capacitator: when you use a tuber as a dielectric

there are two hard problems in systems programming: hardwand race condiare butionsgs

RE: https://mastodon.social/@hbons/116845294021960905

> We will amend our contributing policy to include a prohibition on new features or significant re-factoring from new contributors without explicit permission from maintainers. This ensures that new contributors take the time to learn the codebase and engage with maintainers to build trust by working on bug fixes and documentation before diving into significant projects.

This seems reasonable even without AI in play. If you hire someone new on a team, at *any* level of seniority-- do you want them to do huge refactoring right away?

OK, I have done one (1) household-level project with computers today. Do I do another of this sort? Or something else?

great read btw https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/where-to-find-the-colors-your-screen-cant-show-you/

Enjoying the game a lot @mercutio :)

I like unit-aware computing: types like `Distance`, `Duration`, etc.

I was just looking at an API [1] that has "age of a star" as a field. Which is a `Duration`. But, that's a long time; can I actually store that in a Rust `std::time::Duration`?

A quick check shows the universe is 13.8 billion years old, [2] and Rust's duration type has a range of about 584 billion years-- so yeah, this is fine.

[1]: https://replicant.space
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe
[3]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/beta/std/time/struct.Duration.html#associatedconstant.MAX

I started with the “complicated” piece in 2021 or 2022. I finished the hand embroidery but it didn’t feel done, so I stashed it for years. I recently learned to do needle tatting and thought it would be exactly what this piece needed!

That was true enough to get me to also make the “simple” piece, which was tedious because I couldn’t leave any errors at all in it. I had to frog whole lines three times.

RIP Tony Hoare, whose wisdom is needed more every day.

#fiberarts #embroidery #crossStitch

New batch of photos: a red-shouldered hawk came to visit and found some food in my yard.

https://cceckman.com/photos/20260529-red-shoulder/

Looking for: browser extension that takes every <ul> element and shuffles the <li>s in it. You said it was unordered!

Call it "Pike lists"

- [x] pong

> Propitiatory IP functions are mixed case to match FreeRTOS convention.

[headscratch, loads up wiktionary]

> 1. Intended to propitiate, reconcile, expiate or appease; conciliatory.

[headtilt]

> 1. (transitive) To conciliate, appease, or make peace with someone, particularly a god or spirit.
> 2. (transitive) To make propitious or favourable.
> 3. (intransitive) To make propitiation.

[squint]

> 2. (theology) The death of Christ as a basis for the forgiveness of sin.

[nods, understanding]

I just posted this announcement to wikitech-l mailing list.

ACL Statement on Desk Rejecting Papers with Hallucinated References

"During the final consistency checks of the camera ready versions of papers accepted to ACL 2026, we identified over 100 papers that contained citations to non-existent literature. Since these papers were going to be published and are no longer subject to the anonymity requirements, an automated system was used to identify potential citation issues and then all flagged citations were reviewed by human experts (PCs and SACs) to confirm that references did not exist. Whether human-authored or LLM-generated, the inclusion of these non-existent references is a clear violation of the ACL Policy on Publication Ethics. Consequently, we have made the decision to desk- reject these accepted papers to maintain the quality and trustworthiness of the conference proceedings."

https://2026.aclweb.org/acl_statement/

“I’d created 2000 free-text responses and labelled them ‘UK’. Then I copied and pasted the exact same 2000 responses but labelled these ‘US’. Finally, I combined them to create a dataset of 4000 total responses, and jumbled them up.

Despite the responses being identical for the UK and US, Copilot produced a rich, detailed summary of how US and UK respondents differed.”

https://kucharski.substack.com/p/real-signals-or-artificial-stereotypes

H/T @sinalana.eurosky.social

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116605858023186072

Google Search rests on a social contract: their bots can crawl our sites, they can index our sites, and they can show excerpts of our sites because

and •only because•

they send people to our sites. •Our• sites, our words, with our design, with our links, with our context and our aesthetics, shared the way we want to share them.

Google is announcing — unambiguously and with great fanfare — that they are now fully breaking that already-ragged contract. We should reciprocate.

1/2

Thanks to @cliffle 's earlier contribution, and another from @kapsalot , we almost have a full adventuring party:
- Jason Parsontaxer
- T'paamayim Nekudotayim
- Carg O'Build

Cis folk - have you ever had even the most fleeting thought to change your name? To what? For any reason. Just cool. Connection. Vibes. Whatever.

Do it.

In classrooms and public events and private conversations, my campus regularly facilitates discussion (often heated) about the virtues and dangers of capitalism and Marxism and every economic theory you can think of, about human rights and AI and abortion access and data centers and civil wars and genocide and myriad other subjects of •extreme• controversy.

We do not, however, make space for and amplify people who believe the Earth is flat, because that would be a f***ing waste of time.

6/

...did I just reach Haskell instead of Rust? (I don't know Haskell.)

I wanted to define a type (constructor) `struct Data<T>` with various fields, and be able to construct it wither with "optional fields" (while filling it in) or "concrete fields".

But...the fields are of multiple kinds. So really I want T to be either `Option<_>` or `Just(_)`, but where I can fill in the blank in my struct.

Which means...I want `T` to be a type constructor instead of a type? Or something like that? (I hate to say "monad" because I'm not sure I specifically want the other properties, but.)