Tootfinder

Garbage. Ppl pay for this?
My prompt was `Edward Hopper's American Gothic but with two robots` and it didn't even include a pitchfork.
#microsoft

“Resistance is futile.” Why Star Trek: TNG’s Borg Collective Is the Perfect Monster for Our Time https://reactormag.com/star-trek-tng-borg-collective-is-the-perfect-monster-for-our-time/

“Resistance is futile.” Why Star Trek: TNG’s Borg Collective Is the Perfect Monster for Our Time - Reactor
35 years on, what can we learn from the Borg and "The Best of Both Worlds"?

What channel is Broncos vs. Cowboys on today? Live stream, time, TV schedule to watch NFL Week 8 game https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/news/broncos-cowboys-channel-stream-time-schedule-watch-nfl/d7f9109894d61bbe238ac7c0

Series B, Episode 04 - Horizon
[Teleport section. Avon is seated at the console]
BLAKE: Have you got the coordinates yet?
AVON: It takes time.
BLAKE: There may not BE much time.
AVON: Then stop distracting me.
[Rack room]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/204/602 B7B2…

🤚 Wake up in the middle of the night and wonder what time it is
👉 Wake up at 2:30 AM and wonder what timezone it is
#DST

I really can't put Book of Hours down on #Steam.
Cultist Simulator is less of my jam because of the timers - and yet that's exactly what other people love more about it than Book of Hours.
Chill, mysterious exploratory gaming plus unlock puzzles plus a sound track that sounds like you're listening to Coraline the whole time. What's not to love?

"What do you lose by using Facebook", asked a friend who is keen to keep his account there for some reason.
What made me leave was the manipulation. I mean: they started hiding your friends posts in order to show you adverts instead! Feeding you slop from their promoted posts and "viral" messages (that aren't actually boosted by anyone, just picked out by their megaphone to show to everyone).
If you let the algorithm determine what you see than you let it determine what you are, who you become.
Even if you think it's better at finding shiny things than you, even if you think it builds the parasocial relationships that you want, even if you think it's saving you time to let the robot manage your reading-list: if you are letting Facebook, or any algorithm written by advertisers, do your reading selection then you are letting Facebook decide who you are.
On behalf of the advertisers who bribe them the most.
This is why you gotta use RSS. You gotta use the chronological timelines not the "for you" feeds. You gotta build follow relationships that you choose and understand because otherwise, you are letting the corporation and it's systems determine these things. You are abdicating some control of your very self to the machine.
Not to mention that we have to stop feeding money to the evil multi-trillion dollar companies built to control and manipulate us through our relationships with our friends. They have enough money, they need less participation not more.
#fediverse #algorithm

#Hitzewellen, #Flutwarnungen und geschlossene Schulen – extreme Wetterlagen prägen zunehmend den Alltag von Kindern.
In einem persönlichen Brief an ihre Töchter beschreibt Laura Schifter, wie sich #Klimawandel

Floods are Becoming More Common. Here’s What I Tell my Kids
Laura Schifter writes about how climate change is changing childhood and parenthood.

Hey #DirecTV?
When they ask what straw broke the camel's back & got you cancelled by our household, refer to this utterly obnoxious screen appearing EVERY TIME I turn my damned TV on. That & your obscene $210/mo price tag.
Is it any wonder no one I know has DirecTV any more?
In other news,

mood
https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/10/creative-neglect-what-about-the-apps-in-apple/

Creative neglect: What about the apps in Apple?
One of the things that I think about from time to time is Apple’s collection of apps. Some are the crown jewels, like Apple’s pro apps, and others help an everyday consumer to tackle th…

So, made the CMPTR breakout board, got RGB into the TV and all of the colors were very, very dim. Even cranking the brightness to 100% didn't solve the issue, and the picture was then slightly brighter and washed out. Spent a ton of time troubleshooting the board and got to the point where there was no obvious issue with the signal going into the TV.
Decided to sleep on the problem and attacked it today where I realized what the issue was: the Picture setting was at the minimum. …

Series A, Episode 04 - Time Squad
VILA: Could I read yours?
CALLY: You could receive my thought if I wished you to.
BLAKE: Cally, how do we contact the resistance force?
CALLY: There is no resistance force. They're all dead.
BLAKE: All of them?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/104/377

Time for authors to get off Audible (and ideally Amazon as well) before you'll find yourself trapped in a death spiral.
And yes, I know how hard that would hit most. But if Amazon is able to destroy competitors, nothing will stop them from exploiting you even more.
https://www.instagram.com/r…

Why reuniting with the Jets is just what former OSU teammates Fields, Wilson need https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46057155/new-york-jets-garrett-wilson-justin-fields-ohio-state-bond

Dit is goed https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/its-time-for-americans-to-start-talking

Now that the three #heliophysics missions are in orbit here is - from https://www.spacex.com/launches/imap - what happens next: this is in mission elapsed time; add 11:30:50 to get UTC or 7:30:50 to get EDT a.m.

What TV channel is Cowboys vs. Broncos on today? Time, TV schedule for NFL Week 8 game https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/10/26/where-to-watch-cowboys-vs-broncos-today-tv-ch…

What channel is Cardinals vs. Raiders on today? Time, TV schedule, live stream to watch NFL Week 3 preseason game https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/news/cardinals-raiders-channel-time-schedule-stream-nfl-preseaso…

What can we do to protect ourselves against #chatcontrol? Politicians and governments will not solve this.They are all about #control and power. Begging them is a waste of time and dignity.
Must it be a technological change? A social one? What do we do?
More

I scored 9/21 on https://e-mail.wtf and all I got was this lousy text to share on social media.
Comment on the score:
"Yay! You're average! Time to start making plans for what you'll do when an LLM takes your job."

Email is Easy
Everyone knows what an email address is, right?

Phase field modelling of the growth and detachment of bubbles in a hydrogen electrolyzer
Carlos Uriarte, Marco A. Fontelos, Manuel Array\'as
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16585

Phase field modelling of the growth and detachment of bubbles in a hydrogen electrolyzer
We develop and implement numerically a phase field model for the growth and detachment of a gas bubble resting on an electrode and being filled with hydrogen produced by water electrolysis. The bubble is surrounded by a viscous liquid, has a prescribed static contact angle and is also subject to gravitational forces. We compute, as a function of the static contact angle, the time at which the bubble detaches from the substrate and what volume it has at that time. We also investigate de dependen…

The Lurie/Mandelman RV ban is still set to go into effect and tow people's homes on Nov. 1, the same day SNAP expires and at the same time federal agents are in the Bay to terrorize immigrants.
Send a letter to the mayor and BOS asking them to extend the towing deadline:
https://

All Eyes on the Mayor’s RV Ban - No Tows Before Housing!
DSA SF is continuing its opposition to Daniel Lurie’s two-hour restriction on RV parking, which will take effect on November 1st, 2025. We know this policy for what it is - the latest attempt by San Francisco’s oligarch Mayor to exile poor and working class people from the City. While San Francisco has put in place a refuge permit program, it’s deeply flawed. The City’s initial eligibility list excludes many longtime RV residents, and those that are eligible have an uncertain offer of …

The near unanimous verdict from over 100 top business leaders, representing some of the world’s largest companies and most iconic brands:
Trump’s policies aren’t working.
These opinions were all about business results, by the way:
the reasoning was independent of personal politics or industry sector,
it always came back to the bottom line.
Business leaders at the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute’s CEO forum worry that Trump is undermining an economic…

Behind closed doors, our top CEOs say Trump is bad for business and it’s time to Make America into America Again
At our Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute forum, over 100 business leaders said what they really think. They're worried Trump is eroding America’s future.

I was in a meeting this week where it was stated the management belief is anyone complaining about the low quality of agentic AI responses is because that person is bad at prompting, and they should've spent more time using AI sooner.
Their example was a puzzle (how many trials to find irregular ball of 20, when 19 are same weight). Sure, AI can solve puzzles that lots of people have written about. What about fix a bug in our proprietary, 5,000-line program?

One does not simply use rootless … me with a rootless Podman walks into Mordor of CI and docker build anyway.
Just kidding! Rootless Podman containers, quadlets and systemd are truly amazing in 2025.
https://vyskocil.me/blog/ci-setup-which-never-worked/

Ci Setup Which Never Worked
In an earlier post about giving up Kubernetes, I wrote that my server is a plain old virtual machine pet. While this works pretty well for a static web server use case, I wanted to explore ways how to automate this blog. This is a story about how I failed. I am writing this because I did my best to make it work, but it turned out its impossible At the same time it has a some good hints about user systemd, quadlets, rootless podman and what I managed to get working.

TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?

Here is my little buddy. She comes hopping if she sees me outside and follows me around the yard.
One time I was going somewhere in the yard and stopped and felt a bump. She had run into me and was backing up and trying to decide if she should flee or what as she was shivering. Little pieces of carrots are her favorites but she will eat swiss chard, romaine lettuce and beets too. Most of other veggies she will nibble and leave.

Today, my trusted wristwatch fell face down on a tiled floor. As a result, all twelve marker lines broke off and are now changing place with my every movement. At first, I was angry and sad. But then I noticed: What a perfect metaphor for life! How fragile life is. How sudden our illusion of safety can be broken. And also, how resilient life is. The watch is still working perfectly. Now, whenever I check the time, I am reminded to be grateful for being alive.

Social Networks Are Lying to Manipulate You
#SocialMeda are manipulating all the time. This is what h…

It's been a week since I watched this episode, and I still giggle at this scene about once per day.
[I read a lot of Mad Magazine in my youth.]

Really recommended, gives you a better perspective about what is at stake in Ukraine and Europe at this time.
https://www.amazon.com/If-Russia-Wins-Carlo-Masala-ebook/dp/B0F42NNP3Y

Recently reminded of the time I was out in the backyard with my (at the time) 2ish year old daughter teaching her about colors.
"What color is the sky?"
"Blue"
"What color is the grass?"
"Green"
"What color is that car?"
"Red"
"What color is Daddy's leg?"
(Thinks for a minute)
"Hairy"

Scarf time!

I randomly bought this book in a quirky bookshop in Copenhagen for the sole reason that it said all the wrong things right on the cover.
(Sales: the single most important profession. NLP™: not natural language processing but neuro-linguistic programming. Meta: the Meta Model™ and Meta Publications™.)
I just started reading it and boy oh boy, I was not disappointed. It's outrageously hilarious.
"Persuasion engineering".

Persuasion engineering by Richard Bandler | Open Library
Persuasion engineering by Richard Bandler, unknown edition,

Interesting observation by Langdon Winner regarding technological transformation: “by the time the issue of ‘use’ comes up for consideration at all, many of the most interesting questions involved in how technologies are constituted and how they affect what we do are settled or sub-merged.”
This is happening right now with #GenAI .

Series A, Episode 04 - Time Squad
BLAKE: I came here with two of my crew a few hours ago.
CALLY: I keep a check on the landing area. Nothing has come in or gone out.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/104/352 B7B4

I found this reflection of one community member in the forum interesting: «Every time I read that AI is better, faster etc. it lowers my motivation to identify. It makes me feel that what I do when identifying (mostly unknowns) is not going to be useful any longer.»
My take is that this development is par for the course once organizations "professionalize" — and thus start to focus more on keeping their staff salaries than on their mission & working with their volunteer community…
#inaturalist

By the way, what time is the Rapture occurring tomorrow? I have a few things I want to do beforehand, so hopefully it will be later in the day.
#Rapture #Sarcasm

I was asked to help with a video for our trail maintenance team.
On Saturday we went half way up a mountain to a good spot, did all the recordings, took lots of photos and finally also renewed all the trailmarks while going down again.
Then all the video and photo processing on sunday night and tonight.
I really learned A LOT in these days. (Not just about trail-marking😉). I know what I'd do better next time and saw again: creating good videos is REALLY hard. I'll p…

3: with a futuristic design.
I find this a little tricky; what counts as “futuristic design” depends a lot on the zeitgeist. “Dazzle Ships” certainly felt very futuristic at the time, especially when you also consider the inside design, and I think it still holds up very well. Unfortunately, the sleeve of the cassette version is completely bland…
#30AlbumCovers

3: with a futuristic design.
I find this a little tricky; what counts as “futuristic design” depends a lot on the zeitgeist. “Dazzle Ships” certainly felt very futuristic at the time, especially when you also consider the inside design, and I think it still holds up very well. Unfortunately, the sleeve of the cassette version is completely bland…
#30AlbumCovers

Musing on this post from @…: “Shared reality” is a direly important idea right now, but agreed: it’s missing something, hiding something.
A more useful framing might involve •time•. How long does it take for an idea to meet empirical challenge? What is the convergence time for differing understandings? What is the FA-to-FO latency?
1/ https://werd.social/@ben/115384162920438859

youtube labs has an experiment where in youtube music's auto playlists it occasionally injects AI announcers telling you trivia about the previous track, and every time this happens I'm completely derailed, why are people talking to me, ugh downvote, what was I just doing, who is this feature for.
in a year the AI voices will automatically be personalized for me so they speak in a seductive husky voice and scream in agony when I downvote, and I'll still think: ugh who is th…

Oh no. So sad to hear of Keith McIvor / JD Twitch's far too early death (on my birthday of all days 😪).
Optimo has been such an important influence on me and just last week a friend and I talked about what a wonderful time we had with him when we once invited him to our club for a set. RIP. What a loss.
https://optimomusic…

Optimo Music
Optimo Music is a record label based in Glasgow, Scotland and run by Optimo's JD Twitch. This page includes releases from the various Optimo Music affiliated sub-labels: Optimo Music Digital Danceforce, Optimo Trax, So Low, and Against Fascism Trax. For CEASE & DESIST releases, follow the link below ↓

Anthropic details three infrastructure bugs that intermittently degraded Claude's responses between August and early September, and explains how they were fixed (Anthropic)
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-recent-issues

A postmortem of three recent issues
This is a technical report on three bugs that intermittently degraded responses from Claude. Below we explain what happened, why it took time to fix, and what we're changing.

A comprehensive write-up on post-quantum cryptography in today's web.
My favourite quote: "we are in an interesting in-between time, where almost all Internet traffic is protected by post-quantum key agreement, but not a single public post-quantum certificate is used."
https://blog.cloudflare.com/p…

Figured it was finally time to watch Audition (オーディション, 1999) today. Always meant to.
#horror #Japan

Audition (1999)
Seven years after the death of his wife, widower Shigeharu seeks advice on how to find a new wife from a colleague. Taking advantage of their position as a film company, they stage an audition. Interviewing a series of women, Shigeharu is enchanted by the quiet Asami. But soon things take a twisted turn as Asami isn’t what she seems to be.

In case anyone is wondering what type of screws hold on the heatsink of an UltraSPARC I processor, they aren't screws. They are 3/16" nuts. You need a socket wrench. Another tip, the fins in the heatsink can be bent fairly easily by sticking a large screw driver bit between them.
Signed,
Spent way to much time on this.
#themoreyouknow

Maybe it wasn’t a waste of time after all.
““We were able to win the following concession: That the United States could offer Article 5-like protection, which is one of the real reasons why Ukraine wants to be in NATO,” Witkoff told CNN’s “State of the Union.”
But the question is, what about the territory?
#RussiaUkraineWar
https://apnews.com/article/trump-witkoff-ukraine-russia-putin-war-048aa829a69b4020ca368577bfe18aee

American tourist to German tourist, regarding Strokkur: “do you know what time it goes off?”
“Every four or five minutes, but you know nature is unreliable…”

Every now and then I assign something that sounds great but that just doesn't work. Sometimes this involves students just not getting it and submitting work that's wide of the mark. Sometimes, though, students produce fine work but, because I didn't do a great job designing it, the assignment is virtually impossible to grade. That's what happened this time. Everyone did the work and I can tell they learned something, but the results are all over the place. High marks for all,…

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
Should AI coding be taught in undergrad CS education?
1/2
I teach undergraduate computer science labs, including for intro and more-advanced core courses. I don't publish (non-negligible) scholarly work in the area, but I've got years of craft expertise in course design, and I do follow the academic literature to some degree. In other words, In not the world's leading expert, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about course design, and consider myself competent at it, with plenty of direct experience in what knowledge & skills I can expect from students as they move through the curriculum.
I'm also strongly against most uses of what's called "AI" these days (specifically, generative deep neutral networks as supplied by our current cadre of techbro). There are a surprising number of completely orthogonal reasons to oppose the use of these systems, and a very limited number of reasonable exceptions (overcoming accessibility barriers is an example). On the grounds of environmental and digital-commons-pollution costs alone, using specifically the largest/newest models is unethical in most cases.
But as any good teacher should, I constantly question these evaluations, because I worry about the impact on my students should I eschew teaching relevant tech for bad reasons (and even for his reasons). I also want to make my reasoning clear to students, who should absolutely question me on this. That inspired me to ask a simple question: ignoring for one moment the ethical objections (which we shouldn't, of course; they're very stark), at what level in the CS major could I expect to teach a course about programming with AI assistance, and expect students to succeed at a more technically demanding final project than a course at the same level where students were banned from using AI? In other words, at what level would I expect students to actually benefit from AI coding "assistance?"
To be clear, I'm assuming that students aren't using AI in other aspects of coursework: the topic of using AI to "help you study" is a separate one (TL;DR it's gross value is not negative, but it's mostly not worth the harm to your metacognitive abilities, which AI-induced changes to the digital commons are making more important than ever).
So what's my answer to this question?
If I'm being incredibly optimistic, senior year. Slightly less optimistic, second year of a masters program. Realistic? Maybe never.
The interesting bit for you-the-reader is: why is this my answer? (Especially given that students would probably self-report significant gains at lower levels.) To start with, [this paper where experienced developers thought that AI assistance sped up their work on real tasks when in fact it slowed it down] (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089) is informative. There are a lot of differences in task between experienced devs solving real bugs and students working on a class project, but it's important to understand that we shouldn't have a baseline expectation that AI coding "assistants" will speed things up in the best of circumstances, and we shouldn't trust self-reports of productivity (or the AI hype machine in general).
Now we might imagine that coding assistants will be better at helping with a student project than at helping with fixing bugs in open-source software, since it's a much easier task. For many programming assignments that have a fixed answer, we know that many AI assistants can just spit out a solution based on prompting them with the problem description (there's another elephant in the room here to do with learning outcomes regardless of project success, but we'll ignore this over too, my focus here is on project complexity reach, not learning outcomes). My question is about more open-ended projects, not assignments with an expected answer. Here's a second study (by one of my colleagues) about novices using AI assistance for programming tasks. It showcases how difficult it is to use AI tools well, and some of these stumbling blocks that novices in particular face.
But what about intermediate students? Might there be some level where the AI is helpful because the task is still relatively simple and the students are good enough to handle it? The problem with this is that as task complexity increases, so does the likelihood of the AI generating (or copying) code that uses more complex constructs which a student doesn't understand. Let's say I have second year students writing interactive websites with JavaScript. Without a lot of care that those students don't know how to deploy, the AI is likely to suggest code that depends on several different frameworks, from React to JQuery, without actually setting up or including those frameworks, and of course three students would be way out of their depth trying to do that. This is a general problem: each programming class carefully limits the specific code frameworks and constructs it expects students to know based on the material it covers. There is no feasible way to limit an AI assistant to a fixed set of constructs or frameworks, using current designs. There are alternate designs where this would be possible (like AI search through adaptation from a controlled library of snippets) but those would be entirely different tools.
So what happens on a sizeable class project where the AI has dropped in buggy code, especially if it uses code constructs the students don't understand? Best case, they understand that they don't understand and re-prompt, or ask for help from an instructor or TA quickly who helps them get rid of the stuff they don't understand and re-prompt or manually add stuff they do. Average case: they waste several hours and/or sweep the bugs partly under the rug, resulting in a project with significant defects. Students in their second and even third years of a CS major still have a lot to learn about debugging, and usually have significant gaps in their knowledge of even their most comfortable programming language. I do think regardless of AI we as teachers need to get better at teaching debugging skills, but the knowledge gaps are inevitable because there's just too much to know. In Python, for example, the LLM is going to spit out yields, async functions, try/finally, maybe even something like a while/else, or with recent training data, the walrus operator. I can't expect even a fraction of 3rd year students who have worked with Python since their first year to know about all these things, and based on how students approach projects where they have studied all the relevant constructs but have forgotten some, I'm not optimistic seeing these things will magically become learning opportunities. Student projects are better off working with a limited subset of full programming languages that the students have actually learned, and using AI coding assistants as currently designed makes this impossible. Beyond that, even when the "assistant" just introduces bugs using syntax the students understand, even through their 4th year many students struggle to understand the operation of moderately complex code they've written themselves, let alone written by someone else. Having access to an AI that will confidently offer incorrect explanations for bugs will make this worse.
To be sure a small minority of students will be able to overcome these problems, but that minority is the group that has a good grasp of the fundamentals and has broadened their knowledge through self-study, which earlier AI-reliant classes would make less likely to happen. In any case, I care about the average student, since we already have plenty of stuff about our institutions that makes life easier for a favored few while being worse for the average student (note that our construction of that favored few as the "good" students is a large part of this problem).
To summarize: because AI assistants introduce excess code complexity and difficult-to-debug bugs, they'll slow down rather than speed up project progress for the average student on moderately complex projects. On a fixed deadline, they'll result in worse projects, or necessitate less ambitious project scoping to ensure adequate completion, and I expect this remains broadly true through 4-6 years of study in most programs (don't take this as an endorsement of AI "assistants" for masters students; we've ignored a lot of other problems along the way).
There's a related problem: solving open-ended project assignments well ultimately depends on deeply understanding the problem, and AI "assistants" allow students to put a lot of code in their file without spending much time thinking about the problem or building an understanding of it. This is awful for learning outcomes, but also bad for project success. Getting students to see the value of thinking deeply about a problem is a thorny pedagogical puzzle at the best of times, and allowing the use of AI "assistants" makes the problem much much worse. This is another area I hope to see (or even drive) pedagogical improvement in, for what it's worth.
1/2

The most 2004 interview quote ever.
#smartphone #web

#LB Eu acho que realmente preciso ler Terry Pratchett rs.
https://frikiverse.zone/@terrybot/115036206410170877

Sometimes innovation is quite simple 🙂
""Our measurements show that wheat and grass-clover mixtures grow just as well between vertical solar panels as in open fields. At the same time, the panels produce electricity in a daily pattern that better matches energy demand. It's a win-win,"
#solarpanels

Double harvest: Vertical solar panels and crops thrive side by side
Imagine a field where solar panels and crops coexist—with no trade-off. It sounds like science fiction, but that's precisely what researchers from Aarhus University have now documented in a full-scale agrivoltaic pilot project in the Danish countryside.

What channel is Cowboys vs. Falcons on today? Time, TV schedule, live stream to watch NFL Week 3 preseason game https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/news/cowboys-falcons-channel-time-schedule-stream-nfl-preseason-game…

The Danish independent media organisation @… are on a member drive with 10 promises if they make it to 50,000, including that they'll share more on social media. I can dream they'll make it to the #fediverse I suppose?
In any case their journalism is outstanding and they carefully avoid making an explicit political stance and contributing to polarisation. #UnbreakingNews
In depth journalism you can read or listen to (try deepL if you don't speak Danish), often beautifully produced, always fascinating. They also don't report on problems without reporting solutions.
It's by far the most uplifting read/listen of my day.
Free link here, pay what you want and free to first time voters...
https://www.zetland.dk/a/rmottram?og=amba25-8

is dinner time
friend cooked n so I know it's gonna be Healthy as opposed to the burger king I ordered when I didn't know what our plans were lol

Time for more occasional self-promotion
This one is a free/pwyw solo game. It's an RPG point crawl but played in the browser. It was an experiment around writing games in markdown.
https://seedling.itch.io/what-remains-on-copper-island

What Remains on Copper Island by seedling
An HTML solo "tabletop" RPG

Gauge symmetry and the arrow of time: How to count what counts
Sean Gryb
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14720 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14720

Gauge symmetry and the arrow of time: How to count what counts
This thesis addresses two major problems in the philosophy of physics. The first is how to identify the minimal physical content of a theory; that is, what features of a theory are truly needed to make predictions, and what can be removed without changing its empirical consequences. The second is the problem of time's arrow: why time seems to have a direction, even though the fundamental laws of physics treat the past and future symmetrically. I show that answering the first question leads to…

It's time for your purrformance review.

Larry Ellison’s expected incursion into Hollywood and Big Media, if successful,
could also go well beyond what other tech moguls like Jeff Bezos and Marc Benioff have attempted through their acquisitions of The Washington Post and Time magazine, respectively.
For those men, the acquisitions were more like expensive hobbies.
Mr. Ellison is up to something very different:
transforming himself into a media magnate.
Along with his son, David, he could soon end up …

Opinion | Larry Ellison Is Closing In on CNN, HBO and TikTok
Larry Ellison is now suddenly poised to become the most powerful media mogul America has ever seen.

Bengals' Joe Flacco shines in battle for the ages vs. Aaron Rodgers, Steelers: 'This is what we do it for' https://www.nfl.com/news/bengals-joe-flacco-shines-in-battle-for-the-ages-vs-aaron-rodgers-steelers-t…

Sadly the live feed from New Zealand of the partial #SolarEclipse was lost a while ago (with the image frozen, now removed) - here is what the eclipse would have looked like moments ago at maximum phase in Dunedin, from the real-time simulation https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/in/new-zealand/dunedin?iso=20250921

My talk about #Thunderbird was accepted at @…
it's a talk from a community perspective and I will share my personal story (not so much) and some aspects you wont find anywhere else:

Thunderbird (a community angle) OpenAlt 2025
I am a [community](https://pontoon.mozilla.org/contributors/bogomil/) [contributor](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/user_profile?user_id=359734) and a long-time user of [Thunderbird](https://www.thunderbird.net/). I want to share with you my vision of what Thunderbird was, is, and will be in the future. Many people are familiar with the interface and the fact that it allows you to manage your email, but this is not why I decided to spend time improving it. I'll cover topics like: - What can any …

Raiders vs Cardinals schedule, TV channel, time for NFL preseason game https://www.azcentral.com/story/sports/nfl/cardinals/2025/08/19/las-vegas-raiders-arizona-cardinals-tv-channel-time-nfl-preseason/85…

«younger generations are seeking information on social video platforms rather than the open web. This gradual shift is not unique to #Wikipedia. Many other publishers and content platforms are reporting similar shifts as users spend more time on search engines, AI chatbots, and social media to find information.»
All of those "alternatives" are facilitated through algorithmic recommendation engines designed to maximize profits, what could possible go wrong there…
https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-says-ai-is-causing-a-dangerous-decline-in-human-visitors/

Series C, Episode 12 - Death-Watch
VILA: A few hours ago. We've plenty of time to get to the combat grounds.
TARRANT: Zen. [Looks at Avon] Yes?
AVON: Why not?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/312/71 B7B5

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy

What TV channel is Cowboys vs. Falcons on today? Time, TV schedule for NFL preseason game https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/08/22/where-to-watch-cowboys-vs-falcons-today-tv…

Know what time it is?
It's cat time. :3

FREEDOM means #NoKings
Tomorrow, Saturday October 18
@…
@…
@…

Why Travis Kelce believes Taylor Swift is an athlete: 'I've seen what she goes through ... it's mind-blowing'

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news…

TL;DR: what if instead of denying the harms of fascism, we denied its suppressive threats of punishment
Many of us have really sharpened our denial skills since the advent of the ongoing pandemic (perhaps you even hesitated at the word "ongoing" there and thought "maybe I won't read this one, it seems like it'll be tiresome"). I don't say this as a preface to a fiery condemnation or a plea to "sanity" or a bunch of evidence of how bad things are, because I too have honed my denial skills in these recent years, and I feel like talking about that development.
Denial comes in many forms, including strategic information avoidance ("I don't have time to look that up right now", "I keep forgetting to look into that", "well this author made a tiny mistake, so I'll click away and read something else", "I'm so tired of hearing about this, let me scroll farther", etc.) strategic dismissal ("look, there's a bit of uncertainty here, I should ignore this", "this doesn't line up perfectly with my anecdotal experience, it must be completely wrong", etc.) and strategic forgetting ("I don't remember what that one study said exactly; it was painful to think about", "I forgot exactly what my friend was saying when we got into that argument", etc.). It's in fact a kind of skill that you can get better at, along with the complementary skill of compartmentalization. It can of course be incredibly harmful, and a huge genre of fables exists precisely to highlight its harms, but it also has some short-term psychological benefits, chiefly in the form of muting anxiety. This is not an endorsement of denial (the harms can be catastrophic), but I want to acknowledge that there *are* short-term benefits. Via compartmentalization, it's even possible to be honest with ourselves about some of our own denials without giving them up immediately.
But as I said earlier, I'm not here to talk you out of your denials. Instead, given that we are so good at denial now, I'm here to ask you to be strategic about it. In particular, we live in a world awash with propaganda/advertising that serves both political and commercial ends. Why not use some of our denial skills to counteract that?
For example, I know quite a few people in complete denial of our current political situation, but those who aren't (including myself) often express consternation about just how many people in the country are supporting literal fascism. Of course, logically that appearance of widespread support is going to be partly a lie, given how much our public media is beholden to the fascists or outright in their side. Finding better facts on the true level of support is hard, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about the "fact" that Trump has widespread popular support?
To give another example: advertisers constantly barrage us with messages about our bodies and weight, trying to keep us insecure (and thus in the mood to spend money to "fix" the problem). For sure cutting through that bullshit by reading about body positivity etc. is a better solution, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about there being anything wrong with your body?
This kind of intentional denial certainly has its own risks (our bodies do actually need regular maintenance, for example, so complete denial on that front is risky) but there's definitely a whole lot of misinformation out there that it would be better to ignore. To the extent such denial expands to a more general denial of underlying problems, this idea of intentional denial is probably just bad. But I sure wish that in a world where people (including myself) routinely deny significant widespread dangers like COVID-19's long-term risks or the ongoing harms of escalating fascism, they'd at least also deny some of the propaganda keeping them unhappy and passive. Instead of being in denial about US-run concentration camps, why not be in denial that the state will be able to punish you for resisting them?

The Republican's decision to give the White House full power to decide what, when, and how congressionally appropriated money is spent
has created an impasse more deep and intractable than the shutdown itself,
because the question of how the conflict over Obamacare subsidies gets resolved has become impossible to answer.
What we have here is a fully busted appropriations process;
it is impossible to have faith in anything that Trump and his Republican cronies do w…

Why It’s Pointless for Democrats to Negotiate a Shutdown Deal
The most overlooked aspect of the current impasse is that it began a long time ago—and is rooted in a deep Trumpian dysfunction.

Series D, Episode 08 - Games
AVON: Tell me everything you know about Belkov's One Nine Seven computer.
ORAC: You suggested I spared you the technical details.
AVON: Oh, don't sulk, Orac. I have a little more time now.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/408/277 B7B4

Raiders Are Sending ‘Mixed Signal’ Around the NFL: Report https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/jakobi-meyers-trade-deadline-espn/?adt_ei=[email]

Joe Burrow out with turf toe: What is it, and what would extended time away mean for the QB, Bengals? https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46264761/nfl-turf-toe-cincinnati-bengals-joe-burrow

What channel is Cowboys vs. Ravens on today? Time, TV schedule, live stream to watch NFL Week 2 preseason game https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/news/cowboys-ravens-channel-time-schedule-stream-nfl-preseason-game/f5…

What TV channel is 49ers vs. Raiders on today? Time, TV schedule for NFL preseason game https://ninerswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/niners/2025/08/16/49ers-game-today-tv-channel-live-stream/85670876007/

Series A, Episode 04 - Time Squad
BLAKE: [Laughs slightly] More interesting is where it was going and why. Let's see if Avon's got any ideas.
[Interior. Alien projectile]
BLAKE: [To Avon] What do you Think?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/104/227 B7B5

What TV channel is Cowboys vs. Commanders on today? Time, TV schedule for NFL Week 7 game https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/10/19/where-to-watch-cowboys-vs-commanders-to…

How popular media gets love wrong
Okay, so what exactly are the details of the "engineered" model of love from my previous post? I'll try to summarize my thoughts and the experiences they're built on.
1. "Love" can be be thought of like a mechanism that's built by two (or more) people. In this case, no single person can build the thing alone, to work it needs contributions from multiple people (I suppose self-love might be an exception to that). In any case, the builders can intentionally choose how they build (and maintain) the mechanism, they can build it differently to suit their particular needs/wants, and they will need to maintain and repair it over time to keep it running. It may need winding, or fuel, or charging plus oil changes and bolt-tightening, etc.
2. Any two (or more) people can choose to start building love between them at any time. No need to "find your soulmate" or "wait for the right person." Now the caveat is that the mechanism is difficult to build and requires lots of cooperation, so there might indeed be "wrong people" to try to build love with. People in general might experience more failures than successes. The key component is slowly-escalating shared commitment to the project, which is negotiated between the partners so that neither one feels like they've been left to do all the work themselves. Since it's a big scary project though, it's very easy to decide it's too hard and give up, and so the builders need to encourage each other and pace themselves. The project can only succeed if there's mutual commitment, and that will certainly require compromise (sometimes even sacrifice, though not always). If the mechanism works well, the benefits (companionship; encouragement; praise; loving sex; hugs; etc.) will be well worth the compromises you make to build it, but this isn't always the case.
3. The mechanism is prone to falling apart if not maintained. In my view, the "fire" and "appeal" models of love don't adequately convey the need for this maintenance and lead to a lot of under-maintained relationships many of which fall apart. You'll need to do things together that make you happy, do things that make your partner happy (in some cases even if they annoy you, but never in a transactional or box-checking way), spend time with shared attention, spend time alone and/or apart, reassure each other through words (or deeds) of mutual beliefs (especially your continued commitment to the relationship), do things that comfort and/or excite each other physically (anywhere from hugs to hand-holding to sex) and probably other things I'm not thinking of. Not *every* relationship needs *all* of these maintenance techniques, but I think most will need most. Note especially that patriarchy teaches men that they don't need to bother with any of this, which harms primarily their romantic partners but secondarily them as their relationships fail due to their own (cultivated-by-patriarchy) incompetence. If a relationship evolves to a point where one person is doing all the maintenance (& improvement) work, it's been bent into a shape that no longer really qualifies as "love" in my book, and that's super unhealthy.
4. The key things to negotiate when trying to build a new love are first, how to work together in the first place, and how to be comfortable around each others' habits (or how to change those habits). Second, what level of commitment you have right now, and what how/when you want to increase that commitment. Additionally, I think it's worth checking in about what you're each putting into and getting out of the relationship, to ensure that it continues to be positive for all participants. To build a successful relationship, you need to be able to incrementally increase the level of commitment to one that you're both comfortable staying at long-term, while ensuring that for both partners, the relationship is both a net benefit and has manageable costs (those two things are not the same). Obviously it's not easy to actually have conversations about these things (congratulations if you can just talk about this stuff) because there's a huge fear of hearing an answer that you don't want to hear. I think the range of discouraging answers which actually spell doom for a relationship is smaller than people think and there's usually a reasonable "shoulder" you can fall into where things aren't on a good trajectory but could be brought back into one, but even so these conversations are scary. Still, I think only having honest conversations about these things when you're angry at each other is not a good plan. You can also try to communicate some of these things via non-conversational means, if that feels safer, and at least being aware that these are the objectives you're pursuing is probably helpful.
I'll post two more replies here about my own experiences that led me to this mental model and trying to distill this into advice, although it will take me a moment to get to those.
#relationships #love

For the first time in U.S. history, there are more Americans over 62 than under 18.
With the national workforce getting older every year, many economists argue that having people keep working longer than they used to would help maintain a robust labor market.
But it can be hard for many older adults to stay employed past the age of 62, the year they typically become eligible for early Social Security retirement benefits, even when their health is good.
In part, that’s becaus…

Trump administration ends a federal program helping older people get jobs since the 1960s
The White House left the program out of its proposed 2026 budget due to what it said was a failure at moving older workers into unsubsidized employment.

Series A, Episode 11 - Bounty
SARKOFF: To my decision? Of course not.
BLAKE: No, of course not. [Checks watch a final time then looks up] Right. Stay here, please. [Exits]
SARKOFF: Where else would I go? This is all I have left.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/111/268 B7B4

Picture the human body. Zoom in on a single cell. It lives for a while, then splits or dies, as part of a community of cells that make up a particular tissue. This community lives together for many many cell-lifetimes, each performing their own favorite function and reproducing as much as necessary to maintain their community, consuming the essential resources they need and contributing back what they can so that the whole body can live for decades. Each community of cells is interdependent on the whole body, but also stable and sustainable over long periods of time.
Now imagine a cancer cell. It has lost its ability to harmonize with the whole and prioritize balance, instead consuming and reproducing as quickly as it can. As neighboring tissues start to die from its excess, it metastasizes, always spreading to new territory to fuel its unbalanced appetite. The inevitable result is death of the whole body, although through birth, that body can create a new fresh branch of tissues that may continue their stable existence free of cancer. Alternatively, radiation or chemotherapy might be able to kill off the cancer, at great cost to the other tissues, but permitting long-term survival.
To the cancer cell, the idea of decades-long survival of a tissue community is unbelievable. When your natural state is unbounded consumption, growth, and competition, the idea of interdependent cooperation (with tissues all around the body you're not even touching, no less) seems impossible, and the idea that a tissue might survive in a stable form for decades is ludicrous.
"Perhaps if conditions were bleak enough to perfectly balance incessant unrestrained growth against the depredations of a hostile environment it might be possible? I guess the past must have been horribly brutal, so that despite each tissue trying to grow as much as possible they each barely survived? Yes, a stable and sustainable population is probably only possible under conditions of perfectly extreme hardship, and in our current era of unfettered growth, we should rejoice that we live in much easier times!"
You can probably already see where I'm going with this metaphor, but did you know that there are human communities, alive today, that have been living sustainably for *tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years*?
#anarchy #colonialism #civilization
P.S. if you're someone who likes to think about past populations and historical population growth, I cannot recommend the (short, free) game Opera Omnia by Stephen Lavelle enough: https://www.increpare.com/2009/02/opera-omnia/

AP is ending its weekly book reviews, beginning Sept. 1.
This was a difficult decision but one made after a thorough review of AP’s story offerings
and what is being most read on our website and mobile apps as well as what customers are using.
Unfortunately, the audience for book reviews is relatively low and we can no longer sustain the time it takes to plan, coordinate, write and edit reviews.
AP will continue covering books as stories, but at the moment those will …

The Associated Press tells its book critics that it’s ending weekly reviews
Terrible news from The Associated Press. Media Nation correspondent J.A. passes along this note from Anthony McCartney, the AP’s global entertainment and lifestyle editor. AP to end its weekl…

NFL insider links Cowboys' Micah Parsons to trade destination of 4-time Super Bowl Champion https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/dallas-cowboys/news/nfl-insider-links-cowboys-mi…

Series A, Episode 10 - Breakdown
VILA: You can say goodbye to one bolt hole.
BLAKE: How far is it?
AVON: One hundred and fifty hours. [To Zen] Confirm.
ZEN: Flight time is six hundred forty three hours.
AVON: Direct flight.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/110/120 B7B4…

At no other time in modern history has a country so thoroughly turned its back on its core national strengths.
With devastating cuts to science and health research,
the administration is turning its back on a history of being powered and renewed by the innovation and vision of immigrants.
What America may find is that we have squandered the greatest gift from the Manhattan Project
— which, in the end, wasn’t the bomb
— but a new way of looking at how science a…

Opinion | Trump Is Squandering the Greatest Gift of the Manhattan Project
The U.S. risks not just being left behind, but out of the game entirely.

What channel is Cowboys vs. Giants on today? Time, TV schedule, live stream to watch NFL Week 2 game https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/news/cowboys-giants-channel-time-schedule-stream-watch-nfl-week-2/0afc603817aec23e…

A04 - Time Squad
BLAKE: Zen, three sixty degree survey. Put etheric detector beams on maximum. Report any space vehicles within range. Vila, put visual survey on the screen.
ZEN: Negative on all systems. There are no space vehicles within detector range.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/104/10…

Series D, Episode 01 - Rescue
DORIAN: How long before we make planet fall?
SLAVE: One hour, Master. That is Earth standard time, of course. I hope that is satisfactory.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/401/45 B7B3

#Blakes7 Series D, Episode 05 - Animals
SERVALAN: Every time you see him, you're going to hate him.
DAYNA: No!
SERVALAN: In the end you'll tell me you'll hate him and when I believe you I'll stop.
DAYNA: I'll never hate him.
SERVALAN: You will.