Tootfinder

Apple’s Liquid Glass is coming along!

CrossOver (and Apple silicon) continues to amaze me
(Clair Obscur: Expedition 33)
#Steam #macos

People are still not paying nearly enough attention to what @… wrote here:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/
“The American right is a brittle coalition.”
The topic above is a prime example. There are two MAGA constituencies here — employers and workers — who think they’re about to get exactly opposite things. Both are going along with the ICE program because they think they’re the ones who will really get what they want in the end. At least one of them is going to get screwed over.
6/

"But Wall Street professionals, like so many other ostensibly smart people, refused to see Trump clearly, mistaking his skill as a demagogue for wisdom as a policymaker. “I don’t think this was foreseeable,” a mournful Ackman posted on X on Monday. “I assumed economic rationality would be paramount.” What an odd assumption to make about a man who bankrupted casinos.
Berezin thinks Wall Street still hasn’t come to terms with the cost of the nascent Trump presidency. “I do think that at this point we might have passed the event horizon, meaning that even if Trump backs off from the tariffs, there’s been enough damage done to the U.S. economy, to the global economy, to investor confidence, consumer confidence, that we’re probably going to see a recession regardless of what happens,” he said.""
#GiftArticle #USPolitics
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/opinion/trump-stock-market-wall-street.html?unlocked_article_code=1.-E4.q7Gk.5YS3EpoLnh8C&smid=url-share

I have been trying to find some Chili Rasboras for my new 16 gallon nanotank since before I even got the tank. They've been out of stock everywhere. I even signed up for text notifications on a couple of sites and when I got the text I was in the middle of a meeting, and by the time I escaped, they were out of stock again.
I went to a meeting of the Colorado Aquarium Society tonight and managed to snag six in the auction.
Here's a terrible picture of them being drip acclimated.
@… #rasbora

Fortunate to spend 10 days with like-minded people in #Udupi, not to mention seeing the historic idol up close and 1-1s with amazing scholars. Gratifying to be treated as part of the inner circle, no longer just as a guest.
Eager to return to pursue #learning and be of #service to others.
Last view on the visit:
https://mastodon.social/@nityakrishna/114607842190854407

The future's so bright, I gotta wear 😎
#work #future cc: @…

Finished the book “Some Desperate Glory”.
I’ve enjoyed it immensely. Easily, among the most interesting and entertaining and well paced books I read lately. https://hachyderm.io/@al3x/114784095891256401

I'm somehow tired and depressed with the world already even though it's only 4 pm on a Monday.
Gonna do what always works best in these situations - turn off electronics and go read a novel outside.

I really wish whoever runs nixos.wiki would shut it down and just setup a redirect to wiki.nixos.org instead #nixos

But that’s not the endpoint. Oh no.
In a move alarmingly close to outright chattel slavery, there is talk of ICE capturing immigrants and then •selling them back to their former employers•, presumably under much-worsened employment conditions.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-5-2025
3/

If you like any sleep at all at night:
1. Don't take a long nap during the day
2. Don't drink a large cappuccino at 4pm
3. Don't drink the leftover large coffee your spouse didn't finish.
Especially if you don't normally drink coffee.
#psa #sleep #coffee

"The Republican Party is a hollow, decrepit husk. It is not a political movement. It is not a governing apparatus. It is not even an ideology with any internal coherence. It is a decaying vessel for a set of impulses: authoritarianism, greed, cruelty, nostalgia, and fear. And now, with the party marching in lockstep behind a man openly exploring how to violate the Constitution to seize a third term in office, it is fair to say the Republican Party has collapsed into something far worse than irrelevance. It is a clear and present danger to democracy."
#USPolitics
https://www.theindex.media/the-gop-is-the-most-dangerous-organization-in-america/?ref=dispatches-newsletter

Tag yourself

If you're trying to do the trick that was shared for #nintendoswitch2 where you can use a USB HDMI capture dongle HDMI to USB-C cable to use your iPhone as a camera - don't use the True Visage app mentioned in the video
That will rely on screen sharing mirroring and you'll potentially get an aspect ratio mismatch and see the dynamic island floating in your view
I'd personally suggest the free "Blackmagic Camera" app instead, and then go to:
Settings->Monitor->HDMI Out
Switch from Mirror Display to Video Feed and it will cleanly output your camera. Works for a Lightning to HDMI out adapter for older phones, too
Then just tap on Lense and FPS and pick which combo you like.
Also, if you're not getting any output signal make sure the capture dongle you're using supports 1080p out - not sure the Switch 2 supports anything higher as camera input

Also, why did we build technology that requires extreme levels of flattery to function?
I don't want to tell my computer that they are "the world's best" at ANYTHING to get them to do tasks. Why does Claude need to be told that you believe in it?
It's so dumb.

And the most recent jobs report has many hints that ICE is indeed having that desired effect: in an otherwise stagnant or contracting labor market, there was job group in leisure and hospitality, private health care, and (somewhat less) construction — all job markets with a concentration of immigrant labor.
I am not an economist and this is not a proper analysis — grain of salt, please! — but a quick skim of these stats is at least superficially consistent with a good chunk of current job growth coming from decreased immigrant participation in the labor force.
https://www.bls.gov/ces/publications/highlights/2025/current-employment-statistics-highlights-06-2025.pdf
2/

Tonight #Maven and Maven Exec plugin in combination with Weld brought me to me knees.
Weld refused to load my classes and resources even if Maven reports compilation is successful, I can see the classes in target/classes, and when using -X I see it adds the jars and target/classes to the classpath.
Still Weld throws a bunch of ClassNotFound exceptions.
To make things a lot worse, there're no good hits when searching.
😖 emoji-with-pulling-my-hair emoji-with-me-banging-my-head-against-the-desk 😩

New album cover dropped

Hey, folks who understand alt text and limited vision accessibility:
I have need to write alt text for the diagram below. The alt text needs to be comprehensible to somebody who is encountering this kind of diagram for the ••very first time••. I could describe the images using the relevant jargon, but that would only serve people who already know the thing this activity is teaching them!
Any suggestions for how I could write good alt text for something like this? Is it possible? (The horizontal black bars are minus signs, i.e. subtraction. This is clear from context in the text, but probably not clear in the image.)
PLEASE NOTE: I am looking for people with ••relevant accessibility expertise••, not just random best shots from people who (like me) don’t really know much about this kind of problem.

I guess I can thank AI for all link previews I see anywhere being «Making sure you’re not a bot»…

Stop bending the knee to Trump: it’s time for anticipatory noncompliance | David Kirp | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/08/trump-anticipatory-noncompliance

Not to be alarmist but the Power Mac G4 Cube is now a quarter of a century old

For context - I didn't write that prompt or feed particularly bad input to prove my point. I was trying out Claude, which so many people tell me is "the good" LLM product and above-and-beyond.
This prompt was written by Anthropic's own team, and featured in their gallery of web apps that can be built with this AI.
THEY THINK THIS IS GOOD!

lolol https://mamdanitimes.com

Is there a guide for how to start a command line Go project in 2025?
\(^-^)/

No, really, my OP scarcely even involved creativity at all.
#TeslaTakedown
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:m65ifh7vn5zdgs7izcmht4gy/post/3ltfqdcndf22i

Physical: No shoes, No service
Virtual: No SIM, No service
#travel #technology #comparison

Since fire season has kicked in, a reminder that it's easy (it took me ~10m because I am a crappy solderer) to add an ESP32 to an Ikea Vindriktning air quality sensor and get pm2.5 data into HA so you can have it notify you when the air quality gets worse than usual.
It costs ~$25 for the esp32 Vindriktning. There are plenty of howtos out there, mine is at #HomeAssistant @…

I really don't get what the hold-up is with EFTA implementing the Digital Markets Act. Seems like a no-brainer to me 😕

In case anyone thought I was going over the top with that:
#TeslaTakedown

A timer on the WatchOS and iOS can be easily repeated.
I don’t see how to do this on iPadOS. Is it possible?

hummingbird chilling on the fence mood

TIL!
https://newsie.social/@TheConversationUS/114813874295476106

Even if “AI” worked (it doesn’t), there’s many reasons why you shouldn’t use it:
1. It’s destroying Internet sites that you love as you use chat bots instead of actually going to sources of information—this will cause them to be less active and eventually shut down.
2. Pollution and water use from server farms cause immediate harm; often—just like other heavy industry—these are built in underprivileged communities and harming poor people. Without any benefits as the big tech companies get tax breaks and don’t pay for power, while workers aren’t from the community but commute in.
3. The basic underlying models of any LLM rely on stolen data, even when specific extra data is obtained legally. Chatbots can’t learn to speak English just by reading open source code.
4. You’re fueling a speculation bubble that is costing many people their jobs—because the illusion of “efficiency” is kept up by firing people and counting that as profit.
5. Whenever you use the great cheat machine in the cloud you’re robbing yourself from doing real research, writing or coding—literally atrophying your brain and making you stupider.
It’s a grift, through and through.

SWELL (old-timey use) Vs SWILL. What a difference a letter makes.
#English #language #difference

Should have listened to my rants about "AI"
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyvm1dyp9v2o

This from @… is actually a really good solution to certain classes of problem https://f.duriansoftware.com/@joe/114813581760030356

"But you shouldn't confuse the art with the artist"
The problem is that HE WILL DELIBERATELY DO SO. This is a way for him to pivot his speaking career and get a platform at Linux conferences and to write forewords in books and articles and whatnot.

Just tried putting one of our open source repos thru Devin's DeepWiki document generator and its pretty amazing https://deepwiki.com/tc-functors/tc

Don’t forget to disband the HOA in your mind, too

Are you really fasting if... you spend most of your fasting day thinking of food? 🤔
Asking for a friend.
#question #fasting #health

These are choices as a community, and if you do not make them you’ll get racists as your champions.

Certainly nothing harmful or deserving of mockery will come of this

Is sleezy a good word to describe this behavior? https://hachyderm.io/@ttscoff/114807295692830552

On the contrary, people like RMS are celebrated. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I am 100% certain that the intractable and ancient questions of “What is ‘human?’” and “What is ‘intelligence?’” will finally be resolved once and for all by corporate lawyers in a contract dispute with billions of dollars at stake
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/agi-may-be-impossible-to-define-and-thats-a-multibillion-dollar-problem/

Apparently DHH announced he’s moving to Linux; no big surprise there as there’s a sizable fraction of right-wing users of it (somewhere in the “rational-thinking, free speech, meritocracy & libertarian with a sprinkle of pseudoscience” oeuvre).
Something the Linux community has never managed to effectively deal with.

Here @… gets at something important: programming languages aren’t just a pile of syntax and features. They have context, motivations, idioms, expectations, communities. These things are all interrelated; in fact, they are all •part of the language•. And they are the things a language guide should communicate.
https://ddrake.prose.sh/why_i_hate_programming_language_intro_tutorials

Is this feasible everywhere?
Maybe not, depending on population density and geography.
However, it's not a big mystery where floods will happen and we figured this out long ago—there's no reason anyone should live there and we know in advance when they happen to evacuate anyone being temporarily around.

He just started on the job, like 8 weeks ago, and he's already going on vacation? 😖
#vacation #pope

User-centered design is what made the iPhone take over the mobile world. But that was then. Now? Now I agree with what @… said.
Byzantine navigation. Confusing state. Gratuitous graphical flair. Designed for marketing, not for user experience.
Full circle. The iOS 26 is the new J2ME.
/end
https://pdx.social/@louie/114793614305262321

Apropos of nothing, in 1960s Vienna the socialist city government decided—against vehement protests of the conservatives—to spend a lot of money on a major civil engineering flood protection project.
In 2013, the Danube reached a 500-year flood in Vienna.
Nothing was destroyed and no one got seriously hurt.

Oh, the arguments we had! There was a marketing person — quite a good one, and a good person too — who just couldn’t see it, who fought the dev team tooth and nail on this. She finally relented when @… wrote a brief positive plug for our app, and made her realize that the landscape had changed and her J2ME-world design instincts just didn’t work in this new iPhone market.
(I’m not sure that company ever really made the shift. They struggled with and eventually dropped their general consumer app, and concentrated quite successfully on some pro markets where features ruled all.)
4/

Wait there’s a second Epstein Island AI pioneer? Who also was Chief Learning Officer at… Trump University?
Can’t make this up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Schank

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/

This kind of user-centered design was utterly baffling to the people steeped in the pre-iPhone mobile market. The shop where I’d being doing that mobile app work set out to make their iPhone app. We’d try to create clear, simple, information-focused UX that was a pleasure to •use• for its intended purpose, not just a pleasure to •look at• in a demo, and…
…we’d get pushback. Soooooo much pushback. “Can you add more graphics?” “It looks too boring!” “Shouldn’t it do something when you shake it?”
3/

There’s more examples but it seems that AI research attracts people with a bias towards a reactionary worldview.

I remember in particular one phone that used an •animated fire background• to indicated the currently highlighted menu item. It was just embarrassing.
The iPhone was such a breath of fresh air. Of course it was eye-catching too — but what really made it soar was the •experience•. You can see it in that famous launch demo when Jobs does the “slide to unlock:” the audience absolutely loses it, so much that he has to repeat it.
Why? Because you could sense, even from the demo, that the experience was wonderful.
2/

Another one of the disgruntled OG AI computer scientists was Karl Steinbuch, who made one of the first implementations of a neural network.
He was also an ardent Nazi and directly ordered war crimes in the Second World War.
After his research stalled he wrote many racist, misogynist and xenophobic articles for the rest of his life.
He won many awards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Steinbuch

When I first started working on mobile apps, the iPhone didn’t exist yet. We were writing J2ME code for devices like the Motorola Razr. And wow did the UI on those things suck.
By “suck,” I mean byzantine navigation and confusing state drenched in useless, gratuitous graphical flair. I mean UI designed for eye-catching ads and splashy demos — not for making the thing clear or pleasant to use.
It was design centered on how people imagined the the device made them •look•, not on what •experience• it created for them.
1/

I think the root of the “AI” evil is when AI researchers in the 1960s recognized that they outrageously underestimated the complexity of the human mind.
They became utterly humiliated by their self-congratulatory promises from the 1950s that AGI was just a few years away—and then went full goblin mode that’s lasting to this day, even if the original researchers (like Minsky*) died long ago.
*probably raped children on Epstein’s island

You see how this works? Shake the jar and make them fight. Flood their zone with resentment and distrust.
We’ve got to figure out how to do this. People are somehow too high-minded for it, maybe? We need to get over that. The right has been doing it against the left for years; it’s time to do the same.
/end

Going down a sizable rabbit hole of anthropic mechanism, disputing Gödelian incompleteness and "Neural Darwinism" (meaning a specific theory, not that brains evolved over time).
The AI stans certainly like to throw around big words.

You think ICE is going to “bring the jobs back?” Bullshit. They’re gearing up to sell imprisoned immigrants back to employers as slave prisoners who work for free. You think your wages are going up? You’re a sucker. Your wages are going down.
You think ICE is going to sell you imprisoned immigrants as cheap labor? Bullshit. They’re too beholden to the radical white supremacist extremists. Those people will •never• let those immigrants stay in the country. ICE is going to steal your labor force and you won’t get them back.
8/

Sigh I really should take up long-form writing for these rants, because the current absolutely unhinged intellectual dishonesty in tech is something that really bothers me.

We need to find these fracture points, stick dynamite in them, and blow them up.
Those people who want exactly different things out of ICE? Pit them against each other. Figure out how. We don’t have to wait to see what happens; tell them now, like a broken records, exactly how they’re going to get screwed over.
7/

A very odd thing about Artificial Intelligence as a discipline in computer science is that it historically shifted from “understanding the human brain better” to “we give up on understanding the brain and will just replace humans despite having no fucking clue”

Leave aside for the moment that both of those plans are morally horrendous. That matters, it’s the thing that matters most, but leave it aside for just long enough to notice:
This is a fracture point in the MAGA coalition.
5/

It’s really something watching all the tech people who used to be so enthusiastic about the Internet and how it democratizes knowledge and gives people access to free publishing give it all up for a Skinner box and fascism

Here’s the thing: these two goals are in •direct contradiction•.
A bunch of ICE cheerleaders want inhumane treatment of immigrants in order to shrink — and thus strengthen — the remaining (white) labor pool.
A bunch of other ICE cheerleaders want inhumane treatment of immigrants in order to •weaken• the labor pool.
They can’t both get their way.
4/

OMG hell froze over https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/114818205693866443

This horrendous thought @… is talking about here is in fact for many MAGA voters the explicit goal of all this immigration cruelty, except for the job market instead of used cars:
“fewer immigrants − smaller labor supply − $$$ for me yay”
1/ https://thepit.social/@tsyum/114809824016492757

Ask your local weather service & electeds about your warning system. Because it’s not at all guaranteed they’re even thinking about it.
https://mastodon.social/@CelloMomOnCars/114806023804308265

I share a lot of @…’s feelings here. (He doesn’t mention training data sourcing, but that’s on my mind too.)
There’s a layer of ethics and social impact that hangs, as Tim put it, as a stench over all the thinking about whether and how the tech is useful. I am actually willing to discuss the utility questions, but they are secondary.
https://cosocial.ca/@timbray/114807889514002925

Say what you will about the police who supposedly maintain the rule of law (and I’m from Minneapolis, hoo boy could I say a lot), but keep this in mind:
The Trump administration is pumping up ICE to massive proportions and trying to give it absolute free reign because they find even the police — even the police! — too legally constrained for their purposes.

Underlining this from @….
Do not let anyone get away with calling ICE “law enforcement.” That term is wrong. They are operating outside the law. They aren’t law •enforcement•; they’re law •circumvention•. Their purpose is to grant a would-be authoritarian military power against his own country, unconstrained by either law or democracy. https://med-mastodon.com/@gregggonsalves/114644138834261758

HyperCard was magnificent. Still is.
The HyperTalk language was cool — but even cooler IMO was the way the dev environment mixed code with direct manipulation of the UI. There are lots of problems with that approach for generalized Ui development, yes, but the experience of it was magical.
Unity and the like have a similar editor structure — edit UI objects, attach code to them — but the feeling is totally different somehow.
https://mastodon.social/@ricmac/114643259120579546

Good. At least somebody has their head screwed on the right way about this.
https://mstdn.social/@DemocracyMattersALot/114648893677394963

The text I have conveys the •meaning• of the diagram, and it’s better than nothing:
❝Three different trees showing possible interpretations of 1000 - 100 - 10 - 1. In the first tree, subtraction happens from left to right. In the second tree, it happens from right to left. In the third tree, we first compute 1000 minus 100, then 10 minus 1, then subtract those two results.❞
That’s probably the best I can do in the current format. But if there were a way to make convey more of the spatial sense, I’d do it!

The proper way to do this for a blind student would surely be some kind of physical manipulatives, not verbal descriptions. The thing is, I don’t have any blind students currently, and if I did, we’d work on individual accommodation and assistance.
With this alt text, I’m just trying to get •something• in there to be at least minimally accessible: head start on those accommodation, something helpful if I ever share this online, etc. If there’s any way for text to convey the spatial relationships, that would be better than the text I have.

Thanks for the thoughtful replies. Answers to questions:
Many people asked for the context. This is for college students using what they already know about the order of arithmetic operations to start analyzing the structure of code. In the activity, they visual code structures using these kind of diagrams. The important thing here is thus not just subtraction; it’s this way of visualizing the relationships — and there already is a sight-centeric word, “visualize!” But I suspect a blind reader could also use these spatial relationships as a learning tool…if there were a good way of conveying the spatial relationships.

RETVRN

You probably think vinyl records, cassette tapes or compact discs are retro; I get my new music releases on floppy disk.

Did you know someone reverse-engineered the Weather Channel computer system from the 80s/90s and now you can generate your own private weather channel for your location?
https://weatherstar.netbymatt.com

Logging in here or the first time in a while to wish @… a very heartily fuck you for inviting a racist to give a keynote at #RailsConf.
What a way to sully your legacy and that of the conference, putting a bad taste in everyone's mouth.
There's a German expression for this—a "Griff ins Klo" (reaching into the toilet and pulling something out).
I hope y'all step on Lego bricks daily.

What’s really fascinating about this graph is that used Tesla prices started plummeting circa fall 2022, about the time Musk wrecked Twitter, 2.5 years •before• the #TeslaTakedown movement started.
What’s killing Tesla? It’s not just the protests. The brand was already fundamental damaged. Protests simply gave coherence to a disgust that was •already• powerful and widespread.
Musk is permanently radioactive. Institutional investors take note — and get out while you can.
(ht to @… for the link)
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:z6rujpf4u56jfie7aqic2nfg/post/3lqxairloqc2n

I know some of the money is thinking what @… says here. The trouble here is that Tesla is currently wildly, absurdly, comically overvalued wrt its fundamentals, and there are really only two rationalizations for that:
(1) Musk is a brain genius who will innovate the company into magic unicorn fairyland of world domination.
(2) Musk has Trump on a leash and will reap the benefits of kleptocratic plundering of the US Federal budget.
Both of those justifications depend on Musk remaining at Tesla. If he leaves, there’s little reason for the P/E ratio not to correct to normal car company levels — which AIUI would mean a stock price drop of >90%.
https://hachyderm.io/@zzzeek/114637505037473139

Don't want to come across as a miser (though there's a lot to rant about), so I'll post a few cool things.

If you are not familiar with the meaning and context of that phrase, please look it up.

“Arbeit macht frei.”
[shudder]
https://toad.social/@wdlindsy/114806792086061358

So this was a wild thing that happened just a mile or two from my house. https://mastodon.social/@UnicornRiot/114633283844250846

Sorry, investors, Tesla is simply not going to expand to be larger than •the entire rest of the auto industry• as your “buy” recommendations implicitly posit.
If they make robotaxis, the public will see them as Nazi robotaxis. If they make robots that aren’t just demo smoke and mirrors, the public will see them as Nazi robots.
Your money is in the Titanic of car brands. Get it out while you can.

Just to spell it out, because there are people who really do not get it yet:
Even if the protests blow over (they won’t, but even if), even if Musk gets his filthy nose out of politics (he won’t, get real, but even if), even then, the public will still remember that Musk is a Nazi and the Tesla brand will still be toxic.

A good counter-explanation from @…, although it’s not entirely consistent with the data: if this were merely aging vehicles, we’d expect to see a slow, steady decline. But we don’t; we see a •very• sharp turnaround that coincides precisely with Musk’s fascism entering full public view, and not with any sort of sudden aging event in the vehicles.
But yes, surely normal depreciation is a contributing factor as well.
https://mstdn.ca/@alessandro/114637425697204963

Just to clarify: this is not a complete list of things I want for the world. This is not even a complete political platform. It’s just a single simple, clear, core message that I suspect would work much better in elections than that fash-lite mush all the Newsomesque political consultants are oozing out of their pores right now.

So some Democratic politicians actually got the memo, but clearly others are flailing. To help them out, I’d like to offer my sage political wisdom. Try the following message:
1. Kick Trump out.
2. Tax the living shit out of billionaires.
3. Use the money to get folks back on their feet and clean up this mess.
Just that. Simple and direct, no fussing around. Give that a try and see how it lands. Float a trial balloon in some minor swing district election and see what happens.

I also want to re-up this thread, which links to two different funds providing direct mutual aid to people in Gaza. If you are looking to help •right now•, in this dire moment, this a place you can do that.
4/
https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/114593006896846609