When I was a little one, I was told that I ought to follow the path set for me, and I'll eventually find happiness there. It's just around the corner, just walk forward and don't stray. So I ran ahead, only to discover another segment of the same road, even more bleak than the previous one. And I heard again: just a little more. Finally, I realized that this road only leads to my grave, and there's no reason to hurry; and the only way to find happiness, is to actually stray from it.
Today in the drizzle I stopped by the Living Library, a beautiful native plant garden near SF's Balboa Park at the San Jose/Seneca intersection. Highly recommend a visit to see some #ceanothus in bloom and California poppies and island mallows beginning to, and much more.
I'm a little behind with posting my recent photos. but here you see one of my favourite lokal "afternoon hills".
This is one of the RARE hills, where I often walk without camera. But that day the clouds were so low that I just brought it - hoping for some exceptional shots... Exceptional for the location - not wordlwide exceptional ;-)
Enjoy!
#photography
Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney speech at Davos. It was a good one. This is how he ended it, but it is worth watching in full, including the Q&A afterward.
“We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine cooperation.
The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home, and to act together.
That is Canada’s path. We choose it openly and confidently, and it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.”
#CanPoli #CdnPoli #Canada #USA
RE: https://social.growyourown.services/@FediGarden/116082350446529495
Here's a wishlist item for Fediverse clients: it should be a one-click path to view the Local Feed page of an OP's server (where public) and if it is really niche, to subscribe to the feed like a hashtag.
Series D, Episode 01 - Rescue
VILA: Dayna. Dayna. [follows the path Dayna has taken. He leaves Orac and the binoculars on the ground in the snow.] Dayna.
[Planet Terminal. Exterior. Avon finds Tarrant lying face down in the snow, unconscious. Avon walks over and nudges Tarrant with his boot. Tarrant stirs.]
https://blake.torpidi…
Doea anyone know of any organizations in the greater Seattle area working to eliminate, or at least oppose the further proliferation of, unnecessary urban lighting? One of my favorite places to go in the city at night is now full of street lights. The whole reason I loved it is that it was *dark* and you could look out across the water without glare everywhere.
Not every beachfront bike path needs to be lit up like a sports stadium. It's a waste of electricity, contributes to light…
We rush through days counting minutes. But what if we're using the wrong kind of time?
The Greeks knew two types: Chronos (clock time) and Kairos (soul time). One measures. One reveals openings.
When we stop racing, something shifts. Endings become doorways. Crisis becomes life reorganizing itself.
What if the future isn't running out but circling back?
Read more about relearning the rhythms of change:
He filmed himself killing a man,
and the case ends in mistrial
An Orange County man who recorded himself fatally shooting a homeless man he said was blocking his path remained free this week after a jury deadlocked in his manslaughter trial.
Craig Sumner Elliott, 70, of Garden Grove was charged with one count of involuntary manslaughter for the 2023 shooting of Antonio Garcia Avalos.
According to prosecutors, Elliott and Avalos got into a confrontation on Sept. 29, 2…
Oh #thicktrunkTuesday might be a good day for this photo that I took on a recent hike.
It's one of my usual hikes but clouds or fog always make it so special as the usual background is gone and I see the motives in a complete different way.
And believe it or not - I went this path over 10 times but I've never seen that tree the way like at that day.
👀Great, hopeful review on one avenue to increase #crop yield 🌿🧪.
Context - we'll need 35-50% more food globally by 2050 but there are few signs that we're getting there. Yes, many issues in this space.
But photosynthesis is now one of the plant metabolic pathways where we have really good understanding, sufficient to see meaningful improvements of yield in the field, in #rice, #potato, #soybean. This is detailed in the review ➡️ #PlantSci #FoodSecurity
Urbanity - Urbana Composita 🌆
城市化 - 建构城市 🌆
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️ Ilford Pan 100
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite
„That’s three or four clicks just to see the error, and every one of them loads a new page with its own loading spinner, and none of them are fast. You are navigating a bureaucracy. You are filling out forms at the DMV of CI.“
What an apt comparison. The whole piece is *chef’s kiss*!
https://www.
This morning in Minneapolis:
Somebody posted in one of the local chats that their neighbor didn’t come home last night, looking for help finding them. Family doesn’t know where they are. They’d been taking the legal path to seek asylum. ICE doesn’t have their name (but that means very little; they hide names, kidnap anonymously, even discard people’s IDs).
Meanwhile, confirmed ICE sightings are ramping up in my area now after some relative early morning quiet.
Just in case you wondered how things are going here.
Frank Gehry, legendary architect of some of world’s most iconic buildings, dies at 96
Gehry defined his own idiosyncratic path in Toronto, Los Angeles and around the world
one of the greats!
What a great idea, dictators getting rid of other dictators for a better, brighter path under one unified dictatorship.
Tying up loose ends on the STM32MP2 PCIe board.
It's fully routed and I'm trying to fine tune the layer 3 power (and some ground) plane to provide good return current paths for the FPGA transceivers.
Left to right the pairs are two refclks (one from an LVDS oscillator and one from the SoC), SFP RX, and PCIe RX.
The actually-fast signals (PCIe and SFP) are fully ground referenced their entire length and have return path vias between L2 and L3 when they jump up to L1…
Weekend #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
Many aquatic animals are described as "filter feeders" but this is not functionally correct since it would require water forced through a mesh. Instead, most zooplankton, including copepods, are suspension feeders. They create feeding current gyres using appendages, and use spiny modified ones (maxillae) to intercept individual algal particles and move …
Fork, Explore, Commit: OS Primitives for Agentic Exploration
Cong Wang, Yusheng Zheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08199 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.08199 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.08199
arXiv:2602.08199v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: AI agents increasingly perform agentic exploration: pursuing multiple solution paths in parallel and committing only the successful one. Because each exploration path may modify files and spawn processes, agents require isolated environments with atomic commit and rollback semantics for both filesystem state and process state. We introduce the branch context, a new OS abstraction that provides: (1) copy-on-write state isolation with independent filesystem views and process groups, (2) a structured lifecycle of fork, explore, and commit/abort, (3) first-commit-wins resolution that automatically invalidates sibling branches, and (4) nestable contexts for hierarchical exploration. We realize branch contexts in Linux through two complementary components. First, BranchFS is a FUSE-based filesystem that gives each branch context an isolated copy-on-write workspace, with O(1) creation, atomic commit to the parent, and automatic sibling invalidation, all without root privileges. BranchFS is open sourced in https://github.com/multikernel/branchfs. Second, branch() is a proposed Linux syscall that spawns processes into branch contexts with reliable termination, kernel-enforced sibling isolation, and first-commit-wins coordination. Preliminary evaluation of BranchFS shows sub-350 us branch creation independent of base filesystem size, and modification-proportional commit overhead (under 1 ms for small changes).
toXiv_bot_toot
Unsplittable Transshipments
Srinwanti Debgupta, Sarah Morell, Martin Skutella
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07230 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.07230 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.07230
arXiv:2602.07230v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We introduce the Unsplittable Transshipment Problem in directed graphs with multiple sources and sinks. An unsplittable transshipment routes given supplies and demands using at most one path for each source-sink pair. Although they are a natural generalization of single source unsplittable flows, unsplittable transshipments raise interesting new challenges and require novel algorithmic techniques. As our main contribution, we give a nontrivial generalization of a seminal result of Dinitz, Garg, and Goemans (1999) by showing how to efficiently turn a given transshipment $x$ into an unsplittable transshipment $y$ with $y_a<x_a d_{\max}$ for all arcs $a$, where $d_{\max}$ is the maximum demand (or supply) value. Further results include bounds on the number of rounds required to satisfy all demands, where each round consists of an unsplittable transshipment that routes a subset of the demands while respecting arc capacity constraints.
toXiv_bot_toot
🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#MusicMap
- Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Sara Mohr-Pietsch traces a path towards Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, a single-movement work for piano and orchestra, based on one of Paganini's Violin Caprices.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002nps6
Frank Gehry, legendary architect of some of world’s most iconic buildings, dies at 96
Gehry defined his own idiosyncratic path in Toronto, Los Angeles and around the world
one of the greats!
President Xi Jinping highlighted China’s achievements in artificial intelligence and the chip industry
in a triumphant New Year’s Eve speech as he called for more confidence in the country’s development path in the year ahead.
“China has become one of the world’s fastest-rising economies in terms of innovative capacity,”
he declared in a televised address on Wednesday beamed to the nation’s 1.4 billion people,
in which he touted China’s achievements in large AI models …
As I said previously, I do, do ❤️ ridges... This was six days ago, on almost the last day of autumn (meanwhile it's all white)...
#FootpathFriday #LandscapePhotography #Hiking
Un Momento 🕰️
一瞬 🕰️
📷 Zeiss Ikon Super Ikonta 533/16
🎞️ Lucky SHD 400
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite
It’s about this time of year I like to check my backups and download my archives.
One archive I download is the archive of my Mastodon posts. Pretty much the only one now I’ve left the corporate web really.
I also like to copy the contents of my public fediverse posts into my own diary within my vimwiki.
Keep it all in one place for easy and local search.
Here’s the script I use, it’s very short and just copies the content of every post in the archive into a new diary entry in the vimwiki diary.
If it finds something already there, it appends.
It checks if it’s already written this post into the diary to avoid duplicating it when you run it over and every again every month or year or whatever.
Paste it into a new text-file called toVimWiki.php, download and unzip your mastodon archive, and run the script with php, passing it the path to the archive’s outbox.json and the root diary directory.
My diary is honestly mostly just public posts these days. Ain’t much in it I won’t blab about on the internet for likes and lols.
#archive #mastodon #vimwiki #endOfYear
Incremental (k, z)-Clustering on Graphs
Emilio Cruciani, Sebastian Forster, Antonis Skarlatos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08542 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.08542 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.08542
arXiv:2602.08542v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Given a weighted undirected graph, a number of clusters $k$, and an exponent $z$, the goal in the $(k, z)$-clustering problem on graphs is to select $k$ vertices as centers that minimize the sum of the distances raised to the power $z$ of each vertex to its closest center. In the dynamic setting, the graph is subject to adversarial edge updates, and the goal is to maintain explicitly an exact $(k, z)$-clustering solution in the induced shortest-path metric.
While efficient dynamic $k$-center approximation algorithms on graphs exist [Cruciani et al. SODA 2024], to the best of our knowledge, no prior work provides similar results for the dynamic $(k,z)$-clustering problem. As the main result of this paper, we develop a randomized incremental $(k, z)$-clustering algorithm that maintains with high probability a constant-factor approximation in a graph undergoing edge insertions with a total update time of $\tilde O(k m^{1 o(1)} k^{1 \frac{1}{\lambda}} m)$, where $\lambda \geq 1$ is an arbitrary fixed constant. Our incremental algorithm consists of two stages. In the first stage, we maintain a constant-factor bicriteria approximate solution of size $\tilde{O}(k)$ with a total update time of $m^{1 o(1)}$ over all adversarial edge insertions. This first stage is an intricate adaptation of the bicriteria approximation algorithm by Mettu and Plaxton [Machine Learning 2004] to incremental graphs. One of our key technical results is that the radii in their algorithm can be assumed to be non-decreasing while the approximation ratio remains constant, a property that may be of independent interest.
In the second stage, we maintain a constant-factor approximate $(k,z)$-clustering solution on a dynamic weighted instance induced by the bicriteria approximate solution. For this subproblem, we employ a dynamic spanner algorithm together with a static $(k,z)$-clustering algorithm.
toXiv_bot_toot
Past and Sapiens 🉐
过去和智人 🉐
📷 Nikon F4E
🎞️ ERA 100, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite
Urban Spots ✴️
城市噪点 ✴️
📷 Nikon F4E
🎞️ Ilford HP5 Plus 400, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite
This article is absolute insanity. The only way I can describe it is being from a Rabidly anti-Canadian American.
And in an overall tone of disrespect for the rule of law, autonomy, democracy, or progressive thought.
"In a strategy of the retrenchment, the dismemberment of Canada becomes a wise decision. Rather than allowing it to continue down a path of anti-American antagonism, the United States could support the Alberta and Quebec separatist movements. A successful secession by Alberta alone would cripple the federal fisc, and drive separatism in other regions due to the resultant decline in their equalization payments which comprises such a substantial part of their provincial budgets. In the end, British Columbia and a unified Maritime province would be admitted to the Union as Democratic states while Alberta and Saskatchewan would be admitted as Republican states; ensuring continued balance in the US Senate.
The rump of Canada, left with only one or two provinces, would finally be able to revise its constitution with ease. Under US pressure, the rump could become a freely associated state similar to Palau, with a new constitution reordering society along American lines. In time, perhaps it too could be annexed.”
#Canada #USA #CanPoli #CdnPoli #51stState #Separatism #Alberta #Quebec
https://defenseanalyses.org/work/our-canadian-problem/
(edit: sorry, wrong link previously)