Tootfinder

Four ways to build a zero-trust program for the AI world:
Think of AI as just another identity.
🤔 https://www.scworld.com/perspective/four-ways-to-build-a-zero-trust-program-for-the-ai-world

Four ways to build a zero-trust program for the AI world
Why AI tools deserve the least amount of trust.

Turkey-based Good Job Games, which develops Match-3 games like the popular Match Villains, raised a $60M Series A, after raising a $23M seed six months ago (Cate Lawrence/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2025/07/31/good-job-games-secures-60m-seri…

Good Job Games secures $60M Series A to build the future of Match-3 gaming
Turkish mobile games dev company Good Job Games has raised a $60 million Series A round, co-led by Menlo Ventures and Anthos Capital, with additional participation by Bessemer Venture Partners.  The round brings the total investment amount to date to $83 million, after a seed round of $23 million just six months ago. Good Job Games aims to build a generational entertainment brand through timeless, socially-driven games. An example is its popular Match Villains, a game designed to be endless…

Cowboys' need to build offensive line depth stressed again with Tyler Smith exiting practice early https://www.foxsports.com/articles/nfl/cowboys-need-to-build-offensive-line-depth-stressed-again-with-tyle…

I love my SwiftUI Observable view-models, how I use some 150 of them in Xogot:
https://blog.la-terminal.net/blissful-ui-development-with-swiftui-and-godot/

Blissful UI Development with SwiftUI and Godot.
Xogot is a SwiftUI interface built on top of the Godot engine. To speed up development, we needed a way to build large portions of the user interface without having to compile and deploy the entire project every time. A full build of the app in Godot takes a couple

Genesis AI, which generates its own synthetic data for training an AI model for robots, emerges from stealth with a $105M seed co-led by Eclipse and Khosla (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/01/gene

Genesis AI launches with $105M seed funding from Eclipse, Khosla to build AI models for robots | TechCrunch
Genesis AI, which aims to build a foundational model for powering all kinds of robots, has emerged from stealth with $105M in seed funding.

I just noticed the serve cost vs. the build cost in the @… documentation. I love this idea ❤️.
It shows the trade-offs while helping folks make informed decisions instead of believing everything will magically work itself out.

this was a plot point in vernor vinge's "rainbow's end" (2006), retroactively part of the expanded "torment nexus" universe apparently. https://code4lib.social/@dltj/114774949197817082

Have you or some one you know played Geometry Dash? It's a simple game with some very challenging levels and a pretty epic community of level makers. Inside is almost a whole game engine to build some of the most wild level I have ever seen.
This game is my nightmare but my son has sunk hundreds of hours in to this game and has even learned some game dev skill while trying to build levels
What do other know about this game?

This is the data center Meta is planning to build in a last-ditch effort to add legs to Metaverse avatars

How popular media gets love wrong
Okay, so what exactly are the details of the "engineered" model of love from my previous post? I'll try to summarize my thoughts and the experiences they're built on.
1. "Love" can be be thought of like a mechanism that's built by two (or more) people. In this case, no single person can build the thing alone, to work it needs contributions from multiple people (I suppose self-love might be an exception to that). In any case, the builders can intentionally choose how they build (and maintain) the mechanism, they can build it differently to suit their particular needs/wants, and they will need to maintain and repair it over time to keep it running. It may need winding, or fuel, or charging plus oil changes and bolt-tightening, etc.
2. Any two (or more) people can choose to start building love between them at any time. No need to "find your soulmate" or "wait for the right person." Now the caveat is that the mechanism is difficult to build and requires lots of cooperation, so there might indeed be "wrong people" to try to build love with. People in general might experience more failures than successes. The key component is slowly-escalating shared commitment to the project, which is negotiated between the partners so that neither one feels like they've been left to do all the work themselves. Since it's a big scary project though, it's very easy to decide it's too hard and give up, and so the builders need to encourage each other and pace themselves. The project can only succeed if there's mutual commitment, and that will certainly require compromise (sometimes even sacrifice, though not always). If the mechanism works well, the benefits (companionship; encouragement; praise; loving sex; hugs; etc.) will be well worth the compromises you make to build it, but this isn't always the case.
3. The mechanism is prone to falling apart if not maintained. In my view, the "fire" and "appeal" models of love don't adequately convey the need for this maintenance and lead to a lot of under-maintained relationships many of which fall apart. You'll need to do things together that make you happy, do things that make your partner happy (in some cases even if they annoy you, but never in a transactional or box-checking way), spend time with shared attention, spend time alone and/or apart, reassure each other through words (or deeds) of mutual beliefs (especially your continued commitment to the relationship), do things that comfort and/or excite each other physically (anywhere from hugs to hand-holding to sex) and probably other things I'm not thinking of. Not *every* relationship needs *all* of these maintenance techniques, but I think most will need most. Note especially that patriarchy teaches men that they don't need to bother with any of this, which harms primarily their romantic partners but secondarily them as their relationships fail due to their own (cultivated-by-patriarchy) incompetence. If a relationship evolves to a point where one person is doing all the maintenance (& improvement) work, it's been bent into a shape that no longer really qualifies as "love" in my book, and that's super unhealthy.
4. The key things to negotiate when trying to build a new love are first, how to work together in the first place, and how to be comfortable around each others' habits (or how to change those habits). Second, what level of commitment you have right now, and what how/when you want to increase that commitment. Additionally, I think it's worth checking in about what you're each putting into and getting out of the relationship, to ensure that it continues to be positive for all participants. To build a successful relationship, you need to be able to incrementally increase the level of commitment to one that you're both comfortable staying at long-term, while ensuring that for both partners, the relationship is both a net benefit and has manageable costs (those two things are not the same). Obviously it's not easy to actually have conversations about these things (congratulations if you can just talk about this stuff) because there's a huge fear of hearing an answer that you don't want to hear. I think the range of discouraging answers which actually spell doom for a relationship is smaller than people think and there's usually a reasonable "shoulder" you can fall into where things aren't on a good trajectory but could be brought back into one, but even so these conversations are scary. Still, I think only having honest conversations about these things when you're angry at each other is not a good plan. You can also try to communicate some of these things via non-conversational means, if that feels safer, and at least being aware that these are the objectives you're pursuing is probably helpful.
I'll post two more replies here about my own experiences that led me to this mental model and trying to distill this into advice, although it will take me a moment to get to those.
#relationships #love

Buttigieg DOT ignored safety issues to build dozens of windmill projects near highways, railroads (Josh Christenson/New York Post)
https://nypost.com/2025/07/29/us-news/buttigieg-dot-ignored-safety-issues-to-build-dozens-of-windmill-projects-near-highways-railroads/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250729/p89#a250729p89

@… @… may the pursuit of no-build keep our build steps honest, light, and nimble!!

Ask before you Build: Rethinking AI-for-Good in Human Trafficking Interventions
Pratheeksha Nair, Gabriel Lefebvre, Sophia Garrel, Maryam Molamohammadi, Reihaneh Rabbany
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22512

Ask before you Build: Rethinking AI-for-Good in Human Trafficking Interventions
AI for good initiatives often rely on the assumption that technical interventions can resolve complex social problems. In the context of human trafficking (HT), such techno-solutionism risks oversimplifying exploitation, reinforcing power imbalances and causing harm to the very communities AI claims to support. In this paper, we introduce the Radical Questioning (RQ) framework as a five step, pre-project ethical assessment tool to critically evaluate whether AI should be built at all, especiall…

My Seeed Solar Node has been in the darkness of my basement now for two weeks - still 78% charge.
I think that one will go up on my roof.
And for my forest nodes, I should probably build some birdhouses :)
#meshtastic

But seriously, how does someone not deeply reading about LLMs build a 'theory of mind' for a pseudo-mind emulator stuck in a business process?

Great blog about EuroStack, we need to BUILD !
"We need to think about this first and foremost as an industrial project. With some public support but one where “industry” (the supply side) needs to be given the incentive to build, and the opportunity to scale and expand. We don’t need more “events” and pensive stuff about “our European values” and “democracy” around digital sovereignty. Industry should do its thing, or nothing will happen. Wake up."

European Digital Sovereignty is an Industrial Project.  Everyone Else Get Out of the Way.
It is oh-so-European that just when the imperative of getting more European assets to support our digital life is finally established (was staring at everyone in the face for some time, yes?), mult…

Build a new body layer by layer with pastry cream and peanut m&ms and dough that needs more mixing

Don't usually weigh in on L.A. stuff but if it's not safe to build 7 duplexes there, then it's not safe to rebuild 5,000 single-family homes there. Make up your mind, Newsom and Bass.
https://laist.com/news/housing-homeles

LA mayor bans duplexes in Palisades burn zone after getting permission from governor
Following uproar from homeowners and local elected leaders, a state law allowing denser housing in single-family areas will no longer apply to the Pacific Palisades.

Lumana, which integrates vision-language models and agentic AI into its video surveillance system, raised a $40M Series A led by Wing Venture Capital (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2025/07/29/lumana-gets-40m-build-intel…

Lumana gets $40M to build more intelligent video surveillance systems - SiliconANGLE
Lumana gets $40M to build more intelligent video surveillance systems - SiliconANGLE

Looks like someone cut a Yugo in half.
Yugos were basically Fiats that Fiat no longer wanted to make. https://mstdn.social/@bweller/114770694902314410

I’ve just discovered that Microsoft have a .NET library to build web applications called “Blazor” (https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blazor).
And all I can think when I read it is this:

Showrunner, an Amazon-backed AI streaming service, launches Thursday, letting users paying $10-$40/mo. to create their own animated shows or build on others' IP (Lucia Moses/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/fable-amaz

Amazon-backed Showrunner courts Hollywood for AI streamer: pitch deck
Fable Studio got Amazon backing for its AI streaming platform, Showrunner. Here's its pitch to Hollywood studios.

Sometimes it’s not about the technology, but the person building with it.
#WordPress

If you build it, they will come.
UK DSO National Grid Energy Distribution has worked to remove barriers for consumer energy resources participating in its local flexibility market. With great success, over 50% of all #EV chargers in its area are now registered.

If you build it, they will come | Jaap Burger
If you build it, they will come Applying that well-worn phrase here: 'It' is a local flexibility market. 'They' refers to the flexibility inherent in EV home charging that has not previously been used to support the local grid. National Grid Electricity Distribution's impressive statistics show that more than 50% of EV chargers in its area are registered to deliver flexibility services. In terms of the number of assets, 90% of those registered are from domestic households, mainly in the form …

The Guitar Practice Blueprint - GUITARHABITS
#guitar #technique

The Guitar Practice Blueprint - GUITARHABITS
Master your guitar practice routine with The Guitar Practice Blueprint. Build technique, play better, and make every session count.

Note to self: When starting doing something large and complicated in Visual Studio, regularly build and run in both Debug and Release configurations from the start, even while you are still very much debugging the stuff, so that you notice if the latter mysteriously doesn't work early enough.

NIMBY war mir bekannt, aber
BANANA (an acronym for "build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything -or anyone") und CAVE people (citizens against virtually everything) kannte ich noch nicht.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY#BANANA_and_CAVE

NIMBY - Wikipedia

"But good DX doesn’t guarantee good UX. In fact, it’s often the opposite. Because the more comfortable we make things for developers, the more abstraction we add. And every abstraction creates distance between the thing being built and the people it’s for."
https://www.jon…

JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
We replaced simple websites with complex apps nobody asked for. Now it takes a complex build pipeline just to change a headline.

PSA: Fake verification replies are starting again. Don't fall for them. Best thing you can do is report them as SPAM to your instance and forward to any optional instances with "Fake Mastodon Verification Scam" written in the notes/comments section for the report. Make sure everyone you interact with knows this is going on. Permanent solutions to combat this scam are being implemented to tackle it by the software developers.

Normally, I'd be a bit more paranoid with my 9950X, but looking at the build, the mounting of the Noctua NH-U9S, and the mainboard involved makes this more worry significantly less.
Issues with the GMP build:
1. The thermal paste (likely NT-H1 or NT-H2, good paste) is wedge shaped in application and distribution. This looks like uneven pressure across the contact patch and is Not A Good Thing(tm).
2. The Asus Prime B650M-A WIFI II is a shitty board. Just because ASUS p…

Turn your #Azure cost data into powerful insights! Use the #CostManagement connector in #PowerBI to visualize spend, build custom reports, and track budgets—all in one place. 💰
📈 Start now:

Raiders Rookie with ‘Perfect Build’ Has ‘Rough’ Day at Practice https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/raiders-rookie-with-perfect-build-has-rough-day-at-practice/?adt_ei=[email]

Series C, Episode 02 - Powerplay
AVON: What do we get?
KLEGG: You'll be teleported onto the surface of the nearest planet. You can build your security into the computer program. It won't respond to me until you are safely off the ship.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/302/498

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

Why in-person dating is making a comeback—and why Gen Z is struggling with it
https://theconversation.com/why-in-person-dating-is-making-a-comeback-and-why-gen-z-is-struggling-with-it-257210

Why in-person dating is making a comeback — and why Gen Z is struggling with it
Many Gen Z people are tired of dating apps, but haven’t had the same opportunities to build in-person social skills that some of us older folks take for granted.

I'm nervous about Southend being combined with Rochford and Castle Point - will those rural councils understand our urban needs? It risks a change in character and priorities.
We already share the same bus and train transport network. We need nearby councils working with us to grow the city, as we have no fields to build on.
Our neighbours often build car-focused housing and send us the traffic. Will they embrace city life? Will they force us to build roads? Risks and opport…

Resolving Build Conflicts via Example-Based and Rule-Based Program Transformations
Sheikh Shadab Towqir, Fei He, Todd Mytkowicz, Na Meng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19432 https:/…

Resolving Build Conflicts via Example-Based and Rule-Based Program Transformations
Merge conflicts often arise when developers integrate changes from different software branches. The conflicts can result from overlapping edits in programs (i.e., textual conflicts) or cause build and test errors (i.e., build and test conflicts). They degrade software quality and hinder programmer productivity. While several tools detect build conflicts, few offer meaningful support for resolving cases like those caused by method removal. To overcome limitations of existing tools, we introduce …

Causal2Vec: Improving Decoder-only LLMs as Versatile Embedding Models
Ailiang Lin, Zhuoyun Li, Kotaro Funakoshi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23386 https://ar…

Causal2Vec: Improving Decoder-only LLMs as Versatile Embedding Models
Decoder-only large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to build embedding models that effectively encode the semantic information of natural language texts into dense vector representations for various embedding tasks. However, many existing methods primarily focus on removing the causal attention mask in LLMs to enable bidirectional attention, potentially undermining the model's ability to extract semantic information acquired during pretraining. Additionally, leading unidirectional a…

MonoFusion: Sparse-View 4D Reconstruction via Monocular Fusion
Zihan Wang, Jeff Tan, Tarasha Khurana, Neehar Peri, Deva Ramanan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23782 https://

MonoFusion: Sparse-View 4D Reconstruction via Monocular Fusion
We address the problem of dynamic scene reconstruction from sparse-view videos. Prior work often requires dense multi-view captures with hundreds of calibrated cameras (e.g. Panoptic Studio). Such multi-view setups are prohibitively expensive to build and cannot capture diverse scenes in-the-wild. In contrast, we aim to reconstruct dynamic human behaviors, such as repairing a bike or dancing, from a small set of sparse-view cameras with complete scene coverage (e.g. four equidistant inward-faci…

Dutch government inaction and support for Israel during the entire build-up of its starvation campaign against the people of Gaza is now called 'patience' (geduld) by several Dutch news media, and while the famine has become devastating, this 'patience' is reported to be 'running out'.

Geduld met Israël is op, kabinet wil inreisverbod voor twee Israëlische ministers en importbeperkingen
Het demissionair kabinet komt met nationale sancties tegen Israël. Met een inreisverbod voor twee omstreden ministers, een tijdelijk wapenembargo en importbeperkingen moet Israël onder druk worden gezet om snel meer humanitaire hulp toe te laten in de Gazastrook.

Maxx Crosby points to NBA's Thunder when talking hopeful Raiders turnaround: 'We've got a lot of work to do' https://www.nfl.com/news/maxx-crosby-points-to-nba-s-thunder-when-talking-hopef…

MPC in the Quantum Head (or: Superposition-Secure (Quantum) Zero-Knowledge)
Andrea Coladangelo, Ruta Jawale, Dakshita Khurana, Giulio Malavolta, Hendrik Waldner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22961

MPC in the Quantum Head (or: Superposition-Secure (Quantum) Zero-Knowledge)
The MPC-in-the-head technique (Ishai et al., STOC 2007) is a celebrated method to build zero-knowledge protocols with desirable theoretical properties and high practical efficiency. This technique has generated a large body of research and has influenced the design of real-world post-quantum cryptographic signatures. In this work, we present a generalization of the MPC-in-the-head paradigm to the quantum setting, where the MPC is running a quantum computation. As an application of our framework…

For those considering #SanFrancisco's Upzoning Plan (aka #FamilyZoningPlan) , predicated on letting for profit developers build higher and denser, we have some data:
"London boroughs with the greatest number of these rental property developments, rents have increased by 48% to 5…

For those considering #SanFrancisco's Upzoning Plan (aka #FamilyZoningPlan) , predicated on letting for profit developers build higher and denser, we have some data:
"London boroughs with the greatest number of these rental property developments, rents have increased by 48% to 5…

are you a platform/embedded developer?
do you need to interact with hardware in a semi-custom manner?
would you like to suffer a lot less doing it?
if so, #GlasgowInterfaceExplorer might be for you. the code below is all you need to build a custom testbench for a DUT you've never seen before. just as easily you can add JTAG/SWD debug, protocol analyzers, etc.…

What I've been saying... YIMBY "wins" in California have failed to actually build housing. The blockage is investment. The solution is public investment, ideally in the form of social housing!
With quotes from @…

SF YIMBYs keep winning, so where's the housing?
Legislators and voters have approved novel ideas to generate funding, but a lack of political will has scuttled them.

Every day I try and think on a small site or service I could build that would generate enough money to have it be my main source of income. I've failed at this for so long that I'm probably approaching this problem all wrong and I assume I just don't have enough patience to dedicate to long term projects that might never payout. This is why so many of the projects I complete are short term.

This is democracy — the American people are getting what they voted for.
AND: This is authoritarianism — Not Trump cleaning up crisis or disorder but Trump creating crisis and disorder so he can build what he has wanted to build:
an authoritarian state, a military or a paramilitary that answers only to him
— that puts him in total control.
I can see the picture of a president doing what he was elected to do.
Donald Trump ran unquestionably on mass deportations. …

Opinion | Trump Is Building His Own Paramilitary Force
The journalist Radley Balko explains the mechanisms Trump is using to create a personal army.

Here we go,
Developer uses "Grey Belt" argument to justify building on green space / #GreenBelt
Developer offers ‘grey belt’ argument in attempt to build 80 homes on green belt - Manchester Evening News

Developer offers ‘grey belt’ argument in attempt to build 80 homes on green belt
New rules can enable development of protected areas which do not 'significantly contribute to the green belt’s core purposes

hacker: "yeah, I downloaded a driver from the manufacturer. It didn't build of course, because the v2l API changed between what they released and the kernel you're running, but i updated it to the new API and it worked."
linux user: "you going to send the driver upstream?"
https://mk.moth.zon…

eri :floofMischief: (@eri)
hacker: i am spying on you through your webcam linux user: omg you got it working?

Access InContext: Futuring Accessible Prototyping Tools and Methods
Patricia Piedade, Peter A Hayton, Cynthia Bennett, Anna R L Carter, Clara Crivellaro, Alan Dix, Jess McGowan, Katta Spiel, Miriam Sturdee, Garreth W. Tigwell, Hugo Nicolau
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.24057

Access InContext: Futuring Accessible Prototyping Tools and Methods
The popularity of accessibility research has grown recently, improving digital inclusion for people with disabilities. However, researchers, including those who have disabilities, have attempted to include people with disabilities in all aspects of design, and they have identified a myriad of practical accessibility barriers posed by tools and methods leveraged by human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers during prototyping. To build a more inclusive technological landscape, we must question…

There are some good writers on Substack. But I still hope they will take their writing elsewhere someday.
Substack Sent a Push Alert Promoting a Nazi Blog https://pxlnv.com/linklog/substack-nazi-notification/

"Transportation for Palestinians in the Bethlehem and Hebron governorates to Jericho in the Jordan Valley would go through a new underground tunnel Israel is planning to build to bypass the wilderness east of Jerusalem. What this means is that the entire space between Jerusalem and the edges of the Jordan Valley would become accessible to Israelis only."
Israel is building a tunnel to cut off Palestinians from the heart of the West Bank – Mondoweiss

Israel is building a tunnel to cut off Palestinians from the heart of the West Bank
Israel is constructing tunnels that Palestinians will be required to pass through in the heart of the West Bank, making large parts of the occupied territory accessible only to Israelis. The aim is to remove the Palestinian presence around Jerusalem.

Efficient Interleaved Speech Modeling through Knowledge Distillation
Mohammadmahdi Nouriborji, Morteza Rohanian
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23670 https://…

Efficient Interleaved Speech Modeling through Knowledge Distillation
Current speech language models exceed the size and latency constraints of many deployment environments. We build compact, expressive speech generation models through layer-aligned distillation, matching hidden states, attention maps, and softened logits to compress large multimodal transformers by 3x with minimal loss in performance. We introduce TinyWave, a family of 2B-parameter models for speech-to-speech and interleaved speech-text generation, trained on 50,000 hours of public audio. TinyWa…

INTACT: Compact Storage of Data Streams in Mobile Devices to Unlock User Privacy at the Edge
R\'emy Raes (SPIRALS), Olivier Ruas (SPIRALS), Adrien Luxey-Bitri (SPIRALS), Romain Rouvoy (SPIRALS)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21998

INTACT: Compact Storage of Data Streams in Mobile Devices to Unlock User Privacy at the Edge
Data streams produced by mobile devices, such as smartphones, offer highly valuable sources of information to build ubiquitous services. Such data streams are generally uploaded and centralized to be processed by third parties, potentially exposing sensitive personal information. In this context, existing protection mechanisms, such as Location Privacy Protection Mechanisms (LPPMs), have been investigated. Alas, none of them have actually been implemented, nor deployed in real-life, in mobile d…

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

I've just tagged build-and-inspect-python-package 2.13.0 of my popular GitHub Action.
It now offers the package name as an output and uses it in the job summary which should be useful to people building multiple packages at once.
https://github.com/hynek/build-and-ins

Release v2.13.0 · hynek/build-and-inspect-python-package
Added New output: package_name is the name of the built package as stored in metadata. #162 The package name is now part of the action summary which is helpful when you build more than one pack...

Romania plans to build drones with Ukraine: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/18/romania-plans-to-build-drones.html

If you want to show how cool generative AI is, please don't use an astronaut in the desert. This is becoming a bit of a cliché I think.
A skateboarding lion is also a close runner-up in the slop olympics.
(warning, link goes to a page for a proprietary tool that creates three "AI agents" that are told to act as a photography team which is tasked to generate a text prompt that in turn is used to generate an ugly

I can't imagine OpenAI is going to Trumpify GPT. I'm pretty sure they've spent more on instruction tuning data than they have on model training.
Even if they wanted to throw all that out and start again, you'd need to build a coherent image of what the bot should do in any given situation. The MAGA worldview simply doesn't have the required coherence.

Tech elites are turning AI into ChatGPTrump
The administration's new AI plan gives Silicon Valley everything it wants — for a price.

"It's "#ORCID and…," not "ORCID or…": How researcher identifiers work together to help researchers, build a better picture of research, and streamline administrative tasks": White Paper by MoreBrains › https://

Finally got the x25519 accelerator to build for a Trion T20 (with REGFILE_OUT_REG=1, MULT_AREA_OPT=2).
It's pretty full (12356 / 19728 LE, 112/204 RAM, 34/36 mult), but fits. Fmax in C4 speed grade is 97.8 MHz and one crypto_scalarmult takes 756703 clocks which comes out to 7.73 ms. A scalarbase() is slightly slower but I don't have that number handy right now.
I'm not sure how practically useful this config is, because the FPGA is 62% full logic wise so I can't c…

I'm right chuffed! Even just after watering it, and having the door open for a while, our greenhouse is between 25-40 degrees C, in the last week of winter. We've already got a bunch of seedlings coming up. I think it's going to be a good summer for veggies in our household. Now if I can just find a good spot to plant that Avocado tree... 🤔

Regularity of infinitesimal automorphisms of involutive structures
Bernhard Lamel, Nicholas Braun Rodrigues
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.24105 https://

Regularity of infinitesimal automorphisms of involutive structures
In this paper, we prove that infinitesimal automorphisms of an involutive structure are smooth. For this, we build a regularity theory for sections of vector bundles over an involutive structure $(M,V)$ endowed with a connection compatible with $V$, which we call $V$-connection. We show that $V$-sections, i.e. sections which are parallel with respect to $V$ under the $V$-connection, satisfy an analogue of Hans Lewy's theorem as formulated for CR functions on an abstract CR manifold by Berhanu a…

♨️ Meta teams with XGS Energy to build a 150 MW geothermal power plant
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/12/meta-teams-with-xgs-energy-to-build-a-150-mw-geothermal-power-plant/

Meta teams with XGS Energy to build a 150 MW geothermal power plant | TechCrunch
Meta is the latest tech company to warm to geothermal energy, announcing on Thursday a deal with startup XGS Energy to develop a 150 megawatt geothermal power plant in New Mexico. 

Just emailed the leaflet.pub folks about fedi integration and they said they’d like to build their platform on ATproto(?), so I'm excited to see how that works out for them /sar :P

Just emailed the leaflet.pub folks about fedi integration and they said they’d like to build their platform on ATproto(?), so I'm excited to see how that works out for them /sar :P

Grammarly acquires email startup Superhuman as part of a push to build an AI-powered productivity suite; Superhuman was last valued at $825M in 2021 (Krystal Hu/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/grammarly-acquires-e…

Viser: Imperative, Web-based 3D Visualization in Python
Brent Yi, Chung Min Kim, Justin Kerr, Gina Wu, Rebecca Feng, Anthony Zhang, Jonas Kulhanek, Hongsuk Choi, Yi Ma, Matthew Tancik, Angjoo Kanazawa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22885

Viser: Imperative, Web-based 3D Visualization in Python
We present Viser, a 3D visualization library for computer vision and robotics. Viser aims to bring easy and extensible 3D visualization to Python: we provide a comprehensive set of 3D scene and 2D GUI primitives, which can be used independently with minimal setup or composed to build specialized interfaces. This technical report describes Viser's features, interface, and implementation. Key design choices include an imperative-style API and a web-based viewer, which improve compatibility with m…

Build It Clean: Large-Scale Detection of Code Smells in Build Scripts
Mahzabin Tamanna, Yash Chandrani, Matthew Burrows, Brandon Wroblewski, Laurie Williams, Dominik Wermke
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17948

Build It Clean: Large-Scale Detection of Code Smells in Build Scripts
Build scripts are files that automate the process of compiling source code, managing dependencies, running tests, and packaging software into deployable artifacts. These scripts are ubiquitous in modern software development pipelines for streamlining testing and delivery. While developing build scripts, practitioners may inadvertently introduce code smells. Code smells are recurring patterns of poor coding practices that may lead to build failures or increase risk and technical debt. The goal o…

You just need 20 minutes, a kettlebell and this metcon workout to help you build total body strength at home https://www.tomsguide.com/welln…

You just need 20 minutes, a kettlebell and this metcon workout to help you build total body strength at home
Build lean muscle and strength from your living room

OpenAI is expanding its consulting-like service to refine its models and build bespoke apps for large enterprise and government clients spending at least $10M (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-takes-page…

OpenAI Takes a Page From Palantir, Doubles Down on Consulting Services
As OpenAI pitches its artificial intelligence to big companies and government agencies, it’s taking a page from the playbook of many software firms by offeringin-house researchers and software engineers to customize AI for customers. OpenAI is adding staff and resources for a consulting-like ...

Raiders' HC Pete Carroll Nabbed Picks From Old Division Rival https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-pete-carroll-san-franciso-49ers-charles-grant

Recently Departed Cowboy ‘Rankled Teammates’ In Locker Room – Report https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/micah-parsons-not-popular-locker-room/?adt_ei=[email]

US states to get $608 million from FEMA to build migrant detention centers (Courtney Rozen/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-states-get-608-million-fema-build-migrant-detention-centers-2025-07-25/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250725/p93#a250725p93

i should make a build of vscodium that can install all of the proprietary extensions
my next best bet for a usable editor is sublime text, and unfortunately st4 doesn't seem like it's particularly actively developed anymore. yes, it's still maintained, but i expect a much better editor today than in 2010

OpenAI launches Stargate Norway, the first Stargate-branded initiative in Europe, to build a 230MW data center owned by a joint venture between Nscale and Aker (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07…

Talking-to-Build: How LLM-Assisted Interface Shapes Player Performance and Experience in Minecraft
Xin Sun, Lei Wang, Yue Li, Jie Li, Massimo Poesio, Julian Frommel, Koen Hinriks, Jiahuan Pei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20300

Talking-to-Build: How LLM-Assisted Interface Shapes Player Performance and Experience in Minecraft
With large language models (LLMs) on the rise, in-game interactions are shifting from rigid commands to natural conversations. However, the impacts of LLMs on player performance and game experience remain underexplored. This work explores LLM's role as a co-builder during gameplay, examining its impact on task performance, usability, and player experience. Using Minecraft as a sandbox, we present an LLM-assisted interface that engages players through natural language, aiming to facilitate creat…

Podcast host Jon Lovett, a former aide to former President Barack Obama: "This is an emergency. We should all be freaking out about how urgent it is to do anything humanly possible to build housing,” he said, “and you’re worried about whether or not there’s a place for a few senior citizens to sit outside a building.”
Think about that for a moment. How does this align with all of the research around outdoor access, windows with views, and general health? How does this address th…

Podcast host Jon Lovett, a former aide to former President Barack Obama: "This is an emergency. We should all be freaking out about how urgent it is to do anything humanly possible to build housing,” he said, “and you’re worried about whether or not there’s a place for a few senior citizens to sit outside a building.”
Think about that for a moment. How does this align with all of the research around outdoor access, windows with views, and general health? How does this address th…

Experience converting a large mathematical software package written in C to C 20 modules
Wolfgang Bangerth
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21654 https://

Experience converting a large mathematical software package written in C++ to C++20 modules
Mathematical software has traditionally been built in the form of "packages" that build on each other. A substantial fraction of these packages is written in C++ and, as a consequence, the interface of a package is described in the form of header files that downstream packages and applications can then #include. C++ has inherited this approach towards exporting interfaces from C, but the approach is clunky, unreliable, and slow. As a consequence, C++20 has introduced a "module" system in which …

Reliance launches a subsidiary called Reliance Intelligence, aiming to create national-scale AI infrastructure in India, in partnership with Google and Meta (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/29/billionaire-ambani-taps…

Billionaire Ambani taps Google, Meta to build India's AI backbone | TechCrunch
Reliance is launching a new subsidiary to drive India's AI ambitions, including a pending partnership with OpenAI.

🪭 Frontier is helping Arbor build a “vegetarian rocket engine” to power data centers
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/08/frontier-is-helping-arbor-build-a-vegetarian-rocket-engine-to-power-data-centers/

Frontier is helping Arbor build a 'vegetarian rocket engine' to power data centers | TechCrunch
Arbor Energy's carbon-removing power plant is inspired by SpaceX's rocket engines.

Broncos QB Bo Nix spent offseason time with future Hall of Famer as he looks to build off strong rookie season

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/bron…

Sky News expands its data and forensics team as part of the Sky News 2030 project to build a newsroom focused on premium video journalism (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/sky-news-data-forensics-journalism/

Sky News expands data and forensics journalism team
Sky News is hiring journalists to expand its data and forensics team as part of a plan to make premium journalism that people might pay for.

Instead of the CHIPS Act money being tied to Intel actually building fabs,
the money is now tied to the government buying into Intel.
That is a different thing.
The specific deal is also different from the concept of the government getting shares as part of a grant to build fabs.
According to the SEC filing, there is less emphasis on fab building and more emphasis on government ownership.
The actual Intel deal is a major change to CHIPS Act purposes
and…

The U.S. Now Owns 10% Of Intel. What That Means For America's Chip Supply.
Featured Videos The U.S. Now Owns 10% Of Intel. What That Means For America's Chip Supply. S&P 500 Hits High; Cameco, Rubrik, Micron Among Stocks …

Showrunner, an Amazon-backed AI streaming service, launches Thursday, letting users paying $10-$40/mo. to create their own animated shows or build on others' IP (Lucia Moses/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/fable-amaz

Amazon-backed Showrunner courts Hollywood for AI streamer: pitch deck
Fable Studio got Amazon backing for its AI streaming platform, Showrunner. Here's its pitch to Hollywood studios.

Microsoft says its new AI tool diagnoses diseases with 80% accuracy vs. doctors' 20%; Mustafa Suleyman calls it a "step toward medical superintelligence" (Will Knight/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-medical-superintelligence-di…

Microsoft Says Its New AI System Diagnosed Patients 4 Times More Accurately Than Human Doctors
The tech giant poached several top Google researchers to help build a powerful AI tool that can diagnose patients and potentially cut health care costs.

good news: California Assembly passed a bill to require Caltrans to develop a quick-build program for bike lane and intersection safety projects on state highways! it's #AB891 (Zbur)
https://

Quick-Build Legislation Makes It Through the Assembly - Streetsblog California
Following the success of Quick-Build projects in Santa Monica, their Assemblymember wants to allow them on state highways.

Dynamic and Static Analysis of Python Software with Kieker Including Reconstructed Architectures
Daphn\'e Larrivain, Shinhyung Yang, Wilhelm Hasselbring
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23425

Dynamic and Static Analysis of Python Software with Kieker Including Reconstructed Architectures
The Kieker observability framework is a tool that provides users with the means to design a custom observability pipeline for their application. Originally tailored for Java, supporting Python with Kieker is worthwhile. Python's popularity has exploded over the years, thus making structural insights of Python applications highly valuable. Our Python analysis pipeline combines static and dynamic analysis in order to build a complete picture of a given system.

Blue Water Autonomy, which is building autonomous, unmanned ships for the US Navy, raised a $50M Series A led by GV, bringing its total funding to $64M (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/08/26/exclusive-b…

Exclusive: Blue Water Autonomy raises GV-led $50 million Series A to build unmanned ships
Blue Water Autonomy has raised a $50 million Series A, led by GV, Fortune has exclusively learned.

Trump Media and Crypto.com sign a deal to integrate Crypto.com's wallet and adopt the CRO token for Truth Social's rewards; Trump Media will buy $105M in CRO (Oliver Knight/CoinDesk)
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/08/

Trump Media, Crypto.com to Build $6.4B CRO Treasury Firm, CRO Jumps 25%
Trump Media will buy $105 million in CRO while Crypto.com takes $50 million in DJT stock as part of a partnership that makes the Cronos token central to Truth Social’s rewards system.

Hands-on with seven coding agents tasked with building a website: Claude Code performed best, OpenAI's Codex lacked polish, and Replit failed to build the site (Timothy B. Lee/Understanding AI)
https://www.understandingai.org/p/what-i-learned-trying-seven-…

What I learned trying seven coding agents
There's still room for improvement, but don't underestimate this technology.

Anthropic now lets Claude app users build, host, and share AI-powered apps directly in Claude via Artifacts, launching in beta on Free, Pro, and Max tiers (Jay Peters/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/693342/anthropic-claude-ai-apps-artifact

Anthropic now lets you make apps right from its Claude AI chatbot
Anthropic is adding a new feature to its Claude AI chatbot that lets you build AI-powered apps right inside the app. It builds upon Anthropic’s Artifacts feature.

Commonwealth, which wants to build a fusion power plant, raised $863M from Nvidia's NVentures, Khosla Ventures, and Google, bringing its total raised to ~$3B (Will Wade/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/202…

Anthropic requires users to accept new terms by September 28, including choosing whether new chats and coding sessions can be used to train AI models (Anthropic)
https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms

Updates to Consumer Terms and Privacy Policy
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

On the a16z podcast, Bryan Kim said a16z backed Cluely because speed in marketing and building beats crafting a perfect "artisan" product due to AI competition (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/202…

Why a16z VC believes that Cluely, the ‘cheat on everything’ startup, is the new blueprint for AI startups | TechCrunch
Andreessen Horowitz explains why its new investment philosophy prioritizes 'build as you go' approach embodied by Cluely

A look at India's plan to build a quantum computing hub in Amaravati, Andhra Pradesh, where IBM is in talks to develop India's most powerful quantum computer (John Reed/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/22ce39e9-6122-4fd8-8d03-c12f594c87fc

Aspora, which makes financial tools like remittance services for the Indian diaspora, raised a $50M Series B co-led by Sequoia and Greylock at a $500M valuation (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/15/aspora-ge…

Aspora gets $50M from Sequoia to build remittance and banking solutions for Indian diaspora | TechCrunch
Aspora (formerly Vance) is trying to build a verticalized financial experience for the Indian diaspora by keeping convenience at the center.