Tootfinder

Broncos' Patrick Surtain II: Bo Nix 'going to make a lot of noise' in 2025 https://www.nfl.com/news/broncos-patrick-surtain-ii-bo-nix-going-to-make-a-lot-of-noise-in-2025

Why Young Men Care Less About Music and Why It Matters (A Lot)
https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2025/06/why-young-men-care-less-about-music-and-why-…

Why Young Men Care Less About Music and Why It Matters (A Lot)
Explore why young men care less about music and prefer video games, as trends in music consumption shift dramatically.

Just finished "Get a Life, Chloe Brown" by Talia Hibbert. It's... much less chaste than most of the other romances I've been reading, but also incredibly sweet and positive, so I enjoyed it a lot.
My one reservation is that it does the thing a lot of romance novels do where they equate physical desire with romantic desire, and physical flirtations/advances with actual communication, and yes people equate those things in the real world all the time, by it's often really harmful when they do that.
This novel does better with consent than 99% of the field probably, and legitimately deserves props for that, so this isn't the harsh criticism I'd level if it seriously broke the "would this be okay if we didn't have access to interior monologues" test, but it skirts the edges of that a bit.
#AmReading

Ok that #fork diagram is looking a lot better than the last one. Fixed a lot of bugs in the data processing and I am starting to see some useful #information in the diagram. #qemu

Added a lot more detail to my /uses/ timeline, including software/hardware/consumer gear. Interesting to see what stuff has lasted the longest.
https://www.zachleat.com/uses/#uses-timeline

A look at the invite-only iOS and Android apps for Digg, which now operates similarly to Reddit, with links with a lot of "diggs" moving up the feed (Jay Peters/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/apps/763689/digg-mobile-ios-android-app-relaunch…

Digg’s new app is basic, but a great start
Digg has launched its new mobile apps for iOS and Android. I tried the new iOS app out, and it’s bare-bones but promising.

A sampler by Louisa Burnham, Boddington, #Northamptonshire. 1840 https://www.sheffieldauctiongallery.com/auction/lot/lot-12…

I was just browsing @… and there are a lot of accounts there posting AI art that follow no one and have just one follower.
This seems bad.
#noAI #aiArt

Columbia University trustees removed control of the student disciplinary process from the University Senate,
with the trustees taking control themselves of the process through the provost’s office.
The intent was to make sure that any student guilty of violating university regulations during an anti-genocide protest would be severely punished.
One goal is to make sure that students engaged in such protest are removed from the university and can’t do it again.
Anot…

The Situation at Columbia XVIII
When I first started writing here about what was going on at Columbia, part of the motivation was that I didn’t understand myself a lot of what was happening, especially the actions of the tr…

I used ChatGPT a lot when reading those Whitman Calamus poems. Here's everything it has remembered about me from those conversations. Its memory of me has been very useful, particularly that I want "Engagement with queer subtext when it’s plausibly present."

Enjoyed the demo for Die For The Lich. I've really enjoyed the design space of dice in video games (Dicey Dungeons, DICEOMANCER, Duck and Roll). Similar to cards, they provide explicit input randomness, but you think a lot more about probabilities and sums.
The game feels pretty streamlined, but open to a lot of depth as you earn more dice and trinkets (which you draw like dice).
#Games

US survey: most Fox News anchors saw increases in respondents who trusted them "a lot" or "some"; Anderson Cooper and Rachel Maddow saw trust levels decline (Erik Hayden/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter…

America’s Most Trusted News Stars in the Trump Era Are …
Fox News anchors rise, Joe Scarborough and Chris Cuomo fall and David Muir reigns in primetime, THR's exclusive poll finds.

The simple fact is that there are systems that are actually built to resist fascism. There have been a lot of advancements in the last couple hundred years.
We are at a breaking point. The political institutions of the US have been largely destroyed. Even another Democrat, even the best Democrat, even Bernie Sanders couldn't fix this. Every American instruction is rotten to the core.
It's time to face this fact, and figure out how to build something better. Stop believing in American exceptionalism and start looking for models of systems that are inherently resistant to fascism.

Ingesting 4 Petabytes of logs / day, that's a lot.

from my link log —
A catalog of ways that compilers generate SSA.
https://bernsteinbear.com/blog/ssa/
saved 2025-02-11 https://

I was asked to help with a video for our trail maintenance team.
On Saturday we went half way up a mountain to a good spot, did all the recordings, took lots of photos and finally also renewed all the trailmarks while going down again.
Then all the video and photo processing on sunday night and tonight.
I really learned A LOT in these days. (Not just about trail-marking😉). I know what I'd do better next time and saw again: creating good videos is REALLY hard. I'll p…

3: with a futuristic design.
I find this a little tricky; what counts as “futuristic design” depends a lot on the zeitgeist. “Dazzle Ships” certainly felt very futuristic at the time, especially when you also consider the inside design, and I think it still holds up very well. Unfortunately, the sleeve of the cassette version is completely bland…
#30AlbumCovers

3: with a futuristic design.
I find this a little tricky; what counts as “futuristic design” depends a lot on the zeitgeist. “Dazzle Ships” certainly felt very futuristic at the time, especially when you also consider the inside design, and I think it still holds up very well. Unfortunately, the sleeve of the cassette version is completely bland…
#30AlbumCovers

I'm trying to make a disc image of the M.2 drive that was in the home server. I don't have a lot of flat surfaces next to power outlets on the first floor of my house.

Like, at this point having an exploit on Xiaomi would make my life A LOT easier rn

Same, love him for most of his foreign work, hate him for his domestic
https://mstdn.ca/@Chigaze/115078960585588119

I have installed Firefox Klar (aka Firefox Focus) on my iPhone and set it to the default browser. It’s a browser specifically intended to make it easy to delete all history, cookies, etc. I feel a lot more comfortable clicking random links that people send me now.
I don’t use it for my everyday browsing; I still use normal Firefox for that.

Ah yes, unstable #firmware ABIs and C macro hell.
I've seen a lot of that. 😅

An extremely overdue blog post about the last NSR camp and the games I ran and played there, including a lot of thoughts on playing D&D 4E again many years later
https://seedlinggames.com/blogging/discourse/nsr_camp_2.html

@…, do you think we should aim at replacing `flaky` with `pytest-rerunfailures`? I see quite a lot of #Python packages are using `@flaky.flaky` decorator directly, even though they are using #pytest otherwise.

How to download videos from Vimeo, even the paywalled ones
#Vimeo

I am surprised that this article has not received much mention.
I agree with its message, which is that the maga regime is creating a legal, political, and social ratchet in which the goals of the r-party (to destroy the Federal government) will continue even if the D's were to somehow regain authority in all three branches of the Federal government.
It is not an optimistic point of view, but it makes a lot of sense.

What a Democrat Could Do With Trump’s Power
America is entering an age of retributive governing cycles.

From Monday onwards the Icelandic postal service will be severely limiting the types of parcels that can be sent to the US. The same goes for quite a few European countries. The reason is because of the way Trump's new tariffs are structured.
Evidently a lot of extra work is supposed to be carried out by the postal service in each country. I can't really describe what the problem is, mostly the new system seems confusing and is likely in breach of international agreements.

From David Suzuki
Our current economic path leads to disaster
An economic approach that rewards waste, greed and endless growth isn’t compatible with today’s reality. But as some cling to this destructive, outdated, fossil-fuelled system in their pursuit of greater wealth and power, others are experimenting with better ways.
We invent economic systems to facilitate production and distribution of goods, services and wealth, and to maintain societal stability.
...

I walked up the creek and got my feet stuck in a foot of mud and got cut up by sawgrass to get this shot of what used be a much larger beaver pond in the wet meadow upstream of my driveway
#photo #photography #water

I've just fought #fedora 42's into submission on my desktop. I added a 'omit_dracutmodules' to a /etc/dracut.conf.d/99davefix-2025.conf with a whole bunch of unused things and it's booting happily now.
It looks like the problem is that, somewhere about a month ago, as a 42 update, Dracut got bumped, and a lot more devices were added as default in the 'host_only (n…

President Coups-a-lot
bot by @…
This is for tee hee, not treason: please don't torture me.
#satire #potus45

I read this article about inattention while eating my breakfast at work and dropped sardine paté down my top and trousers in the process, the very definition of irony. I usually get quite grubby at work so I got away with it but really.
‘We’re exhausted – but not from doing too much’: can this woman help us survive the age of distraction? | Health & wellbeing | The Guardian

Working on some possible designs for tables to support three retro PCs.
Corner desk won't fit in the room (too wide).
Long table will be difficult to move upstairs and get into the room
Three small tables are a lot more work, but easier to place.

The FBI searches John Bolton's home. For what? Absent strong evidence to the contrary, this seems like obvious political retribution and distraction ploy.
There's a lot of things I don't like about JB, but his willingness to unhesitatingly and openly criticize POTUS47 is worthy of respect. He's one of a few people I'd give the benefit of the doubt to WRT to personal integrity.
#POTUS45

@… I think about this a lot too

"What sets you apart can feel like a burden, but it’s not. A lot of the time it’s what makes you great."
—Emma Stone
#acting #coaching #inspiration

While AI hasn't yet led to new physics discoveries, the tech is proving powerful in the field, aiding in experiment design and spotting patterns in complex data (Anil Ananthaswamy/Quanta Magazine)
https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-comes-up

AI Comes Up with Bizarre Physics Experiments. But They Work. | Quanta Magazine
Artificial intelligence software is designing novel experimental protocols that improve upon the work of human physicists, although the humans are still “doing a lot of baby-sitting.”

Perhaps the Dallas Cowboys aren’t as great in the draft as we thought https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/draft/perhaps-dallas-cowboys-arent-as-great-in-nfl-draft-as-we-thought

Raiders Star Continues to Garner Hype for Fantasy Season https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-chip-kelly-lesean-mccoy-ashton-jeanty-fantast-football

On the Differential Topology of Expressivity of Parameterized Quantum Circuits
Johanna Barzen, Frank Leymann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16401 https://

On the Differential Topology of Expressivity of Parameterized Quantum Circuits
Parameterized quantum circuits play a key role in quantum computing. Measuring the suitability of such a circuit for solving a class of problems is needed. One such promising measure is the expressivity of a circuit, which is defined in two main variants. The variant in focus of this contribution is the so-called dimensional expressivity which measures the dimension of the submanifold of states produced by the circuit. Understanding this measure needs a lot of background from differential topol…

Seems like a lot of people need to know this.
https://www.dictionary.com/e/immigrants-vs-emigrants-vs-migrants/

Thinking more about the PIC12F683 RE project.
I think if I really want to go all out, it might make sense to be both blog and video dual tracked, since some stuff will map better to one format or the other.
But that's gonna be a lot of work. Another option would be split media with particular parts of the analysis in one format or the other but not double covered.

Why is everything on the cloud these days?
I’m kind of getting tired of every piece of professional and business software being a SaaS or cloud-based solution these days.
I have a good computer, it can run a lot of complex programs on it locally. I wish I had the option to do so.
Not everything needs to be synced 24/7. And I’d much rather have some tools include a cloud sync functionality that backs up changes with some kind of regular frequency for version control and cross-device access, but otherwise runs on my device.
These days, when I’m trying to go work somewhere without an internet connection or am traveling and have spotty data - I can’t access 90% of my work. Files don’t back up locally even when there’s a native desktop client app. Why?
It feels wasteful, sending so much data to the internet and back with constantly required online sync and web apps.
I feel nostalgic now, remembering the days of software that would require buying a license every couple of years, that would run on your device and could be accessed even from the top of a remote mountain if you wished, and that didn’t log you out every other week.
#tech #software

David Gerard on the "AI doomers"/"rationalists" and their beliefs.
In the end they are a bunch of eugenicist, racist losers afraid of death.
(Original title: AI doomsday and AI heaven: live forever in AI God)
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/08/17/ai-

AI doomsday and AI heaven: live forever in AI God
I get a lot of requests for a piece on the AI 2027 paper. That’s the one that draws a lot of lines going up on a graph to show we’re getting a genuine artificial general intelligence by 2027! Then …

I was feeling pretty drained last night and wasn't sure if I should bike to work today. My knee was really bugging me going up steps (more than usual) and I decided I would wait til morning to decide, based on how I felt.
I felt totally fine this morning. Reset! I think it's because I walked nearly 5 miles yesterday, and also spent a lot of time on the floor fixing a laser cutter.

Even though Nancy Cartwright's been giving millions of fuckin dollars of Simpsons money to Scientology over the years, at least a lot of it is from dick and ball jokes

Putin throws 'a lot of b*llshit', Trump says as he 'looks strongly' at sanctions bill: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/08/putin-throws-a-lot-of.html

Did I just spend 40 minutes of my life (having a LOT of stuff to do) watching a video about the Eurovision Song Contest?
Did I just upvoted an Eurovision video for the first time in my life?
Yes. Yes, I did do all that.
https://youtu.be/THgn1w7Lzvo

Getting another treat today from #PyConUK2025 because @… is on stage! Such a LOT of great advice about running and scaling projects.

not enough people have heard of
THE TRAIN PIRATES
https://youtu.be/kG8fmSW_5wM
back in 2008 on BBC3 there was a sketch comedy series called THE WRONG DOOR which featured a lot of visual comedy and special effects
stuff like dinosaurs in a pub, that would have been cutting edge 1…

Dan Quinn on Brian Robinson trade situation: 'A lot of moving parts this time of year' https://www.nfl.com/news/dan-quinn-on-brian-robinson-trade-situation-a-lot-of-moving-parts-this-time-of-year

Back to Future town square:
- past: park
- present: parking lot
- future: park
#urbanism

How often do you stop to consider how much harm has come from the absurd capitalist notion of "everyone must work for living" [does not apply to the rich], and its sister notion "everyone must work full hours"?
How many harmful technologies couldn't be phased out because it meant a lot of people losing their only source of income? How many destructive industries have been proliferating simply because closing them down would mean a lot of people without jobs? How much further are we going to push for the absurd notion of infinite growth?
And of course it only applies to the quasi-privileged groups. Nobody cares when lots of "low-tech" people are laid off and told to find a new job, because techbros need their new "high-tech" (read: more destructive to the planet) ideas to sell.
#AntiCapitalism #ClimateCrisis

Addressing Bias in Algorithmic Solutions: Exploring Vertex Cover and Feedback Vertex Set
Sheikh Shakil Akhtar, Jayakrishnan Madathil, Pranabendu Misra, Geevarghese Philip
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14509

Addressing Bias in Algorithmic Solutions: Exploring Vertex Cover and Feedback Vertex Set
A typical goal of research in combinatorial optimization is to come up with fast algorithms that find optimal solutions to a computational problem. The process that takes a real-world problem and extracts a clean mathematical abstraction of it often throws out a lot of "side information" which is deemed irrelevant. However, the discarded information could be of real significance to the end-user of the algorithm's output. All solutions of the same cost are not necessarily of equal impact in the …

If we had any multibillionaires who wanted to make a big splash in effectively fighting the Fash, fully funding CPB (and hence, indirectly, PBS and NPR) would be a useful thing. A billion dollars is a lot of money, no one needs even one, much less more than one.
Sadly, we don’t.

A second thought now, newly surfacing in the wake of the Wordpress fiasco and the emerging Ruby gems crisis:
We should pay a lot more attention to the •human system• dependencies we’re introducing when we import a library, not just the code.
2/

One would hope that this actually is a violation of law - There certainly are no exigent issues requiring this abusive treatment. I would feel a lot better if I saw a concerted action from Congress - or at least the #Democrats, in the hope that a few #GOP might join in - to stop this. But I fear that's …

One would hope that this actually is a violation of law - There certainly are no exigent issues requiring this abusive treatment. I would feel a lot better if I saw a concerted action from Congress - or at least the #Democrats, in the hope that a few #GOP might join in - to stop this. But I fear that's …

People are already moving stuff into office while workmen are completing finish working inside
#cornell #photo #photography

So I don't think that readability is an issue in liquid glass? I think as part of a dynamic system it's always pretty much OK.
What I'm less sure of is that there are a lot of places where the UI used to disappear in various apps and now there's always something floating on the screen, that's moving in the corner of your eye as you scroll…
#iOS26

Been a lot of monarchs in the neighborhood this week. I found one on the sunflowers in the backyard but the picture didn't turn out. So, of course, I had to draw it. :) #bloomscrolling #monarch

Just finished "Barda" by Ngozu Ukadi. I don't normally grab classic comics or their modern successors from the library, and this exception to that rule has reminded me why I prefer to stick with other stuff, especially indie graphic novels: the stories are just so blocky & uninspired. I don't say "childish" since there are plenty of great books in the kids graphic novel section that I've enjoyed. It's also true that *some* of the classic stuff is deeper than the rest. But the average "comic" is not going to be very high on my list of stuff I enjoy, and this, while passable, was no exception to that generalization.
Still might look for other stuff by this author, since I'm pretty sure a lot of the issues with mainline comics can be publisher-dictated.
#AmReading

I follow a lot of bands on Tidal I don't like yet because I believe they could release something I would like.
Finding music I like it a big time sink!
#music

I’m so tired of this big lot in the Mission sitting fenced and vacant in the midst of a housing crisis. For a while I thought vacancy tax, now I’m thinking eminent domain. Reportedly owned by an old lady in the Sunset who refuses to do anything with it.

Season 3 of Strange New Worlds is making a lot of choices, that aren't really working.

If you have a lot of time (and I do mean a LOT!), Federico Viticci’s deep dive into #iOS26 / #iPadOS26 is well worth the read! I spent much of last night and some time early this morning working my way through it, trying different things out, and generally *learning* so much about this new o/s from

I have a lot of devices (~15) on my home wifi network. Around me are also 10-15 neighboring wifi networks as well as nearly 30 bluetooth devices of various origins.
I find it incredibly funny that using wireless bluetooth headphones throws me back to the vinyl record days where you hear constant popping, cracking and skipping.
All this fancy technology just to come full circle. 😄
Luckily, my particular pair came with an optional wire. 🎧

Mailbag: Should Cowboys hit more in training camp? https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/mailbag-should-cowboys-hit-more-in-training-camp

Clowney to dispute arrest in S.C. parking dispute https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46315732/cowboys-jadeveon-clowney-arrested-south-carolina-parking-lot-dispute

From a story in today’s Wall Street Journal about Woody Allen and his new novel:

Though he’s already at work on a second novel, he rarely reads fiction—“I feel like I’m wasting time.”
More often he reads philosophy and books by physicists.
“I keep thinking I’m going to learn something of deep value that’s going to make me feel better in life,” he says.
“It never does.”

Two Number Theory Items (and Woody Allen)
James Douglas Boyd has recently spent a lot of time interacting with Mochizuki and others at RIMS working in anabelian geometry. Material from interviews he conducted are available here (Mochizuki …

Post Edited: Duston and St James tramways https://edintone.com/duston-tramway/ Old maps reveal a lot about our town. The landscape of St James and Duston has changed unr

Duston and St James tramways - Miscellanea Edintone
Old maps reveal a lot about our town. The landscape of St James and Duston has changed unrecognisably in the last 100 years. Examining an OS map surveyed in

WATCH: Raiders LB Coach John Glenn Speaks Following Training Camp https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-tyree-wilson-pete-carroll-maxx-crosbu-john-glenn

👾 Invasion intensifies on Karipuna Indigenous land in the Brazilian Amazon
https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/08/invasion-intensifies-on-karipuna-indigenous-land-in-the-brazilian-amazon/

Invasion intensifies on Karipuna Indigenous land in the Brazilian Amazon
Illegal invasions in the Karipuna Indigenous Territory in the northwest of the Brazilian Amazon have started to advance again, Karipuna leaders told Mongabay following an alert by global nonprofit Survival International. “This year has been very difficult because there are a lot of people on our territory,” André Karipuna, the chief of the Karipuna people, […]

Been playing Transiruby and the exploration poetics are top-notch, like rivalling Super Metroid good, which is a distinct rarity among metroidvanias.
Something the original Super Metroid had was required secrets and the expectation that you'd actually read the map as a gameplay skill. Many many metroidvanias don't have that, including favorites like Ori, but it's one of the things that makes Hollow Knight stand out. Transiruby sadly doesn't have maps-as-rewards, but it does have moments where consulting the map is expected (water cog is a big one since it's in the middle of an already-explored area by the time you can access it). The game also requires revisits with the coin door mechanic, but marks the things you need on the map and structures revisits really nicely with a variety of shortcuts that open up as you gain abilities.
I was kinda sad when the first movement power was double jump (le sigh) but the second movement power is really neat and original, so I'm happy again.
Besides the big things, there are a lot of little moments where there's ludonarrative harmony between the choice structures and the area themes/plot points.
Haven't finished it yet, but so far it's headed into my top tier of metroidvanias, or very close, even despite fairly simple combat and easy (if fun) bosses.
#Transiruby #AmPlaying #Metroidvania

Honestly, I just feel more like myself when I lean into the feminine side of things. It feels way more natural than when I try to act more masculine. Being gender fluid can be a lot of fun, but sometimes it sucks to remember I was assigned male at birth and still have to deal with having male genitals.
I live in Norway, so being openly trans isn’t too bad here. Still, I haven’t come out to everyone yet, and that’s something I’m taking my time with. I want to feel ready before I take th…

Sir Lies-a-lot
bot by @…
No laws were broken in the making of this bot: let's not get carceral over comedy.
#satire #potus45

3 Cowboys' receivers Dak Prescott will target after CeeDee Lamb injury https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/dallas-cowboys/news/cowboys-receivers-dak-prescott-target-ceedee-injury/59202e2bc00e46949e622d9a

Lot of things I see kids do on these TV crime dramas (and it's TV, but much is based on real type events) I just can't imagine, this has to be some outlier shit. It makes me think maybe my friends growing up weren't as bad as they could've been. Because if anyone in our friend group had brought up ANYTHING like the shit some of these kids are doing, anyone I knew would've been like "get the fuck outta here". We didn't tolerate abusive shit. Maybe it was the …

The excellent @… (https://erinkissane.com) has written a lot about the idea of “governance” in tech: the human networks and processes that surround the things that we build. Erin has proposed — and I agree, though I long failed to see it! — that governance is the gaping hole in the way we build OSS, shared infra, and the whole technology commons.
3/

How the Raiders' Offseason Has Earned Confidence, Believers https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-chris-canty-pete-carroll-maxx-crosby-chip-kelly

#ScribesAndMakers 22
Show us something you've created. Tell us the story behind it.
https://cs.wellesley.edu/~pmwh/labyrinfinite/
I was thinking on a dog walk about how most games with procedurally generated content like Minecraft get pretty repetitive at some point if you zoom out far enough, and large-scale structures that have structural constraints like rivers are very hard to generate piecemeal. So I wanted to come up with an algorithm that could generate globally-consistent structures piece-by-piece, with consistency even if pieces were generated out-of-order, while maintaining only a fixed amount of context no matter how far from the origin you went. This demo is *almost* that, except the amount of context scales logarithmically with the distance-from-origin, which I find a very acceptable compromise. In the demo, there's a single infinitely-long path that eventually touches every cell of the infinite 2D grid (okay, computer limitations mean it's not really infinite, but mathematically it could be). You can get different path structures from different random seeds, although the generation trick does constrain things a lot relative to the set of all possible such paths (notice that in each 5x5 region it touches every cell before leaving; that's not in general necessary).

In a remarkable turn from prominent American conservatives,
-- who until Trump’s return to power in January had long complained of a censorious leftwing “cancel culture”
-- now seem happy to reframe that, too, as “consequence culture”.
Nancy Mace, a House representative, sounded a lot like the progressives she has often decried for their political correctness when she declaredlast week, during an effort to censure one of her opponents in Congress, that “free speech isn’t f…

Jaguars bet big on Travis Hunter -- through three weeks, his usage hasn't matched the cost

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/jaguars-bet-bi…

Google unveils the $999 Pixel 10 Pro and $1,199 10 Pro XL, with 6.3" and 6.8" OLED displays, Tensor G5 chips, Zoned UFS storage, available on August 28 (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2025/08/20/google-pixel-10-pro-xl-seri…

Pixel 10 Pro and Pro XL are all about upgrades you can’t see, still starting at $999 [Hands-on]
Google Pixel 10 Pro series doesn't have much in the way of visual updates, but it packs a lot of upgrades under the hood for the same price.

Raiders Wide Receiver Position Battles in Training Camp https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-position-battles-training-camp-jack-bech-jakobi-meyers-tre-tucker-geno-smith

I’d venture that the situation depicted in the classic and obligatory xkcd on the topic (https://xkcd.com/2347/) is rooted in the failure to distinguish (1) and (2).
So is a lot of OSS burnout: somebody shares something cool in the spirit of (1), maybe even tries to be a good individual steward of it, and next thing you know people are beating down their door with demands and complaints as if they are (2).
6/

Overly academic/distanced ethical discussions
Had a weird interaction with @/brainwane@social.coop just now. I misinterpreted one of their posts quoting someone else and I think the combination of that plus an interaction pattern where I'd assume their stance on something and respond critically to that ended up with me getting blocked. I don't have hard feelings exactly, and this post is only partly about this particular person, but I noticed something interesting by the end of the conversation that had been bothering me. They repeatedly criticized me for assuming what their position was, but never actually stated their position. They didn't say: "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, it's actually Y." They just said "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, please don't assume my position!" I get that it's annoying to have people respond to a straw man version of your argument, but when I in response asked some direct questions about what their position was, they gave some non-answers and then blocked me. It's entirely possible it's a coincidence, and they just happened to run out of patience on that iteration, but it makes me take their critique of my interactions a bit less seriously. I suspect that they just didn't want to hear what I was saying, while at the same time they wanted to feel as if they were someone who values public critique and open discussion of tricky issues (if anyone reading this post also followed our interaction and has a different opinion of my behavior, I'd be glad to hear it; it's possible In effectively being an asshole here and it would be useful to hear that if so).
In any case, the fact that at the end of the entire discussion, I'm realizing I still don't actually know their position on whether they think the AI use case in question is worthwhile feels odd. They praised the system on several occasions, albeit noting some drawbacks while doing so. They said that the system was possibly changing their anti-AI stance, but then got mad at me for assuming this meant that they thought this use-case was justified. Maybe they just haven't made up their mind yet but didn't want to say that?
Interestingly, in one of their own blog posts that got linked in the discussion, they discuss a different AI system, and despite listing a bunch of concrete harms, conclude that it's okay to use it. That's fine; I don't think *every* use of AI is wrong on balance, but what bothered me was that their post dismissed a number of real ethical issues by saying essentially "I haven't seen calls for a boycott over this issue, so it's not a reason to stop use." That's an extremely socially conformist version of ethics that doesn't sit well with me. The discussion also ended up linking this post: https://chelseatroy.com/2024/08/28/does-ai-benefit-the-world/ which bothered me in a related way. In it, Troy describes classroom teaching techniques for introducing and helping students explore the ethics of AI, and they seem mostly great. They avoid prescribing any particular correct stance, which is important when teaching given the power relationship, and they help students understand the limitations of their perspectives regarding global impacts, which is great. But the overall conclusion of the post is that "nobody is qualified to really judge global impacts, so we should focus on ways to improve outcomes instead of trying to judge them." This bothers me because we actually do have a responsibility to make decisive ethical judgments despite limitations of our perspectives. If we never commit to any ethical judgment against a technology because we think our perspective is too limited to know the true impacts (which I'll concede it invariably is) then we'll have to accept every technology without objection, limiting ourselves to trying to improve their impacts without opposing them. Given who currently controls most of the resources that go into exploration for new technologies, this stance is too permissive. Perhaps if our objection to a technology was absolute and instantly effective, I'd buy the argument that objecting without a deep global view of the long-term risks is dangerous. As things stand, I think that objecting to the development/use of certain technologies in certain contexts is necessary, and although there's a lot of uncertainly, I expect strongly enough that the overall outcomes of objection will be positive that I think it's a good thing to do.
The deeper point here I guess is that this kind of "things are too complicated, let's have a nuanced discussion where we don't come to any conclusions because we see a lot of unknowns along with definite harms" really bothers me.

#NowPlaying this really wild album I only saw because KEXP said they were playing it.. a lot of what they mention I dislike, but I always try all of it, because well, sometimes, there's gems..
Land of Echo is producer Rob Mac collaborators, lots of female vocals, etc- it's a mix of funk, disco, soul, dance- I dig it. Catchy, chill, spacey, weird.
LP 'Almost Music':

Overlooked Raiders Unit Must Improve Quickly https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-tom-mcmahon-pete-carroll-dan-quinn

A lot of MAGA anger is performative and dictated to them by their leaders.
Demonstrating that ours isn't is one of the more powerful things we can do right now.
#canceldisney
https://bsky.a…

🍁🇨🇦Team Canada Forever🇨🇦🍁 (@teamcanadaforever.bsky.social)
Disney has lost nearly $4 Billion in three days from combined stock price collapse and cancelled subscriptions.

Raiders Defense Focused on Fixing Key Issues Ahead of Week 4 https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-eric-stokes-darien-porter-pete-carroll

Steelers backup QB shares his true feelings on Aaron Rodgers: 'He gets misinterpreted a lot'

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/steeler

I just finished "An Ember in the Ashes" by Sabaa Tahir. I picked it up because I found her non-fantasy novel "All My Rage" extremely compelling, and I enjoyed fantasy a lot as a genre in my youth but as my politics have changed I'm too disappointed to enjoy a lot of fantasy any more but I thought Tahir might not fall into that.
Although I don't think Ember in the Ashes is bad, it's definitely not what I was looking for, and I don't think I'll pursue the sequels, at least not right now.
Overall the writing was weaker in a lot of ways than All My Rage, and in terms of basic fantasy quality, the worldbuilding was noticeably lacking, the romantic subplot felt stilted, and the politics were a bit murky. Compared to what I felt was Tahir's deft, delicate, and very meaningful handling of trauma in All My Rage, trauma in Ember felt overused and thin.
I also recently finished "Black Panther Red Wolf" by Marlon James, which had excellent world building and (to me) a much more nuance in both romance and in handling trauma. The politics felt a bit off for this one too I guess, but for me it was an overall more enjoyable (if much more difficult) read.
#AmReading

Raiders' Offensive Success Will Depend On One Thing https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-ashton-jeanty-pete-carroll-geno-smith-chip-kelly-kolton-miller

For the past three weeks, I’ve been attending protests at the Broadview ICE facility.
There’s been a vigil there for almost two decades at this point, but they started ramping up after three protesters were arrested four weeks ago.
Three weeks ago, we went, and it was very peaceful.
We ended up actually getting a car to turn around.
Last week, when we went, ICE assaulted a lot of us.
We went early because they changed their deportation time to around 6 a.m.

I’m a Congressional Candidate. I Was Assaulted by ICE.
An interview with Kat Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old Democratic House candidate in Illinois, who was violently thrown to the ground twice at a peaceful protest in Illinois on Friday morning.

Maxx Crosby details massive shift in relationship with Jackson Powers-Johnson https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/news/maxx-crosby-massive-shift-relationship-jackson-powers-johnson/4…