Tootfinder

The background makes ir better than systemd-boot at least. Still not nearly as good as what I had on grub tho. Now I need to figure out if I can customise the rest of it too and if I can send old generations to a separate menu.
Today’s goal was getting remote boot to work before traveling tomorrow tho, so that’s good enough for now.
Commit: https://github.com/LuNeder/nixos-config/commit/01ea9893235654c716ad4200ae0405e031b42b6c

I agree with him. I'd like to see The Several States end straight-ticket voting. Even better, I'd like to see them remove the political parties from the ballots. Make people look for names.

The EU unconditionally approves Omnicom's $13.25B all-stock deal to buy Interpublic, creating the world's largest ad agency to better compete with Big Tech (Bart Meijer/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/eu-approves-omnicoms…

In the black of the winter of nineteen-nine
When we froze & bled on the picket line,
We showed the world that women could fight
& we rose & won with women's might.
https://kolektiva.social/@MikeDunnAuthor/115594417199677371

MikeDunnAuthor (@MikeDunnAuthor@kolektiva.social)
Attached: 1 image Today in Labor History November 22, 1909: The “Uprising of the 20,000” occurred in New York, as female, mostly Jewish, garment workers went on strike for better pay and an end to sweatshop working conditions. It was also known as the Shirtwaist Strike. 19-year-old Clara Lemlich, who led the strike, said she had no patience for talk and called for her coworkers to join in a General Strike. She made this speech not long after leaving the hospital after thugs had beat her up…

The EU unconditionally approves Omnicom's $13.25B all-stock deal to buy Interpublic, creating the world's largest ad agency to better compete with Big Tech (Bart Meijer/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/eu-approves-omnicoms…

Researching inequality – Northampton and the Welfare State https://edintone.com/northampton_1913-24/ Two studies of Northampton in 1913 and 1924 give us a detailed view of working-class life. @…

Researching inequality - Northampton and the Welfare State - Miscellanea Edintone
Two studies of Northampton in 1913 and 1924 give us a detailed view of working-class life and economic conditions in on the eve of World War 1 and the somewhat better situation in the early 1920s.

Spent half a day adding error checking for errors that can't really happen anyway on the advice of a robot.
Now, instead of crashing with an error message if the input data is impossibly broken, the function instead checks if the error exists, and if so quits with an error code and a slightly different error message.
This is better code apparently. I guess when it's longer there's more to read so it's more readable.

If #Musk 🏴‍☠️ were a guy from the lower middle class with an average income and net worth, he would have been committed to a psychiatric ward long ago.
But since he is the richest person in the world (which doesn't really mean much, but enough to cause damage), even a sociopath like Musk is tolerated—even though he has already caused enormous damage and that is probably not the end of it.

"There was no choice, there is no choice: either submit to capital or watch your ideas wither and die. There are no other practical ways to raise significant capital. Real Angels don’t exist"
On the Feudal-like structures in Silicon Valley. Written in 2018, but not much has changed.
https://<…

Anyone out there able to help Nadeen out at the last minute so she can pay her (and her sister’s) tuition to continue their studies? You would be gifting the world two new dentists for the low price of $2,000.
The last day for them to register is tomorrow.
Please share donate if you can.
💕
#academia

Black Coffee from lnbits likes internet of things, but doesn't like the way it tends to work with centralised servers and spying companies running them.
But what if your coffee pot and lights and smart plugs were nostr instead?
Nobody can cut your machine off, it has it's own keys and encryption, you could even ruin your own relay to talk to it instead of using public relays.
Remote control without having to expose the home network.
You could even make it require zaps and so make a vending machine.
Demonstration by sending lightning requests to the coffee pot on stage works better than the mikes that have been feeding back this afternoon 😆
#nostr #nostrshire #internetOfThings

There is a divide in the world centered around privilege. For many, the cries of people suffering terrible injustice and abuse are comfortably removed.
For others, the sight of privileged people deliberately tuning out the suffering that surrounds them so they can better enjoy their privilege is like getting kicked in the teeth after being knocked down by a bully.
Our society is a monstrous abomination of cruelty, greed, and self-absorption.
Consider Ukraine, and how the we…

Marti Malmi talks about cloud flare being down but nostr staying up.
Decentralised software isn't supposed to have these single points of failure, even though some clients failed due to dependency on it.
Media files in particular aren't as decentralised as we might hope. Can we decentralise that better? Content addressed media available from many servers should be better.
#nostrshire

A song for protesters in the US. Thanks for "going outside... [to] help organize something better, something beautiful."
John K. Samson, "Fantasy Baseball At The End Of The World" (2020)
https://johnksamsonmusic.bandcamp.com/albu…

RE: https://mastodon.world/@Arkenston/115748523371900734
Reality is better than AI

Many parts of the Internet I know and loath are mostly down. I hope this helps shake confidence in US BigTech. Probably won't, because if people were rational, they wouldn't have built the digital world we're currently forced to inhabit, but who knows, it might. Even the vague possibility of it has made my day better as I head to bed.

This applies to all of us #Researchers - why do we keep flying all around the world just to give (or watch) some talks that could have been given or watched online???
Yes, in-person conferences are slightly better for "networking"... but is this really worth destroying the planet?!
Quoting @…

After #Trump finally crashes and burns (I'm still saying I don't think he makes it to the mid terms, and I think it's more than possible he won't make it to the end of the year) we'll hear a lot of people say, "the system worked!" Today people are already talking about "saving democracy" by fighting back. This will become a big rally cry to vote (for Democrats, specifically), and the complete failure of the system will be held up as the best evidence for even greater investment in it.
I just want to point out that American democracy gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile, who, before being elected was already a well known sexual predator, and who made the campaign promise to commit genocide. He then preceded to commit genocide. And like, I don't care that he's "only" kidnaped and disappeared a few thousand brown people. That's still genocide. Even if you don't kill every member of a targeted group, any attempt to do so is still "committing genocide." Trump said he would commit genocide, then he hired all the "let's go do a race war" guys he could find and *paid* them to go do a race war. And, even now as this deranged monster is crashing out, he is still authorized to use the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
He committed genocide during his first term when his administration separated migrant parents and children, then adopted those children out to other parents. That's technically genocide. The point was to destroy the very people been sending right wing terror squads after.
There was a peaceful hand over of power to a known Russian asset *twice*, and the second time he'd already committed *at least one* act of genocide *and* destroyed cultural heritage sites (oh yeah, he also destroyed indigenous grave sites, in case you forgot, during his first term).
All of this was allowed because the system is set up to protect exactly these types of people, because *exactly* these types of people are *the entire power structure*.
Going back to that system means going back to exactly the system that gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile *TWICE*.
I'm already seeing the attempts to pull people back, the congratulations as we enter the final phase, the belief that getting Trump out will let us all get back to normal. Normal. The normal that lead here in the first place. I can already see the brunch reservations being made. When Trump is over, we will be told we won. We will be told that it's time to go back to sleep.
When they tell you everything worked, everything is better, that we can stop because we won, tell them "fuck you! Never again means never again." Destroy every system that ever gave these people power, that ever protected them from consequences, that ever let them hide what they were doing.
These democrats funded a genocide abroad and laid the groundwork for genocide at home. They protected these predators, for years. The whole power structure is guilty. As these files implicate so many powerful people, they're trying to shove everything back in the box. After all the suffering, after we've finally made it clear that we are the once with the power, only now they're willing to sacrifice Trump to calm us all down.
No, that's a good start but it can't be the end.
Winning can't be enough to quench that rage. Keep it burning. When this is over, let victory fan that anger until every institution that made this possible lies in ashes. Burn it all down and salt the earth. Taking down Trump is a great start, but it's not time to give up until this isn't possible again.
#USPol

I get the outrage, and the injustice of those sanctions, but 'Amazon', Uber, better off without those.
‘It’s surreal’: US sanctions lock International Criminal Court judge out of daily life – The Irish Times
https://www.irishti…

‘It’s surreal’: US sanctions lock International Criminal Court judge out of daily life
Canadian judge Kimberly Prost, is unable to use credit cards, transfer money or book everyday services in what she calls an attack on the independence of the judiciary

This is why the OpenBastard team needs to do more community outreach and not just commit more PRs
#cloudflare #opensource #foss

There's a Ghidra pull request to add hd6303/6301 - this is looking much better for doing Epson HX-20 stuff;
Copy the Processors/MC6800/data/languages/*6303* into a standard Ghidra world and run 'ant' in the data directory, restart - and it works!
https://github.com/NationalSecurityA…

Add support for HD6301 and HD6303 microcontrollers by depili · Pull Request #6314 · NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra
HD6303 is a Hitachi clone of 6803. This implementation has been done based on the Hitachi HD6301V1/HD6303R User's Manual. The ISA differs from 6805 and 6809. The flags are implemented as pseudo...

Thank you all for 3,000 followers on here! Here’s a photo of Danny to celebrate the occasion ☺️
3 years into being part of Mastodon, I continue to be impressed with how wonderful the people here are and how much this social network actually FEELS social. People replying to one another, having conversations, learning things, sharing moments of joy, making friends.
Mastodon brought my business clients, helped me gain confidence in my own voice, freed me from dependence on big tech and algorithms, rekindled my interests, introduced me to incredible people and projects, and served as a source of hope in humanity in the times when cynicism and nihilism felt all but inevitable.
I love our little corner of the internet, and am so glad that it’s still here despite everyone who professed it was doomed to fade into irrelevance.
Thank you to everyone reading these words for being here on the Fedi. The world is a little better thanks to your choice to support an independent web.

💧 Supercritical subsurface fluids open a window into the world
#geology

Supercritical subsurface fluids open a window into the world
Researchers have built on past studies and introduced new methods to explore the nature and role of subsurface fluids, including water, in the instances and behaviors of earthquakes and volcanoes. Their study suggests that water, even heavy rainfall, can play a role in or even trigger seismic events. This could potentially lead to better early warning systems.

It's been a whole since I publicly hated on the NYT, but the news today about David Brooks is a good reminder that The New York times is a garbage newspaper that the world would be better off without.

Python Folks, in my old Perl days I used HTML::Template, is there something comparable (or better) for simple HTML generation with templates in the Python world?
#python #html #perl

RE: https://toot.cat/@zkat/115737870313508332
Been afraid of similar knowledge for many years myself & still hoping to make the world a better place, at least a teensy bit... But yes, the right to "use for any purpose" has always been the weakest point…

We’re grateful to Elon Musk for proving once again
why the world needs to log off corporate-owned, centrally-controlled social media platforms
and log on to a better way of being online.
The world needs an open social web through the fediverse and Mastodon.
Calls for public institutions to invest in digital sovereignty are increasing across civil society.
The term "digital sovereignty" means that an institution has autonomy and control over the critical…

The world needs social sovereignty
The world needs to log off corporate-owned, centrally-controlled social media platforms and log on to a better way of being online. The world needs an open social web through the fediverse and Mastodon.

Ukraine update: Bessarabia is being overwhelmed by Russian fuckery, as Kremlin diverts resources to the "Transnistria" region of Moldova.
Rumors took little time to confirm, thanks to a true reporter on the ground in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to befuddle a shockingly ignorant and greedy American populace with the same old tricks, allowing Russia to run rampant...
Share the friend link to bypass the paywall, and give the world a better chance to glimpse t…

Ya Germany... do better.
😂😂😭😭
#Canada #Rail #Transportation
https://mastodon.world/@verdantsquare/115706907838681701

I made a script for this, but then I thought a webui would be better so I could use it in my phone and stuff
I asked an LLM to generate a python webui to run server-side the script I wrote, and surprisingly it 100% worked first try. I was sure it wouldn’t work at all, but I didn’t touch that code and it works.
I can’t even say I “vibe coded” this bc I didn’t even read the code enough to know its vibes lmao. I’m surprised this even works, and it does work well. What the actual fuck.
Welp, not my favourite way to do things but I wasn’t in the mood to do python and figure out the extra libraries and stuff.
And it works so I’ll just use that. In a hardened systemd service to make sure it doesn’t like accidentally delete my whole system or something.

Finished "Lobizona" by Romina Garber. I have extremely mixed feelings about this book. It's a powerful depiction of the fear of living as an undocumented child/teen and it has interesting things to say about rejection, belonging, and the choice between seeking to be recognized for who you are and wanting you blend in enough to be accepted as normal. However, it's also an explicit homage to Harry Potter, and while it doesn't include antisemitic tropes or glorify slavery or even have any anti-trans sentiments I can detect, to me the magical school setup felt forced and I thought it would have been a better book had it not tried to fit that mould. Also, it would have been a super interesting situation to explore trans issues, and while it's definitely fine for it not to do that, the author's praise of Rowling's work has me wondering...
There's a sequel that I think could in theory be amazing, but given the execution of the first book, I think I'll wait a bit before checking it out. By putting her main character in opposition to both ICE in the human world and the magical authorities in the other world, Garber explicitly sets the stage for a revolution standing between her protagonist and any kind of lasting peace. But I'm not confident she's capable of writing that story without relying on some kind of supernatural deus ex machina, which would be disappointing to me, since "a better world if only possible through divine intervention" is an inherently regressive message.
Overall, #OwnVoices fantasy centering an undocumented immigrant is an excellent thing, and I've certainly got a lot of privilege that surely influences my criticism. However, #OwnVoices stuff has a range of levels of craft and political stances, and it can be excellent for some reasons and mediocre for others.
On that point, if anyone reading this has suggestions for fiction books grappling with borders and the carceral state, Is be happy to hear them.
#AmReading

Sometimes it feels like nothing I do is good enough to overcome the biases I face.
No one tells you that the glass ceiling is covered in shards of sharp glass spikes rather than getting mashed against a smooth glass surface.
I worked so hard to create a better world for the people around me that I almost forgot that no one was creating a better world for me.

We’re grateful to Elon Musk for proving once again
why the world needs to log off corporate-owned, centrally-controlled social media platforms
and log on to a better way of being online.
The world needs an open social web through the fediverse and Mastodon.
Calls for public institutions to invest in digital sovereignty are increasing across civil society.
The term "digital sovereignty" means that an institution has autonomy and control over the critical…

The world needs social sovereignty
The world needs to log off corporate-owned, centrally-controlled social media platforms and log on to a better way of being online. The world needs an open social web through the fediverse and Mastodon.

Miguel Ángel Russo passed away yesterday. Besides his sports achievements, he was loved and respected everywhere he go. And he died doing what he loved and being fully conscious about it, I can't think of a better way to leave this life.
Today, football is a little bit worse.
https://www.batimes.…

Ofcourse…. The US is better friends with Russia then with Europe.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/kremlin-says-new-us-security-strategy-accords-largely-with-russias-view-2025-12-07/

Nadeen and her sister need $2,000 to pay their tuition fees to continue studying.
If anyone wants to sponsor their education, this is your chance to gift our world two young dentists.
💕
#Gaza #Palestine #FediAid

i think we learned the wrong lessons from left-pad. maybe it would create a better world if any npm user could pull a "stop cord" for the entire silicon valley corporate environment

I'm no fan of the the U.S. prison industrial complex or its justice system, but I can't help but think how much better the world would be now if they'd just locked Tim Allen away for life all those years ago

Today we celebrate all the wonderful creatures who share our planet. Happy World Animal Day! May every animal live a life full of love, kindness, and care.
#worldanimalday

That’s almost certainly the better strategy for them, even if the cynical view is true and they really are an investment org and not an educational institution at heart. We know that caving to bullies just marks you as a target. We know that, as @… said, those who resist grow in stature, and those who capitulate emerge as shadows of themselves (https://www.theindex.media/p/donald-trump-can-t-make-cowards-of-us-all). If Harvard is a brand, well….
But investment is a fear-driven world, and there’s a lot of fear circulating.
5/

"The system now maintains 38-nanosecond median RMS offset from the GPS PPS reference, with frequency drift that’s barely detectable in the noise."
"World’s Most Stable Raspberry Pi? 81% Better NTP with Thermal Management" – Austin Pivarnik
https://

I love Deerhoof’s Actually, You Can not just as a great, fun album but as a time capsule from an optimistic moment. In late 2021, we seemed to be emerging from the shadows of Trump and Covid-19—who’d have thought the Four Seasons presser and the vaccines, respectively, didn't end them? The music bottles up joyful, radical imaginings of a better world that were in the air since the George Floyd rebellion, not yet extinguished by the reactionary “crime” panic to come.

I've been reminded how completely terrible some people are this week and I don't like it one bit.
I guess I am just amazed (though maybe I shouldn't be?) at how much people do not give one shit about other human beings.
Perhaps it's not surprise the world is in the state it is in right now...
But! I can't give up and I won't give in... I know there are good people out there, people who care about others, and want to build a better world... and that&…

Super Mario Odyssey: completed!
It seems a little contrived to say it's completed, really, since I can see that there are over half the moons I am yet to discover, and the game is still throwing new ideas at me each time I play. However, Peach has been rescued, Bowser is defeated, and the world is a better place. I stopped the wedding, which I hasten to add wouldn't have been legally binding in any case as Peach was not entering it of her own free will.

Multi-Armed Bandits with Minimum Aggregated Revenue Constraints
Ahmed Ben Yahmed, Hafedh El Ferchichi, Marc Abeille, Vianney Perchet
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12523 https://

Multi-Armed Bandits with Minimum Aggregated Revenue Constraints
We examine a multi-armed bandit problem with contextual information, where the objective is to ensure that each arm receives a minimum aggregated reward across contexts while simultaneously maximizing the total cumulative reward. This framework captures a broad class of real-world applications where fair revenue allocation is critical and contextual variation is inherent. The cross-context aggregation of minimum reward constraints, while enabling better performance and easier feasibility, intro…

She's right. So very, very right.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOwANiADYoc/?igsh=dnFiN3M5cjJjZXF6

Irene's Entropy on Instagram: "In a world where the top is trying to tear us apart, know that we hold power in our every day decisions of how we treat our friends, strangers, and neighbors. There is always some commonality in our human experience. Find it. Sometimes it takes work, but it’s what will make this world a better place. #storyteller #musician #news #currentevents #quinceñera #empowerment #love #fyp"
229K likes, 15K comments - irenes.entropy on September 18, 2025: "In a world where the top is trying to tear us apart, know that we hold power in our every day decisions of how we treat our friends, strangers, and neighbors. There is always some commonality in our human experience. Find it. Sometimes it takes work, but it’s what will make this world a better place. #storyteller #musician #news #currentevents #quinceñera #empowerment #love #fyp".

Anything to deflect the narrative!
Adelita Grijalva elected but not yet sworn in.
Epstein files not released.
Hundreds of thousands will lose health care under the Republican budget.
Foreign governments buying gold and not USD.
But what is the MSM reporting?
Democrats shut down the Government.
Blue cities unsafe.
Tylenol unsafe.
Circumcision unsafe.
And now we get to talk about this?

mekka okereke :verified: (@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io)
Attached: 1 image Some of y'all are pointing out that Trump ran the FBI on Jan 6, and had run it for ~1,400 days straight at this point. But this doesn't have to pass your discerning eye. It has to work on people that believe that Haitians eat your dogs, and that raw milk and Ivermectin is better than vaccines.🤷🏿‍♂️ You live in a world where the Ivermectin sipping, Black people hating, anti-vaxxers have consolidated enough power that they don't have to even pretend to care what …

So you know how keyboards in VR are a pain in the ass?
Maybe Tacoma’s method for text input is actually a good option for VR, sign language. I don’t really know sign language and I know they differ between languages, but for hand tracking headsets gestures seem like a way better text input than most VR keyboards out there

"...one notable policy initiative from the world body was not discussed by world leaders when it should have been. UN secretary-general António Guterres has put together a high-level group of specialists to propose new indicators for human and planetary prosperity that go ‘Beyond GDP’."
A #Nature journal editorial:
End GDP mania: how the world should really measure prosperity

End GDP mania: how the world should really measure prosperity
The obsession with economic output as a measure of human development puts sustainability on the back burner. Researchers can now help to devise better indicators.

Just wrote two more ministers with the request to vote AGAINS #chatcontrol .
Imagine a world where antidemocratics gain power—and want to “cleanse” the country. What better tool than access to all private chats?
My grandma experienced denunciations during WW2. I don’t want to relive that. And backdoors can and WILL be exploited by enemies of the country.
And once it's …

Die Chatkontrolle ist wieder da und wir haben nur noch ein paar Wochen, um die EU-Pläne für CSAM-Scans zu stoppen. | Tuta
Die EU-Verordnung zur Verhütung und Bekämpfung von sexuellem Kindesmissbrauch, die erstmals im Mai 2022 veröffentlicht wurde, ist zum "meistkritisierten Gesetz aller Zeiten" geworden. Hier erfahren Sie, wie Sie es jetzt stoppen können!

I still like better the South Park interpretation of Hegseth, but what South Park lacks is Jost's looks and delivery. His Hegseth would never be kicked in the ass and thrown out the door. No possibility of anything like this happening exists in real-Hegseth's self-imagined world.
Pentagon Press Conference Cold Open - SNL
https://ww…

I mean, only better...

Open science hymn.
Imagine no more journals
It's easy if you try.
No more rejections
No "publish or you'll die".
Imagine everybody
Having access to your work.
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join me And the world'll be a better one

The thing about the headlong dash to AI is that it makes very clear that there is just SO MUCH money just sloshing around waiting for an opportunity.
Money that was made by tightening the screws on the labour force another turn, that they didn't even know what to do with.
Money ground of an increasingly oppressive system that they didn't even have anything to spend it on.
Money that could have been making the world a better place all along, except that wasn't…

Which countries have the most patent applications per million inhabitants?
My Dataguessr score:
✅✅🟥✅✅🟥✅
Can you do better?
https://dataguessr.com/

Dataguessr
Update your knowledge of the world. One quiz at a time.

Saw something unremarked in the background of a YouTube video, spent 5 minutes in CAD, walked to the 3D printer and pushed the button. An hour later my life was just that little bit better.
I like that that is possible nowadays, much as I dislike so much else about the modern world.

Today, I designed, built and launched a small software application within very strict financial, security, hardware and software constraints.
Then I helped people with all levels of tech skill, and different hardware and software configurations, get it running with their own setups.
That's a lot of corporate speak and being vague, but it feels good to have it out in the world helping people: letting them get a very specific thing done better.

A great quote from the book Autocracy Inc from Ann Applebaum, a recommended read. A good description of the atmosphere the Trump administration tries to create.
#trump #autocracy #applebaum

Small is Sufficient: Reducing the World AI Energy Consumption Through Model Selection
Tiago da Silva Barros, Fr\'ed\'eric Giroire, Ramon Aparicio-Pardo, Joanna Moulierac
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01889

Small is Sufficient: Reducing the World AI Energy Consumption Through Model Selection
The energy consumption and carbon footprint of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have become critical concerns due to rising costs and environmental impacts. In response, a new trend in green AI is emerging, shifting from the "bigger is better" paradigm, which prioritizes large models, to "small is sufficient", emphasizing energy sobriety through smaller, more efficient models. We explore how the AI community can adopt energy sobriety today by focusing on model selection during inference. Model se…

China to start reducing its CO2 emissions within a decade!
Wind and solar to reach 3.6 TW by 2035; that's just a little below what the whole world has installed so far.
https://bsky.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did…

Simon Evans (@drsimevans.carbonbrief.org)
NEW: China's president Xi Jinping unexpectedly joins the UN climate summit, by video, to offer his nation's 2035 climate pledge * Cut GHGs to 7-10% below peak by 2035, "striving to do better" * Raise non-fossil share of energy to at least 30% * Boost wind/solar to 3,600GW

Mitigating Modal Imbalance in Multimodal Reasoning
Chen Henry Wu, Neil Kale, Aditi Raghunathan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02608 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.…

Mitigating Modal Imbalance in Multimodal Reasoning
Foundation models (FMs) deployed in real-world tasks such as computer-use agents must integrate diverse modalities. How good are FMs at performing joint reasoning, simultaneously reasoning over multiple modalities, especially when the modalities interact and relate to each other to form cross-modal context? To better understand this problem, we study FMs on cross-modal conflicts: scenarios where conflicting evidence is presented across modalities. This allows us to examine whether FMs prioritiz…

Hummm. This chair seems to fit better than any stool.
But will it fit under the dresser?...
Probably? My measurements in the model aren't great. I was way off in the length of the room it turned out.

Sonnet 075 - LXXV
So are you to my thoughts as food to life,
Or as sweet-season'd showers are to the ground;
And for the peace of you I hold such strife
As 'twixt a miser and his wealth is found.
Now proud as an enjoyer, and anon
Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure;
Now counting best to be with you alone,
Then better'd that the world may see my pleasure:
Sometime all full with feasting on your sight,
And by…

Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
.
.
.
I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading

"""
Traditional politics of assistance and the repression of unemployment were now called into question. The need for reform became urgent.
Poverty was gradually separated from the old moral confusions. Economic crises had shown that unemployment could not be confused with indolence, as indigence and enforced idleness spread throughout the countryside, to precisely the places that had previously been considered home to the purest and most immediate forms of moral life. This demonstrated that poverty did not solely fall under the order of the fault: ‘Begging is the fruit of poverty, which in turn is the consequence of accidents in the production of the earth or in the output of factories, of a rise in the price of basic foodstuffs, or of growth of the population, etc.’ Indigence became a matter of economics.
But it was not contingent, nor was it destined to be suppressed forever. There would always be a certain quantity of poverty that could never be effaced, a sort of fatal indigence that would accompany all forms of society until the end of time, even in places where all the idle were employed: ‘The only paupers in a well governed state must be those born in indigence, or those who fall into it by accident.’ This backdrop of poverty was somehow inalienable: whether by birth or accident, it formed an inevitable part of society. The state of lack was so firmly entrenched in the destiny of man and the structure of society that for a long time the idea of a state without paupers remained inconceivable: in the thought of philosophers, property, work and indigence were terms linked right up until the nineteenth century.
This portion of poverty was necessary because it could not be suppressed; but it was equally necessary in that it made wealth possible. Because they worked but consumed little, a class of people in need allowed a nation to become rich, to release the value of its fields, colonies and mines, making products that could be sold throughout the world. An impoverished people, in short, was a people that had no poor. Indigence became an indispensable element in the state. It hid the secret but most real life of society. The poor were the seat and the glory of nations. And their noble misery, for which there was no cure, was to be exalted:
«My intention is solely to invite the authorities to turn part of their vigilant attention to considering the portion of the People who suffer … the assistance that we owe them is linked to the honour and prosperity of the Empire, of which the Poor are the firmest bulwark, for no sovereign can maintain and extend his domain without favouring the population, and cultivating the Land, Commerce and the Arts; and the Poor are the necessary agents for the great powers that reveal the true force of a People.»
What we see here is a moral rehabilitation of the figure of the Pauper, bringing about the fundamental economic and social reintegration of his person. Paupers had no place in a mercantilist economy, as they were neither producers nor consumers, and they were idle, vagabond or unemployed, deserving nothing better than confinement, a measure that extracted and exiled them from society. But with the arrival of the industrial economy and its thirst for manpower, paupers were once again a part of the body of the nation.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Can Synthetic Query Rewrites Capture User Intent Better than Humans in Retrieval-Augmented Generation?
JiaYing Zheng, HaiNan Zhang, Liang Pang, YongXin Tong, ZhiMing Zheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22325

Can Synthetic Query Rewrites Capture User Intent Better than Humans in Retrieval-Augmented Generation?
Multi-turn RAG systems often face queries with colloquial omissions and ambiguous references, posing significant challenges for effective retrieval and generation. Traditional query rewriting relies on human annotators to clarify queries, but due to limitations in annotators' expressive ability and depth of understanding, manually rewritten queries often diverge from those needed in real-world RAG systems, resulting in a gap between user intent and system response. We observe that high-quality …

Incentivizing Time-Aware Fairness in Data Sharing
Jiangwei Chen, Kieu Thao Nguyen Pham, Rachael Hwee Ling Sim, Arun Verma, Zhaoxuan Wu, Chuan-Sheng Foo, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09240

Incentivizing Time-Aware Fairness in Data Sharing
In collaborative data sharing and machine learning, multiple parties aggregate their data resources to train a machine learning model with better model performance. However, as the parties incur data collection costs, they are only willing to do so when guaranteed incentives, such as fairness and individual rationality. Existing frameworks assume that all parties join the collaboration simultaneously, which does not hold in many real-world scenarios. Due to the long processing time for data cle…

This brings to mind Gladstone's quote about judging a society based on how it treats its dead. We've got to do better. #JusticeReform #PrisonReform

These Families Wanted to Lay Their Loved Ones to Rest. They Had to Bring Them Home From Prison First.
Policies that dictate what happens after a death behind bars often add new layers of pain — and financial and logistical challenges — for those left behind.

Energy-Regularized Sequential Model Editing on Hyperspheres
Qingyuan Liu, Jia-Chen Gu, Yunzhi Yao, Hong Wang, Nanyun Peng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01172 https://

Energy-Regularized Sequential Model Editing on Hyperspheres
Large language models (LLMs) require constant updates to remain aligned with evolving real-world knowledge. Model editing offers a lightweight alternative to retraining, but sequential editing often destabilizes representations and induces catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we seek to better understand and mitigate performance degradation caused by sequential editing. We hypothesize that hyperspherical uniformity, a property that maintains uniform distribution of neuron weights on a hypersp…

🤠 Deforestation and disease spread as Nicaragua ignores illegal cattle ranching
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/10/deforestation-and-disease-spread-as-nicaragua-ignores-illegal-cattle-ranching/

Deforestation and disease spread as Nicaragua ignores illegal cattle ranching
Illegal cattle ranching has torn through Nicaragua’s rainforests in recent years, supplying a growing international market for meat despite calls for better oversight of the industry. Now, the country is feeling the consequences, as disease spreads through the unchecked movement of livestock. Cases of New World screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax), or NWS, a fly that feeds […]

Oh, Steam games actually launch on wayland now. That’s progress. They seem to look better than on X11 too, maybe due to HDR?
Can Steam Link please work now tho?

A Technique Based on Trade-off Maps to Visualise and Analyse Relationships Between Objectives in Optimisation Problems
Rodrigo Lankaites Pinheiro, Dario Landa-Silva, Jason Atkin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00877

A Technique Based on Trade-off Maps to Visualise and Analyse Relationships Between Objectives in Optimisation Problems
Understanding the relationships between objectives in a multiobjective optimisation problem is important for developing tailored and efficient solving techniques. In particular, when tackling combinatorial optimisation problems with many objectives, that arise in real-world logistic scenarios, better support for the decision maker can be achieved through better understanding of the often complex fitness landscape. This paper makes a contribution in this direction by presenting a technique that …

"My concern is not artificial intelligence, but natural stupidity. I think that's what drives most of the world's worst features. But I did want it to have the arrogance of Victor [Frankenstein] be similar in some ways to the tech bros. He's kind of blind, creating something without considering the consequences and I think we have to take a pause and consider where we're going."
Guillemo del Toro in an interview about his Frankenstein movie.

Guillermo Del Toro Compares His Victor Frankenstein to Tech Bros
The Frankenstein director would 'rather die' than use generative AI.

The Thirteenth Floor (1999) was a great concept but the execution (the acting and dialogue) weren't the greatest - and this is coming from me, who watches and doesn't mind a lot of B movies. This one could really do with a modern remake. Simulation etc type stuff. I can just imagine this remade now, but so much better 😂
https://boxd.it/294Y<…

The Thirteenth Floor (1999)
In Los Angeles, a wealthy man, known as Mr. Fuller, discovers a shocking secret about the world he lives in. Fearing for his life, he leaves a desperate message for a friend of his in the most unexpected place.

As an historian of the fur trade in Canada, I think it's sort of perfect that the Thomson and especially the Weston families get the charter. Nobody performed the proud Canadian tradition of corporate monopoly over the basic necessities of life and knowledge of the outside world better or longer than the HBC.
htt…

Thomson, Weston families win Hudson's Bay charter auction with sole bid | CBC News
The Hudson's Bay Company has chosen the new owners of the royal charter that created the company more than 350 years ago.

Bedroom is done! Well. Builders are finished anyway. I still have to buy a bed and stuff to put in it, and since I've spent all my money that'll have to wait until payday. And then it's nearly xmas so probably better to wait until January.
There's a clasp missing to hold the window shutters shut. The one we had was too big. Should be able to screw one in myself tomorrow.
Doing all the lights and stuff will takes months and months probably.
But I can go back to sleeping in late instead of getting up to let the builders in every day.

Maybe I should mention how well it does.
It's caught some bugs before they're published, some fairly serious. But mostly its hallucinated many problems which aren't really there.
With all the code we write being reviewed by robots now, the code is written slightly differently to avoid it going on about issues that aren't really there.
People imagine that code is written for the computer to run, but really it's always been written for the programmers to understand. Now it's also written keeping in mind it'll be reviewed by an AI that has no context or understanding tasked with nit-picking to review.
Arguably this is ending up with better code. More unnecessary re-validation of everything mostly, but its also taking longer rather than being quicker.
Is that more efficient? 🤷 Sort of maybe?
3/3

The Kremlin has heaped praise on Donald Trump’s latest national security strategy,
calling it an encouraging change of policy
that largely aligns with Russian thinking.
The remarks follow the publication of a White House document on Friday
💥that criticises the EU and says Europeis at risk of “civilisational erasure”,
💥while making clear the US is keen to establish better relations with Russia.
🔥“The adjustments that we see correspond in many ways to our vi…

SEEC: Stable End-Effector Control with Model-Enhanced Residual Learning for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
Jaehwi Jang, Zhuoheng Wang, Ziyi Zhou, Feiyang Wu, Ye Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21231

SEEC: Stable End-Effector Control with Model-Enhanced Residual Learning for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
Arm end-effector stabilization is essential for humanoid loco-manipulation tasks, yet it remains challenging due to the high degrees of freedom and inherent dynamic instability of bipedal robot structures. Previous model-based controllers achieve precise end-effector control but rely on precise dynamics modeling and estimation, which often struggle to capture real-world factors (e.g., friction and backlash) and thus degrade in practice. On the other hand, learning-based methods can better mitig…

Day 5: Robin Wall Kimmerer
I'm taking these liberty of changing my hashtag and expanding the intent of this list to include all non-men, although Kimerer is a woman so I'll get to more gender diversity later... I've also started planning this out more and realized that I may continue a bit beyond 20...
In any case, Robin Wall Kimmerer is an Indigenous academic biologist and excellent non-fiction author whose work touches on Potawotomi philosophy, colonialism (including in academic spaces), and ideas for a better future. Anyone interested in ecology, conservation, or decolonization in North America will probably be impressed by her work and the rich connections she weaves between academic ecology and Indigenous knowledge offer a critical opportunity to expand your understanding of the world if like me you were raised deeply enmeshed in "Western" scientific tradition. I suppose a little background in skepticism helped prepare me to respect her writing, but I don't think that's essential.
I've only read "Braiding Sweetgrass," but "Gathering Moss" and her more recent "The Serviceberry" are high on my to-read list, despite my predilection for fiction. Kimmerer incorporates a backbone of fascinating anecdotes into "Braiding Sweetgrass" that makes it surprisingly easy reading for a work that's philosophical at its core. She also pulls off an impressive braided organization to the whole thing, weaving together disparate knowledges in a way that lets you see both their contradictions and their connections.
The one criticism I've seen of her work is that it's not sufficiently connected to other Indigenous philosophers & writers, and that it's perhaps too comfortable of a read for colonizers, and that seems valid to me, even though (perhaps because I am a colonizer) I still find her book important.
An excellent author in any case, and one doing concrete ideological work towards a better world.
#20AuthorsNoMen

Is it talent?
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQM0-w2jEOd/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

Duaa Izzidien - Visual Storyteller & Artist on Instagram: "I had far too much fun creating this reel and couldn’t bring myself to delete any of it to make it shorter and more algorithm friendly 🙈 If you watched it all the way to the end - well done! You’ve just demonstrated the very thing the reel is about - showing up is the only talent that matters. My arrows don’t always hit the target. My paintings don’t always turn out how I planned. And honestly? Life rarely goes the way I intend. But really that isn’t what matters. In Islam we say that actions are by intentions and that sometimes means letting go of controlling our outcomes. We can control our intentions, our effort, showing up - but we have to remember that the result doesn’t actually come from those actions. Sometimes the arrow misses because there’s a better lesson waiting or perhaps it’s to remind you to stay humble and remember that ‘you’ are not the architect of your success. Sometimes the painting goes “wrong” because it’s becoming something more beautiful than you imagined. Sometimes life doesn’t work out the way you planned because there’s something different, better, round the corner for you. A huge thank you to @thabitoon_archers and @mamluk.academy for teaching me. You’ve taught me far more than just archery - you’ve taught me a rich history and life lessons that bring peace. (any mistakes in my form are entirely mine!). Want to learn how to use art as a tool for trusting and letting go of control? DM me ‘CREATE’ and I’ll show you these techniques. #showingisenough #trusttheprocess #archery #archerygirl #traditionalarchery #archerylife #overwhelm #personalgrowth #innerstrength #growthmindset #breakthrough #findingmyself #resilience #transformation #letgoofcontrol"
24K likes, 763 comments - duaaizzidien on October 24, 2025: "I had far too much fun creating this reel and couldn’t bring myself to delete any of it to make it shorter and more algorithm friendly 🙈 If you watched it all the way to the end - well done! You’ve just demonstrated the very thing the reel is about - showing up is the only talent that matters. My arrows don’t always hit the target. My paintings don’t always turn out how I planned. And honestly? Life rarely goes the way I …

I wish the Milwaukee Recreation web site was easier to use / better designed but then I guess I wish for a lot of things...
Like, also it's amazing that 30 years into the World Wide Web thing there are so many terrible and crappy and difficult to use web sites.
https://milwaukeerecreation.net/

Future Plans:
I have like ten years of data in my log, converted from those prior prototypes. I will be adding ways to more usefully compare and analyse data going this far back.
It could maybe use a milestone function, to track singular events which don't take actual time so don't spread on the grid. Snack tracking and the like.
It could likely use a flashcard system, with spaced repetition to review the flashcards, for better memory and recall.
Synching between devices might be nice, and lots will suggest doing that through Nostr, but Nostr is a bit public. Would need an encryption layer. Do nostr relays want to relay encrypted data from one user to themselves I suspect Veilid ( https://veilid.com/ ) would be a better option. The "no servers" ethos probably includes nostr relays.
Mostly I plan just more and better ways to view the ten years and growing of data I already have. And to do some other things for a bit so my log isn't just full of "Vibecoding Exocortex" like it is the last two weeks 😉

Symmetry breaking in collective decision-making through higher-order interactions
David March-Pons, Romualdo Pastor-Satorras, M. Carmen Miguel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00853 h…

Symmetry breaking in collective decision-making through higher-order interactions
Collective decision-making is a widespread phenomenon in both biological and artificial systems, where individuals reach a consensus through social interactions. While traditional models of opinion dynamics and contagion focus on pairwise interactions, recent research emphasizes the importance of including higher-order group interactions and autonomous behavior to better reflect real-world complexity. In this work, we introduce a collective decision-making model inspired by social insects. In o…

A day without work with the worker calling in sick.
Seems to be better today though.
We have shelves in the closet and another frame is in construction here. Presumably for the window doors.
Painting has begun. Colour would ideally be half a shade darker but getting varnish for pine in blue seems to be surprisingly tricky. Maybe another coat will help but don't want to lose the wood grain under it.
Might have tried to get a slightly more pale wall if I'd known. So many things you don't really know until you see 'em.
Feels like I'm being gassed, opened up all the windows and doors. This paint takes a long time to try and apparently stinks up the flat while it does so.

Researching inequality – Northampton and the Welfare State https://edintone.com/northampton_1913-24/ Two studies of Northampton in 1913 and 1924 give us a detailed view of working-class life

Researching inequality - Northampton and the Welfare State - Miscellanea Edintone
Two studies of Northampton in 1913 and 1924 give us a detailed view of working-class life and economic conditions in on the eve of World War 1 and the somewhat better situation in the early 1920s.

Generating Difficult-to-Translate Texts
Vil\'em Zouhar, Wenda Xu, Parker Riley, Juraj Juraska, Mara Finkelstein, Markus Freitag, Dan Deutsch
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26592

Generating Difficult-to-Translate Texts
Machine translation benchmarks sourced from the real world are quickly obsoleted, due to most examples being easy for state-of-the-art translation models. This limits the benchmark's ability to distinguish which model is better or to reveal models' weaknesses. Current methods for creating difficult test cases, such as subsampling or from-scratch synthesis, either fall short of identifying difficult examples or suffer from a lack of diversity and naturalness. Inspired by the iterative process of…

In which I talk about pet peeves in TV shows and how they pull you out of a story. Sorry the post is late today. Website problems.
https://www.bobmuellerwriter.com/ow-isnt-enough-writers-we-can-do-better/

Some people like to go on and on about corruption in Ukraine, but it is often more complicated than these people say.
The USA has had its tendrils in the Ukrainian corruption for a long time. The FBI even has an agent with their own office in one of the corruption agencies.
Giorgio is a hero reporting from the trenches of democracy in Ukraine. He share the friend link so the world has a better chance of discovering the truth.
Please support Ukraine and Giorgio's work by…

Paint samples arrived today and it was obvious which was gonna work better so I ordered a full 2.5l can.
Only to get an email back saying they can't make that colour in that varnish. Weird. That was literally the only actually blue they said they'd do last time they said they couldn't deliver what the website let me order.
After some discussion they have referred it to the Tainting Supervisor and it's apparently going to be here Monday.
Similarly for the wood, failed to arrive again today. They reckon Monday this time really for reals. Fingers crossed coz the carpenter can't do more until the wood arrives really and he's going on holiday this time next week.
So assuming the wood comes, four days to build the doors and finish off the walls of the closet and stuff.
Hopefully it can all be done in that time. Or at least the hard bits leaving the easy stuff for the less carpentery builder.

When you're watching a stream in 4K, does anyone else run into the audio begin about half a second behind the video? If like to have the better video quality of 4K but the audio issue drives me nuts.

"What do you lose by using Facebook", asked a friend who is keen to keep his account there for some reason.
What made me leave was the manipulation. I mean: they started hiding your friends posts in order to show you adverts instead! Feeding you slop from their promoted posts and "viral" messages (that aren't actually boosted by anyone, just picked out by their megaphone to show to everyone).
If you let the algorithm determine what you see than you let it determine what you are, who you become.
Even if you think it's better at finding shiny things than you, even if you think it builds the parasocial relationships that you want, even if you think it's saving you time to let the robot manage your reading-list: if you are letting Facebook, or any algorithm written by advertisers, do your reading selection then you are letting Facebook decide who you are.
On behalf of the advertisers who bribe them the most.
This is why you gotta use RSS. You gotta use the chronological timelines not the "for you" feeds. You gotta build follow relationships that you choose and understand because otherwise, you are letting the corporation and it's systems determine these things. You are abdicating some control of your very self to the machine.
Not to mention that we have to stop feeding money to the evil multi-trillion dollar companies built to control and manipulate us through our relationships with our friends. They have enough money, they need less participation not more.
#fediverse #algorithm

When Doug Ford... DOUG FORD... comes across as the conciliatory, nice guy…?
"“What do they expect me to do? Sit back and roll over like every other person in the world?” he said, adding the video was “successful” with over 11.4 billion impressions.
“So why doesn't the president start being nice? Play nice in the sandbox to his biggest customer in the entire world and everything's hunky dory," Ford said.”
Let's face it Canadian friends, the USA is not a nice trading partner. This is a full on abusive relationship and the quicker we can extract ourselves from it, the better.
#CanPoli #CdnPoli #USA #Trade #TheAmericanFascist
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/doug-ford-us-ambassador-apology-ad-9.6958531

I am quite keen to watch The War Between The Land And The Sea on iplayer.
But we need to consider tactics. Will the folks sit and watch it with me at Xmas? If they would that'd perhaps be better than whatever drivel quiz shows and police car chase stuff they normally make me watch.
If they won't I'll be be postponing it three weeks for no reason.
🤔
Might be nice to watch it in the new bedroom but that probably won't have a bed or a chair until the new year.
#watching #doctorWho #onlyNotDoctorWho #tv