Tootfinder

"There was once a programming environment made by Microsoft called Visual J . It allowed one to write, debug, and run Java code on Windows. Visual J was the first serious, usable, complete IDE Java ever had, at least until IntelliJ IDEA appeared in 2001."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/w…

Write Anywhere, Run Once
Back in the days when I had a day job in the .NET galaxy, I had a colleague who was a terrific C# developer… born in the island of Java. Given the looks I got from him, I think I was the first to point this fact to him. Or maybe I just pissed him off. In any case, here go some personal anecdotes around Java, stretching back 23 years.

Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
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 this more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of manservant 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.

Field Diary 2025
I very rarely have time to write a proper field diary, our time in the field is usually extremely hectic and filled with 12-18 hour working days that blend seamlessly together. I suspect this week is also going to be busy, but Nature has offered an olive branch in the shape of an early break-up of the sea ice, so I'm taking a moment to write a few things down.
http://sternaparadisaea.net/2025/05/24/field-diary-2025/

Join Andrew Musselman and Trevor Grant as they present the latest developments in Mahout's new quantum compute layer, Qumat. They will provide an overview of the project, explain why Qumat was developed, and demonstrate its current capabilities. They will also present a demo of Qumat in action and conclude with calls to action for researchers and engineers who are interested in using and contributing to the project.
Learn more:

Time For 9 o'clock #HashTagGames hosted by @…
We lost George Wendt, the actor who played NORM! on Cheers, this week. In remembrance, Let's play!
#FictionalCharactersLastWords

@… @… Tempting, but it’s old now, and hopefully I’ll have a much more positive one to write in a month or two. I have received the green light to exorcise Jira from my team.

lol at Ian Hislop hosting the Paul Foot awards:
(1/2)
"Boris Johnson, fellow journalist, wrote about Keir Starmer. He said Keir was the orange ball-chewing manacled gimp of Brussels. And we always tell young journalists: write about what you know!
Some of you will remember that a lot of Tory MPs were actually found with orange balls in manacles at various stages of the last government.

So, @… is working on using LLMs to process XML Except for, the models can’t write legal XML. So he’s using the model to generate a sloppy-XML parser: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/202…

My First Open Source AI Generated Library
In a first for me, I published some agentic programmed AI slop to PyPI.

Read an essay on HN advocating letting users change the edit prompt of the LLM used in their services, and the envy of letting an AI write (and thus think) in your place (often writing longer prompt than the LLM output), is completely alien and dystopian to me (and I say this as an AI enthusiast). This sounds like an ego death.

#WordWeavers 22/5: If you could magically write a new genre really well, which genre would you choose?
You mean like multi-classing in D&D or do you mean switch genre entirely? I think I'll stick to fantasy, thank you very much. I love my genre, so if I could just get a few levels in "fantasy writing", that'd be great, thank you 🙂

Why why why? Last night I upgraded from Sonoma to Sequoia, and now Spotlight doesn't work. The 🔍 icon is still there, the entry box opens, I write something in it and
NOTHING HAPPENS.

Sonnet 076 - LXXVI
Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O! know sweet love I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;…

Nothing I’m trying to write is "flowing"...it's all laborious.
I'm encouraged by "Your labor isn’t a sign of defeat" from @… wherein she quotes Verlyn Klinkenborg:
"if you accept that writing is hard work, And that’s what it feels like when you’re writing, Then everything is as it should be. Your labor is…

Feedbackless Feed
A (non)social feedbackless feed to nowhere

Stories of expanded solidarity: the personal and the political in the degrowth perspective from the European periphery
by Mladen Domazet1 When Mark asked me to contribute to this series, there was an instruction to try to point to any good prospects for degrowth in this conjuncture, and a lingering implication to use my semiperipheral voice to inform the by-now-desperate comrades in the metropole. Combine that with a professional deformation to write essays when given…

Stories of expanded solidarity: the personal and the political in the degrowth perspective from the European periphery
by Mladen Domazet1 When Mark asked me to contribute to this series, there was an instruction to try to point to any good prospects for degrowth in this conjuncture, and a lingering implication to u…

The rise of student reliance on #AI to write for them reminds me of this quote, and how we're seeing it play out in real time:
“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” - George Orwell

Check out I Don't Write About Girls by Marcin feat. Ichika Nito on Amazon Music
https://music.amazon.com/albums/B0D5DCLF4L?trackAsin=B0D5DCLF4M&do=play&ts=1750437613&ref=dm_sh_4hj6HTTKIHglFy…

Words like “prowess” and “tapestry,”
which are favored by ChatGPT,
are creeping into our vocabulary,
while words like “bolster,” “unearth,” and “nuance,”
words less favored by ChatGPT,
have declined in use.
Researchers are already documenting shifts in the way we speak and communicate as a result of ChatGPT
— and they see this linguistic influence accelerating into something much larger.

You sound like ChatGPT
AI isn’t just impacting how we write — it’s changing how we speak and interact with others. And there’s only more to come.

"He has identified three levels of human signals that we’ve lost in adopting AI into our communication. The first level is that of basic humanity signals, cues that speak to our authenticity as a human being like moments of vulnerability or personal rituals, which say to others, “This is me, I’m human.” The second level consists of attention and effort signals that prove “I cared enough to write this myself.” And the third level is ability signals which show our sense of humor, our comp…

You sound like ChatGPT
AI isn’t just impacting how we write — it’s changing how we speak and interact with others. And there’s only more to come.

How to find #deadcode in your #Java services
https://blog.picnic.nl/how-to-find-dea

#WordWeavers 22/5: If you could magically write a new genre really well, which genre would you choose?
You mean like multi-classing in D&D or do you mean switch genre entirely? I think I'll stick to fantasy, thank you very much. I love my genre, so if I could just get a few levels in "fantasy writing", that'd be great, thank you 🙂

AI is just a tool, like a pencil. A pencil that can only write and draw what some faceless corporation somewhere allows you to write and draw.
#AI #theMastersTools

Instead of needing to write a complex function or remember complicated formulas, we just need to know how to instruct AI to get the results we want.
And if we’re not experts, we can have multiple AIs check the work.
We’re basically sitting in a council of experts and learning along the way.
So, in the end, we’re not getting dumber - we’re just shifting our knowledge and adapting to a new way of thinking.

Watching the frustratingly fruitless fights over the USEFULNESS of LLM-based coding helpers, I've come down to 3 points that explain why ppl seem to live in different realities:
Most programmers:
1) Write inconsequential remixes of trivial code that has been written many times before.
2) Lack the taste for good design & suck at code review in general (yours truly included).
3) Lack the judgement to differentiate between 1) & FOSS repos of nontrivial code, …

"I Cannot Write This Because It Violates Our Content Policy": Understanding Content Moderation Policies and User Experiences in Generative AI Products
Lan Gao, Oscar Chen, Rachel Lee, Nick Feamster, Chenhao Tan, Marshini Chetty
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14018

"I Cannot Write This Because It Violates Our Content Policy": Understanding Content Moderation Policies and User Experiences in Generative AI Products
While recent research has focused on developing safeguards for generative AI (GAI) model-level content safety, little is known about how content moderation to prevent malicious content performs for end-users in real-world GAI products. To bridge this gap, we investigated content moderation policies and their enforcement in GAI online tools -- consumer-facing web-based GAI applications. We first analyzed content moderation policies of 14 GAI online tools. While these policies are comprehensive i…

Compton amplitude and Contact term(s) in the Spinor Helicity formalism
Aakash Kumar, Arnab Rudra, Rahul Shaw
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12431 https://

Compton amplitude and Contact term(s) in the Spinor Helicity formalism
In gauge theories, contact terms play an important role in ensuring gauge invariance. In the spinor helicity formalism, the choice of a gauge-fixing condition manifests itself in the form of the choice of reference vector to write the massless polarization vector(s). However, this choice must be irrelevant in any gauge-invariant observable. We use this principle to determine contact term for Electromagnetic Compton amplitude. We considered three-point function between two massive particles \& a…

2nd-year LB has a golden opportunity in 2025 https://insidethestar.com/2nd-year-lb-has-a-golden-opportunity-in-2025

#NowPlaying - and rainy sunday hootenannying with the not-quite (grateful) dead boys, live in 1981. was very honored to write liner notes for this, owsley's last time mixing/recording the band before moving to australia in advance of the oncoming ice age. @…

Quarto Manuscript makes me almost want to write scientific articles again. This could potentially change the process quite a lot. But maybe there is also a good use for it in internal project reports. https://quarto.org/docs/manuscripts/

Quarto Manuscripts – Quarto

Ashton Jeanty Is Ready To Write His Next Chapter in Silver and Black | NFL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL3H8BXKSa8

Research and Analysis of Employers' Opinion on the Necessary Skills that Students in the Field of Web Programming Should Possess
Yordan Kalmukov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11084

Research and Analysis of Employers' Opinion on the Necessary Skills that Students in the Field of Web Programming Should Possess
In the era of artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots, based on large language models that can generate programming code in any language, write texts and summarize information, it is obvious that the requirements of employers for graduating students have already changed. The modern IT world offers significant automation of programming through software frameworks and a huge set of third-party libraries and application programming interfaces (APIs). All these tools provide most of the necessary…

Bhatt Conjectures: On Necessary-But-Not-Sufficient Benchmark Tautology for Human Like Reasoning
Manish Bhatt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11423 https://

Bhatt Conjectures: On Necessary-But-Not-Sufficient Benchmark Tautology for Human Like Reasoning
Debates about whether Large Language or Reasoning Models (LLMs/LRMs) truly reason or merely pattern-match suffer from shifting goal posts. In my personal opinion, two analytic--hence "tautological"--benchmarks cut through that fog in my mental model. In this paper, I attempt to write down my mental model in concrete terms.

Calamus 32 What think you...
A funny gotcha of a poem: Whitman starts by suggesting he is going to write about battleships, or cities, or "splendors". But then he switches gears:
two simple men I saw to-day ... parting the parting of dear friends
And then goes into fully romantic
The one to remain hung on the other's neck, and passionately kissed him,
While the one to depart, tightly prest the one to remain in his arms.
Hot, right? A passionate kiss, a tight embrace, never wanting to let go.
Again I am astonished that a poem this gay would be published in 1860. Or that generations of bloodless scholars would sputter and say "they were just pals".

Details from Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer’s study of Trump’s cellphone habits have a way of lingering in the mind.
The president’s personal number is “broadly circulated.”
He picks up calls from unknown numbers, and keeps a photograph of his own face on his lock screen.
The Cellphone in Chief is a “portal,” Parker and Scherer write,
but it’s also a mirror, a security blanket, and a vulnerability.
Their short psychological study suggests a man who is occasio…

Hey, folks who understand alt text and limited vision accessibility:
I have need to write alt text for the diagram below. The alt text needs to be comprehensible to somebody who is encountering this kind of diagram for the ••very first time••. I could describe the images using the relevant jargon, but that would only serve people who already know the thing this activity is teaching them!
Any suggestions for how I could write good alt text for something like this? Is it possible? (The horizontal black bars are minus signs, i.e. subtraction. This is clear from context in the text, but probably not clear in the image.)
PLEASE NOTE: I am looking for people with ••relevant accessibility expertise••, not just random best shots from people who (like me) don’t really know much about this kind of problem.

#EroticMusings Week 3 (June 15-21), Studio: Is your work in erotica integrated with your day-to-day life and work, or somewhat separate?
It's fully integrated, but I also have it easy. I work from home, so no strangers snooping. And I mostly write (and occasionally draw). When you enter the room, you see my set-up from the front or side, nothing to see there.
Funny story th…

It’s #FollowFriday, and I want to share some wonderful people who brighten my day in their own ways.
Some are trans, some live in the UK, some write about fascism and Trump, while others focus on climate change.
You’ll find folks who dress like they’re from the 1800s, and others who aren’t shy about sharing some fun jiggle physics.
If you’re curious, go check them out b…

"Judge Michael Wilner imposed $31,000 in sanctions against the law firms involved, saying 'no reasonably competent attorney should out-source research and writing' to AI" #aiethics
https://www.

David Cope, a composer and algorithmic composition pioneer who created a program in the 1980s to write music in the style of Bach and others, died at age 83 (Miguel Salazar/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/technology/david-cope-dead-ai…

David Cope, Godfather of A.I. Music, Is Dead at 83
His EMI algorithm, an early form of artificial intelligence that he developed in the 1980s, prompted searching questions about the limits of human creativity.

I have been trialling Substack as a supplement to my blog. Substack has a large community of people interested in local and social history, so it's a good fit for me. I'm not planning to stop blogging, and some posts may appear in both places, but it allows me scope to write on a wider range of topics. https://

Newspapers and Research
The Norwood Review and Sir Archur Conan Doyle

Coming back from holidays in Scotland (😍) I wonder what is the best way to organize photographs in albums, edit them, maybe comment them and share them online with chosen people?
(in a private and controlled way, no AI training of any kind)
#PhotoSharing #PhotoSoftware

Cryptee | Encrypted Secure Photo Storage & Encrypted Documents Editor
Cryptee is an encrypted secure photo storage service, and an encrypted documents editor to write personal docs, notes, journals, store files and more.

I have two journals for poetry. One where I write some certified stinkers and the other where I try my best to write good ones.
And sometimes, I write some personal favorites in the bad journal and have to transfer it over to the good journal anyway.
Is this weird? Shouldn't I just have one journal where the good and the bad poetry can live next to each other?
#poetry

Amazing. #Gemini just wrote this #LAMP app for me to keep notes in folders with formatting in #markdown.
"Write a LAMP app for keeping notes. Include the ability to create, edit, and delete n…

CXL-GPU: Pushing GPU Memory Boundaries with the Integration of CXL Technologies
Donghyun Gouk, Seungkwan Kang, Seungjun Lee, Jiseon Kim, Kyungkuk Nam, Eojin Ryu, Sangwon Lee, Dongpyung Kim, Junhyeok Jang, Hanyeoreum Bae, Myoungsoo Jung
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15601

CXL-GPU: Pushing GPU Memory Boundaries with the Integration of CXL Technologies
This work introduces a GPU storage expansion solution utilizing CXL, featuring a novel GPU system design with multiple CXL root ports for integrating diverse storage media (DRAMs and/or SSDs). We developed and siliconized a custom CXL controller integrated at the hardware RTL level, achieving two-digit nanosecond roundtrip latency, the first in the field. This study also includes speculative read and deterministic store mechanisms to efficiently manage read and write operations to hide the endp…

Sonnet 103 - CIII
Alack! what poverty my Muse brings forth,
That having such a scope to show her pride,
The argument all bare is of more worth
Than when it hath my added praise beside!
O! blame me not, if I no more can write!
Look in your glass, and there appears a face
That over-goes my blunt invention quite,
Dulling my lines, and doing me disgrace.
Were it not sinful then, striving to mend,
To mar the subject that before was well?…

A Fast, Reliable, and Secure Programming Language for LLM Agents with Code Actions
Stephen Mell, Botong Zhang, David Mell, Shuo Li, Ramya Ramalingam, Nathan Yu, Steve Zdancewic, Osbert Bastani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12202

A Fast, Reliable, and Secure Programming Language for LLM Agents with Code Actions
Modern large language models (LLMs) are often deployed as agents, calling external tools adaptively to solve tasks. Rather than directly calling tools, it can be more effective for LLMs to write code to perform the tool calls, enabling them to automatically generate complex control flow such as conditionals and loops. Such code actions are typically provided as Python code, since LLMs are quite proficient at it; however, Python may not be the ideal language due to limited built-in support for p…

A great piece of analysis with lots of suggestions for what to do in response to the Trump administration's efforts to destroy U.S. research infrastructure. I appreciate the inclusion of the work to #DefendResearch against #censorship.

Before this #LetterboxdFriday ends, I share my #LastFourWatched
The Greatest Hits (3½★)
Despicable Me 2 (3★)
Despicable Me (3½★)
Sing (1½★)
🔗 https://…

#WritersCoffeeClub
June 20: Solstice. What’s the most you’ve ever written in a single session? What made that possible?
---
I remember writing a story in three pages in a single go. Probably did even more before. Usually happens when I get to a part which I was going to and planning to write for a while - a culmination,a standoff, a cathartic scene, something like that. It l…

TuneGenie: Reasoning-based LLM agents for preferential music generation
Amitesh Pandey, Jafarbek Arifdjanov, Ansh Tiwari
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12083 h…

TuneGenie: Reasoning-based LLM agents for preferential music generation
Recently, Large language models (LLMs) have shown great promise across a diversity of tasks, ranging from generating images to reasoning spatially. Considering their remarkable (and growing) textual reasoning capabilities, we investigate LLMs' potency in conducting analyses of an individual's preferences in music (based on playlist metadata, personal write-ups, etc.) and producing effective prompts (based on these analyses) to be passed to Suno AI (a generative AI tool for music production). Ou…

I get the desire for live coding interviews, you can't just take people's word that they know how to do it.
But what's the point in throwing Advent of Code style problems at me and interrupting a naive or incorrect approach before I even start implementing it? Let me write unoptimized code for you and then make it better! I'm not going to write the perfect implementation first try for every problem, but I can show you my process and prove I can write _some_ code.
…

Focus and Context and LLMs | Taras' Blog on AI, Perf, Hacks
#AI

Degrowth as an Essential Part of an Eco-Socialist Transition
by Anna Gregoletto* In the series Prospects for Degrowth Many thanks to Mark Burton for encouraging me to write this article and offering so many helpful suggestions. Thank you also to my comrades at Climate Vanguard. Without their teachings I’d have never been able to articulate the ideas in this article. Do check out Climate Vanguard’s incredible work.

Degrowth as an Essential Part of an Eco-Socialist Transition
by Anna Gregoletto* In the series Prospects for Degrowth Many thanks to Mark Burton for encouraging me to write this article and offering so many helpful suggestions. Thank you also to my comrades …

I know I shouldn't still be using this curséd website
but what is happening here with your lesson planning, Duo
Employ humans to write QA validations to keep these questions from being this silly
And stop using LLMs. Please.

Here's an idea: People in tech want better AI criticism? It's all just too $something? I'm willing to take off a month from work to write a whole bunch of detailed structural criticism if the people demanding better, more specific criticism pay my salary for that month.

I’m unreasonably fucking pissed.
An r/me_irlgbt moderator banned me, and is now accusing me of being an A.I. … … … because I use fucking emdashes and ellipses.
#typography #AI #nightmaretimeline

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04678 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDB_…

BVLSM: Write-Efficient LSM-Tree Storage via WAL-Time Key-Value Separation
Modern data-intensive applications increasingly store and process big-value items, such as multimedia objects and machine learning embeddings, which exacerbate storage inefficiencies in Log-Structured Merge-Tree (LSM)-based key-value stores. This paper presents BVLSM, a Write-Ahead Log (WAL)-time key-value separation mechanism designed to address three key challenges in LSM-Tree storage systems: write amplification, poor memory utilization, and I/O jitter under big-value workloads. Unlike state…

Deterministic Switching of the N\'{e}el Vector by Asymmetric Spin Torque
Shui-Sen Zhang, Zi-An Wang, Bo Li, Wen-Jian Lu, Mingliang Tian, Yu-Ping Sun, Haifeng Du, Ding-Fu Shao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10786

Deterministic Switching of the Néel Vector by Asymmetric Spin Torque
Néel vector, the order parameter of collinear antiferromagnets, serves as a state variable in associated antiferromagnetic (AFM) spintronic devices to encode information. A deterministic switching of Néel vector is crucial for the write-in operation, which, however, remains a challenging problem in AFM spintronics. Here we demonstrate, based on analytical derivation and macro-spin simulations, that Néel vector switching can be generally achieved via a current-induced spin torque, provided th…

Time For 9 o'clock #HashTagGames hosted by @… Let's play!
#WeatherInterruptsUsAnything

I don't want to write spoilers or need content warnings here, so:
It's popcorn 🍿 time in the US 🇺🇸! Bring out your best bullshit bingo sheets for billionaire battles!
#uspol #spacekaren #drump

Time to write to your MP again!
#ClimateChange
#ClimateEmergency
#JustStopOil
#FossilFuel

Petition: Ban fossil fuel advertising and sponsorship
Advertisements encourage the use of products and sponsorship promotes a positive reputation & creates a social licence of trust & acceptability. In 2003 a ban on all tobacco advertising was introduced and has arguably worked. I believe continued fossil fuel usage will kill more people than smoking.

It is so hard to write headlines for basic biochem research.
I can substantially understand what the popular summary is saying about the primary source and thanks to my antique education including some graduate-level biochem courses, I can even read

Mycelium: A Transformation-Embedded LSM-Tree
Holly Casaletto, Jeff Lefevre, Aldrin Montana, Peter Alvaro
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08923 https://

Mycelium: A Transformation-Embedded LSM-Tree
Compaction is a necessary, but often costly background process in write-optimized data structures like LSM-trees that reorganizes incoming data that is sequentially appended to logs. In this paper, we introduce Transformation-Embedded LSM-trees (TE-LSM), a novel approach that transparently embeds a variety of data transformations into the compaction process. While many others have sought to reduce the high cost of compaction, TE-LSMs leverage the opportunity to embed other useful work to amorti…

"Two lessons here: 1) Use a marker with a wider tip than a Sharpie, so it’ll be more visible, and 2a) if civilians are able to get right onto your armored vehicle to write graffiti, maybe this wasn’t the kind of militarized raid that you needed an armored truck for in the first place, or 2b) at the very least, your security cordon sucks."
**Minneapolis Says No Fascists, DHS Won't Deport And Kill Preschooler Yet. Your ICE Times Roundup**
https://www.wonkette.com/p/minneapolis-says-no-fascists-dhs

nice article, let me add it to my RSS feeds
- last post: today
- previous post: 2 years ago
- previous post: 10 years ago
(no shame in that, it’s pretty much the rate at which I also write online)

CnC-PRAC: Coalesce, not Cache, Per Row Activation Counts for an Efficient in-DRAM Rowhammer Mitigation
Chris S. Lin, Jeonghyun Woo, Prashant J. Nair, Gururaj Saileshwar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11970

CnC-PRAC: Coalesce, not Cache, Per Row Activation Counts for an Efficient in-DRAM Rowhammer Mitigation
JEDEC has introduced the Per Row Activation Counting (PRAC) framework for DDR5 and future DRAMs to enable precise counting of DRAM row activations using per-row activation counts. While recent PRAC implementations enable holistic mitigation of Rowhammer attacks, they impose slowdowns of up to 10% due to the increased DRAM timings for performing a read-modify-write of the counter. Alternatively, recent work, Chronus, addresses these slowdowns, but incurs energy overheads due to the additional DR…

If someone had to write a perfect book for me, it's hands down tracers in the dark. I just love reading about stuff like this

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.15919 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

What Monads Can and Cannot Do with a Few Extra Pages
The delay monad provides a way to introduce general recursion in type theory. To write programs that use a wide range of computational effects directly in type theory, we need to combine the delay monad with the monads of these effects. Here we present a first systematic study of such combinations. We study both the coinductive delay monad and its guarded recursive cousin, giving concrete examples of combining these with well-known computational effects. We also provide general theorems stati…

Check out this compelling rebuttal of Soteria International's claims regarding the OKC case. Get informed about the facts and perspectives presented in the article by visiting: https://blog.rmendes.net/2024/12/15/rebuttal-of-soteria.html

Rebuttal of Soteria International's Claims on the OKC Case - rMdes - a place to write and think freely
Rebuttal of Soteria International’s Claims on the OKC Case As a victim of the Ogyen Kunzang Chöling (OKC) cult and an advocate for justice, I find Soteria …

Oh dear -- within a day of hearing about this from another professor, I got my first LLM-generated email from an aspiring grad student. It mischaracterized my research (apparently I write lots of mathematical formulas, ha!) and ascribed papers to me that I never wrote, which are basically remixes of common words in my paper titles. If you do this, you will insult the people you want to impress.

I mean, I don't usually write happy songs, but this looks good so far, right?

Ask your MP to support a ban on the import and sale of fur in the UK #AnimalRights

Ask your MP to urge the government to legislate to ban the import and sale of real fur and foie gras as soon as possible
Please write to your MP straight away ask them to support a ban on the import and sale of fur and foie gras. Thank you

Life Hack: Don't take College in the High School classes if you aren't willing to read 3-4 page articles, understand them, and then write about them in minimally coherent sentences.

I cannot figure out how to use Github Copilot in @… @… on demand.
Is it a way to make it work like code assist? Basically trigger it with a shortcut.
I don’t want it turned on all the time spewing text right in front of what I write.

I’ve been around a while too, and I can vouch for this.
I remember somebody telling me with deadly earnestness circa 1999 that Java Beans were going to make it so that business analysts could write integration code themselves, no developers. Java Beans.
Two certainties in software:
1. The work always changes.
2. The work never goes away. https://front-end.social/@alvaromontoro/114494970685095188

Nice - Emile Donovan talks to a local (to Ōtautahi) tech legend, Dr Tim Bell (U Canterbury CompSci lecturer) about teaching kids about computers https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/nights/audio/20…

I have a habbit of making (too) many (small) packages for functionality that might be reused in different context. {box} might be an alternative by making scripts into modlues that can be loaded: #RStats

‘box’: Write Reusable, Composable and Modular R Code
A modern module system for R. Organise code into hierarchical, composable, reusable modules, and use it effortlessly across projects via a flexible, declarative dependency loading syntax.

Adopting Use Case Descriptions for Requirements Specification: an Industrial Case Study
Julian Frattini, Anja Frattini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13303 htt…

Adopting Use Case Descriptions for Requirements Specification: an Industrial Case Study
Context: Use case (UC) descriptions are a prominent format for specifying functional requirements. Existing literature abounds with recommendations on how to write high-quality UC descriptions but lacks insights into (1) their real-world adoption, (2) whether these recommendations correspond to actual quality, and (3) which factors influence the quality of UCs. Objectives: We aim to contribute empirical evidence about the adoption of UC descriptions in a large, globally distributed case company…

Degrowth as an Essential Part of an Eco-Socialist Transition
by Anna Gregoletto, on DegrowthUK
https://degrowthuk.org/2025/06/12/degrowth-as-an-essential-part-of-an-eco-socialist-transition/
Also
Degrowth: …

Degrowth as an Essential Part of an Eco-Socialist Transition
by Anna Gregoletto* In the series Prospects for Degrowth Many thanks to Mark Burton for encouraging me to write this article and offering so many helpful suggestions. Thank you also to my comrades …

Last morning in Qaanaaq, time to go home, but first a massive clean up is due! Lots of notes to write up, still some data to download, need to go and repair a cable too. May have time to update and round off the full #FieldDiary later.
But first a peaceful shot from last night, when the narwhals were in the bay again...

Time For 9 o'clock #HashTagGames hosted by @… Let's play!
#AlphaMailTips

Why I Don’t Use #Mocking Frameworks and Why You Might Not Need Them Either by @…

"What I'm optimizing for isn't growth... reach, or influence. I'm chasing connection[...]spending my days on things that bring me alive."
"It's about...signals that something genuinely MATTERED to one or more humans...private replies saying they've never felt so seen or understood." Rob Hardy
To fellow #writers

BVLSM: Write-Efficient LSM-Tree Storage via WAL-Time Key-Value Separation
Ming Li, Wendi Cheng, Jiahe Wei, Xueqiang Shan, Liu Weikai, Xiaonan Zhao, Xiao Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04678

BVLSM: Write-Efficient LSM-Tree Storage via WAL-Time Key-Value Separation
Modern data-intensive applications increasingly store and process big-value items, such as multimedia objects and machine learning embeddings, which exacerbate storage inefficiencies in Log-Structured Merge-Tree (LSM)-based key-value stores. This paper presents BVLSM, a Write-Ahead Log (WAL)-time key-value separation mechanism designed to address three key challenges in LSM-Tree storage systems: write amplification, poor memory utilization, and I/O jitter under big-value workloads. Unlike state…

Here are a couple of springtime pictures with small associated stories. It’s a thrill to find something positive to write about: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/05/27/Happy-Colors

CL XLVI: Happy Colors

Calamus 15 O drops of me!
It's a remarkably morbid poem for Whitman, literally about blood dropping from wounds, corrupting his poetry.
stain every song I sing, every word I say, bloody drops
But he turns this blood into a sort of virtue that infuses his poem, starting with an inversion. It's not "saturate yourself with the drops". Instead it's saturate them with yourself.
Saturate them with yourself, all ashamed and wet,
Glow upon all I have written or shall write, bleeding drops,
Let it all be seen in your light, blushing drops.
I can make a case for a queer reading of recognizing gay shame and overcoming it. To take the stigma of homosexuality and turn it into a virtue, "let it all be seen in your light".
But I think I may be out on a limb with that interpretation. Whitman's not typically a writer about shame. And I think "gay shame" doesn't apply well as a concept in the 1850s, that's a malady that comes with a backlash against modern gay identity.

The $\mathcal{W}$-algebra bootstrap of 6d $\mathcal{N}=(2,0)$ theories
Mitchell Woolley
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08094 https://arxi…

The $\mathcal{W}$-algebra bootstrap of 6d $\mathcal{N}=(2,0)$ theories
6d (2,0) SCFTs of type $\mathfrak{g}$ have protected subsectors that were conjectured in arxiv:1404.1079 to be captured by $\mathcal{W}_\mathfrak{g}$ algebras. We write down the crossing equations for mixed four-point functions $\langle S_{k_1} S_{k_2}S_{k_3}S_{k_4}\rangle$ of 1/2-BPS operators $S_{k_i}$ in 6d (2,0) theories and detail how a certain twist reduces this system to a 2d meromorphic CFT multi-correlator bootstrap problem. We identify the relevant 6d (2,0) $\mathcal{W}$-algebras of t…

Linguine: A Natural-Language Programming Language with Formal Semantics and a Clean Compiler Pipeline
Lifan Hu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08396 https://

Linguine: A Natural-Language Programming Language with Formal Semantics and a Clean Compiler Pipeline
Linguine is a natural-language-inspired programming language that enables users to write programs in a fluent, controlled subset of English while preserving formal semantics. The language introduces anaphoric constructs, such as pronoun variables (e.g., "it", "them"), that are statically resolved through referent-tracking analysis combined with a Hindley-Milner-style type system. Each pronoun is guaranteed to be unambiguous and well-typed at compile time. The Linguine compiler pipeline includ…

@… Agreed, but I write the shell script in nushell.

I’m well out of my depth here: my historical knowledge to speak to the issues is thin; my cultural knowledge is almost nonexistent. Reading that Standing Together site, seeing how they’ve crafted what they write, I see just how much nuance and awareness I •don’t• have.
I’m grateful to the people who’ve helped me learn, and who’ve pointed me to these resources — in this case @… and @…. Sometimes the Internet really is good for something.
/end

New article,
Degrowth as an Essential Part of an Eco-Socialist Transition
by Anna Gregoletto, on DegrowthUK
https://degrowthuk.org/2025/06/12/degrowth-as-an-essential-part-of-an-eco-socialist-transition/

Degrowth as an Essential Part of an Eco-Socialist Transition
by Anna Gregoletto* In the series Prospects for Degrowth Many thanks to Mark Burton for encouraging me to write this article and offering so many helpful suggestions. Thank you also to my comrades …

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03295 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Examining Human-AI Collaboration for Co-Writing Constructive Comments Online
This paper examines if large language models (LLMs) can help people write constructive comments on divisive social issues due to the difficulty of expressing constructive disagreement online. Through controlled experiments with 600 participants from India and the US, who reviewed and wrote constructive comments on threads related to Islamophobia and homophobia, we observed potential misalignment between how LLMs and humans perceive constructiveness in online comments. While the LLM was more lik…

#WritersCoffeeClub Jun 6
What are the conventions of the genre in which you write? How strictly do you follow them?
Um.. . I don't know, I write high/epic/dark fantasy (according to my beta readers) but I follow my story where it leads me. Are there conventions? Probably. Do I care? Not consciously.

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor argue that there’s no real MAGA vision at all.
Instead, they write, “the governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.”
This is an “end times fascism” that is taking advantage of social and environmental catastrophes
and “simultaneously provoking and planning for them.”

Sonnet 021 - XXI
So is it not with me as with that Muse,
Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse,
Who heaven itself for ornament doth use
And every fair with his fair doth rehearse,
Making a couplement of proud compare
With sun and moon, with earth and sea's rich gems,
With April's first-born flowers, and all things rare,
That heaven's air in this huge rondure hems.
O! let me, true in love, but truly write,
And then bel…

Time For 9 o'clock #HashTagGames hosted by @… Let's play!
#MovieSubPlots