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To the fair folk of the Fedi.

However you choose to deal with the festivities, or don't, or can't, I wish you at least some joy and peace. We are on our way out of the dark and since long before memory or record, humans, it seems, have deemed this worthy of celebrating, at least in some way. But, this may be no more than remembering who you are and realising that the world around us, for all its horror and fear, is still a place of beauty and grace. That there is still kindness and joy and magnificence and the simplest things can show us the most.

So be yourself, enjoy, or not, yourself in the ways that you want to. Let go of shouldn't and what if and all the should be's that plague us. This is not just a time for others, it is your time too. A time to embrace the moment and what we can and we what we have, no matter how little that may seem to be, all the small things and all the great, the stars and the moon (even though we don't have the paperwork for those, and yes, that was a Pratchett reference.) the wind in our hair and everything in between. A time to dream, a time to shine.

Have a good one and wishing you all the best.

#Christmas
#ActuallyAutistic

#christmas #actuallyautistic

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friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

I am dangerously close to unleashing my first #emacs package on the public. It's nothing fancy and still relatively niche, but I deem it potentially useful enough to be worth publishing.

There are a couple small features I want to add and a few things that still need some polish, but it's almost ready for a version 0.1 release.

It's not anything ground breaking or anything. I'm still pretty much an #elisp novice, but I'm proud of it anyway.

More details when it's released.

#emacs #elisp
in reply to Álvaro R.

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Jonathan Lamothe

@Álvaro R. At this point all I need to add is a README and two features (which will mostly reuse code I've already written just in a slightly different way).

Surprisingly enough, the hardest part of the whole project was getting it to display numbers with thousands separators. That code might exist in the bowels of the calc package, but it was easier to just roll my own.

@Álvaro R.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Jonathan Lamothe

Okay, my first #Emacs package is officially released. It was strongly inspired by @Soroban Exam Website's work, providing practice tools for the #soroban. This is the first Emacs package I've ever released. It's probably not perfect, but I welcome feedback on how it can be improved.

I wonder if there is an overlap of more than say five people who are both soroban and emacs users. 🙃

Anyhow, it can be found at: codeberg.org/jlamothe/soroban

#emacs #soroban @Soroban Exam Website

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in reply to Soroban Exam Website

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Jonathan Lamothe

@Soroban Exam Website Might as well. I wrote it mainly for myself, partly because I don't own a printer and this makes it easier to practice when working from a computer screen, but also just to see if I could.

Still, if someone else is going to find it useful, that's probably the place I'll find them.

@Soroban Exam Website

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Katy's been down a YouTube rabbit hole on $medical_condition lately. Today we watched a yoga video that purported to relieve one of the symptoms. Cool cool, yoga can have benefits. Let's give it a go. Some of the instructions in this video were oddly specific but whatever, that's fine. Then we read the comments and my cult alarm started blaring.

This was a video with millions of views and an untold number of comments. Some of them were downright scary in their praise for this guy* and there wasn't a single remotely negative comment to be found.

Not one. I looked.

Someone is really dedicated to sliencing dissent on this video, and I can't imagine that being anything shy of a full-time job. That is probably one of the most massive red flags there is.

* e.g.: "Who needs western medicine? $youtuber is always the answer."

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Maybe the best way to fight AI taking over our media, is to stop supporting the arts with clicks on ads and subscription fees?

Go see a new band.
Watch a play.
Visit a gallery and talk to an artist.

Maybe if we made it more about supporting artists, and less about cammodifying the arts for our convenience, we won’t have to lose one of the things that makes humanity great?

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viva supeR

The digital domain forces a change of model.
Y BUT Y, that is: digital leftcopY BUT physical rightcopY.
The digital domain is freely accessible, but commercial exploitation remains the prerogative of the author; in all other domains, all rights remain with the author or artist.
Public Administration should then monitor the circulation of digital works and citizens’ preferences, and accordingly fund the artists who publish under a Y BUT Y license.
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The US TikTok sale has been signed. The company will be controlled by a joint venture including Oracle, Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, Abu Dhabi-based MGX. Adding a UAE company really makes it clear that this was never about national security concerns.

axios.com/2025/12/18/tiktok-sa…

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It isn't smart to try to hire above average skilled people and then encourage them to communicate through any medium that munges what they wrote into what software guesses an average person would have been likely to write.

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Mozilla right now.

#firefox #mozilla

#firefox #mozilla
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

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Laurent Cimon

while the recursive name certainly helps, pizza developers use proprietary ingredients while mac and cheese development is fully free. The source code is in the name!

Although you could argue that Kraft Dinner is proprietary, but that's like a proprietary version of UNIX. People just go to it for nostalgia knowing it's way outdated, and any attempt to replicate it will give a better result.

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I swear to you, my hands are freezing cold right now.🥶I'm sleeping without a blanket.Ieven put my blanket on my baby so Ican keep him warm.Life is truly so unfair😞
I'm freezing! 🥶😭Oh world
I'm freezing!🥶😭Oh world
I'm freezing!🥶😭Oh world
Please, let your kindness warm me tonight so I can buy myself a blanket🙏🥺
chuffed.org/project/161145
Please🙏😞🙏 @gvenema
@tekul @AnnaLion
#Gaza #Palestine #GazaVerified #genocide #famine #warCrimes #StopIsrael #StopTheGenocide #mutualAid
@kathimmel
@divya

Help us save my family in Gaza from hunger and killing.

Chuffed
#famine #Palestine #Genocide #WarCrimes #Gaza #mutualaid #StopIsrael #stopthegenocide #gazaverified @kat donegan (she/her) 🇵🇸✊ @Dr. Divya 🍉 offline @Anna Li-On @Gerrit 🇪🇺🌍🍉🔻 @小羊肖恩
This entry was edited (Tuesday, December 23, 2025, 8:19 AM)

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friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
ph
Going in for a medical procedure (probably nothing to be worried about) that's going to require me to start a clear liquid diet tomorrow morning. It's gonna suck, but at least 12 years as a Mormon taught me how to deal with being hungry for an extended period (because fasting). I made sure to eat well for my last meal tonight though.
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Quality products from Acme. Accept no substitutes.

#LooneyTunes #joke #TrolleyProblem

#joke #looneytunes #trolleyproblem

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If you want a rigorous analysis of why statistical #AI models collapse when continuously trained on their own data without external supervision and constraints, read this amazing paper from last year.

If you want to get a visual intuition of how model collapse looks like, look at this video.

When AI stares at its own reflection for too long, and its inference is purely rooted on statistics rather than reasoning, this becomes statistically inevitable.

Keep this in mind whenever you hear someone talking about “AI models learning from their own outputs” without addressing the statistical parrot issue.

AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data - Nature

 Analysis shows that indiscriminately training generative artificial intelligence on real and generated content, usually done by scraping data from the Internet, can lead to a collapse in the ability of the models to generate diverse high-quality out…
Nature
#AI
This entry was edited (Monday, December 15, 2025, 12:45 PM)

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posted about my Apple ID woes, please share widely?

hey.paris/posts/appleid/

20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple

Here’s how Apple “Permanently” locked my Apple ID. I am writing this as a desperate measure. After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer, authoring technical books on Apple’s own programming languages (Objective-C and Swift), and spending tens upon ten…
Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison (hey.paris)
in reply to DG1JAN 🇪🇺

akkoma - Link to source

rowan!

glad you have the luxury and privilege to spend exorbitant amounts of time fucking with linux servers but not all of us do.

btw i noticed you arent the admin of your instance. also your site and code is hosted on github (microsoft).

@parisba

@Dr Paris (he/him)
This entry was edited (Sunday, December 14, 2025, 11:12 PM)

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
elisp nonsense

I've been playing around with keymaps. Apparently they can be used to create menus that give the user a visual list of options. The canonical way to make them is aparently with make-sparse-keymap to create the menu and define-key to add options to it, but this causes some confusing behaviour.

Take the following example:

(let ((menu (make-sparse-keymap "My menu")))
  (define-key menu "a"
    '(menu-item "Foo" foo))
  (define-key menu "b"
    '(menu-item "Bar" bar))
  menu)

Yields the following:
(keymap (98 menu-item "Bar" bar) (97 menu-item "Foo" foo) "My menu")

Each new entry is added to the top of the list, so when the menu is displayed, they're listed in reverse order. This is very counter intuitive.

Now, I understand that the nature of lists in lisp make inserting an element at the top of the list less computationally expensive, but when you've already got to walk the whole list anyway to ensure the key binding isn't already present, this no longer feels like an adequate excuse.

Am I missing something?

#emacs #elisp

#emacs #elisp

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I virtually never set custom keybindings in #Emacs preferring instead to rely on M-x function calls because I had such a hard time finding key sequences that weren't used by something else. Since learning that C-c /[A-Za-z]/ is reserved for user-defined keybindings, I've gone mad with power.
#emacs

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#PSA: Calling someone cringe is cringe.

Just let folx like stuff :floofPlead:

Don't try to blow out someone else's candle because yours is dim.

#PSA

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friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
nerdy computer stuff

I've long known that certain ASCII control sequences could be mimicked by holding control and pressing a key, e.g.: backspace is CTRL-H, newline is CTRL-J, but I was today years old when I learned that the ASCII control code is just the ASCII value of the key being pressed along with control bitwise and-ed with 0x1f.

It feels weird that I hadn't caught onto this sooner.

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
more venting

Welp, it looks like our Instacart account is probably cooked. We need to find a replacement for that income quickly.

Fortunately, we were already in the process of trying to do that because of the wear and tear it was putting on the car. I have a few irons in the fire, but nothing concrete yet. We need something we can do on an on-demand basis so that we can work when our mental health permits.

I'm notoriously bad at interviewing for jobs. It always involves some element of exaggerating the truth (a.k.a. lying) which I suck at. It turns out for instance that the honest answer to "why do you want to work here?" (so I don't starve and end up homeless) isn't a good answer. 🙃

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My retirement account is doing great this month, thank you very much.

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friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
venting about the medical system in Ontario (vague for privacy reasons)

My partner has been dealing with $condition for a very long time. In that time we have tried many therapies and medications without much success. We have found $medication_a which actually helps, but causes $side_effect which is not sustainable. Fortunately, we've found $medication_b which makes $side_effect tolerable.

She's been on a waiting list to see a specialist for a while and finally had her first appointment today. After a single 30 minute appointment, his solution was to increase $medication_a while completely stopping $medication_b. When she objected about $side_effect (which she'd already told him was the reason for $medication_b) he said to just do $obvious_thing as though we hadn't tried that already.

What's worse is that he faxed the order to our pharmacy canceling her previous prescriptions.

Of course, I am not a doctor but what the hell is this guy thinking??

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friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
Long-winded post about Emacs and gripe about modern computing

I think I've been able to pin down what it is that I like about #Emacs so much. When I first started using computers, I was using a TRS-80. If you didn't have a cartridge inserted, It'd boot directly into BASIC where you could program the machine directly. That wasn't a bug, it was a feature.

Modern computing seems to do its best to hide all that stuff away. Everything is treated more like a simple (albeit specialized) appliance, not a powerful machine that can be made to do literally anything you want. Instead, it's about what the various software vendors want it to do.

Emacs by contrast not only gives you all the tools you need to modify it in any way you want, but actively encourages you to do so. It feels a lot more like the computing systems of old. Perhaps that's not for everyone. There's a reason computers were so niche back in the early days. Most people just didn't care to learn what was going on under the hood, and that's valid. There's something to be said for a tool that just works effortlessly out of the box. Also, to be clear, you don't strictly speaking need to dig into the internals to use Emacs, but I prefer for my technology to serve me, and I'm willing to put the effort in to make that happen.

That's why it's a good fit for me.

#emacs
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🎶 AMBIENT MUSIC EVENT 🎶

Second Unitarian Church of Omaha
3012 S.119th St.
Doors at 7, show starts at 8pm
FREE
#livemusic, #ambient, #music

#music #livemusic #ambient

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