Tootfinder

New on blog: "How we incidentally uncovered a 7-year old bug in gentoo-ci"
"""
“Gentoo CI” is the service providing periodic linting for the Gentoo repository. It is a part of the Repository mirror and CI project that I’ve started in 2015. Of course, it all started as a temporary third-party solution, but it persisted, was integrated into Gentoo Infrastructure and grew organically into quite a monstrosity.
It’s imperfect in many ways. In particular, it has only some degree of error recovery and when things go wrong beyond that, it requires a manual fix. Often the “fix” is to stop mirroring a problematic repository. Over time, I’ve started having serious doubts about the project, and proposed sunsetting most of it.
Lately, things have been getting worse. What started as a minor change in behavior of Git triggered a whole cascade of failures, leading to me finally announcing the deadline for sunsetting the mirroring of third-party repositories, and starting ripping non-critical bits out of it. Interesting enough, this whole process led me to finally discover the root cause of most of these failures — a bug that has existed since the very early version of the code, but happened to be hidden by the hacky error recovery code. Here’s the story of it.
"""
#Gentoo

RE: https://phpc.social/@syntaxseed/115855415960085751
I have such conflicted thoughts on this.
What happened? Gross. It's very much a harm as a systemic effect of "AI"
But also _open source industry_ is in fact a thing I think has been deeply destructive and somewhat replaced the collectivist work done before. We could go back to that. That was good stuff.
But TailwindCSS is super popular.
I also think it's a bad technology, meant to undermine the foundations and design of CSS, leading us to technically worse places.
Also the business? It is selling themes and components.
That's a really hard business to be in. The time to buy a license comes in a project's lifecycle too early, so people avoid it. It's a weird business. Not one I think people should plan to have work.

This episode of Ideas is powerful. Still - and not to minimize the experience of veterans - I'd really love a parallel series focused on the moms and dads, partners, and kids who stayed behind.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/canadian-war-museum-v…

Not a war story: this is about what comes after | CBC Radio
Canada’s veterans have a conflicted relationship with Remembrance Day, an idea that may be shifting as older war vets leave us. In a two-part series, IDEAS shares postwar experiences from The Canadian War Museum’s oral history project called In Their Own Voices. *This is a two-part series.

Series A, Episode 09 - Project Avalon
TRAVIS: Ohh?
SERVALAN: Oh, so far I have resisted that pressure. But now, I need your reassurance that my confidence has not been misplaced.
TRAVIS: I think Project Avalon will silence the critics.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/109/174 B7B4

I'm in the garage painting - day 32 of a 4 day project because I hate painting. But I have a nice view down the driveway reminding me that I could be shoveling snow instead.
#Snowmageddon #DIY

Podcast: A Massive Archiving Effort at National Parks (with Jenny McBurney and Lynda Kellam) https://www.404media.co/podcast-a-massive-archiving-effort-at-national-parks-with-jenny-mcburney-and-lynda-kellam/

South Australia is getting a major energy upgrade.
Engie and Sungrow just broke ground on the Pelican Point battery storage system—a massive 200MW/400MWh facility that'll power over 29,400 homes while stabilizing the renewable-rich grid.
Expected online in late 2027, it's a key piece of the region's clean energy transition.

Construction begins on Engie’s Pelican Point BESS in South Australia
Sungrow and Engie have started construction on the Pelican Point grid-forming battery energy storage system (BESS) project in South Australia, marking a key step in the state’s clean energy transition.

Next project - Logseq in docker to have self hosted notes in a system close to Obsidian.md

Police in Edmonton, Canada partner with Axon to test body cameras with AI facial recognition, and say the results will be verified by human officers (Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/ai-facial-recognition-axon-edmonton-21f319ce806a0…

AI-equipped police body cameras in Canada's Edmonton spark ethical concerns
Police in Edmonton, Canada, have started a pilot project using AI-equipped body cameras to detect faces on a "high risk" watch list. The move by Axon Enterprise, Inc. has raised ethical concerns, especially since the company previously paused facial recognition due to privacy issues. The pilot aims to enhance officer and public safety by identifying individuals flagged for a history of serious offenses. However, critics worry about societal risks and the lack of public debate. Axon CEO Rick Smi…

So this is percolating and the results so far are not surprising.
I'd vote NO, for the following reasons:
- oil demand continues to decline and risk is high we'll end up with an expensive underutilized pipeline. Therefore high risk we'll end up subsidizing any private entity that builds this thing.
- why would we invest public dollars to support infrastructure for a product where 75% of the profit leaves Canada? There has to be a net benefit, beyond steel sales and jobs, for this project to be considered.
- Indigenous land rights must be respected. They will be left with the rusting pipeline decades in the future, and it's impact on the land.
- the B.C. government must also have a final vote as they have to give up land and provide support.
- we don't need additional oil tankers on our west coast.
- and most importantly, with this MOU, Canada pretty much declared we aren't serious about protecting the environment or fighting climate change. We're oil whores. Harsh but....
#CanPoli #ClimateAction

dbpedia_recordlabel: DBpedia artist-label affiliations
Bipartite networks of the affiliations (contractual relations) between artists and the record labels under which they have performed, as extracted from Wikipedia by the DBpedia project.
This network has 186758 nodes and 233286 edges.
Tags: Economic, Employment, Unweighted
http…

"Personal computing must be [...] a social project of all of us building things, trying things, learning from one another."
(Original title: Personal computing)
https://tante.cc/2026/01/08/personal-computing/

Personal computing
When computers entered the homes it was often as toys or toy-like artifacts: These machines, usually called “home computers“, were often used like gaming consoles with magazines giving you code to type in to have simple games on them. Their use was limited to people who wanted to play arcade games without losing all your […]

What’s disgusting is speaking to a Palestinian person in Gaza this way.
Maybe Mastodon server admins should check for basic humanity before allowing people on. Unless that’s not a necessary prerequisite for membership in your community, of course. https://lemmy.ca/comment/20336687

Anonymous help:
#OpenSource #FreeSoftware

Everyone is selling innovation and none of it works. What if I started an agency that sold denovation. We'll build you a last-gen project that actually works.
It'll cost twice as much up front, but you won't have to pay to get it fixed once a year forever.

If you still have your project on GitHub and think that it is a public project, try this: Log off (eg. using a private tab), go to your project, and try reading 3-4 issues. Chances are you're Too Many Requests'd for a few minutes before you even got a decent overview of the project's state. Is this then still a public project?
([ed:] For comparison, #Codeberg manages crawler load …

For a project to be truly #OpenSource (not to mention #FreeSoftware), it really needs to:
1. Have a *public* issue tracker that enables you to browse and search through issue reports *without* having to create an account.
2. Accept issue reports, with no strings attached. Yes, expecting registration is fine. Yes, expecting some effort to file a good bug report is fine. No, expecting people to ask permission, donate or otherwise put a lot of extra work to report a problem is not.
3. Do not close issue reports as "stale". Yes, it's fine to close a report if you really believe it was fixed, or if you asked for something and the user didn't reply for a long time. It's not fine to run a bot expecting users to jump every month so that the issue report that *you are ignoring* doesn't get closed.
If a project doesn't meet these, it's just a glorified throwaway code.

Real conspiracies tend to come out, but some of them take a while. Information on the Iran/Contra scandal broke out about 5 years after the conspiracy started. That would have taken several hundred people to carry out, so it was somewhat hard to hide. Even so, they largely got away with it.
The moon landing conspiracy theory would have taken thousands of people, so it would have come out more quickly. Since we have an example of a real secret program of a similar scale as what would be required to fake a moon landing (that is, the Manhattan project), we know that the fake moon landing conspiracy theory is not true. (There's also the literally tons of evidence in the form of rocks and other samples, and all kinds of other ways to debunk the claim.)
Could Kash Patel's FBI have been trying really hard to entrap people into carrying out terrorist attacks in order to justify #Trump's occupation of DC? Could they have helped a guy plan an attack then just failed to arrest him? There are reasonable scenarios that fall in between malice and incompetence while still indicating some level of false flag.
Could someone have just snapped and ambushed some guardsmen without any involvement from the FBI? Yeah, totally. The US is a country full of guns with a completely non-functional mental health system. Someone coming from a country that the US destroyed, twice, could have a lot of untreated trauma. Might they see the national guard as a threat (even if that wasn't totally true)? Yeah, they were deployed to threaten people (even when they were just picking up trash). The point was to incite this kind of response. It's completely reasonable to believe that the FBI would not need to be involved at all, that this would just be the stochastic response they were looking for.
So the point here is that everything is on the table, nothing is really known, nothing should be surprising, and no matter what it's Trump's fault. This is exactly the escalation he was looking for. If he didn't get it naturally, he would also have had ways of making it happen.
He will use this in exactly the same way as the Reichstag fire, to drive a wedge between liberals and radicals. Don't fall for it.
Edit:
There are plausible reasons to not believe the official narrative at all right now, or maybe ever. The official narrative is also plausible, but there are plausible reasons to disagree with the response even if the official story is true. It is unnecessary to resort to conspiracy thinking in order to account for what happened and to disagree with the response. But it is also understandable why someone might jump immediately to a conspiracy given the circumstances.

I know many academics, especially in these dark days, have to deal with worse, but it's obnoxious when the university takes a few years to slowly smother the cost-sharing program that you wrote into your successful grant application. Where I once had the money to hire the undergrad RAs the project needs, I now have enough for maybe a sixth of the planned hours.

A judge has ruled that, for now,
asylum seekers are not required to pay an annual fee for each year their application is pending.
The ruling was in response to a lawsuit filed by the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP.)
The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, which became law on July 4, 2025,
instituted a new fee system for people in the immigration system,
including asylum seekers.
The legislation requires that they pay a $100 filing fee and an Annual A…

Judge Rules Asylum Seekers Do Not Have to Pay Annual Fee, For Now
The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill instituted a new fee system for people in the immigration system, including asylum seekers.

The first large project that I took on basically alone in a large environment was polishing the custom-crafted system for feeding printers into something less support-ticket-generating at Daimler-Chrysler. That provides a rough date... The original author (who had become management) praised my work.
It got me a promotion of sorts. I graduated to no longer being required to work on printer issues or with anyone who might have printer issues.

"So far, only Brazil and Indonesia have announced investments in the scheme. The World Bank has agreed to host the facility. Several countries have murmured positively, but not yet committed any money. The UK has made clear it will not contribute at this stage. There will need to be greater momentum at Cop30 if the plan is to get off the ground."
"Brazilian finance ministry officials, who have spent the past 18 months working on this project, say the TFFF would be a step…

A survey by the News Literacy Project of US 13- to 18-year-olds shows 84% use negative words including "boring", "fake", or "biased" to describe news media (David Bauder/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/news-media-

Survey shows how much teenagers dislike the news media
You don't have to tell Cat Murphy or Lily Ogburn about the attitudes of young people toward journalists. The profession hasn't been popular among adults for many years, but a new survey shows the extent to which teens aged 13 to 18 feel the same way; Murphy and Ogburn have seen it for years among their friends who wonder why they want to go into the field. Experts say it's a combination of their surroundings, including the most prominent politician they have known — Donald Trump — who frequ…

"I am not at all an expert on the topic you propose I should cover, and I see that those topics on which I claim to have some knowledge are already very expertly covered by colleagues. This is actually a source of relief, since I think that such a resource is highly important, yet my schedule over the next year is already so full that I would not be able to give it the attention it deserves. I wish you all the best for the project!"

BananaFin, my mix of project Banana (immutable KDE/Aurora) and BlueFin, is reaching finalization.Tomorrow some more testing (have brew and flatpak install my own applications upon first boot), but it is all running very smoothly. Aside from this being my hobby as well, you'd just install this and get on with it. And yes, it's a bootc container, from the cloud, secure boot enabled and it runs flatpaks and systemd. And very well, thank you!

So… talk to me about #Zotero … How do you use it? WHY do you use it versus other tools? What do you like most?
I realize I am maybe 15 or 20 years late to the Zotero party, but 3 things have me interested now:
- I’m taking on a project at work that involves a good amount of research
- I have some ideas for papers and maybe a book that would benefit from more structured organizatio…

I have been learning #Rust for a couple of years, and using it for pet projects and demos alike. Working for a JVM-heavy company, I thought it would be my fate forever. Last week, I had a nice surprise: I convinced my management that using Rust for a particular project was the right choice. It’s not a huge project, but I want to describe my experience using Rust in a "real" project.

2/2 Reflection on #citizenship:
I do not treat the concept of “#democracy" lightly. I was born into the aftermath of centuries of totalitarian oppression that ended suddenly, leaving the nascent Ukrainian state of the late 90s and early 2000s floundering in the turbulent whirlpool of hopes and fears felt by millions of people who were finally allowed to ponder: how to build a free democratic state in the place of Soviet and imperial ruins?
I was taught the words "democracy", "citizen", "freedom", "voting", “liberty" (and more) by people who, less than two decades prior, weren't allowed to leave the borders of their country. I was told about self-determination by people whose political choices were ridiculed, punished, and eviscerated form most of their lives. The duty of governing ourselves felt to us ephemeral - a nice fantasy, akin to a fairytale or a utopia from fictional works.
And then I saw those same people fight with their bodies and souls once the previously unfathomable democracy was threatened. Protests in 2004, then again in 2014, then the unthinkable war against foreign invasion in 2022. Democracy no longer felt abstract or silly. It became as tangible as saying "I love you".
I write of Ukraine as I reflect on becoming a citizen of another country because the history and values of my adopted United States feel as real as the skin on my legs, the significance of its legacy lays as heavy as the weight of my waist-long hair, and the desire to uphold the freedoms of its Constitution burns my throat as harshly as dehydration after a long day in the sun.
People have asked me why I even want to join this country, when the present moment is shrouded in impenetrable darkness. And I answer: because I've felt the warmth of a newly lit fire of freedom breaking through shadows that for centuries looked like solid walls. I have seen kindness, and solidarity heal the fear and hate of oppression. I've seen liberty emerge from nothing but the human soul.
I am not a religious person, but I have faith. Faith in the ideals at the foundation of the American project. Faint but powerful recognition that "we the people" now includes me.
I love #America. And I hope to keep loving my home for the rest of my life.

Life hasn't been at all consumed with leukemia. I have a monthly checkup (which was again fine today) and apart from some fatigue from the apparent permanent anemia, I'm getting on with things.
This is a project I've been working on for the past few months with local musicians. I did all the audio engineering and video editing on it, and played a handful of parts.
#beachboys #northcarolinamusic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26WZpW4_TGI

I got a #TRMNL e-ink display wotsit thingy (apologies for getting all technical there) not long ago, and now I'm getting round to setting it up.
One of the nice things is that as well as all the dashboards provided by the company, there are a load provided by the community that you can just load up, customise & use.
But I was shocked -- SHOCKED I tell you -- to discover that so far nobody has created a "When Is Bins?" dashboard.
I think I have found my latest project!
#TRMNL

The Bonfire team have met their first “maintenance” fundraising goal. The next stretch goal is designing and shipping federated groups.
There is lots of good writing in this post about the needs of different types of groups.
https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/why-<…

One of the great shames of my software career is that I have not once but •twice• been a part of a project where I found out only after I was off the project that a male manager or client had been just absolutely, utterly •wretched• to a female teammate.
In both cases, it happened out of my sight. I had no idea what was going on.
I still think to this day about my obliviousness: how I could have found out sooner, what warning signs I missed, what I could have done to stick up for my female colleagues.
1/ https://toot.cafe/@baldur/115570002490755386

Like all the politicians, transphobes, Nazis, Project 2025 authors, corporate spokespeople, and architects of genocide that American news media have allowed to say whatever they want sans pushback, printing whatever a chatbot says is a recipe for fundamentally destroying a news outlet’s credibility.

"Many corporate interests that have donated to the president’s pet project have business before his administration."
Trump’s Team Offers to Keep Some Ballroom Donors Incognito - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/01/us/politics/trumps-team-offers-to-keep-some-ballroom-donors-incognito.html

Wasn't there a website that collects and explains the small print/terms and conditions of popular online services?
I have a faint memory of such a project.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-starlink-musk-ukraine-space-china-canada-c69c1fda5ffc93828712ab723e606a2c

Russia's new anti-satellite weapon project would target Starlink with space shrapnel
NATO-nation intelligence services believe Russia is developing a weapon to target Starlink satellites. Intelligence findings seen by The Associated Press say the weapon could release pellets to disable multiple satellites. Analysts have doubts, saying such a weapon could create chaos in space and risk other vital orbiting systems. But a Canadian space commander has told the AP that such a weapon is “not implausible.” Starlink's services are used by Ukraine. Russia views the constellation as…

I have just released my debut solo album, "Tools and Toys", part of an electronic/synthpop project (Transits of Mars) that I've been developing in recent years.
Available to stream and download on Bandcamp.
Produced with free and open-source music production tools in #Linux, mainly #lmms

"UK, Dutch agencies pull funding from Total’s controversial Mozambique LNG project"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #Netherlands

UK, Dutch agencies pull funding from Total’s controversial Mozambique LNG project
U.K. and Dutch export credit agencies have withdrawn their financial commitments for French oil and gas giant TotalEnergies’ gas project in Mozambique, in an unprecedented move that marks the latest setback for the controversial project. UK Export Finance (UKEF), a government agency, and Netherlands-based Atradius, both of which provide companies with loans, guarantees and insurance […]

Blast from the past!
Writing firmware on my first laptop, for the PIC12F683 (the first microcontroller I ever used), on my first embedded project ever (robotic rubber band gun turret) freshman year of college, bodged together on perf board.
The UART and servo PWM were both bitbanged because the PIC12F683 didn't have any UARTs and I hadn't learned how to use the timer block yet.

🌤️ There’s far less land available for reforestation than we think, study finds
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/10/theres-far-less-land-available-for-reforestation-than-we-think-study-finds/

There’s far less land available for reforestation than we think, study finds
Josep “Pep” Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project, says he believes countries large and small need to think twice before pledging to collectively plant billions of trees as a primary emissions-reduction strategy to meet climate action goals. “We have somehow sold reforestation as a kind of easier path [to fighting climate change], and […]

A few years back, wifey and I did a project together, as we often do. We wanted to do a very specific mashup - death metal and Pokémon. It's admittedly a niche. But we wanted to choose Cubone because that's the name of our furry son (the one in my avi). And the Pokémon's back story, wearing his dead mom's skull, it's pretty metal. Original shirt inspiration on the right, for reference (I have a very worn copy of this one). I sketched it out, she painted (she's so tale…

I presented a draft book chapter to a group of colleagues today. They had a ton of great thoughts and the discussion ranged far and wide. It turns out I have a lot to say and remain fascinated by the project. Yay research! Yay colleagues!

RIP #DOGE
https://time.com/7336327/doge-disbanded-elon-musk/

I, too, think some of the efforts of the CSSWG have gotten ahead of the use cases and I, too, think catching our breath would be good.
“Chris’ Corner: Stage 2”
https://blog.codepen.io/2025/10/20/chris-corner-stage-2/

Musk's Starlink alone owns two-thirds of all satellites in space.
With 8,000 in low Earth orbit, the company currently has permission to launch a further 4,000,
and has reportedly filed paperwork to raise the total number to 42,000.
Amazon and a state-backed project from China have their own rivals to Starlink in the works,
all of which would see the numbers vastly multiply,
with some estimates that in a decade there could be 100,000 satellites in orbit.

Hey everyone,
@…’s mom needs your help:
“My mother has been suffering from chronic diabetes, and some time ago, one of her toes had to be amputated. During the war, her condition has worsened, and she now relies on a walker to move. 💔
Today, she fell inside our tent, and her foot got injured again – it’s swollen and bruised badly…

Help Bara'a and her elderly parents in Gaza
My name is Bara'a El-Mughraby. Me and my older brother are the sole breadwinners for my family of five in Al-Shati refugee camp in North Gaza. Me, my elderly parents, my sister and my brother. For months, we have endured the unimaginable and did everything we can to survive, but now our situation worsened a lot and has become a matter of life or death. The constant bombardment and the recent evacuation orders from the IDF mean we have to leave our home—but we don't have the capabilities nor t…

I'm getting closer with my nginx-rtmp-Docker-container-on-MacOS project!
I started from scratch on the mac a couple days ago, reinstalled docker with homebrew and then realized that part of my problem was that macOS (and windows) has to run docker in a virtual machine container of its own and *that* can mess with networking.
So I have now figured that out. Colima, the vm that seems most popular on macOS, needs a mac specific option (--network-attached) when starting so that it gets the mac network going. Major Aha! moment.
I also learned more completely how to build my own Docker images.
I've gotten to the point where nginx is definitely running, I know the port is open (via nmap on another device), I know nginx is accepting the stream, but nginx still refuses to publish that stream to Youtube (or at least youtube is not seeing it).
I also can ping apple.com and youtube.com from within the container, so access to the outside world is working.
I
So that's where I'm at.
I just figured out how to get into a container and examine the nginx log files now.
At this point I am going to rebuild the container with nginx configured for full debug level logging. Hopefully that provides some more clues on where it is getting stuck.
I give it a 50/50 chance that it is either an nginx configuration/installation problem or another colima virtual machine/networking issue.
I've learned a lot at least and feel better about my overall Docker knowledge!
And I'm documenting on my blog as I go so I'll have a howto produced from this when it finally works!
#docker #mac #nginx #colima #rtmp #youtube #containerizeit

Interesting write-up of the history of Project Xanadu / the history of the Web before the Web
Included quite a few characterizations I wasn't at all aware of.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-project-xanadu-the-internet

Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
Finalist #12 in the Review Contest

One of the things that made organizing a lot easier with the GDC was a thing called "GDC in a box." It was a zip file with all kinds of resources. There was a directory structure, templates for all kinds of things like meetings and paperwork you had to file (for legal reasons) and "read me" files.
We had all kinds of support. There were people you could talk to who had been there. There were people you could call to walk through legal paperwork (taxes). Centralized orgs are vulnerable and easy to infiltrate. They're easy for states to shut down. But there are benefits to org structures.
I think it's possible to have the type of support we had with the GDC, but without the politics of an org (even the IWW). I hope this most recent essay has some of the same properties. I hope that it makes building something new, something no one has really imagined before, easier.
This whole project is something a bit different. It's a collective vision and collective project, from the ground up. Some of it has felt like a brain dump, just getting things that have been swimming around in my head down somewhere. But I hope this feels more like an invitation.
Everything thus far written is all useless unless people do things with it. Only from that point does it become a thing that lives, a thing with its own consciousness that can't be controlled by any individual human.
Tech billionaire cultists want to bring a new era of humanity with AGI. That is definitely not possible with LLMs, and may not be possible at all. But there is a super intelligence that is possible, though it's been constrained by capitalism: collective human intelligence.
The grand vision of the tech dystopians is that of the ultimate slave that can then enslave all humans on their behalf. I think we can build a humanity that can liberate itself from their grasp, crush their vision, and build for itself a world in which people will never be enslaved again. Not only do I think it's possible, I think it's necessary. I think there are only two choices: collective liberation or death.
And that's what I plan to write about next time to wrap this whole project up. Today things often feel impossible. But people talked about the Middle Ages as though they were the end of the world, and then everything changed in unimaginable ways. Everything can, and will, change again.
"The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."

#Blakes7 Series A, Episode 09 - Project Avalon
SERVALAN: [To Travis] Project Avalon has failed totally. There will be a full inquiry. Until that time you are relieved of your command.
TRAVIS: [To himself] If it takes all my life, I will destroy you, Blake. I will destroy you. I will destroy you.

Getting ready for the premiere of "The Adventures of Dirk Balsäk" next week, and I'm revisiting the project files for E1. Had to copy back onto a fast drive from an external, and a year and a half later certain things have broken. For the life of me couldn't figure out why certain clips were not rendering, and it's because I used an effect that I no longer have installed!!
#FCPX

Just to repeat / recap what others have said already.
"No politics in my #OpenSource project" is a political statement. It's a statement of "I'm fine with the status quo, and I don't want to be bothered by people who are hurt because of it."
"Neutrality" doesn't make you look professional. It makes you either look ignorant or complacent.
The whole #FreeSoftware movement is a political movement. So is the idea that you can freely use, modify and redistribute software.
So you should really think where you want to stand. Do you really want to be the complacent fascist enabler, or do you want to actually try making a difference?

Today, students startet working on their term project (we're in week 6 of 14). They create a learning mate based on a given structure. So, basically they need to come up with a good system prompt to make the mate do what they expect.
After 10 minutes: „Wait, we only need to input the prompt here? That’s all?“
An hour later: „D'oh, it acts strange! We tried this and that and whatnot, and it still isn’t what we need. Can we have another week?“

Construction of TotalEnergies pipeline cuts through coral reefs in Mozambique https://news.mongabay.com/2025/11/construction-of-totalenergies-pipeline-cuts-through-coral-reefs-in-mozambique/

Construction of TotalEnergies pipeline cuts through coral reefs in Mozambique
Over the past year, a dredger operated by Dutch company Van Oord cut through a coral reef off the coast of northern Mozambique, part of the construction of French oil and gas giant TotalEnergies’ troubled liquefied natural gas project in Cabo Delgado. Data scientists analyzing satellite imagery and vessel data have found that a massive […]

California is turning drought-stricken farmland into a massive solar opportunity.
The Westlands Water District in the San Joaquin Valley plans to generate 21 gigawatts of solar energy on fallowed agricultural land. It's a win-win: preserving what farmland remains viable while putting dry, empty fields to work producing clean energy.
The project includes battery storage and community benefits too.

21 Gigawatts of Solar for California Land That Can No Longer Be Used for Agriculture - CleanTechnica
Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe. There’s a water district in San Joaquin Valley in California where there’s empty land that “can no longer sustain irrigated agriculture.” The Westlands Water District board of directors have decided on a plan for this land. They are going to ... [continued]

The "write my own render manager" itch is getting harder to ignore. I think l'll scratch it if I have some slow days at work before Xmas :-)
Will it look like Deadline and use mongodb like Deadline? Sure. Do I know anything about writing networking code or other database options? Nope. Do I think I can write something better than a Sony-born ASWF-backed open-source project like OpenCue? Well that would be hubris.
But I think it'll be a fun side-project 😁

> (By the way; thank you so much for this project, it's enabled us to teach HDL as a small portion of an introductory course to digital logic which would have been much harder any other way!)
i'm very pleased about yowasp vscode extension actually being used for its intended purpose! i've kind of developed it and then thrown it onto the winds of fate

Yesterday, I read about an innovative project to develop a special kind of road that charges electric vehicles while driving. It made me think that yet again, capitalists are two steps* away from reinventing public transportation 🤦‍♀️
* 1) let's have special cars on these special roads
2) maybe not everyone needs to buy their own such car, you can just rent them as you need them
=> 🚋 🚆 🚄

The other picolibc project this week is to (finally) put together a coding standard and reformat all of the code. I'm wondering if others have experience with this particular transition and if you all have advice and guidance about how to make this less disruptive. Of course, bike-shedding about the actual format is highly encouraged.

picolibc/.clang-format at refs/heads/reformat · picolibc/picolibc
picolibc - a C library designed for embedded 32- and 64- bit systems. - picolibc/picolibc

Senior Microsoft Product Manager Wendy Breiding discusses in this recent post how you can now customize your IDE to include agentic AI to your project that is focused on tasks related to a specific language or UI stack, in this case: C# and WinForms. The results have been positive when comparing these agents to previous more general approaches.
"Introducing Custom Agents for .NET Developers: C# Expert & WinForms Expert"

Why does Trump want Greenland? “National security.”
Why should Trump’s ballroom vanity project proceed? “National security.”
Why is Trump killing the wind energy industry? “National security.”
Why does #Trump hate the New York Times? “National security.”
The pattern is ... not subtle.
☑️ For the

For the White House, ‘national security’ is becoming the answer to every question
Donald Trump and his team have a go-to tactic intended to shut down debate over their goals. It's not working.

This evening I have been listening to one of @… 's podcasts and thinking about my failure in trying to lead the village's planning working group, and about the cognitive dissonance underlying my Tricycle project. I suspect this essay will be a grim read; it's not well formed in my mind as I sit down to write.

Boosts appreciated.
Sign making advice:
#NoKings was my 5th protest since 2017 and my 3rd this year. I'd love to get better at making signs.
I was thinking of buying a cheap projector I could hook up to my Mac, project onto poster board, draw light outlines from the projection, and then fill them in with markers.
Anyone have a recommendation for a sub $100 projector?
…

Hopefully work won't install this. Reason is that those whose job it is to install and monitor on the work machines won't have the security clearance to view some of what we do. Doesn't matter if they even have high security clearance, they don't get access to even know what some of what our work is unless they have been authorized for access to that specific project.

I’ve been testing a theory: many people who are high on #AI and #LLMs are just new to automation and don’t realize you can automate processes with simple programming, if/then conditions, and API calls with zero AI involved.
So far it’s been working!
Whenever I’ve been asked to make an AI flow or find a way to implement AI in our work with a client, I’ve returned back with an automation flow that uses 0 AI.
Things like “when a new document is added here, add a link to it in this spreadsheet and then create a task in our project management software assigned to X with label Y”.
And the people who were frothing at the mouth at how I must change my mind on AI have (so far) all responded with resounding enthusiasm and excitement.
They think it’s the same thing. They just don’t understand how much automation is possible without any generative tools.

I have been working on a project of cataloging Concord city streets without sidewalks; hopefully we can get more built...

Everyone wants to steal fire from the gods, but no-one wants to have their liver pecked out by eagles.
https://www.theverge.com/news/821943/jeff-bezos-project-prometheus-co-ceo-funding-ai-startup

Jeff Bezos will be co-CEO of AI startup Project Prometheus
Project Prometheus, with Bezos as co-CEO, will use artificial intelligence to improve manufacturing for computers, cars, and spacecraft.

Demolition of the East Wing,
which once housed the first lady’s office,
began in October.
Trump has said the new ballroom will be 90,000 square feet and hold 1,000 people,
a complex that will be much larger than the main White House building,
which is about 55,000 square feet.
Cost estimates for the ballroom project have ballooned from $200 million to as much as $350 million.
Wealthy individuals and corporate donors — including billionaire Steve Sc…

“How did it feel for the man who built a home, only to watch it turn to the rubble? How does a farmer stand before the land he tended year after year, now lying barren—no scent of soil, no whisper of harvest? How does a father tell his son the school he loved is gone, that the garden where he played is now only a rumor in the rubble? How does a mother walk through the ghost of a playground, finding a small shoe, a torn notebook, a toy she once mended? How do neighbors look at one another, wo…

Help Sehwel family with their medical treatment
I'm Joe in the UK, I've been in touch with Aseel from the Sehwel family for over a year now and have been following their difficult struggle to afford medication, shelter and food in Gaza. I'm creating this Chuffed campaign for the family to help afford these things and hopefully help them get out of Gaza when the opportunity arises. Here's Aseel's writing:

Project-Level C-to-Rust Translation via Synergistic Integration of Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models
Zhiqiang Yuan, Wenjun Mao, Zhuo Chen, Xiyue Shang, Chong Wang, Yiling Lou, Xin Peng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10956

Project-Level C-to-Rust Translation via Synergistic Integration of Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models
Translating C code into safe Rust is an effective way to ensure its memory safety. Compared to rule-based translation which produces Rust code that remains largely unsafe, LLM-based methods can generate more idiomatic and safer Rust code because LLMs have been trained on vast amount of human-written idiomatic code. Although promising, existing LLM-based methods still struggle with project-level C-to-Rust translation. They typically partition a C project into smaller units (\eg{} functions) base…

dbpedia_recordlabel: DBpedia artist-label affiliations
Bipartite networks of the affiliations (contractual relations) between artists and the record labels under which they have performed, as extracted from Wikipedia by the DBpedia project.
This network has 186758 nodes and 233286 edges.
Tags: Economic, Employment, Unweighted
http…

Today I spend a few hours fixing a server crash in my project with the most users. We moved the app to a new server yesterday. Today at lunch it crashed (right during Mittagsjournal..). The log was full of ElasticSearch errors complaining about 6278198379712 being bigger than maxint. Fair enough. After some digging I found searches requesting this hugh number as the page param. Which makes no sense, we don't have that much content. The quick fix was to limit page to 100. Then the proper …

I need a new project to mess with. After my Neovim–Taskwarrior script, I’m thinking of building another Lua tool. I just have to figure out what I’m missing, because the community already has a plugin for basically everything ^^

This week's pickups! Dino Crisis (in space) and Sudeki on OG Xbox. Played neither of these. Reviews seem positive. Tenchu on PS2 because it had a memory card inside the box, bonus. On PS1 we have Twisted Metal 2, original XCOM (I played the DOS version), and the fantastic Raiden Project shmup! #retrogaming

From Translink
New bus stop lights roll out to improve safety and visibility
TransLink testing solar-powered lights at 14 bus stops
TransLink is improving safety and comfort with new solar-powered lights at bus stops.

The project will test lights at 14 locations where customers or staff have identified a need for improved lighting. The initiative will improve visibility for both Bus Operators and waiting passengers.

For my #HamRadio tunable elevated radial project, I want to isolate them from the earth and the mast, and I'm not finding an isolating mount that goes into a normal ½" "light stand". So I've come up with this design to build. (Yay, I can't just buy it, so I have an excuse to spend some shop time!)
From 1" 6061 aluminum stock and 1" POM:

• An aluminum stem/spigot that fits…

Starting the year with a drive-by contribution to the hamster time tracker.
I find that noteworthy because I'm going back to the time tracker I enjoyed using until 2018, when due to the project announcing EoL (IIRC) I switched to charmtimetracker.
Now that too is EoL since 2023, but hamster development did continue after 2018, so hey, could have saved myself a lot of annoyance by sticking with the software I like and patching it up where needed.

GitHub - projecthamster/hamster: GNOME time tracker
GNOME time tracker. Contribute to projecthamster/hamster development by creating an account on GitHub.

Let's get this straight: it is entirely normal for a #OpenSource project to accumulate bug reports over time. They're not a thing to be ashamed of.
On the contrary, if you see a nontrivial project with a very small number of bug reports, it usually means one of the following:
a. you've hit a malicious fake,
b. the project is very young and it doesn't have many users (so it's likely buggy),
c. the project is actively shoving issues under the carpet.
None of that is a good sign. You don't want to use that (except for b., if you're ready to be the beta tester).
#FreeSoftware #Gentoo #GitHub #Python

Money has always distorted U.S. politics,
but the current Trump regime has entered new territory with
🔥an unabashed pay-to-play setup that’s stuffing the president’s political coffers
while enriching him and his family.
💥Donald Trump’s coldly transactional dealings have been on full display
as he’s tapped billionaire allies and major corporations
to shower his administration with donations to pay for his latest vanity project:
a 90,000-square-foot, $…

Trump’s White House Ballroom Is Being Bankrolled by Genocide and ICE Profiteers
The ballroom donor list also includes Wall Street and cryptocurrency firms that benefit from the president’s agenda.

Anyone here has any experience with a ToDo/Shopping list one can
- self host
- has an Android app
- allows sharing lists between users
?
(I have already googled, only interested in actual experience)
(EDIT: I am asking for an app because I want to be usable by another person who's not looking for an ideological project or an opportunity to learn markdown or how weird PWAs work. That's why a dedicated app would be a plus. )

Series A, Episode 09 - Project Avalon
ZEN: All systems confirm instrument readings. Orbit is established, status is firm.
JENNA: [To Cally] Very impressive. I think I might have taught you too well.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/109/46 B7B6

Quick teaser / test video of the PIC12F683 project.
Anyone have thoughts on format/audio quality etc?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQoWavKAhbA

I've been away from Python for a bit, and project setup seems to have advanced a lot from one obviously correct way to do things. Where there was setuptools pip pip-tools venv, there is now `uv`, `pixi`, `poetry`, `pdm`, more?
Maybe because it's not obvious because I'm not dutch?
Any suggestion for a project that includes a little cython that is slowly being replaced with some maturin/pyo3 parts?

Yesterday I had to present some stuff to a pretty large group, around 40 people.
What better moment to install my KDE spin of the Nixbook project (codeberg.org/thesaigoneer/asterix-saigon) for a real life test?
I have only one issue with it.
It just keeps working 🤣
#nixos #kde

dbpedia_recordlabel: DBpedia artist-label affiliations
Bipartite networks of the affiliations (contractual relations) between artists and the record labels under which they have performed, as extracted from Wikipedia by the DBpedia project.
This network has 186758 nodes and 233286 edges.
Tags: Economic, Employment, Unweighted
http…

Details of the MOU as reported by CBC. Hot Take:
It's a sh_t show of oil soaked hopeium and climate defeatism.
- Shovels in Ground by 2029 *(may this be forever extended)
- Tanker Ban will be lifted if the project is approved by MPO *(Coastal First Nations setting rhetorical fire to MPO in 3-2-1)
- July 1, 2026 deadline for submission to MPO *(OIL CANADA DAY)
- 75% methane emissions cut on 2014 levels from methane by 2035 *(*shaking head* We are VERY GOOD at hitting 10 year targets *shaking head*)
- "both sides commited to net-zero by 2050” (implied via CCS) *(carbon capture and storage? should be Carney Can't Stop -- Emissions)
- industrial carbon price of $130 -- down from $170
*(Oil Industry - Very Poor)
- Alberta exempt from fed O&G emissions cap and clean electricity regulation *(Woop Coal! Let's Mine the Rockies!)
- No private proponents have been announced. *(Hear No Evil)
- No pipeline path/route has been announced. *(See No Evil)
#TMX #EndFossilFuels #ClimateSellout #ClimateEmergency #CdnPoli #CanPoli #BCPoli #ABPoli
Since multiple Ottawa CBC reporters seem utterly incapable of understanding what First Nations groups are what in BC here are some facts about the Coastal First Nations. It has existed since 2003.
https://coastalfirstnations.ca/about/
"The Great Bear Initiative Society (a non-profit society under the BC Societies Act), also known as Coastal First Nations-Great Bear Initiative (CFN), is an alliance of First Nations on the North Pacific Coast that includes the Gitga’at, Gitxaała, Haida, Heiltsuk, Kitasoo Xai’xais, Metlakatla, Nuxalk and Wuikinuxv First Nations. " Their territories span on the mainland coast of BC from the top of Vancouver Island to the Alaska Border including Haida Gwaii.

Chile's new Cape Froward national park is a wild expanse of wind-torn coastline and forested valleys that harbours unrivalled biodiversity and has played host to millennia of human history.
“I have been to many exceptional places, and I can tell you that the Cape Froward project is the wildest place I have walked through,”
said Kristine Tompkins, the renowned US conservationist at the heart of the project.
“It’s one of the few truly wild forest and peak territories lef…

Marc Gurman said that Apple's plan to bring more ads to iOS is "gaining traction,"
-- with the Maps app being next in line.
The project will apparently give restaurants and other businesses the option to pay to have their details featured more prominently in search.
The system is said to be similar to Search Ads in the App Store, which allows developers to pay to have their software appear in a promoted slot above other results

dbpedia_recordlabel: DBpedia artist-label affiliations
Bipartite networks of the affiliations (contractual relations) between artists and the record labels under which they have performed, as extracted from Wikipedia by the DBpedia project.
This network has 186758 nodes and 233286 edges.
Tags: Economic, Employment, Unweighted
http…

When people talk about the Enlightenment as if it were an intellectual garden party where everyone sipped wine and agreed about reason, they're missing the part where producing and distributing ideas was (in fact) dangerous and thankless work.
Today we have more information than any civilization in history.
But aside from Wikipedia, we've organized the sum total of our collective knowledge into formats optimized for making people angry at strangers in pursuit of private …

The Case for Blogging in the Ruins
In 1751, Denis Diderot began publishing his Encyclopédie, a project that would eventually span 28 volumes and take more than two decades to complete. The French government banned it twice. The Catholic Church condemned it, Diderot's collaborators abandoned him, his publisher secretly censored entries behind his back, and he worked

"By the end of 2026, Trump will have begun to distance himself from the aggressively pro-AI industry policies that characterized his AI strategy in 2025,"
wrote retired New York University professor and AI entrepreneur Gary Marcus.
"The giant AI infrastructure plays (like Project Stargate) that he championed after his inauguration will look like an unprofitable and underused mistake.
So will his utter failure to meaningfully regulate AI,
against the w…

This 'utter failure' from Trump could 'stun the world' in 2026: researcher
President Donald Trump has bet big on an agenda to expand artificial intelligence investment in the United States — but this year, some analysts think it could come back to haunt him, as a long-suspected AI investment bubble bursts and the public turns against the technology for its increasingly app...

Trump illegally blends governance and family business -- particularly in Persian Gulf countries.
Since returning to office, the Trump family and businesses have announced new ventures abroad involving billions of dollars,
made hundreds of millions from cryptocurrency,
and sold tickets to a private dinner hosted by Trump.
Trump is set to host Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, in Washington next week.
He hopes to sign a mutual defens…

Trump Organization Is Said to Be in Talks on a Saudi Government Real Estate Deal
The chief executive of a Saudi firm says a Trump-branded project is “just a matter of time.” The Trump Organization’s major foreign partner is also signaling new Saudi deals.

dbpedia_recordlabel: DBpedia artist-label affiliations
Bipartite networks of the affiliations (contractual relations) between artists and the record labels under which they have performed, as extracted from Wikipedia by the DBpedia project.
This network has 186758 nodes and 233286 edges.
Tags: Economic, Employment, Unweighted
http…

The chance that Trump's ballroom will actually be built is rapidly disappearing.
Perhaps it could have if Trump had delegated the management of the project to someone competent,
but that’s not what he does.
Instead, the famously lazy and disorganized president decided to blow off his actual governance duties in favor of micromanaging a construction project he is incapable of handling.
Finishing the ballroom in the next three years would be difficult for anyone,…

The White House ballroom will never be built
Trump can't focus long enough, even on his $400 million passion project

Various news about a possible future collider,
all pointing to the CERN FCC-ee as the leading proposal.
The Chinese CEPC plan is now on hold, as a decision was reached to not include it in China’s plans for the next five years (2026-30).

As part of the European Strategy for Particle Physics update process, recommendations drafted earlier this month have now been released
As expected, the main recommendation is to pursue the FCC-ee project, which will cost an esti…

Future Collider Update
Various news about a possible future collider, all pointing to the CERN FCC-ee as the leading proposal. For up to date background technical information on proposed colliders, including cost estimat…

America is numb to this infrastructure problem
Maryland needs to replace the Chesapeake Bay Bridge,
as everyone who has driven on it knows.
Yet construction to replace the structure is only scheduled to begin in 💥2032.
The most shocking aspect of this story is that locals aren't more shocked.

Tens of thousands of drivers cross the Bay Bridge every day. -- It’s a vital link to the Eastern Shore.
The bridge has no shoulders.
No new lanes have b…

America is numb to this infrastructure problem
The timeline for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge replacement project is an indictment of a broken system.