Tootfinder

OK, this is kind of fascinating. And it triggered all kinds of plot bunnies, especially in the urban fantasy series I haven't started writing yet.
https://time.com/7307401/rise-of-etsy-witch/

The Rise of the Etsy Witch
"Hiring an Etsy witch has become a commodified exchange—often for social media clout," writes Taylor Crumpton.

Always good to get a reality check. At the same time good to remember the data collection of this trial was from October 2024 to Decembre 2024. Models have improved since then, reasoning, more tool use etc.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/m365_copilot_uk_government/

UK government trial of M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost
: AI tech shows promise writing emails or summarizing meetings. Don't bother with anything more complex

Messing the whole weekend with the WordPress instance of a friend. He's been using an old plugin for multiple languages. The plugin is abandoned since 2015 and doesn't support newer PHP versions. Wordpress and the other plugins is about to no longer support the old PHP version.
At first I thought about writing a conversion tool to another plugin. Spend some considerable time setting up a test environment as well. Eventually it turns out group of people forked the problematic p…

Fanatics, I am once again boosting this into the void for your edification.
https://mas.to/@markwyner/109797687993819959

Crisis of Writing in the Time of the "Limit-Experience" https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/09/29/crisis-of-writing-in-the-time-of-the-limit-experience

When your opponent is Donald Trump you escalate in response to threats;
you don’t try to appease him.
Jerome Powell must do everything in his power to compel the conventional wisdom of market traders to more adequately “price in” the degradation of the rule of law.
This must include tying the rule of law and the threats to the constitution to the credibility and standing of the Federal Reserve itself.
Powell’s term expires in less than a year anyway.
If defe…

Powell Will Hang Separately: The Federal Reserve Has Already Failed its Duty to Lisa Cook and the Constitution
This is a free Notes on the Crises article. A reminder to readers that the various activities run out of the still-new Notes on the Crises office cost money, while an enormous amount of time and effort goes into my writing and my constant dedication to refresh and deepen my

June 2024 I installed #veeam B&R on my #foreniscs workstation because I had to tinker with some of this stuff... never touched it ever since
But it kept sleeping as a time-bomb on my workstation...
Today.. out of nowhere ... as I was writing a report, clicking through XWF and …

#WritersCoffeeClub
4. How do you handle nudity or sex in your writing? Subtly, graphically, not at all?
5. How much should a writer read?
6. Do you write daily? Why or why not?
---
4. Depends on the goal.
I did write explicit scenes at some point, and I see no problem in doing so again if the need arises.
Most of the time in generic audience writing I settl…

Wikipedia has •numerous• problems, but it belongs in education.
And right now, per the McSweeney’s OP, it’s a lifeboat of humanity in a sea of slop.
For reference, snapshots of the two articles concerned at the time of this writing:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250923124231/https://www.britannica.com/event/Louisiana-Purchase
https://web.archive.org/web/20250917014942/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Purchase
/end

VietBinoculars: A Zero-Shot Approach for Detecting Vietnamese LLM-Generated Text
Trieu Hai Nguyen, Sivaswamy Akilesh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26189 https://

VietBinoculars: A Zero-Shot Approach for Detecting Vietnamese LLM-Generated Text
The rapid development research of Large Language Models (LLMs) based on transformer architectures raises key challenges, one of them being the task of distinguishing between human-written text and LLM-generated text. As LLM-generated textual content, becomes increasingly complex over time, and resembles human writing, traditional detection methods are proving less effective, especially as the number and diversity of LLMs continue to grow with new models and versions being released at a rapid pa…

Cool little adapted tale on AI, by Alison Gopnik:
https://simons.berkeley.edu/news/stone-soup-ai

Stone Soup AI
For some time, I’ve argued that a common conception of AI is misguided. This is the idea that AI systems like large language and vision models are individual intelligent agents, analogous to human agents. Instead, I’ve argued that these models are “cultural technologies” like writing, print, pictures, libraries, internet search engines, and Wikipedia.

I’ve worked over the past year to reduce the amount of noise in my consciousness on a daily basis.
By that I mean - information noise, not literal sounds “noise”. (That problem was solved long ago by some good earplugs and noise canceling earphones.)
I’ve gotten used to spending less time on social media, regularly blocking most apps on my devices (anything with a feed news, most work communication apps, etc.), putting my phone and other devices aside for extended periods of time. Often go to work places with my iPad explicitly having its WiFi turned off and selecting cafes that don’t offer WiFi at all.
Negotiated better boundaries at work and in personal life where I exchange messages with people less often but try to make those interactions more meaningful, and people rarely expect me to respond to requests in less than 24 hours. Spent a lot of time setting up custom notification settings on all apps that would allow it, so I get fewer pings. With software, choosing fewer cloud-based options and using tools that are simple and require as few interruptions as possible.
Accustomed myself to lower-tech versions of doing things I like to do: reading on paper, writing by hand, drawing in physical sketchbooks, got a typewriter for typing without a screen. Choosing to call people on audio more, trying to make more of an effort to see people in person. Going to museums to look at art instead of browsing Pinterest. Defaulting to the library when looking for information.
I’m commenting on this now for two reasons:
1. I am pretty proud of myself for how much I’ve actually managed to reduce the constant stream of modern life esp. as a remote worker in tech!
2. Now that I’ve reached a breaking point of reducing enough noise that it’s NOTICEABLE - I am struck by the silence. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to navigate it and fill it. I made this space to be able to read and write and think more deeply - for now I feel stuck in limbo where I’m just reacquainting myself with the concept of having any space in my mind at all.

So much of what's wrong with tech started from one simple phenomenon: focusing on the money-movers instead of people who actually *make* shit. Real technology matters. Inventors over investors, every time. Founders over funders. Writing code > writing checks. https://www.anildash.com/2025/10/24/foun…

Founders Over Funders. Inventors Over Investors.
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

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/

authoritarian politics, Thomas Mann
... An excellent, powerful exhibition on democracy and despotism through the life and writing of local lad Thomas Mann, roughly 1890s to 1950s (now two Nobel references in one thread).
Rich set of contemporary and current images (Pegida, AfD etc), lots of visitor engagement. Folk were taking this in slowly, giving me time for some online translation.
➡️ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Mann

Once you are done fighting it, documents typeset with #TexLaTeX are pretty damn rad! 🚀
The automations you can put into place to help you focus on the actual writing are really something else:
- different modes for notes, submission, and publishing
- acronym or physical unit expansion only upon first mention
- auto-generated glossary or symbol list
- and of course a ton…

The Federal Reserve System has not been the most craven of the powerful institutions who have attempted to placate Trump to defend themselves,
but it has not been the bravest institution either.
They were quick to concede to Trump on financial regulatory issues in the hopes that would get Trump off their back.
They also ignored the attack on the legal architecture propping up independent administrative agencies in the hopes that other agencies would receive the brunt of Tru…

Powell Will Hang Separately: The Federal Reserve Has Already Failed its Duty to Lisa Cook and the Constitution
This is a free Notes on the Crises article. A reminder to readers that the various activities run out of the still-new Notes on the Crises office cost money, while an enormous amount of time and effort goes into my writing and my constant dedication to refresh and deepen my

As I’m writing, the season is “Crickets chirp around the door.” By the time you read it, it will be “First Frost.” In New York, where I live, autumn is taking hold. Darkness in the early morning, leaves and branches coming down in high winds, and in the afternoon, low light floods the avenues, catching the tops of trees.
https://

Ways of Seeing: Seasonal Feeling
Autumn is taking hold

Text-Based Approaches to Item Alignment to Content Standards in Large-Scale Reading & Writing Tests
Yanbin Fu, Hong Jiao, Tianyi Zhou, Robert W. Lissitz, Nan Zhang, Ming Li, Qingshu Xu, Sydney Peters
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26431

Text-Based Approaches to Item Alignment to Content Standards in Large-Scale Reading & Writing Tests
Aligning test items to content standards is a critical step in test development to collect validity evidence based on content. Item alignment has typically been conducted by human experts. This judgmental process can be subjective and time-consuming. This study investigated the performance of fine-tuned small language models (SLMs) for automated item alignment using data from a large-scale standardized reading and writing test for college admissions. Different SLMs were trained for alignment at…

Finally tried "testing/synctest" and I must say this is A PERFECT way of a writing tests for async and cancelable code. No more flaky checking of random time ranges. No more selecting timeouts small enough to not kill the testing at all, but big enough that they'll work on a busy CI machine.
I put sleeps 1s, 2s, 5s, 10s in a loop and the test itself finishes in 0s. All asserts are for the exact time too.

Testing Time (and other asynchronicities) - The Go Programming Language
A discussion of testing asyncronous code and an exploration of the `testing/synctest` package. Based on the GopherCon Europe 2025 talk with the same title.

So, No Kings day begins...
I am reminded of the time when I stood on the grave of King Charles I.
I never got to St. Denis near Paris to see the tomb of Louis XVI.
I am reminded of Diderot, who is often given credit for writing:
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest".
Songs for today...

I’m old enough to remember `-ms-high-contrast-adjust: none;` to remove the backplate that Edge added in 2016 (pre-Chromiedge).
Not surprised its `forced-colors` version is frustrating authors:
“forced-color-adjust: none is an unavoidable foot gun”
https://sarahmhigley.com/writing/force

forced-color-adjust: none is an unavoidable foot gun | Sarah Higley
A very long treatise on why text backplates were a bad idea. Most of the time.

If anybody is interested in 14 days of unlimited access to #BBCMaestro, I have three guest passes to claim. Not sure how this works but if you’ll want to try check it out.
I liked the Alan Moore class on #writing and Oliver Burkeman’s course on Time Management for Humans.

Yes! God still loves us!
There's a new Spinal Tap movie!
😎🤘🏼
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/10/spinal-ta…

A 'Spinal Tap' Sequel Riffs on the End of Rock
Forty years after Spinal Tap, history’s most hapless band turns it up to 11 one last time.

Writing subtitle support code from scratch is a PAIN, but also kinda fun 😆
New PR opened for #Jellyfin for #Roku to support displaying multiple subtitles at the same time in different locations using custom subtitles.
It already supports using the line cue value to control vertical p…

One of my favorite dreams was one in which I was wandering around a large interstellar space ship, tracking down some non-human beings of some sort, and I came across a glass-topped container in the middle of the passageway, more or less coffin-sized. Through the top I could see a plaque with writing on it. I could read the writing. The one and only time that ever happened. This was probably 45 years ago or so.

Generative AI alone may not be enough: Evaluating AI Support for Learning Mathematical Proof
Eason Chen, Sophia Judicke, Kayla Beigh, Xinyi Tang, Zimo Xiao, Chuangji Li, Shizhuo Li, Reed Luttmer, Shreya Singh, Maria Yampolsky, Naman Parikh, Yi Zhao, Meiyi Chen, Scarlett Huang, Anishka Mohanty, Gregory Johnson, John Mackey, Jionghao Lin, Ken Koedinger
https://…

Generative AI alone may not be enough: Evaluating AI Support for Learning Mathematical Proof
We evaluate the effectiveness of LLM-Tutor, a large language model (LLM)-powered tutoring system that combines an AI-based proof-review tutor for real-time feedback on proof-writing and a chatbot for mathematics-related queries. Our experiment, involving 148 students, demonstrated that the use of LLM-Tutor significantly improved homework performance compared to a control group without access to the system. However, its impact on exam performance and time spent on tasks was found to be insignifi…

Day 16: Mayra Cuevas & Marie Marquardt
Okay so this is cheating, but they're co-authors of multiple books together, and there's no way for me to separate their contributions... I've already got too many authors I'd like to list, so why not?
I read their book "Does My Body Offend You?" and absolutely loved it; it's a celebration of teen activism while also being a deep exploration of feminist issues through practical situations that bring out the complicated side of things, which the authors refuse to reduce back to a simple formulaic answer. It has a supporting cast of appropriately-complex male characters that help in exploring the nuances of issues like the line between female empowerment & male gratification, and it brings race and macho culture into the conversion as well.
CW for sexual harassment & deep discussion of the resultant trauma.
I'll cheat again here to sneak in mention of two male authors whose work resonates with theirs: Mark Oshiro's "Anger is a Gift" has a more pessimistic/complex take on teen activism along with a gay romance (CW for racist cop murder), while Jeremy Whitley's graphic novel "Navigating With You" deals with queer romance & disability, while having a main character pairing that echoes those from "Does My Body Offend You?" in a lot of ways. Another connection (to non-men authors this time) is with "Go With the Flow" by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann. Their graphic novel about teen activism and periods is a bit more didactic and has a much lighter tone, but it does necessarily have some overlapping themes.
To bring it back to Cuevas & Marquhardt, their writing is great and their ability to discuss such complex topics with such nuance, all wrapped up in a story that feels completely natural, is amazing to me, and makes their book feel like one of the most valuable to recommend to others.
In writing this I've realized a grave oversight in the list so far that I'll have to correct tomorrow, but I'm quickly running out of days. The didn't-quite-make-it list is going to be full of more excellent authors, and I'm honestly starting to wonder whether it might actually be harder to name 20 male authors I respect now that I've found the sense to be mostly somewhere between disgusted and disappointed with so many of the male authors I enjoyed as a teen.
#20AuthorsNoMen (cheating a bit)

alright im going through my old files again and rediscovered a shitty unfinished sci-fi epic poem thing i was writing sometime when i was 14/15/idfk. all i remember about it is that it was gonna keep doing this countdown and changing structure accordingly for a really long time, i was thinking of depicting the character finding love in an ethereal sorta way for the ending, and it was gonna incorporate a enochian number square for some reason.

Crisis of Writing in the Time of the "Limit-Experience"
https://ift.tt/GQz4XCd
updated: Monday, September 29, 2025 - 1:31pmfull name / name of organization: Northeast Modern…
via Input 4 RELCFP

Every year, as I come up on my birthday, I start to think a lot more about the shooting. The intensity was a bit lower after Trump left office the first time, but October of 2024 was pretty intense.
As I've been processing through all this, I thought about the cards and letters folks sent to me in the hospital. I have a box of them in the US and sometimes I think about asking for them to be sent here. But things have a tenancy to get lost in the mail on the way here.
There's a little bit of a trapped and incomplete feeling, that Trump's chaos makes feel even more intense.
So I decided to write a bit about that box, and the hospital, and death.
CW: body horror, death
#Writing

Fell down a WITSEC rabbit hole courtesy of the YouTube algorithm. Plus, I hit a new bookstore, and decided it was time to close the Mystery Writers Forum.
https://www.bobmuellerwriter.com/witsec-bookstores-and-mystery-writing/

WITSEC, Bookstores, and Mystery Writing – Bob Mueller
YouTube's algorithm served up a fascinating story about WITSEC. I hit a new bookstore, and I'm pulling the plug on a longstanding forum.

I had started another visualization tool, this time for page tables - and so I did a live stream on it. If you want to watch me creating UI elements for that, writing the functions to translate a set of tables into graphs and such, go check it out! 🧑‍💻
https://www.youtube.com/watch?…

Generative AI as a Safety Net for Survey Question Refinement
Erica Ann Metheney, Lauren Yehle
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08702 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.0…

Generative AI as a Safety Net for Survey Question Refinement
Writing survey questions that easily and accurately convey their intent to a variety of respondents is a demanding and high-stakes task. Despite the extensive literature on best practices, the number of considerations to keep in mind is vast and even small errors can render collected data unusable for its intended purpose. The process of drafting initial questions, checking for known sources of error, and developing solutions to those problems requires considerable time, expertise, and financia…

Pentagon press secretary
Kingsley Wilson called Netflix’s programming “woke garbage”
He was asked about “Boots,”
a dramedy about a closeted gay man in the Marines,
which has drawn critical acclaim and strong viewership
-- at the time of writing, it’s one of the most streamed shows on the platform.
…

One does not simply use rootless … me with a rootless Podman walks into Mordor of CI and docker build anyway.
Just kidding! Rootless Podman containers, quadlets and systemd are truly amazing in 2025.
https://vyskocil.me/blog/ci-setup-which-never-worked/

Ci Setup Which Never Worked
In an earlier post about giving up Kubernetes, I wrote that my server is a plain old virtual machine pet. While this works pretty well for a static web server use case, I wanted to explore ways how to automate this blog. This is a story about how I failed. I am writing this because I did my best to make it work, but it turned out its impossible At the same time it has a some good hints about user systemd, quadlets, rootless podman and what I managed to get working.

Raman Microspectroscopy for Real-Time Structure Indicator in Ultrafast Laser Writing
Xingrui Cheng, Eugenio Picheo, Zhixin Chen, Martin J. Booth, Patrick S. Salter, \'Alvaro Fern\'andez-Galiana
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11422

Raman Microspectroscopy for Real-Time Structure Indicator in Ultrafast Laser Writing
Raman microspectroscopy provides non-destructive, structure-specific contrast suited to in situ monitoring of femtosecond (fs) laser fabrication processes. In this work, we introduce a sample-agnostic Raman workflow that screens candidate spectral indicators using drift-resistant, self-normalized metrics and, where appropriate, label-free hyperspectral unmixing to extract endmembers and validate metric selection. Using diamond as an example, hyperspectral maps and electrical tests show that dep…

"Can You See Me Think?" Grounding LLM Feedback in Keystrokes and Revision Patterns
Samra Zafar, Shifa Yousaf, Muhammad Shaheer Minhas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13543 …

"Can You See Me Think?" Grounding LLM Feedback in Keystrokes and Revision Patterns
As large language models (LLMs) increasingly assist in evaluating student writing, researchers have begun questioning whether these models can be cognitively grounded, that is, whether they can attend not just to the final product, but to the process by which it was written. In this study, we explore how incorporating writing process data, specifically keylogs and time-stamped snapshots, affects the quality of LLM-generated feedback. We conduct an ablation study on 52 student essays comparing f…

Read every embarrassing thing about felon trump into the congressional record.
Make it a weekly night event on the floor for cspan and advertise it.
Make a bingo game out of it.
Read off the court transcripts trump and his ilk.
Enjoy yourselves while you do this.
Bullies hate being mocked.
If the GNP (Grand Nazi Party) wants to stop you, make them own the chamber 24/7.
Tell them you will stop making them own the space when they start to push bac…

Wanted also to test #postmarketos with plasma. It took a lot of time to install :
---
medo@lenovoX270:~/postmarketOS> pmbootstrap flasher flash_rootfs
[19:20:35] (native) flash rootfs image
[19:20:37] (native) install android-tools
Sending sparse 'userdata' 1/7 (518847 KB) OKAY [504.951s]
Writing 'userdata' …

The least I can do. After you write YOUR letter, post a picture!
#disney #boycottdisney
#uspol #JimmyKimmel