"Somewhere", said Father Vittorini, "did Blake not speak of the
Machineries of Joy? That is, did not God promote environments, then
intimidate these Natures by provoking the existence of flesh, toy men and
women, such as are we all? And thus happily sent forth, at our best, with
good grace and fine wit, on calm noons, in fair climes, are we not God's
Machineries of Joy?"
"If Blake said that", said Father Brian, "he never…
I feel like using QQ, Douyin, Weibo, Bilibili, etc. would be an effective means of subverting this Western push toward mandatory online ID and all its attendant baggage. I don't personally care if the Chinese spy on my inane conversations, and I don't really spend much time talking about Tiananmen Square. The enemy of my enemy, and so forth.
💡Compiling Prolog to Forth
#prolog #forth
It's that time again! Tomorrow (Tues, 12 May) at 20:00 NZST we will be having our monthly Libre/FOSS Meeting. Anyone is welcome to participate. Questions and demos at any level both welcome and appreciated. We'll be holding forth on our BigBlueButton (thanks, as usual, to https://Prodigi.nz for sponsored infrastruc…
In an test assertion, do you prefer the expected value first or the actual value first? (
I have been back and forth on this over the years. Sometimes I feel one is more legible than the other. Then I change my mind.
Why do I care? Curiosity! (Probably also some form of API perfectionism 😳 )
Team assertEquals(actualValue, expectedValue)
Team assertEquals(expectedValue, actualValue)
I never cared about this
Do you think puppygirls do this when you turn on the garden hose?
It's a good technique, but it only work well up to the forth or fifth rum and coke
Sonnet 034 - XXXIV
Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o'ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?
'Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break,
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,
For no man well of such a salve can speak,
That heals the wound, and cures not the disgrace:
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;
Though th…
Went back and forth a few times before it popped into my head. #Wordle
Wordle 1 752 4/6
🟨🟨⬛🟨⬛
🟩⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Fish. Lips.
https://vimeo.com/1180173970?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci
alt video: from a camera on a stick in the water behind a boat, three interested fish, swimming back and forth and quite close to the camera.
Let me be clear. If the state of Washington ever asked me the question:
Permanent DST or switch back and forth?
I would eagerly select "No more switching boneheads".
But I would also be emailing the state legislature asking why on earth they ended up with this boneheaded choice, when the obvious, correct, answer was right there all along: Just abolish DST.
Listening to Anthony Healy (?) head of APRA holding forth on RNZ. I'm reminded of how badly broken the concept of Copyright is. Their whole model is driven by corporate 'rights holders' who want to extract maximum $ from the market, and not the interests of individual creators who desperately need the income. The model rewards those who're already successful. New & small creators get nuthin', especially if they haven't sold out to the big evil streaming providers.…
Crocuses burst forth
Through last year's leaves I am told.
But not here, not yet.
#DailyHaikuPrompt #haiku
Google expands Search Live, its AI conversational search feature previously limited to the US and India, to all languages and regions where AI Mode is available (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/26/google-is-launching-search-live-globally/
I couldn't care less about a bunch of rich people in Brooklyn, I just read the article for the delicious drama. However, about halfway through the article, I started to see so many #FreeSoftware parallels.
1) Volunteers spend countless unpaid hours creating/maintaining something to better their community.
2) For-profit business packages it up as part of their offering.
sometimes its a night where u need something like http://www.paperrad.org
"Jesse Jackson was a gift from God and a witness that God exists in the ways he cared for and lifted all people, the way he called forth a rainbow coalition of people to challenge economic and social inequality from the pulpit to a historic presidential run, the way he dared to keep hope alive whenever the nation struggled with being who she says she is and yet ought to be."
—The Rev. Dr. William Barber
Full statement here:
The latest release of the small and nifty monitoring tool #Beszel merged a pull request from some AI dude who made it using Claude. The merge request's text has the usual embarrassing amount of emojis and it was merged without a lot of back and forth. It adds the ability to notify and send data to external services like healthchecks.io. This feels slightly unnerving to me. Wasn't there a r…
A boy scout troop went on a hike. Crossing over a stream, one of
the boys dropped his wallet into the water. Suddenly a carp jumped, grabbed
the wallet and tossed it to another carp. Then that carp passed it to
another carp, and all over the river carp appeared and tossed the wallet back
and forth.
"Well, boys," said the Scout leader, "you've just seen a rare case
of carp-to-carp walleting."
Tom Forth considers the Graduate Premium in the UK
https://tomforth.co.uk/graduatepremium/
TIL that WB0RLJ Jim posts videos of his POTA activations keyed by time, so you can find your call in his video description with a link straight to the time in the video. Very cool!
I also read his QRZ page and discovered that I did something that he dislikes. I've heard other ops say that if someone gives a partial call, you should reply with your sign twice to cut down on back-and-forth, and now I kn…
France is on its 5th Republic.
Perhaps it is time for serious citizens of the United States of America to start thinking about the successes and failures of the USA’s first republic and start working on a constitution and system of government for the 2nd American Republic.
It could be argued that this is a natural cycle for all democracies. France went back and forth from Republic to Empirical Fascist half a dozen times in 200 years before landing on its fifth iteration in 1958.
Many other countries (Spain, Germany, Austria) have had similar progressions.
#usa #theAmericanFascist #democracy #republic
Sonnet 134 - CXXXIV
So now I have confessed that he is thine,
And I my self am mortgaged to thy will,
Myself I'll forfeit, so that other mine
Thou wilt restore to be my comfort still:
But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free,
For thou art covetous, and he is kind;
He learned but surety-like to write for me,
Under that bond that him as fast doth bind.
The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,
Thou usurer, that put'st forth …
Restoring missing low scattering angle data in two-dimensional diffraction patterns of isolated molecules
Yanwei Xiong, Martin Centurion
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24334 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.24334 https://arxiv.org/html/2603.24334
arXiv:2603.24334v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Anisotropic two-dimensional diffraction signals contain more information than the conventional isotropic signals for both gas phase ultrafast electron and X-ray diffraction experiments and are common in typical time-resolved diffraction experiments due to the use of linearly polarized lasers to excite the sample that imprints spatial anisotropy on the molecules. We report an iterative algorithm to restore the missing data at low scattering angles in a two-dimensional diffraction signal, which is essential to obtain real-space representation. The iterative algorithm transforms two-dimensional signals back and forth between the momentum transfer domain and the real space domain through Fourier and Abel transforms and apply real space constraints to retrieve missing signal at low scattering angles. The algorithm only requires an approximate a-priori knowledge of the shortest and longest internuclear distances in the molecule. We demonstrated successful retrieval of the missing signal in simulated patterns and in experimentally measured diffraction patterns from laser-induced alignment of trifluoroiodomethane molecules.
toXiv_bot_toot
#SmallWinButItsAllIGot I opened this packaging with my bare hands, clearly I am ready to take on a grizzly bear.
(I bent it in half across the top, then flexed it back and forth as fast as I could, thinking that if I could put enough heat into the bend it would weaken the plastic. I don't know if I generated that much heat. But it did weaken.)
id Software: Let's make a pioneering 2.5D shooter. (#Doom)
Raven Software: Oh, cool engine. But what if we added the ability to look up and down, and sometimes fly? Oh, and let's add inventory. And maybe some randomized ambient sounds. And interactive environments. (#Heretic)
Also Raven Software: You know what? Let's also add character classes. And make the gameplay more nonlinear, with going back and forth between maps. And let's add jumping. And let's add some hacks to enable doors and walls to move horizontally, and add scripting. And monsters spawning randomly. (#Hexen)
EDIT: Oh, and animated backgrounds, and thunderstorms, and falling leaves!
#games
Sonnet 145 - CXLV
Those lips that Love's own hand did make,
Breathed forth the sound that said 'I hate',
To me that languished for her sake:
But when she saw my woeful state,
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet
Was used in giving gentle doom;
And taught it thus anew to greet;
'I hate' she altered with an end,
That followed it as gentle day,
Doth follow night, who like a…
Sonnet 034 - XXXIV
Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o'ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?
'Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break,
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,
For no man well of such a salve can speak,
That heals the wound, and cures not the disgrace:
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;
Though th…