Tootfinder

EU Member States are deprioritising 'non-wires' solutions or non-fossil flexibility as alternatives for network expansion.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/20…

Another heatwave 🥵, another Java Geek Weekly 📅
https://blog.frankel.ch/java-geek-weekly/147/

#OpenSource #Alternatives to Popular Software
https://openalternative.co/

I really enjoyed this post with lots of info on Gemini, Gopher, history and the present day including links to software I haven’t tried yet. https://brennan.day/gemini-gophers-and-fingers-oh-my-alternative-internets-beyond-https/

SambaNova Executive Chairman Lip-Bu Tan says the AI chip startup is set to raise $800M to $1B, sources say at a ~$10B valuation, up from $2B in February (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/intel-backed-ai-chip-f…

Intel-Backed AI Chip Firm SambaNova to Quintuple Valuation to $10 Billion
AI server chips that effectively compete with Nvidia’s have never been more in-demand as AI developers and cloud providers seek lower-cost alternatives to the market leader. In the latest example, nine-year-old chip startup SambaNova is set to raise between $800 million and $1 billion, its ...

Dutch Surf sta elaborando un'offerta per liberarsi dalla dipendenza dalle grandi aziende tecnologiche
La cooperativa olandese per l'informatica applicata all'istruzione e alla ricerca sta conducendo progetti pilota con strumenti open source, affiancando valide alternative ai servizi esistenti delle grandi aziende tecnologiche.

RE: https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@grahamperrin/116897410215062526
If Pangram Labs is not truly "the most accurate AI detector on the market", then I'll welcome suggestions for alternatives that can extend Firefox in the same way as this a…

Real existing degrowth - Red Pepper
https://www.redpepper.org.uk/economics-unions-work/alternative-economies/real-existing-degrowth-economic-alternatives-to-capitalism/

Real existing degrowth - Red Pepper
Radical alternatives to capitalism are being practiced now across the world as everyday realities, not future possibilities

The announcement of #Infomaniak came just at the right time.
I wanted to stop using Nextcloud (mainly for motivation and its resource usage) and was looking at various alternatives.
I moved file syncing to Syncthing and experimented with Davis and Radicale for Cal/CardDAV.
However I want to share my calendar with various people without too many hoops and both weren't a…

In my latest blog post, I address 5 common myths about Self-Care and suggest some simple alternatives.
https://www.worklifepsych.com/five-myths-about-self-care-and-what-you-can-do-instead/

I just hope the cool people won't just be offline, when Bluesky draws it's last breath.
I hope they'll realize, that community funded alternatives, that are built for people and not corporations, are the way to go.
Social media isn't dead.
Big tech "solutions" are.

I guess I haven't do lamentations about Trakt (@…) after a lot of the changes lately, so I'll start now and do it in small steps.
I don't understand why they have to do another website rewrite (dubbed Web V3).
I hold on to the old website for so long, while I'm trying to find alternatives (more on that later). The moment that it is not accessi…

Last.fm users, give this one a vote (upper left) - https://support.last.fm/t/limit-the-number-of-artist-photo-uploads/118521
@…@…

Limit the number of artist photo uploads
As long as multiple artists share the same page then photo battles are always going to part of LastFM but, more and more, I'm seeing people simply flood the photo section with dozens of images in an attempt to drown out any possible alternatives. I propose limiting users to ONE image upload per artist. Pages don't need 100+ images, all uploaded by the same 2-3 people.

from my link log —
No-one knows the type of char char.
https://blog.knatten.org/2019/05/24/no-one-knows-the-type-of-char-char/
saved 2019-10-17

No-one knows the type of char + char
Quick quiz! Given the following: Which overload gets called by the following? Alternatives: f(unsigned int) f(int) f(char) No-one knows the type of char + char If you answered 4), congratulations! …

I decided it was time to check out Firefox alternatives.
LibreWolf came up, and being a FF fork, and a quick check shows it seems to update in a timely manner, I decided to give that a go.
I decided to utilise Firefox Sync to get most of my FF setup imported into LW. Went smoothly enough, although I discovered that the tabs syncing is just providing a list of what's on other devices, not actually creating and populating all of the same windows.
And, of course, some ext…

Meanwhile, Fat Putin is eliminating subsidies for & eveb paying companies not to implement energy alternatives to Iran's fossil fuel.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-14315-en…

From Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
September 17 at 7 pm PT for this year‘s Rosenbluth Lecture with Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks, who will be speaking about their new book Cancelling Billionaires Before They Cancel Us. Linda needs no introduction as one of Canada’s top journalists and progressive commentators. Neil is a lawyer and academic, and his work was extremely influential to me when I was starting out as a progressive economist. They will be available to chat and sign…

Rosenbluth Lecture 2026: live at Vancouver's Harbour Centre | CCPA
Where: Challenge Theatre, Simon Fraser University Harbour Centre campus, 555 West Hastings Street, Vancouver

Due to popular demand, our article about European social media alternatives is now also available in english. #dnip
(Translation supported by artificial friends, corrections welcome)
https://dnip.ch/2026/06/19/social…

The repo troubles aside (latest is not fully back for me), hyprland on FreeBSD turned out to be the Turd show I expected it to be. A quick glance at the forums showed me I'm not the only one. With excellent alternatives like mango available it's time to move on. One final go at it tomorrow.morning.
Btw, the first time I had to weed through large numbers of completely useless AI slop guides. Speaking of a pile of shiite 💩

I hope Andy Burn 'em has some advisor who actually reads Environmental Research Letters. The review essay by Emily Grubert, summarizing a frustrating 25 years of research with no apparent effect on climate overheating, is blunt.
" For people and places that rely on fossil fuel production and face major transition challenges (Xenarios et al 2026), failing to be explicit about the degree to which transition must proceed, or the extent to which alternatives might actually be ava…

Browse self-hostable software · selfhost.directory
The index of self-hostable projects — ranked, categorized and served with live updates.
Own your data and stop giving it to big tech.
🌐 https://selfhost.directory
:mastodon: @…

Browse self-hostable software
Discover self-hostable software you can run on your own server — a curated, open-source directory with setup guides, alternatives, licenses and live version track…

a little Grist mention in here, see if you can find it https://www.wired.com/story/the-eu-is-going-through-a-trump-fueled-breakup-with-big-tech/

The EU Is Going Through a Trump-Fueled Breakup With Big Tech
France is already moving on from Zoom and Microsoft Teams in favor of homegrown alternatives. Other countries are quickly following suit.

Ein Start-up produziert #Kunststoff aus #Pflanzenresten und steigt in die industrielle Fertigung ein.
Das Verfahren nutzt Biomaterial statt fossiler Rohstoffe und setzt auf die Verwertung organischer Reststoffe. So entsteht ein alternatives Material für unterschiedliche Anwendungen. …

Plastik aus Pflanzenresten
Ein innovatives Start-Up hat einen Weg gefunden, aus Biomaterial Kunststoff herzustellen und steigt damit nun in die Produktion ein.

CoMaps is open-source community-oriented privacy-first navigation app for mobile devices. It is currently choosing its fiscal / umbrella host which would be most aligned with those goals, so if you have opinions, come vote at https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance/issues/166

Poll on umbrella host
Dear members of the CoMaps community. After we've [investigated a large number of potential umbrella hosts](https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance/wiki/Umbrella-Orgs) that could potentially fit as a host organisation for the project, we've now narrowed it down to two alternatives that we think wo...

Logistics in the technical sense (part of supply chain management) is a subset of logistics in the vernacular sense ("the handling of the details of an operation"). You can explore this second and more general sense, and thereby build an understanding of the first and more technical sense, by iteratively asking the question, "how does one make that happen" and follow questions from there.
A big part of organizing is figuring out the (vernacular) logistics (and helping others figure it out). You want to organize a seed swap? Ok. How does one make that happen? Well, you need seeds, people, a place, and perhaps a time. How does one make that happen? You can forage seeds or you can buy seeds for a garden and swap extras. How do you get people to come? Well, figure out where you want people to come from and choose an accessible place. What's the easiest thing to do? Get people from your neighborhood. How does one make that happen? Well, maybe put up flyers. How does one make that happen? Well, print them on your printer if you have one, or at a library, then go post them up. Etc.
Keep asking questions until you either find a roadblock that you can't find a way around, or you find things you can do yourself (one of those things you can do yourself is asking friends to help).
If you practice the exercise of thinking about how things happen, you can start to find things that you can do yourself. You can start to understand what exists now, and you can imagine what's possible. By thinking about logistics, you can figure out how to replace things when they collapse or are dismantled. You can also identify things that can't easily be replaced, and try to figure out alternatives.
This practice is good for figuring out how to build, but it can also be a valuable practice for figuring out how to resist. Concentration camps and ethnic cleansing also require logistics. Mass displacement means moving people. How does one do that? People are generally going to be moved in planes or buses. How does one do that? Well, people get loaded on to planes or buses in specific places. Planes and buses need fuel. Planes are fueled at their airports, which may well be the same places where people are loaded on to them. There is a fuel depo and a fuel truck that makes flying people out of a specific place possible. How does the fuel get to that fuel depo? Well, that fuel is probably also delivered by truck. Someone drives those trucks. Someone fuels those planes. Someone clears the planes for takeoff. Someone fuels those busses. Someone drives those busses. And so on.
Logistics networks can be highly complex. The more complex the operation, the more possible points of failure and more possible points where pressure can be applied, where operations can be disrupted. Ethnic cleansing is a complicated operation. The logistics of disrupting complicated things tend to be much less complicated than the logistics of the complicated things themselves.
The Right has exploited this fact for a long time. Centralized social services are logistically complex. Public infrastructure is logistically complex. By destroying these things, they can loot public resources by privatizing the infrastructure and functionality.
But the things that support the Right are even more logistically complex. Oil, cars, AI data centers, internal paramilitary, these are extremely complicated and fragile. There are numerous pressure points, all of which can respond to numerous strategies.
If we want to win, we should reduce the influence of politics over the things we care about. We should focus on building distributed mutual aid networks that don't rely on state funding and aren't subject to the whims of politicians. This is also known as "dual power." That is, creating counter-institutions outside of the dominant political system. The Right already does this in the form of churches and corporations.
As we reduce our complexity, we can then press our complexity advantage against the things for which the Right *needs* the state: the apparatus of violence needed to maintain capital and enforce the dominant order.

Chinese open models like Kimi K3 and Qwen3.8 Max shift the industry's focus back to marginal costs and cost of goods sold, as inference costs scale with revenue (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)
https://stratechery.com/2026/whos-afraid-of-chinese-models/

Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?
Everyone is worried about Chinese models, but the frontier labs will be fine; we need to enable open U.S. alternatives.

The dirty chunks are back, baby: “Global coal imports in May are expected to be more than 464,000 tonnes, the third highest monthly coal imports on record.” FT.com
Well, #coal has never been in decline. We have never had a #transition.

We spent that last couple days playing with a completely de-googled LineageOS Android to come up with a list of apps for common services and applications, with a focus on options that are truly open-source.
If you're looking for apps for a Google-free LineageOS phone, or just some alternatives for your regular Android device, (no shame from us; removing Google services isn't for everyone), come check out our list of FOSS alternatives!

The Ultimate De-Googling Guide: FOSS Alternatives for Every Google Service
Switching to LineageOS? This guide shows you how to replace Google services with FOSS alternatives. Get a full list of de-googling apps for your calendar,...

"This ruling confirms what we have argued from the start: interoperability is not optional under the DMA, it is the law. Developers finally have legal certainty to build competitive alternatives to Apple's ecosystem, and we remain committed to monitoring enforcement of today’s decision, says Lucas Lasota, FSFE's Senior Programme Manager Legal"
@…

Reduced meat and dairy consumption improves health, environmental and most nutritional outcomes without increasing diet costs among Scottish adults https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-026-01384-3

Reduced meat and dairy consumption improves health, environmental and most nutritional outcomes without increasing diet costs among Scottish adults - Nature Food
Using microsimulation of Scottish Health Survey adults, this study compares 33 pathways for achieving the UK Climate Change Committee meat and dairy reduction targets. Most pathways improved nutrient intake, health and environmental outcomes without increasing diet costs, with greater benefits from reducing red and processed meat among high consumers and using gram-for-gram substitutions with foods including vegetables, beans, eggs and plant-based alternatives.

I spent twenty minutes today speaking with Mitch McConnell. He gave me his thoughts on natural alternatives to combating the algae at the Reflecting Pool. #MitchMcConnell #TwentyMinutesWith Mitch

I’m still completely lost with logic of JA4 patent licensing and actual incompatibility with the copyleft-license. So it seems to be a patent-based license and really risky to implement if you want to keep your actual software open source.
Did someone explore alternatives to avoid this? and especially other format which are open source friendly?
#ja4

Just noticed the (Computing Within) LIMITS 2026 workshop papers are on arXiv already. A selection:
Narratives That Limit the Possible: Interrupting Narrative Closure in Computing Practice
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17360
Modest, artistic, and radical solutions to the environmental impact of ima…

Narratives That Limit the Possible: Interrupting Narrative Closure in Computing Practice
Computing's dominant concepts - innovation, efficiency, resilience, professionalism - often migrate from reflective ideals to instruments that limit behaviour, redirect responsibility, and foreclose critique. We call this drift weaponisation: the discursive repurposing of professional concepts so that they stabilise business-as-usual while making structural alternatives appear unreasonable, illegible, or out of scope. Using collective autoethnography across education, justice, public administra…

No, most will be incinerated.
Nearly as bad, what's wrong with a manual fan?
Britons to buy 8m mini fans this year – but almost half will end up in landfill | Retail industry | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jul/08/uk-mini-…

Britons to buy 8m mini fans this year – but almost half will end up in landfill
Shoppers urged to seek quality products or alternatives as data shows demand surpassing least year’s total

Have just started using Ente for secure, privacy focused photo back up and organisation.
So far I am actually pretty impressed. It's lightning fast and very easy to navigate - and I have tens of thousands of photos that it's definitely helping me to organise and search through easily. And share with non-Ente users too.
It's miles better than Flickr as a UI experience.
This is a test period before I decide if I migrate rest of family too.
However, I was under the impression the company was German/Dutch but it unfortunately appears to be US incorporated - even though the servers are supposed to be in NL, F and DE. It just makes me very suspicious that at some point the company will be sold off and the creeping enshittification will start again.
It is very frustrating. I could but am not very keen to self host. I have far too many other things going on in my life for that. But it does look like immich or memories for nextcloud is the only other good option. And this probably epitomises why most people just stick with (mostly US) big tech. It is so much easier and less effort than working out what the alternatives are.

Friends Don't Let Friends Make Bad Graphs! Do you agree with the examples of bad graphs and the alternatives Chenxin Li (@chenxinli2.bsky.social) lists at #RStats

GitHub - cxli233/FriendsDontLetFriends: Friends don't let friends make certain types of data visualization - What are they and why are they bad.
Friends don't let friends make certain types of data visualization - What are they and why are they bad. - cxli233/FriendsDontLetFriends

🎯 It acts as a pre-execution firewall: when an agent tries a command, dcg inspects it in sub-millisecond time and either allows it silently or blocks it with a clear explanation safer alternatives
🔧 A three-tier pipeline with SIMD-accelerated quick-reject lets 95% of commands pass in under 10µs — only commands with dangerous keywords hit the expensive regex stage

from my link log —
No-one knows the type of char char.
https://blog.knatten.org/2019/05/24/no-one-knows-the-type-of-char-char/
saved 2019-10-17

No-one knows the type of char + char
Quick quiz! Given the following: Which overload gets called by the following? Alternatives: f(unsigned int) f(int) f(char) No-one knows the type of char + char If you answered 4), congratulations! …

"… I gradually switched from OS X 10.9.5 Mavericks to PC-BSD. Then TrueOS, then FreeBSD-CURRENT. In the midst of all that, something with FreeBSD in September 2012 … probably toying with 9.0 on a PowerPC iMac with failing graphics hardware. Not because I was a glutton for punishment (like, the horror of a command-line loader, and the certainty that hardware was failing) – because there was nothing good to be done with the Mac, and I was curious about non-Apple alternatives to Microsoft…

Cowboys’ edge rush in ‘wait and see’ mode until training camp https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2026/07/14/dallas-cowboys-edge-rush-wait-see-mode-2026-training-camp-von-mi…

Y a quoi comme alternatives crédibles Š google en termes de moteur de recherche, basé en Europe avec son propre index ?
le retoot rends les cheveux soyeux.

AI inference startup Baseten is raising $1.5B in a dual-tiered deal, with some investors putting in money at an $11B valuation and others at a $13B valuation (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-13-billion

Both the SF Congress race and the California gubernatorial have this weird dynamic where the viable candidate with the most-left platform is an ultra-rich person self-funding their campaign. I don't like it, but nor do I like that the alternatives — the candidates of relatively humble origins — are selling out *to* ultra-rich people. It seems like a symptom of our new gilded age.

Whenever I'm forced to use commercial, proprietary software, I look into open-source alternatives because I know it's only a matter of time before the company in question tries to fuck me with a random change to its terms of service.
By the way, Plex users, welcome to Jellyfin.

As it turns out... #Proton is financing (through advertising) some elements of the far right :( .
#FarRight #Privacy

German electric car drivers are protesting against the unfair pricing practices of a major EV charging network.
The fact that they are (rightfully) raising their voices is a clear sign that there are too few alternatives to this apparent dominant operator.
via @…

"Zustände wie im Wilden Westen" - 70 E-Auto-Fahrer protestieren gegen Ladetarife der EnBW
Rund 70 E-Auto-Fahrer demonstrierten am Donnerstag vor der EnBW-Firmenzentrale in Karlsruhe. Grund dafür seien laut Organisator undurchsichtige Ladetarife und Bezahlarten der EnBW.

I had missed the news that Vancouver city council had asked the city to stop relying exclusively on Twitter for updates.
The staff did a report on feisability. Shows too well how governments can be so slow at the most basic changes.
https://vancouver.c…

@maikel@vmst.io Flash didn't just vanish with no fanfare tho. Apple released iPhone which notoriously didn't support Flash, and refused to because it was a resource hog. There was a lot of noise and complaints about it, but eventually folks transitioned to standards-based alternatives to retain users.
Android supported Flash, but the experience suuucked, which only reinforced Apple's position lol

In around two weeks I’m migrating from iOS to a postmarketOS phone. Please leave app suggestions, I’m definitely going to need them!
Waydroid is… fine, but not preferred Please avoid android apps unless it’s something that is like confirmed to work well on waydroid, is proprietary or something so has no alternatives or something like that. I’m not launching waydroid to listen to music, to read my e-mails or to use xmpp.
Some examples of what I’m looking for, probably for Plasma Mobile:
And also just anything y’all find useful in your daily life with a postmarketOS daily driver, I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot of stuff here.
I know some of those exist for desktop Linux, but I’m obviously looking for stuff made with phones in mind (so like… apps made for gnome should be automatically fine maybe?)
(Also, has anyone managed to get nix’s system-manager to work on postmarketOS? There’s no way I’m configuring all of this by hand every time I need to flash it lmao)
#postmarketOS #LinuxMobile #Linux

The "AI Industry" (to the degree that it exists) has burned billions of dollars with no real hope of recuperating that. Models offered by services, charging huge amounts for inference, don't really offer much, if anything, above open source models run locally. Many of the claims made by these companies, and their supporters, have turned out to be lies. It seems as though the whole thing is a huge grift.
Investments will likely never be recovered. We've already seen a bail out in the form of military contracts. We will see much more public money dumped in to these technologies. In fact, threatening workers and suppressing labor strength is so strategically valuable that I expect LLMs to just be publicly funded (by being folded into the military industrial complex).
On these grounds, it can be easy to reject the technology outright. After all, how can anything useful not be profitable?
Even for radicals, capitalism can cloud our lens. The fact is, the dominant technologies of our age tend to not be profitable. Or rather, they are "publicly funded, privately profitable" (/hums in propagandhi/). Just like oil.
Outside of Saudi Arabia, oil is mostly not profitable to get out of the ground. Even there, it had only historically been profitable because of massive global military investments. The oil-centric world we have today is largely built on, and kept in place by, massive government subsidies. Roads, street parking, and direct subsidies to oil companies are all massive investments that tie populations to the resource at the heart of the military industrial complex: oil.
Oil was strategically important, because you can't run a modern military without it. The fossil fuel economy doesn't exist because fossil fuels are so cheap, but because modern militaries are only really possible by militarizing the population.
Unprofitable things *are made profitable* to serve the strategic interests of authoritarian systems. Though we have better alternatives to most oil-based products, it would be hard to argue that oil is not a useful resource. We can acknowledge it's strategic importance while also recognizing that the elimination of oil is essential to the survival of humanity.
Returning to "AI," we're seeing the same type of thing but it's more obvious. After the crypto grift, this seems to just be another way to transfer money into the pockets of the rich.
But crypto wasn't exactly a grift. It had a strategic function to power. It wasn't what we were told it was. It didn't free us from central banks. It wasn't a new way to invest. It wasn't anonymous. But it did create a new way to bribe politicians. It did make it easier to funnel public money into the pockets of the far right.
"AI" can similarly be mostly a grift. It can fail to do most, or all, of the things it claims, and it can still fulfill strategic functions. If we dismiss it as "just another grift," I think we miss a lot. "Just a grift" isn't something sustainable. It is something that will die out. It's something we don't need to resist because it is self limiting. But a strategy is something different. A strategy is more complex. A strategy will be sustained, at any cost. A strategy must be actively resisted.

The more I think about it, and the more I compare the new #Commodore phone to the available alternatives, the more I like the majority of the choices they have made. It’s just a shame that the blacklisting of browsers is an absolute and utter dealbreaker. Doing a web search and messaging are two non-negotiable features for my phone.

I like my analogy: modern iOS / macOS is the IKEA of UI design. It’s…OK! It’s better than many of the large commercial alternatives! (Modern Windows UI design is the analog of buying furniture from a three-month-old company named QUFRLTZ on Amazon. Linux UI…needs a whole other thread of analogies.) But IKEA is…kind of generic. It has a tendency to look better in the showroom than in daily use. And sometimes it falls apart. It’s fine, but it’s never breathtaking.

Reduced meat and dairy consumption improves health, environmental and most nutritional outcomes without increasing diet costs among Scottish adults https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-026-01384-3

Reduced meat and dairy consumption improves health, environmental and most nutritional outcomes without increasing diet costs among Scottish adults - Nature Food
Using microsimulation of Scottish Health Survey adults, this study compares 33 pathways for achieving the UK Climate Change Committee meat and dairy reduction targets. Most pathways improved nutrient intake, health and environmental outcomes without increasing diet costs, with greater benefits from reducing red and processed meat among high consumers and using gram-for-gram substitutions with foods including vegetables, beans, eggs and plant-based alternatives.

This is devastating.
Due to imperialist prohibitions, Cuba will no longer be able to process Visa or MasterCard transactions.
It's also a warning to other countries: set up alternatives to USA owned payment systems.
Cuba | El Banco Central informa que el país no podrš efectuar transacciones con tarjetas Visa y Mastercard a raíz de las medidas coercitivas unilaterales impuestas por Trump – NODAL

Cuba | El Banco Central informa que el país no podrá efectuar transacciones con tarjetas Visa y Mastercard a raíz de las medidas coercitivas unilaterales impuestas por Trump – NODAL
NODAL - Noticias de América Latina y el Caribe

🚀 Quick start: run it natively via cargo, pull the Docker image (malisper/pgrust:nightly), or connect with psql on port 54321 — no install needed for the browser demo.
📊 Status: V1 / experimental, not production-ready. Roadmap: close the remaining compatibility gap toward 100%, stability work, plus 64-bit transaction IDs and VACUUM alternatives. Licensed AGPL-3.0.
🌐

Strange the EuroOffice project started out on GitHub. That almost immediately disqualifies it for me, especially in these times. And let's not forget excellent alternatives like Forgejo. A completely missed opportunity. A pity. And stupid.

A Scoping Review of Physics Informed Machine Learning for Wave Propagation Modeling in Seismology
\'Oscar Rinc\'on-Carde\~no, Gregorio P\'erez-Bernal, Silvana Montoya-Noguera, Nicol\'as Guar\'in-Zapata
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00178 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.00178 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.00178
arXiv:2607.00178v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: \emph{Background:} Standard numerical methods accurately simulate seismic waves but are computationally expensive, particularly for inverse problems. Machine learning approaches have been proposed as alternatives that can reduce computational cost while maintaining acceptable physical accuracy. \emph{Objective:} To map how physics-informed machine learning methods have been applied to seismic wave propagation modeling based on partial differential equations. \emph{Methods:} A scoping review was conducted using the OpenAlex and Scopus databases. Selected studies were classified by problem type (forward or inverse) and machine learning strategy to identify research trends, methodological patterns, and gaps in the literature. \emph{Results:} Physics-informed machine learning has been applied to both forward modeling and inversion in seismology, often reaching accuracy comparable to standard numerical methods at lower computational cost. Application of three mechanisms for incorporating physical knowledge were identified: observational bias, inductive bias, and learning bias. To evaluate methodological reproducibility of a representative method, the original PINN framework was replicated in PyTorch, obtaining results consistent with and in most cases more accurate than those originally reported. From the reviewed literature, limitations remain in benchmarking consistency, training cost, and scalability to three-dimensional and experimentally validated problems. \emph{Conclusions:} Standard numerical methods remain the basis of seismological workflows, while physics-informed machine learning offers complementary approaches that are useful for inverse problems and surrogate modeling. Future work should focus on consistent benchmarking, hybrid formulations, and validation under realistic geophysical conditions.
toXiv_bot_toot

Good to see this kind of reporting in Canada!
"A new report calls the market for cloud computing in Canada "broken" and warns that domestic alternatives to U.S. tech giants could still leave Canadians trapped in "maplewashed dependencies" unless providers are required to be compatible”
#DigitalSovereignty #Canada #CanPoli #CdnPoli #Cloud

There's a post going around claiming rice can't be used to absorb water and therefore shouldn't be used to dry wet electronics and that "it's a myth that it's a desiccant" and some people even claiming it's xenophobic—well it's not a myth; it does actually absorb water (this is also why you should close containers with uncooked rice air-tight). Here's a study on this with electronics (hearing aids in this example): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27869510/
The question is more if it is a *good* desiccant in general and for electronics in particular, and the answer is probably it's a so-so desiccant (not terrible but there's better alternatives) and "for electronics, use only as last resort if just air-drying the thing has failed", the issue is mainly that rice is dusty and the dust can get inside the electronics and make things worse.
A protip from dealing with retrocomputing stuff: if it's electronics that you can open and have like one main circuit board in them that you can completely remove, like maybe e.g. a laptop mainboard you can rinse the removed board thoroughly with 99% isopropyl alcohol and let it dry thoroughly (the isopropyl alcohol displaces any water and will evaporate without leaving residue). Note: personally I would do this only with low-voltage electronics.

RE: https://orbital.horse/@emma/116665857261626596
I would love to see a resurgence of early-career developers descend on libraries and community orgs to offer getting neighbourhood Fediverse alternatives installed. In my consultancy, which ran 22 years, one day a week was devoted to such, and the connections and skills I built carried a fifty year career 😊

Instead of •judging• people who are stuck between a rock and a hard place, we all — but especially us tech folks! — should spend some time •actually learning• what’s locking people in to a platform going bad. There are some answers in the original QP. Here are some guesses of my own:
- Is prohibitively hard to migrate their catalog / inventory?
- Are they unsure how to proceed?
- Are they burned out on platform switching?
- Do they have some larger process that really, really works and are loath to abandon it?
- Do the alternatives not provide the same functionality?
- Will they lose contact with their supporters if they switch?
- etc.
Those are all made-up guesses, but they're all examples of •perfectly good reasons• for someone to be resistant to switching.

Oh great... so we're going to privatize or sell 'equity' in our airports to private interests so that we can spend the 'proceeds’ on... let me guess... fossil fuel projects.
The more this government digs in, the more it looks like the worst Brian Mulroney Stephen Harper mashup.
@avilewis and the NDP need to be relentlessly loud in their opposition to this and presenting of socially progressive alternatives.
#CanPoli #CdnPoli #Canada #Airports #Transportation #EndFossilFuels

This is a very reasonable question:
https://pouet.chapril.org/@Zekovski/116844176606612240
The truest and most honest answer is •we have no idea how the hell learning works•, not really, only in hints and glimpses. The mind is full of mysteries, and we only have clues.
A good first step is to imagine some alternatives to the conduit metaphor — all also flawed, also tending toward misunderstanding if we take them too far, but having multiple metaphors helps us get unstuck from one:
- What if learning is like •exercise•: the strain of sustained effort stimulates muscle growth?
- What if learning is like •resonance•: what your mind perceives or experiences makes your mind echo that thing, like a string picking up sympathetic vibrations?
- What if learning is like •filling a toolbox•: problems cause your brain to seek out new tools, which give it the capacity to solve similar problems more easily in the future?
…etc etc. A fun exercise is to try to come up with metaphors of your own, think about what they imply, and notice where they fall apart.