Tootfinder

I wandered around the botanical garden in Kraków for 3 hours last Friday, and the plants there were amazing 💚! While writing the alt texts, I learned that one of the plants is a "red hot cat tail" ❤️ and one is a kind of "foxtail fern" 🧡.
#flowers #plants

Why do we let the greedy capitalists do this to our industry?
#LLM

Writing a CM system is all fun and games until you realise you're using Unix and its a shitshow.
> The bug is most likely this: Store() uses fchown on the open temp file descriptor (tf.Chown(uid, gid)), while the chown CLI uses path-based chown. On certain bind-mount setups (Docker Desktop for
Mac/Windows with gRPC FUSE or VirtioFS, NFS, FUSE-backed mounts), fchown can silently no-op or fail to persist while path-based chown works fine.

https://www.stvn.sh/writing/programming-still-sucks-fqffhyp

#EroticMusings 55. How do you show the initial spark of lust or love between characters? Share!
I realised while I enjoy reading slow burn written by others, I don't write it when writing erotica. If it's slow it's mostly offscreen and allows some leaps while the main story has some progress.
Mela and Camelia slowly falling for each other? They stare at each other u…

Just finished the game "Arco". It's a masterpiece. Wonderfully evocative setting and writing, excellent systems with top-notch ludonarrative harmony, and complex characters that you love while also seeing their not-so-great sides.
For once in a violence-centric game I get to be murdering colonizers instead of metaphorical stand-ins for indigenous people? Feels excellent.
The systems and abilities did a great job of keeping things balanced too, with definite power growth but growing costs too, letting the tactics remain important throughout. After playing Flamberge, I was worried it might feel too fiddly, but it doesn't at all, and the ghosts mechanic really pushes you to play quickly.
#Games

Let's get this straight: anything created with "AI" is #slop.
It doesn't have to be vibe-coded. It doesn't have to be horrible code. It doesn't matter that you've spent hours perfecting the prompt. It doesn't matter that ten people have spent a week reviewing it in detail.
As long as an "AI" took part in writing it, it's slop. It's an unethical technology, and anything created with it is tainted. It's an inhuman technology, and you're supporting it. You're being disrespectful to your users and contributors. You're putting your own convenience over humanity. You're aiding the worst murderous assholes in the history of humanity. And what's perhaps worst, you quite likely believe that you are making a net positive contribution, that you're helping people, while you're actually disrespecting and harming them.
#NoAI #NoLLM

For me this age of AI is the time we should appreciate less polished handwritten texts for their authenticity. I see this happening during selection of job applications.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026…

How AI is changing language
As allegations of LLM use rock the literary and media worlds, linguists explain what really distinguishes human and machine writing, while novelists including Jennifer Egan and Jeanette Winterson reflect on the future of fiction in an age of ChatGPT

Inspired by a Bluesky post from a while ago, I *finally* got around to writing up a bunch of things I find myself frequently telling people. (Well, I wrote it up a while ago, but not sure I remembered to post it here.)
https://parentheticallyspeaking.org/articles/pedago…

Pedagogy Recommendations
Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi

Wonder what happened here? It looks like someone was trying to tweet at #MattGaetz while writing copy for this #HP #monitor. The weirdness shows up at

I finally went ahead and migrated my Mastodon to NixOS so I can finally update it again. Same for Synapse.
This took a while. Writing NixOS configs is just as time consuming as writing configuration the first time, but now I hopefully have a long-lived solution. 🙏🏻

I’m writing today’s Gist in the quiet before everyone else in the house wakes up.
The cat has just come in from a night in the rain, furious.
I have a coffee and a weekend paper to browse while I collect my thoughts.

Immersing myself for the last 10 days in the ecological economics of waste.
I can only conclude that the enormous, enormous, enormous problem can't be solved while matetial growth and capitalism persist.
That's difficult as I'm writing a book about practical policies!

The thing about training an #LLM on human culture and then renting that culture back isn't that it's "Intellectual Property Theft." There's nothing wrong with sharing. There is something wrong with framing LLMs as piracy. That's a completely different concept.
When a powerful group of people takes the writing, the art, the music, various parts of a culture and then make some bland reproduction that lacks all the meaning and essence in the original, then those powerful people profit off that mess while the people who made the original stuff are erased, marginalized, and made to suffer, there is a different term for that.
The term everyone is looking for is "appropriation."
I'm not saying this is the same as other forms of cultural appropriation, but there are definitely enough shared elements that we should revisit that conversation. Perhaps some folks who thought the idea was silly when the idea first came up may feel differently now.

While rewatching 30 Rock my wife and I came by the episode with the improve joke.
S-Tier quality comedy writing for a throw-away flashback scene.
https://youtu.be/Kb_AHBGF5i8

Just finished "Future Home of the Living God" by Louise Erdrich. It's a beautiful and entrancing novel in many ways, but I couldn't bring myself to like the ending. I think in one of my most recent book posts I complained about a deus ex machina, so it's ironic that in this case as the pages dwindled I was fully prepared to accept and even welcome one, especially with all of the deus-related stuff going on already. I am left profoundly unsure as to whether Erdrich imagines a positive future beyond our current oppressions, or just futility, when for most of the book it seemed like the former, which is something I seek out in earnest these days. It is of course impressive that a book about innocents being hunted through the streets of Minneapolis & Saint Paul, while a volunteer citizens network organizes to keep them safe, could be published in 2017. There are strong echoes of Octavia Butler here, and in both cases I think it's a marginalized position which allows authors to see with clarity that most mainstream authors miss or don't even attempt.
I think I will seek out more of Erdrich's writing, but only after a bit of a break.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@hex_m_hell/116665145783070924
While the target audience of this security program managers, and the series I'm writing is focused on developing secure products in a world of exploding complexity, this is working towards a cybernetic threat model informed by counterinsurgency theory.
A lot can be done with such a model, if one is adept at adapting concepts across domains.