Tootfinder

From my LinkedIn post: “Telling your dev team to use AI coding tools is like telling your 2010 ops team to use AWS. They didn’t know how to code, they were ticket and click-it VMware people… developers who don’t have product management mindset or have never managed a dev team will fail by trying to micromanage the output of the tool rather than specifying the outcome of the product and managing the agent team to deliver that outcome.”

Back in 2010 when we first started using AWS to run Netflix, the AWS services were very incomplete, somewhat unreliable, had scaling issues, but were super fast to provision compared to filing… | Adrian Cockcroft
Back in 2010 when we first started using AWS to run Netflix, the AWS services were very incomplete, somewhat unreliable, had scaling issues, but were super fast to provision compared to filing tickets and waiting for data center ops teams to do what we need. We worked around the issues, built a new cloud native developer driven architecture and scaled Netflix at speed. At the time many people said we were crazy to run a large enterprise on cloud and would be back in datacenters when it failed. …

Here’s the lightning sketch of Paul’s Treatise Against Efficiency that I’ve never written:
1. Efficiency is asymptotically inefficient: as costs approach zero, the cost of further reducing them approaches infinity.
2. Efficiency prioritizes the measurable over the difficult-to-measure.
3. Efficiency prioritizes what those in power see (or imagine) over on-the-ground reality.
4. Following from 2 and 3, efficiency reduces the amount and quality of information flowing into a human system.
5. Efficiency foments institutional inflexibility.
6. By removing slack, efficiency causes small failures to cascade more readily and increases the risk of catastrophic failure.
7. Following rom 4, 5, and 6, efficiency trades small costs for massive risks: from failures, from missed opportunities, and from inability to adjust.
8. Efficiency, when pushed, strangles the emergent phenomena that in the long term create all new things of value.
9. Thus, although it can be a by-product of evolution, efficiency as a goal in itself strangles evolution.
10. Efficiency as a goal strangles joy.

Chipmaker Cerebras Systems raised a $1.1B Series G from Fidelity, Trump Jr.'s 1789 Capital, and others at an $8.1B post-money valuation ahead of its planned IPO (Rebecca Szkutak/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/30/a-year-…

A year after filing to IPO, still-private Cerebras Systems raises $1.1B | TechCrunch
Cerebras initially filed to go public in September 2024 but ran into several regulatory delays due to foreign investments.

As Amazon's 'flying rivers' weaken with tree loss, scientists warn of worsening droughts #Amazon

As Amazon's 'flying rivers' weaken with tree loss, scientists warn of worsening droughts
Droughts have withered crops in Peru, fires have scorched the Amazon and hydroelectric dams in Ecuador have struggled to keep the lights on as rivers dry up. Scientists say the cause may lie high above the rainforest, where invisible "flying rivers" carry rain from the Atlantic Ocean across South America.

Imgur blocks UK access after the ICO notified it of a possible fine over its handling of kids' data; the ICO calls Imgur's move a "commercial decision" (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/30/imgur-pulls-out-of-uk…

Imgur pulls out of UK after data regulator warns of fines | TechCrunch
Imgur, one of the web's most popular image sharing and hosting platforms, has shut off access to its site in the U.K., following a notice of a fine by the country's data protection watchdog.

Okay, here's the promised follow-up with more authors I respect who didn't make it onto this list. I won't do deep dives but I'll list at least one work per author:
YA novelists:
- Randi Pink ("Girls Like Us")
- Louisa Onomé ("Twice as Perfect")
- Emery Lee ("Meet Cute Diary")
- Robin Benway ("Far from the Tree")
- Angela Velez ("Lulu and Milagro's Search for Clarity")
Children's book authors:
- Jacqueline Davies ("Bubbles Up")
- Freya Hartas ("Slow Down in the Park")
Novelists:
- Rimma Onoseta ("How You Grow Wings")
Graphic novelists:
- Linda Medley ("Castle Waiting")
- 🖋️Magsalene Visaggio 🖌️Paulina Ganucheau ("Girlmode")
- Ursula Vernon ("Digger")
- SJ Sindu ("Tall Water" w/ Dion MBD)
- Hope Larson ("Be That Way"; "Salt Magic" w/ Rebecca Mock)
- Lily Williams Karen Schneemann ("Go With the Flow")
- Maia Kobabe ("Gender Queer")
- Kay O'Neill ("Tea Dragon Society")
- Marjane Satrapi ("Persepolis")
Mangaka:
- Kaoru Mori ("Young Bride's Stories")
- Ryoko Kui ("Delicious in Dungeon")
- Natsuki Takaya ("Fruits Basket")
Anime writers/directors and/or Japanese light/fantasy/SF novelists:
- Nahoko Uehashi ("Moribito")
- Sayo Yamamoto ("Michiko & Hatchin"; "Yuri!!! On Ice")
- Mari Okada ("Ano Hana: The Flower we Saw That Day"; "Toradora!")
Game designers/programmers:
(Upon review I was pretty remiss in skipping over a few of these people, some of whom I wasn't aware of but most of whom I just didn't remember when writing my short list. Subconscious misogyny in action. Short & Thorson probably would have squeezed out some of the YA authors I included, although I have no real regrets.)
- Junko Kawano ("Suikoden")
- Elizabeth LaPensée ("When Rivers Were Trails")
- Momo Pixel ("Hair Nah")
- Zoë Quinn ("Depression Quest"; narrative designer on "Solar Ash")
- Kellee Santiago ("Cloud"; "Flower")
- Tanya X. Short ("Moon Hunters")
- Kim Swift ("Portal")
- Maddy Thorson ("Celeste")
- Andi McClure @… ("Jumpman")
Note: I haven't included composers or artists here, but there's a deep bench.
Games journalists/steamers:
- Tanya DePass @… (#/INeedDiverseGames; twitch streams)
- Anita Sarkeesian (Feminist Frequency)
Game/play scholars:
- Mary Flanagan ("Critical Play")
- Tracy Fullerton ("Game Design Workshop")
- Brenda Laurel ("Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System")
- Janet Murray ("Hamlet on the Holodeck"l
- Susana Tosca ("A Pragmatics of Links")
- Jichen Zhu ("Agency Play: Dimensions of Agency for Interactive Narrative Design")
- Magy Seif El Nasr ("Design patterns to guide player movement in 3D games")
- Kate Compton ("Causal Creators"; also "Spore")
P.S. upon consideration I've decided not to include any authors who are men in this coda.
There are definitely others who probably deserve to be here that I'm forgetting...
#GsmeDesign #Authors

Turbulent Magnetic Fields and Molecular Cloud Interactions in the Supernova Remnant G1.9 0.3
Moeri Tao, Takaaki Tanaka, Hidetoshi Sano, Rami Z. E. Alsaberi, Jun Kataoka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25833

Turbulent Magnetic Fields and Molecular Cloud Interactions in the Supernova Remnant G1.9+0.3
We present on results of a spatially resolved spectral analysis of G1.9+0.3, the youngest known supernova remnant in the Galaxy. The X-ray spectra are well described by synchrotron emission from a power-law electron distribution with an exponential cutoff. We found a cutoff energy $ε_0 \sim 1 ~ \rm{keV}$ in both the radio bright rim and the X-ray bright rims. In the loss-limited case, the cutoff energy depends on the shock velocity $v_{\rm{sh}}$ and the Bohm factor $η$, following the relation…

Linking Process to Outcome: Conditional Reward Modeling for LLM Reasoning
Zheng Zhang, Ziwei Shan, Kaitao Song, Yexin Li, Kan Ren
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26578 https://

Linking Process to Outcome: Conditional Reward Modeling for LLM Reasoning
Process Reward Models (PRMs) have emerged as a promising approach to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by guiding their step-by-step reasoning toward a final answer. However, existing PRMs either treat each reasoning step in isolation, failing to capture inter-step dependencies, or struggle to align process rewards with the final outcome. Consequently, the reward signal fails to respect temporal causality in sequential reasoning and faces ambiguous credit assign…

The least frightening films ever – ranked! https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/oct/30/the-least-frightening-films-ever-ranked?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Imgur blocks UK access after the ICO notified it of a possible fine over its handling of kids' data; the ICO calls Imgur's move a "commercial decision" (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/30/imgur-pulls-out-of-uk…

Imgur pulls out of UK after data regulator warns of fines | TechCrunch
Imgur, one of the web's most popular image sharing and hosting platforms, has shut off access to its site in the U.K., following a notice of a fine by the country's data protection watchdog.