iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mel :blobcatgiggle:

@mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy

14 followers 0 following 287 posts

PhD researcher in mixed-signal integrated circuit design and data compression. FOSS and retro computing enthusiast :blobcat: Contributor to the open-source EDA ecosystem […] 🌉 bridged from ⁂ tech.lgbt/@mlyoung, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

Posts Replies Media

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026

Going to a metal concert this evening and sitting on the metro The guy across from me is wearing a Trivium shirt and I'm wearing Lamb of God. I look at him and he looks at me, we both smile and exchange nods of approval Such a wholesome interaction :blobcat:

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

@wingo I know Hanlon's razor, but my genuine and sincere belief is that they do this as some baffling DRM scheme. Which is insane given yknow I have legal access to the paper through my university to download and keep. But maybe it's like "pls pls don't download the paper and add it to your […]

Original post on tech.lgbt

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

Academic fun fact for publishers: Never, not even once, have I wanted to wait 5 minutes and use your god awful dogshit browser DOM PDF viewer! Give me the actual PDF literally not that hard :blobcatglare:

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

for the real ones

infosec.exchange

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 26/09/2026

moved from 1Password to Bitwarden 🙂‍↕️ Very happy for myself!! Next to go is Dropbox. And also Spotify but thats just because they're my opps not because they are related to DHH lol

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

this was done by the lovely Will from Spider and Fly tattoo btw!! if you're in Sydney I highly recommend them, such a fun time 🥹 www.spiderandflytattoo.com/will (this isn't endorsed or anything I just actually had a fun time aha)

spiderandflytattoo.com

Will | Spider and Fly Tattoo | Sydney Australia

Meet Will, a young tattoo artist creating whimsical, cute and charming custom tattoos designed to perfectly match your personality.

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

new tattoo omgeeeeee :blobcatsurprised:

A green vine tattoo on a forearm

Green vine tattoo on a forearm with a watch and grey jumper sleeve

Reposted by Mel :blobcatgiggle:

Myk @notsle.kzoo.to.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

oh this is fun. Who wants to go first? #ssh #itmeme #humor

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

update to the whole mosquito tone sonic weapon in Sydney situation: I wrote an email to the government 🙀🙀 with the location I observed it and the spectral analysis. Hopefully they will reply and I'll publish their response to my questions, if not, I guess I'll file an FOIA request or something […]

Original post on tech.lgbt

000

Reposted by Mel :blobcatgiggle:

Darren @dplattsf.sfba.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/09/2026

Olympic grade sleeping here #caturday

cat napping with head tucked under paw

cat, napping different position with head tucked under paw

Reposted by Mel :blobcatgiggle:

Amber :neodog_box: @puppygirlhornypost2.transfem.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/06/2026

real.

anime girl captioned `please use "okay :3" instead of "ok" bc okay is happy and ok is scary mean and evil,,,`

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

here is also the original recording to see for yourself :blobhaj_headphones: I may contact the venue in question and see what their justification for this type of device is :/

[Audio] Original post on tech.lgbt

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

Very disappointing to see an anti-loitering tone/"Mosquito" tone in use in the wild; at the Cutaway in Barangaroo, Sydney. This kind of indiscriminate acoustic weapon should have no place in an entertainment district like Barangaroo, no matter what time of day it […] [Original post on tech.lgbt]

A sine wave signal on a spectral analyser at a frequency of 18-20 KHz.

100

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

@maybeanerd impressive, very nice :blobcatthumbsup: I'll give them that; they do at least know not to blow up phones!

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

Yes, friends, they really did. That blob on the homepage is an ENTIRE FUCKING WEBGL CANVAS my GPU is now ALMOST MAXED OUT just loading this homepage oh my god what were they thinking??? were they??? the future has arrived....

GPU usage 86%

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

IN TODAY's episode of slop; a dear friend sent me this website: www.cognichip.ai now, you may notice they have this cool looking 3D fractal blob thing (pictured below). that's a video right?? wait... why is there aliasing around the edge??? did they.... they wouldn't.... (cont)

$Screenshot of a website with a fractal blub. It has pixelised aliasing around the edge.$

Reposted by Mel :blobcatgiggle:

thermia ! :thermos: :ndgt: @thermia.sk.girlthi.ng.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

born to "awawa, awa, beep, awawa" forced to "as per my last email"

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

[thinking and philosophising] 1. Valuing handmade and hand-engineered things more, and doing things the old-school way. I now make a concerted effort to do things the like, old-school way. In my research I print off and highlight all my papers and read them cover to cover. I borrow hardcopy […]

Original post on tech.lgbt

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

[thinking and philosophising] I was inspired by a comment I saw and I think there are actually a few _good_ things that have come out of this AI apocalypse for my mindset, or things that I'm trying to focus on: 1. Takings things slow. Not everything needs to be done _right fucking now._ Not […]

Original post on tech.lgbt

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 10/09/2026

New blog post! mlyoung.cool/blog/macquarie_asrs In this article, I have a look at (read: gush over) Macquarie University's Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS) based on a tour I did last month. I try to analyse the system as deeply as I can. There is then also a small […]

Original post on tech.lgbt

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 10/09/2026

flashback to when the Starbucks lady thought my name was "lel" 😭

Starbucks Iced Latte with the name "Mel"

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

[the Millennium Prize stuff] As depressing as the discovery was today, I did think this in the shower: I wonder if you get a similar result if you lock 10,000 maths PhD students in a room, and they all speak the same language, can communicate more or less instantly, and tell them they are only […]

Original post on tech.lgbt

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

new blog post is ALMOST done!!! it's about 3.3k words so far, been writing since August :) the topic is my uni library's automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS) robot, with a brief aside on physical media and how companies are destroying it 🙀 (mostly I'm putting this post up to actually […]

Original post on tech.lgbt

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2026

[re: complaint] reddit may be dogshit but at least it has r/wunkus 😭

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2026

[complaint] I forget how fucking conservative and insufferable Hacker News is sometimes, I got sent into the negative votes for correcting someone being quite intentionally misgendered ^ yipeee

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

This kinda makes me think I should create a Pixelfed, maybe I can take a bunch of photos and mark them all CC-BY :D

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

"Don't be a Galah!" back to taking some photos :3 location: Macquarie University, Sydney shot on: Canon EOS 80D, Canon EF 100mm macro lens

Image of a Galah, Australian bird, standing in a grassy field

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

[academiaaaaa] four pages of telling me how great your compression algorithm is, only to reveal in the last figure on the last page that this algorithm draws almost TWO WATTS of power!!! :neocat_floof_explode: the next closest algorithm they cite draws **8x** less power!! :neocat_floof_explode […]

Original post on tech.lgbt

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2026

[what] nursery rhyme but techbro podcast: (nasal male socal voice) guest: So you know, as it turns out, all the kings horses, and- uh, all the king's men, you know, uh- they couldn't put Humpty together... really, again. interviewer: Not at all? Not, like, just a little bit? guest: Uh, no […]

Original post on tech.lgbt

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2026

I think this botnet also is specifically designed to browse Forgejo or GitHub, it always requested raw commit tags and seemed to enumerate branches pretty efficiently. For comparison, I _still_ have the stupid Meta scraper stuck in my tar pit lmao. has anyone seen anything like this??

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2026

extremely interesting scraper bot story: This botnet has been scraping my Forgejo for a couple days now, all the traffic comes from residential IPs in countries like Brazil and Tunisia. I think it must be some compromised Chinese app given that all the Accept-Language headers were zh-CN. Also […]

Original post on tech.lgbt

100

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2026

i'm sad to report that after feeding the Meta AI scraper SIX GIGABYTES of Markov chain rubbish, it seems to have given up scraping my domain :pensive_bread: (thank you to the author of Nepenthes for the wonderful tool though!)

IPv6 traffic graph on Linode showing a falling off in traffic

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026

lmfaoooo github is down big time again www.githubstatus.com it remains an excellent idea for me to host my own git forge :D

githubstatus.com

Welcome to GitHub's home for real-time and historical data on system performance.

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026

Pains me greatly that I had to write _this_ much to ask a bunch of people "hey man what do you want on a chip", whereas the Australian census can **fudge my gender** and ask me for my birth sex with not so much as a second thought :/

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026

After 2.5 weeks, ~15,000 words, 3 separate forms and who knows how many hours, I'm VERY pleased to announce to everyone that I have finally finished my HREC approval submission for my qualitative research experiment :3

100

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026

today begins my quest to learn toki pona :D

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2026

[drugs, surprisingly] incredible things happening on the FOSSi Matrix I definitely love Matrix's total seeming inability to monitor spam even by keywords 😭

A spam post from a Matrix user claiming to sell various narcotics and weaponry.

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2026

teenager who tries to be a bully, but they were raised by their grandma so they end up getting bullied themselves for using really old timey insults

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026

@the_art_of_giving_up is this better or worse than Australia where the two viable business models are mining and landlording (or maybe property development at a pinch). we are so unbelievably dull and terrified of doing anything technological that I don't even think being a defence contractor is […]

Original post on tech.lgbt

100

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026

RE: social.lansky.name/@hn50/1170363584… NHS having a normal one

social.lansky.name

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026

groundbreaking figure 😭

Do you agree to participate in this survey voluntarily?

Yes: 100%

(DOI: 10.1109/ACDSA67686.2026.11468138)

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2026

Sooo, I've been developing a dataset and training a naive Bayes classifier for the purposes of distinguishing between AI slop on GitHub and human authored content (the classic "spam" vs "ham" task), for fun and interest. The classifier is 92% accurate which is REALLY impressive and super cool […]

Original post on tech.lgbt

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2026

and here's what it looks like setup!

An Amscope ME580 binocular microscope set up in a white electronics lab

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2026

we just got the BIGGEST upgrade at my lab, I managed to convince them to buy an AmScope ME580 metalurgical microscope with up to 500x magnification 🤯 this thing is soooo cool, I'm literally overjoyed 🥹

A type of inductor on an RFIC

Some sort of spiral inductor

An (I believe) single NPN transistor c. 1970

Wiring on the metal layers of an RFIC with several inductors

100

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 24/07/2026

[Codeberg terms change, mild vent post] As much as I agree with Codeberg's policy of banning LLMs, their blog post (blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-fl…) is really problematic (for me), imo, because: > while the following use cases are discouraged (similar to […]

Original post on tech.lgbt

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 23/07/2026

when your supervisor drops out midway through:

A snippet from an article in PLOS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266102

Author Contributions
Conceptualization: Robert Rosenbaum.
Formal analysis: Robert Rosenbaum.
Funding acquisition: Robert Rosenbaum.
Investigation: Robert Rosenbaum.
Methodology: Robert Rosenbaum.
Software: Robert Rosenbaum.
Visualization: Robert Rosenbaum.
Writing - original draft: Robert Rosenbaum.
Writing - review & editing: Robert Rosenbaum.

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

@the_art_of_giving_up ooh yea, I am always a super fan of ECS-style systems, so I would very much support its integration in Yosys :D

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

@the_art_of_giving_up I mega agree although as a one time Yosys plugin developer, I am guilty of this too 😭 you want TMR on a module? yup, that's an attribute. but which wire should be the error sink? don't forget your annotation! the pass makes a modification to the tree by inserting a […]

Original post on tech.lgbt

100

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

[Microsoft ventpost lmao] I hate Microsoft with every fibre of my being. (this is about Outlook, Exchange and the Outlook Web App in case it was unclear which despicable Microsoft service I was criticising) I swear on my nan if I ever have a company I will never ever ever use Microsoft. I […]

Original post on tech.lgbt

000

Mel :blobcatgiggle: @mlyoung.tech.lgbt.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

I love HR :)))

Gender Identity (Mandatory field)

Yes

000