In the past a special guild was responsible for not only assembling and disassembling the floats at festival time, but preserving information about the knots and methods of construction unique to each 'hoko' and 'yama'.
It was rage-inducing that my latest Window$ laptop would not Go To Fucking Sleep and would burn CPU and run the fan when closed. This article explains why and how to fix: https://windowsforum.com/threads/how-to-disable-modern-standby-on-windows-10-11-for-better-battery-life.389687/
(Indirect HT to @nina_kali_nina for the "they paid me to use Windows" article link)
Mostly for the figure part-way through the article showing the complete disconnect between grades on a take-home midterm and an in-person final.
Brown Professor Suspects Most of His Class Used AI to Cheat
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/learning-assessment/2026/07/08/brown-professor-suspects-most-his-class-used-ai-cheat
My friend Mathew Kneebone is displaying California electrical utility outages on this giant display in Ghent, Belgium. (I helped him wrangle the data: he originally wanted to display European outages but there basically aren’t enough to be interesting :)
Credit https://019-ghent.org/neighbor/
@scattershot how these things generally work out is I'll wiggle the connectors, check the voltages, pull up a schematic, observe what's wrong with the game by playing it, look on the schematic for the bits responsible for the stuff wot don't work (some games are old enough that each sound effect is its own circuit for example) and make a very precise mental model of exact components to test individually, and then I'll take one look at the actual board and go "Well bollocks" and start off by replacing every single rusty chip lol
So basically, step 1 is form an idea of what's wrong, and step 2 is overwrite that idea with "Everything"
a hot summer addition — Caroline is setting out a daily cooler with ice and water bottles for our postal person and various delivery drivers
Say, old-timer, what was the 1976 bicentennial like?
This. It was exactly like this. https://archive.org/details/200bicentennial
I'm helping a friend with some digital forensics and trying to learn how video metadata can reveal signs that a file has been edited. I'm much more familiar with image metadata, so this is new territory for me.
Search hasn't been very helpful, so I thought the fediverse: Does anyone have good articles, tools, or case studies about video metadata and digital forensics?
RE: https://mastodon.social/@gnomon/116841677116794660
Sigh. If you haven’t downloaded your Bandcamp purchases, you might think about doing that…
spouse woke me up so we could go vote early in the day
grabbed a spare copy of the voter guide I'd written https://harihareswara.net/posts/2026/2026-nyc-democratic-primary-election-endorsements-all-in-one/ to put in my pocket
sat down for a few minutes before leaving to check for any new world-shattering developments in State Senate District 13 since I'd gone to sleep (none, thank God)
walked to the polling place
voted
cried
I never want to take this for granted
People fought and died for me to be able to do this
for the ordinary room where someone brought donuts for the workers and someone's teaching their colleagues how to do the process right
for the ballots with names transliterated into a few character sets
for the people of all genders and races, the required distance from the door, last-minute flyering -- some of them the candidates themselves
for my freedom to write and publish my thoughts about it all
every Election Day is a holy day to me
[crying again btw]
Come to San Francisco we have the gay lasers.
And fog.
#pride
Kiwi fans singing “Aotearoa” to the Seven Nation Army riff. Works well.
Nicely done art piece: a clock that slows down when you look at it
https://justus-ratzke.xyz/home/rest
“You are absolutely right. That’s not a tumor, it’s your gall bladder. I will be more careful with my diagnoses in the future“
As a kid I learnt to say the alphabet backwards thanks to a trick in a book called "The Whizzkid's Handbook". Adult me taught the trick to my nieces and they loved it... now I've just discovered that the book has been scanned into the Internet Archive and so I can share it with you lovely bunch.
Identity team is hiring a Senior Staff person in SF at GoFundMe. This is a team we work a lot with, and I sure would like an additional good person there. HMU if you want to talk about it. https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/gofundme/jobs/7680986
@pschwahn and I met here and started talking about math. We did a lot of work here on Mastodon, trading posts. Eventually we found a new way to understand the symmetry group of the best known theory of particle physics: the so-called 'gauge group of the Standard Model'. And now our paper on this is out!
This group is well-known but still mysterious. It seems random. But we may have found a clue.
In quantum physics we often talk about qubits. But we also talk about qutrits, where a quantum system has 3 alternative ways to be, instead of just two. We can also study systems with more than 3 alternative ways to be.
Qubits and qutrits are described using complex numbers. But we can also do quantum mechanics using other number systems. The options have been mapped out, and the largest allowed number system for this purpose is called the 'octonions'.
A weird thing is that the octonions can describe qutrits, but not quantum systems with more than 3 alternative ways to be.
So, there's something special about octonionic qutrits - and it turns out that every symmetry in the gauge group of the Standard Model is a symmetry of an octonionic qutrit!
Now, not every symmetry of an octonionic qutrit is a symmetry of the Standard Model. But those that do have a simple description. They are those that restrict to give symmetries of an ordinary qutrit sitting inside the octonionic qutrit... and an ordinary qubit sitting inside that!
All this suggests an intriguing connection between the Standard Model and quantum information, where the octonions lie in the background, but we mainly see the complex numbers.
Or, all of this could be just a coincidence.
Do not provide your ID or facial scan to access social media.
I repeat, do NOT provide your ID or facial scan to access social media when requested.
This is not a drill.
If everyone refuse to comply, and let their accounts dormant instead, I promise you the platforms themselves, with their immense budget and network of lobbyists, are going to fight these absurd laws to recover their users.
They need you more than you need them.
Make them fight for your rights.
Do not comply.
Spread the word and boycott ID checks ✊
#StopIDSurveillance #AgeVerification #Privacy #HumanRights #Democracy #Safety #MassSurveillance #Authoritarianism