Tootfinder

Or one could use LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice and not be dependent on some distant service provider.
Online office suites confuse me. It’s unclear what *modern* problem they address. Sharing files is a solved problem. Common data formats exist. https://mastodon.social/@DevOpsPink/11

Tatiana Mikhaleva (@DevOpsPink@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image Proton rolled out Proton Sheets - a spreadsheet Google can’t peek into. Gemini: “Show me your data?” You: “No.” Sheets: also no, but in Swiss.🇨🇭🔐 End-to-end encryption, zero-knowledge, even file names get the Swiss-bank treatment. You open a spreadsheet - Big Tech immediately cries. Somewhere in California, an AI whispers: “But… my training data…” Privacy 1 : 0 AI https://proton.me/blog/sheets-proton-drive #Proton #Privacy #Encryption #CyberSe…

Welfarist Formulations for Diverse Similarity Search
Siddharth Barman, Nirjhar Das, Shivam Gupta, Kirankumar Shiragur
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08742 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.08742 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.08742
arXiv:2602.08742v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Nearest Neighbor Search (NNS) is a fundamental problem in data structures with wide-ranging applications, such as web search, recommendation systems, and, more recently, retrieval-augmented generations (RAG). In such recent applications, in addition to the relevance (similarity) of the returned neighbors, diversity among the neighbors is a central requirement. In this paper, we develop principled welfare-based formulations in NNS for realizing diversity across attributes. Our formulations are based on welfare functions -- from mathematical economics -- that satisfy central diversity (fairness) and relevance (economic efficiency) axioms. With a particular focus on Nash social welfare, we note that our welfare-based formulations provide objective functions that adaptively balance relevance and diversity in a query-dependent manner. Notably, such a balance was not present in the prior constraint-based approach, which forced a fixed level of diversity and optimized for relevance. In addition, our formulation provides a parametric way to control the trade-off between relevance and diversity, providing practitioners with flexibility to tailor search results to task-specific requirements. We develop efficient nearest neighbor algorithms with provable guarantees for the welfare-based objectives. Notably, our algorithm can be applied on top of any standard ANN method (i.e., use standard ANN method as a subroutine) to efficiently find neighbors that approximately maximize our welfare-based objectives. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach is practical and substantially improves diversity while maintaining high relevance of the retrieved neighbors.
toXiv_bot_toot

Seriously, the worst ones are nodejs and rust: they fundamentally break the nodejs dependency model, flattening everything. They've chosen _controlling_ dependencies instead of _annotating_ them for understanding. Metadata about what's in a package and a package-build-time mechanism for substituting things in lockfiles would be far far simpler for forcing security updates than rewriting everything to use system dependencies, and versions that are not reconcilable.
Heck, both npm and cargo have put a lot of effort into repeatability though not actual hermetic builds, so it's very much Good Enough if you're using lock files. The problems are in updating those, not building packages. Mirror the registries if you need to. That's a much more tractable problem than _rewriting parts of everything you package_ or _eagerly packaging every dependency as a separate [human] task_

Good Morning #Canada
Overnight news of Trump attacking another country in a blatant attempt to seize their resources should be a wakeup call for Canada. Does anyone here think a strike on Ottawa to remove the current government couldn't happen? Could the U.S. find a stooge willing to become the interim leader? How much oil, aluminum, uranium, hydropower or other resources would be looted before Trump strokes out from too many big macs. Yesterday I would have laughed at this scenario but today it starts to be less of a fantasy.
I glossed over this article when it was first published back in November but now I'm leaning towards support of developing a volunteer force in Canada. Perhaps a 2-year voluntary military service for our youth to provide employment and training. I don't want a volunteer military force to ever be used and hopefully it becomes a deterrent. But unfortunately a serious discussion is needed.
#CanadaIsAwesome #ElbowsUp
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/article/the-military-plans-for-a-volunteer-force-to-defend-canada/

Since I rely on and use @… pretty much everyday as my preferred email provider, I donated €10, and will turn it to a monthly donation.
Support the projects, organizations, or initiatives you depend on the most. For me, that’s https://…

Client told DEV the changes looks good in test, deploy.
DEV told our support person, deploy the fix.
Me? STOP, CEASE, DESIST!
1. It is a Friday and we have three special set of 'apps' running this evening. They must run tonight!
2. There were zero backups that would allow a rollback if there are problems.
3. No process defined to verify the before and after.
4. NEVER DEPLOY FIXES ON A FRIDAY UNLESS IT IS AN EMERGENCY!

I love gardening with specifically native plants because it's like restoring a damaged tapestry of life. An exotic from a climatically similar place to coastal California, like the Mediterranean or South Africa, might look pretty and grow well here, but contributes nothing greater than itself. Natives support particular webs of life that depend on them.

Support Indigenous Land Defender Marcos Aguilar’s Family
(original: https://www.instagram.com/p/DSFUcy_jKU7 by zapatistasolidaritynetwork)
On November 26, 2025, Indigenous land defender Marcos Aguilar Rojas was assassinated for protecting his anc

Zapatista Solidarity Network! on Instagram: "📢‼️URGENT On November 26, 2025, Indigenous land defender Marcos Aguilar Rojas was assassinated for protecting his ancestral territory in San Lorenzo de Azqueltán, Jalisco, Mexico. He leaves behind five young children — including two babies — and elderly parents who depended on him. Marcos was a devoted father, a loving son, and a guardian of Mother Earth. He refused to abandon his community despite threats and violence. This was a planned political attack from those trying to steal Indigenous ancestral territory. ✨ That’s why we are asking for your solidarity: @semillas_collective is collecting donations that will go directly to Marcos’s family and Indigenous community to support: • His children’s wellbeing (food, housing, education) • Care for his parents • Community protection against further attacks • Legal justice for his assassination 🔗Link in our bio to the fundraiser and the communiqué from the Autonomous Indigenous Community or San Lorenzo de Azqueltán (adherents of the National Indigenous Congress [CNI]) 📣Please donate if you are able. If you cannot, share and help us break the silence. Marcos lives in the land, in his children, and in our struggle. Marcos vive — la lucha sigue. ✊🏽💚🌱 #JusticeForMarcos #Semillas #IndigenousSolidarity #Azqueltán #LandBack #ProtectLandDefenders #NoMoreImpunity #MarcosVive #LaLuchaSigue"
99 likes, 0 comments - zapatistasolidaritynetwork on December 10, 2025: "📢‼️URGENT On November 26, 2025, Indigenous land defender Marcos Aguilar Rojas was assassinated for protecting his ancestral territory in San Lorenzo de Azqueltán, Jalisco, Mexico. He leaves behind five young children — including two babies — and elderly parents who depended on him. Marcos was a devoted father, a loving son, and a guardian of Mother Earth. He refused to abandon his community despite threats a…

I explained something for a friend in a simple way, and I think it's worth paraphrasing again here.
You cannot create a system that constrains itself. Any constraint on a system must be external to the system, or that constraint can be ignored or removed. That's just how systems work. Every constitution for every country claims to do this impossible thing, a thing proven is impossible almost 100 years ago now. Gödel's loophole has been known to exist since 1947.
Every constitution in the world, every "separation of powers" and set of "checks and balances," attempts to do something which is categorically impossible. Every government is always, at best, a few steps away from authoritarianism. From this, we would then expect that governments trand towards authoritarianism. Which, of course, is what we see historically.
Constraints on power are a formality, because no real controls can possibly exist. So then democratic processes become sort of collective classifiers that try to select only people who won't plunge the country into a dictatorship. Again, because this claim of restrictions on powers is a lie (willful or ignorant, a lie reguardless) that classifier has to be correct 100% of the time (even assuming a best case scenario). That's statistically unlikely.
So as long as you have a system of concentrated power, you will have the worst people attracted to it, and you will inevitably have that power fall into the hands of one of the worst possible person.
Fortunately, there is an alternative. The alternative is to not centralize power. In the security world we try to design systems that assume compromise and minimize impact, rather than just assuming that we will be right 100% of the time. If you build systems that maximially distribute power, then you minimize the impact of one horrible person.
Now, I didn't mention this because we're both already under enough stress, but...
Almost 90% of the nuclear weapons deployed around the world are in the hands of ghoulish dictators. Only two of the countries with nuclear weapons not straight up authoritarian, but they're not far off. We're one crashout away from steralizing the surface of the Earth with nuclear hellfire. Maybe countries shouldn't exist, and *definitely* multiple thousands of nuclear weapons shouldn't exist and shouldn't all be wired together to launch as soon as one of these assholes goes a bit too far sideways.