Powderhorn

My ex-wife's grandson hit a 104.7 fever, and she was not amused when I mentioned that was the frequency in MHz for KZZP in Phoenix in the '80s.

Like, when you've heard a jingle often enough, you can't just hear "104.7" and think "this is a terrible fever."

He's got Covid. Of course they didn't immunize him, because, well, I didn't marry for intellect. I'm not calling my wife an idiot; she just needs a bit of hand-holding to believe that she's come to the rational conclusion on her own.

It's somewhat excruciating to watch from afar. But once we start heading down the path of bad decisions that get us to this point, you'll be bored, and it won't excuse a fucking thing.

I'm feeling a pull back to her. She, back in 2009. warned me this would happen. She said that people somehow decide to be in her orbit, and she didn't understand why.

I know why, but ... no one else does. This ends up being a problem, as it makes our reconnection look arbitrary.

Over the course of 16 years, you learn to know what your partner is thinking, even if they haven't quite grokked it. You're ready to respond to the question that hasn't yet been asked.

I have been of late haunted by the image I see when trying to sleep. I'm at her door, crying and crumpling into a crouch, and I look up at her, and she kisses me deeply and then invites me inside.

I'd not head there if crying in reality, but I dislike the implication, because with her, we know how to make shit work.

For very brief periods of time.

Nonetheless, we are seemingly stuck with each other. Neither of us has found a better alternative in a fucking decade, which is twice as long as we were married.

We still do not use each others' names. If there's one thing that really stands out about our interaction, it's that names are the knives-out last resort. If we've gotten to names, someone's likely sleeping on the sofa.

And yet, though I don't want back into some fresh hell, I can't pull away from the other half of me. The one I can't feel via touch because it's just another limb.

Now in his fourth decade of spreading the word across most of the world’s continents about “Housing First”, an approach to helping homeless people that has convinced governments and non-profits alike to see housing as a human right, Sam Tsemberis experienced a first.

He was censored by the US government.

In the 1990s, Tsemberis began developing a simple idea: people living on the street want, and should have, safe housing with no strings attached. When you add accessible mental health and addiction services and caring, consistent case management, most stay housed. His research would bear out the idea, showing that Housing First results in at least 85% of people staying housed 12 or 24 months later, depending on the study. These are higher rates than any other approach that’s been studied.

The big bang wasn’t a bang in the traditional sense—but it was nonetheless the start of important things: for one, space; another, time. Thirdly, it began the conditions and processes that eventually resulted in us humans, who can sit here and wonder about space and time. The big bang was, effectively, the beginning of the universe. According to the logic of human brains, it seems like there must have been something before the big bang, even if “before” is the wrong word because there was no time until after.

The good news for us is that physicists do have ways of thinking about—and even empirically studying—the origins of the origin of the universe. Counterintuitive and impossible as it may seem, cosmologists are even making progress in determining which wild ideas might peel back the veil on that early era, even though it remains inaccessible to telescopes.

Even after cosmology became a hard science, the field was a bit sketchy, Ismael says. “The science was one-and-a-half facts,” she adds. The sentiment, she says, is usually attributed to physicist James Jeans. But that has changed in the past century or so as the philosophers’ musings have wandered into the realm of theory, experiment and data. “These old conceptual questions are arising in ways that have new angles, a new spin and a new framework,” Ismael continues.

It’s unclear whether science as a discipline—and scientists as people—will ever be able to answer some questions definitively. After all, no one can “see” before the big bang, and no one will ever be able to—at least not directly. But the current and future universe, researchers are learning, may contain clues about the distant past.

Amid questions over how Van Rootselaar was described in alerts, McDonald said police “identified the suspect as they chose to be identified” in public and in social media.

“I can say that Jesse was born as a biological male who, approximately six years ago, began to transition to female and identified as female, both socially and publicly,” he said.

I guess the right has their angle now.

Wikipedia editors are discussing whether to blacklist Archive.today because the archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blogger who wrote a post in 2023 about the mysterious website’s anonymous maintainer.

In a request for comment page, Wikipedia’s volunteer editors were presented with three options. Option A is to remove or hide all Archive.today links and add the site to the spam blacklist. Option B is to deprecate Archive.today, discouraging future link additions while keeping the existing archived links. Option C is to do nothing and maintain the status quo.

Option A in particular would be a huge change, as more than 695,000 links to Archive.today are used across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. Archive.today, also known as Archive.is, is a website that saves snapshots of webpages and is commonly used to bypass news paywalls.

“Archive.today uses advanced scraping methods, and is generally considered more reliable than the Internet Archive,” the Wikipedia request for comment said. “Due to concerns about botnets, linkspamming, and how the site is run, the community decided to blacklist it in 2013. In 2016, the decision was overturned, and archive.today was removed from the spam blacklist.”

Discussion among editors has been ongoing since February 7. “Wikipedia’s need for verifiable citations is absolutely not more important than the security of users,” one editor in favor of blacklisting wrote. “We need verifiable citations so that we can maintain readers’ trust, however, in order to be trustworthy our references also have to be safe to access.”

Well, fuck.

Actually, if you have a moment, fuck, fuck, fuckitty fuck mcfuckface.

Despite having a very clear idea of the reasons we can't work, she and I have apparently decided (without the express written consent of the NFL) damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

The ongoing problem is when we touch. I've been in her apartment for a total of five days over the past two months, and ... things did not go according to plan. We just ... I don't really know how to explain it, as it's ineffable.

My body does not register touching her. You might think this is a bad thing, and it is, but likely not for the reasons you imagine. Rather, neither of us recognizes the other as a foreign body. Touching her hand was like grabbing my right hand with my left the night we met, setting everything in motion.

We can still easily pull off "old married couple" interactions. Cards. A nice fire in the fireplace. Some cold beers. Good music. Getting into bed naked. For your listening pleasure, I'll stop there.

We did such a good job of hating each other for like eight years. This detente is welcome but also alarming, given why this has to remain a fantasy.

In 1869, a group of Massachusetts reformers persuaded the state to try a simple idea: counting.

The Second Industrial Revolution was belching its way through New England, teaching mill and factory owners a lesson most M.B.A. students now learn in their first semester: that efficiency gains tend to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually somebody else. The new machines weren’t just spinning cotton or shaping steel. They were operating at speeds that the human body—an elegant piece of engineering designed over millions of years for entirely different purposes—simply wasn’t built to match. The owners knew this, just as they knew that there’s a limit to how much misery people are willing to tolerate before they start setting fire to things.

Still, the machines pressed on.

So Massachusetts created the nation’s first Bureau of Statistics of Labor, hoping that data might accomplish what conscience could not. By measuring work hours, conditions, wages, and what economists now call “negative externalities” but were then called “children’s arms torn off,” policy makers figured they might be able to produce reasonably fair outcomes for everyone. Or, if you’re a bit more cynical, a sustainable level of exploitation. A few years later, with federal troops shooting at striking railroad workers and wealthy citizens funding private armories—leading indicators that things in your society aren’t going great—Congress decided that this idea might be worth trying at scale and created the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Measurement doesn’t abolish injustice; it rarely even settles arguments. But the act of counting—of trying to see clearly, of committing the government to a shared set of facts—signals an intention to be fair, or at least to be caught trying. Over time, that intention matters. It’s one way a republic earns the right to be believed in.

First off, no, they won't. The journalism of 30 years ago isn't coming back in any form. May as well be hoping for a resurgence of semaphore (granted, there is a news site with a closely related name).

"Normal" is a rather tricky thing to nail down in news, in much the same way that NOAA produces new "average" temperatures each decade to include only the prior 30 years.

What was normal in 1986 is not normal 40 years later.

The problem is, to break the problem of shareholder value, you would need thousands of people willing to buy papers, take on printing costs, hire lawyers ...

"But some papers are digital only," you may respond. Yes, and the proportion increases each week. When I learned the paper I worked at from 2010-2011 went to publishing a print edition only three days a week a few years later, it was a sign.

Time was, we had the monopoly on the AP feed locally, grocery circulars, what kid got a Little League trophy, and of course, quilting bees. Not to mention "Drunk Driver Runs Into Pole" (and we have art).

There are economic, systemic and sociological reasons for this. You may be able to shift one with out a clutch, but all three is an impossibility.

It is up to each of us to maintain media literacy and understand we're not going back to where we were. Vigilance is indicated.

This is admittedly from November, but it's the first deep-dive I've seen.

The story of the United States corn ethanol industry is a story about a sector that grew rapidly under a very specific set of policy, technology and market conditions. It filled a gap when gasoline demand was rising, when climate policy focused on incremental change, and when EVs were still a niche. It became a major part of the Midwestern political economy. It shaped land use patterns. It supported thousands of farmers and dozens of rural communities built around steady demand for transport fuel. That world is shifting and the signals point toward a twenty year horizon that looks very different from the previous twenty, with very significant implications for the Midwest’s economies and likely politics.

Corn ethanol grew from a small program focused on oxygenates into a national industry producing over 16 billion gallons annually, about 48 million metric tons. The Renewable Fuel Standard created guaranteed demand by requiring refiners to blend increasing amounts of ethanol into gasoline. Direct subsidies through the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit helped expand capacity. By the late 2000s the industry had become large enough to hold political weight in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota and Nebraska. Ethanol plants became anchor employers. Farmers gained a new buyer that consumed nearly 40% of the national corn crop. The system became predictable and self reinforcing. All gasoline sold in the country now has about 10% ethanol added, with some higher blends available in some places. Once direct subsidies expired, the mandate and a large fleet of internal combustion vehicles kept the industry stable. That stability is now being tested by structural changes in transportation and energy.

The first challenge appears in the gasoline market itself. EIA data from 2015 through 2019 shows finished motor gasoline stabilizing at roughly 140 billion gallons a year. The post pandemic rebound never reached that range again. By 2024 gasoline demand had slipped below pre pandemic levels even though the population was larger than in 2019. The shift is not a statistical quirk. Efficiency gains, hybrid penetration and improved powertrain design are pushing gasoline demand down. Even modest EV adoption affects fuel consumption more than most people expect because each EV replaces an entire household’s gasoline demand, not a small slice of it. Hybrid and work from home models that are common after COVID also inhibit demand. Gasoline peaks are rarely jagged events. They plateau and then begin slow but durable declines. Ethanol demand sits inside that shrinking pool. Rising blend rates cannot compensate if the base declines year after year.

The real opponent of digital sovereignty is "enterprise IT" marketing, according to one Red Hat engineer who ranted entertainingly about the repeated waves of bullshit the industry hype cycle emits.

During a coffee break at this year's CentOS Connect conference, The Reg FOSS desk paused for a chat with a developer who was surprised but happy to find us there. We won't name them – we're sure that they'd prefer to keep their job rather than enjoy a moment of fame – but we much enjoyed their pithy summary of how IT has faced repeated waves of corporate bullshit for at least 15 years now, and how they keenly and enthusiastically anticipate a large-scale financial collapse bursting the AI bubble.

This vulture has been working in the tech field for some 38 years now, and the Linux developer we spoke with has been in the business nearly as long. We both agreed that the late 20th century – broadly, the period from the early 1990s onward for a decade or so – had mostly been one of fairly steady improvement. Then, they suggested, roughly following the 2008 credit crunch, we've had some 15 years of bullshit in tech.

Developers looking to gain a better understanding of machine learning inference on local hardware can fire up a new llama engine.

Software developer Leonardo Russo has released llama3pure, which incorporates three standalone inference engines. There's a pure C implementation for desktops, a pure JavaScript implementation for Node.js, and a pure JavaScript version for web browsers that don't require WebAssembly.

"All versions are compatible with the Llama and Gemma architectures," Russo explained to The Register in an email. "The goal is to provide a dependency-free, isolated alternative in both C and JavaScript capable of reading GGUF files and processing prompts."

GGUF stands for GPT-Generated Unified Format; it is a common format for distributing machine learning models.

Llama3pure is not intended as a replacement for llama.cpp, a widely used inference engine for running local models that's significantly faster at responding to prompts. Llama3pure is an educational tool.

Weather agencies and climate scientists have pointed to the possibility of an El Niño forming in the Pacific Ocean later this year – a phenomenon that could push global temperatures to all-time record highs in 2027.

Both the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology have said some climate models are forecasting an El Niño but both cautioned those results came with uncertainties.

Experts told the Guardian it was too early to be confident, but there were signals in the spread of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific that suggested an El Niño could form in 2026.

The cycle of ocean temperatures in the Pacific – known as the El Niño southern oscillation (ENSO) – is linked with extreme climate events around the world.

When warmer-than-average waters gather in the east of the equatorial Pacific and extend to the coast of the American continent, this is known as an El Niño and tends to give global temperatures a boost and, in Australia, can be linked to drier and hotter conditions.