Thursday October 2nd, 2025
If you want a few pleasant moments on a charming small planet with a look that, to me, evokes Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, delivering messages and exploring the lives of the people who live there, may I recommend https://messenger.abeto.co
Oh cool, looks like MacOS 26.0.1 fixed the 26.0.0 USB throughput issue that was hosing frame rate on my external webcam.
Yeah, I had no clue about the founding of the Gupta Empire in today's Timdle...
‘Emergency’ World Naked Bike Ride planned in Portland
e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online
this is basically portland's version of a haka
I'm experimenting. AllemandeLeft.com is now hosted on Hetzner's Level 4 hosting, which I *thought* gave me additional domains, but is maybe just subdomains? Might drop back to Level 1
It's not on my Flutterby.com server.
This is mostly an experiment to see if I can have them do mail hosting.
I have for years thought nothing of the Apple warning that pops up for browsers sometimes, allow Chrome (or whatever) to discover devices on local networks.
I'm developing an app that uses MacOS WKWebView. First time I saw that permissions request was when loading Facebook. What's it looking for?
Wednesday October 1st, 2025
Just forcing an update.
Just forcing an update.
Incidents like this lead to me learning things about my backups. Think I'm kinda recovered. Probably lost a few one-off images. The separator looks like it needs fixing.
There are some changes to the CMS code that I apparently lost some of. Vivaldi is downloading my index file (everything else is viewing it fine).
Welp, I inadvertantly did an rm -rf, holler if anything seems obviously missing from here, searching for my backups now...
I'm looking at Hetzner's shared webhosting product (and would like to recommend it
to a few other people), both for static web hosting and for email, but apparently it's not
possible to host a .com or .net domain there, even if you have DNS with another provider?
Anyone figured this out?
Edit: Never mind, figured it out.
We find that MBA students implement substantially more unequal earnings distributions than the average American, regardless of whether inequality stems from luck or merit. Their redistributive choices are also highly responsive to efficiency costs, with an effect that is an order of magnitude larger than that found in representative U.S. samples. Analyzing fairness ideals, we find that MBA students are less likely to be strict meritocrats than the broader population.
Via.
Okay, this is kinda interesting. Grant Gould @nonnihil@hachyderm.io posted that his company is looking for an educational non- profit or school to take a donation of UR-3 robot arms.
So I type "UR-3 robot arm" into Vivaldi's address bar, it takes me to the Startpage search, which has as its top sponsored link Vention.io selling them for $33,011.
I wonder if Google gives me different results, so I hit there, and the top sponsored result is the same link, but titled "Universal Robots UR3e - $38,363 USD".
Huh. Anyway, clicking through gives me the same $33k.
The actual product page appears to be Universal Robots UR3e. It's got a 3kg payload. It looks like the stock version doesn't have a gripper.
It's great that companies like Physical Intelligence (π), are training robots to fold laundry, but it's gonna be a while before I shell out for two of these, plus hands, on a mobile base, to fold my underwear.
I mean, you don't actually own your phone, especially with Google going after F- Droid, but they're also scanning your content for nudity. Google's Android System SafetyCore scans your photos for 'sensitive content' - how to disable it
I like this framing: Liz Dye: SCOTUS Blessed "Kavanaugh Stops." Will They Also Give Thumbs Up To "Roberts Residencies?" Maybe Barrett Bookings? Alito Arrests? Gorsuch Guest Passes?
On September 8, the Supreme Court effectively legalized racial profiling. Naturally, they did it on the shadow docket, in a one-paragraph order <span> in which five of the six conservative justices voted to stay a trial judge’s order “pending the disposition of the appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari, if such a writ is timely sought.” So far, so blahblahblah. But Justice Kavanaugh, likely stinging from criticism of the Supreme Court’s unexplained shadow docket rulings, took it upon himself to explain that the conservative justices are very definitely greenlighting racial profiling
Via which quote skeeted P. Andrew Torrez @andrewtorrez.bsky.social.
Moment of hesitation while I tried to figure out if the Macarena craze happened before or after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, but 100% on today's Timdle!
Wow. Saw that there were two hang gliding related fatalities at Lookout Mountain Flight Park, near Chattanooga, today. Went to look for news, not much out there, but Startpage's news tab has more info right now than Google's.
The tide of search may be shifting.
Tuesday September 30th, 2025
Rather than the awful tree-layered GUI experience that is QT's MaintenanceTool.app, it sure would be nice if there were a command-line "install whatever your name for the module identified by 'webenginewidgets' is" tool.
Sometimes it takes a great cover to pull me in to a long read. This one is worth it.
Trump has pardons and tanks.... What do you have?
Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous,
Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty.
Together, We the People of the United States -- you and me -- have our magnificent Constitution.
Here's how that works out in a specific case --
https://storage.courtlistener....82460/gov.uscourts.mad.282460.26 1.0.pdf
Judge Young is on fire:
"And there’s the issue of masks. This Court has listened carefully to the reasons given by Öztürk’s captors for maskingup and has heard the same reasons advanced by the defendant Todd Lyons, Acting Director of ICE. It rejects this testimony as disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable. ICE goes masked for a single reason - - to terrorize Americans into quiescence."
Oh, good, pulling the open source project i work on I see that someone has added the QT "webenginewidgets" component.
Now I have to figure out WTF that's called in the Qt Maintenance Tool.
This is why I love software development. Not.
Local climate & active transportation activist has just discovered AI, and the cognitive dissonance is great with this one.
NBC, August 26, 2025: The CDC quietly scaled back a surveillance program for foodborne illnesses
CDC, September 26, 2025: Listeria Outbreak Linked to Prepared Meals
Frozen meals from Walmart and Trader Joe's leave 4 dead and 19 hospitalized
The CDC is warning consumers to check their fridges as two ready-to-eat pasta meals sold at Walmart, Kroger, and Trader Joe's locations nationwide have been recalled due to Listeria contamination.
Via Emma Evans @trance.bsky.social and rahaeli @rahaeli.bsky.social
I mentioned that Firefox's AI/make the system harder to configure/don't fix bugs thing drove me away, and the thing I miss about that rendering engine is "show selection source".
The Chromium-based ones don't seem to do this, just "inspect".
Nextdoor post saying "I've got some excellent news to share with my neighbors!! I've gotten clearance from my doctor to drive again! I'm going to take it real slow and only go to nearby places at first until my confidence grows."
And on the one hand, I'm glad for her, on the other hand I'm scared to walk now.
Geoffrey Huntley — i ran Claude in a loop for three months, and it created a genz programming language called cursed. It cost him $14k (via).
Code at https://cursed-lang.org/ https://github.com/ghuntley/cursed
$14k of LLM compute plus, of course, whatever prompting time and babysitting he had to do. Obviously that may get cheaper, although that cost to him likely includes massive subsidies from the Anthropic investors (why, yes, I do have the latest Where's Your Ed At open in another tab), but/and: I wonder what that taught him about language development, about parsing and data structures and whatnot.
I wonder how long it took Urban Müller to write the first version of Brainfuck.zCu
A common theme in AI skepticism is "why aren't the tech press pushing back or asking questions?"
Looking at some of the bullshit coming out of the NYT lately on all sorts of fronts, I'd say the problem isn't limited to the tech press.
Monday September 29th, 2025
The number of GOP members or self-identified fundamentalist Christians participating in child abuse is high, the number participating in sexual abuse of minors is probably a little lower, but still high. So I generally don't make a point of linking to busts, but I feel like in the next few days I'm gonna wanna dunk on some Trumper, so...
Charleston County (South Carolina) judge James Benjamin Gosnell Jr. arrested for posession of CSAM
South Carolina Republican state legislator Rep. RJ May said trans people “harm” children. He just pled guilty to child porn charges. He was a 2023 "Mom's for Liberty" Legislator of the Year.
There is a lot about race and class and my childhood that I'm unpacking, but seeing fights on 1970s NYC subways and (inadvertently) walking with my sisters and mom through Boston's "Combat Zone" is helping put a lot of the current fear mongering in perspective.
Sitting in the CVS awaiting my Covid/fly shot, and the JR JR version of "Higher Love" is playing. My life is not enriched by this version.
Lizard @lizardky.bsky.social
Man, first the pinkos at Cato produce a chart showing right-wing violence is much more prevalent than left-wing, and now the woke antifa National Review is claiming the Comey Indictment is invalid!
National Review — Was Lindsey Halligan Validly Appointed as United States Attorney?
That doesn’t mean that the president can’t temporarily fill the office with a pick of his own. As a 2003 OLC opinion by yours truly explains, the Vacancies Reform Act is a separate source of authority. But while there are many individuals whom Trump could have appointed as “acting” United States Attorney pursuant to the Vacancies Reform Act, Halligan doesn’t qualify: She isn’t serving as a Senate-confirmed officer in another position, and she hadn’t been in the Department of Justice at all, much less for the 90 days required.
(This article also references Mational Review — The Indictment Against Comey Should Be Dismissed, on the substance of the indictment.)
Cato, September 11, 2025 — Politically Motivated Violence Is Rare in the United States
Left-wing terrorists murdered 65 people, or about 2 percent of the total.
Realization: The problem with "social media" vs forums/mailing-lists/newsgroups is that it's easier to create personalities with whom we think we have a social relationship, but actually have a parasocial relationship.
We're not actually participating in a community.
That's so AI: BBC: The perils of letting AI plan your next trip
"They [showed] me the screenshot, confidently written and full of vivid adjectives, [but] it was not true. There is no Sacred Canyon of Humantay!" said Gongora Meza. "The name is a combination of two places that have no relation to the description. The tourist paid nearly $160 (£118) in order to get to a rural road in the environs of Mollepata without a guide or [a destination]."
This is a really good piece on Palestine, Israel, and how the media we consume impacts our views, and destroys people: House Arab by Ismail Ibrahim.
I was working at the magazine as a fact-checker and my parents no longer considered me a failure, not because they read or admired it, but because when they said its name to friends and relatives it sparkled on their tongues.
Via Kottke (Bluesky) who says the magazine in question was the New Yorker.
Comedian Atsuko Okatsuka posts contract after turning down Riyadh Comedy Festival
Per Deadline, Okatsuka posted about the festival on Threads this weekend, writing, “FYI there are more of us that said no to the Riyadh comedy festival in Saudi Arabia.” In her post, Okatsuka also posted the list of things comedians have been told they weren’t allowed to talk about, including jokes “that may be considered to degrade, defame, or bring into public disrepute, contempt, scandal, embarrassment, or ridicule” Saudi Arabia, its ruling government, royal family, or any religion or religious figure, period. Okatsuka also takes time to point out that “The money is coming straight from the Crown Prince, who actively executes journalists, ppl with nonlethal drug offenses, bloggers, etc without due process. A lot of the ‘you can’t say anything anymore!’ Comedians are doing the festival 😂 they had to adhere to censorship rules about the types of jokes they can make.” (Worth noting that comedian Tim Dillon has said he was kicked out of the festival for a response video he made about accepting the gig, joking, “So what, they have slaves?”)
Via a whole bunch of places, including ResearchBuzz</ a>.
Seen this same story behind paywalls, but it's out now: Futurism: Deutsche Bank Issues Grim Warning for AI Industry.
In a new research note, as Fortune reports, the international finance giant Deutsche Bank is warning that AI spending can’t continue to increase exponentially. And if spending were to slow down without realizing the tech’s outsize promises, the analysts caution, it could reveal an economy in tatters — marked by unemployment, lower household incomes, and inflation — that had been hidden by an irrational optimism in the power of AI.
That notion of looking at what kind of returns we'd have to be getting from... well... it's hard to figure out "when do you start looking", but Harvard's Human Centered Artificial Intelligence AI Index Report 2025 says a decend back of the envelope since spending started ramping up starts at $1.5T, and with this year and stretch back could easily be $2T.
So ballpark, we're gonna need to be seeing returns, not just revenues, that are more of the economy than farming. And if your lifetime expectation of chips is 18 months...
Someone smarter than me figure this out, because I'm just seeing "kaboom".
Some headlines don't need a lot of additional exposition: Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word
The good news is that when this whole economy collapses and we enter a decade of Even Greater Depression, it'll be hard to point the finger at any one of the AI bubble, Trump, or the housing situation, because it's all so fucked up.
We measure Agent Mode on both our internal evaluation sets and the public SpreadsheetBench benchmark. Our results on SpreadsheetBench place Agent Mode at the leading edge of current systems, accurately completing 57.2% of the benchmark’s tasks.
Frank Skornia @fskornia@glammr.us observed:
I work in a library, so hardly work that will injure or kill someone and even here if I was constantly handing in stuff that was 57.2 percent accurate they would question my suitability for the job.
What I think this whole "AI" thing is showing is quite clearly how accuracy doesn't actually matter to anyone who's finding AI useful.
Today's Timdle was foiled by the birth of Walt Disney and the debut of Camel cigarettes...
Sunday September 28th, 2025
Max Leibman @maxleibman@beige.party
LinkedIn guy: Where others saw a trolley problem, I saw a trolley opportunity…
Saturday September 27th, 2025
Sometimes the bands at Aqus are just playing the old classics. Really enjoying that Sparky Mark and the Funky Bunch are doing upbeat pop (despite not even having a keyboard in the lineup).
Friday September 26th, 2025
Helen Czerski @helenczerski.bsky.social
In discussion with a computer scientist from the University of Cambridge last night:
Me: "you've described some of the things that AI is good at. How would you describe the category of things it's not good at?
**pause**
Him: "Anything where it has to be right".
Mic drop.
Enthropic Thoughts: The Wind, a Pole, and the Dragon, in which there is much speculation about the meanings of machine translation of programming error messages.
ErosBlog documents an example of racial bias in AI detection: Pornocalypse AI Comes For Black Pinup Models
Thursday September 25th, 2025
A Man of Rubber: A True Story of Love, Adventure & The Art of Staying Flexible
Dan Lyke comments (0)I think the best reviews are the ones that give you a feel for whether you want to read the book, and a taste of what you'll get out of it. I'm struggling with Gary Harper's memoir "A Man of Rubber: A True Story of Love, Adventure & The Art of Staying Flexible", because this book is so much about explaining the context for a time and a place in my life that was the source of so much personal growth .
When I finished the ebook I threw off a quick typed-on-my phone review on the Kindle app. Gary just messaged me about using those words in a larger review, and I felt like I had to give it a little better treatment.
I think it was spring of 1989 that I was walking through Hamilton Place Mall in Chattanooga Tennessee, and saw Chris at a folding table covered with High Country flyers advertising rafting on the Ocoe. I'd been down once, it was fun, but I was not the sort of high energy twenty-something to be a passenger. So I asked "how do you become a guide?", was told "show up Saturday morning and ask for John Miller", and the descent began. It was at least two years before I stopped having nightmares about swimming Slice-n-Dice.
I have ... grown and matured a lot ... since then. There are personal connections I haven't kept, there was socializing at the time I did not do. All of the people I guided with are amazing people, but it's now, 3 decades later, that I'm learning how many more amazing people there were (and still are) in that scene, and how much that world was in transition and new right before I got there.
I think I mentioned previously David Brown's "The Whitewater Wars: The Rafters and the River Trip that Saved the Ocoee & The Gauley River Battle", about the fight for access to whitewater, and "Man of Rubber..." is a more personal story, focusing on a path through the business of whitewater, and capturing a bit more of the time and the place.
My time there was 6 years after the Benton Fireworks Disaster. The thumbtack board at the general store had someone advertising moonshine for barter. I was a weekend guide, and a damnyankee besides, so there were huge swaths of what was going on around that I was completely unaware of.
"A Man of Rubber" is a story that fills in a lot of gaps. It starts with a tale of big water on the Grand Canyon, a style of whitewater I've never done and likely never will, though the notion of "above Crystal again" is a philosophy I can definitely take into life.
It's told by someone who's clearly in love with all kinds of paddling, and with Southeast Tennessee, and who made his home in a place where I was only really a tourist, both physically, and in the ways that he's contributed to the technologies of whitewater.
It talks about the technology of repurposing roofing materials to make rafts better for whitewater, about the evolution of whitewater raft design, and how the design and manufacture of the dry bag that still carries the most critical bits of my bug-out kit came to be.
It's a story of personal growth of someone who chose to make his home in the mountains (literally, that stair rail is amazing) with the help of family, and of how he followed small ideas to turn them into big things. And seeing my friends referenced and thanked in the text reminds me of how much of that space was, and hopefully continues to be, a real community.
And it's got everything else you'd want out of a memoir, success over health challenges, whitewater disasters, and triumphs, literal flying.
As I skim back through it, I'm reminded of that old saw about how you "never paddle the same river twice". A few years ago I went back and took a commercial trip down the Ocoee, got a chance to show Charlene what that time of my life was about. Even if my world flipped inside out and I could manage the logistics to go back to it (and endure the likely months of physical pain it'd take to get back into shape enough to do it again), I'm not the same person I was then, it'd be a very different experience.
But it sure is fun to go back through and think about what might have been.
https://www.amazon.com/Man-Rub...-Staying-Flexible/dp/B0FM8BRYDM/
We were just talking about what to do about the intersection of Grant & Mountain View Ave yesterday.
Indianapolis residents fix an intersection by installing water-filled plastic barriers in the center turn lane, vertical delineators and repainting bike lanes.
https://www.wthr.com/article/n...3873-0a69-4176-b382-6016ad2cf271
Lot of people have been passing around this version of Chappell Roan and Nancy Wilson doing Barracuda, but on Facebook one friend (Hi, Scott!) mentioned how the song is 48 years old, and still fresh. Chappell does a good version; I have a few critiques (some based on my own learning to growl, it's coming very very slowly, some might just be that the mic on the phone recording is missing some of the ringing overtones that I associate with the guitar part), but in Scott's comments this got into the weeds about other times when rock or pop stars covered music from similar eras before.
I've often commented that square dance callers using '80s songs as "modern" is the same as, in the '80s, using the Andrews Sisters as "Modern" (although I have been known to use Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again" as a closer). And I have this feeling that the music of the '70s and '80s has a popularity that, okay in the '80s we enjoyed some older music, but not the way modern metalheads dig into Zep.
Anyway...
The obvious ones to me were David Lee Roth in 1985 doing Just A Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody, a medley of songs from 1929 and 1915 and Michael Jackson in 1995 recording Smile, music from 1934 and lyrics from '56. Larry brought up (1928).
And, of course, I used the term "cover" there, but I don't think any of those are equivalent to, say, most of Pat Boone's work, in terms of relationship to the original.
What you got?
The thing about this European Chat Control issue is that this is exactly the sort of thing we used to be horrified by when the Soviet Union registered typewriters and such.
Wednesday September 24th, 2025
Oh great, the other thing MacOS Tahoe 26 brought, aside from rounder buttons and new XCode crashes, is the frame rate on my external webcam suuuuucks.
The Raptured Hon @danhon.com
I want a thing that looks like a metal detector and works like a metal detector, like, beeping like it, only it's for detecting AI.
Bright Burro 🍁🇨🇦🍁 @brightburro.bsky.social
So like an aiger counter?
Hat tip to the dudes rebranding a hotel as a substance abuse treatment center in Healdsburg, the [checks notes] heart of wine country tourism.
Double points for calling it "The Ruse".
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/...ealdsburg-ruse-substance-center/
The thing about "share of attention" as a business metric is that it's a zero sum game.
JA Westenberg @Daojoan@mastodon.social
My 9 year old and his classmates have started using “that’s AI” to mean “I don’t believe you.”
Me: we’re having dinosaur meat for dinner
Kiddo: that’s AI
Tuesday September 23rd, 2025
This story has it all. Sex. Politics. Diane Feinstein being petty enough to have someone arrested for an expired dog license. The Rialto Report: When Cicciolina Headlined at the O’Farrell Theater
Via MeFi, with more links.
Ugh. Please, please, please, if you're an "AI" user, just share the prompt with me, don't make me wade through all of the LLM generated slop to figure out what you were trying to say.
Watching coworker recover from the Shai Halud exploit is further cementing my feelings about importing packages to do terminal coloring because importing packages to do minification on code that's being developed in embedded web views...
Highlights
- The randomized experiment increased participants’ average income by 9 %–11 %.
- Health outcomes were objectively measured using data from medical records and prescriptions.
- Psychotropic drug use decreased by 8 %–11 %, with suggestive evidence of fewer outpatient visits due to mental health issues.
- No significant effects were detected on other health outcomes.
Harvard Business Review: AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity
In collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, our research team at BetterUp Labs has identified one possible reason: Employees are using AI tools to create low- effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as “AI slop.” In the context of work, we refer to this phenomenon as “workslop.” We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.
Edit: Klarna CEO Makes Employees Review His AI- Generated Vibe Coding Projects. The URL prefixes this with "nightmare boss", which... yeah.
Second Edit: Pivot To AI weighs in, and is not complimentary on the "study" methodology.