Tootfinder

Just read this post by @… on an optimistic AGI future, and while it had some interesting and worthwhile ideas, it's also in my opinion dangerously misguided, and plays into the current AGI hype in a harmful way.
https://social.coop/@eloquence/114940607434005478
My criticisms include:
- Current LLM technology has many layers, but the biggest most capable models are all tied to corporate datacenters and require inordinate amounts of every and water use to run. Trying to use these tools to bring about a post-scarcity economy will burn up the planet. We urgently need more-capable but also vastly more efficient AI technologies if we want to use AI for a post-scarcity economy, and we are *not* nearly on the verge of this despite what the big companies pushing LLMs want us to think.
- I can see that permacommons.org claims a small level of expenses on AI equates to low climate impact. However, given current deep subsidies on place by the big companies to attract users, that isn't a great assumption. The fact that their FAQ dodges the question about which AI systems they use isn't a great look.
- These systems are not free in the same way that Wikipedia or open-source software is. To run your own model you need a data harvesting & cleaning operation that costs millions of dollars minimum, and then you need millions of dollars worth of storage & compute to train & host the models. Right now, big corporations are trying to compete for market share by heavily subsidizing these things, but it you go along with that, you become dependent on them, and you'll be screwed when they jack up the price to a profitable level later. I'd love to see open dataset initiatives SBD the like, and there are some of these things, but not enough yet, and many of the initiatives focus on one problem while ignoring others (fine for research but not the basis for a society yet).
- Between the environmental impacts, the horrible labor conditions and undercompensation of data workers who filter the big datasets, and the impacts of both AI scrapers and AI commons pollution, the developers of the most popular & effective LLMs have a lot of answer for. This project only really mentions environmental impacts, which makes me think that they're not serious about ethics, which in turn makes me distrustful of the whole enterprise.
- Their language also ends up encouraging AI use broadly while totally ignoring several entire classes of harm, so they're effectively contributing to AI hype, especially with such casual talk of AGI and robotics as if embodied AGI were just around the corner. To be clear about this point: we are several breakthroughs away from AGI under the most optimistic assumptions, and giving the impression that those will happen soon plays directly into the hands of the Sam Altmans of the world who are trying to make money off the impression of impending huge advances in AI capabilities. Adding to the AI hype is irresponsible.
- I've got a more philosophical criticism that I'll post about separately.
I do think that the idea of using AI & other software tools, possibly along with robotics and funded by many local cooperatives, in order to make businesses obsolete before they can do the same to all workers, is a good one. Get your local library to buy a knitting machine alongside their 3D printer.
Lately I've felt too busy criticizing AI to really sit down and think about what I do want the future to look like, even though I'm a big proponent of positive visions for the future as a force multiplier for criticism, and this article is inspiring to me in that regard, even if the specific project doesn't seem like a good one.

I had an air filter attached to the rear of my #Kombi, and then I realized that I couldn't shift. One of the cords that I had used to secure the hepa filter was on the derailleur. It was an easy thing to fix, but it reminded me just how much I hate derailleurs (and any kind of external gears in general).

We was playin' the Homestead Grays in the city of Pitchburgh. Josh [Gibson]
comes up in the last of the ninth with a man on and us a run behind. Well,
he hit one. The Grays waited around and waited around, but finally the
empire rules it ain't comin' down. So we win. The next day, we was disputin'
the Grays in Philadelphia when here come a ball outta the sky right in the
glove of the Grays' center fielder. The empire made the only possible c…

Ok, this is hilarious. https://www.yankodesign.com/2025/06/27/worlds-narrowest-fiat-panda-is-one-anorexic-19-inch-wide-ev-destined-for-the-record-books/

Calamus 19 Mind you the timid models of the rest, the majority?
A declaration of intellectual independence and a celebration of brotherly love. Honestly this poem feels a little clumsy to me, I can see why Whitman struck the awkward introducing lines in later editions.
As always, looking for the gay content:
Yet comes one, a Manhattanese, and ever at parting, kisses me lightly on the lips with robust love.
And I, in the public room, or on the crossing of the street, or on the ship's deck, kiss him in return
We observe that salute of American comrades
But I can't in all honestly read this use of "kissing" as erotic. Here the public kissing and the "salute of comrades" makes me think it's more of a fraternal kiss.
Which doesn't exclude a romantic kiss as well, or an erotic one. What's so vital about Calamus is how Whitman blends masculine sexual love with the love of comrades. I think both meanings are latent in every poem.

Hey @… I was just listening to the great literary olfactoloy episode with @allylouks.bsky.social€, but I feel that the existence/role of human pheromones has been a bit misrepresented.
I have worked on mammalian pheromones for my PhD, and I have encountered (at least) two major definitions of the term "pheromone", one based on the function of a substance, and the other, which I personally prefer, on the information flow involved in it (https://doi.org/10.1159/000096511).
Based on the Sbarbati & Osculati definition, a pheromone would be a component that conveys information between individuals of the same species.
There is also quite a bit of research that argues for the existence of human pheromones (e.g. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.a.20125, https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.a.20125, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1198331)
However, the discussion on the existence of human pheromones is difficult, as it touches on the topic of free will as many reactions to odor are involuntary. During the International Symposium on Olfaction and Taste held in Iceland in 2024, there have been several session on human olfaction touching on sensitive aspects such as olfaction-mediated effects on mate choice and pregnancy, but none of the researchers dared utter the word pheromone, while colleagues working on other mammals where happily talking about pheromonal effects for very similar topics.
Long story short, I feel that saying there is no hard evidence for human pheromones is misrepresenting the current research.

"The Nordic and Baltic states have quietly demonstrated that Europe has done more than its fair share in helping an embattled ally. The continent as a whole is a lot stronger than it looks. Perhaps it’s time it knew its own strength."
https://newlinesmag.com/argument/the-farther-east-one-goes-in-europe-the-more-west-one-winds-up/

sp_infectious: Art exhibit dynamic contacts (2011)
This dataset contains the daily dynamic contact networks collected during the Infectious SocioPatterns event that took place at the Science Gallery in Dublin, Ireland, during the artscience exhibition INFECTIOUS: STAY AWAY. Each file in the downloadable package contains a tab-separated list representing the active contacts during 20-second intervals of one day of data collection. Each line has the form “t i j“, where i and j are the a…

On The Road - Train to Xi’An 🚞
在路上 - 去西安的火车 🚞
📷 Minolta Hi-Matic AF
🎞️Kentmere Pan 200
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

So #Gentoo #Python eclasses are pretty modern, in the sense that they tend to follow the best practices and standards, and eventually deal with deprecations. Nevertheless, they have a long history and carry quite some historical burden, particularly regarding to naming.
The key point is that the eclasses were conceived as a replacement for the old eclasses: "distutils" and "python". Hence, much like we revision ebuilds, I've named the matching eclasses "distutils-r1" and "python-r1". For consistency, I've also used the "-r1" suffix for the remaining eclasses introduced at the time: "python-any-r1", "python-single-r1" and "python-utils-r1" — even though there were never "r0"s.
It didn't take long to realize my first mistake. I've made the multi-impl eclass effectively the "main" eclass, probably largely inspired by the previous Gentoo recommendations. However, in the end I've found out that for the most use cases (i.e. where "distutils-r1" is not involved), there is no real need for multi-impl, and it makes things much harder. So if I were naming them today, I would have named it "python-multi", to indicate the specific use case — and either avoid designating a default at all, or made "python-single" the default.
What aged even worse is the "distutils-r1" eclass. Admittedly, back when it was conceived, distutils was still largely a thing — and there were people (like me) who avoided unnecessary dependency on setuptools. Of course, nowadays it has been entirely devoured by setuptools, and with #PEP517 even "setuptools" wouldn't be a good name anymore. Nowadays, people are getting confused why they are supposed to use "distutils-r1" for, say, Hatchling.
Admittedly, this is something I could have done differently — PEP517 support was a major migration, and involved an explicit switch. Instead of adding DISTUTILS_USE_PEP517 (what a self-contradictory name) variable, I could have forked the eclass. Why didn't I do that? Because there used to be a lot of code shared between the two paths. Of course, over time they diverged more, and eventually I've dropped the legacy support — but the opportunity to rename was lost.
In fact, as a semi-related fact, I've recognized another design problem with the eclass earlier — I should have gone for two eclasses rather than one: a "python-phase" eclass with generic sub-phase support, and a "distutils" (or later "python-pep517") implementing default sub-phases for the common backends. And again, this is precisely how I could have solved the code reuse problem when I introduced PEP517 support.
But then, I didn't anticipate how the eclasses would end up looking like in the end — and I can't really predict what new challenges the Python ecosystem is going to bring us. And I think it's too late to rename or split stuff — too much busywork on everyone.

Bend it like Beckham is one of my all time favorite movies. I would watch a sequel in a heartbeat.
The original cast knows it in the works. keira says there should be a sequel in 2018. The OG cast all know it's in the works.
Emma Hayes is somehow involved??

The latest casualty of Donald Trump’s efforts to silence media criticism is Eduardo Porter, one of the most thoughtful and intelligent critics of his heinous regime.
On Tuesday, Porter wrote his last column for the Washington Post.
In a widely circulated email, he explained why he was leaving the Post:
"Jeff Bezos and his new head of Opinion are taking the paper down a path I cannot follow, directed toward the relentless promotion of free markets and personal liberties…

But look at the 4 on that! Don't these sundial makers know how to write Roman numerals? Where is the QC!?
https://social.lol/@adam/114880680239385409

One thing that's great about living in #Japan is that it's one of the few countries where the main hard-left party both has some power, and is critical of the pseudo-#fascist, ethno-#nationalist party tha…

The Japanese Communist Party’s Feud with Beijing: Will the Global Left Take Note? | New Bloom Magazine
On July 1st, 2021, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated its hundredth anniversary, and duly received congratulatory messages from political leaders and parties around the world.

Watched all of "Ghosts US", the American version of the UK spooky sit-com.
There's like seventy episodes that I watched in less than a week. This is how I like telly to be. Relentless.
The show's weaker than the UK one in some ways but that shear continuity, the endless-seeming perpetuity of it, drove it into my brain.
US Ghosts are always trying to cop off with each other. Sexy ghosts. Pairing up. Don't remember much of that in the UK one. Perhaps when you make it 5x longer you're left with little else in the way of story to write.
Anyway, it's over now. I miss it in the way you might miss an infuriating neighbour if they moved out.
#watching #tv

To Grok: If you compare a Neuralink Blindsight brain implant to The vOICe visual-to-auditory sensory substitution, which one really has the best long-term outlook? Don't speculate on implants going beyond normal vision because there is just zero evidence. Challenge your own bias. https://x.com/i/grok/share/XM32w4XapPi

Motorcyclists cross the bridge in downtown Newark Valley, NY a cute town about which I visited last Saturday about 16 miles away; I haven't made up my mind where I'm going this weekend yet...
#upstateny #outdoors

Series A, Episode 02 - Space Fall
BLAKE: Spread out and find the armoury. Jenna?
JENNA: What?
BLAKE: Let's find the computer room.
[Switch to Raiker and Artix]
RAIKER: All the doors are open!
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/102/316 B7B2

The Media Dismissing The Transgender Factor In This School Shooting Are Enabling Another One (Eddie Scarry/The Federalist)
https://thefederalist.com/2025/08/29/the-media-dismissing-the-transgender-factor-in-this-school-shooting-are-enabling-another-one/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250831/p12#a250831p12

#FuckEricAdams so so much. And fuck Hochul for not removing him. #BikeNYC
https://hellgateny…

I think one main issue I have with the whole "EURO Stack" stuff is that it is not looking for an alternative. It's "we want what we got just with EU companies". But the fact that the Internet and its services have been turned into a mall is the big fucking problem. I don't want a "European Facebook" built on the same logic of exploitation.

One-loop Renormalization of the Type-I Seesaw Model in the Modified Minimal-subtraction Scheme
Jihong Huang, Shun Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21691 https://

One-loop Renormalization of the Type-I Seesaw Model in the Modified Minimal-subtraction Scheme
Extending the Standard Model (SM) with three right-handed neutrinos, the type-I seesaw model serves as the simplest and most natural scenario to successfully explain both tiny neutrino masses and the baryon number asymmetry in the Universe. In this paper, we perform a complete one-loop renormalization of the type-I seesaw model in the modified minimal-subtraction ($\overline{\rm MS}$) scheme. The one-loop self-energy corrections of charged leptons and Majorana neutrinos are calculated in the $R…

Amazing sentence:
"There is of course always the God of the uncriticizable self, who behaves with the same irritable intolerance as the monotheistic God in the face of even the faintest suggestion that one might consider behaving or thinking differently."
https://itself.blog/2025/07/27/chatgpt-is-going-to-kill-god/

From the "Your UX is bad so you should feel bad Dept.":
The act of observing the state of your 365 subscription changes the state of your 365 subscription. Or Schrodingers's 365 subscription - until you check, the subscription is both active AND expired in superposition and by checking your subscription the waveform collapses to one of those two states. Was your subscription ever really active at all?

Yep it's a volcano all right.
Quakes around here are pretty common but this is the first time I've noticed one with a negative depth. Makes sense given that the mountain is over 4km high, there's plenty of spots deep underground that are well above sea level.
I'm no geologist but there's probably either a magma chamber there or one deeper underground that's inducing stresses in overlying rocks.

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

Sources: Cohere has told investors it expects to generate $200M in annualized revenue by the end of 2025, up from $70M in annualized revenue as of February (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-startup-cohe…

AI Startup Cohere Projects $200 Million Revenue Pace as New Funding Nears
Cohere, a Canadian artificial intelligence developer that competes with Anthropic and OpenAI, has sustained one of the richest valuations in the industry as a multiple of the relatively modest revenue it generates. Now it’s told investors that sales are picking up—enough to entice existing ...

Jerry Jones confirmed an incredible reason to justify why the Dallas Cowboys traded Micah Parsons to the Packers https://bolavip.com/en/nfl/nfl-news-jerry-jones-confirms-incredible-reason-to-justify-why-the-c…

One of the TV or cable networks should totally have the Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake at the ready to play when the time comes.
Context: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-04/swan-lake-broadcast-signals-turmoil-in-russia/100881424

Swan Lake TV broadcast signals turmoil in Russia as independent media outlets forced to close
Staff at a leading independent Russian TV station resign before airing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, in a Soviet-era signal of political turmoil in the country.

The Problem with Safety Classification is not just the Models
Sowmya Vajjala
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21782 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21782

The Problem with Safety Classification is not just the Models
Studying the robustness of Large Language Models (LLMs) to unsafe behaviors is an important topic of research today. Building safety classification models or guard models, which are fine-tuned models for input/output safety classification for LLMs, is seen as one of the solutions to address the issue. Although there is a lot of research on the safety testing of LLMs themselves, there is little research on evaluating the effectiveness of such safety classifiers or the evaluation datasets used fo…

from my link log —
The baby paradox in Haskell.
https://blog.jle.im/entry/the-baby-paradox-in-haskell.html
saved 2025-08-22

The Baby Paradox in Haskell
Everybody Loves My Baby is a Jazz Standard from 1924 with the famous lyric: Everybody loves my baby, but my baby don’t love nobody but me. Which is often formalized as: \begin{align} \text{Axiom}_1 . & \forall x. \text{Loves}(x, \text{Baby}) \\ \text{Axiom}_2 . \forall x. & \text{Loves}(\text{Baby}, x) \implies x = me \end{align} Let’s prove in Haskell (in one line) that these two statements, taken together, imply that I am my own baby.

QED calculations of the $2p$-$2s$ transition energies in Li-like ions
V. A. Yerokhin, Z. Harman, C. H. Keitel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21718 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21718 https://arxiv.org/html/2507.21718
arXiv:2507.21718v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Systematic QED calculations of ionization energies of the $2s$, $2p_{1/2}$, and $2p_{3/2}$ states, as well as the $2p_{1/2}$--$2s$ and $2p_{3/2}$--$2p_{1/2}$ transition energies are performed for Li-like ions with the nuclear charge numbers $Z = 10$--$100$. The convergence of QED perturbative expansion is improved by using the extended Furry picture, which starts from the Dirac equation with a local screening potential. An ab initio treatment is accomplished for one- and two-photon electron-structure QED effects and the one-photon screening of the self-energy and vacuum-polarization corrections. This is complemented with an approximate treatment of the two-photon QED screening and higher-order (three or more photon) electron-structure effects. As a result, the obtained theoretical predictions improve upon the accuracy achieved in previous calculations. Comparison with available experimental data shows a good agreement between theory and experiment. In most cases, the theoretical values surpass the experimental results in precision, with only a few exceptions. In the case of uranium and bismuth, the comparison provides one of the most stringent tests of bound-state QED in the strong-field regime. Alternatively, the obtained results can be employed for high-precision determinations of nuclear charge radii.
toXiv_bot_toot

I have lots of reactions about Dr Who, the predominant one at the end is RTD saying "You want a reboot suckers, I'll give you a fucking reboot, give me your money!"
The spirit of the original is strong in him.
Simultaneously wiping out the Timeless Child hoohah and reincarnating The Rani and Omega.
That's the way to do it.
#DrWho

Another nerd snipe for today: solve the definite integral from 0 to pi for the sine of 2x times the cosine of x dx. This one took a minute for me, but got the answer two different ways. Still a nice way to exercise integration techniques and trig identities.
#math #nerdsnipe

A multi-frequency, multi-epoch radio continuum study of the Quintuplet cluster with the Very Large Array
M. Cano-Gonz\'alez, R. Sch\"odel, A. Alberdi, J. Mold\'on, M. P\'erez-Torres, F. Najarro, A. T. Gallego-Calvente
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21617

A multi-frequency, multi-epoch radio continuum study of the Quintuplet cluster with the Very Large Array
The Quintuplet cluster, located in the Galactic centre, is one of the few young massive clusters in the Milky Way. It allows us to study dozens of massive, post main sequence stars individually, providing unique insights into the properties of the most massive stars. Our goal is to study the radio continuum emission of the most massive stars in the cluster. We carried out a total of nine observations (three in the C- and six in the X-band) of the Quintuplet cluster with the Karl G. Jansky Ver…

Recovering the Topology in One Point Interaction Problem on Extended Non-Local Star Graphs
Lung-Hui Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22322 https://

Recovering the Topology in One Point Interaction Problem on Extended Non-Local Star Graphs
The author studies the inverse spectral problem of Sturm-Liouville operator on a star-like graph. To this star-like graph centered at the origin as its vertex, there are attached $m$ edges that imposed the Sturm-Liouville operator with certain non-local potential functions with some suitable local boundary value conditions. At the vertex, we consider one point interaction condition at vertex to model a network that fixed on the end of the edges on the graph. The vibration and flow changes are m…

"By now it should be clear that the subjection of the United States to the dictatorship of Donald Trump is no longer a theoretical possibility or even a distant probability. It is an imminent reality."
Andrew Coyne , Globe and Mail
https://www.theglobe…

Donald Trump is on the brink of becoming a dictator. Can he be stopped?
As the guardrails of American democracy fall one by one, it is no longer a question of where the President is going, but how fast he will get there

One of the things I like about the #Quartiles puzzle game in the Apple News app, is how many non-words there are that could very well be words, but aren’t. The sequence of letters follow basic general conventions that look & sound like a word, but nobody’s used it yet. With just the right buzz that sounds profound.

I shouldn't need to say this...but if you're reading this in Ventura County and considering going to the beach or one of the harbors to watch tonight...please don't. At the beaches you likely won't notice anything, but the whitewater from broken waves may suddenly be a lot further up the beach than you expect. Not fun at night.
A tsunami is really a change in sea level. The harbors are going to fill up by a foot, and it *could* be messy. Stay away and out of the way.

One NFL team to bet on to win the Super Bowl, plus the 10 biggest question marks in the league

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/one-nfl

Modelling hydrogen storage in metal hydrides
Francesc Font, Attila Husar, Tim Myers, Maria Aguareles, Esther Barrab\'es
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22083 https://

Modelling hydrogen storage in metal hydrides
We develop a one-dimensional mathematical model for the loading process of hydrogen in a metal hydride tank. The model describes the evolution of the density and pressure of the hydrogen gas, the temperature of the tank, the averaged velocity of the gas through the porous metal structure, and the transformed fraction of metal into a metal hydride. The non-dimensionalisation of the model indicates a possible reduction of the system of equations and also shows that the density and the transformed…

"I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a signboard had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall."
— Nabokov

Spin squeezing generation in atom-cavity systems: on the effects of adiabatic elimination beyond the leading order
Stefano Gregorio Giaccari, Giulia Dellea, Marco Giovanni Genoni, Gianluca Bertaina
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22383

Spin squeezing generation in atom-cavity systems: on the effects of adiabatic elimination beyond the leading order
Spin-squeezed states are a prototypical example of metrologically useful quantum states where structured entanglement allows for enhanced sensing with respect to the one possible using classically correlated particles. Relevant aspects are both the efficient preparation of spin-squeezed states and the scalability of estimation precision with the number $N$ of probes. Recently, in the context of the generation of spin-squeezed states via coupling of three-level atoms to an optical cavity, it was…

The Athletic thinks Raiders have one of NFL's worst quarterback situations https://raiderswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/raiders/2025/08/30/the-athletic-raiders-nfls-ten-wo…

"The trick is knowing which tape to use, and young influencers on the social media platform are quick to enter into paid partnerships to sell the one brand of mouth tape you really need."
The Paper-Thin Evidence for Mouth Taping https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical

C.H.U.D. was released in theaters today (August 31) in 1984. Absolutely one of my favorites.
#horror #80s

Maker playing against an invisible Breaker
Dennis Clemens, Fabian Hamann, Mirjana Mikala\v{c}ki, Yannick Mogge, Milo\v{s} Stojakovi\'c
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22519 https…

Maker playing against an invisible Breaker
We initiate the study of the phantom version of Maker-Breaker positional games. In a phantom game, the moves of one of the players are hidden from the other player, who still has the complete information. We look at the biased $(a:b)$ Maker-PhantomBreaker games where the board is the edge set of the complete graph on $n$ vertices, $K_n$, and Maker has no information about PhantomBreaker's choices of edges. We give randomized strategies for both players in four classical games: connectivity game…

Blind search for activity-sensitive lines in the near-infrared using HARPS and NIRPS observations of Proxima and Gl 581
Jo\~ao Gomes da Silva, Elisa Delgado-Mena, Nuno C. Santos, Telmo Monteiro, Pierre Larue, Alejandro Su\'arez Mascare\~no, Xavier Delfosse, Lucile Mignon, \'Etienne Artigau, Nicola Nari, Manuel Abreu, Jos\'e L. A. Aguiar, Khaled Al Moulla, Guillaume Allain, Romain Allart, Tomy Arial, Hugues Auger, Fr\'ed\'erique Baron, Susana C. C. Barros, Luc Bazine…

Blind search for activity-sensitive lines in the near-infrared using HARPS and NIRPS observations of Proxima and Gl 581
Stellar activity variability is one of the main obstacles to the detection of Earth-like planets using the RV method. The aim of this work is to measure the effect of activity in the spectra of M dwarfs and detect activity-sensitive lines in the NIR. We took advantage of the simultaneous observations of HARPS and the newly commissioned NIRPS spectrograph to carry out a blind search of the most activity-sensitive spectral lines in the NIR using NIRPS spectra and known activity indicators in the …

I suppose the fact that DOGE’s people are clowns and its methods are bullshit means that DOGE’s failure does not prove wrong this theory of “a few great engineers could magically fix government.”
The trouble is, when such an effort fails, one can •always• imagine a hypothetical better engineer and say the theory is not proved wrong. It’s like dieting: it’s always •your• fault for not doing it perfectly, never the diet’s fault for being BS.

I had an architecture class where the professor spent an entire class discussing doorknobs. It was one of my favorite classes.
So the headline was all I needed to click this link:
“On the Architectural Hostility of Doorknobs”
https://sightlessscribbles.com/writing

West not ready for modern war, Ukrainian drone commander says: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/30/west-not-ready-for-modern.html

Interesting analysis of how memes and humor are used in Kenya‘s GenZ protests: "One protester, clutching a phone still streaming to thousands online, summed up the day: “They tax, we meme. They shoot, we stream.”"
https://democracyinafrica.org/humour-a

Humour as a Form of Resistance in the Kenyan Gen Z Protests | Democracy in Africa

This entire #iOS dialer looks remarkably ugly, like one of those cheap Chinese 2016-era Android apps with massive amounts of ads in them. If I had bought an iPhone because of the UI and UX months ago, I'd be biting my arse now (German idiom). #LiquidGlass
QT @…

Marco Arment (@marcoarment@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image I don't want to seem like I'm nitpicking too much, but the "Hold This Call?” UI needs another pass. The small "Hold” button is nearly touching the needlessly tiny dismiss (✕) button, which only seems about 24pt wide. This will be error-prone for lots of people in practice. Opposite actions should not be represented by tiny, immediately neighboring touch targets. I know it's a small thing, but it's the kind of thing that has me worried that institutional UI talent is …

I can't help but wonder if the real anti-Semites aren't the #NetanyahuAdministration & those who conflate criticism of the Netanyahu Administration's horrific acts in Gaza and the West Bank with antisemitism. It is the acts of Netanyahu and his ilk that cast Judaism in a bad light, as they hide behind a Jewish identity to justify the unjustifiable. Hiding evil behin…

I can't help but wonder if the real anti-Semites aren't the #NetanyahuAdministration & those who conflate criticism of the Netanyahu Administration's horrific acts in Gaza and the West Bank with antisemitism. It is the acts of Netanyahu and his ilk that cast Judaism in a bad light, as they hide behind a Jewish identity to justify the unjustifiable. Hiding evil behin…

The Chiral Limit of Fully Nonlinear Minimal Massive Gravity
Massimo Porrati, Xilin Sheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22762 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22762

The Chiral Limit of Fully Nonlinear Minimal Massive Gravity
We study 3D Anti de Sitter Minimal Massive Gravity near the chiral limit where one of the boundary Brown-Henneaux central charges vanishes and two modes become null. We go beyond the known free-theory analysis to prove that these modes decouple completely also in the full MMG Lagrangian and field equations. We also use the full action to ascertain if the interacting theory becomes infinitely strongly coupled in the chiral limit. We show that this is not the case at tree level but that a strong …

Requirements on bandpass resolution and measurement precision for LiteBIRD
S. Giardiello, A. Carones, T. Ghigna, L. Pagano, F. Piacentini, L. Montier, R. Takaku, E. Calabrese, D. Adak, E. Allys, A. Anand, J. Aumont, M. Ballardini, A. J. Banday, R. B. Barreiro, N. Bartolo, S. Basak, M. Bersanelli, A. Besnard, M. Bortolami, T. Brinckmann, F. J. Casas, K. Cheung, M. Citran, L. Clermont, F. Columbro, A. Coppolecchia, F. Cuttaia, P. de Bernardis, E. de la Hoz, M. De Lucia, S. Della Torre, E…

Requirements on bandpass resolution and measurement precision for LiteBIRD
In this work, we study the impact of an imperfect knowledge of the instrument bandpasses on the estimate of the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ in the context of the next-generation LiteBIRD satellite. We develop a pipeline to include bandpass integration in both the time-ordered data (TOD) and the map-making processing steps. We introduce the systematic effect by having a mismatch between the ``real'', high resolution bandpass $τ$, entering the TOD, and the estimated one $τ_s$, used in the map-ma…

surely one of the all-time most promising starts to a #SciFi novel i've encountered. ("black hole of carcosa" by @… ) (no spoilers.) @…

The article points out that the rise on borrowing and visiting libraries in Denmark is an anomaly in Europe*, which is a pity. It also rightly identified that the number of events, reading groups and a good selection of books are key to get people into libraries. IMHO, the other important factor is the digital side. It's extremely easy to see what books are available and to order from libraries across the whole country on the bibliotek.dk website.
And once you're in the library to collect one thing, it's easy to pick up a few more...
*Citation needed
https://fediscience.org/@Ruth_Mottram/114946331036135197
Ruth_Mottram - Last year Danes borrowed 23.6 million paper books from public libraries, plus music, film, games digital loans, with 32.5 million in person library visits. It's increasing annually too.
I'm not surprised, Danish libraries are wonderful, everyone should have this.
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/bibliotekernes-udlaan-stiger-tredje-aar-i-traek-vi-elsker-laese-papirboeger

Machine Learning Experiences: A story of learning AI for use in enterprise software testing that can be used by anyone
Michael Cohoon, Debbie Furman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22064

Machine Learning Experiences: A story of learning AI for use in enterprise software testing that can be used by anyone
This paper details the machine learning (ML) journey of a group of people focused on software testing. It tells the story of how this group progressed through a ML workflow (similar to the CRISP-DM process). This workflow consists of the following steps and can be used by anyone applying ML techniques to a project: gather the data; clean the data; perform feature engineering on the data; splitting the data into two sets, one for training and one for testing; choosing a machine learning model; t…

On the role of connectivity in Linear Logic proofs
Raffaele Di Donna, Lorenzo Tortora de Falco
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21678 https://

On the role of connectivity in Linear Logic proofs
We investigate a property that extends the Danos-Regnier correctness criterion for linear logic proof-structures. The property applies to the correctness graphs of a proof-structure: it states that any such graph is acyclic and that the number of its connected components is exactly one more than the number of nodes bottom or weakening. This is known to be necessary but not sufficient in multiplicative exponential linear logic (MELL) to recover a sequent calculus proof from a proof-structure. We…

A triptych on Starhawk, who developed some of the most poignantly insightful ideas in structural theories of power, among the many philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists who wrote about theories of power in the 20th century
Note that the second and third image come from the *same book*, in the first and second chapters
I…did not expect woo poetry on magic and sexuality in a book that's highly cited by writers on theories of power

“The Miyawaki forests aren’t going to solve all our problems,” she says. “It’s not a magic wand, but it will solve one of the thousands of problems we have. We need a system of solutions, and this is one of them.”
https://engl…

Miyawaki in Nezahualcóyotl: The Japanese method of creating forests comes to Mexico
The municipality, adjacent to Mexico City and surrounded by concrete, suffers from the heat island effect. The community came to the rescue with this accelerated tree planting method

Luskentyre Beach on the Isle of Harris is one of the many beautiful beaches in Scotland
https://www.mirror.co.uk/travel/ive-travelled-world-david-attenborough-35811964#Echobox=1756595018

'I've travelled world with David Attenborough but one of my top places is on our doorstep'
Chadden Hunter has spent the last 25 years travelling the world with the likes of Sir David Attenborough and has visited some of the most remote and beautiful places on the planet

God damn #UnicyclesArePractical
Warm weather outside but lightly raining. No problem for me. Shorts, t-shirt and umbrella ☔ … oh and unicycle :unicycle: OFC! 😆
#Unicycle #Unicyclist

Refugees, intergenerational trauma, child death, abusive family
Also just finished "The Best We Could Do" by Thi Bui, which is the second memoir I've stumbled upon recently that deals with the Vietnamese exodus after the end of the war (House Without Walls by Ching Yeung Russel is the other one, which is written in verse, not illustrated). Bui traces more of the political landscape and history of Vietnam through the stories of both of her parents, and also unpacks a lot of intergenerational trauma, but has less focus on the boat trip out and refugee camp experience, presumably because hers were easier than Russel's.
My thoughts after reading this return repeatedly to all of the impacts that patriarchy and toxic masculinity had on her father, from setting up his father and grandfather to be abusive towards him and the women in their lives, to pushing him deep into depression when he feels unable to fulfill the role of a protective husband, ironically leaving his wife to pick up the slack and ultimately ruining their relationship, to how it teaches him to despise and shirk the caregiver role he's left with, ultimately passing on some measure of trauma to his children. For sure war, abusive family, and child death can happen in the absence of patriarchy and those are in some ways perhaps bigger factors here, but at the same time, Bui's mom copes with most of the same factors in healthier ways.
#AmReading

"""
Writing has been an instrument for some of the highest expressions of the human spirit: poetry, philosophy, science. But to understand it — why it came into being, how it changed the human experience — we have to first appreciate its crass practicality. It evolved mainly as an instrument of the mundane: the economic, the administrative, the political.
Confusion over this point is understandable. Some scholars have equated the origin of “civilization” with the origin of writing. Laypeople sometimes take this equation to mean that with writing humanity put aside its barbarous past and started behaving in gentlemanly fashion, sipping tea and remembering to say “please.” And indeed, this may be only a mild caricature of what some nineteenth-century scholars actually meant by the equation: writing equals Greece equals Plato; illiteracy equals barbarism equals Attila the Hun.
But, in truth, if you add literacy to Attila the Hun, you don’t get Plato. You get Genghis Khan. During the thirteenth century, he administered what even today is the largest continuous land empire in the history of the world. And he could do so only because he had the requisite means of control: a script that, when carried by his pony express, amounted to the fastest large-scale information-processing technology of his era. One consequence was to give pillaging a scope beyond Attila’s wildest dreams. Information technology, like energy technology or any other technology, can be a tool for good or bad. By itself, it is no guarantor of moral progress or civility.
"""
(Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny)

Urban Diaspora VI 🏮
城市放逐 VI 🏮
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

TIL that the Xilinx PCIe endpoint IP, at least on some Versals (I assume it's likely the same on other parts but I've never looked) has a cursed non-compliant AXI4-Stream interface that uses TKEEP as a *dword* level valid strobe, rather than byte level as the spec requires.
Lovely.
The more I see of Xilinx IP blocks the more my decision to avoid then seems like the right one.

How Turkmenistan turned censorship into a lucrative extortion scheme by intentionally restricting internet access in order to sell its own VPNs to citizens (Tor Blog)
https://blog.torproject.org/Corruption-Control-Turkmenistan-internet-censorship-bus…

Corruption and Control: How Turkmenistan turned internet censorship into a business | Tor Project
In Turkmenistan, one of the most isolated regimes in the world, internet censorship has evolved beyond surveillance and control. In an Orwellian twist, the people blocking access to the internet are the same ones secretly selling it back, at a price most Turkmens can't afford.

The Utopia of “AI” is the Dystopia of never being touched by anything.
(Original title: Friction and not being touched)
https://tante.cc/2025/07/30/friction-and-not-being-touched/

add_health: Adolescent health (ADD HEALTH) (1994)
A directed network of friendships obtained through a social survey of high school students in 1994. The ADD HEALTH data are constructed from the in-school questionnaire; 90,118 students representing 84 communities took this survey in 1994-95. Some communities had only one school; others had two. Where there are two schools in a community students from one school were allowed to name friends in the other, the "sister school".…

Series C, Episode 02 - Powerplay
AVON: Unless he was here first as I said I was.
TARRANT: No, Klegg's men would have found you. They had to make sure no one else was on board in order to claim the salvage prize money. Greed makes very efficient troopers. No, if you were here then you must have been hiding. I repeat, an innocent stranger wouldn't question who was in command.

Black and white 𝑅𝑢𝑑𝑏𝑒𝑐𝑘𝑖𝑎𝑠 -- since red and green light account for like 80% of the brightness in sunlight, this flower is often the brightest thing in the frame by far and can cause challenges for exposure not to mind printing because the shade is far outside the CMYK gamut of printers
#photo #photography

The state of Florida is committed to $245 million toward the construction of
"Alligator Alcatraz,"
the Everglades immigration detention facility which is due to close in days.
Having to close the new Florida detention facility would be a blow to
both Governor DeSantis and the Trump administration,
and would show that one of the main impediments to authoritarian White House policy continues to be the courts.

Ron DeSantis Wasted $250 Million on Alligator Alcatraz as It Faces Closure
A federal judge has ruled that the new Florida detention center must close within 60 days.

Cowboys 'should be in NFL playoff mix' if one key unit comes together https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-should-be-nfl-playoff-mix-one-key-unit-comes-together

Norway to send F-35 fighter jets to Poland to cover transportation hub for Ukrainian military aid: https://benborges.xyz/2025/06/30/norway-to-send-f-fighter.html

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

Weird Greco III 🇬🇷
怪异希腊 III 🇬🇷
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

A while ago the media reported that most of the long-distance "suburban" trains between #Wrocław and #Poznań will be discontinued, and instead one will have to change trains midway. Irrespective of whether it's actually going to happen, let's consider it.
As you can probably tell by now, I'm not a stranger to changing trains. In fact, there are some direct connections that I do criticize. For example:
• Poznań — Szczecin — Świnoujście, where arriving at Szczecin Główny and turning back to leave the city is a waste of time. It's better to change trains at Szczecin Dąbie.
• Poznań — Krzyż — Kostrzyn, where instead of using a single railbus, you can use a larger EMU for the Poznań — Krzyż segment, and a smaller DMU for Krzyż — Kostrzyn (in fact, only recently the "direct" Poznań — Kostrzyn train involved just that, but it was supposed to be temporary).
However, good matches are the key. Say:
1. Max 10 minutes (when there are no delays) from one train to the other.
2. "Door-to-door" transfer — without having to carry all your luggage across platforms.
3. Reliable connection — if one train is delayed, the other train waits for it (or there are so many alternatives that it doesn't have to).
Can such a thing happen on Poznań — Wrocław route? I have my doubts.
I've been using these trains for years, and I can say this: there is no effort to match train from/to Poznań with other trains in Wrocław. Sometimes the trains depart 10 minutes before the first train from Poznań arrives, sometimes I need to transfer in 10 minutes, and sometimes I have to wait over an hour. And the same in the other direction.
Perhaps things would actually improve if the route is split. Perhaps people would actually care. Maybe even the trains would be fitted better to the timetable in Wrocław. But I find it hard to believe.
EDIT: One final thought — since there is no real reason to split these connections (except for profiteering), why make travellers' lives harder?
#rail

Nearly 200 employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) signed an extraordinary letter sent to Congress on August 25,
denouncing the current administration’s erosion of their work
and warning that it risks the occurrence of another Hurricane Katrina-sized disaster.
More than 30 provided their names; the rest signed anonymously.
Named the "Katrina Declaration",
the letter was one of the most powerful written so far by beleaguered federal …

FEMA Employees Speak Out After Attacks on Workers Warning of Looming Disaster
“The danger posed to our collective communities … is very real,” said one employee who signed a public letter.

Cowboys 'should be in NFL playoff mix' if one key unit comes together https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-should-be-nfl-playoff-mix-one-key-unit-comes-together

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.

dbpedia_genre: DBpedia work-genre network
A bipartite network of the affiliations between artists and their works on one side and genre classifications on the other, as extracted from Wikipedia by the DBpedia project. The date of this snapshot is uncertain.
This network has 266717 nodes and 463497 edges.
Tags: Informational, Relatedness, Unweighted

Series B, Episode 03 - Weapon
[Messroom. Travis enters]
SERVALAN: Are the guards in clear view?
TRAVIS: Three of them, as you ordered, Supreme Commander.
SERVALAN: And the fourth is concealed?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/203/429 B7B3

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

I was late to pick my daughter up from camp because #NYCParks closed a huge portion of Corona-Meadows Flushing Park. Apparently for some kind of music festival. There was, of course, no bike detour. The area has highways running through it, and the bridges over the highways are cordoned off. How do you get to

𝗧𝘄𝗼 𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗶𝗿𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗔 𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘁
We want to turn your attention to one of the most important elections this November:
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
Right now, two billionaires,
❌ Leonard Leo
– architect of the Trump Supreme Court
– and ❌ Jeff Yass
– Greg Abbott's biggest donor who just helped Trump rig the Texas maps
– are now pouring millions into Pennsylvania
to try and flip the state's Supreme Court.

Donate to Get Out the Vote PAC
I just gave to Get Out the Vote PAC!

How popular media gets love wrong
Okay, so what exactly are the details of the "engineered" model of love from my previous post? I'll try to summarize my thoughts and the experiences they're built on.
1. "Love" can be be thought of like a mechanism that's built by two (or more) people. In this case, no single person can build the thing alone, to work it needs contributions from multiple people (I suppose self-love might be an exception to that). In any case, the builders can intentionally choose how they build (and maintain) the mechanism, they can build it differently to suit their particular needs/wants, and they will need to maintain and repair it over time to keep it running. It may need winding, or fuel, or charging plus oil changes and bolt-tightening, etc.
2. Any two (or more) people can choose to start building love between them at any time. No need to "find your soulmate" or "wait for the right person." Now the caveat is that the mechanism is difficult to build and requires lots of cooperation, so there might indeed be "wrong people" to try to build love with. People in general might experience more failures than successes. The key component is slowly-escalating shared commitment to the project, which is negotiated between the partners so that neither one feels like they've been left to do all the work themselves. Since it's a big scary project though, it's very easy to decide it's too hard and give up, and so the builders need to encourage each other and pace themselves. The project can only succeed if there's mutual commitment, and that will certainly require compromise (sometimes even sacrifice, though not always). If the mechanism works well, the benefits (companionship; encouragement; praise; loving sex; hugs; etc.) will be well worth the compromises you make to build it, but this isn't always the case.
3. The mechanism is prone to falling apart if not maintained. In my view, the "fire" and "appeal" models of love don't adequately convey the need for this maintenance and lead to a lot of under-maintained relationships many of which fall apart. You'll need to do things together that make you happy, do things that make your partner happy (in some cases even if they annoy you, but never in a transactional or box-checking way), spend time with shared attention, spend time alone and/or apart, reassure each other through words (or deeds) of mutual beliefs (especially your continued commitment to the relationship), do things that comfort and/or excite each other physically (anywhere from hugs to hand-holding to sex) and probably other things I'm not thinking of. Not *every* relationship needs *all* of these maintenance techniques, but I think most will need most. Note especially that patriarchy teaches men that they don't need to bother with any of this, which harms primarily their romantic partners but secondarily them as their relationships fail due to their own (cultivated-by-patriarchy) incompetence. If a relationship evolves to a point where one person is doing all the maintenance (& improvement) work, it's been bent into a shape that no longer really qualifies as "love" in my book, and that's super unhealthy.
4. The key things to negotiate when trying to build a new love are first, how to work together in the first place, and how to be comfortable around each others' habits (or how to change those habits). Second, what level of commitment you have right now, and what how/when you want to increase that commitment. Additionally, I think it's worth checking in about what you're each putting into and getting out of the relationship, to ensure that it continues to be positive for all participants. To build a successful relationship, you need to be able to incrementally increase the level of commitment to one that you're both comfortable staying at long-term, while ensuring that for both partners, the relationship is both a net benefit and has manageable costs (those two things are not the same). Obviously it's not easy to actually have conversations about these things (congratulations if you can just talk about this stuff) because there's a huge fear of hearing an answer that you don't want to hear. I think the range of discouraging answers which actually spell doom for a relationship is smaller than people think and there's usually a reasonable "shoulder" you can fall into where things aren't on a good trajectory but could be brought back into one, but even so these conversations are scary. Still, I think only having honest conversations about these things when you're angry at each other is not a good plan. You can also try to communicate some of these things via non-conversational means, if that feels safer, and at least being aware that these are the objectives you're pursuing is probably helpful.
I'll post two more replies here about my own experiences that led me to this mental model and trying to distill this into advice, although it will take me a moment to get to those.
#relationships #love

dbpedia_genre: DBpedia work-genre network
A bipartite network of the affiliations between artists and their works on one side and genre classifications on the other, as extracted from Wikipedia by the DBpedia project. The date of this snapshot is uncertain.
This network has 266717 nodes and 463497 edges.
Tags: Informational, Relatedness, Unweighted

Cowboys Predicted to Replace Micah Parsons With 11-Sack Edge https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/cowboys-predicted-replace-micah-parsons/?adt_ei=[email]

I tried taking a new route to pick up my kid from camp (there's new bike infrastructure to check out). It was a bust, as half of it is under construction; the normal roads, not the bike infra.
On one of the residential roads where the top surface had been ground off for repaving, I got honked at & close-passed _twice_ by some asshole. The third time I caught up with him at a light, I screamed "yo wtf is wrong with you?". He rolled down his window and yelled, "fuc…

Ofcom: YouTube is the second most-watched TV service in the UK, behind the BBC and ahead of ITV; one in five Gen Alpha viewers turn to YouTube first on their TV (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/3d3d2769-ea15-4454-91b2-b43a00cc4fe9

Can I send you my recipe for green chile chicken posole?
I’m Deb Haaland
– a 35th-generation New Mexican,
proud member of the Laguna Pueblo,
and former U.S. Secretary of the Interior
– and I’m running to be the next Governor of New Mexico.
I’ve always believed that food brings us together
– and what better way to fuel up for the fight ahead than by sharing one of my favorite recipes?
If you make a donation of any amount through this link toda…

Deb Haaland for New Mexico | Official Campaign Website
Deb Haaland is running for Governor because she’s lived the struggles of New Mexicans. She is determined to face the toughest challenges head-on.

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

amazon_copurchases: Amazon co-purchasing network (2003)
Network of items for sale on amazon.com in 2003 and the items they "recommend" (via the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" feature). If one item is frequently co-purchased with another, then the first item recommends the second.
This network has 410236 nodes and 3356824 edges.
Tags: Economic, Commerce, Unweighted

physics_collab: Multilayer physicist collaborations (2015)
Two multiplex networks of coauthorships among the Pierre Auger Collaboration of physicists (2010-2012) and among researchers who have posted preprints on arXiv.org (all papers up to May 2014). Layers represent different categories of publication, and an edge's weight indicates the number of reports written by the authors. These layers are one-mode projections from the underlying author-paper bipartite network.
This n…

Trump maintains control over and can profit from his businesses while in office through a revocable trust, of which he is both the sole donor and sole beneficiary.
In his first term, those looking to support Trump financially could lend him money against his real estate, license his name, buy his assets, join one of his clubs or book a hotel.
Since leaving office in 2021, Trump’s business empire expanded into the digital realm, where the products are often intangible, but the rev…

Truth Social, the $Trump meme coin and World Liberty Financial Give Supporters And Favor Seekers New Ways To Pay Trump
Foreign firms, crypto whales and political allies are using Trump’s newest ventures to route millions into companies he profits from while in office.

physics_collab: Multilayer physicist collaborations (2015)
Two multiplex networks of coauthorships among the Pierre Auger Collaboration of physicists (2010-2012) and among researchers who have posted preprints on arXiv.org (all papers up to May 2014). Layers represent different categories of publication, and an edge's weight indicates the number of reports written by the authors. These layers are one-mode projections from the underlying author-paper bipartite network.
This n…

Anarchists: often said to be frighteningly violent and/or unhinged because maybe a handful of times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they used bombs or guns to target literal blood-soaked tyrants and help usher in the end of feudalism.
People who manufacture, sell, buy, and use guns and bombs daily to kill another nation's conscripted commoners along with a healthy dose of completely innocent civilians, who perpetuate genocide and other war crimes every year: heroes, I guess? "Civilized?" "Great leaders."
The distinction of course is that one obeys the "rules of society" about who it's okay to wantonly murder (whose "lives matter," in fact) while the other does not, and you've been trained to believe that anyone who violates those rules must not have any principles at all. All along, the rules have been crap.
#anarchy

Life at low Reynolds number
E. M. Purcell
Lyman Laboratory,
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
(Received 12 June 1976)
Editor's note:
This is a reprint (slightly edited) of a paper of the same title that appeared in the book
Physics and Our World: A Symposium in Honor of Victor F. Weisskopf
Some essential hand waving could not be reproduced

Kieran Healy (@kjhealy@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image On the upside, this does give me an excuse to link to one of the all-time great talks, “Life at Low Reynolds Number.” https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/fluids/lowreynolds.pdf