Tootfinder

(Speaking as someone who, to my shame, once worked for the Dread Pirate) And this would be a problem how?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/may/12/jamie-dimon-jp-morgan-could-scrap-new-3bn-hq-…

"Rejoice, for even though we do, verily, walk through the valley of the shadow of death, not all the phantasms we see in the valley are as dark as they appear."
This essay, like all the essays on my blog, is on #CreativeCommons Attribution/Share Alike licence.
Please feel free to republish it anywhere.

AGI Will Not Have a Lizard Brain
Rejoice, for even though we do, verily, walk through the valley of the shadow of death, not all the phantasms we see in the valley are as dark as they appear.

"We are in a period where we face huge challenges on many fronts: the planet is burning, the species which provide the ecosystem services we depend on to survive are going extinct, we are fighting wars over resources. We need to focus on the real risks we face. #ArtificialGeneralIntelligence is not one of these. It may happen, but probably not soon. If it does happen, i…

AGI Will Not Have a Lizard Brain
Rejoice, for even though we do, verily, walk through the valley of the shadow of death, not all the phantasms we see in the valley are as dark as they appear.

Okay, I need the prog supervisors to have a charter amendment ready to go to require BOS confirmation for mayoral appointees that fill vacancies. If it doesn't have six votes now, so be it, just have it ready for that final vote the minute Chow/Gee or Brooke are seated. It is very unusual and obviously prone to corruption that SF lets its mayor fill vacancies unilaterally

London Breed said she’d appoint Stephen Sherrill to curry favor with Bloomberg, 2 former staffers say
Former staffers' statements are first on-record allegations of compromised appointment process of Stephen Sherrill by London Breed.

"none of these legacy behaviours are rational. They arise out of that bundle of behaviours inherited from our two billion years of sexually selected ancestors... If our ancestors had not had these behaviours, we would not be here. Our ancestors were not, in the sense we mean here, rational... A purely rational being — a being created ab initio rational — would not have these behaviours.
No one is proposing to build an AI with a lizard brain. It won't happen."

AGI Will Not Have a Lizard Brain
Rejoice, for even though we do, verily, walk through the valley of the shadow of death, not all the phantasms we see in the valley are as dark as they appear.

"our energy systems are already massively in carbon debt. We cannot afford to borrow any more carbon from fossil reserves. To burn carbon now to build AGI on the vague hope that it may by some remote chance produce systems with more insight than we now have, at a time when our politicians are already failing to act on the very clear data being produced by their own scientists, it the purest folly"
#AGI

AGI Will Not Have a Lizard Brain
Rejoice, for even though we do, verily, walk through the valley of the shadow of death, not all the phantasms we see in the valley are as dark as they appear.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MiddayShow
Brooke Combe:
🎵 Tears Won’t Lie
#BrookeCombe
https://open.spotify.com/track/07LUwalhQE7iHMxr1r3HIq

"we are at the end of days. Our planet — which is, as far as we know, the only planet anywhere in the universe to support intelligent life — is literally burning as I write this, and it is burning because we are burning it. Building huge data centres to pursue the egocentric fantasies of kleptocrat pirates only accelerates that process"
#AGI

AGI Will Not Have a Lizard Brain
Rejoice, for even though we do, verily, walk through the valley of the shadow of death, not all the phantasms we see in the valley are as dark as they appear.

Does anyone have a comprehensive spreadsheet of the #Holyrood2026 results that they're prepared to share? It's obvious that BallotBoxScotland has a really good one, but as far as I can see he's not sharing it. SPICe say they're getting their figures from the BBC website(!), but I can't find a spreadsheet download there, either.
I mean I could web-scrape the BBC and W…

I seem to have written a wee essay about #ArtificialGeneralIntelligence #AGI
It's probably not in its final form yet, I'll probably revise a bit. Comments welcome.

AGI Will Not Have a Lizard Brain
Rejoice, for even though we do, verily, walk through the valley of the shadow of death, not all the phantasms we see in the valley are as dark as they appear.

Well, Jings.
#Starmer has chosen today of all days to send TWENTY SIX more toffs to the House of Lords.
OK, it seems that this bunch of chancers are 'procedural'. but... Read the room, man, read the room.

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@dyckron/116395351623673805
I think that if you look at Scotland, the results would be similar. Much of the food we produce, we don't eat; much of the food we choose to eat, we don't produce. That isn't sustainable as we mov…

"The pope, who is scheduled to leave on Monday for an 11-day trip to Africa, has previously said that God 'does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them'. He has also referenced an Old Testament passage from Isaiah, saying that 'even though you make many prayers, I will not listen – your hands are full of blood'”

RE: #ScottishIndependence

RE: #Jews and

I went out into the wood to try to assess what dangerously unstable trees still standing in places where they could cause damage when they fall.
Needless to say, besides the two trees that have already collapsed above the house, there's at least one and possibly two unstable trees hanging over the house.
H'mmm...
#TheJoyOfCrofting

#Israel is sponsoring yet more terrorism in #Gaza
#GazaGenocide

I gave two of the three gifts I can afford to give this week to #Gaza, to people I already know and regularly communicate with; I woke up this morning thinking I knew who I would give the third gift to.
But I've just learned of a young unmarried woman living in a tent, caring for younger siblings (and I think some other people, I'm not yet fully clear). She appears to have no support at…

@…
What is mastodon.scot's policy on moderation of people posting appeals for help from #Gaza? This morning I have for the second time seen a message
> "Notifications from this account have been filtered because the account or its server has been li…

"Norway’s trade in fossil fuels is like the British opium trade in the 19th century: a curse to be dumped on other countries" -- @…
That's an excellent and telling comparison.
#FossilFuels

Story advice please!
I have a character, an elderly senior official in a roughly bronze-age city with roughly bronze-age medical science.
I want him to have a progressive medical condition which he is trying to conceal, which will eventually kill him, and which requires him to take frequent, sometimes extended, lavatory breaks.
What is his illness, and what would people around him be able to observe?

Hallelujah! Hallelujah Halle-e-loo-jah!
"UK ban on Palestine Action unlawful, high court judges rule"
#UKPol
#RightToProtest
#PalestineAction

RE: https://mstdn.fname.ca/@crispius/116553313718042858
This has been obvious for at least a decade. But will our politicians sit up and take notice? Can they see any time horizon further than the next election?

Just had another substantial tree come down in the wood, quite suddenly and with a huge bang, as I was splitting firewood for this evening's cooking. Fortunately I was nowhere near it, but I'm a bit shaken.
The wind isn't even that strong.

"It's one of the features of modern Western democracies that political parties seek their crucial election finance from those people who have surplus wealth, and those who have surplus wealth are by definition those who are profiting from the status quo... So it's little surprise that when 'financial services' institutions shudder and fall, our politicians, whom we elected with their money, choose to use our money to bail them out" -- me, 2012

Novara media are reporting that UK RAF surveillance drones are supporting #Israeli massacres of civilians in #Lebanon .
This follows the RAF's complicity, by operating daily surveillance flights over #Gaza

Post from Novara Media
The UK flew a drone over Baalbek, Lebanon as Israel massacred 18 people and injured 28 others there on Wednesday, flight data shows. The flight, first report...

Excellent here from Laura Moodie of @… on thinking about the strategic energy and infrastructure needs of #ScottishIndependence. Why do we not see this sort of thinking from the

Hi @…
I need a name for my new (male) Cyberpunk character, and I was thinking of Vakaris. Would you be offended if I stole it?
Best wishes
Simon

OK, Abdulaziz Ghuloum's #Lisp compiler course, and all of the many implementations thereof, intercept the (usually x86) assembly language generated by GCC, and build from that. My next challenge: how to do the same trick for LLVM-IR...

"[The #Fediverse] became the only place consistently posting trustworthy information I could actually access. This became personally relevant when Trump threatened to invade #Greenland, which is the kind of sentence I never expected to type"

Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse
I have never been an "online community first" person. The internet is how I stay in touch with people I met in real life. I'm not a "tweet comments at celebrities" guy. I was never funny enough to be the funniest person on Twitter. So when Twitter was accidentally purchased

RE: https://mastodon.social/@eslamradwan1_D_5/116380937992369793
One of the anxieties I have as my mental health unravels is that I am increasingly unable to support even those few people I have been supporting in

Well, Shrove Tuesday was three weeks ago, but my hens have just started laying again so it's #PancakeTuesday here!

#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 10
How informal is your prose? Is there a limit to informality?
I think that, even where you don't have a first-person narrator, prose in fiction should express the personality of the point of view character -- be similar to but just a little more formal than their normal way of speaking.
To preserve the plausibility that they might have writt…

This is a fine example of good parenting.
https://youtu.be/QLBjeM53iBI?si=VxtSI9suKaov-DQK

"Attacks on civilian systems, including water systems, must be condemned and punished under the laws of war"
Well yes, but by whom?
I am not a proponent either of nation states or of laws, but in a world of nations, some consensus standard of what behaviour is acceptable for them is better than none.
We are in the mess we are in because 'the west' failed to defend the 'international rules based order' which it claimed to have established.

Desalination, water, and war
Attacks on civilian systems, including water systems, must be condemned and punished under the laws of war.

RE: https://toot.wales/@linguacelta/116541051874459431
@…, is this legal? It doesn't seem that it should be.

And once again, with#AltText4You.

"It is no coincidence that tech oligarchs in the U.S. have been on a media purchasing spree, scooping up newspapers, TV stations and social media networks - especially in the past 4 years. Controlling the flow of information is a potent thing - and we should be very careful of whom we give that power to."
https:…

W Social uncovered: the reality behind the hype
An article dispelling myths about W Social, the new European platform that aims to rival X: it is a fork of Bluesky that shares many similarities with Eurosky and requires government ID to sign up.

My view on the #Holyrood2026 election? The #SNP came first because enough people in Scotland have a settled will in favour of #ScottishIndependence, not because very many people feel that the SN…

"The SNP is still the central vehicle of the independence movement, but part of that movement is no longer willing to give it a blank cheque. The clearest evidence came in the Greens’ wins...
Those were politically meaningful defeats... and they suggest that some pro-independence voters want more clarity, more renewal and a more convincing line on climate, public services and the direction of the movement itself." -- Assa Samake Roman

"We’re told that only an SNP majority justifies another vote. Why? Why do SNP votes matter more than Green votes? That shouldn’t stand. It’s not democratic. Why are we adhering to some abstract commandment, like members of a crank cult? The people didn’t vote for this arbitrary rule. Why are we bound by the events of the past? Yes, an SNP majority was the route to the 2014 referendum. But so what? Times change." -- Neil MacKay quoted by Oor Lesley Riddoch

The media I'm following show 70 constituency seats called; presumably the list votes have all been tallied, so the list seats ought to be all allocated as soon as the last constituencies are called.
I can see that Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch is still pending; where are the other two?
#ScotPol
#Holyrood2026

Well, here's an #InOurTime episode which I *think* is not actually an April Fool but real knowledge carefully presented to make it *sound* like an April Fool. But I'm honestly not sure.
Listen to it before checking other sources and see what you think. Whatever, the people who made it had a lot of fun doing so.
In Our Time: Archaea
Starting from: 00:31:10
Episode w…

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Archaea
How a discovery in the 1970s changed the theory of the origin of complex life on earth.

"there is a growing divide between #Democrats whose opposition to #Trump is essentially defensive, aimed at preserving norms and institutions, and those who see the Trump era as a reason to challenge concentrated wealth, the security state and the corporate power that shapes both parties. The first…

"UNITED NATIONS, April 9 (IPS) - In 2025, at least 326 humanitarians were recorded as killed across 21 countries, bringing the total number of humanitarians killed in three years to over 1,010... Of those over 1,000 deaths, more than 560 were in #Gaza and the West Bank, 130 in Sudan, 60 in South Sudan, 25 in Ukraine and 25 in [the Democratic Republic of the Congo]."

Over 1,000 Humanitarian Workers Killed Distributing Food, Water, Medicine & Shelter
UNITED NATIONS, April 9 (IPS) - In 2025, at least 326 humanitarians were recorded as killed across 21 countries, bringing the total number of humanitarians killed in three years to over 1,010. We recognise, grieve and honour each of our 326 colleagues, and commit the work ahead to their memory.

#Israel will elect a new government on 27th October 2026.
These days we tend to ascribe the #Holocaust to 'the Nazis', not 'the Germans'; and that's reasonable because not all Germans supported the Nazis -- despite the fact that

RE: https://mastodon.scot/@simon_brooke/115790892487712781
Dear @… , @…

RE: #Gaza is a place of unbearable tragedy after unbearable tragedy. That such …

"If an #LLM trains on UK media and UK media has mentioned Farage 442 times against Greer's 27, the model reflects that. Not because of a deliberate choice, but because that's what was in the data." -- @…
The idea of people asking a

What the hell's happening in south Ayrshire with #ReformUKLtd coming second in Kyle, Carrick & Doon Valley?
That is not good! Although congratulations to Katie Hagmann winning it!

Back in 2022, after #StormArwen, I rolled up a section of the fence around my wood so that I could haul fallen timber out of the south end of my wood. There's still a lot of fallen timber there, but I think I have hauled out as much as I practically can. So today I decided to get the fence back up.
Of course, brambles had grown through the rolled up fence, so it was far beyond my stre…

And I see Holly Bruce has now won Glasgow South for @…. I know absolutely nothing about Holly, but two #Green constituency MSPs will shake up #SNP complacency even mor…

Well that's the news I've been waiting for. @… has taken Edinburgh Central for @…. I'm very pleased; she's the only genuinely inspirational member of

Dumfrieshire, I expected no better of you.
#ScotPol
(#Tory hold)

Galloway, I am ashamed of us.
#ScotPol
(#Tory hold)

A one-two for pro- #ScottishIndependence parties in this year's #Holyrood elections would be an epic win and a magnificent boost to the movement -- but we shouldn't fool ourselves, what it would mean is that Scotland's electoral system is almost as bad as First Past the Post in…

"Opening new oil and gas fields in the North Sea would “send a shock wave around the world”, imperilling international climate targets, undermining the UK’s climate leadership and encouraging developing countries to exploit their own fossil fuel reserves, experts have warned"
Indeed. But do the #SNP care what happens to the planet?

"a model of war that meant one side waging it without risk, the other without hope" — Azmi Bishara, paraphrased by Patrick Wintour.
Loud echoes, for me, of the first opium war. Or the wars waged by European settlers against the indigenous peoples of North America. Or of #Palestine.
From Bush Sr to Trump: the risks, lessons and legacy of US interference in the Middle East | …

"Using #AI to check the output of AI for errors is a method that is historically prone to errors"
No shit, Sherlock.
#LLMs
#StochasticParrots
AI Translations Are Adding ‘Hal…

AI Translations Are Adding ‘Hallucinations’ to Wikipedia Articles
AI translated articles swapped sources or added unsourced sentences with no explanation, while others added paragraphs sourced from completely unrelated material.

I inherited my copy of Plato's Republic from my father, and I have always assumed he got it while he was at university. He probably did. But I assumed he bought it new, and he didn't. He's written his name on the flyleaf, but above it someone else has written 'A H Pearce, Jan 88' (very nice handwriting). The title page dates it to 1881.
So this wee book is probably one hundred and forty five years old. It's in remarkable condition.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Layan2002/116534274894840691
Being pregnant while being starved is inevitably a perilous situation. Being pregnant and starved while caring for other children is still more perilous.
If you can help @…

"One proves political maturity by not banging on about injustice, by not troubling too much the rich and powerful. To try it out, simply stand in front of a mirror and slowly declare yourself to be “pro-business and pro-worker”. If you can do that without flinching at the obvious contradiction, then congratulations! You too can be prime minister"
This isn't my analysis of why #Starmer

OK, I have a horrible bug in `read`, which seems to be looping on the first character after a left parenthesis -- and I can't see why. But I got only four hours sleep last night and I am not taking enough care of my body, so it's time to stop work for the day, have a bath, and rest.
(Yes, I have voted).
#SelfCare

RE: #Gaza is like having a ringside seat for the Paris Commune. Except that the Commune, for al…

RE: https://climatejustice.social/@ketan/116527579875678977
Imagine being the God who spent four billion years carefully nurturing a planet into the perfect Garden of Eden to bring people into, only to have them utterly trash it in fewer than ten thous…

"A Plaid Cymru victory in May would be “a pretty revolutionary change” for Wales, she said, but the party would first have to prove it could govern better than Labour: since devolution began in 1999, NHS and education standards in Wales have dropped below the other UK nations, and poverty has deepened."
So #Plaid_Cymru have a pretty low bar to climb, it would seem. Less incompe…

"There are expectations too that Sinn Féin would use Plaid Cymru and SNP victories next month to boost its demands for a poll on Irish reunification by 2030, making that central to its Northern Irish election campaign in May 2027"
#UnitedIreland
#IrishReunification…

New #Holyrood poll from Electoral Calculus claims to have constituency by constituency predictions, although I've failed to find them.
Headlines:
#ReformUKLtd on 14 seats/no constituencies;
#SNP

I've started my development log for May. It's really mostly about tooling -- specifically, editors and debuggers.
#PostScarcitySoftware
#Lisp

Dear everyone
Ghada Elkhalili is an orphan, the eldest surviving member of her family. She is supporting six other family members in a tent close to the yellow line in northern #Gaza. I have been in touch with her for some months; other people in Gaza whom I'm in touch with and who know her have verified her story.
She is receiving very little support; in the past month she's had …

Help Ghada Survive
Hello, I am Amir Hartt from America and I am raising funds for Ghada Elkhalili from the Gaza Strip, whom I connected with through her sisters Shireen and Angham. She has suffered much loss of loved ones and property in this genocide, and funds are urgently needed to rebuild her life to a self-sustaining level. These funds will go towards food, medical treatment, an emergency evacuation fund, firewood, and securing and reparing shelter. Funds will be sent via SWIFT transfer to Ghada's IBAN with …

This is where the char32_t thing bite me in the arse. I didn't want tu use wchar_t because sizeof( wchar_t) may be two or four bytes depending on platform, and I'm trying to be very careful about how I fit things into memory.
But some of the libraries I use require wchar_t, and while 99% of the time there's no practical difference and you can just gaily cast the one to the other, just occasionally you can't. A string in wchar_t is not equal to a visually identical one i…

RE: #BorderPoll in #Ireland

RE: https://freesewing.social/@Rania/116357508575584815
I said yesterday, writing about @…, that everyone I support in …

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ghadaelkha/116354253702133243
Ghada is the eldest, and the bread-winner, of a family of orphans living under a tattered tent in the east of Gaza, close to the notorious "yellow line". I have corresponded both with …

"Then, when [#Trump] begins an illegal war with the help of the oligarch’s AI, the oligarch’s newspaper is full of praise for the AI and the military that uses it."
Indeed.
#IranWar
AI and the illegal war

AI and the illegal war
“No stupid rules of engagement.” That was Pete Hegseth, the American war secretary, boasting during a press conference about the approach with which he and...

Friends in #Gaza, I am not able to send money to all of you. I am personally making gifts mainly to single parents, who are living in tents, and who are verified by the @… team.
If you are verified, I will boost your posts, even if I cannot afford to give t…

This is an astonishingly good essay by @… on #Trump and the #EnergyTransition. I'm not going to bother to select pull-quotes from it -- it's all potential pu…

I'm getting stack frames corrupted (or else I'm hitting the wrong stack frames) and I can't see why. My brain is far too messed up to deal with this level of shit just now!
#PostScarcitySoftware
#TheJoyOfSoftwareEngineering

#Software peeps: do you still do box diagrams to work out how your structures will sit in memory?
#Lisp

So many complex, vivid dreams that I'm exhausted, and shall need to go back to sleep to recover.

Is it just me, or do others find it odd to hear journalists say that the UK 'must' take action to protect 'ex-pats' who have chosen to evade their fair share of taxation by moving to the Gulf?
I think an appropriate response would be to say to them, yes, of course you can return to blighty if you pay off all the taxes you've evaded while you've been away, but if you choose not to, you're on your own.

I was at a meeting last night of key decision makers in the two main civic institutions of my village, and no one in the room was under seventy.
There are reasons.
1. House prices are way beyond what people of working age can afford;
2. Limited social housing is (rightly) allocated to the most vulnerable, but they typically don't have the bandwidth to take on civic roles;
3. There are few jobs in the local economy for degree-educated young people;
/Continued…

RE: https://freesewing.social/@Rania/116175514967908052
When I was prioritising my list of people to give to this week -- a task which is always difficult -- @…

My monster, she lives.
It has to be admitted, she can't do very much yet.
#PostScarcitySoftware

RE: https://mastodon.social/@eslamradwan1_D_5/116516022635422812
Everyone, Islam and her children have been evicted from the patch of land where they had their tent. They've found another site, but they need to move, and quickly.
I know …

Being mad just isn't fun
It isn't fun for anyone
It is not fun if you are mad
It is not fun it it's your dad
If it's your child it's just as bad
There is no fun in being mad.

SO!
I can fix my code so that the arguments to FEXPRs are not evaluated, by deferring the call to EVLIS into APPLY; but this is not what the code given on pages 70-71 does, and so my code will then not directly follow the specification in the #Lisp 1.5 Programmer's Manual;
OR,
I can not do this, in which case FEXPRs will not work as specified on pages 18 and 19.
(Note that…

OK, Beowulf bug. Both EVAL and APPLY in Beowulf are straight transcriptions of the mexprs on pages 70 and 71 of the #Lisp 1.5 Porgammer's Manual.
CONC is the only FEXPR I have implemented so far (and one of only three FEXPRs in the manual).
The unit test for CONC fails, because EVLIS is called on the argument list by EVAL (line 20 on page 71) before it reaches APPLY, and therefore b…

I've been hacking on Beowulf again, today; and I'm reminded how enchanted I am with the Beowulf logo, which sort-of designed itself.
I take no credit for it, really.
#Lisp 1.5
https://git.journeyman.cc/simon/beowulf

I think what we all want to know just now is when #ICE will leave Minneapolis.
https://xkcd.com/1732/

RE: #Mastodon has surprising reach. I wrote and published this essay yesterday; I have advertised it …

RE: #Gaza

It's a week since my last #PostScarcitySoftware entry. The version of eval/apply copied from `0.0.6` still doesn't compile, let alone work. There are reasons. I've been ill — my brain really is fucked — and I've had urgent outdoor work.
There is progress. I am cleaning up bits of old cruft as I go. But I don't think copying the old code was a good decision. I…

RE: #Israel's new war on

"Fascism and monopolies go hand in hand, and smashing monopolies is key to the program of fighting #fascism." -- @…

Listening to this podcast series, it occurs to me that the US oil industry's ambition to pump every last barrel of fossil hydrocarbon meshes very well with the #Maga millennialist yearning for the apocalypse. After all, if it is your religious duty to bring about the end of the world, what does it matter if you burn down all of God's creation?

The Polycrisis
The Polycrisis is a newsletter on geopolitics and climate, by Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie.

Definitely spring. Too warm to cycle in a hat.
#BikeTooter