Tootfinder

"Reflections on CoLIS 2025" [International Conference on Concepts of Library and Information Science] https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/datablog/2025/07/16/reflections-on-colis-2025/

The Danish independent media organisation @… are on a member drive with 10 promises if they make it to 50,000, including that they'll share more on social media. I can dream they'll make it to the #fediverse I suppose?
In any case their journalism is outstanding and they carefully avoid making an explicit political stance and contributing to polarisation. #UnbreakingNews
In depth journalism you can read or listen to (try deepL if you don't speak Danish), often beautifully produced, always fascinating. They also don't report on problems without reporting solutions.
It's by far the most uplifting read/listen of my day.
Free link here, pay what you want and free to first time voters...
https://www.zetland.dk/a/rmottram?og=amba25-8

You encounter two guards!
"One of us always purrs and the other always meows."

Democracies should stop focusing on efficiency: Lack thereof and friction are important parts of what defines a healthy democracy. Efficiency will always sacrifice participation, representation and meaningful political discourse. The focus on it is a path into authoritarianism. In the essay ...

""Simmon’s map is geographically correct, yet purposely—and literally—turns convention on its head. What was once familiar becomes alien, challenging readers to look at Earth anew. It also encourages us to think more deeply about such conventions: Why is north almost always at the top of maps? And must it always be that way? Simmon’s map reminds us that it doesn’t have to be.""

This is powerful stuff and good on Auckland councillor Julie Fairey for writing it. https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/08-07-2025/as-a-councillor-ive-always-advocated-for-improved-road-safety-then-i-got-hit-by-a-car

Base your ideology on wanting to rid society of the undesirables, yet defend the system that will always cause there to be a relevant amount of them until your last breath. That is how you stay in power indefinitely.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #DriveTime
Dam Swindle:
🎵 The Present Is Always Perfect
#DamSwindle
https://damswindle.com/track/the-present-is-always-perfect
https://open.spotify.com/track/7pIk4T4cvai7jApJKQ6M1Y

It's always nice to see @… on an @… stage 😊
#MINASWAN #ruby

Explicit vs. Implicit Biographies: Evaluating and Adapting LLM Information Extraction on Wikidata-Derived Texts
Alessandra Stramiglio, Andrea Schimmenti, Valentina Pasqual, Marieke van Erp, Francesco Sovrano, Fabio Vitali
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14943

Explicit vs. Implicit Biographies: Evaluating and Adapting LLM Information Extraction on Wikidata-Derived Texts
Text Implicitness has always been challenging in Natural Language Processing (NLP), with traditional methods relying on explicit statements to identify entities and their relationships. From the sentence "Zuhdi attends church every Sunday", the relationship between Zuhdi and Christianity is evident for a human reader, but it presents a challenge when it must be inferred automatically. Large language models (LLMs) have proven effective in NLP downstream tasks such as text comprehension and infor…

Keywords are not always the key: A metadata field analysis for natural language search on open data portals
Lisa-Yao Gan, Arunav Das, Johanna Walker, Elena Simperl
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14457

Keywords are not always the key: A metadata field analysis for natural language search on open data portals
Open data portals are essential for providing public access to open datasets. However, their search interfaces typically rely on keyword-based mechanisms and a narrow set of metadata fields. This design makes it difficult for users to find datasets using natural language queries. The problem is worsened by metadata that is often incomplete or inconsistent, especially when users lack familiarity with domain-specific terminology. In this paper, we examine how individual metadata fields affect the…

Grab-n-Go: On-the-Go Microgesture Recognition with Objects in Hand
Chi-Jung Lee, Jiaxin Li, Tianhong Catherine Yu, Ruidong Zhang, Vipin Gunda, Fran\c{c}ois Guimbreti\`ere, Cheng Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11620

Grab-n-Go: On-the-Go Microgesture Recognition with Objects in Hand
As computing devices become increasingly integrated into daily life, there is a growing need for intuitive, always-available interaction methods, even when users' hands are occupied. In this paper, we introduce Grab-n-Go, the first wearable device that leverages active acoustic sensing to recognize subtle hand microgestures while holding various objects. Unlike prior systems that focus solely on free-hand gestures or basic hand-object activity recognition, Grab-n-Go simultaneously captures info…

If you've always been vaguely aware of Edward Said but could do with a refresher, this episode of NPR's Throughline and his work on Palestine is a good listen
https://overcast.fm/ AAYs-wlLr8I

Behold the Very First Color Photograph (1861): Taken by Scottish Physicist & Poet James Clerk Maxwell
https://flip.it/ZdV70o

Behold the Very First Color Photograph (1861): Taken by Scottish Physicist & Poet James Clerk Maxwell
Since its ancient origins as the camera obscura, the photographic camera has always mimicked the human eye, allowing light to enter an aperture, then projecting an image upside down. Renaissance artists relied on the camera obscura to sharpen their own visual perspectives.

"What goes with [GDP growth] is ... ignored; growth depends on increased production and distribution, which always increase waste."
Jon Cloke in our new #ProspectsForDegrowth piece.
The Macavity of Degrowth – Waste, the Empire that isn’t there… – degrowthUK

The Macavity of Degrowth – Waste, the Empire that isn’t there…
Jon Cloke* “You may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air But I tell you once and once again, Macavity’s not there!” Growth, Degrowth, Post-Growth There are so many accepted definiti…

Saw this guy a few days ago. Just a few houses up 🦉
Then last night I hear this screech again from our upstairs bedroom window. So I use the Merlin app to identify it as a Great Horned Owl. Then I played the various sounds and learned that this is a juvenile doing a "begging call", which is a raspy screeching sound young owls use to solicit food from their parents.
Kids, man. They always need something.

Frag mich ob die Analogie zu "KI"-Lernen funkioniert:
Whats the point of "AI" Feedback, if I still have to pay a teacher to fix it?
Wenn wir annehmen, dass Lernen ein ähnlich komplexer Vorgang wie programmieren ist, dann können wir das übertragen. Vielleicht ist ja "KI"-Lernen wenig mehr als ein Rollenspiel für Leute, die sich wie Lehrende fühlen wollen, ohne die eigentliche Arbeit zu machen.
Bringt uns der Begriff vibe learning weiter?

tante (@tante@tldr.nettime.org)
Angehängt: 1 Bild I think the Vibecoding reddit has accidentally stumbled on the best description of vibecoding: It's "roleplay for guys [it is always guys] who want to feel like hackers without doing the hard part". (Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1mu6t8z/whats_the_point_of_vibe_coding_if_i_still_have_to/ ) #ai #vibecoding

To add a single example here (feel free to chime in with your own):
Problem: editing code is sometimes tedious because external APIs require boilerplate.
Solutions:
- Use LLM-generated code. Downsides: energy use, code theft, potential for legal liability, makes mistakes, etc. Upsides: popular among some peers, seems easy to use.
- Pick a better library (not always possible).
- Build internal functions to centralize boilerplate code, then use those (benefits: you get a better understanding of the external API, and a more-unit-testable internal code surface; probably less amortized effort).
- Develop a non-LLM system that actually reasons about code at something like the formal semantics level and suggests boilerplate fill-ins based on rules, while foregrounding which rules it's applying so you can see the logic behind the suggestions (needs research).
Obviously LLM use in coding goes beyond this single issue, but there are similar analyses for each potential use of LLMs in coding. I'm all cases there are:
1. Existing practical solutions that require more effort (or in many cases just seem to but are less-effort when amortized).
2. Near-term researchable solutions that directly address the problem and which would be much more desirable in the long term.
Thus in addition to disastrous LLM effects on the climate, on data laborers, and on the digital commons, they tend to suck us into cheap-seeming but ultimately costly design practices while also crowding out better long-term solutions. Next time someone suggests how useful LLMs are for some task, try asking yourself (or them) what an ideal solution for that task would look like, and whether LLM use moves us closer to or father from a world in which that solution exists.

Always found these hilarious, but now they're terrorism. Don't look.

"A society under “number go up” tends towards evil. The men and women behind an excessively high rate of return often make deeply sinful and immoral choices, little different than the Confederate plantation owners did in whipping slaves or lords in castles did when abusing serfs. That they do it with spreadsheets doesn’t make it better. (We even use old terminology: I know of several people in a large health insurance conglomerate who set policies to deny care whose nickname is “the three witches.”)
And that’s why Jeff Epstein’s story is so compelling, it expresses this evil in a way that we all understand. On Sunday, I wrote about the oddness of the story, how an elite sex trafficker convicted of procuring children as prostitutes was friends or associates with everyone from Trump to Bill Clinton to Larry Summers to Bill Gates. Epstein represents how elites live in one moral universe where evil bacchanalia is rampant, while the rest of us live in a different more normal one. Every society has elites, and there are always weird things that elites do. But America, and the West, have reached a point where there is increasingly deep resentment and cynicism about this divide."
#USPolitcs #EconomicInequality
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-number-go-up-rule-why-america

Ashton Jeanty: 'There is always room to get better' https://www.raiders.com/video/ashton-jeanty-training-camp-preseason-week-3-presser-08192025

Sometimes I’m posting about Syndicalism. Suddenly, I’m deep into LGBTQIA rights, because yes, my brain’s got tabs open everywhere.
Mid-rant, autism brain hits and it’s like, nope, time to fire up YouTube on the Debian box, because special interests top all discourse. The playlist is always oddly specific.
Then, work panic: my boss exists, bills exist. Pretend to be productive, start the loop again.

#ShamelesslySpoofedFromTheOtherSite

Adaptive Spiking with Plasticity for Energy Aware Neuromorphic Systems
Eduardo Calle-Ortiz, Hui Guan, Deepak Ganesan, Phuc Nguyen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11689 https://

Adaptive Spiking with Plasticity for Energy Aware Neuromorphic Systems
This paper presents ASPEN, a novel energy-aware technique for neuromorphic systems that could unleash the future of intelligent, always-on, ultra-low-power, and low-burden wearables. Our main research objectives are to explore the feasibility of neuromorphic computing for wearables, identify open research directions, and demonstrate the feasibility of developing an adaptive spiking technique for energy-aware computation, which can be game-changing for resource-constrained devices in always-on a…

Is a Dissipative System Always a Gradient System or a Gradient Like System?
Rafael Rangel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14409 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14409…

Is a Dissipative System Always a Gradient System or a Gradient Like System?
We find that to the dynamics of a given dissipative system a $p=1$ differential form can be associated with a general decomposition into a potential term and a non-potential residual part. If the residual part is absent the form is closed and the system is gradient system or gradient like. If it is non-closed, in the differential form approach, it remains non-closed under a variable change of coordinates, i.e., the system is not a gradient one or a gradient like in any coordinate system. On the…

Tietze extension does not always work in constructive mathematics if closed sets are defined as sequentially closed sets
Shun Ding, Yang Wan, Luofei Wang, Siqi Xiao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11635

Tietze extension does not always work in constructive mathematics if closed sets are defined as sequentially closed sets
We prove that Tietze Extension does not always exist in constructive mathematics if closed sets on which the function we are extending are defined as sequentially closed sets. Firstly, we take a discrete metric space as our topological space. Now all sets open and sequentially closed. Then, we form an unextendible algorithmic function transforming positive integers to 0 and 1, looking at the preimages of these values as our sequentially closed sets. Then we show that if the Tietze theorem concl…

Parsons blasts Cowboys on contract tactics, 'ownership's always gonna make it drag out' https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/07/17/cowboys-star-micah-parsons…

I've managed to install the Stirling PDF tools on one of our company's mini PCs using #podman. I've tried doing it with Redhat's cockpit admin GUI but it didn't really work, probably because of SELinux or something (it's always SELinux...). I found some instruction for the commandline that worked.
This is all seems like a good use-case for Docker but the whole contain…

I don't want any of those to be illegal but I always keep in my mind the fact that the overwhelming majority of wagering opportunities/solicitations come from profitable businesses whose core business is making winning wagers with people whose lesser knowledge and resources put them at deep disadvantages.
I'm not big on wagering...

I think the Vibecoding reddit has accidentally stumbled on the best description of vibecoding:
It's "roleplay for guys [it is always guys] who want to feel like hackers without doing the hard part".
(Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/com…

Another shoe has dropped in the Michael Tait story.
There's always another shoe.
https://julieroys.com/woman-accuses-michael-tait-drugging-her-watching-newsboys-tour-manager-covered-up/

Woman Accuses Michael Tait of Drugging Her and Watching While She Was Raped; Says Newsboys Tour Manager Covered It Up
After singer Michael Tait admitted he has preyed on other men, a woman who worked with the Newsboys says she was raped while Tait watched.

It's a running gag that my wife is like Columbo's wife on 𝐶𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑜 [1] because she's always getting mentioned on my socials but she never shows up.. here she is, in the garden she maintains in front of the barn
#photo #photography

I'm paranoid about the cloud, OneDrive etc
I have a policy that most stuff I put on the cloud is encrypted (esp backups). Not always practical tho.
I was happy to discover rclone https://rclone.org/ a while ago, & to find out it can set up encrypted containers on OneDrive etc. Readable on both ends, e…

So you need to get the version of Intel #MKL.
You can't really take it out of the pkg-config files, because not every distro mkl version combo supplies these files. On top of that, without pointing fingers, certain distribution installs pkg-config files with "debian" in the version field.
Well, there's INTEL_MKL_VERSION you can get via the C preprocessor, right? Except that its semantics depend… on mkl version. Given that mkl is released as "<major>.<update>.<patch>", versions prior to 2025.0.0 constructed the version number from <major> <minor> <update> (where <minor> seems to be always 0, and <patch> was not included), and 2025.0.0 forward use the more logical <major> <update> <patch>.
Well, yeah, it's kinda doable. You parse the major first, and parse the rest depending on whether it's >= 2025 or not. For versions prior to 2025, you get it truncated to update. It works, but still kinda funny.
#WTF

Belief-Conditioned One-Step Diffusion: Real-Time Trajectory Planning with Just-Enough Sensing
Gokul Puthumanaillam, Aditya Penumarti, Manav Vora, Paulo Padrao, Jose Fuentes, Leonardo Bobadilla, Jane Shin, Melkior Ornik
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12166

Belief-Conditioned One-Step Diffusion: Real-Time Trajectory Planning with Just-Enough Sensing
Robots equipped with rich sensor suites can localize reliably in partially-observable environments, but powering every sensor continuously is wasteful and often infeasible. Belief-space planners address this by propagating pose-belief covariance through analytic models and switching sensors heuristically--a brittle, runtime-expensive approach. Data-driven approaches--including diffusion models--learn multi-modal trajectories from demonstrations, but presuppose an accurate, always-on state estim…

I went for a ride, and 5 miles in the chain sort of got "stuck"... it didn't come off, but I had to pedal backwards a few seconds and then forwards, and it seemed to be okay again...
But then it started shifting on its own as I kept riding. It's always been a poor shifter, sometimes it can be difficult to get it to change gears, and sometimes it changes gears on its own...

Apple announces $249 Apple Watch SE 3, featuring the S10 chip, an always-on display, support for gestures, coming September 19 (Ben Lovejoy/9to5Mac)
https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/09/apple-watch-se-3-announced-with-s10-chip-and-always-on-display/

Apple Watch SE 3 announced
The Apple Watch SE 3 has been announced alongside the Series 11 and Ultra 3. The SE was long due...

All of the random crap I ordered to fix the home server arrived yesterday. I'm not going to have enough time to work on it today, but there is always tomorrow.
#Server #HomeServer

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.DB. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.DB/new
[1/1]:
- Keywords are not always the key: A metadata field analysis for natural language search on open da...
Lisa-Yao Gan, Arunav Das, Johanna Walker, Elena Simperl

Fair Division Among Couples and Small Groups
Paul G\"olz, Hannane Yaghoubizade
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13432 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13432

Fair Division Among Couples and Small Groups
We study the fair allocation of indivisible goods across groups of agents, where each agent fully enjoys all goods allocated to their group. We focus on groups of two (couples) and other groups of small size. For two couples, an EF1 allocation -- one in which all agents find their group's bundle no worse than the other group's, up to one good -- always exists and can be found efficiently. For three or more couples, EF1 allocations need not exist. Turning to proportionality, we show that, when…

"When we trace any royal line back to its progenitor... that first king always turns out to be a swaggering thug, a bully whom no one in their right mind would follow. Resigning oneself to life under such a person’s authority would be bad enough, but hereditary #monarchy makes things infinitely worse: the generation that crowns him also sacrifices their descendants to his, trading away the f…

Inventing the American Revolution: On Thomas Paine’s Guide to Fighting Dictatorship
Back in 2018, two years into the first Trump presidency, when the ground was shifting beneath our feet in ways that, today, might barely register on our wearied internal seismographs, political ana…

I love the non-profit block of the Art Fair, I love to go and argue with the anti-tax people and the Mars society dweebs, to glare at the Republicans, to donate to Planned Parenthood and some of the off-brand religions, to smile and wave and loudly greet the communists HI COMMUNISTS!!! They always wave back. It is such a welcoming feeling!
I’ve been twice already today, once with four grandchildren who collected tons of swag and were cute as hell.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MorningShow
Now Always Fades:
🎵 Close to Greatness
#NowAlwaysFades
https://northernundergroundrecords.bandcamp.com/track/close-to-greatness
https://open.spotify.com/track/3Geq8mIrXkY5SY8XimBD8B

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.DL. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.DL/new
[1/1]:
- Keywords are not always the key: A metadata field analysis for natural language search on open da...
Lisa-Yao Gan, Arunav Das, Johanna Walker, Elena Simperl

This article is a good example of why I’m fed up with the “if used responsibly” argument:
https://thejournal.com/articles/2025/08/07/the-brain-drain-how-overreliance-on-ai-may-erode-creativity-and-critical-thin…

Putin's negotiator calls for 'constructive dialogue' as Trump shifts stance on Ukraine: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/14/putins-negotiator-calls-for-constructive.html

As usual we watched the "Stoertebekker" stage play at Ralswiek on Rügen Island. The stage setups and wardrobes were as awesome as always. They really try to improve on that every year and come up with clever mechanisms to transform the building for the various acts of the play. The script this year left room for desire ;) Nevertheless a happing worth attending
htt…

The Green's Function on Rhombic Flat Tori
A. E. D. Castillo, G. A. Lobos, V. Ramos Batista
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12299 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.…

The Green's Function on Rhombic Flat Tori
We obtain the Green's function $G$ for any flat rhombic torus $T$, always with numerical values of significant digits up to the fourth decimal place (noting that $G$ is unique for $|T|=1$ and $\int_TGdA=0$). This precision is guaranteed by the strategies we adopt, which include theorems such as the Legendre Relation, properties of the Weierstraß\,P-Function, and also the algorithmic control of numerical errors. Our code uses complex integration routines developed by H. Karcher, who a…

Tom Petty's 'Square One' was on The Bear in episode 8, I always forget how much I love that song. The things that guy could do with just a guitar and voice- damn. Magical. And then Strange Currencies later on in the episode. A lot of great and sometimes really unique musical choices on the show in general.
#TheBear #TV

Where that understanding goes wrong is that humans have perception and experience and common sense. And yes, people are foolish and fallible — but ultimately humans are the adaptable element of complex systems[1], and when we design processes involving humans, we always, always lean on that adaptability.
If we say “walk out the door,” humans generally will not just walk face first into the wall just because the door is behind it.
Code will — unless you tell it not to.
[1] https://how.complexsystems.fail/#12
3/

Solar cells on cattle holding pens seems like a great idea! Probably tons of buildings and farms that would be fine with solar cells on top.
I'm no (food) scientist but I am a lot more confident that it doesn't pose a risk to the food source. But I'm less confident of growing crops under solar cells or solar cells floating on aquatic farms. Likely need significant maintenance over the years to prevent leaching and it's always hard for politicians to fix old instead of …

A few thoughts on LLMs and the super-rich
https://tante.cc/2025/07/17/never-hearing-no/

Never hearing No
If you are very rich – think multi-millionaire or billionaire – there is a thing you no longer experience really: Hearing no. Sure there will always be people on social media yelling at you and what you did and what you stand for but in your daily life, your actual environment that will happen increasingly […]

#Wordle 1,489 2/6*
⬜🟩🟨🟨⬜ <1% of 218,337 (7)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 18% of 11
WordleBot
Skill 99/99
Luck 94/99
wow, some days! The 2's always just sneak up on me!

Numerical investigation on solids settling in a non-Newtonian slurry inside a horizontal flume
Shubham Sharma, Somasekhara Goud Sontti, Wenming Zhang, Petr Nikrityuk, Xuehua Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11657

Numerical investigation on solids settling in a non-Newtonian slurry inside a horizontal flume
Slurry transportation is always crucial for many industrial processes. This study numerically investigates the settling behavior of multisize solid particles in a non-newtonian slurry inside a semicircular open channel (flume). The non-newtonian slurry is modelled using a three-dimensional (3D) unsteady Eulerian-Eulerian (E-E) model coupled with the Hershel-Bulkley (HB) rheological model. A detailed sensitivity analysis of drag models is performed to establish the solid-fluid interaction in the…

The Centrality Paradox: Why Your Friends Are Always More Important
Rajat Subhra Hazra, Evgeny Verbitskiy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13059 https://

The Centrality Paradox: Why Your Friends Are Always More Important
We revisit the classical friendship paradox which states that on an average one's friends have at least as many friends as oneself and generalize it to a variety of network centrality measures. In particular, we show that for any irreducible, undirected graph $G$, the "friends-average" of degree, eigenvector-centrality, walk-count, Katz, and PageRank centralities exceeds the global average. We show that the result follows from the variational characterisation of the eigenvector corresponding to…

“I’ve always loved him”—Derek Carr on new Raiders coach Pete Carroll https://raiderramble.com/2025/07/14/ive-always-loved-him-derek-carr-on-new-raiders-coach-pete-carroll/

"WWF rethinks conservation after a crisis of its own making"
#WWF #Conservation
https:…

WWF rethinks conservation after a crisis of its own making
Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. In the world of conservation, good intentions have not always made for good outcomes. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), one of the most recognizable environmental organizations on the planet, learned this the hard way. In 2019, […]

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.HC. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.HC/new
[1/1]:
- Keywords are not always the key: A metadata field analysis for natural language search on open da...
Lisa-Yao Gan, Arunav Das, Johanna Walker, Elena Simperl

We are not always discovering high mountains - sometimes we also go below earth. 😄
Here we went ~55m below the surface to see what the world below our feet looks like. And yes, the stairs were as steep as they appear on the #photo! The whole walk took us about an hour.
more about it:

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."
-Bruce Lee
#acting #coaching

Higher-Form Anomalies on Lattices
Yitao Feng, Ryohei Kobayashi, Yu-An Chen, Shinsei Ryu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12304 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12304…

Higher-Form Anomalies on Lattices
Higher-form symmetry in a tensor product Hilbert space is always emergent: the symmetry generators become genuinely topological only when the Gauss law is energetically enforced at low energies. In this paper, we present a general method for defining the 't Hooft anomaly of higher-form symmetries in lattice models built on a tensor product Hilbert space. In (2+1)D, for given Gauss law operators realized by finite-depth circuits that generate a finite 1-form $G$ symmetry, we construct an index r…

Despite his unassuming title of “deputy chief of staff,”
Stephen Miller is one of the most powerful men in America.
His boss, Donald Trump, is undisciplined and unfocused,
prone to launching major initiatives (mass deportation, D.C. crime crackdown)
before wandering off to get distracted by fripperies (redecorating the White House, micromanaging the Kennedy Center).
Miller, by contrast, is the always-on attack dog, single-mindedly scheming up new ways to trans…

It’s Stephen Miller’s Show Now
The most powerful guy in Trump’s ear has a plan for how to respond to the death of Charlie Kirk. You’re not going to like it.

We drove to Goulburn yesterday. We left Canberra just before 10am. Approached Lake George at exactly the right time. I've never seen it look so beautiful. The water glittered in the sunlight. It was absolutely stunning. We were both struck by how we had never seen it look so jewel-like, not once in all the years we had travelled this road. Of course, on the trip home, it was just Lake George again. Always appreciated but nothing like the gorgeousness that we had encountered on the way th…

always_comm: An FPGA-based Hardware Accelerator for Audio/Video Compression and Transmission
Rishab Parthasarathy, Akshay Attaluri, Gilford Ting
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11503

always_comm: An FPGA-based Hardware Accelerator for Audio/Video Compression and Transmission
We present a design for an extensible video conferencing stack implemented entirely in hardware on a Nexys4 DDR FPGA, which uses the M-JPEG codec to compress video and a UDP networking stack to communicate between the FPGA and the receiving computer. This networking stack accepts real-time updates from both the video codec and the audio controller, which means that video will be able to be streamed at 30 FPS from the FPGA to a computer. On the computer side, a Python script reads the Ethernet p…

I have so many drafts on my blog (https://blogs.linux.pizza/), that I dont know what to do with anymore.
It felt like a good think to do when I started writing the posts, but then I always gets stuck in some details and start taking breaks lol

Regardless of the weather, the cyber world is always hot, so check out today's Metacurity for the crucial infosec developments you should know, including
--M&S and Qantas leaders remain mum on ransomware payments,
--M&S chairman says two other British companies' ransomware attacks have gone unreported,
--5.7m customers impacted by Qantas attack,
--US sanctions DPRK man for IT worker scheme,
--DoJ seeks to bring COVID hacker to US,
--Rubio im…

M&S and Qantas leaders remain mum on ransomware payments
M&S chairman says two other British companies' ransomware attacks have gone unreported, 5.7m customers impacted by Qantas attack, US sanctions DPRK man for IT worker scheme, DoJ seeks to bring COVID hacker to US, Rubio impersonated in AI voice effort, MSFT patches 137+ flaws, much more

Apple Watch SE 3 review: great value for $249, with an always-on display and 5G connectivity, but an outdated design and no ECG or hypertension alerts (Kate Kozuch/Tom's Guide)
https://www.tomsguide.com/wellness/smartwatches/apple-watch-se-3-review

I reviewed the Apple Watch SE 3 and it's easily the best smartwatch value around right now
The Apple Watch SE 3 is a small price to pay for big upgrades

Apparently I’m just blind, or has the "Featured profile" page always been there, or did it just come back on desktop?
https://social.linux.pizza/@midtsveen/featured
Apparently I have had @…

#ebay had something to say:
"The eBay #Developers Program now offers Free Support to all developers."
The "paid" support has always been an absolute disaster.
Now that they're apparently relying more on

The fascist coalition was never going to hold. It couldn't. Fascists want everyone to be exactly the same. That's their whole thing. Leftists want diversity, so we can actually form coalitions. Fascists will always reach a point where they have to kill all the other fascists who aren't exactly like them.
Project 2025 betrayed this. It wasn't consistent. It was a jumble of different ideas that couldn't actually be implemented together. Someone gets left out. The Groypers haven't been getting what they want. Things have been moving too slowly for them. So now we get to see what happens. If they keep accelating, Trump could be forced to choose between cracking down on the far right (and destroying his coalition completely) or letting his people get killed. I hope that's a choice he has to make.
🍿
While Rome burns, go build things that help people and get other people involved in it. The way we win is by not getting involved in that mess, but rather just clearly demonstrating that we can make things better.

Apple Watch Series 11, SE 3 und Ultra 3: Mehr Gesundheit, besserer Mobilfunk
Die Watch-Palette wurde generalüberholt: Die günstige SE 3 erhält ein Always-On-Display, die teureren Varianten können den Blutdruck optisch messen.

TIL: always always always keep a sources.list line to stable-security, even if you're on #debian #sid
```
linux-image-amd64:
 Installed: 6.12.41-1
 Candidate: 6.12.41-1
 Version table:
*** 6.12.41-1 500
       500

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #LateJunction
Paul St. Hilaire:
🎵 Like It's Always Been
#PaulStHilaire

This Weird Pyramid Always Lands on the Same Face, Confirming 40-Year-Old Theory
https://gizmodo.com/this-weird-pyramid-always-lands-on-the-same-face-confirming-40-year-old-theory-2000623838

"The Cranberries visited Dutch tv show "2 Meter Sessies" on May 25, 1993 for their first television performance abroad. Two songs in this video: 'I Will Always' [00:51] and 'Wanted' [03:38]."
The Cranberries - I Will Always Wanted (Live on 2 Meter Sessions - 2metersessions
https://www.youtu…

What are you working on at the moment? (Can be anything / any form.) It's almost always interesting to hear what people are up to. 🙂

#Blakes7 Series D, Episode 12 - Warlord
ZUKAN: Insofar as we on Betafarl have always sought to protect ourselves and our borders, there are some here who would not be unjustified in regarding us as aggressors, but if it is aggression to protect oneself by ensuring that the others remain weak, then we have been aggressors.
BOORVA: Ah.

"I think the root of homelessness is greed... England has a population of 60 million people and about the same homeless population as San Francisco, which is a city of about 850,000 people."
Kevin's book is in my queue. May move it up. He's speaking at the Roxie on Sunday!

For longtime Chronicle homelessness reporter Kevin Fagan, the business was always personal
Learn about Kevin Fagan’s powerful stories of homelessness and recovery that come from connections made in a life-long reporting career.

#SoulIISoulCaronWheelerForEvah Soul II Soul - Keep On Movin' (1Xtra Live Lounge)

Ight, I need some help picking an approach for my homelab.
Right now I've got 3 raspberry pis (1gb RAM) always on and 2 optiplexes running proxmox which are only on when needed.
Trying to work out whether I should move everything to one of my proxmox machines and just leave a single pi somewhere running a thing to act as a tiebreaker or just leave as is rn.
I run docker on pis with HA, pihole, some discord bots, status things but am kinda limited rn with RAM.
…

I’m glad to have never lived in such places that are only accessible by car. Just cities and 'burbs built up before the phenomenon of encapsulated residential developments became dominant. I always walked (or more often biked) to school as a kid and so did my kids (except for K, of course)
I wonder what sort of effect that has on the psyche. Seems like a recipe for people predisposed to xenophobia.

Speed Always Wins: A Survey on Efficient Architectures for Large Language Models
Weigao Sun, Jiaxi Hu, Yucheng Zhou, Jusen Du, Disen Lan, Kexin Wang, Tong Zhu, Xiaoye Qu, Yu Zhang, Xiaoyu Mo, Daizong Liu, Yuxuan Liang, Wenliang Chen, Guoqi Li, Yu Cheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09834

Speed Always Wins: A Survey on Efficient Architectures for Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) have delivered impressive results in language understanding, generation, reasoning, and pushes the ability boundary of multimodal models. Transformer models, as the foundation of modern LLMs, offer a strong baseline with excellent scaling properties. However, the traditional transformer architecture requires substantial computations and poses significant obstacles for large-scale training and practical deployment. In this survey, we offer a systematic examination of…

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."
-Bruce Lee
#acting #coaching

Why Does Your Brain Always Expect the Worst? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/traumatization-and-its-aftermath/202506/why-does-your…

Why Does Your Brain Always Expect the Worst?
Your brain constantly predicts the future based on past pain, but you can retrain it and turn catastrophic thinking into hope.

"The understanding that the total supremacy of the “data” discourse was always a problematic, neoliberal way of seeing and structuring the world, of legitimizing violence according to the needs of those in power."
(Original title: The “Data” Narrative eats itself)
https://tante.cc/2025/09/15/…

The "Data" Narrative eats itself
“The first model fakes the data, then the second model trains on the fake data. Any problems in the synthetic data set are amplified further. Then the second model — based on fake data — is used to treat real patients. This is, of course, all fine.” Today I want to take David Gerard’s recent […]

A lot of the design work that goes into programming languages and tools is about prompting developers to •think about meaning•: tests, types, scope, compile errors, runtime errors — all about •preventing code from running• in the presence of an expectation/reality mismatch.
I’m always on high alert for tools that promise to speed development by letting developers skip the thinking.
5/

Donald Trump presents himself as strong, indomitable, and always forceful.
But when disaster strikes — whether hurricane, flash flood, or pandemic — he’s oddly helpless.
To hear Trump tell it, he has infinite power to do good and no power to do bad
-- and anyone who says otherwise is an enemy of the country.
To believe in MAGA is to believe in his simultaneous omnipotence and impotence, depending on whichever is convenient for partisan purposes.
This dynamic h…

Disasters are for the greater glory of Trump
He cannot fail. He can only be failed.

As a survivor of the type of stochastic terrorism that people like Charlie Kirk carry out, and also a survivor of gun violence, I've had a bit to think about.
I still understand the anger, the frustration, that leads someone to snap. I'll always have compassion, if also paired with some frustration, for the person who shot me and her husband. That makes sense to me. I refused to testify because it never made sense to punish a tool who acted out of ignorance.
What doesn't make as much sense to me are the upper class grifters, the stochastic terrorists, who turn a profit of off setting people like that up to kill. I always wanted to see people like that, people who were clearly profiting off of bringing evil into the world, held accountable.
But the way I always want to see them held accountable, is by being forced to live in a world where everyone is free. Charlie Kirk got out easy, and that is a bit sad. He should have had to suffer through our victory. He should have had to watch the fall of Western Civilization, the collapse of all the things he held dear, all the things he tried to uphold. I wish that he had lived long enough to understand the suffering he inflicted on the world. He should have lived long enough to have to do real work, to have to figure out how to feed himself, house himself, in a world that has no market for the hate that he brings.
As much as I had rather that he starved, I would never shed a tear for the opening of a new public urinal.
Rest in piss. Charlie Kirk.

ReconVLA: Reconstructive Vision-Language-Action Model as Effective Robot Perceiver
Wenxuan Song, Ziyang Zhou, Han Zhao, Jiayi Chen, Pengxiang Ding, Haodong Yan, Yuxin Huang, Feilong Tang, Donglin Wang, Haoang Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10333

ReconVLA: Reconstructive Vision-Language-Action Model as Effective Robot Perceiver
Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have enabled robotic agents to integrate multimodal understanding with action execution. However, our empirical analysis reveals that current VLAs struggle to allocate visual attention to target regions. Instead, visual attention is always dispersed. To guide the visual attention grounding on the correct target, we propose ReconVLA, a reconstructive VLA model with an implicit grounding paradigm. Conditioned on the model's visual outputs, a …

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MorningShow
Quivers:
🎵 You're Not Always On My Mind
#Quivers
https://quiversss.bandcamp.com/album/youre-not-always-on-my-mind-when-it-breaks-me-in-honey-r-e-m-cover
https://open.spotify.com/track/08yZSZvNR0eYt8Bx8xkPmA

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."
—Bruce Lee
#acting #coaching

Halo, a startup founded by former Harvard students who developed a facial recognition app for Ray-Ban Meta glasses, is launching "always-on" AI glasses for $249 (TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/20/harv

Harvard dropouts to launch 'always on' AI smart glasses that listen and record every conversation | TechCrunch
After developing a facial-recognition app for Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses and doxing random people, two former Harvard students are now launching a startup that makes smart glasses with an always-on microphone.

I’m always excited to see people moving to vehicles that are (1) smaller and (2) more electric/human-powered. However, I probably agree with @… on this one.
Questions for this and any such “Should it use bike infrastructure?” situation:
1. Does it have emissions while in operation?
2. Does it regularly •stop• in the bike line (in practice, not just in theory)?
3. Does it block the full width of a narrow-ish urban bike lane, and thus prevent passing where a cargo bike would allow it?
4. What’s the magnitude of its momentum (weight times speed) while in operation? https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/114845877730092611

14 Mountain Towns in the U.S. So Beautiful They Feel Like Heaven on Earth
#travel
https://themodernfield.com/best-smal…

14 Mountain Towns in the U.S. So Beautiful They Feel Like Heaven on Earth
We all get that deep urge to swap city noise for the scent of pine. I know I have. Hence, I am always on the search for the best small mountain towns in the US. 

Trump Is a Weak and Failing President, and It’s Time to Say So
Economy loses jobs for August
Donald Trump understands better than anyone else alive that his hold on his supporters
—and on plenty of swing voters, too
—depends on the mere perception that he’s strong, wins everywhere, always acts boldly, and wields absolute mastery over his eternally feckless, disoriented enemies.
Last month, after an anemic July jobs report, Trump fired the steward of jobs data,

Trump Is a Weak and Failing President, and It’s Time to Say So
It’s possible for Trump to be an inept buffoon—but still extremely dangerous. And it shouldn’t be so hard to make that case.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MorningShow
Packaging:
🎵 Always Calling
#Packaging
https://packaging.bandcamp.com/track/always-calling
https://open.spotify.com/track/1vACKQBl7HbbLLg3c0lEgy

Hands-on with AI startup Friend's $129 always-listening pendant: feels like a beefy AirTag, runs Gemini 2.5, gives unhelpful commentary, and makes others uneasy (Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/i-hate-my-ai-friend/

I Hate My AI Friend
The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #Early
Willie Nelson:
🎵 Always on My Mind
#WillieNelson
https://hellvetika.bandcamp.com/track/always-on-my-mind
https://open.spotify.com/track/2xYQTU2bbg6WVAmpY1eae4