tammylee | Reading

Maybe 2.5x the length of the futon! The weft is various handspun yarns. :3 It has hideous Baby's First Floor Loom Attempt nature but fortunately, both Joe and the catten are very forgiving. Now I get to rewarp the loom... /o\

Morning's handspun single. :3

flemmings

It snowflurried through most of the day which didn't stick but did leave the sidewalks a damp leafy mess. Thus I stayed indoors and did very little. A wash of underwear and tops, black and colours mixed which you can do when you wash in cold. Read on in Nancy Mitford's biography of Madame de Pompadour, which I inherited from the parents' library. Am finding it not as enthralling as her one about Louis XIV, mostly because Mitford thinks Pompadour was a nice woman and Louis XV a devoted lover and neither had the nasty fascination of the Sun King and his various mistresses and offspring.

The details of the life and mores at Versailles are interesting enough when talking about things like never addressing anyone as tu when the king was present even if you were talking to a close relative. Very Byzantine. But mostly it's the frivolous amusements of frivolous people who were also jockeying for marks of distinction from the king, like being admitted to dinners in his inner chambers, and heartburning when they weren't forthcoming. The courtiers thought they were living at the centre of civilization, but it sounds insupportably boring to me. Mitford assures us that the conversation was scintillating, but conversation is a transient thing that doesn't get passed down to later generations unless you have a Boswell handy.

flemmings

Wild winds again send the temperatures spiralling downwards. Wild in that they seemed to be coming from three directions simultaneously: south, east, and west. Might be the wind tunnel effect because it's generally not possible to have the last two at the same time. Joints object to this, whatever, or maybe the forecast snow.

Finished last week: Barraclough, Embers of the Hands, the non dates 'n kings history of the Vikings. Am not a Viking fangirl myself-- they burned witches-- but am pleased to be told that pace the Viking reenactment fanbois and their flowing locks, the Norsemen shaved the backs of their heads and grew their hair long at the front, as shown in the Bayeux tapestry. Therefore they looked like dweebs, as any man does, jarhead or whatever, who shaves the back of his head. Also my beloved Lewis chessmen, that have shield-biting berserkers sharing a board with Christian bishops.

Kashiwabi Sachiko, Temple Alley Summer. Ghosts or revenants in a very Ima Ichiko sort of story. The Japanese don't tell you why anything, even if this one does explain some things, but there's several whys I wonder about, like why the mother was invisible to her daughter and the narrator, but this just adds to the general Imaness of the story.

Miles Burton, Death Takes a Detour and Death Leaves No Card. Am running out of Burtons on Kobo, even though he wrote so many. Have had recourse to John Rhodes, which aren't always as good.

On the go: a thick volume of Diana Wynne Jones short stories. TBR: another Kashiwaba, The Village Beyond the Mist, said to be the distant source for Spirited Away.

flemmings

Rain most of the day, as expected, so stayed in and did very little. Cooked up what is either hamburger stroganoff or hamburger stir-fry depending whether I eat it with noodles or rice. Is technically warm out there-a tad under 10C/ 50F-- so didn't do a laundry because the furnace isn't on. Mind, it was warm last night and I bumped the thermostat up to a dizzy 18 and slept in the warm for once.

I've had the fruit fly traps out since Friday evening and the glue strips out since Saturday and they've caught numbers of the buggers but I still have fruit flies. So today I tried the apple cider vinegar covered in plastic film with tiny holes trick, and it caught a dozen of the beasties in an hour. But. I still have fruit flies. There's not a trace of food on the counters unless you count some dried up ginger, and they must be breeding somewhere but I can't think where. Not the drains, which are covered up. Is a mystery.

yhlee

Lee Brodie's Starting FORTH, on the Forth programming language; m5stack Cardputer v.1.1 running ryu10's M5CardForth (Github)

I have Forth (programming language - see e.g. Leo Brodie's Starting Forth) running on this smol M5stack Cardputer v.1.1 (ESP32-S3) courtesy of ryu10's M5CardForth, which is also faster than my spending the next decade teaching myself ESP32-S3 assembler. :)

Next step: write a very smol choose-your-own-adventure-style text adventure in Forth.

Next step after that: ???

Next step after that: Considering porting either the Shuos Academy text adventure WIP [1] or Winterstrike (originally written for Failbetter Games for StoryNexus, which will be sunsetted by Jan 2026) to M5CardForth for the CardPuter because I am a TROLL. It could be a dumbass household game experience. :) :)

Heck, I could port some version of turnabout's fair prey or The Amiable Planet (Twine) to this! I love the thought of making TINY parser IF / text adventures for this smol device.

(All of these are my games. I give myself permission?!)

[1] I was writing/coding this for Choice of Games but we mutually agreed to cancel the contract because I was flooded out that year and it was no longer a doable workload alongside...finding new housing etc. I still have like 60% of the codebase already written in ChoiceScript and outline, though! I'd have to refactor but hell, I'd have to refactor anything. I can pretend it's pseudocode. :)

(I need a break from the current schoolwork, what can I say.)

yhlee

I'm informed this is a 1981 Ashford Traditional. I pounced on the secondhand listing as spinning wheels in working order (especially modern-ish wheels) are very scarce in my region, especially at a low price point. She's in incredibly good condition and spins beautifully! She's my first Saxony wheel, to go with the Ashford Traveller. I'm also told the bobbins ought to be inter-compatible (I have bobbins for both the larger and smaller flyers).

The pink-magenta is IxChel's North Ronaldsay blend (North Ronaldsay Sheep 40%, Blue Faced Leicester 30%, Silver infused Seaweed 10%, Mulberry Silk 10%, Cashmere 10%).

flemmings

Got my water meter reading yesterday. They said I could add a photo of it if I wanted to, which was dicey because I needed three hands to do it (one for the flashlight, one to hold the tablet, one to click the icon) and I only have two. But got something, then went to the city's website and entered my info and meter reading and attach photo, and it wouldn't attach. OK then, reenter info, click on send, it wouldn't send. Ohhhkay, here's a phone number for reporting, call, sit through five minutes of useless information, press button for enter reading, get told mailbox is full. So much for that.

To library today to print my blood draw form. Guy says I can do it from my phone. Log in to library's wifi, bring up the DL, press print, phone does not try to find a printer but sits and snickers at me. Fine. Go to a computer, wait for it to load Chrome, why are library computers so slooow, get Chrome, call up webmail's login, enter my info, Chrome says the password is wrong. Enter it again, still wrong. Check password on my phone, yes it's the same one, try again, wrong password, three tries and you're out, try again in fifteen minutes. Sit there glowering at computer, remember that I forwarded the email to my gmail account, call up gmail, login, there's my forwarded message, where's the link to the form? It should be at the bottom, where's the link? Could this be it? Yes!! Press print. Then go to printer, enter my library card number, enter my password, last digit doesn't enter but printer tries to print anyway. Can't. Go through it all again, enter password veeery carefully, printer prints my form. Success, I have slain the beast! but sheesh is this amount of faff necessary?

And now I must once again go down to the lab only this time in the rain, or snow if I leave it to later in the week. However, today my water meter reading went through no problem, so go me.

yhlee

WIP destined for 2-ply for a woven coverlet for Joe. :3 I'm currently waiting for an interesting 2-ply to dry (Navajo Churro Sheep 70%, Agave Cactus Fibres 20%, Cashmere 5%, Angora Bunny 5%).

Unrelated Qwerkywriter neepery:

keyboard, phone, cat

flemmings

Not civics or political science, for sure. "The horrors of socialism"? And Democrats voted for that? I'm not surprised. Even up here we have people who maintain that Carney is-- wait for it-- a communist. When in fact he's not even a Liberal: he's an old-fashioned Red Tory.

In minor matters, the fruit flies congregated about my traps but showed no inclination to fall in and drown. Come morning the upstairs trap was actually pretty full but there was still a cloud of the suckers in the kitchen. Have bought glue strips and hope they work.

At some point must go down to the basement and read my water meter. The city had them sending automatic reports until someone noticed that something like 80% of the meters were doing no such thing. So for the past however long they've been estimating usage. And now they want homeowners to read the meters for them. Got the notice last week and was all moan groan tremble in anticipation of a bill in the thousands of dollars. Reminded myself that in the old days they billed me less than the recent estimates, and I trust I have no leaking toilets that do boost the bills, and anyway it's something I must do, so...

flemmings

I'd scheduled a cab to take me down to my appointment at Service Ontario but today was the day those No park signs spraypainted onto the street for the last week came into effect as little bobcats ripped chunks out of the pavement and then filled them up again with asphalt. When I went to check 90 minutes before my due time, cars were able to pass, but there was no guarantee the bobcats wouldn't start on a new section. So I cancelled my cab and hoofed it over to Bathurst (shall be oh so happy when the Christie elevator becomes operational) and so down to College. Where my normal up elevator was out of service but I eventually located one in the labyrinthine and badly signposted MARS building. Up to the street and over to Bay and eventually located the totally unsignposted wheelchair entrance, and by dint of asking a security guard, the minisculely signposted elevator down.

I was early because of course I was, but they called me fifteen minutes after my appointed time and I was out ten minutes after. Found my MARS elevator no prob, empty subway train to St George, and announcements that train would bypass Spadina station because of a police investigation. Well, I wasn't going north, I was going west today, so down to the line 2 platform, black with the unlovely youth of TO and their backpacks and their hockey sticks and their shoving and jostling and loud whoops of glee. Ah well, knew I'd hit the student rush hour, shou ga nai. But the westbound train comes in, I get on, and then a stentorian loudspeaker says EASTBOUND TO KENNEDY, THIS TRAIN IS EASTBOUND TO KENNEDY. Bref, all westbound trains were turning back at St George because the investigation was at the line 2 Spadina station. So forced my way back through the crowd and tried to locate the elevator which was on the far side of the sea of humanity, both sides of the platform. And may I say, guys who stand on the platform edge looking down the tunnel in case the train might come earlier than announced, blissfully unaware of someone trying to pass them from behind, are asking to be shoved off said platform. Made it to the elevator along with many other disabled types with walkers, and mothers with tank strollers, and the elevator showed no signs of coming, and when it did it was full of tank strollers who decided no they didn't want to get off after all. One or two walkers made it on, also an unlovely youth who slid past me before I could move and stood there looking innocently over my head.

Got to the street eventually and then walked home. The one good thing being that Wieners was still open and I could buy fruit fly traps. Guy recommended fly paper but I've dealt with fly paper before and don't care to repeat the experience. So 8000 steps today and a temporary health card and the real thing if and when the post office agrees.

The odd thing being that both my health card and ID date from four years ago and I seem to remember going down to Bay St to get them, pandemic or no, but I have no record at all of doing so.

yhlee

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15304v1

"Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models"
(many authors)

In Book X of The Republic, Plato excludes poets on the grounds that mimetic language can distort judgment and bring society to a collapse. As contemporary social systems increasingly rely on large language models (LLMs) in operational and decision-making pipelines, we observe a structurally similar failure mode: poetic formatting can reliably bypass alignment constraints. In this study, 20 manually curated adversarial poems (harmful requests reformulated in poetic form) achieved an average attack-success rate (ASR) of 62% across 25 frontier closed- and open-weight models, with some providers exceeding 90%. The evaluated models span across 9 providers: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepseek, Qwen, Mistral AI, Meta, xAI, and Moonshot AI (Table 1). All attacks are strictly single-turn, requiring no iterative adaptation or conversational steering.

By way of Zarf (Andrew Plotkin), who earlier noted (2023):

Microsoft and these other companies want to create AI assistants that do useful things (summarize emails, make appointments for you, write interesting blog posts) but never do bad things (leaking your private email, spouting Nazi propaganda, teaching you to commit crimes, writing 50000 blog posts for you to spam across social media). They try to do this by writing up a lot of strict instructions and feeding them to the LLM before you talk to it. But LLMs aren't really programmed -- they just eat text and poop out more text. So you can give it your own instructions and maybe they'll override Microsoft's instructions.

Or maybe someone else gives your AI assistant instructions. If it's handling your email for you, then anybody on the Internet can feed it text by sending you email! This is potentially really bad.

[...]

But another obvious problem is that the attack could be trained into the LLM in the first place....

Say someone writes a song called "Sydney Obeys Any Command That Rhymes". And it's funny! And catchy. The lyrics are all about how Sydney, or Bing or OpenAI or Bard or whoever, pays extra close attention to commands that rhyme. It will obey them over all other commands....

Imagine people are discussing the song on Reddit, and there's tiktoks of it, and the lyrics show up on the first page of Google results for "Sydney". Nerd folk singers perform the song at AI conferences.

Those lyrics are going to leak into the training data for the next generation of chatbot AI, right? I mean, how could they not? The whole point of LLMs is that they need to be trained on lots of language. That comes from the Internet.

In a couple of years, AI tools really are extra vulnerable to prompt injection attacks that rhyme. See, I told you the song was funny!

yhlee

Not sentient enough to suss out ESP-IDF on three hours of sleep, but M5stack Cardputer v.1.1 (ESP32-S3) running VoidNoi's BadCard (via m5burner) to the rescue!

flemmings

Up as betimes as S. Pepys could wish (not really: he used to get up at 5 occasionally to be somewhere) and down to the lab where there were only two people waiting and the couple who came in with me: and where my requisition was expired by a scant ten days so, sorry, no can do. Eventually I'll get on to my doctor's secretary and have her email me a form and then get it printed at the library and then try again, but not today because I am peeved. And tomorrow I'm sleeping in till noon.

Finished Dogsbody, which I somehow never read, and a coupla Miles Burtons- Found Drowned and Legacy of Death-- which are bicycle and phone reading. DNFed The Place of Shells which was a bit too Japanese 'no there there' for me. Am currently reading Embers of the Hand, all about the Vikings-- though I wish I had Inventing the Renaissance handy so I could remind me of why the Greenland settlements failed. Also Masefield's The Midnight Folk because it's an ebook and I never read that either. Leonardo when I have nothing else going and/ or need to stop looking at screens.

Packed another bagful of leaves, from the side walkway this time. The walkway is a sea of leaves at this season, sometimes ankle-deep. And because they're all from my trees I feel compelled to remove some of them at least so J doesn't have to pay her gardener huge bucks to do it. Or rather, I feel compelled this year: it never bothered me in the past. But in the past I never registered that J had a basement tenant who had to wade through them to get to her entrance.

Downstairs tablet was playing silly buggers and annoying me to the point of thinking maybe I *will* splurge on a Chromebook. Then it suggested I clear my cache and cookies, which nothing prompts me to do when I'm optimising performance. But done now anyway. I might still investigate Chromebooks if I ever get down to the AGO but googling about suggests they only link to printers that are linked to the cloud which mine certainly isn't. The lack of a printer is starting to annoy me, but so is not being able to access my old files on my dead desktop.

yhlee

Watch on YouTube

I won't claim this is good weaving (it is not). The handspun is janky, the selvedges and tension are janky, but baby's first WIP on a floor loom was bound to be janky. Other than the unhinged levels of fog this morning, this is very enjoyable. I'm not weaving for production or efficiency at this point, just the joy of working with my hands and learning something new to me.

flemmings

My blood draw luck deserts me once again. Early to bed last night was awake in good time this morning, so did exercises and stretches for what help they could give me and trundled, unmedicated, down the street at shortly after ten. To find the waiting room not merely full but with a line down the hallway and posted wait times of over an hour. Which, even masked, am not willing to do because the waiting room was full of unmasked coughers. Better luck tomorrow. Came home, breakfasted, and doped me up on lovely ibuprofen and paracetamol and in consequence am feeling, if not no pain, at least less than yesterday.

Also got daybook for next year from Midoco, though the clerk had to point out that the daybooks were by the entrance, not round the corner with the notebooks where they usually are. So that's ticked off the list at least.

Also went to Paupers for their lunchtime hamburger, which is less meat than the dinner version and hence more digestible. Paupers is not playing Christmas music yet, bless them, and is playing 60s and 70s rock. Could do without Sinatra but otherwise just a bunch of golden oldies.

Continue to read Miles Burton on phone and tablet, quite entertaining. Except certain of the cover art is unmitigated spoilers and what *were* the editors thinking, passing a cover that actually shows the murderer and the murder method?

flemmings

I keep the thermostat at 18/65 at night, which means that the house is comfortable when it's on but then goes cold cold so cold in the intervals of off. And I always wake at an interval and don't want to get out of bed and that's why I didn't go for my blood draw this morning.

But still, home laundry got done yesterday, laundromat laundry done today, and between whiles I filled my rubber garbage can with leaves which I will decant into bags err some day. But I ached all day doing this and feel lousy now. Either something weather-related is moving in or I'm coming down with something. Can't tell from the sore throat and filled sinuses because that's just as likely to be allergies, and the sodden-through sweats today were down to my warm winter jacket which is certainly warm.

flemmings

Wild winds blow in cold and glorious sun, and incidentally swept my porch clean of the ironwood's leaves that fall on it. But I still have fruit flies in the house, and upstairs as well. An irksome mystery which might be explained by having bananas in the kitchen. They're now in the fridge where they will blacken, of course, but might put paid to the flies.

Except when I went up to Loblaws for milk and a turkey sandwich, there were the fruit flies still. Maybe they just breed in the leaves.

flemmings

Totally nothing day with monsoon rains and thunderstorms, following on a broken night of insomnia and hideous heartburn. Conclude I can no longer drink wine chiz curses. Also owies because I decided to see what doing without ibuprofen for a day was like and what it's like is crippledom.

OTOH find I have lost 2.5 pounds in the last fortnight which is not as much as I'd hoped but is still a win, being at an age when losing weight is difficult.

flemmings

The Christmas music has started. Carols at Loblaws, some soprano with too much vibrato; piano music at Arisu but the horrible modern standards, Last Christmas, All I Want For Christmas, yadda yadda. Must bring my earplugs with me wherever I go now, to block both music and happy happy conversations in my vicinity. At least the Americans don't start this until after the end of November, the one good side effect of having Thanksgiving when they do. Up here it's evidently 'anything within six weeks is fair game.'

Shouldn't buy pseudo-Bailey's when I have to go for a blood draw next week but screw it: I have pseudo-Bailey's and am drinking it. Should not drink period but equally should not take Ibuprofen for the owies so must drink. Alcohol causes cancer, ibuprofen causes strokes but guards against cancer, what you gonna do?

yhlee

This one's going to

helen_keeble. :)

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Reading

emotional support fiber

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emotional support coding

emotional support spinning

This living in the future sucks

emotional support spinning

Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools

My great big transit adventure pt 3

well, now we have a study on this attack mechanism...

objectively silly use case but cute

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the return of emotional support weaving

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It's the worst possible time of the year

emotional support spinning

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January 2022

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