Tootfinder

here's my new solution for "i need to send a file to someone and i really don't want them to need anything but the browser"
unsurprisingly, it uses https://codeberg.org/git-pages/git-pages

A look at the challenges some AI developers face in building models to extract trillions of high-quality tokens from PDFs, which are hard to parse, for training (Josh Dzieza/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/882891/ai-pdf-parsing…

Still working the kinks out of transporting my computing home to a new laptop, and this one popped up today attempting to generate and view #Emacs #org as HTML. I recognize the words as english, but can anyone parse the meaning?
org-open-file: Please see Org News for version 9.0 about ‘org-file-apps’--Error: Deprecated usage of (browse-url file)
needless to say, search engines were no help in finding Org News, for any version.

Customize what happens when you start R: #rstats #environment

I cleaned up/firmed up my scaffold project to have tests, better file creation model, better docs etc.
Scaffold can be used to render many files from a template source - imagine you have a scaffold to bootstrap a Go project.
Combine this with interactive forms and you can have a interactive question-answer session to start up new projects.
I also added a CLI tool that lets you just use these features interactively.
The project

This morning I received the top text from a Muslim friend of our Christian church.
This is how it’s supposed to work.
#muslim #christian #Christmas

The vOICe for Android now also runs on Meta Quest headsets (here Quest 2), but it is still useless because it can only access the "avatar selfie camera", not a real camera. APK file for sideloading at https://www.seeingwithsound.com/phone/vOICeAndroid.apk

bookcrossing: BookCrossing ratings (2005)
Two bipartite networks representing people and the books they have interacted with, from the BookCrossing website. Nodes represent users and books, and an edge connects a user to a book they have interacted with. The file book_implicit is unweighted; edge weights in book_ratings give the rating a user assigned to a book.
This network has 445801 nodes and 1149739 edges.
Tags: Economic, Preferences, Unweighted, Weighted

JUST IN: Lawyers file declaration in federal court from first-hand witness to immigration agents' shooting of a US citizen onlookers today. Minneapolis Mayor Frey said details would be used to bolster case for ousting ICE from city. Doc: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26

The Open Contributions Descriptor (OCD) is an open, machine-readable JSON format that allows an organization to publish a structured description of its participation in the open ecosystem.
It's still a bit in flux but the goal of OCD is to make organizational openness discoverable, interoperable, and automatable.
#opensource

#Gentoo kann sich beim #Linux #Kernel auch nicht entscheiden, oder? >_>
"for your editing pleasure" − "Automatically generated file; DO NOT EDIT."

Second big batch of Epstein files includes many mentions of Trump
Three days after releasing a large tranche of Jeffrey Epstein documents that contained few mentions of Donald Trump,
the Justice Department on Monday disclosed thousands more files that included wide-ranging references to the president.

The documents show that a subpoena was sent to Mar-a-Lago in 2021 for records that pertained to the government’s case against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s accomplice in sex …

had another look at the żmij repo to see what’s happening, and i notice @… has added a section explaining the name https://github.com/vitaut/zmij?tab=readme-ov-fi…

For the record: There really is no tool to find files of certain mime types? Like `find --mime 'image|video'`? One really has to resort to calling `file` and grepping? I find that very hard to believe. 🤨

@… Thank you!
Unfortunately, ExifTool can only read but not write Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files. However, it shouldn’t be too difficult to extend the package to use different tools for different file types, and indeed I'd like to be able to use it for audio files myself.

@… Thank you!
Unfortunately, ExifTool can only read but not write Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files. However, it shouldn’t be too difficult to extend the package to use different tools for different file types, and indeed I'd like to be able to use it for audio files myself.

Phew! Managed to record from Vinyl, via my dads record player that I've just oiled/belt changed, through his amp that I went through a year or so ago, to ardour on Linux and out to an Ogg file. Right, that means I've got a lot of records to go through.

Added information on HTML, CSS, and Markdown Fragments to the Kitten Components and Fragments tutorial, including a little TypeScript type declarations file you can add to your projects so you don’t get type warnings for them when you import them in your projects:
https://k…

📉 Reduces token consumption by 99%! From ~47,000 tokens to ~400 tokens when using 6 MCP servers with 60 tools - massive savings for AI agent workflows
⚡ Connection pooling with lazy-spawn daemon featuring 60s idle timeout for optimal performance - no manual start/stop needed
🎛️ Tool filtering via allowedTools and disabledTools config to control which tools are available - supports glob patterns like read_* or *file*

For file explorer how about looking at the code and remove the bloat. You are treating the symptom and not the cause!
https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2025/11/21/announcing-windows-11-insider-preview-bui…

Newly released Epstein file links Trump to murdered newborn baby dumped in Lake Michigan (David McAfee/Raw Story)
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-epstein-files-2674827578/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251224/p71#a251224p71

What would my options be to replace pgp/gpg. My use case is as follow :
- I sign 90% of the emails I send
- I encrypt one file that I edit using vim and the gpg plugin
If you don't know please boost, it will help make the World more secure.
#GnuPGP #gpg

bookcrossing: BookCrossing ratings (2005)
Two bipartite networks representing people and the books they have interacted with, from the BookCrossing website. Nodes represent users and books, and an edge connects a user to a book they have interacted with. The file book_implicit is unweighted; edge weights in book_ratings give the rating a user assigned to a book.
This network has 445801 nodes and 1149739 edges.
Tags: Economic, Preferences, Unweighted, Weighted

@dansup@mastodon.social after a long time i managed to upload another video to #loops
this is what i uploaded:
Duration: 00:02:23.93, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 1880 kb/s
Stream #0:0[0x1](und): Video: h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p(progressive), 1280x720, 1878 kb/s, 30.20 fps, 30 tbr, 15360 tbn (default)
and this is what i then downloaded from loops
Duration: 00:02:24.00, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 2791 kb/s
Stream #0:0[0x1](und): Video: h264 (…

I can, for example, delete and then only register the FreeBSD-vi package, with confidence that a related file will not exist.
We can think of this as telling white lies to the database.
root@clean:~ # which vi
/usr/bin/vi
root@clean:~ # pkg delete -fqy FreeBSD-vi FreeBSD-vi-dbg
Generating apropos(1) database for /usr/share/man...
Generating apropos(1) database for /usr/share/openssl/man...
root@clean:~ # pkg install -qUy --register-only FreeBSD-vi FreeBSD…

#Magika 1.0: Smarter, Faster #FileDetection with Rust and AI
https://www.infoq.com/news/2025/12/magika-

> Consumer-protection organisations call for tighter rules, while online platforms such as Tik ToK argue that there is only a very limited need for further regulatory intervention.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative

I don't send many emails anymore. I receive emails but I don't send many. Even at work, most of our communication is done via other means. But I do generate at least one email a day to send to a group of external testers. I don't send this from a traditional mail client. Instead it is a shell script that gathers some information and opens a text editor to add further comments. After that the file is sent with

One of the things that made organizing a lot easier with the GDC was a thing called "GDC in a box." It was a zip file with all kinds of resources. There was a directory structure, templates for all kinds of things like meetings and paperwork you had to file (for legal reasons) and "read me" files.
We had all kinds of support. There were people you could talk to who had been there. There were people you could call to walk through legal paperwork (taxes). Centralized orgs are vulnerable and easy to infiltrate. They're easy for states to shut down. But there are benefits to org structures.
I think it's possible to have the type of support we had with the GDC, but without the politics of an org (even the IWW). I hope this most recent essay has some of the same properties. I hope that it makes building something new, something no one has really imagined before, easier.
This whole project is something a bit different. It's a collective vision and collective project, from the ground up. Some of it has felt like a brain dump, just getting things that have been swimming around in my head down somewhere. But I hope this feels more like an invitation.
Everything thus far written is all useless unless people do things with it. Only from that point does it become a thing that lives, a thing with its own consciousness that can't be controlled by any individual human.
Tech billionaire cultists want to bring a new era of humanity with AGI. That is definitely not possible with LLMs, and may not be possible at all. But there is a super intelligence that is possible, though it's been constrained by capitalism: collective human intelligence.
The grand vision of the tech dystopians is that of the ultimate slave that can then enslave all humans on their behalf. I think we can build a humanity that can liberate itself from their grasp, crush their vision, and build for itself a world in which people will never be enslaved again. Not only do I think it's possible, I think it's necessary. I think there are only two choices: collective liberation or death.
And that's what I plan to write about next time to wrap this whole project up. Today things often feel impossible. But people talked about the Middle Ages as though they were the end of the world, and then everything changed in unimaginable ways. Everything can, and will, change again.
"The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."

Due to the blizzard, there is a complete travel restriction for all of NJ from 9pm tonight to 7am tomorrow.
NJ Turnpike and appropriate medical, storm-related, and emergency services excepted.
#blizzard #TravelRestriction

How on earth do you *permanently* opt out of Dropbox moving file storage to MacOS' weird cloud location?
Failing that, are there alternatives with the same basic 'sync files across multiple devices and allow shared access' functions? I don't want to lose the ability to share folders with family

If you're a prof who teaches multi/nanopass #compiler s, how do you manage the different versions of the files? Suppose you want to add a construct; now you have to propagate the change through every subsequent file, say. Just in general, how do you manage the different versions?

I fiddled something again. The challenge was to enable static web file “hosting” out of Forgejo Repos. This doesn’t come out of the box from Forgejo and there are various ways to solve this.
I went for a hopefully lightweight setup using a Caddy Webserver to serve the static files and a little Rust program to act as a Webhooks for Forgejo to call on push to the repo. The repo can be found at

from my link log —
Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18.
https://boringsql.com/posts/instant-database-clones/
saved 2025-12-23 https://

Supreme Court Says You Can't File Tort Suits Against Postal Carriers Who Won't Deliver Mail to Black People (Madiba K. Dennie/Balls and Strikes)
https://ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/postal-service-v-konan-opinion-recap/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260225/p50#a260225p50

ck up skewer on conveyor belt to ll on r ll #i18nFails
i18nfails.1a23.studio/posts/ck-up-skewer-on-conveyor-belt-to--ll-on--r-ll

Many years ago I was working with a friend to find a bug in a Makefile generator. We had a megabyte or so of Makefile we needed to examine. He was an emacs user. It took him minutes just to open the file. I was using sam. It took about a second for sam to load, and I found the problem before he'd even finished loading the file.
The speed of tools matters, and big files are common nowadays. Things should stay fast as their workload grows. That goes double for interactive tools.
By the way, it still takes me 30 seconds to log in to my bank. I wonder how long it will take when it's an LLM-generated landing page.
https://phanpy.social/#/hachyderm.io/s/115891592999188880

Some of esp's naming confuses the hell out of me; it uses 'cntl' as a short abbreviation for 'control';, I'm used to using 'ctrl'. And whether I read 'otg_fs' I'm mentally thinking 'file system'

There absolutely must be SOME way to detect WHY a #Java #Tomcat server would suddenly, after 6 years operation, spontaneously exit after 25-50 seconds of perfectly functional uptime and yet leave no #JVM hs_err crash file.
In catalina.sh debug, it logs the startup, sits idle, then the debugger reports 'disconnected'. This suggests it self-destructs, rather than an external kill - 9?

Seems like this could be useful for some #Selfhosted / #HomeLab folks. https://m.vinduv.app/@VinDuv/115940541

@dansup@mastodon.social could you add to pixelfed android app the option of opening links to pixelfed instances in the app?

Oh well, our upcoming client doesn't provide cc files for each shot. Instead, we need to extract the grading values from an EDL file. Fortunately I've already written a script to do that a few years ago for another show.
The time to write a script might be more than what it takes to do the task manually (here it would be copying values from a text file to an xml file). But it pays off if you have to repeat the task. Even if that is 7 years later.

Adobe updates Acrobat to add new AI features, including presentation generation, file editing, and creating podcast summaries from docs stored in Adobe Spaces (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/21/adobe-acr…

us_congress: US Congressional co-sponsorship (1973-2016)
Two temporal networks of bill co-sponsorship tendencies among US Congresspeople, from 1973 (93rd Congress) to 2016 (114th Congress). Edges are signed, indicating the presence of a significant tendency to co-sponsor, or tendency to not co-sponsor, bills. Two networks per year, one for each chamber (House, Senate). Each file contains the signed network for a chamber of congress (H = House, S = Senate) in one session (e.g. 93 = 93rd…

Facing a pretty strange behavior in #VSCode while editing Markdown: when using the backtick to wrap code, the editor behaves like it's a grave accent waiting for the next character to be entered. If the next character doesn’t accept an accent, then the backtick is not displayed. It is saved in the file though.

Keep Android Open and Stop Google from limiting APK file usage
https://keepandroidopen.org/
Direct link to the petition (one way of action ):
h…

I hate OpenAI but I had to use Whisper to help someone make accessible content. I hate that I had to use Whisper to do it because it comes from OpenAI.
But I don't know of any other way to get a text transcription from a media file that is free/open. (Besides doing it manually.)
I tell myself because it's for education and accessibility it's okay, but I still don't like it.
#AI

Three right-wing media figures, who were denied press credentials in WA because of political affiliation, sue to get permanent press passes to the statehouse (John Stang/Columbia Journalism Review)
https://www.

A little work done on my web browser. I'm working on bookmarks, and instead of storing them in a text file like I originally planned I'm going to try out storing them in an sqlite database. Some of that infrastructure is in place. Bookmarks are going to be tag based rather than in folders, so you can tag a bookmark with multiple categories and it will show up in all of them. I think that's a better way of organizing them than the traditional folder view.
Downloads are worki…

Cyber spies use fake New Year concert invites to target Russian military https://therecord.media/cyber-spies-fake-new-year-concert-russian-phishing

For a project to be truly #OpenSource (not to mention #FreeSoftware), it really needs to:
1. Have a *public* issue tracker that enables you to browse and search through issue reports *without* having to create an account.
2. Accept issue reports, with no strings attached. Yes, expecting registration is fine. Yes, expecting some effort to file a good bug report is fine. No, expecting people to ask permission, donate or otherwise put a lot of extra work to report a problem is not.
3. Do not close issue reports as "stale". Yes, it's fine to close a report if you really believe it was fixed, or if you asked for something and the user didn't reply for a long time. It's not fine to run a bot expecting users to jump every month so that the issue report that *you are ignoring* doesn't get closed.
If a project doesn't meet these, it's just a glorified throwaway code.

FML *smdh*
#stripe #checkout #managedPayments #darkMode

Replaced article(s) found for cs.LG. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.LG/new
[6/6]:
- Fast-ThinkAct: Efficient Vision-Language-Action Reasoning via Verbalizable Latent Planning
Chi-Pin Huang, Yunze Man, Zhiding Yu, Min-Hung Chen, Jan Kautz, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Fu-En Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09708 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/115898618760721320
- Universality of Many-body Projected Ensemble for Learning Quantum Data Distribution
Quoc Hoan Tran, Koki Chinzei, Yasuhiro Endo, Hirotaka Oshima
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18637 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_quantph_bot/115967001797773134
- FROST: Filtering Reasoning Outliers with Attention for Efficient Reasoning
Haozheng Luo, Zhuolin Jiang, Md Zahid Hasan, Yan Chen, Soumalya Sarkar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19001 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115972068838908815
- Analysis of Shuffling Beyond Pure Local Differential Privacy
Shun Takagi, Seng Pei Liew
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19154 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDS_bot/115971701218309765
- CryoLVM: Self-supervised Learning from Cryo-EM Density Maps with Large Vision Models
Weining Fu, Kai Shu, Kui Xu, Qiangfeng Cliff Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02620
- XtraLight-MedMamba for Classification of Neoplastic Tubular Adenomas
Sultana, Afsar, Rahu, Singh, Shula, Combs, Forchetti, Asari
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04819
- Flow-Based Conformal Predictive Distributions
Trevor Harris
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07633 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/116045671088130364
- GOT-Edit: Geometry-Aware Generic Object Tracking via Online Model Editing
Shih-Fang Chen, Jun-Cheng Chen, I-Hong Jhuo, Yen-Yu Lin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08550 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/116046486984991360
- UI-Venus-1.5 Technical Report
Venus Team, et al.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09082 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/116050980295461008
- The Wisdom of Many Queries: Complexity-Diversity Principle for Dense Retriever Training
Xincan Feng, Noriki Nishida, Yusuke Sakai, Yuji Matsumoto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09448 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csIR_bot/116051022881293649
- Intent Laundering: AI Safety Datasets Are Not What They Seem
Shahriar Golchin, Marc Wetter
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16729 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCR_bot/116101884238965526
- The Metaphysics We Train: A Heideggerian Reading of Machine Learning
Heman Shakeri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19028 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCY_bot/116125225694943789
- Skill-Inject: Measuring Agent Vulnerability to Skill File Attacks
David Schmotz, Luca Beurer-Kellner, Sahar Abdelnabi, Maksym Andriushchenko
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20156 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCR_bot/116125330557447048
- A Very Big Video Reasoning Suite
Maijunxian Wang, et al.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20159 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/116125664801070747
toXiv_bot_toot

Now for ye.
This formal criminal complaint from FG TD Barry Ward BL makes the case against X very clearly.
https://pastebin.com/cdEVuLqA

Uh. Is this a known #ubuntu thing? Or is this a quirk of #Wayland?
Sometimes when I bring a window from the background it stays like this, text and icons all garbled. Sometimes if I resize or jiggle it, it sorts itself out, sometimes I have to kill it.

Series A, Episode 02 - Space Fall
VILA: I got confused.
DAINER: [To the prisoners there] Hands on your heads. Now move. Single file.
LEYLAN: [To Raiker] They're still in there?
RAIKER: Yes, sir.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/102/353 B7B4

Wow, just managed to fix a problem that has hounded me the last few days: after a reboot, one of my home servers (Ubuntu 24.04, 2 NVMEs with XFS filesystems) couldn't find its RAID 1 boot volume, claiming 'duplicate MD device names in conf file were found'. Gulp. Managed to find the solution here:

Such great news!
Fulton County Judge Officially Dismisses RICO Charges Against All 61 #StopCopCity Defendants
https://atlantadai…

That's a new one. Upgraded my router from Debian bookworm to trixie and all of the sysctls (including rather important ones like ipv4 and ipv6 forwarding) that I had set in /etc/sysctl.conf no longer applied, the file was moved to a .bak but not migrated to whatever Debian is trying to force me onto instead.
But overall far from the most painful distro upgrade I've had. I was worried all of my NICs would change names (again) and I'd have to rebuild my whole firewall configu…

More of my managers need to say "I've read your file" when they first meet me.
#startrek

15 inches of snow. 2.5 hours of shoveling.
My lower back would like to speak to my manager.
#blizzard #NJ

@dansup@mastodon.social could you add to pixelfed android app the option of opening links to pixelfed instances in the app?

In this world nothing can be said to be certain except death, taxes and LLM will dutifuly exfiltrate your data via a hidden prompt:
https://www.promptarmor.com/resources/claude-cowork-exfiltrates-files

Georgia DFCS claims neglect, and also won't let a family see most of their case file.
https://reason.com/2026/01/16/she-let-her-6-year-old-ride-to-the-park-alone-georgia-called-it-neglect/

University of Michigan surveillance footage shows former co-offensive coordinator Matt Weiss entering three team offices seconds before investigators say he hacked into the personal accounts of college athletes.

I keep saying that understanding an individual’s relationship with abuse and abusers is the key to understanding their relationship with Trump.
Add this from @… to the file of evidence for that claim: https://mastodon.social/@IveyJanette/115730378983568715

The Epstein file is the only thing Trump has ever taken his name off of
-- Senator Ron Wyden
https://bsky.app/profile/zacheverson.com/post/3maeof45cfp25

Here's a #PixelFed update #git issue I didn't expect: installed on an rpi5, the git was cloned to the sdcard, but after installation I had to move /storage to a USB drive and so symlinked the path. I also had to modify database.php to use pgsql.
Now, when I attempt a pull, I'm told to stash my changes, but stash throws an error because composer.lock was changed and /storage/app/.gitignore is now a symlink.
error: 'storage/app/.gitignore' is beyond a symbolic link
fatal: Unable to process path storage/app/.gitignore
Whatever this stash test is, it doesn't obey root .gitignore, and I did a git rm --cached on that file which shouldn't be IN the repo anyway, and wasn't. Google and DDG refuse to understand that this isn't about adding filenames to .gitignore and git itself has no obvious override.
So I'm stuck 😞

An Hacker there was, one of the finest sort
Who controlled the system; graphics was his sport.
A manly man, to be a wizard able;
Many a protected file he had sitting on his table.
His console, when he typed, a man might hear
Clicking and feeping wind as clear,
Aye, and as loud as does the machine room bell
Where my lord Hacker was Prior of the cell.
The Rule of good St Savage or St Doeppnor
As old and strict he tended to ignore;
He let go by …

Moderna Says FDA Refusal to Review mRNA Flu Vaccine Contradicts Federal Rules, Prior Guidance - MedCity News
https://medcitynews.com/2026/02/moderna-vaccine-fda-refuse-to-file-letter-flu-influenza-prasad-ceber-mrna/

Have you ever tried doing digital forensics using an SBOM or even just gathering evidence for a technical investigation from one?
No file hashes, a single cryptographic signature covering an arbitrary set of files, and often missing full paths or permissions.
Many SBOM standards need a serious revamp if they are to support DFIR use cases
#dfir

from my link log —
Phase-in codes.
https://hbfs.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/phase-in-codes/
saved 2021-07-03 https://dotat.at…

China's Cyberspace Administration requires firms to file their AI tools in a public algorithm registry, creating a detailed map of the country's AI ecosystem (Yi-Ling Liu/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/china-ai-boom-algorithm-registry/

I got bored and reverse engineered how SCO #cpio is able to store such large files in their archives when the newc format only officially supports 4Gb file entries.
I am not a coder, so I just made some files with cpio from the Heirloom Toolset and looked at them in hexdump.
#rpm packag…

I could not find a working example for command line VLC to convert a WEBM video file to an MP3 audio file, so here you go:
vlc -I dummy INPUT_FILE.webm --no-sout-video --sout-transcode-samplerate 44100 --sout "#transcode{acodec=mp3,ab=128,channels=2}:std{access=file,mux=raw,dst=OUTPUT_FILE.mp3}" vlc://quit

One month after the justice department’s congressionally mandated deadline to
👉release all Jeffrey Epstein investigative files went unmet,
victims’ advocatesare expressing outrage over the department’s failure to comply with federal law.
Advocates have also indicated that they are not surprised,
describing the justice department’s noncompliance with the
"Epstein Files Transparency Act"
as yet another example of US officials failing to hold wrongdo…

DOJ Moves to Block Independent Monitor in Maxwell Case, Says Courts Cannot Force Epstein File Disclosures (Aaron Parnas/MeidasTouch News)
https://meidasnews.com/news/doj-moves-to-block-independent-monitor-in-maxwell-case-says-courts-cannot-force-epstein-file-disclosures
http://www.memeorandum.com/260117/p6#a260117p6

do you know whether this "may" is actually a "shall" or not? does this differ per-OS?

Sources: AI chipmaker Cerebras plans to file for a US IPO as soon as next week, targeting a Q2 2026 listing, after withdrawing its prior IPO filing in October (Echo Wang/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/ai-chip-firm-cerebras…

Hachette and Cengage file to join an existing copyright infringement lawsuit against Google in which authors say Google used their books to train its Gemini LLM (Blake Brittain/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/p

Cynicism, "AI"
I've been pointed out the "Reflections on 2025" post by Samuel Albanie [1]. The author's writing style makes it quite a fun, I admit.
The first part, "The Compute Theory of Everything" is an optimistic piece on "#AI". Long story short, poor "AI researchers" have been struggling for years because of predominant misconception that "machines should have been powerful enough". Fortunately, now they can finally get their hands on the kind of power that used to be only available to supervillains, and all they have to do is forget about morals, agree that their research will be used to murder millions of people, and a few more millions will die as a side effect of the climate crisis. But I'm digressing.
The author is referring to an essay by Hans Moravec, "The Role of Raw Power in Intelligence" [2]. It's also quite an interesting read, starting with a chapter on how intelligence evolved independently at least four times. The key point inferred from that seems to be, that all we need is more computing power, and we'll eventually "brute-force" all AI-related problems (or die trying, I guess).
As a disclaimer, I have to say I'm not a biologist. Rather just a random guy who read a fair number of pieces on evolution. And I feel like the analogies brought here are misleading at best.
Firstly, there seems to be an assumption that evolution inexorably leads to higher "intelligence", with a certain implicit assumption on what intelligence is. Per that assumption, any animal that gets "brainier" will eventually become intelligent. However, this seems to be missing the point that both evolution and learning doesn't operate in a void.
Yes, many animals did attain a certain level of intelligence, but they attained it in a long chain of development, while solving specific problems, in specific bodies, in specific environments. I don't think that you can just stuff more brains into a random animal, and expect it to attain human intelligence; and the same goes for a computer — you can't expect that given more power, algorithms will eventually converge on human-like intelligence.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, what evolution did succeed at first is achieving neural networks that are far more energy efficient than whatever computers are doing today. Even if indeed "computing power" paved the way for intelligence, what came first is extremely efficient "hardware". Nowadays, human seem to be skipping that part. Optimizing is hard, so why bother with it? We can afford bigger data centers, we can afford to waste more energy, we can afford to deprive people of drinking water, so let's just skip to the easy part!
And on top of that, we're trying to squash hundreds of millions of years of evolution into… a decade, perhaps? What could possibly go wrong?
[1] #NoAI #NoLLM #LLM

'graphviz' is a suite of programs for drawing graphs (In the nodes/edges senses, rather than upwards and to the right sense) - and it uses a file format called 'dot'. Lots of things generate dot output (such as systemd-analyze I mentioned) and it's really easy to generate from scripts and things. 'dotty' is probably the most common program in the suite.
There are some newer formats and programs - but this one is probably the most universal.

Trump Says He Plans to File BBC Lawsuit Monday or Tuesday (Skylar Woodhouse/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-15/trump-says-he-plans-to-file-bbc-lawsuit-monday-or-tuesday
http://www.memeorandum.com/251215/p118#a251215p118

us_congress: US Congressional co-sponsorship (1973-2016)
Two temporal networks of bill co-sponsorship tendencies among US Congresspeople, from 1973 (93rd Congress) to 2016 (114th Congress). Edges are signed, indicating the presence of a significant tendency to co-sponsor, or tendency to not co-sponsor, bills. Two networks per year, one for each chamber (House, Senate). Each file contains the signed network for a chamber of congress (H = House, S = Senate) in one session (e.g. 93 = 93rd…

Husband of US Labor Secretary barred from Labor Department offices due to sexual assault complaints from staff (free link)
#labor #uspol #LoriChavesDeRemer

I followed a link to a PDF file that was stored in Google Drive and got assaulted with options to let Gemini create an outline, list the main points, create an audio summary, or answer questions.
I just want to download a PDF file. That's it.
#noAI #ai

Donald Trump has bragged about building a political war chest exceeding $1.5 billion
— a staggering sum that he can wield at his whim to shape November’s midterms and the 2028 race to succeed him.
Trump’s stockpile
— which dwarfs any amounts raised by his predecessors in their second terms
— is not easy to precisely calculate
given that much of it is being collected by groups that aren’t required to file regular financial disclosures.
Current and former st…

from my link log —
The disappearing Windows DNS debug log.
https://nxlog.co/disappearing-windows-dns-debug-log
saved 2019-01-10 https://

CFTC Chair Mike Selig says the commission will file friend-of-the-court briefs to defend its exclusive jurisdiction over prediction markets amid state lawsuits (Nathan Bomey/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/17/cftc-prediction-markets-mike-selig

'xxd' is a command that is both a hex dumper, and an undumper - i.e. it can turn the hexdump back into a binary.
Being able to go both ways makes it good for being able to edit a hex file in your favourite editor. Other tricks it can do are to generate a C array declaration with the contents. It defaults to hex numbered address (unlike 'hexdump' which confusingly uses octal!)

Three US prosecutors quit their jobs after being pressed to investigate the widow of Renee Good. The failure to investigate the ICE agent shooter was involved.
#uspol #ReneeGood #ICE

This is the sort of thing that makes me wary of tech. Not his script, all it does is install a policy.json file that does what it claims.
But installed, suddenly kiosk mode in Firefox is a black screen! Normal mode is fine. So I remove the policy file although nothing there should affect kiosk, restart and -kiosk is still a black screen!
There's likely a fix, for them who has the nous, but I'm guessing stuff like this contributes significantly to our tech landfills 😅

us_congress: US Congressional co-sponsorship (1973-2016)
Two temporal networks of bill co-sponsorship tendencies among US Congresspeople, from 1973 (93rd Congress) to 2016 (114th Congress). Edges are signed, indicating the presence of a significant tendency to co-sponsor, or tendency to not co-sponsor, bills. Two networks per year, one for each chamber (House, Senate). Each file contains the signed network for a chamber of congress (H = House, S = Senate) in one session (e.g. 93 = 93rd…

us_congress: US Congressional co-sponsorship (1973-2016)
Two temporal networks of bill co-sponsorship tendencies among US Congresspeople, from 1973 (93rd Congress) to 2016 (114th Congress). Edges are signed, indicating the presence of a significant tendency to co-sponsor, or tendency to not co-sponsor, bills. Two networks per year, one for each chamber (House, Senate). Each file contains the signed network for a chamber of congress (H = House, S = Senate) in one session (e.g. 93 = 93rd…

Amazon rolls out Alexa on the web to early access users, with chat functionality, smart home controls, file management, and cross-device conversations (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)
https://www.geekwire.com/2025/with-new-ale