The Drone flights vs car break-ins chart in this article is fascinating: It shows a sharply declining rate of car break-ins, and then, as drone flights are introduced later in 2024, the rate of decline slows.
And "The SFPD increased patrols in bipping hot spots like Fisherman’s Wharf starting in 2023. Cops also started using bait cars and building cases against major bipping gangs. " And that correlates with the fastest rate of decline - good, old fashioned policing.
Brian May, the astrophysicist.
Let's begin …
A Sharper Look at the First Image of a Black Hole | NOIRLab — <#AI
A profile of Suno, which has been used by more than 100M people since 2023 and has 2M paid subscribers, as it faces copyright lawsuits from UMG and Sony Music (Bloomberg)
Scientists race to save Florida’s coral reef as El Niño heats the ocean
The waters off the coast of South Florida were already growing warm by late June
— ominously warm to Ken Nedimyer and other scientists and conservationists
still scarred by a devastating 2023 marine heat wave
that led to the worst mass coral bleaching event on record in the state.
Nedimyer, technical director for the nonprofit Reef Renewal USA,
and other colleagues kicked into gear. …
Over the last few weeks I've had a nice combination of vacation and some research using Bayesian Optimization (BO) for high harmonics generation. (Inspired by the Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 - https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2023/press-release/ )
They …
16WW Hot Noon Garden Ambient (2023-09) - Back garden noises with temperature hitting 32 Celsius; birds, bees, cars, planes, sirens. #fieldRecording #London #heatWave -
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With extra squeeze and torque for blaming the Covid lockdowns.
Kumulativer Zubau von #Balkonsolarleistung in #Deutschland mit Stand vom 31.07.2026.
Die summierte Leistung aller offiziell registrierten #Steckersolaranlagen beträgt b…
from my link log —
Behind the scenes of Rust string formatting and format_args!().
https://blog.m-ou.se/format-args/
saved 2023-12-05 https://dotat.at…
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Well put.
Rutte doesn't have any room left for self-respect.
Wir waren sehr glücklich mit der Abschlussveranstaltung unserer #Fachgruppe im Juni! Die Teilnehmer*innen haben die Veranstaltung moderiert, Vorträge gehalten und das Publikum befragt. Trotz der großen Hitze kamen gut 60 Gäste. Darunter Menschen mit und ohne Behinderung, Freund*innen der Fachgruppe, ehemalige Teilnehmende, aber auch Menschen, die beruflich im Bereich Inklusion arbeiten. Danke…
fly_larva: Drosophila larva brain (2023)
A complete synaptic map of the brain connectome of the larva of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Nodes are neurons, and edges are synaptic connections, traced individually from brain image sections using three-dimensional electron microscopy–based reconstruction. Node metadata include the neuron hempisphere, hemispherical homologue, cell type, annotations, and inferred cluster. Edge metadata include the type of interaction (`'aa'`,…
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
(YouTube, 2023) This seeming "reconstruction" is misleading: not reconstruction but rather neural signal pattern matching with video frame lookup https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zBZySKWAqA Seeing through the eyes of a mouse by decoding its brain signals.
Guardrails enable you to defend against prompt injection or jailbreak attacks by your coding agents. In our tutorial on agentic software engineering, we provide an overview of the options available to you for this purpose: https://agentic-software-engineering.r
Price Responses of Rwandan Tungsten Exports under Conflict Minerals Regulation
Haruka Nagamori, Kazuhiko Nishimura
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08690 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.08690 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.08690
arXiv:2608.08690v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Section 1502 of the Dodd--Frank Act, enacted in 2010, requires U.S.-listed companies using tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold (3TG) from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and adjoining countries to disclose information on the minerals' origins. Concerns have been raised that the regulation may have induced a de facto embargo through avoidance of sourcing from the covered region. However, how the price responsiveness of mineral exports evolved under changing institutional and market conditions remains insufficiently understood. Since tungsten production in the covered region is concentrated almost entirely in Rwanda, this study examines the price responsiveness of Rwandan tungsten exports from January 2009 to December 2023.
Because missing export quantity data prevent continuous observation of export unit values, we apply the identification approach of Nakano and Nishimura (2025), combining monthly mirror trade data from UN Comtrade with exchange rates and a world average price. An importer fixed-effects model is estimated using export value as the dependent variable, with the sample divided into four periods according to changes in the institutional and market environment.
The results reveal substantial temporal variation in price responsiveness. A statistically significant negative price response is observed in Period 1 ($\eta=-20.814$, $p<0.01$), disappears in Period 2 ($\eta=1.814$, $p>0.10$), reappears in Period 3 ($\eta=-5.277$, $p<0.01$), and disappears again in Period 4 ($\eta=0.440$, $p>0.10$). Coefficient-difference tests confirm significant changes between Periods 1 and 2 ($p=0.0021$) and between Periods 3 and 4 ($p=0.0006$). These findings suggest that the price responsiveness of Rwandan tungsten exports varied substantially over time rather than following a uniform trajectory after the regulation.
toXiv_bot_toot
Study: rate of fabricated references in biomedical papers has grown 12x since 2023; in early 2026, one in 277 papers had at least one non-existent reference (Tristan Bove/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/05/24/ai-hallucinations-scient…
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On the other hand CSS...
Estimated Demand for Mega-Constellation Internet Service
Akhil Rao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08851 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.08851 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.08851
arXiv:2608.08851v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The near-term growth of the commercial space economy and sustainability of the low-Earth orbit (LEO) environment depends on the commercial prospects of large LEO satellite telecommunications constellations (``mega-constellations''). If successful, mega-constellations can spur competition between launch providers, which may lead to lower launch prices. They may also demand orbital sustainability services and/or generate additional collision risk, which may in turn affect space sustainability interests. Consumer demand for mega-constellations' internet services is critical to their commercial success. This analysis presents a method to estimate consumer demand for mega-constellations' internet services, using SpaceX's Starlink over December 2021--November 2023 as an example. This analysis finds that Starlink users are highly concentrated in the wealthiest countries. It also finds that consumer demand for Starlink is growing more slowly than orbital capacity is being added and more slowly than demand for non-Starlink internet overall. Continuation of these trends may indicate that the market for mega-constellation internet is less lucrative than previous forecasts have indicated.
toXiv_bot_toot
Gerade Rieder steht sinnbildlich für den Wandel in Teilen der Partei. Der Walliser Ständerat gilt als Vater des «Solarexpress» und war lange ein Vertreter des Ausbaus der erneuerbaren Energien. Noch bei den Wahlen 2023 beantwortete er bei Smartvote die Frage, ob in der Schweiz wieder neue Atomkraftwerke gebaut werden dürfen, mit «Nein».
Im Ständerat stimmte er nun für Röstis Gegenvorschlag.
https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/atomausstieg-zwei-drittel-der-mitte-partei-will-akw-comeback-477677126472
A Note on the Identification Step in "A Semistructural Methodology for Policy Counterfactuals"
Henri Ker\"anen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10596 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.10596 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.10596
arXiv:2608.10596v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The New Keynesian example of Beraja (2023) is not identified at its printed calibration: more than one structure satisfies every condition of its identification step. Two of the paper's six identifying restrictions coincide on equilibrium equations consistent with the printed reduced form, leaving eleven conditions to determine an equation's twelve coefficients. The note derives the rank condition the identification step requires, computable from the reduced form and the restrictions alone. The note also documents and corrects a misprint in the paper's counterfactual display. A one-clause amendment to the paper's Theorem 1 restores its conclusion.
toXiv_bot_toot
Changes in Pluto’s Atmosphere Based on Stellar Occultation Data from 2017 to 2023: #Pluto
@paulwermer@sfba.social
