2026-05-18 10:20:39
Baidu reports Q1 revenue down 1.1% YoY to ~$4.7B, above ~$4.5B est., and net profit down 55% YoY to ~$506.6M, above ~$462.5M est., amid a slow AI payoff (Tracy Qu/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/baid
Baidu reports Q1 revenue down 1.1% YoY to ~$4.7B, above ~$4.5B est., and net profit down 55% YoY to ~$506.6M, above ~$462.5M est., amid a slow AI payoff (Tracy Qu/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/baid
Another day (well) above 30°C in the Netherlands, and even 35°C in the south. @NOS keeps choosing fun pictures with this kind of news, but it isn't funny anymore. https://nos.nl/l/2619358
Urban Fallacies ❌
城市谬误 ❌
📷 Pentax 6x7
🎞️ Ilford HP5 Plus 400 (6x7)
If you like my work, Support by buying me a coffee or a roll of film from PayPal https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/ydcdingsite
I hereby declare the IRS, DOJ and all federal agencies can never investigate me, my family members and companies for any reason, in perpetuity.
I am hereby above the law forever.
You see how ridiculous that sounds when I say it? It remains just as ridiculous when the acting Attorney General says it.
The AG does not have the authority to declare that any more than you and I do.
#USpol
What is so bewildering about Trump’s cruelty is how it has been allowed to pass, its casualness.
Donald Trump hovers above the circus of death and chaos.
Trump defies attempts to make his actions cohere with any particular strategy.
His wars, killing of innocents, and indeed, the threatening of entire civilisations are reshaping the world,
but without him even having orchestrated some master plan.
He is animated by little more than momentary impulses and resent…
🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
Beth Orton:
🎵 The Ground Above
#BethOrton
https://bethorton.bandcamp.com/track/the-ground-above
https://open.spotify.com/track/03czEOGf1RDg2FPcl30XCn
Well this is interesting. Last night during the workstation outage the grid power voltage to my house reached the highest level I've ever seen, 257V across the two nominally 120 legs (meaning they were 128.5V RMS above/below neutral). And a day or two earlier it dropped down to 235V.
Almost certainly unrelated, they don't pull enough power for this to make a difference and are on double conversion UPS so the voltage they saw wouldn't change. But the timing is curious, as is…
I love to see the crushing ethereal cloud landscapes above the painfully material rural decay of Ohio but I want the two desegregated and thats always what its been about
I'm posting this photograph to confirm my suspicion that the preview card above looks terribly compressed. Is this a known issue with all sites or is iNaturalist doing something unusual? #inaturalist #photography
Trump's energy boss: gas may stay above $3-per-gallon into 2027 (Ben Geman/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/19/gas-prices-below-3-dollars-2027-midterm-iran
http://www.memeorandum.com/260419/p36#a260419p36
Historic Glacial Confluence
This is the site of confluence of the former glaciers Vernagtferner and Hintereisferner, two of the most (and longest) studied glaciers in the world. It is the site (at ~2200m) where several times over the past thousand years the ice of the Vernagtferner would pile up to form a massive dam, 150-200m tall, which caused a semi-permanent ice lake to form in the Rofen/Hintereis valley above (the one visible from ~7 seconds). Many times this lake would get up to …
50 years ago yesterday, the debut of phil lesh’s side jam, touloos ta truck (aka toulousse, aka too loose to truck), at river city in fairfax (with father guido sarducci!), feat. terry haggerty (from sons of champlin) on guitar, plus hardcore marin locals john allair on organ, & steve mitchell on drums. a few notches above the garcia band energy-wise, some of the groovier lesh. soundboard:
#silentSunday
Cormorant. July 2023
#ElNino forms, expected to strengthen, say NOAA forecasters: https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/el-nino-forms-expected-to-strengthen-say-noaa-forecasters - prolonged period of above-average temperatures in the equatorial Pacific expected to peak this winter.
Happy 5th birthday to #Wordle!
According to Wordle’s stats, I’ve played 1601 times. And because I first started playing on 5 January 2022, I missed playing 26 times.
"India curtailed 2.1 TWh of renewable electricity in fiscal year 2025–26"
#India #Energy #Renewables
I am actually above the law, in a cosmic sense.
Nice view yesterday evening.
Jupiter, Moon and Venus side by side. Castor&Pollux above.
Too bad I had no good camera and had to use my phone. :(
#planets #astrophotography
@… Ha ha! Thanks for listening. One principle above all - if what you're doing is working for you, keep going!
Oh wow. I guess it's "lazy and smart" in a way (and only gives you three attempts at loading, then 401)
#security
Pulitzer Prize board members complain about Trump in court
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/yet-to-produce-a-single-written-response-frustrated-pulitzer-prize-board-members-tired-of-trump-acting-like-hes-above-the-law-in-discovery-ask-judge-to-act/
Sources: UK-based CuspAI, which aims to use AI for discovering new materials, is in discussions to raise at least $200M, taking its valuation to over $1B (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-20…
wiki_science: Wikipedia Map of Science (2020)
A network of scientific fields, extracted from the English Wikipedia in early 2020. Nodes are wikipedia pages representing natural, formal, social and applied sciences, and two nodes are linked if the cosine similarity of the page content is above a threshold. See <http://www.s…
The average temperature over the entire contiguous U.S. (CONUS) in March was 10.5°C, 5.2°C above average, ranking as the warmest March in the 132-year record.
This marks the first time any month's average temperature has exceeded 5°C above its 20th-century baseline.
https://www.ncei.noaa…
More than 17,000 people were under evacuation orders in southern California on Tuesday as a wildfirethreatened suburban homes.
The wind-driven #Sandy fire was reported Monday in the hills above Simi Valley, about 30 miles (48km) north-west of Los Angeles.
By Tuesday morning, it had consumed more than 2 sq miles of dry brush and destroyed at least one home, according to the Ventura county fire dep…
Energy Secretary Says Gas Prices May Stay Above $3 Until 2027 (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/world/middleeast/energy-secretary-gas-prices.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/260419/p55#a260419p55
Had to get rid of some ants in the garden. My daughter was not pleased about this deathly maneuver but accepted it if we also set up grave stones for the ant’s memorial!
So if you need some crafts gravestones you know where to look for!
#RIP Ants
Question: I'm designing the board game version of my digital game. I have two levels in the digital game: the ground where the spider walks along, and just above where the fly, flies.
The fly isn't in the sky, though. I can't call it sky because it is at human-level and players assume sky means above all our heads.
What do you think I could call this area above the ground?
The Honest Button
The crosswalk button at the corner of my downtown intersection has an LED above it that lights up red and says "Wait!" when you press it. The traffic signal does not change any faster. No wire runs from the button to the signal timer. The LED is connected only to the button itself, and it does the single job of telling the pedestrian to wait.
🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #SHERELLE
Soeneido:
🎵 Above The Clouds
#Soeneido
https://ruffntuff.bandcamp.com/track/above-the-clouds
https://open.spotify.com/track/62K363qsH4DhuAiSaQ7jYZ
Quartet 👁️🗨️
四重奏 👁️🗨️
📷 Nikon F4E
🎞️ Ilford Pan 400
If you like my work, Support by buying me a coffee or a roll of film from
PayPal https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/ydcdingsite
Wise
wiki_science: Wikipedia Map of Science (2020)
A network of scientific fields, extracted from the English Wikipedia in early 2020. Nodes are wikipedia pages representing natural, formal, social and applied sciences, and two nodes are linked if the cosine similarity of the page content is above a threshold. See <http://www.s…
Crosslisted article(s) found for physics.atom-ph. https://arxiv.org/list/physics.atom-ph/new
[1/1]:
- Electrical Noise Produced by Micron-Sized Particles above a Surface Paul Trap
Ben Saarel, Ozgur Sahin, Hartmut H\"affner, Alpha T. N'Diaye
Source: Cerebras priced its IPO at $185 per share, above the expected range of $150 to $160, raising at least $5.55B and valuing it at $56.4B fully diluted (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/13/cerebras-prices-ipo-above…
Well, what I’m wondering is, what are these people who “work very closely with Claude” gonna do when they or their institutions have to pay the full price for access to the chatbots?
Go back to writing mediocre articles themselves?
[EDIT: removed the link, because things may not have been quite the way they were presented. More generally, and not wrt. to a specific individual, the question posed above is still valid, though.]
Well, what I’m wondering is, what are these people who “work very closely with Claude” gonna do when they or their institutions have to pay the full price for access to the chatbots?
Go back to writing mediocre articles themselves?
[EDIT: removed the link, because things may not have been quite the way they were presented. More generally, and not wrt. to a specific individual, the question posed above is still valid, though.]
Climate Defenders Warn GOP Immunity Bill Puts 'Big Oil Above the Law' | Common Dreams
https://www.commondreams.org/news/big-oil-immunity-bill
@… see above ⬆️
The office last night. Rialto Square Theater, #Joliet, IL.
Built in 1926; surely one of the most beautiful buildings in America.
#chicago #LiveMusic
I went out into the wood to try to assess what dangerously unstable trees still standing in places where they could cause damage when they fall.
Needless to say, besides the two trees that have already collapsed above the house, there's at least one and possibly two unstable trees hanging over the house.
H'mmm...
#TheJoyOfCrofting
Scientists said the high of 15.4C broke the previous record set at the same station in 1998 by 2C. “This is absolutely crazy,” said Raúl Cordero, an Ecuadorian climate professor at the University of Groningen. “It is also about 20C above normal for this time of the year. That is a huge anomaly.”
#ClimateCrisis
"Scientists said the high of 15.4 °C broke the previous record set at the same station in 1998 by 2 °C. “This is absolutely crazy,” said Raúl Cordero, an Ecuadorian climate professor at the University of Groningen. “It is also about 20 °C above normal for this time of the year. That is a huge anomaly.”
(Degree symbols added for clarity.)
My jar of goodies — Observe, reflect, engage
https://jar.tiddlyhost.com/#2026-04-17-Fri
The verb “calls” in the verse above is a present active participle. His call, made initially at conversion, still is active. But the emphasis is on the Caller, more than the time of…
I got quite a few photos Tuesday for which I didn't give somebody a token but I am prioritizing portraits for processing since I know people are waiting for them; here is a wide angle of the four season garden in the ILR courtyard with a class discussing outdoors
#photo #photography
Finally, Volkswagen is launching a V2G tariff in Germany. It is now scheduled for launch in Q4 2026.
Although Volkswagen was the first German car manufacturer to release bidirectional charging functionality in their vehicles, they are now behind BMW, Mercedes and Ford (whose EVs use VW technology) in terms of announcing an actual charger and tariff bundle.
Too high concentrations of PFAS 'forever chemicals' found in all waterways and lakes of the Dutch rural province of Friesland, often a factor of 1 to 10 above the legal limit, and sometimes worse than that. Water management board asks for a complete ban. https://nos.nl/l/2619066
this came to me in a dream and i thought it was the funniest shit ever
@… #VOTV #VoicesOfTheVoid
En attendant Godot II 🤡
等待戈多 II 🤡
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️ Ilford FP4 Plus 125, expired 1993
If you like my work, buy me a coffee from PayPal #filmphotography
Just got confirmation that I will be documenting and helping with some maintenance works at Breslauer Hütte, before the main season starts. This hut, built in 1882, is one of the oldest high-alpine mountain huts in the eastern Alps, and located just below Wildspitze (3768m), Tyrol's highest mountain.
The hut belongs to the Breslau section of the Alpenverein (now based in Stuttgart) and it's their upcoming 150th anniversary next year. Aside from the repair work, for me it's a long await…
Remember what I said about flower naming conventions? Well this one is called "Sunrise Dynasty".
#photography #bloomScrolling #tulips
I grew up in Southern California - so the concept of continuously free flowing fresh water all year was a thing of hard-to-believe imagination.
All these decades later, now that I live in the mountains around the Monterey Bay, I look with daily amazement at at the ever-running stream that runs past my garden.
I kinda wonder whether climate change will cause my stream to dry up or become larger.
I'm glad my house is roughly 40 to 60 feet above (and well back from) the cr…
Ende Mai 2026 wurden im #Atlantik und im #Mittelmeer deutlich erhöhte #Meeresoberflächentemperaturen gemessen.
Daten des
This front page, above-the-fold article about Hany Farid is a good read. I know him ever so slightly from when our paths crossed in steganography research 25 years ago. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/us/ai-d
Still thinking about those delicious Steak Frites at Little Bad Wolf in Andersonville from over a month ago - highly recommended #Chicago
"‘A huge anomaly’: Antarctica records winter temperatures 20C warmer than normal"
#Antarctica #Climate #ClimateChange
This afternoon, fulfilling a Mother’s Day request a day early, the family hiked the Cascades in Pembroke, VA. The trail transits up Little Stony Creek to this fantastic set of falls. We had the fortunate timing of being there not long after heavy rains. Perfect weather for it too.
#hiking #waterfall
0°C line has dropped to 1100m above sea level. I see white summits around 🤯🥶
I'm so glad that I was cycling and hiking last weekend!
Trying to argue with car-brained people...
One says that since everyone drives above the posted speed limit that it's the speed limit signs that are wrong, and the drivers are right!
sigh...
Is this article too praiseful (at least the part I can see above the paywall)? Well…
When I complain about executive types at Target, CBS, Google, Apple, etc. who rolled over and played dead the instant fascism farted in their general direction…it’s not like I’m expecting them to form the New French Resistance or something. I’m just expecting them to respond to wildly inappropriate power grabs with modest but firm refusal. That’s it. And that’s what Powell did.
So I say yeah, go ahead and lionize him for 15 min, even if just to shame Tim Cook.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-jerome-powell-fed-legacy/
Antarctica’s west coast is missing an area of winter sea ice the size of France,
sparking concerns for threatened penguins other marine life and global sea levels.
One expert said the loss of ice in the Bellingshausen Sea was “depressing”
and the failure of ice to form could have intensified a heatwave over the continent’s peninsula
Last week saw daytime temperatures peak at 15.4C
which is more than 20C above average.
SpaceX closed up 4.8% on Tuesday with a $2.65T market cap, just above Amazon's, after popping ~12% intraday and briefly overtaking Microsoft's $2.93T market cap (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/16/spacex-stock-rally-market-cap.html
Somewhat shaky proof that the skies above over the International #DarkSky Community MŸn and Nyord - https://darksky.org/places/mon-and-nyord-dark-sky-community/ - are good indeed: out of cam vertical 60 seconds f/2.8 shot at ISO 1600 (camera lying on an unstable table) from a place between Elmelunde and NŸrreby, still no sky background appearing. The SQM reading in the zenith was consistently 21.7 mag./sq.arcsec.
May 2026 was the second-warmest May on record globally, in between 2024 and 2025.
The global average temperature was 15.81°C, 0.55°C above the 1991-2020 average for May and 1.42°C above the estimated 1850-1900 pre-industrial average for the month.
https://climate.copernicus.eu/surface-
Sprig of flowers on dining room table
#photo #photography #flowers #bloomscrolling
Human Traces X ⛩️
人类踪迹 X ⛩️
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️ Lucky SHD 400
If you like my work, Support by buying me a coffee or a roll of film from PayPal #filmphotography
🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #DriveTime
Gang Starr feat. Inspectah Deck:
🎵 Above the Clouds
#GangStarr #InspectahDeck
https://open.spotify.com/track/3ZBSXNYdTZVaBUQI3E2rF6
TSMC reports Q1 revenue up 35.1% YoY to ~$35B, net income up 58.3% YoY to ~$18B, both above est., and says 7nm or smaller chips were ~74% of its wafer revenue (Dylan Butts/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/16/tsmc-q1-profit-58-percent-ai-chip-demand-reco…
Record winter temperatures in Antarctic raise fears over speed of climate breakdown.
Scientists said the high of 15.4C broke the previous record set at the same station in 1998 by 2C. “This is absolutely crazy,” said Raúl Cordero, an Ecuadorian climate professor at the University of Groningen. “It is also about 20C above normal for this time of the year. That is a huge anomaly.”
"Record winter temperatures in Antarctic raise fears over speed of climate breakdown"
#Climate #ClimateChange #Antarctic
SF vibes are frenetic over the huge divide in outcomes and career uncertainty for software engineers; over 5 years ~10K people in AI attained retirement wealth (Deedy/@deedydas)
https://x.com/deedydas/status/2055491938464489888
Human Traces IX ⛩️
人类踪迹 IX ⛩️
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️ Lucky SHD 400
If you like my work, Support by buying me a coffee or a roll of film from PayPal #filmphotography
Figma reports Q1 revenue up 46% YoY to $333.4M, vs. $313.2M est., and forecasts Q2 revenue above estimates, citing AI monetization; FIG jumps 8% after hours (Zaheer Kachwala/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/figma-r
PitchBook: US growth and late-stage venture funds raised $23.6B YTD, up from $7.4B in 2025 and above the totals for any of the past 12 years, amid the AI boom (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/pro/venture-capital/ai
Klarna reports Q1 revenue up 44% YoY to $1.01B, above est., GMV up 33% to $33.7B, active customers up 20% to 119M, and a $1M profit, up from a $99M loss YoY (Connor Hart/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/klar…
Cisco reports Q3 revenue up 12% YoY to $15.84B, vs. $15.56B est., forecasts Q4 revenue above est., and is cutting almost 4,000 jobs; CSCO jumps 17% after hours (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/13/cisco-csco-q3-earnings-report-2026.html
SoftBank reports Q4 net income up 3x to ~$11.6B, above ~$1.5B est., driven by a $25B gain in its OpenAI stake; by October, its OpenAI investment will hit $64.6B (David Keohane/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/85b9fe04-0d70-482e-bd27-9c87c1ebfc01
Microsoft raises prices for Surface PCs, with Laptop 7 and Pro 11 now $500 more expensive than at their 2024 launch, citing higher memory and component costs (Zac Bowden/Windows Central)
https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/s…
STMicro reports Q1 revenue of $3.10B, above $3.04B est., $171M operating income, above $165.8 est., and forecasts $3.45B revenue for Q2, above $3.21B est. (Nathan Vifflin/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/stmicroelectronics-repor…
DoorDash reports Q1 revenue up 33% YoY to $4.04B, vs. $4.14B est., and forecasts Q2 marketplace gross order value above estimates; DASH jumps 11% after hours (Koyena Das/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-tra
AMD reports Q1 revenue up 38% YoY to $10.25B, Data Center revenue up 57% to $5.8B, and forecasts Q2 revenue above estimates, as AI chip demand stays strong (Zaheer Kachwala/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/amd-forec
JD.com reports Q1 revenue up 4.9% YoY to $46.5B, above ~$45.8B est., and adjusted net profit down 42% YoY to $1B, amid a fierce food delivery battle in China (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/busin…
Sea reports Q1 revenue up 47% YoY to $7.1B and net income up 6% YoY to $428M, both above est., after warding off rivals in Southeast Asia's e-commerce market (Olivia Poh/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20…
Indian IT giant TCS reports Q4 sales up 9.7% YoY to $7.63B, net profit up 12.2% to $1.48B, both above est., and says new AI models did not hurt services demand (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/indias-tcs-beats-fourth-quarter-revenue-v…
Apple forecasts Q3 revenue above estimates and reports Q2 results above projections in China but below expectations in the Americas and Europe regions (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-30/ap…