Tootfinder

My first attempt at desoldering a BGA chip and it worked really well. Chip cleaned up nicely as well.
Disclaimer: I don't plan on using this chip or board again. So, I don't need it to work at the end.
#retrocomputing
#desoldering

Lol - John Carpenter's 1988 They Live.
Starring famed 80s wrestler Roddy Piper - who coined "I'm here to kick ass and chew gum and Im all outa gum!" - who discovers a pair of special sunglasses that show the world as it really is: we are subliminally controlled by aliens using global warming to make Earth's atmosphere similar to their homeworld, depleting its resources
`DISRUPT! SHIFT PARADIGMS! MOVE FAST BREAK THINGS!`

I was asking Claude Sonnet 4.5 some questions about how to transfer some old Fortran 90 progs into R. It's the sort of simple rules based question that AI is supposed to be good at. It's helpful on the rules of R, but took a lot of prompting to get it right -it would not have worked for someone who didn't understand the maths.
But it sure knows how to be creepily sycophantic. It's a machine and shouldn't pretend to be human.

The worst possible scenario for Jamaica came true: climate-fueled hurricane #Melissa just made landfall at its strongest.
Maximum sustained winds of 295 km/h (185 mph) and an
estimated minimum central pressure of 892 mb (26.34 inches).
Devastating.

An ex-OpenAI staffer of four years says it isn't doing enough to protect users, especially those with mental health issues, and needs to offer more than words (Steven Adler/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/opinion

Opinion | I Worked at OpenAI. It’s Not Doing Enough to Protect People.
A.I. companies need to do more to show the proof behind their claims.

Workout of the day.

Toyah Höher, @…, #Klimakrise und Lösungen,
Interview: Wie eine Studentenbewegung das #Klimarecht für immer verändert hat
Während

Wie eine Studentenbewegung das Klimarecht für immer verändert hat
Während Klimaschutz in Deutschland derzeit wie Stillstand wirkt, versinkt seine Heimat. Hier erzählt Vishal Prasad, warum er keine Alternative sah, als vor das höchste UN-Gericht zu ziehen.

DeepTravel: An End-to-End Agentic Reinforcement Learning Framework for Autonomous Travel Planning Agents
Yansong Ning, Rui Liu, Jun Wang, Kai Chen, Wei Li, Jun Fang, Kan Zheng, Naiqiang Tan, Hao Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21842

DeepTravel: An End-to-End Agentic Reinforcement Learning Framework for Autonomous Travel Planning Agents
Travel planning (TP) agent has recently worked as an emerging building block to interact with external tools and resources for travel itinerary generation, ensuring enjoyable user experience. Despite its benefits, existing studies rely on hand craft prompt and fixed agent workflow, hindering more flexible and autonomous TP agent. This paper proposes DeepTravel, an end to end agentic reinforcement learning framework for building autonomous travel planning agent, capable of autonomously planning,…

If I may, folks, if you’re trying to figure out remote control settings on your folks’ TVs, consider uploading a pic to your fave LLM to ask. Just worked like a charm for me.

Workout of the day.