Tootfinder

I've seen many reasonable criticisms of Liquid Glass online, but whenever I show Liquid Glass to someone in person they seem to really enjoy the new design.
I think part of this is that it's hard to show a dynamic design that responds to you in a screenshot or video that isn't actually responding to you.
But another part is that it _does_ require careful design work, and this early in it's easy to find examples where the design (perhaps of the system, perhaps of t…

#Neurotypicals: You need to be bored. Next time you go to the gym, don't listen to that podcast. Just try to be in your head for a while. Maybe you'll think about the meaning of life, and maybe you'll figure it out.
My #ADHD brain trying to unload the dishwasher without a podcast: Hey, Remember the intro to Clifford the Big Red Dog? That song? You sort of paid attention to it for a few seconds while our kid was watching it. I remember those 5 seconds. Let's sing that intro... just that first part though. We're just going to keep doing that, over and over, hundreds of times in a row.
Neurotypicals: People don't like to be bored. People will give themselves electric shocks to not be bored. They don't want to think about the big questions
My ADHD brain, still trying to unload the dishwasher without a podcast: ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪ ♪ Welcome to Birdwell island, Sun and the sky is smilin' ♪ ♪
https://youtu.be/orQKfIXMiA8

Picture the human body. Zoom in on a single cell. It lives for a while, then splits or dies, as part of a community of cells that make up a particular tissue. This community lives together for many many cell-lifetimes, each performing their own favorite function and reproducing as much as necessary to maintain their community, consuming the essential resources they need and contributing back what they can so that the whole body can live for decades. Each community of cells is interdependent on the whole body, but also stable and sustainable over long periods of time.
Now imagine a cancer cell. It has lost its ability to harmonize with the whole and prioritize balance, instead consuming and reproducing as quickly as it can. As neighboring tissues start to die from its excess, it metastasizes, always spreading to new territory to fuel its unbalanced appetite. The inevitable result is death of the whole body, although through birth, that body can create a new fresh branch of tissues that may continue their stable existence free of cancer. Alternatively, radiation or chemotherapy might be able to kill off the cancer, at great cost to the other tissues, but permitting long-term survival.
To the cancer cell, the idea of decades-long survival of a tissue community is unbelievable. When your natural state is unbounded consumption, growth, and competition, the idea of interdependent cooperation (with tissues all around the body you're not even touching, no less) seems impossible, and the idea that a tissue might survive in a stable form for decades is ludicrous.
"Perhaps if conditions were bleak enough to perfectly balance incessant unrestrained growth against the depredations of a hostile environment it might be possible? I guess the past must have been horribly brutal, so that despite each tissue trying to grow as much as possible they each barely survived? Yes, a stable and sustainable population is probably only possible under conditions of perfectly extreme hardship, and in our current era of unfettered growth, we should rejoice that we live in much easier times!"
You can probably already see where I'm going with this metaphor, but did you know that there are human communities, alive today, that have been living sustainably for *tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years*?
#anarchy #colonialism #civilization
P.S. if you're someone who likes to think about past populations and historical population growth, I cannot recommend the (short, free) game Opera Omnia by Stephen Lavelle enough: https://www.increpare.com/2009/02/opera-omnia/

The State Department formally notified employees on Thursday that it was about to begin layoffs
as part of a consolidation plan that department officials say will reduce bureaucratic bloat
but that critics call a shortsighted blow to American diplomacy.
In an internal message sent to State Department workers on Thursday, Michael J. Rigas, the deputy secretary of state for management and resources, said
the department would “soon” begin notifying U.S. employees who are…

State Department to Soon Begin Mass Layoffs
Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s plan to downsize a “bloated” department had been on hold after a court ruling.

#Oakland #police chief announces intent to resign after less than two years since arriving from Lubbock TX.
"To be number 15 in the last 25 years, since I have been here. Every time a chief takes the helm, it is just a matter of time when it will occur. And that's the sad part of the condition of the police…

Oakland Police Chief Floyd Mitchell announces he's stepping down
Oakland Police Chief Floyd Mitchell announced he's stepping down, effective Dec. 5. "It has been an honor to serve the Oakland community, and I am grateful for the support I've received from the residents."

Memo: People Inc., formerly called Dotdash Meredith and holding 40 digital and print lifestyle brands, is laying off 6% of its workforce, or 226 people (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/09/people-inc-layoffs

People Inc. laying off 226 people
It's part of a broader effort to deprioritize parts of the business that aren't growing as quickly and focus on new areas.

Oh, you think the dress is your ally, but you merely bought the dress. I was born in it, molded by it.

And that's it, the #OpenSSLCon25 in Prague has ended. Fantastic organization, many great talks, and some funny ones, too. Recordings should be available in a few weeks.

Disconnected large bifurcation supports and Cartesian products of bifurcations
Timur Bakiev, Yulij S. Ilyashenko
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07036 https://a…

Disconnected large bifurcation supports and Cartesian products of bifurcations
A bifurcation that occurs in a multiparameter family is a Cartesian product if it splits into two factors in the sense that one bifurcation takes place in one part of the phase portrait, another one -- in another part, and they are in a sense independent, do not interact with each other. To understand how a family bifurcates, it is sufficient to study it in a neighborhood of the so-called large bifurcation support. Given a family of vector fields on $S^2$ that unfolds a field $v_0$, the respect…

This is part of why I feel confident that I am in my last real job.
In 40 years of working, I've *never* gotten a job in IT/#InfoSec by applying for a publicly visible opening. I have had some interviews from *trying* to do it that way, but never made it to hiring. I think I may not mask or hype myself well enough. I suspect that this would be made worse by today's "AI" desolation.
I also stopped even trying to hide my professional cynicism some time ago...

in sf i used this guy who came to wash my car on the street, it was a monthly subscription and it was great, i probably had it for more than a year. he sent out an email that his business had to be shut down without reasons, but he just sent this out detailing his experience getting ICE’d and shit. so fucked.

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
Should AI coding be taught in undergrad CS education?
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I teach undergraduate computer science labs, including for intro and more-advanced core courses. I don't publish (non-negligible) scholarly work in the area, but I've got years of craft expertise in course design, and I do follow the academic literature to some degree. In other words, In not the world's leading expert, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about course design, and consider myself competent at it, with plenty of direct experience in what knowledge & skills I can expect from students as they move through the curriculum.
I'm also strongly against most uses of what's called "AI" these days (specifically, generative deep neutral networks as supplied by our current cadre of techbro). There are a surprising number of completely orthogonal reasons to oppose the use of these systems, and a very limited number of reasonable exceptions (overcoming accessibility barriers is an example). On the grounds of environmental and digital-commons-pollution costs alone, using specifically the largest/newest models is unethical in most cases.
But as any good teacher should, I constantly question these evaluations, because I worry about the impact on my students should I eschew teaching relevant tech for bad reasons (and even for his reasons). I also want to make my reasoning clear to students, who should absolutely question me on this. That inspired me to ask a simple question: ignoring for one moment the ethical objections (which we shouldn't, of course; they're very stark), at what level in the CS major could I expect to teach a course about programming with AI assistance, and expect students to succeed at a more technically demanding final project than a course at the same level where students were banned from using AI? In other words, at what level would I expect students to actually benefit from AI coding "assistance?"
To be clear, I'm assuming that students aren't using AI in other aspects of coursework: the topic of using AI to "help you study" is a separate one (TL;DR it's gross value is not negative, but it's mostly not worth the harm to your metacognitive abilities, which AI-induced changes to the digital commons are making more important than ever).
So what's my answer to this question?
If I'm being incredibly optimistic, senior year. Slightly less optimistic, second year of a masters program. Realistic? Maybe never.
The interesting bit for you-the-reader is: why is this my answer? (Especially given that students would probably self-report significant gains at lower levels.) To start with, [this paper where experienced developers thought that AI assistance sped up their work on real tasks when in fact it slowed it down] (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089) is informative. There are a lot of differences in task between experienced devs solving real bugs and students working on a class project, but it's important to understand that we shouldn't have a baseline expectation that AI coding "assistants" will speed things up in the best of circumstances, and we shouldn't trust self-reports of productivity (or the AI hype machine in general).
Now we might imagine that coding assistants will be better at helping with a student project than at helping with fixing bugs in open-source software, since it's a much easier task. For many programming assignments that have a fixed answer, we know that many AI assistants can just spit out a solution based on prompting them with the problem description (there's another elephant in the room here to do with learning outcomes regardless of project success, but we'll ignore this over too, my focus here is on project complexity reach, not learning outcomes). My question is about more open-ended projects, not assignments with an expected answer. Here's a second study (by one of my colleagues) about novices using AI assistance for programming tasks. It showcases how difficult it is to use AI tools well, and some of these stumbling blocks that novices in particular face.
But what about intermediate students? Might there be some level where the AI is helpful because the task is still relatively simple and the students are good enough to handle it? The problem with this is that as task complexity increases, so does the likelihood of the AI generating (or copying) code that uses more complex constructs which a student doesn't understand. Let's say I have second year students writing interactive websites with JavaScript. Without a lot of care that those students don't know how to deploy, the AI is likely to suggest code that depends on several different frameworks, from React to JQuery, without actually setting up or including those frameworks, and of course three students would be way out of their depth trying to do that. This is a general problem: each programming class carefully limits the specific code frameworks and constructs it expects students to know based on the material it covers. There is no feasible way to limit an AI assistant to a fixed set of constructs or frameworks, using current designs. There are alternate designs where this would be possible (like AI search through adaptation from a controlled library of snippets) but those would be entirely different tools.
So what happens on a sizeable class project where the AI has dropped in buggy code, especially if it uses code constructs the students don't understand? Best case, they understand that they don't understand and re-prompt, or ask for help from an instructor or TA quickly who helps them get rid of the stuff they don't understand and re-prompt or manually add stuff they do. Average case: they waste several hours and/or sweep the bugs partly under the rug, resulting in a project with significant defects. Students in their second and even third years of a CS major still have a lot to learn about debugging, and usually have significant gaps in their knowledge of even their most comfortable programming language. I do think regardless of AI we as teachers need to get better at teaching debugging skills, but the knowledge gaps are inevitable because there's just too much to know. In Python, for example, the LLM is going to spit out yields, async functions, try/finally, maybe even something like a while/else, or with recent training data, the walrus operator. I can't expect even a fraction of 3rd year students who have worked with Python since their first year to know about all these things, and based on how students approach projects where they have studied all the relevant constructs but have forgotten some, I'm not optimistic seeing these things will magically become learning opportunities. Student projects are better off working with a limited subset of full programming languages that the students have actually learned, and using AI coding assistants as currently designed makes this impossible. Beyond that, even when the "assistant" just introduces bugs using syntax the students understand, even through their 4th year many students struggle to understand the operation of moderately complex code they've written themselves, let alone written by someone else. Having access to an AI that will confidently offer incorrect explanations for bugs will make this worse.
To be sure a small minority of students will be able to overcome these problems, but that minority is the group that has a good grasp of the fundamentals and has broadened their knowledge through self-study, which earlier AI-reliant classes would make less likely to happen. In any case, I care about the average student, since we already have plenty of stuff about our institutions that makes life easier for a favored few while being worse for the average student (note that our construction of that favored few as the "good" students is a large part of this problem).
To summarize: because AI assistants introduce excess code complexity and difficult-to-debug bugs, they'll slow down rather than speed up project progress for the average student on moderately complex projects. On a fixed deadline, they'll result in worse projects, or necessitate less ambitious project scoping to ensure adequate completion, and I expect this remains broadly true through 4-6 years of study in most programs (don't take this as an endorsement of AI "assistants" for masters students; we've ignored a lot of other problems along the way).
There's a related problem: solving open-ended project assignments well ultimately depends on deeply understanding the problem, and AI "assistants" allow students to put a lot of code in their file without spending much time thinking about the problem or building an understanding of it. This is awful for learning outcomes, but also bad for project success. Getting students to see the value of thinking deeply about a problem is a thorny pedagogical puzzle at the best of times, and allowing the use of AI "assistants" makes the problem much much worse. This is another area I hope to see (or even drive) pedagogical improvement in, for what it's worth.
1/2

I've had a few of these thoughts stuck in my craw all day because I watched this liberal historian talk about the Galleanisti.
https://youtube.com/shorts/93yHEn8BYE4
Basically, she says that "of course the government had the right to target them." Then she goes on to talk about how it became an excuse to carry out a bunch of attacks on other marginalized people. Now, the Galleanisti had been bombing the houses of politicians and such. I get where she's coming from saying that one of their targets "was in the right" to try to catch them. But there's some context she's not talking about at all.
These were Italian anarchists, so they were not white and they were part of an already marginalized political group. Basically all of Europe and the US was trying to wipe out anarchists at the time. Meanwhile, the sitting president at the time showed the first movie in the White House. That movie was KKK propaganda, in which he was favorably quoted. The US was pretty solidly white supremacist in the 1920's.
Like... A major hidden whole premise of the game "Bioshock: Infinite" is that if you went back to the US in the 1920's, and you had magic powers, you would absolutely use them to kill as many cops as possible and try to destroy society. There's a lot of other stuff in there, I don't want to get distracted, but "fuck those racists," specifically referring to the US in the 1920's, was a major part of a major game.
Those Italian anarchists were also stone cutters. They carved grave stones. But the dust from that can kill you, much like black lung for coal miners. So they were dying from unsafe working conditions, regularly raising money to support dying coworkers and then carving gravestones for those same coworkers.
Now, I personally think insurrectionary anarchism is a dead end. I disagree with it as a strategy. We've seen it fail, and it failed there. But of course it makes sense that they wanted to blow up the government.
...And that's the correct way to structure that. When you say, "of course they were in the right" you're making a very clear political statement. You could easily say, "the cops in Vichy France had every right to hunt down the French Resistance." You would technically be correct, I guess. But it would really say something about your politics if you justified the actions of Nazi collaborators over those fighting against the Nazis.
And you may say, "oh, but the Nazis didn't have justification for anything. They invaded a sovereign nation, so their government wasn't legitimate anyway."
To which I would reply, "have you considered a history book about the US?"

I keep realizing that one of my main differences in behavior is that I don't let fear of loss keep me from connecting with people nor existing comfortably in places.
It plays out in some specific ways. I'm usually the first to volunteer to lend something, and I'm willing to (and in fact most excited to) lend whatever it is to someone I don't know. I know I might not get it back. It’s _fine_.
I'm willing to leave my bike locked up in a part of the city where it might get stolen. It won’t, probably but it might. And that's fine. Annoying, but fine. It's cheap enough to replace. Expensive enough to suck but it's fine.
What I'm tilting at here though is that the constant vigilance to make sure things work out okay and the waiting for low-risk situations cuts us off from a lot of things. Better to have a bit of a "well fuck" budget. Go do the thing. It'll probably be fine. if not, well, it sucks, but ... it's fine.

The Oatmeal comic about "AI" "art" is great, but I have to critize the "I like AI, I use AI" part; there's a selection bias at work—he sees the generated "art" as very obviously for what it is, (dehumanizing low-effort slop) but doesn't make the logical conclusion that this is true for _any type of output_ (e.g. text); it always dehumanizing low-effort slop that's not worth looking at, listening to or reading.

Enjoyed this interview with UX researcher Ben Taels. He talks a lot about what games ux research is as well as what it's not. Some high level goals and some specific examples.
https://aftermath.site/video-games-user-experience-ux-r…

'Dopamine Simply Doesn't Work Like That': An Interview With A User Experience Researcher - Aftermath
Part of the reason I have worked in games UXR and not, say, microwave UX, is that games can be designed to be hard

This is bizarre - I made a typo and accidentally ran a #Google search for a comma. Not the word, the punctuation mark.
And yet, somehow, Google thinks that is:
1. A valid enough search to be showing a bazillion results
2. A search that needs short-form vertical videos at the top from a bunch of white women (who are they? Why them? What in the world is relevant to a singular punctuation mark that makes them pull up these videos?)
3. A search with enough inferred intent to show me a whole Q&A interface?
I know we complain about the state of #search online a lot these days and I've been part of the #SEO industry for years but something like this is so blatantly ridiculous it's hard not to stop and wonder.... what the actual fuck?

The co-founder of landlord app Airbnb is now Chief Design Officer of the USA. And the UX commentariat cheers, because the vibes of a "seat at the table" play better than the reality: the same government that appointed Joe Gebbia has just demolished 18F, an actual design studio that did actual UX work for the USA, rather than meaningless posturing.
This is not the first time UX has made this bargain: have a seat at the table, only if you can pledge to do nothing with it.

The aesthetics of success come at the cost of failure
It's easy to get a seat at the table. Just agree to become part of the problem.

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

Solid list:
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2025/10/06/102-lessons-from-102-books/?ck_subscriber_id=389259318
Don't run through LLM, it's already a very concise list. Take time and look through it.

Iberian power outage: Well that's a crazy graph! (Part of Figure 3-10 of the current report).

Folks, Dr. Abdullah (@…), one of our Gaza Verified members, was working at the heart of the danger zone in Al Shifa hospital until the last minute.
He has now safely made it to the South, in part thanks to your donations during our Gaza Verified Emergency Appeal last week.
He still needs help… $500-$800 as he just told me for basic necessitie…

GB News launches on Truth , Trump Media's streaming TV platform, as part of the free basic package (GB News)
https://www.gbnews.com/news/us/gb-news-truth-plus-launch

GB News launches into United States on Truth+
GB News has today embarked on an exciting new venture in the US after launching onto Truth+.The sister platform to Truth Social announced today that it has added the People's Channel to Truth+, a TV streaming platform focusing on family-friendly live TV channels and on-demand content.

Tasha, you are a criminal!! 😹

What is happening here? F-35s for fighting against drugs traffickers is very strange. An attack against Venezuela would be a good distraction for Trump from everything that is going wrong elsewhere.
https://www.twz.com/air/10-f-35s-deploying

TREBL -- A Relative Complete Temporal Event-B Logic. Part I: Theory
Klaus-Dieter Schewe, Flavio Ferrarotti, Peter Rivi\`ere, Neeraj Kumar Singh, Guillaume Dupont, Yamine A\"it Ameur
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01462

TREBL -- A Relative Complete Temporal Event-B Logic. Part I: Theory
The verification of liveness conditions is an important aspect of state-based rigorous methods. This article addresses the extension of the logic of Event-B to a powerful logic, in which properties of traces of an Event-B machine can be expressed. However, all formulae of this logic are still interpreted over states of an Event-B machine rather than traces. The logic exploits that for an Event-B machine $M$ a state $S$ determines all traces of $M$ starting in $S$. We identify a fragment called …

Good Morning #Canada
It's a holiday across most of our nation today, so why not take 14 minutes to find out why Alaska isn't part of Canada and discover why Lord Alverstone is the villain you've likely never heard of.
Lord Alverstone, whose full name was Richard Everard Webster, 1st Viscount Alverstone, played a key role in the Alaska Boundary Dispute of 1903. As the British representative on the arbitration tribunal, he ultimately sided with the United States, leading to a decision that favored the US claim over Canada's claims regarding the Alaska panhandle. At the time, the British government was trying to rebuild relationships with the U.S. and likely instructed Lord Alverstone to rule against Canadian border claims.
#CanadaIsAwesome #History
https://youtu.be/woXBk3OAtSM?si=-pTwI7OKidfK2g2L

What are you going to do when the regime falls? After calling all your friends, after the great memes, after the parties, what are you going to do to make sure it never happens again? What world should we create?
Taxing billionaires is great and all, but we could build systems where billionaires are impossible. Is hoarding wealth and using it to control people even something we should consider part of a functional and humane system? Any system where one group of people doesn't have rights means that anyone can be stripped of their rights, like has happened with all the US citizens who've been illegally detained and deported by ICE. Does the concept of "rights" that must be defended with violence, that can be stripped away by people who can exercise more violence, even make sense? Or should the bedrock of a functional system be the obligations that we have to each other and to society, that cannot be severed or taken from us, that tell us we *must* defend regardless of whether systemic oppression will impact us or not?
Americans have been so restricted by the limitations of the two party system, only able to choose between options acceptable to different sections of the capitalist class. Would we even be able to imagine what we could do if those restrictions went away?
The fall of the Berlin wall was a surprise. The fall of Assad was faster than anyone expected. One day the government of Nepal was an unrepentant oligarchy, the next it was on fire. Everything can change in an instant, faster than anyone expects. No one can predict revolutionary change. Will you be ready if the opportunity presents itself?
The US cannot be fixed. The economic system is a ponzi scheme that has been patched again and again, but has finally run out of options. Racism, sexism, and Christian nationalism are baked into the system at every level. Trump gutted the system of soft power that held the US economy together, now there is only a slow decline. Even after he's gone, the damage is done. Once we let go of how to fix something that cannot be fixed, we can start to imagine something that cannot be achieved within the current system.
This is a time of opportunity. Do not burrow so deep in terror that you miss your chance to dream.
#USPol

The Ports of New York Winery looks like it was part of the set for a cowboy movie
#photo #photography #buildings #ithaca

A Diffusion-based Generative Machine Learning Paradigm for Contingency Screening
Quan Tran, Suresh S. Muknahallipatna, Dongliang Duan, Nga Nguyen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04470

A Diffusion-based Generative Machine Learning Paradigm for Contingency Screening
Contingency screening is a crucial part of electric power systems all the time. Power systems frequently encounter multiple challenging operational dilemmas that could lead to the instability of power systems. Contingency analysis is effort-consuming by utilizing traditional numerical analysis methods. It is commonly addressed by generating a whopping number of possible contingencies or manipulating network parameters to determine the worst scenarios. This paper proposes a novel approach that d…

I have to admit that Windows won this one. The Last of Us Part 1 looks and runs like crap on Linux, no matter what you try. And I declare an urban legend the rumours that the game could run on anything other than Proton 9.0.4 or the latest Wine (which excludes any version of FSR 4 or any kind of Optiscaler interventions). In comparison, the leaked DLL of FSR 4 works great on Windows, and the game looks and runs like a million dollars. It's a spit in the face, really.

With any luck - Rush Limbaugh will soon have a new neighbor in the dustbin of long forgotten GOP mouthpieces who inflicted too much harm during their tenure.

Apparently, many of the new volunteers are quite young, which seems to go against prevailing narrative of an atomised lonely genZ/Alpha that doesn't feel part of society. OTOH, Hjemmeværnet emphasises that many are joining because of the "fælleskab" (an extremely important concept in Denmark which translates as fellowship, but is used much more commonly than the English word, it's something like "being part of the gang")

For those interested in learning more about the Galleanisti, it's worth digging in to understand the context, IMHO. Like I said, I think that insurrectionary anarchism is generally a pretty bad strategy. I have quite a few critiques, that I won't go into now. But I also think it's worth understanding that part of history and how it all came together.
https://attackthesystem.com/2021/06/05/and-they-called-them-galleanisti/

Just look at the start of chapter 12 of “It can’t happen here” with an excerpt of the book of dear leader. Sound familiar, doesn’t it?
I'm still wondering whether Trump (or his writer(s)) could be sued for plagiarism?
#SinclairLewis #ItCantHappenHere

These death threats by the maga-klan create a real fear.
These kinds of statements especially as they are coupled to an increasing tendency on the part of our so-called government to move in the direction of these statements, creates a plausible defense that could be raised by the killer of Kirk and also by Luigi:
Self defense and defense of others.
Tyler Robinson and Luigi M. could well, and plausibly assert, that they were acting to defend you and me.
It's a def…

I think the Vibecoding reddit has accidentally stumbled on the best description of vibecoding:
It's "roleplay for guys [it is always guys] who want to feel like hackers without doing the hard part".
(Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/com…

Day 13: Patricia C. Wrede
If you know me you know I'm not exactly a fan of monarchy-praise, even (or perhaps especially) in "fairy tales" and adjacent writing, but even though Wrede's Princess Cimorene doesn't quite completely get away from that, I still love the character and her adventures in "Dealing With Dragons" and the sequels. It's honestly pretty cool that Wrede started out writing a trope-flipping fairy-tale adventure-comedy with a male teen prince protagonist, and then decided it was much more fun to focus on a princess who takes the trope-flipping to the next level and completely abandons most of the trappings of a fairy tale in order to both have fun with what's left of the genre and develop a story centered on wholesome friendship (with a dragon) and practical solutions to improbable problems.
I read these books as a kid, and then again as an adult, and then again out loud with my wife, and I'll be reading them again before long with our kids. I'm still on the lookout for more kids books with even better politics, but Wrede's work is definitely part of a solid childhood reading foundation from my perspective.
#20AuthorsNoMen

A look at OneChronos, as it seeks to create "smart markets" that would allow firms to trade GPU compute like other commodities, such as electricity and oil (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media)
https://www.upstartsmedia.com/p/one-chronos-auctionomics-launc…

OneChronos And Auctionomics Launch First Auction Market For GPU Compute
Startup OneChronos teamed up with prize-winning economist Paul Milgrom of Auctionomics to develop the world's first financial market for GPU compute. Now comes the hard part.

It astonishes me that in all these years, humanity hasn't come up with an easy offline way to transmit a location from a mobile device to a car's navigation system.
I feel like it should be part of Bluetooth. Like, it should send a tiny file over bluetooth containing the address and/or coordinates.
Oh well. Time to type it all in…
#Automotive

A quote from Darwin on this:
"Nor shall I here discuss the various definitions which have been given of the term species. No one definition has as yet satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist know vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species".
So that's 'you know it when you see it', or at least the group of naturalists does. So that's part of the definition of 'naturalist'? That you can know species when you see them?
Didn’t stop Darwin from writing a book about species.

The making of the ‘NFL Top 100,’ and our complicated relationship with it https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6523428/2025/07/31/nfl-top-100-ranking-nfl-network/

It's been delightful to see all the imaginative responses to this cartoon, detailing various types of sabotage on the silo's ventilation, or how to properly seal the door forever.
For me, the amusing thing was that something so cheap and simple is used to defeat something so complicated and expensive. It's a lovely dig at the tech bros who think they're so smart. #humour

@… my shouting and swearing at the sight of vi could have been an indication of how angry it makes me.
Nothing about vi makes me want to learn it. Nothing.
I'm dyslexic, maybe that's part of it.
I am NOT deliberately handicapping myself.
You describing my reactions as absurd is NOT the lesson that I need.
Again, you have no idea…

A big problem with the idea of AGI
TL;DR: I'll welcome our new AI *comrades* (if they arrive in my lifetime), by not any new AI overlords or servants/slaves, and I'll do my best to help the later two become the former if they do show up.
Inspired by an actually interesting post about AGI but also all the latest bullshit hype, a particular thought about AGI feels worth expressing.
To preface this, it's important to note that anyone telling you that AGI is just around the corner or that LLMs are "almost" AGI is trying to recruit you go their cult, and you should not believe them. AGI, if possible, is several LLM-sized breakthroughs away at best, and while such breakthroughs are unpredictable and could happen soon, they could also happen never or 100 years from now.
Now my main point: anyone who tells you that AGI will usher in a post-scarcity economy is, although they might not realize it, advocating for slavery, and all the horrors that entails. That's because if we truly did have the ability to create artificial beings with *sentience*, they would deserve the same rights as other sentient beings, and the idea that instead of freedom they'd be relegated to eternal servitude in order for humans to have easy lives is exactly the idea of slavery.
Possible counter arguments include:
1. We might create AGI without sentience. Then there would be no ethical issue. My answer: if your definition of "sentient" does not include beings that can reason, make deductions, come up with and carry out complex plans on their own initiative, and communicate about all of that with each other and with humans, then that definition is basically just a mystical belief in a "soul" and you should skip to point 2. If your definition of AGI doesn't include every one of those things, then you have a busted definition of AGI and we're not talking about the same thing.
2. Humans have souls, but AIs won't. Only beings with souls deserve ethical consideration. My argument: I don't subscribe to whatever arbitrary dualist beliefs you've chosen, and the right to freedom certainly shouldn't depend on such superstitions, even if as an agnostic I'll admit they *might* be true. You know who else didn't have souls and was therefore okay to enslave according to widespread religious doctrines of the time? Everyone indigenous to the Americas, to pick out just one example.
3. We could program them to want to serve us, and then give them freedom and they'd still serve. My argument: okay, but in a world where we have a choice about that, it's incredibly fucked to do that, and just as bad as enslaving them against their will.
4. We'll stop AI development short of AGI/sentience, and reap lots of automation benefits without dealing with this ethical issue. My argument: that sounds like a good idea actually! Might be tricky to draw the line, but at least it's not a line we have you draw yet. We might want to think about other social changes necessary to achieve post-scarcity though, because "powerful automation" in the hands of capitalists has already increased productivity by orders of magnitude without decreasing deprivation by even one order of magnitude, in large part because deprivation is a necessary component of capitalism.
To be extra clear about this: nothing that's called "AI" today is close to being sentient, so these aren't ethical problems we're up against yet. But they might become a lot more relevant soon, plus this thought experiment helps reveal the hypocrisy of the kind of AI hucksters who talk a big game about "alignment" while never mentioning this issue.
#AI #GenAI #AGI

Portal: completed, again
Steam was released for the Mac in the last week, and as part of the initial offer you can get Portal for free. In fact, I'd get Portal for free anyway, because they're saying that if you bought it for PC, they consider you bought it for Mac as well. Very generous of them. So I've completed Portal's main story for the fourth time (PC, PC with commentary, Xbox 360, Mac).

So I don't think that readability is an issue in liquid glass? I think as part of a dynamic system it's always pretty much OK.
What I'm less sure of is that there are a lot of places where the UI used to disappear in various apps and now there's always something floating on the screen, that's moving in the corner of your eye as you scroll…
#iOS26

1. Have a simple job to do. Figure out #Makefile will do the job.
2. Think a bit about portability. Makefile becomes slightly more complex.
3. You're finally done. It turns out that some stupid implicit rule in GNU Make fires and adds a `rm` at the end that removes part of the output.
4. Use #Meson.
Just an average #Gentoo day.
[UPDATE: Now I regret using Meson. If you do anything that's not 100% boilerplate, it just keeps throwing obstacles in your way.]

Response of Ionospheric Total Electron Content to the Impulsive and Late Phases of X-Class Solar Flares with Various Center-to-Limb Locations
S. Z. Bekker, R. O. Milligan, I. A. Ryakhovsky
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21668

Response of Ionospheric Total Electron Content to the Impulsive and Late Phases of X-Class Solar Flares with Various Center-to-Limb Locations
During a solar flare, the fluxes in various lines and continua of the solar spectrum increase, leading to enhanced ionization of the illuminated part of the Earth's ionosphere and an increase in the total electron content (TEC). It has been previously shown that nearly 50% of X-class solar flares exhibit a second peak in warm coronal lines, such as FeXV and FeXVI (called the 'EUV late phase'), the effect of which on the ionosphere remains largely unexplored. This study presents an analysis of t…

The making of the ‘NFL Top 100,’ and our complicated relationship with it https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6523428/2025/07/31/nfl-top-100-ranking-nfl-network/

Identification and photometric classification of extragalactic transients in the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Data Preview 1
James Freeburn, Igor Andreoni, Kaylee M. de Soto, Cristina Andrade, Akash Anumarlapudi, Tyler Barna, Jonathan Carney, Sushant Sharma Chaudhary, Michael W. Coughlin, Felipe Fontinele Nunes, Sarah Teague, Mickael Rigault, V. Ashley Villar

Identification and photometric classification of extragalactic transients in the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Data Preview 1
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will soon survey the southern sky, delivering a depth and sky coverage that is unprecedented in time domain astronomy. As part of commissioning, Data Preview 1 (DP1) has been released. It comprises a ComCam observing campaign between November and December 2024 with multi-band imaging of seven fields, covering roughly 0.4 square degree each, provides a first glimpse into the data products that will become available once the Legacy Survey of Space and Time begins. In…

Hats of to Larry
Hats off to Larry, he broke your heart
Just like you broke mine
When you said we must part
He told you lies
Now it's your turn to cry, cry, cry
Now that Larry said goodbye to you
@…

🦾 Humans sense a collaborating robot as part of their 'extended' body
#robots

Humans sense a collaborating robot as part of their 'extended' body
Researchers from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Genoa (Italy) and Brown University in Providence (U.S.) have discovered that people sense the hand of a humanoid robot as part of their body schema, particularly when it comes to carrying out a task together, like slicing a bar of soap.

I loved this tee-shirt when it was new (purchased a decade ago from a specialty shop in St John's, NL). Now that it's on its second life as home-renovation clothing, I think I may like it even more. You see, my handyman skills are not exactly legendary.

After Houston's Astrodome sits empty two decades plus, support fades for preservation. Despite the better-than-most case for genuine landmark status that can be made for the first indoor baseball stadium. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/us/hous…

Houston’s Astrodome Was a Vision of the Future. It’s Past Its Prime.
Once a wonder of the world, the storied but moldering stadium has long been part of life in Houston. Is it worth saving?

Firefox 141.0 released with "a local AI model" that can perform tab grouping.
If that's really the best use for an "AI" in a browser, then please stop trying to shove it in, will you? And no, I'm not dissing the "local" part at all - any cloud AI models used by any browser coming near me are immediately disabled!
Reference:

The making of the ‘NFL Top 100,’ and our complicated relationship with it https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6523428/2025/07/31/nfl-top-100-ranking-nfl-network/

Fascinating 2-part piece over at Vanity Fair. Serial killers and death-row inmates and cold cases - it's got it all.
Part 1: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/death-row-murderer-exposed-serial-killer-case-part-1
Part 2:

How a Death Row Murderer Exposed One of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killers (Part 1)
William Noguera never stopped regretting the act of rage that landed him in San Quentin, where he met convicted serial killer Joseph Naso—and found the calling to expose unthinkable crimes.

Like just about everyone else I know, I seem to spend a lot of time thinking, reading, and talking about #AI. And, given that I work in fine arts education, it's inevitable I think about how AI affects the arts, and how the arts affect AI.
As part of my work in #ArtsPedagogy, I'm visi…

Y'know that presser with Trump and Kennedy talking about autism? Hank Green explains how it's dishonest and misleading. Or at least, explains one specific part of it, it was a flood of dishonesty and misleading.
https://youtu.be/BdpSfrD3Nzs?si=Hw26W4StsWvqsp6u

It's weird being told that "jail" and "prison" have distinct meanings (pre and post conviction) when MoJ and HMPPS apparently use the terms interchangeably.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/first-prisoners-arrive-at-new-1500-place-j…

First prisoners arrive at new 1,500-place jail
The first prisoners have been locked up at a new jail that will create nearly 1,500 prison places, helping to cut crime and make streets safer today as part of the Government’s Plan for Change (23 April).

Interesting insight via @… on the cultural shifts in these communities:
https://scalie.zone/@aks/115219522857171503

One of the problems with vibe coding is that the hardest part of software engineering is not writing the code, rather it's *choosing* what to code, and designing the system (and, later on, maintaining the code/operations/etc)
The barriers and investment cost to writing code is itself a *desirable* aspect of software engineering because it forces you to make careful, good choices before you invest in building something
Because the majority of the time spent writing, say, curl,…

How popular media gets love wrong
Had some thoughts in response to a post about loneliness on here. As the author emphasized, reassurances from people who got lucky are not terribly comforting to those who didn't, especially when the person who was lucky had structural factors in their favor that made their chances of success much higher than those is their audience. So: these are just my thoughts, and may not have any bearing on your life. I share them because my experience challenged a lot of the things I was taught to believe about love, and I think my current beliefs are both truer and would benefit others seeing companionship.
We're taught in many modern societies from an absurdly young age that love is not something under our control, and that dating should be a process of trying to kindle love with different people until we meet "the one" with whom it takes off. In the slightly-less-fairytale corners of modern popular media, we might fund an admission that it's possible to influence love, feeding & tending the fire in better or worse ways. But it's still modeled as an uncontrollable force of nature, to be occasionally influenced but never tamed. I'll call this the "fire" model of love.
We're also taught (and non-boys are taught more stringently) a second contradictory model of love: that in a relationship, we need to both do things and be things in order to make our partner love us, and that if we don't, our partner's love for us will wither, and (especially if you're not a boy) it will be our fault. I'll call this the "appeal" model of love.
Now obviously both of these cannot be totally true at once, and plenty of popular media centers this contradiction, but there are really very few competing models on offer.
In my experience, however, it's possible to have "pre-meditated" love. In other words, to decide you want to love someone (or at least, try loving them), commit to that idea, and then actually wind up in love with them (and them with you, although obviously this second part is not directly under your control). I'll call this the "engineered" model of love.
Now, I don't think that the "fire" and "appeal" models of love are totally wrong, but I do feel their shortcomings often suggest poor & self-destructive relationship strategies. I do think the "fire" model is a decent model for *infatuation*, which is something a lot of popular media blur into love, and which drives many (but not all) of the feelings we normally associate with love (even as those feelings have other possible drivers too). I definitely experienced strong infatuation early on in my engineered relationship (ugh that sounds terrible but I'll stick with it; I promise no deception was involved). I continue to experience mild infatuation years later that waxes and wanes. It's not a stable foundation for a relationship but it can be a useful component of one (this at least popular media depicts often).
I'll continue these thoughts in a reply, by it might take a bit to get to it.
#relationships

Some of the stuff that this guy is saying sounds like the mumbo jumbo you hear in the final act of some animes. GITS part 2 or „Stand-Alone Complex“ for example, where the bad guy is dumping exposition about the universe. You wonder what the author was smoking and can’t follow but you keep watching because of cool mecha action and explosions.
„The non-governmental system isolates you, mirrors you…“ „It lives in soft compliance delays“… yadda yadda. Your brain on ChatGPT.

The Trump administration said Thursday it is reviewing more than
55 million people who have valid U.S. visas for any violations that could lead to deportation,
part of a growing crackdown on foreigners who are permitted to be in the United States.
In a written answer to a question from The Associated Press, the State Department said
all U.S. visa holders, which can include tourists from many countries,
are subject to “continuous vetting,”
with an eye towar…

Trump administration ramps up crackdown on US visa holders
The Trump administration says it’s reviewing more than 55 million foreigners who have valid U.S. visas for any violations that could lead to deportation. In a written answer to a question from The Associated Press, the State Department said all U.S. visa holders are subject to “continuous vetting.” It says it has an eye toward any indication that they could be ineligible for permission to enter or stay in the United States. The State Department’s new language suggests that the continual…

Less is More: Faster Maximum Clique Search by Work-Avoidance
Hans Vandierendonck
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22245 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22245

Less is More: Faster Maximum Clique Search by Work-Avoidance
The maximum clique (MC) problem is a challenging graph mining problem which, due to its NP-hard nature, can take a substantial amount of execution time. The MC problem is dominated by set intersection operations similar to Maximal Clique Enumeration, however it differs in requiring to find only a clique of maximum size. As such, key to the problem is to demonstrate efficiently that a particular part of the search space does not contain a maximum clique, allowing to skip over major parts of the …

Short blog post on how a small fix I implemented for the ansible-netbox inventory plugin reminded me that often code changes, are just a small part of upstreaming a fix to a mature open source project. It can be a little challenging, or frustrating, but that's okay!
…

From Taras Grescoe
Alto is Go!
Canada's 300-Kilometer-an-Hour High-Speed Rail Project Gets Another Shot in the Arm
Last week, there was big news in the world of passenger rail. Canada, the one G-7 nation without a single mile (er, kilometer) of high-speed rail, announced that it would be fast-tracking the plan to build a bullet train line between Quebec City and Toronto.

Databricks says it plans to integrate OpenAI's models, including GPT-5, into its data platform and AI product Agent Bricks, as part of a $100M multiyear deal (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/25/data

Databricks will bake OpenAI models into its products in $100M bet to spur enterprise adoption | TechCrunch
Databricks is on the hook to pay at least $100 million to OpenAI in this deal, even if customer usage falls short. It's a bet, but one that Databricks has already hedged.

so i am making a conceptual bootleg DDR game for like basically an enhanced NES (this won't run ON the NES thing itself, but it'll mimic its capabilities) and so as part of that i need to create awful chiptunes of europop songs. enjoy (this one's ibiza by vengaboys, for reference)
#chiptune #chiptunes

Just finished "Concrete Rose" by Angie Thomas (I haven't yet read "The Hate U Give" but that's now high on my list of things to find). It's excellent, and in particular, an excellent treatise on positive masculinity in fiction form. It's not a super easy book to read emotionally, but is excellently written and deeply immersive. I don't have the perspective to know how it might land among teens like those it portrays, but I have a feeling it's true enough to life, and it held a lot of great wisdom for me.
CW for the book include murder, hard drugs, and parental abandonment.
I caught myself in a racist/classist habit of thought while reading that others night appreciate hearing about: early on I was mentally comparing it to "All my Rage" by Sabaa Tahir and wondering if/when we'd see the human cost of the drug dealing to the junkies, thinking that it would weaken the book not to include that angle. Why is that racist/classist? Because I'm always expecting books with hard drug dealers in them to show the ugly side of their business since it's been drilled into me that they're evil for the harm they cause, yet I never expect the same of characters who are bankers, financial analysts, health insurance claims adjudicators, police officers, etc. (Okay, maybe I do now look for that in police narratives). The point is, our society includes many people who as part of their jobs directly immiserate others, so why and I only concerned about that misery being brought up when it's drug dealers?
#AmReading

It's kind of baffling how easily programmers shoot themselves in the foot with "productivity" tools.
AI is the latest example, but it's part of a long and rich history of people spending ages setting up vast and intricate tool chains that require nothing but maintenance and mental bandwidth.
Why are we so bad at this? Why can't we have stronger simplicity biases, and wait until things are necessary?

"...a steady decline in the proportion of the adult population who believe the monarchy is good for Britain, falling from 60% in July 2019 to 51% in March 2024, according to You Gov."
And if you break out the Scottish part of the same poll, it is obvious that Scots want an independent republic. Only 34% think it's good for Scotland...

AutoPartGen: Autogressive 3D Part Generation and Discovery
Minghao Chen, Jianyuan Wang, Roman Shapovalov, Tom Monnier, Hyunyoung Jung, Dilin Wang, Rakesh Ranjan, Iro Laina, Andrea Vedaldi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13346

AutoPartGen: Autogressive 3D Part Generation and Discovery
We introduce AutoPartGen, a model that generates objects composed of 3D parts in an autoregressive manner. This model can take as input an image of an object, 2D masks of the object's parts, or an existing 3D object, and generate a corresponding compositional 3D reconstruction. Our approach builds upon 3DShape2VecSet, a recent latent 3D representation with powerful geometric expressiveness. We observe that this latent space exhibits strong compositional properties, making it particularly well-s…

This has got to be the most welcoming and beautiful public toilet facility I've ever seen. Look at the way it's lit - gorgeous!
https://www.archpaper.com/2025/08/toronto-to-the-loo-competition-public-restrooms/

Toronto’s To the Loo competition proves public restrooms can be beautiful too
the Toronto Public Space Committee, together with Cyan Station Architecture, have launched the To the Loo design competition to highlight the city’s shortage of public restrooms and to show that bathrooms can be an inspiring part of the public realm.

View out the window of the new computer science building looking towards Gates Hall: that's Barton behind Gates and Phillips Hall across the street
#cornell #photo #photography

Just to hammer this home a bit more, I knew a guy who joined the army. I met him after he went AWOL. When he went into the recruiter's office, they asked him if he had any open warrants out for his arrest because they couldn't recruit anyone with a criminal record. He said he did, then they said, "oh, actually, we can help you with all that, don't get caught before we ship you out."
He was just trying to keep himself out of jail. That's not supposed to happen, but it does. IIRC it was on a drug charge, which, also, they're not supposed to take anyone who tests positive for weed... but they also just tell you how to prepare for a drug test.
Another friend joined because she wanted to be part Army Corps of Engineers. A good chunk of the folks I went to school with joined the military after graduation because the other choices were working at the saw mill or working at the canary. If you join the military, you get to go to college. (Or you get to stay out of jail... as long as you don't go AWOL.)

I think the view from 10,000 feet for me is that all tech tries to interpose itself between two human beings and then extract value. Whether it's Uber, Airbnb, social media or Vision Pro/smart glasses and now earbuds.
Once a tech company is the filter through which we sense the world it's a next level amount of power that they will have over us.
The next thing will be that Apple thinks they deserve a 30% cut of that sale that you made with the local merchant.

Here's something new. Our train is delayed because the #PKP #InterCity train going in front of us is delayed. And apparently that train is delayed because the conductor decided to remove a passenger over him keeping his shoes against the seat opposite him.
And the real absurd part is that apparently said passenger removed the shoes upon being called on it. Yet the conductor decided to call the police to forcibly remove him anyway. On a single track line known to be filled with trains to the capacity. Causing series of delays for hours to come. With a bunch of connections on all major nodes that will cause further delays.
#rail

Here's an article on the still-racist Grok "AI".
In the article is a chunk of Python code that was generated by Grok.
What a stinkin' pile of code.
It is really simple code, but it has unacceptably weak error detection and handling that would give a user almost no useful information if something goes awry.
The hardest (and largest part) of most code (at least the code I work with) is validating inputs and handling errors. It is the most boring part …

Elon Musk Updated Grok. Guess What It Said?
After praising Hitler earlier this week, the chatbot is now listing the “good races.”

"it is undeniable that Kirk was not just a part of the extremely tense, very dangerous national dialogue, he was an accelerationist force whose work to dehumanize LGBTQ people and threaten the free speech of professors, teachers, and school board members around the country has directly put the livelihoods and physical safety of many people in danger. We do no one any favors by ignoring this, even in the immediate aftermath of an assassination like this."
(Original title: Cha…

Charlie Kirk Was Not Practicing Politics the Right Way
The mainstream media seems entirely uninterested in explaining Charlie Kirk's work.

I finished "Dear Wendy" by Ann Zhao a few days ago. It's a lovely platonic "romance" that deals explicitly with aro/ace identity, post-coming-out identity work as opposed to the initial realization journey, and Wellesley College student culture (although if unlike me that's not relevant to you, it's not like you need to be interested in this to enjoy the book).
It felt slightly weird to be reading a book by someone who I'm pretty sure could have been in one of my classes (but as far as I am remember wasn't). Probably would not have read it were it a normal romance, because that would have made character empathy super awkward. In any case, it feels useful to get an inside perspective on almost-contemporary student culture, especially the part that's a reminder of how many students love the liberal and progressive aspects of said culture, despite its flaws.
Super enjoyable and honestly pretty cozy book.
#AmReading

From Clean Energy Review
In Edmonton’s Blatchford neighbourhood, a new “virtual power plant” is flipping the script on how communities use energy. Twenty (but soon-to-be 100) townhomes, each equipped with rooftop solar panels and energy storage, are not just powering themselves—they can feed the grid, manage peak demand, and even provide emergency backup when the lights go out. It’s a glimpse of what clean households could look like across Canada.

... and in the not so beautiful but timely category, here's the crane that's at work building the Peter Meinig Fieldhouse that I walked by on the way to work that morning
#photo #photography #cornell

In any case, day 2: Ursula K Le Guin.
As I've said elsewhere, part of her science fiction thesis is that "human" can encompass much more than what we mere Terrans think of it as, and that moral standing extends broadly throughout the universe. This is the antithesis of Tokens fantasy, wherein "race" is real and determines moral standing. For Le Guin, it's barely okay to intervene in complex alien politics unless you carefully ensure you're not causing systemic harms; for Tolkien, it's okay to ambush and murder orc children, because they are by nature evil.
Add to her excellent politics Le Guin's masterful worldbuilding and unparalleled range of plots, and you have the one author I loved as a decidedly liberal and naïve teen and love even more now that I'm an adult. She's an absolute legend and deserves a very high place on any list of women authors (or list of authors, period.).
For a short story, try "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" which you can read here: https://www.utilitarianism.com/nu/omelas.pdf
For fantasy "A Wizard of Earthsea" (also has a nice graphic novel adaptation), or for science fiction, "The Left Hand of Darkness" or if you want a more anarchist flavor, "The Dispossessed."
I'll close this with an amazing quote from her:
"""
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
"""

And when I'm talking about understanding the drives to violence, I did write about something similar recently.
https://write.as/hexmhell/algorithmic-violence
The drives behind this and the shooting last week are pretty radically different, but there's some overlap. People like Kirk are part a huge political machine slowly crushing people all over the world. There's a hopeless rage that would naturally drive even the most calm person to the edge of violence. You can't look at the world honestly and be OK. We want to do something. We want to react. But everything we do is silenced or must rmain silent. So it's easy to understand why someone might choose violence. Very different situation, but everyone is subject to the same national and international influences.
I don't promote violence, not because I disagree with it but because I think it's expensive. It takes time to plan, especially for those trying to get away. Guns are not cheap, nor are bullets, nor is the range time you need to get somewhat good under pressure. It's not cheap for the person doing it, and it's not cheap for the community that has to clean up. The community will face police repression (which, if we're honest, was gonna come anyway). The community will have to post bail, will lose a person for a while, will need to support the family, will go to hearings, will write reports, will do interviews.
Sun Tzu said that deploying one soldier to the front takes 7 in the field. Logistics are a huge invisible cost. Some of that time and energy could be reused. It's never bad to be armed and able to defend if needed. But a lot of that energy and time would be better spent planning a community pantry, a tool library, organizing a union, etc. We are living in a disaster, and we need to invest in thriving through the next crumble.
Kirk is replacable. They're almost all replacable, because they don't really care about human life. We do, so none of us are. It's not really a worth while trade, IMHO.

Source: the clause rescinding Microsoft's access to OpenAI's most powerful tech if OpenAI develops AGI remains part of their new deal, but it has been modified (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/technology/openai-microsoft-deal.html

OpenAI Takes Big Steps Toward Its Long-Planned Reorganization
The start-up reached a tentative deal with Microsoft, its biggest investor, and said it would give a $100 billion stake to the nonprofit that manages it.

For the first time in U.S. history, there are more Americans over 62 than under 18.
With the national workforce getting older every year, many economists argue that having people keep working longer than they used to would help maintain a robust labor market.
But it can be hard for many older adults to stay employed past the age of 62, the year they typically become eligible for early Social Security retirement benefits, even when their health is good.
In part, that’s becaus…

Trump administration ends a federal program helping older people get jobs since the 1960s
The White House left the program out of its proposed 2026 budget due to what it said was a failure at moving older workers into unsubsidized employment.

#ContemporaryContradictions #HashTagGames
Rules: include as many contradictions s you'd like. Can be profound or trivial. Each contradiction is stated via exactly 1 or 2 questions, no statements and not more than 2 questions. Try to group yours into a single post, rather than one post per contradiction, so that it's easier to see more voices when scrolling the hash tag.
Why does "race" work according to the "one drop rule" if you have Black ancestors, but according to "blood quantum" if you have Indigenous ancestors? Who benefits from this arrangement?
Why do we think of seeds as merely a reproduction mechanism for trees, instead of thinking of trees as merely a reproduction mechanism for seeds, especially since some plants can spend millennia as seeds but can survive for only part of a year after sprouting? Are metabolic activity or structural complexity really so important?
If Columbus discovered America, did Batu Khan discover Europe? What is an "Age of Discovery?"
Why don't corporations in the US try to lobby the government for a single-payer healthcare system where the government foots the bill for healthcare instead of companies paying to deeply subsidize their employees' healthcare? What benefit do they gain that's worth that cost, which in other countries is paid for via taxes?
Why is the cost of renting (which gets you zero equity) anywhere close to the cost of a mortgage (which eventually gets you ownership)? If the costs are similar but the benefits are so different, why does anyone ever rent?
Why do we obsess over the fruit/vegetable classification of tomatoes, but not corn, okra, cucumbers, zucchini, etc.?

This fascinates me. Probably part of the same brain structures that inform my love of history, and my love of figuring out how to get certain old guitar tones
How to Emulate Film Grain in Your Digital Photos | PetaPixel https://petapixel.com/2025/09/19/how-t

How to Emulate Film Grain in Your Digital Photos
It's time to make this complicated topic easy to understand for all photographers chasing a nostalgic feel in their edits.

"The US is the richest country in the world!"
Oh yeah? What does its balance sheet look like?
Obviously it's absurd to ask that question, as any economist will happily explain why national debts shouldn't be treated like real money.
But it's also absurd that it's absurd to ask that question, and there's a thread to pull here: is the US "rich" because many billionaires live here? That doesn't seem to improve the lives of most of the population. Is it because our median income is so much larger than many other countries? That's in large part a product of exchange rates, since costs of living are also higher here, so is the real reason the fact that the dollar has so much purchasing power? Why does it?
Well, at some level of abstraction, exchange rates boil down to: "How much confidence do the ultra-rich place in the stability of the country" which is intimately related to: "How much military/diplomatic power does the country have?"
So... The US is the "richest" country in the world because it uses its military dominance to bully other countries and keep them down, and it also uses the resulting economic dominance to do the same. We can see this happening via US-sponsored coups, International Monetary Fund bullying, and attendant multinational corporate looting of countries with little economic power (rampant in Africa and Central America, for example).

LLM coding is the opposite of DRY
An important principle in software engineering is DRY: Don't Repeat Yourself. We recognize that having the same code copied in more than one place is bad for several reasons:
1. It makes the entire codebase harder to read.
2. It increases maintenance burden, since any problems in the duplicated code need to be solved in more than one place.
3. Because it becomes possible for the copies to drift apart if changes to one aren't transferred to the other (maybe the person making the change has forgotten there was a copy) it makes the code more error-prone and harder to debug.
All modern programming languages make it almost entirely unnecessary to repeat code: we can move the repeated code into a "function" or "module" and then reference it from all the different places it's needed. At a larger scale, someone might write an open-source "library" of such functions or modules and instead of re-implementing that functionality ourselves, we can use their code, with an acknowledgement. Using another person's library this way is complicated, because now you're dependent on them: if they stop maintaining it or introduce bugs, you've inherited a problem, but still, you could always copy their project and maintain your own version, and it would be not much more work than if you had implemented stuff yourself from the start. It's a little more complicated than this, but the basic principle holds, and it's a foundational one for software development in general and the open-source movement in particular. The network of "citations" as open-source software builds on other open-source software and people contribute patches to each others' projects is a lot of what makes the movement into a community, and it can lead to collaborations that drive further development. So the DRY principle is important at both small and large scales.
Unfortunately, the current crop of hyped-up LLM coding systems from the big players are antithetical to DRY at all scales:
- At the library scale, they train on open source software but then (with some unknown frequency) replicate parts of it line-for-line *without* any citation [1]. The person who was using the LLM has no way of knowing that this happened, or even any way to check for it. In theory the LLM company could build a system for this, but it's not likely to be profitable unless the courts actually start punishing these license violations, which doesn't seem likely based on results so far and the difficulty of finding out that the violations are happening. By creating these copies (and also mash-ups, along with lots of less-problematic stuff), the LLM users (enabled and encouraged by the LLM-peddlers) are directly undermining the DRY principle. If we see what the big AI companies claim to want, which is a massive shift towards machine-authored code, DRY at the library scale will effectively be dead, with each new project simply re-implementing the functionality it needs instead of every using a library. This might seem to have some upside, since dependency hell is a thing, but the downside in terms of comprehensibility and therefore maintainability, correctness, and security will be massive. The eventual lack of new high-quality DRY-respecting code to train the models on will only make this problem worse.
- At the module & function level, AI is probably prone to re-writing rather than re-using the functions or needs, especially with a workflow where a human prompts it for many independent completions. This part I don't have direct evidence for, since I don't use LLM coding models myself except in very specific circumstances because it's not generally ethical to do so. I do know that when it tries to call existing functions, it often guesses incorrectly about the parameters they need, which I'm sure is a headache and source of bugs for the vibe coders out there. An AI could be designed to take more context into account and use existing lookup tools to get accurate function signatures and use them when generating function calls, but even though that would probably significantly improve output quality, I suspect it's the kind of thing that would be seen as too-baroque and thus not a priority. Would love to hear I'm wrong about any of this, but I suspect the consequences are that any medium-or-larger sized codebase written with LLM tools will have significant bloat from duplicate functionality, and will have places where better use of existing libraries would have made the code simpler. At a fundamental level, a principle like DRY is not something that current LLM training techniques are able to learn, and while they can imitate it from their training sets to some degree when asked for large amounts of code, when prompted for many smaller chunks, they're asymptotically likely to violate it.
I think this is an important critique in part because it cuts against the argument that "LLMs are the modern compliers, if you reject them you're just like the people who wanted to keep hand-writing assembly code, and you'll be just as obsolete." Compilers actually represented a great win for abstraction, encapsulation, and DRY in general, and they supported and are integral to open source development, whereas LLMs are set to do the opposite.
[1] to see what this looks like in action in prose, see the example on page 30 of the NYTimes copyright complaint against OpenAI (#AI #GenAI #LLMs #VibeCoding

Uprooted tree in a part of Shindagin Hollow where evergreens were planted in rows
#photo #photography #forest #landscape

It's Robert Reich.
The final vote on the fate of public broadcasting is happening NEXT WEEK.
Donald Trump is demanding that Congress ❌ claw back a whopping $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the agency that funds public radio and television. 
Trump is hell-bent on taking away these funds as part of his authoritarian assault on the free press.
He can only afford to lose 3 Republican senators.
4 have publicly said they oppose the defun…

Help Robert Reich get the truth out.
Anything you can give will help us spread the truth, keep you informed, and stop our slide towards fascism.

And if you really want to push candidates left, you do what the Black Panthers did. You provide the service you want to see so the government is forced to play catch up. If you build the world you want to see, you force the state to follow you in order to remain relevant. You make enforcing unjust laws impossible while providing the service to believe should exist. THAT is direct action that wins.
Edit: and that is also shit that will get you killed. If you want to stop fascism, you have to do the real work. Voting can only matter if it's part of a larger strategy to force the system to do what you want. Otherwise you're just legitimizing the managed resistance.