Tootfinder

"""
Writing has been an instrument for some of the highest expressions of the human spirit: poetry, philosophy, science. But to understand it — why it came into being, how it changed the human experience — we have to first appreciate its crass practicality. It evolved mainly as an instrument of the mundane: the economic, the administrative, the political.
Confusion over this point is understandable. Some scholars have equated the origin of “civilization” with the origin of writing. Laypeople sometimes take this equation to mean that with writing humanity put aside its barbarous past and started behaving in gentlemanly fashion, sipping tea and remembering to say “please.” And indeed, this may be only a mild caricature of what some nineteenth-century scholars actually meant by the equation: writing equals Greece equals Plato; illiteracy equals barbarism equals Attila the Hun.
But, in truth, if you add literacy to Attila the Hun, you don’t get Plato. You get Genghis Khan. During the thirteenth century, he administered what even today is the largest continuous land empire in the history of the world. And he could do so only because he had the requisite means of control: a script that, when carried by his pony express, amounted to the fastest large-scale information-processing technology of his era. One consequence was to give pillaging a scope beyond Attila’s wildest dreams. Information technology, like energy technology or any other technology, can be a tool for good or bad. By itself, it is no guarantor of moral progress or civility.
"""
(Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny)

Join us for a casual Scrappy Hour bike ride on Sunday, August 31st. 🚴‍♀️
We'll roll out from Rocket Baby just after 9am and head to the Domes... There's about four or five of us so far but we welcome anyone to join us! 🚴
https://www.instagram.com/p/DNvbxVRXHS1/

Scrappy Hour on Instagram: "It’s that time of year again! Ya, you know it! It’s Scrappy Hour BBQ BABY!!! Maybe it will be hot and we can all go swimming. Or maybe it will rain and we can all cower together. Or maybe it will be perfect and we’ll lay in the grass eating hot dogs till we have to roll us out of there. Here’s how it’s going to go down. First we’ll do a ride. We’re gonna do the Domes again, because it’s fun. Meet ups: BAY VIEW Cactus Club- meet 8:30a; wheels up 9:00a EAST SIDE/RW The Daily Bird-meet 9:00a; wheels up 9:15a TOSA Rocket Baby- meet 9:00; wheels up 9:15a Then, we SHBBQ at South Shore Park! We’ll bring some dogs and veggie alternatives. A couple sides. And a cooler of mixed bevies. We’ll bring a couple grills too. Last year our gang showed up with some really delightful offerings! There was homemade bread, and baked goods and side salads. It ruled. So feel free to bring what ever you would like to share with everyone. It will be much appreciated. Bring a baseball mitt and we’ll have a catch. Have a frisbee, bring that too. If it’s hot, good luck keeping me out of that lake, so bring your suit. If you have any questions, as always hit us up and we’ll try to answer. All our love, SH ✌️🚲🏃‍♂️☕️ #coffeeoutsidemke #scrappyhourmke"
107 likes, 8 comments - scrappyhourmke on August 24, 2025: "It’s that time of year again! Ya, you know it! It’s Scrappy Hour BBQ BABY!!! Maybe it will be hot and we can all go swimming. Or maybe it will rain and we can all cower together. Or maybe it will be perfect and we’ll lay in the grass eating hot dogs till we have to roll us out of there. Here’s how it’s going to go down. First we’ll do a ride. We’re gonna do the Domes again, because it’s fun. Meet ups: BAY VIEW …

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

“I destroyed months of your work in seconds.” AI agents can also panic and cause mayhem—not because they're sentient, but because they've read plenty of online posts about us panicking when we do stupid stuff.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonippoli…

The headline here — I think, I’m out of my depth — is that, contrary to what they did before, the Trump admin •did• in fact comply with an emergency order from a judge to stop a deportation flight.
Do not let anyone tell you authoritarianism is a done deal. Judges still have power. Activists still have power. We still have power. Nothing’s certain, nothing’s safe — but nothing is already decided either.
They want your defeatism. They want a fait accompli. Don’t give it to them. https://toad.social/@KimPerales/115125053018448139

Series C, Episode 02 - Powerplay
AVON: What do we get?
KLEGG: You'll be teleported onto the surface of the nearest planet. You can build your security into the computer program. It won't respond to me until you are safely off the ship.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/302/498

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

So #Gentoo #Python eclasses are pretty modern, in the sense that they tend to follow the best practices and standards, and eventually deal with deprecations. Nevertheless, they have a long history and carry quite some historical burden, particularly regarding to naming.
The key point is that the eclasses were conceived as a replacement for the old eclasses: "distutils" and "python". Hence, much like we revision ebuilds, I've named the matching eclasses "distutils-r1" and "python-r1". For consistency, I've also used the "-r1" suffix for the remaining eclasses introduced at the time: "python-any-r1", "python-single-r1" and "python-utils-r1" — even though there were never "r0"s.
It didn't take long to realize my first mistake. I've made the multi-impl eclass effectively the "main" eclass, probably largely inspired by the previous Gentoo recommendations. However, in the end I've found out that for the most use cases (i.e. where "distutils-r1" is not involved), there is no real need for multi-impl, and it makes things much harder. So if I were naming them today, I would have named it "python-multi", to indicate the specific use case — and either avoid designating a default at all, or made "python-single" the default.
What aged even worse is the "distutils-r1" eclass. Admittedly, back when it was conceived, distutils was still largely a thing — and there were people (like me) who avoided unnecessary dependency on setuptools. Of course, nowadays it has been entirely devoured by setuptools, and with #PEP517 even "setuptools" wouldn't be a good name anymore. Nowadays, people are getting confused why they are supposed to use "distutils-r1" for, say, Hatchling.
Admittedly, this is something I could have done differently — PEP517 support was a major migration, and involved an explicit switch. Instead of adding DISTUTILS_USE_PEP517 (what a self-contradictory name) variable, I could have forked the eclass. Why didn't I do that? Because there used to be a lot of code shared between the two paths. Of course, over time they diverged more, and eventually I've dropped the legacy support — but the opportunity to rename was lost.
In fact, as a semi-related fact, I've recognized another design problem with the eclass earlier — I should have gone for two eclasses rather than one: a "python-phase" eclass with generic sub-phase support, and a "distutils" (or later "python-pep517") implementing default sub-phases for the common backends. And again, this is precisely how I could have solved the code reuse problem when I introduced PEP517 support.
But then, I didn't anticipate how the eclasses would end up looking like in the end — and I can't really predict what new challenges the Python ecosystem is going to bring us. And I think it's too late to rename or split stuff — too much busywork on everyone.

LLM coding is the opposite of DRY
An important principle in software engineering is DRY: Don't Repeat Yourself. We recognize that having the same code copied in more than one place is bad for several reasons:
1. It makes the entire codebase harder to read.
2. It increases maintenance burden, since any problems in the duplicated code need to be solved in more than one place.
3. Because it becomes possible for the copies to drift apart if changes to one aren't transferred to the other (maybe the person making the change has forgotten there was a copy) it makes the code more error-prone and harder to debug.
All modern programming languages make it almost entirely unnecessary to repeat code: we can move the repeated code into a "function" or "module" and then reference it from all the different places it's needed. At a larger scale, someone might write an open-source "library" of such functions or modules and instead of re-implementing that functionality ourselves, we can use their code, with an acknowledgement. Using another person's library this way is complicated, because now you're dependent on them: if they stop maintaining it or introduce bugs, you've inherited a problem, but still, you could always copy their project and maintain your own version, and it would be not much more work than if you had implemented stuff yourself from the start. It's a little more complicated than this, but the basic principle holds, and it's a foundational one for software development in general and the open-source movement in particular. The network of "citations" as open-source software builds on other open-source software and people contribute patches to each others' projects is a lot of what makes the movement into a community, and it can lead to collaborations that drive further development. So the DRY principle is important at both small and large scales.
Unfortunately, the current crop of hyped-up LLM coding systems from the big players are antithetical to DRY at all scales:
- At the library scale, they train on open source software but then (with some unknown frequency) replicate parts of it line-for-line *without* any citation [1]. The person who was using the LLM has no way of knowing that this happened, or even any way to check for it. In theory the LLM company could build a system for this, but it's not likely to be profitable unless the courts actually start punishing these license violations, which doesn't seem likely based on results so far and the difficulty of finding out that the violations are happening. By creating these copies (and also mash-ups, along with lots of less-problematic stuff), the LLM users (enabled and encouraged by the LLM-peddlers) are directly undermining the DRY principle. If we see what the big AI companies claim to want, which is a massive shift towards machine-authored code, DRY at the library scale will effectively be dead, with each new project simply re-implementing the functionality it needs instead of every using a library. This might seem to have some upside, since dependency hell is a thing, but the downside in terms of comprehensibility and therefore maintainability, correctness, and security will be massive. The eventual lack of new high-quality DRY-respecting code to train the models on will only make this problem worse.
- At the module & function level, AI is probably prone to re-writing rather than re-using the functions or needs, especially with a workflow where a human prompts it for many independent completions. This part I don't have direct evidence for, since I don't use LLM coding models myself except in very specific circumstances because it's not generally ethical to do so. I do know that when it tries to call existing functions, it often guesses incorrectly about the parameters they need, which I'm sure is a headache and source of bugs for the vibe coders out there. An AI could be designed to take more context into account and use existing lookup tools to get accurate function signatures and use them when generating function calls, but even though that would probably significantly improve output quality, I suspect it's the kind of thing that would be seen as too-baroque and thus not a priority. Would love to hear I'm wrong about any of this, but I suspect the consequences are that any medium-or-larger sized codebase written with LLM tools will have significant bloat from duplicate functionality, and will have places where better use of existing libraries would have made the code simpler. At a fundamental level, a principle like DRY is not something that current LLM training techniques are able to learn, and while they can imitate it from their training sets to some degree when asked for large amounts of code, when prompted for many smaller chunks, they're asymptotically likely to violate it.
I think this is an important critique in part because it cuts against the argument that "LLMs are the modern compliers, if you reject them you're just like the people who wanted to keep hand-writing assembly code, and you'll be just as obsolete." Compilers actually represented a great win for abstraction, encapsulation, and DRY in general, and they supported and are integral to open source development, whereas LLMs are set to do the opposite.
[1] to see what this looks like in action in prose, see the example on page 30 of the NYTimes copyright complaint against OpenAI (#AI #GenAI #LLMs #VibeCoding

What follows is a surprisingly elegant introduction to a lesser-known evolutionary theory,
wrapped in the curious biography of Sewall Wright
-- a geneticist with a lifelong fixation on guinea pigs.
I’ve occasionally wondered:
Why don’t we see fish wandering around on little legs, on their way to becoming something grander?
Wright put it more scientifically:
How do organisms evolve beneficial traits when the steps in between might be maladaptive?
I…

Evolution and Guinea Pig Toes
How one animal's oddity inspired Sewall Wright to take on one of Darwin's big ideas

Thinking about #DiscoElysium succesors(?), including ones with heavy ethical concerns. A lot of them have gone for female protagonists: Good! There could have been a couple more leading women in DE. But the reveal trailers are mainly voiced by men... men berating or mocking the central character.
Longdue's Hopetown has a father figure voice over, berating the protagonist: "Who do you think you are? [...] You don't understand the forces at play" Infantalised, she doesn't get to respond.
ZA/UM's Zero Parades VO is also a man, initially flattering the spy protagonist "brilliant, relentless" ... then saying she came after him and "everything she touched, written into failure". Again, no chance for the female spy to tell her side of the story ... And there's an objectifying/threatening section about how her fair hair is like a dandelion. Tangeant: what's with the heavy/bad pseudo-German VO accent?
Do I bother mentioning DarkMath's XXX Nightshift? Yes, for once a woman's VO, but (as you'll have guessed from the name) a porn-like, male-gaze view of what a woman would say and think.
So, don't be fooled that a female protagonist means we're actually getting a woman's POV. It's just a cosmetic change. Dora Klindžić's https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:rx3zlqzbjylvtyg6siikaouq experiences as a writer at ZA/UM show how women struggle to have a voice and stay employed in these types of studios. Many of the senior men she mentions are still at ZA/UM.

I just don’t know what to write anymore. Israel is committing genocide with the full support of our countries in the West.
What do I say to my friends in Palestine who don’t know if they’re going to survive the night? That we are morally vacuous? That we are horrible human beings? That we’ve lost any semblance of humanity we might have had? That we deserve their eternal wrath?
What do you say about societies that, far from failing to prevent genocide, support and profit from it?

Just read this post by @… on an optimistic AGI future, and while it had some interesting and worthwhile ideas, it's also in my opinion dangerously misguided, and plays into the current AGI hype in a harmful way.
https://social.coop/@eloquence/114940607434005478
My criticisms include:
- Current LLM technology has many layers, but the biggest most capable models are all tied to corporate datacenters and require inordinate amounts of every and water use to run. Trying to use these tools to bring about a post-scarcity economy will burn up the planet. We urgently need more-capable but also vastly more efficient AI technologies if we want to use AI for a post-scarcity economy, and we are *not* nearly on the verge of this despite what the big companies pushing LLMs want us to think.
- I can see that permacommons.org claims a small level of expenses on AI equates to low climate impact. However, given current deep subsidies on place by the big companies to attract users, that isn't a great assumption. The fact that their FAQ dodges the question about which AI systems they use isn't a great look.
- These systems are not free in the same way that Wikipedia or open-source software is. To run your own model you need a data harvesting & cleaning operation that costs millions of dollars minimum, and then you need millions of dollars worth of storage & compute to train & host the models. Right now, big corporations are trying to compete for market share by heavily subsidizing these things, but it you go along with that, you become dependent on them, and you'll be screwed when they jack up the price to a profitable level later. I'd love to see open dataset initiatives SBD the like, and there are some of these things, but not enough yet, and many of the initiatives focus on one problem while ignoring others (fine for research but not the basis for a society yet).
- Between the environmental impacts, the horrible labor conditions and undercompensation of data workers who filter the big datasets, and the impacts of both AI scrapers and AI commons pollution, the developers of the most popular & effective LLMs have a lot of answer for. This project only really mentions environmental impacts, which makes me think that they're not serious about ethics, which in turn makes me distrustful of the whole enterprise.
- Their language also ends up encouraging AI use broadly while totally ignoring several entire classes of harm, so they're effectively contributing to AI hype, especially with such casual talk of AGI and robotics as if embodied AGI were just around the corner. To be clear about this point: we are several breakthroughs away from AGI under the most optimistic assumptions, and giving the impression that those will happen soon plays directly into the hands of the Sam Altmans of the world who are trying to make money off the impression of impending huge advances in AI capabilities. Adding to the AI hype is irresponsible.
- I've got a more philosophical criticism that I'll post about separately.
I do think that the idea of using AI & other software tools, possibly along with robotics and funded by many local cooperatives, in order to make businesses obsolete before they can do the same to all workers, is a good one. Get your local library to buy a knitting machine alongside their 3D printer.
Lately I've felt too busy criticizing AI to really sit down and think about what I do want the future to look like, even though I'm a big proponent of positive visions for the future as a force multiplier for criticism, and this article is inspiring to me in that regard, even if the specific project doesn't seem like a good one.

Interesting thing about tomorrow's tarot show, rendering now, is that I upgraded from Blender 4.0 to blender 4.4 and it's quite a bit nicer to look at the timeline editor.
Was sad to find that the render time was up though. From about 3 seconds per frame usually to more like 12!?
Trying it with an old version I see that the lights and textures look way better with 4.4 than 4.0 though. A substantial step up in the way the show looks without me even doing anything other than waiting four times longer per frame.
Seems to be heavily dependent upon lighting now. The slow frames are like 12 seconds but the fast frames with minimal lighting and close up on the video are more like 2.
Looks too beautiful now to go back though. Upgraded my cloud-remote render machines too. We will render on four machines tonight. FOUR! The power of it all.
g3.4xlarge is no faster than g3.large but g6.xlarge seems to be twice the speed.
But hard to be sure really coz of the massive variance in time depending on the lighting.
Anyway, great show coming tomorrow. Sometimes I wonder what the hell I'm trying to do with it but tomorrow's show is the answer. Hide the angry bitter political rant behind a strange CGI tarot show. When the rant comes together well I like it.
https://wordcloudtarot.com/@wordcloudtarot/statuses/01JYFF0GQV1680Z0VG0YTFZDTP

Oh no it happened - client for a research project I’m working on got upset that we’re doing manual data analysis of survey responses, and complained about why we are so slow when their internal team working on a different report got “everything done in a couple of days with #AI tools”
And then they told us that waiting for proper human analysis is a “waste of time” and that we need to just chuck our dataset into AI and “get it over with”
I really don’t know what to do right now 🥲
Trying to do this properly on their expected timeline will mean very little sleep for multiple days, but giving up on the project quality and dumping it into AI is will make this entire project a waste of time. (As I wouldn’t be able to trust the output of the analysis, or be proud of it to showcase the final report as an example of our work, and not to mention that I don’t want to support this expectation to rush everything at work with these AI models)

An excellent explanation of what bothers me about LLMs, especially in schools (but also more broadly). It's changing who we are - we the community, not just individuals - and in ways we cannot control or manage. I guess some people want those changes. I do not.
It's ironic that writing has never been more central to our lives, with texting and messaging and blogging and social media, yet we are moving towards a sterile world where no one will know how to write.
https://discuss.systems/@rebeccawb/114886341261935128

We do need a European Sovereign Tech Fund, yes.
What we don’t need is Microsoft – a trillion-dollar surveillance capitalist from the US that peddles proprietary technology and is helping Israel carry out its genocide of the Palestinian people as we speak – having anything whatsoever to do with it.
#microsoft

Today is Joy Day!
How do you allow joy to show up in your life? How do you bring joy to others?
What does joy mean to you?
Got questions? I'm here to help
#EOLD #DeathDoula #AskAnnetta

Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Edit: fixed some typos.
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and thus more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of management caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.

"Donald Trump has Epstein DNA smeared all over him. He tries to hide who he is with concealer pancake make-up. It doesn’t work. We know who he is. He is Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend."
#trump #epstein
From: @…

RIVERS!
What can we learn from European rivers? How can we prevent floods using that knowledge?
What are some of Europe's latests wild rivers?
What is the "fifth season" in Estonia and what does it have to do with flooding rivers?
Find out at The European Perspective. New article by Raluca Besliu:
"Understanding the flow: Europe’s forgotten river wisdom"

Understanding the flow: Europe's forgotten river wisdom - The European Perspective
I come from a country where rivers crisscross the land like veins—feeding valleys, nourishing communities, and shaping the terrain. From wide, slow-moving

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.
- Carl Sagan

That's assuming it even tries.
It doesn't.
So what are we going to do next? One more toothless fine?
https://flipboard.com/@euronews/tech-news-tecns1r3z/-/a-lw-N-iJoQdSdiPJTlP8M5A:a:89340020-/0

Exclusive: Elon Musk’s X fails to deal with Russian disinformation, breaching EU rules, study says
Some 125 reports of Russian disinformation were reported to X, but only one was removed. The rest went largely ignored. More than 100 pieces of …

Epstein shit and adjacent, Rural America, Poverty, Abuse
Everyone who's not a pedophile thinks pedophiles are bad, but there's this special obsessed hatred you'll find among poor rural Americans. The whole QAnon/Epstein obsession may not really make sense to folks raised in cities. Like, why do these people think *so much* about pedophiles? Why do they think that everyone in power is a pedophile? Why would the Pizzagate thing make sense to anyone? What is this unhinged shit? A lot of folks (who aren't anarchists) might be inclined to ask "why can't these people just let the cops take care of it?"
I was watching Legal Eagle's run down on the Trump Epstein thing earlier today and I woke up thinking about something I don't know if I've ever talked about. Now that I'm not in the US, I'm not at any risk of talking about it. I don't know how much I would have been before, but that's not something I'm gonna dig into right now. So let me tell you a story that might explain a few things.
I'm like 16, maybe 17. I have my license, so this girl I was dating/not dating/just friends with/whatever would regularly convince me to drive her and her friends around. I think she's like 15 at the time. Her friends are younger than her.
She tells me that there's a party we can go to where they have beer. She was told to invite her friends, so I can come too. We're going to pick her friends up (we regularly fill the VW Golf well beyond the legal limit and drive places) and head to the party.
So I take these girls, at least is 13 years old, down to this party. I'm already a bit sketched out bringing a 13 year old to a party. We drive out for a while. It's in the country. We drive down a long dark road. Three are some barrel fires and a shack. This is all a bit strange, but not too abnormal for this area. We're a little ways outside of a place called Mill City (in Oregon).
We park and walk towards the shack. This dude who looks like a rat comes up and offers us beer. He laughs and talks to the girl who invited me, "What's he doing here? You're supposed to bring your girl friends." She's like, "He's our ride." I don't remember if he offered me a beer or not.
We go over to this shed and everyone starts smoking, except me because I didn't smoke until I turned 18. The other girls start talking about the rat face dude, who's wandered over by the fire with some other guys. They're mainly teasing one of the 13 year old girls about having sex with him a bunch of times. They say he's like, 32 or something. The other girls joke about him only having sex with 13 year olds because he's too ugly to have sex with anyone closer to his own age.
Somewhere along the line it comes out that he's a cop. I never forgot that, it's absolutely seared in to my memory. I can picture his face perfectly still, decades later, and them talking about how he's a deputy, he was in his 30's, and he was having sex with a 13 year old girl. I was the only boy there, but there were a few older men. This was a chunk of the good ol' boys club of the town. I think there were a couple of cops besides the one deputy, and a judge or the mayor or some kind of big local VIP.
I kept trying to get my friend to leave, but she wanted to stay. Turns out under age drinking with cops seems like a great deal if you're a kid because you know you won't get busted. I left alone, creeped the fuck out.
I was told later that I wasn't invited and that I couldn't talk about it, I've always been good at compartmentalization, so I never did.
Decades later it occurred to me what was actually happening. I'm pretty sure that cop was giving meth he'd seized as evidence to these kids. This wasn't some one-off thing. It was regular. Who knows how many decades it went on after I left, or how many decades it had been going on before I found out. I knew this type of thing had happened at least a few times before because that's how that 13 year old girl and that 32 year old cop had hooked up in the first place.
Hearing about Epstein's MO, targeting these teenage girls from fucked up backgrounds, it's right there for me. I wouldn't be surprised if they were involved in sex trafficking of minors or some shit like that... but who would you call if you found out? Half the sheriff's department was there and the other half would cover for them.
You live in the city and shit like that doesn't happen, or at least you don't think it happens. But rural poor folks have this intuition about power and abuse. It's right there and you know it.
Trump is such a familiar character for me, because he's exactly that small town mayor or sheriff. He'll will talk about being tough on crime and hunting down pedophiles, while hanging out at a party that exists so people can fuck 8th graders.
The problem with the whole thing is that rural folks will never break the cognitive dissonance between "kill the peods" and "back the blue." They'll never go kill those cops. No, the pedos must be somewhere else. It must be the elites. It must be outsiders. It can't be the cops and good ol' boys everyone respects. It can't be the mayor who rigs the election to win every time. It can't be the "good upstanding" sheriff. Nah, it's the Clintons.
To be fair, it's probably also the Clitnons, a bunch of other politicians, billionaires, etc. Epstein was exactly who everyone thought he was, and he didn't get away with it for so long without a whole lot of really powerful help.
There are still powerful people who got away with involvement with #Epstein. #Trump is one of them, but I don't really believe that he's the only one.
#USPol #ACAB

YOWSA that was some #toronto parade! We left #christiepits at dusk, with 4 sousaphones, some number of trumpets, trombones, saxophones of all sorts, fire dancers and drums galore, and I'm told my notoriously loud banjo was actually heard above the chaos.
It's largely a blur, but I do recall an extended 2nd line paused in the centre of some intersection where a blocked streetcar called Hold was opposite another that seemed in business, so that suggests we were crossing College?! A fair hike from Bloor.
My feet hate me, but it was a magical night. All musicians volunteered, for many it was old-home catching up with others not seen in years, and dancers of all ages.
I pinged a few fellow players with my "THIS is what Music is for, what we do on a stage is only a simulation of this" and all agreed. That gives me hope.

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 .

Is this a parody?
I don’t do #InfoSec or other cons so I don’t have a strong sense of whether the “Open Space” concept is brilliant or uproariously absurd. I lean towards the latter because it just seems to me like a recipe for people standing around.

Overly academic/distanced ethical discussions
Had a weird interaction with @/brainwane@social.coop just now. I misinterpreted one of their posts quoting someone else and I think the combination of that plus an interaction pattern where I'd assume their stance on something and respond critically to that ended up with me getting blocked. I don't have hard feelings exactly, and this post is only partly about this particular person, but I noticed something interesting by the end of the conversation that had been bothering me. They repeatedly criticized me for assuming what their position was, but never actually stated their position. They didn't say: "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, it's actually Y." They just said "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, please don't assume my position!" I get that it's annoying to have people respond to a straw man version of your argument, but when I in response asked some direct questions about what their position was, they gave some non-answers and then blocked me. It's entirely possible it's a coincidence, and they just happened to run out of patience on that iteration, but it makes me take their critique of my interactions a bit less seriously. I suspect that they just didn't want to hear what I was saying, while at the same time they wanted to feel as if they were someone who values public critique and open discussion of tricky issues (if anyone reading this post also followed our interaction and has a different opinion of my behavior, I'd be glad to hear it; it's possible In effectively being an asshole here and it would be useful to hear that if so).
In any case, the fact that at the end of the entire discussion, I'm realizing I still don't actually know their position on whether they think the AI use case in question is worthwhile feels odd. They praised the system on several occasions, albeit noting some drawbacks while doing so. They said that the system was possibly changing their anti-AI stance, but then got mad at me for assuming this meant that they thought this use-case was justified. Maybe they just haven't made up their mind yet but didn't want to say that?
Interestingly, in one of their own blog posts that got linked in the discussion, they discuss a different AI system, and despite listing a bunch of concrete harms, conclude that it's okay to use it. That's fine; I don't think *every* use of AI is wrong on balance, but what bothered me was that their post dismissed a number of real ethical issues by saying essentially "I haven't seen calls for a boycott over this issue, so it's not a reason to stop use." That's an extremely socially conformist version of ethics that doesn't sit well with me. The discussion also ended up linking this post: https://chelseatroy.com/2024/08/28/does-ai-benefit-the-world/ which bothered me in a related way. In it, Troy describes classroom teaching techniques for introducing and helping students explore the ethics of AI, and they seem mostly great. They avoid prescribing any particular correct stance, which is important when teaching given the power relationship, and they help students understand the limitations of their perspectives regarding global impacts, which is great. But the overall conclusion of the post is that "nobody is qualified to really judge global impacts, so we should focus on ways to improve outcomes instead of trying to judge them." This bothers me because we actually do have a responsibility to make decisive ethical judgments despite limitations of our perspectives. If we never commit to any ethical judgment against a technology because we think our perspective is too limited to know the true impacts (which I'll concede it invariably is) then we'll have to accept every technology without objection, limiting ourselves to trying to improve their impacts without opposing them. Given who currently controls most of the resources that go into exploration for new technologies, this stance is too permissive. Perhaps if our objection to a technology was absolute and instantly effective, I'd buy the argument that objecting without a deep global view of the long-term risks is dangerous. As things stand, I think that objecting to the development/use of certain technologies in certain contexts is necessary, and although there's a lot of uncertainly, I expect strongly enough that the overall outcomes of objection will be positive that I think it's a good thing to do.
The deeper point here I guess is that this kind of "things are too complicated, let's have a nuanced discussion where we don't come to any conclusions because we see a lot of unknowns along with definite harms" really bothers me.

Informal Education is Essential to Physics: Findings of the 2024 JNIPER Summit and Recommendations for Action
Alexandra C. Lau, Jessica R. Hoehn, Michael B. Bennett, Claudia Fracchiolla, Kathleen Hinko, Noah Finkelstein, Jacqueline Acres, Lindsey D. Anderson, Shane D. Bergin, Cherie Bornhorst, Turhan K. Carroll, Michael Gregory, Cameron Hares, E. L. Hazlett, Meghan Healy, Erik A Herman, Lindsay R. House, Michele W. McColgan, Brad McLain, Azar Panah, Sarah A. Perdue, Jonathan D. Perry, …

Informal Education is Essential to Physics: Findings of the 2024 JNIPER Summit and Recommendations for Action
In order to reach the full civic and scientific potential of physics, this white paper calls for a culture change in physics to recognize informal physics education (also referred to as public engagement or outreach) as an essential disciplinary practice. That is, engaging in informal physics education (IPE) is part of what it means to ''do physics.'' In June 2024, we hosted a summit with forty-two members of the Joint Network for Informal Physics Education and Research (JNIPER) to discuss conc…

Do transit planners realize they're helping the anti-Mamdani frenzy by publishing their pieces? Of *course* you're getting attention for your fares-are-good-actually writing now, despite the fact that no one cares about this normally - because billionaire media wants whatever they can use against Mamdani.
(As an aside, you also sound incredibly obnoxious when voters are like "we want fast & free buses" and you respond with "well actually..")

Jesse Raub (@jesseraub.bsky.social)
damn, it's also like he's already advocating for all of those things as part of his proposal. it's like maybe you didn't even read what his free bus fare policy included

“What AI sells is vastly different from what it delivers, particularly what it delivers out of the box.”
The post gives some great context on the study of “the difference between work-as-imagined (WAI) and work-as-done (WAD),” and says:
“If what we have to do to be productive with LLMs is to add a lot of scaffolding and invest effort to gain important but poorly defined skills, we should be able to assume that what we’re sold and what we get are rather different things. That gap implies that better designed artifacts could have better affordances, and be more appropriate to the task at hand.”
5/

This is what I got from thanks.dev’s Ali and it tracks with GitHub’s reaction in the maintainer community.
@… https://piaille.fr/@ewjoachim/114816028154436161

I was supposed to use Ruggothrikh for very specific tasks, why did I not do them?
Anyway now we'll do another Albion run...
What I like with Albion is that it is player driven...even the loot contains crafted items by other players.
I don't think many games are like this...I think this may be unique to Albion and a few other games like it.
They took player based crafting to a new level!

In the future, “they took us on buses, soldiers. When we arrived I was surprised: didn’t smell like I remember Everglades smelling. Wasn’t that wet rain smell. Was…different. Piles, sinking, of what had been people…my stomach turned.
I turned to the soldier with a different flag patch on their sleeve and tried to explain, ‘I didn’t do this, this wasn’t me.’
In lightly accented English, soldier said, ‘yes you did, you voted for this,’ punctuated with a rifle gesture to start carry…

At this rate, the Dems are gonna have to pay Kendrick Lamar do the response to the State Of The Union Address, aren’t they?

I’m so proud of my little brother.
I just spoke to him in his dorm room at a top 30 college here in the US, he just arrived for freshman orientation.
He got in on a full ride - tuition, housing, food, books, travel, stipend for daily expenses. Won a competitive scholarship to do so.
More than that, he’s had a tougher road than most to get there:
- he had to suddenly move away from Manila, Philippines (where he grew up) in middle school because of COVID restrictions that didn’t let kids go outside (2020)
- then, just as he adjusted to school and a different language in our home country, Ukraine, Russia invaded (2022)
- he stayed in Greece for a month while I was calling our congressional representative here in NY and negotiating with the US embassy to get them a visa ASAP to enter the US and be with me and my husband. There were no paths for Ukrainian refugees yet, we just wanted them with us temporarily for a few months to figure out what options they even had next.
- he had to wait, not going to school, with no clue where they’d move next, until TPS became available to Ukrainians and they got to stay here in the US
- then he had to continue high school in yet another system, yet another country, amidst news of bombings and destruction back home
- my mother wasn’t allowed to work for months while their documents were pending, so we had to raise money with a public GoFundMe campaign and my husband and I maxed out our credit cards to help them get by
- they shared a one-room cottage for the first year, graciously hosted for free by an elderly local couple
- he saw a therapist who also graciously took him in for free while they didn’t have insurance
- he had to graduate high school amidst news of other immigrant students getting arrested, detained, and deported at their own graduations around the country
- he wasn’t sure if he would even make it to college as this administration publicly considered canceling TPS for Ukrainians and cutting off their pathway to maintaining legal status.
We don’t know what tomorrow holds. But he’s there. He’s on campus. He got to go to college.
I love him so much.

But when it comes to ways for meeting the challenge, it always gets very vague. “Educators have a critical role to play” essentially means: “whatever, figure something out.”
Just create “curricula that blend machine efficiency with human judgment.” Right. And we need to encourage “reflection on the learning process itself.” Pray tell me why students should do so. What's the incentive if they’re already using

But when it comes to ways for meeting the challenge, it always gets very vague. “Educators have a critical role to play” essentially means: “whatever, figure something out.”
Just create “curricula that blend machine efficiency with human judgment.” Right. And we need to encourage “reflection on the learning process itself.” Pray tell me why students should do so. What's the incentive if they’re already using

Hi everyone at #MCH2025! We're about to start with the last talk of the day: #BadgeHub! In this talk Francis, Edwin, and Aleksander will explain the Infra, Frameworks, Databases, Backend and Frontend for this new website where Apps for this amazing Badge can be shared. Please reply to this message if…

All about BadgeHub WHY2025
BadgeHub is a Badge Application Website that enables Badge Enthousiasts to share Badge Apps. In this talk, we first explain what BadgeHub is and what you can do with it. After that, we go into all the technical details and difficult decisions that went into building BadgeHub with PostgreSQL, Node.js and Vite. We will talk about Infra, Frameworks, Databases, Backend and Frontend.

So we've got $170 billion here. What should we do with it? Cure cancer? End hunger? Nah, let's use it to be cruel to people. #maga

Subtooting since people in the original thread wanted it to be over, but selfishly tagging @… and @… whose opinions I value...
I think that saying "we are not a supply chain" is exactly what open-source maintainers should be doing right now in response to "open source supply chain security" threads.
I can't claim to be an expert and don't maintain any important FOSS stuff, but I do release almost all of my code under open licenses, and I do use many open source libraries, and I have felt the pain of needing to replace an unmaintained library.
There's a certain small-to-mid-scale class of program, including many open-source libraries, which can be built/maintained by a single person, and which to my mind best operate on a "snake growth" model: incremental changes/fixes, punctuated by periodic "skin-shedding" phases where make rewrites or version updates happen. These projects aren't immortal either: as the whole tech landscape around them changes, they become unnecessary and/or people lose interest, so they go unmaintained and eventually break. Each time one of their dependencies breaks (or has a skin-shedding moment) there's a higher probability that they break or shed too, as maintenance needs shoot up at these junctures. Unless you're a company trying to make money from a single long-lived app, it's actually okay that software churns like this, and if you're a company trying to make money, your priorities absolutely should not factor into any decisions people making FOSS software make: we're trying (and to a huge extent succeeding) to make a better world (and/or just have fun with our own hobbies share that fun with others) that leaves behind the corrosive & planet-destroying plague which is capitalism, and you're trying to personally enrich yourself by embracing that plague. The fact that capitalism is *evil* is not an incidental thing in this discussion.
To make an imperfect analogy, imagine that the peasants of some domain have set up a really-free-market, where they provide each other with free stuff to help each other survive, sometimes doing some barter perhaps but mostly just everyone bringing their surplus. Now imagine the lord of the domain, who is the source of these peasants' immiseration, goes to this market secretly & takes some berries, which he uses as one ingredient in delicious tarts that he then sells for profit. But then the berry-bringer stops showing up to the free market, or starts bringing a different kind of fruit, or even ends up bringing rotten berries by accident. And the lord complains "I have a supply chain problem!" Like, fuck off dude! Your problem is that you *didn't* want to build a supply chain and instead thought you would build your profit-focused business in other people's free stuff. If you were paying the berry-picker, you'd have a supply chain problem, but you weren't, so you really have an "I want more free stuff" problem when you can't be arsed to give away your own stuff for free.
There can be all sorts of problems in the really-free-market, like maybe not enough people bring socks, so the peasants who can't afford socks are going barefoot, and having foot problems, and the peasants put their heads together and see if they can convince someone to start bringing socks, and maybe they can't and things are a bit sad, but the really-free-market was never supposed to solve everyone's problems 100% when they're all still being squeezed dry by their taxes: until they are able to get free of the lord & start building a lovely anarchist society, the really-free-market is a best-effort kind of deal that aims to make things better, and sometimes will fall short. When it becomes the main way goods in society are distributed, and when the people who contribute aren't constantly drained by the feudal yoke, at that point the availability of particular goods is a real problem that needs to be solved, but at that point, it's also much easier to solve. And at *no* point does someone coming into the market to take stuff only to turn around and sell it deserve anything from the market or those contributing to it. They are not a supply chain. They're trying to help each other out, but even then they're doing so freely and without obligation. They might discuss amongst themselves how to better coordinate their mutual aid, but they're not going to end up forcing anyone to bring anything or even expecting that a certain person contribute a certain amount, since the whole point is that the thing is voluntary & free, and they've all got changing life circumstances that affect their contributions. Celebrate whatever shows up at the market, express your desire for things that would be useful, but don't impose a burden on anyone else to bring a specific thing, because otherwise it's fair for them to oppose such a burden on you, and now you two are doing your own barter thing that's outside the parameters of the really-free-market.

"In churches we pray for revival, but we need to understand what that really means. It is not just about personal change, but about change in the whole society. That requires that we lay down our arms, care for the poor, and treat creation well."
—YDS Professor Willie James Jennings in this interview with the Dutch Daily Newspaper. Prof. (To access the article, you'll need to do a free registration. Google translation should help you turn the Dutch into English.)

Series C, Episode 13 - Terminal
CALLY: We've got to help them!
TARRANT: No. It's too late. There's nothing we can do. [The links rip at Reeval and Toron's clothing.]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/313/274 B7B3

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

I've been listening to a podcast by the German public broadcaster ​ARD about the end of the world. Every episode had a different topic and one was about AI. It was mostly sourced from an interview with a youtuber but one idea is now stuck in my head: what if AI doesn't launch nukes but develops into an all-powerful actor whose aims are not aligned with those of human survival? Do we have a precedent?
Yes. There are such super-human and quasi-immortal beings here on earth today…

"When we say monumental, you had better believe it; the 500 pages of this volume, laid out with astonishing detail (and a very small font size) summarize the history and evolution of computers from 1945 to 1990. Throughout these pages, Waldrop reveals that the backbone, the axis, the arrow, the orientation, the mastermind of all that history was none other than Lick himself: he was the incarnation of the phrase “being at the right place at the right time”."

J. C. R. Licklider & M. Mitchell Waldrop
The writings of Jorge Luis Borges twist our perception of time and space. In between articles about Shaw, Chesterton, Wilde, and Coleridge, his 1952 book "Otras Inquisiciones" included an unexpected gem: a short story called "El Tiempo y J. W. Dunne". The question is, who was this John William Dunne and what does he have to do with time? Well, his name might be forgotten by contemporary audiences, but Dunne was the author of one of the biggest bestsellers of the first half of the twentieth cent…

I believe I have managed to prove my ID in order to comply with the new laws that say I have to prove my ID to own the business I own that I'm sure already asked me to prove my ID when I registered it.
First we tried the on-web version, but that apparently relies upon the corporates having managed to profile and track me, because it told me they had no questions upon which to base identification. Good I guess? My avoid-tracking systems must be working at least a bit?
Next we tried the android app, but apparently the phone I tried that with is too old and the app won't install.
So next option is turning up at a post office with a printed letter. I don't own a printer though, so had to have them post that to me.
Took the letter and a driving licence up to the post office today and "It's not going through" they said, pointing to a stalled progress bar on an android app on a tablet.
Um. Okay. So?
Just wait longer apparently. About ten minutes and it finally proceeded and the post office man took a photograph of me after asking me to disrobe of my robe, strip down to a teeshirt and jeans.
Not sure in what sense this has proven my ID any more than it was already proven to get the driving licence or company registration in the first place?
Apparently I now have government logins for "One Login" and for "government gateway" and they are not the same thing? But sort of are the same thing?
Can't say I really understand it. Expect they'll introduce a third government login when they do these Digital ID cards they're talking about.
God knows how I'm supposed to know which to use when the company tax records need updating in a few months.
#id #government #oneLogin

Best comment ever below this post:
"You know what else is unsafe? Life, yet we do it all the time.
I don’t care about rust and it’s artistic fanatics doing artistic screeching every time some C programmer uses a pointer."
👏🏻😂🙏😬🫣😳
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/04/a-gent

A Gentle Introduction To Fortran
Originally known as FORTRAN, but written in lower case since the 1990s with Fortran 90, this language was developed initially by John Backus as a way to make writing programs for the IBM 704 mainfr…

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

Agreed with what @… said, if
and only if
we view this as the start of a marathon.
We are going to have to do this again, and again, and again, and all kinds of other work beyond it.
https://mstdn.social/@stux/114684095462476087

#Blakes7 Series B, Episode 09 - Countdown
BLAKE: We'll do it. [Starts to call the ship]
AVON: Wait. Disarming a device is not your field. You finish what we came here for: find Provine.
GRANT: [To Avon] I'll come with you.
AVON: No.

From what I’ve seen of #FediCon (which, believe it or not, is a convention for the FEDIVERSE), there seems to be a whole lot of “check out this non-Fediverse thing that is in fact built on Bluesky” and “here are some problems with the Fediverse that no one actually faces, how do we fix them, let’s make it centralized” and not much actual talk about ongoing Fedi projects.

Keep the pressure on the very few republicans who know none of this is okay
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lr3xaxp7m22l

We stopped for ice cream tonight and I saw a guy with an interesting shirt and I said "Hey, is that a `Prisoner` shirt"? (meaning the 1960's series starring Patrick McGoohan) and he said "Yeah, but it's actually a Knobcon shirt." and I said "Ah, Knobcon, cool!"
I explained all those things to my partner and then said "Do you know how excited that dude will be when tells someone that a guy recognized his shirt and knew what both things were!?&q…

"My vision of a world with computers is a world in which people have a lot more time to do what they like. Playing tennis, jogging… they’ll have plenty of time to go to the shore. I’d go to the library. I could do my work at home. I could have a computer at home and talk to my office. I could live up on top of a nice mountain in New Hampshire and smell pine trees and it would be the same as if I were here in the sub-sub-subbasement of the Pentagon."
– Grace Hopper

Series B, Episode 05 - Pressure Point
JENNA: You're suggesting that we go into the Forbidden Zone and attack Control?
BLAKE: Yes, that is what I am suggesting.
CALLY: Do we know where this computer complex is?
JENNA: Most Earth people have heard of it.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/205/49

So I've found my answer after maybe ~30 minutes of effort. First stop was the first search result on Startpage (https://millennialhawk.com/does-poop-have-calories/), which has some evidence of maybe-AI authorship but which is better than a lot of slop. It actually has real links & cites research, so I'll start by looking at the sources.
It claims near the top that poop contains 4.91 kcal per gram (note: 1 kcal = 1 Calorie = 1000 calories, which fact I could find/do trust despite the slop in that search). Now obviously, without a range or mention of an average, this isn't the whole picture, but maybe it's an average to start from? However, the citation link is to a study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32235930/) which only included 27 people with impaired glucose tolerance and obesity. Might have the cited stat, but it's definitely not a broadly representative one if this is the source. The public abstract does not include the stat cited, and I don't want to pay for the article. I happen to be affiliated with a university library, so I could see if I have access that way, but it's a pain to do and not worth it for this study that I know is too specific. Also most people wouldn't have access that way.
Side note: this doing-the-research protect has the nice benefit of letting you see lots of cool stuff you wouldn't have otherwise. The abstract of this study is pretty cool and I learned a bit about gut microbiome changes from just reading the abstract.
My next move was to look among citations in this article to see if I could find something about calorie content of poop specifically. Luckily the article page had indicators for which citations were free to access. I ended up reading/skimming 2 more articles (a few more interesting facts about gut microbiomes were learned) before finding this article whose introduction has what I'm looking for: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3127503/
Here's the relevant paragraph:
"""
The alteration of the energy-balance equation, which is defined by the equilibrium of energy intake and energy expenditure (1–5), leads to weight gain. One less-extensively-studied component of the energy-balance equation is energy loss in stools and urine. Previous studies of healthy adults showed that ≈5% of ingested calories were lost in stools and urine (6). Individuals who consume high-fiber diets exhibit a higher fecal energy loss than individuals who consume low-fiber diets with an equivalent energy content (7, 8). Webb and Annis (9) studied stool energy loss in 4 lean and 4 obese individuals and showed a tendency to lower the fecal energy excretion in obese compared with lean study participants.
"""
And there's a good-enough answer if we do some math, along with links to more in-depth reading if we want them. A Mayo clinic calorie calculator suggests about 2250 Calories per day for me to maintain my weight, I think there's probably a lot of variation in that number, but 5% of that would be very roughly 100 Calories lost in poop per day, so maybe an extremely rough estimate for a range of humans might be 50-200 Calories per day. Interestingly, one of the AI slop pages I found asserted (without citation) 100-200 Calories per day, which kinda checks out. I had no way to trust that number though, and as we saw with the provenance of the 4.91 kcal/gram, it might not be good provenance.
To double-check, I visited this link from the paragraph above: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022316622169853?via=ihub
It's only a 6-person study, but just the abstract has numbers: ~250 kcal/day pooped on a low-fiber diet vs. ~400 kcal/day pooped on a high-fiber diet. That's with intakes of ~2100 and ~2350 kcal respectively, which is close to the number from which I estimated 100 kcal above, so maybe the first estimate from just the 5% number was a bit low.
Glad those numbers were in the abstract, since the full text is paywalled... It's possible this study was also done on some atypical patient group...
Just to come full circle, let's look at that 4.91 kcal/gram number again. A search suggests 14-16 ounces of poop per day is typical, with at least two sources around 14 ounces, or ~400 grams. (AI slop was strong here too, with one including a completely made up table of "studies" that was summarized as 100-200 grams/day). If we believe 400 grams/day of poop, then 4.91 kcal/gram would be almost 2000 kcal/day, which is very clearly ludicrous! So that number was likely some unrelated statistic regurgitated by the AI. I found that number in at least 3 of the slop pages I waded through in my initial search.

"The industry perpetuates this state of things, keeping itself in a state of blissful high-hormone idiocy. Software is important, so clearly those who are writing it must be hailed as the holders of some occult knowledge and the purveyors of infinite wisdom. Through bribery, hubris, or ill luck, some of those same assholes find themselves later in management positions, and continue the tradition by hiring more people like themselves, because that is what humans do."

Series A, Episode 10 - Breakdown
BLAKE: [V.O.]Have you done it, Avon?
AVON: Soon.
BLAKE: [V.O.]How soon?
AVON: I can talk or I can work, but I can't do both.
BLAKE: [V.O.]We're running out of time, Avon.
[Flight deck]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/110/225…

Double descent: When do neural quantum states generalize?
M. Schuyler Moss, Alev Orfi, Christopher Roth, Anirvan M. Sengupta, Antoine Georges, Dries Sels, Anna Dawid, Agnes Valenti
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00068

Double descent: When do neural quantum states generalize?
Neural quantum states (NQS) provide flexible wavefunction parameterizations for numerical studies of quantum many-body physics. While inspired by deep learning, it remains unclear to what extent NQS share characteristics with neural networks used for standard machine learning tasks. We demonstrate that NQS exhibit the double descent phenomenon, a key feature of modern deep learning, where generalization worsens as network size increases before improving again in an overparameterized regime. Not…

Long; central Massachusetts colonial history
Today on a whim I visited a site in Massachusetts marked as "Huguenot Fort Ruins" on OpenStreetMaps. I drove out with my 4-year-old through increasingly rural central Massachusetts forests & fields to end up on a narrow street near the top of a hill beside a small field. The neighboring houses had huge lawns, some with tractors.
Appropriately for this day and this moment in history, the history of the site turns out to be a microcosm of America. Across the field beyond a cross-shaped stone memorial stood an info board with a few diagrams and some text. The text of the main sign (including typos/misspellings) read:
"""
Town Is Formed
Early in the 1680's, interest began to generate to develop a town in the area west of Natick in the south central part of the Commonwealth that would be suitable for a settlement. A Mr. Hugh Campbell, a Scotch merchant of Boston petitioned the court for land for a colony. At about the same time, Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton also were desirous of obtaining land for a settlement. A claim was made for all lands west of the Blackstone River to the southern land of Massachusetts to a point northerly of the Springfield Road then running southwesterly until it joined the southern line of Massachusetts.
Associated with Dudley and Stoughton was Robert Thompson of London, England, Dr. Daniel Cox and John Blackwell, both of London and Thomas Freak of Hannington, Wiltshire, as proprietors. A stipulation in the acquisition of this land being that within four years thirty families and an orthodox minister settle in the area. An extension of this stipulation was granted at the end of the four years when no group large enough seemed to be willing to take up the opportunity.
In 1686, Robert Thompson met Gabriel Bernor and learned that he was seeking an area where his countrymen, who had fled their native France because of the Edict of Nantes, were desirous of a place to live. Their main concern was to settle in a place that would allow them freedom of worship. New Oxford, as it was the so-named, at that time included the larger part of Charlton, one-fourth of Auburn, one-fifth of Dudley and several square miles of the northeast portion of Southbridge as well as the easterly ares now known as Webster.
Joseph Dudley's assessment that the area was capable of a good settlement probably was based on the idea of the meadows already established along with the plains, ponds, brooks and rivers. Meadows were a necessity as they provided hay for animal feed and other uses by the settlers. The French River tributary books and streams provided a good source for fishing and hunting. There were open areas on the plains as customarily in November of each year, the Indians burnt over areas to keep them free of underwood and brush. It appeared then that this area was ready for settling.
The first seventy-five years of the settling of the Town of Oxford originally known as Manchaug, embraced three different cultures. The Indians were known to be here about 1656 when the Missionary, John Eliott and his partner Daniel Gookin visited in the praying towns. Thirty years later, in 1686, the Huguenots walked here from Boston under the guidance of their leader Isaac Bertrand DuTuffeau. The Huguenot's that arrived were not peasants, but were acknowledged to be the best Agriculturist, Wine Growers, Merchant's, and Manufacter's in France. There were 30 families consisting of 52 people. At the time of their first departure (10 years), due to Indian insurrection, there were 80 people in the group, and near their Meetinghouse/Church was a Cemetery that held 20 bodies. In 1699, 8 to 10 familie's made a second attempt to re-settle, failing after only four years, with the village being completely abandoned in 1704.
The English colonist made their way here in 1713 and established what has become a permanent settlement.
"""
All that was left of the fort was a crumbling stone wall that would have been the base of a higher wooden wall according to a picture of a model (I didn't think to get a shot of that myself). Only trees and brush remain where the multi-story main wooden building was.
This story has so many echoes in the present:
- The rich colonialists from Boston & London agree to settle the land, buying/taking land "rights" from the colonial British court that claimed jurisdiction without actually having control of the land. Whether the sponsors ever actually visited the land themselves I don't know. They surely profited somehow, whether from selling on the land rights later or collecting taxes/rent or whatever, by they needed poor laborers to actually do the work of developing the land (& driving out the original inhabitants, who had no say in the machinations of the Boston court).
- The land deal was on condition that there capital-holders who stood to profit would find settlers to actually do the work of colonizing. The British crown wanted more territory to be controlled in practice not just in theory, but they weren't going to be the ones to do the hard work.
- The capital-holders actually failed to find enough poor suckers to do their dirty work for 4 years, until the Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, were desperate enough to accept their terms.
- Of course, the land was only so ripe for settlement because of careful tending over centuries by the natives who were eventually driven off, and whose land management practices are abandoned today. Given the mention of praying towns (& dates), this was after King Phillip's war, which resulted in at least some forced resettlement of native tribes around the area, but the descendants of those "Indians" mentioned in this sign are still around. For example, this is the site of one local band of Nipmuck, whose namesake lake is about 5 miles south of the fort site: #LandBack.

Series A, Episode 04 - Time Squad
BLAKE: Then stay with us.
CALLY: Thank you.
JENNA: What are we going to do about the projectile.
BLAKE: Dump it in deep space.
JENNA: Thanks a lot.
GAN: I don't like the sound of that. It's murder.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/104/490

Toronto Star: “New numbers reveal 10,000-plus Ontario college layoffs, 600 programs cancelled or suspended over past year”
The bloodbath in our higher education system in Canada has gotten NO press even though provincial governments and likely federal KNOW. This is the first in depth article I have seen. ALL governments micro-manage university and college policy/finances, no matter what they might say to the contrary.
Here are some truths you need to know:
Yes, I am biased as a 25 year employee of a University.
Yes, my University has also had completely unprecedented cuts in the past 12-24 months, with more coming.
Yes, it is because of the loss of International Students and their tuition revenue. Without that loss, many domestic enrollment numbers have actually been growing, but the money per student is orders of magnitude less. (ie. International was a cash cow)
Yes, faculty and even many admin, have been warning about the government downloading funding onto International tuitions for decades.
Yes, government will claim they are “investing more than ever”, but this is usually about Capital expenses (buildings, residences, infrastructure) or meeting contractual increases for staff salaries, *not* operating expenses.
Yes, in BC in the 1980s 80-90% of a University or College operating budget was covered by “base funding” from the province. Now, it is often below 50%. (If this makes you ask… is it still a “public University system”, please do!!)
And finally, yes, if we want to consider ourselves a modern country, we cannot possibly think this kind of contraction in educational opportunity (while domestic tuitions continue to increase!) is at all healthy for our society as a whole.
Toronto Star: #canpoli #cdnpoli #education #internationalEd #immigration #postsecondary #educationShouldBeFree

How the US democracy is designed to avoid representation
Right now in the US, a system which proclaims to give each citizen representation, my interests are not represented very well by most of my so-called representatives at any level of government. This is true for a majority of Americans across the political spectrum, and it happens by design. The "founding fathers" were explicit about wanting a system of government that would appear Democratic but which would keep power in the hands of rich white landowners, and they successfully designed exactly that. But how does disenfranchisement work in this system?
First, a two-party system locked in by first-post-the-post winner-takes-all elections immediately destroys representation for everyone who didn't vote for the winner, including those who didn't vote or weren't eligible to vote. Single-day non-holiday elections and prisoner disenfranchisement go a long way towards ensuring working-class people get no say, but much larger is the winner-takes all system. In fact, even people who vote for the winning candidate don't get effective representation if they're really just voting against the opponent as the greater of two evils. In a 51/49 election with 50% turnout, you've immediately ensured that ~75% of eligible voters don't get represented, and with lesser-of-two-evils voting, you create an even wider gap to wedge corporate interests into. Politicians need money to saturate their lesser-of-two-evils message far more than they need to convince any individual voter to support their policies. It's even okay if they get caught lying, cheating, or worse (cough Epstein cough) as long as the other side is also doing those things and you can freeze out new parties.
Second, by design the Senate ensures uneven representation, allowing control of the least-populous half of states to control or at least shut down the legislative process. A rough count suggests 284.6 million live in the 25 most-populous states, while only 54.8 million live in the rest. Currently, counting states with divided representation as two half-states with half as much population, 157.8 million people are represented by 53 Republican sensors, while 180.5 million people get only 45 seats of Democratic representation. This isn't an anti-Democrat bias, it's a bias towards less-populous states, whose residents get more than their share it political power.
I haven't even talked about gerrymandering yet, or family/faith-based "party loyalty," etc. Overall, the effect is that the number of people whose elected representatives meaningfully represent their interests on any given issue is vanishingly small (like, 10% of people tops), unless you happen to be rich enough to purchase lobbying power or direct access.
If we look at polls, we can see how lack of representation lets congress & the president enact many policies that go against what a majority of the population wants. Things like abortion restrictions, the current ICE raids, and Medicare cuts are deeply unpopular, but they benefit the political class and those who can buy access. These are possible because the system ensures at every step of the way that ordinary people do NOT get the one thing the system promises them: representation in the halls of power.
Okay, but is this a feature of all democracies, inherent in the nature of a majority-decides system? Not exactly...
1/2
#uspol #democracy

#Blakes7 Series C, Episode 05 - The Harvest of Kairos
AVON: So?
TARRANT: So what do we do before they blow us out of the galaxy?
AVON: We attack.
TARRANT: Attack? We have nothing to attack with.
AVON: Then bluff it. Tell them to surrender.

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

US ethnic cleansing and what to do about it
Reposting link to source article instead of screenshot of tweet that had no alt text:
Data on arrests shows that ICE was heavily engaged in racial profiling in LA, because their arrest numbers fell by ~66% after that were ordered to stop making arrests based just in factors like skin color, with place, or language spoken.
#ICE #USPol

A while ago, I've followed the example given by #Fedora and unbundled ensurepip wheels from #Python in #Gentoo (just checked — "a while ago" was 3 years ago). This had the important advantage that it enabled us to update these wheels along with the actual pip and setuptools packages, meaning new virtual environments would get fresh versions rather than whatever CPython happened to bundle at the time of release.
I had considered using our system packages to prepare these wheels, but since we were already unbundling dependencies back then, that couldn't work. So I just went with fetching upstream wheels from PyPI. Why not build them from source instead? Well, besides feeling unnecessary (it's not like the PyPI wheels are actually binary packages), we probably didn't have the right kind of eclass support for that at the time.
Inspired by @…, today I've tried preparing new revisions of ensurepip packages that actually do build everything from source. So what changed, and why should building from source matter now? Firstly, as part of the wheel reuse patches, we do have a reasonably clean architecture to grab the wheels created as part of the PEP517 build. Secondly, since we're unbundling dependencies from pip and setuptools, we're effectively testing different packages than these installed as ensurepip wheels — and so it would be meaningful to test both variants. Thirdly, building from source is going to make patching easier, and at the very least enable user patching.
While at it, I've refreshed the test suite runs in all three regular packages (pip, setuptools and wheel — we need an "ensurepip" wheel for the last because of test suites). And of course, I hit some test failures in testing the versions with bundled dependencies, and I've discovered a random bug in #PyPy.
https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/42882 (yes, we haven't moved yet)
https://github.com/pypy/pypy/issues/5306

(And now @… are less than €19,000 away from their stretch target of € 75,000 to provide @… services to all. Amazing work folks and fedizens 🤩)
#Fediverse is amazing, less than 24 hours after I posted this and @peertube  is only €223 from the penultimate target with 30 hours to go.
Not taking any credit for that, but happy to see a chord has been struck for all genuine surveillance-capital-free social media. Even more important in the time of #NoKings.
Looks like I'm going to be busy making #Science videos on #ClimateChange in the #Polar Regions too for the next few weeks.
Here's one I made earlier on #SurfaceMass Budget. Let me know if there's something #Climate and/or #ice related you'd like to see a short clip about and I'll see what we can do
#fedizens who may not have seen this already? If they make the €55,000 target I promise to write a peertube channel into my next grant proposal, AND I'll post some better quality videos of our Greenland and #Antarctic research over the coming weeks...
Go!
https://support.joinpeertube.org/en/

AI, AGI, and learning efficiency
My 4-month-old kid is not DDoSing Wikipedia right now, nor will they ever do so before learning to speak, read, or write. Their entire "training corpus" will not top even 100 million "tokens" before they can speak & understand language, and do so with real intentionally.
Just to emphasize that point: 100 words-per-minute times 60 minutes-per-hour times 12 hours-per-day times 365 days-per-year times 4 years is a mere 105,120,000 words. That's a ludicrously *high* estimate of words-per-minute and hours-per-day, and 4 years old (the age of my other kid) is well after basic speech capabilities are developed in many children, etc. More likely the available "training data" is at least 1 or 2 orders of magnitude less than this.
The point here is that large language models, trained as they are on multiple *billions* of tokens, are not developing their behavioral capabilities in a way that's remotely similar to humans, even if you believe those capabilities are similar (they are by certain very biased ways of measurement; they very much aren't by others). This idea that humans must be naturally good at acquiring language is an old one (see e.g. #AI #LLM #AGI

The #Fediverse is amazing, less than 24 hours after I posted this and @… is only €223 from the penultimate target with 30 hours to go.
Not taking any credit for that, but happy to see a chord has been struck for all genuine surveillance-capital-free social media. Even more important in the time of #NoKings.
Looks like I'm going to be busy making #Science videos on #ClimateChange in the #Polar Regions too for the next few weeks.
Here's one I made earlier on #SurfaceMass Budget. Let me know if there's something #Climate and/or #ice related you'd like to see a short clip about and I'll see what we can do
#fedizens who may not have seen this already? If they make the €55,000 target I promise to write a peertube channel into my next grant proposal, AND I'll post some better quality videos of our Greenland and #Antarctic research over the coming weeks...
Go!
#bigTech derisory) amount of EUR 75,000 to develop the opensource #fediverse competitor app to Youtube. Maybe chuck 'em a few euros if you think it useful?
https://support.joinpeertube.org/en/

It bothers me that so many LLM/genAI applications seem to be all about "now that we have new tool X, what can we do with it" while completely ignoring the question "for problem Y, what is the best tool for the job?"
Perhaps unsurprisingly for developers where we have strong evidence of poor ethics (e.g., uncritically using big-brand LLMs), I suspect that many of the people behind these systems care more about the exhiliration of using new tech and the prestige it might bring them than any of the problems they might claim to solve (if they even bother to identify such things at all). Turns out that's a great way to cause a lot of harm in the world, since you likely won't do a good job of measuring outcomes (if you even bother to do so) and you especially won't carefully look for systemic biases or ways your system might unintentionally hurt/exclude people. You also won't be concerned about whether your system ends up displacing efforts that would have led to better solutions.
#AI #GenerativeAI #GenAI #LLM