Flutterby™! (short)

Shann on Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town</a

Using ethics but only recreationally.

I always thought this was the hallucination of stoners: Scientists reveal why red wine gives you the worst hangovers

A team of scientists at the University of California discovered that there is a nutrient called ‘quercitin’ in red wine that actually stops your body from processing alcohol.

UCLA Health: Research suggests quercetin linked to red wine headaches

UC Davis: The Conversation: Why Does Red Wine Cause Headaches? — UC Davis Research Points to Compound Found in Grapes' Skin

Inhibition of ALDH2 by quercetin glucuronide suggests a new hypothesis to explain red wine headaches

Endogenous and exogenous mediators of quercetin bioavailability.

Ben Werdmuller's Friday links included notes about the New Public Local Lab announcement of their community engagement platform Roundabout. In the sign-up form they ask you to write a bit about how and why you'd like to bring their platform into your community, and I wrote the following:

I have been chronically online since the '80s, started an ISP in the '90s to expand my online community and cross that with my in-person community, and sociology grad students call me up to chat about being one of the early bloggers (still am). Over the years I've participated in various community email lists.

I accidentally helped found Petaluma Urban Chat (urbanchat.org), a 501c3 which works to educate and advocate on housing to meet community needs, alternatives to car mobility, sustainable municipal finance, all in the face of needing to adapt to climate change.

I'm even a Nextdoor lead, though I mostly ignore those duties, because...

I *hate* that I'm enriching Nextdoor through trying to bring some sanity to their horrific engagement bait. My reasonable neighbors have fled their platform.

I used to believe that online created fantastic communities, which is why I worked to bring the physical world online, but discovered that mostly I just was one of many people whose work destroyed those online communities.

So these days in my spare time (yes, I'm employed) working on building real-world physical communities, but I see a need for better communication, for better neighborhood level organizing, and, despite all of the evidence and experience to the contrary still believe that it may be possible to use online tools to do such things.

And the few Signal groups that are forming up don't seem up to the task.

I am getting more and more pissed off at Apple: Wi-Fi settings "Copy Password" does not appear to be working, and I can't find another way to see it.

Masonry: Things You Won’t Need A Library For Anymore is an article on the excesses of CSS, or a good rundown of all of the things you don't need JavaScript or other hacks (wacky-ass background images) for, or that can now be laid out more cleanly in CSS and HTML.

Valerie Roney @vlrny@disabled.social

A friend, while having an existential meltdown, just said:

"I think I'm grieving for the future."

And dayum! That pretty much sums up all the feels rather poetically, eh?

Wired: AI slop is ruining Reddit for everyone draws extensively from a friend who was okay with using their Reddit name, but was quoted anonymously.

Chuck Wendig — Vital Cat Update

It’s time to talk about my cat. To which you might be saying, “Chuck, I didn’t know you had a cat!” and I’d respond with, “I didn’t know I had a cat either.” But Google — the preeminent search engine! — knows otherwise, courtesy of its wonderful, never-ever- inaccurate “AI Overview,” which is totally not a piece of shit that just makes up information willy-fucking-nilly.

Interesting: SkoBots — A Wearable Language Revitalization Robot for Indigenous Languages

Which I found via dylan @dylan@dair-community.social's note:

Speaking of data collection, a detail I always look for in projects like this is the data: where does it come from? Who benefits from it? Who decides how it's used? I can't find specific info on their methods, but I think their stated principles are spot-on:

"We will never own recordings, we will never publish them, we will never profit off of them. It will always be up to the discretion of the communities we work with and we always defer to them."

LinkPro: eBPF rootkit analysis

LinkPro targets GNU/Linux systems and is developed in Golang. The Synacktiv CSIRT names it LinkPro in reference to the symbol defining its main module: github.com/link-pro/link-client. The GitHub account link-pro has no public repositories or contributions. LinkPro uses eBPF technology to only activate upon receiving a "magic packet", and to conceal itself on the compromised system.

(eBPF is the "extended Berkeley Packet Filter")

This is fascinating to me because the calculus (and, indeed, the linear algebra) I was taught was so much drudgery and remembering rules, and it took other means to build a better intuitive feel for what was actually happening.

Daniel Lakeland @dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org

Found this article thanks to a Reddit comment. Every day or so there's someone asking in math reddits what "dy/dx" means or why there's a "dx" in the integral notation, and then an army of people come out of the woodwork to push the orthodoxy of limits like some stockholm syndrome prisoners... And a small number of people point out that nonstandard analysis is actually a real thing and works... Anyway, back before I was born Sullivan did an actual experiment on teaching

The paper is The Teaching of Elementary Calculus Using the Nonstandard Analysis Approach Kathleen Sullivan (Wayback Machine link) from The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 83, No. 5 (May, 1976), pp. 370-375

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2318657

Æ. @aesthr@wandering.shop

Last week in a seminar we discussed a text that was largely about sexual violence, including mass rape during war. Heavy stuff.

One student admitted they had not read the text but worked off a ChatGPT summary.

They had no idea the text was about sexual violence. ChatGPT withheld that information.

This wasn’t just a minor error nor a typical LLM hallucination.

About a third of the text, arguably its most important part, went completely ignored because it didn’t match OpenAI’s content policies

The COVID vaccines are good for you: JAMA: COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality Among Adults Aged 18 to 59 Years in France

Via.

lyra's epic blog: SVG Filters - Clickjacking 2.0. In which someone sets out to recreate Apple's "Liquid Glass" interface for the web, and ends up discovering a whole new class of iframe exploits.

Via

Sagebrush Repair: Buying a good laptop. Not a new laptop, a good one. Notes on used business laptops.

Via David Gerard.

We are taking care of the neighbor's cat, which means he gets lots and lots of scritches.

Ars Technica: In comedy of errors, men accused of wiping gov databases turned to an AI tool

US DOJ: Two Virginia Men Arrested for Conspiring to Destroy Government Databases.

The indictment:

16. On February 18, 2025, at approximately 4:58 p.m., MUNEEB AKHTER issued commands that deleted a DHS production database containing U.S. government information. The database was hosted on a Company-1 server in the Eastern District of Virginia.
17. On February 18, 2025, at approximately 4:59 p.m., MUNEEB AKHTER asked an artificial intelligence tool, “how do i clear system logs from SQL servers after deleting databases.”
18. On February 18, 2025, at approximately 5:14 p.m., SOHAIB AKHTER stated aloud, “They’re gonna probably raid this place,” to which MUNEEB AKHTER replied, “I'll clean this shit up.” SOHAIB AKHTER responded, “We also gotta clean stuff up from the other house, man.”

Interesting both for work, and for thinking about environments and platforms like Emacs: Jack Rusher at Strange Loop 2022: Stop Writing Dead Programs.

I found a taker for the TI99-4a that came into my life, but in pondering the joy of the BASIC environment I was reminded of a lot of the Seymour Papert and Alan Kay ideas that made their way into this talk, about how a great environment isn't just about being able to inspect the state at a given place, but to play with it and let it continue.

My primary environment these days has been XCode, and the problems with Apple's direction on software process are well documented, but as conditional breakpoints are apparently broken and it's harder to change values than it was with CodeView or SoftICE back in the day, I've been pondering this even at my level.

Darkness fell, like a cliche in a room full of poetry majors.

I've been seeing the posts about RAM, and not quite understanding what was up (especially given that "DDR" will always mean "Dance, Dance, Revolution" to me), but allison @aparrish@friend.camp noted

you know i'd never stopped to consider how annoying tulip mania must have been for folks who just wanted to grow a few pretty flowers in their front garden

about Ars Technica: After nearly 30 years, Crucial will stop selling RAM to consumers

The surprise announcement from Micron follows a period of rapidly escalating memory prices, as we reported in November. A typical 32GB DDR5 RAM kit that cost around $82 in August now sells for about $310, and higher-capacity kits have seen even steeper increases.

Yikes, especially since 32G seems to be the absolute minimum for a computer these days...

Edit: Pivot to AI weighs in.

My VLC wrapped for 2026: Top artist was "Unknown Artist", top album was "Unknown Album".

Single top track was "Vocal Warmup 2.mp3".

From the creators of Oglaf, though this one is mostly SFW, some notes on owning a pony. For the horse-y people in my feed.... https://www.patreon.com/posts/pony-club-144777978