Tootfinder

Entropy, a decentralized crypto custodian that raised a $25M seed led by a16z in June 2022, is shutting down after "several pivots, and two rounds of layoffs" (Zack Abrams/The Block)
https://www.theblock.co/post/386942/entro…

Entropy, a16z-backed decentralized custody startup, is winding down and returning capital to investors
Entropy's "anti-capitalist anarchist" founder is winding down the firm and returning capital to investors after failing to find a scalable business model.

Tying up loose ends on the STM32MP2 PCIe board.
It's fully routed and I'm trying to fine tune the layer 3 power (and some ground) plane to provide good return current paths for the FPGA transceivers.
Left to right the pairs are two refclks (one from an LVDS oscillator and one from the SoC), SFP RX, and PCIe RX.
The actually-fast signals (PCIe and SFP) are fully ground referenced their entire length and have return path vias between L2 and L3 when they jump up to L1…

Snow, Silence, and the Difficult Question of How We Die
A winter storm slowed the world to an eerie quiet, blurring time and routine. In that silence, my thoughts drifted from snow and preparation to harder questions about death, dignity, and whether we should have more control over how life ends.
https://…

Snow, Silence, and the Difficult Question of How We Die – Bob Mueller
A winter storm brings silence and reflection, leading to difficult but necessary thoughts on death, dignity, and medical aid in dying.

The patriotic duty to dissent | TPR #dissent

The patriotic duty to dissent
When the No Kings protests recently took place on streets across the nation, Trump administration officials said these were quote "hate America" rallies. But in fact, these were patriots using their constitutional right to dissent and voice their opposition to government policies — a practice that has been part of America since the founding.

On Electric Vehicle Energy Demand Forecasting and the Effect of Federated Learning
Andreas Tritsarolis, Gil Sampaio, Nikos Pelekis, Yannis Theodoridis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20782 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.20782 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.20782
arXiv:2602.20782v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The wide spread of new energy resources, smart devices, and demand side management strategies has motivated several analytics operations, from infrastructure load modeling to user behavior profiling. Energy Demand Forecasting (EDF) of Electric Vehicle Supply Equipments (EVSEs) is one of the most critical operations for ensuring efficient energy management and sustainability, since it enables utility providers to anticipate energy/power demand, optimize resource allocation, and implement proactive measures to improve grid reliability. However, accurate EDF is a challenging problem due to external factors, such as the varying user routines, weather conditions, driving behaviors, unknown state of charge, etc. Furthermore, as concerns and restrictions about privacy and sustainability have grown, training data has become increasingly fragmented, resulting in distributed datasets scattered across different data silos and/or edge devices, calling for federated learning solutions. In this paper, we investigate different well-established time series forecasting methodologies to address the EDF problem, from statistical methods (the ARIMA family) to traditional machine learning models (such as XGBoost) and deep neural networks (GRU and LSTM). We provide an overview of these methods through a performance comparison over four real-world EVSE datasets, evaluated under both centralized and federated learning paradigms, focusing on the trade-offs between forecasting fidelity, privacy preservation, and energy overheads. Our experimental results demonstrate, on the one hand, the superiority of gradient boosted trees (XGBoost) over statistical and NN-based models in both prediction accuracy and energy efficiency and, on the other hand, an insight that Federated Learning-enabled models balance these factors, offering a promising direction for decentralized energy demand forecasting.
toXiv_bot_toot

This becomes especially interesting when you understand the history of the church as a quasi-revolutionary organization. One could describe early church history as a mostly-successful attempt to overthrow the Roman empire. I say mostly successful because, in the end, the Roman state mutated the church for it's own ends and basically pulled a Lenin.
The early church was a religion of women and slaves that set up alternative institutions. See, the Roman economic system basically ran through the temples. Temples were basically the banks of their day (thus money changers in the temples and all that). So when the church set up their own institutions, they were actually attacking the economic system of the Roman empire. *That* is why the empire tried to destroy them. The Romans didn't really care about the gods. They would just mutate their beliefs to pull other pagans in. No, it wasn't about the gods. The Christian were fucking with the money.
The whole church as an institution was about dual power, and Paul (one of the early founders of the church) was central to organizing this into a political machine that could actually threaten the dominant order. One could argue that he saw the potential of the church, and used it to solidify his own power.
It all basically worked, right up until Constantine figured out how to flip the whole thing against the most radical elements. He had his people collect up different books of the Bible and modify them in such a way that it favored Rome. The trick here was to highlight the existing antisemitic threads of early church, and destroy the anti-Roman ones. Anti-authoritarian sects were killed as heretics, and centralized sects became aligned under the church.
This strategy of controlling internal dissent probably feels quite familiar. It's basically how the US works.
But this whole time, during the whole lead up to this, Christianity was illegal and it was continuing to grow as a system of dual power. When Romanism merged with Christianity, it created the most authoritarian institution in human history that brutally destroyed all opposition. Even still, several hundred years later it's power broke.
Today Liberalism has separated banking and the church, and has created the illusion of separation of church and state. But the same dual power strategy that allowed the first church to gain enough power to merge with the Roman power structure have now allowed Christian Nationalism to fully merge with Americanism into the Christian Fascism we see today...

Cracks Appear in Trump Coalition Ahead of State of the Union
As the president prepares to speak to the nation,
Northeastern Pennsylvania is showing discontent on the edges of the Trump coalition and an energized Democratic opposition.
https://www.…

Ahead of State of the Union, Cracks Appear in Trump Coalition
As the president prepares to speak to the nation, Northeastern Pennsylvania is showing discontent on the edges of the Trump coalition and an energized Democratic opposition.

A winter storm slowed everything down—quiet house, lost sense of time, strange stillness. That silence turned into a reflection on death, dignity, and medical aid in dying. New post is up. ❄️🕯️
https://www.bobmuellerwriter.com/snow-silence-and-the-diff…

Snow, Silence, and the Difficult Question of How We Die – Bob Mueller
A winter storm brings silence and reflection, leading to difficult but necessary thoughts on death, dignity, and medical aid in dying.

OpenAI plans to discontinue the app for its Sora video platform, as it refocuses on business and coding tools ahead of a potential IPO as soon as Q4 (Berber Jin/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-set-to-discontinue-sora-video-platfo…