Tootfinder

Now is when it really matters
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DF6WJLZttlN/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ

Leigh McGowan on Instagram: "Kendrick Lamar showed more courage in the face of rising American tyranny than we’ve seen from ANY former American leader. If you swore an oath to protect this nation, where are you now?"
190K likes, 15K comments - iampoliticsgirl on February 10, 2025: "Kendrick Lamar showed more courage in the face of rising American tyranny than we’ve seen from ANY former American leader. If you swore an oath to protect this nation, where are you now?".

Quick tip for those with young kids who want them to learn how to use a watch with an analogue (dial) style interface.
While the likes of Flik Flak make nice kids watches, they are a little on the pricy side.
Potentially better IMHO however are these kids field/pilot style watches from AliExpress. They cost basically nothing [<$5🇺🇸] and the hour hand points to an inner ring of numbered hours, while the minute hand points to an outer ring of numbered minutes. So simple!

Für die breite Verwendung von #KI, speziell im Kontext #Schule, muss sichergestellt sein, dass #LLMs user:innen nicht zu selbstgefährdendem Verhalten animieren.
Das Nonprofit Transluce arbeitet an verschie…

Surfacing Pathological Behaviors in Language Models
We train reinforcement learning (RL) agents to craft realistic natural-language prompts that elicit specified behaviors in frontier open-weight models (Llama 3.1/4, Qwen 2.5, and DeepSeek-V3), using a proposed variational lower bound to guide the search.

Combined Public Service Announcement and Today I Learned: if you have `CLICOLOR=1` on macOS, if you do an `ls` of a directory which is inside iCloud Drive, evicted files (i.e., those that cannot be immediately used, but need to be downloaded first from iCloud) show with a grey background… see below:
First, both files are in iCloud, but not locally available. They have a dotted cloud icons in the iCloud Status field of the Finder window, and a greyed background in the output of the `ls` …

Annd youtube is doing this again for me.

Could an axion-like particle be hidden in $\eta_c\to\gamma\gamma$?
Zhi-Jun Li, Zheng-Yun You, Xiao-Rui Lyu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04144 https://…

Could an axion-like particle be hidden in $η_c\toγγ$?
We discuss the possibility of an axion-like particle being merged in the recent observation of $η_c \to γγ$ at BESIII and find that it cannot be excluded in the current experimental data. The mass, width, and coupling strengths of the axion-like particle are extracted, and several other channels to confirm or exclude the existence of such an axion-like particle are also discussed.

Companies House have just sent me an email telling me that because of new laws, I need to verify my identity. So I leapt into action. There follows an open letter.
Dear Companies House.
The questions "Do you have a passport?" and "Do you have your passport on you in the office right now?" are different fucking questions and you should clarify which you mean before you direct me down an irreversible cul-de-sac in your application's verification logic.

Nintendo says it didn't send any Switch 2 review units to outlets as "important features and updates" will only be available via an update on its June 5 launch (Andy Robinson/Video Games Chronicle)
https://www.

It’s official: There are no Nintendo Switch 2 reviews. Here’s what that means for us, and you | VGC
Nintendo’s decision not to facilitate pre-launch Switch 2 reviews is disappointing news for everyone…

This is an especially good time for you vacationers who plan to fly, because
the Reagan administration, as part of the same policy under which it
recently sold Yellowstone National Park to Wayne Newton, has "deregulated"
the airline industry. What this means for you, the consumer, is that the
airlines are no longer required to follow any rules whatsoever. They can
show snuff movies. They can charge for oxygen. They can hire pilots right
out of Vend…

Show your pride this month in Southern New England - find an event near you with @wpri12: https://bit.ly/3FDAkHu
Events are already happening - including this weekend!

@…
Incidentally, just after you posted, author Greg Egan posted a conversation a different author had with an AI that is stunningly impressive until the end, which reveals that the AI text was thoroughly and fatally flawed in a horrible way, and it just lied.
It's long, but you could skim the beginning and then skim the end if you are time-limit…

"Two lessons here: 1) Use a marker with a wider tip than a Sharpie, so it’ll be more visible, and 2a) if civilians are able to get right onto your armored vehicle to write graffiti, maybe this wasn’t the kind of militarized raid that you needed an armored truck for in the first place, or 2b) at the very least, your security cordon sucks."
**Minneapolis Says No Fascists, DHS Won't Deport And Kill Preschooler Yet. Your ICE Times Roundup**
https://www.wonkette.com/p/minneapolis-says-no-fascists-dhs

Series D, Episode 01 - Rescue
DORIAN: Exactly.
AVON: You really are insane, aren't you?
DORIAN: By now I probably would be.
AVON: If it wasn't for this mysterious room.
DORIAN: And what it contains.
SOOLIN: [Enters] And what might that be, Dorian?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/401/467…

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

What does the death of Julius Caesar and probability have to do with the future of knowledge? Join me at noon EDT today for a webinar on how AI, like a JPEG, compresses information, risking a future where history is endlessly rewritten https://maine.zoom.us/webinar/register

"What Stroustrup wanted was apparently what a lot of people wanted: a language that provided OOP features, such as those offered by Smalltalk, but compiled into binaries that would execute as fast as an executable written in C.
The solution Stroustrup adopted was not to adopt the Smalltalk model, but instead to take inspiration from fellow Scandinavians and to bolt ideas borrowed from Simula into C."

Someone wrote an article talking about how LLMs helped him write code called "My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts". Cool. If a tool works for you, go for it.
And that's my whole opinion.

I’ve never seen this memory issue on #MacOS before. I had left Safari with Mela’s share sheet/importer app snippet open overnight and came back to a nearly unresponsive computer. I assume one of these has a memory leak. I was able to reboot via the shell using SSH from another device.

Breaking down why Apple TVs are privacy advocates’ go-to streaming device - Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/all-the-ways-apple-tv-boxes-do-and-mostly-dont-track-you/

All the ways Apple TV boxes do—and mostly don’t—track you
Using the Apple TV app or an Apple account means giving Apple more data, though.

Finished streaming #Paradise. A 2nd season has been confirmed and I'm looking forward to it. The characters are intriguing and the VFX are great. Nothing too fancy on the surface, mostly digital landscape stuff and set extensions. But those are actually hard because you need an incredible amount of detail to get the "CG look" out of CG towns and landscapes.
They also went cra…

Some of you probably remember WAIS. An Internet search engine from the Gopher era (more specific: a search protocol). TIL: Thinking Machines (those with the massive red blinkenlights servers) were the main driver and developer of WAIS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_information…

My apartment management company has joined the undisclosed-AI bandwagon.

AI isn’t an existential threat to humanity, capitalism and corporations are.
You see, we created capitalism, a religion modeled on cancer, and the corporation, a new, artificial species; a parasite that co-opts human beings to do its bidding; an organism that’s psychopathic by design and grows by extracting from and exploiting us and our habitat.
And we now find ourselves ruled by this religion and driven to ruin by these parasites as they drain our humanity, destroy our habitat,…

Let's say you find a really cool forum online that has lots of good advice on it. It's even got a very active community that's happy to answer questions very quickly, and the community seems to have a wealth of knowledge about all sorts of subjects.
You end up visiting this community often, and trusting the advice you get to answer all sorts of everyday questions you might have, which before you might have found answers to using a web search (of course web search is now full of SEI spam and other crap so it's become nearly useless).
Then one day, you ask an innocuous question about medicine, and from this community you get the full homeopathy treatment as your answer. Like, somewhat believable on the face of it, includes lots of citations to reasonable-seeming articles, except that if you know even a tiny bit about chemistry and biology (which thankfully you do), you know that the homoeopathy answers are completely bogus and horribly dangerous (since they offer non-treatments for real diseases). Your opinion of this entire forum suddenly changes. "Oh my God, if they've been homeopathy believers all this time, what other myths have they fed me as facts?"
You stop using the forum for anything, and go back to slogging through SEI crap to answer your everyday questions, because one you realize that this forum is a community that's fundamentally untrustworthy, you realize that the value of getting advice from it on any subject is negative: you knew enough to spot the dangerous homeopathy answer, but you know there might be other such myths that you don't know enough to avoid, and any community willing to go all-in on one myth has shown itself to be capable of going all in on any number of other myths.
...
This has been a parable about large language models.
#AI #LLM

Good communication relationships across an organization are necessary if you want to draw an accurate representation of how parts of your system interact. You may think you understand how others use outputs, but you can’t be certain until you ask. Knowing who to ask comes from relationship building.
From: @…
https://fosstodon.org/@ama_conf/114601855016106036

Oh dear -- within a day of hearing about this from another professor, I got my first LLM-generated email from an aspiring grad student. It mischaracterized my research (apparently I write lots of mathematical formulas, ha!) and ascribed papers to me that I never wrote, which are basically remixes of common words in my paper titles. If you do this, you will insult the people you want to impress.

This is why you don't vote for CDU.
---
Our Berlin CDU mayor ladies and gentleman:
https://theintercept.com/2025/03/31/germany-gaza-protesters-deport/

If you are a #DiscoElysium fan, you might like to see this before it is (likely) taken down from YouTube. It purports to be an internal presentation on X7, a project ZA/UM cancelled, that was set in the DE world but written largely by Argo Tuulik and Dora Klindžić:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dde8H1YhP-U

A deep dive into Apple TV's privacy features shows that Apple's streaming device is more private than the vast majority of alternatives, save for dumb TVs (Scharon Harding/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/0

Breaking down why Apple TVs are privacy advocates’ go-to streaming device
Using the Apple TV app or an Apple account means giving Apple more data, though.

Religion, PLpol
It's about time I elaborated on an earlier thought.
"Non-practicing Catholics" have more liberal worldview than "conservative" Catholics — and often they jeer at them. These qualities make it easy to forget that you're draining with Catholics. But when the push comes to shove, you discover that you can't rely on them. They won't openly oppose the Church, they won't protect the people who are "immoral" according to Catholic morality, and if they are forced to choose a side, they'll side with the Catholics.
The Polish PO/KO party (often perceived as "liberal") is just like that. Their views are more liberal than the conservative right wing, they love portraying themselves as an opposition to it, but in the end they are a right-wing party. When it's convenient to them, they happily present liberal postulates — but they are as fast to withdraw them to please their right-wing electorate.
#PLpol

You know what would be really cool? A #quantifiedself person influence monitor. Say I have a #Fitbit and Joe has a Fitbit, we could have them detect when we are in proximity (if both people agreed) and then it would let us know over time how being around the other person influenced us - e.g. did heart rate variability increase or decrease (do they relax us or cause stress), did we burn more calories (maybe we usually go on hikes together), did we sleep better that night, and so on.
There are definitely people in my life who I'm pretty sure have significant effects on me in both directions, it'd be awesome to quantify them.
It would also be cool if one could do this without data sharing - e.g. maybe one presses a button on ones device to indicate one has entered x's presence and again when one has exited...
Honestly, I'd totally forget to do this...so something passive would be better - e.g. when you want to start tracking the next time you are around someone you press a button and it scans for electronic signatures and identifies Bluetooth etc. uniquely so that when you are around then it auto knows and can record...
The latter raises issues of #consent and #privacy...I'm not sure how/if one could do this in an ethical manner...but I'd like to have it 😂

:heart_trans: It’s #PrideMonth, and just so you know, I’m a #GenderFluid person, proudly #bisexual and #queer

If you take a walk along the coast, near Caleta Camarones in northern Chile, near an old archeological site called Camarones 15, it is hard not to spot evidence of the mummies.
Cloth, rope, hair, tiny fragments of bones, and pieces of wood, an item that is nowhere to be seen growing anywhere nearby, but which the Chinchorro people used to keep their mummies intact like little dolls.
The Chinchorro mummies are considered the oldest mummies in the world.
Thousands of years olde…

The Chinchorro Mummies: Resisting in the Desert
Seven thousand years ago, the Chinchorro people, along the Pacific coast of South America, began to mummify their dead. Their bodies remain hidden in the desert. This is episode 41 of Stories of Resistance.

Breaker: Removing Shortcut Cues with User Clustering for Single-slot Recommendation System
Chao Wang, Yue Zheng, Yujing Zhang, Yan Feng, Zhe Wang, Xiaowei Shi, An You, Yu Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00828

Breaker: Removing Shortcut Cues with User Clustering for Single-slot Recommendation System
In a single-slot recommendation system, users are only exposed to one item at a time, and the system cannot collect user feedback on multiple items simultaneously. Therefore, only pointwise modeling solutions can be adopted, focusing solely on modeling the likelihood of clicks or conversions for items by users to learn user-item preferences, without the ability to capture the ranking information among different items directly. However, since user-side information is often much more abundant tha…

If you need any more proof that they are about the elimination of any alternative lifestyles—here you go. This is absolutely disgusting behaviour by the administration.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/health/trump-hiv-cuts.html

Re: Geo-locked.
There is an album of remixes released by Japanese artist, Yoko Oginome, called "Dancing Hero (All Eat You Up) [Remixes]"
I can listen to it on Spotify no problem, but the album on Apple Music is not available in Ireland. It's available on the UK and US versions of Apple Music.
Now, I get that it is more than likely something on the label side (Victor Entertainment), but geographical restrictions are such an archaic excuse.

Harmoknight: completed!
Harmoknight is best described as a rhythm platformer, although the platforming is basic at best and the rhythms are simple. You have two buttons - a jump, and an attack - and you have to either jump or attack in time with the music's beat. In most cases it's sufficient to react in time to seeing the gap or enemy, but on occasion the screen zooms in and reaction times are just too long; it's at this point that you'll lose too many lives and have…

Analytics company founder: Hosters demands over server costs are unworkable
„The hosting platforms will just have to give us servers for free“ Daniel said in an interview, while wearing a onesie Pyjama in the form of an octopus. https://mastodon.social/@jensscholz/114573315…

Jens Scholz ⍟ (@jensscholz@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image Ok, kill it then. If your business is not feasable if you have to pay for the ressources you need for your product, it's not a business anyway.

Turns out scones for one are totally possible! This one is an oat, honey, ginger situation and made the best start to a Monday ever! Bit proud of myself, because I had to adapt a recipe meant for much larger that was trying to make orange scones—quite different! Also, the air fryer is a wonderful contraption! I hope everyone has a marvelous day #today and if anyone needs a little gentle sweetness, you're welcome at my table! #Food

Please, read this.
"An open letter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who thinks my daughter is a tragedy" - by Anaïs Godard
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-robert-f-kennedy-jr-who-thinks-my-d…

So look, if you talk to me about the job threat from the things we currently call “AI,” well…
…if where you’re going with that is “The concentration of wealth is an existential crisis! Establish UBI! 99% marginal tax rate! Capital gains tax! Wealth tax! Abolish billionaires!” then yes, I’m •all• ears. My pitchfork is already sharpened.
But if where you’re going is “Get in on it now while you still can! Buy the AI vendors’ products! Drink radium for that youthful glow!” then…kthanksbye. I am not going to be a vector for your marketing propaganda, no matter how agitated you are.
/end

#Blakes7 Series C, Episode 09 - Sarcophagus
ALIEN: [Her robes start blowing as if a breeze had sprung up] I thought you were the clever one. You're a fool, like Tarrant. The pain Tarrant is experiencing ... visualize that pain and much more. [Shot of Cally tossing her head back and forth.] You're as close to death as you have ever been. Think about human death, Avon. Irrevocable…

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

Two rather different implementations of a V10 engined car, today at the Down Royal Motor show.
There was a nice selection of cars on display, and as usual at these things, some gems in the visitor car park as well. https://timfoster.smugmug.com/Events/Down-Royal-Motor-Show-20…

Down Royal Motor Show 2025 - timfoster
All of the photos under timfoster.smugmug.com are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Please contact me if you want to use any of these photos for commercial purposes. You're welcome to print any photos you like for your own use.

Thank you, Norm! FFS ppl, stop listening to media outlets who are to sell papers to both parties & start using your brain:
Trump is extending numerous roles past the non-employee limit. That was NOT the reason #ElonMusk had an unceremonious departure.
Original post:

@… @… Oh yeah, I remember having similar kinds of conversations with the first venue.
Every year there’s a new management and you have to go through the process of “hey, we are weird, here is an extremely detaile…

Workplace Adjustments For Energy Limiting Conditions - free online event
On Zoom, Monday 16 June 2025
1pm - 2pm BST
From Astriid, a UK charity aiming "to make working practice more inclusive for people with long-term conditions"
"Are you seeking work alongside managing a long-term health condition? Join our free Spring Into Inclusive Employment Webinars!
"Working with an energy limiting condition is tough, but workplace adjustments can make things more manageable. In this session we’ll explore examples of reasonable adjustments to your working patterns, environment, and communication preferences that can all help you to thrive in your role while taking care of yourself."
Book here:
#ChronicIllness #disability #work #access #ReasonableAdjustments #UK

"Journalism screwed itself over by betting
on Meta and its profit-over-society peers.
Now, nobody trusts “the media” and
everyone is going bankrupt. The next bet
is on generative AI, with its inability to
distinguish truth from “hallucinations” –
fabrications that on the page become lies.
The Continent is an attempt to prove
journalism can be done differently.
Expect more of this in what our team
has decided to call our “serious era”.
We’re no longer a start-up. We’re going
to empower more people with quality
journalism. We’re going to help others
launch newspapers. We’re going to
stay sane. And we’re going to prove
that African excellence can set global
standards."
@… reaches 5 years and 200 issues. If you're not already receiving their copy via @… (or email, telegram or WhatsApp if you must) then it's really worth signing up to remind yourself just how big and diverse the world ist.
This weeks highlights are an extraordinary story about how Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe directly interfered with Mozambique's election. Plus a frankly beautiful photo piece on Addis Ababa

Calamus 19 Mind you the timid models of the rest, the majority?
A declaration of intellectual independence and a celebration of brotherly love. Honestly this poem feels a little clumsy to me, I can see why Whitman struck the awkward introducing lines in later editions.
As always, looking for the gay content:
Yet comes one, a Manhattanese, and ever at parting, kisses me lightly on the lips with robust love.
And I, in the public room, or on the crossing of the street, or on the ship's deck, kiss him in return
We observe that salute of American comrades
But I can't in all honestly read this use of "kissing" as erotic. Here the public kissing and the "salute of comrades" makes me think it's more of a fraternal kiss.
Which doesn't exclude a romantic kiss as well, or an erotic one. What's so vital about Calamus is how Whitman blends masculine sexual love with the love of comrades. I think both meanings are latent in every poem.

#PennedPossibilities 681 — Let’s talk about your current WIP. Although it of course depends on your genre, do you have an antagonist or an evil villain?
They are an antagonist, not villain. You can't say that someone who's only trying to go home is evil. Well, OK they're not going about it in the best of ways. But they're not evil, just ... weird.

I decided to share some of my observations that would benefit you if you are building applications: a deep dive session into the archetypes of attackers.
This session is for people who are developing software of any kind. It could be an API endpoint, a blog, or a complex application used by millions.
Join in or share with smart people.
Let me help you!

You know that thing we hear from Americans all the time?
"If Bush gets elected again, I'm leaving the USA."
"If Obama doesn't win, I'm moving to Canada."
"If Trump wins, I need an exit plan."
Well, this time it's actually happening. Not just words, but I personally know several people who are not just threatening to leave the United States, but they actually have a plan and are literally in the middle of packing and shipping…

@…
Are you interested in chess openings or chess puzzles?
I use to open with King's Pawn Game in regular games but there are many other openings.
Do you know about the Philidor Defense?(played as black)

If a starting date is mentioned in an academic job posting, and if the job involves teaching, which customarily follows a specific calendar, I’d have thought that it’s rather obvious that there are reasons for this particular starting date.
Of course, you can always ask, but it’s typically not possible to move the semester to accommodate you.
#AcademicChatter

Generating Shakespeare-like text with an n-gram language model is straight forward and quite simple. But, don't expect to much of it. It will not be able to recreate a lost Shakespear play for you ;-) It's merely a parrot, making up well sounding sentences out of fragments of original Shakespeare texts...
#ise2025

You want to order Italian. You want bruschetta. If you want to sound like an Italian, pronounce it like this: Broo-sketta, with the accent on the sketta part. Not Broosheta. When the C in Italian is followed by an H it sounds hard like the K in kick. If you really want to sound like an Italian, give the 2 Ts a bit of a kick. When two consonants appear together in words in Italian, generally they are punched a bit: Broo-skeTTa. Make it fun. Sound like you know what you are ordering.😀

"Bill Gates has never received a résumé from anyone who read all of TAOCP. There’s an urban legend (now sadly debunked) that Steve Jobs told Knuth he had “read all of his books”, to which Knuth replied “you are full of crap”.
While that tale is not true, nobody including Steve Jobs can say that they have read all of TAOCP. The reason is simple: it isn’t finished yet."

The Art Of "The Art Of Computer Programming"
A quote from the cover of Volume One of Professor Donald Knuth's Magnum Opus, "The Art of Computer Programming (3rd edition)": "If you think you're a really good programmer… read (Knuth's) Art of Computer Programming… You should definitely send me a résumé if you can read the whole thing." "Me" here refers to the author of the quote, Bill Gates.

I'm very busy at the moment with work and life stuff, so if I am taking a while to reply, you are in my reply queue.
Have an awesome day!

Some thoughts on "vibecoding" and why it is not a cardinal sin, especially for people that have little interest in "being developers."
https://www.davideaversa.it/blog/it-is-okay-vibecode/

It Is Okay to “Vibecode”
Critiques to vibecoding are often an example of right-Gaussian thinking. If you want to be a developer, you should avoid it. But if not, why should you not take advantage of new tools? Just be aware of the limitations. Here I try to explain why vibecoding is not a cardinal sin.

Turns out scones for one are totally possible! This one is an oat, honey, ginger situation and made the best start to a Monday ever! Bit proud of myself, because I had to adapt a recipe meant for much larger that was trying to make orange scones—quite different! Also, the air fryer is a wonderful contraption! I hope everyone has a marvelous day #today and if anyone needs a little gentle sweetness, you're welcome at my table! #Food

I am seeking speakers for my @… & @… meetups. We prefer in-person presentations in Frankfurt or the Mannheim area, but remote talks are also an option.
If you have anything interesting to share with us, let us know. We'd be …

Our Sylius meetup is coming to Mannheim on June 26th! Are you ready to join us for an evening of learning, networking, and fun?
Register here: https://www.meetup.com/phpug-rhein-neckar/events/305478305/

PHPUGMRN 03/25 (The Sylius Meetup), Thu, Jun 26, 2025, 7:00 PM | Meetup
**Agenda:** 19:00 CET - Intro 19:05 CET - Brille24 - Post Mortem, Max Pesch 19:50 CET - Break 20:00 CET - Sylius & Automation, let's dive in!, Jacques Bodin-Hullin 20:50 CE

We all perform tasks in our day-to-day work that are considered 'non-promotable' – these are crucial for project success, but they won't get you promoted. This is commonly known as 'glue work', a term coined by Tanya Reilly. Join Fatima Taj at this year's Berlin Buzzwords as she shares her personal experience of narrowly avoiding the trap of being permanently stuck with glue work, and explains how to handle similar situations.
Learn more:

I just called AI bullshit on Marriott's web support. It's infuriating when a company can't be bothered to actually read what you send them, and responds with long, detailed instructions that contain made-up facts (I don't even have an iPhone), and that are unresponsive to a fully reproducible issue I repeatedly described in detail.
I don't think even the laziest, sloppiest human would produce a response like they just sent me.
And this is like the 10th message…

So look, if you talk to me about the job threat from the things we currently call “AI,” well…
…if where you’re going with that is “The concentration of wealth is an existential crisis! Establish UBI! 99% marginal tax rate! Capital gains tax! Wealth tax! Abolish billionaires!” then yes, I’m •all• ears. My pitchfork is already sharpened.
But if where you’re going is “Get in on it now while you still can! Buy the AI vendors’ products! Drink radium for that youthful glow!” then…kthanksbye. I am not going to be a vector for your marketing propaganda, no matter how agitated you are.
/end

"Capital has been here before with chintz—by which I mean real chintz, an artisanal craft from India. “Chintz” is originally a Hindi word, and if you’re like most people, you’ve probably got the term all wrong."
Informative, sweet, a great read. Re #aislop #ai

If you work in an open knowledge project (basically an open source project that deals mostly with data), you might be interested in these diataxis workshops that are running for projects like yours.
Book here (apply if you're not sure if your project is eligible) https://vurt.org/events/workshops-april-2025/ - and please share widely to help reach this rather niche audience? Thanks!

APPARENTLY web kits like Wix now offer an AI assistant that builds your web template, but of course you are trapped.
So, asking for a friend 🤣, is there anything similar that spits out a WordPress template his father can actually use? 🙄
Admittedly his wix looks good, but I could-a tol' him, only noooo…

​The Tech Pizza Monday meetup yesterday was so successful that we’re doing it again, you guessed it, next Monday! Come for the pizza and stay for the tech discussions. Got an open hardware demo? Cool! Those are the best! The more you believe in free and open software and hardware in service of a free and open society, the more you’re welcome to join us. The location is Victory Cafe, 440 Bloor St. W., Toronto, ON. The start time is 6 PM.
RSVP is not required, or even encouraged, frankl…

It seems that chatting with AIs can either cause or trigger psychotic episodes
Please be careful. My suggestion, if you're using AI frequently, would be to tell someone you trust that you're using AI frequently, ask them to keep an eye on you, and even allow them to access your chat log.

People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies
Marriages and families are falling apart as people are sucked into fantasy worlds of spiritual prophecy by AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT

Dear #Apple Time Machine has become an unreliable POS. Jeez what the FICK are you guys doing!

Beyond just predicting words, LLMs interpolate meaning between data points, as in the recent phenomenon of AI explaining fake idioms like "you can’t lick a badger twice." The danger is that made-up "truths" will fuel future models
https://www.

Are you interested in how dependency-heavy your (or another) package is and why? #rstats

“it is a truth of this website that no matter what position you hold on any topic, one of the most terminally online people on earth whose full time job appears to be getting angry on the internet will appear to declare that you are a centrist” https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3s5wt

Many people have this sense that the price of books is primarily linked to the cost of materials, manufacture, & distribution. But the majority of the cost of publishing books are in the labor leading up to the 1st copy: editorial & editorial production work, before any reproduction in whatever format. Addition labor happens later, for marketing. When you buy a book, you’re mainly paying for these kinds of labor.
From: @…

Whether you're directly affected or observing from the outside – this is a moment to reflect:
🔹 How resilient is your skillset in an uncertain economy?
🔹 Are you building for long-term adaptability or short-term optimization?
🔹 Are you open to considering a potentially lucrative side hustel as a means to weather economic storms?
If your answer to that last question is ‘Yes’ or ‘Maybe’, message me and we can chat further.

I think people are overestimating AI for programming. I mean to use it effectively you need to know what you are doing. When you want it to make something, you need an understanding of how it will function. If you can't explain how it should work, it won't be right. AI is a tool to program better, not a replacement for developers.
#programming

(1/2) #YourUndividedAttention [PODCAST] Echo Chambers of One: Companion AI and the Future of Human Connection (15 May 2025)
https://pca.st/episode/53327729-f332-4a29-82d9-00…

#PennedPossibilities 681 — Let’s talk about your current WIP. Although it of course depends on your genre, do you have an antagonist or an evil villain?
They are an antagonist, not villain. You can't say that someone who's only trying to go home is evil. Well, OK they're not going about it in the best of ways. But they're not evil, just ... weird.

When you spend an hour backporting #CPython #security fixes to all versions of #Python #Gentoo, because there was no planned security release, and a few hours later you spend time again bumping to the unexpected security releases.
And then you are surprised why you didn't mask Python 3.8 yet, and repeat the same mistake.
Oh, and ofc update your CPython and PyPy (fixed PyPy only in Gentoo).

Series B, Episode 06 - Trial
ZIL: To be alone must not be feared. The Host is slow to recognize one who is alone. Though there are many, all stay alone. [Clears off a patch of ground] Do you hunger? [Tears the ground open, scoops up some of the lining of the opening and eats it.] Do you hunger?
BLAKE: What is it?
https://

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

Horsing Arrond
More #Comics at: #Sims4

Caerfinon’s Comics | Substack
A place for my comics. Click to read Caerfinon’s Comics, a Substack publication. Launched 9 months ago.

When both your wife and your girlfriend are busy, you take yourself out! #polyamory #gobraves

Two years ago at #CSUN I learned about what became my favorite browser extension, BeeLine Reader. I've been a subscriber ever since.
It's easy to set up on desktop, but has been some struggle to get working on Android. But this week I discovered it works with Microsoft's Edge Canary mobile browser, which has experimental support for extensions. Instructions are here:

I made a helper for Proximity (a word association game like #Semantle). It lets you poke around the database to see what's close to what:
https://github.com/adamhotep/userscrip

I often read and hear that ChatGPT and other Gen AI solutions are the future and will replace us all - especially in IT. As someone that moved cities and switch universities for an AI focus I was of course super curious about this and therefore often try ChatGPT out just for funsies.
All that I can say, is: Don't do it. I tried coding with ChatGPT, and while it produces okeyish results for Python and Java, it will completely fail if you try more complicated and less common things (…

Series B, Episode 06 - Trial
ZIL: To be alone must not be feared. The Host is slow to recognize one who is alone. Though there are many, all stay alone. [Clears off a patch of ground] Do you hunger? [Tears the ground open, scoops up some of the lining of the opening and eats it.] Do you hunger?
BLAKE: What is it?
https://

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

Whether you're directly affected or observing from the outside – this is a moment to reflect:
🔹 How resilient is your skillset in an uncertain economy?
🔹 Are you building for long-term adaptability or short-term optimization?
🔹 Are you open to considering a potentially lucrative side hustel as a means to weather economic storms?
If your answer to that last question is ‘Yes’ or ‘Maybe’, message me and we can chat further.

If you set limits for a scale (e.g. x-axis) in ggplot, how would you like data outside of that range be handled? There is the oob parameter for that and a set of functions to use with it: https://scales.r-lib.org/reference/oob.html

So the basic idea is that we first compute a "level" for whatever interaction, by adding beneficial modifiers and subtracting harmful ones. Imagine most modifiers are smallish integers like 2 or -3 (though they can be non-integers too). Each level can be thought of as making things twice as good/bad, although this only applies directly when they're balanced. The actual formula starts with a 50/50 chance of "success" at level 0, and then each positive level halves the chance of failure, or if the levels are negative, each negative level halves the chance of success (note that halving the chance of failure is not the same as doubling the chance of success).
The intuitive explanation is that you start with a coin flip. Then if the level is positive, you flip that many additional coins and succeed if any single coin succeeds, but it the level is negative, you have to flip that many additional coins and succeed only if *all* flips succeed.
For example, if I have a dagger with 5 crit chance, and I attack an opponent with no armor modifiers, I'd have to win any 1 of 6 coin flips to score a crit (p = 1 - (1/(2^6)) = 63/64. Increasing my crit modifier by 1 ups my chances only slightly, to 127/128. This is obviously pretty poor return, indicating that the 5 I already have is very strong. If the opponent had armor with -3 to crits, the interaction is now level 2, so the crit chance is 7/8, which is still pretty good. We can see from these examples that the basic system
rewards a small level advantage a lot, but the rewards diminish rapidly. The system has a few avenues for tweaking how it works though, that can let us modify this. There's also a potential benefit (though sometimes drawback) that no matter what the level gap, there's an effective limit to how much the interaction swings.

When both your wife and your girlfriend are busy, you take yourself out! #polyamory #gobraves

AI won’t save PDF from itself. PDFs are largely inaccessible, proprietary, and a nightmare for data extraction (ever tried copy-pasting a two-column doc?). Mistral’s new tool still struggles to convert them cleanly; imagine misreading a PDF drug chart and prescribing a 500mg overdose instead of 50mg. Science is about reusing knowledge, so it's high time we used formats that make it easy to extract data—rather than consign it to a tomb

"Dr. Dobb’s would cover every month some programming topic with an excellent series of monographs and a wide array of sample code, interviews, and even excellent humor. In the latter case, an honorary mention goes to Verity Stob, because of their uncanny description of the daily life of a software developer in the Microsoft galaxy of the late 1990s. Those who witnessed the good old days of `On Error Resume Next` are now nodding their heads in despair. I hear you."

If you use a read later or bookmarking tool, are you noticing an increasing number of sites that don’t work with them or intentionally don’t allow content to be fetched?
I use wallabag as both productivity and accessibility helper and I’m definitely finding more content that isn’t available… is it just me?

#ZenBrowser is considering to change the behaviour of windows in the following way:
- Two windows of the same workspace show the exact same tabs.
- Tabs are not lost when closing a window.
- In order to create a new, empty window, you first need to create a new workspace.
Any opinions? I find that quite weird and don't understand the purpose. 🤔

The full formula for the probability of "success" is:
p = {
1/(2^(-n 1)) if n is negative, or
1 - (1/(2^(n 1))) if n is zero or positive
}
(Both branches have the same value when n is 0, so the behavior is smooth around the origin.)
How can we tweak this?
First, we can introduce fixed success and/or failure chances unaffected by level, with this formula only taking effect if those don't apply. For example, you could do 10% failure, 80% by formula, and 10% success to keep things from being too sure either way even when levels are very high or low. On the other hand, this flattening makes the benefit of extra advantage levels even less exciting.
Second, we could allow for gradations of success/failure, and treat the coin pools I used to explain that math like dice pools a bit. An in-between could require linearly more success flips to achieve the next higher grade of success at each grade. For example, simple success on a crit role might mean dealing 1.5x damage, but if you succeed on 2 of your flips, you get 9/4 damage, or on 4 flips 27/8, or on 7 flips 81/16. In this world, stacking crit levels might be a viable build, and just giving up on armor would be super dangerous. In the particular case I was using this for just now, I can't easily do gradations of success (that's the reason I turned to probabilities in the first place) but I think I'd favor this approach when feasible.
The main innovation here over simple dice pools is how to handle situations where the number of dice should be negative. I'm almost certain it's not a truly novel innovation though, and some RPG fan can point out which system already does this (please actually do this, I'm an RPG nerd too at heart).
I'll leave this with one more tweak we could do: what if the number 2 in the probability equation were 3, or 2/3? I think this has a similar effect to just scaling all the modifiers a bit, but the algebra escapes me in this moment and I'm a bit lazy. In any case, reducing the base of the probability exponent should let you get a few more gradations near 50%, which is probably a good thing, since the default goes from 25% straight to 50% and then to 75% with no integer stops in between.

The {conflicted} package makes sure that namespace conflicts are solved explicitly and prevents unpleasent surprises: #rstats

US political contradictions; knowledge systems
As Trump at least partially succeeds in constructing an alternate reality for his most ardent followers, it's tempting to think of his dogma as false, in contrast to some imagined "truth" which his non-followers are smart enough to believe in. But a more nuanced view of knowledge would admit that different groups of people have different shared truths, constituting different knowledge systems which each deviate from what's objectively measurable in different ways, and in fact they each accept different standards of what is objective, so there's not really a single "ground truth" we can even compare to to determine which of these knowledge systems is "more correct" (similar problems arise even if we only care about "more useful").
To make this more concrete, we can see that e.g., competing quantum physics theories, or likewise competing religious beliefs, have no reasonable basis on which to judge between them, either in terms of "truth" or "utility." So the Trump-dogma knowledge system, although bad, morally repugnant, etc., can't so easily be dismissed as "false" in my view. "Distorted" or "malignant" or "evil" or "contradictory" are better monikers, in my opinion.
But what I'm even more interested in thinking about is: in what ways does the current American liberal "common sense" knowledge system already bear the scars of past fascist lies & contradictions? I can think of a few:
"Columbus was an explorer."
This is "factually accurate" in the same way some of Trump's propaganda is, but it's also a cruel distortion of "Columbus was a child murderer," and it's a misrepresentation that serves an evil purpose, yet which is widely taught in elementary schools today.
Another: "dropping atomic bombs on civilians in Japan was necessary to end WWII."
Perhaps in the future we'll have "family separation & the 2025 ICE crackdowns were necessary to end the immigration crisis," although I dearly hope not.
"Reparations for slavery aren't reasonable," is yet another...
I'll close this rambling with a question: what other fascist lies have you noticed that are normalized in America right now from past Trump-like leaders (or even from less overtly fascist institutions)?

The only jury I've ever been on faced a question about resisting arrest. The defendant was tackled by an officer and initially fought back (or so the officer claimed). The officer was wearing a police uniform, but we acquitted on the charge, because the defendant was tackled from behind and there was reasonable doubt as to whether the officer actually identified themselves verbally in a way that made it clear to the defendant they weren't being tackled by some random dude.
This ain't legal advice, but in situations where a kidnapper refuses to identify themselves, show a warrant, or even a badge number, I suspect a sufficiently white bystander might not be convicted on interference charges if they did something like a citizen's arrest of a suspicious out-of-town paramilitary type who was in the process of an extrajudicial kidnapping. If there are multiple kidnappers, to be effective you might need multiple people willing to face jail time for such interventions to be successful...
#resist #ICE #kidnapping
Just thinking about this in light of the recent kidnapping in the next town over where some fools called the city police thinking they might actually protect the community from an unlawful assault. Can't blame the fools too much because of how deep positive portrayals of cops are embedded in our media diet though...