Tootfinder

We watched the Joker ironically and then went on YouTube to watch whatever people made about the movie there back in the day, landed in the worst slop bubble, and dug so deep until we hit “JOKER QUOTES ABOUT WOMEN” and these videos could be classified as performance art, they're pure gold

What’s a great example you love of a technical blog post (or similarly shaped writing) that:
- explains a tool, technique, technical idea
- by trying it to the author’s specific project or experience
- but also illuminates a larger concept, a bigger picture?
I don’t just want tutorials; I want writing that illuminates. I’m thinking of things where you read it and had a reaction like:
“Oh, FINALLY, I get it now!”
“What a nice example of _____!”
“This is great. I’m going to bookmark this for the next time I need to use / explain / teach a colleague to use _____.”
Looking for writing examplars to share with students. I want your favorites.

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

I spent some time this weekend sitting at a proper coffee shop with a proper cup of tea, working on writing code examples for @… and it makes me happy to know that there are at least a dozen more ideas in the hopper for future weekends.

In the time I've been offline, I've been doing a lot and feeling a lot more mentally healthy. I've been exploring nomadnet a bit, looking at reticulum. I'm definitely going to go back to my break and being online much less regularly.
I actually totally forgot about the anniversary of the shooting, which is the first time that's happened since... uh... the shooting, I think.
I've definitely realized that, on some level, I've definitely used Mastodon (and formerly Twitter) as a coping mechanism, often in order to deal with the stressful things that I've found out about on Mastodon or Twitter.
But, again, none of those things really change our core job: build community. And that's part of what I've been neglecting, and what I can focus on more when I'm not spending as much time talking to people all over the world indirectly. Like, I can just chat directly with folks and talk about this shit.
Yeah, I do think there's value in this community. I don't think it's really screaming into the void (at least, not most of the time). But I know that I need the balance to be way farther on the side of direct engagement with comrades doing and building.
So that's what I'm gonna go back to. I feel as though it's a good sign that with all the writing about getting shot that I've been doing, and all the thinking about that, that the actual anniversary of the shooting I'm actually just thinking about bread.
And that seems like a good note to leave on. I'm gonna go back to some hacker shit.

"Spiritual humility and ecological wisdom alike teach us that it’s time to let go of anthropocentrism—the idea that human beings are the center of the universe. Instead, we can rejoice that all creatures belong to Jesus … "
—Professor and alum Carolyn Sharp ’94 M.A.R., ’00 Ph.D. writing in the new issue of Reflections, in her piece "Let There Be Life! A Sermonic Call to Ecological Witness"

Don’t get me wrong - while using the fountain pen I am still trying to maintain good writing posture and I’m continuing to do my regular hand stretches.
But for a sense of the difference: before, I was happy with the fact that I managed to develop a good pain management routine to allow me to write like 2-3 pages at a time without convulsing in pain.
And now I can write 6 pages nonstop without even thinking or feeling anything. A short 5–10 minute rest and I can come back for more.
This is such a big deal to me. I was able to draw yesterday with a relaxed hand after spending hours writing notes. Before I’d only be able to do one or the other in a day!
And then I finished the evening by writing out a chapter of my novel by hand.
And today my hand is totally fine!!

Much thanks and heartfelt support to @… for writing up the kind of article that I, too, have been dreading to have to write: that absolutist OSS is bad and we protect the commons with fair licensing, non-commercial and otherwise

More than math. I have noticed for years a decline in reading, writing and grammar. I may not be the best, but at least most of the time I can compose a grammatically correct note that doesn't have spelling errors. I can (usually) read documents and I am capable of writing an executive summary.
https://flip.it/hiBh8X

Just finished "The Raven Boys," a graphic novel adaptation of a novel by Maggie Stiefvater (adaptation written by Stephanie Williams and illustrated by Sas Milledge).
I haven't read the original novel, and because of that, this version felt way too dense, having to fit huge amounts of important details into not enough pages. The illustrations are gorgeous and the writing is fine; the setting and plot have some pretty interesting aspects... It's just too hard to follow a lot of the threads, or things we're supposed to care about aren't given the time/space to feel important.
The other thing that I didn't like: one of the central characters is rich, and we see this reflected in several ways, but we're clearly expected to ignore/excuse the class differences within the cast because he's a good guy. At this point in my life, I'm simply no longer interested in stories about good rich guys very much. It's become clear to me how in real life, we constantly get the perspectives of the rich, and rarely if ever hear the perspectives of the poor (same applies across racial and gender gradients, among others). Why then in fiction should I get more of the same, spending my mental bandwidth building empathy for yet another dilettante who somehow has a heart of gold? I'm tired of that.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

Along the way I learned how to create a nice document from all the Markdown files I have written in Obsidian. With Pandoc and LaTeX stitching the chapters together as one PDF or EPUB. And of course I lost way too much time solving the last typesetting problems, reading documentation of either Pandoc or templating for Latex. It was a fun ride.
#pandoc #latex #obsidian #writing

Can I complain about required, subject-agnostic university writing courses? Part of the crisis in the humanities is that our institutions appear to have decided that we don't teach writing. But we do. Or maybe their problem is that we also teach troublesome substance? I haven't seen any evidence that the writing courses on my campus pay any attention to ideas, it seems to be all form all the time.

Amid US public media funding cuts, a look at how the model of private donations can lead to an audience that's older, whiter, and richer than average Americans (Sarah Scire/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/11/funding-c…

Funding cuts may make public radio more reliant on old, rich, white donors
After years of interviews, research, and writing, Laura Garbes submitted the final draft of her book on public radio in December 2024. By the time Listeners Like Who? Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry published last month, a lot had changed. Following Trump’s election and fede…

'writing is more than just the process by which you obtain a piece of text, right? it's also about finding out what you wanted to say in the first place, and how you wanted to say it. this post existed in my head first as a thought, then it started to gel into words, and then i tried pulling those words out to arrange them in a way that (hopefully) gets my point across. ... i alone can get the thought out and writing is how i do that.'

Have you ever wondered to what extend LLMs are used to support writing of scientific publications? Here is a chart indicating the fraction of LLM-modified sentences in scientific publications over time.
c.f. Liang et al, Mapping the Increasing Use of LLMs in Scientific Papers (2024)
https://arxiv.org/html/2404.01268v1

After writing some questionable `rust` code for #adventofcode Day 8, I've managed to get the right answers in a reasonable amount of time which has taken far, far longer than I'd care to admit. I'll jump on the Python and Nim solves later because my brain is absolutely fried at the moment.
Solution:

To ChatGPT: At the time of writing, there is not a single mass media article comparing Neuralink Blindsight with The vOICe. Why? #BCI

ChatGPT - Neuralink vs The vOICe
Shared via ChatGPT

Happy grant writing season to all who celebrate! #CrunchTime

My toots are getting too long and I sometimes want to share more than just (but also) my tech ramblings.
With all that metal running just fine, it's time to do sth else. And more.
The two excellent write-ups below pushed me over the brink, website and blog time!
Thanks to @… and @…

In 1588, Galileo had not yet looked through a telescope.
Microscopes, pendulum clocks, barometers, and steam pumps were decades away.
Francis Bacon,
a member of parliament still in his twenties,
was only beginning his writing on science.
Robert Boyle wouldn’t be born for another 39 years,
Isaac Newton for another 55.
But a subtle shift in perspective was already taking place,
heralding the
‘culture of growth’
that would blossom i…

The Renaissance book that heralded growth - Works in Progress Magazine
Long before modern science, Europeans learned to see their own time as an age of invention rather than decline.

Well, today marks a new low in my professional experience with AI. For the first time in my life, AFAIK, I’ve been quoted in a technical article using a quote that was hallucinated by ChatGPT. Author has been contacted, fix has been made, and stern advice given. It’s truly depressing that people who are perfectly capable of writing their own work are outsourcing to tools that are known to make 💩 up. #AIslop

Do Not Put Your Site Behind Cloudflare if You Don't Need To
At the time of writing 12:43 UTC on Tue 18 Nov, Cloudflare has taken many sites down. I'm trying to browse the web, but about half of the sites show an error.
🤦 https://huijzer.xyz/posts/123/do-not-p

Sonic CD: comparing time periods
When playing through Sonic CD, there are frequently ledges that seem inaccessible, or slopes that seem to stop abruptly. I noted when writing about my completion of the game that the level design felt a little bit off in places, preventing you from getting up too high a speed; on reflection this may well be another deliberate puzzle, to work out how to time travel, but I thought it might also be where the levels had been adjusted for…

#EroticMusings 23: Does your (or loved ones') physical/mental health make your work difficult? Does your work help?
Writing my little cozy fantasy erotica is usually a place for me to decompress and to balance the horrors of the world, so it certainly helps with mental health.
But at the same time, mental health getting too bad or me being too sick to be able to write a mea…

If you are an anti-fascist, you are against petroleum. Petroleum funds fascism globally. It is at the heart of the military industrial complex driving global imperialism, from both the US and Russia. Motonormitivity is fascist, both in it's elitist roots and in it's ties to historical fascism (Hitler hated bikes, just on principle). Oil is militarism.
Oil is the dominant resource which drives war, both in terms of it being the primary spoil wars are fought over and in terms of fueling the military vehicles and weapons that carry out those wars. Practically every war since (and including) WWII has been over oil. Genocides are carried out to secure oil. Gaza is over oil, in more ways than one.
Oil is the absolute enemy, and AI is simply an extension of that: an attempt to atomize us so we can't resist the oil-centric global order, one last grasp at the control over our lives oil has given to those whose power is now threatened by a solar punk future.
"I haven't written for a few weeks now. As I write the closing chapter and begin rewriting previous sections, everything feels both more distant and more immediate. The working title [Kairos] has only continued to feel more and more resonant, both during the writing and during my pause."
Now is the time to resist by making something different, by creating a world fundamentally opposed to these systems of oppression.
This is the last in my Kairos series. From here on out I'll be editing to try and make it more of a book than a series of posts. Thanks to everyone who has helped so far. All editing is welcome (typos, spell checks, questions and challenges). Between ADHD and dyslexia, it's always hard for my brain to notice mistakes in my own text so I always appreciate the support of those who can.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/kairos

"The relationship between power, poverty, inequality, and lack of political participation is mirrored in the damage to the natural world. They cannot be divorced from each other."
—Yale School of the Environment professor Gerald Torres ’77 J.D. writing in the new issue of Reflections https://

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

The chat interface was a marketing bet. Selling #AI as if it is not auto complete. It still is.
"#ChatGPT shifted the user’s relationship to text, moving the prompt from a ‘piece of writing for the model to finish’ to a ‘question calling for an answer’."

What Was ChatGPT?
A Chatbot Optimized for Social Distance Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, we can finally speak in hindsight about what it was and how it came to be. Its meteoric rise shocked the world, gathering more users in less time than any product launch in history. But that specific

So I was going to write a short piece about this, but I'm so plumb out of time, and it would be so weird to put this in Metacurity as a special report that I'm writing a social media thread instead.
Last summer, I wrote a piece about the Coinbase breach based on an extensive conversation I had with the exchange's CSO, Philip Martin, who has serious chops as a cybersecurity guy.

Behind the Coinbase breach: Bribery emerges as enterprise threat
Coinbase’s breach shows how bribery schemes — long used for SIM swaps — can be a potent enterprise attack vector. Experts urge security leaders to add bribery training and red-teaming to their cyber defense toolkits.

#WritersCoffeeClub November
3. How much of your writing time is actively spent putting words on the page?
4. What's the funniest thing you've ever written?
5. Is the idea of a work requiring a takeaway 'moral' old-fashioned?
---
3. Much less than mulling it over. 5%? Probably still too generous.
I can cycle ideas for years.
4. Wish I could r…

Finished “People Like Us” by Jason Mott.
I will admit that there were moments early where I struggled, trying to puzzle out the dual narratives. You have to accept it as experimental writing with a plurality in scope. When I surrendered and just READ, I absolutely loved it!
What is it about? So much. Gun violence. Where home is. America. Race. Writers. Trauma & coping. Time travel. Peacocks.
So much to say, but for spoilers 🤐
5/5 ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

People Like Us
The riveting new novel by the author of the 2021 Nation…

Writing unit tests for my random number generation library continues to be difficult. My tests are failing because the bias in the distribution exceeds my expectations, but I'm wondering whether I should just repeat the test more times and permit it to exceed expectations some of the time (as long as it does it symmetrically/rarely/etc. My gut tells me that second-order expectations aren't any better than first-order expectations, but another part of me disagrees.
Thinking more as I write this (writing is thinking): second-order tests can at least give me better info to work with towards fixing things I think! So maybe I'll invest in them.
#coding

Whatever happens to our democracy, history will remember our 3 good SCOTUS justices as a voice of clarity when civil society was unraveling around them.
Future generations will point to their writing and say, “Look at this. It’s not like people didn’t understand what was happening at the time. They knew perfectly well.”
EDIT: I said Sotomayor at first; this is Jackson!! “What would you do with a brain if you had one, Paul?” I’m sure I have no idea.
https://journa.host/@chrisgeidner/115504618482036124

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.