Tootfinder

I love that so many Americans turned out to not just protest policies that hit personally,
but to rally in support of democracy writ large.
For many, it was their first time taking this kind of action,
and they were doing it in a way that expressed optimism and possibility rather than giving in to anger or despair

Commentary: America tried something new in 2025. It's not going well
Glow up or grow up? Times columnists Anita Chabria and Mark Z. Barabak look back and assess whether 2025 was good for America or an unmitigated disaster.

Ich bin echt kein Freund von Eierlikör, aber der fortschrittsfeindliche Angriff des alten weißen Herr vanporten auf das Start-Up #LikörOhneEi macht Lust auf Ausprobieren.
Auch wieder so eine typisch deutsche Innovationsstory. Superreicher Typ investiert null in eigenen Fortschritt und ganz viel Geld in die Bekämpfung von Fortschritt der anderen.

Namensstreit: „Likör ohne Ei“ siegt vor Gericht in Kiel
Darf ein Likör ohne Ei „Likör ohne Ei“ heißen? Ja! In einem kuriosen Namensstreit hat das Landgericht Kiel am Dienstagmorgen das Urteil gesprochen. Der Schutzverband der Spirituosenindustrie ist mit seiner Klage gegen das Start-up Warlich Rum aus Henstedt-Ulzburg abgeblitzt.

Ontology is shaping up to be the buzzword of 2026 because they are offering what #LLMs are lacking: formal grounding
LLMs offer creativity but need logical grounding. Ontologies provide this formal structure, anchoring meaning and unifying diverse data sources into a single semantic layer. They are essential for achieving precision and are one of the most reliable defense mechanisms against

Voice authentication???
I would not trust the basic competence of any org doing that. Facial recognition is bad enough.
Part of this is that I’m whatever the voice equivalent is to face-blindness. I don’t believe that such a thing as a “voice print” can exist. I can tell the difference between Neil Young and Bob Dylan, but any more similar and I’m lost.

I just spent ~20 minutes trying to find information on how to do something in a Golang library on my client computer, before I decided it was worth pulling up @… on my personal computer to look it up instead.
Immediately found the answer I needed to get me moving.
We don’t need “vibe coding”, we need search engines that actually work.

#Wordle 1,593 6/6*
⬜⬜⬜🟨🟩 <1% of 228,956 (53)
⬜🟩🟩⬜🟩 17% of 18 (10)
⬜🟩🟩⬜🟩 13% of 8 (6)
⬜🟩🟩⬜🟩 11% of 166 (3)
🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩 14% of 1,101 (2)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 75% of 365
WordleBot
Skill 90/99
Luck 40/99
Pulled it out, but you're really not puzzling out the answer when there are so many words that fit that initial 3 known letters, each using different letters (well I guess the last 2 did share a letter, so if I had thought of all of the words when I made guess 3, I should have tried one of them first.
Actually I see there were 2 pretty common first letters among the 10 remaining words. And it ended up that getting the answer was just lucky.

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Totally normal situation:
Ruh 🐱 is eating from the bowl. Mr Ek 🐱 comes through the window. He walks up to the bowl. She notices him and stops eating to sniff his snout. Ek uses the opportunity to start eating the food. Ruh looks at me surprised.
After a minute, Ruh shouts at him. He answers with a hiss, and continues eating.
#cat

Position estimation based on UWB swarm optimization and comparison against traditional trilateration
Vinish Yogesh, Bert-Jan van Beijnum, Jaap H. Buurke, Chris T. M. Baten
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24738

Position estimation based on UWB swarm optimization and comparison against traditional trilateration
Ultra-wideband (UWB) is a promising technology for indoor position estimation for various localization applications of object swarms, such as in 3D analysis of human movement with multiple on-body sensors or a swarm of drones in an indoor environment. However, most UWB-only position estimation methods are based on a star topology, where the position of a mobile node is estimated using distances from several fixed anchors. These approaches ignore the valuable inter-node distance estimates, possi…

🧀 Graphite's natural pores shown to have no impact on nuclear reactor performance
#graphite

Graphite's natural pores shown to have no impact on nuclear reactor performance
A remarkable study led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory answers a decades-old question in nuclear science: Do tiny pores in graphite affect nuclear reactor performance?