Tootfinder

A giant mirror to create
“sunlight on demand”
was just approved by the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC),
despite opposition from astronomers and the public, and real safety concerns.
The FCC approved the company
Reflect Orbital
to test one satellite, named Earendil-1,
as a means of reflecting the sun’s rays back to Earth for extra solar energy
and wide-area lighting.
The light is expected to cover an area about five ki…

The U.S. just approved a giant space mirror to test ‘sunlight on demand.’ Low Earth orbit is getting weird
From space hotels and artificial meteor showers, to a new giant mirror that reflects sunlight to Earth — low-Earth orbit is getting weird.

Surfing Ability Summit page at 200% with my keyboard (as one does) and came across this weird control.
Turns out it’s a roled-up button that launches Microsoft Immersive reader. Which is crap at 200%, it turns out.
Anyway, use native HTML buttons and let users rely on their browser’s reader mode.

I hesitate to post this. The voice of the presenter is obviously generated artificially, but if you can watch and tune out the voice, and read the subtitles, then you can listen to the chickens. In other clips he speaks with an accent similar to what’s on this one, but this one just sounds weird. Never mind, just watch, and be amused. https://

Microsoft''s "focused" inbox view is the most confusing crap ever. It keeps me from seeing the email I need to see - the one purpose that the inbox is for.
Since my hosting provider had decided to move their stuff into Microsoft's cloud thing, I started having to deal with weird shit like that.
So luckily, there is an option to turn it off:

Got tired of having to disassemble my entire-ass computer to get to the second SSD (it's a Streacom DB4 passive cube; everything is an ordeal), so I implemented an external PCIe disk attachment point around the open rear of the case. Now any SSD on a standard PCIe carrier can be swapped out easily!
Many years ago, I discovered that one of my ASUS 2nd-gen Core i motherboards would let me hotswap PCIe devices, under Linux anyway. I don't think I'm brave/dumb enough to try tha…

Isn't it weird how viaducts look so cool from a distance, but it's hard to see how cool it is when you're on top of one? Something something metaphor for life.
(This post brought to you by a train journey up the east coast of Scotland)

Experimental Demonstration of Gravitational Impact on the Speed of Light / Exploring the gravito-optic effect for gravity sensing applications: #Gravitation

Today an intern stopped by my desk and said "ah, you're the programmer who doesn't use AI". And I don't know if his tone was more "oh that weird dinosaur" or more "OMG he's one of the ancient ones who can still write without AI".
I really don't know. That makes me uneasy.
I said my task isn't so much pumping out lines of code. It's more about finding a solution to problems that requires the least amount of changes to the e…

It’s so weird, one of largest demonstrations ever to to take place in the US, supporting multiculturalism, urban living, & community happened last night in NYC with what appears to be hundreds of thousands of people & I can’t find anything about it on any news sites
Just stuff about the Nicks win
😁

Amusingly @… inspired to me to try IPv6 one-more time with Verizon FiOS on my Debian router (something that has never worked for me)..and I got it going. Verizon's IPv6 documentation is basically only available through hear-say and rumors.. Their situation is so weird. Anyway I shared some tips and sloppy reflection in a quick blog post.
…

I've been plotting a weird west comic with the pitch; Michael Moorcock's Gunsmoke.
I already feel unsafe levels of investment in the property and I can’t afford to finance another passion project.
So I might test the waters with a one-shot featuring Six Gun Gorilla.
https://pdsh.fandom.com/wiki/Six-Gun_G

Six-Gun Gorilla
Six-Gun Gorilla was an ape named O’Neil who as an infant was kidnapped and brought from Africa to the United States where he was sold to a prospector named Bart Masters of Colorado. Masters was a loving owner whom the gorilla grew to love like a father. Bart Masters taught his gorilla to dig, fetch firewood, gather water, cook, clean, and most importantly, load and fire a revolver. Unfortunately, Bart Masters was murdered by Tutt Strawhan, leader of the Strawhan Gang, in order to learn what...

How Marco Beat JD with One Weird Trick (Jonathan V. Last/The Bulwark)
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/how-marco-beat-jd-with-one-weird-trick-iran-war
http://www.memeorandum.com/260605/p8#a260605p8

En fin summering av funktionsmedicinen tillsammans med en väldigt snygg och totalt sågande genomgång av en av få studier som har utförts på konceptet
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/one-weird-trick-to-get-significant

One Weird Trick to Get Significant Results
Something everyone uses but no one knows how to use correctly provides strong evidence for p-hacking

Folks, I'm curious.
Over on Bluesky I was bragging about the warm and welcoming attitude to trans people that I have noticed on the Fediverse, and was attacked by a couple of people with obvious mental health problems, but also one polite and rational person who sent me this link, to a 3 year old blog.
It's loooooooog. But skim-reading it, it is detailing some weird bunch who purportedly were/are(?) taking over moderation in the Fedi.
Anyone even heard of this?

Looks like you can't even buy a non-electric Yuba Kombi any more (at least not from Yuba directly). Such a bummer that every cargo bike manufacturer is removing the option of much cheaper non-electric (and forcing weird bike frames that will only ever work with one mid-drive motor type..)

It’s been over two years since I last submitted a #Wikimedia #Phabricator ticket, so I guess I should submit a new one for a weird bug on #WikimediaCommons involving structured data via

T429008 Commons SDC seems broken after a history split
**Steps to replicate the issue** (include links if applicable):

Anthropic has been trying to understand how large language models (LLMs) work for a few years now.
Anthropic isn’t the only one looking at this, but I think the company has made it part of its core mission more than most.
Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, has said we won’t be able to control LLMs fully unless we learn more about how they work. 
So this new research is very much in that context.
It goes deeper into the weird mechanisms inside LLMs than ever before.

What Anthropic’s latest AI discovery does—and doesn’t—show
The company says it has found a new window into how its models arrive at answers. We spoke with senior editor Will Douglas Heaven about it. 

I went to the cinema (I almost never do that). I watched the film. The weird one, with the aliens. Spoiler: it's weird, and there are aliens.

Colleges and universities are a weird mixture of “nobody can tell me what to do” free-for-all and unlistening top-down mandates. The mix varies a •lot• (my institution leans pretty hard to the first) — but neither one is amenable to creating the kind of environment I describe in the previous post.
And as commenters note…this isn’t just higher ed. I mean, higher ed institutional culture •is• quite distinct from corporate culture — I’ve experienced plenty of both! — but what I’m describing is also the reason your online banking probably sucks.
5/

One of the great things about the Lyon Algorave was the huge diversity of live coding languages and systems being used, all kinds of strange experiments making weird noises.. with hundreds of ravers dancing to them

@… I found one abandoned outside a local church this week. Useless, flat; maybe stolen, then abandoned because the thieves didn't have the weird power connector.
I plan to borrow the weird thing from someone, then charge it to discover whether the owner's identity is stored. That's the plan, although I don't know anyone who uses Kindle.

So great when I find weird, new, promising death metal demos for #ThursDeath. This one is a new one by New Hampshire's TUMULUS MOUND, and it's nice and grody, a little grindy maybe. Raw, fantastic death.
https://tumulusmound.ba…

So one of the authors is Nicholas Carlini, who works for Anthropic. This is basically an ad for the three letter agencies to use Claude. It massively over-promises compared to what the actual paper says.
But, it is important. First, this is really about silencing people. The threat of identification is designed to make people afraid to talk online. There's a massive asymmetry between the fascists and the people. The fascists are weird racists and pedophiles who are obsessed with control. No one likes them. No one likes their ideas, because their ideas are creepy and bad.
When they talk about their ideas, that people should be murdered or kidnaped based on their skin color, that there should be a national dress code, that people's sex lives should be monitored, that children should be treated like objects that are owned by the parent (specifically, one parent), that people with different skin color or uteri should be considered as livestock, people fucking hate it because it's awful. When we talk about our ideas, that everyone should be able to eat and take care of themselves, that people who can't take care of themselves should be taken care of, that we should live in a society that values life, that we should live in harmony with nature, people like those ideas. When fascists out us for talking about those ideas, people support us. When we out people who are working as fascist goons those people have to face social consequences.
Everyone hates these people. The US government is currently less popular than it has ever been. The only way they can keep power is by making everyone think that they aren't extraordinarily unpopular. The only way to do that, the way authoritarian have always done it, is to make everyone afraid to talk.
But, yes, what this paper is saying is actually kind of bad. It looks like people who don't take any precautions at all in separating identities can be identified about 30% of the time (based on the results). It's unclear how this will actually work in the real world. Larger corpses will probably have more data, making connecting things easier.
This isn't as good as a human trying to dox someone. It's not going to work as well. It may only work in a small number of cases. There will be false positives (just like there are with people doing the work). It's probably not cheaper than hiring people. But it does mean that you can just dump money into a machine that has no ethical framework and get data out. That's the point. It's hard to find humans who will do evil shit like help dictatorships target human rights activists, but if a machine can do it for twice the price then it's a better deal for the dictatorship.
For most people, you just shouldn't care. This isn't for you. As long as you keep doing what you're doing, and you can keep everyone else doing what they're doing, then there aren't enough resources to actually target you. Even if they know who you are, there are just too many people who hate them and too few goons.
For people who might actually be targeted, there are a lot of things. First, keep in mind what you're putting into anonymous accounts. Any feature that's connected to your real life is a feature that can be extracted to identify you. This has always been true, it just may be easier to find now. Your identities should be totally siloed. It's also harder to identify you if you're writing anonymously as a collective. Collectives are better anyway because they can help check your thinking. When you write as a collective, you can help clean up each other's personal details and language. A collective develops its own voice, which is distinct from individual contributors. If you do this, and you also present your work as being from one "person," then it becomes even harder for anyone (systems or individuals) to really figure it out.
I'm not going to do a full deep dive on this because I just don't have time, but your existing threat model should *already cover these threats* if you need to make sure your writing remains anonymous.
This paper doesn't present any novel methodologies. It just extracts a bunch of features, which a human would extract as notes, and tries to correlate those between identities, which is how human researchers work. Linguistic forensics were mentioned (not by name) in the paper, but the actual methodology doesn't actually seem to use them.
So a thing with less ethics can do a worse job for more money (when adjusted for the real, not investor deflated, price of tokens). It's worth knowing. It's not the end of the world, but it is a good reminder to check your threat model and make sure it's up to date.

that Kash FBI guy is one weird dude

This was a weird POTA activation. Only 8 QSOS in about an hour and a half. I could barely work any US stations, but worked two UK stations. One answering my CQ, one who I called. (My tuner ran out of battery so I couldn't wander off 20m to see how other bands were.)
@… saved my activation with a three-fer, but I was clearl…

It’s weird that so many people were appalled by Trump’s post of him as Dr. Jesus reviving John McAfee, but I barely heard a peep about the one he posted with him as Jesus on the cross with a crown of thorns.
Tolerance is so fast. I bet he could get away with picturing himself as Mohammed, and I really hope he tries it.

Ever seen a tiny but chonky keyboard like the one Pierre Schaeffer has in this French recording studio (1961)
From a very cool book with lots of accordions 🪗 by famous photographer Robert Doisneau
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Schaeffer

@… I use a cheap plastic digital one (looks exactly like the one from @… but in plastic)
Only problem I have, after a few years is a weird bug :
If I don’t use it for a little period of time (few days) it sometimes give m…

Just watched #SheepDetectives and bloody loved it. So I went to add an IMDB rating and I am stunned to find out that #NicholasBraun, who plays the plod, is a YANK!
Sir, full marks to you on nailing a proper English accent so well that I had not one weird thing triggering my Enery Iggins reflex.

My pitch if I ran a TV production company would be something like:
Twelve episodes a year of 3-episode serials: That keeps the number of sets you have to construct down. It gives each story the complexity of a movie and time to breath without the frantic pace. You can have one every season of the year.
You gotta remember to focus on the companion. This isn't really a story about The Doctor, it's about the companions asking the question, Doctor Who?
Episodes should generally start with a companion's face or escapade coz they're the ones we're identifying with as we figure out who the doctor is.
At some point in 2027 you'll cast and announce a new doctor.
This is when you call Billie Piper in to film and release a webisode which is just the regeneration into Billie so far: her going "Oh, hello?" Then shaking her head and saying "oh hell no" and shaking harder until she shakes the face off into the new man or woman you picked who says "Oh, that was close".
That change into the Bad Wolf Doctor was just bad without a capstone xmas episode. So a one minute tik-tokable short to announce the newbie frees you of it.
Then you can start ep1 filming and released nearly a year later on the 65th anniversary with a story that focuses on the companion getting into trouble and meeting The Doctor.
Cast nobody famous. The production is about making stars not finding them I don't want anyone having preconceived notions about the character from seeing the actor in that other show even it it was a really good one and they're great.
Earthbound cross-time time-travel story for serial one to pick up new companion, intervene in an aliens vs aliens space-war in serial two, go screw up history and fix it for the third and aliens endangering companion's family for the fourth.
When they're 3-episode serials you only need four a year. Different writer for each.
Cliff-hangers between episodes in each serial of course, with stories about the nature of time and space and getting along with other cultures and running up and down corridors and scary monsters and of course the question "who is The Doctor and how can they fix this without guns or violence with just a screwdriver and two hearts worth of compassion".
The Doctor is some weird looking older dude, more importantly vivid and strange and scholarly than handsome. He has a big coat and no question marks. Then he can change clothes but with the same coat always have the same look. He needs to be able to do a good arrogant rant at himself while he thinks.
The companion is curious and brave and young enough to be naive and surprised and energetic. Doesn't do what she's told. Wonders off against orders. Maybe sometimes bombs things.
Obviously you keep the blue box and the tune and make a new style screwdriver.
You need to do the behind the scenes shows too. Not sure if they make or cost money but they are brilliant for the geeky fandom. That may be why it came back last time.
Anyway. Sadly I don't own a production company.
I cancelled the TV license in the mean time. Give the money to Big Finish instead. These audio things are expensive. I've bought bundles before. Anyone have favorites? I lose track of which one's I've heard.
#doctorWho

Job loss? That one really seems weird. The numbers are not adding up to the stories we hear yet. But the numbers are not dire yet. Of course, our actual tracking of those numbers is increasingly suspect because of the US fascist project.
The big tech companies are absolutely pulling shenanigans, and using "AI" as an excuse for layoffs in a great number of cases, and in many cases, openly admitting they don't have any good ideas, so they'll lay people off instead of allocate them better. We are absolutely seeing the shifts in what are viable careers in tech though. And that was underway before AI: the UX bootcamps, for example, destabilized those job function, devaluing the workers, and the resulting shifts absolutely wrecked those job titles and the pay for them, leaving a bunch of people in the lurch.
But behind that too was our broken education system in the US: it was a shortcut around the massive debt that going to college can produce for people. But it didn't last, because it was vocational training being used purposefully as a wedge to change the labor market. Similar, sometimes intentional effects have happened in other aspects.
A huge amount of the "AI" problem is actually labor problems coming home to roost. We can blame Reagan for a lot of this.

Weird. The weather forecast says 13C (yes, Celsius) for Victoria, BC (yes, not the one in AU :D), but it really feels like... idk, 30C?!
https://weather.gc.ca/en/location/index.html?coords=48.433,-123.362
What is this magic?
It is super sunny outsid…

I have a weird niche question about the steam machine: when suspending to ram, will the videoram be refreshed as well, or will it need to swap it off to disk?
I hope the first, even if it's unconventional, because the smoothless suspend on the steamdeck is one of its best features.

If you're facing weird effects or poor performance when working with #Emacs (or #orgmode) and you're having a customized setup:
One thing that may solve some issues is removing your elpa/melpa packages and let it install from scratch.
It might be a good idea not to mix up

One Weird Trick for Torpedoing Todd Blanche's Hearing (Sarah Longwell/The Bulwark)
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/one-weird-trick-for-torpedoing-todd
http://www.memeorandum.com/260712/p71#a260712p71

En fin summering av funktionsmedicinen tillsammans med en väldigt snygg och totalt sågande genomgång av en av få studier som har utförts på konceptet
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/one-weird-trick-to-get-significant

I am excited about this weird climbing plant waking up again after the winter and framing one of my windows with its leaves. Hello, friend.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@matt_birchler/116470623708806109
Don't know if this is weird, but I have literally never taken and kept one

More eyes on the story. This time from a different angle. We Treated Potholes Like Software Bugs and Accidentally Built a Civic Hacking Playbook.
https://hackernoon.com/we-treated-potholes-like-software-bugs-and-accidentally-buil…

We Treated Potholes Like Software Bugs and Accidentally Built a Civic Hacking Playbook | HackerNoon
We treated potholes like software bugs, hacked the visibility layer instead of the asphalt, and discovered that one weird civic experiment can spread

gemini 3.5 flash "extended thinking" gets the geometry correctt in 4 of 4 tries, but the controls still have weird labels. what baffles me is the "thinking steps" all have weird hallucinations
- one claims I requested a chrome toaster with crumbs; no I didn't.
- one claims the image will include a dish towel and a spice rack; no it doesn't.
the image generator in both standard and extended thinking is nano banana 2. I'm unclear how the "th…

So far NASA hasn't released any post-flight images of the #ArtemisII heat shield (except for a weird under-water view) - but here is one, kind of, I have extracted from the series https://www.facebook.com/NavalBaseSD/posts/pfbid05mJ788QWZoVSugx81FqT9aqGMSmvdCNP9P7KQfXtc6GevGQMtCkh184xgFV3N26vl of images taken by the Naval Base San Diego during a series of precision crane lifts and movements to prepare the Orion spacecraft for its final cross-country trip to Kennedy Space Center.

To be clear, I don't think this is a model to emulate but I do think it's an interesting little corner of history worth exploring.
The whole "human sacrifice" thing is a bit much, but I guess it depends on who is being sacrificed. They were going to sacrifice one of their members (which they never did), and that seems a bit silly. Now, if they were gonna sacrifice a Nazi, that might be a bit different.
That said, if you decide to go down *that* path absolutely do not tell me. Do not ask for help. Do not file paperwork. Just keep being your weird self and make sure to write a memoir after all the shit is over... cause I wanna read that crazy shit.

RE: https://swiss.social/@paulfoerster/116828322923623286
This seems so weird to me…
Email spam is one of the few things that has actually improved over the past decade. If you get more than a handful per week getting through to your Inbox, your ma…

As per my posts, I have the luxury of not having LLM vendors shoved down my throat, and I generally avoid them for ethical reasons:
https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/116581463138461199
But because this all these questions about the usage and limits of these tools keep crashing through my doors, all of our doors, whatever we think of the ethical showstoppers, well…
…fight off amazing percentages of LLM overhype with this one weird question.
/end

So yesterday was a weird day; had an onsite and while wrangling my access to the building, realized one of my boot heels had come off, so I spent like 20m trying to backtrace where it fell off. Never did find it. 😂
Was working in an office space client is moving into, so basically abandoned

Federal law enforcement agents were spotted installing AI-powered surveillance towers at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in the latest escalation of Donald Trump’s weird obsession.
In one video shared by TMZ Tuesday, U.S. Marshals escorted an LVT Mobile Security Unit to the edge of the Reflecting Pool.
In another video a day earlier, Daily Mail reporter John Michael Raasch witnessed a surveillance tower being towed in circles around the supposedly embattled landmark by U.S. Pa…

Trump Launches AI Surveillance of Reflecting Pool as Disaster Grows
Is the Trump administration doing anything other than obsessing over the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool?

Super-weird #sunset on April 23 from Bochum, Germany, at extreme magnification (optical & digital zoom at the limit, otherwise out of cam, images covering just 3 seconds): the Sun is almost gone, with one half of the remaining segments turning bright green before fading away while the other half is dissolving into a turbulent red cloud ... can only guess that there is some cooling tower or chimney behind the horizon causing this extreme distortion in a particular azimuth. Always something new ...

Went to see the Super Furry Animals at Brixton Academy.
Missed this band over the last, what, 15 years since they last played?
Banger after banger. One of those bass rumbles felt like the building was shaking, earthquake alerts.
The classic SFA song has some sweet jangly guitar tune going on then two verses in you feel something weird and electronic in the beat and then the wall of noise and beeps and booms hits you in the face. Love it.
Power-ranger helmet, furry suits, flashing lights and strange cartoon alien creatures on the backdrop.
Ending with that first song they ever wrote together, as they almost always did. The Man Don't Give A Fuck is a masterpiece and that beepy boomy wall of noise is different every time. Whole room bouncing up and down shouting that they don't give a fuck about anybody else you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else you know.
No encores. Ever. If you have a finale like that why would you? Prompt finish and out. Staff must love it. Everyone hanging on to that last second then moving on at once instead of hanging around unsure if anyone's gonna play again.
Looking forward to doing it again outdoors at Beautiful Days.
#music #gig #superFurryAnimals #sfa #sfaok #brixton #london