Tootfinder

Been playing Pistol Whip again. Such a great game. The Black Magic "hard" level, with Reckless and Hell options is ridiculously hard. Finishing at all is a feat.
Was wondering how the hell the top players managed to score so highly. I was in like 4th place thinking I was playing a practically perfect game.
But it turns out only with 188 hits. The top three, I noticed, has 189 hits! There's a secret dude!?
Found him, flying around in the sky mid level on the right.
Nice. That's me 3rd in the global leaderboard for Black Magic Hard Reckless Hell now then.
Maybe I shouldn't be giving the game away. If someone learns of the secret dude from this post and then beats me into 4th place I'll be miffed.
#vr #games #pistolWhip

Joe Davidson, a longtime Washington Post columnist, says he resigned after a column he wrote about Trump's policies was blocked for being "too opinionated" (Corbin Bolies/The Daily Beast)
https://www.thedailybeast.com/wapo-columni

WaPo Columnist Flames Jeff Bezos After Quitting in Protest
Joe Davidson said he left the paper after it spiked political commentary from his column.

Ukrainians grapple with how to memorialize a war still being fought: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/10/ukrainians-grapple-with-how-to.html

For all the other passengers and crews of #Dreamliner‎s around the globe, I hope that #AirIndia flight 171 indeed didn't crash due to general issues with the aircraft type. 🧐 #Boeing
“Th…

Air India crash investigation focuses on movement of engine fuel control switches
Data-driven reporting and analysis on the strategy and technology of flying.

It's worth bearing in mind that all AI companies are in that phase where they burn money to attract the most customers and hope that the competition blinks first. That means all AI is pretty badly underpriced.
For coding, that's a problem. It's just on the edge of being arguably positive for some. If the price goes up by an order of ten, the bubble is going to burst. And it may take the other AI use cases with it. After all, coding was kind of a killer app.

Anthropic Is Bleeding Out
Hello premium customers! Feel free to get in touch at ez@betteroffline.com if you're ever feeling chatty. And if you're not one yet, please subscribe and support my independent brain madness. Also, thank you to Kasey Kagawa for helping with the maths on this. Soundtrack: Killer Be Killed -

Failing Banks
Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck, Emil Verner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06082 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06082

Failing Banks
Why do banks fail? We create a panel covering most commercial banks from 1863 through 2024 to study the history of failing banks in the United States. Failing banks are characterized by rising asset losses, deteriorating solvency, and an increasing reliance on expensive noncore funding. These commonalities imply that bank failures are highly predictable using simple accounting metrics from publicly available financial statements. Failures with runs were common before deposit insurance, but thes…

The overall goal at "A New Social"
is to shift the power of social networks back to the people,
not the platform makers,
by giving them tools that let them
move their account and their followings,
and leave if a platform ever fails them in some way.

Introducing Bounce, a tool to move your following between Bluesky and Mastodon | TechCrunch
The overall goal at A New Social is to shift the power of social networks back to the people, not the platform makers, by giving them tools that let them move their account, their followings, and leave if a platform ever fails them in some way.

Rule-Assisted Attribute Embedding
Sibo Zhao, Michael Bewong, Selasi Kwashie, Junwei Hu, Zaiwen Feng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08314 https://

Rule-Assisted Attribute Embedding
Recommendation systems often overlook the rich attribute information embedded in property graphs, limiting their effectiveness. Existing graph convolutional network (GCN) models either ignore attributes or rely on simplistic triples, failing to capture deeper semantic structures. We propose RAE (Rule- Assisted Approach for Attribute Embedding), a novel method that improves recommendations by mining semantic rules from property graphs to guide attribute embedding. RAE per…

Interesting idea. I would just like to be able to mine my BlueSky followings to see if they are bridgyfed so I can follow them on Mastodon which is my preferred experience rather than moving though.
https://werd.io/2025/bounce-lets-you-move-your-f…

The IRS open sourced much of its incredibly popular Direct File software as the future of the free tax filing program is at risk of being killed by Intuit’s lobbyists and Donald Trump’s megabill.
Meanwhile, several top developers who worked on the software have left the government and joined a project to explore the “future of tax filing” in the private sector

The IRS Tax Filing Software TurboTax Is Trying to Kill Just Got Open Sourced
Direct File has been open sourced, and its creators have left government to continue working on the "future of tax filing."