Tootfinder

The @… recently released version 3 of the #PNG spec more than 2 decades after version 2 was released in 2003. The new spec largely makes official various extensions already in use like animated PNGs, HDR support, and EXIF metadata, so many browsers and graphics apps already largely suppo…

Days after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that Covid shots would be removed from the federal immunization schedule for children,
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued updated advice that largely countered Mr. Kennedy’s new policy.
The agency kept Covid shots on the schedule for healthy children 6 months to 17 years old, -- but added a new condition.
Children and their caregivers will be able to get the vaccines in consultation with a doctor…

CDC Issues New Advice on Covid Vaccines for Children That Contradicted RFK Jr.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Tuesday that the vaccine would no longer appear on the childhood immunization schedule. C.D.C.’s update counters his policy.

ICE is arresting migrants in worksite raids. Employers are largely escaping charges. (Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/06/30/ice-raids-arrests-workers-companies/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250630/p62#a250630p62

We (@…) are preparing to again publish Weekend Reads and The Internet Last Week series of posts.
We may be making some changes to our Mastodon account and blog, but otherwise it should largely resemble what we were doing before.
I know many appreciated seeing them and we missed doing them. They take us a fair bit of time and effort to compile, whic…

Is it plausible that someone who did a psychology degree in the UK in the early 1980s but went on to work in a largely unrelated field has never heard of The Trolley Problem?
I ask only for a trivial reason and to satisfy my curiosity. Backstory is that a UK talk show host took a call in the last week where the caller said, "you know The Trolley Problem?" and he said no, but I am sure he did that only so the caller would explain in their own words for the purposes of the show…

According to my napkin estimations, and also assuming (unreasonably) that we will have cracked 100% fusion efficiency of E=mc² within the next few weeks, humans will have burned up the entire mantle of the Earth in approximately 2200 years.
This is using the 2023 figures for present use (15000 Mtoe, ie about 7 tonnes annually) and its 2.2% growth rate which, while suddenly up from the long standing 1.5%, is largely pre-LLMs.

Guardian article today about a kind of 'citizens council light' (they are given just two days to discuss it) on the pay of parliamentarians. There's a delicate balance to strike. Too much pay and you might get too many of those who want to be a parliamentarian for the wrong reason; too little and you leave parliament largely to the independently wealthy and the occasional idealists who are willing to give up a well-paid job elsewhere. Tricky.

So #Gentoo #Python eclasses are pretty modern, in the sense that they tend to follow the best practices and standards, and eventually deal with deprecations. Nevertheless, they have a long history and carry quite some historical burden, particularly regarding to naming.
The key point is that the eclasses were conceived as a replacement for the old eclasses: "distutils" and "python". Hence, much like we revision ebuilds, I've named the matching eclasses "distutils-r1" and "python-r1". For consistency, I've also used the "-r1" suffix for the remaining eclasses introduced at the time: "python-any-r1", "python-single-r1" and "python-utils-r1" — even though there were never "r0"s.
It didn't take long to realize my first mistake. I've made the multi-impl eclass effectively the "main" eclass, probably largely inspired by the previous Gentoo recommendations. However, in the end I've found out that for the most use cases (i.e. where "distutils-r1" is not involved), there is no real need for multi-impl, and it makes things much harder. So if I were naming them today, I would have named it "python-multi", to indicate the specific use case — and either avoid designating a default at all, or made "python-single" the default.
What aged even worse is the "distutils-r1" eclass. Admittedly, back when it was conceived, distutils was still largely a thing — and there were people (like me) who avoided unnecessary dependency on setuptools. Of course, nowadays it has been entirely devoured by setuptools, and with #PEP517 even "setuptools" wouldn't be a good name anymore. Nowadays, people are getting confused why they are supposed to use "distutils-r1" for, say, Hatchling.
Admittedly, this is something I could have done differently — PEP517 support was a major migration, and involved an explicit switch. Instead of adding DISTUTILS_USE_PEP517 (what a self-contradictory name) variable, I could have forked the eclass. Why didn't I do that? Because there used to be a lot of code shared between the two paths. Of course, over time they diverged more, and eventually I've dropped the legacy support — but the opportunity to rename was lost.
In fact, as a semi-related fact, I've recognized another design problem with the eclass earlier — I should have gone for two eclasses rather than one: a "python-phase" eclass with generic sub-phase support, and a "distutils" (or later "python-pep517") implementing default sub-phases for the common backends. And again, this is precisely how I could have solved the code reuse problem when I introduced PEP517 support.
But then, I didn't anticipate how the eclasses would end up looking like in the end — and I can't really predict what new challenges the Python ecosystem is going to bring us. And I think it's too late to rename or split stuff — too much busywork on everyone.

PAC Bench: Do Foundation Models Understand Prerequisites for Executing Manipulation Policies?
Atharva Gundawar, Som Sagar, Ransalu Senanayake
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23725

PAC Bench: Do Foundation Models Understand Prerequisites for Executing Manipulation Policies?
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly pivotal for generalist robot manipulation, enabling tasks such as physical reasoning, policy generation, and failure detection. However, their proficiency in these high-level applications often assumes a deep understanding of low-level physical prerequisites, a capability that remains largely unverified. For robots to perform actions reliably, they must comprehend intrinsic object properties (e.g., material, weight), action affordances (e.g., grasp…

When JD Vance arrived in the Senate in 2023, he backed a raft of proposals that were characterized as reflecting a new brand of economic populism for the Republican Party.
He championed higher taxes on some businesses, increased support for families and a willingness to interfere in free markets that bordered on the heretical in the modern GOP.

Two years later, the now-vice president’s distinctive policy ideas are hard to find in the tax legislation now advancing through Congres…

JD Vance’s prior vision for populism is largely absent from GOP tax bill
The GOP tax bill advancing through Congress does not include key proposals championed by JD Vance, including a $5,000 child tax credit and a tax on executives of large banks that fail.