Tootfinder

#ScribesAndMakers for July 3: When (and if) you procrastinate, what do you do? If you don't, what do you do to avoid it?
I'll swap right out of programming to read a book, play a video game, or watch some anime. Often got things open in other windows so it's as simple as alt-tab.
I've noticed recently I tend to do this more often when I have a hard problem to solve that I'm not 100% sure about. I definitely have cycles of better & worse motivation and I've gotten to a place where I'm pretty relaxed about it instead of feeling guilty. I work how I work, and that includes cycles of rest, and that's enough (at least, for me it has been so far, and I'm in a comfortable career, married with 2 kids).
Some projects ultimately lose steam and get abandoned, and I've learned to accept that too. I learn a lot and grow from each project, so nothing is a true waste of time, and there remains plenty of future ahead of me to achieve cool things.
The procrastination does sometimes impact my wife & kids, and that's something I do sometimes feel bad about, but I think I keep that in check well enough, and for things my wife worries about, I usually don't procrastinate those too much (used to be worse about this).
Right now I'm procrastinating a big work project by working on a hobby project instead. The work project probably won't get done by the start of the semester as a result. But as I remind myself, my work doesn't actually pay me to work during the summer, and things will be okay without the work project being finished until later.
When I want to force myself into a more productive cycle, talking to people about project details sometimes helps, as does finding some new tech I can learn about by shoehorning it into a project. Have been thinking about talking to a rubber duck, but haven't motivated myself to try that yet, and I'm not really in doldrums right now.

GÉANT’s GN4-3N project is a finalist in the European Digital Connectivity Awards 2025 🎉
We’re honoured to be nominated in the “Cross-border and international connectivity” category, recognising the GN4-3N project’s role in building a more inclusive, resilient, and future-proof network infrastructure for the European #Research &

Norway's Northern Lights project is seen as a model for efforts to pump carbon dioxide deep into wells, but high costs remain an obstacle
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/business/norway-cabon-capture-northern-lights.html

Norway’s Hedged Bet on Europe’s Energy Future: A Garbage Disposal for Emissions
A business called Northern Lights is seen as a model for efforts to pump carbon dioxide deep into wells, but high costs remain an obstacle.

Design and performance of "R-FLEX", a flexure-based fiber positioning robot for spectroscopic cosmology
Nicholas R. Wenner, Joseph H. Silber, David J. Schlegel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02730

Design and performance of "R-FLEX", a flexure-based fiber positioning robot for spectroscopic cosmology
We present the design, fabrication, and testing of R-FLEX, a novel flexure mechanism for next-generation fiber-fed astronomical instruments. As the current Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) revolutionizes cosmology with over 56 million collected spectra using 5,000 robotic fiber positioners at 10.4 mm pitch, we project that future instruments will require 2.5-3x smaller fiber robots by area. R-FLEX enables precision radial motion for fiber robots mountable at 6.2 mm pitch, delivering …

A new paper projecting Joshua tree habitat under future climate based on incredibly high-resolution distribution data, from Joshua Tree Genome Project collaborators at USGS. They estimate up to 80% loss of suitable habitat by 2100 under the worst-case climate scenario.
#JoshuaTree #science

“Noor, who made so many friends on Bluesky since she started an account there in the summer of 2023, had her account suddenly suspended on Friday. Bluesky did not send a reason for the suspension, so while she wrote an appeal, she did not know what actions she was appealing, so as of now it's still suspended. She’s been silenced, and effectively disappeared.”

A Future for Noor and Her Children
Hello! I'm Meave, a U.S. citizen sponsoring this fundraiser on behalf of my dear friend Noor Hassan and her children. Noor and her son Abdul Rahman are kind, generous people; though their original fundraiser succeeded last summer, supporting themselves and their extended family cost them everything. This fundraiser will allow them to support themselves and save up to buy passage to Egypt and pursue a better future.

Look: AI at Work! - Analysing Key Aspects of AI-support at the Work Place
Stefan Schiffer, Anna Milena Rothermel, Alexander Ferrein, Astrid Rosenthal-von der P\"utten
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02274

Look: AI at Work! - Analysing Key Aspects of AI-support at the Work Place
In this paper we present an analysis of technological and psychological factors of applying artificial intelligence (AI) at the work place. We do so for a number of twelve application cases in the context of a project where AI is integrated at work places and in work systems of the future. From a technological point of view we mainly look at the areas of AI that the applications are concerned with. This allows to formulate recommendations in terms of what to look at in developing an AI applicat…

The future of debate: get an LLM to generate your tirade, copy it to the world dog, have it spotted by an LLM spotter and rejected on that basis.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2025/07/msg00031.html

Just read this post by @… on an optimistic AGI future, and while it had some interesting and worthwhile ideas, it's also in my opinion dangerously misguided, and plays into the current AGI hype in a harmful way.
https://social.coop/@eloquence/114940607434005478
My criticisms include:
- Current LLM technology has many layers, but the biggest most capable models are all tied to corporate datacenters and require inordinate amounts of every and water use to run. Trying to use these tools to bring about a post-scarcity economy will burn up the planet. We urgently need more-capable but also vastly more efficient AI technologies if we want to use AI for a post-scarcity economy, and we are *not* nearly on the verge of this despite what the big companies pushing LLMs want us to think.
- I can see that permacommons.org claims a small level of expenses on AI equates to low climate impact. However, given current deep subsidies on place by the big companies to attract users, that isn't a great assumption. The fact that their FAQ dodges the question about which AI systems they use isn't a great look.
- These systems are not free in the same way that Wikipedia or open-source software is. To run your own model you need a data harvesting & cleaning operation that costs millions of dollars minimum, and then you need millions of dollars worth of storage & compute to train & host the models. Right now, big corporations are trying to compete for market share by heavily subsidizing these things, but it you go along with that, you become dependent on them, and you'll be screwed when they jack up the price to a profitable level later. I'd love to see open dataset initiatives SBD the like, and there are some of these things, but not enough yet, and many of the initiatives focus on one problem while ignoring others (fine for research but not the basis for a society yet).
- Between the environmental impacts, the horrible labor conditions and undercompensation of data workers who filter the big datasets, and the impacts of both AI scrapers and AI commons pollution, the developers of the most popular & effective LLMs have a lot of answer for. This project only really mentions environmental impacts, which makes me think that they're not serious about ethics, which in turn makes me distrustful of the whole enterprise.
- Their language also ends up encouraging AI use broadly while totally ignoring several entire classes of harm, so they're effectively contributing to AI hype, especially with such casual talk of AGI and robotics as if embodied AGI were just around the corner. To be clear about this point: we are several breakthroughs away from AGI under the most optimistic assumptions, and giving the impression that those will happen soon plays directly into the hands of the Sam Altmans of the world who are trying to make money off the impression of impending huge advances in AI capabilities. Adding to the AI hype is irresponsible.
- I've got a more philosophical criticism that I'll post about separately.
I do think that the idea of using AI & other software tools, possibly along with robotics and funded by many local cooperatives, in order to make businesses obsolete before they can do the same to all workers, is a good one. Get your local library to buy a knitting machine alongside their 3D printer.
Lately I've felt too busy criticizing AI to really sit down and think about what I do want the future to look like, even though I'm a big proponent of positive visions for the future as a force multiplier for criticism, and this article is inspiring to me in that regard, even if the specific project doesn't seem like a good one.

I always feel soooooo slow when I'm starting a new IaC project or doing a major refactor.
In this case there's a lot of orchestration that I'm the tying to leave room for future enhancements. Anyway it always takes long time
I'm re-working my lanecloud Ansible provisioning to better use netbox as a source of truth... And also switching to provisioning VMs with libvirt instead of nomad

"A retread of the defeated 2015-19 project is unlikely to be a recipe for future success.
"Even so, this is a very encouraging beginning. The march of authoritarianism and racism across this country, the disgusting consensus behind complicity in Israeli genocide and the attempt to keep public ownership and wealth redistribution off the table can all be challenged by the emergence of a left movement on this scale."

rsyslog lead dev on AI, and also see this: https://www.rsyslog.com/clarifying-ai-first-what-it-really-means-for-rsyslog/

Clarifying “AI First” – What It Really Means for rsyslog - rsyslog
TL;DR:The rsyslog project is embracing AI First (Human-Controlled) — AI is becoming an integral partner across development, documentation, user education, technical support, deployment guidance, and future observability tools. This does not mean “vibe coding” or letting AI run unsupervised. Instead, AI accelerates routine work, drafts ideas, and provides insights, while Rainer Gerhards — with decades […]

Composable Life: Speculation for Decentralized AI Life
Botao Amber Hu, Fangting
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20668 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20668

Composable Life: Speculation for Decentralized AI Life
"Composable Life" is a hybrid project blending design fiction, experiential virtual reality, and scientific research. Through a multi-perspective, cross-media approach to speculative design, it reshapes our understanding of the digital future from AI's perspective. The project explores the hypothetical first suicide of an on-chain artificial life, examining the complex symbiotic relationship between humans, AI, and blockchain technology.

US universities leading the way in sustainable energy with new solar project. Another step forward towards a clean energy future. #climatechange #climatesolutions #climate

US universities announce massive project that could transform how we power our schools: 'Another step forward'
Connecticut's CSCU just launched a huge solar project expected to save millions.

Weakening NEPA without replaciing it with something better is no abundance agenda.
This highway widening would foreclose future transit expansion and probably make traffic worse for most drivers.It is opposed by both local governments it goes through. NEPA is the only veto point.
A transit project with the same local opposition would be dead on arrival.

Alexandria asks VDOT to delay adding express lanes to Woodrow Wilson Bridge | ALXnow
Alexandria Mayor Alyia Gaskins and city staff are asking that the Virginia Department of Transportation delay approval of a preferred alternative on a plan to add express lanes from the Springfield Interchange across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. In an April letter to VDOT, Gaskins wrote that the project will bring "Alexandria "substantial consequences to our

TransLink seeks feedback on Metrotown-North Shore Bus Rapid Transit
Input will help decide between two route options
TransLink is launching public engagement on the future Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) route between Metrotown and the North Shore. Members of the public are being asked to provide feedback on the project, rank features that are most important to them, and pick which of the two routes they prefer.

Four years after Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas would be the first state to build its own border wall, lawmakers have quietly stopped funding the project, leaving only scattered segments covering a small fraction of the border.
That decision, made in the waning hours of this year’s legislative session,
leaves the future of the state wall unclear.
Just 8% of the 805 miles the state identified for construction is complete, which has cost taxpayers more than $3 billion to dat…

With only 8% built, Texas quietly defunds state border wall program
Texas officials suggested the federal government could pick up construction. However, during President Trump’s first term, his administration built about one-third of what the state was able to put up in the same amount of time.

Please support this important project to digitise recorded science lectures!
People of the future will treasure these. Make sure they survive - even a tenner helps:
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/roger-penrose-asks-support-for-the-archive-trust#

DIAMOND DRAGON - Catgirl Cyberpunk Action! ( Updated 6/19/25 ) - Gameplay Mods - Doomworld
https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/153613-diamond-dragon-catgirl-cyberpunk-action-updated-61925/

Guidelines for the Enhancement of the Corpus and the Verismo Vocabulary
Michael Bassi, Giovanni Salucci
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15645 https://arxiv.org/…

Guidelines for the Enhancement of the Corpus and the Verismo Vocabulary
VIVer is a digital lexicography project with historical-literary and historical-linguistic aims that can be considered a case study of a Digital Humanities project. This paper presents the IT choices made to promote the dissemination and enhancement of the results, analysing the issues and advantages for wider adoption, beyond the specific VIVer project, serving as a model and inspiration for future projects.

Community Report from the 2025 SNOLAB Future Projects Workshop
M. D. Diamond, P. Abbamonte, A. Arvanitaki, D. M. Asner, D. Balut, D. Baxter, C. Blanco, D. Boreham, M. Boulay, B. Broerman, T. Brunner, E. Caden, A. Chavarria, M. Chen, J. P. Davis, A. Drlica-Wagner, J. Estrada, N. Fatemighomi, J. Foster, D. Freedman, C. Gao, J. Hall, S. Hall, W. Halperin, M. Hirschel, N. Hoch, Z. Hong, A. Ianni, C. Jillings, D. Johnson, Y. Kahn, C. B. Krauss, T. Laframboise, M. Lai, M. R. Lapointe, B. Lil…

Community Report from the 2025 SNOLAB Future Projects Workshop
SNOLAB hosts a biannual Future Projects Workshop (FPW) with the goal of encouraging future project stakeholders to present ideas, concepts, and needs for experiments or programs that could one day be hosted at SNOLAB. The 2025 FPW was held in the larger context of a 15-year planning exercise requested by the Canada Foundation for Innovation. This report collects input from the community, including both contributions to the workshop and contributions that could not be scheduled in the workshop b…

Very early in the commercial registrar era, some registrars priced domains in harmony with their costs: no teaser marketing, just discounts on buying multiple future years at once. Even after everyone stopped giving out-year discounts explicitly, the fact of inflation in upstream fees made it wise for legitimate domain holders to buy many years in advance.
I am close to wanting a return to the InterNIC model. DNS Marxism.

The Spamhaus Project (@spamhaus@infosec.exchange)
Attached: 1 image Over the past 30 days, six gTLDs have ranked in the Top 10 for being associated with botnet C2s - all showing significant increases in detections 📈: .tech (+4,000%), .icu (+433%), .today (+429%), .fun (+400%), .digital (+314%), and .life (+258%). 🌐 Full stats over at: https://www.spamhaus.org/reputation-statistics/gtlds/domains/ These TLDs are all cheap to register (as low as $0.98 using a promo code 🤑), but expensive to renew. Perfect conditions for throwaway dom…

I just saw a post saying someone let their agent AI run for 19 hours to solve a problem.
Is that the expectation?
I’m going to predict a future scandal: A global consulting firm has been caught charging human hours for agentic AI elapsed time. If I were an unscrupulous consulting firm, I could charge customers 24 hours a day at ludicrously high prices to deliver what likely would have been an ill-advised and doomed project anyway.

Chicago Public Media, which owns the Sun-Times and public radio station WBEZ, names Kimbriell Kelly as EIC effective September 2, succeeding Jennifer Kho (David Roeder/Chicago Sun Times)
https://chicago.suntimes.com/media/2025/08/14/kimbriell-…

Kimbriell Kelly named editor-in-chief at Sun-Times, WBEZ
A Pulitzer Prize winner, Kelly has a background in investigative reporting. She will succeed Jennifer Kho, who will work on a project dealing with the future of public media.

I was trying to package #FlexiBLAS for #Gentoo, and to be honest, it doesn't look that good.
The first red flag is lack of an open bug tracker. Apparently, there is the tracker on GitLab that's limited to "members of their group and selected external contributors", but it doesn't seem to be used much. So it's "send us an email", and wonder how many people sent us the same bug report before.
The git repository is currently at something tagged 3.4.80 that seems to be prerelease, and its build system is quite broken. Not exactly the best path to verify that the bugs you are hitting are still there.
Now, upstream seems to insist on either using vendored netlib #LAPACK, or statically linking to the system library (we don't install the static libraries). Apparently I can specify the shared libraries instead, but it doesn't work — and it's unclear to me whether it doesn't work because I'm using the shared libraries, or because it doesn't support my LAPACK version. If I build LAPACK without deprecated symbols, it refuses to load it at runtime because of missing symbols. And if I build it with deprecated symbols, it fails to find some symbols at CMake time.
Honestly, I feel like I've spent too much time on this project already, especially given that its future is entirely unclear to me — the current git is quite broken, I have no clue how many issues were reported already and whether my bug reports will receive any reply. It definitely doesn't fare well for a package that we might start to rely heavily on. We don't want a cathedral there.
https://www.mpi-magdeburg.mpg.de/projects/flexiblas
https://gitlab.mpi-magdeburg.mpg.de/software/flexiblas-release

Weakening NEPA without replaciing it with something better is no abundance agenda.
This highway widening would foreclose future transit expansion and probably make traffic worse for most drivers.It is opposed by both local governments it goes through. NEPA is the only veto point.
A transit project with the same local opposition would be dead on arrival.

Onboard Dual Quaternion Guidance for Rocket Landing
Abhinav G. Kamath, Javier A. Doll, Purnanand Elango, Taewan Kim, Skye Mceowen, Yue Yu, Taylor P. Reynolds, Gavin F. Mendeck, John M. Carson III, Mehran Mesbahi, Beh\c{c}et A\c{c}{\i}kme\c{s}e
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10439

Onboard Dual Quaternion Guidance for Rocket Landing
The dual quaternion guidance (DQG) algorithm was selected as the candidate 6-DoF powered-descent guidance algorithm for NASA's Safe and Precise Landing -- Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) project. DQG is capable of handling state-triggered constraints that are of utmost importance in terms of enabling technologies such as terrain relative navigation. In this work, we develop a custom solver for DQG to enable onboard implementation for future rocket landing missions. We describe the de…

A Tale of Two Mobile Generations: 5G-Advanced and 6G in 3GPP Release 20
Xingqin Lin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11828 https://arxiv.or…

A Tale of Two Mobile Generations: 5G-Advanced and 6G in 3GPP Release 20
As the telecommunications industry stands at the crossroads between the fifth generation (5G) and sixth generation (6G) of mobile communications, the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) Release 20 emerges as a pivotal point of transition. By striking a balance between enhancing 5G-Advanced capabilities and setting the stage for 6G, Release 20 provides the crucial foundation upon which future mobile communication standards and deployments will be built. This article examines these dual obj…

Making Effective Decisions: Machine Learning and the Ecogame in 1970
Catherine Mason
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07027 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07027

Making Effective Decisions: Machine Learning and the Ecogame in 1970
This paper considers Ecogame, an innovative art project of 1970, whose creators believed in a positive vision of a technological future; an understanding, posited on cybernetics, of a future that could be participatory via digital means, and therefore more democratised. Using simulation and early machine learning techniques over a live network, Ecogame combined the power of visual art with cybernetic concepts of adaptation, feedback, and control to propose that behaviour had implications for th…