Tootfinder

Tomorrow people from all over the world are sharing their ideas on constructionism in education. From China, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, UK, Austria, United States and Germany (and maybe some others 😉). Some of them in real life at the LocHal, some others remote.
#turtlestitch10 #arts

copenhagen: Copenhagen Networks Study
A network of social interactions among university students within the Copenhagen Networks Study, over a period of four weeks, sampled every 5 minutes. Interactions include physical proximity (undirected), phone calls (directed, weighted), text messages (directed), and information about Facebook friendships (undirected). Nodes include some metadata, including gender.
This network has 536 nodes and 3600 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unwei…

If you’ve paid attention to my ramblings over the last decade-plus, then you’ve heard me to talk about selfish accessibility.
It’s nice to see others embrace it.
“Selfish reasons for building accessible UIs”
https://nolanlawson.com/2025/06/16/sel

Selfish reasons for building accessible UIs
All web developers know, at some level, that accessibility is important. But when push comes to shove, it can be hard to prioritize it above a bazillion other concerns when you’re trying to c…

Some #NoctilucentClouds activity over Bochum, Germany, in the late evening, having to struggle against an all too brightly lit logistics center ... and the display didn't survive for the morning.

One nice thing about Switzerland is that you can mispronounce every word in your shitty German and people just assume you’re from some place over the mountain.

Fun new summer music video, is out, Kesha’s Boy Crazy. It’s a basic pop/hiphop bop, featuring various images of Kesha surrounded by her boy toys. Only some of her boy toys are well over the age of 60.

I saw that I have just passed a million total #OpenStreetMap map changes according to HDYC! 🎉🗺️
While this might seem a lot, this is still less than some of my OSM friends that have over 2 or 3 million changes.

This type of reasoning is always baffling to me. When climate change is discussed these people always say that there is some magical technological solution that will pop up to save us (usually handed to us by the AI gods).
Why then, in the the several decades that it takes to scale up nuclear, can we not account for the possibility that AI could become more energy efficient?
That sounds like something you could solve for the cost of a few power plants...

UK needs more nuclear to power AI, says Amazon Web Services boss
The world's largest cloud computing company plans to spend £8bn on new data centres in the UK over the next four years.

Some remarks on Folkman graphs for triangles
Eion Mulrenin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14942 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14942

Some remarks on Folkman graphs for triangles
Folkman's theorem asserts the existence of graphs $G$ which are $K_4$-free, but which have the property that every two-coloring of $E(G)$ contains a monochromatic triangle. The quantitative aspects of $f(2,3,4)$, the least $n$ such that there exists an $n$-vertex graph with both properties above, are notoriously difficult; a series of improvements over the span of two decades witnessed the solution to two \$100 Erdős problems, and the current record due to Lange, Radziszowski, and Xu now stand…

Since “Get Your War On” (the post 9/11 webcomic) came up as a subject on BlueSky, I’ve also been zipping through the old comics and JFC…”Plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes”
http://www.mnftiu.cc/2001/11/08/war4-4/

Stable amalgamation over a predicate and the Gaifman property
Saharon Shelah, Alexander Usvyatsov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12631 https://

Stable amalgamation over a predicate and the Gaifman property
We consider the following property of a first order theory T with a distinguished unary predicate P: every model of the theory of P occurs as the P-part of some model of T. We call this property the Gaifman property. Gaifman conjectured that if T is relatively categorical over P, then it has the Gaifman property. We propose a generalized version of this conjecture: if T fails the Gaifman property, then it exhibits non-structure over P, i.e., has many non-isomorphic models over P in many cardina…

The proposed sell-off of federal lands in the Senate budget bill includes a LOT of Joshua tree habitat—the trees grow in some of the largest areas of undeveloped land in the lower 48 states
The place where eastern and western Joshua trees hybridize, north of Creech AFB, is included
#JoshuaTree #USpolitics

Sources: some Trump administration officials are holding up finalizing a deal for the UAE to buy Nvidia AI chips over concerns that China could access the chips (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/politi…

Imagine you're president, and someone in prison awaiting trial had dirt on you, dies suspiciously. Then ~6 years later people clamor for info you'd kill to suppress to be released anyway.
Might make you post: people should "not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about."
Rough Tuesday for Dopey McGropey.
His post from 3 days ago:

Donald J. Trump: "What’s going on with my “boys” and, in some cases, “gals?” They’re all going...
What’s going on with my “boys” and, in some cases, “gals?” They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and “selfish people” are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein. For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again. Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, …

Insalata di rucola e parmigiano
When mixed simply with Parmesan and some kind of dressing, rocket is the perfect accompaniment to steak. The recipe given here is our own where we mix handfuls of rocket with shaved Parmesan, and drizzle over olive oil and balsamic vinegar in the classic 3:1 proportions of a French vinaigrette (some say 1:1). It is important to use the best olive oil you can find, and the shave the Parmesan with a speed peeler or potato peeler rather than grating it.

Week 1 NFL best bets to make before lines move: Projecting the trendy picks the market will soon be all over

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/week-1-…

I shop at the Petco there and can confirm it's incredibly dangerous... to make the left turn into the parking lot on your bike. Somehow that's not what this article is about, though.
https://missionlocal.org/2025/06/sf-potrero-center-drugs-16th-missi…

"An Australian study, conducted over four years and starting before the pandemic, has come up with some enlightening conclusions about the impact of working from home. The researchers are unequivocal: this flexibility significantly improves the well-being and happiness of employees, transforming our relationship with work."

An early morning alone on the banks of the (still young) Isar river some weeks ago... Really more "flow" rather than #WaterfallWednesday, but I just absolutely cherish places and moments like this & feeling so privileged being able to experience these after decades of living in large cities... (each time also a reminder how much we stand to lose...)

Over the past twenty-one years, I've posted 365 posts to my blog, on average one every twenty-one days. They total almost half a million words.
That's quite some corpus of work.
#Blog
#Blogging

365 posts
Checking my blog yesterday, I noticed that I had published 365 posts, one for every day of the year. Which, considering that the oldest post that remains is from the 24th June 2004, almost twenty one years ago, means that I've averaged one post every twenty-one days over that period. Mind you, I've not been consistent; there've been periods I've posted more, others I've posted less.

The team and I at @… are very excited to announce we're one of the teams for the IndieDev 2025 fund working on our game 'Valley of the Lost Abbey'.
Looking forward to sharing our dev progress over the next few months.

IndieDev 2025: 8 Teams Announced for Second Year of Games Prototype Fund | Ardán

A big question will be how to regulate national scale things. Like our central bank, the Federal Reserve, or our military. We have (or had) a reasonable system over those, and those systems should be retained.
I think the idea that states cover disasters in other states is going to need to be revisited. Some states, like California, are recognizing and beginning to self-address things like earthquakes and fires - For instance my home insurance has increased several fold. But why sh…

Very early in the commercial registrar era, some registrars priced domains in harmony with their costs: no teaser marketing, just discounts on buying multiple future years at once. Even after everyone stopped giving out-year discounts explicitly, the fact of inflation in upstream fees made it wise for legitimate domain holders to buy many years in advance.
I am close to wanting a return to the InterNIC model. DNS Marxism.

The Spamhaus Project (@spamhaus@infosec.exchange)
Attached: 1 image Over the past 30 days, six gTLDs have ranked in the Top 10 for being associated with botnet C2s - all showing significant increases in detections 📈: .tech (+4,000%), .icu (+433%), .today (+429%), .fun (+400%), .digital (+314%), and .life (+258%). 🌐 Full stats over at: https://www.spamhaus.org/reputation-statistics/gtlds/domains/ These TLDs are all cheap to register (as low as $0.98 using a promo code 🤑), but expensive to renew. Perfect conditions for throwaway dom…

Chocy Milk Life Hack

We asked Abbott for his and his staff’s emails with Elon Musk and Musk’s companies.
The governor’s office won’t turn them over, saying some contain
“intimate and embarrassing” information that is “not of legitimate concern to the public.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/…

Texas Governor’s Office Says Its Emails With Elon Musk May Be, in Part, Too “Embarrassing” to Release to the Public
We asked Abbott for his and his staff’s emails with Elon Musk and Musk’s companies. The governor’s office won’t turn them over, saying some contain “intimate and embarrassing” information that is “not of legitimate concern to the public.”

Rare events algorithm study of extreme double jet summers and their connection to heatwaves over Eurasia
Valeria Mascolo, Francesco Ragone, Nili Harnik, Freddy Bouchet
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13101

Rare events algorithm study of extreme double jet summers and their connection to heatwaves over Eurasia
Several large scale circulation patterns have been identified in relation to extreme Northern Hemisphere summer heatwaves. Three main ones are a double jet over Eurasia, a positive phase of the summer northern annular mode, and a quasi-wave-3 geopotential height anomaly. While there is some evidence suggesting these patterns are related to each other, the explicit nature of their relation, as well as the explicit mechanisms by which they are related to extreme heatwaves is still not known. The …

❝Police on horseback charged at the crowd, striking some with wood rods and batons as they cleared the street in front of the federal building. Officers then fired teargas and crowd control projectiles at the large group, sending demonstrators, hotdog vendors and passing pedestrians fleeing through the street. Some have since regrouped, ignoring an LAPD dispersal order.
‘It was a total 100% over-reaction. We weren’t doing anything but standing around chanting peaceful protest,’ said Samantha Edgerton, a 37-year-old bartender.”❞
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/jun/14/trump-birthday-military-parade-no-kings-protest-live-updates?page=with:block-684e0b918f08be826d571aa2#block-684e0b918f08be826d571aa2

New York's Zohran Mamdani wins over some of the city's business elite (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/f172fc63-422f-4016-a0b7-ac155eb50f81
http://www.memeorandum.com/250716/p86#a250716p86

With the browser being such a core part of our digital reality and how we access it I find it incomprehensible to move my life and workflows over to a closed source browser by some money burning "AI" startup that might not be there in a year.

Analysis: nearly 70 Trump administration officials and nominees held crypto or investments in blockchain or digital-asset firms at the time of their selection (Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2025/…

1 in 5 top Trump picks held crypto, some worth millions, Post finds
Over 1 in 5 top Trump appointees reported investments in crypto and other digital assets, far more than previous administrations, a Post analysis found.

Look, I give a fuck, because freedom isn't some abstract idea or lip service paid to "choice" while real decisions are made over your head.
Freedom is collective, it's when everyone gets to shape the community together, no more of this top-down bullshit where rules drop from above and you’re told to accept it or leave. Anarcho-syndicalism is not theory to me, it’s my fucking life story now, because I want to actually live this principle where people, not bosses, run t…

copenhagen: Copenhagen Networks Study
A network of social interactions among university students within the Copenhagen Networks Study, over a period of four weeks, sampled every 5 minutes. Interactions include physical proximity (undirected), phone calls (directed, weighted), text messages (directed), and information about Facebook friendships (undirected). Nodes include some metadata, including gender.
This network has 568 nodes and 24333 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unwe…

This is just yet another example of what happens when #ClimateChange is ignored. A ramp-up of extreme #weather is causing #insurance companies to stop offering coverage in areas around the globe where…

Where Brian Schottenheimer stands among NFC East head coaches https://insidethestar.com/where-brian-schottenheimer-stands-among-nfc-east-head-coaches

Series D, Episode 07 - Assassin
BENOS: One moment, gentlemen. A late addition. Perhaps you'd like to send back a few details to your clients, especially the ladies. Now I know he looks soft, and he talks soft, too, but you can tell the ladies he's strong enough to work all day and still have plenty of energy left over for any little chores you might have for him in the evenings. [laughter] Now, what am I bid?
TOK: Valeria of Prim bids a hundred... [1/2] B7B5

just tried my first Pixelfed story (which only works over web-ui yet) - but there was no chance to tag @… (with your pixelfed account) at all...
that story thing needs some love @… too

Join the second edition of the OpenSearch User Group Berlin. Learn about OpenSearch Project and Eliatra, get the latest news from the projects and meet the community over some drinks & snacks. 
📅 When: June 18, 2025 – 6.30 pm
📍 Where: Automat Berlin Gmbh, Schöneberger Ufer 65 | 10785 Berlin
Register now:

OpenSearch Project Berlin 2nd meetup, Wed, Jun 18, 2025, 6:30 PM | Meetup
Hi Everyone, we are very excited to announce our OpenSearch Project Berlin 2nd meetup on **Wednesday June 18th** **Agenda** 6:30pm Start (Drinks and snacks will be provide

Saw some wild messaging from Apple in the Software Update app on an old MacBook — in fact the system was *not* up-to-date. Surfaced via a Google Chrome EOL message.
Got them switched over to the latest version of Firefox just fine 👀
The web should be for everyone (and not just on new hardware)

Sunset in Bochum, Germany, today, with some sunspots (see https://x.com/joe_stalder/status/1945915214794211795 for daytime views) - with the falling declination the sunset point has moved so much to the left that the Sun ist hard to get from my roof top right now; I have to bend over with a vengeance to the left or right to shoot past a big obstruction. Astronomy athletics ...

About morbid thriftiness (Autism Spectrum Condition)
As you may have noticed, I am morbidly thrifty. Usually I don't buy stuff that I don't need — and if I decide that I actually need something, I am going to ponder about it for a while, look for value products, and for the best price. And with some luck, I'm going to decide I don't need it that bad after all.
One reason for that is probably how I was raised. My parents taught me to be thrifty, so I have to be. It doesn't matter that, from retrospective, I see that their thriftiness was applied rather arbitrarily to some spendings and not others, or that perhaps they were greedy — spending less on individual things so that they could buy more. Well, I can't delude myself like that, so I have to be thrifty for real. And when I fail, when I pay too much, when I get cheated — I feel quite bad about it.
The other reason is that I keep worrying about my future. It doesn't matter how rich I may end up — I'll keep worrying that I'll run out of money in the future. Perhaps I'll lose a job and won't be able to find anything for a long time, Perhaps something terrible will happen and I'm going to need to pay a lot suddenly.
Another thing is that I easily get attached to objects. Well, it's easier to be thrifty when you really don't want to replace stuff. Over time you also learn to avoid getting new stuff at all, since the more stuff you have, the more stuff may break and need to be thrown away.
Finally, there's my environmental responsibility. I admit that I don't do enough — but at least the things I can do, I do.
[EDIT: and yes, I feel bad about how expensive my new phone was, even though it's of much higher quality than the last one. Also, I got a worse deal because I waited too long.]
#ActuallyAutistic

@… It's not looking good for Scotland's rivers 😳

You won't want to miss today's Metacurity for the most critical infosec developments you might have missed over the weekend, including
--Trump cyber EO reverses some parts of Biden, Obama orders
--Starlink endangers WH security,
--Nigeria convicts Chinese cybercriminals,
--US sentences Nigerian hacker,
--ICE arrests Oz hacker,
--Italy ends contract with spyware company Paragon,
--Supreme Ct. gives DOGE social security data,
--BADBOX 2.0 …

Trump cyber EO reverses some parts of Biden, Obama orders
Starlink endangers WH security, Nigeria convicts Chinese cybercriminals, US sentences Nigerian hacker, ICE arrests Oz hacker, Italy ends contract with spyware company Paragon, Supreme Ct. gives DOGE our social security data, BADBOX 2.0 infects 1m+ devices, EU issues cyber blueprint, much more

Just download some RAM
https://www.servethehome.com/kyocera-pegatron-and-smart-show-cxl-over-optics-at-computex-2025/

Tulip UFOs hovering at dusk in spring
#photography #bloomScrolling #tulips #pink

The fast, the slow and the merging: probes of evaporating memory burdened PBHs
Alessandro Dondarini, Giulio Marino, Paolo Panci, Michael Zantedeschi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13861

The fast, the slow and the merging: probes of evaporating memory burdened PBHs
The so-called memory-burden effect implies that evaporating Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) inevitably stabilize before complete decay. This stabilization opens a new mass window for PBH Dark Matter below $10^{15}\,$g. The transition to the memory-burdened phase is not instantaneous but unfolds over cosmological timescales, with some PBHs entering this phase in the present epoch. Additionally, a fraction of PBHs undergo mergers today, forming ''young'' semiclassical black holes that evaporate at …

Revisiting some of my favorite #Kimock tracks over the past few days. 1-22-06 in Carrboro, the final SKB show. This was the opener. Sort of a plugged in Bitches Brew.
https://youtu.be/2npgKHkvn2k

Equations defining Jacobians with Real Multiplication
Rahul Mistry, Ramesh Sreekantan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11459 https://arxiv.…

Equations defining Jacobians with Real Multiplication
If $C:y^2=x(x-1)(x-a_1)(x-a_2)(x-a_3)$ is genus $2$ curve a natural question to ask is: Under what conditions on $a_1,a_2,a_3$ does the Jacobian $J(C)$ have real multiplication by $\mathbb{Z}[\sqrtΔ]$ for some $Δ>0$. Over a hundred years ago Humbert gave an answer to this question for $Δ=5$ and $Δ=8$. In this paper we use work of Birkenhake and Wilhelm along with some classical results in enumerative geometry to generalize this to all discriminants, in principle. We also work it out explici…

I have two journals for poetry. One where I write some certified stinkers and the other where I try my best to write good ones.
And sometimes, I write some personal favorites in the bad journal and have to transfer it over to the good journal anyway.
Is this weird? Shouldn't I just have one journal where the good and the bad poetry can live next to each other?
#poetry

From Production Logistics to Smart Manufacturing: The Vision for a New RoboCup Industrial League
Supun Dissanayaka, Alexander Ferrein, Till Hofmann, Kosuke Nakajima, Mario Sanz-Lopez, Jesus Savage, Daniel Swoboda, Matteo Tschesche, Wataru Uemura, Tarik Viehmann, Shohei Yasuda
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11402

From Production Logistics to Smart Manufacturing: The Vision for a New RoboCup Industrial League
The RoboCup Logistics League is a RoboCup competition in a smart factory scenario that has focused on task planning, job scheduling, and multi-agent coordination. The focus on production logistics allowed teams to develop highly competitive strategies, but also meant that some recent developments in the context of smart manufacturing are not reflected in the competition, weakening its relevance over the years. In this paper, we describe the vision for the RoboCup Smart Manufacturing League, a n…

An Empirical study on LLM-based Log Retrieval for Software Engineering Metadata Management
Simin Sun, Yuchuan Jin, Miroslaw Staron
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11659

An Empirical study on LLM-based Log Retrieval for Software Engineering Metadata Management
Developing autonomous driving systems (ADSs) involves generating and storing extensive log data from test drives, which is essential for verification, research, and simulation. However, these high-frequency logs, recorded over varying durations, pose challenges for developers attempting to locate specific driving scenarios. This difficulty arises due to the wide range of signals representing various vehicle components and driving conditions, as well as unfamiliarity of some developers' with the…

One of my takeaways from reading _War and Peace_ last year was that Napoleon, whose warmongering killed millions across Europe, was basically a buffoon, a clown. Many of the most destructive men in history were ridiculous and laughable, and it just added insult to injury for contemporaries watching them come to power. There's nothing new under the sun.

The full formula for the probability of "success" is:
p = {
1/(2^(-n 1)) if n is negative, or
1 - (1/(2^(n 1))) if n is zero or positive
}
(Both branches have the same value when n is 0, so the behavior is smooth around the origin.)
How can we tweak this?
First, we can introduce fixed success and/or failure chances unaffected by level, with this formula only taking effect if those don't apply. For example, you could do 10% failure, 80% by formula, and 10% success to keep things from being too sure either way even when levels are very high or low. On the other hand, this flattening makes the benefit of extra advantage levels even less exciting.
Second, we could allow for gradations of success/failure, and treat the coin pools I used to explain that math like dice pools a bit. An in-between could require linearly more success flips to achieve the next higher grade of success at each grade. For example, simple success on a crit role might mean dealing 1.5x damage, but if you succeed on 2 of your flips, you get 9/4 damage, or on 4 flips 27/8, or on 7 flips 81/16. In this world, stacking crit levels might be a viable build, and just giving up on armor would be super dangerous. In the particular case I was using this for just now, I can't easily do gradations of success (that's the reason I turned to probabilities in the first place) but I think I'd favor this approach when feasible.
The main innovation here over simple dice pools is how to handle situations where the number of dice should be negative. I'm almost certain it's not a truly novel innovation though, and some RPG fan can point out which system already does this (please actually do this, I'm an RPG nerd too at heart).
I'll leave this with one more tweak we could do: what if the number 2 in the probability equation were 3, or 2/3? I think this has a similar effect to just scaling all the modifiers a bit, but the algebra escapes me in this moment and I'm a bit lazy. In any case, reducing the base of the probability exponent should let you get a few more gradations near 50%, which is probably a good thing, since the default goes from 25% straight to 50% and then to 75% with no integer stops in between.

I do some advisory work with #Nubank $NU which is a big (well over 100M customers), young and fast growing Brazilian based fintech that has some very cool and senior people working remotely from the US like Michael Nygard (author of Release It! - Chief Architect), and @…@…

Indian Creek Village,
the “Billionaire Bunker” near Miami,
couldn’t get approval to discharge its waste into a neighboring town’s sewer lines.
So the village quietly persuaded state lawmakers to force the issue.
In a world where billionaires are increasingly exercising political clout,
the fight over sewage in Indian Creek suggests the degree to which their influence is extending not just to policy in the White House and Congress but to some of the most foundat…

A Billionaire Island Where Bezos and Kushner Live Is Fighting Over Sewage
Indian Creek Village, the “Billionaire Bunker” near Miami, couldn’t get approval to discharge its waste into a neighboring town’s sewer lines. So the village quietly persuaded state lawmakers to come to the rescue.

"Come to mind the names of violent battles: DR-DOS, Taligent, AmigaOS, Newton OS, Windows for Pen Computing, Copland, Vino, NeXTSTEP, Novell NetWare, JavaOS, BeOS, DoJ vs Microsoft, Rhapsody, POSIX, Linux is communism, Linux is a cancer, Samizdat, Windows Vista, SCO, Symbian, Solaris, OpenSolaris, systemd, Windows Phone, MeeGo, Tizen, Firefox OS, Sailfish OS. Countless mythical man-month hours were lost. Millions of lines of code were fired."

Aftermath Of The Kernel Wars
During the 1980s and 90s, computer companies waged an open war for supremacy. We are witnesses of an age that could be described as post-apocalyptic. The dust has settled for the past 20 years, with a small ignition of hostilities around 2010, between members of the mobile duopoly and some late challengers. But to a large degree, we can say that the Kernel Wars are over, and we are privileged observers of their aftermath. But everyone was surprised to discover the winner emerging from the ashes…

Not necessarily an IV for input. Sometimes they just need to do the blood draw from my hand because I have terrible veins. Usually results in some bruising
I don’t bother trying to cover up when that happens to me… https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app

Downstream: efficient cross-platform algorithms for fixed-capacity stream downsampling
Connor Yang, Joey Wagner, Emily Dolson, Luis Zaman, Matthew Andres Moreno
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12975

Downstream: efficient cross-platform algorithms for fixed-capacity stream downsampling
Due to ongoing accrual over long durations, a defining characteristic of real-world data streams is the requirement for rolling, often real-time, mechanisms to coarsen or summarize stream history. One common data structure for this purpose is the ring buffer, which maintains a running downsample comprising most recent stream data. In some downsampling scenarios, however, it can instead be necessary to maintain data items spanning the entirety of elapsed stream history. Fortunately, approaches g…

Fast Distributed Nash Equilibrium Seeking in Monotone Games
Tatiana Tatarenko, Angelia Nedich
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11703 https://

Fast Distributed Nash Equilibrium Seeking in Monotone Games
This work proposes a novel distributed approach for computing a Nash equilibrium in convex games with merely monotone and restricted strongly monotone pseudo-gradients. By leveraging the idea of the centralized operator extrapolation method presented in [5] to solve variational inequalities, we develop the algorithm converging to Nash equilibria in games, where players have no access to the full information but are able to communicate with neighbors over some communication graph. The convergenc…

“[T]here can be no debate that most protesters demonstrated peacefully,” he said & that those who were violent were not armed with weapons or organized to overthrow the government.
✅ Q&A on Federalizing the #NationalGuard in #LosAngeles - FactCheck.org

Q&A on Federalizing the National Guard in Los Angeles - FactCheck.org
The disagreement between President Donald Trump and California Gov. Gavin Newsom over Trump deploying state National Guard troops to Los Angeles is now being debated in court. We’ll explain how the situation developed and answer some common questions.

Replaced the garbage #disposal last night. It's one of those jobs like redoing the guts of a toilet; seemed intimidating but it was far easier than I expected. (Replacing with the same model helps.) #insinkerator #diy

Theta-invariants of $\mathbb{Z}\pi$-homology equivalences to spherical 3-manifolds
Hisatoshi Kodani, Tadayuki Watanabe
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12121 htt…

Theta-invariants of $\mathbb{Z}π$-homology equivalences to spherical 3-manifolds
We study Bott and Cattaneo's $Θ$-invariant of 3-manifolds applied to $\mathbb{Z}π$-homology equivalences from 3-manifolds to a fixed spherical 3-manifold. The $Θ$-invariants are defined by integrals over configuration spaces of two points with local systems and by choosing some invariant tensors. We compute upper bounds of the dimensions of the space spanned by the Bott--Cattaneo $Θ$-invariants and of that spanned by Garoufalidis and Levine's finite type invariants of type 2. The computatio…

For god's sake stop boosting those exaggerated "news" reports claiming at least in their headlines that "Denmark" is replacing Microsoft products with Open Source. They are *experimenting*. In *one* ministry. With about half the workforce, over the summer. Nothing firmly decided yet.
At least look for some a bit more original source for this, as such indeed good, news.

On the almost everywhere convergence of two-parameter ergodic averages along directional rectangles
Bastien Lecluse
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14283 https:…

On the almost everywhere convergence of two-parameter ergodic averages along directional rectangles
In this paper, we study the almost everywhere convergence of sequences of two-parameter ergodic averages over rectangles in the plane. On the one hand, we show that if the rectangles we consider have their sides with slopes in a finitely lacunary set, then the averages converge almost everywhere in all $L^p$ spaces, $1 < p \leq \infty$. On the other hand, given some non-lacunary sets of directions, we construct sequences of rectangles oriented along these directions for which the associated erg…

I am so hard on headphones. I am semi-picky and prefer over the ears for my Chromebook and laptops. For the cell phone I have and use ear buds.
Well, I have broken my third bluetooth headset and these are not cheap models! For some reason the spot where you adjust the fit broke. I try my best being gentle when putting them on or take them off, but that is a weak point. The wired sets are still going strong after years of use, but I prefer going wireless.

China pours money into brain chips that give paralysed people more control https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02098-5 "Brain–computer interfaces being trialled in China offer some advantages over Neuralink and other leading US devices" (archived at

China pours money into brain chips that give paralysed people more control
Brain–computer interfaces being trialled in China offer some advantages over Neuralink and other leading US devices.

Why Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Won’t Release His Elon Musk Emails
#texas

Texas Governor’s Office Says Its Emails With Elon Musk May Be, in Part, Too “Embarrassing” to Release to the Public
We asked Abbott for his and his staff’s emails with Elon Musk and Musk’s companies. The governor’s office won’t turn them over, saying some contain “intimate and embarrassing” information that is “not of legitimate concern to the public.”

I’ve been scanning through NUGET, and consulting firms have figured out they can get quality backlinks by publishing some bespoke “dev kit” that no one will use.
It’s exacerbated by the package sprawl and “separation of concerns” style solutions that plague .NET, so their DevKit sprawls over 100 packages.
Keep pushing new versions every few minutes to keep those “recently updated” pages showing your corporate logos.

The average time at Omni for current members of our engineering team is over 19 years. If we expand that to look at the average tenure of all employees at Omni—including our most recent hires in tech support—the average is still over 15 years.
Each year, we're all pushing forward on the latest tech—shipping two visionOS apps last year, working on Liquid Glass designs in SwiftUI this year—not just maintaining ancient code. (Though we have some of that, too!)
I'm incredibly…

copenhagen: Copenhagen Networks Study
A network of social interactions among university students within the Copenhagen Networks Study, over a period of four weeks, sampled every 5 minutes. Interactions include physical proximity (undirected), phone calls (directed, weighted), text messages (directed), and information about Facebook friendships (undirected). Nodes include some metadata, including gender.
This network has 568 nodes and 24333 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unwe…

There are now exactly 365 posts on my blog. So, considering I've been writing it for twenty years, I have a long term average of one post every twenty days, over all that time.
Some of them are good. I'd go further. Some of them are excellent.
https://www.journeyman.cc/blog/

Home
Random thoughts on politics, fiction and software; occasionally interesting.

“Supreme Court win for girl with epilepsy expected to make disability lawsuits against schools easier”
https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-disabilities-schools-education-access-lawsuits-56f67cf12f1f9c4a7e…

Supreme Court rules for girl with epilepsy in case over access to education
A teenage girl with a rare form of epilepsy has won a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that’s expected to make it easier for families of children with disabilities to sue schools over access to education. Thursday's ruling comes after her family said her Minnesota school district didn’t do enough to get her the disability accommodations she needs to learn. The girl and her family appealed to the Supreme Court after lower courts ruled against their disability discrimination case. Some courts h…

Barchans interacting with dune-size obstacles: details of the fluid flow and motion of grains
Nicolao Cerqueira Lima, Willian Righi Assis, Danilo da Silva Borges, Erick de Moraes Franklin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12630

Barchans interacting with dune-size obstacles: details of the fluid flow and motion of grains
We investigate details of the interaction of subaqueous barchans with dune-size obstacles by carrying out numerical simulations where the fluid is solved at the grain scale and the motions of individual grains are computed at all time steps. With the outputs, we analyze the disturbances of the fluid flow, the trajectories of grains, and the resultant force on each grain, the latter being unfeasible from experiments and field measurements. We show that in some cases particles pass over the obsta…

Was speaking to some journalists recently who didn't realise how long a history the use of radar has in measuring ice thickness over glaciers.
The technique was discovered by pilots, who must have had the frankly terrifying experience of landing on the ice sheet with their radars telling them they still had a few thousand metres of descent to reach the surface...
It's not mentioned in this obituary but I wonder if this guy would have seen it? Perhaps he didn't even have radar to assist in landing?
https://flipboard.com/@newyorktimes/obituaries-bq1u22g8z/-/a-gd4LiLY4RbOMXavSDWOBQQ:a:3195393-/0
newyorktimes@flipboard.com - Conrad Shinn, First Pilot to Land at the South Pole, Dies at 102
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/08/obituaries/conrad-shinn-dead.html?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Obituaries @obituaries-newyorktimes

So this is a recent photo of #LiverKing, some weirdo who’s challenged #JoeRogan to a fight to the death for some reason.
Dude’s got issues.

It's only a week away until the moving truck arrives and puts an end to our 16 years in Caledon. Today, I'm taking some time to squeeze in 9 holes of golf with my brother, who has a cottage close to our new home. My car is packed with 11 different plants that we split from our current garden, over 70 individual plants for the new house. Two planters will have to wait for the next trip.
#Moving #Gardening

Paramount faces a backlash for settling with Trump; Democrat FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez says it "marks a dangerous precedent for the First Amendment" (Meg James/Los Angeles Times)
https://www.latimes.com/entertain…

Paramount faces backlash over its $16-million Trump settlement
Journalists and others said the payoff will embolden attacks by Trump and his allies on news outlets. Some called the settlement a stain on the proud legacy of CBS News.

There are lots of Police watching over the OASIS concert; a couple with machine guns taking out anyone without a bucket hat.
the guests at this are notably older than other concerts; while there are some yungsters, there are a lot of middle age fat blokes.

Just did a once over on my Vimeo as a portfolio for a lead producer job application.
Mainly, just updated some descriptions. Nice to be reminded of some past work I like: #film

David August
David August is an award-winning actor, acting coach, writer, director, and producer. He plays a role in the movie Dependent’s Day, and after its theatrical…

Open multiplication in relatively free profinite semigroupoids
Jorge Almeida, Alfredo Costa, Herman Goulet-Ouellet
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08580 https:/…

Open multiplication in relatively free profinite semigroupoids
The purpose of this paper is to extend some useful results, such as the multiplication being open, previously known for suitable finitely generated relatively free profinite semigroups, to relatively free profinite semigroupoids over finite-vertex graphs. This extension is used to give a profinite characterization of recurrent words over infinite alphabets and to establish new results about stabilizers in relatively free profinite semigroups and semigroupoids.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department oversees FEMA’s work,
issued a new agency rule this year requiring all contracts and grants costing over $100,000 to be personally approved by her.
As floodwaters were rising in Texas, Noem failed to respond to such requests over the weekend,
taking four days to approve the spending that could have saved lives.
As of Wednesday evening, 120 people in Texas have been killed by the massive flo…

DHS Head Kristi Noem Prioritized Instagram Pics Over FEMA Requests for Response to Texas Floods
It took Noem four days to respond to requests from FEMA, delaying access to some search and rescue tools.

Fascism is not some distant nightmare locked away in history books. It is a dark, living force that haunts the present, casting its shadow over the United States with terrifying clarity.
The brutal dehumanization, the cruelty inflicted on vulnerable people, the aggressive nationalism and racism, these are not echoes from the past but the harsh reality of today. Concentration camps for children, hateful rhetoric that strips away humanity, and the rise of authoritarian power show that fa…

intentional self portraits
#photography #begonia

Solnit: "It's...routine to blame the Democratic Party for what the Republican Party does. The two parties are unconsciously regarded as akin to a husband and wife in a traditional marriage in which it's the job of the wife to placate and soothe the husband and help him realize his goals or be held responsible for his outbursts and outrages."

Some Notes on the City of Angels and the Nature of Violence
I think maybe it's begun, the bigger fiercer backlash against the Trump Administration which is itself a violent backlash against every good thing that's happened over the past several decades – the advance of rights for nature, women, children, indigenous peoples, BIPOC and immigrants/refugees, queer people, trans people, people with

The only jury I've ever been on faced a question about resisting arrest. The defendant was tackled by an officer and initially fought back (or so the officer claimed). The officer was wearing a police uniform, but we acquitted on the charge, because the defendant was tackled from behind and there was reasonable doubt as to whether the officer actually identified themselves verbally in a way that made it clear to the defendant they weren't being tackled by some random dude.
This ain't legal advice, but in situations where a kidnapper refuses to identify themselves, show a warrant, or even a badge number, I suspect a sufficiently white bystander might not be convicted on interference charges if they did something like a citizen's arrest of a suspicious out-of-town paramilitary type who was in the process of an extrajudicial kidnapping. If there are multiple kidnappers, to be effective you might need multiple people willing to face jail time for such interventions to be successful...
#resist #ICE #kidnapping
Just thinking about this in light of the recent kidnapping in the next town over where some fools called the city police thinking they might actually protect the community from an unlawful assault. Can't blame the fools too much because of how deep positive portrayals of cops are embedded in our media diet though...

I have long mentally muted any hype about new optimizers, but this Muon/MuonClip seems to be the real deal...
I'll have to dig into the details at some point. It seems that they ideas are a bit more complex than AdamW, which is a shame. Still, the performance suggests it's worth it.
https://moonshotai.github.io/Kimi-K2/

Interesting piece on the #Arctic #SeaIce and it's (improving) representation in global climate models by Gavin Schmidt over on @realclimate, I'm not entirely sure all of the improvement is for the right reasons, there are probably compensating biases, it would be interesting to see if the models get the regional signal correct in different parts of the Arctic, but overall I agree with this piece, there have been some big steps forward in global models, the regional level is often not very well represented though.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/05/predicted-arctic-sea-ice-trends-over-time/

I’ve done some crazy things to get over a breakup.
Maybe a tub of Ben & Jerry’s and The Notebook is a better way to grieve your boyfriend than deploying the National Guard.

Scanning some old slides; in 1981 when the riots were on in Moss side, my dad decided it best to board up his chemist shop before hand, as did some others on the row.
#manchester

Sources: OpenAI and Windsurf talks ended after Windsurf raised concerns over how its tech would fit into OpenAI's agreement to share tech with Microsoft (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-windsurf-break-a…

Google to Pay $2.4 Billion for Windsurf Staff, IP After Startup Ends OpenAI Talks
OpenAI’s discussions to buy Windsurf, the maker of a popular artificial intelligence coding assistant formerly known as Codeium, have ended. Instead, Google will hire Windsurf’s CEO, Varun Mohan, and some of the startup’s staff, both Google and Windsurf said. The monthslong talks between OpenAI ...

Here’s a mind-blowing experiment that you can try at home:
Gather some children’s blocks and place them on a table.
Take one block and slowly push it over the table’s edge, inch by inch, until it’s on the brink of falling.
If you possess patience and a steady hand, you should be able to balance it so that exactly half of it hangs off the edge.
Nudge it any farther, and gravity wins.
Now take two blocks and start over.
Stacking one on top of the other, how…

This Block-Stacking Math Problem Has a Preposterous Solution You Need to See to Believe — Scientific American
In principle, this impossible math allows for a glue-free bridge of stacked blocks that can stretch across the Grand Canyon—and into infinity Amanda Montañez Math Here’s a mind-blowing experiment that you can try at home: Gather some children’s blocks and place them on a table. Take one block and slowly push it over the table’s edge, inch by inch, until it’s on the brink of falling. If you possess patience and a steady hand, you should be able to balance it so that exactly half of it…

Demonstration of the Major #LunarStandstill with two cell phone pics taken 5 months apart in 2025 in the very moments when the (practically) full moon culminated at maximum and minimum elevation, respectively, over Bochum, Germany. This time there were no clouds on both days (the evening on 12 Jan and the morning of 12 Jun), while the same experiment in 2024 had had some problems: https://scicomm.xyz/@cosmos4u/113653916761501298

Elon Musk says "I regret some of my posts about President Trump last week. They went too far"; Trump said he had no interest in repairing the relationship (Andrés R. Martínez/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/business/elon-musk-trum…

Musk Expresses ‘Regret’ Over His Criticisms of Trump
President Trump and Elon Musk traded social media barbs last week. Mr. Trump has said that he has no interest in repairing the relationship with his former adviser.

Long; central Massachusetts colonial history
Today on a whim I visited a site in Massachusetts marked as "Huguenot Fort Ruins" on OpenStreetMaps. I drove out with my 4-year-old through increasingly rural central Massachusetts forests & fields to end up on a narrow street near the top of a hill beside a small field. The neighboring houses had huge lawns, some with tractors.
Appropriately for this day and this moment in history, the history of the site turns out to be a microcosm of America. Across the field beyond a cross-shaped stone memorial stood an info board with a few diagrams and some text. The text of the main sign (including typos/misspellings) read:
"""
Town Is Formed
Early in the 1680's, interest began to generate to develop a town in the area west of Natick in the south central part of the Commonwealth that would be suitable for a settlement. A Mr. Hugh Campbell, a Scotch merchant of Boston petitioned the court for land for a colony. At about the same time, Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton also were desirous of obtaining land for a settlement. A claim was made for all lands west of the Blackstone River to the southern land of Massachusetts to a point northerly of the Springfield Road then running southwesterly until it joined the southern line of Massachusetts.
Associated with Dudley and Stoughton was Robert Thompson of London, England, Dr. Daniel Cox and John Blackwell, both of London and Thomas Freak of Hannington, Wiltshire, as proprietors. A stipulation in the acquisition of this land being that within four years thirty families and an orthodox minister settle in the area. An extension of this stipulation was granted at the end of the four years when no group large enough seemed to be willing to take up the opportunity.
In 1686, Robert Thompson met Gabriel Bernor and learned that he was seeking an area where his countrymen, who had fled their native France because of the Edict of Nantes, were desirous of a place to live. Their main concern was to settle in a place that would allow them freedom of worship. New Oxford, as it was the so-named, at that time included the larger part of Charlton, one-fourth of Auburn, one-fifth of Dudley and several square miles of the northeast portion of Southbridge as well as the easterly ares now known as Webster.
Joseph Dudley's assessment that the area was capable of a good settlement probably was based on the idea of the meadows already established along with the plains, ponds, brooks and rivers. Meadows were a necessity as they provided hay for animal feed and other uses by the settlers. The French River tributary books and streams provided a good source for fishing and hunting. There were open areas on the plains as customarily in November of each year, the Indians burnt over areas to keep them free of underwood and brush. It appeared then that this area was ready for settling.
The first seventy-five years of the settling of the Town of Oxford originally known as Manchaug, embraced three different cultures. The Indians were known to be here about 1656 when the Missionary, John Eliott and his partner Daniel Gookin visited in the praying towns. Thirty years later, in 1686, the Huguenots walked here from Boston under the guidance of their leader Isaac Bertrand DuTuffeau. The Huguenot's that arrived were not peasants, but were acknowledged to be the best Agriculturist, Wine Growers, Merchant's, and Manufacter's in France. There were 30 families consisting of 52 people. At the time of their first departure (10 years), due to Indian insurrection, there were 80 people in the group, and near their Meetinghouse/Church was a Cemetery that held 20 bodies. In 1699, 8 to 10 familie's made a second attempt to re-settle, failing after only four years, with the village being completely abandoned in 1704.
The English colonist made their way here in 1713 and established what has become a permanent settlement.
"""
All that was left of the fort was a crumbling stone wall that would have been the base of a higher wooden wall according to a picture of a model (I didn't think to get a shot of that myself). Only trees and brush remain where the multi-story main wooden building was.
This story has so many echoes in the present:
- The rich colonialists from Boston & London agree to settle the land, buying/taking land "rights" from the colonial British court that claimed jurisdiction without actually having control of the land. Whether the sponsors ever actually visited the land themselves I don't know. They surely profited somehow, whether from selling on the land rights later or collecting taxes/rent or whatever, by they needed poor laborers to actually do the work of developing the land (& driving out the original inhabitants, who had no say in the machinations of the Boston court).
- The land deal was on condition that there capital-holders who stood to profit would find settlers to actually do the work of colonizing. The British crown wanted more territory to be controlled in practice not just in theory, but they weren't going to be the ones to do the hard work.
- The capital-holders actually failed to find enough poor suckers to do their dirty work for 4 years, until the Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, were desperate enough to accept their terms.
- Of course, the land was only so ripe for settlement because of careful tending over centuries by the natives who were eventually driven off, and whose land management practices are abandoned today. Given the mention of praying towns (& dates), this was after King Phillip's war, which resulted in at least some forced resettlement of native tribes around the area, but the descendants of those "Indians" mentioned in this sign are still around. For example, this is the site of one local band of Nipmuck, whose namesake lake is about 5 miles south of the fort site: #LandBack.

They Planned Parties and Salsa Music for July 4th.
ICE Raids Made Them Think Twice.
Some communities in the Los Angeles region canceled events over fears of immigration raids,
as Latinos grapple with how, and whether, to celebrate Independence Day.
Bell Gardens, where more than 96 percent of residents are Hispanic, is one of more than two dozen so-called Gateway Cities that make up a hub of largely Latino working-class communities.
In recent days, the mayor of …

They Planned Parties and Salsa Music for July 4th. ICE Raids Made Them Think Twice.
Some communities in the Los Angeles region canceled events over fears of immigration raids, as Latinos grapple with how, and whether, to celebrate Independence Day.

A former employee says fewer than 10,000 people use Ola Krutrim's LLM chatbot, which supports 10 Indian languages, and that over 60% of them are random testers (Swathi Moorthy/The Economic Times)
https://

Krutrim finds few takers for its LLMs and cloud products
Ola founder Aggarwal first announced Krutrim in December 2023, launching an LLM that could support 10 Indian languages, starting with Krutrim chatbot in February 2024, and cloud offering shortly after. Two founders told ET recently that repeated sign-in attempts were blocked by a persistent “logged out of session” error, making sign-up via mobile or Gmail difficult.

US halts weapons shipments to Ukraine over fears stockpiles are too low
Some shipments have been stopped ‘to put America’s interests first’, White House says
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/02/us-halts-ukraine…

OpenAI told investors stock compensation jumped over 5x last year to $4.4B, or 119% of total revenue for that period but expects it to drop to under 10% by 2030 (Sri Muppidi/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/op

OpenAI’s Stock Compensation Reflect Steep Costs of Talent Wars
OpenAI has signaled it will hike pay for some employees in the wake of a raid by Meta Platforms on its artificial intelligence researchers. That could mean a significant increase in the billions of dollars in stock awards it already accounts for, threatening tofurther diluteinvestors after a ...

Witnesses reported a caravan of armored vehicles and unmarked police vehicles with masked men in plain clothes,
some wearing ICE or police vests,
and a group of people in military camouflage, all carrying weapons.
Additional reports state helicopters have been seen over the area as well.
“It looks like they’re going to war on our street,” one protestor stated
Unidentified masked and armed guards, presumed to be federal agents or military, in front of a crowd of…

Sources: ByteDance replaced some TikTok Shop's US staff in Seattle with China-based managers after 2024 revenue hit $9B, far short of its $17.5B goal (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20