Tootfinder

’I think I see your problem’, I said. ’You have come here to build a nest. But you cannot find the materials you need. There is only cold, wet seaweed and you need something drier to make a cosy nest for your egg. Do not worry. I will help you. I have a supply of dry seaweed. Speaking as a non-avian, I feel sure that this would be a highly suitable building material. I will go and fetch it immediately.’
Reading Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

What I have also come to appreciate about my lean Debian stable is that there are no updates every day (or even several times a day) that require a reboot. As is the case with Fedora or Arch. I also find this very pleasant because it doesn't constantly interrupt my work. Yes, comfort comes with age.
#linux

Been out today trying to get my phone battery replaced.
Three phone repair places said they couldn't do it today and would have to order the battery in, and the last made a call and said they'd have a battery this evening if I came back.
So I did come back and they did have the battery. Went to the pub for half an hour while they changed it only to come back and find them apologizing that their heat-plate is apparently broken since yesterday so they can't soften the glue to open the screen.
Annoying how sealed-in batteries are these days. Could change it myself if I had a heat plate to soften the glue and open the screen.
Oh well. They'll call me back when the heat plate is fixed next week.
Given how hot the battery gets now and how hot the weather is, it's a bit surprising the glue isn't softened all on it's own 😆

So I've found my answer after maybe ~30 minutes of effort. First stop was the first search result on Startpage (https://millennialhawk.com/does-poop-have-calories/), which has some evidence of maybe-AI authorship but which is better than a lot of slop. It actually has real links & cites research, so I'll start by looking at the sources.
It claims near the top that poop contains 4.91 kcal per gram (note: 1 kcal = 1 Calorie = 1000 calories, which fact I could find/do trust despite the slop in that search). Now obviously, without a range or mention of an average, this isn't the whole picture, but maybe it's an average to start from? However, the citation link is to a study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32235930/) which only included 27 people with impaired glucose tolerance and obesity. Might have the cited stat, but it's definitely not a broadly representative one if this is the source. The public abstract does not include the stat cited, and I don't want to pay for the article. I happen to be affiliated with a university library, so I could see if I have access that way, but it's a pain to do and not worth it for this study that I know is too specific. Also most people wouldn't have access that way.
Side note: this doing-the-research protect has the nice benefit of letting you see lots of cool stuff you wouldn't have otherwise. The abstract of this study is pretty cool and I learned a bit about gut microbiome changes from just reading the abstract.
My next move was to look among citations in this article to see if I could find something about calorie content of poop specifically. Luckily the article page had indicators for which citations were free to access. I ended up reading/skimming 2 more articles (a few more interesting facts about gut microbiomes were learned) before finding this article whose introduction has what I'm looking for: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3127503/
Here's the relevant paragraph:
"""
The alteration of the energy-balance equation, which is defined by the equilibrium of energy intake and energy expenditure (1–5), leads to weight gain. One less-extensively-studied component of the energy-balance equation is energy loss in stools and urine. Previous studies of healthy adults showed that ≈5% of ingested calories were lost in stools and urine (6). Individuals who consume high-fiber diets exhibit a higher fecal energy loss than individuals who consume low-fiber diets with an equivalent energy content (7, 8). Webb and Annis (9) studied stool energy loss in 4 lean and 4 obese individuals and showed a tendency to lower the fecal energy excretion in obese compared with lean study participants.
"""
And there's a good-enough answer if we do some math, along with links to more in-depth reading if we want them. A Mayo clinic calorie calculator suggests about 2250 Calories per day for me to maintain my weight, I think there's probably a lot of variation in that number, but 5% of that would be very roughly 100 Calories lost in poop per day, so maybe an extremely rough estimate for a range of humans might be 50-200 Calories per day. Interestingly, one of the AI slop pages I found asserted (without citation) 100-200 Calories per day, which kinda checks out. I had no way to trust that number though, and as we saw with the provenance of the 4.91 kcal/gram, it might not be good provenance.
To double-check, I visited this link from the paragraph above: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022316622169853?via=ihub
It's only a 6-person study, but just the abstract has numbers: ~250 kcal/day pooped on a low-fiber diet vs. ~400 kcal/day pooped on a high-fiber diet. That's with intakes of ~2100 and ~2350 kcal respectively, which is close to the number from which I estimated 100 kcal above, so maybe the first estimate from just the 5% number was a bit low.
Glad those numbers were in the abstract, since the full text is paywalled... It's possible this study was also done on some atypical patient group...
Just to come full circle, let's look at that 4.91 kcal/gram number again. A search suggests 14-16 ounces of poop per day is typical, with at least two sources around 14 ounces, or ~400 grams. (AI slop was strong here too, with one including a completely made up table of "studies" that was summarized as 100-200 grams/day). If we believe 400 grams/day of poop, then 4.91 kcal/gram would be almost 2000 kcal/day, which is very clearly ludicrous! So that number was likely some unrelated statistic regurgitated by the AI. I found that number in at least 3 of the slop pages I waded through in my initial search.

I find myself thinking about a long-lost friend a lot lately. Sometime in the late 90s, we both accepted that our friendship had run its course. I had come to embrace fairly low-key socialism and he was increasingly angry about the media's "liberal bias." The common ground we had once shared was gone. I imagine him cheering now, even as I recall his father, a deeply conservative Marine colonel, remarking that only authoritarian regimes used the military against their own citize…

@… I get that. I’m very familiar with spiraling.
I don’t know if this works for you, but for me, it’s important that after I understand a problem, I’m allowed to fuck around a little bit, do some unrelated stuff, and then come back to it. I find I can focus a lot more if I do this.
I wrote about it in a bit more detail here:

"The industry perpetuates this state of things, keeping itself in a state of blissful high-hormone idiocy. Software is important, so clearly those who are writing it must be hailed as the holders of some occult knowledge and the purveyors of infinite wisdom. Through bribery, hubris, or ill luck, some of those same assholes find themselves later in management positions, and continue the tradition by hiring more people like themselves, because that is what humans do."

> fifties era Rocketship Republicanism … come back to earth to find the Overton window has moved the landing pad and it's gotta set down somewhere
— @… can turn a phrase, y'all
https://

Sometimes you know what you want to say in a keynote and for the longest time don't find the angle, the hook, and then when you suddenly find it, it's so obvious and neat. Doesn't happen always but I love when these things come together.

Long shot but I can't find an answer with "short searches": I got a KVM. Everything finally works, except Mint shuts down (closing all apps) when I switch to the other computer and I need to open the lid to make it come back.
This is with "lid action=nothing" in the power settings, of course.
Any ideas? Even ideas on how to express this concept in a way that lets me find the relevant reddit thread would be awesome.

DS@GT at CheckThat! 2025: Exploring Retrieval and Reranking Pipelines for Scientific Claim Source Retrieval on Social Media Discourse
Jeanette Schofield, Shuyu Tian, Hoang Thanh Thanh Truong, Maximilian Heil
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06563

DS@GT at CheckThat! 2025: Exploring Retrieval and Reranking Pipelines for Scientific Claim Source Retrieval on Social Media Discourse
Social media users often make scientific claims without citing where these claims come from, generating a need to verify these claims. This paper details work done by the DS@GT team for CLEF 2025 CheckThat! Lab Task 4b Scientific Claim Source Retrieval which seeks to find relevant scientific papers based on implicit references in tweets. Our team explored 6 different data augmentation techniques, 7 different retrieval and reranking pipelines, and finetuned a bi-encoder. Achieving an MRR@5 of 0.…

What I really need to do is get back up to my full antidepressant dose to lift me out of the depression, and find better coping strategies for the irritability / rage episodes that come with the increased dose.
#mentalhealth #depression

This is such a perfect analogy.
My goto is "asbestos". Super useful invention which bit us in the ass afterwards.
https://xoxo.zone/@annika/114614639082253074

Have you ever watched a @… video? They’re incredibly well-crafted, full of meaningful motion and creative ideas...
and we’ll chat with the man himself this Wednesday to find out how they come together!
Spoiler: it’s fascinating stuff that you’re very familiar with ;)

"Some AI prompts could cause 50 times more CO₂ emissions than others, researchers find"
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Technology

Some AI prompts could cause 50 times more CO₂ emissions than others, researchers find
No matter which questions we ask an AI, the model will come up with an answer. To produce this information—regardless of whether the answer is correct or not—the model uses tokens. Tokens are words or parts of words that are converted into a string of numbers that can be processed by the LLM.

Come join us at Tech Pizza Monday: Sticker Club Edition! The first Monday of the month is when we gather to share the stories of the stickers, pins and patches we’ve collected over the years and even trade some of them! Find us at the sign at Victory Cafe, 440 Bloor St. W., on July 7th at 6:00 PM. #Toronto #tech

If #BartSimpson and #ChrisGriffin Went to #CouplesTherapy, with #BobbyHill as the therapist.

Cycling question: trying out saddles, in the UK
UK cycling people, is there somewhere you'd go to sit on different saddles to test if they're comfortable? Is that a thing?
I've worked out that my (default came-with-the-bike) saddle isn't the right shape for me: it's giving me an achy tailbone, as well as I think being a bit too narrow for optimal sit-bone comfort.
For context, I'm an "occasional cyclist for pleasure and/or practical reasons", shall we say. No ambition to be super fast.
Looking around online, I think I want something more like the Rido R2 or one of the Selle ones, shaped to have air under the tailbone area. Or maybe even a noseless one like the Spongy Wonder, though I don't like the look of how the metal frame sticks out at the front of those.
What's the chances a shop would have more than one of those and a willingness to get them out for a test sit? Or, better still, is there a loan scheme anywhere, so you can actually "test drive" them for a bit? Or do people usually just buy and be willing to sell again?
I'm in Nottingham, and I know there are bike shops I could get to, but I'm not seeing "come in and try all these saddles, we'll help you to find the right one" kinds of messaging.
Could also potentially travel elsewhere at some point if it turns out there's some kind of "best place in the country for that question".
Advice welcome!
#cycling #BikeTooter #AskFedi #UK