Normally, I do not read book reviews. Either I haven't read the book, in which case there's spoiler potential, or I have, in which case it's unlikely to be useful or enjoyable for me to read a thing about a thing I've already read.

But Review: Radiant Star caught my eye, and I thought, “Hmm, I've read all those books” and was curious. Of course, because I am old and senile and have no understanding of time, the “May 2026” staring at me was not able to trigger the neural synapses that would remind me that I haven't read any Ann Leckie since 2023.

However, as I read Russ's review, and began to wonder what the hell he was talking about, I was able to piece together that while I have, in fact, read 6 Ann Leckie books, none of them have been Radiant Star.

This presented an opportunity, so I resolved to add Radiant Star to my todo list. To my surprise, it was already there.

The UX of jj's builtin merge editor finally became too much for me. So, I looked at the list of merge tool options, saw vimdiff, and thought, “Oh, cool, I know how to use vimdiff.” So, I launched jj config edit --user, added a ui section, and set merge-editor to vimdiff. With the new config, I ran jj resolve again. It was at that point that I realized that I do not, in fact, know how to use vimdiff: I only know how to use vimdiff with two buffers. What appeared in my terminal was a 4-pane monstrosity. Why are there four panes? I'm trying to resolve conflicts between only two changes on only one file. For a moment, I nearly go down a rabbit hole, because this says that by default, vimdiff is “barely useable” [sic]. Should I be installing some addon or a Python script? Apparently there are tradeoffs. I just want to resolve these conflicts without doing line-by-line approvals for how ever many hours that would take.

Accordingly, I ran away in terror, installed meld, set merge-editor to meld, and went clicky-clicky in the GUI. I'm not happy using a GUI, but at least it didn't have a mysterious extra buffer to confuse and taunt me.

sq network keyserver search $id ; sq cert export --cert=$id > $id.asc

One of the servers to which I SSH ratcheted up its public key requirements and thus the Monkeysphere key I've been using for 15 years stopped working.

Unfortunately, monkeysphere gen-subkey hardcodes RSA keys and if I'm going to be forced to use a new subkey I want mine to be of the 25519 variety. Therefore, to add a subkey by hand:

gpg --expert --edit-key $KEYID

Follow roughly what's in /usr/share/monkeysphere/m/gen_subkey, but change the key type to 11 (ECC (set your own capabilities)), don't bother with Encrypt capability, and pick Curve25519.

monkeysphere subkey-to-ssh-agent and agent-transfer will be all happy with the "ed25519" subkey without any code modifications, and you won't need to rewrite monkeysphere from scratch to use Sequoia for the next 15 years.

I've been working on a multi-label email classification model. It's been a frustrating slog, fraught with challenges, including a lack of training data. Labeling emails is labor-intensive and error-prone. Also, I habitually delete certain classes of email immediately after its usefulness has been reduced. I use a CRM-114-based spam filtering system (actually I use two different isntances of the same mailreaver config, but that's another story), which is differently frustrating, but I delete spam when it's detected or when it's trained. Fortunately, there's no shortage of incoming spam, so I can collect enough, but for other, arguably more important labels, they arrive infrequently. So, those labels need to be excluded, or the small sample sizes wreck the training feedback loop. Currently, I have ten active labels, and even though the point of this is not to be a spam filter, “spam” is one of the labels.

Out of curiosity, I decided to compare the performance of my three different models, and to do so on a neutral corpus (in other words, emails that none of them had ever been trained on). I grabbed the full TREC 2007 corpus and ran inference. The results were unexpected in many ways. For example, the Pearson correlation coefficient between my older CRM-114 model and my newer CRM-114 was only about 0.78.

I was even more surprised by how poorly all three performed. Were they overfit to my email? So, I decided to look at the TREC corpus for the first time, and lo and behold, the first spam-labeled email I checked was something I would definitely train all three models with as non-spam, but ham for CRM-114 and an entirely different label for my experimental model.

Why can't Debian have embarrassing flamewars like this thread?

∵ unmerged /usr is unsupported in bookworm and sid has been feeding bookworm since 2021-08-14,

unmerged /usr is also unsupported in sid since 2021-08-14,

no one using any portion of either bookworm or sid since 2021-08-14 should have any expectation that things should function correctly with unmerged /usr ,

∴ anyone using any portion of either bookworm or sid should execute apt install usrmerge or perform its equivalent on or prior to 2021-08-14.

Mom,

When you upgrade to bullseye, you need to change your security source from

deb http://security.debian.org/ buster/updates main

to

deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security bullseye-security main

However, that will silently fail to work if you forget to update the file in /etc/apt/preferences.d to add something like this stanza:

Explanation: Debian security
Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,n=bullseye-security
Pin-Priority: 990

Who are the voting members of the Free Software Foundation?

This story is not true.

In 1971, Atlantic Records released John Prine's eponymous debut album. The third track (on the first side) was a song called “Hello in There”.

In 1972, Atlantic Records released Bette Midler's debut album, The Divine Miss M. The seventh track (the second track on the second side) was a song called “Hello in There”, written by John Prine.

In 1973, Asylum Records released Tom Waits's debut album, Closing Time. The sixth track on that album was a song called “Martha”.

Later that year, Bette Midler's concert tour took her to Radio City Music Hall in New York City, where she performed from December 3 until December 22. On one of those nights, she sang “Hello in There” while a young John Prine sat in the cheap seats, thinking to himself, “Someday I'll be up on that stage.”

In 1977, both Tom Waits and Bette Midler, who were dating, released albums with a duet by Waits called “I Never Talk to Strangers”.

In 1979, Bette Midler, who was no longer dating Waits, performed on Saturday Night Live a version of “Martha”.

On Friday, April 13, 2018, Sturgill Simpson took the stage at Radio City Music Hall, acoustic and solo. After he finished, John Prine appeared, and for the first time of his life on stage at Radio City, he performed “Hello in There”, nearly 45 years after declaring he would.

For his final encore, he played “When I Get to Heaven” while his niece and nephew played kazoo and Brandi Carlisle yodeled.

If you received this story through a blog aggregator of some kind and are annoyed because this story is not true, you may find that the administrators are more than eager to be complicit in censorship reactions in response to your complaint.