Tootfinder

Noam Shazeer leaves Google to join OpenAI as lead for architecture research; he rejoined Google in 2024 as part of the Character.AI deal and was Gemini co-lead (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/star-google-ai-researcher-shazeer-j…

Star Google AI Researcher Shazeer Joins OpenAI
Noam Shazeer, the Google DeepMind researcher whose work underpinned the generative AI boom, is joining OpenAI, the AI firm told some staff Wednesday. Shazeer, who left Google in 2021 to cofound a chatbot startup, Character.AI, rejoined Google’s AI team DeepMind in 2024 as part of a $2.7 billion ...

from my link log —
Using a SmartCard HSM for DNSSEC with BIND, Knot DNS, and LDNS/NSD.
https://jpmens.net/2021/06/04/using-a-smartcard-hsm-for-dnssec-with-bind/
saved 2021-06-07

Hyundai says it would make Boston Dynamics a wholly owned subsidiary by acquiring SoftBank's ~10% stake; Hyundai bought an 80% stake in Boston Dynamics in 2021 (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/hyundai-motor-gro…

"Eine wichtige Rolle dabei spielt die Initiative 706. Sie geht auf ein Jugendzentrum im Pekinger Universitätsviertel zurück und hat mittlerweile einige Ableger in Europa. Xiyu ist seit elf Jahren in Deutschland und hat die Gruppe in Berlin 2021 mitgegründet. Der Name leitet sich von der Hausnummer des Zentrums in Peking ab. Das 2012 gegründete Hostel dort entwickelte sich über die Jahre zum Ort des Austauschs für Studierende und Denker, um gesellschaftliche Themen zu diskutieren."

Jährlicher Zubau und Rückbau von #Balkonsolarleistung in Deutschland mit Stand vom 29.06.2026.
Unplausible Inbetriebnahmedaten von 1900 bis 2017 wurden durch das Registrierungsdatum der #Steckersolaranlage ersetzt.
👉 Zusatzlesestoff:

cofe: Collaboration in Financial Economics (2021)
Network of authors and commenters of papers in finantial economics, obtained from the acknowledgement sections of over 5,000 published research papers.
This network has 13967 nodes and 102039 edges.
Tags: Social, Directed, Weighted, Online, Collaboration
https://networks.ske…

Quake rewritten in 18kb: #Quake

Q1K3
A game in the js13kGames 2021 competition. Play it now, for free!

"“Well, Parts of Linguistics Is Open…”: Insights into Linguists’ Diverse Understandings of Open Science"
https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7974
"[…] The study aims to gain insights into th[e] misalignment by exploring linguists’ understanding of what constitutes [

Sources: Netflix is in talks to buy Radford Studio Center, a historic LA studio lot, for a fraction of its 2021 $1.85B sale price after lenders repossessed it (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-21/net…

US SEC filing: Vanguard marks down Ola Consumer's valuation to ~$70.3M; Ola, which faces intense competition from Uber and Rapido, was valued at $7.3B in 2021 (Kunal Manchanada/Entrackr)
https://entrackr.com/news/vanguard-marks-down-olas-valuation-to-70-mn-…

Vanguard marks down Ola Consumer's valuation to $70 Mn
US-based asset management company Vanguard has sharply marked down the valuation of ride-hailing company Ola to approximately $70.3 million.

from my link log —
Fontemon: the world’s first video game in a font!
https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html
saved 2021-03-19 https://dotat.at/:/E…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #MidsummerDreaming
Midsummer Dreaming:
🎵 Nightingales of Berlin (2021)
#MidsummerDreaming

Improved Approximation Guarantees for Groupwise Maximin Share Fairness
Georgios Amanatidis, Anna Korfiati, Evangelos Markakis, Christodoulos Santorinaios
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04731 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.04731 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.04731
arXiv:2606.04731v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods to a set of $n$ agents with additive valuation functions. We focus on the very demanding notion of \textit{groupwise maximin share fairness} (GMMS), which requires that each agent $i$ receives value comparable to their maximin share, where the latter is computed \textit{with respect to any subset of agents that contains $i$}. We show that it is possible to compute $(\phi-1)$-approximate GMMS allocations in polynomial time, where $\phi \approx 1.618$ is the golden ratio). This improves on the previously known guarantee of $4/7$ of Chaudhury et al. [SICOMP; 2021] and Amanatidis et al. [TCS; 2020]. We propose a simple algorithm that maintains the same main properties as the Draft-and-Eliminate algorithm of Amanatidis et al. [TCS, 2020] and we improve on the approximation guarantee analysis by carefully bounding the relevant value within any subinstance induced by the restriction of our allocation to a subset of agents. Our analysis is asymptotically tight for algorithms that share these properties and has the additional benefit of giving improved guarantees for restricted settings; in particular, when the agents agree on the top $n$ goods or when the number of agents is small. To illustrate the challenges of going beyond the guarantees of our algorithm, we also present a variant with an improved approximation of $(\sqrt{10}-1)/3 \approx 0.72$ for the case of three agents. To achieve this improvement we partially characterize the maximin share guarantees of short picking sequences for a small number of goods.
toXiv_bot_toot

from my link log —
Vulnerabilities show why STARTTLS should be avoided if possible.
https://blog.apnic.net/2021/11/18/vulnerabilities-show-why-starttls-should-be-avoided-if-possible/
saved 2021-11-18

Vulnerabilities show why STARTTLS should be avoided if possible | APNIC Blog
Guest Post: Study finds more than 40 STARTTLS-related security flaws in many different software products, both client-side and server-side.

celebrate bobsday 85 with 18 hours of dylanological pleasures! live tapes! covers! novelties! WTFs! the past 6 frow show @… blowouts:
2021: https://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/104186

from my link log —
A tour of safe tracing GC designs in Rust.
http://manishearth.github.io/blog/2021/04/05/a-tour-of-safe-tracing-gc-designs-in-rust/
saved 2021-06-19

Tracxn: global edtech funding fell from $16.7B in 2021 to $2.6B in 2025, while the number of startups launched dropped from 10,491 in 2021 to just 645 in 2025 (Ananya Bhattacharya/Rest of World)
https://restofworld.org/2026/edtech-funding-collapse-k12-startups…

The global edtech boom is fading as investors look elsewhere
Venture capital is moving away from K-12 edtech worldwide as investors prioritize AI tools and workforce training with clearer returns.

from my link log —
The longest train journey in the EU.
https://jonworth.eu/the-longest-train-journey-in-the-eu/
saved 2026-04-25 https://

The longest train journey in the EU
Anyone who has been following my work for a while knows I have long had a rather abstract discussion about the definition of the World's Longest Train Journey. I started calculating this back in 2021, after an incorrect map on Reddit went viral, and have updated my thoughts about it

from my link log —
Foreign Data Wrappers for migrating from Oracle to PostgreSQL.
https://www.migops.com/blog/2021/02/15/role-of-foreign-data-wrappers-in-migrations-to-postgresql/
saved 2021-04-06

MigOps.com is for sale | HugeDomains
Join thousands of people who own a premium domain. Affordable financing available.

from my link log —
Google Chrome reduces its root DNS traffic.
https://blog.verisign.com/domain-names/chromiums-reduction-of-root-dns-traffic/
saved 2021-01-07

Chromium’s Reduction of Root DNS Traffic - Verisign Blog
As we begin a new year, it is important to look back and reflect on our accomplishments and how we can continue to improve. A significant positive the DNS

from my link log —
PostgreSQL is a great pub/sub and job server.
https://webapp.io/blog/postgres-is-the-answer/
saved 2021-12-18 https://

Postgres is a great pub/sub & job server
If you need a publish/subscribe or job server at any point in your project, try using Postgres. It'll give you lots of data integrity and performance guarantees, and it doesn't require you or your team learning any new technology.