- Definite and distinct ecclesiastical government
This is explicitly defined in your legal documents. It's the way in which you "govern" things that are legally owned by the "church." If you're going to start a church with some people, you need to have a way of working together. The more formal you are about writing all this stuff out, the easier it will be when you *inevitably* have conflict. (Conflict is normal, so everyone should expect it.)
I also wrote something up about this. Again, it's an example (using the term "coven", because I like it more) so take it for what it's worth:
Group agreements are collectively defined rules that describe how members should interact. They may function to simplify interactions, ensure access needs are met, or to protect against the emergence of hierarchical behavior.
You can use the following prompts, or define your own:
- How should we interact with each other?
- What are your access needs?
- What would help you feel safe and respected?
- How should we deal with conflict?
- How do we deal with unanswerable questions?
- What is the process by which we update these agreements?
Write down these agreements. Edit them until you reach consensus. If it isn't possible to reach a consensus, the group may need to break apart to form separate covens.
Keep these available to refer to as they may be needed during services. These agreements will change over time. Keep them updated and be sure to check in regularly, perhaps even through a specific yearly ritual, to make sure they all still apply and no more are needed.
I spent some time #blogging today.
Oh man, why does writing take so much time?! Honestly, this time I tried dictating (Speech-to-text) and curating afterwards ... but it feels like it takes the same amount of time 🤔 Maybe it's just a lack of practice - or a lack of articulation.
Anyways - a bit of story, a peertube video and a couple of photos are waiting to be watched! 😉
…
A lot of people are writing lots of things about A.I here already, all of which are more important than my complaint...but man, trying to buy a new NVMe drive at this juncture is utter insanity.
Really wish I'd gone for a bit more RAM and especially storage back when you could actually afford them.
Time to delete some of my praying mantis video collection to make space for less essential things, like work files.
I've had a lot of fun writing an interpreter for my mailbox-typed language Pat over the last month or so.
This was actually nontrivial: faithfully implementing the semantics requires us to detect that a mailbox is empty, and also *will never receive any more messages*. Perceus reference counting to the rescue!
Anyway, I thought with this merged it was time to give it a proper home, rather than a scrappy repository under my personal user:
Things I've learned today:
- Valgrind does not support AVX512 instructions. That was an adventure because I was writing purposefully bad code at the time...
- However, changed strategies and used `clang` with the `fsanitize=address,undefined` option which seems to work perfectly fine.
#clang
Oooooh I just got #mansplained at on a forum I won't name, telling me that something I am already doing (and writing a paper about, and is a rather key feature of electrical grid operation) is stupid and impossible. I have replied with very mild snark and a couple of links to the commercial services and real-time data in GB, but I don't suppose facts will prove important!
Tired of writing Swift code like an animal?
Recent Swift compiler improvements cut your bathroom quality time short?
AgenticSwift to the rescue, write what your function is supposed to do, list inputs and outputs, and let your agent do the work for you.
Inspired by @… 's visionary outlook.
UltraGeeking:
Using Slackware Mango to ssh into a new Gentoo install (musl, openrc, rust, cosmic, zfs if it all works out this time) and writing a install manual is a very nice way to spend this Saturday morning 🤓
#slackware #gentoo
Am I an LLM? Just out of interest, I checked different variations of a piece of my very own writing I've done this weekend with GPTZero, and each time it says it's 100% AI generated, literally for every single sentence...
Such great motivation on a Monday AM! 😭
#Writing #LLM…
“I remember the first time I read Alan Moore writing about magic and the nature of spells. He said that spells were literally spelling. Words can change you. This didn’t mean a physical transformation into a toad or a worm, it meant that your reputation would be such that people though of you as toady or wormy.”
Robin Ince on being gaslit
Just back from traveling in Scotland for a couple of weeks, and this time I went without a computer - Just Lightroom Mobile on iPad. I encountered a bunch of caveats and ended up writing this guide at Framespotting for people who want to try the same - you'll want to plan and practice to make this work well! Sorry about the dorky Gemini illustration.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the gulf between people who think LLMs can cut 90% of the cost of software development or whatever and people who think that’s a pile of catastrophes balanced on top of a nonsense wish.
I think a lot of that chasm boils down to the fact that software is already •terrible•, and people have very different feelings about that. I don't just mean “Liquid Glass is ugly” terrible; I mean “it’s broken and insecure and unreliable and just doesn't flipping WORK” terrible, like Arbiter Sports.
We are right now in a war between people who think software should treat humans humanely and people who are perfectly willing to offload their development costs onto captive users in the form of wasted time, anger, anxiety, and other forms of personal harm even more severe than those. That war was raging well before LLMs entered the picture, but LLMs drove it to fever pitch. I’m extremely skeptical of the idea that LLMs make any significant positive contribution to the long-term speed or cost of writing •good• software, but they clearly have the potential to lower the floor for •bad• software to unheard-of levels at unheard-of speeds. How you feel about that fact probably predicts a lot about how you feel about the “LLMs can 10x software dev!” hype.
3/3
my final dispatch on dylan & the dead’s misbegotten 1986 shows for @…'s wonderful newsletter, in which dylan finds a new way to get booed, plays (to my ears) his best set of the run, & i rediscover my fave paul williams passage (& an all-time fave piece of rock writing, really), where he champions uncritical listening & hears genius in the specific w…
Martha Lillard had just turned 5 when she was diagnosed with polio
and depended on an iron lung to live.
She died June 26 in Oklahoma,
the last U.S. polio patient who used the machine, her sister said. She was 78.
“They told her she wasn’t supposed to live past 20 years old,”
Lillard’s younger sister, Cindy McVey, told The Associated Press on Friday.
“She had the enthusiasm and the drive to continue living and make the best of her life.”
McVey attri…
Writing up an overview of the whole @… ecosystem. I'm bound to forget something. but it's definitely time for an update to the old 2019 paper
I've been spending quite some time debugging fairmeeting, which seldomly forced all users to re-join a room. I found out that a plugin of prosody was writing too many messages in high volume instances. Moving those to memory fixed it. After some testing I notified the #Jitsi developer community and they integrated the fix upstream
I'm mostly writing this for radlib folks who may be reading this, because a lot of my people have been targeted for a long time. I don't go to the US anymore.
The ‘Analog Warmth’ of Vinyl Has Been Mostly Digital Since the ’80s, Says Sound Engineer | Headphonesty
I'm not giving up on a pure analog signal path, but this confirms my worst fear:
"The shift to digital processing in vinyl production began in 1979 when Ampex released their ADD-1 Digital Delay. This device, built specifically for vinyl cutting, soon became standard equipment in mastering studios across the globe."
They cite one and only one at-time-of-writing holdout; there must be more!
#theVinylFrontier #vinylrecords #analogaudio #musicianslife
https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/02/vinyl-records-gone-digital-process/
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@jaythvv/117023948737805171
The numbers seem legit as¹ only 10–20 % of the time goes into writing code. And the numbers easily can get negative if the generated code introduces more technical debt than the average programmer.
Just did very approximate calculations; with 10g of lithium per drone*, and assuming the Russian and Ukrainian drone efforts consume 5m units a year**, that'd be ~50 tons of lithium deposited into the environment per year, mostly within, let's say, 50km of the grey zone***. It's only about $20,000 / ton****, which means $1m of metal*****.
So to answer my own silly question: no, it won't be economically viable to scalp the top few inches of topsoil and extract the lithium from it.
* Roughly right for quadcopters / small FPV; larger and longer range ones will have more, so this is a bottom bound. (OTOH longer range UAVs will tend to use ICE kerosene rather than batteries
** Changing all the time as both sides try expanding production as fast as they can manage. Ua are scaling much faster at time of writing
*** Handwaving. Contact zone's hardly moved since early 2023; OTOH Ua are pushing range limits on small battery-powered form factor, saw a 60km claim for the Logistics Lockdown operation the other day
**** There was a big spike to the $70-8000 range in 2022; median price is closer to $10k than $20k
***** (IDK the chemistry but presumably it's in an exciting range of different compounds, depending on how many bits the battery was blown into, how hot / pressured the blast wave was a few tens of mm from the boom, what other stuff was in the vicinity that the lithium would combine with, etc etc.
🧑💻 - Can't help really, dunno anything about Windows.
🧑🎓 - But don't you write programs that run on Windows?
🧑💻 - Well, yeah, I help run a website which windows users can use. But I'm just writing for the web. I think maybe the testers run some Windows machines but none of the programmer staff do. Certainly not me.
🧑🎓 - Oh.
🧑💻 - I mean technically I mostly write software that runs in a just-in-time compiler environment, in a virtual container running Linux, that's hosted on another machine running Linux, that delivers a program that compiles into web assembly that runs on a virtual machine in a browser which could be on Windows, or OS X, or Android, or iOS, or even BSD or some experimental phone or something net yet invented.
🧑🎓 - Please shut up.
Agent libOS: A Library-OS-Inspired Runtime for Long-Running, Capability-Controlled LLM Agents
Yingqi Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03895 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.03895 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.03895
arXiv:2606.03895v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are evolving from request-response assistants into long-running software actors: they maintain state across model calls, fork subtasks, wait for external events, request human authority, generate tools, and perform side effects that must be resumed and audited. This paper presents Agent libOS, a library-OS-inspired runtime substrate for LLM agents. Agent libOS runs above a conventional host operating system; it does not implement hardware drivers, kernel-mode isolation, or a POSIX-compatible operating system. Instead, it treats an agent as an AgentProcess: a schedulable execution subject with process identity, parent-child lineage, lifecycle state, a tool table derived from an AgentImage, typed Object Memory, explicit capabilities, human queues, checkpoints, events, and audit records. Its central design rule is tools are libc-like wrappers; runtime primitives are the authority boundary. Filesystem access, object access, sleeps, human approval, JIT tool registration, and external side effects are checked at primitive boundaries under explicit capabilities and policy.
We describe the design, threat model, Python prototype, and safety-oriented evaluation. The current prototype implements async scheduling, namespace-local Object Memory, runtime-integrated human approval, one-shot permission grants, per-process working directories, shell and image-registration primitives, Deno/TypeScript JIT tools over a libOS syscall broker, filesystem/object bridge tools, an injectable Resource Provider Substrate, deterministic demos, real-model smoke scripts, and 123 regression tests at the time of writing. Rather than improving planner accuracy, Agent libOS demonstrates a runtime substrate in which long-running LLM agents can be scheduled, authorized, resumed, and audited without treating tool dispatch as the trust boundary.
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@hex@kolektiva.social
