Tootfinder

IT WORKS! ZOMG IT WORKS!!!!
🥳
Turns out, I have to use `internal/runtime/atomic` instead of sync/atomic`` for the `atomic.Bool`.
Then this here will _not_ happen lol:
https://gist.github.com/orangecms/7f985ef19398544114599430b79868f7#file-lol-…

Golang 32-bit Linux futex fixing for year 2038
Golang 32-bit Linux futex fixing for year 2038. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

A teardown of the $800 Meta Ray-Ban Display reveals a system of mirrors enabling its "geometric" waveguide tech, setting it apart from other AR glasses (Elizabeth Chamberlain/iFixit News)
https://www.ifixit.com/News/113543/theres-

There’s Groundbreaking Waveguide Tech Inside Meta’s $800 AR Glasses But Don’t Count on Fixing Them
Imagine an AR repair guide that follows along with your repair. We’re excited by the possibility, but you won’t be able to fix these glasses just yet.

Took me a good while now to find a way to
- configure a Linux kernel
- find a suitable QEMU command
- build a corresponding initramfs
for 32-bit Arm Linux supporting Arm v7.
It is such an utter mess lol
Addendum:
In the end, I went with the RPi2 target.
My defconfig and notes are here:
https…

Golang 32-bit Linux futex fixing for year 2038
Golang 32-bit Linux futex fixing for year 2038. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

PatchSeeker: Mapping NVD Records to their Vulnerability-fixing Commits with LLM Generated Commits and Embeddings
Huu Hung Nguyen, Anh Tuan Nguyen, Thanh Le-Cong, Yikun Li, Han Wei Ang, Yide Yin, Frank Liauw, Shar Lwin Khin, Ouh Eng Lieh, Ting Zhang, David Lo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07540

PatchSeeker: Mapping NVD Records to their Vulnerability-fixing Commits with LLM Generated Commits and Embeddings
Software vulnerabilities pose serious risks to modern software ecosystems. While the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) is the authoritative source for cataloging these vulnerabilities, it often lacks explicit links to the corresponding Vulnerability-Fixing Commits (VFCs). VFCs encode precise code changes, enabling vulnerability localization, patch analysis, and dataset construction. Automatically mapping NVD records to their true VFCs is therefore critical. Existing approaches have limitati…

Germany's Federal Cartel Office opens an investigation into whether Temu is influencing the pricing of third-party merchants, potentially stifling competition (Mark Hallam/DW News)
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-investigating-temu-on-price-fixing-sus…

Germany investigating Temu on price-fixing suspicions
Germany's competition watchdog has announced an investigation of Chinese discount online retail site temu.com, suspecting it of influencing retailers' prices. The site is the fastest-growing of its kind in the world.

My blog -- which I haven't updated since 2019 -- was off the air for an unknown amount of time due to a Debian update that removed MariaDB. Finally got around to fixing that today. It "only" has posts going back to 2005, when I switched to Drupal. Before that I posted hundreds of entries over several years using software I wrote for myself. Somewhere I might have those files.

This from IPPR on the greatly increased costs of UK government debt servicing seems reasonable from IPPR.
1) Tax the big 4 banks on the windfall profits that the government is, effectively, funding.
2) Slow down the QE buy-back.
I would also think that the government/bank could, as an exceptional measure, buy back some of the long term gilts using 'monetary financing' aka 'printing money'.
Not something to be done willy-nilly, but here it could get govt ou…

Fixing the leak: How to end the £22 billion annual taxpayer losses at the Bank of England
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) is an independent charity working towards a fairer, greener, and more prosperous society.

I wrote up a post about fixing a watch band because I really need to remember it's better to repair the things you have instead of binning it and buying a new one...
https://rasterweb.net/raster/2025/08/17/fixing-a-watch-band/

Fixing a Watch Band
Let's repair things when we can...

@… it's free, so use it for the mass, not for the difficult tasks... Fixing simple phpstan errors for example works very well...

Girls Talk, ‘Boys Talk: Fixing the Force https://www.dallascowboys.com/podcast/girls-talk-boys-talk-fixing-the-force

Right; mail server upgraded to #debian Trixie; I did it by recreating it in a local VM first; package install to match, and then tested a restore from my encrypted backups - which was a good exercise in its self. Then a dist-upgrade; fixing up Dovecot was the hairiest bit - they've randomly changed the name of a bunch of options. mail_location is now mail_driver/home/path/inbox_path and t…

Quantum carrollian bosonic strings
Jos\'e Figueroa-O'Farrill, Emil Have, Niels A. Obers
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04397 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509…

Quantum carrollian bosonic strings
We study a recently discovered carrollian bosonic string, described classically by a sigma model where both the worldsheet and the target spacetime are carrollian. After fixing the carrollian analogue of the conformal gauge, we determine the Lie algebra of residual gauge symmetries and show it is isomorphic to the three-dimensional extended BMS algebra. We quantise the sigma model à la BRST and determine the spectrum of the corresponding string theory by computing the BRST cohomology. In contr…

Explaining Code Risk in OSS: Towards LLM-Generated Fault Prediction Interpretations
Elijah Kayode Adejumo, Brittany Johnson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06104 https://

Explaining Code Risk in OSS: Towards LLM-Generated Fault Prediction Interpretations
Open Source Software (OSS) has become a very important and crucial infrastructure worldwide because of the value it provides. OSS typically depends on contributions from developers across diverse backgrounds and levels of experience. Making safe changes, such as fixing a bug or implementing a new feature, can be challenging, especially in object-oriented systems where components are interdependent. Static analysis and defect-prediction tools produce metrics (e.g., complexity,coupling) that flag…

The kind of IT support we deserve

I've probably mentioned that I'm working on switching #Gentoo from our half-broken eselect-ldso logic to #FlexiBLAS. This also involves a transition period where both setups would be supported.
A good thing is that the switch is ABI-compatible with the previous state (or at least it's supposed to be — we're working with upstream on fixing function coverage). Since libblas.so, liblapack.so and the rest are replaced by symlinks, programs that link to them will simply start using FlexiBLAS. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, switching the other way doesn't work as well. Stuff newly built against our libblas.so & co. symlinks naturally reads FlexiBLAS's SONAME from them, and links to libflexiblas directly. So should you decide to switch back, some packages will stay linked to FlexiBLAS and will need to rebuilt.
In order to avoid this, I would have to replace the symlinks with wrapper libraries, having libblas.so.3 and so on SONAMEs, and linking to libflexiblas. Unfortunately, a dummy wrapper isn't going to work — the linker will complain about using indirect symbols from libflexiblas.so. So I would probably have to "reexport" their symbols somehow, and ideally split into appropriate libraries, so that `-Wl,--as-needed` wouldn't drop some of them. But how to do that?
Well, let's look at the existing logic for eselect-ldso — clearly both BLIS and OpenBLAS create some wrappers. So I've spent some time investigating upstream Makefiles, and literally couldn't find the respective targets. I mean, these are quite complex Makefiles, but I'm grepping hard and can't find even a partial match.
As it turns out, these Makefile targets are added by Gentoo-specific patches. And these patches are just horrible. In case of OpenBLAS, they create the wrapper libraries by linking all the relevant .o files from OpenBLAS build, plus the shared OpenBLAS library. So the OpenBLAS symbols relevant to each interface end up duplicated in libblas.so, liblapack.so, etc., and apparently the symbols needed by them are taken from libopenblas.so. The individual interface libraries aren't even linked to one another, so they expose their own duplicate symbols, but use the implementation from OpenBLAS instead.
BLIS is even worse — the patch is simply creating libblas.so and libcblas.so, using all BLIS objects directly, plus symbol visibility to hide symbols irrelevant to the library. So yes, libblis.so, libblas.so and libcblas.so are roughly three separate copies of the same library, differing only in symbol visibility. And of course libcblas.so doesn't use libblas.so.
Truly #GSoC quality.

Can the Ravens right their 1-3 ship? Barnwell breaks down their two biggest issues that need fixing https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46413984/2025-nfl-week-4-baltimore-ravens-whats-wrong-offense-defense-injuries-la…

An iterated $I$-projection procedure for solving the generalized minimum information checkerboard copula problem
Ivan Kojadinovic, Tommaso Martini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02829

An iterated $I$-projection procedure for solving the generalized minimum information checkerboard copula problem
The minimum information copula principle initially suggested in \cite{MeeBed97} is a maximum entropy-like approach for finding the least informative copula, if it exists, that satisfies a certain number of expectation constraints specified either from domain knowledge or the available data. We first propose a generalization of this principle allowing the inclusion of additional constraints fixing certain higher-order margins of the copula. We next show that the associated optimization problem h…

Trump claims credit for fixing Social Security as it barrels to insolvency (Meryl Kornfield/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/08/14/trump-social-security-90th-annniversary/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250814/p133#a250814p133

Went on a fun adventure "fixing" an issue with a Slay the Spire mod. And by "fun" I actually mean fun. Even managed to fix the issue on the first try. However, it was a pain to get everything setup to work on the mod.
https://blog.jamesthebard.net/posts/build-…

I was feeling pretty drained last night and wasn't sure if I should bike to work today. My knee was really bugging me going up steps (more than usual) and I decided I would wait til morning to decide, based on how I felt.
I felt totally fine this morning. Reset! I think it's because I walked nearly 5 miles yesterday, and also spent a lot of time on the floor fixing a laser cutter.

Semiclassical polymer field with a cubic potential in cosmology
Ahsan Mujtaba, Syed Moeez Hassan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16416 https://arxiv.org/pdf/250…

Semiclassical polymer field with a cubic potential in cosmology
We study the semiclassical dynamics of a polymer quantized scalar field with a cubic potential in cosmology. The cosmological spacetime is chosen to be homogeneous and isotropic, and we work in the polymer quantization scheme where the field operator does not exist directly. The dynamics are studied in the `e-fold' time gauge, where a choice of time gauge fixing, in terms of the scale factor, is made at the classical level. The cubic potential is interesting to study because it is unbounded fro…

'Until we win games ... it doesn't matter': Why Dolphins are fixing a broken team culture https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46284120/miami-dolphins-mike-mcdaniel-culture-reset-tyreek-hill-tua-tagovailoa

Former NFL Head Coach Goes on Epic Rant Over Cowboys’ Defense https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/rex-ryan-epic-rant-dallas-defense/?adt_ei=[email]

Optimal Transport on Lie Group Orbits
Bahar Taskesen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09377 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09377

Optimal Transport on Lie Group Orbits
In its most general form, the optimal transport problem is an infinite-dimensional optimization problem, yet certain notable instances admit closed-form solutions. We identify the common source of this tractability as symmetry and formalize it using Lie group theory. Fixing a Lie group action on the outcome space and a reference distribution, we study optimal transport between measures lying on the same Lie group orbit of the reference distribution. In this setting, the Monge problem admits an …

I've filed a report about a minor problem with a #Python package, namely that the source distribution contained some trailing junk that breaks GNU #tar. On one hand, I'm happy that upstream took the issue seriously. On the other hand, I'm terrified of how much #AI slop was involved in the response.
I mean, my short bug report yielded a few walls of text of #LLM analysis of what the cause of the problem might be, of suggested solutions… and praise of the author's fix. These are interspersed with short comments from the author, all pasted under their own personal account. And the linked pull request is also huge, with "verification code" that's quite sloppy (bits that don't do anything, conditions that will never be true… but at least it seems to do what it was supposed to do).
Honestly, I don't know what to do. Not that I ever planned using this package, but at this point I will definitely stay away from it. It's in #Gentoo, and I'll have to continue maintaining it for the sake of reverse dependencies, but I feel like it's unfair to expose our users to packages that have clearly proven to accept AI slop without reviewing it properly. Or rather, AI slop that's being reviewed… by AI. How can anyone think this a good idea?!
There were multiple times in my life when I've considered retiring from Gentoo, for variety of reasons. There were also multiple times when I wanted to get away from computers altogether. Unfortunately, we're living in a truly fucked up world, and there is no escape. The best you can do is put an ever increasing effort to keep fixing all that crap that will just keep piling on faster and faster.
#FreeSoftware #OpenSource