Tootfinder

from my link log —
Mailchimp's Mandrill outage due to PostgreSQL XID wraparound.
https://mailchimp.com/what-we-learned-from-the-recent-mandrill-outage/
saved 2019-04-01

What We Learned from the Recent Mandrill Outage | Mailchimp
Following a recent outage, we committed to sharing what we learned with our customers. The outage began at 05:35 UTC on February 4, and we resolved the issue...

Three-fold Superstructured Superlattice HfN/HfAlN Thin Films for Enhanced Toughness
M. Lorentzon, R. Hahn, J. Palisaitis, H. Riedl, L. Hultman, J. Birch, N. Ghafoor
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00716

Three-fold Superstructured Superlattice HfN/HfAlN Thin Films for Enhanced Toughness
To simultaneously achieve high hardness and high toughness in protective coatings remains a fundamental challenge. Here, we harness the superlattice architecture to combine Koehler hardening while the coherent interfaces reduce the crack driving force and improve toughness, enabling coatings that are both hard and damage tolerant. We design and fabricate epitaxial HfN$_{1.33}$/Hf$_{0.76}$Al$_{0.24}$N$_{1.15}$ superlattices, deposited on MgO(001) substrates using low-energy, high-flux ion-assist…

Sources: after earlier suing CBS over 60 Minutes, Trump is set to be interviewed for the show by Norah O'Donnell, following David Ellison's Paramount purchase (Max Tani/Semafor)
https://www.semafor.com/article/10/31/2025/trump-to…

Trump to sit with CBS News in first interview after lawsuit
The US president is set to sit down with CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell on Friday afternoon, Semafor has learned.

Almost paracontact metric 3-dimensional Walker manifolds
Galia Nakova, Cornelia-Livia Bejan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21809 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.218…

Almost paracontact metric 3-dimensional Walker manifolds
In this paper we construct and study almost paracontact metric structures $(φ,ξ,η,g)$ on a 3-dimensional Walker manifold $(M,g)$ with respect to a local basis only by the coordinate functions of a unit space-like vector field $ξ$, globally defined on $M$ and a function $f$ on $M$, characterizing the Lorentzian metric $g$. Necessary and sufficient conditions are obtained for $M$, endowed with these structures, to fall in one of the following classes of 3-dimensional almost paracontact metric…

Continual Neural Topic Model
Charu Karakkaparambil James, Waleed Mustafa, Marius Kloft, Sophie Fellenz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15612 https://arxiv.org/p…

Continual Neural Topic Model
In continual learning, our aim is to learn a new task without forgetting what was learned previously. In topic models, this translates to learning new topic models without forgetting previously learned topics. Previous work either considered Dynamic Topic Models (DTMs), which learn the evolution of topics based on the entire training corpus at once, or Online Topic Models, which are updated continuously based on new data but do not have long-term memory. To fill this gap, we propose the Continu…

Vikings-Bears on 'Monday Night Football': What We Learned from Minnesota's 27-24 win https://www.nfl.com/news/vikings-bears-on-monday-night-football-what-we-learned-from-minnesota-s-27-24-win

Sources: CNN staff were taken aback when Mark Thompson suggested easing up on covering Trump's East Wing demolition after a rare White House visit last week (Natalie Korach/Status)
https://www.status.news/p/mark-thompson-cnn-white-house-east-wing-demolition…

Mark Thompson’s D.C. Drop-In
CNN’s chief has Washington talking about his private meeting at the White House—following which he urged the network to ease up on coverage of Trump’s East Room demolition, Status has learned.

Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
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I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading

Testing new-physics scenarios with the combined LHAASO and Carpet-3 fluence spectrum of GRB 221009A: axion-like particles and Lorentz-invariance violation
P. S. Satunin, S. V. Troitsky
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07234

Testing new-physics scenarios with the combined LHAASO and Carpet-3 fluence spectrum of GRB 221009A: axion-like particles and Lorentz-invariance violation
From gamma-ray burst (GRB) 221009A, very high-energy photons were detected: >10 TeV with LHAASO and >100 TeV with Carpet-3. Such energetic photons are expected to be absorbed via electron-positron pair production on their way to the Earth. Their observation might be explained by new physics, including Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) or photon mixing with axion-like particles (ALPs). Here, we construct a joint fluence spectrum by combining flux measurements from both experiments, and fit it u…

Chiefs' Rashee Rice on what he’s learned as he returns from suspension, injury https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6726904/2025/10/17/chiefs-rashee-rice-return-suspension/