Tootfinder

Giants O-line coach: Evan Neal 'doing well so far' in transition from tackle to guard https://www.nfl.com/news/evan-neal-giants-doing-well-so-far-in-transition-from-tackle-to-guard

It’s almost as if RTOs and grind-for-welfare are scams. 🤔 https://aus.social/@rakkar/114888408069212569

https://www.reddit.com/r/MarchAgainstNazis/comments/1lfe8ab/we_were_lied_into_iraq_now_theyre_doing_it_again/

I need you to think about how bias happens in the real world.
Like the banality of evil, bias isn't often perpetrated by monsters, rather by well meaning people who think they're being fair and thoughtful and doing their best — and they (you! us!), we ARE doing our best, but I need you to understand that doing our best isn't good enough to identify, understand, prevent, nor heal all harm.

It’s ok, anyone stupid enough to *voluntarily* travel to the US will be stupid enough to pay this fee.
(I sympathise with those of you who are forced to go; not everyone has the privilege of being able to refuse.) https://m.ai6yr.org/@ai6yr/114876352417719220

I am doing my best to explain to the users that they cannot submit an account request directly to my team. There is a process (and form) required and their local security person should be the one doing the paperwork, getting all required signatures and then submitting to us after they create the template account in the security system.
I have done this several times, and it is overdue for me to compose a template email explaining the process, where to find the forms, security orders, …

Data Verbalisation: What is Text Doing in a Data Visualisation?
Paul Murrell
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15129 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

Data Verbalisation: What is Text Doing in a Data Visualisation?
This article discusses the role that text elements play in a data visualisation. We argue that there is a need for a simple, coherent explanation of text elements similar to the understanding that already exists for non-text elements like bars, points, and lines. We explore examples of how text is used within a data visualisation and use existing knowledge and assessment techniques to evaluate when text is effective and when it is not. The result is a framework that aims to be easy to understan…

Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Edit: fixed some typos.
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and thus more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of management caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.

Doing the rounds #Caturday #CatsOfMastodon

Doing the rounds #Caturday #CatsOfMastodon

<Endy> knghtbrd: QW's netcode is doing strange things to me. :P
<knghtbrd> This is unusual? ;>
<Endy> Not really. :P

Doing my bit for DEI at the lily show, talking about how wide crosses have diverse genomes, that bring out interesting traits, and then sometimes we double (tetraploid) the chromosomes, so as to allow even more diverse mixtures and more interesting crosses.

CBS is absolutely dead to me. Doing the only thing I can do which is not watching #CBS & canceling #247Sports & #ParamountPlus subscriptions.
Join me.
▶️

For people doing web perf
Links? Links! - Infrequently Noted
#rss

There seem to be constant reminders of the disastrous mistakes that led up to the most catastrophic American foreign policy decision in recent memory -- the war on Iraq.
Despite the costly lessons of the past and the flashing warning signs before us today,
Trump seems poised to press the button on joining Israel’s attack on Iran.
Doing so could be an even bigger mistake.
The echoes are numerous:
A complete disregard for international law and diplomatic alternativ…

Can the United States Really Be Marching Toward This Madness Again?
The eerie echoes of Iraq and 2003 are numerous. But there are some key differences—and they make going into Iran an even greater act of folly.

from my link log —
I want a good parallel computer.
https://raphlinus.github.io/gpu/2025/03/21/good-parallel-computer.html
saved 2025-03-21

Never a while of rest.
When I'm not working dayjob, I'm doing Gentoo.
When I'm not doing Gentoo, I'm fulfilling quests…

Sitting on the porch at the cabin. A solitary loon calls out across the lake.
"What are you doing!?"
"Huh?" <dips cheese cube in the spinach dip>
"That's for the Vegetables!"
"You're not the boss of me!" <holds dip tighter>
"The vegan can't have it anyway cause it's not plant based so.... Stay. In your lane, loon."

How I Approach Performance Investigations
https://ricomariani.medium.com/how-i-approach-performance-investigations-69f4191c553f?source=rss-e6e91dab0708------2

It's #sourdough pretzeldog night
Last batch will have cheese
Also doing some pizza pretzels

«If a robot told you that walking off a cliff was your fastest route home, how close would you get to the edge before turning it off?»
Judging from how many people crashed their cars and trucks at bridges too low for them to fit under, my guess is plenty people will walk themselves off those cliffs.
@… another "AI is doing great" story waiting to happen 😅
https://archive.is/20250618045009/https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/06/17/news/alltrails-ai-tool-search-rescue-members

Lot of things I see kids do on these TV crime dramas (and it's TV, but much is based on real type events) I just can't imagine, this has to be some outlier shit. It makes me think maybe my friends growing up weren't as bad as they could've been. Because if anyone in our friend group had brought up ANYTHING like the shit some of these kids are doing, anyone I knew would've been like "get the fuck outta here". We didn't tolerate abusive shit. Maybe it was the …

"And we are doing it all with backward compatibility, so gamers could access their favourite titles across platforms." I guess they felt it should be stated even more clearly, since no one was really sure if Xbox console games would be included in this open strategy ->
AMD & Xbox | Advancing the Future of Gaming
https://w…

I'm now getting several political spam texts a day. This is a recent escalation and I've done my best to keep my cell phone number a secret for several years now. Politicians are ruining text messaging, just like they ruined phone lines.
So far my Google Pixel is doing a pretty good job blocking most of them as spam. But that's going to be a losing battle.

The Dutch left just forced every other party to show their hand and their hand is "we don't actually mind what Israel is doing that much".
#nlpol

I'm doing the climbing dance now. #totp

Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign funds frozen by bank. They have been doing very good work to provide support and relieve suffering for many years.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/20/two-uk-pro-pa…

Call for Participants> Roundtable on Knowing and Doing Buddhism in 1980s Asia (AAS26 Vancouver)
https://ift.tt/ytX3FN5
CFP: Visibilising Marginalised Early Career Researchers in Peace, Conflict and Security Studies: A…
via Input 4 RELCFP

I've made a summer quiz for EU energy policy nerds 🤓
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jaapburger_acers-country-sheets-summer-quiz-acti…

Now that the school year is coming to an end in many European countries, many children are receiving their school reports. | Jaap Burger
Now that the school year is coming to an end in many European countries, many children are receiving their school reports. What are they doing well and where can they improve? Have they learned from the curriculum and have they acted on previous recommendations? How are they doing compared to their peers? EU Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) does something similar for countries, their retail energy markets and the level of consumer participation. It's time for their annual …

Locked myself and everyone else out of a production mail machine for ~20 seconds today because ipfw did *something* that knocked all the rules out except for the default deny.
2 hours later I’m still mystified. I re-did everything I was doing before it died and it did not recur. I have nowhere else to look. I will never know.
But I sure am glad that I added the watchdog that kills the fw when it's working too well.

The concept of “doing more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing” just so perfectly captures a lot of the pressure I’ve been feeling lately.

https://improvesomething.today/on-doing-more-with-less/

FormGym: Doing Paperwork with Agents
Matthew Toles, Rattandeep Singh, Isaac Song Zhou Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14079 https://arx…

FormGym: Doing Paperwork with Agents
Completing paperwork is a challenging and time-consuming problem. Form filling is especially challenging in the pure-image domain without access to OCR, typeset PDF text, or a DOM. For computer agents, it requires multiple abilities, including multi-modal understanding, information retrieval, and tool-use. We present a novel form-filling benchmark consisting of 432 fields spread across 55 documents and 3 tasks, requiring knowledge of 236 features per user. We find that baseline VLAs achieve les…

I see so many young kids now just constantly staring and scrolling through reels, tiktok, youtube clips when we are out and about. Everywhere. It's disgusting and extremely sad at the same time. Initially I was wondering how the hell parents are allowing this, but when you notice grown people just doing the same thing. It's insane how that has become a majority, not a minority, behavior.

Thousands of Federal Troops in LA Spent 40 Days Doing Nothing #fascism

The Military Occupied LA for 40 Days and All They Did Was Detain One Guy
Sent over the objections of California officials, the military has detained one man who was rushing to an appointment in a federal building, not protesting.

I've managed to install the Stirling PDF tools on one of our company's mini PCs using #podman. I've tried doing it with Redhat's cockpit admin GUI but it didn't really work, probably because of SELinux or something (it's always SELinux...). I found some instruction for the commandline that worked.
This is all seems like a good use-case for Docker but the whole contain…

Well, it doesn't look like much but I just switched my infra from Apache to Caddy.
Sometimes doing some admin work is good for the soul.
(Also a preparation to install an AI scraper poison service)

Somehow my steps ring got into the orange and past 6,000 today. Plenty of it was from doing a proper boatload of laundry.

Analyst: 'Doing the Draft Show in October' if Cowboys don't correct this Prescott issue https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/06/18/cowboys-prescott-mccarthy…

The USA is doing so much damage to our long term economic future every week. We elected the wrong people. They have been destroying the USA.
It isn't a couple big failures. Many absolutely horrible confirmations of extremely unqualified people. Then hundreds of policy decisions every week causing immense damage.
Those seeking jobs are going to be harmed the a great deal for decades. Our health is going to be severely damaged for decades. Our finances are going to be damaged f…

Rigor in AI: Doing Rigorous AI Work Requires a Broader, Responsible AI-Informed Conception of Rigor
Alexandra Olteanu, Su Lin Blodgett, Agathe Balayn, Angelina Wang, Fernando Diaz, Flavio du Pin Calmon, Margaret Mitchell, Michael Ekstrand, Reuben Binns, Solon Barocas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14652

Rigor in AI: Doing Rigorous AI Work Requires a Broader, Responsible AI-Informed Conception of Rigor
In AI research and practice, rigor remains largely understood in terms of methodological rigor -- such as whether mathematical, statistical, or computational methods are correctly applied. We argue that this narrow conception of rigor has contributed to the concerns raised by the responsible AI community, including overblown claims about AI capabilities. Our position is that a broader conception of what rigorous AI research and practice should entail is needed. We believe such a conception -- i…

This brings me back to the mid/late 1980s... I remember doing an interview (by mail) with Eric from Life Sentence for my first zine. (He had a tragic ending in 2016, glad we still have the music.)
https://lifesentence.bandcamp.com/album/life-sentence-remastered …

National Guard came to L.A. to fight unrest. Troops ended up fighting boredom (Los Angeles Times)
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-07-17/military-troops-los-angeles-what-they-doing
http://www.memeorandum.com/250717/p74#a250717p74

What do people use for profiling on ARM64 MacOS?
Looking for something along the lines of VTune to check how ngscopeclient is doing on macs.

But here’s the thing: anyone could make music •before• gen AI. Some more skilled or more artistically successful than others, sure! But that’s not the point. •Doing it• is the point. •Living it• is the point.
A product that promises to generate it for you so that you neither do it nor live it is antithetical to the point, is hostile to the idea of art itself.
(Note: that’s exactly what the artists in the OP are •not• doing! They are all grabbing the AI and actively •doing• and •living• while poking at the curious new object.)
5/

Maybe I'm doing it wrong or missing the obvious, but am I the only one who thinks the way to read a fediverse timeline is in proper chronological time order (oldest to newest) like I can easily do in my email app?
Some apps have a context feature or implement threading, but by and large reading or browsing a timeline on the fediverse from newest to oldest seems to be the norm. I find this, at best, unsatisfying.

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

On many issues, Americans are deeply polarized.
War with Iran isn’t one of them.
An Economist/YouGov poll of U.S. adults taken in the days after Israel’s attack last Friday found that Democrats opposed entering the conflict by a margin of 50 points and Republicans opposed entering it by a margin of 30 points.
Given these numbers, you might think Democratic leaders would be doing everything they can to prevent President Trump from striking Iran without the approval of Cong…

Opinion | Schumer and Jeffries Need to Step Up and Challenge Trump on War Powers
Failing to aggressively defend Congress’s role in authorizing war would be a serious blunder for Democrats.

The dog was insistent on getting out during my lunch break, so I guess that's what I'm doing for my lunchtime walk.

"I don't want to talk about those things. I see the worst in people, Henry. I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I've built up my hatreds over the years, little by little... I can't keep doing this on my own... with these, umm... people."

Software Engineer Will Larson unpacks a lot in this July 2025 post. Key takeaway use cases of agentic AI include:
1. Using an LLM to evaluate a context window and get a result.
2. Using an LLM to suggest tools relevant to the context window, then enrich it with the tool’s response.
3. Managing flow control for tool usage.
4. Doing anything software can do to build better context windows to pass on to LLMs.
"What can agents actually do?"

I'm happy: 5 handstand push-ups once again. Tried for a sixth, but nope. Not yet! I'm also happy that my T-shirt stayed put. 😂 I'm 69 (until X-mas).
#seniorfitness #nogym #calisthenics

https://social.treehouse.systems/@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes/114876343841030910
https://ko-fi.com/anarchoninawrites

@… were you able to ascertain its motivation for doing so?

AI, AGI, and learning efficiency
An addendum to this: I'm someone who would accurately be called "anti-AI" in the modern age, yet I'm also an "AI researcher" in some ways (have only dabbled in neutral nets).
I don't like:
- AI systems that are the product of labor abuses towards the data workers who curate their training corpora.
- AI systems that use inordinate amounts of water and energy during an intensifying climate catastrophe.
- AI systems that are fundamentally untrustworthy and which reinforce and amplify human biases, *especially* when those systems are exposed in a way that invites harms.
- AI systems which are designed to "save" my attention or brain bandwidth but such my doing so cripple my understating of the things I might use them for when I fact that understanding was the thing I was supposed to be using my time to gain, and where the later lack of such understanding will be costly to me.
- AI systems that are designed by and whose hype fattens the purse of people who materially support genocide and the construction of concentration campus (a.k.a. fascists).
In other words, I do not like and except in very extenuating circumstances I will not use ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, etc.
On the other hand, I do like:
- AI research as an endeavor to discover new technologies.
- Generative AI as a research topic using a spectrum of different methods.
- Speculating about non-human intelligences, including artificial ones, and including how to behave ethically towards them.
- Large language models as a specific technique, and autoencoders and other neural networks, assuming they're used responsibly in terms of both resource costs & presentation to end users.
I write this because I think some people (especially folks without CS backgrounds) may feel that opposing AI for all the harms it's causing runs the risk of opposing technological innovation more broadly, and/or may feel there's a risk that they will be "left behind" as everyone else embraces the hype and these technologies inevitability become ubiquitous and essential (I know I feel this way sometimes). Just know that is entirely possible and logically consistent to both oppose many forms of modern AI while also embracing and even being optimistic about AI research, and that while LLMs are currently all the rage, they're not the endpoint of what AI will look like in the future, and their downsides are not inherent in AI development.

#eurovision #Denmark doing RGB PC

I've stopped saying illegal and I prefer saying immoral now, because the two can somewhat diverge and the politics are not doing their job.

Hard work today.
(Literally 2 hours of doing nothing)

Georgetown Carnival is lit right now
Middle aged belly-dancers performing to early 2000s hip hop, in between tweens doing circus gymnastics and tweens doing four on the floor grunge and punk

Great #DH2025 talk from @luanamcosta.bsky.social on using CLIP to analyse images of the 'New Woman'. Loved the idea of networks of queries, eg women working, voting, doing domestic activities, and querying the intersection of 'women working' and 'women in a public space'. Thus far CLIP was good for insights and exploration rather than definitive analysis - excellent for a …

If a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB (CM4, ideally) really isn't enough NAS for you, then I don't know what you're doing with your NAS, but you should probably calm down.
33 terabytes online
13 watts idle
6 SATA SSDs
2 external USB3 disks
2 VMs
2 LXC containers
2 GHz overclock
0 fucks given

ICE insiders saying agents are "desperate" to meet these quotas — and are doing so by forgoing dangerous criminal migrants in favor of "anyone they can get their hands on at the local Home Depot or bus stop."
“These quotas are undermining the agency’s ability to focus on the really serious criminal aliens,” John Sandweg, a former acting ICE director under Obama, told the outlet.
Trump quotas 'killing morale' at ICE as Home Depots busted over violent gangs - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-ice-2672387662/

Is it better to let people know when you see them doing something when others have done something similar previously?
I've found myself doing this a lot around live coding, on one level it seems helpful to know about prior art, and fun to talk about weird old projects/events. On the other it could be stifling to obsess over identifying the 'first' person to try something, and might feel like old people are trying to pitch their tents all over your garden.

I know my web site "isn't doing well," but the SEO spammer fucks really have some cheek to take that line when their contact method is a hotmail/yahoo/gmail account.

@… Right!? The voice and accent seem to be separate from what’s actually being said.
I think this might be related to why we often hear harsher tones from others when we’re in a bad mood. Our brains are doing a lot of generation.

The content of the user agent is the dumbest thing we've done to the web, and we've doing a whole lot of dumb things to the web—all the way back to spelling referrer incorrectly (and we still do).

I’ve been doing an unholy amount of weeding recently and keep seeing these little spiders fleeing my progress. Many are carrying a tiny white ball and so I looked them up out of curiosity.
Apparently they are “Rabid Wolf Spiders”, which sounds like they themselves got to pick it out and sought something impressively terrifying so that humans would leave them alone. It’s certainly a misnomer since spiders cannot be rabid.
The white ball is an egg sac.

student_cooperation: Student cooperation (2012)
Network of cooperation among students in the "Computer and Network Security" course at Ben-Gurion University, in 2012. Nodes are students, and edges denote cooperation between students while doing their homework. The graph contains three types of links: Time, Computer, Partners.
This network has 185 nodes and 360 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Multigraph, Unweighted

Comparing Apples to Oranges: A Dataset & Analysis of LLM Humour Understanding from Traditional Puns to Topical Jokes
Tyler Loakman, William Thorne, Chenghua Lin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13335

Comparing Apples to Oranges: A Dataset & Analysis of LLM Humour Understanding from Traditional Puns to Topical Jokes
Humour, as a complex language form, is derived from myriad aspects of life, whilst existing work on computational humour has focussed almost exclusively on short pun-based jokes. In this work, we investigate whether the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to explain humour depends on the particular humour form. We compare models on simple puns and more complex topical humour that requires knowledge of real-world entities and events. In doing so, we curate a dataset of 600 jokes split across…

Thinking of you @… while you wait, brave and undaunted, for the arrival of The Plumber. Seriously darling, it will be worth the trauma to get it finally fixed. You may sigh with relief as much as you wish and crumple a little after it's over but it will still be better than doing nothing about the plumbing problems. 🫶

Steering Robots with Inference-Time Interactions
Yanwei Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14287 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14287…

Steering Robots with Inference-Time Interactions
Imitation learning has driven the development of generalist policies capable of autonomously solving multiple tasks. However, when a pretrained policy makes errors during deployment, there are limited mechanisms for users to correct its behavior. While collecting additional data for finetuning can address such issues, doing so for each downstream use case is inefficient at deployment. My research proposes an alternative: keeping pretrained policies frozen as a fixed skill repertoire while allow…

Better weather today 😀 Doing the running belt with water now too, sucks to be without hydration even on these short runs in higher temps. Also made a friend (non-human) 😏
#running #runnersofmastodon

@cmccullough@discuss.systems Signal is centralized just the same as Whatsapp though. What's stopping them from enshittification too? They're already doing closed-source things.

Colts' Shane Steichen: Daniel Jones has been doing a 'hell of a job' https://www.nfl.com/news/colts-shane-steichen-daniel-jones-has-been-doing-a-hell-of-a-job

from my link log —
What is my fuzzer doing? How to get coverage of Rust code.
https://tweedegolf.nl/en/blog/154/what-is-my-fuzzer-doing
saved 2025-05-06

What is my fuzzer doing? - Blog - Tweede golf
Fuzz testing is incredibly useful: it has caught many a bug during the development of NTP packet parsing and gzip/bzip2 (de)compression. But I've always been unsatisfied with the fuzzer being a b ...

Someone asked how play multiple simultaneous CD-quality WAVs from an SD card to I2S DAC on ESP32 in CircuitPython. Turns out: possible! Can get a bit glitchy if doing USB stuff tho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97OA6L9PLCg
code:

Someone asked how play multiple simultaneous CD-quality WAVs from an SD card to I2S DAC on ESP32 in CircuitPython. Turns out: possible! Can get a bit glitchy if doing USB stuff tho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97OA6L9PLCg
code:

I just used a Family Circus reference to explain what I thought of a coworkers proposed sw architecture plan.
It will work, but it will suck.

Masked ICE agents are only the start of the assault on government transparency.
Now, government attorneys that are arguing to deport immigrants are doing so in secret.
The Intercept reports on two separate instances immigration judges in New York City declined to identify the government attorneys for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In the first case Judge ShaSha Xu said,
“We’re not really doing names publicly.”
But that’s not really true. Because she *did* ID…

Government Attorneys Now On Board With The Whole Secret Police Thing
Judges are letting government attorneys do the ugly work of mass deportations anonymously.

The Military Occupied LA for 40 Days and All They Did Was Detain One Guy (Nick Turse/The Intercept)
https://theintercept.com/2025/07/16/federal-troops-la-doing-nothing/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250716/p82#a250716p82

Let's use Hanlon's Razor, and assume good faith in that the #inaturalist staff just needs a bit of help for how one could actually share decision-making power with a large online community.
To do that, I've written up some ideas of how other online communities (in #citizenscience, #openscience and beyond) have gone about doing that.
https://tzovar.as/power-sharing/

It looks like they told her: right, we need a video. Stand here, sing, and dance, and we'll film it. We've got twenty minutes. Top job she's doing too.
#totp #fame

LEGO is officially doing a Godzilla set- this one's gonna be tough to avoid wanting to grab. I usually don't go for new LEGO (too pricey). But I already have a bit of a zilla collection. And wow, damn.
More: https://www.fangoria.com/official-godzilla-lego-set-d…

An Official GODZILLA LEGO Set Is Coming Our Way
The LEGO Ideas team has confirmed that a fan-created GODZILLA set is becoming an official product that you will soon be able to get your hands on.

I hate doing updates on my Mac Studio because they include at least 2 long periods of screen blackness and total silence that feel “too long” and the urge to just hit the button is intense. I guess it’s the price of 64GB RAM.
#1stworld1stquintileproblems

A package that I expected just came and I went to the door to pick it up. The FedEx driver was listening to music while doing his deliveries. I can respect that but I was a little thrown by the song. He was blasting "The Ants Go Marching" (the kids song). 🤨

Krugman continues:
❝While there is a cadre of Trumpist true believers who will obey the Leader under any circumstances, most of those doing the dirty work of undermining democracy and the rule of law are cowards and opportunists. They’re willing to participate in the destruction of America as we know it because they believe that many others will do the same. As a result, they believe that they are unlikely to face any personal consequences for their actions and may even be rewarded for their lawbreaking.
And what of those who oppose Trumpism? While there are heroes willing to take a stand against tyranny whatever the personal cost, most anti-Trumpists are reluctant to stick their necks out unless they believe that they are part of a widespread resistance that will grant them some measure of safety in numbers.
In other words, the victory or defeat of competitive authoritarianism will depend to a large extent on which side ordinary people believe will win. If Trump looks unstoppable, resistance will wither away and democracy will be lost. On the other hand, if he appears weak and stymied, resistance will grow and — just maybe — American democracy will survive.❞
2/

My wife’s petunias are doing quite well. #Bloomscrolling

'He is doing a bit': Rumors swirl around Trump's 'alpha male' troll ambassador - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/nick-adams-malaysia-doing-bit/

There have been many instances documented, do a damn web search.
But forget that for a moment: What I’m doing is the same as what Netanyahu is doing? My opposing genocide is the same as a fucker perpetrating genocide?
Fuck you, Alfred.
Get some fucking perspective. https://mastodon.social/@amsz…

Colts coach says Daniel Jones is 'doing a helluva job' with QB battle extended to training camp

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/colts-c

Mailbag: Comparing 2025 Cowboys to 2023? https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/mailbag-comparing-2025-cowboys-to-2023

Went out to see Stewart Lee doing his "Man Wulf" show at the Royal Festival hall.
Huge place. Ginormous! Easily the biggest place I've ever seen him perform.
He mocks the 60 million dollar netflix special offensive comedians doing their skits about how they're not allowed to say stuff, while actually saying the stuff they say you're not allowed to say and suffering nothing but millions of dollars for it.
There are things you're *actually* not allowed to say this month of course. But they will not say the things that can get you 14 years in jail: like pointing out the government's collaboration in a genocide and supporting those who oppose it.
The man wulf just mocks the weak instead.
And Stew does too, while by mocking the wolf inside him showing he could be them. Sort of. Only he can't, because even though it's enjoyable and funny and easy to deconstruct, it's still fundamentally inane.
Stew's voice and accents and singing and impersonations have improved considerably!
Great costume. See the show if you can.
#stewartLee #comedy #london

I need everyone on Normal People internet to know that American Girl Doll Instagram is doing doll protests today.
There are tiny t-shirts and signs.
AND THEN I realized it's a joint protest with the Barbie ppl, where there are EVEN TINIER SIGNS.
https://bsky.app/profile/tolcser…

Sarah Tolcser (@tolcser.bsky.social)
I need everyone on Normal People internet to know that American Girl Doll Instagram is doing doll protests today. There are tiny t-shirts and signs. AND THEN I realized it's a joint protest with the Barbie ppl, where there are EVEN TINIER SIGNS.

People don’t appreciate how much AI-adjacent practice #Apple has, going back decades. You can be sure that they are using what they have learned from doing speech-to-text, text summary, etc. since the 90s https://

Bob Costas Condemns Mainstream Press for Doing 'MAGA Media': 'There Really Isn't Two Sides' (Michael Luciano/Mediaite)
https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/bob-costas-condemns-mainstream-press-for-doing-maga-media-there-really-isnt-two-sides/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250610/p152#a250610p152

Oh hey, I know that guy….
In July 2017 I was abruptly fired. I still do not know exactly why.
In March 2019 I was called by the owner of the company and begged to come back. The CTO who had canned me had ghosted the company after all the junior sysadmins found other gigs. I’ve never heard the full story.
Apparently the fact that I had tickets for all the work I had been doing slipped the notice of my then cow-orkers. The pile of tech debt was impressive.

Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social)
Attached: 1 image Can't wait for all the orgs to fire everybody after buying generative AI tools and discovering about glue people the hard way.

Donald Trump has repeatedly encouraged or defended violent attacks on Democrats and political critics.
As just a few examples:
— In 2015, during Trump’s first primary campaign, white attendees at one of his campaign rallies tackled and beat a Black protestor.
Trump approved of the attack, telling Fox News,
“Maybe he should have been roughed up because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”
— In 2018, Trump praised then-US Rep. Greg Gianforte for physi…

MAGA political violence claims more victims
Trump’s movement relies on terror.