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Boosted by denschub@schub.social ("Dennis Schubert"):
lislis@toot.cat wrote:

I'm looking for a beginner/noob pcb design tool. Bonus if I can order low quantities right after the design process. Any recommendations? :boost_ok:

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
mathias@rhizospherelabs.com wrote:

Folks that do software and analog electronics: (and please boost for visibility)

Is there an OSS tool that simulates analog circuits for signals? In particular, I want something that I can script and write expectations of the output signals for given inputs. And ideally that scripting would include programmatically adding/removing/changing components in the simulated circuit and then testing the outputs.

Thanks!

#electronics #analogElectronics #simulations #programming

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
lisyarus@mastodon.gamedev.place ("Nikita Lisitsa") wrote:

New blog post! I really hope I'll get a decent amount of people mad with this one 😈😈😈

It's OK to compare floating-points for equality:

https://lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/its-ok-to-compare-floating-points-for-equality.html

#programming #computing #floatingpoint #geometry

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
eff ("Electronic Frontier Foundation") wrote:

Today, EFF sent complaints to the attorneys general of California and New York urging them to investigate Google for deceptive trade practices over Google's broken promises to users targeted by the government 🧵(1/4) https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-state-ags-investigate-googles-broken-promise-users-targeted-government

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
rdm@aus.social wrote:

It is early in the morning on Sunday, and I am opening the back door to see if there are any ripe lemons on the tree.

Instead I almost tread on a fox. Curled up and asleep.

Now, you have to understand that ever since Europeans settled here, we have had Japanese immigrants as well. Some by choice, some ... less so.

This is why I am not too surprised to see that the fox has three tails. My opening the door has not awakened it, so I step over and continue on to the lemon tree. There are two ripe lemons this morning, which suits me just fine.

I have another look at the fox on the way back, just to make sure, but there is no sign of any injury. I step over again, and leave the screen door ajar.

Charlie is still asleep upstairs as I start putting breakfast together. I am cooking pancakes, and I know the smell of them will wake her up. Eventually.

I'm on the fourth one when I feel a nose in the back of my knee. I look down at the fox, and nod towards the crockery cabinet. "Can you get some plates out please? The medium ones." I ask.

The fox looks at the cabinet, back at me, back to the cabinet, and sneezes. The young woman standing in its place sticks her tongue out at me "You're no fun" she says in a broad accent.

"I'm Toby, Charlie's husband. A kitsune is fairly normal by my standards. Now, do you want bacon on your pancakes?"

"Sally. Your wife, Charlie? She's the witch?"

"Yep. What's the problem?" As I speak, I put some bacon on as well.

"Um, I need some help finding Mum."

"She's missing?"

"Yes? No? Sort of? I was adopted. And, well, I had no idea what I was until a year ago."

"Are you in trouble?"

"No, but I don't know what I should do. I um, I like this guy back home, but there's also my best friend, and they don't know about me and I don't know what to do."

The last came out with a bit of a whine, and she blushed, clearly embarrassed by it all.

I smiled a sympathetic smile "OK, I'll get Charlie, and let's get you sorted. If I know how these things go, it will not be too bad. But first, breakfast. Tea or coffee?"

"Um, do you have hot chocolate?"

"Of course." Plus the smell of chocolate will get Charlie down here even quicker than the coffee and pancakes.

#CharlieAndToby #SF #SFF #UrbanFantasy #microfiction #tootfic #microfic #IAmWriting

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

"Postal Service union launches ad campaign promoting mail voting as Trump assails the method"

https://journa.host/@samlitzinger/116404027611130106

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
Tarale@aus.social wrote:

You ever need to pull over immediately because there's a rainbow?

You ever need to pull over a second time (but somewhere more picturesque) because it only intensified while you drove?

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

you know i think all those consumer brands that were shutting down are about to start right back up.

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

wahey, RAM prices are starting to crash

Boosted by dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase"):
whitequark@treehouse.systems ("✧✦Catherine✦✧") wrote:

alright here we go https://codeberg.org/keepasschi

(linked post)

pzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:

I might agree in part and in principle with Dawkins here, but I have to agree with Hasan in practice.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/04/14/whats-an-atheist-to-think/

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/prSoI46EkBg

Boosted by zkat@toot.cat ("Katerina Marchán"):
aesthr@wandering.shop ("Æ.") wrote:

Every single time I try posting a little more on here again, stuff like this happens and I remember why I spend my time elsewhere (namely bluesky). I really with it wasn't like this but it is.

Sure, I can mute, block, and report but there's always more. It never ends.

The Fediverse has a massive toxic-masculinity problem and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

you know how c requires pointers to be adequately aligned or else UB? what performance benefits does being able to do that bring to the table?

ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕") wrote:

Thanks to everyone who joined us on the #Owncast today with me and Drew. Really enjoying streaming there, and we get a good number of viewers and chat. Ten-times better than YT or Twitch.

Follow on @fblive

Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
twipped@twipped.social ("Jocelynephiliac :reclaimer:") wrote:

This is a very interesting perspective on the tech collapse. Yes, high interest rates and the loss of tax writeoffs for R&D have contributed a lot, but the biggest abandon may just be because there's not a large need. Thats why tech pivoted so hard into trying to find applications for LLMs and machine learning, there wasn't anything else to show growth in.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47759588

Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
d_stepanovic ("Dragan Stepanović") wrote:

The risk with removing parts of your delivery process that you think you don't need anymore because "AI can do it" - such as teasing out the mental model of how the system works from the heads of people who own the system - is that you get to discover, often way too late, what some of the purposes of that practice were and the benefits you didn't recognize you were getting.

Assumptions you don't know you're making. Unknown unknowns.

1/2

Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
scroeser@kolektiva.social ("sky") wrote:

Actually I think it's agonisingly embarrassing that there are so many small moments when it's difficult to do the right thing in front of kids.

"Sorry, we don't have time to stop and pick up that litter someone else dropped."

"That person is sleeping there because they don't have a home, and there's not much we can do to help"

Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
scroeser@kolektiva.social ("sky") wrote:

My four-year-old and I stopped to check on someone who was getting arrested today.

She had made it clear that she did want help, and I checked on with my kid as well before approaching.

The police officer tried to tell me off. "Do you think this is the kind of thing you want your kid to see? Do you think this is good parenting?"

Yeah, actually! If we see something happening that seems wrong, I want my kid to see me doing something about it!

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
Gustodon@mas.to ("Ω 🌍 Gus Posey") wrote:

Donald understands blockades in the same way that he understands crowd sizes.

#USPol

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

this suxs

https://www.masslive.com/education/2026/04/hampshire-college-to-close-after-years-of-financial-struggles.html

h/t @StillIRise1963

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
TheConversationUS@newsie.social ("The Conversation U.S.") wrote:

Medicaid enrollment surged during the pandemic, then tumbled during the ‘Great Unwinding’. A health economist who studies the effects of public policy on insurance coverage looks at how paperwork and particular state policies influence who is still covered.
https://theconversation.com/25-million-people-lost-medicaid-after-the-covid-19-pandemic-and-state-policies-shaped-who-stayed-covered-277599

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
wdlindsy@toad.social ("William Lindsey :toad:") wrote:

"On Monday, a federal judge dismissed Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal. The lawsuit alleged that the Wall Street Journal defamed Trump when it reported on a bawdy letter allegedly authored by Trump in 2003 in celebration of Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday."

~ Judd Legum

#Trump #Epstein #WallStreetJournal #courts

https://popular.info/p/update-judge-dismisses-trumps-10

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
brucelawson@vivaldi.net ("Bruce Lawson ✅ ♫ ♿ ✌️♂️✊") wrote:

Man Who Threw Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s Home Claims He Was Following ChatGPT Recipe For Risotto https://theonion.com/man-who-threw-molotov-cocktail-at-sam-altmans-home-claims-he-was-following-chatgpt-recipe-for-risotto/

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
wdlindsy@toad.social ("William Lindsey :toad:") wrote:

"All over Fox News and social media, conservatives are absolutely losing their minds over birth rate dips, and are upset that teenage girls aren’t having babies like they used to. ...

When I was a kid in the 1990s, it was conservatives even more so than liberals who wrung their hands about 'babies having babies.'”

~ Jill Filipovic

#Republicans #MAGA #GreatReplacement #ReproductiveRates #BirthRates #babies #WhiteSupremacy #TeenMothers
/1

https://www.throughline.news/p/want-more-babies-make-more-girlbosses

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
wdlindsy@toad.social ("William Lindsey :toad:") wrote:

"Now the Pope is saying, Now let me tell you what the scriptures really say. And let me just meet you with the scripture. It's not my words. It's not my politics. It's not my policy. I'm just going to hit you with the scriptures. Blessed are the peacemakers, the children of God. Blessed are the meek."

"In a real sense, with Donald Trump, what you have at MAGA is a war on divinity."

~ William J. Barber

#Trump #PopeLeo #PaulaWhite #FranklinGraham #narcissism #WhiteChristianNationalism #MAGA
/5

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
wdlindsy@toad.social ("William Lindsey :toad:") wrote:

"One thing that I love of what's happening right now is the Pope is not speaking as a political figure or as a politician. What he is doing is quoting the scriptures ans exposing these hustlers like Paula White and Franklin Graham and all the rest of them who have been hijacking the scriptures to pump this guy up and justify all their evil, their wickedness that they've been doing."

#Trump #PopeLeo #PaulaWhite #FranklinGraham #narcissism #WhiteChristianNationalism #MAGA
/3

aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart") wrote:

So to follow up on this, I've caught it in action. Models, when quantized a bit, just do a bit more poorly with short contexts. Even going from f32 (as trained) to bf16 (as usually run) to q8 tends to do okay for "normal" context windows. And q4 you start feeling like "this model is a little stupid and gets stuck sometimes” (it is! It's just that it's still mostly careening about in the space of "plausible" most of the time. Not good guesswork, but still in the zone)

And then at Q2 (2 bits per parameter) or Q1, the model falls apart completely. Parameters collapse to zero easily. You start seeing "all work and no play makes jack a dull boy” sorts of behavior, with intense and unscrutinized repetition, followed by a hard stop when it just stops working.

And quantization is a parameter that a model vendor can turn relatively easily. (they have to regenerate the model from the base with more quantization, but it's a data transformation on the order of running a terabyte through a straightforward and fast process, not like training).

If you have 1000 customers and enough equipment to handle the requests of 700, going from bf16 to q8 is a no-brainer. Suddenly you can handle the load and have a little spare capacity. They get worse results, probably pay the same per token (or they're on a subscription that hides the cost anyway so you are even freer to make trade-offs. There's a reason that subscription products are kinda poorly described.)

It's also possible for them to vary this across a day: use models during quieter periods? Maybe you get an instance running a bf16 quantization. If you use it during a high use period? You get a Q4 model.

Or intelligent routing is possible. No idea if anyone is doing this, but if they monitor what you send a bit, and you generally shoot for an expensive model for simple requests? They could totally substitute a highly quantized version of the model to answer the question.

There are •so many tricks• that can be pulled here. Some of them very reasonable to make, some of them treading into outright misleading or fraudulent, and it's weirdly hard to draw the line between them.

pzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:

Paperwork submitted. I am officially unemployed as of April 2027.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/04/14/its-official/

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

The slides for the talk with all of the references. Lots of worthwhile reading there

https://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/papers/Bender-ISU-2025.pdf

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

"Resisting Dehumanization in the Age of "AI": The View from the Humanities, Emily M. Bender"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7Lc6QNxolQ

> What if we had a bunch of money that came in from tobacco interests? Would we have a series of grants to explore how tobacco can enhance teaching and learning?