@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-12-22 13:01:18
Investigation: in 22 US states, Uber approves drivers with many types of convictions, such as violent felonies, that are over seven years old to keep costs low (Emily Steel/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/business/uber-background-chec…
@arXiv_csLG_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-12-22 10:31:40
Estimating Spatially Resolved Radiation Fields Using Neural Networks
Felix Lehner, Pasquale Lombardo, Susana Castillo, Oliver Hupe, Marcus Magnor
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17654 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17654 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.17654
arXiv:2512.17654v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We present an in-depth analysis on how to build and train neural networks to estimate the spatial distribution of scattered radiation fields for radiation protection dosimetry in medical radiation fields, such as those found in Interventional Radiology and Cardiology. Therefore, we present three different synthetically generated datasets with increasing complexity for training, using a Monte-Carlo Simulation application based on Geant4. On those datasets, we evaluate convolutional and fully connected architectures of neural networks to demonstrate which design decisions work well for reconstructing the fluence and spectra distributions over the spatial domain of such radiation fields. All used datasets as well as our training pipeline are published as open source in separate repositories.
toXiv_bot_toot
@mariyadelano@hachyderm.io2025-10-20 21:41:39
A paradox I think about:
If advertising doesn’t work - why is that the business model nearly every internet business defaults to?
If advertising online is so lucrative, why are marketing departments all over failing to meet targets and struggling to show any results?
Everything is ads and none of it is working. And I’m just a lone marketer screaming in this forest of nonsense hoping some tree falls and hears me.
@detondev@social.linux.pizza2025-12-10 14:39:26
Kimi Onoda, Japan's new Minister of State for Economic Security, is a 43 year old half-Irish ex-game industry PR femcel with an extensive history of defending her exclusive attraction to anime boys on twitter
@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng2025-12-14 15:46:49
Looking for other people here who're interested in analog "alt process" photography (especially Kallitype & salt prints in general) and who are also making their own prints. There used to be a few more such people in my TL, but they all seem to have vanished or stopped posting in the past year, and generally it feels there's precious little interest in this topic on Mastodon... (I too have a feeling, either my own photography went drastically downhill over the past 3-4 …
@leftsidestory@mstdn.social2025-11-13 00:30:02
Moody Urbanity - Relations V 🪢
情绪化城市 - 关系 V 🪢
📷 Minolta Hi-Matic AF
🎞️ Shanghai GP3 400 Pan
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite
@Mediagazer@mstdn.social2025-12-15 21:50:42
Sources: Bay Area radio station KCBS-AM, which faced MAGA backlash over ICE coverage, scaled back political reporting after Brendan Carr's threats of a probe (Byron Tau/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/trump-media-fcc-kcbs-5dbed5c466771d53e2c7…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-10-27 03:00:46
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
@kurtsh@mastodon.social2025-10-15 04:09:42
LA County has declared a state of emergency BECAUSE OF the federal government.
The Feds, LA County is (correctly) saying, have CAUSED the emergency.
This is a striking political moment of internal collapse. Local govts feeling compelled to protect their ppl from … their own govt.
☑️ Los Angeles County declares state of emergency over immigration raids - ABC News
@cdarwin@c.im2025-11-03 15:36:23
Over nearly nine months,
the lawsuit challenging Trump’s attempt to slash foreign aid funding
has ricocheted around the federal judiciary
but still has not reached a final resolution.
It has been reviewed by 21 judges,
spawned thousands of pages of filings
and lumbered forward
even after the administration dissolved the U.S. Agency for International Development,
the government office responsible for disbursing much of the contested funding.
