Tootfinder

"AI tool trial could save equivalent of 1.5m meals in food waste"
#FoodWaste #AI #ArtificialIntelligence

Not actually a solution to Manchyester's dirty air.
Need to clamp down on unnecessary private motoring, wood burning and waste incineration, for starters.
Most vehicle particulate emissions now come from tyres, not exhaust pipes.
Cabbies fear 'hundreds' of taxis will be 'forced off' Manchester's roads at stroke of New Year's Eve midnight - Manchester Evening News

Cabbies fear 'hundreds' of taxis will be 'forced off' Manchester's roads at stroke of New Year's Eve midnight
"It physically cannot be done"

"The waste of having processes that create defects and then use inspection to catch them is certainly something to avoid. A significant part of the effort in code reviews should be geared toward capturing learning that can be applied to current processes to improve them so fewer bugs are created in the future.
..."

"Will the disposable vape ban really deter young people and reduce waste?"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #Vapes

Transparent and heat-insulation bionic hydrogel-based smart window system for long-term cooling and waste heat collection
Qianwang Ye, Hanqing Dai, Yukun Yan, Liwei Wang, Xinlin Du, Yimeng Wang, Zhile Han, Wanlu Zhang, Ruiqian Guo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23213

Transparent and heat-insulation bionic hydrogel-based smart window system for long-term cooling and waste heat collection
With the energy crisis and climate warming, the position of a new generation of smart windows is becoming increasingly important, and materials or systems that can have high blocking of near-infrared (NIR) and ultraviolet (UV) and high transmittance of visible light (VIS) are needed. Currently, it is difficult for smart heat-insulation materials to achieve high transmittance of VIS, good UV isolation, outstanding cooling and thermal insulation, and excellent waste heat collection. Here, we desi…

THE WASTIVE: An Interactive Ebb and Flow of Digital Fabrication Waste
Yifan Shan, Bo Liu, Sebastian Bidegain, Thijs Roumen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21153

THE WASTIVE: An Interactive Ebb and Flow of Digital Fabrication Waste
What if digital fabrication waste could observe the world? What would they see? What would they say? "THE WASTIVE" reimagines digital fabrication waste as sentient observers, giving them a poetic voice through interactive art. As viewers approach, the installation awakens, mimicking the rhythmic ebb and flow of ocean waves - a silent dialogue where discarded materials "observe" and respond to human presence. These interactions echo the gentle murmurs of the sea, transforming technological resid…

Le DOGE a le soutien des Américains. Arrêtez de vous faire des illusions, les gens.
Source : https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/polls/doge-elon-musk.html

Reminder that pigs are intelligent and social, and even when exploited by humans, do a great service as food waste processors - they are too good to be used disparagingly when describing the brutishly stupid fascists being allowed to run various countries at the moments.
Pigs would never be fascists. (Urban Orwell, hanging out on a hobby farm his wife had to run so that he could write, has a lot to answer for.)

Our coffee machine died this morning. That makes 4 Kuerig machines in 9 years, and our last one ever. We ordered an 8-cup drip maker with carafe this morning. No more feeling guilty about using pods (I'm sorry, Mother Earth), cost per cup will be cheaper, I can control my flavor and strength, and the coffee grounds are great in our compost. Yes, it took me a decade to figure out I was a slave to convenience and waste. No judging, please.

Musk's Government Teardown Isn't About Cutting Waste -- It's a Land Grab - Rolling Stone https://apple.news/AlZEzWuN-S6acrU6oUaaV9A

Ticking away, the moments that make up #Caturday; fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way

techno-political rant
Say what you want about using the right tool for each problem, but there are tools that suck no matter what.
I'm tired of people portraying legit technical criticism as "biased" and "religious", while at the same time they present themselves as tolerant and open-minded (spoiler: for the most part, they aren't).
Almost every day of my life I have to deal with the nasty consequences of ultra-dumb decisions made by the very same people who are obsessed with productivity and criticise all day long whoever pushes for any design that shows any minim amount of care and/or deep thought (mostly via strawmen arguments).
And, of course, unironically: this has a lot to do with capitalism, as many of our other social and economic problems.
They arrive, have a strike of super-productivity for a few weeks/months and then use that as a trampoline to raise through the ranks or abandon ship before having to face the consequences of their technical crimes.
Then others arrive and are obviously slower at that same job... so the uneducated observers start believing that these newcomers aren't as good as the class traitors who wrote the initial nasty code.
To make things worse, if any of these newcomers dare to speak openly about introducing good practices... this ends up creating a new mental association (in the minds of uneducated observers) between "good engineering" and "lack of productivity".
The ones trying to fix the mess are indeed slower, not because they try to do things the right way though, but because they have to waste vasts amounts of time fixing what is objectively broken besides doing the "visible" work.
Most of today's established "super-productive" ones, if they were starting today, would be probably "vibe coders", certainly not what we commonly understand as a programmer. Not because AI-coding is the future, but because they never cared about the trade at all. They were here only for the grift.

#uspol Federal grants that my mom's department uses to study long-term care for people with Alzheimer's disease have been withdrawn, and an accompanying letter bearing RFK Jr.'s signature decried their work as unscientific and a waste of money.
This is especially sad to our family as her father/my grandfather had Alzheimer's for many years before he passed.
To sus…

Alzheimer's Association | Alzheimer's Disease & Dementia Help
Alzheimer's Association national site – information on Alzheimer's disease and dementia symptoms, diagnosis, stages, treatment, care and support resources.

So many computers in the e-waste bin today. I grabbed 4 Dells, all 3rd gen i3s with 4 or 8 GB of RAM. Three of them have half-height PCIe dGPUs. One has a HDD but the rest of the HDDs were missing. They probably just forgot to remove one before recycling.
I probably need to get a bunch of cheap SATA SSDs and 2.5"->3.5" drive brackets. Not sure what I'm going to do with all of this though! One will be Guix System. Maybe one for FreeDOS and such.
(I already found t…

The more time goes on, the more conflicted I get about #AI. (or, more specifically, generative AI. I like causal AI a fair bit)
On one hand, I hate so much about it:
the needless environmental and electronic parts waste, the impact on labor, the monopolistic nature of main organizations driving it, the endless conversations about AGI and other absurdly utopian (or dystopian) futures, the widespread theft of IP and human work, the devaluation of labor and craft… so much of it is not okay at all.
On the other hand, I kinda get it?
I like to test software for myself, so I've been dipping my toes into some popular AI tools over the past couple of years. I have a paid subscription to ChatGPT (which I don’t feel great about, I know), and I have found genuine utility in it.
More so, I feel so conflicted when I talk to people I respect and who I think are very smart and creative and they tell me how in love they are with all of these AI tools, about the complex workflows they build, about their experiments with agentic AI and integrations... These people seem so excited, so alive, so joyous about the things that this technology allows them to do. They often wouldn't have had the skills / knowledge / financial capital to do some of those things with human efforts alone. And now I see them coding their own tools, doing complex data analysis, trying creative experiments with graphics / text / video...
And I feel like a total jerk going "BUT ACTUALLY THIS IS UNETHICAL AND INEFFICIENT AND YOU SHOULD STOP IT BECAUSE AI SUCKS".
The technology behind all these gen AI models does have real utility, and it has kicked off a lot of creativity from people who wouldn't have dabbled in those kinds of projects otherwise.
So I don't know how to feel. Because I can't let go of the guilt and the real problems and the awareness of how much empty hype there is.
#technology #artificialintelligence #genAI #ChatGPT