tal

Note that this is something specific to the GSA, not a broad reversal of all federal layoffs.

Looks tasty! I'm a sucker for buttered and toasted sourdough or rye.

This culture isn’t nearly as sharp as a San Francisco germ

Apologies if this is obvious to you, but IIRC from past reading, commercial sourdough achieves a higher acidity without needing to use the specific yeast via just adding acid directly. If you aren't dead-set on authentic, "the yeast do everything" sourdough, you could probably tweak sourdough to taste that way.

kagis

Okay, this isn't talking about what commercial producers do, but it is directly talking about increasing tang in homemade sourdough via the "directly-add-acid-to-the-dough" route:

https://www.pantrymama.com/how-to-make-sourdough-more-sour-a-guide-to-getting-more-tang-in-your-bread/

Use Citric Acid In Your Sourdough
If you really want a stronger flavor in your sourdough bread, adding a little citric acid to your dough will help.
You can add ⅛ to ¼ of a teaspoon of citric acid to your sourdough. Do not use more than this amount because it will make your sourdough inedible.
You add the citric acid to your dough along with the water, flour and salt.

I kind of feel that on the whole, if the Democrats are going to choose a battlefield, "who can more-effectively misrepresent the other side as communist" may not be the most favorable one.

If I liked short-form video, which I have not been very impressed with, I'd probably watch YouTube Shorts rather than either.

Searches on Kagi, a la "googles" -> search on Google.

Problematic content specifically targeted includes posts inciting fan group clashes

That what now?

kagis

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-china-is-cracking-down-on-its-online-fandom-obsessed-youth/

Fandoms and their capacity for collective action were also one of the largely untold stories of China’s fight against the COVID-19 epidemic in its early stage. In January 2020, as it became clear that an epidemic had emerged in Wuhan and surrounding areas, the government response was far too slow in many key areas, including the provision of protective equipment. By contrast, the networks already formed within fandom culture—the same that allowed mobilization in support of chosen idols—enabled the rapid marshalling of resources. On Jan. 21, 2020, one day after China confirmed human transmission of COVID-19, the fan network of Zhu Yilong, a young actor originally from the city of Wuhan, mobilized funds to purchase more than 200,000 protective masks. These and other supplies were delivered to Wuhan within 24 hours, offering much-needed support for medical personnel and others on the front lines. The aid offered by the Zhu Yilong network is just one of many examples of how online groups provided a crucial means of support amid a rapidly unfolding crisis.
Perhaps more worrying for the CCP has been their potential for mobilization on a global scale. Within 10 days of China’s formal acknowledgement of the coronavirus outbreak in January 2020, a group of 27 fandoms from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan known as the “666 Alliance,” had sourced nearly half a million-yuan worth of medical supplies for use in Wuhan. As one Chinese scholar wrote of fandoms in 2020: “They are a huge population, are well-organized, and have a clear division of labor, giving them an explosive power many would find astonishing.”

Oh, for Pete's sake.

"Here, have a nice state-approved idol to be a fan of."

I thought about recommending that myself, and while I imagine that a dry-cleaner would be more authoritative, it sounds like the chemical they frequently use, "perc", dissolves glue, which is used there to attach the objects.

Not even Halo CE man,

I mean, he's right, though. It's been a while.

Halo: Combat Evolved came out in 2001, 24 years ago.

Go back to 2001 and hack off 24 years, and you're at 1977. In 1977 --- late in 1977 --- the Atari 2600 was released, so the equivalent would be an early Atari 2600 game. If you were playing Halo: Combat Evolved when it was new and someone proposed playing an early Atari 2600 game, it'd be hard to call it anything but retrogaming with a pretty hard emphasis on the "retro".

EDIT: It also does kind of highlight, I think, how the rate of change of video games has kind of slowed a lot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atari_2600_games

It looks like only nine Atari 2600 games were out in 1977. I think the only game on there I have played is Combat. I remember having fun with it, but if you compare Combat and Halo: CE versus Halo: CE to a current video game, the rate of change has fallen way off.

Don't care

I don't watch ABC --- though I'll occasionally look at their website --- but I do care. I think that it's a positive not to have Kimmel kicked off over this.

However, after returning it to the Turo owner and having the suspension damage evaluated by Tesla, the repair job was estimated to be roughly $10,000. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a similar situation with this accident.

Hmm. That makes me wonder.

Like, it's hard for me or for Joe Blow to evaluate how effective a car company's self-driving functionality is. Requires expertise, and it's constantly changing. And ideally, I shouldn't be the one to bear cost, if I can't evaluate risk, because then I'm taking on some unknown cost when purchasing the car.

And the car manufacturer isn't in a position to be objective.

But an insurer can do that.

Like, I wonder if it'd be possible to have insurers offer packages that cover cost of accidents that occur while the car is in self-driving mode. That'd make it possible to put a price tag on accidents from self-driving systems.

Honestly, I'd happily post to a LessCredibleDefense, but nobody's yet created it, and I don't want to moderate a community and do one myself, so I'm using NCD as the closest thing until someone up and does it.

Reddit had three "tiers" of seriousness:

Credible Defense: This expects material to be cited, have people who really know what they're talking about. This is kinda stifling, and a lot of people can't really engage in conversation at this level.

Less Credible Defense: Weakens those requirements. There is currently no equivalent to this on the Threadiverse.

Non Credible Defense: Shitposting, memes

Does there need to be an LCD yet? I don't know. Personally, I don't think that there's enough traffic to warrant breaking out a lot of communities --- like, there just isn't a large-enough userbase for most video-game-specific forums that existed on Reddit to exist, not enough users to keep them alive. I think that there's a better case for an LCD than them...but even NCD doesn't have a whole lot of traffic today, and CD is basically a ghost town.

For anyone else not familiar with hyperpop:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperpop

Hyperpop is an electronic music movement and loosely defined microgenre that originated in the early 2010s in the United Kingdom. It is characterised by an exaggerated or maximalist take on popular music, and typically integrates pop and avant-garde sensibilities while drawing on elements commonly found in electronic, rock, hip hop, and dance music.

Yeah, I don't like Trump even "joking" about things --- especially since he often then claims that he was 'just joking' about something to justify having said things. I don't want Newsom lowering the bar on joking about censorship or similar such things.

Frankly, I'm not interested in this social media politicking in the first place, but regardless of that, I think that Newsom can manage to criticize Trump in other ways if he really looks for it.

Personally, I'd rather not have my elected representatives not engage in shit-flinging on social media in the first place, but I suppose that politicking is politicking, and it's not only my preferences that matter in getting elected, and some people clearly do revel in that sort of thing.

But I also think that part of the problem with Trump is that he's intentionally violated lines on social norms that I don't want violated. I want as few politicians as possible even "joking" about using the legal system to go after their political opponents, things like that. Just legitimizes and popularizes the idea.

EDIT: I'd also add that I'm personally really skeptical that this is actually a good idea politically, at least for the Democratic Party as a whole.

As I understand it, the primary political goal that Trump has is mostly peeling off enough white, blue-collar voters from the Democratic electorate to tilt things towards the Republican Party, people from post-industrial areas around the Midwest and the like. Things like encouraging racial conflict between them and other members of the Democratic coalition or focusing on wedge issues there are useful, and a lot of why Trump tries to create conflict.

If you're a leading Democratic politician --- perhaps even a future presidential candidate nominee --- I don't think that you want to be encouraging cultural divisions like that. That's only facilitating that division. You don't want to actively go manufacture an image for the Democratic Party as "anti-country music" or whatever.

What do you think: should all government software be open source?

No. I think that there are some things that should very much not be open source or even have binaries distributed, stuff like things like software used for some military purposes. You wouldn't want to distribute it with abandon to the world any more than you would the weapons it drives or is used to create.

Datacentres also rely on water, to help cool the humming banks of hardware. In the UK the Environment Agency, which was already warning about a future water shortfall for homes and farming, recently conceded the rapid expansion of AI had made it impossible to forecast future demand.
Research carried out by Google found that fulfilling a typical prompt entered into its AI assistant Gemini consumed the equivalent of five drops of water – as well as energy equivalent to watching nine seconds of TV.

I mean, the UK could say "we won't do parallel-processing datacenters". If truly and honestly, there are hard caps on water or energy specific to the UK that cannot be dealt with, that might make sense.

But I strongly suspect that virtually all applications can be done at a greater distance. Something like an LLM chatbot is comparatively latency-tolerant for most uses --- it doesn't matter whether it's some milliseconds away --- and does not have high bandwidth requirements to the user. If the datacenters aren't placed in the UK, my assumption is that they'll be placed somewhere else. Mainland Europe, maybe.

Also, my guess is that water is probably not an issue, at least if one considers the UK as a whole. I had a comment a bit back pointing out that the River Tay --- Scotland as a whole, in fact --- doesn't have a ton of datacenters near it the way London does, and has a smaller population around it than does the Thames. If it became necessary, even if it costs more to deal with, it should be possible to dissipate waste heat by evaporating seawater rather than freshwater; as as an archipeligo, nearly all portions of the UK are not far from an effectively-unlimited supply of seawater.

And while the infrastructure for it doesn't widely exist today, it's possible to make constructive use of heat, too, like via district heat driven off waste heat; if you already have a city that is a radiator (undesirably) bleeding heat into the environment, having a source of heat to insert into it can be useful.:

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/06/sustainable-data-centre-heating/

Data centres, the essential backbone of our increasingly generative AI world, consume vast amounts of electricity and produce significant amounts of heat.
Countries, especially in Europe, are pioneering the reuse of this waste heat to power homes and businesses in the local area.

As the chart above shows, the United States has by far the most data centres in the world. So many, in fact, the US Energy Information Administration recently announced that these facilities will push the country’s electricity consumption to record highs this year and next. The US is not, however, at the forefront of waste heat adoption. Europe, and particularly the Nordic countries, are instead blazing a trail.

That may be a more-useful strategy in Europe, where a greater proportion of energy is --- presently, as I don't know what will be the case in a warming world --- expended on heating than on air conditioning, unlike in the United States. That being said, one also requires sufficient residential population density to make effective use of district heating. And in the UK, there are probably few places that would make use of year-round heating, so only part of the waste heat is utilized.

looks further

The page I linked to mentions that this is something that London --- which has many datacenters --- is apparently already doing:

And in the UK, the Mayor of London recently announced plans for a new district heat network in the west of the city, expected to heat over 9,000 homes via local data centres.

I mean, I'm listing it because I believe that it's something that has some value that could be done with the information. But it's a "are the benefits worth the costs" thing? let's say that you need to pay $800 and wear a specific set of glasses everywhere. Gotta maintain a charge on them. And while they're maybe discrete compared to a smartphone, I assume that people in a role where they're prominent (diplomacy, business deal-cutting, etc) probably know what they look like and do, so I imagine that any relationship-building that might come from showing that you can remember someone's name and personal details ("how are Margaret and the kids?") would likely be somewhat undermined if they know that you're walking around with the equivalent of your Rolodex in front of your eyeballs. Plus, some people might not like others running around with recording gear (especially in some of the roles listed).

I'm sure that there are a nonzero number of people who would wear them, but I'm hesitant to believe that as they exist today, they'd be a major success.

I think that some of the people who are building some of these things grew up with Snow Crash and it was an influence on them. Google went out and made Google Earth; Snow Crash had a piece of software called Earth that did more-or-less the same thing (albeit with more layers and data sources than Google Earth does today). Snow Crash had the Metaverse with VR goggles and such; Zuckerberg very badly wanted to make it real, and made a VR world and VR hardware and called it the Metaverse. Snow Crash predicts people wearing augmented reality gear, but also talks about some of the social issues inherent with doing so; it didn't expect everyone to start running around with them:

Someone in this overpass, somewhere, is bouncing a laser beam off Hiro's face. It's annoying. Without being too obvious about it, he changes his course slightly, wanders over to a point downwind of a trash fire that's burning in a steel drum. Now he's standing in the middle of a plume of diluted smoke that he can smell but can't quite see.
It's a gargoyle, standing in the dimness next to a shanty. Just in case he's not already conspicuous enough, he's wearing a suit. Hiro starts walking toward him. Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider, these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all of the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.
The CIC brass can't stand these guys because they upload staggering quantities of useless information to the database, on the off chance that some of it will eventually be useful. It's like writing down the license number of every car you see on your way to work each morning, just in case one of them will be involved in a hit-and-run accident. Even the CIC database can only hold so much garbage. So, usually, these habitual gargoyles get kicked out of CIC before too long.
This guy hasn't been kicked out yet. And to judge from the quality of his equipment -- which is very expensive -- he's been at it for a while. So he must be pretty good.
If so, what's he doing hanging around this place?
"Hiro Protagonist," the gargoyle says as Hiro finally tracks him down in the darkness beside a shanty. "CIC stringer for eleven months. Specializing in the Industry. Former hacker, security guard, pizza deliverer, concert promoter." He sort of mumbles it, not wanting Hiro to waste his time reciting a bunch of known facts.
The laser that kept jabbing Hiro in the eye was shot out of this guy's computer, from a peripheral device that sits above his goggles in the middle of his forehead. A long-range retinal scanner. If you turn toward him with your eyes open, the laser shoots out, penetrates your iris, tenderest of sphincters, and scans your retina. The results are shot back to CIC, which has a database of several tens of millions of scanned retinas. Within a few seconds, if you're in the database already, the owner finds out who you are. If you're not already in the database, well, you are now.
Of course, the user has to have access privileges. And once he gets your identity, he has to have more access privileges to find out personal information about you. This guy, apparently, has a lot of access privileges. A lot more than Hiro.
"Name's Lagos," the gargoyle says.
So this is the guy. Hiro considers asking him what the hell he's doing here. He'd love to take him out for a drink, talk to him about how the Librarian was coded. But he's pissed off. Lagos is being rude to him (gargoyles are rude by definition).
"You here on the Raven thing? Or just that fuzz-grunge tip you've been working on for the last, uh, thirty-six days approximately?" Lagos says.
Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they're talking to you, but they're actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro's cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation.

I think that Stephenson probably did a reasonable job there of highlighting some of the likely social issues that come with having wearable computers with always-active sensors running.

kagis

It does sound like there are people who have been working on synthesizing spider silk for some time. So maybe we'll get there in our lifetimes.

https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qiy6x/what_is_keeping_us_from_making_synthetic_spider/

What is keeping us from making synthetic spider silk?
Hey, I can tackle this one because I work in a lab where we ARE making synthetic spider silk.
First off, the collection of natural silk or the farming of spiders is difficult on a large scale. This is due to spiders being cannibalistic and territorial. So what we've done is create transgenic organisms that create the spider silk proteins for us. These organisms include goats, silkworms, bacteria and alfalfa.
Problems still exist overall. For example, for every organism, except silkworms, we must spin the protein fibers ourselves. This is the current bottleneck in the production line. After the long process of protein purification, the proteins are dissolved in an organic solvent, and pushed through a long thin needle into an alcohol coagulation bath. The fibers are then treated by different methods to try to increase the strength further. Currently, we can take 1 gallon of goats milk and purify between 1 and 10 grams of protein. From 1 gram of protein we an spin hundreds of meters of silk. The silk is not as strong as the native silk, but stronger than Kevlar and silkworm silk. We are currently working on optimizing this procedure, as well as up-scaling it.
The other promising organism is the transgenic silkworms. The benefit of the silkworms is they spin the fibers for us. The most recent data show that a fiber containing 5% spider silk proteins increase the strength of the silkworm silk by 50%. If we can increase the amount of protein in the silkworms, it may be the most promising way to produce large amounts of silk, due to the infrastructure for silk manufacturing already existing for silkworm cocoons.
Currently, I am working on a couple of projects. One is mixing different ratios of silkworm silk and spider silk (created from bacteria), and finding the changes in mechanical strengths. It is unlikely we can go much higher than 20% spider silk proteins with out competently knocking out the silkworm genes altogether (which may be a future project). Another project I am working on is trying to create a human ACL from transgenic silkworm silk/spider silk fibers. We will be cabling and braiding the fibers in different way to find the best method of creating ligaments.
So, in closing, we are making synthetic silks; however, only in the lab. Once the technology is optimized, it will be moved into industry and many different applications may come from it.

https://www.science.org/content/article/black-widows-spin-super-silk

The silk of the humble spider has some pretty impressive properties. It’s one of the sturdiest materials found in nature, stronger than steel and tougher than Kevlar. It can be stretched several times its length before it breaks. For these reasons, replicating spider silk in the lab has been a bit of an obsession among materials scientists for decades.
Now, researchers at the University of Cambridge have created a new material that mimics spider silk’s strength, stretchiness and energy-absorbing capacity. This material offers the possibility of improving on products from bike helmets to parachutes to bulletproof jackets to airplane wings. Perhaps its most impressive property? It’s 98 percent water.
“Spiders are interesting models because they are able to produce these superb silk fibers at room temperature using water as a solvent,” says Darshil Shah, an engineer at Cambridge’s Centre for Natural Material Innovation. “This process spiders have evolved over hundreds of millions of years, but we have been unable to copy so far.”
The lab-made fibers are created from a material called a hydrogel, which is 98 percent water and 2 percent silica and cellulose, the latter two held together by cucurbiturils, molecules that serve as “handcuffs.” The silica and cellulose fibers can be pulled from the hydrogel. After 30 seconds or so, the water evaporates, leaving behind only the strong, stretchy thread.
The fibers are extremely strong – though not quite as strong as the strongest spider silks – and, significantly, they can be made at room temperature without chemical solvents. This means that if they can be produced at scale, they have an advantage over other synthetic fibers such as nylon, which require extremely high temperatures for spinning, making textile production one of the world’s dirtiest industries. The artificial spider silk is also completely biodegradable. And since it’s made from common, easily accessible materials – mainly water, silica and cellulose – it has the potential to be affordable.

Shah and his team are far from the only scientists to work on creating artificial spider silk. Unlike silkworms, which can be farmed for their silk, spiders are cannibals who wouldn’t tolerate the close quarters necessary for farming, so turning to the lab is the only way to get significant quantities of the material. Every few years brings headlines about new inroads in the process. A German team has modified E-coli bacteria to produce spider silk molecules. Scientists at Utah State University bred genetically modified “spider goats” to produce silk proteins in their milk. The US army is testing “dragon silk” produced via modified silkworms for use in bulletproof vests. Earlier this year, researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden published a paper on a new method for using bacteria to produce spider silk proteins in a potentially sustainable, scalable way. And this spring, California-based startup Bolt Threads debuted bioengineered spider silk neckties at the SXSW festival. Their product is made through a yeast fermentation process that produces silk proteins, which then go through an extrusion process to become fibers. It’s promising enough to have generated a partnership with outdoor manufacturer Patagonia.
But, as a 2015 Wired story points out, “so far, every group that’s attempted to produce enough of the stuff to bring it to the mass market, from researchers to giant corporations, has pretty much failed.”

considers

I think that with thermoplastic, the problem is that you're extruding a liquid that hardens as it cools. Unless you have very good information about the particular filament used, a very good model of how it acts as it cools, good control over airflow, and good control over (or at least sensors to get a very good awareness of) environmental temperature, you're going to have a hard time extruding something at precisely the right rate such that it cools into exactly the shape you want. Also, you're facing the constraint of keeping the thermoplastic in the extruder at the right fluidity. Maybe you could...have the filament be melted, then enter some kind of heated pump...that'd help decouple the rate at which you need to extrude from the temperature at which you want to have the already-extruded material.

In theory, it's possible to move a 3D printer's extruder and extrude at just the right rate such that you could run a line from point A to point B without regard for support. But in practice, I think that current thermoplastic printers would have a long way to go before they could reliably do that.

That being said...

A printer that could print in spider silk --- or a printer that could print in multiple materials, including spider silk --- might have some neat applications.

https://www.science.org/content/article/black-widows-spin-super-silk

Need a strong elastic fiber? Try black widow silk. The thread spun by these deadly spiders is several times as strong as any other known spider silk--making it about as durable as Kevlar, a synthetic fiber used in bulletproof vests, according to a report presented here at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.

I mean, I'd kind of imagine that you could maybe even use that in some sort of composite, to strengthen other printed things in various ways.

Now I kind of want a black widow spider silk 3D printer.

Yeah, there's some value to sales information.

considers

Amazon does provide some information.

goes to Amazon, picks a random product

https://www.amazon.com/HANPOSH-Military-Stopwatch-Waterproof-Chronograph/dp/B0CGX3SBJF

3K+ bought in past month

That's a bit limited, but camelcamelcamel already scrapes Amazon for price history, and so even if they aren't already grabbing sales volume history, my guess is that Amazon exposing this is probably already functionally exposing a fair bit of information about sales history.

checks camelcamelcamel

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0CGX3SBJF

Nothing about sales volume, so if they are scraping that as well, they aren't currently exposing it to users. But I imagine that they could. It may be that competitors or various manufacturers in the industry already look at this to get some idea of what consumer demand is like.

And just the quantity of reviews will expose some data about sales volume. I mean, if an item has 15k reviews, then they're going to have sold more than 1000 units.

tal

@ tal @olio.cafe

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tal

Trump administration rehires hundreds of federal employees laid off by DOGE

Sourdough accomplished

Harris on Trump: ‘We’re dealing with a communist dictator’

Who would win in a battle to the death, a lion or a knight in full armor?

Australia may have to choose between a Chinese TikTok and one owned by Trump’s billionaire backers

China bans negative online posts and ‘sensational conspiracy theories’

China bans negative online posts and ‘sensational conspiracy theories’

possible to clean the backing fabric of this art?

Stan Kelly (The Onion) - Throwback and Forth

Jimmy Kimmel's show returning on Tuesday, ABC announces

Tesla coast-to-coast FSD crashes after 60 miles

Germany explores how to replace France in Europe’s flagship fighter jet project

Hyperpop

Governor Gavin Newsom "Suspends" Kid Rock From Playing in California

What do you think: should all government software be open source?

Heather Stewart: Labour cosies up to US tech firms with little thought of downsides

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg unveils new smart glasses powered by AI

Explain that

Explain that

Every little thing I buy, within a couple weeks is followed by an email asking me to leave a review. For EVERYTHING! WTF do they do with their billions of reviews?