Tootfinder

African defense tech company Terra Industries, founded in 2024, raised a $52M seed round from 8VC and others, and says it's on track to book $100M in contracts (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/17/terr

Terra Industries closes $52M seed round to build defense infrastructure for the Global South | TechCrunch
African defense tech company Terra Industries announced an additional $18 million in funding, bringing its seed round to $52 million.

I have one for #GrindayFriday this week. This is one man deathgrind project NAILGUT from Kelowna, British Columbia, and their brief 4 song EP 'Distorted Perceptions of Reality' from 2024. It's nasty, grody, grindy, sludgy stuff with chainsaw guitars and bashing drums. I love it.

He won't declare actions for an #EmergencyBrake though. Because 'growth'.
Headline: Andy Burnham to chair emergency Cobra meeting amid extreme heat.
https://gettingreal.org.uk/2024/05/02/

The Emergency Brake | Getting Real about the Crises Facing the UK
Imagine that you are in a vehicle, going fast towards an immovable barrier. What do you do? Press the accelerator harder

August 2026 was the hottest on record globally, followed by 2023, 2024, and 2025.
The temperature was well over 1.5°C above pre-industrial.
From Copernicus ECMWF
#globalwarming #ClimateChange

"Some designs of emojis are very different for the same codepoint, especially the ones depicting emotions/reactions. Examples coming to mind are 😨, 🔫. What are your thoughts on this?" - The (water) pistol 🔫 was originally a hand gun which looked a lot more real. In response to its frequent use in criminal or other unsavory contexts (e.g., as a threat), most platforms replaced it with the colorful plastic toy gun design in 2018. (In 2024, Elon Musk had it turned back into a realistic hand gun for the Twemoji design 🙄)
I'm torn. On the one hand, I don't think we can stay on top of all potential uses of emojis (or should even try to limit them) and people who want to use emojis for threats probably can still do so. On the other hand, I do find it rather hard to imagine that the green plastic 🔫 could be used as a threat... so... I guess good job, designers/tech firms? #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay
https://emojipedia.org/pistol#designs

Yesterday I scrolled through the accounts I'm following and was a bit surprised about the amount of accounts that haven't been active since 2024 :-(

ooh, gillian welch & david rawlings have been playing another new song on tour recently (along with "midnight bones"), called "goodnight." looks like it was debuted in 2024. part of the encore on this recent tape: https://archive.org/details/gillianiowa

Gillian Welch & David Rawlings Hancher Auditorium Iowa City IA 8-5-2026
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings live at Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City on August 5th 2026. Taped from front row center of the lower balcony. 

from my link log —
A history of parsers of the Ruby programming language.
https://railsatscale.com/2024-04-16-prism-in-2024/
saved 2024-04-19 https…

Prism in 2024
In Ruby 3.3.0, a new standard library was added to CRuby called Prism. Prism is a parser for the Ruby language, exposed as both a C library (optionally usable by CRuby) and a Ruby library (usable as a Ruby gem). The Prism project represents many person-years worth of effort, and is the result of a collaboration between Shopify, CRuby core contributors, other Ruby implementation authors, and Ruby tooling developers.

On Website Technicals (2024-09) - Tech updates: anticipating the heat pump, BibTeX crossref, ETag clean-up, APFS defrag, Gallery traffic trim. - https://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-site-technicals-88.html

On Website Technicals (2024-09)
Tech updates: anticipating the heat pump, BibTeX crossref, ETag clean-up, APFS defrag, Gallery traffic trim.

Mit der Studie ergibt vieles wieder Sinn, wenn davon gesprochen wird, dass »die Politik«™ Sorgen ernst nehmen müsse – die Sorgen sind nämlich rassistischer Natur und weniger Abstiegsängste. Passt auch zum Sachsen-Anhalt-Monitor 2025, demzufolge 90 Prozent mit ihrem Leben zufrieden sind. Nur die Ausländer, Schmarozer und Queers stört den Deutschen.

"I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mamdani said.
“He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court,
and what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many,
purely because of what his actions have wrought over these past many years.”
The International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest in 2024 for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Palestine,
including “s…

The volume (parts 1 and 2) the paper appeared in has a lot of interesting contributions on writing systems, including Donald Knuth's remarks on the grapholinguistic model of TeX (start of Part 2).
https://doi.org/10.36824/2024-graf1
https://doi.org/10.36824/2024-graf2

Robert Reich, always on point. 🎯

📅 Mi, 24.6. – 10:00 Uhr bis 12:00
Seminar: Erste Schritte auf dem Weg zur Erarbeitung eines Notfallplans
👉 Weitere Infos: https://nfdi4culture.de/id/E6826
📝 Anmeldung:

Cowboys ink Raiders edge who was 'sleep, unresponsive' in 2024 arrest https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2026/06/18/cowboys-raiders-edge-charles-snowden-signing/90615532007/

Fruits Of Labor (Of Love)
(A 10x8" silver chloride print I made last night of a scene captured in the Bernina Range in 2024, which reminded me of 18th century landscape painting...)
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography

Elon Musk Threatens Legal Action Over Documentary’s 2024 Election Claims
https://people.com/elon-musk-threatens-legal-action-over-documentary-2024-election-claims-12113839

"Until now, the record for most spending per vote was held by Mayor Daniel Lurie, who paid $156.14 for each of his first-choice votes in the 2024 mayoral race. But there’s a big difference: Lurie won."
(He had much worse opposition! It was a terrible field.)
https://

$211 per vote: How Saikat Chakrabarti spent $8.8M on his congressional run
Connie Chan spent $25.09 per vote. Scott Wiener spent $61.24. Saikat Chakrabarti spent...a lot more than that.

new gorgeous solo zither tape by drew gardner, recorded live on the frow show in 2024. https://worriedsongs.bandcamp.com/album/white-clouds-for-thousands-of-miles

"Ørsted turns on 500 MWh battery project with co-located solar in Texas"
#US #USA #America #Teax

Ørsted turns on 500 MWh battery project with co-located solar in Texas - pv magazine Global
The Old 300 Storage project has reached commercial operations and is now fully integrated with the ERCOT grid, using made-in-America Tesla battery energy storage systems (BESS). It is co-located with a 430 MW solar project that was switched on in 2024.

Crows in the Cemetery on a Hot June Afternoon (2024-06) - Corvids chatting in a green space between a suburban recycling centre and a building site under airport flight path #fieldRecording #London #crows

Crows in the Cemetery on a Hot June Afternoon (2024-06)
Corvids chatting in a green space between a suburban recycling centre and a building site under airport flight path #fieldRecording #London #crows

On Tuesday, the Trump administration filed a motion to join a lawsuit attempting to
block the U.S.’s first and only reparations program.
The federal government is supporting a 2024 lawsuit by right-wing group Judicial Watch,
which argues that the Evanston, Illinois reparations program violates the rights of non-Black residents

Trump Administration Attempts to Stop Reparations to Black Community in Illinois
The motion is an “attack on the revived hope that Black communities have felt” from the program, said its architect.

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

Gas prices were a staple of GOP ads in 2024. Now it's Democrats' turn. (Jessica Piper/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/19/gas-prices-midterms-affordability-ads-01041175
http://www.memeorandum.com/260819/p9#a260819p9

Wow... a nearly 70% drop in Labour Day border crossing this year since 2024 from Metro Vancouver area to Washington State.
"Numbers for the Peace Arch, Pacific Highway, Lynden and Sumas ports of entry show a 49 per cent decline in the number of southbound vehicles with B.C. plates visiting Washington State during Labour Day this year, compared to 2025, and that becomes a drop of 67 per cent when compared to Labour Day 2024.
There were 1,465 trips this year, compared to 2,900 in 2025 and 4,385 in 2024.”
#ElbowsUp #USA #Canada #TradeWar #TheAmericanFascist
https://albernivalleynews.com/2026/09/09/southbound-b-c-washington-border-crossings-fall-49/