Tootfinder

“To waste what little bandwidth we have left – when 750 million people worldwide lack access to electricity – assisting some of the richest men ever to hone their plagiarism bots would be a historic idiocy that future generations are unlikely to forgive today’s leaders for.”
#StochasticParrots
#LLMs

Health care, new cars and new homes feel unaffordable to most Americans,
a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll shows.

Most Americans say that they can afford basic necessities like their current housing costs, groceries, utilities and gasoline.
But large numbers across income levels also say larger expenses and the cost of things associated with an enjoyable life
— including taking a weeklong vacation
— are out of reach.
Overall, 53 percent of adults say…

A new car, home feel out of reach for middle-class Americans, poll finds
Most renters — including those earning six figures — doubt they could afford a home in the foreseeable future.

I never cease to be mystified by this common work-from-home complaint.
I’ve been 100% wfh aside from a half-dozen short trips to NJ for “all-hands” meetings since 2008. Last one of those was 2016.
I consider solitude when working one of the great positive features of wfh. Having people forcibly interrupt me by their physical presence gained me a ‘prickly’ reputation in my last office.

Kinda related to #Gentoo, so cool" or "they stopped using it, so sad". And I'm like, "why should we care?"
Do they donate money to Gentoo? They don't. And if they did, it would probably come with obligations making this not worth it.
Do they contribute back? Rarely, and if they do, they are unreliable. They benefit more than we do. They just want to dump the packages they need, quickly duct taped together, so that we would maintain them going forward. Their employees rarely reveal that they're paid to do this, and if they do, it's not so they'd be held to higher standards, but to emphasize their importance: "you must placate us."
Well, sometimes they hire Gentoo developers. It's nice that these developers get some gratification for their work, especially if they're able to continue contributing on work time. But in the end, company priorities win. We are either left with loads of new packages with no maintainer and unclear significance, or a Google employee who appeared every once in a while to dump a bunch of ChromeOS patches and never bothered handling the fallout.
So, sorry, but I'd rather care for volunteers who want to make Gentoo better, than companies who see some profit incentive in it.
PS. I'm probably focusing too much on the negative aspects, and we likely had some positive interactions that are far less known and usually don't meet with such fanfare.
#FreeSoftware

Trump is 'not protecting Americans'
Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said Democrats were right to remain seated when Trump called on the crowd to stand if they believed in protecting US citizens over undocumented immigrants,
a line that Republicans are now using to call out Democrats.
“Bottom line is very simple,
we agree we need to protect Americans.
He’s not,”
Schumer told CNN this morning.
“By his reckless ICE agency in Minnesota,

Just went through a code file and replaced "target" with "recipient" in a bunch of docs and variable names, because I had had two senses of "target" and because I want to encourage less-combat-focused thinking among potential devs (which at the moment and for the foreseeable future is just me). Zero changes to code functionality (unless I messed up) and took maybe 30 minutes. Got me thinking about the goal of software development and who would view that time as "wasted".
From a short-sighted "measure user-facing functionality" standpoint there was basically zero progress made. From a "cultivating-code-understanding-entities" perspective, there are both immediate and long-term gains. I got a chance to review the entire file at a high level which improves my understanding of things even if no changes had been made. The changes increase clarity of a lot of documentation, as well as variable naming clarity in code which deals with both senses of "target" which now has clear separation between variables that refer to targets and recipients. If there are any other devs in the future, this will help them a lot. Even if not, by increasing my own development efficacy, the expected values for project-gets-shipped and overall-project-impact just went up. I've also helped myself not introduce the same ambiguity in all my future projects, because I'll remember this time investment, and I've bent the ideological flavor of the protect towards neutral/beneficial interactions between "initiators and recipients" instead of hostile interactions between "initiators and targets".
Overall, well worth the time investment if we consider all the subtler benefits, and not just a very crude measure of user-facing behavior. (Secretly, this is also a post about LLMs.)
#programming

I am amazed how well these 3D-printed PETG parts have survived all these years in the elements. They're gunked up, but still flexible and strong as ever.
These were part of the sensor network I build during my #PhD, which I tore down today. End of an era for me. A good one.
#3dPrinting

The American right wing has forgiven Donald Trump for his affairs, impeachments, mass deportations and the platforming of JD Vance.
But having stuck with him through all that unpleasantness,
it seems that we may have discovered the one thing that is capable of splitting some Maga conservatives from Trump:
starting a war in the Middle East.
On Tuesday Joe Kent, the US counter-terrorism chief
who previously ran for office as an ultra-Maga, white nationalist-endors…

I take this as Nature's cue to get planting. #Frogspawn on the #allotment pond and lots of it. So today in went some Broad Beans, it been far too wet in the UK to do this much sooner. #growyourown

How college students who study war view Trump’s Iran taunts
For Politics 226: "Introduction to Peace Studies"
this was a week when treaties, rules and theories slammed into the reality of a U.S. president who says he
“doesn’t need” international law,
doesn’t ask God for forgiveness
and is limited solely by his own ideas about morality.
Even for Trump, his Tuesday post casually threatening to level Iran,
in a way that seemed to suggest the …

How college students who study war view Trump’s Iran taunts
On campuses around the country, thoughtful debates about “just war” theory and morality collided with President Trump’s erratic approach to combat.