Hard Pass

(A shortened version of an annoying phonecal I’ve had)

Customer: I’m going to send you a picture, do you know which brand/model of product this is?

Me: no sir, we’ve never seen this one.

Customer: please look it up, I need to know if it needs part X.

(Searching online, through catalogues, asking around, nothing. So we call him back with that news.)

Customer: oh but I just put it into google and it found the type and it also says it needs part X.

Me: ok, be sure verify it. You know, you can’t trust ai.

Customer: yeah sure.

Next day customer walks in, orders some unrelated stuff, not a single word about the phonecalls from the day before. Not a single word.

And I bump into this more and more, people that use ai to look up stuff and then smugly act like they somehow beat the system. As if they did the great rebellious act that paves the way forward. No you schmuck, you gave into the system and now it’s biting you up the ass.

(Edit for clarity)

Auf INSTAGRAM! 🤢

NutriTrace is a self-hosted nutrition / fitness tracker (Docker + Android, AGPL-3.0). rc.47 is the next public roll-up, bundling everything since the rc.42 broad release plus the small fix-only patches in between.

What's new

• Quick-view Foods sheet. Tap a food on the Foods tab and a slide-up sheet shows the full Nutrition Facts label, brand, and barcode, with Add to Diary + Edit buttons right there. The full Food Editor is still one tap away when you need it. Replaces the heavier "jump straight to the editor" behavior for what's usually a glance-at-info action.
• Scheduled automatic backups. Settings → Backup → Schedule lets you pick a time + frequency (daily / weekly / monthly). Server installs get an admin UI with optional ENV lock for managed deployments; the Android app does the same for offline-only users, writing scheduled backups to device storage.
• Copy diary items to another day. Unified copy sheet for a single item or a whole meal. Pick the target date + meal in one flow. Handy for meal-prep weeks where the same lunch repeats.
• Nutrient drill-down in the Diary Nutrition Summary. Tap any row (Sodium, Protein, Fiber, etc.) to expand it in place and see the top contributing foods sorted descending. Answers the "where did today's sodium come from?" question without leaving the Diary.
• Recipe / saved meal ingredient picker now searches every food source. Source filter chips (Local, OFF, USDA, Mealie, From Others) and a barcode scan button appear inside the picker, gated by what you have enabled in Settings. Picking from a non-local source auto-saves it to your local catalog first.

Fixes

• Sidebar was missing the Wellness link for Health Connect / Google Health users (#62)
• Imported foods showed the wrong photo after a sync round because the local image cache collided on OFF's structurally-identical filenames; cache keys are now derived from the full URL (#61)
• Sharing a log file or crash report from Diagnostics only saved the filename, not the contents — files now route through the cache directory so Android can grant read access (#60)
• Wellness goal progress bars stayed at 0 for Health Connect / Google Health users (#57)
• AI Assistant works with Gemini again — a schema field rejected only by Gemini's parser (#56)
• Manual Google Health sync no longer throws an unhandled rejection on Android (#55)
• AI proposal cards no longer stick around after a photo entry is committed
• Local Open Food Facts mirror nutrition data now loads correctly across every parquet shape encountered in the wild — rc.43 through rc.45 added parser support for Python-repr lists, Uint8Array buffers, and SQL NULL literals (#53)

Install / upgrade

• Docker: pull the new image and restart your stack (see the README for compose snippets)
• Android: signed APK on the release page
• Full CHANGELOG: main repo

What is NutriTrace?

Self-hosted nutrition tracker. Diary + Foods catalog (with Open Food Facts / USDA / Mealie search + barcode scan), wellness integrations (Fitbit, Garmin, Withings, Google Health, Health Connect), workouts, goals, statistics, recipes, multi-user, OIDC SSO, federation with LiftTrace and CookTrace (in development, not yet publicly available), AI assistant (Claude / OpenAI / Gemini / Ollama). Docker on the server, Capacitor app on Android. AGPL-3.0 licensed.

You can formally comment on the proposal to put political commissars in charge of deciding which science is acceptable here

The losses on any given day come so fast and across such a wide spectrum of civic life that it overwhelms our capacity to mourn. One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.

. . . Living through the Trump II presidency is an exercise in repeated loss and extended mourning for what is gone — while being daily confronted with the farcical and the absurd.

And when retirement and savings funds are burnt up, oh that's just too bad for all you poor people who didn't save for a rainy day.

Time for plumbers to rise up!

Donald Trump said Thursday that federal housing finance regulator Bill Pulte, his pick for acting director of national intelligence, would not be his “permanent” choice for the critical security post.

The Republican president’s disclosure that he was ruling out installing Pulte in the position full-time came after bipartisan pushback on Capitol Hill in recent days over Pulte’s lack of national security experience. The position requires Senate confirmation, something that lawmakers indicated was unlikely if Pulte were the nominee.

sounds good, but why do I have a feeling these will all be red state cities?

Canada's spy agency and close international partners warn that China's military intelligence services are using professional networking sites and online job platforms to target current and former government and military personnel.

Archived link

The alert was issued Wednesday by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the Australia Security Intelligence Organization, the New Zealand Intelligence Community, the United Kingdom’s MI5 and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

They say China ultimately seeks privileged military, political and economic intelligence that can provide Beijing with a strategic and tactical advantage over the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance.

...

CSIS says Chinese intelligence officers or their affiliates pose as employees of private consultancies, think tanks or human resources firms, and place online job advertisements for foreign policy and defence analysts.

It says that while applicants often have no direct access to classified information, successful candidates are then pressured to provide "non-public" information, including unclassified data on government policy or on military strategy, capabilities and installations.

CSIS says that even a small piece of information can be collected and combined with more sensitive reporting to undermine Canada’s interests.

...

I liked some of what he said around focusing on applications across industries e.g. save fertilizer in farming, decrease diagnostic time in healthcare. I liked the talk about enacting privacy legislation.

I did not like how for everything he said about sovereign AI infra ended with "and if we fail to do it ourselves we'll buy it" (from you know who.) I didn't hear any contingency plan for tackling potential rising unemployment as a result of AI integration. Seems like they're betting on the AI-creates-more-jobs-than-it-destroys scenario.

He did not address the question about losing sovereignty by embedding US tech into our economy, e.g. what happens if the US turns off our AI access at a point when our economy is reliant on it.

Ultimately I'm very skeptical even though I think there's genuine potential for social benefit from productively applying AI where it makes sense. I'm skeptical that this bunch would deliver those social benefits. I think they're likely to deliver benefits to capital/business from instead of working Canadians. I'd be happy to be wrong.

What did you think about it?