Tootfinder

What I find among the most fascinating cultural phenomena to observe is that people believe all sides are playing fair. Many, especially among the left or liberal spectrum, think that once they've just told the right argument or elaborated on the best point, alt-right figureheads will concede and see it their way.
While it's always good to be able to explain yourself, do you truly believe historical oppression and subjugation was honest?
Governments will call whatever you do equi…

good news: the webusb version of #GlasgowInterfaceExplorer software is now more or less as fast as native (the latency is a bit worse)
bad news: i have no idea why. i didn't do anything

Series A, Episode 10 - Breakdown
AVON: Right. Bring it directly over the skull. No, that won't do. You'll have to use the radio sensor. Good, that's much better. Yes, there it is. There's the limiter implant, you can see it quite clearly. Give me the side view. Good. Yes, it's in the sub four section all right. Now let's take a look at the limiter itself. Close focus, slowly.
JENNA: Well, there's nothing wrong with the connectors.

What's a good quick way to add a widget to a webpage for an event, so that people can view dates and times in their own timezone? Ideally it would guess from their browser settings but allow them to change it to something else.
I expected wordpress to have a feature or plugin for this but can't find anything without using a whole event plugin which I don't really want to do for this small task..
I have been linking to timeanddate.com for this, but someone just let me …

Might be a good time to get caught up on this ARG if they are going to do more!
#criticalRole

Well, it's not quite 11:00 and we've already completed the section of rendering we planned for today. That feels good.
Not going to do any more today because it's extremely hard physical work, but tomorrow's shift should complete the first coat on the outside of the building.
#roundhouse

Hello & good morning / TZAG Fedi.
Our Gloucestershire holiday continues and today we're heading over towards Ross-on-Wye to amble around the town, do a bit of hiking, and mooch around the ruined but very picturesque Goodrich Castle.
#Gloucestershire

Why is everything on the cloud these days?
I’m kind of getting tired of every piece of professional and business software being a SaaS or cloud-based solution these days.
I have a good computer, it can run a lot of complex programs on it locally. I wish I had the option to do so.
Not everything needs to be synced 24/7. And I’d much rather have some tools include a cloud sync functionality that backs up changes with some kind of regular frequency for version control and cross-device access, but otherwise runs on my device.
These days, when I’m trying to go work somewhere without an internet connection or am traveling and have spotty data - I can’t access 90% of my work. Files don’t back up locally even when there’s a native desktop client app. Why?
It feels wasteful, sending so much data to the internet and back with constantly required online sync and web apps.
I feel nostalgic now, remembering the days of software that would require buying a license every couple of years, that would run on your device and could be accessed even from the top of a remote mountain if you wished, and that didn’t log you out every other week.
#tech #software

Overly academic/distanced ethical discussions
Had a weird interaction with @/brainwane@social.coop just now. I misinterpreted one of their posts quoting someone else and I think the combination of that plus an interaction pattern where I'd assume their stance on something and respond critically to that ended up with me getting blocked. I don't have hard feelings exactly, and this post is only partly about this particular person, but I noticed something interesting by the end of the conversation that had been bothering me. They repeatedly criticized me for assuming what their position was, but never actually stated their position. They didn't say: "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, it's actually Y." They just said "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, please don't assume my position!" I get that it's annoying to have people respond to a straw man version of your argument, but when I in response asked some direct questions about what their position was, they gave some non-answers and then blocked me. It's entirely possible it's a coincidence, and they just happened to run out of patience on that iteration, but it makes me take their critique of my interactions a bit less seriously. I suspect that they just didn't want to hear what I was saying, while at the same time they wanted to feel as if they were someone who values public critique and open discussion of tricky issues (if anyone reading this post also followed our interaction and has a different opinion of my behavior, I'd be glad to hear it; it's possible In effectively being an asshole here and it would be useful to hear that if so).
In any case, the fact that at the end of the entire discussion, I'm realizing I still don't actually know their position on whether they think the AI use case in question is worthwhile feels odd. They praised the system on several occasions, albeit noting some drawbacks while doing so. They said that the system was possibly changing their anti-AI stance, but then got mad at me for assuming this meant that they thought this use-case was justified. Maybe they just haven't made up their mind yet but didn't want to say that?
Interestingly, in one of their own blog posts that got linked in the discussion, they discuss a different AI system, and despite listing a bunch of concrete harms, conclude that it's okay to use it. That's fine; I don't think *every* use of AI is wrong on balance, but what bothered me was that their post dismissed a number of real ethical issues by saying essentially "I haven't seen calls for a boycott over this issue, so it's not a reason to stop use." That's an extremely socially conformist version of ethics that doesn't sit well with me. The discussion also ended up linking this post: https://chelseatroy.com/2024/08/28/does-ai-benefit-the-world/ which bothered me in a related way. In it, Troy describes classroom teaching techniques for introducing and helping students explore the ethics of AI, and they seem mostly great. They avoid prescribing any particular correct stance, which is important when teaching given the power relationship, and they help students understand the limitations of their perspectives regarding global impacts, which is great. But the overall conclusion of the post is that "nobody is qualified to really judge global impacts, so we should focus on ways to improve outcomes instead of trying to judge them." This bothers me because we actually do have a responsibility to make decisive ethical judgments despite limitations of our perspectives. If we never commit to any ethical judgment against a technology because we think our perspective is too limited to know the true impacts (which I'll concede it invariably is) then we'll have to accept every technology without objection, limiting ourselves to trying to improve their impacts without opposing them. Given who currently controls most of the resources that go into exploration for new technologies, this stance is too permissive. Perhaps if our objection to a technology was absolute and instantly effective, I'd buy the argument that objecting without a deep global view of the long-term risks is dangerous. As things stand, I think that objecting to the development/use of certain technologies in certain contexts is necessary, and although there's a lot of uncertainly, I expect strongly enough that the overall outcomes of objection will be positive that I think it's a good thing to do.
The deeper point here I guess is that this kind of "things are too complicated, let's have a nuanced discussion where we don't come to any conclusions because we see a lot of unknowns along with definite harms" really bothers me.

Some may know that I've ranted about abuse of H-1B visas for many years. A $100k fee is a stupid change that will do all sorts of unnecessary damage.
A GOOD reform to H-1B visas would be a $10k annual fee plus annual re-certification of the need to import the worker & of that worker being paid competitively. That would end most of the abuses of the program. It would also end much of the demand for the visas from US companies.

Off to explore bits of NI I don't know well today, with my better half and a promise of fish & chips and trifle en route. Sound good? The cherry on the cake, is that we get to do it with a bunch of PCGB members too - lovely 🙂

I find it kinda funny that the 2020 MacBook Air—my work machine (albeit with 16 GB of RAM)—is now described as being “still capable at handling basic tasks like a champ, including streaming video, browsing, and dealing with documents.”
I haven’t noticed #Emacs slowing down, so what do people do that needs so much more computing power!?

So, just knocked off from the #Bostodon fedi folks meetup in Boston today. Met a bunch of cool folks (we ended up taking over 4 tables at Trillium on the Greenway, good sized crowd)
NEXT time I do one of these I’m gonna do a little nametag with my profile header and QR code to my profile(s) 😂

fstrings.wtf
How good is your knowledge of Python f-strings?
:python: #python #fstrings

fstrings.wtf - Python F-String Quiz
Test your knowledge of Python's f-string formatting with this interactive quiz. How well do you know Python's string formatting quirks?

https://karlgroves.com/how-much-should-you-spend-on-accessibility/
“… a good rule of thumb is to treat accessibility as a core part of your compliance strategy. Aiming for 5%–10% of your compliance budget is a solid starting point. For some, that may mean 0.1%–0…

It's a distortion of our time when those working towards ecological repair are expected to live without contradiction, while those fueling destruction are expected to do nothing. full article @ https://www.brichapman.com/p/capitalism-wants-you-tired-perfect

The System Wants You Tired, Perfect, and Harmless
On the Lies We Swallow About Doing Good vs. Doing Well

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

@… do you know a good ISO8601 parsing library that handles all the variants? 😅

Went to see a Hoopla improv show at The Bell, a mix of half a dozen different groups doing different thin
gs. "Shuffle improv" were basing their scenes on a shuffled playlist built by the audience on the way in
and an interesting format from a improv-as-a-second-language group chatting about their experiences in a
foreign land and basing their scenes off it. The group called "twelve people" only had six but were good
chaotic fun.
Lots of stuff about cooking and food.
I found myself pondering optimum size for an improve group. In general the larger groups seemed more fun to me, with the exception of three-person "burn the script" who did excellent work. More than eight wouldn't fit in the tiny stage at that venue. In rehearsal I like to have the group split in half and perform for each other. Hard to do that with fewer than six. Still up in the air if our group will get off the ground or not. More people does mean more calendar clashes even if it makes for a cheaper-per-person room hire.
Everyone has instagram pages, which are no use to me. Won't link or visit there. Interesting that nobody has a Twitter profile any more and of course nobody seems to have just a damned website which still strikes me as madness. Imagine not wanting to own your own space on the web?
#improv #london

This is gonna be great! This company has punched above its weight for years. A small team of like 6 talented people. My recommendation: Hire them to do some work OR support their Patreon, but definitely send them a good question.
https://iconfactory.world/@Iconfactory/1150516380960…

The Iconfactory (@Iconfactory@iconfactory.world)
Attached: 1 image Inspired by a suggestion from Mastodon, we’re going to try something new - Ask the Iconfactory! Patreon supporters can ask us the answer to that burning Iconfactory-related question and we’ll answer our favorites in an upcoming podcast. Supporters will get early access to the public audio ep and if it’s successful we may do more! Leave your questions in the comments. Now’s your chance, ask away! https://www.patreon.com/posts/ask-iconfactory-136788695

Did you know, President & CEO of CBS, which just bribed potus by settling a case and canceled Stephen Colbert's show, is named, not making this up, George Cheeks?
Sure they were bullied as a kid, but as CEO, George Cheeks laying down for fascists makes me theoretically ('cause violence is not a good answer) want to clap those cheeks (metaphorically slap him).
Stop returning Paramount & subsidiaries' (like CBS) calls. They wither w/no one to work for them. …

If you've always been vaguely aware of Edward Said but could do with a refresher, this episode of NPR's Throughline and his work on Palestine is a good listen
https://overcast.fm/ AAYs-wlLr8I

I made some progress on the Beat Bike!
The magnet mounted on the wheel passes a reed switch which is sensed by the control box (with a Raspberry Pi Pico) and then triggers the drum machine to step through the programmed sequence.
Still a lot of work to do, mostly mounting everything onto the bike, and some more code to write, but the proof of concept is all good.
#bikeTooter

2/2 I continued blogging Alberniweather and on FB and Twitter but I gradually removed my personal self from Facebook and eventually during the Pandemic, I decided the Facebook environment was just too toxic even for weather stuff and I shut down my page and left Facebook completely.
The impact on traffic to Alberniweather.ca and its prominence in the community was, and still is, significant.
I have diehard followers, many who have become friends over the years, I still get the odd call from media, or even the public about random weather things.
I have good connections with a few folks at Environment Canada (though their staff have become thinner and more transient :(
and major events still get spikes of local traffic but I since about 2022, and after I removed myself from Twitter that year, I don’t blog nearly as much. I would do a few posts in a week, and then go months without posting. I just got out of the habit I guess.
But I am still interested in the weather. I still feel like Alberniweather is a useful service for people in my community. I still feel a willing obligation to inform people about the weather and I believe I am trusted to do so by the public and local leaders. I’ve never made any money at it, I sold ad space on the website for a few years but it wasn’t worth the hassle and I didn’t feel comfortable taking the money when I was councillor. I have had some generous spontaneous donations at times.
But mainly I do it because it’s interesting, and I hope it is useful for people especially when people are looking for information during a major event.
The highest traffic I have ever had on Alberniweather pre-FB exit was the local Dog Mountain forest fire in 2015.
post-FB exit: the #underwoodfire
People want easy access to reliable local, trusted, information.
Large media orgs have mostly given up on this.
I am grateful we still have an active local newspaper and radio and that both trust me and I trust them.
@… @…

Oh my, over the weekend, my old laptop had a crash. That seems to have caused some disk damage. That happens. The not so fun part: Apparently the #Nextcloud client thought it would be a good idea to sync up a few 0KB files, including in shared folders. So now it turns out I accidentally deleted a few colleagues’ work. 🫣 I do have a backup from last Wednesday, but anything after that might be lost.…

Donald Trump presents himself as strong, indomitable, and always forceful.
But when disaster strikes — whether hurricane, flash flood, or pandemic — he’s oddly helpless.
To hear Trump tell it, he has infinite power to do good and no power to do bad
-- and anyone who says otherwise is an enemy of the country.
To believe in MAGA is to believe in his simultaneous omnipotence and impotence, depending on whichever is convenient for partisan purposes.
This dynamic h…

Disasters are for the greater glory of Trump
He cannot fail. He can only be failed.

These whiny cowards are really getting on my nerves. Aside from that I have not seen anything good there in a long time, maybe it has to do with AI, who knows. Either way I would rather spend the 50 dollars a year on something more useful, like a subscription to Rapidgator 😏 at least there you get something for your money 😜

Lifting $L$-polynomials of genus 2 curves
Jia Shi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11028 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11028…

Lifting $L$-polynomials of genus 2 curves
Let $C$ be a genus $2$ curve over $\mathbb{Q}$. Harvey and Sutherland's implementation of Harvey's average polynomial-time algorithm computes the $\bmod \ p$ reduction of the numerator of the zeta function of $C$ at all good primes $p\leq B$ in $O(B\log^{3+o(1)}B)$ time, which is $O(\log^{4+o(1)} p)$ time on average per prime. Alternatively, their algorithm can do this for a single good prime $p$ in $O(p^{1/2}\log^{1+o(1)}p)$ time. While Harvey's algorithm can also be used to compute the full z…

We could have had the good timeline, but no, you just couldn't imagine it to manifest it. I'm still on their mailing list tho

I have so many drafts on my blog (https://blogs.linux.pizza/), that I dont know what to do with anymore.
It felt like a good think to do when I started writing the posts, but then I always gets stuck in some details and start taking breaks lol

How Larry Ellison is focusing his philanthropic efforts on the Ellison Institute of Technology, an Oxford-based, for-profit entity set to spend £1B by 2027 (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/business/larry-ellison-oracle-philanthropy.html…

Larry Ellison Wants to Do Good, Do Research and Make a Profit
Oracle’s co-founder and the world’s second-richest person pledges to concentrate his vast resources on his own research institute and for-profit ventures to address health, hunger and climate change.

Do AI Companies Make Good on Voluntary Commitments to the White House?
Jennifer Wang, Kayla Huang, Kevin Klyman, Rishi Bommasani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08345 https://…

Do AI Companies Make Good on Voluntary Commitments to the White House?
Voluntary commitments are central to international AI governance, as demonstrated by recent voluntary guidelines from the White House to the G7, from Bletchley Park to Seoul. How do major AI companies make good on their commitments? We score companies based on their publicly disclosed behavior by developing a detailed rubric based on their eight voluntary commitments to the White House in 2023. We find significant heterogeneity: while the highest-scoring company (OpenAI) scores a 83% overall on…

Good proposal, a no-fly zone above Ukraine, NATO/EU can do this, it is non-escalatory and saves delivered weapons and material from europe from destruction.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/15/europe/poland-nato-no-fly-zone-ukraine-russian-drones-i…

NATO should impose no-fly zone over Ukraine to protect against Russian drones, Poland says
Poland’s foreign minister has suggested that NATO states should consider imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine to protect the alliance’s territory and people from Russian drones.

The mantra of "If you don't have time to do it right, what makes you think you have time to do it twice?" rings true, it *sounds* right.
But the whole point of agility is to see a third option:
If you don't have time to do it (the complete thing) right, maybe you have time to do part of it right, show the value in that, and then do the next part of it right.
I enjoy doing a good job as much as the next craftsman, but we also can't hold customer outcome…

Do the EU Members who want #chatcontrol for everybody (but politicians) realize that once a backdoor is in, it's in for everybody?
That it will be used by "good" and bad guys? That it will be used against real criminals and people who happen to have the wrong sort of face?
Most importantly (for them), do they understand their friends etc will not be even nominally e…

Going to lament about the changes on Drive World in Roblox, because somehow they somehow do the "you get some, you lose some" updates every time.
Who thought that it is a good idea to change the trucking and delivery system? Now that all of this is replaced with the "Daniel" system (finding trailers on the wild and delivering it to a place), it is now harder to do them.
#DriveWorld

I've been trying to explain to somewhat car-brained people that honest to gosh, people on bikes are actually good at not running into things, most of them DO wait for green lights, etc, and every so often I manage to collect some illustrative video. This one is notable because in the space of 5 seconds 4 bikes pass through the same not-wide space, traveling in different directions, and it just happens, no big deal, but I fear they could not get past the "chaos!"

An interesting guide to what you can do for climate action:
https://bsky.app/profile/globalecoguy.bsky.social/post/3lysibvowyk26

Dr. Jonathan Foley (@globalecoguy.bsky.social)
We often get asked, "What can I *personally* do to help address climate change?" Sadly, there hasn't been a very good answer to this question. Previous guides often treated people as monoliths, providing a one-size-fits-all answer. But that's all changed, thanks to SHIFT. jointheshift.earth https://jointheshift.earth

An interesting guide to what you can do for climate action:
https://bsky.app/profile/globalecoguy.bsky.social/post/3lysibvowyk26

Dr. Jonathan Foley (@globalecoguy.bsky.social)
We often get asked, "What can I *personally* do to help address climate change?" Sadly, there hasn't been a very good answer to this question. Previous guides often treated people as monoliths, providing a one-size-fits-all answer. But that's all changed, thanks to SHIFT. jointheshift.earth https://jointheshift.earth

Cowboys have work to do after preseason opener https://insidethestar.com/cowboys-have-work-to-do-after-preseason-opener

Why doesn't the West threaten Putin with open #warfare, possibly involving the use of nuclear weapons? We must be prepared to do so, and if #Putin ignores this, then forces should be mobilized and nuclear weapons deployed.
If war breaks out, Russia will never recover, while the West has good prospects …

Why don't a large number of good-minded people take DHS/ICE up on its employment give-away, go through the training, collect the $$, and then simply do nothing until they are fired?
In other words, dilute ICE, drain their money, and gum up their works - from the inside.

Interesting observation by Langdon Winner regarding technological transformation: “by the time the issue of ‘use’ comes up for consideration at all, many of the most interesting questions involved in how technologies are constituted and how they affect what we do are settled or sub-merged.”
This is happening right now with #GenAI .

What options do I have for phones with good cameras that do not throw money down a fascist mega company's throat but still have good support for open ROMs and banking apps? I'm afraid the answer is none, but happy to hear any suggestions.
#Android #GrapheneOS

Do you enjoy working? Sure, as long as the shop floor runs on real democracy and it’s the workers themselves making the calls through good old-fashioned worker self-management, without bosses or rigid hierarchies.
#RevolutionarySyndicalism #Syndicalism

After turning on both users and advertisers, tech companies only had one more place to go: employees. Individual productivity (AI-powered or otherwise) will not save you, because the issue is not performance.
In return, employees rightly stopped caring.
But unless you care, you can't do good design.
https://

Fear vs Play
Fear is choking out thoughtfulness in tech, and it can't be replaced with "more productivity" — because productivity is not what motivates corporate layoffs.

Why do I keep buying CRT TVs? I now own 3 of them, and the new one is a Sony PVM-2530. I haven't seen many around, and I figured that September is a good time to grab a waaaay-too-expensive TV.
#retrogaming #crtgaming

Everything I know about good #API #design
https://www.seangoedecke.com/good-api-design/

Governments freeloading on FOSS, not helping with funding (and at the same time collecting taxes on income/donations sourced otherwise) are just as exploitative as privately held companies, maybe even worse...
https://scalie.zone/@aks/115012388922867133

"About 8 in 10 Americans, 79%, say immigration is 'a good thing' for the country today, an increase from 64% a year ago and a high point in the nearly 25-year trend. Only about 2 in 10 U.S. adults say immigration is a bad thing right now, down from 32% last year."
ht…

Poll shows how U.S. views of immigration have changed since Trump took office
Since taking office, Trump has called on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to do all in its power to deliver “the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.”

Are you in #Prague ? You must visit my talk entitled:
Disobey: #FOSS tools to fight back!
https://pretalx.linuxdays.cz/linux…

FOSS tools to fight back! LinuxDays 2025
Everyone is trying to control your communication. The reasons vary from simple curiosity to pure commercial interest, all the way to using it to control one's thoughts. Are there any ways to fight back, and why are free software and open-source tools a good alternative to the ones you use? As cypherpunks, do we have the obligation to help people be ready for the worst, or should we only take care of ourselves? In this talk, I will cover my experience with fighting back against #chatcontrol …

What Cowboys OT Tyler Guyton must do in Year 2 to avoid the dreaded bust label

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/what-cowboys-ot-tyler-guyt…

A good friend of mine was railing against the Baby Boomers what they've created for us and this was my response:
Keep in mind it's the Ruling Class who runs things, not your average Baby Boomer. Just think about your average Gen X or Millennials, and what power they possess to create huge societal change. (Sure, some do... but most do not.)
That isn't to say we can't do good things, and keep trying, and keep fighting.
1/2

Do we believe this?
Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters hackers announce retirement
https://www.cyberdaily.au/security/12629-scattered-lapsus-hunters-hackers-announce-retirement

Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters hackers announce retirement
The hacking league responsible for multiple high-profile hacks says it is going “gentle into that good night”.

Was talking with an AI / NLP researcher colleague yesterday, who lamented the way that AI keeps flailing back and forth between states where (1) it’s an uphill battle to do good research because hype is at 11 and everyone is talking nonsense and (2) it’s an uphill battle to do good research because everyone thinks it’s an “AI winter” and won’t fund it.

this scam-detector dot com bollox keeps showing up in my search results for random websites.
looks like scam-detector dot com is a scam:
https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.scam-detector.com
my good deed for the day 🐝

I feel stupid for asking this… but is there still no good way to checkout and later pull a pull request branch from another repo?
We've got `gh pr checkout NUMBER` but the only way I've found to fetch updates is to delete the local branch and start over.
I really don't want to play adlib with manually adding remotes etc – is this still the best we can do in 2025??
EDIT: it’s solved! 🎉

Tomáš Janoušek (@liskin@genserver.social)
@hynek @carlton Drop fetch.all=true and that fixes it.You may need to learn to use git remote update instead of git fetch though.And I’d consider filing this as a bug upstream, because as you said ...

For the love of science, why do so many people use AI-generated slop images for their blog posts and in their presentation.
It literally never looks good, doesn't add anything and makes you look like someone who love shitty images.
Stop.

Ahh so good to do a quick #workout loop after a day in the office!
#cycling #BikeTooter #afterwork

We should acknowledge that if there is an "Epstein client list",
there’s a good chance Donald Trump is on it.
“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump said in 2002.
“He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Is that why Bondi won’t release the list?
Quite the enticing possibility.
If there ever was a case made for conspiracy theorists,…

Trump betrays his conspiracy-addled base
From Epstein to chemtrails, they're learning it was all a scam.

As we continue down this path of escalating nihilistic meme violence, it can feel like the worst things have become viral. We are drowning in the memetic effluent of a capitalist media that profits by maximizing engagement. But I wonder if anyone remembers "Pay it Forward?"
A movie came out in 2000 about a kid who started a viral kindness campaign. The idea was that you do something nice for someone else with the expectation that they do the same in the future. I never really saw the movie, but I do remember the time. There were a few weeks, maybe a few months, where people started doing it. People would just be randomly nice, and everything actually just started feeling better.
Over time, the world caught up. Capitalism consumed the whole thing, and life went back to normal. 9/11 happened the next year, and the US started down the path of becoming the most twisted and evil version of itself. But there was a short time that doing nice stuff was a viral meme, a thing that people just started doing.
Gun violence doesn't have to be the only viral meme we have. We can make good things happen too.

Had my talk on Small Web accepted at #why2025 but I hadn’t realised (my bad) that not only do you have to cover your own travel and accommodation but you also have to buy a ticket to speak. I’m sorry, as part of a tiny two-person not-for-profit working for the common good, I can’t afford to pay to speak at events. I’m not Deloitte. So I sadly had to withdraw my talk.
If any conferences do w…

#AI is mostly crap. But its good at some very specific things.
I'm going to train an AI model on all the episodes of #thewestwing and all its going to do is detect every "Walk - and - Talk" scene and plot it out on a floorplan of the West Wing set in the style of one of Billy's dotted-line adv…

I finished reading “Automatic Noodle” and it’s such a good hopeful little novel. Now I’m craving Biang Biang noodles! Unfortunately, I haven’t found any in the area of Nairobi where l’m currently staying, so I know what I’ll do once I’m back in Berlin.

Larry Ellison aims to do good, research, and profit through his Ellison Institute of Technology, focusing on global issues like climate change and disease cures. #climatechange #climatesolutions #climate

Larry Ellison Wants to Do Good, Do Research and Make a Profit
Oracle’s co-founder and the world’s second-richest person pledges to concentrate his vast resources on his own research institute and for-profit ventures to address health, hunger and climate change.

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
Should AI coding be taught in undergrad CS education?
1/2
I teach undergraduate computer science labs, including for intro and more-advanced core courses. I don't publish (non-negligible) scholarly work in the area, but I've got years of craft expertise in course design, and I do follow the academic literature to some degree. In other words, In not the world's leading expert, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about course design, and consider myself competent at it, with plenty of direct experience in what knowledge & skills I can expect from students as they move through the curriculum.
I'm also strongly against most uses of what's called "AI" these days (specifically, generative deep neutral networks as supplied by our current cadre of techbro). There are a surprising number of completely orthogonal reasons to oppose the use of these systems, and a very limited number of reasonable exceptions (overcoming accessibility barriers is an example). On the grounds of environmental and digital-commons-pollution costs alone, using specifically the largest/newest models is unethical in most cases.
But as any good teacher should, I constantly question these evaluations, because I worry about the impact on my students should I eschew teaching relevant tech for bad reasons (and even for his reasons). I also want to make my reasoning clear to students, who should absolutely question me on this. That inspired me to ask a simple question: ignoring for one moment the ethical objections (which we shouldn't, of course; they're very stark), at what level in the CS major could I expect to teach a course about programming with AI assistance, and expect students to succeed at a more technically demanding final project than a course at the same level where students were banned from using AI? In other words, at what level would I expect students to actually benefit from AI coding "assistance?"
To be clear, I'm assuming that students aren't using AI in other aspects of coursework: the topic of using AI to "help you study" is a separate one (TL;DR it's gross value is not negative, but it's mostly not worth the harm to your metacognitive abilities, which AI-induced changes to the digital commons are making more important than ever).
So what's my answer to this question?
If I'm being incredibly optimistic, senior year. Slightly less optimistic, second year of a masters program. Realistic? Maybe never.
The interesting bit for you-the-reader is: why is this my answer? (Especially given that students would probably self-report significant gains at lower levels.) To start with, [this paper where experienced developers thought that AI assistance sped up their work on real tasks when in fact it slowed it down] (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089) is informative. There are a lot of differences in task between experienced devs solving real bugs and students working on a class project, but it's important to understand that we shouldn't have a baseline expectation that AI coding "assistants" will speed things up in the best of circumstances, and we shouldn't trust self-reports of productivity (or the AI hype machine in general).
Now we might imagine that coding assistants will be better at helping with a student project than at helping with fixing bugs in open-source software, since it's a much easier task. For many programming assignments that have a fixed answer, we know that many AI assistants can just spit out a solution based on prompting them with the problem description (there's another elephant in the room here to do with learning outcomes regardless of project success, but we'll ignore this over too, my focus here is on project complexity reach, not learning outcomes). My question is about more open-ended projects, not assignments with an expected answer. Here's a second study (by one of my colleagues) about novices using AI assistance for programming tasks. It showcases how difficult it is to use AI tools well, and some of these stumbling blocks that novices in particular face.
But what about intermediate students? Might there be some level where the AI is helpful because the task is still relatively simple and the students are good enough to handle it? The problem with this is that as task complexity increases, so does the likelihood of the AI generating (or copying) code that uses more complex constructs which a student doesn't understand. Let's say I have second year students writing interactive websites with JavaScript. Without a lot of care that those students don't know how to deploy, the AI is likely to suggest code that depends on several different frameworks, from React to JQuery, without actually setting up or including those frameworks, and of course three students would be way out of their depth trying to do that. This is a general problem: each programming class carefully limits the specific code frameworks and constructs it expects students to know based on the material it covers. There is no feasible way to limit an AI assistant to a fixed set of constructs or frameworks, using current designs. There are alternate designs where this would be possible (like AI search through adaptation from a controlled library of snippets) but those would be entirely different tools.
So what happens on a sizeable class project where the AI has dropped in buggy code, especially if it uses code constructs the students don't understand? Best case, they understand that they don't understand and re-prompt, or ask for help from an instructor or TA quickly who helps them get rid of the stuff they don't understand and re-prompt or manually add stuff they do. Average case: they waste several hours and/or sweep the bugs partly under the rug, resulting in a project with significant defects. Students in their second and even third years of a CS major still have a lot to learn about debugging, and usually have significant gaps in their knowledge of even their most comfortable programming language. I do think regardless of AI we as teachers need to get better at teaching debugging skills, but the knowledge gaps are inevitable because there's just too much to know. In Python, for example, the LLM is going to spit out yields, async functions, try/finally, maybe even something like a while/else, or with recent training data, the walrus operator. I can't expect even a fraction of 3rd year students who have worked with Python since their first year to know about all these things, and based on how students approach projects where they have studied all the relevant constructs but have forgotten some, I'm not optimistic seeing these things will magically become learning opportunities. Student projects are better off working with a limited subset of full programming languages that the students have actually learned, and using AI coding assistants as currently designed makes this impossible. Beyond that, even when the "assistant" just introduces bugs using syntax the students understand, even through their 4th year many students struggle to understand the operation of moderately complex code they've written themselves, let alone written by someone else. Having access to an AI that will confidently offer incorrect explanations for bugs will make this worse.
To be sure a small minority of students will be able to overcome these problems, but that minority is the group that has a good grasp of the fundamentals and has broadened their knowledge through self-study, which earlier AI-reliant classes would make less likely to happen. In any case, I care about the average student, since we already have plenty of stuff about our institutions that makes life easier for a favored few while being worse for the average student (note that our construction of that favored few as the "good" students is a large part of this problem).
To summarize: because AI assistants introduce excess code complexity and difficult-to-debug bugs, they'll slow down rather than speed up project progress for the average student on moderately complex projects. On a fixed deadline, they'll result in worse projects, or necessitate less ambitious project scoping to ensure adequate completion, and I expect this remains broadly true through 4-6 years of study in most programs (don't take this as an endorsement of AI "assistants" for masters students; we've ignored a lot of other problems along the way).
There's a related problem: solving open-ended project assignments well ultimately depends on deeply understanding the problem, and AI "assistants" allow students to put a lot of code in their file without spending much time thinking about the problem or building an understanding of it. This is awful for learning outcomes, but also bad for project success. Getting students to see the value of thinking deeply about a problem is a thorny pedagogical puzzle at the best of times, and allowing the use of AI "assistants" makes the problem much much worse. This is another area I hope to see (or even drive) pedagogical improvement in, for what it's worth.
1/2

Musk: Come on, you need Grok!
Pentagon: Nah, we good.
[ Musk turns Grok antisemitism up to 11 ]
Musk: How about now?
Pentagon: Where do we sign!?
• https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c628d9mre3go
•

Musk's Grok signs $200m deal with Pentagon just days after antisemitism row
The deal is part of the Trump administration's push for more aggressive adoption of artificial intelligence in the government.

What does one do when people here who one generally thinks of as 'good people' post memes or other images showing text without #AltText ?
It seems to me such a thoughtless, unkind, disrespectful thing to do, yet I'm still seeing it all too often. This isn't OK, folks! You wouldn't deliberately block a wheelchair ramp, you wouldn't kick someone's crutches away, don…

Seems to me Coke should put pages of a certain file and list on their bottles, just print them on there. It would really get the information to the people.
Could be so refreshing.
source: https://trumpstruth.org/statuses/32028

And when I'm talking about understanding the drives to violence, I did write about something similar recently.
https://write.as/hexmhell/algorithmic-violence
The drives behind this and the shooting last week are pretty radically different, but there's some overlap. People like Kirk are part a huge political machine slowly crushing people all over the world. There's a hopeless rage that would naturally drive even the most calm person to the edge of violence. You can't look at the world honestly and be OK. We want to do something. We want to react. But everything we do is silenced or must rmain silent. So it's easy to understand why someone might choose violence. Very different situation, but everyone is subject to the same national and international influences.
I don't promote violence, not because I disagree with it but because I think it's expensive. It takes time to plan, especially for those trying to get away. Guns are not cheap, nor are bullets, nor is the range time you need to get somewhat good under pressure. It's not cheap for the person doing it, and it's not cheap for the community that has to clean up. The community will face police repression (which, if we're honest, was gonna come anyway). The community will have to post bail, will lose a person for a while, will need to support the family, will go to hearings, will write reports, will do interviews.
Sun Tzu said that deploying one soldier to the front takes 7 in the field. Logistics are a huge invisible cost. Some of that time and energy could be reused. It's never bad to be armed and able to defend if needed. But a lot of that energy and time would be better spent planning a community pantry, a tool library, organizing a union, etc. We are living in a disaster, and we need to invest in thriving through the next crumble.
Kirk is replacable. They're almost all replacable, because they don't really care about human life. We do, so none of us are. It's not really a worth while trade, IMHO.

I'm currently hitting a huge impostor syndrome wall-cum-quicksands state of mind.
I don't want to talk about it with friends because "no you're actually good" is something I tell myself already and I donì't trust myself about it, let alone non-mes saying it.
I have watched videos and read articles and it's not enough right now.
What do I do?

okay... so far, so good.... there is much to learn (for someone not used to #arch #linux).... but i really think it’s worth the time and effort ❤️
i do now understand all the positive postings about

This song feels a good match to current events.
And do not forget - there is a real reason for flags at half mast: Birmingham Sunday (which falls on the coming Monday) - the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. But this horror has been forgotten.
"Death Don't Have No Mercy "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t…

Why do these people never have any inkling to look beyond their immediate fields of study?
Why do they find it good and proper if one of their members behaves in an absolutely unacceptable fashion, antithetical to your organization, repeatedly?
I'm not even talking Hitler salutes here. Musk was leading an organization that actively worked on dismantling scientific research and space exploration.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/aug/01/royal-society-elon-musk-astronomer-royal-michele-dougherty

This AI complaint is brought to you today by this ridiculous poster at Manhattan’s Guitar Center
“Make your dream tone a reality”, my ass.
Ever notice how 90% of AI marketing copy is literally just vague platitudes because they can’t actually think of any legitimate benefits or use cases?
“Be anything you imagine” = “we can’t imagine anything good enough to say here so you do the thinking for us”

Questions off every NFL Week 2 game: Do the Patriots have kicker trouble? How good is the Packers defense? https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46209485/nfl-week-2-2025-season-questions-takeaways-lessons-stats-recap-every-game…

Do the Cowboys have enough to replace sack production? https://insidethestar.com/do-the-cowboys-have-enough-to-replace-sack-production

$27.7 billion budget and they didn’t spring for run-flats.
Honestly, it’s really good that they’re not good at what they do.
#USpol

I am triply cautious of this article from @…:
- OpenAI et al use the supposed danger (and thus implied power) of their own product as a marketing ploy (as the article points out)
- When a product vendor funds their own research about the potential dangers of their product, it’s more likely to be good PR than good research
- Society always engages in moral panics about new things causing addiction and psychological damage (including bicycles and novels!)
With those caveats in mind, I do think this is an issue worth watching closely. And that quote in the post? Chef’s kiss.
https://mstdn.ca/@dyckron/114796898620291517

@… just saw your story seeds site which is very cool. One gentle nudge: the "humanity learns how to sustainably live on Earth," framing erases all the groups of humans who do already know how to live sustainably, and have been doing do for tens of thousands of years. It's not "humans" who have "learning" to do, but specific groups of humans who have decisions to make.
Admittedly there's some learning to do about sustainably at scale, and about integrating good modern inventions with sustainable traditions, but I think that framing the problem as "we need to deploy existing rich knowledges of how to live sustainably" helps newcomers catch on to the decolonial thread of solarpunk more easily.

I think this analysis misses or hides the more radical way of viewing things, that of the state responding to an already existing people's revolution (the slave revolt angle) but I do think it's also good context and interesting to see liberals trying to take the narrative.
https://youtu.be/BK1cyndeuNs

Sigh, well I was feeling good about getting an ebike but I stopped by a local shop and the model I was looking at is pretty much sold out everywhere. They do have newer models ($more expensive$) and some other modes so I may need to do up that whole spreadsheet of features to compare things.
#bikeTooter #biking

It’s important to note some exceptions, not all AI pioneers fell into this trap.
Some, like Seymour Papert went to do a lot of good (creator of Logo, Mindstorms and a principal of One Laptop Per Child).
https://forward.com/culture/346666/remembering-seymour-papert-revolutionary-socialist-and-father-of-ai/

"As we approach the coming jobs cliff, we're entering a period where a college isn't going to be worth it for the majority of people, since AI will take over most white-collar jobs. Combined with the demographic cliff, the entire higher education system will crumble."
This is the kind of statement you don't hear that much from sub-CEO-level #AI boosters, because it's awkward for them to admit that the tech they think is improving their life is going to be disastrous for society. Or if they do admit this, they spin it like it's a good thing (don't get me wrong, tuition is ludicrously high and higher education absolutely could be improved by a wholesale reinvention, but the potential AI-fueled collapse won't be an improvement).
I'm in the "anti-AI" crowd myself, and I think the current tech is in a hype bubble that will collapse before we see wholesale replacement of white-collar jobs, with a re-hiring to come that will somewhat make up for the current decimation. There will still be a lot of fallout for higher ed (and hopefully some productive transformation), but it might not be apocalyptic.
Fun question to ask the next person who extols the virtues of using generative AI for their job: "So how long until your boss can fire you and use the AI themselves?"
The following ideas are contradictory:
1. "AI is good enough to automate a lot of mundane tasks."
2. "AI is improving a lot so those pesky issues will be fixed soon."
3. "AI still needs supervision so I'm still needed to do the full job."

I did not make any good progress on my project to read GPX data with Python today. (Trying to read speed.) May need to just read it as XML.
There are a bunch of nerds who do Python and bikes though, so someone might have the code example I need.
#biking #bikeTooter

Bad things are happening, but so are good ones. Demonstrations and protests across the country this last weekend did not get much press coverage from large outlets, but they happened. People are showing up. And they show us that Americans are not going gently into that good night, but are raging against the dying of the light. And more and more people each day are organizing and pushing back against this autocratic breakthrough.

Presidential Incapacity
We know already he can't do good things. Wag the Dog is a movie that was being made as Bill Clinton was doing the things he would later be impeached for. The impeachment timed out as taking place roughly when the movie came out. The movie depicts an American President

Mailbag: How important is a good start to season? https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/mailbag-how-important-is-a-good-start-to-season

Long; central Massachusetts colonial history
Today on a whim I visited a site in Massachusetts marked as "Huguenot Fort Ruins" on OpenStreetMaps. I drove out with my 4-year-old through increasingly rural central Massachusetts forests & fields to end up on a narrow street near the top of a hill beside a small field. The neighboring houses had huge lawns, some with tractors.
Appropriately for this day and this moment in history, the history of the site turns out to be a microcosm of America. Across the field beyond a cross-shaped stone memorial stood an info board with a few diagrams and some text. The text of the main sign (including typos/misspellings) read:
"""
Town Is Formed
Early in the 1680's, interest began to generate to develop a town in the area west of Natick in the south central part of the Commonwealth that would be suitable for a settlement. A Mr. Hugh Campbell, a Scotch merchant of Boston petitioned the court for land for a colony. At about the same time, Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton also were desirous of obtaining land for a settlement. A claim was made for all lands west of the Blackstone River to the southern land of Massachusetts to a point northerly of the Springfield Road then running southwesterly until it joined the southern line of Massachusetts.
Associated with Dudley and Stoughton was Robert Thompson of London, England, Dr. Daniel Cox and John Blackwell, both of London and Thomas Freak of Hannington, Wiltshire, as proprietors. A stipulation in the acquisition of this land being that within four years thirty families and an orthodox minister settle in the area. An extension of this stipulation was granted at the end of the four years when no group large enough seemed to be willing to take up the opportunity.
In 1686, Robert Thompson met Gabriel Bernor and learned that he was seeking an area where his countrymen, who had fled their native France because of the Edict of Nantes, were desirous of a place to live. Their main concern was to settle in a place that would allow them freedom of worship. New Oxford, as it was the so-named, at that time included the larger part of Charlton, one-fourth of Auburn, one-fifth of Dudley and several square miles of the northeast portion of Southbridge as well as the easterly ares now known as Webster.
Joseph Dudley's assessment that the area was capable of a good settlement probably was based on the idea of the meadows already established along with the plains, ponds, brooks and rivers. Meadows were a necessity as they provided hay for animal feed and other uses by the settlers. The French River tributary books and streams provided a good source for fishing and hunting. There were open areas on the plains as customarily in November of each year, the Indians burnt over areas to keep them free of underwood and brush. It appeared then that this area was ready for settling.
The first seventy-five years of the settling of the Town of Oxford originally known as Manchaug, embraced three different cultures. The Indians were known to be here about 1656 when the Missionary, John Eliott and his partner Daniel Gookin visited in the praying towns. Thirty years later, in 1686, the Huguenots walked here from Boston under the guidance of their leader Isaac Bertrand DuTuffeau. The Huguenot's that arrived were not peasants, but were acknowledged to be the best Agriculturist, Wine Growers, Merchant's, and Manufacter's in France. There were 30 families consisting of 52 people. At the time of their first departure (10 years), due to Indian insurrection, there were 80 people in the group, and near their Meetinghouse/Church was a Cemetery that held 20 bodies. In 1699, 8 to 10 familie's made a second attempt to re-settle, failing after only four years, with the village being completely abandoned in 1704.
The English colonist made their way here in 1713 and established what has become a permanent settlement.
"""
All that was left of the fort was a crumbling stone wall that would have been the base of a higher wooden wall according to a picture of a model (I didn't think to get a shot of that myself). Only trees and brush remain where the multi-story main wooden building was.
This story has so many echoes in the present:
- The rich colonialists from Boston & London agree to settle the land, buying/taking land "rights" from the colonial British court that claimed jurisdiction without actually having control of the land. Whether the sponsors ever actually visited the land themselves I don't know. They surely profited somehow, whether from selling on the land rights later or collecting taxes/rent or whatever, by they needed poor laborers to actually do the work of developing the land (& driving out the original inhabitants, who had no say in the machinations of the Boston court).
- The land deal was on condition that there capital-holders who stood to profit would find settlers to actually do the work of colonizing. The British crown wanted more territory to be controlled in practice not just in theory, but they weren't going to be the ones to do the hard work.
- The capital-holders actually failed to find enough poor suckers to do their dirty work for 4 years, until the Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, were desperate enough to accept their terms.
- Of course, the land was only so ripe for settlement because of careful tending over centuries by the natives who were eventually driven off, and whose land management practices are abandoned today. Given the mention of praying towns (& dates), this was after King Phillip's war, which resulted in at least some forced resettlement of native tribes around the area, but the descendants of those "Indians" mentioned in this sign are still around. For example, this is the site of one local band of Nipmuck, whose namesake lake is about 5 miles south of the fort site: #LandBack.

Mailbag: How important is a good start to season? https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/mailbag-how-important-is-a-good-start-to-season

Join us for a casual Scrappy Hour bike ride on Sunday, August 31st. 🚴‍♀️
We'll roll out from Rocket Baby just after 9am and head to the Domes... There's about four or five of us so far but we welcome anyone to join us! 🚴
https://www.instagram.com/p/DNvbxVRXHS1/

Scrappy Hour on Instagram: "It’s that time of year again! Ya, you know it! It’s Scrappy Hour BBQ BABY!!! Maybe it will be hot and we can all go swimming. Or maybe it will rain and we can all cower together. Or maybe it will be perfect and we’ll lay in the grass eating hot dogs till we have to roll us out of there. Here’s how it’s going to go down. First we’ll do a ride. We’re gonna do the Domes again, because it’s fun. Meet ups: BAY VIEW Cactus Club- meet 8:30a; wheels up 9:00a EAST SIDE/RW The Daily Bird-meet 9:00a; wheels up 9:15a TOSA Rocket Baby- meet 9:00; wheels up 9:15a Then, we SHBBQ at South Shore Park! We’ll bring some dogs and veggie alternatives. A couple sides. And a cooler of mixed bevies. We’ll bring a couple grills too. Last year our gang showed up with some really delightful offerings! There was homemade bread, and baked goods and side salads. It ruled. So feel free to bring what ever you would like to share with everyone. It will be much appreciated. Bring a baseball mitt and we’ll have a catch. Have a frisbee, bring that too. If it’s hot, good luck keeping me out of that lake, so bring your suit. If you have any questions, as always hit us up and we’ll try to answer. All our love, SH ✌️🚲🏃‍♂️☕️ #coffeeoutsidemke #scrappyhourmke"
107 likes, 8 comments - scrappyhourmke on August 24, 2025: "It’s that time of year again! Ya, you know it! It’s Scrappy Hour BBQ BABY!!! Maybe it will be hot and we can all go swimming. Or maybe it will rain and we can all cower together. Or maybe it will be perfect and we’ll lay in the grass eating hot dogs till we have to roll us out of there. Here’s how it’s going to go down. First we’ll do a ride. We’re gonna do the Domes again, because it’s fun. Meet ups: BAY VIEW …

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

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.

Just wrote an article about Presidential Incapacity, and you can read it (and while you're there, please subscribe to get articles and satire and other good stuff I write and make first).
https://stuff.davidaugust.com/presidential-incapacity/

Presidential Incapacity
We know already he can't do good things. Wag the Dog is a movie that was being made as Bill Clinton was doing the things he would later be impeached for. The impeachment timed out as taking place roughly when the movie came out. The movie depicts an American President

AI, AGI, and learning efficiency
My 4-month-old kid is not DDoSing Wikipedia right now, nor will they ever do so before learning to speak, read, or write. Their entire "training corpus" will not top even 100 million "tokens" before they can speak & understand language, and do so with real intentionally.
Just to emphasize that point: 100 words-per-minute times 60 minutes-per-hour times 12 hours-per-day times 365 days-per-year times 4 years is a mere 105,120,000 words. That's a ludicrously *high* estimate of words-per-minute and hours-per-day, and 4 years old (the age of my other kid) is well after basic speech capabilities are developed in many children, etc. More likely the available "training data" is at least 1 or 2 orders of magnitude less than this.
The point here is that large language models, trained as they are on multiple *billions* of tokens, are not developing their behavioral capabilities in a way that's remotely similar to humans, even if you believe those capabilities are similar (they are by certain very biased ways of measurement; they very much aren't by others). This idea that humans must be naturally good at acquiring language is an old one (see e.g. #AI #LLM #AGI

TL;DR: what if instead of denying the harms of fascism, we denied its suppressive threats of punishment
Many of us have really sharpened our denial skills since the advent of the ongoing pandemic (perhaps you even hesitated at the word "ongoing" there and thought "maybe I won't read this one, it seems like it'll be tiresome"). I don't say this as a preface to a fiery condemnation or a plea to "sanity" or a bunch of evidence of how bad things are, because I too have honed my denial skills in these recent years, and I feel like talking about that development.
Denial comes in many forms, including strategic information avoidance ("I don't have time to look that up right now", "I keep forgetting to look into that", "well this author made a tiny mistake, so I'll click away and read something else", "I'm so tired of hearing about this, let me scroll farther", etc.) strategic dismissal ("look, there's a bit of uncertainty here, I should ignore this", "this doesn't line up perfectly with my anecdotal experience, it must be completely wrong", etc.) and strategic forgetting ("I don't remember what that one study said exactly; it was painful to think about", "I forgot exactly what my friend was saying when we got into that argument", etc.). It's in fact a kind of skill that you can get better at, along with the complementary skill of compartmentalization. It can of course be incredibly harmful, and a huge genre of fables exists precisely to highlight its harms, but it also has some short-term psychological benefits, chiefly in the form of muting anxiety. This is not an endorsement of denial (the harms can be catastrophic), but I want to acknowledge that there *are* short-term benefits. Via compartmentalization, it's even possible to be honest with ourselves about some of our own denials without giving them up immediately.
But as I said earlier, I'm not here to talk you out of your denials. Instead, given that we are so good at denial now, I'm here to ask you to be strategic about it. In particular, we live in a world awash with propaganda/advertising that serves both political and commercial ends. Why not use some of our denial skills to counteract that?
For example, I know quite a few people in complete denial of our current political situation, but those who aren't (including myself) often express consternation about just how many people in the country are supporting literal fascism. Of course, logically that appearance of widespread support is going to be partly a lie, given how much our public media is beholden to the fascists or outright in their side. Finding better facts on the true level of support is hard, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about the "fact" that Trump has widespread popular support?
To give another example: advertisers constantly barrage us with messages about our bodies and weight, trying to keep us insecure (and thus in the mood to spend money to "fix" the problem). For sure cutting through that bullshit by reading about body positivity etc. is a better solution, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about there being anything wrong with your body?
This kind of intentional denial certainly has its own risks (our bodies do actually need regular maintenance, for example, so complete denial on that front is risky) but there's definitely a whole lot of misinformation out there that it would be better to ignore. To the extent such denial expands to a more general denial of underlying problems, this idea of intentional denial is probably just bad. But I sure wish that in a world where people (including myself) routinely deny significant widespread dangers like COVID-19's long-term risks or the ongoing harms of escalating fascism, they'd at least also deny some of the propaganda keeping them unhappy and passive. Instead of being in denial about US-run concentration camps, why not be in denial that the state will be able to punish you for resisting them?