Tootfinder

Even before Microsoft Azure had a global failure this week,
Austria's Ministry of Economy had taken a decisive step toward digital sovereignty.
The Ministry is migrating 1,200 employees to a Nextcloud-based cloud and collaboration platform hosted on Austrian-based infrastructure
It's the latest move in a European trend to shift away from Big Tech.

European governments and agencies want to control sensitive data.

Another European agency shifts off Big Tech, as digital sovereignty movement gains steam
European Union states are increasingly shifting toward European-based companies that offer open-source solutions. Here's why.

"In a first, a data center is using a big battery to get online faster"
#Batteries #Energy
https://www.

In a first, a data center is using a big battery to get online faster
Aligned Data Centers will pay to build a 31-megawatt battery, an early example of how AI developers can move fast if they’re willing to be flexible.

Dear IT Friends – We Are Called To Action
If you are like me, you have probably experienced your neighbors, friends and family asking you to help them fix their PCs and give them technical advice. That was always a bit odd for me as I was a big systems guy and relied on our internal IT team for PC advice and support.
But the times are changing, aren’t they?
It feels like we are facing so much new danger. And some groups are definitely targets. In my company our success was…

"At the last #Cop climate summit in Baku, there were 1,773 coal, oil and gas lobbyists, a larger contingent than all but three countries. The group said this led to a watering down of penalties for big emitters, backtracking on international commitments to transition away from fossil fuels, and domestic challenges to carbon taxes and legislation designed to reduce emissions"

How could this happen in a country that *checks notes* has made itself entirely beholden to US Big Tech and Big Pharma?
#Ireland

'Outrage' as former tech giant lobbyist appointed to Data Protection Commission 
Privacy experts and digital wellbeing activists say appointment 'reflects a concerning level of disregard for EU law

When I started programming I had one big disadvantage: no Internet. No looking up stuff online, no asking questions, no easy download of tools, only printed books and magazines (and even those hard to get)…
When I started programming I had one big advantage: no Internet. Whatever I created could not expose any security hole, any personal data, everything just run locally, and the biggest fear was that the police would come for my pirated copy of Sokoban – or even worse that the disk it…

Sources: Google has begun pitching customers, including Meta and big financial institutions, on the idea of using TPUs in their own data centers (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-encroaches-nvidias-turf-new-ai-chip-push

Google Further Encroaches on Nvidia’s Turf With New AI Chip Push
Google is picking up the pace of its efforts to compete directly with Nvidia in the AI chip business. For years, the search giant has rented its own AI chips, known as tensor processing units, to cloud customers who use them in its Google Cloud data centers. Now, though, Google has begun ...

Wow - The IRS just sent my company a letter saying they are discontinuing our mailing address.
Why? Because their data got corrupted and they have the wrong zip code.
Now we gotta jump through umpteen IRS hoops to prove our "new" address, which they have had for quite a while, including the correct zip.
My guess is that I am seeing data corruption resulting from Musk and Big Ball's messin with government data via DOGE.

https://restofworld.org/2025/chatgpt-india-alternative-ai-llms/
Thanks @… for sharing!

ChatGPT is huge in India. These locally focused startups found a way to compete
Indian founders are building digital data sets for low-resource languages by involving the community, and count on local relevance to go against big tech platforms.

Doxers Posing as Cops Are Tricking Big Tech Firms Into Sharing People’s Private Data
A spoofed email address and an easily faked document is all it takes for major tech companies to hand over your most personal information.
👉 https://www.wired.com/stor…

Big-Data Insights on the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Texts https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20129203/big-data-insights-hebrew-bible-and-ancient-texts

https://www.wired.com/story/doxers-posing-as-cops-are-tricking-big-tech-firms-into-sharing-peoples-private-data/

Doxers Posing as Cops Are Tricking Big Tech Firms Into Sharing People's Private Data
A spoofed email address and an easily faked document is all it takes for major tech companies to hand over your most personal information.

Did you know?
You can help struggling billionaire owners of big tech companies that can’t build AI data centers fast enough by closing accounts and canceling subscriptions

Five Big Questions (and Zero Predictions) for the U.S. Privacy and AI Landscape in 2026
https://fpf.org/blog/five-big-questions-and-zero-predictions-for-the-u-s-privacy-and-ai-landscape-in-2026/

The joy of commercial big data. Thomson Reuters helps ICE to see in realtime which drivers are Democrats.
https://www.404media.co/this-app-lets-ice-track-vehicles-and-owners-across-the-country/

This App Lets ICE Track Vehicles and Owners Across the Country
Material viewed by 404 Media shows data giant Thomson Reuters enriches license plate data with marriage, voter, and ownership records. The tool can predict where a car may be in the future.

Tigris, which is building a network of localized data storage centers that it claims can meet the compute needs of AI workloads, raised a $25M Series A (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/09/this-distributed-data-stor…

This distributed data storage startup wants to take on Big Cloud | TechCrunch
Tigris has raised $25 million to expand its growing network of localized data storage centers — the storage layer for decentralized computing infrastructure.

I don't disagree with suggestions that the UK public sector should have less reliance on the big-three (American) cloud providers. But this has been a concern for more than a decade, and people should at least be aware of both the "GOV.UK PaaS" and UKCloud.

Migrating our data from GOV.UK Platform as a Service (PaaS) to Amazon Web Services (AWS) – MHCLG Digital
After learning that GOV.UK’s hosting platform PaaS is being decommissioned, the Energy Performance of Buildings Register team decided to migrate all their hosting to AWS. In this post, Barry, Developer, explains what they did.

One thing that influenced my decision to use the iPhone with the Apple Watch as my main device instead of the Pixel with GrapheneOS for health reasons is this: I feel absolutely, ABSOLUTELY bad about it!
On the one hand, of course, because of the data protection issue, but since Trump, I also have the problem that most Europeans have: that you are becoming dependent on a big tech company from the US. A country that is clearly drifting toward fascism, where fundamental rights are being …

You have noticed NFL TV ratings are soaring. Now understand why that is happening https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6699995/2025/10/10/nfl-tv-ratings-nielsen-big-data/

Meanwhile on the #Sun as seen by SDO HMI https://jsoc1.stanford.edu/data/hmi/images/latest/HMI_latest_Int_4096x4096.gif at 21:53 UTC today ... the big groups (1)4296 and 4294 at the bottom as well as 4299 at the top keep marching towards the center of the disk, but not much has happened since the X1.9 flare two days ago. (The Kp forecast in https://www.spacepager.eu/data-products/forecast-of-the-kp-index sees something interesting three nights from now, though, but such long-term views are notoriously unreliable.)

Energy Efficiency in Cloud-Based Big Data Processing for Earth Observation: Gap Analysis and Future Directions
Adhitya Bhawiyuga, Serkan Girgin, Rolf A. de By, Raul Zurita-Milla
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02882

Energy Efficiency in Cloud-Based Big Data Processing for Earth Observation: Gap Analysis and Future Directions
Earth observation (EO) data volumes are rapidly increasing. While cloud computing are now used for processing large EO datasets, the energy efficiency aspects of such a processing have received much less attention. This issue is notable given the increasing awareness of energy costs and carbon footprint in big data processing, particularly with increased attention on compute-intensive foundation models. In this paper we identify gaps in energy efficiency practices within cloud-based EO big data…

Big-Data Insights on the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Texts
https://ift.tt/y3Q08jK
H-Diplo Roundtable XXV-12 on Fall, _Dien Bien Phu: Un coin d’Enfer_ H-Diplo Roundtable…
via Input 4 RELCFP http…

"for the rest of us who don’t have the technical knowledge and time to follow his accomplishments, his advice is to “Never use your primary WiFi network for IoT devices” and to “Treat them as strangers in your home.” "
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/manufacturer-issues-remote-kill-command-to-nuke-smart-vacuum-after-engineer-blocks-it-from-collecting-data-user-revives-it-with-custom-hardware-and-python-scripts-to-run-offline

Claude skills are a big deal™️
Thanks to skills, you can reduce your multi-agent setup to a single agent with skills, greatly reducing complexity and increasing speed of execution.
In fact, if in the past you could have a number of agents each specialized in, for example, data analysis, getting data from a particular set of websites, making that data available in a dashboard, etc., with skills you can substitute all these agents with skills. (1/2)

»8 Million Users' AI Conversations Sold for Profit by "Privacy" Extensions«
WTF?! Now don't tell me that this surprises you. Why do so many people still naively think to keep their privacy over VPN's for data-hungry big corporations?
🤷 https://www.koi.ai/blo…

8 Million Users' AI Conversations Sold for Profit by "Privacy" Extensions | Koi Blog

Blip is amazing: it's kinda AirDrop that works over the Internet & locally on iOS, macOS, Windows, and Android – Linux pending. Works with folders and data goes directly, no upload.
I've learned about it from MKBHD and I'm already sad how it'll inevitably go bad.
https://blip.net/

Blip is the fastest way to send files
Send big files with no size limits, at full quality, across platforms, directly to other people and devices

@… great meeting you at #IETF124
I shared Cyd with you https://cyd.social/ and yes, wo…

A look at Indian startups like TuluAI, which are building LLMs for low-resource languages by creating data sets nearly from scratch with community involvement (Rest of World)
https://restofworld.org/2025/chatgpt-india-alternative-ai-llms/

ChatGPT is huge in India. These locally focused startups found a way to compete
Indian founders are building digital data sets for low-resource languages by involving the community, and count on local relevance to go against big tech platforms.

Manufacturer issues remote kill command to disable smart vacuum after engineer blocks it from collecting data
— Then the user revives it with custom hardware and Python scripts to run offline

Manufacturer issues remote kill command to disable smart vacuum after engineer blocks it from collecting data — user revives it with custom hardware and Python scripts to run offline
The smart vacuum cleaner was remotely bricked for not collecting data.

Next at #12Clouds is Samaresh Kumar Singh talking about doing AI at the edge rather than in some big ol' data center somewhere

“Core Thesis: The target I care about is simple: can you make space-based, commodity compute cost-competitive with the cheapest terrestrial alternative? That's the whole claim. Not "space is big." Not "the sun is huge." Not "launch will be cheap." Can you deliver useful watts and reject the waste heat at a price that beats a boring Crusoe-style tilt-wall datacenter tied into a 200–500 MW substation? If you can't beat that, the rest is just vibes.”
…

Or one could use LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice and not be dependent on some distant service provider.
Online office suites confuse me. It’s unclear what *modern* problem they address. Sharing files is a solved problem. Common data formats exist. https://mastodon.social/@DevOpsPink/11

Tatiana Mikhaleva (@DevOpsPink@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image Proton rolled out Proton Sheets - a spreadsheet Google can’t peek into. Gemini: “Show me your data?” You: “No.” Sheets: also no, but in Swiss.🇨🇭🔐 End-to-end encryption, zero-knowledge, even file names get the Swiss-bank treatment. You open a spreadsheet - Big Tech immediately cries. Somewhere in California, an AI whispers: “But… my training data…” Privacy 1 : 0 AI https://proton.me/blog/sheets-proton-drive #Proton #Privacy #Encryption #CyberSe…

Every day is a big cyber news day, so don't miss today's Metacurity for the most critical infosec developments you should know, including
--Twin brother hackers arrested for US government hacking, data destruction spree,
--GRU cyber ops sanctioned into Skripal poisoning inquiry,
--Defenders scramble to patch React Server Components' critical flaws,
--AI agents match human attackers in smart contract exploits,
--AZ Atty. General sues Temu for customer …

Twin brother hackers arrested for US government hacking, data destruction spree
GRU cyber ops sanctioned into Skripal poisoning inquiry, Defenders scramble to patch React Server Components' critical flaws, AI agents match human attackers in smart contract exploits, AZ Atty. General sues Temu for customer data theft, Threat intel experts recorded DPRK IT recruiters, much more

Real-Time Health Analytics Using Ontology-Driven Complex Event Processing and LLM Reasoning: A Tuberculosis Case Study
Ritesh Chandra, Sonali Agarwal, Navjot Singh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09646

Real-Time Health Analytics Using Ontology-Driven Complex Event Processing and LLM Reasoning: A Tuberculosis Case Study
Timely detection of critical health conditions remains a major challenge in public health analytics, especially in Big Data environments characterized by high volume, rapid velocity, and diverse variety of clinical data. This study presents an ontology-enabled real-time analytics framework that integrates Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable intelligent health event detection and semantic reasoning over heterogeneous, high-velocity health data streams. The a…

This isn't the first transfer to aws.eu. This is the most visible and overt shift in assets by the big U.S. cloud providers I'm aware of. Others (e.g., Google and Microsoft) talk about doing more in the EU and providing isolation, but as far as I can tell Amazon's separation is going a step further.
https://

Post by IP/ASN Transfers, @transfers@bgp.tools
"A100 ROW Inc" transferred: 51.72.0.0/15, 2a11:/29, 51.0.128.0/17 (Taken from 51.0.0.0/16), 51.0.0.0/19 (Taken from 51.0.0.0/16), 193.202.192.0/19, 83.118.240.0/20 to "Amazon Data Services European Sovereign Cloud GmbH" (Estimated Market Value: $2.66 M)

Replaced article(s) found for cs.LG. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.LG/new
[3/5]:
- Look-Ahead Reasoning on Learning Platforms
Haiqing Zhu, Tijana Zrnic, Celestine Mendler-D\"unner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14745 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_bot/115575981129228810
- Deep Gaussian Process Proximal Policy Optimization
Matthijs van der Lende, Juan Cardenas-Cartagena
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18214 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_bot/115610315210502140
- Spectral Concentration at the Edge of Stability: Information Geometry of Kernel Associative Memory
Akira Tamamori
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.23083 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_bot/115644325602130493
- xGR: Efficient Generative Recommendation Serving at Scale
Sun, Liu, Zhang, Wu, Yang, Liang, Li, Ma, Liang, Ren, Zhang, Liu, Zhang, Qian, Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11529 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_bot/115723008170311172
- Credit Risk Estimation with Non-Financial Features: Evidence from a Synthetic Istanbul Dataset
Atalay Denknalbant, Emre Sezdi, Zeki Furkan Kutlu, Polat Goktas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12783 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_bot/115729287232895097
- The Semantic Illusion: Certified Limits of Embedding-Based Hallucination Detection in RAG Systems
Debu Sinha
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15068 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_bot/115740048142898391
- Towards Reproducibility in Predictive Process Mining: SPICE -- A Deep Learning Library
Stritzel, H\"uhnerbein, Rauch, Zarate, Fleischmann, Buck, Lischka, Frey
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16715 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_bot/115745910810427061
- Differentially private Bayesian tests
Abhisek Chakraborty, Saptati Datta
https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.15502 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/111843467510507382
- SCAFFLSA: Taming Heterogeneity in Federated Linear Stochastic Approximation and TD Learning
Paul Mangold, Sergey Samsonov, Safwan Labbi, Ilya Levin, Reda Alami, Alexey Naumov, Eric Moulines
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04114
- Adjusting Model Size in Continual Gaussian Processes: How Big is Big Enough?
Guiomar Pescador-Barrios, Sarah Filippi, Mark van der Wilk
https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.07588 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/112965266196097314
- Non-Perturbative Trivializing Flows for Lattice Gauge Theories
Mathis Gerdes, Pim de Haan, Roberto Bondesan, Miranda C. N. Cheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13161 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_heplat_bot/113327593338897860
- Dynamic PET Image Prediction Using a Network Combining Reversible and Irreversible Modules
Sun, Zhang, Xia, Sun, Chen, Yang, Liu, Zhu, Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.22674 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eessIV_bot/113401026110345647
- Targeted Learning for Variable Importance
Xiaohan Wang, Yunzhe Zhou, Giles Hooker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.02221 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/113429912435819479
- Refined Analysis of Federated Averaging and Federated Richardson-Romberg
Paul Mangold, Alain Durmus, Aymeric Dieuleveut, Sergey Samsonov, Eric Moulines
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.01389 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/113588027268311334
- Embedding-Driven Data Distillation for 360-Degree IQA With Residual-Aware Refinement
Abderrezzaq Sendjasni, Seif-Eddine Benkabou, Mohamed-Chaker Larabi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.12667 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/113672538318570349
- 3D Cell Oversegmentation Correction via Geo-Wasserstein Divergence
Peter Chen, Bryan Chang, Olivia A Creasey, Julie Beth Sneddon, Zev J Gartner, Yining Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01890 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/113949981686723660
- DHP: Discrete Hierarchical Planning for Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Agents
Shashank Sharma, Janina Hoffmann, Vinay Namboodiri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01956 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csRO_bot/113949997485625086
- Foundation for unbiased cross-validation of spatio-temporal models for species distribution modeling
Diana Koldasbayeva, Alexey Zaytsev
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03480
- GraphCompNet: A Position-Aware Model for Predicting and Compensating Shape Deviations in 3D Printing
Juheon Lee (Rachel), Lei (Rachel), Chen, Juan Carlos Catana, Hui Wang, Jun Zeng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09652 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/114017924551186136
- LookAhead Tuning: Safer Language Models via Partial Answer Previews
Liu, Wang, Luo, Yuan, Sun, Liang, Zhang, Zhou, Hooi, Deng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19041 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/114227502448008352
- Constraint-based causal discovery with tiered background knowledge and latent variables in single...
Christine W. Bang, Vanessa Didelez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21526 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/114238919468512990
toXiv_bot_toot

Regulating Big Tech is like regulating a malignant tumour. You don’t regulate a malignant tumour. You cut it out, with enough of a surgical margin to ensure you get every last putrid bit to avoid regrowth.
(This is moot, of course, as we’re not even regulating Big Tech, we’re feeding it with subsidies, government contracts, and access to national healthcare and other sensitive data while the folks who should be regulating them eye their next lucrative gig beyond the revolving doors of …

Big-Data Insights on the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Texts
https://ift.tt/yGBoZsq
Prof. Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, LLM, JSD: "Recognition and Justice for Victims of Sexual Violence in…
via Input 4 RELCFP

OpenAI raised concerns about anti-competitive conduct by "entrenched companies" in a September EU meeting; source: OpenAI targeted Google, Microsoft, and Apple (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

OpenAI Warns EU Antitrust Watchdogs of Big Tech’s Data Dominance
OpenAI has raised concerns with European Union antitrust enforcers over potentially harmful conduct by the likes of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc.

LAMOST J064137.77 045743.8: A New Binary of an A7-type Pulsating Subgiant and an M-type Red Dwarf
Yanhui Chen, Chaomi Duan, Baokun Sun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10164 https://

LAMOST J064137.77+045743.8: A New Binary of an A7-type Pulsating Subgiant and an M-type Red Dwarf
With the progressive release of data from numerous sky surveys, humanity has entered the era of astronomical big data. Multi-wavelength, multi-method research is playing an increasingly crucial role. Binaries account for a substantial fraction of all stellar systems and research into binaries is of fundamental importance. LAMOST J064137.77+045743.8 has not yet been recorded in the SIMBAD astronomical database. We conducted a comprehensive analysis of LAMOST J064137.77+045743.8 using multi-band …

An efficient grey theory-driven path selection for energy efficiency control in the Internet of Things using fog and cloud computing
Mohammad Reza Akbari, Hamid Barati, Ali Barati
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03533

An efficient grey theory-driven path selection for energy efficiency control in the Internet of Things using fog and cloud computing
Due to the big data exchange on the Internet of Things, proper routing and selecting the best routes for fast data transmission improve network performance. There are major challenges, like high delay, when cloud computing is used. Therefore, one solution is to use other schemes, such as fog computing. In fog computing, all data is not sent to the cloud and the fog nodes close to objects are used for data processing. This reduces the network delay. In this paper, we propose an overlapping clust…

On a day full of conversations about big AI tech and the decisions museum, libraries and archives have to make at the intersection of licensing data for AI and their values, the AI Afterlives workbook seems like a thought-provoking exercise #FF2025

”Ghost Workers in the AI Machine:
U.S. Data Workers Speak Out About Big Tech’s Exploitation"
https://cwa-union.org/ghost-workers-ai-machine

The offices at John Quackenbush’s lab at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
were once full of postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and interns.
Young scientists here worked on some of the most cutting-edge computational biology research in the world,
driving new discoveries and the creation of widely used big data tools, including one the National Cancer Institute named among the most important advances of 2024.
Today, the offices are rows of empty comp…

His lab was humming with discovery. After one year under Trump, it’s almost silent
John Quackenbush built a lab that is at the forefront of human genetics research and bioinformatics. Trump administration cuts have put it in danger of collapse.

Claude skills are a big deal™️
Thanks to skills, you can reduce your multi-agent setup to a single agent with skills, greatly reducing complexity and increasing speed of execution.
In fact, if in the past you could have a number of agents each specialized in, for example, data analysis, getting data from a particular set of websites, making that data available in a dashboard, etc., with skills you can substitute all these agents with skills. (1/2)

Big #AI is paying #ThirdWorld contract workers paltry pennies a day to sort through the most disturbing #data that feeds #FirstWorld

Artificial Intelligence for Cost-Aware Resource Prediction in Big Data Pipelines
Harshit Goyal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05127 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.…

Artificial Intelligence for Cost-Aware Resource Prediction in Big Data Pipelines
Efficient resource allocation is a key challenge in modern cloud computing. Over-provisioning leads to unnecessary costs, while under-provisioning risks performance degradation and SLA violations. This work presents an artificial intelligence approach to predict resource utilization in big data pipelines using Random Forest regression. We preprocess the Google Borg cluster traces to clean, transform, and extract relevant features (CPU, memory, usage distributions). The model achieves high predi…

Behind the Blog: Engaging the Public https://www.404media.co/behind-the-blog-engaging-the-public/

Enhanced Matter Power Spectrum from Axion Kination after Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
Raymond T. Co, Nicolas Fernandez, Akshay Ghalsasi, Keisuke Harigaya, Jessie Shelton
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01308

Enhanced Matter Power Spectrum from Axion Kination after Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
Despite stringent constraints from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) and cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations, it is still possible for well-motivated particle physics models to substantially alter the cosmic expansion history between BBN and recombination. In this work we consider two different axion models that can realize a period of first matter domination, then kination, in this epoch. We perform fits to both primordial element abundances as well as CMB data and determine that up to…

> Helldivers 2 takes around 150GB to install on PC - three times larger than on console
We did data duplication on optical drives, but we controlled the layout of the whole disc. Is it also so effective on hard drives? I don't recall duplication for our Xbone launch game, but that was the beginning of mandatory installations to hdd on console so maybe I missed this trend.
A multiplayer game demands faster loads, and this keeps all assets for a map contiguous?

Helldivers 2 developer explains why it's so big to install on PC, and why that won't be changing anytime soon
Helldivers 2 takes up around 150GB to install on PC (three times larger than on console), and the game's deputy technical director has now explained why.

Microsoft, Meta, and sources say, Google will not publish diversity reports and data this year; Amazon, Apple, and Nvidia released diversity data this year (Paresh Dave/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/google-microsoft-and-meta-have-s…

Google, Microsoft, and Meta Have Stopped Publishing Workforce Diversity Data
Other big tech companies including Amazon, Apple, and Nvidia have continued their annual disclosures this year even as the Trump administration cracks down on DEI.

Very funny, #Sun: many of the small groups on the disk have flared in recent days - (1)4298 on the far right in this SDO HMI view https://jsoc1.stanford.edu/data/hmi/images/latest/HMI_latest_Int_4096x4096.gif from today just this morning with an X1.1: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1260371819450012 - but the big ones 4294 (center) and 4296 (left) that had received a lot of media hype and even press releases like https://www.dlr.de/de/aktuelles/nachrichten/2025/erhoehtes-sonnensturm-risiko-dlr-beobachtet-weltraumwetter-in-echtzeit have remained completely quiet during their march over the solar disk which is coming to an end soon.

Speaking of crypto books, just finished https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32073021-life-after-google and it might be the most idiotic book I've read that I actually finished. I usually toss those to the side pretty quickly into the book but it was hilarious to read …

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of…
A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE MONTH FROM THE WALL STRE…

Improved Streaming Algorithm for Fair $k$-Center Clustering
Longkun Guo, Zeyu Lin, Chaoqi Jia, Chao Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05937 https://arxiv.org…

Improved Streaming Algorithm for Fair $k$-Center Clustering
Many real-world applications pose challenges in incorporating fairness constraints into the $k$-center clustering problem, where the dataset consists of $m$ demographic groups, each with a specified upper bound on the number of centers to ensure fairness. Focusing on big data scenarios, this paper addresses the problem in a streaming setting, where data points arrive one by one sequentially in a continuous stream. Leveraging a structure called the $λ$-independent center set, we propose a one-p…

Good Morning #Canada
Checking my fake holiday calendar, and I see it's Go For A Ride Day. I guess that could include cars, trains, skateboards, horses, and your favourite human, but let's focus on bicycles. Some people say Canada is too big to have a cycling culture and that's why there's only 1 bike for every 4 Canadians. But those are the people who have never heard of cities... or are named Doug Ford. Only 6% of Canadians are active commuters, meaning walking or biking, but it's more prevalent in Victoria (18.7%) and Halifax (12.3%). About one-third (34%) of neighbourhoods across Canada have no cycling infrastructure but some municipalities have invested in high-comfort bike lanes (dedicated & protected pathways), including Montréal (360 km), Vancouver (246 km), Edmonton (226 km) and Québec City (190 km).
Here's some #StatsCan data on commuting by bike.
#CanadaIsAwesome #Biking #GetOutside
https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/6203-bike-work-day-cycling-through-data

Scaling up AI requires staggering amounts of power and water
— especially when considering that many areas are already dealing with strained grids or drought conditions.
Even when optimized, a single hyperscale facility can draw as muchpower as a mid-sized city
and millions of gallons of water annually.
Professor Romany Webb, deputy director of Columbia University's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, explained the challenge:
"Data centers are incred…

New map and research expose disturbing side effects of AI industry boom: 'There are going to be challenges'
As part of the latest wave of Big Tech's spending on AI, Google announced a $9 billion investment to build a new data center campus in Virginia.

It's a pretty big day in cybersecurity news, so don't miss today's Metacurity for the critical developments you should know, including
--Korean cops raid Coupang HQ looking for security lapses, breach perpetrator clues,
--Compromise NDAA bill is chock full of cyber provisions,
--FTC rejects petition from spyware company founder,
--Commonwealth Bank of Australia fined A$702k for breaching data rules,
--FBI warns of fake proof of life photos,
--Oz…

Korean cops raid Coupang HQ looking for security lapses, breach perpetrator clues
Compromise NDAA bill is chock full of cyber provisions, FTC rejects petition from spyware company founder, Commonwealth Bank of Australia fined A$702k for breaching data rules, FBI warns of fake proof of life photos, Oz teen social media limits go live tomorrow, much more

SHAPE. I. A SOM-SED hybrid approach for efficient galaxy parameter estimation leveraging JWST
Zihao Wang, Tao Wang, Ke Xu, Hanwen Sun, Ruining Tian, Qi Hao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00187

SHAPE. I. A SOM-SED hybrid approach for efficient galaxy parameter estimation leveraging JWST
With the launch and application of next-generation ground- and space-based telescopes, astronomy has entered the era of big data, necessitating more efficient and robust data analysis methods. Most traditional parameter estimation methods are unable to reconcile differences between photometric systems. Ideally, we would like to optimally rely on high-quality observation data provided by, e.g., JWST, for calibrating and improving upcoming wide-field surveys such as the China Space Station Telesc…

Is Dark Energy Changing? Probing the Universe's Expansion with present and future astronomical probes
Mehdi Rezaei, Supriya Pan, Weiqiang Yang, David F. Mota
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09766

Is Dark Energy Changing? Probing the Universe's Expansion with present and future astronomical probes
This study explores the possibility of a time-varying dark energy (DE) equation of state (EoS) deviating from -1. We employ a comprehensive dataset of usual astronomical probes (Type Ia supernovae, baryon acoustic oscillations, Big Bang nucleosynthesis, Hubble data, and Planck 2018 CMB) alongside future mock gravitational wave (GW) distance measurements from the Einstein Telescope. We utilize the Pad'e approximation, a versatile framework encompassing well-known DE models like constant EoS, Che…

Another big jump in atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa: based on daily values, the October average was ~425.0 ppm, that's 2.6 ppm higher than last year.
"US government is closed; site not updated", so we'll have to rely on the automated data collection for now.

Spreadsheets!!!
Filled in my #dasher tracking sheet today and added a chart!
This one shows most of the stores I've got orders from since I started tracking that more closely in March. (there is a 'long tail' of <5 orders on the right that is not included in the picture.)
No big surprises for me in here. McDs and Dairy Queen are the 'bread and butter' locations. Other good performers pop up as the number of orders declines including NoodleBox, Boston Pizza, and Walmart.
Little Valley and Panago are good ones on the less frequent side.
7-11 is frequent, but pay is terrible.
“Walmart SFS" is their package delivery vs. grocery. It's an anomaly. It does not allow tips, and the orders are generally 5-10 packages at a time per offer which is why it has the most orders, but the very little cash.
I'm also always considering these numbers geographically... as in, where is the best place to stage myself for the most pay. There is a 'north' and 'south' side of town and It's not a clear choice.
#PortAlberni #DasherLife #DoorDash #Uber #GigWork #Charts #Data #Spreadsheet #AppleNumbers

Investment in subsea cable projects is expected to reach $13B between 2025 and 2027, almost 2x the amount invested between 2022 and 2024, driven by AI buildout (Magdalena Petrova/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/08/big-tech-ai-underwater-cables.html

Underwater cables are a vital piece of the AI buildout and internet — investment is booming
Over 95% of international data and voice traffic travels through subsea telecom cables. Tech giants Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft are investing for AI.

ICE and DHS have spent more than $10 million on advertising in just the first three weeks of October
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/ice-spending-big-ads-government-shutdown-1235457329/

ICE Isn’t Letting the Shutdown Stop It From Spending Big on Ads
New data shows ICE, DHS spent nearly $10 million on ads promoting deportation and recruitment — even as the shutdown furloughs thousands.

A smart city model for an intelligent traffic light decision system
Darko Pajkovski, Marija Apostoloska Kondoska, Hristina Dimova Popovska
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25254 https…

A smart city model for an intelligent traffic light decision system
A smart city is a framework that uses information and communication technologies to improve public safety, quality of life, transportation and energy efficiency. A big share of these technologies has intelligent networks consisting of connected objects and devices that transmit data using wireless technology and cloud-based solutions. These technologies and their applications can receive, analyze and manage data in real-time to help citizens and municipalities make better decisions to improve q…

LangChain, whose open-source framework connects AI apps to real-time data, raised a $125M Series B led by IVP at a $1.25B valuation (Sharon Goldman/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/10/20/exclusive-early-ai-darling-lan…

Exclusive: Early AI darling LangChain is now a unicorn with a fresh $125 million in funding
With new funding led by IVP and a roster of enterprise customers, LangChain wants to power the coming wave of AI agents—and investors are betting it could be the next big infrastructure giant.

Scion of #Oracle Data Mining Billionaire installs controversial conservative ideologue #BariWeiss atop #CBSNews, dropping any pretense of independence at the

A dealer (of cards) in a Las Vegas hotel told me that crypto-bros often leave gigantic tips. (I guess that using $100 bills to light cigars has become passe.)
There are uses for block chaining - we used it to secure (and protect the integrity of) network data transfers during the 1970s.
But for money? Nah. Crypto-currency is the dumbest idea since the Pet Rock - even dumber because pet rocks could be useful, like as paperweights.
Apart from crypto mining, the big draw seems…

A Novel Statistical Analysis Method for Radiation Source Classification
Haobo Geng, Yaoyao Li, Weiping Tong, Youwei Meng, Houpu Xiao, Yicong Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25675

A Novel Statistical Analysis Method for Radiation Source Classification
With the rapid advancement of electronic information technology, the number and variety of unknown radiation sources have increased significantly. Some of these sources share common characteristics, which offers the potential to effectively address the challenge of identifying unknown radiation sources. However, research on the classification of radiation sources remains relatively limited. This paper proposes a big data analysis method that combines linear discriminant analysis (LDA) with a ro…

The #sunspot show goes on: now activity region (1)4274 - which caused a major geostorm last month - has returned onto the disk with the new number (1)4299. And immediately fired off an X1.9 #SolarFlare today: see #SDO HMI image - https://jsoc1.stanford.edu/data/hmi/images/latest/HMI_latest_Int_4096x4096.gif - of 18:11 UTC, i.e. exactly an hour ago.

An investor group and AI developer Voltai plan to use AI to design, build, and run a 3GW data center in South Korea, set to cost up to $35B and open in 2028 (Jiyoung Sohn/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/a-…

Good Morning #Canada
Did you know that Interac, the Big Brother organization that knows if you're naughty or nice based on your shopping habits, tracks the busiest shopping day of the year? According to their data, Canadians are apparently getting smarter. A decade ago, December 23rd was traditionally the busiest day of the year for retailers based on how many debit and credit cards they swiped. About 5 years ago it began to shift to earlier in the month and in 2025 December 19th was forecasted to be the pinnacle of purchasing. Maybe we ran out of money 4 days earlier.
How prepared are you for #Christmas? Not including food prep, how organized are you for choosing gifts and getting them wrapped and ready? Please take part in our highly scientific survey below and please boost for a larger data sample.
#CanadaIsAwesome #ReadyOrNot
#POLL - My Christmas gifts are selected, wrapped, and ready for Santa to take credit by this date:
Always before December 1st (Liar)
By December 15th at least
December 20th at the latest
Can't think right now... busy wrapping...

Source: Blue Owl's Digital Infrastructure funds are investing ~$3B in a New Mexico-based Stargate data center, set to consume 4.5GW, as Blue Owl expands into AI (Miles Kruppa/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/open…

OpenAI’s Stargate Project Gets $3 Billion Blue Owl Investment
Blue Owl Capital, one of Wall Street’s biggest private lenders, is ramping up its big bet on artificial intelligence with a roughly $3 billion investment in a New Mexico data center that’s part of OpenAI’s Stargate project, said a person with knowledge of the deal. Blue Owl, which has nearly ...

Dealogic: 51 US tech IPOs raised $16.8B in 2025, driven by AI and crypto, above the past three-year average but far below 2021's 127 IPOs raising $74.4B (Valida Pau/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-crypto-companies-dominat…

AI and Crypto Companies Dominated IPO Winners in 2025
The drought in initial public offerings ended this year, led by big winners in AI and crypto, but gains were rare for companies outside those industries. Bankers expect those trends to hold in 2026. Booms in AI and crypto delivered two of the biggest winners of the year: data center developer ...

Few know the lengths to which the Trump administration is paving the way -- and the part it's playing
-- in deregulating a highly regulated industry
to ensure that AI data centers have the energy they need to shape the future of America and the world
To say the nuclear people are bullish on AI is an understatement.
“I call this not just a partnership but a structural alliance.
Atoms for algorithms. Artificial intelligence is not just powered by nuclear ene…

‘Atoms for Algorithms:’ The Trump Administration’s Top Nuclear Scientists Think AI Can Replace Humans in Power Plants
A presentation at the International Atomic Energy Agency unveiled Big Tech’s vision of an AI and nuclear fueled future.

A basket tracking stocks of 10 European data center operators and infrastructure providers surged 23% in 2025, topping the Nasdaq 100, driven by the AI boom (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-04/the-bi…

Big Tech's AI data center plans, which are set to need an estimated 44GW of additional capacity by 2028, face a power crunch that could deflate the AI "bubble" (Financial Times)
https://ig.ft.com/ai-power/

Circle launches USDCx, a privacy-focused version of its USDC stablecoin on the Aleo blockchain, to give users "banking-level privacy" with a "compliance record" (Ben Weiss/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/12/09/circle-privacy-stablecoin-aleo-uds…

Exclusive: Circle stablecoin for ‘banking-level privacy’ to launch on Aleo blockchain
Blockchains make data public, but Aleo founder Howard Wu hopes to lure big banks and institutions to crypto through semi-private stablecoins.