Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Zou fijn zijn als de kluisjes van de apotheek een modus hadden voor als je cognitief niet in topvorm bent. Na drie keer verkeerd intoetsen wordt het toch een beetje gênant 🙈

TIL that frogs, sharks, salamanders and a few other cold-blooded creatures have a third eye that helps them thermoregulate called the "pineal eye" (bc it works with the pineal gland)

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

WANTED: Intel Architecture Labs 1990’s CD-ROM’s. They appear to have maybe been monthly. They contained a mirror of Intel’s ‘download.intel.com’ ftp server, specifically the /ial/ subdirectory which is not in the 2014 backup of the site on archive.org.

Lots and lots of white papers and design guideline documents in there. Especially looking for ones from the late 1990’s (1998-ish onward) if they exist. I’ve seen references in mailing lists to them that lead me to believe they do.
Example gem: intel trying to cover its ass after the FDIV bug, and have some more FDIV

Bestowing cursed knowledge time, the website of crt.sh is just an apache module that talks to Postgres and the website is generated from within the database itself from a 5k line plpgsql function

https://github.com/crtsh/certwatch_db/blob/master/fnc/web_apis.fnc

#Spotted at a Second-Hand Book Fair in Aotearoa New Zealand:

A woman (60s?) wearing a sequinned black beret and a fluffy pink jumper is showing a friend her cookbook finds. She says: "I LOVE cookbooks. I don't often make the recipes but they're so good for ideas even if you don't follow them."

A young human (7?) is inspecting $1 mystery novels as Mum selects a generous stack. He asks: "How do you know if they're good ones?"
His mum shrugs with a grin: "I don't! I'll give them a read and see. That's a part of the adventure. I never know where I'm going to go next!"

A woman (70s?) is inspecting cookbooks over her reading glasses. With raised eyebrows she says: "French tarts, I wonder what they're like." Her friend cackles wickedly and says: "Come on Daph, with the colourful life you've led I'm sure you've had your share."

A brisk woman (60s?) in a blue cardigan is volunteering at checkout. A man (80s?) approaches and she says: "Ah! You've got a dictionary. You're a man after my own heart."
He looks down at it, then up at her with a serious frown: "I find the words mean more if they come in a heavy book."

A man (70s?) walks up next to his partner who is browsing art books. He pecks her on the cheek and says: "Take as long as you want, love. The science fiction selection is excellent this year and I may be some time."

The typos spotted in this post are a bit under this weather this morning. If spotted, send them back to bed with a lemon honey and a hot water bottle.

"A new dataset, visualized as maps, reveals the extent to which African workers are indirectly employed in the tech sector, doing content moderation, customer service, and data annotation for AI models, among other jobs."

https://restofworld.org/2025/big-tech-ai-labor-supply-chain-african-workers/

People who moan about Europe not having a Google or Meta. Because of regulation and shit and because (of course) we in Europe don't like success.

It's always funny, because to me, the system is working. I don't want an unregulatable, too-big-to-fail hot mess of a company in Europe.

This may not be 100% intentional and I am not saying that EU regulations are without fault.

I just become increasingly suspicious of people who advocate for slashing them.

New Blog!

There is lots of RFC1918 space out there, yet most people use the same 10 /24 subnets

I ended up having my OOB LAN collide with someones home network a few weeks ago, and decided to find a new subnet to use that won't collide backed up with actual usage data!

Picking uncontested private IP subnets with usage data

https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/picking-unused-rfc1918-ip-space

Havenarbeiders in Marseille weigeren ‘container met wapens voor Israël’ te laden https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/06/05/havenarbeiders-in-marseille-weigeren-container-met-wapens-voor-israel-te-laden-a4895889?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon&utm_term=20250605

anyone from Switzerland or somewhere has academic access to this PDF so that I get to graciously read works of my own culture kindly appropriated and paywalled by Swiss academics?
https://yareta.unige.ch/home/detail/d3724499-2c21-4103-b188-e274f798b3b2

Dat geeft ook gelijk aan dat uitlegbare AI alleen zichzelf uitlegt en niet de vraag van de onderzoekers zelf kan beantwoorden. Het model weet helemaal niets over de wereld of wat een dode zee-rol is of wat het concept “jaar” betekent. Het koppelt data aan elkaar om zo veel mogelijk verbanden te leggen op de manier die je hem had aangeleerd.

De schrijvers van de dode zee-rollen wisten ook niet dat de linker pixelrij van elke letter belangrijk zou zijn (of zo. Ik verzin dit).

Wat deze onderzoekers goed hebben gedaan is dat ze het algoritme achteraf altijd vragen “waarom hoort deze score bij dit plaatje?” Dat antwoord kan er bijvoorbeeld uitzien als een kopie van het plaatje waar sommige pixels rood zijn (tellen zwaar mee voor de score) en andere grijs (tellen niet mee) en weer anderen ertussenin. Ik weet niet wat ze hier precies gebruiken, maar dat is een van de methodes van “uitlegbare AI”.

I'm getting pretty close to 'smoke detector out-of-battery beep', I think