Tootfinder

Also... why!?! Well, I like to make weird stuff.
I plan to take this to Maker Faire Milwaukee... and maybe ride it around the neighborhood!?
And I gotta say, pedaling while programming a drum machine is a trip. I used to do it just sitting at a desk but hey, exercise while making beats? It's a win-win!
#bikeTooter

As I've seen a good number of people here post about "Worktree.ca" as a "Canadian-owned" alternative to GitHub: it's a closed-source fork of Gitea which "one day" (maybe, if the company doesn't change its mind) will be open core. It also runs on AWS…
Not that it's any of my business, but migrating there feels like the code-equivalent of leaving Twitter for Bluesky: Moving from one company-owned walled garden to the next, without having learned a lesson. All painted in a nationalist cash grab. 🤷‍♂️

@… I’m definitely seeing this more as well! My body goes, “welp, time to get up, I do not care that you were on your computer until 3am”.
I guess it’s also seasonal: it’s very bright out, and I feel it, even when my partner makes the room as dark as possible.
Maybe I should start on the melatonin again…

Remember when XML-RPC got cool so everyone rushed to haphazardly attach endpoints to their stuff? And then how also everyone found that maybe they should have rushed less to a more complete solution that actually took care of things like… security?
Ok, now: MCP.

The ref cam is also stupid. The perspective is way too distant and the jostling of video on a running human without stabilizing technology is too ridiculous to actually show anything.
PGMOL can’t even get VAR right with umpteen HD replays, so maybe they’re happy to have a ragged replay as a face-saving charade.
If it was accurately synced to what Simon Hooper saw, large sections of the game would be blank screens. He’s hopeless. I don’t need a camera affixed to his chest to see t…

How does this car pass a safety inspection? I mean, maybe the no-doors thing is ok, but no wing mirrors?

Submitted a potentially high impact paper to Nature Climate Change. They have rejected and suggested NPJ atmospheric science.
Frankly, I don't want to spend enormous amounts of money at Springer, I was already ambivalent about NCC. So where next? I'm thinking maybe the Cryosphere? But perhaps we should give Science or PNAS a go? (Also expensive).
Scientific publishing is so broken, too many publications but we all rely on publishing for our careers and future grants. (And we need this one to be published, it's actually quite important).
#academicchatter

As I've seen a good number of people here post about "Worktree.ca" as a "Canadian-owned" alternative to GitHub: it's a closed-source fork of Gitea which "one day" (maybe, if the company doesn't change its mind) will be open core. It also runs on AWS…
Not that it's any of my business, but migrating there feels like the code-equivalent of leaving Twitter for Bluesky: Moving from one company-owned walled garden to the next, without having learned a lesson. All painted in a nationalist cash grab. 🤷‍♂️

Finally started up an account on @… - wish it imported Switch games (I've finished far more of those) - but it's a great site and service, and these are my stats after linking Steam, GOG and Xbox accounts and importing from there. Pretty fucked up 😂 But maybe this will get me to finish more games. Not always for lack of trying. I'm also f…

@… I'm definitely one of the people who considers "persuasion" to be bad, no matter how good the message you're trying to persuade someone into might be.
And honestly, I don't think I can put a fine point on *why* that is. Maybe some vague notion that personal freedom should also encompass the freedom to draw your own conclusion…

Am reading a bit about nations vs states & also about minorities in Ukraine, mentally comparing a couple of books.
It's early days but I'm realising that my concepts of what is a nation, what is a minority etc are maybe very different to concepts used in Europe??
My reaction to paragraphs about having multiple religions/languages in one nation is: yes, that's normal, mate.

I don't understand how people actually enjoy using sway. I live in terminals more than most, but I also enjoy having fancy features available like window controls and maybe a browseable menu of applications installed on my system. Sway's level of asceticism feels performative.

Subtooting since people in the original thread wanted it to be over, but selfishly tagging @… and @… whose opinions I value...
I think that saying "we are not a supply chain" is exactly what open-source maintainers should be doing right now in response to "open source supply chain security" threads.
I can't claim to be an expert and don't maintain any important FOSS stuff, but I do release almost all of my code under open licenses, and I do use many open source libraries, and I have felt the pain of needing to replace an unmaintained library.
There's a certain small-to-mid-scale class of program, including many open-source libraries, which can be built/maintained by a single person, and which to my mind best operate on a "snake growth" model: incremental changes/fixes, punctuated by periodic "skin-shedding" phases where make rewrites or version updates happen. These projects aren't immortal either: as the whole tech landscape around them changes, they become unnecessary and/or people lose interest, so they go unmaintained and eventually break. Each time one of their dependencies breaks (or has a skin-shedding moment) there's a higher probability that they break or shed too, as maintenance needs shoot up at these junctures. Unless you're a company trying to make money from a single long-lived app, it's actually okay that software churns like this, and if you're a company trying to make money, your priorities absolutely should not factor into any decisions people making FOSS software make: we're trying (and to a huge extent succeeding) to make a better world (and/or just have fun with our own hobbies share that fun with others) that leaves behind the corrosive & planet-destroying plague which is capitalism, and you're trying to personally enrich yourself by embracing that plague. The fact that capitalism is *evil* is not an incidental thing in this discussion.
To make an imperfect analogy, imagine that the peasants of some domain have set up a really-free-market, where they provide each other with free stuff to help each other survive, sometimes doing some barter perhaps but mostly just everyone bringing their surplus. Now imagine the lord of the domain, who is the source of these peasants' immiseration, goes to this market secretly & takes some berries, which he uses as one ingredient in delicious tarts that he then sells for profit. But then the berry-bringer stops showing up to the free market, or starts bringing a different kind of fruit, or even ends up bringing rotten berries by accident. And the lord complains "I have a supply chain problem!" Like, fuck off dude! Your problem is that you *didn't* want to build a supply chain and instead thought you would build your profit-focused business in other people's free stuff. If you were paying the berry-picker, you'd have a supply chain problem, but you weren't, so you really have an "I want more free stuff" problem when you can't be arsed to give away your own stuff for free.
There can be all sorts of problems in the really-free-market, like maybe not enough people bring socks, so the peasants who can't afford socks are going barefoot, and having foot problems, and the peasants put their heads together and see if they can convince someone to start bringing socks, and maybe they can't and things are a bit sad, but the really-free-market was never supposed to solve everyone's problems 100% when they're all still being squeezed dry by their taxes: until they are able to get free of the lord & start building a lovely anarchist society, the really-free-market is a best-effort kind of deal that aims to make things better, and sometimes will fall short. When it becomes the main way goods in society are distributed, and when the people who contribute aren't constantly drained by the feudal yoke, at that point the availability of particular goods is a real problem that needs to be solved, but at that point, it's also much easier to solve. And at *no* point does someone coming into the market to take stuff only to turn around and sell it deserve anything from the market or those contributing to it. They are not a supply chain. They're trying to help each other out, but even then they're doing so freely and without obligation. They might discuss amongst themselves how to better coordinate their mutual aid, but they're not going to end up forcing anyone to bring anything or even expecting that a certain person contribute a certain amount, since the whole point is that the thing is voluntary & free, and they've all got changing life circumstances that affect their contributions. Celebrate whatever shows up at the market, express your desire for things that would be useful, but don't impose a burden on anyone else to bring a specific thing, because otherwise it's fair for them to oppose such a burden on you, and now you two are doing your own barter thing that's outside the parameters of the really-free-market.

That's the other problem with academic publishing, it takes soooooo long. I genuinely believe preprint servers are where the exciting stuff is now, but it can be hard to find and keeping up with published literature alone is almost impossible. But when it takes maybe 2 years to come through the process...
(And I'm an editor for the Cryosphere - I realise I'm often the road block- but it also has to be squeezed in around the day job).

Looks like the Goo.gl link shortener dies next month. A reminder of why link shorteners are a bad idea.
(Also note that ".ly" is owned by the country of Libya. Maybe not the most stable place to park your content behind as well).
https://developers.googleblog.co…

Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available- Google Developers Blog
Understand how you will be impacted by our decision to turn off the serving portion of Google URL Shortener.

I’m pretty sure seeing my country bombed by an habitually violent country, causing me direct hardship, or maybe taking the lives of my friends and family, would not make me particularly “happy”.
#ukpolitics #iran

Iranian People Are 'Happy' About US Strikes On Nuclear Facilities, Former UK Security Minister Claims
Tom Tugendhat also pointed to the "silence" from Iran's neighbouring countries. The general public in Iran will be “happy” about the US strikes on …

Genuinely interested in any thoughts as to where to send it next. The subject is Antarctica and influences on observed ice sheet change
#academicchatter

Drinking a few beers and playing games to shakedown the NES NESRGB install. Also, I'm 99% I've got the audio stuff sorted maybe...
#nes

Still rocking this for my #WristCheck. I actually really like this one.
On the one hand there is a lot going on on that dial bit it remains readable and everything present serves a purpose. No extraneous text* or logos, so while it is busy, it's also clean.
* Ok, ok maybe the tiny "JAPAN MOVT" at the bottom is pointless but it's so small it's almost not r…

A friend (who is also a mathematician) sent us feedback that this text is maybe too optimistic and contributes to the general public trusting LLMs to do math. If that is read in there, I have done a terrible job writing it. So let me quote the core of my answer:
On the societal level it is a disaster. Look what it has done to education already and it will not stop there. I think math research as we know it is in big danger.
#llm #math
1/n
https://machteburch.social/@tomkalei/115038889042353525

So this is weird; I picked up a new Bluetooth adapter so I could better test Meshtastic devices and my AAC-only Bluetooth headphones just work with it.
Maybe the root of my issue was just an incompatible radio, though I wouldn't have expected that to make a difference.... I dunno.
Also I think I may try to do a video of the configuration and installation of my next radio, though it'll be a couple weeks for it to be delivered.
Bonus points if I can figure out how the…

Calm down…
Despite the obnoxious footers you sometimes see on email written by the silly, no one can obligate you to protect data that they sent to you without some sort of contract. Maybe if you’re an employee, you have made an explicit agreement to protect your employer’s data. Maybe there is an implied agreement to protect information of your employer’s business partners. But there is NO blanket duty of care for email sent to you any more than there is for snail mail.

Dear Lazyweb!
I plan to go on a cycling holiday on the long weekend this week. I can't decide where to go 🙂
Someone help me choose!
- Andorra - I have been before, lots of climbs, some annoying drivers, good food and shopping
- Puigcerda - easy access to some routes into France. I also been before, but only with others
- La Seu d'Urgell - just driven through so far, maybe new hills?
Any help appreciated. Be it 🎲 or 🤖 or random google image searc…

Quarto Manuscript makes me almost want to write scientific articles again. This could potentially change the process quite a lot. But maybe there is also a good use for it in internal project reports. https://quarto.org/docs/manuscripts/

Quarto Manuscripts – Quarto

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.

Orthonormal Strichartz estimates on torus and waveguide manifold and applications
Divyang G. Bhimani, Subhash. R. Choudhary
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16712

Orthonormal Strichartz estimates on torus and waveguide manifold and applications
We establish orthonormal Strichartz estimates for the fractional Schrödinger equations on torus and waveguide manifold. In the process, we also improve $\ell^2$ decoupling inequality and establish classical fractional Strichartz estimates on waveguide manifold. This maybe of independent interest. As an application, we establish local well-posednes for the Hartree equations with infinitely many particles with non-trace class initial data.

Okay, I wrote a little bit about Sly, and about Janet and Prince, and the very first thing I ever blogged about, and how Sly maybe invented some not-small part of the world we live in. And also about the scariest live show I've ever been to. https://www.anildash.com/2025/06/09/sly-st

Sly Stone and the Scariest Show Ever
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Oh, interesting. After two days and two nights powered down in the cradle, on the third day it is risen!
Strange.
Maybe whatever controls the charging can drain from the battery even when it's at zero until even that bit of battery is also at zero and then that forces the firmware controlling the charging to reset?
Anyway. It seems to be alive again and now starts charging when put in the cradle properly.
So I guess it's back!

#pineTime #smartWatch

There used to be this deal between Google (and other search engines) and the Web: You get to index our stuff, show ads next to them but you link our work. AI Overview and Perplexity and all these systems cancel that deal.
And maybe - for a while - search will also need to die a bit? Make the whole web uncrawlable. Refuse any bots. As an act of resistance to the tech sector as a whole.

Do transit planners realize they're helping the anti-Mamdani frenzy by publishing their pieces? Of *course* you're getting attention for your fares-are-good-actually writing now, despite the fact that no one cares about this normally - because billionaire media wants whatever they can use against Mamdani.
(As an aside, you also sound incredibly obnoxious when voters are like "we want fast & free buses" and you respond with "well actually..")

Jesse Raub (@jesseraub.bsky.social)
damn, it's also like he's already advocating for all of those things as part of his proposal. it's like maybe you didn't even read what his free bus fare policy included

There is lots of talk that using correct punctuation like “curly quotes”—or em-dashes—in – as it looks for me – US book style is a hint for AI-generated text. As LLMs basically are statistical parrots with some syntax engine that are based on vector similarity on their training data I suppose this means AI were predominantly trained on books (and maybe newspaper articles) with proper copy-editing.
This also means all the biases and the racism etc comes from this properly edited books t…

The pub also had proper old school arcade games -- one Pac Man and one Space Invaders -- set to free play. And there was a young lad, looked maybe 11 or 12, having the time of his life on those.
#RetroGaming #Pacman #SpaceInvaders

see also the #Anduril corporatese home page http://www.anduril.com for a slick peek at all the kewl weapons tech our #Instagram and #Facebook friends now power with their loyal attention.
Trouble is, telling them doesn't work. This frustration feels maybe something like what the kids say they feel like when their parents watch Fox?

📌 Pinned Introduction
Hey, I’m Erik. I’m an anarchist with an embarrassingly massive crush on Rudolf Rocker’s syndicalist take. I’m also bisexual, autistic, and genderfluid because why not add some extra flavor?
I’m here to share my weird little world, build some solidarity, and maybe spark a little revolution along the way. No pressure, no drama, just good vibes and a lot of laughs. You do you and I’ll do me. Cool? Cool.

That day in our vacations we had a really beautiful walk around this lake.
Somehow I didn't really see any motifs. So I also didn't take a lot of photes - just this pan around the lake. But maybe that's also enough for such a warm day ;)
https://video.franzgraf.de/w/koPeet9R4

we’ve been home for about six weeks and are getting the travel itch again so we’re looking at apartments in paris for a month or so next spring, maybe also finally get to puglia for a week or two, also need to spend a few weeks in stockholm with the grandkids and want to tuck a visit to helsinki (on the baltic queen!) into that, so … a couple months? i’m not sure i want to be away that long 🤔.

Maybe it's time for security forces to understand that information security is a) also important and b) easily compromised. The Strava vulnerability is a known issue - I saw news articles about that a few years ago. But surely by now the security world should know that any app that shares information on an unsecure system is a risk?
And I wonder what a review of how this is playing out in the US would show. Inquiring minds, and all that.

Maybe it's time for security forces to understand that information security is a) also important and b) easily compromised. The Strava vulnerability is a known issue - I saw news articles about that a few years ago. But surely by now the security world should know that any app that shares information on an unsecure system is a risk?
And I wonder what a review of how this is playing out in the US would show. Inquiring minds, and all that.

Calamus 25 The prairie-grass dividing
Whitman's celebration of simple men, of men from "inland America", of those who are unimpressed by Presidents and Governors. It's a romantic sentiment but in 2025 also feels a little naïve or condescending.
But as always I'm here for the gay stuff. Which starts explicitly enough
[I] Demand the most copious and close companionship of men
Well OK then! Me too. Maybe you could read that in a non-sexual way but then Whitman gets lusty
[I demand] Those with a never-quell'd audacity—those with sweet and lusty flesh, clear of taint, choice and chary of its love-power
My goodness, is that hot! At least to start, it's a shame he tames it seeking out men "chary of love-power". At least he recognizes their love power! I'll take the taint, thank you.

going through my months-old screenshots and this motherfucker is a recurring pattern

Anyone have a soldering iron recommendation (type/make/model)?
My needs are •small•: occasional minor repair, mostly wire-to-wire soldering, maybe some super-basic PCB stuff in the distant future if I get ambitious. Simple foolproof is better than robust precise.
Whole lot of options out there, and hard to tell which ones are overkill for my needs.
UPDATE: Going with the Pinecil (multiple recommendations, looks right-sized for my needs), and also noting the many Hakko recommendations for more robust needs. Thanks, everyone!

#kde kmymoney also started to eat data. If Devs turn something from reliable and safe to unreliable and unsafe, the real question of liability comes into play. How can such a thing end in distribution?
Maybe we need to re-organize open source to have a reliable portfolio of applications, a kind of reliable #kde fr…

So I've found my answer after maybe ~30 minutes of effort. First stop was the first search result on Startpage (https://millennialhawk.com/does-poop-have-calories/), which has some evidence of maybe-AI authorship but which is better than a lot of slop. It actually has real links & cites research, so I'll start by looking at the sources.
It claims near the top that poop contains 4.91 kcal per gram (note: 1 kcal = 1 Calorie = 1000 calories, which fact I could find/do trust despite the slop in that search). Now obviously, without a range or mention of an average, this isn't the whole picture, but maybe it's an average to start from? However, the citation link is to a study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32235930/) which only included 27 people with impaired glucose tolerance and obesity. Might have the cited stat, but it's definitely not a broadly representative one if this is the source. The public abstract does not include the stat cited, and I don't want to pay for the article. I happen to be affiliated with a university library, so I could see if I have access that way, but it's a pain to do and not worth it for this study that I know is too specific. Also most people wouldn't have access that way.
Side note: this doing-the-research protect has the nice benefit of letting you see lots of cool stuff you wouldn't have otherwise. The abstract of this study is pretty cool and I learned a bit about gut microbiome changes from just reading the abstract.
My next move was to look among citations in this article to see if I could find something about calorie content of poop specifically. Luckily the article page had indicators for which citations were free to access. I ended up reading/skimming 2 more articles (a few more interesting facts about gut microbiomes were learned) before finding this article whose introduction has what I'm looking for: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3127503/
Here's the relevant paragraph:
"""
The alteration of the energy-balance equation, which is defined by the equilibrium of energy intake and energy expenditure (1–5), leads to weight gain. One less-extensively-studied component of the energy-balance equation is energy loss in stools and urine. Previous studies of healthy adults showed that ≈5% of ingested calories were lost in stools and urine (6). Individuals who consume high-fiber diets exhibit a higher fecal energy loss than individuals who consume low-fiber diets with an equivalent energy content (7, 8). Webb and Annis (9) studied stool energy loss in 4 lean and 4 obese individuals and showed a tendency to lower the fecal energy excretion in obese compared with lean study participants.
"""
And there's a good-enough answer if we do some math, along with links to more in-depth reading if we want them. A Mayo clinic calorie calculator suggests about 2250 Calories per day for me to maintain my weight, I think there's probably a lot of variation in that number, but 5% of that would be very roughly 100 Calories lost in poop per day, so maybe an extremely rough estimate for a range of humans might be 50-200 Calories per day. Interestingly, one of the AI slop pages I found asserted (without citation) 100-200 Calories per day, which kinda checks out. I had no way to trust that number though, and as we saw with the provenance of the 4.91 kcal/gram, it might not be good provenance.
To double-check, I visited this link from the paragraph above: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022316622169853?via=ihub
It's only a 6-person study, but just the abstract has numbers: ~250 kcal/day pooped on a low-fiber diet vs. ~400 kcal/day pooped on a high-fiber diet. That's with intakes of ~2100 and ~2350 kcal respectively, which is close to the number from which I estimated 100 kcal above, so maybe the first estimate from just the 5% number was a bit low.
Glad those numbers were in the abstract, since the full text is paywalled... It's possible this study was also done on some atypical patient group...
Just to come full circle, let's look at that 4.91 kcal/gram number again. A search suggests 14-16 ounces of poop per day is typical, with at least two sources around 14 ounces, or ~400 grams. (AI slop was strong here too, with one including a completely made up table of "studies" that was summarized as 100-200 grams/day). If we believe 400 grams/day of poop, then 4.91 kcal/gram would be almost 2000 kcal/day, which is very clearly ludicrous! So that number was likely some unrelated statistic regurgitated by the AI. I found that number in at least 3 of the slop pages I waded through in my initial search.

I am still full of self-criticism. But I’m also more aware that it is counter-productive. I’m also more aware that maybe I don't always deserve to treat myself quite that badly. https://www.overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.uk/podcast-ep-190-self-compass…

These guys use a lot of AI.
Maybe in part due to that, they also make some of the best public service announcements around AI I've ever seen. Such as this one.
https://youtu.be/M4TXO4kQwSQ

I am a licensed attorney (in California) and also admitted before various Federal district courts.
Today I got yet another of those postcards about a class action settlement - you know, the kind where the harmed victims get a pittance while the attorneys walk away with the lion's share.
In this case, the attorneys will get about $75,000,000, the lead plaintiffs maybe $20,000, and the rest of us ... probably close to nada.
Class actions are a good thing - especially sinc…

@… So, as you might know from our interaction, I am also a web hobbyist, though I'm not up-to-speed in this decade—or maybe century. 🤔 I learn fast when I can understand a presentation. But I fumble madly to start. I just installed Joomla! 5.3.1 on one of my sites, languagearts.de, and it took me part of the weekend to get it up and part of another day …

Yet another sensor failure. They send 6 at a time for a 3 month supply. I am on the last from this batch. They are lasting from 4 to 6 days then failing with "Replace sensor" and error code 365. Only good thing about it is I added almost 3 sensors to my stash and maybe more if this one also dies.
But the annoyance and it failing while out sucks. As well as pulling off a really stuck on sensor since the adhesive has not started to break down yet. So yet another arm hickie…

Placing my plate at the table, I think to myself "I'll sit here" and try to pull out the chair. Instead of weighing 3 pounds, it weighs 20 pounds. Okay, there's a cat sleeping in that chair, I'll just sit at the next chair. Oh, that one also weighs 20 pounds. Maybe I'll just eat on the couch instead?
We have too many cats. 😃

@… @… Ran it against ext-ev, and that yielded maybe a 0.1% improvement. It's a single connection benchmark, so it doesn't utilise handling thousands of connections well. But will look at ext-uv tonight. Also haven't update…

Epstein shit and adjacent, Rural America, Poverty, Abuse
Everyone who's not a pedophile thinks pedophiles are bad, but there's this special obsessed hatred you'll find among poor rural Americans. The whole QAnon/Epstein obsession may not really make sense to folks raised in cities. Like, why do these people think *so much* about pedophiles? Why do they think that everyone in power is a pedophile? Why would the Pizzagate thing make sense to anyone? What is this unhinged shit? A lot of folks (who aren't anarchists) might be inclined to ask "why can't these people just let the cops take care of it?"
I was watching Legal Eagle's run down on the Trump Epstein thing earlier today and I woke up thinking about something I don't know if I've ever talked about. Now that I'm not in the US, I'm not at any risk of talking about it. I don't know how much I would have been before, but that's not something I'm gonna dig into right now. So let me tell you a story that might explain a few things.
I'm like 16, maybe 17. I have my license, so this girl I was dating/not dating/just friends with/whatever would regularly convince me to drive her and her friends around. I think she's like 15 at the time. Her friends are younger than her.
She tells me that there's a party we can go to where they have beer. She was told to invite her friends, so I can come too. We're going to pick her friends up (we regularly fill the VW Golf well beyond the legal limit and drive places) and head to the party.
So I take these girls, at least is 13 years old, down to this party. I'm already a bit sketched out bringing a 13 year old to a party. We drive out for a while. It's in the country. We drive down a long dark road. Three are some barrel fires and a shack. This is all a bit strange, but not too abnormal for this area. We're a little ways outside of a place called Mill City (in Oregon).
We park and walk towards the shack. This dude who looks like a rat comes up and offers us beer. He laughs and talks to the girl who invited me, "What's he doing here? You're supposed to bring your girl friends." She's like, "He's our ride." I don't remember if he offered me a beer or not.
We go over to this shed and everyone starts smoking, except me because I didn't smoke until I turned 18. The other girls start talking about the rat face dude, who's wandered over by the fire with some other guys. They're mainly teasing one of the 13 year old girls about having sex with him a bunch of times. They say he's like, 32 or something. The other girls joke about him only having sex with 13 year olds because he's too ugly to have sex with anyone closer to his own age.
Somewhere along the line it comes out that he's a cop. I never forgot that, it's absolutely seared in to my memory. I can picture his face perfectly still, decades later, and them talking about how he's a deputy, he was in his 30's, and he was having sex with a 13 year old girl. I was the only boy there, but there were a few older men. This was a chunk of the good ol' boys club of the town. I think there were a couple of cops besides the one deputy, and a judge or the mayor or some kind of big local VIP.
I kept trying to get my friend to leave, but she wanted to stay. Turns out under age drinking with cops seems like a great deal if you're a kid because you know you won't get busted. I left alone, creeped the fuck out.
I was told later that I wasn't invited and that I couldn't talk about it, I've always been good at compartmentalization, so I never did.
Decades later it occurred to me what was actually happening. I'm pretty sure that cop was giving meth he'd seized as evidence to these kids. This wasn't some one-off thing. It was regular. Who knows how many decades it went on after I left, or how many decades it had been going on before I found out. I knew this type of thing had happened at least a few times before because that's how that 13 year old girl and that 32 year old cop had hooked up in the first place.
Hearing about Epstein's MO, targeting these teenage girls from fucked up backgrounds, it's right there for me. I wouldn't be surprised if they were involved in sex trafficking of minors or some shit like that... but who would you call if you found out? Half the sheriff's department was there and the other half would cover for them.
You live in the city and shit like that doesn't happen, or at least you don't think it happens. But rural poor folks have this intuition about power and abuse. It's right there and you know it.
Trump is such a familiar character for me, because he's exactly that small town mayor or sheriff. He'll will talk about being tough on crime and hunting down pedophiles, while hanging out at a party that exists so people can fuck 8th graders.
The problem with the whole thing is that rural folks will never break the cognitive dissonance between "kill the peods" and "back the blue." They'll never go kill those cops. No, the pedos must be somewhere else. It must be the elites. It must be outsiders. It can't be the cops and good ol' boys everyone respects. It can't be the mayor who rigs the election to win every time. It can't be the "good upstanding" sheriff. Nah, it's the Clintons.
To be fair, it's probably also the Clitnons, a bunch of other politicians, billionaires, etc. Epstein was exactly who everyone thought he was, and he didn't get away with it for so long without a whole lot of really powerful help.
There are still powerful people who got away with involvement with #Epstein. #Trump is one of them, but I don't really believe that he's the only one.
#USPol #ACAB

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy

The mantra of "If you don't have time to do it right, what makes you think you have time to do it twice?" rings true, it *sounds* right.
But the whole point of agility is to see a third option:
If you don't have time to do it (the complete thing) right, maybe you have time to do part of it right, show the value in that, and then do the next part of it right.
I enjoy doing a good job as much as the next craftsman, but we also can't hold customer outcome…

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/how-to-install-software/
Did not help me but I'm trying to help myself...will I succeed as when I was troubleshooting why my dispXXXX didn't work for new stuff?
I succeeded with dispXXXX thingy...so maybe I'll succeed with insta…

How to install software
When you wish to install software in Qubes OS, you should generally install it in a template. For installing templates themselves, see how to install a template. Advanced users may also be interested in learning how to install software in standalones and dom0. Qubes OS is effectively a ...

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
Should AI coding be taught in undergrad CS education?
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I teach undergraduate computer science labs, including for intro and more-advanced core courses. I don't publish (non-negligible) scholarly work in the area, but I've got years of craft expertise in course design, and I do follow the academic literature to some degree. In other words, In not the world's leading expert, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about course design, and consider myself competent at it, with plenty of direct experience in what knowledge & skills I can expect from students as they move through the curriculum.
I'm also strongly against most uses of what's called "AI" these days (specifically, generative deep neutral networks as supplied by our current cadre of techbro). There are a surprising number of completely orthogonal reasons to oppose the use of these systems, and a very limited number of reasonable exceptions (overcoming accessibility barriers is an example). On the grounds of environmental and digital-commons-pollution costs alone, using specifically the largest/newest models is unethical in most cases.
But as any good teacher should, I constantly question these evaluations, because I worry about the impact on my students should I eschew teaching relevant tech for bad reasons (and even for his reasons). I also want to make my reasoning clear to students, who should absolutely question me on this. That inspired me to ask a simple question: ignoring for one moment the ethical objections (which we shouldn't, of course; they're very stark), at what level in the CS major could I expect to teach a course about programming with AI assistance, and expect students to succeed at a more technically demanding final project than a course at the same level where students were banned from using AI? In other words, at what level would I expect students to actually benefit from AI coding "assistance?"
To be clear, I'm assuming that students aren't using AI in other aspects of coursework: the topic of using AI to "help you study" is a separate one (TL;DR it's gross value is not negative, but it's mostly not worth the harm to your metacognitive abilities, which AI-induced changes to the digital commons are making more important than ever).
So what's my answer to this question?
If I'm being incredibly optimistic, senior year. Slightly less optimistic, second year of a masters program. Realistic? Maybe never.
The interesting bit for you-the-reader is: why is this my answer? (Especially given that students would probably self-report significant gains at lower levels.) To start with, [this paper where experienced developers thought that AI assistance sped up their work on real tasks when in fact it slowed it down] (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089) is informative. There are a lot of differences in task between experienced devs solving real bugs and students working on a class project, but it's important to understand that we shouldn't have a baseline expectation that AI coding "assistants" will speed things up in the best of circumstances, and we shouldn't trust self-reports of productivity (or the AI hype machine in general).
Now we might imagine that coding assistants will be better at helping with a student project than at helping with fixing bugs in open-source software, since it's a much easier task. For many programming assignments that have a fixed answer, we know that many AI assistants can just spit out a solution based on prompting them with the problem description (there's another elephant in the room here to do with learning outcomes regardless of project success, but we'll ignore this over too, my focus here is on project complexity reach, not learning outcomes). My question is about more open-ended projects, not assignments with an expected answer. Here's a second study (by one of my colleagues) about novices using AI assistance for programming tasks. It showcases how difficult it is to use AI tools well, and some of these stumbling blocks that novices in particular face.
But what about intermediate students? Might there be some level where the AI is helpful because the task is still relatively simple and the students are good enough to handle it? The problem with this is that as task complexity increases, so does the likelihood of the AI generating (or copying) code that uses more complex constructs which a student doesn't understand. Let's say I have second year students writing interactive websites with JavaScript. Without a lot of care that those students don't know how to deploy, the AI is likely to suggest code that depends on several different frameworks, from React to JQuery, without actually setting up or including those frameworks, and of course three students would be way out of their depth trying to do that. This is a general problem: each programming class carefully limits the specific code frameworks and constructs it expects students to know based on the material it covers. There is no feasible way to limit an AI assistant to a fixed set of constructs or frameworks, using current designs. There are alternate designs where this would be possible (like AI search through adaptation from a controlled library of snippets) but those would be entirely different tools.
So what happens on a sizeable class project where the AI has dropped in buggy code, especially if it uses code constructs the students don't understand? Best case, they understand that they don't understand and re-prompt, or ask for help from an instructor or TA quickly who helps them get rid of the stuff they don't understand and re-prompt or manually add stuff they do. Average case: they waste several hours and/or sweep the bugs partly under the rug, resulting in a project with significant defects. Students in their second and even third years of a CS major still have a lot to learn about debugging, and usually have significant gaps in their knowledge of even their most comfortable programming language. I do think regardless of AI we as teachers need to get better at teaching debugging skills, but the knowledge gaps are inevitable because there's just too much to know. In Python, for example, the LLM is going to spit out yields, async functions, try/finally, maybe even something like a while/else, or with recent training data, the walrus operator. I can't expect even a fraction of 3rd year students who have worked with Python since their first year to know about all these things, and based on how students approach projects where they have studied all the relevant constructs but have forgotten some, I'm not optimistic seeing these things will magically become learning opportunities. Student projects are better off working with a limited subset of full programming languages that the students have actually learned, and using AI coding assistants as currently designed makes this impossible. Beyond that, even when the "assistant" just introduces bugs using syntax the students understand, even through their 4th year many students struggle to understand the operation of moderately complex code they've written themselves, let alone written by someone else. Having access to an AI that will confidently offer incorrect explanations for bugs will make this worse.
To be sure a small minority of students will be able to overcome these problems, but that minority is the group that has a good grasp of the fundamentals and has broadened their knowledge through self-study, which earlier AI-reliant classes would make less likely to happen. In any case, I care about the average student, since we already have plenty of stuff about our institutions that makes life easier for a favored few while being worse for the average student (note that our construction of that favored few as the "good" students is a large part of this problem).
To summarize: because AI assistants introduce excess code complexity and difficult-to-debug bugs, they'll slow down rather than speed up project progress for the average student on moderately complex projects. On a fixed deadline, they'll result in worse projects, or necessitate less ambitious project scoping to ensure adequate completion, and I expect this remains broadly true through 4-6 years of study in most programs (don't take this as an endorsement of AI "assistants" for masters students; we've ignored a lot of other problems along the way).
There's a related problem: solving open-ended project assignments well ultimately depends on deeply understanding the problem, and AI "assistants" allow students to put a lot of code in their file without spending much time thinking about the problem or building an understanding of it. This is awful for learning outcomes, but also bad for project success. Getting students to see the value of thinking deeply about a problem is a thorny pedagogical puzzle at the best of times, and allowing the use of AI "assistants" makes the problem much much worse. This is another area I hope to see (or even drive) pedagogical improvement in, for what it's worth.
1/2

That's a first for me. I own 3 cargo bikes; never broke a spoke before. Somehow my wife broke 5 on one of the #CargoBikes. She was apparently carrying a(n "overweight") coworker in it, so maybe that did it?
Though when I got the bike, it had a broken rear (enviolo) hub and multiple broke spokes. I probably reused the non-broken spokes (and I definitely reused the rim),…

There is no perfect #weather app…
Oh wait, there's #TrailSense. And you know what's so great about it? It is 100% offline. Like, it uses the barometer sensor and cloud data. Like, the right kind of clouds.
Is it accurate? Obviously not. But given the choice of non-cool online weather predictions, and totally cool offline weather predictions… Also, now I have an excuse to photograph clouds to feed it data, so maybe I'll finally learn to recognize them.
It also has lots of other useful functions — like a compass, sunrise/sunset times, and lots more. And it's on #FDroid.
#Android

The white flowers in the new “alt-grass” have started to pop up in the front of the driveway (bottom right) and middle. Still patchy bits but nbd. And the taller stuff is now shading/protecting/cooling the smaller.
The front (bottom) that we seeded a few weeks after the initial planting is growing in nicely.
In a few weeks maybe we will get some poppies in the oldest areas.
Love this stuff!
We can start to walk on the older now, gently. Feels nice barefoot. Down to watering once a day, morning, unless it is over 30°C.
Intending to get more slate slabs next week, so I’ll put in a fourth step stone and probably move the one on the left back a few inches. I’ll try to be careful so I can transplant the grass to some of the patchy areas.
That will also be a first try at backing the trailer over the hump onto the new paths with a lot of weight.
#yard #diy #grass #noconcrete #diy #bloomscrolling

Read "What went wrong with capitalism" by Ruchir Sharma.
A mildly interesting description of the major events in world an US economics in the last 50 years. Might
be a fair summary for anyone who didn't live through it or has a poor memory.
In short he thinks what went wrong was government bailing out failure leading to massive debts and increa
sed inequality.
Governments took over all the things instead of letting capitalism sort them out, he reckons, and wheneve
r a big industry or company fails you just get socialism for the rich and a bail-out from new printed money.
Easy cheap money, constant bail-outs, government intervention, leading to zombie companies racking up every larger debt to exist, billionaires who can't fail due to government support, and a stock market that's up-only bringing a flood of inefficiently-allocated capital.
Is he right? I mean, maybe, sort of. But when an industry really can't be allowed to fail, say water supply and waterway management, allowing private capital to extract maximum resources from it isn't the best method to manage it in the first place. No wonder they need bail-outs. Capitalism fails here because capitalism isn't the right solution here. We need publicly owned national services, not robber barons without
bailouts.
So, you know, half right. Perhaps these are some of the reasons why capitalism fails, but also we shouldn't even be trying to apply capitalism to every single thing in the first place.
#reading #capitalism #economics #RuchirSharma

LLM coding is the opposite of DRY
An important principle in software engineering is DRY: Don't Repeat Yourself. We recognize that having the same code copied in more than one place is bad for several reasons:
1. It makes the entire codebase harder to read.
2. It increases maintenance burden, since any problems in the duplicated code need to be solved in more than one place.
3. Because it becomes possible for the copies to drift apart if changes to one aren't transferred to the other (maybe the person making the change has forgotten there was a copy) it makes the code more error-prone and harder to debug.
All modern programming languages make it almost entirely unnecessary to repeat code: we can move the repeated code into a "function" or "module" and then reference it from all the different places it's needed. At a larger scale, someone might write an open-source "library" of such functions or modules and instead of re-implementing that functionality ourselves, we can use their code, with an acknowledgement. Using another person's library this way is complicated, because now you're dependent on them: if they stop maintaining it or introduce bugs, you've inherited a problem, but still, you could always copy their project and maintain your own version, and it would be not much more work than if you had implemented stuff yourself from the start. It's a little more complicated than this, but the basic principle holds, and it's a foundational one for software development in general and the open-source movement in particular. The network of "citations" as open-source software builds on other open-source software and people contribute patches to each others' projects is a lot of what makes the movement into a community, and it can lead to collaborations that drive further development. So the DRY principle is important at both small and large scales.
Unfortunately, the current crop of hyped-up LLM coding systems from the big players are antithetical to DRY at all scales:
- At the library scale, they train on open source software but then (with some unknown frequency) replicate parts of it line-for-line *without* any citation [1]. The person who was using the LLM has no way of knowing that this happened, or even any way to check for it. In theory the LLM company could build a system for this, but it's not likely to be profitable unless the courts actually start punishing these license violations, which doesn't seem likely based on results so far and the difficulty of finding out that the violations are happening. By creating these copies (and also mash-ups, along with lots of less-problematic stuff), the LLM users (enabled and encouraged by the LLM-peddlers) are directly undermining the DRY principle. If we see what the big AI companies claim to want, which is a massive shift towards machine-authored code, DRY at the library scale will effectively be dead, with each new project simply re-implementing the functionality it needs instead of every using a library. This might seem to have some upside, since dependency hell is a thing, but the downside in terms of comprehensibility and therefore maintainability, correctness, and security will be massive. The eventual lack of new high-quality DRY-respecting code to train the models on will only make this problem worse.
- At the module & function level, AI is probably prone to re-writing rather than re-using the functions or needs, especially with a workflow where a human prompts it for many independent completions. This part I don't have direct evidence for, since I don't use LLM coding models myself except in very specific circumstances because it's not generally ethical to do so. I do know that when it tries to call existing functions, it often guesses incorrectly about the parameters they need, which I'm sure is a headache and source of bugs for the vibe coders out there. An AI could be designed to take more context into account and use existing lookup tools to get accurate function signatures and use them when generating function calls, but even though that would probably significantly improve output quality, I suspect it's the kind of thing that would be seen as too-baroque and thus not a priority. Would love to hear I'm wrong about any of this, but I suspect the consequences are that any medium-or-larger sized codebase written with LLM tools will have significant bloat from duplicate functionality, and will have places where better use of existing libraries would have made the code simpler. At a fundamental level, a principle like DRY is not something that current LLM training techniques are able to learn, and while they can imitate it from their training sets to some degree when asked for large amounts of code, when prompted for many smaller chunks, they're asymptotically likely to violate it.
I think this is an important critique in part because it cuts against the argument that "LLMs are the modern compliers, if you reject them you're just like the people who wanted to keep hand-writing assembly code, and you'll be just as obsolete." Compilers actually represented a great win for abstraction, encapsulation, and DRY in general, and they supported and are integral to open source development, whereas LLMs are set to do the opposite.
[1] to see what this looks like in action in prose, see the example on page 30 of the NYTimes copyright complaint against OpenAI (#AI #GenAI #LLMs #VibeCoding