Tootfinder

Apple raises the price of Apple Music, with the individual plan up by $1 to $11.99, and some Apple One bundles, the first price hike for Apple Music since 2022 (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)
https://9to5mac.com/2026/07/17/apple-raises-prices-for-apple…

Apple raises prices for Apple Music and Apple One subscriptions - 9to5Mac
Apple has raised the price of Apple Music today in the United States and other countries. Starting today, Apple Music’s...

In 2022, a group of prominent conservative legal experts
—including former federal judges, Republican election attorney Benjamin Ginsberg, former Solicitor General Ted Olson and ex-U.S. Senators John Danforth and Gordon Smith
—released a report titled
"Lost, Not Stolen", concluding that
“Joe Biden was the choice of a majority of the Electors”
and that there was “absolutely no evidence of fraud” sufficient to alter the results.
Independent reviews, …

Communication de la Commission
C(2026) 4730 final, 10.07.2026
Guidelines on the Application of Article 13(5) of Directive (EU) 2022/2557 on the Resilience of Critical Entities
La Commission européenne a adopté les lignes directrices non contraignantes prévue Š l’Article 13 (5) de la Directive CER qui visent Š préciser les mesures de #résilience que les

First, let’s talk about “grokking”.
In 2022, OpenAI published a paper showing that if you train a model on a simple dataset
(for instance, a simple mathematical operation like division),
and keep training it long after the training looks like it’s stalled out,
the model will suddenly make a massive jump in capability.
Why does this work?
The first stage of training is like rote memorization:
the model has to compress as much of the training data as…

Overtraining as the path to human-like AI

Do you (sometimes) use print() or message() for debugging your code? Next time you can use {icecream} instead: #rstats

Ice Cream for R Programmers - Turtletopia: a blog about programming in R
Icecream is a tool which may serve as a more sophisticated replacement of using print while debugging.

In 2022 I drove across Canada from Ottawa to northern BC. I remember driving for three full days around the top of Lake Superior with a wall of mostly dead trees on either side of the road the whole way, thinking, man when Ontario burns, there's going to be no stopping it. And here we are.
Via Bluesky:

"Fatih Birol said that Europe’s low electrification rate — electricity’s share of the energy consumed in the EU — of around 23 per cent is holding back the bloc’s competitiveness and economic “sovereignty”.
[..]
In a joint interview with Europe’s energy commissioner Dan JŸrgensen, both leaders said that Europe needed to electrify its economy faster after facing two energy crises in less than five years."

from my link log —
If multicast is the answer, what was the question?
https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.09029
saved 2022-11-23 https://dotat.at/:/K9DVS.html…

If Multicast is the Answer -- What was the Question?
Multicast is (almost) as old as the Internet, having become a tool for increasing network efficiency but also enabling destination discovery in a number of key use cases, although misaligned economic interests have limited its deployment to domain-local usages. But recent advances in multicast technologies as well as the identification of new use cases for which IP multicast may be ill fitted yet network-level support may be desirable motivate to re-think old perceptions of multicast and its us…

"Heat waves: Expert tips on redesigning UK homes to cope with hotter temperatures"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #Climate #ClimateChange

Heat waves: Expert tips on redesigning UK homes to cope with hotter temperatures
As the UK prepares for the third heat wave of 2026, most people will be hoping to keep cool at home. Building regulations to protect homes from overheating were introduced in 2022. These require all new homes to be checked at the design stage to see if they might be at risk of overheating. If the overheating risk is high, the architect has to make changes to the design.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #CraigCharles
Everything but the Girl:
🎵 Missing
#EverythingbuttheGirl
https://urmetk.bandcamp.com/track/everything-but-the-girl-missing-urmet-k-2022-edit
https://open.spotify.com/track/1LLYmUrNeb77HTwtr4e2Wr

Which Vancouver parties support proportional representation?
by Fair Vote Canada | Sep 12, 2026
https://www.fairvote.ca/12/09/2026/which-vancouver-parties-support-proportional-representation/
In the 2022 Vancouver municipa…

Which Vancouver parties support proportional representation?
Where do Vancouver's parties stand on proportional representation?

faculty_hiring_us: Faculty hiring networks in the US (2022)
Networks of faculty hiring for all PhD-granting US universities over the decade 2011–2020. Each node is a PhD-granting institution, and a directed edge (i,j) indicates that a person received their PhD from node i and was tenure-track faculty at node j during time of collection (2011-2020). This dataset is divided into separate networks for all 107 fields, as well as aggregate networks for 8 domains, and an overall network for …

„Drei Jahre lang - von 2022 bis 2025 - hatten die Forscher das etwa 3.500 Quadratkilometer große Einzugsgebiet der Unteren Spree zwischen Spreewald und Berlin untersucht.
Laut dem Bericht zählt die Region zu den wasserärmsten Gebieten Deutschlands. Die Grundwasserstände seien lokal seit dem Jahr 2000 um bis zu drei Meter gesunken.“
Genau hier baut Schwarz-Digits ein riesiges #Rechenzentrum

The most revealing fact about Google’s water use in The Dalles is not just the size of the number.
It is how difficult that number was for the public to obtain.
The Dalles spent 13 months fighting to keep Google’s water use secret
— then records showed the data center campus consumed roughly a third of the Oregon city’s supply

The Dalles spent 13 months fighting to keep Google’s water use secret — then records showed the data center campus consumed roughly a third of the Oregon city’s supply
In 2022, Google sued to keep its water use in The Dalles, Oregon secret. When the numbers finally came out, the company's data centers were drinking 29 percent of the town's water.

The first half of 2026 was the 5th warmest on record here in the central Netherlands.
Just following the forecast for the coming 2 weeks, and then the 1991-2020 average (cool by now) would already bring this year into the top-3 warmest since 1901.

Kumulativer Zubau von #Balkonsolarleistung in #Deutschland mit Stand vom 31.08.2026.
Die summierte Leistung aller offiziell registrierten #Steckersolaranlagen beträgt b…

At least 80% of the world lives under light-polluted skies
—a figure that rises to 99% in America and Europe.
A paper published in Science found that between 2011 and 2022 the night sky grew almost 10% brighter each year.
With so many places awash with artificial light, people are increasingly seeking out the darkness.

London-based Nscale agrees to acquire Anyscale, a source says for ~$1.65B; Anyscale, which helps AI workloads run more efficiently, had a $1B valuation in 2022 (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-…

For my latest article for Inquirer.net, I decided to talk about something light and fun and it is the daily puzzle game #Gerrymandle. Your aim in the game is to create electoral districts so that your political party wins more districts than other parties.

Gerrymandle: A fun way to steal elections
MANILA, Philippines - Do you still play Wordle, that viral word game that came out in 2021 then got bought by The New York Times in 2022? I still solve Wordle every day—on hard mode!—and have

Macht uns KI dumm ?
Ende 2022 drängte sich ChatGPT in unser Leben und hat es schnell tiefgreifend verändert. Vielleicht werden künftige Geschichtsbücher die generative KI einmal mit der Erfindung des Buchdrucks vergleichen. Der Begriff „Künstliche Intelligenz“ ist laut der Philosophin Anne Alombert irreführend, denn er vergleicht uns mit Maschinen und entpolitisiert die Debatte. […]
📺

Porno-Witze, Rassismus - Grauslicher Chat-Skandal erschüttert Gewerkschaft #News #Nachrichten

Just did very approximate calculations; with 10g of lithium per drone*, and assuming the Russian and Ukrainian drone efforts consume 5m units a year**, that'd be ~50 tons of lithium deposited into the environment per year, mostly within, let's say, 50km of the grey zone***. It's only about $20,000 / ton****, which means $1m of metal*****.
So to answer my own silly question: no, it won't be economically viable to scalp the top few inches of topsoil and extract the lithium from it.
* Roughly right for quadcopters / small FPV; larger and longer range ones will have more, so this is a bottom bound. (OTOH longer range UAVs will tend to use ICE kerosene rather than batteries
** Changing all the time as both sides try expanding production as fast as they can manage. Ua are scaling much faster at time of writing
*** Handwaving. Contact zone's hardly moved since early 2023; OTOH Ua are pushing range limits on small battery-powered form factor, saw a 60km claim for the Logistics Lockdown operation the other day
**** There was a big spike to the $70-8000 range in 2022; median price is closer to $10k than $20k
***** (IDK the chemistry but presumably it's in an exciting range of different compounds, depending on how many bits the battery was blown into, how hot / pressured the blast wave was a few tens of mm from the boom, what other stuff was in the vicinity that the lithium would combine with, etc etc.

faculty_hiring_us: Faculty hiring networks in the US (2022)
Networks of faculty hiring for all PhD-granting US universities over the decade 2011–2020. Each node is a PhD-granting institution, and a directed edge (i,j) indicates that a person received their PhD from node i and was tenure-track faculty at node j during time of collection (2011-2020). This dataset is divided into separate networks for all 107 fields, as well as aggregate networks for 8 domains, and an overall network for …

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:

The inner working of parquette/arrow data in R: #rstats

Unpacking Arrow Datasets – Notes from a data witch
A comment on how Datasets work in Apache Arrow. I’m not really sure who the audience for this one. Am I just talking to myself? Probably.

Nakakahinayang na hindi nahalal na senador si Chel Diokno noong 2019 o 2022. Pero buti na lang nasa lupon siya ng mga taga-usig kasi nilampaso niya ang magkapatid.
#phpol #impeachment #DuterteImpeachment

Organizational Technology Ladders: Remote Work and Generative AI Adoption
Gregor Schubert
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11626 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.11626 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.11626
arXiv:2608.11626v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: This study proposes that firms move along an "organizational technology ladder": adopting one technology transforms hiring and work processes and builds skills and organizational capital that change the cost of adopting subsequent technologies. I study how firms' adoption of remote work technology during the COVID-19 period shaped later uptake of generative AI. Using U.S. job-posting data and an instrumental-variables strategy based on predicted differences in labor-market pressure to offer remote work, I estimate that a 10 percentage point increase in remote hiring in 2021-2022 increases the share of job postings mentioning generative AI in 2023-2024 by 0.4 percentage points across firms and 0.7 percentage points across occupations within firms. I provide evidence on mechanisms consistent with a technology-ladder channel: remote work adoption shifts hiring toward technical and managerial capabilities that predict faster conversion of generative AI exposure into adoption. Firms with return-to-office mandates---interpreted as revealing low remote productivity---exhibit a substantially larger response of generative AI adoption to remote work, consistent with an organizational frictions channel.
toXiv_bot_toot

In the Summer of 2022, Greek politician Stelios Kouloglou was investigating how intrusive spyware had been used to hack business leaders, law enforcement officials, and politicians.
As part of the European Parliament’s PEGA Committee,
set up to investigate the use of the notorious Pegasus spyware and other variants,
Kouloglou travelled to interview spyware victims and probe high-profile cases.
That fall, according to a new forensic analysis,
💥Kouloglou’s iPhone …

EU Politicians Investigated Pegasus Spyware. Then It Ended Up on One of Their Phones
“It is a direct attack on the rule of law,” says one European Parliament member of the new findings from Citizen Lab.

Study: off-balance sheet debt at Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle grew an est. ~8x since 2022 to ~$1.65T, eclipsing ~$1.35T in balance sheet debt (Kohei Yamada/Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/technolo…

Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65tn on opaque AI funding
Data center leases, GPU supply contracts raise liabilities at Meta, Oracle, Nikkei study shows

at_migrations: Austrian internal migrations (2002-2022)
A network of migrations between municipalities in Austria, from 2002 to 2022. A weighted directed link from source to target indicates a migration flow from these two municipalities. Edges are annotated with migration volume (number of people), nationality, sex, and year.
This network has 2115 nodes and 2908569 edges.
Tags: Social, Economic, Travel, Weighted, Politlcal, Timestamps, Metadata