Tootfinder

This was an interesting problem to work on (back in 2017): A visualization of a path planner for 3D printing (FDM) a single layer/mesh structure of a multi-layer textile. Two setups of the same path strategy which optimized for longest continuous sub-paths and minimum rapids (distance without filament extrusion) between sub-paths. The planner supported six strategies in total, incl. optimizing for straight sub-paths and minimum amounts of "recent" crossings (to allow filament to co…

Client asks me to make a bunch of changes to their “Google My Business” profile for them.
Me, sighing and turning off all my stuff that blocks using Google as a search site. 😂

Sonnet 074 - LXXIV
But be contented when that fell arrest
Without all bail shall carry me away,
My life hath in this line some interest,
Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.
When thou reviewest this, thou dost review
The very part was consecrate to thee:
The earth can have but earth, which is his due;
My spirit is thine, the better part of me:
So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,
The prey of worms, my body being d…

Just went through a code file and replaced "target" with "recipient" in a bunch of docs and variable names, because I had had two senses of "target" and because I want to encourage less-combat-focused thinking among potential devs (which at the moment and for the foreseeable future is just me). Zero changes to code functionality (unless I messed up) and took maybe 30 minutes. Got me thinking about the goal of software development and who would view that time as "wasted".
From a short-sighted "measure user-facing functionality" standpoint there was basically zero progress made. From a "cultivating-code-understanding-entities" perspective, there are both immediate and long-term gains. I got a chance to review the entire file at a high level which improves my understanding of things even if no changes had been made. The changes increase clarity of a lot of documentation, as well as variable naming clarity in code which deals with both senses of "target" which now has clear separation between variables that refer to targets and recipients. If there are any other devs in the future, this will help them a lot. Even if not, by increasing my own development efficacy, the expected values for project-gets-shipped and overall-project-impact just went up. I've also helped myself not introduce the same ambiguity in all my future projects, because I'll remember this time investment, and I've bent the ideological flavor of the protect towards neutral/beneficial interactions between "initiators and recipients" instead of hostile interactions between "initiators and targets".
Overall, well worth the time investment if we consider all the subtler benefits, and not just a very crude measure of user-facing behavior. (Secretly, this is also a post about LLMs.)
#programming

Client asks me to make a bunch of changes to their “Google My Business” profile for them.
Me, sighing and turning off all my stuff that blocks using Google as a search site. 😂

Sonnet 074 - LXXIV
But be contented when that fell arrest
Without all bail shall carry me away,
My life hath in this line some interest,
Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.
When thou reviewest this, thou dost review
The very part was consecrate to thee:
The earth can have but earth, which is his due;
My spirit is thine, the better part of me:
So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,
The prey of worms, my body being d…

There is support for these laws because people think the only consequence of a ban on a thing is that the thing stops existing.
For instance: Heroin is dangerous and addictive? Ban it then.
And suddenly you have organized crime and a grey market and criminal gangs shooting each other in the streets while addicts can’t seek help and have to resort to crime to fund their addiction. Their lives more chaotic and criminal than ever. Our streets are littered in needles.
Well done everyone.
Now we think algorithmic social media may be mind bending?
Shall we ban it? For kids? Even if we can’t define it?
If you break kids access to the internet you sacrifice all the good that the majority of kids are getting from it for an ineffective solution which won’t fix anything and will mean massive increases in government surveillance and censorship. To data-hordes being hacked and people suffering ID theft.
And it won’t help.
Misogyny and sexism and depression are older than the internet.
Plus of course kids remain better at accessing computers than their parents. You’re going to end up breaking the internet for adults who can’t figure out how to verify while the kids start to use VPNs and stolen IDs to browse 4chan.

I wanna jump one more time on the whole "distraction" framing, because this is a point that needs to be hammered home (and I need a reminder to write something longer).
Attacks on trans youth are not a distraction from other types of coercion, they are central to it. Attacks on trans youth come from a conceptualization of children as property, which is literally patriarchy in the Roman sense of the legal objectification all people who share a household as belonging to a man. This legal structure, Roman slave law, continues to be the root of property rights and therefore the foundation of capitalism.
But colonialism also extends from it through the infantalization of colonized people as a justification for oppression. This can also be turned inward again manifesting as the justification for police (that is, some people "can't handle themselves and need external authority to act right").
The #Epstein stuff isn't some weird thing that rich people get away with, it's core to how wealth works. Money isn't useful by itself, it's a proxy for power. One manifestation of power is being able to violate laws that constrain others (this is the "freedom of the monarch" that Graeber talks about in Dawn of Everything). The war in Iran, especially the threats of nuclear weapons and genocide is not a distraction from the #EpsteinFiles, but rather a manifestation of the same thing.
Power must be demonstrated to affirm that it is real. War is a demonstration power. Violating the law without consequences is a demonstration of power. The most taboo things are using nuclear weapons and child sexual abuse. He has already done one of those, and he is going to do everything he can to do the other.
These are not distractions, these are all manifestations of the underlying thing that we need to fight. But we need to make sure we're fighting it as a single thing. We have to tie these things together, because if we do not then we risk reproducing the same thing again but worse.

Something about being German very consciously, after all those years living in Switzerland, and science history
I'm currently in Mannheim, hotel prices are triple the usual, almost all hotels fully booked. I learned that’s because of “der Kongress ist bis Samstag!”
1/n

One day, these sons of bitches are going to get what’s coming to them. That day, I will be shedding zero tears. I just hope they don’t take the rest of us down with them. And if we keep being complicit and allowing them to act with impunity, I’m afraid that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cn5ge95q6y7t…

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei killed in US-Israel attack - follow live
Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps has vowed a "devastating" retaliation following the supreme leader's death.