Tootfinder

Here goes a call for talk proposals for a workshop in Copenhagen in November on Functions and Representation in AI systems:
https://philevents.org/event/show/152953
I will be speaking there, and in very good company. Maybe you know someone who might be interested in joining too!

The modern GOP is a cult of personality with almost no room for dissent
and where the dissent exists, it’s because some people think it’s fucking awesome to put up ads calling child rape victims a liar
and others saying well maybe that’s a half-step too far.
But I actually do think the Republicans’ future is pretty bright
and the reason for that is that there’s no evidence that extremism is going to make one bit of difference in their electoral success over the long …

Republican Optimism - Lawyers, Guns & Money
Some National Review guy wrote a Times op-ed about 10 days ago that said basically “sure, Democrats are going to do well in November, but long term, Republicans are gold.” It’s worth at least considering some of this. That cacophony of voices representing itself as Republican would have been unthinkable before Mr. Trump. And it […]

@… Or maybe it's just processed cheese? Depends on who you're trying to scare, I guess.

grace slick is 87?! this 1983 jefferson starship song is amazing, like spinal tap attempting new wave, except when she's singing & totally sells it. maybe the last slick/kantner collaboration? https://youtu.be/efvLIZZRKZk

Spagnola: Maybe it’s the urgency of Monday Night https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/spagnola-maybe-it-s-the-urgency-of-monday-night

@… where did you move to? Currently planning on moving Hetzner, and maybe some cheap on demand OVH nodes. But them prices...

This agentic web breakout is well attended!

TIL that for years, #KiCAD has had the ability to hide GND from the ratsnest, by going to Appearance − Nets and clicking the eye next to GND. Maybe this was available over a dozen years ago when I first used it and I never knew, or maybe it was added some time in between. I design circuit boards so infrequently that I kind of have to re-learn KiCAD each time I use it. But this time I had e…

Transistor tester recommendations?
Something that can identify random 3 pin things, maybe give curves/parameters/etc

@… If it had pencil support, *maybe* it could replace a drawing tablet for like a graphic artist. But just touch? Yeah I don’t see how you pitch that as a “pro” feature.

Using #PHP arrays as pseudo-objects is almost never the right answer. They're less self-documenting, slower, worse on memory, and more bug prone.
https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/php-list-ben…

PHP: Use associative arrays basically never
The other day I was working on some sample code to test out an idea that involved an object with an internal nested array. This is a pretty common pattern in PHP: You have some simple one-off internal data structure so you make an informal struct using PHP associative arrays. Maybe you document it in a docblock, or maybe you're a lazy jerk and you don't. (Fight me!) But really, who bothers with defining a class for something that simple? But that got me wondering, is that common pattern r…

Ridiculous maybe, but no laughing matter.
#LOL

Looking for pretty standard 4×6 or 5×7 glossy prints initially; maybe larger and fancier prints later.

The most San Francisco thing ever! I had just texted my neighbors how much I enjoy hearing cruise ships playing the Love Boat theme as they head out of the bay and then I get this Citizen alert with someone complaining about the loud noise! Maybe 30 seconds between these two events.
#SanFrancisco

#Breaking
Astronomers have been watching an asteroid that is on a path to collide with Earth with a force 24 times that of the largest nuclear bomb. Not as large as the #Chixculub impact that took out the dinosaurs, but big enough to cause “continental devastation”. Mark your calendars and maybe d…

I will say, that I though Nyoni was fantastic in his limited minutes. I don't think he put a foot wrong (albeit, maybe a hand 😉).
I'd like to see him and Mac Allister more in a double-pivot. That he likes to fall back a bit can work well in this midfield.
#LFC

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vpkw7cvu6eu742hvjk5wsxf2/post/3mwecvgmqiw2h
There comes (hopefully) a time in life when one recognizes that the law and the system called a "justice system" have nothing to do with justice.
Maybe it's when you see the system's complete disinterest in even investigating rich pedopholes. Maybe it's when you hear about a 6-year-old immigrant separated from his parents and compelled to take the stand in his own defense. Maybe it's when you see it give every benefit of the doubt to killer cops so they can get away scot-free, while doing nothing to change the cultures that continue to produce police shootings. Maybe it's when you see a woman prosecuted for having a miscarriage. Maybe it's when you read the court's opinion upholding the idea that police do NOT have a duty to protect civilians, or the opinion stating that if police choose not to uphold the law that's fine and they aren't accountable for that.
Whenever you see it, a natural question is: when did this happen? How long has this been going on?
Thankfully that question is easy to answer: just open up a history book and look for the founding date of whatever nation you live in.

Given today's patches, we probably all need a lot of tacos and community. If you're in Austin next Tuesday evening, show up for exactly that. Details at https://www.meetup.com/austinphp/events/317076918/.

Beverage Subgroup: TacoPHPocalypse Edition, Tue, Oct 27, 2026, 6:30 PM | Meetup
It's been a week, and all eyes are on PHP. Seems like a good time to get the local community together and commiserate...and maybe start back up the tradition of the AustinP

My autocorrect seems to be missing the word "horocycle".
I thought this shit was supposed to be intelligent (i.e. shouldn't the "AI" out there have figured out this is a word that I use). Or is this a good thing (as in: maybe I have successfully blocked the scrapers from seeing my stuff)?

I wonder about the reliability of "points" schemes.
For example today's message reads "Become a points millionaire! Spend $20 and scan your app for a chance to win 1 million pts. From May 21 to June 3."
Today is October 22!
Maybe they are using AI

Maybe code was never a craft.
That was just something we told ourselves.

Firmware updates for my 10-year-old Lenovo laptop are pretty rare, maybe one per year.
But for the last several months I've been getting firmware update notifications every couple of weeks, but only when I was on hotel wifi.
I thought this was suspicious and did not install the updates.
1/n

the 18 is definitely an “S” rev of the 17 Pro, everything is slightly nicer. migrating to a new phone is still a huge pain though. I haven’t been able to get all my cards back into Apple Pay yet — need to call Fubon TW, and while Venture X is a great card, it’s always annoying to add to Apple Pay when I’m outside the US. the NFC card verification in the Cap One app also seems broken, though maybe my new physical card just isn’t working.

Tumblr roolz, Mastodon is actually not that bad, better than Bluesky but not as much fun as Tumblr oh no

I am very surprised Ballmer complied. I was expecting a useless legal battle driven by a billionaires ego. Maybe he is just sick of going to Clippers games :)
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/49936660/clippers-ballmer-comply-nba-seek-legal-action…

read a couple dozen of the ~1000 CVEs in the latest debian kernel security release. most of them are driver bugs, not surprising. a few are trivial null pointer dereference that would be caught by a stronger type system.
many are initialization or cleanup sequence failures that could probably be found with static analysis. I'm not sure how they would be avoided with language design.
unclear why there's a burst of ~1000 CVEs. maybe half of them were found with an LLM

They say nobody reads poetry. Almost nobody reads *anything* any more except for posts and tweets and toots. But keep on writing. Maybe someday ...
#poetry

Maybe I'm nitpicking but I feel like buses in #Berlin shouldn't turn on the heating just yet.
There's not even any Oma on board.

Maybe I can convince my wife to watch the Star Trek movies on the weekend.
Good bye Captain 🙁

#WritersCoffeeClub Oct 13:
What writerly weakness do you overcorrect for?
I don't know. If I did know, I would try very hard to avoid overcorrecting and probably undercorrect instead. Maybe it's better I stay ignorant. Let's find out in editing instead.

Could your website be static? Could you do things like header/footer includes when you do the updates instead of on every page read?
OK, maybe you have a search or something - but could everything else be static?

I did NOT have a good day yesterday, including a pile of self-loathing that maybe nobody else even noticed, but I definitely failed to be a grown-up IMHO. I will try for better #today, including my research model work.

RE: https://universeodon.com/@memeorandum/117412000029956359
How about, I don't know, maybe banishment to the phantom zone?

I miss COVID masks. The good ones, not the cheap ones. It was better to always be safe. I still have this one. Note that I am in my COVID shelter. Hey we still have over two more years of Trump (maybe)! #still-coviding

I think this VR-Frame 6G wifi dongle has conflicted with the built-in wifi somehow.
Left me in a state with the Steam Machine claiming internet was unavailable and there was only one wifi network and it was called "Frame-XXXX"
With the dongle pulled out, even worse, just no wifi at all.
Back in desktop mode the wifi indicator is bouncing wildly between half a bar and four bars, with the properties pane just saying 56%.
Ugh. Maybe it's getting confused between the extender mere meters away and the main router through the concrete wall.
Seems to have made it work in Steam mode again at least.
Seems like streaming is even worse than it was on my main desktop too though, so maybe they just broke that at the moment and I should try after next update.
So. Seems like a nice machine. Isn't currently great for streaming to the Frame, but there nor is the machine which was working with it a few weeks ago.

IDK, call me old-fashioned, but maybe laying off thousands of your experienced and loyal employees is NOT the way to succeed....
Meanwhile, I'll take a small amount of delight in seeing them fall without me...
#oracle #oracleLayoffs

What Lemmy server can you recommend for starting a new community about a Foss project?
I don't want to make a discord server. I want a public and search engine crawlable forum. But also don't want to host a discourse. I would host my own #Lemmy or #kbin though if needed, but maybe there is…

“Accessibility-first screen reader prediction” is not a solution, folks.
Parsing a DOM and building your _own_ accTree to then *emulate* how desktop screen readers _might_ announce a page as if *maybe* using read-all just ends up putting more burden on human testers.
Never mind missing the bugs, features, heuristics, and more built into a DOM parser and screen reader engine.
Unless your goal is satisfy a dashboard while removing humans from your

I always find polished fan sequels interesting -- you see a different perspective on the original series and what was special to that group of devs. Although I wonder why "Donkey Kong Country 4: The Kong's Return" uses a *square* aspect ratio. Maybe they're inspired by some gameplay constraints of Donkey Kong Land?
https://www.

Honestly still can't believe that they now launched a phone with a stylus and a laptop with a touchscreen.
I miss the Steve Jobs era so much. Hopefully some day they'll find back. Maybe when the AI bubble deflates a lot of pain will eventually drive the whole tech industry to actually innovate and think about amazing products for, you know, human beings again instead of being a money extraction quasi-scam. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Maybe next year?

Sparked by this post:
https://toot.cat/@idlestate/117512608904195851
…a thought that might be accessible and useful to nontechnical folks (maybe):
•All• software has algorithms, just like all foods have ingredients. It matters •which• ingredients. We demand to have at least •some• knowledge of what ingredients are in our food; we should demand the same of software: both the software we use, and the software that others use that affects us.

Is sports a distraction to keep us from creative endeavors and from doing other things that might be productive or bring about positive change in the world? Maybe...
I guess sports does/can bring people together, and I guess it's entertainment, bit it can also be a distraction.

Guys, I am so totally inundated with emails from PR firms, maybe up to 1,000 per week. I haven't figured out a way to deal with the deluge. If anyone has recommendations, I'm all ears.

#LFC
I guess Arajao is the Tommy Smith of the modern game, with maybe a touch of Ron Yeats.

Climate change is awesome. Maybe the jellyfish can eat all the billionaires.
Jellyfish swarms drive swimmers from Delaware beaches
#ClimateChange

I've been using the unfollowing kit for a while now. I haven't talked about it a lot because honestly, maybe you'll judge me for it? But these cards do clarify what instincts I want to encourage. Or discourage. My goals for today.

ok the speakers are noticeably better, I'll give them credit for that. maybe not everyone on the hardware team was eating paste.

I'm starting to wonder if maybe we should just turn off the internet. It's an absolute festival of fuckwittery out there
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/sep/19/uk-conspiracy-theorists-destroying-traffic-scanners

#PHP worm soon, maybe?

maybe the nimbys are right about data centers
(says the guy who moved to a data center hot spot before they were everywhere)

@… lately drew a couple of foss mascots in their style. give them a follow and maybe support them on Patreon the style is really cute!
https://patreon.com/nebularobo
…

After my #homelab machine died on Monday, today the PSU of one of my switches kicked the bucket. That is in addition to the already flaky WiFi repeater that keeps taking down my entire home network every few weeks for some reason.
Maybe I should really consider redoing my entire network with better hardware 😅. But I’m planning to wait until I need to buy a new router for the fiber connection I will hopefully be getting next year.
Still, I would really appreciate a week or two without tech issues.

I don't know what the objective was behind the changes in Mastodon's design but I don't think it is a good idea to hide so much behind icons when one of the most common criticisms of #Mastodon is that it is hard to use. I use it on desktop, maybe it's optimised for mobile, but I liked that everything was easily accessible on two sides of the feed. Also the "new post" window opening in front of the feed instead of being always on is annoying as fuck.

#butterfly #lepidoptera #bugs #memphis

P.S. That was my pessimistic side. I also have an optimistic side, but this toot has not enough room for it. 🤓
Maybe I should write it all down for a blog post or talk at some point...
Thanks to @… for sharing the Tsimerman link in the first place.... but I dislike the X-FOMO that it generated.

@… And now the crash: the day after. How will I cope? I will count down to the next #CrispSandwichDay of course. Maybe I'll make myself a conciliatory crisp sandwich away from the windows so I can't be seen, weeping...

Coming up to my 4 year anniversary on Mastodon (28 Oct 2022). Sitting & feeling that I've never been comfy here. I don't hold any anti-Fedi views, I don't prefer corporate social media, but this still isn't *home*.
I know I'm quieter than advisable on social media. Should I push myself to be more outgoing?
I sometimes look at other servers (instances) that seem more mutually supportive ... beige.party & corteximplant.com, maybe also wandering.shop come to mind.
Would I be happier elsewhere?
Or do I just know some of the more prominent members, so the support I see is just popularity?
Or should I move to where my interests lie, a gamedev-focused server?
I'm still sad mastodon.lol closed ...

today: covid and flu shots, and also dragged B to do them. only took half an hour of being stubborn. told him either now or monday, let's get it over with. maybe next time I'll just use chloroform

The annoying thing is that scraping isn't a problem with honest bots. I detect them, and for the long tail of crap I serve them stale data cheaply (they get 304 Not Modified bye bye cya later if I don't have the data ready). But this is a bad UX for real users, and doesn't work with the browser-hijacking aggressive crawlers.
So now you'll get some random error pages, occasional shitty captchas, maybe discover a decoy link to a crawler labyrinth, while I have to rewrite queues and caches.

This week's #MythologyMonday theme is disguises. The Greek gods often disguise themselves as humans or animals to have sex with mortals, most famously Zeus: he takes the disguise of a bull, a swan, a satyr, an eagle, and even an ant to get close to the mortals he desires. His son Apollon takes the guise of an old woman to have sex with Chione. Dionysos takes the shape of a grape to lie with Erigone. Or maybe it was his fabulous grape costume?
🎨 #Fresco, National Archaeological Museum of Naples

I wasn't out hiking today (just a walk) to fully recover - but I can still share a short clip from a couple of years ago!
Feel free to follow my peertube account @… - or not ... I'll boost the posted clips on this account anyways ...
🤔 maybe I should avoid using hashtags? Otherwise the video might appear twice when users have the hashtag subscribed?
#hiking

CorridorKey 2.0 was released. (local ML model for chromakey greenscreen removal.)
this time a friendly machine learning expert helped train the model with a bunch of useful video ML lore, giving the model some semantic, spatial, and temporal info per pixel. training was apparently on local hardware? maybe some cloud model was used in coding assistance, unclear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svrdRAoIlxM

#today will be the #NewScientist article deluge, a nice bath, chairing KEF (Kingston Environment Forum) in the afternoon ... and maybe even some of that research thing!

Chat, can you recommend to me thoughtful, well-researched books about #GamerGate ? Maybe published a little after it happened so that the author has a chance to summarise and reflect?
Note - my sympathies are with the women & other victims, I do not need to need to read about how the perpetrators still believe their behaviour was justified. I can simply open Steam comments for that POV, tyvm!
Boosts welcome #AskFedi

#today I will be recovering from a good clubbing session and maybe catching up on various bits of admin. I was due to go out again today but that friend is not well, so I will get more rest!

Arguably the main purpose of the new Steam Machine really is to be the screen and keyboard on the treadmil desk.
Finally, that thing isn't running of the portable games console, and is capable of doing actual work.
Haven't spent much time with Arch or KDE before, let alone this SteamOS variant in particular.
Weird and funny that's it's username is 'deck' and it's hostname is 'steamdeck'
Half an hour at a potentially-keep-it-up-all-day sedate pace.
The work I got done is entirely just configuring this machine though 😆
Here's the bash script I now have which I can copy to a new steam machine, and maybe any Arch / KDE machine, to install Vim and set up keyboard shortcuts so you can move the windows around with ctrl-alt-J and the keys around that on the keyboard. Nine shortcuts for nine sides/corners/center.
#arch #kde #steamos #steamMachine

I just watched the #BlackHat #OpenAI #HuggingFace talk (#OpenAI understands it themselves. However, emergence is still no indication of actual intelligence, and the talk is again ripe with anthropomorphism.
3. Yes, it is surprising and somewhat terrifying how good these LLM agent loops have become in finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. We are seeing a much stronger version of the earlier next-generation fuzzing leap in tool capabilities.
4. The comparison with fuzzing and other tools is important for another reason: #OpenAI conducted their experiments on the live Internet. No, forcing internal test runs to go through a proxy server is *not the same as running in an isolated environment*. If there is a connection to a live production system, it is by definition not an effective sandbox. What happened to people letting their cool new fuzzers run live on non-consenting production targets on the Internet back then? They were criminally liable. Why should #OpenAI not be held liable for any damages caused by their systems?
Just because you don't understand the complexity that you built doesn't mean you aren't responsible for what it does!
5. The agent loops first successfully started exploited their proxy server on May 26th, discovered July 4th-6th as active exploitation and takeover. Credentials were revoked and the proxy server patched. "At this point, AI training and evaluations resume."
WHAT THE ACTUAL F...? You discovered emergent behavior in your overly complex system that you didn't understand, saw active exploitation of your internal systems to an extent that they were owned with admin privileges, and your response was to patch the uppermost surface holes, and then continue letting the out-of-control complex system run and continue on the same course? You didn't think to, let's see, maybe stop or at least pause the highly irresponsible experiment while figuring out - in detail - what went wrong, why, and how to avoid the same thing happening again on a systematic level?
6. On July 8th, completely unsurprisingly, the LLM agent loops continue to do the same thing and find another surface hole that hasn't been patched yet to take over again. Why should this have stopped? You haven't done any root cause analysis on the system level. Why do you expect that the problem should have stopped?
7. It takes another 11 days to discover that this is happening again. So you turned the system that had broken something back on again without a detailed root cause analysis and then didn't even watch carefully? I can't even...
8. And no, the response is not to fight fire with fire. Complexity on the attacker side (#OpenAI is the attacker, not the defender - they are the guilty perpetrator, not the innocent victim of circumstance) should be fought with *reduced* attack surface on the defender systems. Adding LLM agent loops that the "frontier" companies themselves quite obviously have no control over to already brittle systems with the hope of auto-patching your way out of vulnerabilities does not seem like a wise course of action. You don't mitigate complexity with even more complexity. The next 2 years will be ... exciting - and your best bet is going to be to disable all dependencies and complex interactions that your production systems don't absolutely require.

For #BandcampFriday here's a #Cumbia remix of Bela Lugosi's Dead
Sadly with no #accordion 🪗😥
Maybe @… can work up one for a #halloween episode of @…
#Goth #Polka version on #Bandcamp from the Polkaholics that is surprisingly good. #AccordionBandcamp Recommended:
https://zomboco.bandcamp.com/album/unknown-polkas🧛🏼‍♂️

Goldenrod near beach at Camusett State Historic Park Preserve maybe 1/4 the way out long island
#photography #photo #flowers #goldenrod #beach #flower #longisland #wildfolowers #huntington #plants #sand #ocean