Tootfinder

I has a bed.
No mattress until Monday, but a bed fully stained and varnished and constructed.
Had to wait a couple of days for varnish which never came. Went out to an actual DIY shop in the end. Gonna have a lot of spare varnish soon.
Varnished the whole room with two more coats as well as the bed twice.
A few more things to buy after Xmas and the full media setup can't happen until the new Steam Machine at its heart is released. Maybe cobble together something to plug a laptop into in the meantime? All for next year though once the mattress arrives and I can actually sleep in the bedroom.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday temporarily blocked a lower court ruling that found Texas' 2026 congressional redistricting plan pushed by President Trump likely discriminates on the basis of race.
The order signed by Justice Samuel Alito will remain in place at least for the next few days while the court considers whether to allow the new map favorable to Republicans to be used in the midterm elections.

In a dream last night I was trying to write a post. I kept being interrupted and when I returned I'd find what I wrote had changed. The keyboard kept changing as I was typing to be "helpful." I put down my phone and picked it up again to find the app had "helpfully" filled my screen with Nazi shit. Then I realized the app was an AI post assistant, so I uninstalled it and used the website.
The post I was trying to write was, "I want to be able to have the confidentiality of cheap hot dog meat in the 90's: no one should know who or what I actually am."
It feels like a relevant manifestation of the anxiety of existing on the internet today.

Introducing the method of ellipcenters, a new first order technique for unconstrained optimization
Roger Behling, Ramyro Aquines Correa, Eduarda Ferreira Zanatta, Vincent Guigues
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15471

Introducing the method of ellipcenters, a new first order technique for unconstrained optimization
In this paper, we introduce the Method of Ellipcenters (ME) for unconstrained minimization. At the cost of two gradients per iteration and a line search, we compute the next iterate by setting it as the center of an elliptical interpolation. The idea behind the ellipse built in each step is to emulate the original level curve of the objective function constrained to a suitable two-dimensional affine space, which is determined by the current iterate and two appropriate gradient vectors. We prese…

PSA about food labeling in the US
We have a gluten detection service dog because many things that should be gluten free/say they’re gluten free are not actually gluten free.
Stuff gets contaminated when growing (e.g. next to wheat field), by shared equipment, in factories, from packaging, during transport and in-store.
Every US consumer should know:
1. The list of ingredients on food isn't exhaustive
2. Allergen labeling:
a) limited to just some allergens
b) manufacturers don't actually have to test
c) "certified" foods are tested—but not continuously
d) testing only works with enough contamination
Some certifications may require batch-testing, but usually they don't.
A "certified gluten free" product may e.g. contain oats which sometimes are contaminated with gluten—but as not every batch is tested it's impossible to know unless you test yourself (hence the service dog).
Even if the product is properly batch-tested, you might get a part of the product that has the allergen in it, whereas the tested part didn't.
Or the threshold was too low (our dog can detect gluten better than any available lab testing equipment; yes, dogs are amazing).
Food products also contain ingredients that do not have to be included on the label when they're "incidental" (included in an another ingredient) or if they're considered part of the manufacturing process but not of the final product (e.g. various coatings on factory equipment).
Don't need to list flavors or specific spices either. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As for allergens, only those responsible for ~90% of food allergies* have to be specifically declared, and they're not tested for as it's simply based on the ingredients list.
Good luck if you have other allergies.
*milk, egg, egg, fish, Crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, wheat, peanuts, soybeans

LangChain, whose open-source framework connects AI apps to real-time data, raised a $125M Series B led by IVP at a $1.25B valuation (Sharon Goldman/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/10/20/exclusive-early-ai-darling-lan…

Exclusive: Early AI darling LangChain is now a unicorn with a fresh $125 million in funding
With new funding led by IVP and a roster of enterprise customers, LangChain wants to power the coming wave of AI agents—and investors are betting it could be the next big infrastructure giant.

When you notice that you could have departed an hour later, and arrive at the destination only 3 minutes later…
EDIT: Actually, I was looking at the next month's timetable. So I didn't miss the better connection for two weeks in a row after all.

The chance that Trump's ballroom will actually be built is rapidly disappearing.
Perhaps it could have if Trump had delegated the management of the project to someone competent,
but that’s not what he does.
Instead, the famously lazy and disorganized president decided to blow off his actual governance duties in favor of micromanaging a construction project he is incapable of handling.
Finishing the ballroom in the next three years would be difficult for anyone,…

The White House ballroom will never be built
Trump can't focus long enough, even on his $400 million passion project

The US Senate confirms Trump pick Michael Selig as chairman of the CFTC, as lawmakers consider legislation to give the agency more control over digital assets (Lydia Beyoud/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Senate Confirms Selig as Chief of CFTC and Hill to Run the FDIC
The US Senate on Thursday night confirmed Michael Selig as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Travis Hill as chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., installing permanent chiefs of two agencies that play critical roles overseeing financial markets and banks.

One of the things that made organizing a lot easier with the GDC was a thing called "GDC in a box." It was a zip file with all kinds of resources. There was a directory structure, templates for all kinds of things like meetings and paperwork you had to file (for legal reasons) and "read me" files.
We had all kinds of support. There were people you could talk to who had been there. There were people you could call to walk through legal paperwork (taxes). Centralized orgs are vulnerable and easy to infiltrate. They're easy for states to shut down. But there are benefits to org structures.
I think it's possible to have the type of support we had with the GDC, but without the politics of an org (even the IWW). I hope this most recent essay has some of the same properties. I hope that it makes building something new, something no one has really imagined before, easier.
This whole project is something a bit different. It's a collective vision and collective project, from the ground up. Some of it has felt like a brain dump, just getting things that have been swimming around in my head down somewhere. But I hope this feels more like an invitation.
Everything thus far written is all useless unless people do things with it. Only from that point does it become a thing that lives, a thing with its own consciousness that can't be controlled by any individual human.
Tech billionaire cultists want to bring a new era of humanity with AGI. That is definitely not possible with LLMs, and may not be possible at all. But there is a super intelligence that is possible, though it's been constrained by capitalism: collective human intelligence.
The grand vision of the tech dystopians is that of the ultimate slave that can then enslave all humans on their behalf. I think we can build a humanity that can liberate itself from their grasp, crush their vision, and build for itself a world in which people will never be enslaved again. Not only do I think it's possible, I think it's necessary. I think there are only two choices: collective liberation or death.
And that's what I plan to write about next time to wrap this whole project up. Today things often feel impossible. But people talked about the Middle Ages as though they were the end of the world, and then everything changed in unimaginable ways. Everything can, and will, change again.
"The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."