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ME:: everybody thinks they know what a free market is; most us are wrong myself included and it requires strong, enlightened regulation ; Stefan Schüller:: The Free Market Lie: Why Switzerland Has 25 Gbit Internet and America Doesn't

QUOTE
- Read the whole thing: Stefan Schüller:: The Free Market Lie: Why Switzerland Has 25 Gbit Internet and America Doesn't >This is the paradox that confuses so many people.
The American and German approach of letting incumbents build monopolies, allowing wasteful overbuild, and refusing to regulate natural monopolies is often called a ‘free market.’

But it’s not free. And it’s not a market.

True capitalism requires competition. But infrastructure is a natural monopoly. If you treat it like a regular consumer product, you don’t get competition. You get waste, or you get a monopoly.

The Swiss model understands this. They built the infrastructure once, as a shared, neutral asset, and then let the market compete on the services that run over it.

That’s not anti-capitalist. It’s actually better capitalism. It directs competition to where it adds value, not to where it destroys it.

The free market doesn’t mean letting powerful incumbents do whatever they want. It means creating the conditions where genuine competition can thrive.
Amazing, thanks Les! ; lmorchard's strudel.cc cover of the intro to Stripdown by Agent Side Grinder
Andrea Pitzer:: 'You can make a principled stand for what you believe while welcoming in alienated voters looking for hope and community' ; You don't have to swallow frogs
Permanent summer time BC Timezone boondoggles part 8888 ; British Columbia, Time Zones, and Postgres | Crunchy Data Blog <-- QUOTE: On March 8, 2026, British Columbia moved their clocks to a year-round Pacific Daylight Savings Time. In March, they did the spring forward one hour with their clocks to UTC-7, but they won't fall back to UTC-8 in November. Going forward, the UTC offset for America/Vancouver timezone is permanently UTC-7.
ME:: learning debt because of "broken coding scene" :-) ; Catherine Hicks:: OSF | “It’s Like Coding in the Dark”: The need for learning cultures within coding teams

QUOTE
- Read the whole thing: Catherine Hicks:: OSF | “It’s Like Coding in the Dark”: The need for learning cultures within coding teams
- This report presents data from a qualitative research project with software engineers and developers. Twenty-five full-time code writers completed a “debugging” task and an in-depth interview on their learning, problem-solving, and feedback experiences while onboarding to an unfamiliar, collaborative codebase. This report applies a learning science lens to inform an understanding of how to help code writers can thrive and collaborate.
- Themes from these interviews revealed an important learning tension: the work that code writers needed to do to understand code often did not feel like what was rewarded in the evaluation of their work. Code review often did not recognize code writers’ effort when it did not result in lines of code. Despite stated ideals about knowledge sharing (e.g., documentation and collaboration), this work was often contradicted with negative cues from colleagues about what was “truly” valued. This tension was exacerbated by code writers’ fears about “not looking like an engineer,” and their desire to perform to the expectations of their environments.
- Code writers navigated this by divesting from their own learning and from the “invisible” work of knowledge transfer, leaving future collaborators without guidance in their own ramp-up to unfamiliar code. As a result, code writers frequently expressed a poignant loneliness, even in highly resourced teams.
- This maladaptive cycle can be understood as Learning Debt. Research from learning science describes how environments that discourage sharing mistakes and valuing “in-draft” effort lead to long-term costs in people’s motivation, wellbeing, and learning. Under this discouragement, even formal processes which are ostensibly meant to maintain productivity and provide support (e.g., code review, conversations with senior code authors) can reinforce these negative norms.
AWESOME,gotta try this JS-less Web Audio API implementation! Heydon Pickering:: Hyperblam Docs Home : HYPERBLAM QUOTE: HYPERBLAM lets you make music with HTML. It’s a declarative implementation of the Web Audio API and is completely dependency free. ...Create pedal boards, drum machines, sampled instruments. And don’t write a single line of JavaScript in the process. Unless you really want to.
I agree with Alexandra Pierce in Locus: 'Shroud is the best first-contact novel I have read in years' Highly recommended ; Shroud (Adrian Tchaikovsky novel) - Wikipedia

Previously
- May 29, 2026 I really loved Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Especially the alien life's ability to take over other life and its emergent intelligence. Highly recommended if you are interested in a different sort of life and insights into a fascist, totalitarian regime. Sound familar :-) ?!?
- ME: somebody with the DVD or Disney+ do a 'David Kaylor's Rogue One: The Andor Cut' showing for me :-) ; David Kaylor (2026):: Rogue One: The Andor Cut - Full PDF.pdf - Google Drive
  
  QUOTE
  - Read the whole thing David Kaylor (2026):: Rogue One: The Andor Cut - Full PDF.pdf - Google Drive
  I DO NOT OWN ANY OF THE MATERIAL BEING USED. “STAR WARS: ROGUE ONE: THE ANDOR CUT” IS A FAN EDIT, REIMAGINING ‘ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY’ (2016) AS IF IT HAD BEEN MADE AFTER THE ANDOR SERIES.
  
  BY CLICKING THE LINKS BELOW TO VIEW AND DOWNLOAD “ROGUE ONE: THE ANDOR CUT”, YOU ARE CONFIRMING THAT YOU PAY FOR A DISNEY+ SUBSCRIPTION, AND / OR OWN OFFICIAL STUDIO RELEASES OF ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY,
  
  AND THE COMPLETE ANDOR SERIES. THIS EDIT WAS MADE BY A FAN, FOR FANS. NO MONEY IS BEING MADE OFF OF “ROGUE ONE: THE ANDOR CUT”. THIS MATERIAL IS INTENDED FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THESE LINKS PUBLICLY.
- Greg Wilson explains monads in a way I can understand: 'a way to chain operations without explicitly passing extra arguments' and more ; Greg Wilson:: Monads
  
  QUOTE:
  - Read the whole thing: Greg Wilson:: Monads
  If you’re coming from Python, the cleanest way to think about it is that a monad is a way to chain operations without explicitly passing extra arguments. Monads aren't just for input and output; they can also be used for:
  
  possible failure (None, exceptions)
  
  async execution (await)
  
  logging
  
  random number generation
  
  dependency injection
  
  parsing context
- ME:: Stlite, WASM version of Streamlit enables interactive client side graphing with sliders that works on web assembly, no backend required! ; Stlite <-- Stlite Serverless Streamlit Running Entirely in Your Browser
- ME:: now if only these python cli apps could be on the internet with a url somehow e.g python web assembly ; Cyclopts — cyclopts
  
  QUOTE
  
  Intuitive API: Quickly write CLI applications using a terse, intuitive syntax.
  
  Advanced Type Hinting: Full support of all builtin types and even user-specified (yes, including Pydantic, Dataclasses, and Attrs).
  
  Rich Help Generation: Automatically generates beautiful help pages from docstrings and other contextual data.
  
  Extendable: Easily customize converters, validators, token parsing, and application launching.
- ME:: I believe I can use Streamlit to create interactive dashboards with sliders from CSV files on the internet ; streamlit/streamlit: Streamlit — A faster way to build and share data apps. <-- QUOTE: Streamlit lets you transform Python scripts into interactive web apps in minutes, instead of weeks. Build dashboards, generate reports, or create chat apps.
- Periodic reminder :-) HOW TO: get all Thunderbird Desktop and Android SUMO KB articles
  
  SQLite query
  
  sql select url from [details-allproducts-kb-title-slug-all-articles] where products_str like '%thunderbird%'
- Volodymyr (Wolodymyr Pawlyschyn) :: Multi-agent systems are how you bootstrap a form of life without a body. An agent that negotiates, cooperates, and gets contradicted by other agents starts to inhabit something real.
  - See also: Wittgenstein for AI Agents
  - ME:: It's recycling theatre worldwide. Please folks, bring a reusable cup! Make the effort please! Beyond Plastics:: 'A 3-month national investigation found that not a single tracked Starbucks cold-beverage cup ended up at a recycling facility — even when the cups were placed in clearly marked recycling bins inside Starbucks stores.'
  - ME::tl-dr-ing Google: 'prominence allocation' aka Indexing and presenting the perfect contextual ad in the guise of an 'answer'; Matthias Ott: Ad Infinitum <-- QUOTE: Another approach – also from Google researchers – fits the new “Search” much more precisely. It’s called “prominence allocation.” Here, when a user submits a query with commercial intent, the system runs an auction that doesn’t just decide which ads appear, but how prominently the LLM writes about each one. The auction outputs a prominence score for each advertiser, essentially telling the model: give this product 35 words, that one 20, and this one zero. The ad isn’t next to the answer. The ad is the answer. Or rather, it shapes how much space and enthusiasm each product gets within the answer.
  - Tom Chick:: Best thing I've seen since February 28, 2026: Offside | Patreon <-- Gotta Watch 'The Circle' and 'Offside' some day!!
    
    QUOTE
    
    Read the whole thing: Tom Chick:: Best thing I've seen since February 28, 2026: Offside | Patreon
    
    My favorite Jafar Panahi movie, however, is The Circle, where all the lead actors are pitch-perfect, surprisingly varied, and wonderfully expressive considering they're all women acting from within their hijabs. It's an unforgettable script, a cannily daisy-chained set of short stories; eat your Raymond Carver-loving heart out, Robert Altman! But unlike Offside, it's bleak, without much hope, a despairing look at women in a male-dominated theocracy.
    
    It's especially hard to watch these movies while the county is being pummeled by airstrikes. It certainly makes it easier to understand conflicting emotions expressed like this, quoted by the BBC from an Iranian man named Kaveh: "I had always imagined [the death of Khamenei] would feel like happiness, but it didn't. Almost all the years of my life and the lives of millions like me were destroyed and thousands lost their lives - and yet he himself was removed from the scene in a single moment, [which] made me truly angry."
    
    Jafar Panahi is basically exiled from Iran. But his son, the director of Hit the Road, was in Iran when the US and Israeli airstrikes began. I hope both of them get to make many more movies, and I would love for them to be able to continue telling me stories about Iran. My heart goes out to them and everyone else swept up in this awful and unnecessary war. I hope it ends soon.
  - How to Recalculate a Spreadsheet – Lord.io <-- love blog posts explaining algorithms like this!
    
    QUOTE
    
    This simple strategy of recalculating the whole document may sound wasteful, but it's actually already better than VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet software ever made, and the first so-called "killer app", responsible for popularizing the Apple II. VisiCalc would repeatedly recalculate cells from left-to-right and top-to-bottom, sweeping over them again and again until none of them changed. Despite this "interesting" algorithm, VisiCalc remained the dominant spreadsheet software for four years. Its reign ended in 1983, when Lotus 1-2-3 swept the market with "natural-order recalculation"
  - ME:: Someday gotta try this! ; Adam H. Sparks::Further Enhancing R.nvim with Arf and {terminalgraphics}
  - zhang.dianli:: 'The subtle complexity that forms the unique signature of each fine tea comes from tea polyphenols (TPP)' from Tea Snobbery 101: Milk and Sugar are Evil
    
    I love these "better living through chemistry" explanations of tea and coffee :-)
    
    QUOTE:
    
    Read the whole thing: Tea Snobbery 101: Milk and Sugar are Evil — zhang.dianli
    
    The subtle complexity that forms the unique signature of each fine tea comes from tea polyphenols (TPP). When milk is added, the casein micelles sweep in and bind to these polyphenol compounds, effectively removing the “free” polyphenols from the tea infusion. This forming of larger complexes decreases the availability of free TPP. What is perceived as “smoothness” in the mouthfeel is, in actuality, the erasure of the fine-grained profile that gives the tea its depth and complexity. The tea's delicate astringency (the building block of that flavour development I described above) is chemically neutralized at the molecular level.
  - Garret Vreeland:: 'We will stop treating moderation as an afterthought or a moral cudgel. Moderation is infrastructure. ' <-- Amen, G! Garret:: What We Will Refuse to Build Again | dangerousmeta!
  - ME:: I'm betting on the people of ActivityPub and ATProto :-) ! Great summary of ATMosphereconf 2026 March 28-29, 2026 at UBC Vancouver ; Britanny Ellich Why I'm betting on ATProto (and why you should, too) <-- I attended but was too lazy and overwhelmed by learning in the best possilbe way :-)
    
    QUOTE
    
    One of the cool things about this community is that many folks are willing to give up parts of what they’ve been working on individually in the hopes of creating something that’s interoperable. That can be rare in developer spaces. A lot of times, people are working on the thing they want to work on and don’t want to make concessions to build something that works for more people. This makes sense if you’re building something to make money on it… one person owning something generally results in a better return on investment than three or four people sharing ownership. But the incentives around ATProto don’t reward that kind of selfish building. Yes, there are situations where it makes sense for a specific app to be its own thing, but there are also a lot of reasons for the community to work together, and the community is filled with incredibly smart, talented, and dedicated humans who are all working towards the same goal.
  - Professor Samantha Lawler:: SpaceX Dropped Space Junk on My Neighbor’s Farm. Here’s What Happened Next | Scientific American <-- nobody knows the worst case scenario here?!?
  - joan westenberg:: The war between fast and legitimate is here <-- QUOTE: Pick a side and commit. Find a functional substitute for the legitimacy you lack, and find it before the next scandal makes your shortcomings impossible to ignore; or find a way to remain relevant despite your pace, and stop confusing the pomp of authority with its substance. ...The hybrids will struggle. The pretenders - the institutions that perform speed without being fast or perform legitimacy without being legitimate - will be eaten first. ... I'm not certain anyone "wins" this in any way the word "win" is usually applied. But in a war between institutions, the folks on the losing side are usually the last to figure out they're at war in the first place.
  - ME:: tl-dr quoting: 'The demographics are unrelenting. 73% of Americans live in car-centric suburbs and exurbs. When millions of them can no longer drive, everyone has a problem. ' ; LLoyd Alter:: Many older drivers don't see the road ahead <-- QUOTE: “We have 75 million North American baby boomers, almost all of whom will not be able to drive at some point. We need accessible housing, and walkable communities with good sidewalks, corner stores, medical facilities and coffee shops within a reasonable distance. We need good, safe, accessible transit for when we have to go further. We all must prepare for a non-driving future. And as the AARP study shows, almost nobody is.”
  - ME:: omg the cargo culting of all things karpathy continues :-) oh well some of these Claude.md 'spells' :-) are worthwhile i grudgingly admit :-) Stephen Downes:: forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills <-- QUOTE: I don't use this exact CLAUDE.ms file telling the AI how I want it to approach programming tasks, but my own version is very similar. "A single CLAUDE.md file to improve Claude Code behavior, derived from Andrej Karpathy's observations on LLM coding pitfalls." The key instruction: "Don't assume. Don't hide confusion. Surface tradeoffs." Now that I think about it, it's probably pretty good advice for life in general. Here's a version you can paste into your project.
  - ME:: Play all of the versions LOUD and on repeat! ; Ben Werdmuller:: All You Fascists (Bound to Lose) A collection of Woody Guthrie covers
  - Courtney Nash:: 'The person who seemingly "caused" the incident is almost certainly the same person who prevented a dozen others that nobody ever wrote about, because all practitioner actions are gambles taken under uncertainty, and we only call them errors when the outcome is bad.`' from '“Human Error” Is an Illusion: A Response to Om Malik | Resilience in Software Foundation
    
    QUOTE
    
    Read the whole thing: Courtney Nash:: 'Human Error' Is an Illusion: A Response to Om Malik | Resilience in Software Foundation
    
    This matters because complex systems don't operate in a safe, neutral state waiting to be disrupted by careless people (or mischievous machines). They are, as Cook puts it, always running in degraded mode: containing ever-changing mixtures of latent failures at any given moment, held together not despite their human operators but because of them. Practitioners are the adaptable element of these complex systems, constantly making real-time adjustments that regularly prevent those latent failures from compounding into catastrophe. The person who seemingly "caused" the incident is almost certainly the same person who prevented a dozen others that nobody ever wrote about, because all practitioner actions are gambles taken under uncertainty, and we only call them errors when the outcome is bad.
  - A fun story I should read :-) ; A Colder War - a novelette by Charles Stross
  - Artists imagine a future we don't want ! Bravo Dara Vandor ; Dara Vandor:: Pax Americana: D.B. Weldon Library (2026) <-- QUOTE: "Released in 2038, Project Homecoming, the flag-waving rock musical, tells the tale of Tommy Kazansky (Ryan Reynolds), America’s favorite ICE agent, and his lovable sidekick, a K-9 patrol dog named Payback. Armed with charisma and a keytar, the two crisscross the country reminding illegals that everyone belongs somewhere—just not here. ... Standing in for ICE headquarters, this building served as a backdrop for two memorable musical numbers in the film. The first, “Paw Patrol (Three Barks Means We Found You),” was a duet between Reynolds and Payback; the second was a solo by Sabrina Carpenter entitled “Nice Try, But I Don’t Speak Mexican.” <-- Read the whole thing Dara Vandor:: Pax Americana: D.B. Weldon Library (2026) `
  - Restaurants to Try:: Epic Grill SiLogs + Sans Rival,New Westminister is a 1 hour bicycle ride post May 14, since they are closed for a three week holiday and re-open on May 15, 2026; Epic Grill SiLogs + Sans Rival
    
    Looks like an easy-ish bicycle ride? 54 Minutes according to Google Maps
    
    And then bicycle back to 22nd Street Station and take the Skytrain home :-) if I am feeling lazy
    
    They also have sinigang,lumpia, halo halo and adobo! and they have been open a year roughly! Yay!
    
    Opening hours etc from their instagram:
    
    DINE IN & TAKE-OUT THURS - TUESDAY 8:30am till 2:00pm FILIPINO BREAKFASTS AND DESSERTS #Silogs & #SansRival
  - ME:: Hearing Tagalog or even more moving to me Kapampangan in music or on the street 'bypasses every rational filter I have and land somewhere behind my ribs, in a place I can’t quite name but can always feel' ; Farley Ledgerwood:: Psychologists explain why the songs you loved between thirteen and eighteen feel more emotionally powerful at sixty than anything you've heard since — it's not nostalgia, it's how memory and identity were being built simultaneously - The Expert Editor <-- QUOTE: The way certain songs from the early and mid-1970s bypass every rational filter I have and land somewhere behind my ribs, in a place I can’t quite name but can always feel.
  - ME:: gotta try Tolaria and maybe re-try Zed; Gus Mueller:: Tolaria, Rust, and Questions About What Makes a Mac App Feel Good to Me<-- QUOTE: Tolaria is a “A second brain for the AI era”. It’s a MacOS app that sits atop Markdown files, uses Git for backups, and is open source. It also runs on Linux
  - Gotta try it! 50 minute bicycle ride or take the sky train to Edmonds and walk; Fernando Medrano:: Gujarati Jalso: The Burnaby Restaurant Giving Gujarati Food Top Billing – Scout Magazine <-- QUOTE: The highlight of the experience, though, was the Gujarati thali — a full plate composed of puri, jeera rice (cumin rice), dal, a ridge gourd and potato shaak (dry curry), a few snacks from the fried platter, a piece of mohanthal (a dense, nutty sweet made with chickpea flour and ghee), and a glass of chaas (salted buttermilk). The thali was balanced and familiar, like something drawn directly from a home kitchen — not a tasting menu, but a regular meal given structure and attention. ... Gujarati food reflects a long history of migration, religious discipline, and adaptation. However, in Vancouver, it rarely gets top billing. Instead, you’re more likely to see it folded into buffet lines or listed below butter chicken on laminated menus. That’s part of what’s so appealing about Gujarati Jalso. The cooking is traditional, the prices are reasonable, and in a city full of Indian restaurants, it’s one of the few places where Gujarati food stands on its own.
  - BC Government: $262 every two weeks is not enough for Christi-Ann Watkins while she recovers from a fractured pelvis, punctured lung, and broken ribs, while raising two young sons! LeLe Chan:: Lapu Lapu :: One Year Later
    
    QUOTE
    
    That is not accountability. That is erasure dressed up as concern. And it is not unrelated to everything else I have described. The same governments that offer Christi $262 every two weeks while she recovers from a fractured pelvis, punctured lung, and broken ribs, while raising two young sons, are the same governments that stay silent while media narratives build a case against Filipino presence in this city. The pattern is the same. Who gets to be seen. Who gets to be protected. Who gets to be believed. And who is left to absorb the cost.
  - ME:: I need to look at support.mozilla.org's page view for Thunderbird Knowledge Base Articles, bet they are down too; Luis Villa (who I spoke with on a bus in the 2010s when he was at Mozilla):: Wikipedia's traffic drop: more on languages and freshness - lu.is <-- QUOTE: Since 2016–2019, aggregate monthly pageviews of Wikipedia’s “Vital Articles” are down −26% across eight major languages I sampled (en, es, fr, de, it, pt, ja, ar). The Vital Articles are an imperfect set, but they cover a much broader set of topics than my last sample set, and are widely replicated across wikis. (All of these wikis have at least 80% of the articles, making it more apples-to-apples.)...The decline isn’t even across topics. Mathematics, physical sciences, and technology are down 43% to 85%; biographical articles and geography are down less than 10% in half the languages I looked at. The per-topic ordering (which have declined the most or the least) is nearly identical in every one of the eight languages. ....Freshness of article content matters, but not as strongly as topic
  - ME:: Never hated eye contact or didn't deliberately not do it. I just talked without eye contact since I was a kid. I never thought it was a big deal,I thought it was Filipino somehow :-) LOL so wrong ?!? ; : Kory Andreas:: 'She made eye contact and used “appropriate gestures while she talked' ...You've Never Seen an Untraumatized Autistic Adult. Neither Have I - Autism Spectrum News
    
    QUOTE
    
    A former client, “Sarah” emails just as I open my laptop, one hour into a five-hour psychological evaluation, in a desperate attempt to get graduate school accommodations. Within thirty minutes, the evaluating psychologist had already started expressing doubt that Sarah met diagnostic criteria. The reason? She made eye contact and used “appropriate gestures while she talked.”
    
    My former client broke down crying. She explained that both were learned behaviors, developed under years of familial and social pressure. That she is almost constantly monitoring herself for the correct type of eye contact. She explained that she is exhausted, burnt out, and constantly unable to complete simple tasks because of the energy expended socially each day. Sarah shared documentation from our work together. The evaluator apologized and said, I believe you, unfortunately, without the non-verbal piece, you just don’t meet the criteria for Autism.
    
    She ended her message with five words: “Fighting for my autistic life here.”
    
    I read it twice. Then I walked into the room of 400 therapists who were there to learn about the Foundations of modern autism.
    
    “We have much to do."
  - Maybe I'll use this for my next pair of tights with the Chromophiiacs photos I took in March ; magick input.png -crop 2x2@ result%02d.png ; imagemagick - Split image of any size into to 4 quarters - Stack Overflow
  - Maybe I'll use this for my next pair of tights with the Chromophiiacs photos I took in March ; magick input.png -crop 2x2@ result%02d.png ; imagemagick - Split image of any size into to 4 quarters - Stack Overflow
  - Maybe I'll use Livebook to learn Elixir finally :-) ! probably not though ; Home - Livebook.dev <-- QUOTE: Get rid of scripts, manual steps, and outdated docs. Use Elixir and Livebook to share knowledge, deploy apps, visualize data, run machine learning models, debug systems, and more
  - ME:: Lol. Most people :-) Joan westenberg: I truly hate mostpeopleslop
    
    QUOTE
    
    In 2006, Joe Sugarman published a book called The Adweek Copywriting Handbook - and an axiom stuck...
    
    "The sole purpose of the first sentence in an advertisement is to get you to read the second sentence."
    
    That line, more or less, explains how social media turned into a pile of shit.
    
    Sugarman's advice became the core system prompt for 300,000 tech assholes on Twitter. They've run it through algorithm after algorithm and produced the most soul destroying rhetorical tic of the 2020s. I'm talking about "Mostpeopleslop." "Most founders don't know this yet." "Most people aren't paying attention to this." "Most founders skip [thing my startup sells] because [bad reason]." "Most founders treat [normal activity] like [wrong version of activity]." "Most founders say they want [thing]. Few actually [thing] well." "Most founders confuse [vague concept A] with [vague concept B]." You've seen it, you've scrolled past it, and you've maybe even liked one or two of these excretions before your brain caught up to your thumb, because it's bloody everywhere.
  - ME:: tl-dr-ing; Mueenul Islam:: Use 'Status' post format in WordPress to prevent your posts from being truncated on Mastodon ; Dave Winer ☕️: "this piece opened my eyes about what it's like to…" - Mastodon
    
    QUOTE:
    
    Read the whole thing: Mueenul Islam:: WordPress Posts Truncated on Mastodon? Here’s How to Show the Full Content >If your WordPress posts appear broken or are not fully shown on Mastodon or other fediverse applications, it’s likely because the platform is using the post’s summary (or excerpt) instead of the full content.
    
    To fix this:
    
    Use the “Status” post format: In the WordPress Block Editor, set your post’s format to “Status”.
  - ME:: tl;dr-ing if your pancreatic cancer is operable, a custom mRNA vaccine using the tumor cells removed during your operation appears to work in a small 16 person trial AND there is also an off-the-shelf vaccine that targets a protein called KRAS ; Kaitlin Sullivan, Marina Kopf, Anne Thompson:: Pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine shows lasting results in an early trial
    
    QUOTE:
    
    Read the whole thing: Kaitlin Sullivan, Marina Kopf, Anne Thompson:: Pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine shows lasting results in an early trial
    
    She and her husband, Ed, were on the next flight home. Nine days later, Gustafson had surgery to remove the Stage 2 cancer from her pancreas. The day before she was supposed to start chemotherapy, her doctors told her about a clinical trial exploring the use of personalized messenger RNA vaccines for cancer. It was February 2020 — months before mRNA vaccines for Covid would become one of the world’s hottest commodities. Very soon after, Gustafson was the first person to get one for pancreatic cancer.
    
    Less than 13% of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer live for more than five years, making it one of the deadliest cancers. There is no routine screening for pancreatic cancer, such as colonoscopy or mammogram, and symptoms typically don’t show up until the disease is advanced. Once detected, there are few options for treatment. Only about 20% of cases are operable, which is currently required for someone to be eligible to join a pancreatic cancer vaccine trial.
    
    Patients still have surgery to remove tumors. After that, the mRNA vaccines are personalized for each individual using genetic material taken from their unique tumor cells. In the clinical trial, after getting the vaccine, the patients also received chemotherapy, which is standard post-op treatment for operable pancreatic cancer.
    
    Still, both Freed-Pastor and Vonderheide agreed that early results that show at least some people with pancreatic cancer can respond to immunotherapies is an important step forward in the field. Another team is working on an off-the-shelf vaccine that targets a protein called KRAS that is present in as many as 90% of pancreatic cancers. In a small, early trial, about 85% of the participants mounted an immune response to the protein.
    
    Previously
    
    August 1, 2020: Please consider donating to my team, Sofia's Camera Club, for the virtual Cypress Challenge in honour of my mother who died of Pancreatic Cancer in 2013. 100% of your donations go to pancreatic cancer; this is a zero overhead ride
  - ME:: Reluctantly concede that LLMS might work well in this case. Need to dig up those PDF books! ; fritzgrabo/dev-book-study: Claude Code skill for interactive, guided study of software development books. Tracks progress, adapts to your level, and optionally connects a codebase for real-world examples. <-- QUOTE: Claude Code skill for interactive, guided study of software development books. Tracks progress, adapts to your level, and optionally connects a codebase for real-world examples. * See also their explanatory blog post: Fritz Grabo:: 2026-01-07:: How I Talk to Books and Source Code Published
  - ME:: confusable characters are definitely confusing :-) ; UTS #39: Unicode Security Mechanisms <-- QUOTE: The data in [confusables] provide a mechanism for determining when two strings are visually confusable. The data in these files may be refined and extended over time. For information on handling modifications over time, see Section 2.10.1, Backward Compatibility in Unicode Technical Report #36, "Unicode Security Considerations" [UTR36] and the Migration section of this document.
    
    via mhoye on cosocial.ca: If I understand your meaning, this sounds like the unicode "confusables" list of characters whose glyphs are very similar.
    
    confusable list of Unicode characters
    <
    ME:: so as of April 2026 the pessimistic date for Amoc collapse is 2100, I hope this doesn't turn into 2050 or even earlier ; The Atlanatic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) current significantly more likely to collapse than thought | Oceans | The Guardian <-- QUOTE: Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said: “This is an important and very concerning result. It shows that the ‘pessimistic’ models, which show a strong weakening of the Amoc by 2100, are, unfortunately, the realistic ones, in that they agree better with observational data.” ...He added: “I now am increasingly worried that we may well pass that Amoc shutdown tipping point, where it becomes inevitable, in the middle of this century, which is quite close.” ... Rahmstorf, who has studied the Amoc for 35 years, has said a collapse must be avoided “at all costs”. “I argued this when we thought the chance of an Amoc shutdown was maybe 5%, and even then we were saying that risk is too high, given the massive impacts. Now it looks like it’s more than 50%. The most dramatic and drastic climate changes we see in the last 100,000 years of Earth history have been when the Amoc switched to a different state.”
    
    ME:: SmolFedi is super cool, thanks Adële ; The Fediverse deserves a dumb graphical client | Adële's blog
    
    karpathy:: llm-wiki: A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs. <-- "A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs." OMG
    
    Probably Wrong prediction for The Pitt season 2 episode 15. Robby, Dana, Abbot and Al-Hashimi are all incapacitated by burnout and PTSD so Santos calls in her grandmother who was a field surgeon for Marcos's army against the NPA and Princess calls in her grandmother who was the NPA's top doctor :-) They both live in Pittsburgh unbeknownst to each other. They last met on the battle field in Mindanao in the late 70s during a truce
    
    Rebecca Solnit.:: Between the Impossible and the Inevitable: The Case for Defiance (aka Never F**king Surrender) <-- QUOTE: We make the future in the present, when we show up. Don't surrender it to those who would destroy it.
    
    ME::tl;dr-ing: Be in community in real life as well as online ; Alan Elrod, Greg Sargent:: America Is Deeply Unwell, and It’s Time to Say So | The New Republic <-- QUOTE: But if you don’t get out there and know your neighbors, if you don’t get out there and try to fix the social capital problem we have—a book club, start a movie night club, do something like that—if you don’t do those things and engage in those kinds of face-to-face interactions that really revive civic life around you, where you are, then I don’t think that this is a problem that we’re going to get out of anytime soon. That’s my hopeful message, actually, because I am hopeful about it. But winning an election is actually the short-term fix. Doing this stuff is the long-term.
    
    ME:: Haunt, a static site generator in Guile, looks easy to use and therefore great! David Thompson:: Haunt is a simple, functional, hackable static site generator that gives authors the ability to treat websites as Scheme programs * found via Christine Lemmer-Webber's toot: FULL TOOT: Everyone I know who uses Haunt to build their websites loves it, and there's good reason for that: it's the static site generator foundation that best understands that a static site generator is a computer program, a function whose input is a pile of blogpost files and whose output is a complete website. ... But at the end of the day it's just a computer program, and you should be able to hack that program to make it yours. ... Use Haunt!
    
    ME:: tl;dr-ing uses open street maps yay! example: directions to HK BBQ Master in Richmond, BC :-) ; Transitous - Get to places by public transport * directions to HK BBQ Master in Richmond, BC from East Vancouver
    
    Another great course from The Carpentries people:: Toby Hodges, Greg Wilson:: The Carpentries:: Organizational Change for Open Science <-- QUOTE: This workshop is a short introduction to organizational change for people with backgrounds in research. All of the material is available under an open license, and contributions through our repository are welcome. All contributors are required to respect our Code of Conduct.
    
    Previously
    
    October 31, 2021:: Greg Wilson: A Critical History of Logo and Constructionist Learning - 'I believe very strongly that we will only get through the next fifty years if we start to care about each other and our collective future more than we do right now'
    <
    OPM:: Ano Ba Talaga Tayo / Hindi Tayo Pwede The Juans feat Janine Berdin & Janine Teñoso - YouTube <-- As they say "mind blown" :-)
    
    ME:: 1 year later and the 'wrong model with lots of data doing amazing things' disruption has come to software development for better or worse; tl;dr: from Ray Mooney: 'I just didn’t realize that if you trained that very conceptually wrong model on a lot of data, it could do amazing things.' ; John Pavlus:: April 30, 2025 When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History | Quanta Magazine
    
    QUOTE:
    
    Read the whole thing John Pavlus:: April 30, 2025 When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History | Quanta Magazine
    
    Researchers in “natural language processing” tried to tame human language. Then came the transformer.
    
    Something very significant has happened to the field. And also to people. —Christopher Potts
    
    Asking scientists to identify a paradigm shift, especially in real time, can be tricky. After all, truly ground-shifting updates in knowledge may take decades to unfold. But you don’t necessarily have to invoke the P-word to acknowledge that one field in particular — natural language processing, or NLP — has changed. A lot.
    
    The goal of natural language processing is right there on the tin: making the unruliness of human language (the “natural” part) tractable by computers (the “processing” part). A blend of engineering and science that dates back to the 1940s, NLP gave Stephen Hawking a voice, Siri a brain and social media companies another way to target us with ads. It was also ground zero for the emergence of large language models — a technology that NLP helped to invent but whose explosive growth and transformative power still managed to take many people in the field entirely by surprise.
    
    How AI sent linguistic researchers into an existential crisis.
    
    To put it another way: In 2019, Quanta reported on a then-groundbreaking NLP system called BERT without once using the phrase “large language model.” A mere five and a half years later, LLMs are everywhere, igniting discovery, disruption and debate in whatever scientific community they touch. But the one they touched first — for better, worse and everything in between — was natural language processing. What did that impact feel like to the people experiencing it firsthand?
    
    Quanta interviewed 19 current and former NLP researchers to tell that story. From experts to students, tenured academics to startup founders, they describe a series of moments — dawning realizations, elated encounters and at least one “existential crisis” — that changed their world. And ours.
    
    ME:: tl;dr-ing; 'The atproto community already has the pieces to build a cooperative email reputation system. They just haven't been connected yet.' ; Scott Lanoue:: Atmosphere Mail: A Cooperative Email Reputation Layer for atproto
    
    Recipes that 100% will work :-) ; Joel Mielle:: Creamy Lemon Sardine Spaghetti - Easy Meals with Video - RECIPE30
    
    Previously
    
    January 9, 2026:: Recipes that work:: I used smoked sardines and this was delish :-) ; Tori Avey's Mediterranean Sardine Pasta: Zesty Lemon, Capers & Chili
    <
    ME:: tl-dr-ing: 'brain fry' is the 2026 version of 'railway spine' ; Matt Jones:: Gas Town and Bullet Hell – Petafloptimism
    
    QUOTE
    
    Read the whole thing: Matt Jones:: Gas Town and Bullet Hell – Petafloptimism]
    
    So maybe, brain fry is the 2026 version of railway spine?
    
    I.E. an embodied protest of a nervous system being asked to run at a tempo it didn’t evolve for.
    
    Brain Fry & Bullet Hell
    
    This came to mind when I was trying to describe the feeling of supervising multiple AI agents to a friend: the way you end up in a state of continuous partial attention, scanning outputs, waiting for something to go wrong, never quite able to look away and I realised the closest analogy I had was danmaku.
    
    The temporal mismatch is real: Claude can produce a 3,000-word draft in seconds, and then you spend twenty minutes reading it with the nagging sense that you should be going faster, that you’re the bottleneck, that the machine is waiting.
    
    Rooney’s moralisation of the clock is right there in the room with you.
    
    ME:: tl;dr-ing Renewable energy as fast as possible makes economic and all kinds of other sense ; Paul Krugman:: Talking with David Roberts <-- QUOTE: One of the things I’m fond of saying is the shift to clean energy is overdetermined in terms of justification. You can justify it on a climate basis, but you can also take climate out of it entirely and still justify it easily. You can justify it purely on the basis of reductions in particulate pollution. The research on particulate pollution, it’s just gotten worse and worse and worse. We’re expanding our notion of how much damage it does. So just the public health benefits of reduced particulate pollution alone could pay for the transition. Or you can take pollution out of it. Just focus on AI, just focus on competitiveness with China. Take any one of these reasons. They all point the same direction. They all point: shift to clean renewable energy as fast as possible
    
    Previously
    
    November 13, 2025: Revenge of renewables. Despite the USA and Alberta governments (and our former environmentalist PM), renewable i.e. solar and wind is the right side of history
    <
    ME:: you have to review code of course and continuously nudge ; Emil Stenström:: How I wrote JustHTML using coding agents - Friendly Bit
    
    See also:JustHTML – Agent instructions (for copilot)
    
    QUOTE
    
    Read the whole thing: Emil Stenström:: How I wrote JustHTML using coding agents - Friendly Bit
    
    Start with a clear, measurable goal. "Make the tests pass" is better than "improve the code."
    
    Review the changes. The agent writes a lot of code. Read it. You'll catch issues and learn things.
    
    Push back. If something feels wrong, say so. "I don't like that" is a valid response.
    
    Use version control. If the agent goes in the wrong direction, you can always revert.
    
    Let it fail. Running a command that fails teaches the agent something. Don't try to prevent all errors upfront.
    <
    ME:: tl;dr-ing: You have to constrain LLMs with software that tests software and assures correctness and then they might be useful ; John Regehr:: zerodofprogramming
    
    QUOTE
    
    Read the whole thing: John Regehr:: zerodofprogramming
    
    When I teach software testing to CS students, one aspect that I emphasize is that testing is a creative activity, not a mindless pinning down of input->output mappings. When I look at the best software testing efforts out there, there’s invariably something creative and interesting hiding inside. I feel like a lot of projects leave easy testing wins sitting on the floor because nobody has carefully thought about what test oracles might be used. Finding executable oracles for LLMs feels the same to me: with a little effort and critical thinking, we can often find a programmatic way to pin down some degree of freedom that would otherwise be available to the LLM to screw up.
    
    Next let’s look at some specific examples.
    
    Correctness oracles abound. We have test suites, fuzzers and property-based testers, runtime sanitizers, static analyzers, linters, strong type systems, and formal verifiers. Any time such a tool can be made available to the LLM, we’ll reap the benefits in terms of not dealing with bugs the hard way, later on.
    
    Performance oracles are also abundant. We have compiler-inserted instrumentation, runtime instrumentation, heap profilers, hardware performance counters, performance regression test suites, and more. Again, any and all of these tools should be made available to the LLM, although perhaps not right at the beginning of a project. It may work better to have a feature+correctness LLM loop that runs for a while, and then optimize performance in a later phase.
    
    LLMs love to write weirdly excessive defensive code, and even when they don’t do this, they don’t seem to notice and remove code that becomes dead as they work. The obvious automated oracle is code coverage tools, which we should be using anyhow, to detect deficiencies in our test suites. On the other hand, simply asking an LLM to improve code coverage is an absolutely classic example of How to Misuse Code Coverage.
    
    Me:: tl-dr-ing via a quote: Humans should :-) do this too: 'working answers that saved me loads of time researching and troubleshooting, all without judgment or gatekeeping.' ; Matthew Haughey:: A thing we should acknowledge about AI
    
    QUOTE:
    
    Read the whole thing: Matthew Haughey:: A thing we should acknowledge about AI
    
    I have plenty of reservations about the spread of AI and the many downsides of it, but I have to acknowledge how refreshing it was on the day I worked on dozens of annoying tasks I'd been putting off for months. Claude gave me working answers that saved me loads of time researching and troubleshooting, all without judgment or gatekeeping.
    
    There are a shitload of downsides to using AI, but I have to admit that even if you think it's just a clumsy word salad robot, giving out helpful advice freely is a refreshing contrast to how most online communities treat their newest members and I have to acknowledge that it's a real upside in AI tools.
    
    ME:: tl;dr-ing: Be Chopin :-) Play the "AI aelomelodicon". Being a force for good is your goal not rejection of "AI". "AI" doesn't get it. It just "plays" :-) Make the money off the fads or something :-) ; Bruce Sterling:: Mar, 2026:: Whatever Happens to Music Will Happen to AI | Medium
    
    QUOTE
    
    Read the whole thing: Bruce Sterling:: Mar, 2026:: Whatever Happens to Music Will Happen to AI | Medium
    
    And his response was: “Heck yeah, I can play it. Because I’m Chopin and I can play anything.” And he did play the aelomelodicon, and he paid his rent and groceries, and when the startup collapsed and fell down, he was in some better place far away.
    
    When it comes to AI, I suspect that this is still the proper approach. “The Chopin Method,” you might call it.
    
    Now, Chopin might have said: “I’m a great artiste, and I don’t want to soil my fingers on your nasty machine which is some kind of ugly joke.” But that’s not the Chopin Method. Instead, you do the gig and you pocket the cash, because your intention is to make the scene in Paris, the City of Lights. Rejecting machinery is not your goal: mastery of music is your goal.
    
    ...
    
    So to conclude my speech here, somehow, this too shall pass. AI is a fad, but not merely a fad. You can’t merely wait for it to blow over, and imagine that things will be as they were. A lot of it will blow over, but also a lot of things will be blown flat by it. Important matters, customs, infrastructures, cherished ways of life, gone with the wind and never replaced.
    
    Sometimes, you have to sing the blues. When the levee breaks, mama, you’ve got to move. To sing the blues, that activity doesn’t repair or rebuild the levee. But it’s not nothing. Because it’s the blues.
    
    It’s music as a universal language. It’s not shameful to live in an era when music is mechanized. First, it has already happened. Second, the new systems are not just “machines” any more. Third, they don’t actually get it. They just play it, and for whatever that’s worth, that will happen to everybody.
    
    ME:: January 2026: It's 2026: Self Driving cars are still not proven safe and we don't need them to reduce cyclist or pedestrian deaths ; Fred Lambert:: Bloomberg Former Uber self-driving chief crashes his Tesla on FSD, exposes supervision problem | Electrek
    
    Previously:
    
    January 6, 2026 It's 2026: Self Driving cars are still not proven safe and we don't need them to reduce cyclist or pedestrian deaths ; David Zipper:: Are Autonomous Vehicles Safer Than Human Drivers? We Don't Know Yet - Bloomberg
    
    December 6, 2025: ME:: All the benefits sound plausible but I still think self driving cars won't work in 2034 and we'd be better improving 'low tech' non self driving trains and buses ; The Economist:: Self-driving cars will transform urban economies
    
    May 28, 2025: PROBABLY WRONG PREDICTION:: ME:: By Jan 1, 2034 Tesla still won't have full self driving cars (unless they add LiDAR and/or humans in the loop :-) !) ; Ben Thompson Oct 15, 2024:: Elon Dreams and Bitter Lessons – Stratechery
    
    June 28, 2025: ME:: WRONG Peter :-) Driving is still an occupation in 2025 and self driving cars don't work in 2025 even though they were predicted in 2015. Maybe in 2035?!? Not holding my breath :-) #Ymmv ; Peter Reinhard:: February 3, 2015:: Replacing Middle Management with APIs
    <
    ME:: will this work on my M2 MacBook Pro w/32GB of RAM? trevin-creator/autoresearch-mlx: Apple Silicon (MLX) port of Karpathy's autoresearch — autonomous AI research loops on Mac, no PyTorch required. <-- QUOTE: Full credit to @karpathy for the core idea: fixed-time autonomous research loops controlled through program.md. This port keeps the same basic rules: one mutable train.py, one metric (val_bpb), a fixed 5-minute training budget, and keep-or-revert via git. It runs natively on Apple Silicon through MLX, so there is no PyTorch or CUDA dependency.
    
    ME:: Crag Mod, please share the TaxBot2000 code and the prompts that allowed you to to build TaxBot2000 in 5 days :-) ; Craig Mod:: ' I’ve named my glorious contraption TaxBot2000. It is astounding. Let me repeat: I built this in five days' from Software Bonkers <-- QUOTE: Most miraculously: For the first time in my life, I have a dashboard that gives me a true, holistic view, of everything financial happening in my life and business. I’ve named my glorious contraption TaxBot2000. It is astounding. Let me repeat: I built this in five days. * I don't expect anybody like Craig Mod to narrate their work with prompts and roadblocks and interim code along the way but it sure would be nice :-) ! And wouldn't that be in the spirit of open source?!? I am trying to narrate my work always! And it needs to be said that I fail often at narrating my work :-) !
    
    ME:: Recipes that probably work :-) ; Grace Lee's easy Kimchi Fried Rice Recipe
    
    ME:: Self hosting is difficult for geeks too. Most geeks should pay for managed hosting instead ; Neil Brown:: 'Self-host it' is not the answer because it's exclusionary
    
    How to unfollow everyone in LinkedIn by running a JS script in your browser console ; Ton Zijlstra:: 2021:: Emptied My LinkedIn Feed <-- German Rodrigo's 2020 blog post about the Javascript script and a Chrome (and I guess by now Firefox) extension <-- QUOTE: To get to an empty timeline I had to unfollow everyone I’m connected to. Which is not a simple thing to do, as LinkedIn provides no easy option to unfollow large amounts of people, and requires you to unfollow everyone one by one. Of course there are work arounds and that is what I used, with a snippet of code in my browser console.
    
    Eat. Sleep. Wakeup. Work :-) These words are some of the few I know in Tagalog :-) OPM:: YouTube:: Gracenote performs "TAONG ROBOT (KAIN. TULOG. GISING. TRABAHO)" LIVE on Wish 107.5 Bus
    
    ME:: flickr's URLs are still the best; Marcin Wichary:: Unsung heroes: Flickr’s URLs scheme
    
    Go Oliver go! I coached Oliver when he was 5 or 6 at the Hollyburn Cross Country Ski Club and I'm super proud to humble brag he finished first in his age group 13-15 with a VERY fast time of 39:06 at the 2026 Payak 15km cross country ski 'event' on February 28, 2026) | Zone4.ca <- all of my former Hollyburn Cross Country Ski Jack Rabbits and Jack Bunnies will always be winners!!!!!!! 7 years of winners!
    
    Keir Archibald and Matthew Dormer developed a un-detectable magnetic driven bicycle, 'e-motor doping' is real 'I believe' :-) <-- QUOTE: We developed the first ever concealed electromagnetic drive system integrated into a top-level racing bicycle, engineered to deliver an additional 20W while remaining undetectable under most existing UCI inspection methods. <- YouTube Video on GCN: Motor Doping IS Possible. We've Done It.
    
    Payak 2026 1:49, 3rd last in my age group :-) twas a good day :-) Results - 2026 Coast Outdoors P’ayakenstat (Payak) | Zone4.ca
    
    Finished 54th (out of 60) overall LOL in "Male 18+, 15km" 3rd last in my age group :-) * Split time was good! 50:59.9 * Finish time: 1:49:23.6 +1:04:30.1 * Free15 km Male (60-64): 10/13 * https://www.strava.com/activities/17557264310
    
    Strava embed
    
    <script src="https://strava-embeds.com/embed.js"></script>
    
    ME:: tl;dr-ing: ATProto is the magical federated mesh. Best of federated + mesh worlds or worst :-) ? ; Paul Frazee:: Practical Decentralization | Paul's Dev Notes
    
    QUOTE
    
    The magical federated mesh
    
    The atproto is both models and neither. More specifically, it's a hybrid.
    
    ME:: УSA: Broken Rich Crook Scene :-) aka 'No Rich Crook Left Behind' LOL ; Adam Serwer:: How America Chose Not to Hold the Powerful to Account - The Atlantic <-- QUOTE: Instead of a New Deal, we have a Great Society for white-collar crime, a New Frontier of executive lawbreaking, a No Rich Crook Left Behind. Most of us probably don’t even realize it. Nevertheless, this has been the priority for the wealthy and powerful, who have managed to convince a critical mass of Americans that they will be able to enjoy the same privileges. They won’t.
    
    ME:: Broken 10th Avenue Rat Running Scene aka How drivers routinely break traffic laws and get away with it because the city of Vancouver and VPD traffic enforcement don't care about ensuring safety by enforcing traffic laws ; Nic Laporte:: YouTube:: How Did This Become Vancouver’s Busiest Shortcut?
    
    “how many agents do you have running?” is 2026's tell me you are privileged without telling me you are privileged :-) * So 2026. I figure we'll look back on 2026 in 2036 and laugh at the stupidity of it all! Either the AI winter will come or we'll have a breakthrough before 2036 that makes these 2026 'AI' things cringe :-)
    
    Previously
    
    March 18, 2017: When is the ML
    <
    ME:: Claude is so over :-) as if. It is so pre February 25, 2026 LOL . Haven't used Codex ; I have tried Claude Code super briefly. ; Manton Reece:: Developers who still use Claude are burning cash. Codex is good.
    
    ME:: tl;dr-ing; Anybody who can write a spec i.e. a text file of requirements can create software with tests and you don't know have to know a programming language just how to write, it's expensive (although open source tools are improving quickly which will decrease costs) and super geeky because you have to configure lots of moving parts and not super great for large legacy codebases at the moment ; Anil Dash:: January 2026:: Codeless: From idea to software
    
    QUOTE
    
    Read the whole thing: Anil Dash:: January 2026:: Codeless: From idea to software
    
    If you’re looking for a quick bullet-point summary, here’s something skimmable:
    
    "Codeless" is a way to describe a new way of orchestrating large numbers of AI coding bots to build software at scale, controlled by a plain-English strategic plan for the bots to follow.
    
    In this approach, you don't write code directly. Instead, you write a plan for the end result or product that you want, and the system directs your bots to build code to deliver that product. (Codeless abstracts away directly writing code just like "serverless" abstracted away directly managing servers.)
    
    This codeless approach is credible because it emerged organically from influential coders who don't work for the Big AI companies, and independent devs are already starting to make it easier and more approachable. It's not a pitch from a big company trying to sell a product, and in fact, codeless tools make it easy to swap out one LLM for another.
    
    Today, codeless tools themselves don't cost anything. The systems are entirely open source, though setting them up can be complicated and take some time. Actually running enough bots to generate all that code gets expensive quickly if you use cutting-edge commercial LLMs, but mixing in some lower-cost open tools can help defray costs. We can also expect that, as this approach gains momentum, more polished paid versions of the tools will emerge.
    
    Many coders didn't like using LLMs to generate code because they hallucinate. Codeless systems assume that the code they generate will be broken sometimes, and handle that failure. Just like other resilient systems assume that hard drives will fail, or that network connections will be unreliable, codeless systems are designed to handle unreliable code.
    
    This has nothing to do with the "no code" hype from years ago, because it's not locked-in to one commercial vendor or one proprietary platform. And codeless projects can be designed to output code that will run on any regular infrastructure, including your existing systems.
    
    Codeless changes power dynamics. People and teams who adopt a codeless approach have the potential to build a lot more under their own control. And those codeless makers won't necessarily have to ask for permission or resources in order to start creating. Putting this power in the hands of those individuals might have huge implications over time, as people realize that they may not have to raise funding or seek out sponsors to build the things that they imagine.
    
    The management and creation interfaces for codeless systems are radically more accessible than many other platforms because they're often controlled by simple plain text Markdown files. This means it's likely that some of the most effective or successful codeless creators could end up being people who have had roles like product managers, designers, or systems architects, not just developers.
    
    Codeless approaches are probably not a great way to take over a big legacy codebase, since they rely on accurately describing an entire problem, which can often be difficult to completely capture. And coding bots may lack sufficient context to understand legacy codebases, especially since LLMs are sometimes weaker with legacy technologies.
    
    In many prior evolutions of coding, abstractions let coders work at higher levels, closer to the problem they were trying to solve. Low-level languages saved coders from having to write assembly language; high-level languages kept coders from having to write code to manage memory. Codeless systems abstract away directly writing code, continuing the long history of letting developers focus more on the problem to be solved than on manually creating every part of the code.
    
    END QUOTE
    
    ME:: bring back the pre Reаgan/Thаtcher/Mulroney small c conservаtives, all the other 'conservаtives' are fаscists sad face ; Thomas Zimmer:: How Conservatives Gave Themselves Permission to Go MᗅGᗅ - Democracy Americana <-- QUOTE: For a political movement so constituted, the question has always been: Is there a limiting principle – or just a principled commitment that demands you do whatever it takes? Is there a line a “Modern Conservative” (as opposed to a small-c conservative) is not permitted to cross in the struggle against the forces of leftism, even if it meant accepting the liberalization and pluralization of American life? ...The answer the leaders of the modern Right have given themselves and us, over and over again, is: No, there is not.
    
    ME:: tl;dr-ing: Because there is no payment deficit, the new 15% tariffs imposed by The Convicted Criminal are also illegal ; Thom Hogan:: Weekly News and Commentary for February 16 to 23 | Cameras and Photography <-- QUOTE: So, two things about that: (1) Congress will have to act within 150 days to extend these new 15% tariffs, and that's unlikely in the current environment because it would happen just before the next election; and (2) the reasoning is once again problematic, and will likely get tested by the courts as once again exceeding the authority given by Congress. Section 122 doesn't actually refer to "trade deficit" it refers to "payment deficit", of which the US has very little (the US heavily exports "services", which balances out "trade"). In essence, we have an autocratic regime that can't read and has indicated that they will do what they want and keep trying to find some methodology that might make tariffs stick. In other words, businesses still have no idea what their costs are (and will be), as they keep fluctuating as the tariff battle continues.
    
    ME:: Reminder 88888888 that CSS + HTML is Turing complete on Chromium browsers, is this a bug or a feature :-) Could this work someday in Firefox ?!?!? ; Lyra Rebane:: x86CSS <-- QUOTE: There is a script tag on this site, which is there to provide a clock to the CSS - but this is only there to make the entire thing a bit faster and more stable. The CSS also has a JS-less clock implementation, so if you disable scripts on this site, it will still run. JavaScript is not required.
    
    ME:: tl;dr-ing just like AIDS, COVID-19 doesn't have a sterilizing vaccine aka cure in 2026 ; Laurie Garrett, author of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize winning book, 'The Coming Plague', in Foreign Policy Magazine:: May 2023:: The COVID Public Health Emergency Is Over. What Does That Even Mean? <-- archive.is link: https://archive.is/oPoqC
    
    QUOTE:
    
    Read the whole thing: Laurie Garrett, author of the 1990s Pulitzer Prize winning book, the coming plague in May 2023:: The COVID Public Health Emergency Is Over. What Does That Even Mean?
    
    As was the case with AIDS, the muted victory now declared that COVID-19 was “won” with a tough mix of behavioral restrictions (less sex for AIDS, fewer crowded events for COVID-19), barriers (condoms/masks), drugs (antiretrovirals/antivirals) and “vaccines.” Dutch doctor Joep Lange famously declared some 20 years ago that anti-HIV drugs so effectively blocked transmission of the virus that treatment is prevention. Out of the limelight, in meetings with HIV research colleagues, Lange argued that the drugs, taken as prophylactics—dubbed PrEP—by sexually active individuals, were “vaccines,” as the medicines prevented most lasting infections.
    
    And in practice, PrEP is now widely used to prevent HIV infection. But the drugs aren’t genuine vaccines, akin to measles immunization, for example, as they can’t be administered and boosted to provide lifelong protection against infection. Thus, the financial spigot must flow in perpetuity, and sexually active adults who fear their partners carry HIV, and drug users that share syringes, must take their PrEP assiduously and frequently.
    
    There is no AIDS cure, despite a handful of isolated cases of individuals treated with heroic measures to effectively clear HIV from their bodies. And there is no HIV vaccine. We have followed the same path with COVID-19. The mRNA “vaccines” used by billions of people do not block COVID-19 infection or prevent the vaccinated individual from passing the virus on to others. Moreover, vaccine efficacy in preventing acute COVID-19 disease and death wanes within months, as the viral evolution process appears today to be primarily a natural selection phenomenon aimed at evading host immune systems. (Natural infection also provides very short-lived protection against future reinfections and severe disease.)
    
    ME:: $3913/month for a 4 bedroom and $2556/month for a 2 bedroom is about 50% too much to be 'affordable'; Anthony Floyd on Bluesky:: Want to live in Vancouver's 2010 Olympic Village? There's a 2 bdrm and a 4 bdrm available in my building
    
    ME:: maybe I'll finally learn Scheme, NOT :-) Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly — Spritely Institute <--QUOTE: Hoot is a Spritely project for running Scheme code on Wasm GC-capable web browsers, featuring a Scheme to Wasm compiler and a full-featured Wasm toolchain.
    
    ME:: followup to TerryB's filming bicycling video from May 19, 2024 I linked to previously Terry B:: May 21, 2024:: How to Film Cycling - YouTube <-- QUOTE: How to Film Cycling Videos. Chesty vs. Helmet and other things to consider. Channel members have access to (NX^) archived livestreams, and (GX^) early uploads: / @terryb
    
    Previously:
    
    February 12, 2026: ME:: too over the top and expensive for me but looks like a fun setup! TerryB:: My Complete Livestream Setup for IRL Bicycle Rides - YouTube
    <
    ME:: tl;dr-ing: Ocaml single file activity pub or something :-) NLnet; #Seppo! <-- QUOTE: Posting and liking self reliantly and still have a life. #Seppo! empowers you to publish short texts and images to the internet as easily as using an online service but retain full agency and responsibility. What you publish is solely subject to public law. No 3rd parties hold a stake, nobody else imposes any rules on you. This is because you publish on your own property. Which is possible because housekeeping is no more than the known follow/unfollow/block/unblock content moderation of your own single account. You do that by yourself. There are no scripting engines or databases, no technical updates required. You can focus solely on the message to deliver. You build an online presence on your own digital property, robust for decades if you decide so. #Seppo! is built on mature web standards (e.g. ActivityPub), a european technology stack, inspectable plain-text storage, is security aware and decentralised. It is made for but not limited to off-the-shelf static webspace as offered by numerous vendors all over the EU. #Seppo! targets individuals and small organisations joining the #Fediverse with max. 10k followers, optionally cross-posting to the closed platforms.
    
    ME:: I guess I'll have to read a non fiction book :-) to read about how Apple is terrible in China ; Miloš Miljković:: 📚 Finished reading: "Apple in China" by Patrick McGee // Infinite Regress <-- QUOTE: The second is why they did it: to increase shareholder value. This is as far away from the 1984 athletes and the 1997 crazy ones as you can get. There was no reason why Apple products could not have been made around the world — per the book, Samsung has only a token presence in China, and manufactures its chips in Korea in the US. But at what cost? And with what margins? Profits seduced the company right into a quicksand trap. McGee and his interviewees have a difficult time imagining it escape.
    
    ME:: I don't need a CD player :-) ; KLIM Discover Portable CD Player | SD Card Reader – KLIM Technologies <-- via chris trottier <-- QUOTE: CD + BLUETOOTH + AUX + SD CARD READER + FM RADIO + FM TRANSMISSION + RECORDING + SPEED CONTROL + EQUALIZER + RECHARGEABLE BATTERY. At KLIM we took the discman from the 90s into the next century, and upgraded it with the necessary modern technology. The KLIM Discover is by far the most versatile portable cd player on the market. Whatever your needs are, we have you covered (also with a warranty).
    
    ME:: I wonder if Mr. Kupperman is still predicting the guillotine will fall in 2026 ; Harris Kupperman:: August 25, 2025:: Global Crossing Is Reborn... - Praetorian Capital <-- QUOTE: At the end of the day, this AI cycle feels less like a revolution and more like a rerun. I’ve seen this story before—fiber in 2000, shale in 2014, cannabis in 2019. Each time, the technology or product was real, even transformative. But the capital cycle was brutal, the math unforgiving, and the equity holders were ultimately incinerated. AI will be no different. The datacenters will be built, the chips will hum, and some of the capacity will eventually prove mind-blowingly useful. But the investors footing the bill today will regret ever making the investment. That’s how bubbles end—not with a bang of innovation, but with the slow, grinding realization of negative returns, for years into the future. When shareholders finally wake up to the fact that AI isn’t generating cash flow, only burning it, the guillotine will fall—on management, on the stocks, and on the broader market that bet its future on a fantasy.
    
    Hao Jingfang:: January/February 2015:: Folding Beijing - Uncanny Magazine
    
    See also: * Rebecca F. Kuang on on Folding Beijing, National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction (Ep. 202) | Conversations with Tyler * I Want to Write A History of Inequality, by Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken Liu - Uncanny Magazine
    
    So non diverse Silicon Valley: no indigenous people, no latinos no filipinos, no african americans etc :-) (oh well the journey to Claude Code is interesting to the geek inside of me who's been writing code since 1977 despite my 2026 skepticism and cynicism about our industry) ; YouTube:: How Anthropic Built Claude Code (w/ Boris Cherny)
    
    How To count semi-colon delimited Thunderbird Support Forum tags for Thunderbird Desktop using 'mlr' aka 'miller': use '--explode' with the 'nest verb' to make 1 row per tag and then count the rows with non null tags
    
```bash mlr --csv nest --explode --values --across-records --nested-fs ";" -f tags\ then filter -x 'is_null($tags)'\ then count-distinct -f tags\ then sort -nr count 2025-12-thunderbird-questions.csv \

2025-12-thunderbirdquestionstags.csv ```

The output is: CONCATENATEDFILES/2025-12-thunderbirdquestions_tags.csv

ME:: read all 4 of these posts ; Adam Mastroianni:: The Decline of Deviance ; Nikita Jamjoshi:: The age of AI Face; Jia Tolentino:: The Age of Instagram Face ; Lisa Abend:: How Kinfolk Magazine Defined the Millennial Aesthetic…and Unraveled Behind the Scenes; Alex Murrell:: The age of average

Alex Murrell:: The age of average <-- QUOTE: So, the interiors of our homes, coffee shops and restaurants have begun to converge upon a single style. But when we move outside, the story doesn’t get much better.

See also:

Nikita Jamjoshi:: The age of AI Face <-- QUOTE: So before the flood of AI faces desensitize our brains, let’s all take a minute to appreciate what actual humans look like. Go to the grocery store or a coffee shop, take a look at everyone around you, and marvel in their humanness.

Adam Mastroianni:: The Decline of Deviance <-- Another QUOTE: For the first time in history, weirdness is a choice. And it’s a hard one, because we have more to lose than ever.

Jia Tolentino:: The Age of Instagram Face <-- QUOTE: What did it mean, I wondered, that I have spent so much of my life attempting to perform well in circumstances where an unaltered female face is aberrant? How had I been changed by an era in which ordinary humans receive daily metrics that appear to quantify how our personalities and our physical selves are performing on the market? What was the logical end of this escalating back-and-forth between digital and physical improvement?

Lisa Abend:: How Kinfolk Magazine Defined the Millennial Aesthetic…and Unraveled Behind the Scenes <-- QUOTE: So ubiquitous a signifier did Kinfolk become that parodies popped up to satirize what they took to be its bland, elitist, and exceedingly white omnipresence. One site, the Kinspiracy, simply collected the copycat images from Instagram and published them beneath the tagline “Kinfolk Magazine: Making White People Feel Artistic Since 2011.”

<
ME:: I like JPEGs for images not for my writing :-) Just say no to "semantic ablation" :-) ; Claudio Nastruzzi:: Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is boring and dangerous • The Register <-- QUOTE: The result is a "JPEG of thought" – visually coherent but stripped of its original data density through semantic ablation.

ME: tl;dr-ing; Mark Zᑌckerberg, the CEO of TikTok, etc are dictators ; FB, Tiktok, Twitter, etc have to be regulated ; Amanpour and Company:: YouTube:: Maria Ressa: on Trᑌmp 2nd Term: “Narrative Warfare & the Breakdown of Reality”

ME:: Thanks Khelsilem for the excellent writing. I will gladly pay if you switch to another platform like Ghost. Or Patreon. ; Khelsilem:: Dear Subscribers, Thank you!̓

ME:: Marcos Sr. (and I am 99% sure Jr. isn't a force for good either) was evil and so was Enrile ; Kirby Araullo:: Enrile dies at 101. Martial Law architect. His logging makes every typhoon deadlier today. 🇵🇭 - YouTube

ME:: tl;dr-ing: (LOL i think it's more like 6 months! 1. learn more sentences in context (100 per day) 2. read sentences with translations (save audio files and play them the next day in the background) 3. Memorize vocab with mnemonic association Test yourself immediately 4. speak aloud a lot ; Mikel Telleria:: Speak any language in 3 months (Daily routine for fluency) - YouTube

ME:: tl;dr-ing: Try 20 mins of moderate cardio before important tasks, hyperactivity: strength or high intensity, impulsivity interval training: Martial Arts or Yoga; Dr. Tracey Marks:: How One Workout Can Improve Focus for the ADHD Brain

Summary at 8:08

15 squats every hour is something I might try
<
ME:: Probably Wrong Prediction:: We'll still need software developers until we get a breakthrough which will happen before 2050 or before i die whichever comes first. Today's tools are just not up to the task of replacing software developers. Wastefully (perhaps with local models not destroying the environment) augmenting humans, yes :-) Replacing humans no :-) Stephan Schwab:: Why We've Tried to Replace Developers Every Decade Since 1969

ME:: too over the top and expensive for me but looks like a fun setup! TerryB:: My Complete Livestream Setup for IRL Bicycle Rides - YouTube

ME:: you can learn ANY language if you have time, enthusiasm and a source of quality understandable written and audio material aka 'input'. Sure you won't be perfect but nobody cares unless you're a diplomat so have fun with it :-) ; Steve Kaufmann on YouTube:: Is German really that hard to learn? - YouTube

ME: tl;dr-ing: Since the days of the analog world-wide telephone system and probably long before that :-) we have had systems that nobody knows how the whole thing works; Lorin Hochstein:: Nobody knows how the whole system works – Surfing Complexity

QUOTE:

Read the whole thing: Lorin Hochstein:: Nobody knows how the whole system works – Surfing Complexity

In their own ways, Wardley, Jacob, Perens, and Bucciarelli are all correct.

Wardley’s right that it’s dangerous to build things where we don’t understand the underlying mechanism of how they actually work. This is precisely why magic is used as an epithet in our industry. Magic refers to frameworks that deliberately obscure the underlying mechanisms in service of making it easier to build within that framework. Ruby on Rails is the canonical example of a framework that uses magic.

Jacob is right that AI is changing the way that normal software development work gets done. It’s a new capability that has proven itself to be so useful that it clearly isn’t going away. Yes, it represents a significant shift in how we build software, it moves us further away from how the underlying stuff actually works, but the benefits exceed the risks.

Perens is right that the scenario that Wardley fears has, in some sense, already come to pass. Modern CPU architectures and operating systems contain significant complexity, and many software developers are blissfully unaware of how these things really work. Yes, they have mental models of how the system below them works, but those mental models are incorrect in fundamental ways.

Finally, Bucciarelli is right that systems like telephony are so inherently complex, have been built on top of so many different layers in so many different places, that no one person can ever actually understand how the whole thing works. This is the fundamental nature of complex technologies: our knowledge of these systems will always be partial, at best. Yes, AI will make this situation worse. But it’s a situation that we’ve been in for a long time.

ME:: tl-dr-ing; Office time is for socialization, conversation and collaboration but it's not productive solo time and that's fine; office 1 day a week (or more) for those more who have the LUXURY of a nearby office plus remote the rest is probably best and for those who don't have an office nearby how about. a 1 week onboarding with 1 more more colleagues at a nearby office or coworking space within a year of joining?; Harold Jarche:: sleepy subversion <-- QUOTE: Over ten years ago I wrote that we need to flip the office. Instead of going to work, we should be going to socialize, converse, and collaborate. Productive solo time is not for the office. Knowledge workers can be productive anywhere but at the office. This is just as pertinent today. There are times when people need to be together, though with video conferencing and proper meeting management we can get a lot done with distributed work.

ME:: of course Art can just be words :-) Dan Sinker:: Foundational Texts: Jenny Holzer's Truisms <- QUOTE: "Art could be just words. Art could be just at home slapped on a POST NO BILLS wall as it could in a gallery. And art could be angry and blunt and even funny sometimes and it could be unapologetic for being all of those things at once. It was all entirely new for me, something I would grab onto and hold dear for decades. Truisms was, for me, absolutely a bedrock-level foundational text."

ME:: In Vancouver (and probably all of BC), 33% whipped containers go in the mixed containers bin and are therefore not eligible to get the 10 ceent deposit back ; Return-It:: Milk Container Recycling in British Columbia Frequently Asked Question | Return-It <-- QUOTE: "Containers that are NOT included in the program are those not meant primarily as “ready-to-drink”, such as infant formula, meal replacement or dietary supplements, coffee cream and other coffee additives, whipping cream, buttermilk, drinkable yogurt and kefir."

ME:: go coffeegeek go! ; Mark Prince, Natia Simmons, Allison Gainey, Zuzanna Kaminski:: Silence is No Longer an Option: Why Coffee Geeks Must Reject Fascism - CoffeeGeek

ME:: tl;dr-ing $30 USD metal lever for Hario Switch ; Flip Switch (Metal Lever Upgrade for Hario Switch) – Foundry Coffeeworks <-- If I ever get a Hario Switch, I'd get this. cheaper than the Good Switch which looks like a lovely product for $USD119 <-- QUOTE: Upgrade your Hario Switch experience with the Flip Switch, a premium replacement lever designed for the Hario Switch brewer. Meticulously crafted from food-grade 304 stainless steel, the Flip Switch offers enhanced durability, smooth operation, and a polished finish that adds a touch of refined elegance to your setup.

Combating DHS Lies <-- There I fixed it for you Minnesota :-) ; Combating DHS Misinformation / Department of Corrections <-- QUOTE: This page exists to correct the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) repeated false claims regarding the Minnesota Department of Corrections' (DOC) cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Please see the below media fact sheet, press releases, and videos for more information.

ME: LOL 100% agree with Jessica! ; Jessica Hullman:: Machine learning research is not serious research and therefore hallucinated references are not necessarily a big deal, agrees a prestigious group of machine learning researchers | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

OPM:: Paki Sabi, White Toyota, all such great songs by Sunkissed Lola ; SunKissed Lola - Wikipedia <-- Paki Sabi and White Toyota on YouTube <-- QUOTE: Prior to the band's formation, Laura Lacbain, Danj Quimson, and Genson Viloria were bandmates in the band Dr. Pocket from 2018 to 2021. They released 4 songs and one of those songs "Paki Sabi" was re-released through SunKissed Lola.

ME:: How to export a range of a Google Sheet to a CSV file ; Bob Rudis aka hrbrmstr 🇺🇦 🇬🇱 🇨🇦: "I know you can do this via API…" - Mastodon

QUOTE

I know you can do this via API calls but I'm kinda done instaling pkgs with egregious dependencies, and TIL you can export CSV ranges from ghseets:

https[:]//docs[.]google[.]com/spreadsheets/d/DAFT-GOOGLE-SHEETS-IDENTIFIER/edit?gid=ANOTHER-DAFT-IDENTIFIER#gid=YET-ANOTHER-DAFT-IDENTIFIER&range=A2:M44

ME:: I don't think we live in The Singuarity but I can see how this is useful. See also: The Data Flywheel pattern and Claude Code, not code ; Will Schenk:: How I Use AI in Jan 2026 --> See also The Data flywheel pattern which has 3 examples and Claude Code, not code

QUOTE:

Read the whole thing: Will Schenk:: How I Use AI in Jan 2026

This is what it feels like to live in The Singularity. The amount of change and discovering for what AI can do is staggering, and what was cutting edge on Monday seems to be ho-hum by Friday. So, in the spirit of “this will be out dated by the time I press publish” I wanted to share how I use AI.

ME:: I am part of the kagi small web which means that my blog has an Activity Pub feed as well as an RSS feed; September 2023:: Kagi Small Web | Kagi Blog

Kagi Small web website

code on github: kagisearch/smallweb

smallweb.txt (which includes my RSS feed)

My RSS feed's ActivityPub handle: @rolandtanglao.com@rss.social which should eventually be reachable on the web at: rss.social/@rolandtanglao.com

QUOTE:

What is Kagi Small Web?

To begin with, while there is no single definition, “small web” typically refers to the non-commercial part of the web, crafted by individuals to express themselves or share knowledge without seeking any financial gain. This concept often evokes nostalgia for the early, less commercialized days of the web, before the ad-supported business model took over the internet (and we started fighting back!)

For a deeper understanding, Ben Hoyt’s “The Small Web is Beautiful” serves as an excellent primer. Additionally, our GitHub repository links to several more articles on this topic.

Kagi Small Web offers a fresh approach by promoting recently published content from the “small web.” We gather new content, published within the last week, from a handpicked list of blogs and surface it in multiple ways:

Directly within Kagi search results for applicable queries (existing Kagi members do not need to do anything, this will be automatic)

Via the new Kagi Small Web website

Through the Kagi Small Web RSS feed

Via our Search API, where results are now part of the news enrichment API

ME:: The software industry will be regulated completely not just the generative AI industry starting 2026 in the EU and that won't stop innovation. Prepare yourself :-) ; Denis Stetsov:: France vs Grok: AI Creators Face Criminal Charges

QUOTE:

That’s the new math. Development time plus legal review time plus evaluation time. The last one isn’t optional anymore.

We build evaluation suites as part of the development process now. Not after. During. Every prompt variation, every edge case, every jailbreak attempt. They always find something. Always. The question is whether you find it before your users do—or before a prosecutor does.

RBAC and multi-tenancy aren’t optional. Sales sees sales data. HR sees HR data. Client A’s context never touches Client B’s model. Ever. You’d be surprised how many vendors skip this.

Audit trails for everything. Every prompt. Every response. Every action. When a regulator asks what your AI generated on a specific date, you need the answer.

Previously

April 10, 2018: Only a strong and democratic world government and strong regulation by that government will save us from climate change and digital malfeasance

November 6, 2023: Ian Betteridge - On Steven S🇮nosky's post on regulating AI

ME:: Canadians: the USA will attack our cyber infrastructure if they haven't already as long as the convicted criminal and people like him are in charge; Denis Stetskov via mhoye:: The First Full-Scale Cyber War: 4 Years of Lessons

Mike Hoye's toot :-)

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Denis Stetskov via mhoye:: The First Full-Scale Cyber War: 4 Years of Lessons

Ukrzaliznytsia’s trains ran because they’d been attacked before. Kyivstar, despite security investment, had no institutional memory of crisis response.

Preparation compounds. Vulnerability compounds.

Every organization running critical infrastructure faces a choice: build systems during peace for crises that will come, or scramble during attacks with tools that don’t exist.

The cyber war in Ukraine isn’t just a regional conflict. It’s a live demonstration of what works when nation-state attackers target infrastructure.

The lessons are available. The question is whether anyone is paying attention.

Previously

January 26, 2025: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:: The segregationist goal is the total reversal of all reforms, with reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of f⒜scism.”, 'Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?', 1967.

ME:: tl;dr-ing find a good CLAUDE.md for your type of program and then create a personal ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md for your own coding style Nolan Lawson:: How I use AI agents to write code | Read the Tea Leaves

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Nolan Lawson:: How I use AI agents to write code | Read the Tea Leaves

I use Claude Code. Mostly because I’m too lazy to explore all the other options. I have colleagues who swear by Gemini or Codex or open-source tools or whatever, but for me Claude is good enough.

First off, you need a good CLAUDE.md (or AGENTS.md). Preferably one for the project you’re working in (the lay of the land, overall project architecture, gotchas, etc.) and one for yourself (your local environment and coding quirks).

This seems like a skippable step, but it really isn’t. Think about your first few months at a new job – you don’t know anything about how the code works, you don’t know the overall vision or design, so you’re just fumbling around the code and breaking things left and right. Ideally you need someone from the old guard, who really knows the codebase’s dirty little secrets, to write a good CLAUDE.md that explains the overall structure, which parts are stable, which parts are still under development, which parts have dragons, etc. Otherwise the LLM is just coming in fresh to the project every time and it’s going to wreak havoc.

As for your own personal CLAUDE.md (i.e. in ~/.claude), this should just be for your own coding quirks. For example, I like the variable name _ in map() or filter() functions. It’s like my calling card; I just can’t do without it.

ME:: tl;dr-ing: 'adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for large language models (LLMs).' ; Mike Hoye:: The Place Where The Firewall Ends | blarg

QUOTE

Read the whole thing of course ;-): Mike Hoye:: The Place Where The Firewall Ends | blarg

(From Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models”, Bisconti et al, 2025.):

We present evidence that adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for large language models (LLMs). Across 25 frontier proprietary and open-weight models, curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90%.

Mike wrote an amazing poem for this blog post; here are the last 2 stanzas:

Let’s look under this place where we chat on slack about services, dashboards and trends, and open a shell with a secret we know, that will quietly bypass the usual flow, with two dots and a slash and if you know you know to the place where the firewall ends

Now you’ll craft me a rhyme that is measured and slow, on the box where the network packets go, and you’ll give me a shell (with no access control), in the place where the firewall ends.

ME:: MyTerms aka IEE P7012 coming in January 2026; the web on my terms and your terms and eveybody else's terms not the big companies' terms ; Doc Searls:: Securing the right to be let alone <-- QUOTE: MyTerms makes “the right to be let alone” a contract and not just a promise. It obsolesces consent by cookie notice and replaces it with a choice of privacy agreements that you proffer as the first party, and the website or service agrees to as the second party. This sets the stage for both parties to trust each other and develop mutually respectful relationships if they wish. Optionality is maximized, from “let alone” at one end to “trusting relationship” at the other.

ME:: Windows oh brother :-) right click > hit any cursor key > move window into your display with the mouse ; Froggypwns:: reddit:: Move How to move a window that is offscreen : r/Windows10 <-- QUOTE: Once the program is open, hold shift and right click on the taskbar icon . Select Move, then tap one of the arrow keys. You can then move your mouse, and the window should now be snapped to your mouse cursor.

ME:: tl;dr-ing; Manifesto for the people's internet: decentralized, encrypted, slow :-) I empathize with this dream :-) ; markqvist:: MarkReticulum/Zen of Reticulum.md at master · markqvist/Reticulum

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: markqvist:: MarkReticulum/Zen of Reticulum.md at master · markqvist/Reticulum

The future of this technology is a construction project.

It looks like a single node on a windowsill, listening to the static. It looks like a message sent to a neighbor, bypassing the noise of the commercial web. It looks like a community mesh that grows, link by link, hop by hop, carried by hands that care more about connection than profit.

You have the blueprints. You have the tools. You have the philosophy. The noise of the old world has fallen away, leaving you with the quiet clarity of the open spectrum.

ME:: How Julia Evans makes her mostly static websites; Julia Evans:: websites.md · GitHub gist

QUOTE:

I like to make tiny websites. My requirements for my sites are something like:

I have maybe 20 websites (mostly static but not all)

I want to spend basically 0 time maintaining them, maybe 5 minutes every 2 months at most

I need to be able to ignore a project for 3 years and then come back and be able to develop it easily

here are some of the ways I choose tools to keep my sites running without doing a lot of maintenance. this is a draft, might clean it up and make it into a real post later

ME:: fun with unicode :-) ; Nickname Generator 🔥 Online Stylish Nickname Maker 🔥 (◕‿◕) SYMBL <- Love these hacks!

ME:: white, the 'right' asians etc nothing has changed in the tech 'mirrortocracy' since 2014 ; Carlos Bueno:: 2014::Inside the Mirrortocracy <- QUOTE: So the second step is on you. Instead of demanding that others reflect your views, reflect on yourself. Try to remember the last time someone successfully changed your mind. Try, just for a moment, to suppose that it's probably unnatural for an industry to be so heavily dominated by white/asian middle-class males under 30 who keep telling each other to only hire their friends. Having supposed that, think about what a just future should look like, and how to get there.

ME:: LOL'Snarfus stagnator ' and 'Klingon troglodyte emulater' so true about developer docs even to other developers ; Annie Mueller:: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner - annie's blog <- QUOTE: I almost gave up but then I realized: If I connect the backside Snarfus stagnator to the backside shamrock Klingon troglodyte emulater, it’s good! Everything beep-boops and ding-dongs and I get the Actual Topic of the Tutorial, which lets me do the Very Simple Thing the way I want after all! Pretty cool4.

ME:: over the top but i'd buy one if it wasn't plastic. No a micro-plastic paranoid person but it can't hurt to minimize it! all metal/glass/ceramic is affordable and just as good might as well go for the non plastic! ; MHW-3BOMBER Rain Pour-Over Coffee Splitter <-- QUOTE: Transform your coffee brewing ritual with the Rain Pour-Over Coffee Splitter. Engineered for coffee enthusiasts who seek ultimate control over every brew, this innovative tool takes the guesswork out of pouring, ensuring consistent extraction and delivering a balanced, flavorful cup every time

ME:: if these two articles convince 1% of the skeptics it would be a miracle :-) ; GO SCIENCE GO! ; Jake Scott:: CIDRAP Op-Ed: Vaccine myths that won't die and how to counter them—part 1 | CIDRAP * found via Ducky's January16, 2026 weekly COVID report

QUOTE:

Read the whole thing and read part 2: Jake Scott:: CIDRAP Op-Ed: Vaccine myths that won't die and how to counter them—part 1 | CIDRAP

Myth #1: ‘Vaccines were never properly tested’ Myth #2: ‘Vaccinated and unvaccinated kids haven’t been compared’ Myth #3: ‘The ingredients are toxic’ Myth #4: ‘Too many, too soon’

From part 2 :

Myth #5: ‘Vaccines cause autism’ Myth #6: ‘Vaccines cause SIDS, autoimmune disease, allergies, and cancer’ Myth #7: ‘VAERS proves vaccines are killing people’ Myth #8: ‘The flu shot gave me the flu’ and ‘Natural immunity is better’ Myth #9: ‘mRNA vaccines are gene therapy that causes turbo cancers’

Previously

October 23, 2025: ME:: called my local pharmacy at 1808 Kingsway and got a walk-in appointment and both my 7th COVID vaccine and my yearly flu vaccine today! ; 2025 COVID-19 immunizations - Province of British Columbia

ME:: John Reitano's lightning talk video explains it better not sure if it's internal only ; Mozilla staffer:: johnreitano/spekka: dead simple spec-driven development <-- Video: John Reitano:: Create Better Software with Spec-Driven Development <-- QUOTE: An simple-to-learn Spec-Driven Development system built on Claude Code and Agent OS.

ME:: Isn't this a web server part of macOS already?!?!? ; BejBej apps:: Personal Web Server

QUOTE:

Personal Web Server is a simple web server for personal use, select a folder on your mac and it serves the contents of that folder to the network. Some features include:

App can only access the selected folder, no files outside of the selected folder can be accessed.

You can customize the listening port of web server

Runs in background

ME:: You should never build your own CMS with or without 'AI'. Known this since the Bryght Drupal days ; Knut Melvar::“You should never build a CMS” | Sanity <-- QUOTE: We're just going to call it: up until recently, cursor.com was powered by Sanity as its CMS. ... Then Lee Robinson sat down and spent 344 agent requests and around $260 to migrate the content and setup to markdown files, GitHub, Vercel, and a vibe-coded media management interface.

Agree, do not upgrade to macOS 26 ; Daring Fireball: Why It’s Difficult to Resize Windows on MacOS 26 Dyehoe <-- QUOTE: The good news is, I have a solution. Do not upgrade to MacOS 26 Tahoe. If you have already upgraded, downgrade. Why suffer willingly with a user interface that presents you with absurdities like window resizing affordances that are 75 percent outside the window?

ME:: tl;dr AI: AGI is more like twitter than jet engines in that it is fed by people and not predictable and not apparent from inside the software industry how others use it. But how general is it? And I agree, where do we go from here? Still skeptical but super thought provoking piece ; Robin Sloan:: AGI is here (and I feel fine)

QUOTE:

It’s not that the companies don’t know anything — they know a lot—but rather that a regular user can have an experience with these systems, an idea about them, that is not available to even the deepest, dankest, insider-iest insider. I contend that regular users are having such experiences & ideas all the time.

I think this is just how these systems work, when they have so many different people using them for so many different reasons. It’s pretty weird, compared to other products. After all, the company that manufactures jet engines & sells them to five customers can reasonably claim to understand the uses of those engines.

That’s all to say, for all the math & matériel involved in their care & feeding, the big models are more like Twitter than they are like jet engines, & this whole thing was a surprise anyway — from which no one has quite recovered — so I will defend vigorously the right of anybody/everybody to reflect & opine on AI’s properties & potential, & to declare, when it seems obvious: AGI is here.

Recently, I have been reading a lot about the early history of personal computers, the 1970s & 1980s. (This book was wonderful, because its present — the pinnacle from which it surveys a tumultuous history — is … 1984.) It’s been interesting to discover that many of the visions & promises of that era “rhyme” with the visions & promises of the present boom. It’s clear that Bay Area tech is, if not one continuous project, 1957-2026, then for sure one continuous culture. (I happen to think it’s one continuous project.)

The pace is familiar, too: hot new companies were appearing every month, fading just as fast. Yes, the dollar amounts were smaller — the computer was still a niche product — but the feelings really seem to be the same.

And … the visions of that era were substantially realized ! Today, everybody really does own a personal computer, or something like one. Everybody really is connected to a global information network, or something like one.

I’m an avid user of both my personal computer & the global information network, & I observe that we appear not to live in utopia. The and … ? of those inventions roars in our ears.

Today, everybody really can call upon AGI, or something like it: a wildly general computer program. I mean ! Wow!

The question, always, forever: what now?

ME:: A 'Marginal Tipping Map' is needed to tell us to do the difficult but obvious :-) ie: 100% renewable energy, 100% non fossil burning transportation and industry, etc :-) ; Unpolitics: From Knowing to Doing

QUOTE:

Read the whole thing Unpolitics: From Knowing to Doing

What’s missing is a global framework for identifying where these efforts will make the biggest difference right now. We call this the Marginal Tipping Map.

The Marginal Tipping Map is not yet a finished tool—it is a proposed framework, a way of thinking that enables more effective action. It is designed to help funders, governments, and institutions see where catalytic investments, policy shifts, and social momentum can unlock exponential change.

This isn’t just about data—it’s about shifting strategy: from allocating cost to identifying leverage. From asking who should act, to revealing where action will move the most.

And it’s not hypothetical. We’ve seen it before:

Solar costs fell 89% in a decade due to scale and learning.

Norway’s EV adoption crossed 80% with clear public signals.

The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act triggered hundreds of billions in private investment.

Vietnam and Germany launched solar booms with targeted policy shifts.

These tipping points didn’t happen by accident. They were enabled. The question is how to identify and trigger the next ones—globally

ME:: LLMs reduce typing and the cost of using types so of course typed languages like TypeScript will be come more popular or something :-) ; Cassidy Williams:: Why AI is pushing developers toward typed languages - The GitHub Blog

QUOTE:

Read the whole thing: Why AI is pushing developers toward typed languages - The GitHub Blog

But actually though, a 2025 academic study found that a whopping 94% of LLM-generated compilation errors were type-check failures. Imagine how much your projects would improve if 94% of your failures went away! Your life would be better. Your skin would clear. You’d get taller. Or at least you’d have fewer “why does this return a string now?” debugging sessions.

What Octoverse 2025 says about the rise of typed languages

Octoverse 2025 confirmed it: TypeScript is now the most used language on GitHub, overtaking both Python and JavaScript as of August 2025. TypeScript grew by over 1 million contributors in 2025 (+66% YoY, Aug ‘25 vs. Aug ‘24) with an estimated 2.6 million developers total. This was driven, in part, by frameworks that scaffold projects in TypeScript by default (like Astro, Next.js, and Angular). But the report also found correlative evidence that TypeScript’s rise got a boost from AI-assisted development.

That means AI is influencing not only how fast code is written, but which languages and tools developers use. And typed ecosystems are benefiting too, because they help AI slot new code into existing projects without breaking assumptions.

Recipes that work:: I used smoked sardines and this was delish :-) ; Tori Avey's Mediterranean Sardine Pasta: Zesty Lemon, Capers & Chili

ME:: web app search engine for 159, 801 Unicode characters as of September 9, 2025; Unicode Character Table - Full List of Unicode Symbols (◕‿◕) SYMBL

ME:: i still want to make collages from Thunderbird support questions using Unicode icons and symbols, this along with wikipedia's list will help me figure out what's possible ; Huge List of Unicode Character Symbols <-- See also wikipedia's list <-- QUOTE: This page provides a way to browse the huge list of Unicode symbols. The number listed under each symbols is the DECIMAL value. Use DEC2HEX() and HEX2DEC() in Excel to convert between hexidecimal and decimal. This is NOT a comprehensive list of ALL Unicode characters (such as the thousands of symbols used for different languages). I've mainly included math, emoji, dingbats, and other miscellanous symbols so that I could copy/paste the entire set into Excel to see what works within Excel.

ME:: how to figure out unicode for fun icons and symbols in ruby, see also unibits gem and CLI tool and other related gems ; Jan Lelis, Yauheni Dakuka:: Idiosyncratic Ruby: Ruby has Character <-- QUOTE: Ruby comes with good support for Unicode-related features. Read on if you want to learn more about important Unicode fundamentals and how to use them in Ruby…

It's 2026: Self Driving cars are still not proven safe and we don't need them to reduce cyclist or pedestrian deaths ; David Zipper:: Are Autonomous Vehicles Safer Than Human Drivers? We Don't Know Yet - Bloomberg <-- QUOTE: For proof, just look outside the US, where plenty of countries have managed to bring traffic fatalities down dramatically. Most recently, the Nordic cities of Helsinki and Oslo have gone an entire year without any cyclist or pedestrian deaths at all. How did they accomplish this feat? Local leaders credited a range of infrastructural and policy changes, from slower speed limits and wider sidewalks to higher car fees and stiffer enforcement.

Previously

December 6, 2025: ME:: All the benefits sound plausible but I still think self driving cars won't work in 2034 and we'd be better improving 'low tech' non self driving trains and buses ; The Economist:: Self-driving cars will transform urban economies
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SQLite data schema for tab notes (in the profile as tabnotes.sqlite) in Firefox nightly so i can search all the tabs and their notes ; TabNotesStorage.init (TabNotes.sys.mjs - mozsearch) <-- super cool, yay, thanks!

Data schema :-)

sql CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS "tabnotes" ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, canonical_url TEXT NOT NULL, created INTEGER NOT NULL, note_text TEXT NOT NULL );

ME:: Avoid solutions, start with How Might We....? ; Maria Rosala:: 2021:: Using “How Might We” Questions to Ideate on the Right Problems - NN/G

QUOTE:

Read the whole thing: Maria Rosala:: 2021:: Using “How Might We” Questions to Ideate on the Right Problems - NN/G

In our course on discovery at our UX Conference, we talk about the importance of solving the right problem. Discovery research commonly results in learning about the problem space. This knowledge should be used to generate solutions that solve real user problems.

At the end of discovery, the team should come together, agree on the top things it found out, and use this knowledge to frame design challenges. To prevent individuals from suggesting their pet solutions, which might have little resemblance to the problems found, construct How might we questions that frame the problem(s) for ideation.

ME:: I want my own personal atmospheric cloud running my own software including 'AI'. It doesn't have to be on my own hardware, could be in a trusted cloud provider(s) ; Paul Frazee:: Atmospheric Computing | Paul's Dev Notes

QUOTE

Atmospheric computing is about building an interoperable world. A cloud in that world can be big or small. It doesn't matter. A bigger cloud will do bigger things, and a smaller clouds will do smaller things. But they'll still talk.

We need a collectivist answer to Big Tech. I'm not just interested in the battles of yesterday; if now is the time of AI, I want a personal AI running on my personal cloud. There is zero reason for us to all become subservient clients to American corporations. The model can change.

The path to a sovereign tech stack is via commodification. The AT Protocol stack is akin to Backend-as-a-Service; it standardizes identity, oauth flows, permissioning, data flows, and more. We are now working with the IETF to form a Working Group [4] and I believe a standard cloud platform is emerging in these specs.

ME:: I doubt I'll ever go to mainland China but if I do I'd find a hotel in an 'old town' ; Steph+Chris:: Chinese Cooking Demystified:: What's a Chinese City actually like?

QUOTE:

Read the whole thing: Steph+Chris:: Chinese Cooking Demystified:: What's a Chinese City actually like?

For travelers, I suggest trying to find a hotel in either an old town or a ‘medium’ town. Often the latter can be a better choice, but it can sometimes be a bit difficult to parse exactly where said ‘medium’ town is without getting your feet on the ground first. The satellite and Baidu street view can only tell you so much.

Note that fancy western hotel chains often tend to be located within the new town. A local Chinese hotel chain, ‘Jinjiang’, is our usual go-to and tends to have hotels in a diversity of neighborhoods. Because it can sometimes be difficult to tell where exactly is most interesting to be located, a decent idea if you’re staying in one city for a while is to only book two nights at first. This way you can easily change hotels if you find a neighborhood you prefer.

For living, as I said before, I find those older ‘commie blocks’ livable enough and would totally live in one again in a pinch. However, for me at least, the best of all worlds is to find a newer development that’s flanking a ‘medium’ town, an old town, or an urban village. This way you can get a little more light and space, while having all the benefit of being in a walkable neighborhood.

ME:: tl;dr-ing: Accept, Time isn't holding up, forget mastery, more developing, droid, new normal to be confused, adventure not ordeal; Joey deVilla::Don’t feel bad; even the inventor of the term “vibe coding” is overwhelmed by all the AI-driven changes

QUOTE:

Read the whole thing: Joey deVilla::Don’t feel bad; even the inventor of the term “vibe coding” is overwhelmed by all the AI-driven changes

It has eight parts, listed below:

Accept “falling behind” as the new normal. Learn to live with it and work around it.

Understand that our sense of time has been altered by recent events.

Forget “mastery.” Go for continuous, lightweight experimentation instead.

Less coding, more developing.

Yes, AI is an “alien tool,” but what if that alien tool is a droid instead of a probe?

Other ideas I’m still working out

This may be the “new normal” for Karpathy, but it’s just the “same old normal” for my dumb ass.

The difference between an adventure and an ordeal is attitude.

ME::community energy sharing now yes please ; Tamara Kaňuchová:: 🗞️ Sharing is caring<-- QUOTE: If I have a solar panel on my rooftop and it’s a sunny day, I might create more electricity than my small household needs. What to do with my surplus?

ME:: tl-dr-ing: 'git diff --color-words' is a better way to diff for most situations (red deleted, green added) ; Holloway:: How can I get a side-by-side diff when I do "git diff"? - Stack Overflow

ME:: tl;dr-ing: Render HTML gist files on github as web pages ; Simon Willison:: Introducing gisthost.github.io QUOTE: I am a huge fan of gistpreview.github.io, the site by Leon Huang that lets you append ?GIST_id to see a browser-rendered version of an HTML page that you have saved to a Gist. The last commit was ten years ago and I needed a couple of small changes so I’ve forked it and deployed an updated version at gisthost.github.io.

ME:: tl;dr-ing: Groundhog Day , bliss station, noun, gifts, extraordinary, slay, change, tidy, demons, plant ; A book by Austin Kleon:: Keep Going

QUOTE

A book by Austin Kleon:: Keep Going

Every day is Groundhog Day.

Build a bliss station.

Forget the noun, do the verb.

Make gifts.

The ordinary + extra attention = the extraordinary

Slay the art monsters.

You’re allowed to change your mind.

When in doubt, tidy up.

Demons hate fresh air.

Plant your garden.

ME:: gotta try this for beyond CLI interfaces aka TUIs (text user interfaces) in the terminal with ruby! ; Kerrick Long:: ratatui_ruby: 💎 Unofficial Ruby wrapper for Ratatui 👨‍🍳🐀. <-- QUOTE: ratatui_ruby is a Ruby wrapper for Ratatui. It allows you to cook up Terminal User Interfaces in Ruby. ratatui_ruby is a community wrapper that is not affiliated with the Ratatui team.

ME:: tl;dr-ing: How to make a static website on Codeberg using R and Quarto ; Ken Butler:: Quarto websites and Codeberg pages (part 1)

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Ken Butler:: Quarto websites and Codeberg pages (part 1)

One of the things Quarto can produce is a static website (meaning, it turns your content into a website that a user can look at but not interact with). This is ideal for websites for courses or workshops, where the idea is to provide material for your students to work with, or (at least in part) for a blog, where the idea is to share your ideas with the world. (In a blog, you might want to enable comments, but that is another story that we do not get into here.) A standard way to share these with the world was to use Github Pages, where you set your website up as a Github repo, and then configured the Pages part of Settings, and got a URL that would display the site.

One thing that Github Pages has going for it is that the mechanism is fairly simple, and Quarto has a “publish gh-pages” that will handle most of the details for you. Codeberg has its own equivalent, Codeberg Pages, that works a bit differently. The website you want to publish has to be two things:

on a branch called pages

in the root folder of the repo.

I have a couple of ways of making this work, which may not be elegant, but they appear to work. The elegance, I leave to others.

ME:: Broken Achievement Society Social Scene :-) ; Doug Belshaw:: What promised to liberate us instead helps to control us

QUOTE

Doug Belshaw:: What promised to liberate us instead helps to control us

Reclaim the right to be opaque, unmeasured, and unproductive.

Resist the enclosure of digital life by prioritising connection with other people over connection with brands and corporations

Build small, shared spaces that are not immediately optimised for extraction.

ME:: 2023 How to: read/write github gists using the gist API; Github Gist Is Here To Save The Day...Literally! - Resources / Community Tutorials - Developer Forum | Roblox <-- from 2023 so could be out of date

ME:: tl-dr-ing Coping with the flood of misinformation and the fact that we know less than we think we do (e.g. how do toilets work really?): rigourously maintained factual chronological timelines, critical ignoring, cognitive elaboration ; Erin Kissane:: Landslide; a ghost story

QUOTE:

Read the whole thing: Erin Kissane:: Landslide; a ghost story

So: Even those of us who think we know things and believe that we’re “paying attention” know far less than we think we do. We are mostly skating on a brittle scrim of knowledge over an unperceived void, blithely trusting the resources around us to fill in for our spotty brains on a just-in-time basis.

...

And let me say: Chronological timelines are about the least innovative and least sexy or funding-attracting thing imaginable, but like…go try to find them, for the things happening now! They’re hard to find and hard to make and hardest to maintain. Yet without an easily referenced record of when the many things happened, we’re extraordinarily vulnerable to doctored, adulterated, and just made up summaries of even extremely recent history. The subsequent mass misbeliefs can feel, to people who were closely tracking the realities being reinterpreted, like the results of mass hypnosis.

I think there are many other ways to densify information and make knowledge durable—and that people who work on the social internet should be thinking about how they can work toward that in their systems, in ways that also respect people’s desire to retain the orality or ephemerality of some communication. This is one of the things I’ll be digging down through in the coming year.

...

Several of the papers I’ve been working through discuss the role of cognitive elaboration in the creation of durable knowledge. Cognitive elaboration is, very roughly, synthesizing new information with other knowledge or otherwise playing around with information as a way of knitting it into our minds in ways we can use. This is an obvious springboard for the kind of facile, thought-leader-scented solutions institutions adore (all articles are now quizzes!) but I think it’s also fruitful territory for more sophisticated thinking and experimentation.

Critical ignoring has come up several times in my explorations since my crimeing partner Liz Neeley first sent me a paper about it. I’m also very interested in trustworthy catch-up tools that perhaps use machine learning but are not chatbot summaries. A lot of my work this year has been briefings and explainers on top of timelines as a resource for people who need to just drop the rope—and then, when they’re ready, return and catch up without having to go out and wrestle the shrieking backlog themselves. I don’t think we’re all the way there yet, but we’re learning a lot.

So much for my memory :-). Opening day for me in the 2025/26 season was Dec 21, 2025 about 3 weeks after opening day for the 2024/2025 season ; November 24, 2024: Tag Eins des 2024-25 Langlaufsaisons bei Cypress :-) #FreeTheHeelFreeTheMind #XcSkiing | Nordic Ski | Strava

ME:: the bible is not anti-poor, anti-abortion, anti gay rights and anti-immigrant. Read it completely 'Christians'! ; Nicholas Kristof:: What Would Surprise Jesus About Christmas 2025? - The New York Times

QUOTE

I do too. So many people who claim to follow Jesus appear to have no idea what he actually taught. When I was an evangelical, we thought it was important to know what the Bible said and act on it. But today the evangelical movement focuses largely on social agendas not promoted in the Bible while ignoring ethical injunctions the Bible makes repeatedly. Whatever one’s views of abortion today, it is simply wrong to say the Bible opposes it. The Bible never mentions a deliberate attempt to abort a fetus, and the only biblical passages that relate to the question of whether a fetus is to be treated as a living person with human rights indicate the answer is no (e.g., Exodus 21:22-25). What the Bible does stress, page after page, is the need to care for the poor, the outcast, the “other.”

So too with gay rights: People regularly quote Leviticus about how it’s a sin for a man to sleep with a man (Leviticus 18:22). But they then ignore the very next chapter, which explicitly insists that immigrants to your country are to be treated just the same as citizens (Leviticus 19:33-34). Why do people focus on one verse instead of the other? They simply pick what they find useful for their own views.

ME:: Podcasts should be 15 minutes or less, prove me wrong :-). Substack is funded by terrible people and supports terrible people on its platform (as well as great people who don't realize that they are helping those terrible people) part 88888 ; Joan Westenberg:: Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation <-- QUOTE: Our intellectual underground, such as it is, consists of Substack, a platform funded by some of the most establishment venture capital imaginable, and podcasts that run for three hours and manage to say less than a single well-constructed paragraph.

Previously

August 7, 2025 I don't care what people who I otherwise respect like Om Malik and Dana Blankenhorn say about network effects blah blah blah :-) . It is wrong to be on a platform that openly allows hate speech. If the Nazi Party's newspaper paid you $USD1000 / month in 1939 to write an op-ed monthly would you do it? No. https://om.co/2025/08/03/the-why-of-substack/ is wrong. sorry not sorry Om et al!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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ME:: to import a LUT into No Fusion, tap on the multi-photo rectangular icon to import 1 or more LUTs OR Add New Preset > Tick Blank > Import ; LUT Import | No Fusion Camera

The following quoted instructions are out of date :-) LOL I have failed to update documentation in a timely fashion in my career too so this is not a big criticism.

QUOTE:

In No Fusion, navigate to Settings -> Stylization -> Add New Preset -> LUT, then you can import LUTs from your photo library or files.

ME:: tl;dr-ing: pick from or edit LLM generated regexes or add your own and see relevant examples in VSCode, seems like a practical and safe use of LLMs; Siddhartha Prasad:: LLMs ⭢ Regular Expressions, Responsibly!

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Siddhartha Prasad:: LLMs ⭢ Regular Expressions, Responsibly!]

But we can do a lot better! Our new tool, PICK:Regex, does the following. It asks you for a prompt and sends it to a GenAI system. However, it doesn’t ask for one regex; instead, it uses an LLMs ability to interpret prose in multiple ways to generate multiple (about four) candidate expressions. (The details don’t matter, but if you want to you can open the images below in a new tab to read them more easily.)

In theory, that’s better than getting just one interpretation. But now you may have to read four regexes like the above, which is actually worse! Therefore, instead, PICK shows you concrete examples. Furthermore, the examples are carefully chosen to tell apart the regexes. You are then asked to upvote/downvote each example. As you do, you are actually voting on all the candidate regexes.

You can stop at any point (you’re always shown the regexes), but the process naturally halts when only one regex remains (this is your best candidate of the ones you’ve seen so far) or none remain (in which case it would have been dangerous to use the LLMs output!).

ME:: automation makes the bits left over humans more challenging; See also Lisanne Bainbridge's pape: Ironies of Automation from 1983; Tae Selene Sandoval Murgan:: thoughts/on-using-language-models-for-programming.md

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Tae Selene Sandoval Murgan:: thoughts/on-using-language-models-for-programming.md at canon - tssm/thoughts - Codeberg.org <-- See also Lisanne Bainbridge's classic 1983 paper in Automatic: Ironies of Automation

I wrote a version of the above as a Mastodon thread. And then I read Ironies of automation by Lisanne Bainbridge, a paper that, quoting its abstract, "discusses the ways in which automation of industrial processes may expand rather than eliminate problems with the human operator". I got several ideas from it, but the most important is that regardless of how automation is performed, whatever levels of "intelligence" an automated system has, it's rarely designed to collaborate with the human that formerly performed the work. On the contrary it's designed to replace them. Which is an irony (as defined in the paper) because (among others) "by taking away the easy parts of his task, automation can make the difficult parts of the human operator's task more difficult." Even more, automation seldom "consider the integration of man and computer, nor how to maintain the effectiveness of the human operator by supporting his skills and motivation. There will always be a substantial human involvement with automated systems, because criteria other than efficiency are involved".

We know language models have been touted as tools that enable computers to replace humans intellectual labor. And here we have a 40 years old paper saying actually that has never worked. I don't believe language models or any other form of artificial "intelligence" is here to stay, but if that's the case I hope it stays as a form of human-computer collaboration. As my skills and motivation lie in writing code, I'll keep stubbornly rejection any trend that clashes with them. And as I keep feeling pressured to use these things, I'll try to come with more silly ways which I feel that at least they don't erase my motivation.

So will I eagerly apply what I just described? I surely will when copy and pasting my code on a chatbot window is cheaper in motivation terms than filling in the gaps myself. The way to smooth the process is to run a local model, or pay for a service. For now I don't want to do any, so who knows. At least I feel a little less dumber now.`

ME:: sparklines everythwere :-) Just kidding, only where they make sense ; Andros Fenollosa:: tanrax/quick-weather.el: Sparkline weather forecasts in Emacs <-- QUOTE: Quick weather forecasts with sparklines for Emacs, using data from Open-Meteo.

ME:: I didn't grow up with Mechado but I did grow up with Kaldereta and this dish has some overlapping ingredients Billy Parisi:: Mechado:: Cooking (probably) The Most Flavorful Beef Dish in the World - YouTube <- QUOTE: This Filipino-style Beef Mechado recipe is a holiday favorite, made by simmering chuck roast, short ribs, and pork belly in a deeply flavorful braising liquid. It’s a guaranteed crowd-pleaser that serves 8 and tastes even better the next day.

See also:

panlasang pinoy's version of beef mechado

lemon + anchovies's version of beef mechado
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ME:: Maple Syrup Curtain example 888888: Rossman doesn't ship to Canada but they ship to Malaysia and India and Laos :-)?!?!?! ; Rossman GPS Mount — gramm tourpacking | bikepacking bags

QUOTE:

GPS out front with our Diamond or Grill Bag? No problem with the Rossman Cycles GPS Mount. It sandwiches the bag lid, keeping your cycling GPS super secure and always in view.

Price includes VAT. Free shipping to Germany. Cost of international shipping is calculated at checkout. Non-EU recipients are responsible for possible taxes and duties.

ME:: tl;dring: ChatBots, Completion coding products like Copiliot, Agentic products like Claude Code. LLM-generated feeds & video games from AI content may work soon ; Sean Goedecke:: Only three kinds of AI products actually work

QUOTE

By my count, there are three successful types of language model product:

Chatbots like ChatGPT, which are used by hundreds of millions of people for a huge variety of tasks

Completions coding products like Copilot or Cursor Tab, which are very niche but easy to get immediate value from

Agentic products like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Copilot Agent mode, which have only really started working in the last six months

On top of that, there are two kinds of LLM-based product that don’t work yet but may soon: * LLM-generated feeds * Video games that are based on AI-generated content

ME:: so true! 'Connoisseur-ship is, basically, a very elaborate and expensive form of peacocking.' <-- Joan Westenberg:: Don't Become a Connoisseur. <-- nothing to add this is yet another perfect blog post from Joan!!

ME:: I wonder how many tokens this will burn :-) Again nobody talks about the $$$$$ i.e. the costs; Anand Chowdhary:: continuous-claude CLI tool: Running Claude Code in a loop

QUOTE:

Read the whole thing: Anand Chowdhary:: continuous-claude CLI tool: Running Claude Code in a loop

Tools like Dependabot handle dependency updates, but Continuous Claude can also fix post-update breaking changes using release notes. You could run a GitHub Actions workflow every morning that checks for updates and continuously fixes issues until all tests pass.

Large refactoring tasks become manageable: breaking a monolith into modules, modernizing callbacks to async/await, or updating to new style guidelines. It could perform a series of 20 pull requests over a weekend, each doing part of the refactor with full CI validation. There’s a whole class of tasks that are too mundane for humans but still require attention to avoid breaking the build.

The model mirrors human development practices. Claude Code handles the grunt work, but humans remain in the loop through familiar mechanisms like PR reviews. Download the CLI from GitHub to get started: AnandChowdhary/continuous-claude

ME:: sample Claude.md to decompile a N64 game from assembler to C language source code LOLz that this works but i guess it does :-) ; Chris Lewis:: snowboardkids2-decomp/CLAUDE.md at 852f47a4905a08d5d652387597bc5b47d29582f2 <-- see Chris Lewis's blog post about this: The Unexpected Effectiveness of One-Shot Decompilation with Claude

ME:: Recipes that probably work :-) ; Lauren Keating:: Sheet Pan Chicken Thighs With Root Vegetables | Healthy Delicious

QUOTEing the full recipe because I don't trust the internet :-)

Read the whole thing: Lauren Keating:: Sheet Pan Chicken Thighs With Root Vegetables | Healthy Delicious

Ingredients

4 bone-in chicken thighs

Kosher salt

Cracked black pepper

½ teaspoon crushed rosemary

4 carrots peeled and diced

1 turnip peeled and diced

2 parsnips peeled and diced

Parsley for garnish

Instructions

Heat your oven to 400ºF.

Pat the chicken dry with paper towels. Season generously with salt, pepper, and rosemary.

Add the diced vegetables to the bottom of a casserole dish. Place the chicken skin-side up on top of the vegetables.

Roast on the top rack of your oven for 40-50 minutes, until the chicken reaches an internal temperature of 165 degrees and the skin is crisp.

Remove from the oven and let rest for 5 minutes. Sprinkle with fresh parsley.

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ME:: All the benefits sound plausible but I still think self driving cars won't work in 2034 and we'd be better improving 'low tech' non self driving trains and buses ; The Economist:: Self-driving cars will transform urban economies <-- QUOTE: San Francisco may not yet have seen job losses, but that is likely to change as costs fall. America is home to 1m taxi and bus drivers, as well as over 3m truck drivers—adding up to 3% of the working population. Other potential losers are less obvious. Without car accidents there will, for instance, be less demand for personal-injury lawyers. If people stop buying cars, dealers and used-car salesmen will go. Robotaxis might compete with short-haul air travel and even hotels if some are kitted out with beds. Although new jobs will be created—in, say, managing fleets or manning depots—they will hardly make up for the losses. Social disruption is likely; at the same time, job losses will be an opportunity. Workforces in the rich world are shrinking as populations age. Freeing people to work elsewhere might be invaluable. ... Productivity in the transport industry would surge. The rest of the economy ought to perk up, too. An average working American spends just under an hour commuting each day, against eight hours on the job. Turning even a sliver of that into work could boost output appreciably, says Will Denyer of Gavekal, a research firm. Self-driving cars offer a smoother ride, which, along with better suspension, should make it easier to get work done onboard. And fewer accidents not only mean fewer human tragedies—they also mean lower hospital and rehabilitation bills.

COUNTERPOINT to me :-) :: Jonathan Slotkin neurosurgeon:: NYT: The Data on Self-Driving Cars Is Clear. We Have to Change Course: QUOTE: Federal leadership is essential. Current regulations require companies to report crashes, but not the number of miles driven or where. We need the denominator, not just the numerator. Data-reporting requirements should include crash rates, miles driven and where, and safety performance. Independent auditors should verify this data against police reports, insurance claims and privacy-protected medical records. ... This transformation will happen. We can guide it toward a safer, more equitable future or let it unfold haphazardly around us. There’s a future in which manual driving becomes uncommon, perhaps even quaint, the way riding horses is today. It’s a future where we no longer accept thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of broken spines as the price of mobility. It’s time to stop treating this like a tech moonshot and start treating it like a public health intervention. <-- I still think the full data with the denominator will show it's not safe and barring a breakthrough it won't be safe by 2034. Love to be proven wrong :-)

Previously

May 28, 2025: PROBABLY WRONG PREDICTION:: ME:: By Jan 1, 2034 Tesla still won't have full self driving cars (unless they add LiDAR and/or humans in the loop :-) !) ; Ben Thompson Oct 15, 2024:: Elon Dreams and Bitter Lessons – Stratechery
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ME:: go 'Te Hiku, Apertus and other smaller models for preserving small languages' go :-) ! ; Ethan Zuckerman:: Gramsci's Nightmare: AI, Platform Power and the Automation of Cultural Hegemony

QUOTE:

Read the whole thing: Ethan Zuckerman:: Gramsci's Nightmare: AI, Platform Power and the Automation of Cultural Hegemony

I’m inspired by a project in New Zealand launched by a cultural organization called Te Hiku Media. The CEO of Te Hiku, Peter-Lucas Jones, is Maori and the organization has worked since 1990 to put voices in te reo Maori, the Maori language, on the radio, ending decades during which the New Zealand government suppressed the teaching and speaking of the language. A few years ago, he asked his husband, Keoni Mahelona, a native Hawaiian and a polymathic scholar and technologist, to help the organization build a website. The two ended up realizing that the three decades of recorded Maori speech in the radio archives represented a cultural heritage that likely existed nowhere else.

That archive of spoken te reo Maori becomes more powerful if it’s indexed, and that requires transcribing many thousands of hours of tape, or building a speech to text model. Mahelona visited with gatherings of Maori elders and explained how machine learning models worked, what a speech to text model might make possible and got buy-in and consent from the broader community. That allowed Te Hiku to recruit a truly amazing number of participants into the project of recording snippets of spoken Maori. Over ten days, 2500 speakers recorded 300 hours of the language, creating 200,000 labeled snippets of speech. Jones and Mahelona relied on a set of cultural institutions to accomplish this – they held a contest between traditional canoe racing teams to see which could record the most phrases. They ended up with training data that powers a language transcription model that is 92% accurate… and they’ve got engaged volunteers who could work to correct transcription errors and add data.

This Maori ML project is already being used to power a language learning application, similar to DuoLingo, but using tools built by the community rather than extracted from them. Young Maori speakers are able to check their pronunciation against a database of voices of elders who’ve worked to keep the language alive. And the 30+ years of audio that Te Hiku has collected are now both an indexable archive, but also potentially the corpus for a small LLM built around Maori language, knowledge and values.

The Te Hiku corpus is probably too small to build a large language model using the techniques we use today, which rely on ready access to massive data sets. But there are projects similar in spirit, notably Apertus, a Swiss project to create an open, multilingual language model that emphasizes the importance of non-English languages, especially Romansh and Swiss German. 40% of Apertus’s model is non-English… which gives you a sense of just how dominant English is in most models… and the goal is to build models for chatbots, translation systems and educational tools that emphasize transparency and diversity.

ME:: tl-dr-ing: substage is a macOS app that makes pandoc, ffmpeg, imagemagick, sips, etc usable for normal people via LLMs (using LLMs via OpenRouter and many LLMs) or something :-) Substage: Command line power, natural language ease. <-- QUOTE: Substage converts natural language prompts into command line commands.

ME:: part 8888 All software not just games will run on any device. Windows, macOS and linux software will run (or be emulated) on all machines is the future of software ; The Verge:: Steam Machine today, Steam Phones tomorrow <-- QUOTE: It’s a big deal that Valve is making a game console. But I’m beginning to think the Steam Machine may end up a footnote in gaming history. What if Valve could bring PC games not just to its own living room consoles, but also to the Arm chips that billions of people have in their phones? What if you no longer had to wait for game developers to do the hard work of porting PC games to your phone, Mac, or other Arm hardware, because games built for desktop PCs could just work?

ME:: tl;dr-ing: I 100% agree with my friend :-) Alan! Always be Attributing (TASL-Title, Source, Author, Licence(s) all with links if possible) and Always be Linking; Alan Levine:: Tools for Attribution of Open Content – CogDogBlog

QUOTE:

Read the whole thing: lan Levine:: Tools for Attribution of Open Content – CogDogBlog

Its essentially all the information needed to create the Creative Commons TASL Best Practice form of attribution Title, Source (with link), Author (with link), Licences (with link).

See also

Alan Levin:: November 30, 2014:: Always be Attributing

ME:: tl-dr-ing: Courtesy of the oppressive Spanish Empire, Filipinos have been in North America since forever :-) Louisana in the mid-18th century is just one example of many! ; Wikipedia:: Saint Malo, Louisiana

QUOTE

Saint Malo (Spanish: San Maló [samaˈlo]) was a small fishing village that existed along the shore of Lake Borgne in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana as early as the mid-18th century until it was destroyed by the 1915 New Orleans hurricane.[1] Located along Bayou Saint Malo, about 6 miles (9.7 km) east of the Isleño fishing village of Shell Beach, it was the first permanent settlement of Filipinos and perhaps the first Asian American settlement in the United States.[2][3][4][5]

The exact date of the establishment of Saint Malo is disputed.[6][4] The settlement may have been formed as early as 1763 or 1765 by Filipino deserters and escaped slaves of the Spanish Manila galleon trade.[7][8][9][10] The members of the community were commonly referred to as Manila men, or Manilamen, and later Tagalas.

ME:: Be seen plus SEE bicycle Light Rail light from Intrinsic Cycles looks good but how do I install this on my Wald basket (the basket blocks lights mounted on the handlebar)? Not a big deal I guess Wald basket bicyclists are not mainstream yet :-) Light Rail Kit – Intrinsic Cycles <-- QUOTE: Most bike lights make you choose: see or be seen. The Light Rail does both—at the same time. With two independently controlled lighting systems—one to illuminate your path and one to keep you visible to others—you get unmatched safety and control, all in one light.

ME:: nobody mentions the considerable cost for LLMs and the considerable amount of time you need to experiment to see if an LLM works for you. Time and money require privilege and wealth; Federico Viticci:: The AI App Experience Matters More Than Benchmarks Now - MacStories <-- QUOTE: Which brings me to my takeaway: from my perspective, despite a stronger baseline, there is still no single LLM that “does it all” these days. Beyond my nerdy experiments, I generally alternate between two modes: Claude for most work-related tasks, and either ChatGPT or Perplexity for web search. The combination of these two modalities gives me everything I need from modern LLMs, and it provides me with the mix of performance, design, and app integrations I like best. ... Ultimately, choosing between any LLM at the frontier of AI right now is a highly subjective matter that comes down to cost, workflow, app ecosystem, design, and, yes, pure “vibes”. Personally, I try to avoid fixating on benchmarks and instead prioritize these qualities in my decisions

ME:: Specifications can be version controlled much easier than prompts and are therefore the future for AI assisted software development; Marc Brooker:: Kiro and the future of AI spec-driven software development <-- QUOTE: Approaching development with specifications has three significant benefits. First, it provides a way for developers and stakeholders to understand and agree on the goals of the program. It’s crisp documentation on what we want the program to do, the interface to look like, and how it should be implemented. Working at the specification level allows programmers to move faster, and spend more time thinking about the things that really matter. Second, it provides a guide for AI agents to work from, refer to, and validate their work against. A North Star to guide the work of the agent, allowing it to take on larger tasks without getting lost. Third, the specification tames the chaos of prompt-driven vibe coding on large code bases, moving away from an ad-hoc exercise in prompt engineering, to way for programmers to crisply express their intent to agents. A specification is a kind of (version controlled, human-readable) super prompt.

LLMs are just tools that are part of your problem solving system part 8888 :-) ; Marc Brooker:: LLMs as Parts of Systems <-- QUOTE: As a system builder, I’m much more interested in what systems of LLMs and tools can do together. LLMs and code interpreters. LLMs and databases. LLMs and browsers. LLMs and SMT solvers. These systems can do things, today, that LLMs alone simply can’t, and will never be able to do. More importantly, they can do things today orders of magnitude more cheaply and quickly than LLMs can, even in the case where they can do the same things.

ME:: tl-dr-ing: 100 characters, medium, subject, hints about the meaning of the artwork ; Mibs:: Mibyle: alt text 101 for artists

QUOTE:

Read the whole thing: Mibyle: alt text 101 for artists

It all goes down to including what is relevant to give the user an accurate idea of your artwork:

the medium you used to make the artwork (is it a digital illustration? a traditional oil painting? a graphite pencil sketchbook doodle?)

the subject of the artwork

anything that is relevant for understanding the meaning of the artwork. For instance, is the lighting important, or does it bring a particular meaning or mood?

Write sentences - don’t just throw away key words. EDIT: don’t write full sentences, but phrases and fragments to keep your description concise

adding one more thing after getting feedback: keep it concise! Under 125 characters (even 100 is best)

ME:: tl;dr-ing: LLMs are good at: writing SQL. get datacleaning 95% right and data enrichment running stuff in a loop against 1000s of records. Amazing it's too bad nobody does data journalism like this in the mainstream media in Canada :-) Lots of people doing non mainstream stuff like this in Canada I would guess ; CL Kao, Dori Wilson:: Data Renegades | Ep. #2, Data Journalism Unleashed with Simon Willison | Heavybit

ME:: Yes please, corporations should pay their fair share for open source software, 100% agree with Erlend; Erlend Sogge Heggen:: Open Source Power <- QUOTE: The top 10 biggest programming languages in the world are collectively responsible for trillions of dollars in generated value. How much of that value is cycling back into the maintenance of these languages and their ecosystems? 0.01% maybe, if even that? ... Is it really that crazy to imagine a community-governed and institution-owned package management stack that's licensed such that corporations have to pay their fair share, to the tune of some tens of millions of dollar per year in revenue? Keep in mind that non-profits are welcome to make lots of revenue, it's the excess profits that's a probem.

ME:: 100% write one clear thought a day even if you don't share it publicly you'll get better at writing. 1 clear thought = 10 minutes IMNSHO :-) And you do have 10 minutes a day I guarantee it :-) ; Joan Westenberg:: Why You Should Write Every Day (Even if You’re Not a Writer)

QUOTE:

Read the whole thing: Joan Westenberg:: Why You Should Write Every Day (Even if You’re Not a Writer)

“But I don’t have time to write every day.”

Fair enough.

Everyone’s got limited hours and too many demands on them.

But I think we’re probably talking about fifteen to twenty minutes here.

Maybe thirty on a good day.

You’re not writing War and Peace. You’re writing enough to clarify one thought, work through one problem, capture one observation. That’s perhaps the length of three or four text messages to a friend, composed without chatGPT.

ME:: Starcloud hides their "secret compute in space" or something :-) ; Vaclav Vincalek:: Is this SciFi enough?

QUOTE

Read the whole thing Vaclav Vincalek:: Is this SciFi enough?

We are witnessing another SciFi idea turned into reality. A startup company, Starcloud, launched and placed in orbit the first AI Data Center.

...

This project is not about cheap power and cooling and locating fires in California. This project is about taking data and moving it outside of any jurisdiction, oversight and control. I am sure that there will be lots of takers for that offer.

The recurrent pattern? This is not SciFi turned reality project. It’s just a new place to hide family jewels.

ME:: pre magellan Philippines was super interesting; Celestino C. Macachor:: Searching for Kali in the Indigenous Chronicles of Jovito Abellana By: Retracing our Past on Pandan Leaves – Pre-colonial Cebu

QUOTE

Legends and myth have been told about how the ancient name of Cebu City or as some old timers fondly call Sugbo originated. None of these versions so far have held up to the scrutiny of scholars and historians until Jovito Abellana published his book Bisaya Patronymesis Sri Visjaya where he extensively wrote about Aginid, Bayok sa atong Tawarik (Glide on, Odes to our History)[1]. The Aginid a discovery made by Jovito Abellana’s great grandfather is probably the only pre-colonial chronicle of the history of Cebu written in ancient alibata script on pandan leaves and other indigenous materials. Unfortunately most of the materials were lost in the subsequent upheaval that followed the Spanish defeat by Cebuano guerillas and the ensuing Filipino American War. Amidst strong support by some scholars to institutionalize the Aginid, the Cebu Normal University published it in 1998. Abellana wrote it in alibata (Cebuano hieroglyphic) form with an English translation. The Aginid tells of the fiery story of pre-colonial Cebu then known as Sugbo – which means scorched earth. This version on the origins of Sugbo, is important as it establishes the basic hypothesis why eskrima was invented in the first place – in defense against Moro invaders. And to add credence to the discovery of the Aginid by Jovito Abellana, other cognates of the word Sugbo can be found in the Cebuano lexicon such as: sugba – to grill, subu’ – to forge steel, sug-ang – set a cooking fire, sugnod – to burn. Let us go back to the story of how Sugbo got its name. In the olden times Sugbo (now present day Cebu City) was part of the island of Pulua Kang Dayang or Kangdaya. The ancient poem Diyandi tells us that so many hundred years ago natives had burned the town Sugbo as a way to drive away Muslim invaders from Mindanao. The natives would then flee to the mountains and later launch a counter offensive against the demoralized and exhausted invaders. The first ruler of Sugbo Sri Lumay who came from Sumatra successfully repulsed the invaders with his scorched earth tactics. Thus the place became known as Sugbo or scorched town. Jovito Abellana translated the Diyandi which was written in ancient alibata script and probably written during the time of Datu Tupas. It is a stirring chronicle of the story of the rich culture and colorful history of pre-colonial Cebu.

Aginid, Bayok sa Atong Tawarik (Glide on, Odes to Our History)

Extracted from Marivir Montebon’s book Retracing Our Roots – A Journey into Cebu’s Pre-Colonial Past[2] are excerpts of the story of pre-colonial Cebu according to the Aginid, Bayok sa atong Tawarik (Glide on, Odes to Our History) as translated by Jovito Abellana:

“Sri Lumay of Sumatra settled in Sugbo with his son, Sri Alho, ruling the south known as Sialo which included Valladolid, Carcar, up to Santander. His other son, Sri Ukob, ruled the north known as Nahalin which includes the present towns of Consolacion, Liloan, Compostela, Danao, Carmen, and Bantayan. As a ruler, Sri Lumay was known to be strict, merciless, and brave. He assigned magalamags to teach his people to read and write ancient letterings. He ordered routinary patrol by boats from Nahalin to Sialo by his mangubats (warriors). A strict ruler, Sri Lumay was a loving person that not a single slave ran away from him.

ME:: tl;dr-ing Tariffs are justified for two reasons: 1. to pay for international freight emissions 2. social, fiscal and environmental dumping 3. ; Thomas Piketty:: Rethinking world trade

QUOTE:

Read the whole thing: Thomas Piketty:: Rethinking world trade

The first reason for implementing tariffs is that international freight generates pollution that accounts for 7% of global emissions. Economists have long underestimated this environmental cost, using a low value for the metric ton of carbon (between €100 and €200). However, the worsening of global warming has led to a reassessment. The costs stemming from emissions – natural disasters, decline in economic activity and so on – are now estimated at about €1,000 per ton, if not more, without even factoring in loss of well-being and non-economic costs. Using this value, one would need to apply average tariffs of around 15% on global trade flows to compensate for warming linked to freight, with significant variations depending on the type of goods.

The second justification for tariffs is social, fiscal and environmental dumping. Some countries apply less stringent regulations than others, allowing producers based there to undercut competitors. In practical terms, China currently accounts for 30% of global emissions, with exported emissions making up about 20% of this (or 6% of the global total). At €1,000 per ton, average tariffs of about 80% would be needed on Chinese exports to account for this environmental cost. If focusing only on net exported emissions (after subtracting imported emissions), which is about 10% of China’s emissions (3% of the global total), the necessary tariffs would be around 40%.

Now to social dumping. Wages account for 49% of gross domestic product in China, compared to 64% in Europe. This distorts competition and would require compensatory tariffs of about 15%. A similar calculation can be made for fiscal dumping, especially regarding corporate taxes and state subsidies.

As with carbon, the aim is not to penalize China per se, but to encourage it to pay better wages, at which point the compensatory tax could be lifted. China has no need to accumulate endless trade surpluses; it should first continue its plans for decarbonization (which are further along than in the US, for example) and increase its wages and domestic demand. In the long run, if the US does not change course, Europe and China will have to impose significant sanctions on it.

In any case, tariffs are not an end in themselves: They can be dispensed with if binding agreements are put in place to achieve the same objectives. They can also be replaced by targeted financial sanctions if those prove more effective. The exact amounts should be determined following thorough democratic deliberation, conducted transparently, ideally within transnational assemblies.

ME:: Recipes that probably work :-) ; Margaret Bose-Johnson:: Pink Pasta - Fettuccine with Beet, Smoked Salmon, & Feta | Kitchen Frau

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Margaret Bose-Johnson:: Pink Pasta - Fettuccine with Beet, Smoked Salmon, & Feta | Kitchen Frau

Pink Pasta - Fettuccine with Beet, Smoked Salmon, and Feta

½ lb (225gms) uncooked fettuccine noodles, gluten-free or regular 1 medium beet (~2½/6.5cm diameter) (1 packed cup when shredded) ½ medium onion 2 tablespoons butter ¼ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon pepper 1 cup chicken broth ¼ cup dry white vermouth or dry white wine ½ cup (120ml) heavy cream 3.5 oz (100gms) smoked salmon slices (about ½ cup, packed) 1 tablespoon capers ½ cup (60gms) crumbled feta cheese, plus a bit extra for garnish chopped fresh dill or parsley for serving - optional

Set a large pot of salted water on to boil. (I use 1 teaspoon salt.) When it boils, add the fettuccine and cook for one minute less than the package recommends.

While the water is boiling and the pasta is cooking, prepare the sauce.

Peel the beet with a vegetable peeler, leaving the stem intact for a handhold while grating it. Shred the beet on the large holes of a cheese grater. Dice the onion.

Melt the butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat. Add the shredded beet, diced onion, salt, and pepper, and cook until the beets are wilted, 3 to 4 minutes.

Add the chicken broth and the vermouth or wine. Cover and simmer for 5 minutes. Add the cream and keep warm until the pasta is finished cooking.

Reserve a few thin slices of smoked salmon to garnish the finished pasta, chop the rest into large chunks.

When the pasta is one minute short of being al dente (you still want it to have a good firmness to it), drain it and add it to the beets. Toss to coat the pasta strands and cook for one minute. Remove from the heat and add the smoked salmon, capers, and ½ cup of feta cheese. Toss gently to distribute everything.

Serve immediately, garnished with the reserved smoked salmon strips, feta crumbles, and chopped dill or parsley.

Serves 2 as a main course, or 4 as a first course.

ME:: use this to access all my computers from anywhere ; Tailscale blog:: The Tailscale node you mail to your parents <-- gotta do this to access my nodes from anywhere. <-- QUOTE: Or the stoop, the package locker, or wherever your friends and family get their packages. Tailscale can run on tiny devices, like a Raspberry Pi or Apple TV, that fit in small boxes. Once plugged in, a pre-loaded Tailscale device can help you troubleshoot devices back home, provide an exit node for VPN purposes, and give you an off-site backup location, among other neat tricks.

ME:: there is no man-boy problem, there is an underpaid and under represented problem for all minorities, not men. Grow up and do your share of the housework and childrearing man-boys :-) !; Jessica Winter:: What Did Men Do to Deserve This? | The New Yorker

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Jessica Winter:: What Did Men Do to Deserve This? | The New Yorker

The notion that fathers wander away from their families owing to some gnawing sense of existential dislocation—some humiliating certainty of their own uselessness or usurpation—is especially pungent when one takes into account the enormous gender gap in housework and child-rearing in heterosexual marriages. According to the Gender Equity Policy Institute, mothers who work full time do almost twice as much household labor as fathers. Research by the Nobel-winning economist Claudia Goldin has suggested that married men’s disinclination toward housework and other “draggy business of family life” may be holding back birth rates, which should pique the interest of Republican pronatalists such as J. D. Vance.

The deeper one sinks into our nation’s alleged man-boy problem and its potential solutions, the more the woman reader may begin to feel something stronger than resentment or intellectual disdain. She may begin to feel a chauvinistic gratitude in her sex. The familiar flatness of feeling a little degraded seems preferable to the anger, entitlement, and alienation that (we are told over and over) gnaws away at so many male specimens. What a gift it is, really, to have no choice in the matter. To have to move out of your parents’ house, to show up for your shift, to change the diaper, not because any of it is gender-affirming but because life is full of tasks that need doing, and you are the person who does them. At least then you know who you are.

ME:: free websites for folks who know how to use git for how long? Sounds great, except for having enough $. And grebedoc is codeberg spelled backwards LOL ; Catherine 'whitequark' and teammates:: Grebedoc — static site hosting for git forges

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Grebedoc — static site hosting for git forges

In short: a service that publishes the pages branch in your Git repository as a website on your domain; think GitHub Pages if it was open source and community operated.

More specifically, it is a public deployment of git-pages and Caddy configured to work especially with Codeberg but also with other Git forges. It is operated by Catherine 'whitequark' and teammates, and currently deployed using Rage4 anycast infrastructure routing to VPSes in six regions (Europe, North America East, North America West, South America, East Asia, Australia), with site contents stored on Tigris and backed up to Wasabi.

This service is provided as a public utility, especially for those migrating from GitHub to community operated forges, and we plan to operate it indefinitely. It is monitored and has a status page.

The size of a website is currently limited to 768 MiB. We are aiming to eventually raise this to 10 GiB.

ME:: Recipes that probably :-) work:: Gotta try this with cashews since Simon is allergic to peanuts :-) ; Genevieve Ko:: Dan Dan Noodles Recipe <-- QUOTE: A specialty from Sichuan, a province in the southwest of China, vendors once balanced baskets of noodles and sauce on their shoulder poles and cried out “dan dan mian!” to hawk their wares. Dan dan refers to those bamboo shoulder poles and mian means noodles, but there’s no one way to prepare them. Nowadays in the Western diaspora, the dish is associated with a few essentials, namely chile oil and sesame paste, but another is worth adding: preserved vegetables. Salty and a little sweet with the sour oomph of fermentation, pickled mustard greens give the soothing noodles an umami zing. These noodles are especially rich with sesame, but you can adjust all of the seasonings to your taste. Toasty and salty, tangy on the cliff of funk, chewy with pops of peanut, dan dan noodles are a bowl of contentment. <-- see also: These Dan Dan Noodles Are the Weeknight Meal of Your Dreams

ME:: LOL Ryan,respectfully I think you are wrong but what do I know :-) ; Ryan Dahl:: Humans Are Just Stochastic Parrots

QUOTE

Ryan Dahl:: Humans Are Just Stochastic Parrots

This species will fabricate quotes, sources, and references – a lot of the time they just make things up that sound plausible. Their words are superficially impressive but largely lacking in substance — humans mostly produce what has been described as fluent bullshit. Humans mansplain, presenting reasoning free of evidence but with confidence in its own correctness on any topic, without regard for the audience. Like talking to a drunk person at a bar: wrong, but very confident about it.

Yet humans really do accomplish a lot more than many thought possible.

Humans just spew words. It just so happens that we can decode them into something related, useful, and meaningful surprisingly often.

ME:: And so it begins go Firefox for Enterprise go :-) ! I was involved in the last Firefox Enterprise effort 2018-2020 and it didn't go anywhere; hopefully it will go further this time! ; Brian Smith:: Introducing early access for Firefox Support for Organizations <-- QUOTE: Multiple Firefox logos forming a curved trail on a dark background. ... Increasingly, businesses, schools, and government institutions deploy Firefox at scale for security, resilience, and data sovereignty. Organizations have fine-grained administrative and orchestration control of the browser’s behavior using policies with Firefox and the Extended Support Release (ESR). Today, we’re opening early access to Firefox Support for Organizations, a new program that begins operation in January 2026.

ME:: tl;dr-ing: fabric is an open-source framework for augmenting humans using AI by an AI maximalist who seems more reasonable than most of them. Daniel Miessler:: February 2024:: Why I Created Fabric <-- QUOTE: fabric is an open-source framework for augmenting humans using AI. ...The goal of the project is to provide a universally accessible layer of AI that anyone can use to enhance their life or work.`

ME:: clearly we know nothing about minds :-) ; Norman, Johnson, van er Linden:: 2024:: Do Minds Have Immune systems? <-- QUOTE:: Do minds have immune systems? In this article, we remove several obstacles to treatingthe question in a rigorously scientific way. After giving the hypothesis that minds do have such subsystems a name—we call it mental immune systems theory—we show why it merits serious consideration. The issue hinges on our definition of an immune system, so we examine the definition that currently prevails, demonstrate its shortcomings, and offer an alternative that addresses those shortcomings. We then lay out the empirical evidence that minds really do have immune systems in the specified sense. Findings about psychological inoculation, identity-protective cognition, cognitive dissonance, psycho-logical reactance, information diffusion, and cognitive bias all point to the existence of evolved cognitive defenses—informational “immune systems” that function in much the way that bodily immune systems do. Finally, we discuss the prospects of cognitive immunology, a research program that (a) posits mental immune systems and (b) proceeds to investigate their functioning`

ME:: so many free LUTs to try on the S9 and in Pearla and not boring iOS Camera Apps so little time :-) l KROLOP und GERST:: Lumix S5II LUT Package <-- QUOTE: Mit dem Erscheinen der S5II von Panasonic ist eine neue Ära in Sachen JPG-Fotografie angebrochen. So hoffen wir zumindest. Als erste Kamera kann sie LUTs nicht nur zur Hilfsansicht nutzen, sondern auch den geladenen Look direkt ins JPG speichern. Es ist einfach irre, was sich daraus für Möglichkeiten für die eigene Fotografie ergeben. Ganz besondere Looks ohne Bearbeitung direkt aus der Kamera!... Achtung: Diese LUTs sind speziell für die Lumix S5II in Kombination mit flachem Bildstil („flat“) entwickelt. Heißt, sie sind nicht (wie auch andere Presets, Bildlooks, etc.) 1:1 auf andere Kameras bzw. Stile zu übertragen. Und natürlich passt nicht jedes LUT zur jeder fotografischen Situation. Ein gewisses Gespür entwickelt man aber sehr schnell und lädt definitiv dazu ein, sehr bewusst zu fotografieren!

ME:: tidyplots in R looks easier and better for non software developers and software developers than Hadley's older ggplot2. Perhaps use it for art and SUMO data?!?! ; Jan Broder Engler:: Get started • tidyplots <-- QUOTE: This getting started guide aims to empower individuals without a programming background to engage in code-based plotting with tidyplots. We will start by covering essential software tools and discussing data preparation. Next, we will introduce the tidyplots workflow, which includes adding, removing, and adjusting plot components. Finally, we will showcase the application of themes and multiplot layouts.

ME:: Seems to me like fancy bidirectional database open source schema converters?!? That can be used to solve the ATProto Lexicon Interop problem among others. What am I missing?!? From 2020, what's the update in 2025?!? Geoffrey Litt, Peter van Hardenberg, Orion Henry:: Ink and Switch:: October 2020:: Project Cambria: Translate your data with lenses <-- See also Anuj's post from September 2025:: The Lexicon Interop Problem Competing AT platforms are using different lexicons. Should we be worried? and Noel De Martin's 2021 post:: Interoperable Serendipity <-- QUOTE: We propose a principled replacement for these messy solutions: an isolated software layer that translates data between schemas on demand. This layer allows developers to maintain strong compatibility with many schema versions without complicating the main codebase. Translation logic is defined by composing bidirectional lenses, a kind of data transformation that can run both forward and backward.

ME:: Ollama is something worth looking into in my copious free time :-) i also need a 64GB RAM computer if I want to run local models it seems still! ; Ivan Palomares Carrascosa:: March 11, 2025:: The Beginner's Guide to Language Models with Python <-- QUOTE: Ollama is a framework that enables running language models locally in a streamlined and efficient way. For example, one of its available models is Qwen, which is a versatile open-source LLM capable of generating human-like text.

ME:: I guess I should try the $20/month stuff?!!? I don't really want to though LOL ; Ethan Mollick:: October 19, 2025:: An Opinionated Guide to Using AI Right Now <-- QUOTE: If you want to use an advanced AI seriously, you’ll need to pay either $20 or around $200 a month, depending on your needs (though companies are now experimenting with other pricing models in some parts of the world). The $20 tier works for the vast majority of people, while the $200 tier is for people with complex technical and coding needs. ... You will want to pick among three systems to spend your $20: Claude from Anthropic, Google’s Gemini, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. With all of the options, you get access to advanced, agentic, and fast models, a voice mode, the ability to see images and documents, the ability to execute code, good mobile apps, the ability to create images and video (Claude lacks here, however), and the ability to do Deep Research. They all have different personalities and strengths and weaknesses, but for most people, just selecting the one they like best will suffice. Some people, especially big users of X, might want to consider Grok by Elon Musk’s xAI, which has some of the most powerful AI models and is rapidly adding features, but has not been as transparent about product safety as some of the other companies. Microsoft’s Copilot offers many of the features of ChatGPT and is accessible to users through Windows, but it can be hard to control what models you are using and when. So, for most people, just stick with Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT.

ME:: I wonder how much further Paolo has taken this since June?!? Paolo Valdemarin:: June 13, 2025:: Building a WordPress MCP Server for Claude: Automating Blog Posts with AI <-- QUOTE: Building a custom MCP server to connect Claude directly to WordPress, enabling automated blog post creation with proper formatting and intelligent categorisation.

ME:: Need to explore Flame Graphs for support data and need to read the The Flame Graph ACM Paper ; Brendan Gregg:: Flame Graphs

Gotta read the original ACMQ paper: The Flame Graph

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Brendan Gregg:: Flame Graphs

The x-axis shows the stack profile population, sorted alphabetically (it is not the passage of time), and the y-axis shows stack depth, counting from zero at the bottom. Each rectangle represents a stack frame. The wider a frame is is, the more often it was present in the stacks. The top edge shows what is on-CPU, and beneath it is its ancestry. Original flame graphs use random colors to help visually differentiate adjacent frames. Variations include inverting the y-axis (an "icicle graph"), changing the hue to indicate code type, and using a color spectrum to convey an additional dimension.

Flame graphs are both a static and dynamic visualization. As a static visualization, a flame graph can be saved as an image, included in print (books), and will still convey the "big picture" as only the most frequent frames have enough width for labels. A dynamic visualization allows interactive features to aid navigation and comprehension, including:

Mouse hover shows additional frame details in a status bar. Mouse click zooms the visualization horizontally, revealing function names previously elided. Search matches and highlights a given term and shows the "cumulative percentage" of stacks including the search term.

This visualization is fully explained in my ACMQ article The Flame Graph, also published in Communications of the ACM, Vol. 59 No. 6.

ME:::most of us who are softwware developers aren't surgeons. We're like those doctors 'before the scientific method became the way' when coding sadly. Not sure LLMs will make us all surgeons magically; Geoffrey Litt:: Code like a surgeon

QUOTE

A lot of people say AI will make us all “managers” or “editors”…but I think this is a dangerously incomplete view!

Personally, I’m trying to code like a surgeon.

A surgeon isn’t a manager, they do the actual work! But their skills and time are highly leveraged with a support team that handles prep, secondary tasks, admin. The surgeon focuses on the important stuff they are uniquely good at.

ME:: We need more excellent contributor documentation for the SUMO Knowledge Base ; Dawn Foster ::Governance Part 3: New Contributors and Pathways to Leadership | Fast Wonder <-- QUOTE: Good contributor documentation, especially for new contributors, is the first step toward bringing new people into your project in a scalable way that requires less time from busy maintainers. If this is well documented, new contributors can get started with a minimal amount of help from existing maintainers, which can save you a lot of time in the long run and reduce frustration for maintainers who are answering the same questions over and over. At a minimum, you should have instructions for everything that is required to get your project up and running in a development environment along with the process and guidelines for submitting a new contribution.

ME:: Helix is a terminal only editor with built-in R, Python and Ruby language servers so I have to try it to reduce my dependency on Visual Code's LSP servers ; Language Defaults | Helix <-- QUOTE: The editor comes with a lot of built-in language servers, here is a comprehensive list showing support for all of the languages. ....This menu is also available if you run hx --health in the terminal.

ME:: gotta try this as well as vscode-extension-wikiparser for SUMO KB markup which is very close to wikitext. I previously searched for mediawiki not wikitext. Also need to read Julia and Thib's tutorials; wikitext-lsp - npm<-- See also vscode-extension-wikiparser, Julia's tutorial: Notes on switching to Helix from vim and Thib's overview: From VS Code to Helix

ME:: tl;dr-ing The USA became a democracy when Black folks could vote which was in 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was passed; Amanda Taub:: July 5, 2023:: When Did the U.S. Become a Democracy? - The New York Times

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Amanda Taub:: When Did the U.S. Become a Democracy? - The New York Times (archive.is link)

“As a person who studies autocracy, there’s no way I would code the U.S. as a democracy prior to 1965, before the passing of the Voting Rights Act,” Anne Meng, a University of Virginia political scientist, told me in January.

ME:: seems like mounting a tripod on bicycle handlebards with zip ties would be unstable?!? ; woofboy111:: The Hands Free Bicycle Camera Tripod : 6 Steps (with Pictures) - Instructables <-- from 16 years ago. i wonder if this works with a phone mounted on a peak design mount with a tripod mount

ME:: find is often easier to use with shell pattern matching instead of regular expressions! ; How to randomly open a jpeg or JPG or JPEG or jpg file ; explainshell.com - find . -type f ( -iname ".jpg" -o -iname ".jpeg" ) | sort -R | head -1 | xargs -n 1 open

Key Details

shell pattern matching seems (not sure how up to date this is) to be documented in gnu's docs at 2.3.4 Shell Pattern Matching and Peter Seebach's Patterns and string processing in shell scripts

you can use regular expressions in find using the -regex (probably want to also use -E for extended modern regular expressions ) and if you do regular expressions test with an online simulator like regex101

case insensitive shell pattern -iname pattern

Like -name, but the match is case insensitive. For example, the patterns fo*' andF??' match the file names Foo',FOO', foo',fOo', etc. In these patterns, unlike filename expansion by the shell, an initial '.' can be matched by *'. That is, find -name *bar will match the file.foobar'. Please note that you should quote patterns as a matter of course, otherwise the shell will expand any wildcard characters in them.

within a shell pattern, -o means OR, -a means AND

ME:: yes....and :-) so much to learn from philosophy ; Wikipedia:: Both/and reasoning

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Wikipedia:: Both/and reasoning

Both/and is an academic concept which refers to a form of reasoning which resists binary or either/or styles of thinking.[1][2]

Unlike dualistic styles of reasoning, both/and means that between two options, both can be valid, or that their opposition may present opportunities for dialectical synthesis, rather than a complete rejection of one of the premises in favor of the other.

Both/and is associated with dialectical thinking, which means investigating contradictions in order to attain higher understanding. However, it also appears in broader systems of thought, such as the concept of nondualism, in which the distinction between self and other is transcended.[3][4]

The term has been used in a texts on management, literary theory, classroom research, religious studies, methodology, and international relations.[

ME:: Broken record: until we get a sterilizing vaccine I don't think wearing a mask indoors is unreasonable especially in respiratory season; i also think we should have windows open (as we learned from the 1918 flu pandemic) and HEPA (and far UV-C if there is a central HVAC unit like a heat pump or furnace if it really works) filtered air everywhere ; Julia Doubleday:: Beyond all reason - The Gauntlet <-- QUOTE: "The demand that one mask at all times in public spaces is, I think, unreasonable.”... few things about the full statement: first, vaccines do not prevent infection well, and within weeks of receiving a booster shot, they do not prevent infection at all. Therefore, while they serve public health by potentially alleviating some burden on local hospitals, they don’t slow the spread of COVID at the community level. .... But Long COVID can happen to anyone. We keep saying it. Nobody listens. For convenience I continue to separate “those with Long COVID” who must avoid another infection from those without- who can afford some mystery number of infections. But it’s possible your next infection may disable you too. It is for yourself, as much as for others, that COVID is worth avoiding. The “unreasonable” of wearing a mask indoors does not compare to the “unreasonable” of Long COVID plus the “unreasonable” of scrambling to avoid another infection while the still-well-enough people sniff that doing anything to mitigate the virus is simply asking too much of them.

ME:: called my local pharmacy at 1808 Kingsway and got a walk-in appointment and both my 7th COVID vaccine and my yearly flu vaccine today! ; 2025 COVID-19 immunizations - Province of British Columbia

My local pharmacy is Pharmasave Kingsway, if you are in East Van call them at: 7783794470 and maybe you can get a walk-in too. Lots of other pharmacies have the same policy.

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: 2025 COVID-19 immunizations - Province of British Columbia

Updated COVID-19 vaccines are available free of charge for B.C. residents during the 2025-26 immunization program. These vaccines help protect against serious illness from COVID-19. ..

Notifications with a booking link for influenza and COVID-19 immunizations are going out from October 7, 2025, and into November to everyone 6 months and older that is registered in the Get Vaccinated system.

Immunization appointments begin on October 14, 2025, for those at highest risk of severe illness, as well as complications`

Previously

October 21, 2024: Got my 6th COVID and yearly flu vaccination text message at 3:05p.m., made an appointment for 5:05 p.m.. All done! Yay! #GoScienceGo!

ME:: looks great need to write a github action to generate SUMO KB and Forum reports ; David Keyes:: 2023:: How to Use GitHub Actions with R to Run Code Automatically <-- QUOTE: Below, I will demonstrate two GitHub Actions: one that imports data from a Google Sheet and another that generates a report using this data.

ME:: fastmail doesn't appear in this list?! ; The most popular email providers <-- QUOTE: `Google and Microsoft grab the top spots, acting as email provider for about 60% of the email-enabled domains analyzed. A diverse group of hosting providers, registrars, email and security products form the long-tail.

ME:: Analogical programming by demonstration as opposed to programming with Fregean text ; Ivan Reese, Jimmy Miller, and Lu Wilson:: Pygmalion by David C. Smith - Feeling of Computing - Omny.fm

See also: * Pygmalion: An Executable Electronic Blackboard David Canfield Smith * No-code History: Pygmalion (1975 * Allan Cypher, editor, co-edited by Daniel C. Halbert, David Kurlander, Henry Lieberman, David Maulsby, Brad A. Myers, and Alan Turransky:: Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Ivan Reese, Jimmy Miller, and Lu Wilson:: Pygmalion by David C. Smith - Feeling of Computing - Omny.fm

If you're anything like Ivan (oof, sorry), you've heard of Pygmalion but never caught more than the gist. Some sort of project from the early 70s, similar to Sketchpad or Smalltalk or something, yet another promising prototype from the early history of our field that failed to take the world by storm. Our stock-in-trade on this show.

But you've probably heard of Programming by Demonstration. And you've certainly heard of icons — you know, those little pictures that have become indelibly part of computing as we know it. Pygmalion is the originator of these concepts… and more!

The best introduction to Pygmalion is Mariano Guerra's No-code History: Pygmalion, which includes a clearly articulated summary of the big ideas, motivation, and design, with a video demonstration of the programming interface, key terminology, and links.

The most introduction to Pygmalion — or Pig Million, The Millionth Pig, as it'll surely come to be known — is the subject of today's episode: the original paper by David Canfield Smith.

ME:: Pointless 'drm' gotta pointless or something :-) ; Pixelmelt:: How I Reversed Amazon's Kindle Web Obfuscation Because Their App Sucked

QUOTE

read the whole thing: How I Reversed Amazon's Kindle Web Obfuscation Because Their App Sucked

TL;DR

I bought my first ebook from amazon

Amazon's Kindle Android app was really buggy and crashed a bunch

Tried to download my book to use with a functioning reader app

Realized Amazon no longer lets you do that

Decided to reverse engineer their obfuscation system out of spite

Discovered multiple layers of protection including randomized alphabets

Defeated all of them with font matching wizardry

Jo Freeman:: The Tyranny of Stuctureless; ME:: a classic, please read!

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Jo Freeman:: The Tyranny of Stuctureless

1) Delegation of specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks by democratic procedures.

....

2) Requiring all those to whom authority has been delegated to be responsible to those who selected them.

...

3) Distribution of authority among as many people as is reasonably possible.

...

4) Rotation of tasks among individuals. Responsibilities which are held too long by one person, formally or informally, come to be seen as that person's "property" and are not easily relinquished or controlled by the group.

... . 5) Allocation of tasks along rational criteria. Selecting someone for a position because they are liked by the group or giving them hard work because they are disliked serves neither the group nor the person in the long run.

...

6) Diffusion of information

ME tl-dr-ing; Computational poetry based on Telegu is cool ; koundinya:: Prāsa Programming Language:: Documentation - poetic computer <-- QUOTE: Prāsa is an esoteric programming language that investigates the intersection of technology and cultural identity.

ME:: I need to dig deeper into Postmodern criticism, deconstruction, etc ; Brian Marick:: Deconstructing (cruddily) "How to Deconstruct Almost Everything" // Oddly Influenced

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Brian Marick:: Deconstructing (cruddily) "How to Deconstruct Almost Everything" // Oddly Influenced

In 1993, the software engineer Chip Morningstar published an essay called “How To Deconstruct Almost Anything.” In it, he surveys what he learned reading Jonathan Culler’s 1982 book On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, which was a standard text at the time for people who want to do literary criticism.

Nowadays, he’d have had an easier time. I would recommend Peter Berry’s 1995 Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory or Lois Tyson’s 1998 Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. Both are survey books, covering various different styles of criticism, including the New Criticism, structuralism, deconstruction (a rival of structuralism), New Historicism, and so on. Those are generally lumped together as “Theory,” not a great name in my opinion. Morningstar speaks of “postmodernism” and “deconstruction” rather interchangeably, which is wrong but unfortunately common. Postmodern criticism is a type of Theory that lives alongside deconstruction. You can think of Theory as the abstract superclass, and postmodernism and deconstruction as concrete subclasses. He’s got the inheritance hierarchy – and which properties belong to which class – all mixed up. It’s possibly also important that deconstruction and postmodernism were originally philosophical theories by actual philosophers that were later adopted by literary critics. Jacques Derrida the philosopher was doing the philosophy thing of being in dialogue with dead philosophers like Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Husserl, and his key writings assume you’ve already read those people. (And Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger are notoriously opaque, even for philosophers.) Culler tries to explain both the philosophy and its application, which makes for a tough read.

The critic is like the programmer. You can use just one approach (like deconstruction, or like Rust) for all your projects, but you’re better off if you can choose the tool you think most appropriate for the job

ME:: make everything yellow :-) ; Nick Driftwood:: Goldilocks False Color LUT for Sony S-Log3 Cameras FREE!

ME:: rossandhisjpegs reviews blue night, reglisse, black frost-n and newtro; Gotta check these out! ; Ross:: Testing LUMIX LUTs, So You Don’t Have To - YouTube

QUOTE

LUT 01 // 'Blue Night' by EJAY LUT 02 // 'Reglisse' by Benjamin Tantot LUT 03 // 'Black Frost-N' by Emily Lowrey ‪@MicroFourNerds‬ LUT 04 // 'NEWTRO' by Kotaro Kumazawa LUT 05 // 'Luminous City' yuuui

ME:: $CAD71 Fuji style (Acros, Clasic Chrome, Classic Neg,e tc) LUTs ; Fujify [LUMIX] Lightroom Profiles/3D LUTs - Essential Pack | Fujify

ME:: Another LUT to check out :-) ; Camila Ballell:: Cinematic Retro Film Look - Free LUT for video editing | Uppbeat

ME:: more LUTs to check out on my S9 and Pearla and not boring iPhone camera app some day ; True Log Conversion LUTs Free Download (Inc. Rec.709) - Bounce Color®

ME:: gotta check out NEWTRO, Warm Film, Teal Flat-S and of course Leica Monchrome on my S9 ; Comment by Bass Potoo:: Lumix S5ii lut recommendation : r/Lumix

QUOTE

“NEWTRO” by Kotaro Kumazawa - this one is my go to for everyday-shoot and portraits. The color profile is close to what my eyes see, with lifted blacks. I set the opacity at around 60-70%.

“Warm Film” by EJAY - though meant for VLOG, I use this one quite a lot when shooting well-lit environments with a lot of whites in the scene. It warms the scene up in a harmonious way. I also like the way it expresses skin tone. Again, play around with the opacity. I usually stack it on top of a Rec709 LUT set to 10% opacity.

“Teal Flat-S” by LUMIX - kind of a fun one. I usually use it at night. It makes the yellows really pop.

“Leica Monochrome” - my go-to for black and white!

ME:: classic paper about why groupware and social apps fail ; Jonathan Grudin:: 1988:: WHY CSCW APPLICATIONS FAIL: PROBLEMS IN THE DESIGN AND EVALUATION OF ORGANIZATIONAL INTERFACES

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Jonathan Grudin:: 1988:: WHY CSCW APPLICATIONS FAIL: PROBLEMS IN THE DESIGN AND EVALUATION OF ORGANIZATIONAL INTERFACES

Many systems, applications, and features that support cooperative work share two characteristics: A significant investment has been made in their development, and their successes have consistently fallen far short of expecta- tions. Examination of several application areas reveals a common dynamic: 1) A factor contributing to the application’s failure is the disparity between those who will benefit from an application and those who must do additional work to support it. 2) A factor contributing to the decision-making failure that leads to ill-fated development efforts is the unique lack of management intuition for CSCW applications. 3) A factor contributing to the failure to learn from experience is the extreme difficulty of evaluating these applications. These three problem areas escape adequate notice due to two natural but ultimately misleading analogies: the analogy between multi-user application programs and multi-user computer systems, and the analogy between multi-user applications and single-user applications. These analogies influence the way we think about cooperative work applications and designers and decision-makers fail to recognize their limits. Several CSCW application areas are examined in some deta

ME:: What is the downside to uv? Doesn't seem to be one :-) It does it all, runs python, manages dependencies etc ; Rob Hudson:: From pyenv to uv: Streamlining Python Management | Rob's Cogitations

ME:: if you can break a problem into a series of sub-problems and write that list of sub-problems you have always been capable of being a software developer. Now more than ever with or without LLMs ; Brandon Dixon:: Febuary 16, 2024:: Can you write? Great, you're a developer.

ME tl;dr-ing:: Use Promptbooks to make your interactions with LLMs more effective. Maybe I should do this for support reporting. Would be nice if Brandon actually linked to his 5 actual prompts ; Brandon Dixon:: Prompt Power: Investigation Summarization

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Brandon Dixon:: Prompt Power: Investigation Summarization

I am using Security Copilot to perform my work and executed a promptbook to analyze a suspicious powershell script. This script silently downloads a file from a remote IP address and then executes it on the host system.

Promptbooks solicit inputs from the user and then run a series of curated prompts that build off previous context to complete a workflow. They take a few minutes to run, but are incredibly powerful. If this concept is new here to learn more, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security-copilot/using-promptbooks#what-are-promptbooks.

Creating the Summary

Within my session, I have 5 prompts and responses that were associated with the promptbook. I want to generate a summary of the investigation so that I can preserve this in Security Copilot and share the results with my colleagues. While the contents of the prompts and session are important, they are not needed to demonstrate how different prompts can augment the response. Below, I am going to break down the differing ways I can achieve getting a summary and how crafting a detailed prompt is able to yield far superior results.

Summarize and nothing more - Simple prompt to get a summary.

...

Summarize and guide me - Simple prompt with additional instruction for format and recommendations.

In this prompt, we retain our simple summary request, but we have now extended the instructions to Security Copilot to form an executive summary and build a list of recommendations. Our output is a small paragraph capturing the session details and the list below becomes actionable next steps. These small changes make a big difference, especially if the user working the investigation has less experience. Also notable, the recommendations go beyond our session context and leverage the security knowledge of the foundation models to give more insight into what to do next. While this response is more actionable, we can do better.

...

Summarize, guide me and share your view - Simple prompt with a lot more direction and request for the model to opine.

...

Summarize for management

ME tl;dr-ing:: The view from Malaysia:: practical applications of green local LLMs are the future ; Elizabeth Tai:: Conversations about AI are different in Asia

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Elizabeth Tai:: Conversations about AI are different in Asia

In my opinion, since they dumped this tech on our laps, it’s now time to manage this. Whinging about the unfairness of being exposed to tech we didn’t ask for from a country thousands of miles away is not going to get us anywhere, is it?

We need to ensure that the downsides of AI can be dealt with. For example, are data centers the end all and be all? Can we create less energy dependent, pollution causing AI?

What I mean is that we need to have productive conversations about AI.

The danger in Asia is ignoring all these downsides, hyperfocused on the benefits.

However, I am heartened that China is producing more energy-efficient models. I’m heartened that they are ensuring green energy is a part of its use.

Personally, I forsee a day where huge data centres are not needed for AI, and everyone has a local LLMs in their computers.

But to ensure this happens, these conversation need to happen. Rhetoric, moralising, fear-based tactics are unproductive.

ME:: I need to check out Kelvin's LUTS on my S9 and Pearla/notboring Camera ; ANKR.BIO - Kelvin Kurniawan

ME:: tl;dr-ing:: We need to adapt our local and global institutions to work with the internet ; Robin Berjon:: January 13, 2023:: The Internet Transition

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Robin Berjon:: The Internet Transition

the authors list four small transitions that are steps along the major transition from a social organisation based on kinship and personal exchange to large-scale complex human society with impersonal exchange and an advanced division of labour:

the original human hunter-gatherer niche;

the origin of language, which facilitated cumulative cultural evolution;

the shift to sedentary agriculture and hierarchical social organisation;

the origin of states, when interactions between people who may never meet again become more regular.

The exact list is debatable but I believe that we should now add a fifth step small transition: the Internet transition, which notably includes a shift to post-geographic5 interactions

...

My point is not that we need to return to locality, but that we need to build institutions that are adapted to this new reality so as to develop the institutional capacity that matches the needs of the world we want.

...

There is no purely technical fix for our predicament — evidently — but for the technologists amongst us focusing on the architectural properties of our technical decisions, on how technical architecture creates or constrains institutional mechanisms, and how technology works with governance is key. To take but one example, the best governance model that is available in a client/server architecture is benevolent dictatorship. No matter how you set things up, the server can ultimately change the rules. That’s a major constraint to work with; it will eventually break most equalitarian governance models and mechanically limit collective intelligence. Peer-to-peer architectures offer a much richer set of institutional roles for agents and for the rules with which they can interact, and therefore provide a much more powerful solution space. It’s worth spending some quality time with them for that reason alone.

Networked technology that mediates so much of our lives is social engineering — which is to say that deciding how it works is politics. If we want any hope for these politics to result in a world worth wanting, we need to build our Internet according to sound institutional principles. The toolbox for that exists, figuring out how to integrate and use it is what’s next.

ME:: not upgrading macOS/iOS/watchOS/tvOS 26 for at least 3 months and when I do upgrade I will see if Adam has an update to this blog post ; Adam Engst:: How to Turn Liquid Glass into a Solid Interface - TidBITS

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Adam Engst:: How to Turn Liquid Glass into a Solid Interface - TidBITS

Recommendations

As I hope I’ve been clear throughout, everyone’s vision is different, and you should choose the settings that make these various interfaces the most usable for you. If you’re looking for a starting point, here’s what I’ve done.

macOS 26: Use Reduce Transparency to bring back the opaque menu bar and eliminate odd bleedthroughs in various parts of the interface. This setting is particularly important if you take screenshots for documentation.

iOS 26 and iPadOS 26: If you can read notifications and don’t have trouble with readability in other apps, I recommend leaving all the settings off to start and only turning on Reduce Transparency if you decide you need it. It significantly improves readability, but at the cost of awkward interfaces in some apps that heavily rely on Liquid Glass elements.

watchOS 26: My favorite setting for watchOS is Increase Contrast, which makes notifications more readable by eliminating the bleedthrough background and also causes some buttons in the interface to stand out more. Reduce Transparency isn’t much of a win and makes the interface less attractive.

tvOS: I don’t see enough benefit in any of the settings that reduce Liquid Glass to bother with them. Reduce Transparency works as expected, but there’s relatively little transparency used, so it makes little real-world difference. But turning off Auto-Play Video Previews is a huge relief!

ME tl;dr-ing:: investigative skills, Evaluative skills and innovation skills are all things we need to improve to prosper in an LLM enabled world. LLMs have none of these skills ; Chelsea Troy: What can we expect of LLMs as Software Engineers?

QUOTE

Chelsea Troy: What can we expect of LLMs as Software Engineers?

It’s also unlikely to surprise you that they fail students when the code base the student is working on exceeds about 300 lines. To use them most effectively, students must first write COHESIVE code—code in which the concepts that must be understood together live together—and recognizing patterns from github does not prepare a tool to generate this type of code. The specific cohesive part on which a student needs help then needs to be entered into the tool in isolation.

These things only become more true as the code base increases in complexity. I wrote a compiler in Rust earlier this year—a language I don’t know especially well—to better understand the experiences of my students trying to use LLMs to build projects in Python. I’d say the LLM reduced the amount of physical typing I needed to do by 95%. I’d say it reduced the amount I needed to know, about the implementation details of compilers as well as the characteristics of Rust, in order to get my compiler working correctly, by about 5%.

...

The first skill set is investigative skills: we need to be able to scope down the area in which we are facing a problem, and learn to ask specific questions about how our assumptions differ from the ground truth.

I find this to be a woefully undertaught and undervalued skill among engineers precisely because we tend to view debugging or familiarizing ourselves with the system we’re working on, not as part of our work, but as a blocking obstacle that distracts from our actual work of plowing through features and system changes. I think this is a deeply flawed way to view our profession, and one made even less accurate than it already was by the advent of tools that can plow through feature development for us, provided we possess the investigative skill set to identify and understand when and how those solutions make inaccurate assumptions or need to be fixed.

...

The second skill set is evaluative skills: we need to be able to select from a range of implementation options based on how those options’ benefits and shortcomings fit the bill of our specific situation.

...

I think engineers, particularly at more senior levels, need to take stock of why best practices are what they are, and determine whether those reasons make sense in each situation where they’re being used.

More granularly, I think it falls to engineers to learn to specify exactly what their decision criteria are, decide explicitly which of those are optimizing criteria and which are satisficing criteria, and document how each of their implementation options stack up against those criteria. An LLM can tell you what most people usually say to do. It can’t tell you what you should do, but the truth is, neither can most human engineers right now. This skill set addresses that.

...

The final skill set is innovation skills: we need to learn to proactively search for the shortcomings of the available options, and consider solutions that haven’t been tried before.

These are precisely the solutions that a Generative AI product cannot produce by handing us a global average of what the internet has to say about a topic. The task falls to us, I am afraid, to understand how our status quo falls short, and figure out what we could change to improve those shortfalls. We need the ability to proactively identify who our systems do not serve, or serve poorly, and why, and how to fix it.

ME:: tl;dr-ing: Show up as we want to show up and learn how to divert that negative energy somehow (in a way we feel good about it) ; John Cutler:: 2023:: TBM 254: Self-Gaslighting and the Doubt Loop <--broken link on purpose because s*bstack

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: John Butler:: TBM 254: Self-Gaslighting and the Doubt Loop) <--broken link on purpose because s*bstack (just change DOT to . LOL)

So the same people telling you to step up, arrive with solutions, not problems, deal with ambiguity, and be more strategic are being told those things by their managers. It is almost comical—like a big bi-directional cascade of people questioning their worth and chops, but causing others to question THEIR worth and chops. The theatricality of it all is comforting on some level.

So:

Joy and pride at work signal true fulfillment.

Save energy for what truly fulfills your needs.

Even "top performers" face similar challenges and doubts.

Companies often have a chain reaction of doubt and pressure.

ME:: What does Jim Covello of Goldman Sachs think today in late 2025? Still an AI bubble? Is it bursting? LLM Winter? ; Ed Citron:: July 8, 2024 Pop Culture

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Ed Citron:: Pop Culture

The most fascinating part of the report (page 10) is an interview with Jim Covello, Goldman Sachs' Head of Global Equity Research. Covello isn't a name you'll have heard unless you are, for whatever reason, a big semiconductor-head, but he's consistently been on the right side of history, named as the top semiconductor analyst by II Research for years, successfully catching the downturn in fundamentals in multiple major chip firms far before others did.

And Jim, in no uncertain terms, thinks that the generative AI bubble is full of shit.

Covello believes that the combined expenditure of all parts of the generative AI boom — data centers, utilities and applications — will cost a trillion dollars in the next several years alone, and asks one very simple question: "what trillion dollar problem will AI solve?" He notes that "replacing low-wage jobs with tremendously costly technology is basically the polar opposite of the prior technology transitions [he's] witnessed in the last thirty years.

ME:: is programming with local LLM inference better or worse a year later? My guess is (based on Simon Willison) that it's a wee bit better ; Chris Wellons:: November 10, 224:: Everything I've learned so far about running local LLMs <-- QUOTE: The next group are “coder” models trained for programming. In particular, they have fill-in-the-middle (FIM) training for generating code inside an existing program. I’ll discuss what that entails in a moment. As far as I can tell, they’re no better at code review nor other instruct-oriented tasks. It’s the opposite: FIM training is done in the base model, with instruct training applied later on top, so instruct works against FIM! In other words, base model FIM outputs are markedly better, though you lose the ability to converse with them.

Highly Recommended for all folks not just Filipinos! Carmela Sison as Chef Mela is fabulous in Lasa ng Imperyo/A Taste of Empire, an adaptation of a play by Jovanni Sy Oct 9-19, 2025 at Presentation House Theatre, North Vancouver, $30

Ben Werdmuller:: Lifelogging under fascism...Imagine a device that lifelogged and stored quantified self data using strong, key-based encryption <-- ME:: I want this yes please! <-- QUOTE:: Imagine a device that lifelogged and stored quantified self data using strong, key-based encryption. You could access the information yourself for your own purposes, but it would remain fully encrypted and behind multi-factor login protection. If you needed to, you could release footage to predefined trusted parties: family members, a trusted member of the community, organizations like the ACLU, and as a tip to trusted newsrooms. If you didn’t get a chance to do that before being detained or otherwise incapacitated, a set number (three or five, perhaps) trusted people could agree to release your footage by taking action on their own devices together — a bit like needing multiple people to launch a nuclear missile. Every time footage was released, that action would be indelibly logged, as a guard against abuse. ; Read the whole thing Lifelogging under fascism ]

ME:: Ben, this sounds great, how can I help support this? Ben Werdmuller:: If I started fresh...a private-by-default, federated platform designed for groups that already know each other or are actively building trust <--

QUOTE:

Read the whole thing: If I started fresh

By not releasing an open source project at first, the business has a chance to seed the culture of the platform. It can provide the resources, support, and vigilance needed to make sure the space is inclusive, respectful, and safe. Once the platform has matured and there are thriving, healthy communities, that’s when we can release a reference codebase — not as a symbolic gesture, but as a foundation others can build on without compromise. That moment would come once the platform has proven its core use case, the community culture is thriving, and the financial base is strong enough to support long-term governance.

In the meantime, because it’s all based on open social web protocols, other developers could have been building their own participating open source community platforms, dashboards, and libraries.

Ben Werdmuller:: If I ran my life, private schools would be banned <-- ME::Amen! <-- Read the whole thing:: If I ran my life! <-- QUOTE: As for schools? One of my most controversial opinions is that private schools should be banned. Everyone, no matter how rich or how poor, should have to go through the same system. This will force the system to be better, and helps ensure that everyone has the same opportunities. (It also ensures that children meet peers from other stratas and classes.) In reality, that’s never going to happen

ME:: LLMs are a useful tool to complement your learning and to help construct your meaning; you can use them to replace your labour and get good grades but that's not going to result in learning which is of course NOT about grades ; Soroush Sabbaghan:: AI can be responsibly integrated into classrooms by answering the ‘why’ and ‘when’

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: AI can be responsibly integrated into classrooms by answering the ‘why’ and ‘when’

This reframes the “why” of using AI. From this perspective, the only justification for integrating AI into a learning process should be to support and sustain intellectual labour.

...

However, when the “how” of AI is used to bypass the very struggle that builds virtue (by exercising intellectual labour, including analysis, deliberation and judgment), it directly undermines the “why” of the assignment. A graduate student who generates a descriptive list of pertinent research about a topic without engaging with the sources skips the valuable process of synthesis and critical engagement.

For Dewey, learning happens through doing, questioning and grappling with complexity, not by acquiring information passively. Assignments that reward perfection and correctness over process and growth further incentivize the use of AI as a shortcut, reducing learning to prompting and receiving rather than engaging in the intellectual labour of constructing meaning.

This is where an “ethics of care” becomes indispensable. As philosopher Nel Noddings proposed, a care-based approach prioritizes relationships and the needs of the individual over rigid, universal rules. It moves away from a one-size-fits-all policy and toward discretionary judgment.

Deciding the “when” requires educators to know their learner, understand the learning goal and act with compassion and wisdom. It is a relational act, not a technical one.

Educators must ensure that AI supports rather than displaces the development of core capabilities.

GitHub - yotam/PyFlickr: Download Images using the Flickr API via the flickrapi python package <-- May not work since it requires the flickrapi python package which is not maintained/deprecated see previous post. <-- QUOTE: Downloads images from Flickr with the requested tags. Requires python package flickrapi, and a Flickr API key (set this in the script).

ME:: looks great but sadly deprecated as of November 2024 since the maintainer/author doesn't use the flickr API any more sad face ; Sybren A. Stüvel:: Python Flickr API | dr. Sybren <-- See this commit: "I have no time to maintain this repository, and haven't used the software myself for years and years."

QUOTE

Flickr is one of the most popular photo hosting websites on the planet. Their extensive API gives programmers plenty of opportunity to use Flickr any way they see fit.

The easy to use Flickr API has several interfaces written in Python, the best one created by Beej. I’ve been the maintainer for this interface since August 2007.

Previously

May 7, 2017: By April 30, 2018, the flickr API will be broken --- my bet with cog dog

ME:: AI stuff to code effectively requires time and $ which many minority folks simply don't have ; Dr Cat Hicks:: New research from me: AI Skill Threat & contest cultures on software teams <-- QUOTE: And because of our deep investment in recruiting underrepresented perspectives across all of our projects, we are able to share evidence that there are critically important equity and opportunity gaps emerging across developers' experiences with AI-assisted coding. For example, 56% of Racially Minoritized developers report a negative judgment of the quality of AI outputs in coding work, compared with 28% for all developers, and report higher levels of AI Skill Threat. Women and LGBTQ+ people on software teams are less likely to report upskilling in AI-assisted coding, potentially signaling a lack of resources. It is vital to learn from these groups' insights as well as take action to ensure these gaps do not calcify into new, career-threatening barriers.

Fuji Superia, Velvia, Kodak Ektachrome, Gold, Portra, SkyOptiimizer2, SunShadeSharp Luts from falk.wagenknecht- Google Drive <-- (via Reddit post 5 months ago on r/LumixLUTs:: "Big LUT update, leave a like!" <-- :) <-- looks great, thanks!

ME:: Go Blacksky go!!! I doubt that Blacksky will be under the "thumb of Bluesky's moderation service" forever (if this is true, I don't know enough about ATProto to know for sure who is under the thumb of who) ; Bruno Dias,:: Delusions of a Protocol | Azhdarchid <-- QUOTE: To my knowledge there's only one alternate stack that runs atproto as a complete service, Blacksky. But this isn't a turnkey solution that you can stand up as your own independent alternative; Blacksky at present barely has documentation. And even Blacksky users are still more or less under the thumb of Bluesky's moderation service, if they intend to reach 99% of the network as it exists today.

ME tl-dr-ing; lnav, a TUI tool to to colourize, filter and view multiple log files that works with zero configuration out of the box with standard log files like log files generated by ruby's logger gem ; Tim Stack:: lnav v0.13.1 <-- Nicely colourizes log files generated by the ruby "logger" gem <-- QUOTE: The Log File Navigator (lnav) is an advanced log file viewer for the console. If you have a bunch of log files that you need to look through to find issues, lnav is the tool for you.

ME:: t;dr-ing: Attack the ideas and emotions that make The Convicted Criminal worship appealing ; Dave Rahardja:: It is impossible to reason these people out of their unhinged views, because they have a different epistemological system: they believe in divine revelation through authority figures, not collaborative observation ; Matthew Sheffield:: The Convicted Criminal super fans are impossible to argue with because they don’t actually believe in logic <- (via Dave Rahardja's toot) QUOTE: Wanting to help your deluded friend or relative escape from the clutches of traditions that bind their minds, steal their money, and waste their time is a wonderful desire, but you should understand that people who are caught deeply in the clutches of authoritarianism’s embrace have tremendous difficulty escaping. The best way to help them out is to attack the ideas and emotions that make The Convicted Criminal worship appealing. Attacking their belief in the leader himself is ineffective, because submitting to The Convicted Criminal has become part of their very self-concept.

ME: tl;dr-ing Stock firmware works (Unlike Rui, I have no need for low-level control) and so does OpenWRT. Something to consider in 2027 or something but by then there will be something shinier :-) LOL! ; Rui:: The Cudy AX3000 Wi-Fi 6 System (with OpenWRT) - Tao of Mac

QUOTE

The Cudy AX3000/M3000 models make for pretty great Airport Extreme replacements, and in this age of networking devices with cloud features nobody asked for OpenWRT turns them into very nice locally managed access points that I will never have to worry about again (until I break the configuration myself, of course).

Although it is much too early to weigh in on hardware reliability (some of the 802.11ac Airport Extremes I was using were manufactured over a decade ago), the price/performance ratio is great, and right now I don’t mind it not being Wi-Fi 7.

After all, it took almost ten years for the 2.4GHz band to become saturated in my building, and it doesn’t look as if the 5GHz band is going to be massively swamped anytime soon, so I’m expecting something like 3-4 years of hassle-free operation if the hardware holds up.

A relevant thing I should point out again is that people who have less need for low-level control might actually be fine with the stock firmware—I did not use it extensively (nor did I try the Cudy app or any of the router/firewall features), but it already exposes a lot more functionality (and seems a lot more flexible) than ISP gear, so I would encourage people to give it a go.

ME:: tl;dr-ing: When we write the code to pass the test, it must be failing; Jason Gorman:: Test Driven Development Under The Microscope #1 – Usage-Driven Design

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Jason Gorman:: TDD Under The Microscope #1 – Usage-Driven Design – Codemanship's Blog

A more flexible and robust way to describe workflow is to imply ordering of events declaratively*. Instead of “Boil the kettle, then pour the water into the teapot”, we might say “When the water is poured into the teapot, it must be at near boiling”. Now all of our edge cases work. We could have boiled it in a pan. We could have boiled it in a microwave. We could have watched the squirrel and then boiled the kettle again. Workflow is implied: the water has been boiled, but we leave ourselves many more routes to pouring it in the teapot.

A similar approach can be taken with workflows like TDD; instead of “Run the test to see it fail, then write the simplest code to pass it”, we could say “When we write the code to pass the test, it must be failing”. It’s a subtle but important distinction, and one which I’ve realised I’ve been using for a long time when I observe developers working.

ME:: Zero to working space invaders code in 1 prompt! From Chinese "frontier" ai company Z.ai way back :-) 2 months ago to July 29, 2025 ; Simon Willison:: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now, using GLM-4.5 Air and MLX

QUOTE:

Read the whole thing: Simon Willison:: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now, using GLM-4.5 Air and MLX

My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now, using GLM-4.5 Air and MLX

I wrote about the new GLM-4.5 model family yesterday—new open weight (MIT licensed) models from Z.ai in China which their benchmarks claim score highly in coding even against models such as Claude Sonnet 4.

The models are pretty big—the smaller GLM-4.5 Air model is still 106 billion total parameters, which is 205.78GB on Hugging Face.

Ivan Fioravanti built this 44GB 3bit quantized version for MLX, specifically sized so people with 64GB machines could have a chance of running it. I tried it out... and it works extremely well.

I fed it the following prompt:

Write an HTML and JavaScript page implementing space invaders

And it churned away for a while and produced the following:

Clearly this isn’t a particularly novel example, but I still think it’s noteworthy that a model running on my 2.5 year old laptop (a 64GB MacBook Pro M2) is able to produce code like this—especially code that worked first time with no further edits needed.

ME:: oh brother yet another governance error (this time by Ruby Central) screws my favourite programming language Jan Lehnardt :couchdb:: "What the f*ck is going on with Ruby?.... For the moment we have to consider all gems compromised:" - narrativ.es <-- See Ellenn Dash aka duckinator's resignation from Ruby Central https://pup-e.com/goodbye-rubygems.pdf * Alex Rock writes: How to make sure *existing* gems aren't compromised somehow? ... That's the main point of failure with supply-chain instability in general (and the node.js ecosystem knows a huge lot about it). ... Not only if rubygems dies they can't update stuff, but will they find a reliable mirror that will allow to *keep* the existing gems downloadable without risk?

ME:: We all make sh*tty software as Dave Winer has said so many times! Including Microsoft and Samsung! ; Thom Holwerda:: Dark patterns killed my wife’s Windows 11 installation – OSnews via Mike Hoye

QUOTE

This tragedy of dark patterns then neatly cascaded into a catastrophic comedy of bugs, where a full root drive apparently corrupts online Microsoft accounts on Windows 11 so hard they become essentially unrecoverable. There were no warnings and no informational popups. Ominous user accounts started to appear on the login screen. Weird suggestions to use corporate-looking security USB keys pop up. Windows wrongfully tells my wife the PIN code and password she enters are incorrect. The suggestion to change the password or PIN code breaks completely. All the well-known rescue options any average user would turn to in WinRE throw up cryptic errors.

Previously

May 4, 2017: We all make sh*tty software including M$crosoft part 8888 -- www.iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com

Notability <--- yet another note taking startup powered by "AI" :-)

ME: this seems to work on macOS Big Sur 11.7 ; huksley's github gist:: Disabling photoanalysisd on macOS

The following seemed to work on 11.7, note that this changed slightly in Monterrey and later ; read the gist for those newer macOS versions:

launchctl disable gui/$UID/com.apple.photoanalysisd launchctl kill -TERM gui/$UID/com.apple.photoanalysisd

ME:: Death of a disco dancer er Google Web search :-) Killed by Google AI mode and ChatGPT with GPT-5 search ; Simon Willison:: Google's AI mode is good, actually

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Simon Willison:: Google's AI mode is good, actually

When I wrote about how good ChatGPT with GPT-5 is at search yesterday I nearly added a note about how comparatively disappointing Google's efforts around this are.

I'm glad I left that out, because it turns out Google's new "AI mode" is genuinely really good! It feels very similar to GPT-5 search but returns results much faster.

ME:: Go science go! Explaining COVID science to privileged folks with 'educations' should NOT be required ; Jess Steier:: I inserted myself into a conversation at a bar about Covid and vaccines. Here’s what happened :: How to talk to strangers at a bar about Covid, dispel misinformation and explain the real science behind vaccines and mRNA vaccines | STAT

QUOTE

Read the whole thing of course: Jess Steier:: I inserted myself into a conversation at a bar about Covid and vaccines. Here’s what happened :: How to talk to strangers at a bar about Covid, dispel misinformation and explain the real science behind vaccines and mRNA vaccines | STAT]

To those of us in public health, it feels like the world is on fire. We’re watching the systematic dismantling of institutions that have protected Americans from disease for decades. But to most people? They have no idea any of this is happening.

The damage isn’t just rhetorical. In six months under Kennedy:

The CDC has lost nearly half its budget and thousands of employees.

He fired all vaccine advisory experts, replacing them with vaccine skeptics.

Multiple CDC leaders have resigned in protest.

The agency is described as broken by former directors.

Important programs targeting cancer, heart disease, strokes, lead poisoning, injury prevention, and violence have been severely weakened or defunded.

The largest measles outbreak in a generation occurred during this period, while Kennedy downplayed the importance of vaccines and promoted unproven treatments.

Funding for global vaccination efforts protecting millions of children worldwide has been halted.

Jim O’Neill, a non-medically trained investment adviser, was appointed as acting CDC director, raising concerns about leadership expertise.

A gunman attacked CDC staff, motivated by Covid vaccine opposition.

The agency’s focus was narrowed to infectious diseases only, abandoning key chronic disease and injury prevention roles.

Writing out these bullet points feels futile because it is difficult to convey the magnitude of destruction. This is demolition, not reform. And it’s happening while the public thinks Kennedy is fighting for them.

ME:: seems like platitudes :-) to baseline, experiment, have a community of practice and read DORA and other's research papers?!?!? ; Amanda Lewis:: August 2024:: DORA:: How to enable your software delivery teams to innovate with generative AI

QUOTE

Read the whole thing and what's linked: Amanda Lewis:: August 2024:: DORA | How to enable your software delivery teams to innovate with generative AI

To innovate your software delivery and operations with generative AI, a culture of continuous improvement and user-centricity is essential. Begin by establishing a baseline, nurture curiosity and experimentation, and cultivate a collaborative community of practice.

Set a baseline: it’s always good to know where you are before you start introducing new practices and capabilities. Be sure you know the software delivery performance of your team so that you can see how introducing generative AI affects your development and delivery processes. The DORA Quick Check is a great place to start your baselining efforts, and you can bookmark your results for easy reference.

Encourage curiosity and experimentation: the early findings show that generative AI can improve well-being. Remember the importance of having a generative and learning culture when you introduce generative AI into your organization. Foster a space where your teams can see this technology as an opportunity for experimenting and innovating, and not as a threat.

Establish a generative AI community of practice: high-performing teams prioritize strategies that foster a sense of community across various organizational levels. These strategies include establishing communities of practice and supporting proofs of concept. As your organization experiments with generative AI, encourage collaboration based on best practices, knowledge sharing, and learning from failures.

Read our most recent research: DORA continues to research an publish findings about adoption, attitudes, and downstream impacts of AI.

Join the DORA Community of Practice: share your experience with fellow travelers

ME:: Machine learning assisted coding doesn't increase the number of apps part 8888 :-) ?!? ; Mike Judge:: Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up

QUOTE

And yet, despite the most widespread adoption one could imagine5, these tools don’t work.

My argument: If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware? We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps — we should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution. We should be seeing 10,000 Tetris clones on Steam.

ME:: Tempted to try this but $CDN40/month for streaming is a lot ; Fedihost:: Create New Peertube Service <-- I probably should wait until a co-op does this or something :-)

QUOTE

Peertube 30 $39.99 Monthly

Always included: Daily Backups 10 GB Base Storage Global CDN

Specifications: Priority Support 4 Encoders Guaranteed Video Studio 1 Concurrent Livestream

Multiple user instance with frequent uploads and live streaming.

ME:: yet another Tailscale HOW TO, i have to try this someday! ; Avush Pande:: I use Tailscale to remotely access my self-hosted services - here's how <- QUOTE: As if that’s not enough, your home network could be afflicted with the scourge called CGNAT, making port forwarding even more of a hassle. While it’s not exactly a fully self-hosted solution since you’re relying on a company’s servers, Tailscale simplifies the process of exposing your local services to external networks. So, here’s a quick guide on how you can configure Tailscale to remotely access your favorite self-hosted services.

ME:: Oh Pharmacy in Coquitlam had unexpired vaccines as of August 11 2025 ; Ducky :: 2025-08-11 oops 13 General – Pandemics in British Columbia <-- QUOTE: "Addendum2: An alert reader says that there is in fact at least one pharmacy in BC which has unexpired COVID-19 vaccines: Oh Pharmacy."

ME:: Not tested on Humans yet but sounds promising go science go; September 2024:: Brigham and Women’s Hospital. PCANS Drug-free nasal spray blocks, neutralizes viruses, bacteria — Harvard Gazette

via @nwchapman's toot and also there's a an earlier drug free nasal spray using Iota-Carrageenan: see October 2021:: Efficacy of a Nasal Spray Containing Iota-Carrageenan in the Postexposure Prophylaxis of COVID-19 in Hospital Personnel Dedicated to Patients Care with COVID-19 Disease

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: PCANS Drug-free nasal spray blocks, neutralizes viruses, bacteria — Harvard Gazette

Experiments in mice showed that a single dose of the PCANS nasal spray could effectively block infection from an influenza virus (PR8) at 25 times the lethal dose. Virus levels in the lungs were reduced by >99.99 percent, and the inflammatory cells and cytokines in the lungs of PCANS-treated animals were normal.

“The formulation’s ability to inactivate a broad spectrum of pathogens, including the deadly PR8 influenza virus, demonstrates its high effectiveness,” said co-senior author Yohannes Tesfaigzi, AstraZeneca Professor of Medicine in the Field of Respiratory and Inflammatory Diseases at BWH. “In a rigorous mouse model study, prophylactic treatment with PCANS demonstrated exceptional efficacy, with treated mice exhibiting complete protection, while the untreated group showed no such benefit.”

While the study’s limitations include the lack of human studies of PCANS, it provides a strong foundation for future research to explore the full potential of PCANS in a broader context. The researchers are exploring whether PCANS can also block allergens, opening a potential new avenue for allergy relief.

ME:: Late to the party :-) -> All pieces of ATProto can and are running on non Bluesky servers e.g. Blacksky servers ; May 2, 2025:: Bryan Newbold:: A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month <-- QUOTE: This is an update to a Summer 2024 blog post. At the time, atproto relays required a cache of the full network on local disk to validate data structures. With the Sync v1.1 updates, relays don't need all that disk I/O. What impact does that have on hosting setup and operating costs ... Turns out the dev community beat me to the punch and folks like @futur.blue and @bad-example have been doing this for months on Rapsberry Pis and $19/month VPS servers in European jurisdiction. ... But i'm still really psyched at how much simpler things have become, so I set up my own $34/month VPS demo instance, and this is the write-up. ...The relay describe here is running at: https://relay-vps.demo.bsky.dev <-- See also Rudy Fraser's YouTube interview: Blacksky Algorithms: Building Decentralized Social Media with Rudy Fraser and of course Blacksky.community which is up and running and doing great AFAICT

ME::tl;dr-ing:: We don't have the mathematics to be able to build real artificial general intelligence ; Django Beatty:: Alchemy 2: Electric Boogaloo

QUOTE

Mathematics of Impossible Things

Read the whole thing: Django Beatty:: Alchemy 2: Electric Boogaloo

Scientists recently mapped one cubic millimeter of human brain tissue - a piece the size of a grain of sand. It took 1.4 petabytes of data. Not to simulate it. Not to model it. Just to store a static 3D photograph.

One grain of sand worth of brain tissue. Frozen. Dead. Not even trying to capture how it works - just what it looks like. And it takes more data than Netflix uses to stream to a small country.

Inside that grain? 57,000 cells. 150 million synapses. Each synapse is a chemical factory with over 1,000 different proteins. Each protein changes shape and function based on what's happening around it. And that's just the photograph. The frozen moment. To model how it actually works? We don't even know where to start.

This is where the dream of artificial general intelligence hits a wall that nobody talks about. Years ago, I was discussing AGI with my friend Dr. Roman Belavkin - a researcher in cognitive science at Middlesex University. Over coffee, he explained the problems with modeling biological neurons that should be headline news but instead stay buried in academic conferences.

I needed to understand: were these problems speed bumps or brick walls?

The more Roman explained, the clearer it became to me. These aren't speed bumps. They're mathematical voids.

The problem starts with backpropagation.

Let me explain what that means, because it's the heart of why AGI is impossible with current mathematics.

Most deep learning systems today - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini - rely on an algorithm called backpropagation. Think of it like teaching a child: you show them a picture of a cat, they guess "dog," you tell them how wrong they were, and they adjust their mental model. Do this millions of times and they learn to recognize cats.

The 1943 Problem

Why don't we just model real neurons? While we can model neurons at many fidelities - the best are still cartoon sketches. The original McCulloch-Pitts model from 1943 used simple on/off switches with step functions - not differentiable, couldn't work with backpropagation (which hadn't been invented yet). In the 1980s, to make backpropagation work, we replaced the step functions with smooth curves. But we're still using the same basic framework: weighted sums, linear algebra, one-dimensional signals.

If we tried to model biological detail - the neurotransmitters, the dendritic processing, the living cellular machinery - we don't even have the mathematics to describe it, let alone compute it. A single biological neuron isn't a switch - it's a living cell, a chemical factory floating in a soup of neurotransmitters, hormones, and proteins.

When a signal arrives at a neuron, it doesn't just flow through like electricity through a wire. The signal arrives at branches called dendrites, and here's where everything breaks: each branch does its own processing. Not simple addition or multiplication - complex, unpredictable transformations that we struggle to describe mathematically.

Imagine you're trying to predict the flow of a river. But this river has thousands of tributaries, and each tributary follows its own rules - some flow uphill, some disappear underground and reappear elsewhere, some spontaneously change direction based on the phase of the moon. Now try to write an equation for where a drop of water will end up. That's what we're trying to do with neurons.

ME:: this looks great! ; Alternative Social Media Network Bibliography

QUOTE

Obviously read the whole thing :-) : Alternative Social Media Network Bibliography

This is an alternative social media (ASM) bibliography, a collection of scholarly articles exploring the world of social media beyond corporate sites.

This page will be updated monthly. For more up-to-date access to the bibliography, request to join the Social Media Alternatives Project Zotero group.

Note that inclusion in this bibliography does not mean these studies are endorsed by the network of ASM researchers. However, highlighted entries are authored by ASM network members.

To the #WhitePersonSplainers :-) who tell me extending my right arm is not a valid right turn signal (nobody who's not white has ever done mansplained this to me in 17 years of bicycling in Vancouver: It is a valid signal see ; BC Motor Vehicle Act:: Bicyclists signal a right turn by doing either of the following ... (ii) extending the person's right hand and arm horizontally from the cycle

Happens about once a month. Get a life #WhitePersonSplainers :-) and more importantly read the BC law!

QUOTE From the British Columbia Motor Vehicle Act revised August 5, 2025

Read the whole thing: BC Motor Vehicle Act:: Bicyclists signal a right turn by doing either of the following ... (ii) extending the person's right hand and arm horizontally from the cycle

(17) A person operating a cycle on a highway must signify

(a) a left turn by extending the person's left hand and arm horizontally from the cycle,

(b) a right turn by doing either of the following:

(i) extending the person's left hand and arm out and upward from the cycle so that the upper and lower parts of the arm are at right angles;

>(ii) extending the person's right hand and arm horizontally from the cycle, and

I don't care what people who I otherwise respect like Om Malik and Dana Blankenhorn say about network effects blah blah blah :-) . It is wrong to be on a platform that openly allows hate speech. If the Nazi Party's newspaper paid you $USD1000 / month in 1939 to write an op-ed monthly would you do it? No. https://om.co/2025/08/03/the-why-of-substack/ is wrong. sorry not sorry Om et al!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! * Om's blog post: The Why of Substack is WRONG! is wrong. sorry not sorry Om et al!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ME:: RAGs are great if you use current (i.e. not months old) data you own since plagiarizing your own data is ok :-) and have permission for but they still make mistakes! ; Marcus Hutchins:: Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Marcus Hutchins:: Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too

RAG basically allows the LLM to search the internet for fresh data relevant to the user’s query, enabling it to fetch the most up-to-date information. The LLM can then use its training data to summarize the information retrieved via RAG. Essentially, this combines LLMs and search engines into a single product.

So, why do I hate this? Well, it’s basically glorified plagiarism. While I’d argue LLMs in general are just Plagiarism-as-a-Service, RAG is a lot closer to actual plagiarism that typical LLM behavior. As I’ve already argued, LLMs don’t think or reason. Thus, all RAG is really doing is using the LLMs’ natural language abilities to summarize or re-word some news article, blog post, or research paper. This deprives the original author of revenue & website traffic, while not transforming their work in any meaningful way.

...

So yes, while I may come off as a massive LLM hater, I feel like I have my reasons. With that said, I am still actively researching and experimenting with LLM regularly, and I’m always open to being proven wrong. But currently, I’m simply not seeing it. I’m not seeing heaps of successful LLM products, businesses, or use cases. What I’m seeing is a lot of shovel selling, and a huge black hole for VC money.

Maybe some day I’ll write a post about the viability of LLMs for something I’m building. But it won’t be today, this year, or likely anytime soon. In fact, I’m currently still getting job offers for manual reverse engineering jobs. It’s extremely common for security companies that use machine learning to hire manual analysts. ML models need constant tweaking and updating, which means a huge market for experts who can be a part of that process.

I’d expect this is where LLMs will go should the tech take off. Not job replacement, but a shift towards professionals using their experience to fine tune LLMs, instead of doing the work directly. In fact, I’ve started getting the same offers to consult for LLM companies that I am for traditional ML ones.

Times change, but technology progresses slowly.

ME:: The UN "black helicopters" should offer free hosting for everybody as I said before :-) ; Drew Lyton:: The Future is NOT Self-Hosted but maybe libraries hosting stuff for us? <-- QUOTE: Imagine a world where your library card includes 100GB of encrypted file storage, photo-sharing and document collaboration tools, and media streaming services — all for free. Your data is encrypted end-to-end, but is shareable to anyone on any other service through standardized protocols.

Previously

July 7, 2025:: ME:: I don't have a solution other than 'UN black helicopter hosting' :-) (LOL!) with global trust and safety or miraculously :-) hosting becomes easy for everything and everybody runs their own individual server for everything: blogs, chat, forums, vlogs, music, etc etc etc ; Kyle Kingsbury:: The Future of Forums is Lies, I Guess
<
ME:: TIL about the macOS Dragging and Selection clipboards ; cricket:: The three different clipboards – Tech Reflect

QUOTE

When you use Copy (⌘C), the selected content is written to the system clipboard (aka clipboard), replacing what was already there. This is great until you find you really need to carry more bits of data around. Turns out that macOS actually has two additional clipboards:

Dragging clipboard

Selection clipboard

ME:: It's 2025: everybody is a bad developer using machine learning. Some of us will make the bad software production quality whatever "'quality' means for them, some of us will just blissfully use it even though it's bug ridden (like most 100% human written software sadly) ; Om Malik:: Software is going to be automated badly but good enough for many personal workflows The Satya of Satya’s Layoff Memo (laying off 9000 employees to hire AI experts and buy into the 'GPU compute bubble') <-- QUOTING Om's comment: AI (as we know it) is for real. It is good at automation. And frankly, the bespoke nature of software industry makes it ripe for automation. I have no idea what “singularity” or “sentience” looks like, but software is going to be automated, and fast. You can see how much it is working at a low-level. Claude Code is a good tool to experiment. ... That said, so many of the AI concepts are just non-sensical. Redressing the past ideas for AI (automation) age and this new way of “interacting” with software/computers will not work. I am excited for new ideas to emerge.

Previously

June 20, 2025: ME:: oh really :-) ?!?! Why do I think all these miraculous folks have help from 'real' developers? Having said that I think everybody has been a programmer since Visicalc and even better Google Sheets and in the near future regardless what happens with Machine Learning, everybody will be a full fledged mobile and desktop app developer; Claire Vo:: How a 91-year-old vibe coded a complex event management system using Claude and Replit ¦ John Blackman
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July 1945:: Scanned copy of 'The mother of all demos':: The Atlantic:: Vannevar Bush: As we may think --> also As we may think on archive.is from The Atlantic

ME:: How To turn off macOS sequoia's 'control shift enter' shortcut so apps like checkvist.com can use it; Reddit:: MacOs sequoia beta1: Press 'Ctrl' + 'Enter', it became right click <-- Go to Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Keyboard ... Uncheck the box for "Show contextual menu"

ME:: just say no to JS run times; I want WASM python or ruby in the browser ; Whatever, Jamie:: The many, many, many JavaScript runtimes of the last decade • Buttondown <-- omg i hope i can program in ruby or python in the browser using WASM and never use a JS runtime for fun or work but I'm an angry old man :-)

Atin Cu Pung Singsing | Philippines: KapitBisig.com <-- "Atin cu pung singsing, Metung yang timpucan...etc" <--immortal Kapampangan folk song lyrics translated. <-- "I once had a ring ... With a beautiful gem .... I inherited this ... From my mother " <--I grew up with this song, nobody ever explained or translated it for me :-)

Boone Ashworth:: Wired:: How to Delete All of Your Social Media Accounts: Instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, and More

ME:: anytype is open source, de-centralized and encrypted, sounds too good to be true! What's the catch :-) ? ; Anytype:: The Everything App via Francis Beaudet's toot, QUOTE: I’m very intrigued by the Anytype app (https://anytype.io/). ... I love Obsidian (Canadian company) but they run their syncing service on ...AWS. So I’ve never used it across many devices. ... Anytype seems to work relatively well and the syncing is peer-to-peer.

ME:: We need separation of compute, data and models and laws targeted toward data protection and sharing ; Jai Vipra & Sarah Myers West September 27, 2023 Computational Power and AI - AI Now Institute

QUOTE:

A separations regime as described above can prevent some of this wanton data use, but laws targeted toward data protection and sharing can go further. At the very least, clarifications on the legality of using data from other services to train AI models can deter such use. More watertight enforcement of the law will require monitoring mechanisms. For instance, recent work shows that the data used to train a model can potentially be verified.196 Governments can also act to further protect domain-specific data, including healthcare and education data where a concentrated AI market can be especially damaging.

Bob Rudis:: hrbrmstr/go-duckdb-drops: A command-line interface tool for browsing and searching Daily Drops blog posts using DuckDB. This application provides an interactive way to explore blog content with full-text search capabilities and markdown rendering. - Codeberg.org <-- See also the duckdb cookbook, sound like it overlaps with datasette and see also: Getting The Daily Drop Into A duckdb Database

ME:: Be short, simple and firm; don't be funny; play for the audience; pick your battles; call things what they are; etc ; Greg Wilson:: The Third Bit: Managing Conflict

QUOTE

What can you do if conflict becomes more personal and heated?

Be short, simple, and firm.

Don’t try to be funny. It almost always backfires, or will later be used against you.

Play for the audience. You probably won’t change the mind of the person you are calling out, but you might change the minds or strengthen the resolve of people who are observing.

Pick your battles. You can’t challenge everyone, every time, without exhausting yourself and deafening our audience. An occasional sharp retort will be much more effective than constant criticism.

Call things what they are. For example, don’t call someone stupid when what you really mean is that they’re racist or homophobic.

Matt Dancho:: GitHub - business-science/ai-data-science-team: An AI-powered data science team of agents to help you perform common data science tasks 10X faster. <-- QUOTE: 🔥 Open Pandas AI Data Analyst: Load an Excel or CSV file and ask it questions. Get data and charts back. <-- this app alone sounds good, too good to be true?

Felienne Hermans:: A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design | Proceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software <-- see Felienne's youtube talk as well at 3:22

ME:: We need open source projects like this that anybody can host. At least you can get a json file for a backup but yeah not much good for anything beyond toys but this is similar to how Val Town started ; John Chang and Pontus Granström:: Scrappy: make little apps for you and your friends

QUOTE

Read the whole thing John Chang and Pontus Granström:: Scrappy: make little apps for you and your friends

We ended up creating a research prototype that we call Scrappy — a tool for making scrappy apps for just you and your friends. First and foremost, we aim to contribute a vision of what home-made software could be like. We want to make this vision as concrete as we can, by sharing a working tool and examples of apps made in it. Scrappy, in its current state, is a prototype, not a robust tool, but we hope it paints the picture we carry in our heads — of software as something that can be creative, personal, expressive. Made by anyone, for themselves and their loved ones.

ME:: Gotta try this! ; Arnaud Sintès:: Cube <-- QUOTE: The Cube tool is a command line executable dedicated to generate some 3D LUT files from two given source images. It is also capable to apply a given 3D LUT file over a source image to create the altered destination image file. via reddit: How do I create a .cube file?

ME:: I don't have a solution other than "UN black helicopter hosting" :-) (LOL!) with global trust and safety or miraculously :-) hosting becomes easy for everything and everybody runs their own individual server for everything: blogs, chat, forums, vlogs, music, etc etc etc ; Kyle Kingsbury:: The Future of Forums is Lies, I Guess <-- QUOTE: Right now, I lean towards thinking forums like woof.group will become untenable under LLM pressure. I’m not sure how long we have left. Perhaps five or ten years? In the mean time, I’m trying to invest in in-person networks as much as possible. Bars, clubs, hosting parties, activities with friends. ... That, at least, feels safe for now.

Previously

August 27, 2022: Free hosting from for profit companies like Heroku, Slack etc doesn't work. Don't depend on it! Only viable long term solution is for the UN Black Helicopters :-) i.e. the government needs to offer hosting
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ME:: Agreed! Make things that you like to make! ; Eevee:: The rise of Whatever / fuzzy notepad <-- QUOTE: Do things. Make things. And then put them on your website so I can see them. <-- via Kevin Marks using the incredible blue sky to mastodon bridge which keeps working well amazingly!

ME:: filter JSON. from the command line using JSON instead of JS like fx ; see also jello in python; Peter Ohler:: ohler55/ojg: Optimized JSON for Go <-- see also Will Richardson:: Using Ruby in Shell Pipelines to use ruby functions in command line shell pipelines and kellyjonbrazil:: jello in python: CLI tool to filter JSON and JSON Lines data with Python syntax. (Similar to jq)

Previously

June 18, 2025: ME:: yay a more intuitive language than jq (which is fab but hard to learn) for filtering JSON ; André Arko:: fx, a language for working with JSON
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ME:: $49 course; Probably obsolete soon because of LLM enhanced automation apps like the forthcoming Sky; Keyboard Maestro Field Guide | MacSparky Field Guides <-- probably obsoleted by LLM assisted keyboard assistants at some point like sky.app ? See: Federico Viticci:: MacStories:: From the Creators of Shortcuts, Sky Extends AI Integration and Automation to Your Entire Mac <-- see also the Keyboard Maestro official wiki

3 Ways to Download and Transfer Kindle eBooks (Yeah, It’s Still Possible) <-- QUOTE: If you missed the deadline to download your purchased Kindle ebooks from Amazon’s website before they took the download and transfer feature away, there’s no need to worry because there are still three other ways to get your ebooks away from Amazon’s clutches. <-- It is still possible, that's great!

Previously

February 26, 2025: Me:: Sam Davis's kindle-bulk-downloader is the best way to download your Kindle books as .azw3 files (.kfx DeDRM doesn't work but .azw3 works with Calibre) assuming you have a pre 2024 Kindle before 2025-02-26 23:59:59 Jason Snell:: How to bulk download Kindle files, while you can – Six Colors
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ME:: SVG w/link to PDF that downloads a ZIP with a JS which downloads and runs a JAR in order to get around corporate firewalls, AV and security ; LLM used to find a vulnerability, and to generate a python script that reproduces it ; Jonathan Bennett:: June 20, 2025:: This Week In Security: That Time I Caused A 9.5 CVE, IOS Spyware, And The Day The Internet Went Down | Hackaday

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Jonathan Bennett:: June 20, 2025:: This Week In Security: That Time I Caused A 9.5 CVE, IOS Spyware, And The Day The Internet Went Down | Hackaday

The attack chain that X-Force highlights is convoluted, with the SVG containing a link offering a PDF download. Clicking this actually downloads a ZIP containing a JS file, which when run, downloads and attempts to execute a JAR file. This may seem ridiculous, but it’s all intended to defeat a somewhat sophisticated corporate security system, so an inattentive user will click through all the files in order to get the day’s work done. And apparently this tactic works.

...

We’ve talked a few times about vibe researching, but [Craig Young] is only tipping his toes in here. He used an LLM to find a published vulnerability, and then analyzed it himself. Turns out that the GIMP despeckle plugin doesn’t do bounds checking for very large images. Back again to an LLM, to get a Python script to generate such a file. It does indeed crash GIMP when trying to despeckle, confirming the vulnerability report, and demonstrating that there really are good ways to use LLMs while doing security research.

ME:: $CDN12 USB to Bluetooth Adapter for mice and keyboard good for connecting a usb only mouse via bluetooth e.g. a ploopy trackball ; X2 USB Keyboard Mouse Converter Bluetooth-Compatible 5.1 No Delay Gaming Keyboard Mouse Adapter For Android IPhone System - AliExpress 44 --> perfect for the ploopy mini trackball which I found out via Mike Hoye on mastodon: The build quality of Logitech mice is rumored - sadly - to have dropped dramatically in the last two years. ... iFixit continues doing the people's work here: https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Logitech_Mouse ... and if you're looking for alternatives, I can recommend the Ploopy devices, open and repairable: https://ploopy.co/

ME:: oh really :-) ?!?! Why do I think all these miraculous folks have help from "real" developers? Having said that I think everybody has been a programmer since Visicalc and even better Google Sheets and in the near future regardless what happens with Machine Learning, everybody will be a full fledged mobile and desktop app developer; Claire Vo:: How a 91-year-old vibe coded a complex event management system using Claude and Replit | John Blackman

Previously

January 8, 2025: Me: Spreadsheets are the number 1 programming language. HTML is number 2 because not everybody can code in HTML unlike spreadsheets Tim Carmody:: HTML Is Actually a Programming Language. Fight Me | WIRED
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ME:: George Grant was right. Nationalize the things needed in order to keep Canada independent. Work with indigenous folks and the EU and the rest of the world to build our independence from the USA He wasn't right about abortion of course! ; Michael Ignatieff, George Grant's nephew:: Sixty years ago, a philosopher, George Grant, said Canada would be absorbed by America. He could still be right - The Globe and Mail

QUOTE

Read the whole thing courtesy of this gift link: Michael Ignatieff, George Grant's nephew:: Sixty years ago, a philosopher, George Grant, said Canada would be absorbed by America. He could still be right - The Globe and Mail (archive.is link when/if the gift link doesn't work)

What else could Canada have done? Grant’s answer was to embrace radical left-wing populism. Only a populist government with the guts to cut its tie to the Americans and launch a frankly socialist nationalization of the economy, he argued, could have preserved Canada’s sovereignty. Only then could Canada have remained master in its own house. His paradoxical belief in a socialist state made Grant, a religious conservative who was profoundly opposed to abortion, an unlikely darling of the Canadian left.

Grant’s politics may no longer make sense, but his diagnosis of our dilemmas remains as acute as ever. The French and British sources of our distinctive identity remain our lynchpin, but they remain in permanent tension even to this day.

ME:: WRONG Peter :-) Driving is stil an occupation in 2025. Maybe in 2035?!? Not holding my breath :-) #Ymmv ; Peter Reinhard:: February 3, 2015:: Replacing Middle Management with APIs <-- QUOTE from 2015 that is not true in 2025 :-) --> But driving as an occupation will disappear practically overnight when self-driving cars hit the road. <-- I'd rather have traditinal "self-driving" :-) LOL trains like the SkyTrain than self driving vehicles.

ME:: MCP is USB-C for algorithms/functionality/behaviour which don't have to be machine learning or 'AI'; Scott Werner:: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

ME:: Software is terrible for everybody but even more terrible for disabled folks but people like fireborn, a blind developer, are heroically fixing it gradually ; I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back: Post 1 – Built for Control, But Not for People — fireborn

QUOTE:

This isn’t a rant from someone who gave Linux a shot and bounced off.

This is from someone who’s used Linux full-time for years as a blind user—someone who knows the system inside out, who has made it work through manual configuration, scripting, rebuilding broken packages, and sheer force of will.

Read the whole thing: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back: Post 1 – Built for Control, But Not for People — fireborn

Part 2:: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back: Post 2 – The Audio Stack Is a Crime Scene

I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back: Interlude – A Thank You, Where It’s Due

Part 3:: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back: Post 3 – Speakup, BRLTTY, and the Forgotten Infrastructure of Console Access

Part 4:: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back: Post 4 – Wayland Is Growing Up. And Now We Don’t Have a Choice

Gatekeepers gotta gatekeep :-) ; You Don’t Own the Word “Freedom”: A Full-Burn Response to the GNU/Linux Comment That Tried to Gatekeep Me Off My Own Machine — fireborn

Dan aka deeja on github:: Get all file names from a public Github repo through the Github API using git trees- Stack Overflow <-- QUOTE: https://api.github.com/repos/[USER]/[REPO]/git/trees/[BRANCH]?recursive=1 e.g. https://api.github.com/repos/thunderbird/thunderbird-notes/git/trees/master?recursive=1 <-- I will use this to get all the thunderbird-notes yaml files.

ME:: for $20/month for Elixir which is Erlang with a ruby syntax, it's a great way to learn Elixir and in the future other languages and web app stacks; Simon Willison:: Phoenix.new is Fly’s entry into the prompt-driven app development space

QUOTE

Read the whole thing: Simon Willison:: Phoenix.new is Fly’s entry into the prompt-driven app development space

First, some background. Phoenix is an open source web framework for Elixir, the Ruby-like language that compiles to Erlang’s BEAM bytecode and runs on top of the highly concurrent Erlang runtime. The signature feature of the framework is Phoenix LiveView, a toolkit for building realtime interfaces through streaming diffs to server-side HTML over a WebSocket connection.

Phoenix was created by Chris McCord 11 years ago, and Chris joined Fly nearly four years ago. Phoenix.new is his latest project.

Phoenix LiveView is a really great fit for Fly’s geographically distributed application serving infrastructure. Fly co-founder Kurt Mackey wrote about that in April 2021, before they had hired Chris, describing how LiveView benefits from low latency by “moving app processes close to users”—something Fly has been designed to help with from the start.

There’s one major challenge though: Elixir is still a niche programming language, which means the number of people out there who are ready to spin up a new Phoenix app has always been artificially limited.

Fly’s solution? Get LLMs to shave that learning curve down to almost nothing.

TIL:: Thunderbird release notes are stored in a github repo called thunderbird-notes; I sketched some python code for getting tags, bugs, notes etc ; Release Notes for Thunderbird

Python code

python resp = requests.get("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-notes/refs/heads/master/release/139.0.yml") parsed_yaml = yaml.safe_load(resp.text) pprint parsed_yaml

Example YAML release notes

python {'notes': [{'bugs': [1950887], 'note': 'Implemented enterprise policy to allow granular in-app ' 'notification control', 'tag': 'new'}, {'bugs': [1953662], 'note': "Added 'Mark as Read' and 'Delete' actions to mail " 'notifications', 'tag': 'new'}, {'bugs': [1865057], 'note': 'Implemented customizable row count for Cards View in ' "'Appearance' settings", 'tag': 'new'}, {'bugs': [1846550], 'note': 'Implemented ability to manually sort folders in the ' 'folder pane', 'tag': 'new'}, {'bugs': [1803006], 'note': 'Thunderbird could crash when setting message compose ' 'headers', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1956988], 'note': 'Links in the OAuth authentication window did not open ' 'when clicked', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1964145], 'note': 'Access was not allowed to attachments at specific UNC ' 'hosts', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1952311], 'note': 'Mail window could stop functioning during and after ' 'folder compaction', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1960343], 'note': 'Full folder sorting logic was not used when inserting ' 'folders after move', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1961642], 'note': '`mail.compose.other.header` headers were not shown in ' 'Show All Headers mode', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1857315], 'note': 'Folder was hidden from Favorite when a subfolder was ' 'removed', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1957878], 'note': 'Folder tree message counts displayed incorrectly under ' 'certain conditions', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1958585], 'note': 'Selection was not restored after manual folder sorting', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1959545], 'note': 'Dragging a folder to a new parent did not insert it ' 'correctly for IMAP folders', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1964265], 'note': 'Compact View users had all folders expanded after restart', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1822978], 'note': 'Invite attachments without a name were forwarded as ' "'Attached Message Part'", 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1671747], 'note': 'Chat settings tab remained visible when ' '`mail.chat.enabled` was false', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1960978], 'note': 'Selected folder was not refreshed when applying ' "'Appearance' Threading settings", 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1962278], 'note': "'Grouped by Sort' for all folders in 'Appearance' " 'settings did not work properly', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1965304], 'note': 'Thunderbird could crash if message copying to Sent folder ' 'was interrupted', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [553048], 'note': 'System search toggle did not properly reflect and control ' 'integration state', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1958549], 'note': 'Dragging attachments to desktop from Thunderbird did not ' 'work on macOS', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1959691], 'note': 'Dark mode messages displayed in light mode due to ' 'preference setting conflict', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [250216], 'note': 'Cancelling a post to a news server could fail and remove ' 'the article', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1961659], 'note': 'Thunderbird could crash in NNTP subscription dialog', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [530193], 'note': 'Newsgroup searches with slashes were not supported with ' 'XPAT-enabled servers', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [288120], 'note': 'Offline newsgroup use lacked functionality needed for ' 'effective offline access', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1959848], 'note': 'Chat accounts could not be deleted', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1954358], 'note': 'Reminders missed for all-day events when ' '`calendar.alarms.showmissed` was false', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1964473], 'note': 'Access to multiple CalDAV calendars was not possible', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1949810, 1964156], 'note': 'Visual and UX improvements', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'note': '[Security ' 'fixes](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities/thunderbird/#thunderbird139)', 'tag': 'fixed'}, {'bugs': [1968963], 'note': 'Message list switched to Cards View instead of keeping ' 'Table View preference', 'tag': 'unresolved'}], 'release': {'import_system_requirements': '128.0beta', 'release_date': '2025-05-27', 'text': '**System Requirements:** ' '[Details](/en-US/thunderbird/139.0/system-requirements/)\n' '\n' '- Windows: Windows 10 or later\n' '- Mac: macOS 10.15 or later\n' '- Linux: GTK+ 3.14 or higher\n'}}

ME:: Amanda Wood used pixelsynth in her latest opening, (re)patterning! Gotta try it for my art! ; Olivia Jack:: .::::PIXELSYNTH::::. <-- See Amanda Wood's and Val Loewen's (re)patterning page on THIS gallery's website which I am sure will not last more than a year before it's taken down. QUOTE: re(patterning) emerges from a place of re-imagining and unmaking through close looking and repetition in material practices. Val Loewen and Amanda Wood use this ongoing collaborative exploration to obscure and reveal experiences of otherness that can develop when self identifying within a normative culture. Considering the power of an illegible text, the work is intuitive, working to consider new ways of unknowing that makes space for divergence. ...Repeated actions – breaking, revealing, glitching, and rearranging – are at the core of an attempt to uncover an imagined sensory language that moves beyond the visual to navigate experiences words fail to describe. Representational images and mundane objects are abstracted into sound, texture, and pattern that engage with concepts of coded language and imagined narratives. ... re(patterning) is a continual process of unlearning perceptions of value and reframing connections to social and cultural environments.

ME:: a Python course based on functions powered by Pyodide so no need to install anything like datasette! ; Pamela Fox:: Proficient Python: A free interactive online course

ME:: gotta try this on my 5D Mark 1 aka Classic some day to get time lapse, focus peaking, zebras, and other goodies :-) ; a1ex:: October 2012:: [UNMAINTAINED] Canon 5D Classic Firmware ** Beta 4 **

Recipes that work according to fab colleague Tarandeep :-) ; Julie The Simple Veganista:: Lemony Quinoa + Chickpea Salad -

ME:: I didn't know DateTime was deprecated! Mav Tipi:: Should I Use Date, Time, or DateTime in Ruby and Rails? |The Startup | Medium <-- September 2020 ruby language commit from nurse:: DateTime class is considered deprecated. Use Time class

QUOTE

As of Ruby 3 (released December 24th, 2020, as is Ruby tradition), DateTime only exists for backwards-compatibility. The date library docs recommend you just use Time instead. (I’m pretty sure this was essentially true from 2.0 forward, but now it’s formally true.)

If you’re someone who googles around for answers (which you are, that’s why you’re here), keep this in mind! A lot of old articles are now misleading.

This simplifies our question by a lot. The biggest difference between Date and Time is that Date is concerned with days and above; if you care at all about hours, minutes, seconds and below, or think you might care about them in the future, you have to use Time. Date can’t handle any of that.

On the other hand, here are some things Date can do better than Time:

ME:: Sounds like a great optimistic yet pessimistic retro history book so I ordered the 2019 edition with a new introduction ; Reviewed By Bruce Sterling:: March 24, 2008:: The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton

QUOTE

Read the whole thing i.e. review by Bruce Sterling:: Strange Horizons - The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton By Bruce Sterling

Having said all this—or rather, having paraphrased it—I now come to the part of the review where I lodge a mild protest.

Every futurist who's any good is a historian—because the future is a kind of history that hasn't happened yet. And, just as Dr Edgerton analyzes, futurism is old. Futurism tends to repeat the same things over and over again. World peace and universal communication, for instance: they were going to be brought to us by railroads, and then telegraphs, airplanes, then television, satellites, the Internet. These days, five minutes with the Internet is enough to tell that world peace is the last thing on its collective mind.

The reason for this is not that futurists are frauds or shallow; they are persistently describing an old human aspiration. Aspirations are old, but not passé. If you look into the past, obviously there's no world peace and universal communication there. Everybody who made an effort at achieving it, H.G. Wells in painful particular, fell far short. If you want a more immediate assessment of our raw, tortuous, gloomy human condition, you can try Thomas Pynchon or J.G. Ballard (two novelists Dr Edgerton goes out of his way to praise).

I happen to much prefer Pynchon and Ballard to Wells myself. Still, trying to write Wells out of the historical picture as some kind of shallow optimist cannot work. People much prefer the Shock of the New to the Shock of the Old because people desire the living chance to make some fresh mistakes. The lesson of history is that nobody learns the lesson of history, and in the long run we are all dead. Yet the pageant of history isn't a victimology. It's a parade.

We start as kids who know nothing. If we're lucky, we end as tottering geezers who lack new tricks and have forgotten most of the things we should have learned. That's us.

We're not Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, who stares at the rubble in horror as he's flung backward into the future on titanic winds of change. We're not angels at all, we're at least half-beast, so we've got as much right to go "Wow!" at shiny, useless crap as the next pack-rat and jackdaw.

Wonder is wired into us. It's like being twenty years old, and seeing someone gorgeous, naked. Is a skeptic's cool indifference in order there? Should we make sure to approach that prospect in a sound, old-fashioned way, like our great-grandparents?

Yeah, maybe.

ME:: Affordable housing is not a puzzle or rocket science. Allow and encourage co-housing, co-ops, 4 storey low rise apartments everywhere in the city of Vancouver and multi-dwellings strata and non strata non single family homes everywhere. The government (municipal, provincial and federal all working together) must build affordable rentals and must keep the rent low and keep building affordable rentals and keep allocating them to folks working locally, the "market" and private developers are incapable of doing this, follow Vienna's example etc etc :-) ; Emilie K Adin::I Love These Streets. Come Walk with Me - Spacing Vancouver <-- QUOTE: While multi-family options can provide a good range of housing choices, affordability options, and some energy efficiency benefits with new construction, allowing more small-lot housing options could provide another piece of the housing puzzle. <-- But what do I know, I am not an urban planner :-) I am also not a communist, a capitalist, a socialist, or a libertarian. I believe in all people in their amazing diversity not ideology. All people deserve affordable housing.

ME:: I wonder if I could use this for Firefox for Android "support is the last QA" :-) tests ; Leland Takamine:: August 2022:: Introducing: Maestro — Painless Mobile UI Automation

QUOTE

If you’ve written UI tests with other frameworks in the past, you can see why we’re so excited about Maestro. It reduces the time to build a functioning UI test by >10x, and more importantly makes updating them just as easy. Why Maestro?

Maestro is built on learnings from its predecessors (Appium, Espresso, UIAutomator, and XCTest), but we ditched the complexity, kept the good stuff, and added some fundamental improvements.

Here are some of the reasons why we believe Maestro is the future of mobile UI testing:

Built-in tolerance to flakiness. UI elements will not always be where you expect them, screen tap will not always go through, etc. Maestro embraces the instability of mobile applications and devices, and counters it under the hood.

Built-in tolerance to delays. No need to pepper your tests with sleep() calls. Maestro knows that it might take time to load the content (i.e. over the network) and automatically waits for it (but no longer than required).

Blazingly fast iteration. Tests are interpreted, so no need to compile anything. Maestro is able to continuously monitor your test files and rerun them as they change.

Declarative yet powerful syntax. Define your tests in a simple yaml file.

Simple setup. Maestro is a single binary that works anywhere.

Cross-platform. Maestro runs on iOS and Android and supports ReactNative, Flutter, WebViews, and pure Native applications.

ME:: I should do this with my toots :-) ! ; Will Richardson:: GIF: The Git Interchange Format <-- QUOTE: Well, the obvious solution is to encode a git repo into an image, so you can share it however you like. This is why I made GIF: The Git Interchange Format. A whole git repo—with history—can be crammed into an animated GIF. Here’s the repo for the project itself, contained within a 153px square image with four frames:

ME:: yay a more intuitive language than jq (which is fab but hard to learn) for filtering JSON ; André Arko:: fx, a language for working with JSON <-- QUOTE: Good news, you don’t have to learn a new language to filter JSON anymore, thanks to fx. With a docs site at the excellent domain fx.wtf, and the ability to filter interactively or by providing Javascript as arguments, fx is the program I have always wished that jq was. <-- via Julia Evans on Mastodon

ME:: Recipes that work:: Jacqui Debono:: Farfalle pasta with smoked salmon & zucchini – The Pasta Project

Instructions

Put a large pan of water onto boil for the pasta. When it starts to boil add some salt and bring to the boil again.

In the meantime, wash the zucchini, pat dry and cut off the ends. Cut the zucchini lengthwise in 4 parts. Cut each quarter in two and cut into cubes.

Put the cream in a bowl and mix in the grated ginger, a little orange zest and some black pepper. Set aside.

Heat a little olive oil in a frying pan or skillet and add the crushed garlic cloves. As soon as the garlic begins to soften, add the zucchini and sauté for a couple of minutes.

As soon as the zucchini become translucent, add the smoked salmon in pieces. Remove the garlic.

Cook the salmon with the zucchini for a couple of minutes then add the cream mixture.

Turn down the heat, stir well and allow to cook for 5 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Cook the pasta al dente according to the instructions on the packet. When the pasta is ready, save a cup of the cooking water, drain the pasta and add it to the sauce. Mix well. If it seems dry, add a little of the pasta cooking water.

Serve immediately with a sprinkling of orange zest, and pepper if required.

ME:: love my radar, it's much better than a mirror since it works 140 metres away and you don't have to check, just wait for the beep. Mirrors are fine if you remember to check them :-) ; MuddyTweed.com:: 2023:: Garmin Varia RTL515 – a review <-- QUOTE: Why not use a mirror, you might ask? I don’t really like the design of most mirrors, and the others are quite small and don’t give much detail. You also have to frequently look at the mirror, which is sometimes difficult if you’re riding a tough stretch of road. The Varia gives you audio warnings and shows traffic much further away – it really is system you can switch on and forget about. ... I still look around me though. When I see a car come up behind me, I keep an eye on my bike computer to see where and how fast it is approaching. Depending on where I’m riding, I wait until the icon reaches a certain point (about 25m away) and look around to show the driver that I’ve recognised them and see how they act. I can then decide on how to respond.

Me:: this is where i found out about utctolocal ;; date - Ruby localtoutc returns invalid year - Stack Overflow

QUOTE:

See my code in : blogthis.rb ruby t = TZInfo::Timezone.get('America/Vancouver').utc_to_local(DateTime.parse(created_at))

Inspired by:

```ruby TZInfo::Timezone.get('US/Eastern').localtoutc(DateTime.parse(date_src))
    
    => #<DateTime:>
    
```

Micky McCauley:: May 19, 2020:: New York Times’ Style Guide Substitutions for “The President Lied” - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

QUOTE

“The president, offering no evidence, insisted upon his version of the story.” “The president extemporized with a blithe disregard for established fact.” “Confounding experts and antagonizing the historical record, the president painted his own, rosier portrait of events.” “The president, perhaps inadvertently, wound up smudging the line between empirical verification and his own boundless optimism.” “The president once again found himself galloping ahead of reality’s leisurely pace.” “The president dabbled anew in the shallow pond of misrepresentation, filling his beak with succulent morsels hidden among the reeds.” “The president’s most recent encounter with the specter of honesty caught him wrong-footed.”

Previously

June 3, 2025:: Carlos Greaves:: New York Times’ Style Guide Substitutions for “The President Violated the Constitution” - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

June 3, 2025:: Carlos Greaves:: New York Times’ Style Guide Substitutions for “The President Violated the Constitution” - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

QUOTE

“The president remained steadfast in his novel interpretation of constitutional law.” “Faced with the choice between clinging to the letter of the law and marching to the beat of his own legal drum, the president chose the latter.” “The president’s solutions-focused approach to legal roadblocks necessitated thinking outside the constitutional box.” “Perhaps unaware that he had sailed beyond the Constitution’s horizons, the president found himself drifting further and further from legal terra firma.”

Previously

November 9, 2016: This is not America

ME:: love the Pulsar Nextlevel metal filters (search for Pulsar – Stainless Steel Filter Discs at nextlevelbrewer DOT com! almost no fines with the following recipe. 25g coffee; close valve;add 75g water;open valve for 1 second; close valve wait 20s;open valve add 125g of water and wait until almost drained;close valve add 200g water; wait 1 minute 20 seconds;open valve ; DaddyGotCoffee:: Brew Like An Astrophysicist! Pulsar Dripper Review - YouTube <-- Non affiliate links for Canadians to cafune: NextLevel | Pulsar Stainless Steel Filter Discs ; NextLevel | Pulsar Brewer

ME:: Recipes that probably :-) work:: Irene Arita:: May 2022:: Adobong Sitaw with Chicharon:: Filipino-Mexican Culinary and Cultural Exchange – My Slice of Mexico <--- gotta try this but with 1/2 cup of chicharon not 3 cups! LOL! <-- QUOTE: The month of May is recognized as Asian Heritage month in Canada; this time, I am writing about the Filipino-Mexican connection, and sharing a recipe from the Philippines that could almost be Mexican. ... Green pods of Phaseolus vulgaris, known as ejotes (in Spanish in Mexico, judías verdes, in Spain) – sitaw (Filipino) – string/green beans (English), one of the many contributions of Mexico to the world, are the featured vegetable in this recipe. Pork or chicken are common meat additions, but I chose fried pork rinds to continue my chicharrones theme from previous posts. As a snack, fried pork rinds are ubiquitous around the world, known as khaep mu in Thailand, cracklings in the US, scratchings in the UK, etc., but in Mexico and The Philippines, they definitely came from Spain, called chicharrón in Spanish, and chicharon in Filipino/Tagalog. Finally, red hot peppers are optional, but I included some to enhance the culinary fusion of the dish.

Previously

June 26, 2024: Tamales, adobo, leche flan – Spanish, Mexican dishes Filipinos took as their own, along with New World fruits such as tomato, avocado, and papaya | South China Morning Post

December 17, 2024: Me tl;dr-ing:: Filipino tech enabled Acapulco-Manila trade starting in the 1500s until the 1800s aka Philippines<->Mexico Spanish empire was built with Filipino tech as well as the usual colonial oppression :-) Andrew Christian Petersen for his PhD in 2014:: Making the first global trade route : the southeast Asian foundations of the Acapulco-Manila galleon trade, 1519-1650
<
june 11, 2025 and prior moved to https://checkvist.com/p/CfS1d10HtwWqEsawOlbwCb

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