Tootfinder

> 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://

Just added 18 new names to my 45 Names bot that posts a nickname of potus every hour:
@…
Follow the bot on Mastodon:
https://mastodon.social/@45names
An…

45 Name an Hour (@45names@mastodon.social)
4.7K Posts, 820 Following, 210 Followers · 45 names, one an hour. Created by @davidaugust@mastodon.online https://www.davidaugust.com Collection of names for the 45th President. Thanks to the writers, comedians, late night shows, internet folk and more who made these up. If I've gone missing, please come find me. Thanks to @boodoo@mastodon.social for helping this run. searchable on tootfinder.ch and #fedi22 For entertainment purposes only: please don't ruin my life. #satire #potus45 #potu…

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

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.

We were toyed with by the gods of chaos today. My ADHD son thrives on the in-the-momentness of it but I find it draining. An unexpected dead brake light threw this morning's plans which changed four times along with my clothes as we were/were differently/weren't/were going climbing as various attempts were made to find a bulb in town. Find bulb, hubs fits it, son & I go to Hereford, some tosser sets up a sharp under our tyre so it goes flat as we leave the car park to come home. …

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

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

Well back before the 2016 election I remember seeing a news video in which Trump said something about how, if he ran for the presidency, he could make money. That video seems to have vanished beyond our event horizon. It would be nice if someone could find and resurrect it.
Anyway, FFOTUS has made that video come true:
"Trump Used Your Tax Dollars to Open His New Scottish Golf Course"

Trump Used Your Tax Dollars to Open His New Scottish Golf Course
Donald Trump inaugurated a new, private golf course in Scotland during an official state trip funded by taxpayers.

Color me surprised.
https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission/114930901454223757

European Commission (@EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu)
Attached: 1 image We have preliminarily found Temu in breach of its obligation to properly assess the risks of illegal products being sold on its marketplace. Evidence shows there is a high risk for EU consumers to come across illegal products on the platform. Analysis of a mystery shopping exercise we conducted found that consumers shopping on Temu are very likely to find non-compliant products among the offer, such as baby toys and small electronics. Find out more: https://europa.eu/!Xdq…

How often do you stop to consider how much harm has come from the absurd capitalist notion of "everyone must work for living" [does not apply to the rich], and its sister notion "everyone must work full hours"?
How many harmful technologies couldn't be phased out because it meant a lot of people losing their only source of income? How many destructive industries have been proliferating simply because closing them down would mean a lot of people without jobs? How much further are we going to push for the absurd notion of infinite growth?
And of course it only applies to the quasi-privileged groups. Nobody cares when lots of "low-tech" people are laid off and told to find a new job, because techbros need their new "high-tech" (read: more destructive to the planet) ideas to sell.
#AntiCapitalism #ClimateCrisis

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
Caribou:
🎵 Come Find Me
#Caribou
https://caribouband.bandcamp.com/track/come-find-me
https://open.spotify.com/track/39hX87e2Ku7elpi5eBYZKM
Please 🔁 BOOST to share what you like
- your followers don't see if you ⭐ favourite a post

Trump tariffs bring chaos, as shipments halted from Europe, Asia https://cdm.link/trump-de-minimis-chaos/

Trump tariffs bring chaos, as shipments halted from Europe, Asia - CDM Create Digital Music
The Trump administration's trade policies do more than increase costs for US consumers. Their historic scale and disorganized rollout are causing global disruptions. That hurts independent music gear makers and label owners. It's also ironically likely to cripple manufacturers trying to work in the USA. The only (sort of) good news: shippers and exporters are trying to find solutions, and at least some of the disruptions should be temporary. But those solutions won't come free.

So you teach your kids to respect revealed truths and not question authority and then wonder how sociopaths and malignant narcissists come to power and why you find yourself living under the yoke of fascism?
#microNonfiction

I’ve come to accept that raising a #baby is really time and energy consuming and that many of those things that I’d like to get done simply won’t. I find that acceptance quite liberating. There is tension though as C is not in the same place and is constantly fretting that things are not getting done.
#parenting

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 😆

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…

Another nerd snipe, but this one was out of spite. Every now and again I come across a YouTube video that shows a simple algebra problem with a tagline that implies it's impossible. Today's was just a simple equation, just had to solve for 'x'.
```
4^x * 4^x * 4^x = 40
```
So, broke out a bit of paper and Ye Olde Fountain Pen, solved for 'x', then couldn't find the video that made it seem like the solution was special or extremely difficult…

It’s interesting to see where browsers tap out when counting stuff.
When I was testing heading levels, I found Firefox & Safari go to 2,147,483,647 while Chromium only goes up to 9.
https://mastodon.social/@Meyerweb/114988548324732580

"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.

Epstein shit and adjacent, Rural America, Poverty, Abuse
Everyone who's not a pedophile thinks pedophiles are bad, but there's this special obsessed hatred you'll find among poor rural Americans. The whole QAnon/Epstein obsession may not really make sense to folks raised in cities. Like, why do these people think *so much* about pedophiles? Why do they think that everyone in power is a pedophile? Why would the Pizzagate thing make sense to anyone? What is this unhinged shit? A lot of folks (who aren't anarchists) might be inclined to ask "why can't these people just let the cops take care of it?"
I was watching Legal Eagle's run down on the Trump Epstein thing earlier today and I woke up thinking about something I don't know if I've ever talked about. Now that I'm not in the US, I'm not at any risk of talking about it. I don't know how much I would have been before, but that's not something I'm gonna dig into right now. So let me tell you a story that might explain a few things.
I'm like 16, maybe 17. I have my license, so this girl I was dating/not dating/just friends with/whatever would regularly convince me to drive her and her friends around. I think she's like 15 at the time. Her friends are younger than her.
She tells me that there's a party we can go to where they have beer. She was told to invite her friends, so I can come too. We're going to pick her friends up (we regularly fill the VW Golf well beyond the legal limit and drive places) and head to the party.
So I take these girls, at least is 13 years old, down to this party. I'm already a bit sketched out bringing a 13 year old to a party. We drive out for a while. It's in the country. We drive down a long dark road. Three are some barrel fires and a shack. This is all a bit strange, but not too abnormal for this area. We're a little ways outside of a place called Mill City (in Oregon).
We park and walk towards the shack. This dude who looks like a rat comes up and offers us beer. He laughs and talks to the girl who invited me, "What's he doing here? You're supposed to bring your girl friends." She's like, "He's our ride." I don't remember if he offered me a beer or not.
We go over to this shed and everyone starts smoking, except me because I didn't smoke until I turned 18. The other girls start talking about the rat face dude, who's wandered over by the fire with some other guys. They're mainly teasing one of the 13 year old girls about having sex with him a bunch of times. They say he's like, 32 or something. The other girls joke about him only having sex with 13 year olds because he's too ugly to have sex with anyone closer to his own age.
Somewhere along the line it comes out that he's a cop. I never forgot that, it's absolutely seared in to my memory. I can picture his face perfectly still, decades later, and them talking about how he's a deputy, he was in his 30's, and he was having sex with a 13 year old girl. I was the only boy there, but there were a few older men. This was a chunk of the good ol' boys club of the town. I think there were a couple of cops besides the one deputy, and a judge or the mayor or some kind of big local VIP.
I kept trying to get my friend to leave, but she wanted to stay. Turns out under age drinking with cops seems like a great deal if you're a kid because you know you won't get busted. I left alone, creeped the fuck out.
I was told later that I wasn't invited and that I couldn't talk about it, I've always been good at compartmentalization, so I never did.
Decades later it occurred to me what was actually happening. I'm pretty sure that cop was giving meth he'd seized as evidence to these kids. This wasn't some one-off thing. It was regular. Who knows how many decades it went on after I left, or how many decades it had been going on before I found out. I knew this type of thing had happened at least a few times before because that's how that 13 year old girl and that 32 year old cop had hooked up in the first place.
Hearing about Epstein's MO, targeting these teenage girls from fucked up backgrounds, it's right there for me. I wouldn't be surprised if they were involved in sex trafficking of minors or some shit like that... but who would you call if you found out? Half the sheriff's department was there and the other half would cover for them.
You live in the city and shit like that doesn't happen, or at least you don't think it happens. But rural poor folks have this intuition about power and abuse. It's right there and you know it.
Trump is such a familiar character for me, because he's exactly that small town mayor or sheriff. He'll will talk about being tough on crime and hunting down pedophiles, while hanging out at a party that exists so people can fuck 8th graders.
The problem with the whole thing is that rural folks will never break the cognitive dissonance between "kill the peods" and "back the blue." They'll never go kill those cops. No, the pedos must be somewhere else. It must be the elites. It must be outsiders. It can't be the cops and good ol' boys everyone respects. It can't be the mayor who rigs the election to win every time. It can't be the "good upstanding" sheriff. Nah, it's the Clintons.
To be fair, it's probably also the Clitnons, a bunch of other politicians, billionaires, etc. Epstein was exactly who everyone thought he was, and he didn't get away with it for so long without a whole lot of really powerful help.
There are still powerful people who got away with involvement with #Epstein. #Trump is one of them, but I don't really believe that he's the only one.
#USPol #ACAB

’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

I have a lot of devices (~15) on my home wifi network. Around me are also 10-15 neighboring wifi networks as well as nearly 30 bluetooth devices of various origins.
I find it incredibly funny that using wireless bluetooth headphones throws me back to the vinyl record days where you hear constant popping, cracking and skipping.
All this fancy technology just to come full circle. 😄
Luckily, my particular pair came with an optional wire. 🎧

Evolution of quasiparticle edge states with Hubbard interaction in Rice-Mele chain
Jyoti Bisht, Brijesh Kumar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21008 https://arxi…

Evolution of quasiparticle edge states with Hubbard interaction in Rice-Mele chain
We study the behaviour of edge states in Rice-Mele model with Hubbard interaction, U , at half-filling using density matrix renormalization group, exact diagonalization and effective charge dynamics in Kumar representation. For a fixed dimerization, $δ$, and staggered potential, V , we find by increasing U the quasiparticle edge states in the charge gap to come down in energy from V in the absence of Hubbard interaction to zero energy for U $\approx$ 2V . This presents an uncommon case where r…

#Blakes7 Series B, Episode 09 - Countdown
BLAKE: We'll do it. [Starts to call the ship]
AVON: Wait. Disarming a device is not your field. You finish what we came here for: find Provine.
GRANT: [To Avon] I'll come with you.
AVON: No.

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.

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.

RIVERS!
What can we learn from European rivers? How can we prevent floods using that knowledge?
What are some of Europe's latests wild rivers?
What is the "fifth season" in Estonia and what does it have to do with flooding rivers?
Find out at The European Perspective. New article by Raluca Besliu:
"Understanding the flow: Europe’s forgotten river wisdom"

Understanding the flow: Europe's forgotten river wisdom - The European Perspective
I come from a country where rivers crisscross the land like veins—feeding valleys, nourishing communities, and shaping the terrain. From wide, slow-moving

@… 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:

Addressing Bias in Algorithmic Solutions: Exploring Vertex Cover and Feedback Vertex Set
Sheikh Shakil Akhtar, Jayakrishnan Madathil, Pranabendu Misra, Geevarghese Philip
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14509

Addressing Bias in Algorithmic Solutions: Exploring Vertex Cover and Feedback Vertex Set
A typical goal of research in combinatorial optimization is to come up with fast algorithms that find optimal solutions to a computational problem. The process that takes a real-world problem and extracts a clean mathematical abstraction of it often throws out a lot of "side information" which is deemed irrelevant. However, the discarded information could be of real significance to the end-user of the algorithm's output. All solutions of the same cost are not necessarily of equal impact in the …

Time was the Autumn/Winter cycle shows would come out and run for 26 weeks and brighten up your darker seasons with something small to look forward to each week, even on shitty days like Monday and Tuesday. Now they just dump the entire season (10 episodes, not 26) all at once in early August and you're intended to sit and watch it in one or two evenings. If you don't do that and choose to pace yourself, well, I guess you'll have to find something else to talk about with the othe…

Gutierrez: Jameis, DTR, Rypien? Raiders’ backup QB role is open season after O'Connell injury https://www.raiders.com/news/raiders-backup-qb-role-jameis-winston-dorian-thompson-robinson-tyler-huntley

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

«I believe that the web, like Nokia, was created to connect people. Some create things, some watch or read those, and connections are formed. LLMs […] destroy the human element of the web, and of the real world too, because those are too interconnected now. […] By using LLMs in a collaborative context, you cheat: you introduce errors and invite everybody to find them»
A really lovely interview with @… ! Come for the map talk, stay for the community insight
https://www.apc.org/en/news/every-door-going-map-user-open-source-map-creator

So, been wondering why my mic audio has been absolutely wretched over the last few videos and such. Come to find out, if you accidentally wreck almost all of the settings on the compressor/gate then things are going to go very, very poorly. Did a quick test run in OBS and everything sounded so much better.
Current setup for the microphone: Earthworks Audio Ethos -> Universal Audio SOLO/610 -> dbx 286s -> [insert generic audio interface] -> Linux rig

#ScribesAndMakers 22
Show us something you've created. Tell us the story behind it.
https://cs.wellesley.edu/~pmwh/labyrinfinite/
I was thinking on a dog walk about how most games with procedurally generated content like Minecraft get pretty repetitive at some point if you zoom out far enough, and large-scale structures that have structural constraints like rivers are very hard to generate piecemeal. So I wanted to come up with an algorithm that could generate globally-consistent structures piece-by-piece, with consistency even if pieces were generated out-of-order, while maintaining only a fixed amount of context no matter how far from the origin you went. This demo is *almost* that, except the amount of context scales logarithmically with the distance-from-origin, which I find a very acceptable compromise. In the demo, there's a single infinitely-long path that eventually touches every cell of the infinite 2D grid (okay, computer limitations mean it's not really infinite, but mathematically it could be). You can get different path structures from different random seeds, although the generation trick does constrain things a lot relative to the set of all possible such paths (notice that in each 5x5 region it touches every cell before leaving; that's not in general necessary).

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.…

Gutierrez: With a lack of true first-team battles, Raiders and Niners still find quality work https://www.raiders.com/news/raiders-49ers-quality-work-joint-practice-nfl-2025-preseason-081425

Gutierrez: With a lack of true first-team battles, Raiders and Niners still find quality work https://www.raiders.com/news/raiders-49ers-quality-work-joint-practice-nfl-2025-preseason-081425