Tootfinder

"The overall life expectancy of a programming language has dwindled in the past 56 years. A COBOL developer in the 1960s most probably retired in the 2000s, still writing COBOL. As a former professional VBScript, then C#, then Objective-C, later Swift, and finally Go developer, I can only see this trend accelerating. We should expect our favorite programming language to be replaced and removed from the market in a relatively shorter time every decade."

Alan Perlis And The Evolution Of Programming Languages
Alan Jay Perlis knew a thing or two about programming languages, both as an early pioneer of our industry and as one of the designers of ALGOL. The language that has inspired the one you, dear reader of this magazine, probably use every day to earn a living.

I wonder what people do with all that time they save by writing "UR" instead of "you are"?

today's distracting mindblow: samuel delany & karen dalton shared bills at cafe elysee, plus fred neil, tim hardin, & other notables. (can't find any other details/documentation of the west village venue of that name.) https://archive.org/details/motionofli…

The motion of light in water : sex and science fiction writing in the East Village : Delany, Samuel R : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
572 p. ; 24 cm

How many peer-reviewed scientific papers exist about the Neuralink Blindsight brain implant for the blind? [Spoiler: 0 at the time of writing] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Neuralink Blindsight&sort=date vs The vOICe

Neuralink Blindsight - Search Results - PubMed
Neuralink Blindsight - Search Results - PubMed

learn 👇

Given my background around the funeral industry and writing thrillers, is anyone surprised that I'd like to see this? #TrueCrime
https://time.com/7290184/the-…

The Chilling True Story Behind HBO’s The Mortician
The documentary series examines the startling true story of a cremator who went to prison for mishandling human remains

Since migrating away from big tech platforms (including Google Drive) I have been using Libreoffice for my writing and presentations.
I often get asked why I do not use OnlyOffice since it looks so much better (especially the web client). Two answers:
- The presentation tools of OnlyOffice are too barebones
But more importantly:
OnlyOffice is a company that seems to be controlled by a Russian guy who invests a lot of time to hide the fact that OnlyOffice is Russian (see…

Comparing Collabora with OnlyOffice
Collabora Online provides excellent interoperabilty, efficient backend for scalability, best privacy, and a rich interface for cooperation and editing docx, xlsx, pptx and odf

Wife and I finished watching #PersonOfInterest for the 2nd time.
Fun series.
There are some goofy moments, but the middle stretch of episodes are solid. Great writing and pacing!
#tv #tvseries

“As is the case with reading and writing a language, code is one of those things where if you don’t use it, you lose it. Early studies indicate that humans who use A.I. could become less creative over time.”
Early studies link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3706598.3714198

For those in San Jose: July 4th at Plaza de Cesar Chavez park:
#sanJose

50501 San Jose Independence Day Picnic and March
This 4th of July, pack a picnic lunch and join us in the park for a day of family fun and first amendment free speech! Time: Friday, July 4th, 12 noon to 2 p.m.  Place: Plaza De Cesar Chavez Park, San Jose Activities: Live Music Guest Speakers Face Painting Letter Writing Lawn Games  Banner Painting March to City Hall at the End! Our linktree:  www.linktr.ee/sanjose50501 Go to our Bluesky account for more info and shareable flyers: https://bsky.app/profile/50501sanjose.bsky.social

An MIT study of 54 ChatGPT users: using it for SAT essays led to the lowest brain engagement and poorer neural performance than using Google or writing unaided (Andrew R. Chow/Time)
https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/

ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study
The study, from MIT Lab scholars, measured the brain activity of subjects writing SAT essays with and without ChatGPT.

"Out of pain and righteous anger I took apart the stained glass windows of my childhood faith. Over time I looked more closely at the glass shards at my feet and chose to reconstruct my faith life."
—Sandra L. Fischer ’12 M.Div. writing in the new issue of our journal, Reflections, which addresses whether Christianity is losing its religion.

#WritersCoffeeClub 5/27. What is a ‘load-bearing’ part of your non-writerly life that makes writing possible for you?
I have a limited amount of energy and my family comes first, and then obligations that I have to take care of. Work is necessary, not optional.
The time I have left is my spare time. We all have that, an hour or two when we're free.
During that time,…

I have always been a copyright sceptic but I wouldn't have wished AI to be the force to crash it. Time to think for new models of how to keep writing and music alive. Maybe a society deciding to prioritize guaranteeing giving everyone the possibility of a safe basic income, food, housing and health care instead of forcing them into competition hell could help? Maybe?

The writing that Creative Commons is also "AI"-pilled has been on the wall for a while, and here we are are, wasting time and money on some useless signalling to "AI" scrapers that already don't care for any existing limitations…
https://creativecommons.org/2025/06/25/introducing-cc-signals-a-new-social-contract-for-the-age-of-ai/

This review is about Writing for Developers by Piotr Sarna and Cynthia Dunlop from Manning.
I started this blog as a hobby 17 years ago, in April 2008. At the time, I had no clue about technical writing.Since then, the landscape has changed a lot, to the point that companies hire for technical writer positions.
I was curious to compare what I learned by doing to the structured approach of a book. Here’s my review.

AI copyediting: how Paperpal butchered my paper on AI-generated writing https://jilltxt.net/ai-copyediting-how-paperpal-butchered-my-paper-on-ai-generated-writing/

AI copyediting: how Paperpal butchered my paper on AI-generated writing
This morning I received the copy-edited version of a paper I recently submitted to a journal. This is always cause for celebration, another step towards publication accomplished! But this time the …

The Sunspot Solar Observatory Data Archive: Continuing Operations at the Dunn Solar Telescope
Sean G. Sellers, Juie Shetye, Damian J. Christian, David B. Jess, Peter H. Keys, Gordon A. MacDonald, R. T. James McAteer, Jason Jackiewicz, Colin Hancock, Michael S. Thompson, Jamey E. Eriksen, Sara Jeffreys
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.…

The Sunspot Solar Observatory Data Archive: Continuing Operations at the Dunn Solar Telescope
The Sunspot Solar Observatory Data Archive (SSODA) stores data acquired with the suite of instruments at the Richard B. Dunn Solar Telescope (DST) from February 2018 to the present. The instrumentation at the DST continues to provide high cadence imaging, spectroscopy, and polarimetry of the solar photosphere and chromosphere across a wavelength range from 3500Å to 11,000Å. At time of writing, the archive contains approximately 374 TiB of data across more than 520 observing days (starting on …

#WritersCoffeeClub 5/27. What is a ‘load-bearing’ part of your non-writerly life that makes writing possible for you?
I have a limited amount of energy and my family comes first, and then obligations that I have to take care of. Work is necessary, not optional.
The time I have left is my spare time. We all have that, an hour or two when we're free.
During that time,…

@… unsolicited wild thought: what if the per item front-matter would be within an HTML comment?
1. This would allow any Markdown processor to continue to work.
2. Implementation wise, achieving this won't be extremely extensive.
(Context: I implemented over time many Markdown extensions. Most of the time the main struggle was to find the balance between ease of using (as in writing) the new elements and ensuring that tools unware of the new elements won't choke on them.)

"I never imagined that I would become unchurched. Yet being unchurched, I am discovering that whenever we intentionally put a few chairs and a table together to have a meal, we are manifesting a new—or perhaps ancient—way of doing church in our time."
—Vincent Wei-Cheng Lin ’24 S.T.M. writing in the new issue of Reflections, which addresses whether Christianity is losing its religion.

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

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

Just received a friend request on Facebook by someone named Peter Waldmeier.
https://www.facebook.com/peter.waldmeier.865
He seemed such a nice person, I think he is a model in a Scandinavian country.
When I asked him why he was sending me a friend request he go…

So I spent a lot of time writing a post...which I think was kinda irrelevant but I wrote it due to me being excited with a Mastodon feature.
This can be seen in this screenshot I'm adding here:
Not a complaint comment: It would make more sense to me if the Fedi users showing up were mutual follows...just saying! No judgement!
#Mastodon

StorySage: Conversational Autobiography Writing Powered by a Multi-Agent Framework
Shayan Talaei, Meijin Li, Kanu Grover, James Kent Hippler, Diyi Yang, Amin Saberi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14159

StorySage: Conversational Autobiography Writing Powered by a Multi-Agent Framework
Every individual carries a unique and personal life story shaped by their memories and experiences. However, these memories are often scattered and difficult to organize into a coherent narrative, a challenge that defines the task of autobiography writing. Existing conversational writing assistants tend to rely on generic user interactions and pre-defined guidelines, making it difficult for these systems to capture personal memories and develop a complete biography over time. We introduce Story…

Studying all-optical magnetization switching of GdFe by double-pulse laser excitation
Rahil Hosseinifar, Felix Steinbach, Ivar Kumberg, Jos\'e Miguel Lend\'inez, Sangeeta Thakur, Sebastien E. Hadjadj, Jendrik G\"ordes, Chowdhury S. Awsaf, Mario Fix, Manfred Albrecht, Florian Kronast, Unai Atxitia, Clemens von Korff Schmising, Wolfgang Kuch

Studying all-optical magnetization switching of GdFe by double-pulse laser excitation
The tremendous interest in the technology and underlying physics of all-optical switching of magnetization brings up the question of how fast the switching can occur and how high the frequency of writing the data with ultrafast laser pulses can be. To answer this question, we excited a GdFe ferrimagnetic alloy, the magnetization of which can be reversed by single laser pulses, a phenomenon known as toggle switching, by two pulses with a certain time delay in between. Using photoemission electro…

Let's just say this answer surprised me. Happy reading! #writing #writers
I Refuse to Support My Friend’s Crappy Self-Published Novel: Am I the Asshole? ‹ Literary Hub

I Refuse to Support My Friend’s Crappy Self-Published Novel: Am I the Asshole?
That’s right, you know what time it is! We’re back for another wild installment of everyone’s favorite drunken advice column, Am I the Literary Asshole?, the place where your questions and my answe…

variability.dev: Towards an Online Toolbox for Feature Modeling
Tobias He{\ss}, Lukas Ostheimer, Tobias Betz, Simon Karrer, Tim Jannik Schmidt, Pierre Coquet, Sean Semmler, Thomas Th\"um
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09845

variability.dev: Towards an Online Toolbox for Feature Modeling
The emergence of feature models as the default to model the variability in configurable systems fosters a rich diversity in applications, application domains, and perspectives. Independent of their domain, modelers require to open, view, edit, transform, save, and configure models as well as to collaborate with others. However, at the time of writing, the top five results when googling ``Online Editor Feature Model'' point to editors that either have minimal functionality, are unmaintained or d…

Oh look, my band has a new single out today .. *nudge* *nudge* .. look at it, internet, look at it!
Slight change of pace with this one too, what started in our writing sessions as a prototypical melodeath track went somewhere very different by the time it reached the studio. Different influences were indulged, vocal style swapped, structure tweaked .. Cliché to say it but I'm proud of this one for being a true example of just throwing out the template, not rushing and letting th…

"I rejoice greatly that I find there is patience in my soul for quite a long time yet, that I desire no earthly possessions, and need nothing but books, the possibility of writing, and of being daily for a few hours alone."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky in Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky (trans. Ethel Colburn Mayne)
Ohh, is that all?
#books #writing #reading #dostoevsky #solitude

"I rejoice greatly that I find there is patience in my soul for quite a long time yet, that I desire no earthly possessions, and need nothing but books, the possibility of writing, and of being daily for a few hours alone." - Fyodor #Dostoevsky, letter to N. D. Fonvisin, March 1854.
#books #solitude #writing #quotes