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kaberett

Got libgourou working ~~(link to follow)~~, with thanks to simont for bringing it to my attention and me_and for making sympathetic and encouraging noises while I stared muzzily at the documentation this evening. Happy to report that I have successfully downloaded Adobe DRMed ebooks from my command line without any Windows install or emulators at all.
I am enjoying A Physical Education so much - SO much - that I have gone out and bought a book it recommends (Starting Strength; very wordy descriptions of which muscles one should be using for what, apparently, i.e. exactly my kind of thing). Acquiring my own copy once I've given the library's back is a definite possibility. It's really interesting in terms of both the pain Project (memoir about embodiment!) and in terms of my own movement-related special interests (e.g. the gulf between my experience of largely self-led Pilates vs the version available via mainstream contemporary classes embedded in diet culture). Lots of content notes but I'm really really liking it. Gratitude to buttonsbeadslace for posting about it ~~(... link to follow...)~~
Stupid Little Walk yielded both very cheap pistachio croissants (MORE BREAKFAST NONSENSE) and a very cheap "cinnamon danish with vanilla fondant icing" I've been vaguely eyeing up but was also very suspicious of. I am glad to have tried it and probably won't get it again, even if it is only 19p.
This evening's tofu was particularly cooperative with being cooked. (Thanks be to evilsusan for the specific combination of courgettes, tofu and garlic that I still make regularly lo these many years later )
I hit refresh on Oxfam Online and discovered that the rotating sale has migrated back around to "30% off 3+ books". Thus now on their way to me I have: the first edition of Explain Pain for an astonishingly reasonable price (I want to do the deeply nerdy thing of a side-by-side comparison with the second edition, and also to revisit its structure while the second edition is on loan to a physio friend...); a book entitled Science of Pilates, which I'd previously eyed up but that time it sold before I got around to it; a book about allotments and cooking; and a probably questionable out-of-print 1980s cookbook...

kaberett

Ridiculous indulgent breakfast situation (though having now looked up Culinary Strata because A asked, I am extremely unconvinced that pistachio croissants with raspberries)... counts.
Therapy session, spent entirely talking about One Thing (with tendrils), has left me feeling distinctly more settled.
Today's primary Make Numbers Go Down project has been working my way through some of the short fiction I've had open in tabs since [mumble]. Highlight thus far is Naomi Kritzer's The Thing About Ghost Stories (cn parental death, dementia).
The other New Thing I started consuming today is A Physical Education, which is extremely and often graphically about diet culture and disordered eating, but which 11% of the way through the audio file I am Very Much Enjoying. Further updates to follow. (The library only has audio, I apparently put a hold on it seven weeks ago though I can't at this point remember where I came across it, and The First Headphones I Have Ever Tolerated remain excellent. Shokz OpenRun Pro.)
The Child liked the replacement mock cherries; spring flowers are excellent (we are firmly heading into daffodils now); Routine Dinner tonight DID work even though the app initially Frightened Me by claiming first available pickup was tomorrow morning.

kaberett

Made it to the plot! Brought home more salad than we actually wanted to eat this evening! Mostly lamb's lettuce but some bonus baby beetroot and spinach leaves :)
Also, the broad beans are starting to emerge (well, the ones that didn't get partly dug up and then abandoned on the surface unmunched, anyway; those have now been reinterred).
In the course of Making An Effort to Close More Tabs I rediscovered Standard Ebooks, and downloaded a bunch of things I'd apparently been interested in for Some Time: Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.
I spent some of the evening doing minor crafts with supplies A acquired, to make replacement cherries for a children's board game, using red wooden beans and green cotton string. I am mildly concerned that the Child might disapprove of the string being green rather than red, but We Shall See...
Cleeeeeeeeeen hair.

mark posting in

dw_dev

We've seen some questions lately about AI and how it relates to Dreamwidth, especially around scraping and training. Rather than answer piecemeal, I wanted to talk through how denise and I are thinking about this and try to be explicit about some things.

Dreamwidth is a user-supported service. We don't build the service around monetizing user data, and that informs how we approach AI just like it informs everything else we do.

Your content and AI training

Dreamwidth does not and will not sell, license, or otherwise provide user content for AI training. We have not and will not enter into data-access agreements for AI training purposes.

We will continue taking reasonable technical steps to discourage large-scale automated scraping, including known AI crawlers, where it is practical to do so. No public website can prevent scraping with absolute certainty, but we will keep doing what we reasonably can on our side.

AI features on Dreamwidth

Dreamwidth will not introduce AI features (and we have no current intention of doing so) that use or process user content without a public discussion with the community first.

We're only phrasing it like this because we can't predict the future and who knows what will be possible and available in five or ten years, but right now there's nothing we can see wanting to add.

If that ever changed, the conversation would happen openly before any decisions were made.

Site admin uses of AI

Keeping Dreamwidth usable means dealing with things like spam and abuse, and that sometimes requires automated admin tools to be more efficient or effective.

We are not currently using AI-driven systems for moderation or similar decisions.

If we ever decide that an AI-based tool would help address a site admin problem like spam, we will explain what we are doing and how it works (and ask for feedback!) before putting it into use. Any such tools would exist only to make it easier and more efficient for us to do the work of running the site.

AI and code contributions

Dreamwidth is an open-source project, and contributors use a variety of tools and workflows.

Contributors may choose whether or not to use AI-assisted tools when writing or reviewing code. Dreamwidth will not require contributors to use AI tools, and we will not reject contributions solely because AI-assisted tools were used.

For developers: if you use any AI-assisted development tools for generating a pull request or code contribution, we expect you to thoroughly and carefully review the output of those tools before including them in a pull request. We would ask the community not to submit pull requests from automated agents with no human intervention in the submission process.

I think it's important and I want to be able to review, understand, and maintain any contributions effectively, and that means humans are involved and making sure we're writing code for humans to work with, even if AI was involved.

Important note: this applies to code only. We expect any submitted images or artwork (such as for styles, mood themes, or anything else) to be the work of a human artist.

And to be very explicit, any AI-assisted development does not involve access to Dreamwidth posts or personal content.

In short summary

Dreamwidth does not and will not provide user content for AI training
Dreamwidth have not and will not enter data-sharing agreements for AI training and we will do what we can to prevent/discourage automated scraping by AI companies
Dreamwidth will not introduce AI features without a public discussion first
Any site admin use of AI tools will be explained openly and part of a public conversation
Contributors can choose their own development tools for code, but we do not accept images or artwork generated by AI

Oh, and we'll probably mention this (or a subset of this that isn't code related) in an upcoming dw_news post, but will defer to denise on that!

silveradept posting in

dw_dev

Oh, hi, everybody! It's been a little bit since we did a code tour, hasn't it? But never fear, we're here to walk you through the changes that have happened since the last time we took a tour through the code changes in Dreamwidth.

Let's dive in, shall we?

( Your code tour, with some attempts at arrangement by topic. )

There we go! Another year's worth of code commits, issues resolved, and attempts to make Dreamwidth a greater and cooler place to be. And to have it continue working into the future.

(We should do these more often, but volunteers and, well…*gestures broadly around*. So it may be a while before someone has the spoons to do this again, but we're always trying to be more consistent about it.)

Here are the totals for this code tour:

104 total issues resolved.
Contributors in this code tour:

Copilot,

alierak,

cmho,

dependabot,

jjbarr,

kareila,

l1n,

momijizukamori,

pauamma,

sirilyan,

zorkian

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Daft Punk - Touch It

kaberett

inCompleted White Puzzle!!! We were right about That One Piece being the missing one, and now that I'm not worried about spoilers I have poked the internet and it (mostly in the form of reddit) confirms that Those Are The Missing Bit.
one (1) orchid flower is all the way open!
supermarket had discount fancy croissant, so we are most of the way to prepped for Fancy Breakfast tomorrow morning :)

alias_sqbr

Rules: put your music on shuffle, and make a poll with the first 5 songs that appear to let folks vote for whichever they like best!

I was tagged by

gothyanki but I don't actually listen to playlists much these days, I either listen to specific albums/songs in a variety of ways, or the radio. Last time I did this meme I cobbled together a collection to randomise from, but this time I decided to just listen to the radio (specifically Double J) and write down the first five songs I like enough to theoretically listen to on purpose (though the only one I remember ever actually seeking out is "Weather With You" and then only because it was attached to other Crowded House songs I like more)

Poll #34287

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 5

View Respondents

Which do you like best?

View Answers

Promises: Mama Kin Spender
1 (20.0%)

Run: Flight Facilities
0 (0.0%)

The Bomb! [These Sounds Fall Into My Mind]: The Bucketheads
0 (0.0%)

Weather With You: Crowded House
3 (60.0%)

City of Angels: The Distillers
1 (20.0%)

Crossposted to tumblr, which means it has to be radio buttons. NO NUANCE as they say on tumblr.

kaberett

Reading. Finished The Rose Field (Pullman)!!! I am Making Arrangements for it to Leave My House. ( Read more... )

ANYWAY. I finished it. It Is Done.

Then read the first few pages of Dead Hand Rule (Gladstone; latest in the Craft Wars) before deciding that actually I need to reread at least the end of Wicked Problems in order to remember what's going on...

Writing. Progress continues both glacial and extant.

Listening. My relisten-while-actually-awake of the first chunk of The Hidden Almanac continues, slowly.

Playing. We have finished an Exploders run on Hard in Inkulinati. I am contemplating, given how smoothly that went, whether I want to have a try at Very Hard...

Cooking. It's not quite "this week's breakfast dal, and a loaf of bread", but it does sort of feel like it was. Partly because for reasons we did not get our usual box of veg on Monday last week, which meant that we were scrabbling around using up Shelf Things and the occasional Supermarket Discount Item...

NO WAIT, I also DID make buckwheat pancakes, and inspired by lnr combined Tinned Pear and Stem Ginger with Vanilla Essence and also Ground Cardamom to go in same. V good. Will repeat.

Eating. My mother acquired for us, as A Special Treat, a variety of Baked Goods from The Fancy Bakery In Eddington: my favourite is still the fig-and-?ricotta, but the blueberry-and-?ricotta is also very good, as is the fougasse. A was extremely pleased with the pain aux raisins. AND my mother made some excellent baba ganoush, eaten with said fougasse.

This week also feat. rainbow bagels (which we got to watch some of the manufacturing process for!) as well as misc other foodstuffs from Shalom Hot Beigels.

A has some coffee and butterscotch cake (leftovers from a test bake!) from Flour Arrangements; alas by the time I got my act together to actually collect Excess Test Cake the apple pie and lemon had both all gone...

Exploring. I got to spend a little time in the City of London Cemetery, which is currently ablaze with (among other things) purple crocuses; we also (on our second attempt) managed to go on A Snowdrop Walk Around Anglesey (with thanks to aldabra for reminding me that it is That Time Of Year still!). Snowdrops excellent. May or may not get around to sharing some photos. (Our first attempt at A Snowdrop Walk Around Anglesey Abbey wound up mutating into a poke around the back of Churchill and Astronomy to peer at bulbs and other plants misc, which was also very enjoyable even if I did once again fail to take A to see the Barbara Hepworth.)

Growing. ... I bought a bag of snowdrops In The Green at Anglesey, to go into the ground around the cherry tree at the allotment? The lemongrass seedlings haven't all died?

jadelennox

I take a lot of pictures of three classes of things:

Cats: This pictures are good on any camera, including my agéd single-lens SE.
Birds: These pics are shit on the aforementioned handheld phone.
Moss and lichens and bugs: These pics are fine on the phone, but could be much better.

My real constraint is my hands and arms. I can't hold my arms above my head, I can't hold a phone still very long, the non-ergonomic controls and shape of a phone are shit, I realistically can't carry a tripod on a hike, and I can't bear weight on my shoulders or the back of my neck for any length of time. (I recognize that this collection of constraints means my pictures will never be great, and that's okay.)

So, questions:

Are there any cameras that have particularly good ergonomics, are particularly light, or have a good reputation for accessibility?
I believe I could get a remote shutter trigger & a remote focus, so I could prop the camera somewhere and get a good pic from a less painful angle; do you know how to choose a hand-friendly one? (Not finger-fiddly, easy to attach & detach, easy to click buttons.)
On a modern camera, is it possible to get lenses good enough for bird pics that are not, you know, heavy? Last time I had an SLR I was taking pictures on film, so that tells you how out of date my knowledge is.
What's the lightest tripod that works well for people with shit fine motor control and no finger strength? I can sort by weight on hiking sites, but hikers put up with a lot of fiddly controls that I can't handle.

(I'm only looking for advice from your experience or from the experience of people you trust. Please don't GoogleKagiGoPT it for me!)

alias_sqbr

Watch on YouTube

alias_sqbr

I didn't watch Dunc and Egg but Cam did, and he found himself thinking about how fun it could be to have a story where a somewhat loner knight (disgraced/unproven/just antisocial, whatever) takes on a determined and surprisingly knowledgable page, who he eventually realises is a girl in disguise, and they have Adventures (but no romance, preferably)

He asked if I knew of any stories like that, since it feels like a really obvious premise, and I felt like I must have seen something along those lines by Tamora Pierce/ Mercedes Lackey etc but nothing came to mind. eg the Alanna series has the crossdressing page part but not the loner knight, Kel doesn't have the cross-dressing, etc.

So I come to you! At this point we're mostly just curious if it exists at all, but actual recs are definitely not unwelcome. Books/tv/movies, whatever.

kaberett

Breakfast dal. This experiment continues to work extremely well.
I have definitely reached the point with the Incomplete White Puzzle where it's speeding up significantly on account of enough pieces are in place to significantly reduce the number of possible combinations that need checking. Today's decision was to start filling in from the bottom edge, where I still had a chunk that was just edge and no middles, because I think that up in the top left (interior) corner I've identified The Missing Piece, and will get annoyed if I wind up with non-contiguous gaps...
Today alternating Locate One Puzzle Piece with Do One Useful Job has been nice and smooth and easy. I have got Several things done. Is pleased.
Really really enjoying my ridiculous washi tape collection. Today I self-indulgently Added More Week Dividers, including replacing some pre-existing ones that I was Not Enjoying, Actually.
( Exercise & embodiment. )

vass

Books
Finished (last week) Ursula Whitcher's North Continent Ribbon. As everyone said, it really is very good (and, moreover, I really liked it.) What impressed me the most was the structure: I was expecting a collection of short stories linked by theme and setting. I hadn't known the order of the stories and their timeline would amount to a novel in itself.

Finished (last week) Asterix and the Golden Sickle and didn't really... get it. I don't think I know anyone who read the Asterix books and didn't love them, but I feel like I'm missing something.

Maybe it's that the literary conventions of comics have moved on over the decades, to the extent that the level of exposition makes me feel like a modern science fiction reader reading pulp SF from the 1930s, or a modern TV viewer grappling with the stage conventions of Elizabethan or even ancient Greek theatre. As in: oh, you're explaining that again, alright. Oh, you're explaining that too? Okay.

Unfortunately I'm also unfamiliar with the history, societies, and cultures of Gaul in 50 BCE, so I'm probably missing most of the charm, to say nothing of the Easter eggs.

Read (this week) Balancing Stone by Victoria Goddard, and it was okay. I have now read all of the Greenwing & Dart books currently available, and have a clearer idea of what's happened yet in that part of the Nine Worlds, which is useful for fandom purposes. But I don't really like G&D. It's not for me. But I like some of its fans.

Finished (this week) KC Davis' How To Keep House While Drowning. Mainly a mixture of things that wouldn't work for me but which I could see working for someone else; concepts and skills that do work for me that I'd already learned but could have been absolutely vital if I hadn't learned them yet; and a few nuggets I didn't know as well as plenty that I knew but for which I could use a refresher or some reinforcement.

Reading Sarah Kurchak's I Overcame My Autism And All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder on audiobook. I forget who recommended it (Rydra?) but I'm surprised at just how much I'm relating.

Fandom
Received this lovely, meditative story by

justjourneys for Fanoa'ary: Love Beyond Definition.

I wrote Charting a Course for

Crackfoxx, on the prompt "I want the version of Kip being Fitzroy's wingman that includes the joy and the spreadsheets. Let me be very very clear. This expression of love must actually include spreadsheets.", went nearly entirely for rule of funny over characterisation or plausibility, and had way too much fun with the CSS and HTML.

Side note: who here knew what AO3's HTML parser does if you didn't close a <strike> tag?

...Bad, isn't it? (If you guessed "Everything from the open tag down to the end of the chapter is struck through", you're... well, you're not wrong, but you are underestimating the scope of the problem.)

Links

If only this discussion thread about a mathplotlib pull request were a mixed media work of fiction, and not a case in point of how things are going in tech at the moment, I would enjoy it so much.

Garden
Still alive, producing about a handful a week of tiny ripe cherry tomatoes.

Cats
Are a serious threat to the local plastic mouse from KMart population. Are also very good alarm cats when it's time to wake up in the morning and I don' wanna, very alarming.

kaberett

I have introduced my mother to this, I have introduced the Child's household to this, I am writing it down because clearly It Is Time for me to do so.

( Read more... )

kaberett

Specifically: I find myself in possession of both a superking duvet cover and a deep fitted double sheet that are mostly Genuinely Nice Cotton... and have both got holes worn through them in one specific place.

I have accepted about myself that I am not a person who will tolerate sleeping on patched bedsheets (because Textures). I am loathe to just hand them over to rag recycling. I am scared of trying to sew anything out of them, but might manage it with some encouragement.

I would greatly appreciate people Being Opinionated on this topic.

kaberett

Yesterday afternoon I'd been discussing auditor traps. Yesterday evening we walked out of the supermarket and were confronted by

three signs across a blocked-off road: DIVERSION pointing right, ROAD CLOSED, DIVERSION pointing left

[description in alt text, better to follow]

jesse_the_k

The singer and the band are all on roller skates performing Bend Your Knees by Henry Mansfield & Digital Velvet! It’s an NPR Tiny Desk contest entry. Lyrics on bandcamp, video on YouTube or…

( Stream it Here )

Thanks to clevermanka for sharing Fabulous, an absolute banger in both fashion and music from MEEK. Not work-safe since the chorus repeats “fucking” 42 times. Video on YouTube with accurate captions and lyrics in the description or …

( stream it here )

jadelennox

Maura Healey on state agreements with ICE: “I support them” (via the_mass_dump_feed):

At her January press conference, Healey said she was “prohibiting state agencies from entering into any new 287(g) agreements unless there is a clear and imminent public safety need.” But that part of her executive order contains so many caveats as to be completely meaningless. By only prohibiting new agreements, Healey is keeping the existing one.

“I actually support that agreement,” she said. “When you’re incarcerated under … the custody of the Department of Correction, that means you’ve done something pretty bad.”

The whole post is worth reading. It's a complex situation for activists to respond to because the current situation is an improvement over the pre executive order status quo, and the activist groups need to encourage the governor to do more. And yet also, what an absolute trash human.

All my reactions to "when you’re incarcerated under the custody of the Department of Correction, that means you’ve done something pretty bad" (eg. "no it doesn't oh my god" and "as a society we've agree upon a term of incarceration for certain crimes and when that term of incarceration is over we consider the person to have paid their debt to society" and "the DOC operates multiple minimum security facilities where people work in town and there aren't even walls" and "this is what happens when your governor was the attorney general" and "I guess that's why you don't care about the deaths of Ayesha Johnson and Shacoby Kenny who were only in the county jail" and "ugh the worst east Arlington lesbian is the worst") but mostly my reaction is just flames on the side of my face and also I know you all can say it better than I can.

So, you know. If I were a good person I'd get involved in the fuckery of the Massachusetts Democratic Party but I ain't got the juice. (Tarik Samman is running against Katherine Clark, at least.)

Anyway, support BIJAN, Maura Healey sucks.

jadelennox

one of my more annoying traits is that if I wouldn't like something that I know other people enjoy, I find it very difficult to do for the person who'd enjoy it because it feels rude to me. I wouldn't like it, after all, so why should I do it to someone else?

I know is this is messed up, especially because I often dislike being asked about my day, or being thanked, or receiving presents, or receiving any but very specific forms of recognition. (The Mortifying Agony of Being Seen is a real bugger.)

Apropos of nothing, james makes absolutely gorgeous crafts.

Current Mood: thankful

kaberett

Reading. A Variety of books with the Child, including One Fish, Two Fish and A Squeeze and a Squash.

For my own purposes I have been continuing with The Rose Field, Philip Pullman, and I do indeed continue unimpressed. Not enough to stop! But.

I also picked up What Is Queer Food? (John Birdsall) from the library when I was having an insomnia; I have made it most of the way through the introduction but I am not yet grabbed.

Writing. Words... increase.

Listening. More Hidden Almanac catch-up! "While doing the laundry" or indeed "weeding" continues to work quite well.

Playing. Puzzle progresses! I am not calculating current %age but Significant Progress.

I think we did a leeeeettle bit more of our current run of Inkulinati? But it is petering out.

Cooking. Pineapple upside-down banana bread! This time with some ground almond in it. Otherwise I think... very little of note.

Eating. I was very excited to get to try a Neuhaus dark chocolate poppy seed praline, which on the one hand was not actually quite as dark as I would like and on the other has given me Ideas.

Growing. I got some broad beans in the ground?

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Ricky Buchanan

Not Done Living!

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Reading

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some good things!

some good things.

some good things

AI and Dreamwidth

Your content and AI training

AI features on Dreamwidth

Site admin uses of AI

AI and code contributions

In short summary

Code Tour: 2024-12-01 to 2026-02-25

some good things make a post

Music Meme Poll

vital functions

advice from camera nerds

Music: Full Flower Moon Band – Smoking ft. Drunk Mums

Fantasy story with loner male knight and cross-dressing female page

some good things

Things

[food] the kale thing

what does one do with Sad Bedsheets?

particularly timely

Music Monday: Two Rockin’ Videos

Signal Boost: Maura Healey on 287g agreements: “I support them” ie. ACAB

playing tricks on my brain to get around the buggy pathways

vital functions

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