Tootfinder

Strava sues Garmin for allegedly infringing two patents related to its segments and heatmap features and violating a 2015 agreement between the companies (Ray Maker/DC Rainmaker)
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2025/10/strava-sues-garmin-demands-stop-sell…

Strava Just Sued Garmin: Demands Garmin Stop Selling Devices
 Strava has sued Garmin, an act that I very much did not have on my bingo card for 2025. In doing so, they are demanding that Garmin cease selling effectively all of their fitness/outdoor watches, as well as cycling

The state of checks and balances in the country is among the more ominous indicators of the health of America’s democracy:
in the executive branch is a president who is keen on exercising every lever of power that he has
– as well as some he does not
– to enrich himself and his allies
and to suppress dissent and political opposition.
The legislature is dominated by a regime-friendly political party
that is too happy to roll over and accede to the preside…

"Having Lunch Now": Understanding How Users Engage with a Proactive Agent for Daily Planning and Self-Reflection
Adnan Abbas, Caleb Wohn, Arnav Jagtap, Eugenia H Rho, Sang Won Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24073

"Having Lunch Now": Understanding How Users Engage with a Proactive Agent for Daily Planning and Self-Reflection
Conversational agents have been studied as tools to scaffold planning and self-reflection for productivity and well-being. While prior work has demonstrated positive outcomes, we still lack a clear understanding of what drives these results and how users behave and communicate with agents that act as coaches rather than assistants. Such understanding is critical for designing interactions in which agents foster meaningful behavioral change. We conducted a 14-day longitudinal study with 12 parti…

Let’s be crystal clear about what this law actually accomplishes: It makes it harder for adults to access perfectly legal (and often helpful) information and services. It forces people to create detailed trails of their online activit…

Didn’t Take Long To Reveal The UK’s Online Safety Act Is Exactly The Privacy-Crushing Failure Everyone Warned About
Well, well, well. The “age assurance” part of the UK’s Online Safety Act has finally gone into effect, with its age checking requirements kicking in a week and a half ago. And what do you kno…

Let’s be crystal clear about what this law actually accomplishes: It makes it harder for adults to access perfectly legal (and often helpful) information and services. It forces people to create detailed trails of their online activit…

Didn’t Take Long To Reveal The UK’s Online Safety Act Is Exactly The Privacy-Crushing Failure Everyone Warned About
Well, well, well. The “age assurance” part of the UK’s Online Safety Act has finally gone into effect, with its age checking requirements kicking in a week and a half ago. And what do you kno…

Well, it appears there was some very good news on my birthday, when I was too busy involved in celebrations to notice.
#PalestineAction
#RightToProtest

Students on the campus where I work oppose Ontario Bill 33 - the Orwellian titled "Supporting Children and Students Act." Among other things, the bill would require universities to admit only on merit (though it provides no definition) and would allow the province to decide which fees are required and which are optional, which would undercut student unions, newspapers, and radio as well as some financial support for students.

Arriving at Act I, The Alters is quite engaging. It's a video game, in case you are reaching for your favourite search engine. So far, the sci-fi aspect has that structured feeling of the Eastern European/Soviet branch of the genre, mixed up with the post-Soviet era shift of values and cultural trends -- still kind of bland, but looking at the Western guilty thrill of the dystopian. It's a damn good, well-made game. I hope it holds up in that way until the end.

The UK's Online Safety Act shows the UK prioritized government control over improving safety, becoming a cautionary tale in internet regulation for democracies (Mike Masnick/Techdirt)
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/08…

Didn’t Take Long To Reveal The UK’s Online Safety Act Is Exactly The Privacy-Crushing Failure Everyone Warned About
Well, well, well. The “age assurance” part of the UK’s Online Safety Act has finally gone into effect, with its age checking requirements kicking in a week and a half ago. And what do you kno…

"Brexit has been a resounding disaster. Starmer must find the courage to change course"
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/05/brexit-disaster-courage-eu-act-starmer
With a quote that many politicians would do well to …

#Blakes7 Series A, Episode 11 - Bounty
BLAKE: Well, what have I got to gain by lying?
CALLY: You are the only man who can reunite your planet. If you act now, you can save it from war and from the Federation.
BLAKE: Well? [Sarkoff walks away.]
…

This reporting doesn't make clear the resolution is nonbinding: the departments are free to blow off not just the "deadlines" but the requested actions as well.
It does signal priorities the supervisors may go on to weigh at budget time, when evaluating mayoral appointees that need confirmation, or negotiating with Lurie about legislation he wants passed. But it may be a weak signal because supes who signed onto this did so knowing it was nonbinding.

Supervisors approve new traffic safety plan with deadlines for city departments
After San Francisco’s policy on traffic safety expired at the end of 2024, city supervisors on Tuesday adopted a new plan to curb traffic fatalities and injuries on city streets. The Board of Supervisors passed the Street Safety Act, sponsored by District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar, that includes actions with deadlines for seven city departments, […]

@… Well, doesn't the Securities Act say that all registration statements go effective after 20 days? I know that is not the way the Act has been administered for decades, of course, but there is a statutory basis for the SEC's move.

In the latest act of retributIion targeting public servants in the federal government’s intelligence community
— the Trump administration moved Tuesday to revoke the security clearances of 37 current and former national security officials
A memo posted online by Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence,
accuses the targeted officials of having engaged in the “politicization or weaponization of intelligence” to advance partisan goals,
as well as failure to …

Trump administration revokes security clearances of 37 current and former government officials
The Trump administration says it's revoking the security clearances of 37 current and former national security officials. It's the latest act of retribution targeting public servants in the federal government’s intelligence community. A memo posted Tuesday by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard accuses the targeted officials of having engaged in the “politicization or weaponization of intelligence” to advance partisan goals. It also accuses them of failing to safeguard classif…

Ohana sometimes still pretends that she doesn't like her little adopted sister Nina. That's why she has this "caught in the act"-face in this photo. 😄
Also: went to the vet today, and Nina is recovering well from her little surgery. ❤️
#dogsofmastodon

@… thinks a written constitution would somehow impede a #Fascist takeover of the United Kingdom. I admire his optimism: look how well it's working in the United States.
I mean, a written constitution …

Steven Spielberg's "Artificial Intelligence" (2001) was on Netflix and I had never seen it. I had heard that the final act is very sappy and... spoilers... yes it has issues in my opinion (voice-over narration *and* an alien for exposition dumps?!) but the act works well in the context of the movie: I wasn't aware that this is a modern Pinocchio's tale and the movie is quite literal about it.
But what really blew me away were the animatronic robots:

Now even I think Mike Johnson is going to hell. That lackey is the biggest performative Christian ever caught on camera. He is so deep into Trump's shit, he couldn't even act disgusted when they asked him what he thinks of Trump's latest AI masterpiece. Oh the affected amusement, oh the insincere delight in his eyes when he described what a social media genius is his dear leader. He might as well start crawling in front of the reporters and chew on Trump's diaper with a stupi…

Observational challenges to holographic and Ricci dark energy paradigms: Insights from ACT DR6 and DESI DR2
Peng-Ju Wu, Tian-Nuo Li, Guo-Hong Du, Xin Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02945

Observational challenges to holographic and Ricci dark energy paradigms: Insights from ACT DR6 and DESI DR2
Recent studies suggest that dark energy may be dynamical rather than being a mere cosmological constant $Λ$. In this work, we examine the viability of two physically well-motivated dynamical dark energy models -- holographic dark energy (HDE) and Ricci dark energy (RDE) -- by confronting them with the latest observational data, including ACT cosmic microwave background anisotropies, DESI baryon acoustic oscillations, and DESY5 supernovae. Our analysis reveals a fundamental tension between earl…

SPARQL in N3: SPARQL CONSTRUCT as a rule language for the Semantic Web (Extended Version)
D\"orthe Arndt, William Van Woensel, Dominik Tomaszuk
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13041

SPARQL in N3: SPARQL CONSTRUCT as a rule language for the Semantic Web (Extended Version)
Reasoning in the Semantic Web (SW) commonly uses Description Logics (DL) via OWL2 DL ontologies, or SWRL for variables and Horn clauses. The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) offers more expressive rules but is defined outside RDF and rarely adopted. For querying, SPARQL is a well-established standard operating directly on RDF triples. We leverage SPARQL CONSTRUCT queries as logic rules, enabling (1) an expressive, familiar SW rule language, and (2) general recursion, where queries can act on the r…

From Delegates to Trustees: How Optimizing for Long-Term Interests Shapes Bias and Alignment in LLM
Suyash Fulay, Jocelyn Zhu, Michiel Bakker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12689 ht…

From Delegates to Trustees: How Optimizing for Long-Term Interests Shapes Bias and Alignment in LLM
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising accuracy in predicting survey responses and policy preferences, which has increased interest in their potential to represent human interests in various domains. Most existing research has focused on behavioral cloning, effectively evaluating how well models reproduce individuals' expressed preferences. Drawing on theories of political representation, we highlight an underexplored design trade-off: whether AI systems should act as delegates, mirr…

SDSS J1001 5027: Strong microlensing-induced chromatic variation caught in the act
Luis J. Goicoechea, Vyacheslav N. Shalyapin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02169 https://

SDSS J1001+5027: Strong microlensing-induced chromatic variation caught in the act
We conducted long-term monitoring of the doubly imaged gravitationally lensed quasar SDSS J1001+5027 consisting of spectro-photometric observations separated by $\sim$120 days (time delay between both quasar images), as well as test and auxiliary data. This monitoring approach allowed us to reliably find a strong microlensing-induced chromatic variation of the quasar continuum in the period 2022$-$2025. The ongoing microlensing event has caused the delay-corrected spectral flux ratio in 2025 to…

Coherent matter wave emission from an atomtronic transistor
Sasanka Dowarah, Mengxin Du, Alan Zanders, Shengwang Du, Michael Kolodrubetz, Chuanwei Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03398

Coherent matter wave emission from an atomtronic transistor
The atomtronic matter-wave triple-well transistor is theoretically predicted to exhibit current gain and act as a coherent matter-wave emitter. In this work, we investigate the dynamics of an atomtronic transistor composed of a triple-well potential -- source, gate, and drain -- modeled by the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We systematically explore the dependence of the drain population and the current on the source bias potential and the strength of the interatomic interaction. Our…

The Computational Foundations of Collective Intelligence
Charlie Pilgrim, Joe Morford, Elizabeth Warren, M\'elisande Aellen, Christopher Krupenye, Richard P Mann, Dora Biro
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07999

The Computational Foundations of Collective Intelligence
Why do collectives outperform individuals when solving some problems? Fundamentally, collectives have greater computational resources with more sensory information, more memory, more processing capacity, and more ways to act. While greater resources present opportunities, there are also challenges in coordination and cooperation inherent in collectives with distributed, modular structures. Despite these challenges, we show how collective resource advantages lead directly to well-known forms of …

Enhancing the mass resolving power of FRIB's proposed high-voltage MR-ToF mass separator and spectrometer: addressing non-ideal conditions
Christian Michael Ireland, Franziska Maria Maier, Einstein Dhayal, Erich Leistenschneider, Ryan Ringle, Austin Sjaarda
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11741

Enhancing the mass resolving power of FRIB's proposed high-voltage MR-ToF mass separator and spectrometer: addressing non-ideal conditions
Multi-reflection time-of-flight mass separators and spectrometers (MR-ToF MSs) are indispensable tools at radioactive ion beam (RIB) facilities. These electrostatic ion beam traps act as highly selective mass separators and high-precision mass spectrometers for rare and exotic nuclei. When well-tuned and designed to minimize higher-order flight-time aberrations, state-of-the-art MR-ToF MSs approach, and slightly exceed, mass resolving powers of \( m / Δm = 10^6 \). Achieving \( m / Δm > 3 \cd…

Coupled CFD-DEM model for dry powder inhalers simulation: validation and sensitivity analysis for the main model parameters
Raffaele Ponzini, Roberto Da Vi\`a, Simone Bn\`a, Ciro Cottini, Andrea Benassi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09694

Coupled CFD-DEM model for dry powder inhalers simulation: validation and sensitivity analysis for the main model parameters
The use of computational techniques in the design of dry powder inhalers (DPI), as well as in unravelling the complex mechanisms of drug aerosolization, has increased significantly in recent years. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used to study the air flow, inside the DPI, during the patient inspiratory act while discrete element methods (DEM) are used to simulate the dispersion and aerosolization of the drug product powder particles. In this work we discuss the possibility to validate a …

Leading up to the government shutdown on Wednesday,
congressional Republicans and Donald Trump have
repeated misleading claims
that Democrats were trying to pass a resolution that would provide
“free healthcare for illegals”.
It’s become a well-rehearsed refrain fueling GOP lawmakers.
At the White House on Wednesday, the JD Vance said the Democrats’ spending plan
“would have undone” the work of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA)
– which en…

Well Belinda Carlisle was as awesome as expected last night. She might not have quite the reach for the high notes that she used to, but her voice still has that gorgeous vibrato and it's a pleasure to hear her singing.
Dancing across the stage barefoot and in a flowy black dress she obviously enjoyed belting out all her solo hits, plus Our Lips Are Sealed from the Go-Gos days (a song she dedicated to its writer, the late great Terry Hall). It didn't take long before the audience (mostly people of, ahem, a certain age) were up on our feet singing and dancing along.
And as a special bonus the unbilled support act was Roland Gift, whose voice is similarly still there and gave us 25 minutes of glorious FYC hits.
10/10 would concert again.
#BelindaCarlisle #RolandGift #80sMusic #GigReview