Tootfinder

New machine vision is more energy efficient - and more human #AI vision

Topographic Neural Networks Help AI See Like a Human
All-TNN networks mimic human vision and consume less energy than CNNs. Curious how they achieve this? Dive into the details.

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
Should AI coding be taught in undergrad CS education?
1/2
I teach undergraduate computer science labs, including for intro and more-advanced core courses. I don't publish (non-negligible) scholarly work in the area, but I've got years of craft expertise in course design, and I do follow the academic literature to some degree. In other words, In not the world's leading expert, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about course design, and consider myself competent at it, with plenty of direct experience in what knowledge & skills I can expect from students as they move through the curriculum.
I'm also strongly against most uses of what's called "AI" these days (specifically, generative deep neutral networks as supplied by our current cadre of techbro). There are a surprising number of completely orthogonal reasons to oppose the use of these systems, and a very limited number of reasonable exceptions (overcoming accessibility barriers is an example). On the grounds of environmental and digital-commons-pollution costs alone, using specifically the largest/newest models is unethical in most cases.
But as any good teacher should, I constantly question these evaluations, because I worry about the impact on my students should I eschew teaching relevant tech for bad reasons (and even for his reasons). I also want to make my reasoning clear to students, who should absolutely question me on this. That inspired me to ask a simple question: ignoring for one moment the ethical objections (which we shouldn't, of course; they're very stark), at what level in the CS major could I expect to teach a course about programming with AI assistance, and expect students to succeed at a more technically demanding final project than a course at the same level where students were banned from using AI? In other words, at what level would I expect students to actually benefit from AI coding "assistance?"
To be clear, I'm assuming that students aren't using AI in other aspects of coursework: the topic of using AI to "help you study" is a separate one (TL;DR it's gross value is not negative, but it's mostly not worth the harm to your metacognitive abilities, which AI-induced changes to the digital commons are making more important than ever).
So what's my answer to this question?
If I'm being incredibly optimistic, senior year. Slightly less optimistic, second year of a masters program. Realistic? Maybe never.
The interesting bit for you-the-reader is: why is this my answer? (Especially given that students would probably self-report significant gains at lower levels.) To start with, [this paper where experienced developers thought that AI assistance sped up their work on real tasks when in fact it slowed it down] (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089) is informative. There are a lot of differences in task between experienced devs solving real bugs and students working on a class project, but it's important to understand that we shouldn't have a baseline expectation that AI coding "assistants" will speed things up in the best of circumstances, and we shouldn't trust self-reports of productivity (or the AI hype machine in general).
Now we might imagine that coding assistants will be better at helping with a student project than at helping with fixing bugs in open-source software, since it's a much easier task. For many programming assignments that have a fixed answer, we know that many AI assistants can just spit out a solution based on prompting them with the problem description (there's another elephant in the room here to do with learning outcomes regardless of project success, but we'll ignore this over too, my focus here is on project complexity reach, not learning outcomes). My question is about more open-ended projects, not assignments with an expected answer. Here's a second study (by one of my colleagues) about novices using AI assistance for programming tasks. It showcases how difficult it is to use AI tools well, and some of these stumbling blocks that novices in particular face.
But what about intermediate students? Might there be some level where the AI is helpful because the task is still relatively simple and the students are good enough to handle it? The problem with this is that as task complexity increases, so does the likelihood of the AI generating (or copying) code that uses more complex constructs which a student doesn't understand. Let's say I have second year students writing interactive websites with JavaScript. Without a lot of care that those students don't know how to deploy, the AI is likely to suggest code that depends on several different frameworks, from React to JQuery, without actually setting up or including those frameworks, and of course three students would be way out of their depth trying to do that. This is a general problem: each programming class carefully limits the specific code frameworks and constructs it expects students to know based on the material it covers. There is no feasible way to limit an AI assistant to a fixed set of constructs or frameworks, using current designs. There are alternate designs where this would be possible (like AI search through adaptation from a controlled library of snippets) but those would be entirely different tools.
So what happens on a sizeable class project where the AI has dropped in buggy code, especially if it uses code constructs the students don't understand? Best case, they understand that they don't understand and re-prompt, or ask for help from an instructor or TA quickly who helps them get rid of the stuff they don't understand and re-prompt or manually add stuff they do. Average case: they waste several hours and/or sweep the bugs partly under the rug, resulting in a project with significant defects. Students in their second and even third years of a CS major still have a lot to learn about debugging, and usually have significant gaps in their knowledge of even their most comfortable programming language. I do think regardless of AI we as teachers need to get better at teaching debugging skills, but the knowledge gaps are inevitable because there's just too much to know. In Python, for example, the LLM is going to spit out yields, async functions, try/finally, maybe even something like a while/else, or with recent training data, the walrus operator. I can't expect even a fraction of 3rd year students who have worked with Python since their first year to know about all these things, and based on how students approach projects where they have studied all the relevant constructs but have forgotten some, I'm not optimistic seeing these things will magically become learning opportunities. Student projects are better off working with a limited subset of full programming languages that the students have actually learned, and using AI coding assistants as currently designed makes this impossible. Beyond that, even when the "assistant" just introduces bugs using syntax the students understand, even through their 4th year many students struggle to understand the operation of moderately complex code they've written themselves, let alone written by someone else. Having access to an AI that will confidently offer incorrect explanations for bugs will make this worse.
To be sure a small minority of students will be able to overcome these problems, but that minority is the group that has a good grasp of the fundamentals and has broadened their knowledge through self-study, which earlier AI-reliant classes would make less likely to happen. In any case, I care about the average student, since we already have plenty of stuff about our institutions that makes life easier for a favored few while being worse for the average student (note that our construction of that favored few as the "good" students is a large part of this problem).
To summarize: because AI assistants introduce excess code complexity and difficult-to-debug bugs, they'll slow down rather than speed up project progress for the average student on moderately complex projects. On a fixed deadline, they'll result in worse projects, or necessitate less ambitious project scoping to ensure adequate completion, and I expect this remains broadly true through 4-6 years of study in most programs (don't take this as an endorsement of AI "assistants" for masters students; we've ignored a lot of other problems along the way).
There's a related problem: solving open-ended project assignments well ultimately depends on deeply understanding the problem, and AI "assistants" allow students to put a lot of code in their file without spending much time thinking about the problem or building an understanding of it. This is awful for learning outcomes, but also bad for project success. Getting students to see the value of thinking deeply about a problem is a thorny pedagogical puzzle at the best of times, and allowing the use of AI "assistants" makes the problem much much worse. This is another area I hope to see (or even drive) pedagogical improvement in, for what it's worth.
1/2

I really really really hate how much people in my field and industry have normalized generative #AI use.
I see posts / hear comments literally EVERY DAY to the tune of “can people stop complaining about AI, nobody cares. You’re not morally better” followed up by something about “you’re making work harder than it needs to be” and often “nobody values human-made work more they only care about the final output no matter how it was created”
I usually ignore these conversations but sometimes it really gets to me. It’s so hard to feel sane surrounded by that consensus every day, everywhere I go with people in my profession.
I’ve rarely felt so judged by the majority point of view on anything in my work before.

I had an old portfolio site for my writing (it was never very complete and omitted my Film/TV/stage work as I was under the impression corporate gigs wouldn't want to see that).
It was never getting visited.
I replaced it with "Please go to https://stuff.davidaugust.com/ for current artic…

David August
Stories, serious articles, satire, tech trends, how to guides and ideas from David August. Actor. Writer. Acting coach.

I find the @… #firefox #addon very useful: It just takes one click to archive the website you're on. It's also easy to find archived vers…

Delighted to see these two new papers come out in Nature (they've been on bioRxiv for a while).
How does Pavlov's dog learn that the bell predicts the food? One answer is that the bell appears ``close'' in time to the food and that enables learning. We're certain that dopamine has something to do with learning these kinds of associations. But the definition of ``close'' in time is actually really difficult to pin down. You can get associations over prett…

Series D, Episode 03 - Traitor
LEITZ: Well I'm sorry you took such a risk to hear bad news.
HUNDA: Well, that isn't why I came. I wanted to see how far the flood level's fallen.
LEITZ: Why?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/403/283 B7B4

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

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/07/jack-dorsey-whatsapp-bluetooth.html
This is interesting, and I'm curious to see how he's going to fuck it up.

Jack Dorsey launches a WhatsApp messaging rival built on Bluetooth
Block CEO Jack Dorsey has launched Bitchat, a new peer-to-peer messaging app that works entirely over Bluetooth mesh networks.

"Two final considerations include (1) the necessity of being both deliberate and strategic and (2) the importance of being flexible and even whimsical about your future."
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.…

Cowboys wise to keep low-cost acquisition on current deal before giving $25 million a year https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/06/07/cowboys-george-pickens-expiring-deal/84093396007/…

@… @… I think you are spot on with regards to AI. I cannot see how LLMs will get us anywhere close to what you’re describing, and I am sad that all the funding for AI/ML is now being steered in this direction.

I wonder how long before people adopt delay tactics? For instance , just suppose that every time a box truck, like the one in the article below, enters a Home Depot someone runs up and slides a cable tie or bit of wire through the door latches to prevent the door from being opened from the inside? (The driver could still get out, and remove the cable tie or wire and open the door - but that would let people see the driver and would take maybe 30 to 90 seconds.)

More than a dozen summer camps dot the banks of the Guadalupe River and its tributaries,
a vast network of waterways twisting through the hills of Kerr County, Texas.
But many of the camps’ idyllic locales also face the danger of severe flooding,
since much of the land near the river is designated as a high-risk area by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
In the most affected area, on the upper Guadalupe River in Kerr County, at least 13 summer camps lie next to…

See how FEMA maps reveal camps’ flood risks
Many camps in the Guadalupe river region are adjacent or are partially inside high-risk flood zones, according to maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Hello @…
I'd like to send a message to whoever is planning CCCamp in 2027. Since I don't know how to reach them, I figured I'd try the trusty Chaos Post!
Attn. camp planners: avoid the first week of August 2027! There is a monster solar eclipse on the 2nd of August that no eclipse nerd can miss!
"An eclipse of epic proportions …

How to Favicon in 2025: Three files that fit most needs
It’s time to rethink how we cook a set of favicons for modern browsers and stop the icon generator madness. Frontend developers currently have to deal with 20 static PNG files just to display a tiny website logo in a browser tab or on a touchscreen. Read on to see how to take a smarter approach and adopt a minimal set of icons that fits most modern needs.
🖌️

How to Favicon in 2025: Three files that fit most needs—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog
Prefer SVG over PNG, trust browsers to downscale, drop obscure formats—the ultimate, exhaustive guide to favicons for modern web. Includes steps for static HTML and Webpack.

Time For 9 o'clock #HashTagGames hosted by @…
I didn't see that coming. Let's play!
#ShowCharactersSurpriseRevelation

Tonight's adventure takes us to a galaxy far, far away! Streaming SWTOR on Linux. Come see how it runs and hang out! #LinuxGaming

psst
you! yes, you
would you like to see a piece of fantastic investigative journalism, uncovering an international tax fraud scheme (in minecraft)?
do you want to see how some kids invented CDOs-but-worse and how it ended?
here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQLm-QFzrxA

#ShamelesslyStolenFromSomewhereElseOnTheInternetHonestlyICantKeepTrackOfThisStuffAnymore

Man, I'm a sucker for history but this was *fascinating*.
It's shocking how far things fall in America from their apogee. This is close to Gary, Indiana which at one point was the world's biggest manufacturing hub, and now has literal trees growing out of the gorgeous old buildings.
Next time I'm passing that way I'm gonna see if I can find this.

Turns out the human mind sees what it wants to see, not what you actually see
https://bgr.com/science/turns-out-the-human-mind-sees-what-it-wants-to-see-not-what-you-actually-s…

Turns out the human mind sees what it wants to see, not what you actually see
Researchers have discovered that how the brain sees can vary depending on whether a scene plays out the way the mind expects or not.

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/

Tired of how much Canadian journalism focus on the US. Sure let's do it about trade policies that impact us.. but their non-stop stupidity and fuckery, we just don't need to see that.
They are gerrymandering in Texas, this is their fucking problem. Why should it be the #1 news of the Canadian public broadcaster? What can I do? How does that concern me?
And yes, human rights abuse should be denounced.
Are we running out of problems in Canada to talk about? I don…

Listening to the current episode of the Unnamed RE podcast, I got to learn about #DeskThing, a project repurposing the otherwise defunct Spotify Car Thing.
While I really like to see hardware being saved from ending up as ewaste, I was surprised to learn that very specifically, #AMD

MTG-S1 and Sentinel-4 launch to change how we see our atmosphere: #MTGS1 satellite has been designed to generate a completely new type of data product, especially suited to nowcasting rapidly evolving storms, with three-dimensional views of the atmosphere, while Copernicus Sentinel-4, which consists of an instrument mounted on the MTG-S1 satellite, will be the first mission to monitor European air quality from geostationary orbit.

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

I realize people have differing priorities & everyone's fighting their own war... but FFS, how does a family accidentally leave their dog behind when they move homes?
✅ Gen Z Couple Excited To Get Keys to New Home—Then They See What's Inside - Newsweek
https://www.

Gen Z Couple Excited To Get Keys to New Home—Then They See What's Inside
The previous homeowners left a surprise behind; they "didn't have enough space in their moving van," Louren Wilson told Newsweek.

Quick tip for those with young kids who want them to learn how to use a watch with an analogue (dial) style interface.
While the likes of Flik Flak make nice kids watches, they are a little on the pricy side.
Potentially better IMHO however are these kids field/pilot style watches from AliExpress. They cost basically nothing [<$5🇺🇸] and the hour hand points to an inner ring of numbered hours, while the minute hand points to an outer ring of numbered minutes. So simple!

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/how-to-install-software/
Did not help me but I'm trying to help myself...will I succeed as when I was troubleshooting why my dispXXXX didn't work for new stuff?
I succeeded with dispXXXX thingy...so maybe I'll succeed with insta…

How to install software
When you wish to install software in Qubes OS, you should generally install it in a template. For installing templates themselves, see how to install a template. Advanced users may also be interested in learning how to install software in standalones and dom0. Qubes OS is effectively a ...

"All the tech oligarchs and business titans who’ve thrown in with Trump, apparently deciding that strongman politics are good for business, should think carefully about that post; in it, you can see the transition to a new kind of American regime.""
'Think carefully': How a single Trump threat should have cronies panicking - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-musk-2672324238/?cx_testId=4&cx_testVariant=cx_undefined&cx_artPos=1&cx_experienceId=EXC93HV4HK4I&cx_experienceActionId=showRecommendationsJ2A0SJUMQX4T24#cxrecs_s

"Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else", but how to do this with Linked Data? Eero Hyvönen is quoting Leonardo Da Vinci as an intro to his presentation "How to Create a Portal for Digital Humanities Research Using a Linked Open Data Cloud of Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graphs: Case SampoSampo"
paper:

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

just checking in on the folks that said (years ago) that we needed to sacrifice user experience for developer productivity to see how their AI startups are doing now

Yay, I finally figured out how to build HTML documentation of my custom :nixos: #NixOS options. 🥳
Some thoughts:
- It still contains *all* normal NixOS options (it's a 13MB HTML file...)
- I don't see a way to filter for only my custom options - be it just by regex for example
- It's the documentation of *possible* options, doesn't include the actually chosen val…

📝 `nix build .#docs` now builds a HTML with NixOS options config (including custom ones) (b7be1d09) · Commits · Yann Büchau / 📦 Yanns NixOS Config · GitLab
My NixOS Config

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.

Series B, Episode 03 - Weapon
GAN: Is she bluffing?
AVON: She's not bluffing, is she, Travis?
TRAVIS: Do something reckless and find out.
AVON: Well now, I might just blow your head off.
BLAKE: How would you like to die, too, Supreme Commander?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/203/474

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

It's very amusing to read this piece by @… , "Harvard considered as a long-lived biological organism", examine the section "Harvard's defenses", and see how they seem so strong in normal times and are failing right now—as a bellwether of our times.

One way to ensure I don't buy an item is to market it "as seen on Shark Tank" -- but that's probably just me. Another way to ensure I don't buy an item is to market it as having AI features (??), and apparently that's widespread.
https://futurism.com/customers-see-ai-…

Something Hilarious Happens When Potential Customers See That a Product Has AI Features
New research explores how customers react to products that are marketed as having AI — with striking results.

OK so, let's see how far I can get figuring out the VSC8512 SERDES stuff without any nonpublic information.
It looks like everything fun is accessed via register 18G "global command and serdes configuration".
This is a 16-bit register which is basically a mailbox to the internal MCU.
Bit 15 (0x8000) is documented as "execute command". This always has to be set when writing to the PHY, then you wait for it to be cleared before doing anything else. Tha…

Aus irgendeinem Grund ist gerade die Sonos-Radio-Station "The Lighthouse", über die Brian Eno jede Menge unveröffentlichte Tracks abspielen läßt, gratis (man braucht halt ein Sonos-Gerät dazu), und ich höre mich da nun etwas durch.
DJ Food hat das ein paar Monate lang gemacht übrigens, und mitgeschrieben (Stand 2023):
ht…

Brian Eno – The Lighthouse, what’s on it?
I’ve been compiling this, off and on, all year, while listening to the 340+ unreleased tracks on Brian Eno‘s Sonos HD radio station, The Lighthouse. If I had the phone nearby I’d check what’s playing, make a note of the track number and year and write a short description. I was intrigued to see how often tracks repeated (not very often), how long it would take me to hear all of them (over 6 months) and what the ratio of good to average to bad was. It became quite addictive as I’d fill…

Companies are pursuing small nuclear reactors to power their data centers, and I can't see how anything could go wrong with that

TikTok expands Manage Topics, a feature that lets users customize how often specific topics appear in the For You feed, and adds AI-powered keyword filtering (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/678779/tiktok-for-you-feed-manage-…

TikTok gives everyone more control over what’s on their For You page
TikTok is rolling out Manage Topics globally, a feature that lets you control how often you see certain kinds of videos in your For You feed, such as those related to sports, travel, humor, or dance.

Finder Progress Bar not showing or disappeared!
Copying files from HD to Macbook, but progress bar disappeared after switching the window ! How to find that file transfer progress bar ?

I found the solution!
It was rather simple, follow below steps:
1. Open finder
2. From top bar select "window"
3. From the different options toggle "Hide progress bar" or "Show progress bar"

You'll able to see the progres…

Oh, I see now how quote posting is going to be processed around here...
Not a bad system at all, although I do have my doubts it'll work well when the quoted posts are coming from networks where this kind of approval is tacitly given by default, such as Bluesky, like in this case.
#Mastodon #QuotePosting

Thanking the @… folks for the excellent work they do, and especially for their upcoming support for security certificates for IP addresses which is nothing short of revolutionary for the future of the (Small) Web.

Getting ready to issue IP address certificates
Happy to see the progress on this. Thought you might be interested in seeing how important this feature is going to be for the Small Web: It’s going to be invaluable for helping decentralise the web. Thank you for the work you do 🙂

How to tell a vibe coder of lying when they say they check their code.
People who will admit to using LLMs to write code will usually claim that they "carefully check" the output since we all know that LLM code has a lot of errors in it. This is insufficient to address several problems that LLMs cause, including labor issues, digital commons stress/pollution, license violation, and environmental issues, but at least it's they are checking their code carefully we shouldn't assume that it's any worse quality-wise than human-authored code, right?
Well, from principles alone we can expect it to be worse, since checking code the AI wrote is a much more boring task than writing code yourself, so anyone who has ever studied human-computer interaction even a little bit can predict people will quickly slack off, stating to trust the AI way too much, because it's less work. I'm a different domain, the journalist who published an entire "summer reading list" full of nonexistent titles is a great example of this. I'm sure he also intended to carefully check the AI output, but then got lazy. Clearly he did not have a good grasp of the likely failure modes of the tool he was using.
But for vibe coders, there's one easy tell we can look for, at least in some cases: coding in Python without type hints. To be clear, this doesn't apply to novice coders, who might not be aware that type hints are an option. But any serious Python software engineer, whether they used type hints before or not, would know that they're an option. And if you know they're an option, you also know they're an excellent tool for catching code defects, with a very low effort:reward ratio, especially if we assume an LLM generates them. Of the cases where adding types requires any thought at all, 95% of them offer chances to improve your code design and make it more robust. Knowing about but not using type hints in Python is a great sign that you don't care very much about code quality. That's totally fine in many cases: I've got a few demos or jam games in Python with no type hints, and it's okay that they're buggy. I was never going to debug them to a polished level anyways. But if we're talking about a vibe coder who claims that they're taking extra care to check for the (frequent) LLM-induced errors, that's not the situation.
Note that this shouldn't be read as an endorsement of vibe coding for demos or other rough-is-acceptable code: the other ethical issues I skipped past at the start still make it unethical to use in all but a few cases (for example, I have my students use it for a single assignment so they can see for themselves how it's not all it's cracked up to be, and even then they have an option to observe a pre-recorded prompt session instead).

I accidentally bought Black Chickpeas instead of Black Beans for my Chilli, but I'm going to own it and see how it goes 😬
#Chilli #Vegan

Sorry for the super bad quality, but I wanted to show you how easy it can be to submit any url to a server - on android - without the need to code any app, here you can see how easy it is to submit a reddit URL to my summarizer, to get a few seconds later a notification via pushover, telling me, the summary is ready - which can be opened with one click in the browser....

If you are interested in seeing how IDS rules work, or in trying to write your own, take a look to see how an expert does it. #cybersecurity
From: @…

Canada's "AI Minister" won't be far behind. (Or maybe he's already ahead... it _would_ explain a lot....) https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:35jwgqplo2hl6v77qgsehmhe/post/3lvnyk3fo6s2c

I had an air filter attached to the rear of my #Kombi, and then I realized that I couldn't shift. One of the cords that I had used to secure the hepa filter was on the derailleur. It was an easy thing to fix, but it reminded me just how much I hate derailleurs (and any kind of external gears in general).

Chris Arnade was one of my favorite followers on the old place. One of the very few people who thinks very deeply, but also outside of their own silos, to create a cross-disciplinary theory of the world. One of the few people who is truly willing to see the world as it is.
The solutions to our problems will never come from one realm of expertise, but only by synthesizing a strategy from a more holistic world view.

How to Build the Perfect City
Epsilon Theory contributor and all-around good human Chris Arnade pauses from walking the world to take a first cut at a grand unified theory of

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised to see how easy Pirate Ship is for getting shipping labels at reduced rates. Their customer service is top-notch. My work had been paying for a shipping provider and I was able to drop their prices considerably.
Not an ad, just a fan of how easy they made #shipping.

Let's remove the 'woke' from the people who hate it:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DMK96jduS-J/?igsh=amdjMjdpbm54bXY1

Pete Carroll's approach to team building is reminiscent of classic Al Davis Raiders https://raiderswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/raiders/2025/07/04/pete-carroll-team-bui…

There was somebody fussing in my replies to my last link to my blog post about Medium (I don’t see them now; they probably blocked me, but their specific words don’t really matter), and the gist of their message was that they didn’t like that site. On the modern internet, if you have an issue with content written by humans, with no surveillance ads, that doesn’t allow AI scraping or AI slop content, with a business model that makes money… I don’t know how to help you. Honestly.

A reminder that URL's each only count for 23 characters against your post's character limit, regardless of how long it actually is, precisely so that people can see where the link is going and discourage use of link shorteners
https://infosec.exchange/@BleepingComp

Join Dennis Berger, Marco Petris, and Volker Carlguth to explore 'Intent-Based Clustering.' An approach to overcome some limitations of modern hybrid search systems. Discover how upfront LLM-supported in-depth query understanding can be applied in various steps, including retrieval, clustering, validation, and presentation. Learn about the process of moving from prototype to production for large-scale, high-volume e-commerce searches.

What you see is what you mean; intent based ecommerce search
In today's e-commerce landscape, hybrid search systems represent the market standard, yet they often struggle with highly inspirational queries, lack of precision in semantic recall, and presentation of diversity. Ambiguity in search terms can lead to disorganized results or overshadowed relevant products. This session will demonstrate how an upfront LLM-supported in depth query understanding can increase recall meaningfully without sacrificing precision. We show how LLM-driven query understand…

See how the game works?
Republicans have long instinctively understood, far better than their oft-bumbling opponents,
that capturing the language is crucially important.
When you do that, when you frame the terms of debate,
you have a darn good shot at winning hearts and minds. Particularly weak minds.
I’ll leave it to the shrinks to diagnose the passivity of the Democratic mindset,
to try to fathom why the blue party has long allowed "class warfare&qu…

Just to disclose that I sold off my last few scraps of Bitcoin, after having mostly exited in 2017.
Also wanted to report that I used Newton - https://www.newton.co/ - and was quite impressed with them, on the KYC and due-diligence and security fronts, plus they *gasp* made it easy to turn Btc into ca…

Easy crypto trading for Canadians | Newton
Say hello to Newton. Buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, and 70+ other coins with trading fees and deposit and withdrawal fees. See how easy it is to buy crypto!

Surprising how smoking keeps it's popularity here, even among youngsters (although vaping made progress in that age group). They're not daft, but that's how you can see some cultural things are still like they were in my youth, some 40 years ago. Keep that in mind when you interact in Vietnam, it helps a lot to understand.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20078 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_hept…

Notes on Rindler wave packets in Minkowski spacetime
We consider wave packets of a massless scalar field that have well-localized Rindler energy, and examine how their energy appears to a Minkowski observer to see how the classical gravitational blue-shift formula is modified quantum mechanically. We derive, by using the saddle point approximation, an analytic expression for the Minkowski momentum distribution of such Rindler wave packets. We find a universal lower bound on the uncertainty of Minkowski momentum; the momentum distribution can neve…

There's chatter today about #POX the little Englander Party of Xenophobes and Fascists high in the polls for a Scottish seat.
So how to fight them (and how not)?
https://ste…

The right wing threat and a viable future
A statement from Steady State Manchester Introduction With horror we see the electoral success of POX, The party of Xenophobes and Fascists (which, without irony, actually calls itself Reform UK1).…

@… I would be curious to see how people respond to the inverse: Have you ever *left* your ancestral homeland.

#degoogle adventures: I haven't seen this much bugs in Google Drive EVER. Like it's intentionally making problems while you try to delete files and unshare stuff or stop seeing stuff shared with you.
I have several Google accounts, let's see how I can minimize or completely stop using them.

About morbid thriftiness (Autism Spectrum Condition)
As you may have noticed, I am morbidly thrifty. Usually I don't buy stuff that I don't need — and if I decide that I actually need something, I am going to ponder about it for a while, look for value products, and for the best price. And with some luck, I'm going to decide I don't need it that bad after all.
One reason for that is probably how I was raised. My parents taught me to be thrifty, so I have to be. It doesn't matter that, from retrospective, I see that their thriftiness was applied rather arbitrarily to some spendings and not others, or that perhaps they were greedy — spending less on individual things so that they could buy more. Well, I can't delude myself like that, so I have to be thrifty for real. And when I fail, when I pay too much, when I get cheated — I feel quite bad about it.
The other reason is that I keep worrying about my future. It doesn't matter how rich I may end up — I'll keep worrying that I'll run out of money in the future. Perhaps I'll lose a job and won't be able to find anything for a long time, Perhaps something terrible will happen and I'm going to need to pay a lot suddenly.
Another thing is that I easily get attached to objects. Well, it's easier to be thrifty when you really don't want to replace stuff. Over time you also learn to avoid getting new stuff at all, since the more stuff you have, the more stuff may break and need to be thrown away.
Finally, there's my environmental responsibility. I admit that I don't do enough — but at least the things I can do, I do.
[EDIT: and yes, I feel bad about how expensive my new phone was, even though it's of much higher quality than the last one. Also, I got a worse deal because I waited too long.]
#ActuallyAutistic

#UkAcademia question: I see references to the "REF" a lot, including needing to publish papers that get a specific REF "rating" like 3* or 4*. Anyone knows what these stars mean and how do they decide how many stars your papers get?
#Academia

Series D, Episode 03 - Traitor
LEITZ: Well I'm sorry you took such a risk to hear bad news.
HUNDA: Well, that isn't why I came. I wanted to see how far the flood level's fallen.
LEITZ: Why?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/403/283 B7B4

Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Edit: fixed some typos.
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and thus more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of management caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.

I’m well out of my depth here: my historical knowledge to speak to the issues is thin; my cultural knowledge is almost nonexistent. Reading that Standing Together site, seeing how they’ve crafted what they write, I see just how much nuance and awareness I •don’t• have.
I’m grateful to the people who’ve helped me learn, and who’ve pointed me to these resources — in this case @… and @…. Sometimes the Internet really is good for something.
/end

Noted while reading: 'a data structure or a block of code are things that make implicit and subjective arguments about how to see the world. This is possibly the single most important basic insight that Digital Humanities as a field needs to impart, because it affects so much of the world around us' - excellent post by @…

Meet a Historian: James Baillie on Digital Humanities and the Medieval Caucasus
Note from the Editor: I’m excited to feature another guest post with you all! This week we have James Baillie discussing how digital humanities and prosopographic methods can be used to bette…

My week with Linux: I'm dumping Windows … to see how it goes | Tom's Hardware
#Linux

"How does air pollution affect mental health? New study aimed to find out"
#Pollution #AirPollution #Health

“I destroyed months of your work in seconds.” AI agents can also panic and cause mayhem—not because they're sentient, but because they've read plenty of online posts about us panicking when we do stupid stuff.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonippoli…

A little Furality Somna montage to remember how much fun it was :neofox_happy:
https://youtu.be/kxyTMeegZQ4
This will be made public in a few months on YouTube, and I'll also post a shorter version on TikTok in a few days. But you get to see it first, awesome creatures of Fedi :neofox_cool_…

Brian Schottenheimer, Stephen Jones on Cowboys legends visit, culture change https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/brian-schottenheimer-stephen-jones-on-cowboys-legends-visit-culture-change

A few years back, I started talking about #hacking and repurposing #gadgets. My goal is to help others by documenting how all the chips involved work on a low level.
And I am not alone! 🧡
I am glad to see how it worked out with the

DeskThing
Take back your CarThing.

See, this is another problem with the chatbot bullshit. Here, an OpenAI featured chatbot is pushing extreme surgeries to 'subhuman' men saying they won't be able to find chicks no matter how much confidence they fake.
Dudes, let me tell you, this is TOTAL bullshit. I mean, if I can find a wife, ANYONE can. 😂 The incel bullshit is so sad. It's all lies, they're believing all these lies.

OpenAI featured chatbot is pushing extreme surgeries to “subhuman” men
OpenAI's featured chatbot recommends $200,000 in surgeries while promoting incel ideology

Whereas Leibniz’s task was to find the sum of infinitely many known terms, Hounsfield wondered:
Could the process be run in reverse?
With enough total dimmings, from enough directions, could we work backward to deduce the unknown absorption at each point along the many beams
— and use that to see inside the brain?
Most radiologists thought the idea was crazy. -- But one doctor was willing to listen.
He handed Hounsfield a jar containing a human brain with a t…

How a Puzzle About Fractions Got Brain Scans Rolling
A story of bowling pins, patterns and medical miracles.

Series B, Episode 03 - Weapon
ORAC: No. It was a priority one - for automatic relay to the senior officer present.
BLAKE: Orac, I want more information. I want to know everything there is to know about this man Coser; I want to know how he got out of the base; and I want to know what IMIPAK is.
https://blake.torpidi…

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

Well this was a fun discovery.
Let's see how many of you get this right.
If you read MDIO address 0x0 of a gigabit Ethernet PHY and read the values in bits 13/6 and 8 (speed and duplex state), do you get:
1) The last value you wrote to the register, regardless of actual link conditions
2) The actual current speed/duplex state the PHY is operating in
3) Something else / undefined

Brian Schottenheimer, Stephen Jones on Cowboys legends visit, culture change https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/brian-schottenheimer-stephen-jones-on-cowboys-legends-visit-culture-change

Subtooting since people in the original thread wanted it to be over, but selfishly tagging @… and @… whose opinions I value...
I think that saying "we are not a supply chain" is exactly what open-source maintainers should be doing right now in response to "open source supply chain security" threads.
I can't claim to be an expert and don't maintain any important FOSS stuff, but I do release almost all of my code under open licenses, and I do use many open source libraries, and I have felt the pain of needing to replace an unmaintained library.
There's a certain small-to-mid-scale class of program, including many open-source libraries, which can be built/maintained by a single person, and which to my mind best operate on a "snake growth" model: incremental changes/fixes, punctuated by periodic "skin-shedding" phases where make rewrites or version updates happen. These projects aren't immortal either: as the whole tech landscape around them changes, they become unnecessary and/or people lose interest, so they go unmaintained and eventually break. Each time one of their dependencies breaks (or has a skin-shedding moment) there's a higher probability that they break or shed too, as maintenance needs shoot up at these junctures. Unless you're a company trying to make money from a single long-lived app, it's actually okay that software churns like this, and if you're a company trying to make money, your priorities absolutely should not factor into any decisions people making FOSS software make: we're trying (and to a huge extent succeeding) to make a better world (and/or just have fun with our own hobbies share that fun with others) that leaves behind the corrosive & planet-destroying plague which is capitalism, and you're trying to personally enrich yourself by embracing that plague. The fact that capitalism is *evil* is not an incidental thing in this discussion.
To make an imperfect analogy, imagine that the peasants of some domain have set up a really-free-market, where they provide each other with free stuff to help each other survive, sometimes doing some barter perhaps but mostly just everyone bringing their surplus. Now imagine the lord of the domain, who is the source of these peasants' immiseration, goes to this market secretly & takes some berries, which he uses as one ingredient in delicious tarts that he then sells for profit. But then the berry-bringer stops showing up to the free market, or starts bringing a different kind of fruit, or even ends up bringing rotten berries by accident. And the lord complains "I have a supply chain problem!" Like, fuck off dude! Your problem is that you *didn't* want to build a supply chain and instead thought you would build your profit-focused business in other people's free stuff. If you were paying the berry-picker, you'd have a supply chain problem, but you weren't, so you really have an "I want more free stuff" problem when you can't be arsed to give away your own stuff for free.
There can be all sorts of problems in the really-free-market, like maybe not enough people bring socks, so the peasants who can't afford socks are going barefoot, and having foot problems, and the peasants put their heads together and see if they can convince someone to start bringing socks, and maybe they can't and things are a bit sad, but the really-free-market was never supposed to solve everyone's problems 100% when they're all still being squeezed dry by their taxes: until they are able to get free of the lord & start building a lovely anarchist society, the really-free-market is a best-effort kind of deal that aims to make things better, and sometimes will fall short. When it becomes the main way goods in society are distributed, and when the people who contribute aren't constantly drained by the feudal yoke, at that point the availability of particular goods is a real problem that needs to be solved, but at that point, it's also much easier to solve. And at *no* point does someone coming into the market to take stuff only to turn around and sell it deserve anything from the market or those contributing to it. They are not a supply chain. They're trying to help each other out, but even then they're doing so freely and without obligation. They might discuss amongst themselves how to better coordinate their mutual aid, but they're not going to end up forcing anyone to bring anything or even expecting that a certain person contribute a certain amount, since the whole point is that the thing is voluntary & free, and they've all got changing life circumstances that affect their contributions. Celebrate whatever shows up at the market, express your desire for things that would be useful, but don't impose a burden on anyone else to bring a specific thing, because otherwise it's fair for them to oppose such a burden on you, and now you two are doing your own barter thing that's outside the parameters of the really-free-market.

https://mastodon.social/@shoppingtonz/114979972981864162
This is my post about (#)memes in (#)Wikidata and it links to a query and it got instructions how to "Run query".
Could be interesting for me to see the "structure" of memes...probably I…

Me : I would like to cancel my subscription
Disney : Why don't you pause it?
Me : No, I want to cancel
Disney : How about a special offer for three months?
Me : No, I want to cancel
Disney : Ok
Me : ...
Disney email : Sorry to see you go... continue your subscription?
#DisneyPlus

What follows is a surprisingly elegant introduction to a lesser-known evolutionary theory,
wrapped in the curious biography of Sewall Wright
-- a geneticist with a lifelong fixation on guinea pigs.
I’ve occasionally wondered:
Why don’t we see fish wandering around on little legs, on their way to becoming something grander?
Wright put it more scientifically:
How do organisms evolve beneficial traits when the steps in between might be maladaptive?
I…

Evolution and Guinea Pig Toes
How one animal's oddity inspired Sewall Wright to take on one of Darwin's big ideas

Series A, Episode 04 - Time Squad
CALLY: [Telepaths] How did you get here?
BLAKE: We came from.... [looks quickly to the side].
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/104/344 B7B4

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

I’ve generally disliked my institution’s LMS (that’s software to track course assignments, grades, etc.) since I first started using it in 2008. Grudgingly tolerated, but disliked.
Today, however, that changed. Today, to see if something I wanted to do was technically possible, I finally dug into the source code.
Where there was dislike, there is now terror. I have no idea how this software runs, ever, at all. I don’t understand how it isn’t hacked •constantly•. I am not sure if I will ever use it again. I am not sure if I will ever use a computer again. The code sits somewhere between “maniacal conspiracy theorist corkboard” and “eldrich horror.”
After reading the code, I had to just sit silently and stare at a blank wall for a while.

Governors and state legislatures will be staring at a quite substantial reduction in Medicaid tax revenue.
They will then be faced with three choices:
-one, raise some other sort of tax;
-two, cut some other state service, like education;
-three, cut Medicaid services.
As congressional Republicans well know,
most states are going to choose number three, because it’s the easiest path.
And that brings devastation.
If you want to see why Republica…

How Can the Democrats Be Losing to These Cruel, Stupid, Inept People?
You may have noticed: While Republicans debate Medicaid and other cuts, there’s one aspect of Trump’s big ugly bill that absolutely cannot be discussed.

LLM coding is the opposite of DRY
An important principle in software engineering is DRY: Don't Repeat Yourself. We recognize that having the same code copied in more than one place is bad for several reasons:
1. It makes the entire codebase harder to read.
2. It increases maintenance burden, since any problems in the duplicated code need to be solved in more than one place.
3. Because it becomes possible for the copies to drift apart if changes to one aren't transferred to the other (maybe the person making the change has forgotten there was a copy) it makes the code more error-prone and harder to debug.
All modern programming languages make it almost entirely unnecessary to repeat code: we can move the repeated code into a "function" or "module" and then reference it from all the different places it's needed. At a larger scale, someone might write an open-source "library" of such functions or modules and instead of re-implementing that functionality ourselves, we can use their code, with an acknowledgement. Using another person's library this way is complicated, because now you're dependent on them: if they stop maintaining it or introduce bugs, you've inherited a problem, but still, you could always copy their project and maintain your own version, and it would be not much more work than if you had implemented stuff yourself from the start. It's a little more complicated than this, but the basic principle holds, and it's a foundational one for software development in general and the open-source movement in particular. The network of "citations" as open-source software builds on other open-source software and people contribute patches to each others' projects is a lot of what makes the movement into a community, and it can lead to collaborations that drive further development. So the DRY principle is important at both small and large scales.
Unfortunately, the current crop of hyped-up LLM coding systems from the big players are antithetical to DRY at all scales:
- At the library scale, they train on open source software but then (with some unknown frequency) replicate parts of it line-for-line *without* any citation [1]. The person who was using the LLM has no way of knowing that this happened, or even any way to check for it. In theory the LLM company could build a system for this, but it's not likely to be profitable unless the courts actually start punishing these license violations, which doesn't seem likely based on results so far and the difficulty of finding out that the violations are happening. By creating these copies (and also mash-ups, along with lots of less-problematic stuff), the LLM users (enabled and encouraged by the LLM-peddlers) are directly undermining the DRY principle. If we see what the big AI companies claim to want, which is a massive shift towards machine-authored code, DRY at the library scale will effectively be dead, with each new project simply re-implementing the functionality it needs instead of every using a library. This might seem to have some upside, since dependency hell is a thing, but the downside in terms of comprehensibility and therefore maintainability, correctness, and security will be massive. The eventual lack of new high-quality DRY-respecting code to train the models on will only make this problem worse.
- At the module & function level, AI is probably prone to re-writing rather than re-using the functions or needs, especially with a workflow where a human prompts it for many independent completions. This part I don't have direct evidence for, since I don't use LLM coding models myself except in very specific circumstances because it's not generally ethical to do so. I do know that when it tries to call existing functions, it often guesses incorrectly about the parameters they need, which I'm sure is a headache and source of bugs for the vibe coders out there. An AI could be designed to take more context into account and use existing lookup tools to get accurate function signatures and use them when generating function calls, but even though that would probably significantly improve output quality, I suspect it's the kind of thing that would be seen as too-baroque and thus not a priority. Would love to hear I'm wrong about any of this, but I suspect the consequences are that any medium-or-larger sized codebase written with LLM tools will have significant bloat from duplicate functionality, and will have places where better use of existing libraries would have made the code simpler. At a fundamental level, a principle like DRY is not something that current LLM training techniques are able to learn, and while they can imitate it from their training sets to some degree when asked for large amounts of code, when prompted for many smaller chunks, they're asymptotically likely to violate it.
I think this is an important critique in part because it cuts against the argument that "LLMs are the modern compliers, if you reject them you're just like the people who wanted to keep hand-writing assembly code, and you'll be just as obsolete." Compilers actually represented a great win for abstraction, encapsulation, and DRY in general, and they supported and are integral to open source development, whereas LLMs are set to do the opposite.
[1] to see what this looks like in action in prose, see the example on page 30 of the NYTimes copyright complaint against OpenAI (#AI #GenAI #LLMs #VibeCoding