maintenance and evolution in the long term - volunteer work is not sustainable.
It is remarkable that after 25 years we still haven’t found a viable and scalable funding model for this.

Mailbag: O-line built better for run or pass? https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/mailbag-o-line-built-better-for-run-or-pass

I think I overestimate what #AI can do. I asked MS #Copilot to upscale a specific #image, thinking it might do a better job than #GIMP

Oh, no, I think it's *perfectly fine* that a white man is telling a black woman just how wrong she is on racism and how she doesn't understand it.
It's very good of him to explain it to her, he's so much better informed!
#FuckKeirStarmer #KeirStarmerIsARacist

My recent Lightroom article was meant to help Classic users discover what they might be missing out on by sticking with Classic, and to entertain the concept of a future "convergence." I recently had a request to run it on Medium as well as the original Substack:
https://medium.com/@shacker/give…

Give Lightroom a Chance
Enough with “Classic is for serious photographers, Lightroom is for newbies” — Lightroom is better than you think, and the two aren’t…

So, I think I'm done for the evening. Managed to get the dice roller working as intended with the `lark` parser which is a Christmas miracle. I'll clean it up tomorrow and make it look a bit better code-wise, but I'm pretty happy it does what it says it does. I'll probably roll this into the Pathfinder 2E TUI character sheet.
```
$ python main.py
Roll to parse: (3d8 2d6 15)[lightning] (4d10)[piercing] 3d8
===============================================…

I’m very disappointed in Carney, he’s actually a Conservative. I don’t think Poilievre would have been better, but at least I wouldn’t have been lied to.
#CdnPoli
https://mstdn.ca/@AlisonCreekside/1148

Alison Creekside (@AlisonCreekside@mstdn.ca)
Attached: 2 images What a difference winning an election makes ... April 4 : Carney pledges $150M boost to 'underfunded' CBC July 16: Suggest your own 15% spending cuts, Carney government tells CBC #cdnpoli

I'm glad to see this - I think #GeorgeHornedo nailed it:
"In one phrase: how do we align the scale of our solutions to the scale of our challenges?” Hornedo said. “I don’t care if a solution is up into the left, up into the center, up into the right. I just care that we’re moving up and actually doing a better job of trying to meet people’s needs in solving these challenges.”

I'm glad to see this - I think #GeorgeHornedo nailed it:
"In one phrase: how do we align the scale of our solutions to the scale of our challenges?” Hornedo said. “I don’t care if a solution is up into the left, up into the center, up into the right. I just care that we’re moving up and actually doing a better job of trying to meet people’s needs in solving these challenges.”

I wanna say life is like pubg when you get knocked by someone and searching for your team mate to revive you so that you can knocked the enemy who had knocked you, I mean like that when you broke up and want someone to revive you there are your friends and family who think you can be better with your own, so just when you had a break up then just hang with your friends and family they will keep you comfortable, JUST BE HAPPY WITH YOUR SELF 😀😊

I don’t want to dwell •too• much on the shadenfreude of Trump’s pitiful parade, but I do think it’s worth just taking this in:
Trump’s political success has always hinged on him knowing how to be a reality TV star, knowing better than the news orgs themselves that political “news” is in fact reality TV, knowing how to manipulate that reality TV show.
And today, he failed at that completely. His reality show sucked. The news of the day just ran right over him. https://kolektiva.social/@Voline/114685755430626127

wer Zugriff auf einen 3D-Drucker und ein Fahrrad hat, findet in dieser Kollektion vielleicht etwas Inspiration? ;-)
Oder Ihr habt selbst schon etwas entworfen, was Ihr bei diesem Wettbeweb einreichen wollt?
#Fahrrad #3dDruck

Seriously starting to think that I’d be better off without C. I’d have to find a big chunk of money to pay off the money she’s put into our house. Separating isn’t really feasible though as we have little baby A together. C isn’t well enough to care for A by herself, and I need to work so can’t look after her all by myself. I fucked up pretty badly getting C pregnant just three months into our relationship. I’m a fucking idiot.

A song I think of every time I hear about major flooding from summer storms (as in #Montreal yesterday). The studio version's good, the live one's better.
Blue Meanies, "Pave the World" (live, 1998)
https://youtu.be/bTiRP8qZmUI

@… @… just reading between the lines here if you were going to self host this type of thing, I think Netlify’s caching infra was better for this style of thing. I get the vibe that Vercel has their setup tuned for SSR where the cache doesn…

OK, this is more what I was expecting from my Sweet Peas; I think there's a couple of different varieties in this really high grade LIdl pack of sweet peas. Next year I should get some from better #gardening supplier.

It's very confusing having a parent at the beginning of the end. Mum's been in hospital for a week, needing to be stabilised before she can be moved elsewhere for palliative care. She has a terminal neurodegenerative illness and has suddenly deteriorated very rapidly.
I think I feel survivor's guilt. I want her suffering to be over but is that saying I want her to die? I can also see how much better my dad is in himself now he's not caring for her at home. Confusing is …

Finally watched Luca Guadagnino's Queer but did not like it very much. Tedious. I think Cronenberg did a much better job adapting Burroughs.

Why Japanese Developers Write Code Completely Differently (And Why It Works Better)
https://medium.com/@sohail_saifi/why-japanese-developers-write-code-completely-differently-and-why-it-works-better-de…

> The day people think linux would be better served by somebody else (FSF
> being the natural alternative), I'll "abdicate". I don't think that
> it's something people have to worry about right now - I don't see it
> happening in the near future. I enjoy doing linux, even though it does
> mean some work, and I haven't gotten any complaints (some almost timid
> reminders about a patch I have forgotten or ignored, but n…

#LB Eu acho que realmente preciso ler Terry Pratchett rs.
https://frikiverse.zone/@terrybot/115036206410170877

This video makes me think better of the prophet Jonah:
The word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amittai: Go at once to Nineveh... Jonah, however, started to flee to Tarshish [the end of the known earth in the opposite direction]
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/lords-vengeance…

It's really great how society has decided that philosophy and introspection are actually worthless and it's better to not think about anything except for consuming and producing wealth for people above you

"no I don't think so" and not providing any proof or references that backs up why you think so and what you are going to do to inform yourself better or are too worried that everyone is spying on you...
...is totally fine and I'm totally fine not seeing any of your posts again because my time is valuable!
#MyTimeIsValuable

Just finished Transiruby, along with a 9k-line journal file for it. I almost got 100, but not quite; I don't have time to go back to it before the semester starts though.
If you like exploration games, it's an excellent one, with great level design & tons of secrets. It actually makes you do significant secret-finding and map-reading in order to beat the game, not just for extras or a special ending, which is something that a lot of metroidvania games since Super Metroid don't do. My one complaint is that the map system isn't perfect, and finding obscure secrets to progress is fine when the map hints at them but much less fun when it hints incorrectly (I looked one progress item up in a speedrun video because of this).
Decently cool movement mechanics, although the combat does take a back seat and almost all of the bosses are easy (I beat the final two bosses in the third and second tries respectively). I don't think that's any better or worse than a game like Nine Sols where the final boss took me hundreds of tries though; just a different flavor. The world-building isn't as rich as the more epic metroidvanias like Hollow Knight or Lone Fungus (or again, Nine Sols) but again I'm fine with that. It's just a more casual game that has really excellent level design & exploration poetics.
#AmPlaying

The reasons I’m not at a #NoKings event today are the same reasons I’m not anywhere ever. Basically: I’ve got caregiving duties and a body that's not fit for hours on my feet.
Someone pick up a brick for the pigs but then think better of it in my place.

A friend of mine just retired after 28 years as a teacher… I’ve been working for 31 years since I got out of school and probably have another 10 to 15 (or more) years before I can even think about retirement.
(I’m not jealous, I just wish we had a better system where people didn’t have to work their entire adult lives.)

Will Raiders Hit Their Ceiling or Floor? https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-eric-mangini-pete-carroll-ashton-jeanty-preseason-geno-smith

I used to think it was "#", but it's such a useful character, I am now convinced I was wrong, and "--" is way better.

Theory of Mind and Self-Disclosure to CUIs
Samuel Rhys Cox
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10773 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10773

Theory of Mind and Self-Disclosure to CUIs
Self-disclosure is important to help us feel better, yet is often difficult. This difficulty can arise from how we think people are going to react to our self-disclosure. In this workshop paper, we briefly discuss self-disclosure to conversational user interfaces (CUIs) in relation to various social cues. We then, discuss how expressions of uncertainty or representation of a CUI's reasoning could help encourage self-disclosure, by making a CUI's intended "theory of mind" more transparent to use…

"We honestly should rename GIMP: It's a bad name. | think a new and better acronym would substantially improve brand recognition.
Free Utility for Creative Kits, Brushes, Overlays, & Imaging:
FUCKBOI"
https://lemmy.ca/comment/16863046

GIMP - Lemmy.ca

I think some humans are better than others. No need to make it a dichotomy. https://mastodon.social/@Drwave/114815938386711240

Yeah, I don't know about this. I think they'd be better off making an animated movie in the style of edge runners or even spiderverse.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/07/06/heres-the-rather-absurd-street-…

Here’s The Rather Absurd ‘Street Fighter’ Movie Cast List Right Now
You may not even realize this is happening, but there is a new Street Fighter movie in the works, and it's cast is insane.

One of my local cinemas has a showing of #Amelie for #BastilleDay. I honestly can’t think of a better way to celebrate both Audrey Tautou AND murdering aristocrats in the one sitting. It’s perfect.

I have to keep remembering that carrots are really not a sub-tropical crop. I plant them all year but the winter ones are so much better. Right plant for the climate and the season. You'd think I'd know that by now.
#fromthegarden #Permaculture

I’m really not sad, I’ve made no mistakes, and I don't care about you, and I think it’s better for both of us if I leave.
@…, please don't remember me kindly.
#Windows

Translating 🇩🇪 to #English will most of the time end up with shorter text because English just has so many short words. Like "die" or "lie" or... hm... weird... why isn't English making better use of their 3-letter words for verbs? There's a whole cosmos of unused opportunities there! I think you (the royal "400 million" of you) should seize them! Here's …

"Whatever" is a brilliant essay on "AI" by @…:
"But I think the core of what pisses me off is that selling this magic machine requires selling the idea that doing things is worthless. Because if doing something has some value, then it must be somehow better than pushing a button and receiving Whatever for essentially no cost."

The rise of Whatever
This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit.

She is panting pretty hard after three blocks. I think that I better give her a rest.

See Different, Think Better: Visual Variations Mitigating Hallucinations in LVLMs
Ziyun Dai, Xiaoqiang Li, Shaohua Zhang, Yuanchen Wu, Jide Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22003 h…

See Different, Think Better: Visual Variations Mitigating Hallucinations in LVLMs
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visual understanding and multimodal reasoning. However, LVLMs frequently exhibit hallucination phenomena, manifesting as the generated textual responses that demonstrate inconsistencies with the provided visual content. Existing hallucination mitigation methods are predominantly text-centric, the challenges of visual-semantic alignment significantly limit their effectiveness, especially when confronted with fine-g…

I don't like support chat rooms.
I know the are popular among open source projects, but whenever I have a question it's either buried by a completely unrelated conversation or I get an answer 3 days later without anyone @mentioning me so I have little chance of finding it.
I think the Fediverse is much better suited for asking questions.

IPv4 prices seem to have come down recently. But it is still much better than when I sold a /16 I sold a few years back.
I still can't believe that the Interop company - a for-profit corporation - simply gave away a /8. I don't think the officers/directors knew the value of the asset they gave away.
I've been prediction that the net will fragment into distinct IP address spaces - many full 32-bit IPv4 and many full 128-bit IPv6 spaces connected by application level …

So farewell then Pinetime Watch 🪦.
It isn't showing any signs of charging. even after a completely-flat battery reset. Last hope gone.
Now nobody at all is running my custom software I think, and I have no way to fix the bugs.
Could replace it, but I'm not really paying any attention to the things it measures anyway. Heartrate is too unreliable to be useful and steps seems likely to be counting my leg-jiggles since I tend to hit 10,000 most days without trying or leaving the flat.
The software which tracks my time and mood is probably better running on the phone really. Easier to add notes and detail. Can't really input text from a watch. Location data can be added in ways the watch couldn't.
So back to not wearing a watch at all I think. Who needs it now we all carry pocket watches with internet and telephony.
#pineTime #smartWatch

«But I think the core of what pisses me off is that selling this magic machine requires selling the idea that doing things is worthless. Because if doing something has some value, then it must be somehow better than pushing a button and receiving Whatever for essentially no cost. If you’re some assclown like Sam Altman, whose graph-go-up depends on convincing you to replace all your employees with ChatGPT, you have to destroy that idea.»
https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/
/HT @…

As web developer I am interested in learning more about Spritely Goblins but I think I need a better starter guide then this.
Would love to spin it up on DigitalOcean or Github codespace and play with some code and see if I could build something.
https://files.spritely.…

#music #guitar
If everyday you make some music, tomorrow's music is likely to be better than today's. But even so, today's music is an expression of what you feel and think and know at this moment in your journey.

"It's "#ORCID and…," not "ORCID or…": How researcher identifiers work together to help researchers, build a better picture of research, and streamline administrative tasks": White Paper by MoreBrains › https://

@… In many ways, the occupation was no better than the war had been.
To know that "the Allies" willingly let it be that way, because "the war" was now "over". Makes me sick to think of.

This video makes me think better of the prophet Jonah:
The word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amittai: Go at once to Nineveh... Jonah, however, started to flee to Tarshish [the end of the known earth in the opposite direction]
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/lords-vengeance…

Lord’s Vengeance
The Department of Homeland Security posted an explicitly Christian nationalist and violent...

Powell confirmed Fed would have cut interest rates by now were it not for Trump's tariffs
Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said earlier this morning that the central bank would likely have already cut interest rates this year had it not been for the economic shock caused by Donald Trump’s tariff policies.
When asked if Trump’s tariffs on imported goods held up the Fed’s plan to cut interest rates, Powell replied:
"I think that’s right."
Speaking at a c…

Allotmenteer friends, at this time of the year when my plot is looking pretty full, I think I should have planned better what I planted. What do you prioritise on: high value crops, varieties you cannot gain the shops or just easy to grow? #allotment #GrowYourOwn

I don't think it's possible for this to be better than it is...
https://mastodon.social/users/benroyce/statuses/115009667178603090

Series D, Episode 09 - Sand
CHASGO: Suddenly, I think we must have hit some kind of multi-gravitational field. Instruments are going mad. Investigator, you and the others better get strapped in. S'gonna be a hell of a bumpy ride down.
[In Xenon Base, Vila slams his glass down on the table in front of him.]
https://blake.torp…

Riding around with Kid1 last night, I remarked that many of the drivers, who seemed more agitated than normal, were "ornery." I explained what the word meant and he said, "I think 'hornery' better describes it." We now have a term for a specific form of dangerous driving.
#BikeTooter #cycling

The term "context engineering" is gaining traction over "prompt engineering" as it better describes the skill of providing LLMs with the necessary information (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/27/context-…

Bradley's understanding of this is outstanding. We can discount the goal, perhaps, but he was so very good in both directions. He was constantly showing up in places that Salah left for him and his chemistry w/ Mo & Szoboszlai is terrific. Frimpong;s signing asked questions about who might be the starter. In my view, it's Bradley. Frimpong was good. He's certainly fast, but he didn't get to show as much offensively and Bradley is a better defender. I think it's depth/…

Soft vs. Hard Dependency. A Better Way to Think About Dependencies for More Reliable Systems
https://www.thecoder.cafe/p/soft-hard-dependency

The Cowboys 1st must win comes in week 3 against Chicago https://insidethestar.com/the-cowboys-1st-must-win-comes-in-week-3-against-chicago

@… Yes, exactly! And I think that is closer to what Alexander meant about patterns, TBH.
But honestly, I don’t think he did a stellar job explaining patterns, and his other work is way better.
IIRC A City Is Not A Tree covers changes in the system over time (and how observing the system changes the system), even though its main point is that you …

Did a quick test fit of one of the Minisforum MS-A2s and ran some of the cabling. I think this should turn out pretty clean and everything fits better than expected which is a good thing. The PSUs will go in the bottom 2U "compartment" without issue which I didn't run.
#minisforum #homelab

Welcome to "rowhome"!
As usual, you can count on real estate marketers to signal status shifts.
"Townhome," invented because "rowhouse" felt low-class, now feels low-class itself.
I think they would have done better to just say "rowhouse" and invoke the prestige of historic preservation.

Check out some renderings for Woodley Park’s Wardman Park!! (the former Marriott Wardman) - PoPville
Renderings are courtesy Wardman Park From a press release: "Carmel Partners announced today the start of pre-leasing for Aerie, the first residential tower to open at Wardman Park, a reimagined, 9.5-acre landmark property now home to a resort-style residential oasis. Set atop one of the city’s highest elevations in Woodley Park, Wardman Park is defined

Gutierrez: With a lack of true first-team battles, Raiders and Niners still find quality work https://www.raiders.com/news/raiders-49ers-quality-work-joint-practice-nfl-2025-preseason-081425

The full frequency sweep won't finish before I leave for REcon but I think I've finally got the ARF6 launch dialed in: better than -20 dB return loss from DC to 11.9 GHz, and better than -15.8 dB from DC to 30 GHz.
* Shrink vias from 0.45 pad / 0.25 drill to 0.35 / 0.15
* Use round vias for the signal lines as coupling seemed to be significant vs the square ones I tried to use to simplify meshing
* Keep non-functional via pads
* Single large ground plane cutout o…

What is going on in the land of Fedora Linux?
First, the latest kernel in Fedora 42 recently went from "working" to "broken" with regard to the video screen on Intel(R) Core(TM) Ultra 7 155H on an ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. NUC14RVK-B/NUC14RVBU7
Second, the update repositories now all have invalid checksums. (Update: this is now corrected.)
Fedora is Redhat is IBM - you would think that they could do some regression testing and maybe do a better locking of t…

Still amazes me that people are this clueless.
https://gothamist.com/news/how-do-nj-beachgoers-feel-about-the-governors-race-gothamist-hit-the-shore

Totoro spoilers
Re the quoted post from @…:
The very first time I saw My Neighbor Totoro, it was because a friend cajoled me into attending the student anime club’s showing with absolutely no context whatsoever except “you •have• to see this movie, Paul.” I had no idea what genre it was. I had no idea that it was a movie considered suitable for kids. The last anime I’d seen was IIRC Ghost in the Shell; I was ready for anything.
When Mei went missing, I thought, “omg, is this a tragedy? I think this story is a tragedy!” The whole time they were looking for her, I was absolutely terrified. I thought for sure they’d found her sandal. I still tear up when they find her now, on every rewatching.
I’m so glad for that first viewing. It’s a much better movie that way. When you’re expecting an innocent movie about cute forest plushies, you see that. But when you see that it could be a tragedy — the mother’s shadowy illness, the lost child — it hits hard. https://wandering.shop/@Violinknitter/114792748619083661

Welcome to "rowhome"!
As usual, you can count on real estate marketers to signal status shifts.
"Townhome," invented because "rowhouse" felt low-class, now feels low-class itself.
I think they would have done better to just say "rowhouse" and invoke the prestige of historic preservation.

@… I love this piece. Thanks for sharing it. I'd not heard of Ink & Switch, and I'm going to enjoy browsing their work. Their spreadsheet ideas are really fascinating.
People seem to be pushing LLMs as the saviour to this problem. I think Lisp and Prolog are probably better answers.

I think that I better go take a bike ride ...

I took the old 1970's Raleigh out this morning and it was creaky and had problems shifting, but it was also sort of a fun ride!
I only did about 1.5 miles and when I got home I realized the tires were low... like a lot more low than I think they should have been since I filled them three days ago.
Anyway, I may try to make the ride a bit smoother and see if I can get the shifting working better.

it's cold here, putting on more clothes...
cold is good, you'll think better!
I'LL THINK BETTER! 🤣
#cold

Gutierrez: With a lack of true first-team battles, Raiders and Niners still find quality work https://www.raiders.com/news/raiders-49ers-quality-work-joint-practice-nfl-2025-preseason-081425

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

I think I'm finally starting to get past being sick. It started last week Tuesday, but I had to conduct online training sessions at work so I soldiered through until Friday when I was able to stay home and rest. I thought I was better Saturday but I was wrong... Sunday rolled around and still not great but I think finally this afternoon I am starting to get my energy back.

Raiders Cornerbacks In Midst of Fierce Competition https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-sam-webb-greedy-vance-eric-stokes-darien-porter-darnay-holmes-training-camp

How popular media gets love wrong
Had some thoughts in response to a post about loneliness on here. As the author emphasized, reassurances from people who got lucky are not terribly comforting to those who didn't, especially when the person who was lucky had structural factors in their favor that made their chances of success much higher than those is their audience. So: these are just my thoughts, and may not have any bearing on your life. I share them because my experience challenged a lot of the things I was taught to believe about love, and I think my current beliefs are both truer and would benefit others seeing companionship.
We're taught in many modern societies from an absurdly young age that love is not something under our control, and that dating should be a process of trying to kindle love with different people until we meet "the one" with whom it takes off. In the slightly-less-fairytale corners of modern popular media, we might fund an admission that it's possible to influence love, feeding & tending the fire in better or worse ways. But it's still modeled as an uncontrollable force of nature, to be occasionally influenced but never tamed. I'll call this the "fire" model of love.
We're also taught (and non-boys are taught more stringently) a second contradictory model of love: that in a relationship, we need to both do things and be things in order to make our partner love us, and that if we don't, our partner's love for us will wither, and (especially if you're not a boy) it will be our fault. I'll call this the "appeal" model of love.
Now obviously both of these cannot be totally true at once, and plenty of popular media centers this contradiction, but there are really very few competing models on offer.
In my experience, however, it's possible to have "pre-meditated" love. In other words, to decide you want to love someone (or at least, try loving them), commit to that idea, and then actually wind up in love with them (and them with you, although obviously this second part is not directly under your control). I'll call this the "engineered" model of love.
Now, I don't think that the "fire" and "appeal" models of love are totally wrong, but I do feel their shortcomings often suggest poor & self-destructive relationship strategies. I do think the "fire" model is a decent model for *infatuation*, which is something a lot of popular media blur into love, and which drives many (but not all) of the feelings we normally associate with love (even as those feelings have other possible drivers too). I definitely experienced strong infatuation early on in my engineered relationship (ugh that sounds terrible but I'll stick with it; I promise no deception was involved). I continue to experience mild infatuation years later that waxes and wanes. It's not a stable foundation for a relationship but it can be a useful component of one (this at least popular media depicts often).
I'll continue these thoughts in a reply, by it might take a bit to get to it.
#relationships

@… @… I partially agree. I think PLoP could do a much better job of marketing and publishing!

Long; central Massachusetts colonial history
Today on a whim I visited a site in Massachusetts marked as "Huguenot Fort Ruins" on OpenStreetMaps. I drove out with my 4-year-old through increasingly rural central Massachusetts forests & fields to end up on a narrow street near the top of a hill beside a small field. The neighboring houses had huge lawns, some with tractors.
Appropriately for this day and this moment in history, the history of the site turns out to be a microcosm of America. Across the field beyond a cross-shaped stone memorial stood an info board with a few diagrams and some text. The text of the main sign (including typos/misspellings) read:
"""
Town Is Formed
Early in the 1680's, interest began to generate to develop a town in the area west of Natick in the south central part of the Commonwealth that would be suitable for a settlement. A Mr. Hugh Campbell, a Scotch merchant of Boston petitioned the court for land for a colony. At about the same time, Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton also were desirous of obtaining land for a settlement. A claim was made for all lands west of the Blackstone River to the southern land of Massachusetts to a point northerly of the Springfield Road then running southwesterly until it joined the southern line of Massachusetts.
Associated with Dudley and Stoughton was Robert Thompson of London, England, Dr. Daniel Cox and John Blackwell, both of London and Thomas Freak of Hannington, Wiltshire, as proprietors. A stipulation in the acquisition of this land being that within four years thirty families and an orthodox minister settle in the area. An extension of this stipulation was granted at the end of the four years when no group large enough seemed to be willing to take up the opportunity.
In 1686, Robert Thompson met Gabriel Bernor and learned that he was seeking an area where his countrymen, who had fled their native France because of the Edict of Nantes, were desirous of a place to live. Their main concern was to settle in a place that would allow them freedom of worship. New Oxford, as it was the so-named, at that time included the larger part of Charlton, one-fourth of Auburn, one-fifth of Dudley and several square miles of the northeast portion of Southbridge as well as the easterly ares now known as Webster.
Joseph Dudley's assessment that the area was capable of a good settlement probably was based on the idea of the meadows already established along with the plains, ponds, brooks and rivers. Meadows were a necessity as they provided hay for animal feed and other uses by the settlers. The French River tributary books and streams provided a good source for fishing and hunting. There were open areas on the plains as customarily in November of each year, the Indians burnt over areas to keep them free of underwood and brush. It appeared then that this area was ready for settling.
The first seventy-five years of the settling of the Town of Oxford originally known as Manchaug, embraced three different cultures. The Indians were known to be here about 1656 when the Missionary, John Eliott and his partner Daniel Gookin visited in the praying towns. Thirty years later, in 1686, the Huguenots walked here from Boston under the guidance of their leader Isaac Bertrand DuTuffeau. The Huguenot's that arrived were not peasants, but were acknowledged to be the best Agriculturist, Wine Growers, Merchant's, and Manufacter's in France. There were 30 families consisting of 52 people. At the time of their first departure (10 years), due to Indian insurrection, there were 80 people in the group, and near their Meetinghouse/Church was a Cemetery that held 20 bodies. In 1699, 8 to 10 familie's made a second attempt to re-settle, failing after only four years, with the village being completely abandoned in 1704.
The English colonist made their way here in 1713 and established what has become a permanent settlement.
"""
All that was left of the fort was a crumbling stone wall that would have been the base of a higher wooden wall according to a picture of a model (I didn't think to get a shot of that myself). Only trees and brush remain where the multi-story main wooden building was.
This story has so many echoes in the present:
- The rich colonialists from Boston & London agree to settle the land, buying/taking land "rights" from the colonial British court that claimed jurisdiction without actually having control of the land. Whether the sponsors ever actually visited the land themselves I don't know. They surely profited somehow, whether from selling on the land rights later or collecting taxes/rent or whatever, by they needed poor laborers to actually do the work of developing the land (& driving out the original inhabitants, who had no say in the machinations of the Boston court).
- The land deal was on condition that there capital-holders who stood to profit would find settlers to actually do the work of colonizing. The British crown wanted more territory to be controlled in practice not just in theory, but they weren't going to be the ones to do the hard work.
- The capital-holders actually failed to find enough poor suckers to do their dirty work for 4 years, until the Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, were desperate enough to accept their terms.
- Of course, the land was only so ripe for settlement because of careful tending over centuries by the natives who were eventually driven off, and whose land management practices are abandoned today. Given the mention of praying towns (& dates), this was after King Phillip's war, which resulted in at least some forced resettlement of native tribes around the area, but the descendants of those "Indians" mentioned in this sign are still around. For example, this is the site of one local band of Nipmuck, whose namesake lake is about 5 miles south of the fort site: #LandBack.

@… Hmmm, I get you, but I think it’s the wrong word. I shall see if I can find a better one.

Subtooting since people in the original thread wanted it to be over, but selfishly tagging @… and @… whose opinions I value...
I think that saying "we are not a supply chain" is exactly what open-source maintainers should be doing right now in response to "open source supply chain security" threads.
I can't claim to be an expert and don't maintain any important FOSS stuff, but I do release almost all of my code under open licenses, and I do use many open source libraries, and I have felt the pain of needing to replace an unmaintained library.
There's a certain small-to-mid-scale class of program, including many open-source libraries, which can be built/maintained by a single person, and which to my mind best operate on a "snake growth" model: incremental changes/fixes, punctuated by periodic "skin-shedding" phases where make rewrites or version updates happen. These projects aren't immortal either: as the whole tech landscape around them changes, they become unnecessary and/or people lose interest, so they go unmaintained and eventually break. Each time one of their dependencies breaks (or has a skin-shedding moment) there's a higher probability that they break or shed too, as maintenance needs shoot up at these junctures. Unless you're a company trying to make money from a single long-lived app, it's actually okay that software churns like this, and if you're a company trying to make money, your priorities absolutely should not factor into any decisions people making FOSS software make: we're trying (and to a huge extent succeeding) to make a better world (and/or just have fun with our own hobbies share that fun with others) that leaves behind the corrosive & planet-destroying plague which is capitalism, and you're trying to personally enrich yourself by embracing that plague. The fact that capitalism is *evil* is not an incidental thing in this discussion.
To make an imperfect analogy, imagine that the peasants of some domain have set up a really-free-market, where they provide each other with free stuff to help each other survive, sometimes doing some barter perhaps but mostly just everyone bringing their surplus. Now imagine the lord of the domain, who is the source of these peasants' immiseration, goes to this market secretly & takes some berries, which he uses as one ingredient in delicious tarts that he then sells for profit. But then the berry-bringer stops showing up to the free market, or starts bringing a different kind of fruit, or even ends up bringing rotten berries by accident. And the lord complains "I have a supply chain problem!" Like, fuck off dude! Your problem is that you *didn't* want to build a supply chain and instead thought you would build your profit-focused business in other people's free stuff. If you were paying the berry-picker, you'd have a supply chain problem, but you weren't, so you really have an "I want more free stuff" problem when you can't be arsed to give away your own stuff for free.
There can be all sorts of problems in the really-free-market, like maybe not enough people bring socks, so the peasants who can't afford socks are going barefoot, and having foot problems, and the peasants put their heads together and see if they can convince someone to start bringing socks, and maybe they can't and things are a bit sad, but the really-free-market was never supposed to solve everyone's problems 100% when they're all still being squeezed dry by their taxes: until they are able to get free of the lord & start building a lovely anarchist society, the really-free-market is a best-effort kind of deal that aims to make things better, and sometimes will fall short. When it becomes the main way goods in society are distributed, and when the people who contribute aren't constantly drained by the feudal yoke, at that point the availability of particular goods is a real problem that needs to be solved, but at that point, it's also much easier to solve. And at *no* point does someone coming into the market to take stuff only to turn around and sell it deserve anything from the market or those contributing to it. They are not a supply chain. They're trying to help each other out, but even then they're doing so freely and without obligation. They might discuss amongst themselves how to better coordinate their mutual aid, but they're not going to end up forcing anyone to bring anything or even expecting that a certain person contribute a certain amount, since the whole point is that the thing is voluntary & free, and they've all got changing life circumstances that affect their contributions. Celebrate whatever shows up at the market, express your desire for things that would be useful, but don't impose a burden on anyone else to bring a specific thing, because otherwise it's fair for them to oppose such a burden on you, and now you two are doing your own barter thing that's outside the parameters of the really-free-market.