Tootfinder

This is frickin' brilliant: #TimMinchin, you lil' beauty.

Bingo: "awareness is growing that digital autonomy is no longer a luxury but a prerequisite for a well-functioning democracy." https://ginaplat.com/posts/20251031-digital-sovereignty-and-gov/ Thanks for this, @…

One More Glance with Sharp Eyes: Rethinking Lightweight Captioning as a Practical Visual Specialist
Junha Song, Yongsik Jo, So Yeon Min, Quanting Xie, Taehwan Kim, Yonatan Bisk, Jaegul Choo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21451

One More Glance with Sharp Eyes: Rethinking Lightweight Captioning as a Practical Visual Specialist
Image captioning is fundamental for applications like video instruction systems and exploration robots, yet deploying such models on local devices is challenging due to the high computational demands of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). To address this, we first explore lightweight captioning by implementing a specialist based on a 125M-parameter language model, 56 times smaller than LLaMA-7B, and evaluating its performance on both single-sentence and detailed captioning tasks. Surprisi…

Damn - https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/577448/watch-the-moment-a-dramatic-blaze-ignites-in-whangarei-hospital-s-carpark imagine if the person in that ICE ute had a blanket and had thrown it over over the fire at th…

Anybody out there who uses DigitalOcean cloud services, beware a phishing email telling you you've got an invoice for 'Support Services' that is DigitalOcean branded - check the URL of the payment button (which reveals a sham domain name when you hover over it).

WaveLLDM: Design and Development of a Lightweight Latent Diffusion Model for Speech Enhancement and Restoration
Kevin Putra Santoso, Rizka Wakhidatus Sholikah, Raden Venantius Hari Ginardi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21153

WaveLLDM: Design and Development of a Lightweight Latent Diffusion Model for Speech Enhancement and Restoration
High-quality audio is essential in a wide range of applications, including online communication, virtual assistants, and the multimedia industry. However, degradation caused by noise, compression, and transmission artifacts remains a major challenge. While diffusion models have proven effective for audio restoration, they typically require significant computational resources and struggle to handle longer missing segments. This study introduces WaveLLDM (Wave Lightweight Latent Diffusion Model),…

Meeting LISA
LISA: the Lightweight In Situ Analysis box is one of a kind, built by our friends at PICE in the Niels Bohr Institute. Later this year we're taking LISA to #Antarctica for the first time ever, to analyse shallow #snow and #firn cores directly in the field. We hope LISA will help us understand how much snow falls in Dronning Maud Land, how much it varies from year to year and what is the influence of sea ice and far field atmospheric processes on the rate…
http://sternaparadisaea.net/2025/09/30/meeting-lisa/

VeriLLM: A Lightweight Framework for Publicly Verifiable Decentralized Inference
Ke Wang, Felix Qu, Libin Xia, Zishuo Zhao, Chris Tong, Lynn Ai, Eric Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24257

VeriLLM: A Lightweight Framework for Publicly Verifiable Decentralized Inference
Decentralized inference is an appealing paradigm for serving large language models (LLMs), offering strong security, high efficiency, and lower operating costs. Yet the permissionless setting admits no a priori trust in participating nodes, making output verifiability a prerequisite for secure deployment. We present VeriLLM, a publicly verifiable protocol for decentralized LLM inference that (i) achieves security under a one-honest-verifier assumption, (ii) attains near-negligible verification …

DEPTHOR : Robust Depth Enhancement from a Real-World Lightweight dToF and RGB Guidance
Jijun Xiang, Longliang Liu, Xuan Zhu, Xianqi Wang, Min Lin, Xin Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26498

DEPTHOR++: Robust Depth Enhancement from a Real-World Lightweight dToF and RGB Guidance
Depth enhancement, which converts raw dToF signals into dense depth maps using RGB guidance, is crucial for improving depth perception in high-precision tasks such as 3D reconstruction and SLAM. However, existing methods often assume ideal dToF inputs and perfect dToF-RGB alignment, overlooking calibration errors and anomalies, thus limiting real-world applicability. This work systematically analyzes the noise characteristics of real-world lightweight dToF sensors and proposes a practical and n…

Decided to actually start migrating stuff off of Github seriously. While I did move a few repos to Codeberg, I decided to just go with the whole self-hosted route and put the homelab to work by standing up my own Forgejo instance. Wasn't too bad, went with a Postgres database and the migration tool worked pretty well. So far so good...
https://<…

"Toyota developing two-seater electric vehicle with solar roof"
#Toyota #Cars #Vehicles

Toyota developing two-seater electric vehicle with solar roof
Toyota Manufacturing UK says it is leading a consortium to investigate the feasibility of a lightweight micro-mobility electric vehicle with a PV roof, digital connectivity, and sustainable components.

Screening Canopy-Induced Wind with a Lightweight 2-D RANS Quadratic-Drag Model
Wichai Pattanapol, Adam Gill
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23110 https://arxiv.…

Screening Canopy-Induced Wind with a Lightweight 2-D RANS Quadratic-Drag Model
Vegetation belts are widely used in urban planning to manage pedestrian wind, dust dispersion, and outdoor thermal comfort. This paper presents a compact method for predicting canopy-induced flow using a steady two-dimensional RANS model with Spalart-Allmaras closure and a quadratic drag model for vegetation. Each planting zone is defined by a single leaf area index (LAI). The workflow maps LAI to porosity using an exponential coefficient of 0.5, converts porosity to a local LAI per cell, divid…

NSPDI-SNN: An efficient lightweight SNN based on nonlinear synaptic pruning and dendritic integration
Wuque Cai, Hongze Sun, Jiayi He, Qianqian Liao, Yunliang Zang, Duo Chen, Dezhong Yao, Daqing Guo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21566

NSPDI-SNN: An efficient lightweight SNN based on nonlinear synaptic pruning and dendritic integration
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are artificial neural networks based on simulated biological neurons and have attracted much attention in recent artificial intelligence technology studies. The dendrites in biological neurons have efficient information processing ability and computational power; however, the neurons of SNNs rarely match the complex structure of the dendrites. Inspired by the nonlinear structure and highly sparse properties of neuronal dendrites, in this study, we propose an effic…

EasySteer: A Unified Framework for High-Performance and Extensible LLM Steering
Haolei Xu, Xinyu Mei, Yuchen Yan, Rui Zhou, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Yueting Zhuang, Yongliang Shen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25175

EasySteer: A Unified Framework for High-Performance and Extensible LLM Steering
Large language model (LLM) steering has emerged as a promising paradigm for controlling model behavior at inference time through targeted manipulation of hidden states, offering a lightweight alternative to expensive retraining. However, existing steering frameworks suffer from critical limitations: computational inefficiency, limited extensibility, and restricted functionality that hinder both research progress and practical deployment. We present EasySteer, a unified framework for high-perfor…

Devstral: Fine-tuning Language Models for Coding Agent Applications
Abhinav Rastogi, Adam Yang, Albert Q. Jiang, Alexander H. Liu, Alexandre Sablayrolles, Am\'elie H\'eliou, Am\'elie Martin, Anmol Agarwal, Andy Ehrenberg, Andy Lo, Antoine Roux, Arthur Darcet, Arthur Mensch, Baptiste Bout, Baptiste Rozi\`ere, Baudouin De Monicault, Chris Bamford, Christian Wallenwein, Christophe Renaudin, Cl\'emence Lanfranchi, Cl\'ement Denoix, Corentin Barreau, Darius Dabert Devon …

Devstral: Fine-tuning Language Models for Coding Agent Applications
We introduce Devstral-Small, a lightweight open source model for code agents with the best performance among models below 100B size. In this technical report, we give an overview of how we design and develop a model and craft specializations in agentic software development. The resulting model, Devstral-Small is a small 24B model, fast and easy to serve. Despite its size, Devstral-Small still attains competitive performance compared to models more than an order of magnitude larger.

Microsoft is increasingly shrill in its desperation to get people to love it's 'AI' service, 'Copilot'... https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/11/28/you-heard-wrong-users-brutually-reject-microsof…

Fine-Grained Reasoning About Container-Internal Pointers with Logical Pinning
Yawen Guan, Cl\'ement Pit-Claudel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23229 https://

Fine-Grained Reasoning About Container-Internal Pointers with Logical Pinning
Most separation logics hide container-internal pointers for modularity. This makes it difficult to specify container APIs that temporarily expose those pointers to the outside, and to verify programs that use these APIs. We present logical pinning, a lightweight borrowing model for sequential programs that allows users to selectively track container-internal pointers at the logical level. Our model generalizes the magic-wand operator, making it easy to write and prove precise specifications, in…

from my link log —
libfringe: an old Rust library for stackful coroutines.
https://github.com/edef1c/libfringe
saved 2025-10-28 https://dotat.at/:/S…

Explicit modelling of subject dependency in BCI decoding
Michele Romani, Francesco Paissan, Andrea Foss\`a, Elisabetta Farella
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23247 https://

Explicit modelling of subject dependency in BCI decoding
Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) suffer from high inter-subject variability and limited labeled data, often requiring lengthy calibration phases. In this work, we present an end-to-end approach that explicitly models the subject dependency using lightweight convolutional neural networks (CNNs) conditioned on the subject's identity. Our method integrates hyperparameter optimization strategies that prioritize class imbalance and evaluates two conditioning mechanisms to adapt pre-trained models to…

ProfVLM: A Lightweight Video-Language Model for Multi-View Proficiency Estimation
Edoardo Bianchi, Jacopo Staiano, Antonio Liotta
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26278 https://

ProfVLM: A Lightweight Video-Language Model for Multi-View Proficiency Estimation
Existing approaches to skill proficiency estimation often rely on black-box video classifiers, ignoring multi-view context and lacking explainability. We present ProfVLM, a compact vision-language model that reformulates this task as generative reasoning: it jointly predicts skill level and generates expert-like feedback from egocentric and exocentric videos. Central to our method is an AttentiveGatedProjector that dynamically fuses multi-view features, projected from a frozen TimeSformer backb…

For all you nature lovers (especially herpetological sorts, i.e. lizards, and more specifically, geckos here in Aotearoa) get a load of this: https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/the-strange-beautiful-lizard-at-the-bottom-of-the-world/ Stunning. I tried t…

Explainable Deep Learning for Cataract Detection in Retinal Images: A Dual-Eye and Knowledge Distillation Approach
MohammadReza Abbaszadeh Bavil Soflaei, Karim SamadZamini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22696

Explainable Deep Learning for Cataract Detection in Retinal Images: A Dual-Eye and Knowledge Distillation Approach
Cataract remains a leading cause of visual impairment worldwide, and early detection from retinal imaging is critical for timely intervention. We present a deep learning pipeline for cataract classification using the Ocular Disease Recognition dataset, containing left and right fundus photographs from 5000 patients. We evaluated CNNs, transformers, lightweight architectures, and knowledge-distilled models. The top-performing model, Swin-Base Transformer, achieved 98.58% accuracy and an F1-score…

Welp, that was a short and very damp (hail?!) dog walk here in Ōtautahi.

@… @… you might be able to require MFA for users, which is probably a good step towards minimising that risk. Not sure, though. Discourse has lots of plugins that can do that sort of stuff.

Interpret, prune and distill Donut : towards lightweight VLMs for VQA on document
Adnan Ben Mansour, Ayoub Karine, David Naccache
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26235 https://

Interpret, prune and distill Donut : towards lightweight VLMs for VQA on document
Recent advances in Visually-rich Document Understanding rely on large Vision-Language Models like Donut, which perform document-level Visual Question Answering without Optical Character Recognition. Despite their effectiveness, these models are too costly for real-time or resource-constrained applications. We investigate model compression through knowledge distillation, training compact student models from a larger teacher. We leverage mechanistic interpretability to drive student architecture …

Event Tokenization and Next-Token Prediction for Anomaly Detection at the Large Hadron Collider
Ambre Visive (Institute of Physics, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Nikhef, Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics, Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Polina Moskvitina (High Energy Physics, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, Nikhef, Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics, Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Clara Nellist (Institute of Physics, University …

Event Tokenization and Next-Token Prediction for Anomaly Detection at the Large Hadron Collider
We propose a novel use of Large Language Models (LLMs) as unsupervised anomaly detectors in particle physics. Using lightweight LLM-like networks with encoder-based architectures trained to reconstruct background events via masked-token prediction, our method identifies anomalies through deviations in reconstruction performance, without prior knowledge of signal characteristics. Applied to searches for simultaneous four-top-quark production, this token-based approach shows competitive performan…

Taught Well Learned Ill: Towards Distillation-conditional Backdoor Attack
Yukun Chen, Boheng Li, Yu Yuan, Leyi Qi, Yiming Li, Tianwei Zhang, Zhan Qin, Kui Ren
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23871

Taught Well Learned Ill: Towards Distillation-conditional Backdoor Attack
Knowledge distillation (KD) is a vital technique for deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) on resource-constrained devices by transferring knowledge from large teacher models to lightweight student models. While teacher models from third-party platforms may undergo security verification (\eg, backdoor detection), we uncover a novel and critical threat: distillation-conditional backdoor attacks (DCBAs). DCBA injects dormant and undetectable backdoors into teacher models, which become activated i…

Automated Bug Triaging using Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models
Kiana Kiashemshaki, Arsham Khosravani, Alireza Hosseinpour, Arshia Akhavan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21156 …

Automated Bug Triaging using Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models
Bug triaging, the task of assigning new issues to developers, is often slow and inconsistent in large projects. We present a lightweight framework that instruction-tuned large language model (LLM) with LoRA adapters and uses candidate-constrained decoding to ensure valid assignments. Tested on EclipseJDT and Mozilla datasets, the model achieves strong shortlist quality (Hit at 10 up to 0.753) despite modest exact Top-1 accuracy. On recent snapshots, accuracy rises sharply, showing the framework…

Lightweight Front-end Enhancement for Robust ASR via Frame Resampling and Sub-Band Pruning
Siyi Zhao, Wei Wang, Yanmin Qian
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21833 https://

Lightweight Front-end Enhancement for Robust ASR via Frame Resampling and Sub-Band Pruning
Recent advancements in automatic speech recognition (ASR) have achieved notable progress, whereas robustness in noisy environments remains challenging. While speech enhancement (SE) front-ends are widely used to mitigate noise as a preprocessing step for ASR, they often introduce computational non-negligible overhead. This paper proposes optimizations to reduce SE computational costs without compromising ASR performance. Our approach integrates layer-wise frame resampling and progressive sub-ba…

This is freakin' cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSch_NgZpQs how trees actually work. I learned a lot!

Hybrid Cryptographic Monitoring System for Side-Channel Attack Detection on PYNQ SoCs
Nishant Chinnasami, Rasha Karakchi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21606 https://

Hybrid Cryptographic Monitoring System for Side-Channel Attack Detection on PYNQ SoCs
AES-128 encryption is theoretically secure but vulnerable in practical deployments due to timing and fault injection attacks on embedded systems. This work presents a lightweight dual-detection framework combining statistical thresholding and machine learning (ML) for real-time anomaly detection. By simulating anomalies via delays and ciphertext corruption, we collect timing and data features to evaluate two strategies: (1) a statistical threshold method based on execution time and (2) a Random…

@… @… yes, I run a bunch of Discoursen (via Docker) and it's superb, but I wouldn't consider myself an authority on 'securing' it - there're lots of levels of security to consider (digital stacks have lots of layers as you know). …

For the record, I'm pretty sure that no one should care what Bill Gates thinks. He's missed/misjudged every single technological and social leap in the past 30 years. I'm amazed he's made any money at all, but I guess that's what multi-million $ trust funds and a willingness to ruthlessly exploit ill-gotten monopolies will get you.

EmbeddingGemma: Powerful and Lightweight Text Representations
Henrique Schechter Vera, Sahil Dua, Biao Zhang, Daniel Salz, Ryan Mullins, Sindhu Raghuram Panyam, Sara Smoot, Iftekhar Naim, Joe Zou, Feiyang Chen, Daniel Cer, Alice Lisak, Min Choi, Lucas Gonzalez, Omar Sanseviero, Glenn Cameron, Ian Ballantyne, Kat Black, Kaifeng Chen, Weiyi Wang, Zhe Li, Gus Martins, Jinhyuk Lee, Mark Sherwood, Juyeong Ji, Renjie Wu, Jingxiao Zheng, Jyotinder Singh, Abheesht Sharma, Divya Sreepat, Aashi …

EmbeddingGemma: Powerful and Lightweight Text Representations
We introduce EmbeddingGemma, a new lightweight, open text embedding model based on the Gemma 3 language model family. Our innovative training recipe strategically captures knowledge from larger models via encoder-decoder initialization and geometric embedding distillation. We improve model robustness and expressiveness with a spread-out regularizer, and ensure generalizability by merging checkpoints from varied, optimized mixtures. Evaluated on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) across…

Can someone remind me why no national leaders (so far as I know) are clamouring for a global, independent tax authority to rein in exploitative global corporations (and their attendant billionaires)?

On a side note, where are the Chinese-made EV station wagons? That most perfect of form factors seems to be a dying breed (and all of the current models European except for maybe Japanese Subarus, but even they're looking very bubbly-SUVy to me these days) - it's all hatches and inflated SUVs... yuck.

Very good to see this! https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-european-military-just-ditched-microsoft-for-open-source-libreoffice-heres-why/ h/t to @…

EMO-TTA: Improving Test-Time Adaptation of Audio-Language Models for Speech Emotion Recognition
Jiacheng Shi, Hongfei Du, Y. Alicia Hong, Ye Gao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25495

EMO-TTA: Improving Test-Time Adaptation of Audio-Language Models for Speech Emotion Recognition
Speech emotion recognition (SER) with audio-language models (ALMs) remains vulnerable to distribution shifts at test time, leading to performance degradation in out-of-domain scenarios. Test-time adaptation (TTA) provides a promising solution but often relies on gradient-based updates or prompt tuning, limiting flexibility and practicality. We propose Emo-TTA, a lightweight, training-free adaptation framework that incrementally updates class-conditional statistics via an Expectation-Maximizatio…

DC-VideoGen: Efficient Video Generation with Deep Compression Video Autoencoder
Junyu Chen, Wenkun He, Yuchao Gu, Yuyang Zhao, Jincheng Yu, Junsong Chen, Dongyun Zou, Yujun Lin, Zhekai Zhang, Muyang Li, Haocheng Xi, Ligeng Zhu, Enze Xie, Song Han, Han Cai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25182

DC-VideoGen: Efficient Video Generation with Deep Compression Video Autoencoder
We introduce DC-VideoGen, a post-training acceleration framework for efficient video generation. DC-VideoGen can be applied to any pre-trained video diffusion model, improving efficiency by adapting it to a deep compression latent space with lightweight fine-tuning. The framework builds on two key innovations: (i) a Deep Compression Video Autoencoder with a novel chunk-causal temporal design that achieves 32x/64x spatial and 4x temporal compression while preserving reconstruction quality and ge…

@… @… but I'm nonetheless honoured that you thought I might know!

FLORA: Efficient Synthetic Data Generation for Object Detection in Low-Data Regimes via finetuning Flux LoRA
Alvaro Patricio, Atabak Dehban, Rodrigo Ventura
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21712

FLORA: Efficient Synthetic Data Generation for Object Detection in Low-Data Regimes via finetuning Flux LoRA
Recent advances in diffusion-based generative models have demonstrated significant potential in augmenting scarce datasets for object detection tasks. Nevertheless, most recent models rely on resource-intensive full fine-tuning of large-scale diffusion models, requiring enterprise-grade GPUs (e.g., NVIDIA V100) and thousands of synthetic images. To address these limitations, we propose Flux LoRA Augmentation (FLORA), a lightweight synthetic data generation pipeline. Our approach uses the Flux 1…

Lightweight MobileNetV1 GRU for ECG Biometric Authentication: Federated and Adversarial Evaluation
Dilli Hang Rai, Sabin Kafley
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20382 https://

Lightweight MobileNetV1+GRU for ECG Biometric Authentication: Federated and Adversarial Evaluation
ECG biometrics offer a unique, secure authentication method, yet their deployment on wearable devices faces real-time processing, privacy, and spoofing vulnerability challenges. This paper proposes a lightweight deep learning model (MobileNetV1+GRU) for ECG-based authentication, injection of 20dB Gaussian noise & custom preprocessing. We simulate wearable conditions and edge deployment using the ECGID, MIT-BIH, CYBHi, and PTB datasets, achieving accuracies of 99.34%, 99.31%, 91.74%, and 98.49%,…

Damn, that was lovely.

It looks like the world might finally be doing something. The words from the Colombian and Finnish presidents are especially poignant! The US (like Russia and China) is quickly isolating itself on the global stage. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=vvSsGE6UwsI or

This is a great talk to the UN General Assembly from the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Ressa: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=d4kizE2LgUU or https://www.you…

Fast-SEnSeI: Lightweight Sensor-Independent Cloud Masking for On-board Multispectral Sensors
Jan Kn\v{e}\v{z}\'ik, Jon\'a\v{s} Herec, Rado Pito\v{n}\'ak
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20991

Fast-SEnSeI: Lightweight Sensor-Independent Cloud Masking for On-board Multispectral Sensors
Cloud segmentation is a critical preprocessing step for many Earth observation tasks, yet most models are tightly coupled to specific sensor configurations and rely on ground-based processing. In this work, we propose Fast-SEnSeI, a lightweight, sensor-independent encoder module that enables flexible, on-board cloud segmentation across multispectral sensors with varying band configurations. Building upon SEnSeI-v2, Fast-SEnSeI integrates an improved spectral descriptor, lightweight architecture…

This was a very good interview on climate change and implications in Aotearoa NZ: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2019006040/tim-lenton-how-to-fix-the-climate-crisis

Huh, think I might've figured out why one (but only one) of my NextCloud instances loses contact with the OnlyOffice instance on the same host... Figured out it *might* be because of frequent polling that's resulted in the Mailcow instance (also on the host, as I'm trying to economise) is seeing it as making too many connections and is temporarily fail2banning it nightly. I've added the host's IP(v4&6) to the Fail2Ban whitelist... 🤞 it's still connected tomorrow!<…

Jeepers, Piwigo has come out with an impressive new version! https://piwigo.org/release-16.0.0 (I've been running one for a decade or so). Hot damn, preparing to upgrade.

Nice, fairly long gentle swaying just now #eqnz... anyone else in Ōtautahi notice it?

Whelp, after a stunning summer morning here in Ōtautahi, the temp's just suddenly plummeted, dark clouds rapidly gathered, and the rain has begun.

Ooo, my small parcel form King's Seeds has just arrived **rubs hands**... my greenhouse is about to have some new residents...

Huh, how time flies. 6 or 7 years ago, at the OER Foundation, for whom I work as Open Source Technologist, we decided to replace our MailChimp with, eventually, a self-hosted instance of Mautic (https://mautic.org) to communicate with learners taking courses in our online open university courses (

Hmm - judging by the smoke, looks like there's a bush fire on the hills to the east of us somewhere (south Ōtautahi)... I'm hoping someone's on that.

Hah - interesting that this was considered newsworthy: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/576752/picton-man-uses-electric-car-to-cook-hot-breakfast-amid-power-outages during the ongoing windstorm that's knocked out po…

This is something we should all be pondering: Big tech has most of my email, because it has *all* of yours: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours

Puking in my mouth, hearing about the lionisation of Charlie Kirk. So entirely wrong. He's no hero. Just an unfortunate victim of US-style gun violence, loud-mouthed, largely ignorant, wrong-thinking agitator. Based on my exposure to him (more than I'd like) he did very little in 'good faith'. Nothing admirable to be seen.

Fascinating - https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/573694/from-new-jersey-to-aotearoa-american-teen-dedicates-year-to-te-reo-maori - good on Charlie, and Te Wānanga Takiura! I come from near where she does, w…

There are at least two Aotearoa native grass skinks in this picture... Can you see them?
#Herptophile

Yup, cats, and their wandering predatory ways, are a huge problem in Aotearoa, and getting much bigger: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-depth/579669/why-are-there-so-few-rules-for-the-millions-of-cats-that-damage-our-biodive…

Managed to dig out my cardboard eclipse glasses from last years total eclipse in the US. Had a great view! Lovely morning here in Ōtautahi!

This is what I'm rocking out to while applying system updates to 30ish VPSs on a stunning warm late spring morning in Ōtautahi... #DLO3

On RNZ right now, they're talking about how the software used by pharmacists is not even remotely fit for purpose. Imagine that. Why isn't that sort of thing being sorted by a publicly funded, openly licensed (available to all) system developed by a consortium of companies - that can be scrutinised by anyone - because it's too important to be entrusted to the proprietary gain of any one company. This stuff is a no-brainer. Some things are far too important to be dependent on a pr…

Wow, it's a stunner here in Ōtautahi, but that nor'west wind is formidable! Hope the greenhouse holds up to the onslaught!

I wonder how many digital service businesses who have been affected by the AWS outage... have all their comms to their customers also happening through that same service... Wonder how many of them recognised that issue and went 🤷‍♀️ we'll be fine.

Most days I'm reminded of this: 'expedience is the absence of principle'...

Just took a wee walk around the garden and saw at least 7 (native grass) skinks out and about, doing their thing. Warms my heart each time.

This interview https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/2019013452/emergency-departments-to-use-ai-consultations-with-patients suggests a fait accompli of 'AI' saturating ou…

This is quite splendid. Why are we settling for either Chris when we could have someone like this steering the waka?! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtSsFV9eC1Y

Many parts of the Internet I know and loath are mostly down. I hope this helps shake confidence in US BigTech. Probably won't, because if people were rational, they wouldn't have built the digital world we're currently forced to inhabit, but who knows, it might. Even the vague possibility of it has made my day better as I head to bed.

Cool, after having it sitting on my desk for a few months, doing a whole lotta nuthin', I've just updated the firmware on my Liligo-T-echo LoRA device, and got it connected to my phone... Local community-based (locally sovereign) coms, here we come! #meshtastic Thanks to @…

To all our Aotearoa-based Fediverse community - if you're eligible, have you voted in our local elections?

Hazzah & yikes! Just saw the matriarch skink in our garden - we call her 3-Legs, because she's missing her left front leg. This is my first time seeing her since last fall. She's looking rather worse for the wear. From my quick glimpse, seems she's lost most of her tail and appears to have a mostly healed wound on her side. Here's hoping she's able to recover - and perhaps even parent another brood of skinklets - this summer! It's a pretty harsh world for skinks o…

Who's the real enemy now? Extremely wealthy people (oligarchs) and large corporations (especially in health, fossil fuels, media, & tech). Everything else is probably manageable. We need to hobble the extremely wealthy and the mega corporations. We need to end the 'corporations-as-person' model. as well. It is untenable. That also means rejecting, explicitly & systemically, groups like the Atlas Network/Project 2025.
For the record, these have long been the enemy, b…

I just wrote a new blog post... "It's Aotearoa".... https://davelane.nz/its-aotearoa

Whelp, Kimmel's not even slightly wrong: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/573420/abc-yanks-jimmy-kimmel-s-show-indefinitely-after-remarks-about-charlie-kirk

Katherine Rich gives Uber far too much credit. https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/2019013122/what-uber-ruling-could-mean-for-gig-economy They didn't do any of it to 'make the world be…

This is very good: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/10/the-pivot-1.html Many thanks @…! Between you and

This seems most auspicious: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/12/yes-new-york-will-soon-be-under-new-management-but-zohran-mamdani-is-just-the-start anti-trust specialist Khan on M…

As Microsoft EOLs Windows 10, I'm reminded of why Windows is fundamentally broken, by design. https://davelane.nz/windows-broken-design When you're a global platform monopoly, your existing users are your biggest competition. Your interests and those of your customers are diametricall…

RE: https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@futuresprog/115550268885525233
Superb. It works, recursively!