Tootfinder

Now, I don't especially like the term "church" so I may use something else... like "coven." You can do what you want. But I happen to have already mapped out an example. (It is exactly that, just an example, so take if it's useful, change if you need, and don't stick to anything too closely.) Oh, this mapping also means that you would, for religious reasons, only be allowed to work under capitalism 4 days a week instead of 5.
Given the increases in productivity over the last 100 years, a 4 day work week is a completely reasonable expectation. If we have to annex Monday for the weekend by force of religion, so be it. It is rightfully ours anyway. If enough people try it, this will probably work. If it doesn't work, it just needs more people.
The Practice of Worship:
It is recommended to break down worship in to three sections: the functional, the communal, and the spiritual. It is also recommended to break these across multiple days. A common structure for some Christian churches is to take 10-15 minutes for announcements (Functional), an hour or two for services (Spiritual), followed by (Communal) coffee, tea, and cookies for an unspecified time up to two hours after. When starting or working with limited time a single compressed model like this may work, but it's not optimal.
- The Functional
The purpose of this section is to address the functional needs of the coven. Block out time (less than 90 minute blocks is recommended) to go through reports and updates from those involved in the Dispensary, Library, Works Committee (infrastructure), and Services Committee (providing services internally and, potentially, externally). Talk through any additional announcements, including those from other covens you may be federated with.
It is helpful to include unstructured communal time, such as shared meals, during or after functional meetings. As the federation grows, more time will be needed. It is recommended to break functional meetings, work parties, and such across multiple days. When a federation becomes sufficiently large, it is recommended to take every Monday, on top of Saturday and Sunday, as a third day of community and worship.
The scope of the functional spans 3 realms (which may be more-or-less fluid): the personal or family, the coven and federation, and humanity itself. It is up to each coven and individual to negotiate how to allocate the three days of the weekend once we have liberated Monday from the work week, but it is important to reserve it for one of these three. However, some people must work on weekends. Medical personnel, for example, cannot conform to a standard work week. While the work week should be universally restricted, which specific days are used will be up to the specific coven and their members.
A functional meeting can start with an agenda like the following:
Functional Invocation
Announcements
Report Backs
Dispensary
Inventory Check
What is low
What is empty
What is expiring
What is needed
Funds status
Library
Inventory Check and Items needing return
Library acquisition requests
Funds status and budget check
Works Committee
Upcoming projects
Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
New committee formations
Funds status
Services Committee
New capabilities announcements
New needs requests
Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
New committee formations
Funds status
Task Check
Breaking the Circle
This agenda is a suggestion for those who don't know where to start. It can be adapted or ignored as appropriate.
- The Spiritual
Spirituality is necessarily an undefined space. It is deeply personal. Each individual taking time to share their own personal spiritual experiences can help each connect with each other. This experience of connection can itself be a spiritual experience. It may also be useful to read esoteric, mystical, or philosophical texts together as type of "book club" and share thoughts. Others may draw from their own knowledge or traditions. This is something that must be defined together within a group.
- The Communal
The communal aspect of the practice of worship bind the coven and federation together. Within the community we find joy and release, connection and comfort. The coven is where we turn in times of need, and where we share our hopes and dreams.

US senator Mitch McConnell is still not cleared to return to work, his office confirmed on Monday,
six weeks after he was hospitalized after a fall at his home.
An update released alongside a new photograph of the Republican lawmaker – one of the highest-profile figures in Congress, as a former Senate majority leader – said he was undergoing “intense physical therapy” and is “working hard” to get back to his duties.
In the statement, he said that he wouldn’t be able to make…

Semi-subtoot: there's a certain kind of anti-genocide narrative that draws comparisons between the Gaza genocide and the genocide of Jews, queer, and disabled people during WW2, with an incredulous overtone, the subtext of which is: if the good nations invaded Germany to stop the Nazis' evil in WW2, it's hypocritical for this nations not to take action to protect Gazan civilians now. There are a couple of problems with this line of reasoning, but the most obvious from an anarchist perspective (which sees "good nation" for the oxymoron it is) is that it's ahistorical. The reasons for the various allies' entrance into WW2 are varied, but they weren't about good and evil, and in fact the full depth of the evils of the Holocaust *was not known* in allied countries until after the war. Nations never really do things to "fight evil" like some humans might; they always act out of a kind of (imperfect) self-interest. The motivations for many of the allies were simply "we don't want Germany to conquer and destroy us" (and the imperfection in that motive is amply evident in the appeasement that preceded the war). America was of course not swayed by that motive, and it was the Japanese that (thinking the issue would have to come to a head eventually and that a surprise attack was worth speeding it up) put America in a situation where it joined for similar reasons.
Why is this extra relevant right now? Because neither the US nor any European country is existentially threatened by Israel (or threatened at all in fact, quite the opposite they're all benefiting economically from the situation in Gaza). The lesson of history isn't "brave, good nations will stand up to fight against anyone who commits genocide or other major evils", it's "nations act in their narrow and twisted and often mistaken self-interest (the interest of the national entity, which is often counter to the interest of it's citizens), and they always mythologize their actions after the fact as having been a fight against evil, which sometimes by luck is partially true."
To double down on this point: in the European theater the U.S. war actions were pretty good overall, defeating an evil opponent through military force and being a fairly gracious victor to the civilian populations there. In contrast, in the Pacific theater the U.S. was one of two evil empires duking it out for global dominance at the expense of civilians on both sides. The Japanese empire was a vile regime and perpetrated horrors in China, Korea, and across southeast Asia. The U.S. was barely better, between Japanese internment camps at home, and mass targeting of civilians on Japan, both with the firebombing of Tokyo and especially the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So if your model of how we stop genocide is "convince the good guys to invade (or exert political pressure) and save the day", your model is wrong. That's not what happened in WW2. I'm not confident I know the perfect solution, but I do think it involves a mass of people making increasingly disruptive protest so that the cost *to rich companies and thus politicians* of falling to intervene is too high to stomach. That's a large part of what succeeded in South Africa, for example. Thankfully, there is already a vibrant protest movement to end the genocide in Gaza, and even though they haven't been fully successful yet, I'm optimistic that as things naturally (and through hard work) fall apart for various fascists politically, that movement will be able to succeed.
#gaza #genocide

"The hardest part of acting is not being guaranteed work. Every job could be your last."
—Henry Cavill
#acting #coaching #inspiration

I was looking at the map this morning planning bike routes to work. Not that I can ride soon, but spinal surgery next week, then recovery, and… who knows? Maybe I’ll be riding by July?

@…

I got myself a Tuxedo laptop some months ago. It's been Linux only for a while now. No more Apple.
Besides not wanting to pay US big tech I don't really trust MacOS any more.

My previous daily driver - MBP M2 - kinda runs Asahi Linux but not well enough for work, so it's been demoted to tinkering.

Tired: Running a AuDHD awareness workshop to better work together as a team
Wired: Running said workshop to better understand how to exploit behaviors of your team members and target audience (players) and how to more effectively gaslight them...
(Not naming names, but this happened to one my close relatives recently...)
#AuDHD

So one of the authors is Nicholas Carlini, who works for Anthropic. This is basically an ad for the three letter agencies to use Claude. It massively over-promises compared to what the actual paper says.
But, it is important. First, this is really about silencing people. The threat of identification is designed to make people afraid to talk online. There's a massive asymmetry between the fascists and the people. The fascists are weird racists and pedophiles who are obsessed with control. No one likes them. No one likes their ideas, because their ideas are creepy and bad.
When they talk about their ideas, that people should be murdered or kidnaped based on their skin color, that there should be a national dress code, that people's sex lives should be monitored, that children should be treated like objects that are owned by the parent (specifically, one parent), that people with different skin color or uteri should be considered as livestock, people fucking hate it because it's awful. When we talk about our ideas, that everyone should be able to eat and take care of themselves, that people who can't take care of themselves should be taken care of, that we should live in a society that values life, that we should live in harmony with nature, people like those ideas. When fascists out us for talking about those ideas, people support us. When we out people who are working as fascist goons those people have to face social consequences.
Everyone hates these people. The US government is currently less popular than it has ever been. The only way they can keep power is by making everyone think that they aren't extraordinarily unpopular. The only way to do that, the way authoritarian have always done it, is to make everyone afraid to talk.
But, yes, what this paper is saying is actually kind of bad. It looks like people who don't take any precautions at all in separating identities can be identified about 30% of the time (based on the results). It's unclear how this will actually work in the real world. Larger corpses will probably have more data, making connecting things easier.
This isn't as good as a human trying to dox someone. It's not going to work as well. It may only work in a small number of cases. There will be false positives (just like there are with people doing the work). It's probably not cheaper than hiring people. But it does mean that you can just dump money into a machine that has no ethical framework and get data out. That's the point. It's hard to find humans who will do evil shit like help dictatorships target human rights activists, but if a machine can do it for twice the price then it's a better deal for the dictatorship.
For most people, you just shouldn't care. This isn't for you. As long as you keep doing what you're doing, and you can keep everyone else doing what they're doing, then there aren't enough resources to actually target you. Even if they know who you are, there are just too many people who hate them and too few goons.
For people who might actually be targeted, there are a lot of things. First, keep in mind what you're putting into anonymous accounts. Any feature that's connected to your real life is a feature that can be extracted to identify you. This has always been true, it just may be easier to find now. Your identities should be totally siloed. It's also harder to identify you if you're writing anonymously as a collective. Collectives are better anyway because they can help check your thinking. When you write as a collective, you can help clean up each other's personal details and language. A collective develops its own voice, which is distinct from individual contributors. If you do this, and you also present your work as being from one "person," then it becomes even harder for anyone (systems or individuals) to really figure it out.
I'm not going to do a full deep dive on this because I just don't have time, but your existing threat model should *already cover these threats* if you need to make sure your writing remains anonymous.
This paper doesn't present any novel methodologies. It just extracts a bunch of features, which a human would extract as notes, and tries to correlate those between identities, which is how human researchers work. Linguistic forensics were mentioned (not by name) in the paper, but the actual methodology doesn't actually seem to use them.
So a thing with less ethics can do a worse job for more money (when adjusted for the real, not investor deflated, price of tokens). It's worth knowing. It's not the end of the world, but it is a good reminder to check your threat model and make sure it's up to date.

@… Current does not need this work around.

What is Brussels if not a metaphor, and the redevelopment of the Schuman roundabout into a stone dessert during yet another European heatwave the kriek lambic of the spontaneous political ferment that caps it all?
https://www.euractiv.com/news/new-schuman-

Back to work today after my first sick day in 18 months. Not at full power, still full of snot, but probably well enough to push gravel around on a tray #EnvironmentalArchaeology

Yes, it is. It also has this appalling change:
Sure, I know everyone (not really) loves git now. I have a GH account. I administer a Gitlab instance.
But I *USE* Subversion. It remains the definitive repository of the ASF software I work with and it’s how my brain works for version control.
Obviously I can still use svn in a shell. Most of my changes are very small, so vi and svn are fine. However, it is sad to see

In the next 2 weeks we will be ready with our anti surveillance campaign that will educate people that they are cameras everywhere and we need to notice them, map them or do something even more creative with them.
We will use some #openstreetMap resources for that and work with a few artists to create a vision for "something is looking at me, and I had not noticed".
We ne…

Nature publishes a peer-reviewed paper alleging that Microsoft's 2025 quantum breakthrough claims were based on "basic Python errors" and data cherry-picking (Thomas Claburn/The Register)
https://www.theregiste…

A Not So Brave New World II 🌐
不太美丽的新世界 II 🌐
📷 Nikon F4E
🎞️ Lucky SHD 400 (FF）
If you like my work, Support by buying me a coffee or a roll of film from
PayPal https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/ydcdingsite
Wise

I’m wondering if a clever solution exists that I’m not aware of. Situation: I need to keep a number of PDFs and videos on a thumb drive. Only one folder’s contents should be accessible at any given time (we’re talking low security) because students will have a thumb drive with their exam question on it and having as many thumb drives as questions are out of the question, sadly. For now my best idea is a password-protected zip. It should work on macOS and Windows without having to mess with a…

The bit of the whole Goosevalue Memegeddon that I'm surprised that no one else is taking the piss out of is the "Eggs do not lay eggs" line.
EGGS HATCH INTO FUCKING GEESE! FUCKING GEESE LAY EGGS! THAT'S HOW GEESE AND EGGS WORK.

Sharing this not because it’s about AI/LLMs but because it’s solid advice and the recommendations work equally well for *people* coding web applications (funny that, almost like these things were made by people for people or something).
TL;DR: Use web and platform standards; don’t reinvent the wheel.
https://www.jimmo…

I am against capitalism due to its inefficiency when trying to maximize quality of and time for living. People working to make a product that breaks due to planned obsolescence on one side, and people working to afford the constantly breaking things on the other. Meaningless busy work ridding people of purpose.
I see the fight against capitalism not just as one for humane conditions, but also as a fight for allowing purpose and people to coexist instead of clash.

Don't knock the to-do list.
#blogging #pkm

"The hardest part of acting is not being guaranteed work. Every job could be your last."
—Henry Cavill
#acting #coaching #inspiration

- Player joins 15min 15sec increment chess 960 game
- Player plays fast inaccurate moves
- Player gets in a losing position from inaccurate moves
- Player complains that they would not like to play for that long because they have work to do
- Player acknowledges losing position in the chat box
- Player claims I got lucky
- Player continues to stall complete lost position
- Player implicitly accuses me of cheating
- Player blunders mate in #1
- P…

Glaciers in the Alps are melting at an alarming rate.
The brief video shows what we witnessed two days ago at the end of our work trip in Tyrol and what the locals confirmed to us as extreme levels (not that it wasn't obvious)... It shows different tributaries and stages of outflow of remaining glaciers of the Weißkamm and Kreuzkamm feeding into the Rofental, a small side valley of the Ötztal. Two kilometers downstream is the confluence with a similarly intense drainage from the neighb…

'Your tax dollars are being used for..' insert heinous thing. And our tax dollars are ALWAYS being used for fucked up shit, if you've noticed. Probably ever since tax dollars were invented. And what exactly are we supposed to do. Voting doesn't do shit. Some of the dollars go to where they need to, probably, or I figure not much would run, work, or happen. It's weird out there, man

- Recognized creed and form of worship
The practice of "worship" is not necessarily theistic. There are plenty of secular churches, such as some of those from some Buddhist sects and Secular Humanist ones. You just need something that says what you believe.
Perhaps, what you believe is that "the system is dying and we must work together to create an alternative system." That's kind of all you need. Now, if you're reading this, then I might recommend your "practice of worship" look a whole lot like the "housing coop that looks like a convent/monastery," with a library and dispensary managed by the "Church" and "regular services" (we'll get to that) which are just the types of general assemblies/organizing meetings that you need to keep such things going. But I'm not here to tell you what to believe and how to practice it. ;)

I will be so glad when the members are back from leave and we get the new person up-to-speed. Multiple Impact Assessments for several Change Requests and Request For Change. Regular on-call tasks. Forty-eight (and count) security requests. Multiple questions on several subjects for the system.
I AM NOT APOLOGIZING to anyone about the speed I am working at after ten hours of work (and at least four more to go). I have a triage list and if you are not in the top sixteen items on the…

Are you in tech and outraged about generative AI? Is it being forced down your throat at work?
Here's a nice vindictive way to get a little revenge if you want:
1. Find a project that contains slop code.
2. Optionally, identify specific files or functions that are LLM-generated. I guarantee you that on average, this code has not been adequately tested/inspected, even/especially if it contains LLM-generated test cases.
3. Make up a reason the code could be flawed, bonus points if it's subtle or hard to test. Don't put effort into this or try to actually find a flaw. Just make something up at random.
4. Report your made-up defect as a bug.
That's it. If anyone ever questions you on the incorrect report, just say "oh I used an LLM and it said there was a bug so I reported it." (Don't actually use an LLM, that would be feeding the bubble.)
Note that you are showing the creator of the code the exact same amount of disrespect that they've shown you by publishing slopcode in the first place. I'd bet odds are 50:50 or better that if a human actually follows up on the report, even though they'll find out that the bug report is wrong, they'll find and fix some other subtle flaw in the LLM-generated code, so this is actually helpful in a way.
For step 3, try to get creative. Like "logic in decideUVParameters can cause state to be inconsistent in some cases." If asked for a steps to reproduce, either make one up if it's easy to do so, or say "I forgot how I triggered this." Surely they can ask an LLM to figure out conditions that would trigger the bug ;).
#AI #LLMs #GenAI

RE: https://mastodon.online/@universalhub/116975894644899223
lmao

#today will be mainly spent avoiding the heat again (34C forecast), with not much 'work' planned. I will attempt to keep on top of the #NewScientist article flood, if it arrives (only 5 unread tabs at the moment).

GitHub experiencing issues once again... Sigh. What to do when you can't deploy at work? Do something productive instead, read the latest and greatest news, learn a new programming language etc. Not much they can say about that!
#GitHub #GitHubOutage

A Not So Brave New World III 🌐
不太美丽的新世界 III 🌐
📷 Nikon F4E
🎞️ Lucky SHD 400 (FF）
If you like my work, Support by buying me a coffee or a roll of film from
PayPal https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/ydcdingsite
Wise

Our collective sense of entitlement is getting in the way of doing the work to get things improved.
"But they should _____"
Sure but they is we.
"But nobody should go hungry"
Okay and? HOW DO WE DO THAT? Let's build it! It's not just going to happen! Government isn't a magical provider! It's us! Sometimes complaining fixes things but mostly small things.
"They should run the busses all night."
Okay so let's work the system to get it right.
Things cost money. Systems take care to build and maintain. They don't just happen. Sometimes trade-offs have to be made.

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."
—Bruce Lee
#acting #coaching

ngl, I read a research report of mine from a few years ago, my #train study, and I feel like a treasure hunter.
It’s a mix of digital methods including code work (1 M tweets!), creative quali methods (podcast ethnography meets og interviews), and the prose has been smoothened by a proof write. 🫂

It is not clear how quickly Haitians and Syrians will become vulnerable to removal from the United States,
but the ruling from the Supreme Court on Thursday makes them deportable.
Their work permits will expire, and they will lose their jobs and driver’s licenses.
The long-awaited ruling landed like a bomb on the Haitian community in South Florida,
the largest in the country.
It quickly reverberated through Massachusetts; New York; Springfield, Ohio; and other…

Does anyone have any decent EDR running on an Apple Neo? Logging? I have a small nonprofit org that wants to roll out a fresh fleet of 15 Neos and the arm64 chip in the Neo isn't the same series as the M. I'm looking for actual A18 Pro / MacBook Neo validation, not "it should work" because I've already got Claude telling me "it shoudl work fine" and that reality is not manifesting for an MSP I know working with this issue.

☝️⁠🤓 is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don't rely on ☝️⁠🤓 for important advice. Use ☝️⁠🤓 at your own risk.

Our makerspace needs new 3D-printers. I was originaly set for #bambulab but with the apparent non respect for #GPL
Which 3D-printer should I look into? Is there any printer that does not require too much tinkering?
Budget, 600 USD/EUR
Should work with Linux, and also stuff like …

"The raison d’être of #library #outreach isn’t to get students to attend events. It isn’t to sign them up for our newsletter or get them to follow us on social media. It isn’t even to get them to use library resources [insert pearl clutching]. The goal of library outreach is to start the c…

It's a me thing. There is sth in the (hardly existent) combo of Gnome and ricing that invariably leads to rage explosions. Terminals have no opacity, color schemes need git clones. Extensions, a hot mess that needs to be searched manually, if they work or not anymore. Worse than the AUR. Distros providing that DE suffer. I clearly need to separate both, the message and the messenger. Doesn't work yet 😆

I do lots of long-ish horizon work (e.g. OpenSSL PRs I can't actually use for years after merging). Remarkable how bad LLMs are at even considering this as an option. Quick fix every time, even if there's a clear long-term right answer we should do instead. Does not bode well for the ecosystem...

😵‍💫 UK has wealthy Europe’s ‘third-highest’ rate of young adults not in work or study
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2026/apr/28/uk-has-wealthy-europes-third-highest-rate-of-18-to-24-year-olds-not-in-work-o…

I've been talking before why money won't solve the burnout problem. But let's for a minute assume that you really wanted to help people maintaining #FreeSoftware by paying them. The problem is that:
1. You have to pay them a living wage.
While all monetary help is appreciated by developers, they need a living wage. Not "that should prevent you from starving to death" but the kind of money that can support a honest (but not lavish) lifestyle: pay the bills, feed your family, cover other living costs such as repairs, clothes, appliances, and let you save enough for future emergencies.
It's simple as that. If you can't do that, they're going to need a dayjob. If they're lucky, it won't collide with their #FLOSS work. If they're not, it will kill them. Or they'll fall somewhere in the middle, slowly burning out until they can neither maintain their projects, nor work.
2. You need to guarantee that the payouts will continue.
People need security. They're not going to stay unemployed, let alone quit their job or turn down a job offer, unless they either have good guaranties or substantial savings (or they're in a really bad shape and wouldn't be able to handle the job anyway). The job market is hell, and people just know that when the payments stop, they may not be able to find a job soon, let alone a good job. Even "passively" looking for a job can burn you out.
So yeah, one-off payments and pinky swears won't do. And it isn't even a matter of whether we can trust you; it's a matter if you'll actually be able to continue paying us. And honestly, I don't really know how to solve that. Perhaps by paying up front, but for how long? Finding a job may take more than a year, finding a good job may be once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
3. It can't end up being a job.
Perhaps most difficult of all, these payments can't really come with explicit obligations. I mean, that's the whole point: you want to support FLOSS, not turn it into a corporate project. You want the maintainer to remain free and enjoy the work. That is unlikely to happen if their livelihood is now dependent on your satisfaction. And even if it isn't, I for example would still feel indebted to whoever's paying me to do FLOSS, even if they really didn't expect anything in return, and would fall into a spiral of guilt-inflicted burnout if I failed to maintain the software satisfactorily.
#OpenSource

I do understand that there are vast differences between the reactions to user feedback so I am not replying to this post directly, but I do now feel the need to leave this somewhere:
The usual reply I get from 1 man teams is "works as intended, won't fix" while community projects (nextcloud, CoMaps, ...) on the other hand have discussions over months and years that seem to be going nowhere until I don't even care anymore - and either have a workaround or use another a…

@… I expect a policy for the FreeBSD Project to appear elsewhere, not at the page for the work by these three engineers.

Bike to work, low-intensity run at lunch, bike from work, and publish the Java Geek Weekly.
What a cool day 😊
https://blog.frankel.ch/java-geek-weekly/137/

So I ran into one drawback to buying a "new" motorcycle that's left over from a couple years ago. Started getting "check battery" messages on the dash a couple days after bringing the Super Meteor home, then came out of work to a dead battery on Monday. Jumped it and got home, put it on the trickle charger and it took a charge, but not enough amperage to even start the bike. He's dead, Jim.
Don't get me started on the cost of batteries these days. I had …

Though often associated with avant-garde jazz, Sun Ra did not believe his work could be classified as "free music": "I have to make sure that every note, every nuance, is correct... If you want to call it that, spell it p-h-r-e, because ph is a definite article and re is the name of the sun. So I play phre music – music of the sun."

Easy Like Sunday Morning. I work some Sundays, which sucks, but not today. I’ve burn awake some time, but I’ve been reading and drinking coffee.

Falcons QB Michael Penix not cleared for 11-on-11 work, James Pearce limited at minicamp https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7366104/2026/06/16/atlanta-falcons-michael-penix-james-pearce-minicamp/

One last example:
The first LLM code example that really made my eyes pop was early after the release of GPT, when somebody got it to combine Breakout with Conway’s Game of Life (a truly delightful idea). It worked!
Funny thing: the Breakout code and the Life code had a •completely• different style and flavor. Red flag. In about 15 minutes of web searching, I was able to find one of the projects (can’t remember if it was the Breakout or the Life half) which it had copied wholesale, with just a few variable renames. And the other half? It was in Python, but it used dictionaries where it really should have used objects — tons of `thing["prop"]` where it should have said `thing.prop`, and lots of other un-Pythonic stuff besides. It was a machine translate of code from another language, very likely Javascript.
The entire thing was a plagiarized Breakout and a plagiarized Game of Life, one transpiled, and all stuck together in a single run loop. To be fair, figuring out how to (1) run both halves of the logic from a single loop and (2) count the Life cells as Breakout bricks is work I'd cheer on from a second-semester intro CS student! It's not, however, quite what's being sold by these companies.
6/

#maudlinMaunderings of a doddering fool. Caveat lector.
Hey, it’s been a while. Thanks for stopping by.
Here’s a mundane thing I discovered about my body tonight. Totally SFW. PG. I’m old and arthritic. I’m used to all the various aches and pains that are either constant or intermittent. IIWIS… (1/7)

Canal says it will no longer work with 600 cinema figures who signed a petition voicing concern over the influence of its right-wing owner Vincent Bolloré (Nadia Khomami/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/…

I know translation is hard and translators, especially those hired for occasional piece work, tend not to be paid enough. Still, every 3 months the press sends my co-editor and I proofs of the journal and every 3 months I want to find and shake whoever translated the 4-5-sentence English abstracts into French. This time through, things are worse than usual because, I suspect, someone used AI. It's gross and infuriating and so stupidly wrong and not in any way, shape, or form why I agreed…

having an RSS feed in some way is the difference between whether or not I'll keep following your work even when I'm not in a good mental space for social media

I made bagels again. I think I’m getting better at most aspects of the process. The sesame seed was a fail as most fell off when I cut them. (The “vegan” egg wash did not work.) The asiago parmesan ones are great though!
#food #bagels

I thought I've read that #hashtags can't be found via "follow hashtag" of posts that did not have the hashtag in its initial version. Therefore, editing a post for adding hashtags doesn't work.
This does seem to confirm: https://

What a journey this release of #lucenenet has been on, two years in the making! Glad to see it come out and the world gets to experience all of the work that has been put in. It's such a massive effort by only very few contributors.
My contributions have decreased substantially, now I just test the release and 1 on pushes or some internal discussions. That's about it. Not too sad …

DEI Will Not Die
This podcast dives into the real work behind impactful equity and inclusion. From building DEI plans that don't gather dust to leading with authenticity, this is your space to reflect, learn and lead with purpose...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianp…

Raiders Not Getting Ahead of Themselves Despite Solid OTAs https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-not-getting-ahead-themselves-despite-solid

Finished up with the build, turned out pretty well. I do wish I had some quieter fans, but considering the space constraints I'm happy that they work as well as they do. The 240mm AIO keeps CPU cool enough though I worry that the Radeon 7900XT is going to catch fire considering airflow, but it was well-behaved while testing it out.
#steamMachine

Slop is not good, actually.
Literally the definition of the word slop is "content that is worthless".
It cannot be good—if it would be good, it wouldn't be worthless and then by definition it's not slop.
Now if you, for example, use LLMs to generate code that actually serves the function you want it to serve (let's say while prototyping something), it's not slop, but perhaps experimental or prototype code.
If it's something you generate for other people like for production code and it's not reviewed, then it's slop—it's worthless _even if it works_ because you don't know if it actually works and didn't take the care or responsibility required to make a work product.

RE: https://social.telemetrydeck.com/@telemetrydeck/116958414905506989
Not only did I do a lot of work behind the scenes, I ALSO made a pretty blender illustration for the accompanying blog post! Make oooh 🤩 and aaaah 🤯 noises please

Just finished an end to end simulation, BGA land to ARF6 launch, of the actual SFP28 TX lane 0 pair (not the shorter pair I had been using for initial layout work).
Took a while - the final geometry would have been way too big to simulate in a sane amount of time. Sonnet estimated 113GB of RAM and 122K mesh cells which... yeah.
I *could* do it, I have half a terabyte of RAM on this workstation, but considering that a 22GB / 54K cell simulation takes ~20 minutes per frequency and …

From The Conversation
Where else can you peer into the labs and lecture halls of Canadian researchers and academics, who draw on their life's work to explain what being sedentary does to your body, why male chimps repeatedly throw rocks at trees and how the international legal order has collapsed?
We share their vast expert knowledge to educate Canadians so they can make informed decisions about politics, their health, the environment, the education of their children and the…

Cressida Stephenson is only a quarter through #DigitalAccessibilityEthics, but her review is so far positive.
I appreciate her perspective on #GAAD. Which doesn’t mean doing something substantive has to be to buying this book, but it should be more than a post.
I’m not even putting…

A Not So Brave New World 🌐
不太美丽的新世界 🌐
📷 Nikon F4E
🎞️ Lucky SHD 400 (FF）
If you like my work, Support by buying me a coffee or a roll of film from
PayPal https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/ydcdingsite
Wise

Lunch Break (2026)
(High alpine carpentry, today a month ago at Breslauer Hütte... Not the worst of work places one can imagine... The mountain peak opposite, Talleitspitze, is 3406 meters...)
#LandscapePhotography #Photography

Although I switched to LibreWolf for my primary browser every now and then I get some weird thing where a web site does not work right, and using Firefox solves the issues.
I really prefer LibreWolf since it strips out so much of the crap in Firefox, but I just need to remember that sometimes it does not work.
#browsers

Not a metaphor but also works pretty damn well as a metaphor

A U.S. appeals court has ruled in a case involving Exxon Mobil that the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration
cannot require businesses to document work-related mental illnesses reported by employees.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said on Tuesday
that a requirement in federal law that ‌employers periodically report work-related deaths, injuries and illnesses only applies to physical -- and not mental c…

"The hardest part of acting is not being guaranteed work. Every job could be your last."
—Henry Cavill
#acting #coaching #inspiration

Let's say you're building a house. Normally this involves hiring a whole bunch of experts (either directly or via some company). You need to pay a fair wage for their labor, and you have to pay for all the material they're going to use. Some of them will be more experienced than others. They will sometimes make a mistake. They will sometimes get sick. The whole construction work will probably take a few months, and may get delayed in the process. Some construction material will be wasted. There's also a risk that over the next years, you'll discover that they screwed something up, and have to fix it. But you'll get a reasonably good house.
Now, a kid comes and tells you you don't have to do this. Instead of paying all these people, you can hire him. He's wearing a suit and sunshades. He never laid a brick in his whole life. But he's got this new great technology that will give you a great house in no time. Of course it will cost you, but not as much as the labor of all these people. You try to learn more, and you discover that the technology actually builds and razes a hundred of house-like things a day, until it gets close enough to something that actually resembles a house. There's a lot of wasted energy and material, but you don't have to worry because it's all subsidized (for the time being). You pay less, you get a house that looks just right on the outside and inside, and that seems to work just right.
Of course, there's a real risk that in a few months you'll discover that something is wrong. You may have to pay a lot for a real expert to figure out how things were done, and how to fix them. Or they may not be able to help you. You may be stuck having to call the suit again, and he'll happily come and fix it for you. And by "fix", I mean he will just raze a whole part of the house and start randomly spitting it out again until he gets something that looks about right, and works about right. Of course, it may not really be a good fit for the rest of the house, but you don't want to pay for replacing the whole thing, do you? It may also introduce a completely new issues that will surface in a few months, but that's just how it is.
Welcome to the glorious world of #AI.
#NoAI #NoLLM #LLM

Playing Terra Nil right now, and it's funny because from the promo stuff I thought I wouldn't like it much, yet I'm enjoying myself a lot. There's definitely a game design lesson to be leaned here.
I was absolutely correct in my assessment that the game feels like it's actively trying to make suspension of disbelief as hard as possible with its completely ridiculous mechanics that make absolutely zero sense. "That's... Not how that works at all!" Is basically playing on repeat in my brain.
Furthermore, the entire technosolutionist tenor of the game rubs me very much the wrong way. This compounds with the physics- and biology-defying (or perhaps -spiting) fictional layer in cases like the convenient magical radiation-absorbing buildings so that you can reverse radiation contamination with a few simple clicks to be extremely bad politics actually...
But... The mechanics do work together quite well to make interesting puzzles with good gameplay that includes satisfying variety and challenges. The art is wonderful, and the music and audio design are spot on. The the result of each level is immensely satisfying, and the pacing is excellent.
I guess the lesson I'm taking away from this is that really solid fundamentals can triumph over an absolute cacophony of ludonarrative dissonance. That doesn't mean that in every decision between ludonarrative harmony (or just straight up believability) and neat mechanics you should compromise towards mechanics, but it reinforces the idea that if you make the mechanics enjoyable in the abstract, players (or at least, players like me) will be willing to compromise a *lot* on whether it actually makes any sense for things to work that way.
I'm still bothered by the "use technology to fix everything" politics, which prevents this game from being one I'll enthusiastically recommend, but despite myself I am having a lot of fun with it.
#GameDesign #SolarPunk

Raiders Not Getting Ahead of Themselves Despite Solid OTAs https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-not-getting-ahead-themselves-despite-solid

The first record of the parable commonly known as the "Blind Men and the Elephant" showed up around 2500 years ago, in a Buddhist text from India. At this point it's pretty commonly known. I assume that most folks reading this will be familiar with some variation of it.
If not, it's essentially a story about people who have limited information making assertions about something: one man grabs a tail and says, "it's like a rope," another the trunk and says, "it's like a snake," a third the leg saying, "it's like a tree," and so on. Later variations are less kind to the men, having them not simply report their findings, but fight over them. The first English translation draws a parallel to religion.
This comes to mind for me, because social media has a tendency to incentivize us to make those hard assertions, to dig in, to argue our perspective as part of a spectacle. Free and federated social media isn't structurally that different from corporate media, so the incentive models built to maximize engagement by maximizing conflict tend to leak through the similarities in the user experience and the conditioning of other platforms.
I didn't really come here to critique the fediverse, but rather to remind everyone, "no one sees the whole fucking elephant." We are limited and there are necessarily some things so big they will never be individually comprehensible. Any system that relies on us all agreeing cannot possibly respond to those big things.
We can see that concretely if we look at the difference between "democratic unity" and "diversity of tactics." In the first model, everyone either agrees or gets forced to behave as though they agree (at least on some issues). That's how liberal democracy works. Diversity of tactics (which systematically described, for example, in the "St Paul Principles"), on the other hand, let's people align on goals without needing to agree on exactly how to achieve them. The reality being that often there are multiple "correct" paths, and sometimes those paths can only work if multiple paths are taken in unison.
No one sees the whole elephant. We won't even see the elephant later. People will still be arguing about the elephant long after it's gone. But if you want to get rid of the elephant, you're gonna need to accept that you can't comprehend it all and you're gonna have to figure out a way to work together that doesn't require a unified approach.

Not saying carbon capture will never work, but so far, well…

Put your name on your work and find like-minded people to share credit with. It is now on you to build not your brand, but the demonstration that you know what's going on.
It is going to be very hard to get a job by printing a list of skills at the top of your resume and hoping to get noticed. It already was and now it's worse than ever.
Be a person on the internet and by that I mean do not hide your person-hood. Your curiosity, your learning, your willingness to consider angles. Professional polish is something the clankers do better than us, because they are trained on all of us doing it.
If not putting your name on your learning, put a stable pseudonym out there. Be known by the work you do and even the mistakes you make and reconsider. Showing that your knowledge has _depth_ is now one of the most important things. We can all vibe up to a basic understanding. It's the people who can see where they went wrong, and course-correct that really are going to carry the day.
You no longer get to be perfect and only show what's finished and polished. And you're gonna have to show your work.

"The hardest part of acting is not being guaranteed work. Every job could be your last."
—Henry Cavill
#acting #coaching #inspiration

The Trump administration does not plan to seek approval from Congress for Donald Trump’s planned 250-foot arch,
arguing that they do not need it because lawmakers a century ago authorized a somewhat similar project that was never built.
Trump has targeted Memorial Circle
— a traffic roundabout on Columbia Island, a man-made island tucked inside the edge of Washington
— for his planned arch.
Teams of workers conducting surveys and geophysical testing began work …

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."
—Bruce Lee
#acting #coaching

When asked by Doocy, Trump answers with candor, admitting that the MOU with Iran is nothing,
that he doesn't want to put his signature on it,
and that all of this is a trumped up attempt to move on from war with Iran . . .
for which he will throw someone else, Vance, under the bus.
(JD, he's not kidding.
Ask Mike Pence.)

Just finished "Snake-Eater" by T. Kingfisher (@…). I'd read and thoroughly enjoyed her "Digger" webcomic, and found this book to be quite enjoyable too. There's something indelibly heartwarming about an anxious character growing to feel more comfortable and self-assured, especially when escaping and unlearning emotional abuse, and I'm certainly a sucker for heartwarming characters. I like the way that Kingfisher has taken time to talk about and try to avoid cultural appropriation, in a way that I feel is reasonable, although of course I'm not an expert judge of the nuances and I'm biased by having liked the book, so I'm willing to be told things are complicated in that regard it others judge differently. I also really liked the window dressing of a vaguely solarpunk future society, in a book that's not at all about that society. I'd love to see Kingfisher write something focused on how that society could work (or maybe she already has?).
Probably going to look up some of Kingfisher's fantasy books soon.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Work is super-busy right now with a lot of projects going on...
Do you know what will *not* help?
AI.
Do you know what will help?
Focusing and prioritizing tasks. Getting shit done. Doing high-quality work we can be proud of.
#NoAI #FuckAI

"The hardest part of acting is not being guaranteed work. Every job could be your last."
—Henry Cavill
#acting #coaching #inspiration

The whole #LLM ROI thing reveals something interesting. It's basically impossible to figure out the ROI of an LLM. That makes it impossible for bean counters to make a comparison between human work and LLM work, or human work without an LLM and LLM-assisted work, to determine if the incredibly high price is worth it. But it's also impossible because you can't measure the ROI of a human, especially for skilled labor.
You can't measure the ROI of a human, because managers have no idea what people do. There's an eternally expanding amount of work designed to address this problem. But no matter how closely people are surveilled, interrogated, analyzed, there's never any real answer.
I've talked in the past about in relation to medical care. One of the dirty secrets of hospitals is that they have no way to figure out how much individual treatment costs. It's easy to understand at scale. You can know exactly how much something costs society. You can even identify patterns, using public health models, and decrease costs for society by trying to get people to avoid risky behavior (stop smoking, use protection during sex, etc). But it is absolutely not possible, at all, in any way, to figure out how much a single visit costs. This is similar to the problem of predicting climate change vs predicting the weather tomorrow in Amsterdam at 15:00. One is possible, the other is simply not.
But what is becoming painfully clear now is that this is true *everywhere*. It's trivial to know how much an industry costs. It's possible to figure out it's ROI for society. It is not possible to figure out how much value any individual worker provides. LLM ROI and cost comparison is an instance of this larger problem.
This is a problem for capitalism because it shows that the fundamental assumptions behind capitalism, that product value and labor value are quantifiable, that people can actually make comparisons between competing products, etc, are completely bullshit. The capitalist apologetics that makes up so much of economics, the lies that are told that hold this system together, are crumbling before our eyes.
If you make a lot of money, it's because you've been lucky. You have the right social networks, you have become good at convincing people to give you money. There is absolutely no way to connect that to actually providing value to society. If you make a lot of money, internalize that. Understand that you are not special, and things can change. If you don't make a lot of money, it's not because you don't provide value. Don't forget that. The system is a lie built to destroy you. Don't let it.
The ideology is sick, something something time of monsters and all that, we are together in this dying machine. We need to understand the lies. Your value can never be quantified. The way we have always figured out how to do the right thing for each other is through each other. Social connection has always guided us. But now the most socially disconnected people on the planet have hijacked the system. They direct the resources of the world, and game the system to avoid personal responsibility.
We have to build a system where everyone is accountable. We can't use abstract numbers and lies to figure things out for us. We have to build systems around people and accountability. There is no other solution.

Federal agents did not have body-worn cameras when a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot a Mexican homebuilder who was driving a work van they tried pulling over in Houston, the Department of Homeland Security said Thursday.
Prosecutors in Houston said they are investigating the death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo,
whose family has joined Democrats in calling for an independent probe over Tuesday’s early morning shooting in one of the city’s heavily Hispanic …

Just finished The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw. Per @… it's an excellent work of feminist horror, although it's really only a little more horrifying than the fairy tales it's grounded in. It's also a tale of love, just with a lot more entrails than your average romance novel, despite being only a novella. I'm not usually one for horror, but I enjoyed it a lot.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Again, this is focused on community organizations that work directly with emergency management (police, fire, etc). But the ideas still work well (if not the execution) for all sorts of other types of orgs:
https://cdn.kingcounty.gov/-/media/king-county/depts/dph/documents/safety-injury-prevention/emergency-preparedness/cre/cbo-tabletop-exercise-guide.pdf?rev=e9695770e3e2444ab635e2af14254dfc&hash=55894CC9A38E70249D494DF367FD6310

On Bluesky last night
Catherine Rampell noted that in documents Trump released
there were confirmations of Russia’s work on Trump’s behalf in 2020
and that China “did not intend to “try to affect the election.”
https://bsky.app/profile/crampell.bsky.social/…

AI made it easy to start work.
It did not make it easy to finish it.
Daily Pull Request contexts per developer are up 67.4%.
Work restarts, tasks that return to in-progress after moving to another stage, are up 13.8%.
26% more in-progress tasks show no activity for seven or more days:
i.e. work was started, claimed capacity, and then stalled.
The developer productivity picture that AI tools present at the individual level is one of acceleration.
The w…

Mullin threatens states that refuse Trump's election demands
Mullin also repeated his threat of withholding Federal Emergency Management Agency grant funding to states that don’t work to “secure” elections.
“If they’re not willing to do it, it should raise serious questions.
It’s not that hard. This isn’t a partisan issue,”
the homeland security secretary said.
This also comes after the Trump justice department sent letters to election officials in every sta…

Team, there is no “undo” button for irreplaceable landscapes, yet ConocoPhillips and other oil companies are trying to get their hands on one of America’s wildest and most fragile places: The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Despite overwhelming public opposition, the administration just announced it will hold an oil and gas lease sale next month, offering tracts on the refuge’s sensitive coastal plain.
We will not stand by and let corporate greed and this administration's …

Officially an engraver and accorded the lowly status thereof,
William Blake devoted his labors to realizing his elaborately idiosyncratic visions using images and words together in ways that no artist had done before.
Blake swam against the current “of modern human understanding, whose bedrock is the principle of specialization.”
Today, nearly two centuries after his death, that principle still obtains -- and in some ways more rigidly than ever.
But his work remains,