@brian_gettler@mas.toI have a thing for holiday music, even if I tend not to be into much of what I hear in the outside world. I'll drop some of my favs here over the next few days. Feel free to suggest some yourself.
I'll start on the rougher end of the scale with a less-than-cheery meditation on the rest of Santa's year.
The Murder City Devils, "364 Days" (2001)
@pre@boing.worldI think today's worker is the owner of the company, he certainly is the assessor.
He worked a lot later than those without the vested interest there. 😆 I finished work at my job before he did! 🤭
All the wood was sanded down and remaining nude wood given some paint. We have a test plank in the foreground of the first picture here which is painted with a second coat of paint. Seems likely we lose all the wood grain when doing that, and so will prefer the paler look where it's obviously made of wood not paint.
Won't really know for sure till it's dry. Prefer the colour a bit darker like that but if we're hiding the wood grain we might as well have used MDF instead of pine. We're after something clearly made of wood.
Another area is test-painted with just the clearcoat top varnish as a second layer. That's likely to be right, just a bit more shiny and protected.
The carpenter proper is back from holiday and starts tomorrow. He has a lot of drawers and doors to build and edging to attach to make the door panels. Still hoping at least the carpentry will be pretty much all done by the end of the week but likely some painting and touching up still to do next week. Hopefully by the end of Tuesday because I'm not really able to be here all day each day for most of the two weeks after that.
@scott@carfree.cityI love Deerhoof’s Actually, You Can not just as a great, fun album but as a time capsule from an optimistic moment. In late 2021, we seemed to be emerging from the shadows of Trump and Covid-19—who’d have thought the Four Seasons presser and the vaccines, respectively, didn't end them? The music bottles up joyful, radical imaginings of a better world that were in the air since the George Floyd rebellion, not yet extinguished by the reactionary “crime” panic to come.
@cosmos4u@scicomm.xyzIn which NOAA more or less calls an end to the Earth/Sun excitement: #aurora night for the world will probably not be followed immediately by another great one. (This may be one of the few 'laws' of space weather predicting with a greater than 50% chance of being true. Been through that so many times by now I was actually not expecting much tonight ... d'oh.)
@hex@kolektiva.socialAfter #Trump finally crashes and burns (I'm still saying I don't think he makes it to the mid terms, and I think it's more than possible he won't make it to the end of the year) we'll hear a lot of people say, "the system worked!" Today people are already talking about "saving democracy" by fighting back. This will become a big rally cry to vote (for Democrats, specifically), and the complete failure of the system will be held up as the best evidence for even greater investment in it.
I just want to point out that American democracy gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile, who, before being elected was already a well known sexual predator, and who made the campaign promise to commit genocide. He then preceded to commit genocide. And like, I don't care that he's "only" kidnaped and disappeared a few thousand brown people. That's still genocide. Even if you don't kill every member of a targeted group, any attempt to do so is still "committing genocide." Trump said he would commit genocide, then he hired all the "let's go do a race war" guys he could find and *paid* them to go do a race war. And, even now as this deranged monster is crashing out, he is still authorized to use the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
He committed genocide during his first term when his administration separated migrant parents and children, then adopted those children out to other parents. That's technically genocide. The point was to destroy the very people been sending right wing terror squads after.
There was a peaceful hand over of power to a known Russian asset *twice*, and the second time he'd already committed *at least one* act of genocide *and* destroyed cultural heritage sites (oh yeah, he also destroyed indigenous grave sites, in case you forgot, during his first term).
All of this was allowed because the system is set up to protect exactly these types of people, because *exactly* these types of people are *the entire power structure*.
Going back to that system means going back to exactly the system that gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile *TWICE*.
I'm already seeing the attempts to pull people back, the congratulations as we enter the final phase, the belief that getting Trump out will let us all get back to normal. Normal. The normal that lead here in the first place. I can already see the brunch reservations being made. When Trump is over, we will be told we won. We will be told that it's time to go back to sleep.
When they tell you everything worked, everything is better, that we can stop because we won, tell them "fuck you! Never again means never again." Destroy every system that ever gave these people power, that ever protected them from consequences, that ever let them hide what they were doing.
These democrats funded a genocide abroad and laid the groundwork for genocide at home. They protected these predators, for years. The whole power structure is guilty. As these files implicate so many powerful people, they're trying to shove everything back in the box. After all the suffering, after we've finally made it clear that we are the once with the power, only now they're willing to sacrifice Trump to calm us all down.
No, that's a good start but it can't be the end.
Winning can't be enough to quench that rage. Keep it burning. When this is over, let victory fan that anger until every institution that made this possible lies in ashes. Burn it all down and salt the earth. Taking down Trump is a great start, but it's not time to give up until this isn't possible again.
#USPol
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialDay 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen
@bobmueller@mastodon.world
@Xexyz@mastodon.me.ukViewfinder: petting the cat
Viewfinder caught my eye when it was first demonstrated, with the ability to take photos and walk into them, and clever world manipulation. When it came out it was £20, and that seemed a little expensive for the technical sandbox I imagined it to be. Towards the end of last year it was free on PS , and given away on the Epic Game Store, and now, having played it, I can see that I was wrong: it is not just a technical sandbox, it was not too…
@aardrian@toot.cafeTwenty-four. There are now 24 advents. All of you wiseacres suggesting I was one calendar away from an advent of advents can stuff it.
https://adrianroselli.com/2025/12/web-design-dev-advent-calendars-for-2025.html
Still not making a damn adven…
@toxi@mastodon.thi.ngOne of the most biting & memorable film monologues, inspired by the poetry of Antonio Machado, and delivered by "Jefe" near the end of Ridley Scott's The Counselor:
"Actions create consequences, which create new worlds, and they're all different [...] and hitherto unknown to us. They must have always been there. [...] I urge you to see the truth of the situation you are in. It is not for me to tell you what you should have done or not done. The world in which…
@paulbusch@mstdn.caGood Morning #Canada
Last weekend our granddaughter visited to help decorate our tree and we watched Elf, a movie about #Christmas spirit, because we were feeling Christmassy. I think the majority of Canadians believe in the spirit of this season. We're a little bit more polite and kinder, if that's even possible, and underneath the snark, the passive aggressiveness, the ##ElbowsUp, is a pack of big cuddly beavers. You don't have to take my word for it because places like Quebec City, Banff, and Vancouver regularly end up on lists for best places to sit on Santa's knee. He lives in Canada so not a surprise. Did you know that in 2018, Canada was ranked as #1 most Christmassy country in the world. They can't put it on the internet if it isn't true.
#CanadaIsAwesome #MerryChristmas
https://dailyhive.com/mapped/canada-ranked-1-most-christmassy-country-in-the-world
@tinoeberl@mastodon.onlineIm #Thwaites-Gletscher in der #Antarktis breiten sich Risse schneller aus als erwartet.
Neue Daten zeigen, dass nicht nur Schmelze, sondern auch innere Spannungen den #Eisverlust antreiben. …
@cdarwin@c.imIn the black of the winter of nineteen-nine
When we froze & bled on the picket line,
We showed the world that women could fight
& we rose & won with women's might.
https://kolektiva.social/@MikeDunnAuthor/115594417199677371
@pre@boing.worldThe conference is over now. I likely wouldn't have come for just a bitcoin thing, but I am very interested in redecentralizing the web, so it's attachment to the nostr day pulled me in.
Everyone I met was friendly and interesting and seems much more interested in making a better money system than in making money for themselves.
Our government and bank money systems are dysfunctional in all kinds of ways which are often less visible than they should be too people using them, especially to those in Europe and America who benefit from the way those systems exploit the global south.
I'm not convinced that fixing that would end wars and fix broken government as some seem to think, but I am sure our money is the source of many problems.
There are many bright, well meaning, and intelligent people building to improve bitcoin in fascinating ways with the hope of having a parallel system to transition to. With lots of work still to be done.
Can it work?
I'm sure I don't know, and I'm sure even if it's a better system it'll come with it's own unfairness and cruelty. Money will continue to be a source of suck and worry.
I'm told that the bigger conferences are often full of shitcoin scammers and suit wearing banksters who are in fact all in it too get rich and rip people off, but I found none of that here.
Here there is a real community of people trying to make the world a better place and improve the lives of their neighbours and governance of their countries.
And in the end building community is the most radical and effective way to change the world regardless of the problems of it's money system.
I had a great time. Thanks to those organising it.
#bitfest #bitcoin
@trochee@dair-community.socialOof the AI world is eating its own here
Somehow Google's AI got the wrong end of the stick about Meta's AI and Murati's AI and who is getting hired by whom
everybody's grifting all the time forever
@hex@kolektiva.socialThere's a word at the beginning and end of Dawn of Everything that feels self-referential right now: Kairos.
> We began this book with a quote which refers to the Greek notion of kairos as one of those occasional moments in a society’s history when its frames of reference undergo a shift – a metamorphosis of the fundamental principles and symbols, when the lines between myth and history, science and magic become blurred – and, therefore, real change is possible. Philosophers sometimes like to speak of ‘the Event’ – a political revolution, a scientific discovery, an artistic masterpiece – that is, a breakthrough which reveals aspects of reality that had previously been unimaginable but, once seen, can never be unseen. If so, kairos is the kind of time in which Events are prone to happen.
> Societies around the world appear to be cascading towards such a point. This is particularly true of those which, since the First World War, have been in the habit of calling themselves ‘Western’. On the one hand, fundamental breakthroughs in the physical sciences, or even artistic expression, no longer seem to occur with anything like the regularity people came to expect in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet at the same time, our scientific means of understanding the past, not just our species’ past but that of our planet, has been advancing with dizzying speed. Scientists in 2020 are not (as readers of mid-twentieth-century science fiction might have hoped) encountering alien civilizations in distant star systems; but they are encountering radically different forms of society under their own feet, some forgotten and newly rediscovered, others more familiar, but now understood in entirely new ways.
Reading this as I write something very inspired by this work feels especially serendipitous, especially at this time. When they wrote the book, I think that kairos felt more serendipitous itself. But as the frequency of opportunity increases, the veil between realities feels more malleable... that perhaps we can poke a finger through and open a portal to a completely different future than the one we've felt locked into for such a long time.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/the-coordinated-swarm-lyhr
@servelan@newsie.socialSo what was the point of putting a bug in Trump's ear? To be outed as a liar, to make an excuse end to the conflict?
Ukraine didn't target Putin's home: CIA
https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/cia-assesses-ukraine-was-not-targeting-a-putin-residence-in-drone-attack-contrary-to-kremlin-claim-sources-say/
@michabbb@social.vivaldi.nettoday in a german bakery, a woman asked for 8 slices of bread. when the employee asked, “would you like the end piece too?”, she said no.
8 slices? just wasting bread? #WTF
i’m not out every day (thank god), but every time i am, the world proves again how crazy it’s become.
@hex@kolektiva.socialOne 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."
@arXiv_csLG_bot@mastoxiv.pageSpatially-informed transformers: Injecting geostatistical covariance biases into self-attention for spatio-temporal forecasting
Yuri Calleo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17696 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17696 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.17696
arXiv:2512.17696v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The modeling of high-dimensional spatio-temporal processes presents a fundamental dichotomy between the probabilistic rigor of classical geostatistics and the flexible, high-capacity representations of deep learning. While Gaussian processes offer theoretical consistency and exact uncertainty quantification, their prohibitive computational scaling renders them impractical for massive sensor networks. Conversely, modern transformer architectures excel at sequence modeling but inherently lack a geometric inductive bias, treating spatial sensors as permutation-invariant tokens without a native understanding of distance. In this work, we propose a spatially-informed transformer, a hybrid architecture that injects a geostatistical inductive bias directly into the self-attention mechanism via a learnable covariance kernel. By formally decomposing the attention structure into a stationary physical prior and a non-stationary data-driven residual, we impose a soft topological constraint that favors spatially proximal interactions while retaining the capacity to model complex dynamics. We demonstrate the phenomenon of ``Deep Variography'', where the network successfully recovers the true spatial decay parameters of the underlying process end-to-end via backpropagation. Extensive experiments on synthetic Gaussian random fields and real-world traffic benchmarks confirm that our method outperforms state-of-the-art graph neural networks. Furthermore, rigorous statistical validation confirms that the proposed method delivers not only superior predictive accuracy but also well-calibrated probabilistic forecasts, effectively bridging the gap between physics-aware modeling and data-driven learning.
toXiv_bot_toot
@pre@boing.worldNot sure what the difference between a panel and a"fireside chat" is. There is no fire.
But here's a fireside chat on what nostr is.
Nostr is freedom for Identity. Accounts without hosts. Publishing without publidhers. Censorship resistance without platforms deciding who gets to say what.
It's not a silo in which you can be tapped as the service enshitifies, since it's a protocol with accounts you control, you can't switch clients or relays without loosing social graph or contacts.
Nostr is notes and Other Stuff, what other stuff? the panel is working on an audiobook publishing system with perhaps a required payment and affiliate revenue share. E-commerce, video publishing, zap stream for live video with zap payments.
Onboarding can be tricky with private key management needing to be understood and such a range of options of clients and what relays are. Can we make it easier?
Perhaps by abstracting away the fact it's nostr at all. Devine users don't even know they are using nostr. But this robs users of the understanding they may need to move clients or use the same account for video and notes, say.
Perhaps by making a private messagnger, the panel thinks people are used to using multiple messenger apps. Though I find they hate that, and that's why they refuse to install signal. They feel they don't need it since they already have WhatsApp with a bigger network.
In the end it's education. We have to teach literacy so people can read and write, we have to teach public keys encryption so people can do so securely.
#bitfest #nostr
@andres4ny@social.ridetrans.itOof, fuck microsoft.
But also, there's no reason to use permissive licenses any more. "Open source" has taken over the world. We no longer have to work with billion-dollar companies in order to get our stuff used. Now we need to protect ourselves from being taken advantage of by them.
https://
@servelan@newsie.socialThe comments are *overwhelmingly* anti-Bezos, and many express their intent to cancel subscriptions (I access through a library subscription, canceled my own).
Opinion | Trump replacing the White House East Wing is not the end of the world - The Washington Post
https://wapo.st/4o2FcGU
@ubuntourist@mastodon.social🎜 It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine 🎝 -- R.E.M.
As Microsoft Forces Users to Ditch Windows 10, It Announces That It’s Also Turning Windows 11 into an AI-Controlled Monstrosity;
"Let's rewrite the entire operating system around AI."
https://…
@annsev@troet.cafeIf #Musk 🏴☠️ were a guy from the lower middle class with an average income and net worth, he would have been committed to a psychiatric ward long ago.
But since he is the richest person in the world (which doesn't really mean much, but enough to cause damage), even a sociopath like Musk is tolerated—even though he has already caused enormous damage and that is probably not the end of it.
@scott@carfree.cityHaymarket Books has ebooks on sale for $2 until Nov. 7. Some of my favorite books published by them are:
Abolish Rent: on the potential of tenant organizing
Let This Radicalize You: a guide to activism over the long haul
No Cop City, No Cop World: lessons from Atlanta's Cop City fight
Perfect Victims: unpacks anti-Palestinian narratives you may not realize you've internalized
@paulbusch@mstdn.caGood Morning #Canada
The month of December will typical put a dent in your paycheck, or January if you're using your credit cards, so it's tough to save any money. Canadians rank 21st worldwide with regards to how much of our salary we put into a savings account. According to World Population Review, we put away approximately 7% of our paycheck for a #RainyDay, far behind South Korea at 35%. I'm retired and therefore not a saver at this point, but even during my most successful earnings period I can't imagine I would have been able to put away a third of my salary.
I suspect the savings percentage is driven by a small group of high wage earners as individual Canadian debt has increased. According to Equifax, total consumer debt in Canada reached $2.56 trillion at the end of 2024, a 4.6 per cent increase over 2023.
#CanadaIsAwesome
https://www.equifax.ca/business/blog/all-news/-/story/stable-versus-struggling-canada-s-financial-divide-widens/
@pre@boing.worldSo the temporary placeholder name "Your Party" is made permanent.
None of the options on the shortlist were good. Most of them just as grammatically inconvenient as the dumb placeholder name.
The people who decide on the short-list, who can be a member, whose votes counts and what the options are, have quite a lot of power.
Zara Sultana boycotted day one over who sets the rules and who can be involved. If Your Party have a governing body with power to override conference they end up like the Labour party and just are easily taken over and usurped by a cabal of thatcherite neoliberal capitalists.
They did allow the dual membership system and a wider governance, so Zara won on who gets to be a member and who gets to be in charge. Which is probably good.
Coz as the terrible name shows, if you put the idiots in charge you'll get idiocy not good collective decision making.
For now the membership appear to have won, and I hear are they are all very excited and fierce and canny and not likely to let the old guard just set up another dictatorship from the top.
They currently have half the membership count of the greens, less than a quarter that claimed by Reform. Lets hope they can get some attention towards something other than how billionaires think the country should be run and focus on the people.
Here's hoping they can inflate that number by draining the Labour party and Reform members who just want change really rather than actually liking anything said by Farage.
#yourParty #ukpol
@hex@kolektiva.socialPart of why #Trump has always been so hard to pin down politically is that he was always representing highly conflicting interests. Now, as that eats him alive, the GOP is fracturing in to two main groups: the Pinochet/Franco wing and the Hitler wing.
The Pinochet/Franco wing (let's call them PF) are lead by Vance. PF are also a coalition with some competing interests, but basically it's evangelical leaders, Opus Dei (fascist catholics), tech fascists (Yarvinites), pharma, and the other normal big republican donors. They support Israel, some because apartheid is extremely profitable and some because they support the genocide of Palestinian in order to bring the end of the world. They are split between extremely antisemitic evangelicals and Zionists, wanting similar things for completely different reasons. PF wants strong immigration enforcement because it lets them exploit immigrants, they don't want actual ethnic cleansing (just the constant threat). They want H1B visas because they want to a precarious tech work force. They want to end tariffs because they support free trade and don't actually care about things being made here.
The Hitler wing are lead by Nick Fuentes. I think they're a more unified group, but they're going to try to pull together a coalition that I don't think can really work. They're against Israel because they believe in some bat shit antisemitic conspiracy theory (which they are trying to inject along side legitimate criticism of Israel). They are focused on release of the #EpsteinFiles because they believe that it shows that Epstein worked for Mossad. They don't think that the ICE raids are going far enough, they oppose H1Bs because they are racists. They want a full ethnic cleansing of the US where everyone who isn't "white" is either enslaved for menial labor, deported, or dead. But they're also critical of big business (partially because of conspiracy theories but also) because they think their best option is to push for a white socialism (red/brown alliance).
Both of them want to sink Trump because they see him as standing in the way of their objectives. Both see #Epstein as an opportunity. Both of them have absolutely terrifying visions of authoritarian dictatorships, but they're different dictatorships.with opposing interests. Even within these there may be opportunities to fracture these more.
While these fractures decrease the likelihood of either group getting enough people together, their vision is more clear and thus more likely to succeed if they can make that happen. Now is absolutely *not* the time to just enjoy the collapse, we need to keep up or accelerate anti-fascist efforts to avoid repeating some of the mistakes of history.
Edit:
I should not that this isn't *totally* original analysis. I'll link a video later when I have time to find it.
Here it is:
#USPol
