Tootfinder

A profile of David Sacks, appointed as White House AI adviser in December 2024, who has a ruthless devotion to self-interest and helped pass the GENIUS Act (George Packer/The Atlantic)
https:…

The Venture-Capital Populist
How David Sacks and the new tech right went full MAGA and captured Washington

👻 #Mythos zum #Frühstück: 😱
„Erneuerbare Energien sind die teuersten“.
Eine Umfrage hat diesen Glauben in der deutschen Bevölkerung erst 2025 wieder gezeigt. Schauen wir uns die Kosten an. Wie schneiden

Verschobene Siri: Apple will 250 Millionen US-Dollar an Kläger zahlen
Apples bereits im Sommer 2024 angekündigte verbesserte Sprachassistentin ist immer noch nicht umgesetzt. In einem US-Klageverfahren gibt es nun eine Einigung.

Verschobene Siri: Apple will 250 Millionen US-Dollar an Kläger zahlen
Apples bereits im Sommer 2024 angekündigte verbesserte Sprachassistentin ist immer noch nicht umgesetzt. In einem US-Klageverfahren gibt es nun eine Einigung.

"What’s ironic is that you have the leader of the Catholic church speaking out against war and against the way that immigrants are being treated. That shows this co-option of the Christian identity by Opus Dei to be a complete fallacy; it’s all for political expediency. It’s about these people’s own deeply authoritarian and conservative views about how the world should be run."
He spent years investigating Opus Dei, a Catholic group accused of a vast conspiracy of abuse. Then…

Ampere: KPop Demon Hunters exceeded one billion viewing hours; its success brings into question whether Netflix will keep reducing commissions of kids' content (Neil Batey/C21Media)
https://www.c21media.net/news/success-of-k

Success of KPop Demon Hunters brings into question Netflix’s pullback on kids’ content, claims Ampere Analysis
Global streamer Netflix reduced commissions for kids’ content between 2024 and 2025, even as its animation sensation KPop Demon Hunters surpassed one billion views, according to Ampere Analysis.

A look at SpaceX's IPO, reportedly aiming to raise up to $50B at a $1.75T valuation, more than seven times higher than its ~$200B valuation in October 2024 (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/5bf1fe0c-1593-49b7-aaf1-18e7da9b36ed

SpaceX: the final frontier of IPOs
Can Elon Musk’s moonshot deliver the mooted $1.75tn valuation?

Man pleads guilty in athlete home burglaries case https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/48104437/man-pleads-guilty-2024-athlete-home-burglaries-case

A Not-so-Common Sunflower. LA Arboretum, Arcadia, California, USA. July, 2024. OM System OM-1 M.Zuiko 300mm F4. #laarboretum #sunflower #bloomscrolling

Was this real? Announcing things is cheap; building things matters🏗️
In 2025, it became clear that it is real.
4 industrial-scale Green Methanol plants are operational in China. In Europe? 1
In 2024, A.P. MŸller Holding (owners of Maersk🚢) created the startup VioNeo, with plans for a fossil-free plastics plant in Antwerp🇧🇪. In 2026, they changed plans & want to build "in China near green methanol supply"

The dramatic transition of the extreme Red #Supergiant WOH G64 to a Yellow Hypergiant: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.19329 - this 2024 paper, already mentioned by me in connection with other observations of that star in https://skyweek.wordpress.com/2024/11/24/allgemeines-live-blog-ab-dem-24-11-2024/ ("Die enge zirkumstellare Umgebung des Roten Überriesen WOH G64 ..."), has now been formally published: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-026-02789-7.epdf?sharing_token=7UR_XvTAZerqnMHPRyA0LtRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0N7FejDObMF3AkHA10E71tuouxDX6yP8bM1QCFKGVVZLl8bT37LMadR8u4ukhACilFI60-Zxl0e00Bc0v3qXkG29yIQr7uTE0sd644q7We4d6ay5Tblhxc-UABROlAnuDs=

Docs: Israeli AI chip startup Hailo is pursuing an urgent IPO via a SPAC merger at a valuation of less than $500M; it was last valued at $1.2B in 2024 (Meir Orbach/CTech)
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/rj000qzaowx

Cash-strapped AI chip startup Hailo sees valuation halved to under $500 million ahead of urgent IPO
Israeli firm seeks critical funding through a SPAC merger amid mounting market pressures.

This looks like quite a cool project! Can't help wondering if Aotearoa NZ needs something like this... https://codeberg.org/flohmarkt/flohmarkt/ - example

@… I was reading this article - https://theorkneynews.scot/2025/06/06/between-2008-an…

Between 2008 and 2024, 97 Public Libraries Across Scotland Permanently Closed
The vital contribution public libraries make to our communities has been highlighted in a survey of  2,000 library users and 300 librarians across Scotland. Many libraries are either being closed, …

Our #VFXPipeline, database and renderfarm also supports shot numbers with emojis. Need to find my post about this from a few years ago 😁
Maybe I should test it again to make sure it still works. Back then, all I had to do was disable a regular expression that enforced alphanumeric characters.

“Google handed over a trove of personal data about a student and journalist to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in response to a subpoena that had not been approved by a judge…”
“…latest example of how the U.S. government is using a controversial type of legal request, called an administrative subpoena, to demand that tech companies turn over the private data of individuals who have been critical of the Trump administration.”

Google sent personal and financial information of student journalist to ICE | TechCrunch
The tech giant handed over the personal information of a journalist and student who attended a pro-Palestinian protest in 2024. This is the latest example of ICE using its controversial subpoena powers to target people critical of the Trump administration.

The Dali crew is still in Baltimore 2 years after Key Bridge collapse - The Baltimore Banner https://www.thebanner.com/community/local-news/dali-crew-key-bridge-collapse-LB5XY2XQJVADLBQMBVYSB6OP7I/

2 years after the Dali slammed into the Key Bridge, its crew is still here
Two years after the Dali cargo ship slammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge on March 26, 2024, eight crew members remain grounded in Baltimore, among the longest stretches of time for any seafarers in recent memory.

The Republican former lieutenant governor of North Carolina,
Mark Robinson,
has admitted he "misled" voters during his unsuccessful 2024 gubernatorial campaign
when he denied posting racist and offensive comments on a pornography website
– suggesting he did so to protect Donald Trump’s successful presidential run.
Robinson, who worked in furniture manufacturing before entering politics in 2020, told the "After the Call" podcast on Thursday:

"Valencia’s deadly flood still haunts Spain. Would it have happened in a fossil fuel-free world?"
#Spain #Valencia #FossilFuels

‘Growing threat’: How climate change worsened Valencia’s deadly floods
A major study has confirmed that the flash flooding that devastated Valencia in 2024 was ‘intensified’ by human-made climate change.

Ofcom: the share of adult UK social media users actively posting, sharing, or commenting falls to 49%, down from 61% in 2024, as users become more selective (Dan Milmo/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/apr

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #AfternoonShow
The Three Degrees:
🎵 TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)
#TheThreeDegrees
https://kitremakes.bandcamp.com/track/mfsb-with-the-three-degrees-t-s-o-p-the-sound-of-philadelphia-dj-kit-remakes-2024-115bpm

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #ChrisHawkins
Lynks:
🎵 USE IT OR LOSE IT (6 Music Session, 20 Feb 2024)
#Lynks
https://lynkslynkslynks.bandcamp.com/track/use-it-or-lose-it-2
https://open.spotify.com/track/72YhBiqyf312dbifU3yHbx

"The #Labour party won one third of the votes (34%) in an election in which under two thirds (60%) of the electorate voted. Only one in five (20.4%) registered electors in Britain support this government. It has no mandate to do anything. If it tries to do anything radical, then, as Thatcher did with the poll tax, it will find the difference between Westminster games and real politics.
T…

The election, and after
The first thing to say about the 2024 General Election result is this: Labour lost, and lost badly. They lost, in fact, half a million votes compared to their 2019 result; they lost three million votes when compared to their 2017 result. They also failed to win anything remotely resembling a majority of the popular vote.

Had a bucket list moment performing with him and his son (also a guitarist) in 2024. Lovely man, super cheery, and then just jaw-droppingly note perfect. RIP @… https://

The use of backticks in place of possessive apostrophes suggests this statement wasn't checked by a native-english speaker before being put on the website. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-statement-on-the-2nd-anniversary-of-alexei-na…

Joint statement on the 2nd anniversary of Alexei Navalny`s death
Joint likeminded statement on the occasion of the second anniversary of Alexei Navalny`s death on 16 February 2024.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@lobsters/115882407207303960
Good reads:
― the 2024 blog post
― the 2026 discussion in Lobsters.
Incidentally, I did stop using Discord. No regrets.

Google handed over a trove of personal data
about a student and journalist to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
in response to a subpoena that had not been approved by a judge, according to a report by The Intercept. 
The search and advertising tech giant provided ICE with the usernames, physical addresses, and an itemized list of services associated with the Google account of Amandla Thomas-Johnson,
a British student and journalist who briefly attended a pro-P…

Google sent personal and financial information of student journalist to ICE | TechCrunch
The tech giant handed over the personal information of a journalist and student who attended a pro-Palestinian protest in 2024. This is the latest example of ICE using its controversial subpoena powers to target people critical of the Trump administration.

I like the idea of a low-cost MacBook, but when you can get a 2024 MacBook Air with an M3 and 16GB of memory for the same money, I don't know why more people don't just do that.

"The crew was hungry, the crew was angry, and we tried to survive only day-by-day."
"Back in 2016, 20 ships were abandoned around the world, according to the ITF. In 2025 the number had ballooned to 410, with 6,223 merchant seamen falling victim. Both of those figures for last year were up by almost a third on 2024."
https://www.…

The shadowy world of abandoned oil tankers
A growing number of tankers and other commercial vessels are being ditched by their owners.

"‘You Can’t Live Without Us’: How Big Oil Pivoted from Climate-friendly Messaging to Normalise Dependence on Fossil Fuels "
#Climate #ClimateChange #FossilFuels

'You Can’t Live Without Us': How Big Oil Pivoted from Climate-friendly Messaging to Normalise Dependence on Fossil Fuels  
Four of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies have spent the last four years systematically shifting away from climate-friendly advertising to push a new message: fossil fuels are here to stay, a report has found.  Campaign group Clean Creatives analysed 1,859 communications from BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, and Chevron published between 2020 and 2024, spanning paid advertisements on Facebook, YouTube, […]

Lithuania-based Vinted says it completed an ~€880M secondary share sale led by EQT, Teachers' Venture Growth, Schroders at an €8B valuation, up from €5B in 2024 (Ivan Levingston/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/8410967c-c713-46d1-a5e6-42cfc3b6528c

US child safety group NCMEC received 1.5M reports of suspected CSAM with ties to AI in 2025, a significant surge compared to 67,000 in 2024 and 4,700 in 2023 (Bloomberg)

EssilorLuxottica says it sold over 7M Meta AI glasses in 2025, up from the 2M that the company sold in 2023 and 2024 combined (Samantha Subin/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/11/ray-ban-maker-essilorluxottica-triples-sales-of-meta-ai-gla…

Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica says it more than tripled Meta AI glasses sales in 2025
The France-based eyewear brand has been working on smart glasses with the social media company since 2019.

Sources: cloud provider Vultr is seeking to raise $1B to expand its AI computing capacity, after raising $333M at a $3.5B valuation in 2024 (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/amd-backed-vultr-seeks-1-billion-ai-cloud-push

AMD-Backed Vultr Seeks $1 Billion for AI Cloud Push
Vultr, one of the oldest independent cloud providers, is seeking to raise at least $1 billion in new capital so it can compete with a growing list of startups scrambling for cash to meet the surging demand for AI computing power. The company, which is backed by chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, ...

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #ChrisHawkins
Yard Act:
🎵 We Make Hits (6 Music Session, 4 Mar 2024)
#YardAct
https://open.spotify.com/track/7mYTcajvGEU4LZeHQ8V5w2