Tootfinder

, “lying and deception are rational behaviours to achieve many goals. This is why humans do it. And this is why the AIs do it now.”
Yoshua Bengio
See https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/sep/

‘If you build something vastly smarter than you, it better be on your side’: can we stop AI from deceiving us?
The long read: We are used to the idea that our fellow humans might intentionally mislead or manipulate us, but the idea that machines can now do the same is deeply unsettling. Researchers are racing to find solutions before it’s too late

What should I ask the #solar installer who is coming to do a survey tomorrow?
I'm intending to ask for a Sunsync with no connectivity (other than the 485/modbus socket so I can drive it myself).
Things I have on the list:
* Confirm model of inverter/panels/etc
* Check they do the DNO/G98 stuff
* Check bird protection included
* What electrical work is need…

National Emergency Briefings – what next?
3 workshops, the 1st on Thursday.
Steady State Manchester
What does it mean for us? Who needs to act, and how do we pressure them to do the right thing?
We've still some places - if you want to come, please book.
https://

Events: National Emergency Briefings – what next?
Updated 11 Aug: third workshop added We bring you a series of three workshops looking at the implications of the National Emergency Briefings for Greater Manchester.  What does it mean for us? Who …

Why do the media and politicians continue to talk about #Brexit and reversing Brexit? It happened 10 years ago. It will soon will be in school syllabuses studying our relationship with #Europe. Europe has moved on. We will not be going back to where we were, but we will eventually get to a new place at …

Airbnb hosts are melting down over a new policy banning them from making guests complete tasks that “would typically be performed by a cleaner,”
like “stripping the bed, taking trash offsite, or washing and putting away dishes.”
The change, which applies to all bookings made on or after November 20,
quickly sparked outrage after it was announced in an email to Airbnb hosts on Wednesday.
Many began fuming online about losing the right to make their guests clean up afte…

Airbnb Hosts Are Furious They Can No Longer Make Guests Do Their Chores
Some hosts are threatening to strike, while others are plotting ways around Airbnb’s new restrictions. Guests, meanwhile, are celebrating.

Dress like a pirate and sing Don’t Stop Me Now at karaoke? Don’t mind if I do :)
Happy Halloween!
🎃👻
https://vimeo.com/1241854505

How fast do drugs work? A new review, with James Higham, now on arXiv https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.01228 . Supplementary stuff at

Saturday morning, approaching noon It’s another mild day here. I went out to work in just shirt and shorts again. It’s not typical for OCtober but I certainly not complaining. I really do not enjoy the chilly dark winter days at all.

It's been a while since I've posted a #osint #geolocation challenge.
This one is a bit different, it's not my photo and I do not have the correct answer off the top of my head.
This is one of the home page "hey we're a cool bank let us help you travel places" clipar…

Sorry for the downtime at phpc.social.
I had to rebuild some database indexes to free up database disk space as we're getting close to needing to upgrade to the next DB tier otherwise. Doing a drop-and-recreate while the service was online locked things up, so I had to take the site offline to finish the tranche of index rebuilds I had started.
There's more to do here, and I may need more downtime to do it, but I'll see what I can do tonight when less folks will be af…

Determinism Injection for large prompts.
https://chris.wensel.net/post/determinism-injection/

The modern GOP is a cult of personality with almost no room for dissent
and where the dissent exists, it’s because some people think it’s fucking awesome to put up ads calling child rape victims a liar
and others saying well maybe that’s a half-step too far.
But I actually do think the Republicans’ future is pretty bright
and the reason for that is that there’s no evidence that extremism is going to make one bit of difference in their electoral success over the long …

Republican Optimism - Lawyers, Guns & Money
Some National Review guy wrote a Times op-ed about 10 days ago that said basically “sure, Democrats are going to do well in November, but long term, Republicans are gold.” It’s worth at least considering some of this. That cacophony of voices representing itself as Republican would have been unthinkable before Mr. Trump. And it […]

Birthday Week
My birthday is coming. Plus football and Star Trek.
http://www.bobmuellerwriter.com/birthday-week/

Birthday Week – Bob Mueller
How do you mourn the passing of favorite celebrities? I also talk about Michigan football (we won this week!) and my birthday.

Great piece - interestingly written from a critical, mostly Chinese-focused perspective, which is rare. Doesn't include a single quote from any Indonesian workers
https://grist.org/labor/indonesia-nickel-chinese-workers-energy-transition/

Imagens da recepção de gala em Foz do Iguaçu.

@… @… We do 20 in the first 5 minutes. We'll probably end up north of 200. Forget about property taxes, it's the candy tax that really does us in.

“Not all Israelis”
“Only democracy in the Middle East”
https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2026/10/14/do-any-of-these-israeli-candidates-support-a-palestinian-state

Do any of these Israeli candidates support a Palestinian state?
Do any of these Israeli candidates support a Palestinian state?

Marie’s biscuits with egg bacon tea coffee! Learned I do not have breast cancer yesterday, after a few rough weeks. RIFC soccer match tonight! #TogetherBreakfast https://photos.app.goo.gl/mysZAmE2cqJ7Sf6Y6

Anthropic renames its $100 per month Max 5x plan as Max and the $200 per month Max 20x plan as Ultra, and removes the 5-hour limit for verified Ultra accounts (Claude/@claudeai)
https://x.com/claudeai/status/2116220869479428500

Claude (@claudeai) on X
We’re renaming our Max plans: Max 5x → Max Max 20x → Ultra Max is still $100/month, and Ultra is still $200. If you’re a subscriber, there’s nothing you need to do. We’re also removing the 5-hour limit for verified Ultra accounts, starting today with most existing subscribers. Newer accounts ke…

Do you?
#Wordle
Wordle 1 960 5/6
⬛🟨⬛⬛⬛
⬛⬛⬛🟨⬛
⬛⬛⬛⬛🟨
🟨🟨🟨⬛🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

@… It can do double FYI

This year, all hallows and Halloween happens on the same night. One is a spooky feast for children and the other is a solemn time when we're remembering those who have gone before us.
We can do both. Because that's life.
The graveyards are incredibly beautiful and quiet, and the candles are burning in the darkness. Now it's time to get the child from her party.
Because we can, and must, hold both joy and sadness with the same hand, in one heart.

Whatever you do, don't tell anyone.
Had a song spinning around in my head this morning. Could not remember the songs title or the band. Had to crawl back through a few days of Mastodon posts to see an image to remind myself – that Queens of the Stone Age have a new album out today.

The very predictable side effect of not hiring junior roles and replacing* them with AI instead.
*AI can't actually do the job of humans.
(Credit: inspired by a tweet by a @Dylanszn01 on twitter)

the time says it all, lower caps on top: it's application time. i'm tired. why do new application portals have to be so fiddly and ask (again) for every kind of detail via scroll-down menu? and then, sure, random failures, because impossible-to-have metadata is missing. that's digital waste. dear d. graeber, you are missed.
#academicchatter

Enphase AC Battery Grid-connected Storage in Our UK Home: Review - Does it do what it says on the tin? And what about the important feature not on the datasheet? #storage #dataset #behindTheMeter

Enphase AC Battery Grid-connected Storage in Our UK Home: Review
Does it do what it says on the tin? And what about the important feature not on the datasheet? #storage #dataset #behindTheMeter

A great deal of useful material is not presented well. Try to learn no matter how well material is presented.
"You can blame whoever was communicating the ideas to you for failing to present it as well as they should but that won’t help you learn more."
"You can train yourself to learn more than most people when the material is presented in a less than perfect manner by learning how we commonly fail to learn and making efforts to do better yourself."

How could you even tell?
#AI #LLM

I resolved this year to have my slides for my graduate level stats class do more to engage with the eugenics and elitism that forms the backbone of academic quantitative methods. I think this representation of Fisher in my lecture on logit/probit regressions today turned out nicely.

The Hereford Times doesn't know what to do with itself now Richard Hammond has moved. Thank gods for Jules Hudson eh?
@… https://c.im/@BBC/117525739116455250

Do you ever feel wasteful only eating the pop corners and never the pop middles?

Deleted my entire Instagram direct message history, luckily there are browser extensions to do that. Stop training on my data plz.

Hopefully this will get boosted by someone who has followers who need to see it.
Were you born overseas at a military base or to a parent who was a U.S. citizen? If so you probably do not have a normal birth certificate issued by a state. Instead you will have a Consular Report of Birth Abroad issued by the state department. The current form is FS-240 there are also older discontinued forms FS-545 and DS-1350.
If you do not have yours you can go to

$450 for a GeForce RTX 5050? Thank you, Saint Jencen! What would we do without you? Please, sir, my I have some more circle gratification stocks, sir?

@… @… Problem is, if it goes viral, they'll want you to do this every week.

Something I do when reading to my kids that I hope helps a bit with all of the patriarchy in children's literature is to randomize the genders of the characters, including the occasional non-binary options and various neopronouns, and sometimes swapping mid-story (especially when there's a metamorphosis, like in "The Very Hungry Caterpillar"). There are so many things that are asymmetrically distributed between genders in books for babies and children, but if you randomize the genders, you can blunt that (I hope).
#parenting #patriarchy #gender

RE: https://velocipederider.com/@ruari/117519639436399061
It occurs to me now that many might read this as you can just avoid software if they only offer in a format you do not like.
That wasn't what I meant but feel free to take it that way in…

This arrived yesterday from an eBay seller. A version of the "Pac-Man Fever" 45 from the U.K. in a picture sleeve. I'VE NEVER SEEN THIS SLEEVE BEFORE. As far as Google and Discogs are concerned, THIS DOESN'T EXIST! If you can prove otherwise, please do. The record seems identical to one version of the non-picture sleeve one (minus the "promo only" text). The back of the sleeve duplicates text (and borrows art from) from the Atari 2600 Pac-Man instruction book. 🤔❓<…

My right Index controller (which constantly loses tracking and floats away btw) is now turning off when my overlays report 60% battery. It used to do that at 30%. I gotta have it wired to a battery pack if I want to use it for an hour or more. Steam Frame please come soon :neofox_nervous:

While stroking a sleeping cat is mostly associated with bond villains in pop culture, I do believe it has strong therapeutic value.

Building a robot that looks like a human is like building a car that looks like a horse.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/quote-of-the

Do we have turnout numbers for #topoli yet?

I've played with a toy fluid sim implementation (eulerian) to see if I can make cool fiery explosions with it and ...nope. It seems that the assumption of incompressibility, subsonic velocities, unavoidable viscosity doom it to be just a fluid sim forever. The best I can do is a splotch of ink.

People are always saying the genie isn't going to go back into the bottle, but famously all you have to do is ask the genie how it managed to fit in the bottle, and it will then happily demonstrate that to you. You can then just put the cap back on the bottle. We've literally known this for ages.

All 20 mortises are done. I forgot about the slots for the z-clips to hold the top on. So, I cut those real quick. All the 1" mortises made the 1/4" slots feel like nothing.
All the pieces are sanded to 220 grit and the legs have been rounded off with a router.
Tomorrow is dry-fit and hopefully glue up.
Then, I just have to do the top.
26 days left.
#woodworking

It's kind of crazy that both GPT and Claude really love to manipulate files by writing Python scripts that do text search-and-replace. First of all, why isn't this a dedicated tool? Second, the generated scripts usually don't check that the search-and-replace was successful. Are they just good enough at regurgitating text that they never make mistakes? What if the file was modified in the mean time?

At this point, I started to look deeper at performance. Compute instance startup was taking over 30 seconds, and each generation propagation was about 55-75 seconds
I worked this from a few angles:
- parallelize actions (health checks, integrity checks, propagation initiation, and terminating ancestors) [30% gain]
- rebuild and reduce the AMI below Ubuntu minimal to fit in 2GiB EBS volumes (reduced cost and increased speed by also bundling the glider daemon and boto3 SDK in the AMI) [30% gain]
- switched from AWS CLI to boto3 SDK [5-10% gain]
- switched from CloudFormation creation stacks to using EC2 API directly with LaunchTemplate [under 5% gain total, surprisingly, but the time to initial instance startup is faster so I might be able to do better somewhere here]
- WIP: further refactoring of the daemon propagation steps especially around initial health/integrity checks
I still think I'm missing something major that's extending propagation times, despite benchmarking phases through several trials
I also optimized for cost (reduced DDB calls, abandoned KMS, reduced log & audit retention to the latest run, etc), and it's about a penny for a 10 generation run (and it scales sublinearly, mostly, since the instances are terminated afterwards)

RE: https://mas.to/@aljazeera_gotgrip/117528802269973042
“Why do they hate us?”
It must be your fucking freedom that they’re jealous of. Can’t think of any other fucking reason, can you?

Damn we really do need an alternative to TripAdvisor Zabbit etc. the "Places" thing. It is like the third time now I want to swap out that API somewhere and can't find anything.
I need like a mashup of mobilizon bookwyrm, but with "your local restaurant around the corner".

Cristo entre nuvens, foto da última sexta-feira, tirada de Botafogo.
#PHOTOMonday #fotografia #riodejaneiro #brasil

#ScribesAndMakers 10/23: Our next featured creator enjoys hiking. Do you enjoy being outdoors, and if so, does it have an impact on your creativity?
Everything I do have an impact, in one way or the other. For good or bad remains to be seen, but I enjoy hiking. I just have too little time to actually do it.

Jim Leonhard has a big to-do list in addressing Bills' defensive deficiencies during team's bye week https://www.foxsports.com/articles/nfl/jim-leonhard-has-a-big-todo-list-in-addressing-bills-defensiv…

Levar/destruir a tenda da polícia do Bordalo II poder-se-š pôr na conta do atentado ao património cultural? 🤔

„It also doesn't help that passkeys require you to use a password manager, at which point it must be asked, doesn't a password manager solve a lot of the problems passkeys are supposed to solve anyway?”
https://birchtree.me/blog/passkeys-are-a-trap-no-theyre-not/<…

Waited for Tapbots to do their Bluesky client - I really can’t survive without how they do mutes - but keep looking for alternatives as it’s just way too slashdot user rich here.
Indigo is like a tweetbot/ivory clone that supports both Mastodon and Bluesky and has a unified timeline, mutes how I want etc.
Seems worth a look https://an…

After reading this book I felt like taking a shower, so disgusting how much nonsense / dark money / harm there is in social media space and there is legitimately no positive way forward here. I wish we could somehow keep the kids out of this but I see parents give phones/ipads to their kids and they do whatever the hell they want and just consume nonsense all day. Sad stuff.

Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost o…
A searing investigation into the child influencer indus…

I don't believe in ghosts but I do own a networked printer.

Fabulous episode on what Canada can do domestically to improve sovereignty.
#ElbowsUp #CanCon

Suggestion for a survey: Do you want all-year around Paris clock time or Moscow clock time?
Added a poll just for fun. Please repost.

Do not be evil: #BigTech

Rechenzentren: Google rodet Wald und lockt Wölfe in finnische Dörfer - Golem.de
Google muss den Bau eines Rechenzentrums in Finnland wohl vorerst stoppen. 250.000 Bäume sind ohne Genehmigung entfernt worden.

It's inexplicable to me why apps for #Immich and #Paperless do not have a *button* to upload files from the filesystem. You must use the share-to mechanism from *another* app 🤪 So instead, I just use the webinterfaces (which do have such a button!), those also have much more features anyway...

I just walked past a bus stop.
There is a guy strutting around in front of it in a sea captain's hat ⚓ with all his worldly belongings in a bag on the bench.
He has a lot to say (singing, in a nasal falsetto):
What do you mean 🎵
The brains of a pigeon 🎵
Highly intelligent 🎵
The brains of 🎵
Highly intelligent people 🎵
The brains of a 🎵 piiigeoon🎵
I have fallen into a gritty live-action remake of DON'T LET THE PIGEON DRIVE THE BUS

Could your website be static? Could you do things like header/footer includes when you do the updates instead of on every page read?
OK, maybe you have a search or something - but could everything else be static?

How bad do you have to be at crime for Kalshi to ban you for life?
#Kalshi #GeorgeSantos

Watched this video and it's amazing how easy certain things are to do in Resolve. Definitely multicam/narrative edits seem easier. Also seems like if you come from broadcast you might feel more at home, too.
But it's also very jagged in look and feel, where Apple always makes things feel fluid. DVR feels more engineer-y, computer-y. Like Windows, or Premiere, or Pro Tools.
Still trying to get a sense of how much I'll stumble over before I commit to working in it...

✅ To do: run composer update laravel/framework, check config/auth.php for token guards (top priority on MySQL/MariaDB), and run composer audit against published advisories
https://laravel-news.com/laravel-token-guard-auth-bypass

Cobie Durant aiming to do his part for Cowboys secondary, help create turnovers https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/cobie-durant-aiming-to-do-his-part-for-cowboys-secondary-help-create-turnovers

amazing, in Fedora KDE setting a DNS from the GUI like a normal person doesn't do anything; /etc/resolv.conf is still managed by systemd-resolved that does its own thing.
apparently linux desktop still can't dns

Spotify-owned outlet The Ringer moves newsletters by some of its most popular staff to Substack; Spotify declines to explain the strategy behind the move (Owen Lewis/Defector)
https://defector.com/nobody-wants-to-talk-about-why-the-ringer-is-pivoting-to…

Nobody Wants To Talk About Why The Ringer Is Pivoting To Substack | Defector
A media company launching a series of paywalled newsletters is not, on its own and on its face, a strange thing to do. AI’s ongoing cannibalization of online search is ravaging website traffic, and programmatic advertising doesn’t provide the kind of revenue it used to. If you were running a website like The Ringer, you…

If you've got PHP stuff you need to upgrade tomorrow morning, do some prework tonight. Get stuff on the latest patch of PHP 8.2 or better, at which point that proves you know how to deploy that-plus-the-next-patch. I'm having to do some tweaks to get there myself for some stuff.

Just had a classic issues on a site - all looked fine for me on Desktop but was getting a Lighthouse issue for the fonts. Turned out the font files had been empty since 2023. Of course it looks fine on my Mac but not on my phone! How the files became empty I just don't have a clue! Had an old back up so now all sorted.
Still a few things to do on the site for performance.

If AI were a nation, the increased economic activity it promises to stimulate would become the fifth largest CO2 emitter, just behind Russia—study.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/11/ai-will-do-more-to-boost…

Your brain runs on 20 watts of power. Could brain-inspired computing do the same?
https://theconversation.com/your-brain-runs-on-20-watts-could-brain-inspired-computing-do-the-same-292048?ref=refind&…

Your brain runs on 20 watts. Could brain-inspired computing do the same?
Neuromorphic technology is reimagining how computers should work.

#ScribesAndMakers Oct 29: How do you feel about alliteration?
Like any literary tool, alliteration can be overused. But used at the right moment, it can feel like a stroke of genius.

Voting is a first but also powerful step!
https://piefed.social/c/curatedtumblr@sh.itjust.works/p/2536689/thank-you-serbia

RE: https://cassano.com.br/2026/10/19/e-se-esse-for-o-fim-do-meio/
Lugares instagramšveis, o Guia do Mochileiro das Galšxias, problemas matemšticos e a IA como oršculo: o problema dos finais sem meios e a morte da narrativa.

#DuckDuckGo started making me regularly do captchas to searches...

Progress on my new open source project retrofit continues.
As we work to getting a stable release I’d be happy for others to kick around, we’ve decided to make Wednesdays demo day.
So do please check out our new demo:
https://retrofit.sh/demos/flyway-adopt-retrofit/<…

Today is a good day to poke your management to join the Open Source Pledge:
#PHP #Node

Open Source Pledge
Open Source software powers the world, but who supports the maintainers? We do.

#PennedPossibilities 1169: Your MC is dead and haunting you. Where and how do they show up?
Awkward, because that's not far off from how I sometimes feel already. Slightly removed from the world, ideas showing up in the most inconvenient places, and nights being excessively active.
All of this should probably be cause for concern, considering the book takes place inside t…

Do I want to know why there are multiple big long haired white men with thin blue line shirts on this flight in first class with me?

I am at the doing every single one of the way too many things I have to do poorly stage of my career.

TIL that in the x86-64 SysV ABI, global array variables at least 16 bytes long are forced to 16-byte alignment.
But only arrays. If it’s a struct containing an array, you’re back down to regular alignment.
Windows, more sanely, aligns all globals based on their size on x86-64 and AArch64. Less sanely, the fact that it does so on x86-64 is (according to LLVM) undocumented.
Other AArch64 targets don’t do this at all.

amazing, in Fedora KDE setting a DNS from the GUI like a normal person doesn't do anything; /etc/resolv.conf is still managed by systemd-resolved that does its own thing.
apparently linux desktop still can't dns

Health authorities in France reported the first-ever recorded human infection and death associated with the Shamonda virus.
The patient passed away in a hospice in Lyon and was reportedly already suffering from a serious underlying illness.

France's agricultural and health departments have stated that they do not see a health risk to the general population at this stage, as the virus is not considered highly transmissible to or between humans.

RE: https://phpc.social/@ramsey/117451064521285682
There are ways around this, but it requires the human on the other end to be trusted to consistently do those things. And new models provide a massive temptation to skip steps that you really still need to do.<…

#WritersCoffeeClub Oct 23: How do you make sure you deliver on your writerly promises?
I don't make promises lightly. When I do, whether to myself or someone else, I take them seriously.
What matters isn't necessarily the exact wording, but the intention behind the promise. I can be flexible about how I fulfil it, but not about whether I intend to keep it.
Barring…

🔒 Kitten Security update
I just released a Kitten hotfix that upgrades the Kitten runtime to today’s Node 24.22.1 with a number of critical security fixes, including the eMudhra fix.
All Kitten production servers will automatically update within the next six hours if you do nothing.
If you want to upgrade your servers sooner, like I just did, sign in to your Settings panel and use the manual upgrade feature.

@aiappsapi@mastodon.social I agree that per-query values have limited meaning given all the variability in the context of how they're used.
That said, although I don't know an empirical study of this, I think there are many contexts in which a cheaper model has a much lower footprint. In fact, a recent study out of Stanford et al. found re-reading context was one of the reasons agentic tasks blew up compute

https://silvio.meira.com/a-grande-aposta/

A GRANDE APOSTA — por Silvio Meira
Por que o pânico existencial chegou exatamente agora — e o que ele está tentando comprar …as decisões dependem dos nervos, da histeria, e até da digestão dos investidores. John Maynard Keynes, Teoria Geral do Emprego, do Juro e da Moeda, 1936. Cinco dias Sábado, 12 de setembro de 2026. Dario Amodei, CEO da Anthropic, […]

Only swimmers, submarines, etc surface, and none of them do so at meetings. Thank you for raising your point.

#WritersCoffeeClub Oct 28: Do you hide 'secrets' in your works?
I don't know. Please let me know if you find any.

Any reliance on Palantir is an overreliance on Palantir.
"Pentagon Investigators Say Overreliance on Palantir AI Tech Contributed to U.S. Strike That Killed 123 Iranian Children"
https://gizmodo.com/pentag…

#ScribesAndMakers 10/27. Do you collect (unaltered) natural materials for projects?
Yes, I have the good fortune to live on a farm so I can freely go outside and pick cones, rocks, fern, tiny roots, and twigs if I need them, and I don't have to ask permission first.
I'm still learning how to use it all, how a cone can be dismantled into dragon scales, roots can look lik…

Depois de muito tempo, finalmente consegui corrigir a integração do @… com o Fediverso. O problema era uma restrição de segurança de meu provedor de hospedagem.
Com ajuda do "Claudinho", fizemos uma gambiarra via Cloudfare e pimba! Agora o perfil e os posts aparecem aqui.

#WritersCoffeeClub Oct. 27: As a writer, what do you need right now?
Quiet.
No pressure.
No requirements.
No adulting.
Just me, my notebook, and silence.

#PennedPossibilities 1156: If your MC had (more) money in their possession, what would they do with it?
I am not certain what Prefrontal Cortex would do with money to begin with. What a curious thought.

#ScribesAndMakers Oct 14: How do you feel when a show that is non-musical inserts an episode with a musical number?
To me, it often feels like they miscalculated the season length and had to do a filler episode. I know, how likely is that? Not really. The problem is, they're most often not good. So why else would you stick a poorly executed episode into a good series? Unless it…