Tootfinder

"""
"[…] Wanting a man got me into awful troubles more than once. But wanting to get married, never! No, no. None of that for me."
"Why not?" Tenar demanded.
Taken aback, Moss said simply, "Why, what man'd marry a witch?" And then, with a sidelong chewing motion of her jaw, like a sheep shifting its cud, “And what witch’d marry a man?"
They split rushes.
"What's wrong with men?" Tenar inquired cautiously.
As cautiously, lowering her voice, Moss replied, "I don't know, my dearie. I’ve thought on it. Often I’ve thought on it. The best I can say it is like this. A man’s in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell." She held up her long, bent, wet fingers as if holding a walnut. “It’s hard and strong, that shell, and it’s all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, man-self. And that’s all. That’s all there is. It’s all him and nothing else, inside."
Tenar pondered awhile and finally asked, "But if he's a wizard—"
"Then it's all his power, inside. His power’s himself, see. That’s how it is with him. And that’s all. When his power goes, he’s gone. Empty." She cracked the unseen walnut and tossed the shells away. “Nothing."
"And a woman, then?"
"Oh, well, dearie, a woman's a different thing entirely. Who knows where a woman begins and ends? Listen, mistress, I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into the dark." Moss’s eyes shone with a weird brightness in their red rims and her voice sang like an instrument. “I go back into the dark! Before the moon I was. No one knows, no one knows, no one can say what I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. Who dares ask questions of the dark? Who’ll ask the dark its name?"
"""
(Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu)

The logic of hyperlinking in the era of social media:
- sure, you can link outside of our platform, but we'll proxy your link through our shortener so that you aren't exactly sure where you're going,
- everybody is confused where the hell they are going (and browsers amplify that nonsense by making address bars even dumber, showing barely anything except the top-level domain)
- oh, feeling too confused? Gotcha, we'll serve you additional screen showing "you're leaving our site, this is the exact link, are you sure?" so that you never run of mundane things to click at.
Reinventing the wheel for the millionth time, hell yeah.
(I have the same concern about those transition screens on Mastodon, but there's at least a tiny bit of logic behind that, especially with multiple different servers involved and stuff)

YDS Dean Greg Sterling on the election of the new Pope.
======
The election of Pope Leo XIV is a significant moment. Candidly, I did not think that I would see an American pope in my lifetime. I hope that the surprise of his election bodes well for the ways he will lead. Many of the cardinals (ca. 80%) who voted for the pope were appointed by Pope Francis. I hope that Leo will continue the work of Francis.

Here’s a thoughtful piece from @…, well worth reading. It says things I hadn’t heard yet articulated so well.
One thing I appreciate immensely: the way Fred’s analytical approach centers humans instead of tech, and takes the subjective experiences of human developers •seriously•.
Fred’s summary in the quoted post gives the core idea, but the larger piece has many sharp thoughts and rewards close reading. I’ll quote a few in the thread below.
1/ https://hachyderm.io/@mononcqc/114653605519944320

US political contradictions; knowledge systems
As Trump at least partially succeeds in constructing an alternate reality for his most ardent followers, it's tempting to think of his dogma as false, in contrast to some imagined "truth" which his non-followers are smart enough to believe in. But a more nuanced view of knowledge would admit that different groups of people have different shared truths, constituting different knowledge systems which each deviate from what's objectively measurable in different ways, and in fact they each accept different standards of what is objective, so there's not really a single "ground truth" we can even compare to to determine which of these knowledge systems is "more correct" (similar problems arise even if we only care about "more useful").
To make this more concrete, we can see that e.g., competing quantum physics theories, or likewise competing religious beliefs, have no reasonable basis on which to judge between them, either in terms of "truth" or "utility." So the Trump-dogma knowledge system, although bad, morally repugnant, etc., can't so easily be dismissed as "false" in my view. "Distorted" or "malignant" or "evil" or "contradictory" are better monikers, in my opinion.
But what I'm even more interested in thinking about is: in what ways does the current American liberal "common sense" knowledge system already bear the scars of past fascist lies & contradictions? I can think of a few:
"Columbus was an explorer."
This is "factually accurate" in the same way some of Trump's propaganda is, but it's also a cruel distortion of "Columbus was a child murderer," and it's a misrepresentation that serves an evil purpose, yet which is widely taught in elementary schools today.
Another: "dropping atomic bombs on civilians in Japan was necessary to end WWII."
Perhaps in the future we'll have "family separation & the 2025 ICE crackdowns were necessary to end the immigration crisis," although I dearly hope not.
"Reparations for slavery aren't reasonable," is yet another...
I'll close this rambling with a question: what other fascist lies have you noticed that are normalized in America right now from past Trump-like leaders (or even from less overtly fascist institutions)?

I'm having a short burst of efficiency, which is very unlike me after work. The only thing I can't be arsed to do is sort out breakfast to take to work in the morning, but I have things I can fling together at the last minute.
Among other things I've just reserved a Devla Murphy book from the library, after listening to Great Lives about her today. After that I'll be casting about for another book as I've nearly finished Nikki Erlick's The Measure, thought-provo…

Galois groups of random integer matrices
Theresa C. Anderson, Evan M. O'Dorney
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06463 https://arxiv.org…

Galois groups of random integer matrices
We study the number $M_n(T)$ be the number of integer $n\times n$ matrices $A$ with entries bounded in absolute value by $T$ such that the Galois group of characteristic polynomial of $A$ is not the full symmetric group $S_n$. One knows $M_n(T) \gg T^{n^2 - n + 1} \log T$, which we conjecture is sharp. We first use the large sieve to get $M_n(T) \ll T^{n^2 - 1/2}\log T$. Using Fourier analysis and the geometric sieve, as in Bhargava's proof of van der Waerden's conjecture, we improve this bound…

Power bricks fit perfectly in the bottom of the minirack. Might have to run a fan or two in the bottom, but we'll see how things turn out there.
#minirack #homelab

Another useful article:
"What to know about Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to LA protests"
https://apnews.com/article/insurrection-act-trump-troops-newsom-military-national-guard-…

What to know about Trump's deployment of National Guard troops to LA protests
President Donald Trump says he’s deploying 2,000 California National Guard troops to Los Angeles to respond to immigration protests, over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. It’s not the first time Trump has activated the National Guard to quell protests. In 2020, he asked governors of several states to send troops to Washington, D.C. to respond to demonstrations that arose after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officers. Here are some things to know about when and …

Deformations of OP ensembles in a bulk critical scaling
Caio E. Candido, Victor Alves, Thomas Chouteau, Charles F. Santos, Guilherme L. F. Silva
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05622

Deformations of OP ensembles in a bulk critical scaling
We study orthogonal polynomial ensembles whose weights are deformations of exponential weights, in the limit of a large number of particles. The deformation symbols we consider affect local fluctuations of the ensemble around a bulk point of the limiting spectrum. We identify the limiting kernel in terms of a solution to an integrable non-local differential equation. This novel kernel is the correlation kernel of a conditional thinned process starting from the Sine point process, and it is also…