Sunday November 1st, 2026
When making a coconut cream cannabis extract, do not lick the spoon.
In other news, if anyone needs me I'll be chilling on Mars.
Cannabis explorations so I can find this later: Neighbor brought by a jar of their current crop, we had last year's still in a jar in the freezer, so I crumbled it (resin still on my fingers), oven at 220F for 30 minutes+cooling time for decarboxylation.
Split it, about 13 grams, between soaking in 1 cup of 80 proof vodka at room temperature, and in a can of coconut cream at 175F (induction plate) for a while.
Gonna make gummie bears with some of it (probably coconut chai spice).
Saturday October 31st, 2026
Ugh. After some pain, updated this server.
Very much feeling like I should move to BSD, if nothing else just go get away from systemd. It is very uncool to tell me that a service failed to start, and then have nothing in the logs, and make me go into the application-specific tools that would be be run in the init script to get the output that tells me what's wrong.
(Other thing: No idea why www-data can no longer write into my user directory, even when the subdir us 777, but... fucking opinionated package maintainers.)
It's quite simple, the long-term implications are that we rent our compute from the people who bought up all the chips that they'll never have the data center capacity to actually deploy, so that they get all our money, because their vision for the future is so much better than ours.
“Musk” was released by Bleecker Street Films, which was sold in the last week to ebay founder Pierre Omidyar — not considered a friend of Elon Musk, but a billionaire nevertheless.
Just as it was starting to get momentum, yoinked by the eBay founder.
Y'all have upgraded your ADHD to AD8K, and I'm sitting here stuck on ADNTSC...
NPR: Why the urban legend of contaminated Halloween candy won't disappear
"I have data going back to 1958, and I have yet to find a report of a child that's been killed or seriously hurt by a contaminated treat picked up in the course of trick-or-treating," said Best.
What *will* kill your trick-or-treaters is drivers.
Halloween trick-or-treating encourages creativity, physical activity, and neighborhood engagement. Trick-or-treating should not be abolished in a misguided effort to eliminate Halloween-associated risk. Instead, policymakers, physicians, and parents should act to make residential streets safer for pedestrians on Halloween and throughout the year.
Some people, when faced with the problem of CMake and Ninja, think "I'll add Pixi!"
Now they have 3 problems...
(Also, fuuu..., when did the differences between gcc and clang get so annoying? And when did gcc get ahead on features? And WTF is Dan doing solving build errors on a Friday night?)
So somehow whatever I'm currently playing on my phone is showing up on Charlene's phone's lock screen. I have cleared caches, disabled services, removed permissions, and yet what I'm playing continues to be broadcast.
This feels like a massive security issue.
Friday October 30th, 2026
Trying to figure out where I read "LLM coding agents are to app development what Geocities was to the web".
(I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about that analogy.)
To install the Conda package manager for Python on the Mac, please either install the super annoying desktop application, or run:
conda install anaconda::conda
in the terminal. What sort of bullshit recursive thing is this? The actual answer
appears to be:
brew install --cask anaconda
Reader, the answer was not, in fact, that. At least not directly. Feels like another situation like Qt where the goal is to make the command line use as annoying as possible to rope people into the additional telemetry of the GUI tool.
Shannon Prickett @Binder@petrous.vislae.town
Oh, that's a good idea. We should nationalize the Federal government so it'll be responsive to the people.
Chat, is it a good sign when you find:
from shlex import _find_unsafe
at the top of a Python file?
(Despite importing shlex, and using this deprecated method to tell if it should be escaping the string, it then manually escaped the string...)
Marisa Kabas at The Handbasket: I talked to Tom, the viral ‘Jonestown’ Trump rally guy.
If you haven't seen the clip yet, I think his delivery is perfect. He sounds like a decent dude.
Thursday October 29th, 2026
Multiple posts suggest that Binance and Polymarket have been hit, to the tune of several billion dollars.
So, anyway, cryptocurrency, amiright?
Edit: PC Mag: Binance Investigates Reports of Hack as Billions In Crypto Get Moved:
However, the hack appears to only affect Binance.com, not Binance.us, which was created for the US market. "We are a separate, independent platform, and customer funds and services are secure and operating normally. Rest assured, all user funds are safe," Binance.us tweeted.
Trump’s Secret Stake in Cheesecake Factory Revealed
Financial disclosures reviewed by the Daily Beast show Trump made numerous trades in the restaurant franchise as his White House renovations went into overdrive.
Via.
Wednesday October 28th, 2026
Schadenfreudometer: pegged. Conservative influencers Cam Higby and James O'Keefe face identity theft charges over Minnesota primary
Fifty years of Emacs. If the only thing to come out of this AI bubble is the equivalent of what came out of that era's AI bubble, maybe it's not all for naught?
https://www.technologyreview.c...26/10/20/1145399/emacs-turns-50/
via https://bsky.app/profile/elfst...g.bsky.social/post/3myxf7vtyrk2c
Cornell to Offer Free ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini Access for Students, Staff.
This seems like Penn State offering free tequila.
Anthropic IPO warns its AI could blackmail people, become sentient, end humanity.
Who will be eaten first? was supposed to be parody.
I have never wanted to stand up and cheer for John Hanania, but his closing statement... nicely dropped that knife in and twisted.
I'm still hell yeah for Kevin McDonnell, but appreciate that John pointed out those things.
I am amazed at the candidates talking about hard communication with council. I say "hi" to most of the council members regularly, I run across them all the time. Where are the people who are having trouble feeling heard hanging out?
Alan LaPierre isn't smart enough to know that he's calling for more traffic even as he's saying he's for less of it.
Yay for Brent Newell for calling bullshit on the 11 stories thing. "We deserve better discourse".
Go Janice: "I really encourage all candidates to read the general plan."
Hope some calls bullshit on the PHA...
Shelina Moreda coming out strong for increasing homelessness. Yay for Karen Nau calling bullshit (kindly) on her.
Yay for Eric Vasquez taking it to the next level.
At the Petaluma Women's Club for the candidates forum. There are definitely varying levels of preparation on display here.
This is reinforcing my previous opinions.
We found the criminal immigrants. Brazil’s Flávio Bolsonaro and family will get US visas after election loss, State Department says.
Tuesday October 27th, 2026
Oh this is fascinating: The SCP Foundation is a shared fiction universe in which people have written over 30 million words about an organization focused on containing and studying supernatural and paranormal entities. These stories have been, of course, ingested by LLMs.
If you somehow end up in that area of the embedding vector space, the LLM will happily guide you around it as though it's real.
Kinda reminds me of when I read Umberto Eco and Robert Anton Wilson at the same time...
Futurism: Tech Industry Figures Suddenly Very Concerned That AI Use Is Leading to Psychotic Episodes
Via Elf Sternberg. Further down in that thread, he notes:
It's just genuinely weird that an entire website about theoretical and supernatural cognitotoxins has become, thanks to mad alchemists, an essential ingredients in making actual cognitotoxins.
Nova Scotia woman refused to comply with phone scammer, so would-be fraudster swatted her house
“It appears to be a level of retribution by the fraudsters in this case,” said Staff Sgt. Marc Rose, commander of Colchester District RCMP.
“[It appears] they did this to cause her harm and pain and distress by having the police respond to her residence all because she didn’t follow the original instructions on the phone."
Monday October 26th, 2026
A podcast like Switched on Pop, but where I learn about artists like Sarah and the Safeword.
Spent a portion of the weekend writing a Rust+Slint app. I am not falling in love with this language. So much cognitive load pushed back on to the coder, so much boilerplate.
I know I'll get to the place where much of this reads subconsciously, but I'm still doing so much Emacs "build out the code for this list of properties" rather than having the language do this, and that's super brittle.
Sunday October 25th, 2026
Sunday morning kitchen musings: Thinking about Taylor-like motion studies to figure out when it's faster to mash the timer "+1" button n times vs pressing the timer button, the number button(s?), and then start...
This is interesting: The Goose Programming Language. Looks like they're codifying the notions of arenas that end up being the idioms in Rust, making that essentially the core structure. I'm playing with Rust this weekend while I'm down with a cold, and getting my head into that (so much programming is just figuring out what's wrong with the Cargo.toml file, sigh), but this looks worth reading up on to understand the different way of thinking about memory.
Via.
No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector
Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech. Revenue per worker is rising for the Mag 7 but is flat for the S&P 493, see the first chart below. Profit margins are rising for the Mag 7 but are flat for the S&P 493, see the second chart below. And there are still no signs of AI boosting productivity growth, see the third chart below. With no impact on the bottom line, mainstream corporate America is pulling back and starting to view token spending not as a source of growth but as a cost center that weighs on margins.
A Reddit post also points to Fortune: Here’s the ‘core economic flaw’ in the AI bull case as stock and bond trades unravel, according to a top economist.
Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life@mas.to who also talked about "... the Productivity J-Curve."
Companies can adopt AI but until they change how they operate, they won’t financially benefit from it
(To be fair, he does also acknowledge blockchain.)
Which... I was there, Gandalf. Personal Computing productivity happened despite mandates from above. One of the things I'm constantly aware of in business systems dynamics is that Mike Harrison, who posts here sometimes as meuon, wrote HTMMS, a maintenance management system. Maintenance departments loved this. IT departments hated it. Mike and I spent a lot of time building little tools that, for instance, looked like a printer to the IT department, and imported work orders that came out of corporate into the local system. And simiar gateways scripted in Procomm to look like a terminal and feed updates back into the corporate system.
So as we look at productivity gains from "AI"... a few years ago I did talk to someone working for large company that you've definitely heard of, and corporate policy there was "no using LLMs", but he was constantly using it to develop SQL queries. Presumably because corporate wasn't giving his layer the data they actually needed. I don't know if that was good for the organization, or not.
On the other hand we find all of the studies that show that top-down imposition of these technologies are not having the desired impacts.
Don't know what to think (I mean, aside from all of the ethical issues with these companies), just throwing a few more things into the mix.
Okay, maybe I'm just not thinking clearly on a Saturday night, but how do y'all go about verifying that your Rust project's dependencies all conform to your chosen license?
It's awfully easy to "cargo add ...", and even though this is a free open source app I wanna make sure I respect all the upstreams correctly, and I think I'm in for a nightmare of "is Mozilla Public License 2.0 with GPL3, or whatever Slint's using, or...?"
After a while exploring iTerm2 and Ghostty, I wondered what I was actually getting from them, and reverted to Terminal.
Then I tried to paste some Unicode.
Great, another Mac place where we use TextEdit to workaround... Sigh.
Saturday October 24th, 2026
Thinking about The New Republic article saying that 73% of these donation dollars go to consultants and vendors.
Also pondering that they have Charlene's name associated with my number.
Friday October 23rd, 2026
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: @jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net
This video of dial-up modem sounds MUST be watched with subtitles. MUST. Thank me later :)
Intermittent rewards work. Last Saturday we went to a gem and mineral show and bought a couple of raffle tickets. Charlene won way more than we spent in tickets. I suspect we'll be joining the local rock hound organization soon...
Missed the peak of the sunset trying to find a better foreground. Still got the Dollar Tree.