Tootfinder

Apple delays iPhone Air pre-orders in China, likely over eSIM regulatory issues, replacing the original schedule with "release information to be updated later" (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tec…

Apple postpones iPhone Air in China as Beijing keeps tight grip on eSIM approval
Apple says all three state-owned telecoms network operators would provide eSIM support ‘subject to regulatory approval’.

Exactly 20 years ago I published a blog post (which I've edited to adapt to my most recent incarnation of a blog) , with a comparison of tools and frameworks for quite a few technology stacks: Java, .NET, PHP, etc.
This was right at the very early stages of the Cloud, there was no "Big Data", there was certainly no AI, there was no iPhone or Android, Mac OS X releases were still big cats, Ubuntu had just appeared, and social media was just Orkut or MySpace. Enjoy.

State of the Art
This article is a copy of a research work I did today, to draw a map of today’s development technologies.

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy

Partially paywalled but still lots of juicy data. “State of the software engineering job market in 2025”: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-the-tech-market-in-2025
From which:

State of the software engineering job market in 2025
A deepdive into today’s tech jobs market, with exclusive data on tech jobs, AI engineering, Big Tech recruitment, the growing importance of location, and more

Taxes on Social Security are hardly affected by Trump's bill.
But the increase in the "State & Local Tax" deduction (SALT) from $10k to $40k?
That's a big deal for Californians.
✅ How the New Tax Law Will Actually Affect Your Tax Bill - Retirement Nerds
https://youtub…

Seahawks troll Raiders' Ashton Jeanty after big first half by ex Boise State teammate https://www.si.com/nfl/seahawks/seahawks-troll-raiders-ashton-jeanty-george-holani-big-half

In Ecuador’s Amazon, Big Oil exploits Indigenous communities in the absence of the state https://news.mongabay.com/2025/06/in-ecuadors-amazon-big-oil-exploits-indigenous-communities-in-the-absence-of-the-state/

In Ecuador’s Amazon, Big Oil exploits Indigenous communities in the absence of the state
This story is published in partnership with the Ecuadorian independent media outlet GK. Sitting in a small gray motorboat, Rosa Aranda dips her fingers in the Villano River as she lists the communities she plans to visit over the coming days: Piwiri, Kamunwi and Yutzuyaku. Aranda, 45 years old with long, thick black hair, is […]

Trump’s tax law includes a $40,000 SALT cap. Here’s who qualifies.
The new GOP tax law quadruples how much people can deduct in state and local taxes off their federal returns, offering significant relief to high earners in many Democratic-led states by partially undoing a big change in President Donald Trump’s 2017 law.

That 2017 law, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, limited the deduction to $10,000 a year, imposing a cap for the first time as a way of reducing the bill’s overall cos…

Trump’s tax law includes a $40,000 SALT cap. Here’s who qualifies.
The changes were secured by congressional Republicans who represent high-tax states.

How to Turn the U.S. Into an Immigration Police State in One Big Bill (The Bulwark)
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/how-to-turn-the-us-into-an-immigration-police-state-one-big-beautiful-bill-ice-deportations-senate-murkowski-trump
http://www.memeorandum.com/250702/p74#a250702p74

Which Oklahoma State football games are most important Ranking Cowboys' 2025 schedule https://www.oklahoman.com/story/sports/college/cowboys/2025/08/03/oklahoma-state-football-2025-schedule-ranking-…

A deep dive into the state of the tech job market in 2025, including an increase in demand for AI engineers and a rising average tenure at Big Tech companies (Gergely Orosz/The Pragmatic Engineer)
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-the-tech-market…

State of the software engineering job market in 2025
A deepdive into today’s tech jobs market, with exclusive data on tech jobs, AI engineering, Big Tech recruitment, the growing importance of location, and more

Fuck Trump, fuck Silicon Valley, and fuck Big Tech.
Look at the state of these slimy sycophants.
🤮
#Trump

Penn State on top in CBS Sports' expert Big Ten picks; Browns, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Cal name starting QBs

https://www.cbssports.com/colle…

Pitfalls of Evaluating Language Models with Open Benchmarks
Md. Najib Hasan (Wichita State University), Mohammad Fakhruddin Babar (Washington State University), Souvika Sarkar (Wichita State University), Monowar Hasan (Washington State University), Santu Karmaker (University of Central Florida)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00460…

Pitfalls of Evaluating Language Models with Open Benchmarks
Open Large Language Model (LLM) benchmarks, such as HELM and BIG-bench, offer standardized, transparent protocols that facilitate the fair comparison, reproducibility, and iterative advancement of Language Models (LMs). However, their openness also introduces critical and underexplored pitfalls. This study exposes these weaknesses by systematically constructing ``cheating'' models -- smaller variants of BART, T5, and GPT-2 fine-tuned directly on public test sets -- which achieve top rankings on…

The Boundary Principle of a Single Big Jump: Refined Asymptotics for Branching Processes with Immigration
Yunfan Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05650 https://

The Boundary Principle of a Single Big Jump: Refined Asymptotics for Branching Processes with Immigration
We analyze the stationary tail of a fixed-point equation arising in branching processes with state-independent immigration, when both immigration and offspring distributions have heavy tails with boundary index one. We prove that \[ P(X > x) \sim \frac{1}{(1-b)(1+x)}, \quad x \to \infty, \] and provide a refined asymptotic identifying negligible logarithmic corrections. Our approach develops a closure principle for subexponential summations and a cluster expansion representation, which disentan…

Big-Stop Semantics: A Simple Way to Get the Benefits of Small-Step Semantics in a Big-Step Judgment
David M Kahn, Jan Hoffmann, Runming Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15157 https…

Big-Stop Semantics: A Simple Way to Get the Benefits of Small-Step Semantics in a Big-Step Judgment
As evident in the programming language literature, many practitioners favor specifying dynamic program behavior using big-step over small-step semantics. Unlike small-step semantics, which must dwell on every intermediate program state, big-step semantics conveniently jump directly to the ever-important result of the computation. Big-step semantics also typically involve fewer inference rules than their small-step counterparts. However, in exchange for ergonomics, big-step semantics give up pow…

The Big Ugly Bill taken down by a republican from Texas.
https://substack.com/@demwinsmedia/note/c-131424537?r=8k45f&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

Democratic Wins Media on Substack
BREAKING: Texas State Rep. James Talarico just took down Donald Trump’s Big, Ugly bill in a way we didn’t think was possible. This is incredible.

Oh man, the cybersecurity news is piling up ahead of next week's Hacker Summer Camp, so check out today's Metacurity to stay on top of critical infosec developments you should know, including
--The US Army booted Easterly from West Point post to pacify a conspiracy theorist,
--Big Balls got his hands on sensitive law enforcement HR and payroll systems,
--Fraudsters are flooding Discord with polished websites,
--Likely DPRK hackers stole $44m from India's Co…

The US Army booted Easterly from West Point post to pacify a conspiracy theorist
Big Balls got his hands on sensitive law enforcement HR and payroll systems, Fraudsters are flooding Discord with polished websites, Likely DPRK hackers stole $44m from India's CoinDCX, 90 state and local gov'ts targeted in SharePoint attacks, SSNs swiped in Allianz breach, much more

Vance is tipping their hand here: what the Trump regime •really• wants in the Big Ugly Bill is a white supremacist secret police, under its direct control, with the size and budget of a nation-state military, for use against Americans.
“Ignore the other stuff,” he says. “This is what matters to us.”
https://c.im/@cdarwin/114781524556773462

On the rate of convergence in superquadratic Hamilton--Jacobi equations with state constraints
Prerona Dutta, Khai T. Nguyen, Son N. T. Tu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01528 https…

On the rate of convergence in superquadratic Hamilton--Jacobi equations with state constraints
In this paper, we investigate the convergence rate in the vanishing viscosity limit for solutions to superquadratic Hamilton--Jacobi equations with state constraints. For every $p>2$, we establish the rate of convergence for nonnegative Lipschitz data vanishing on the boundary to be of order $ \mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{1/2}) $ and obtain an improved upper rate of order $ \mathcal{O}\big(\varepsilon^{\frac{p}{2(p-1)}}\big)$ for semiconcave data.

Nº 3 Infielder Nick O'Brien of the Penn State Quakers Makes it to the Base (April 13 game against the Big Red at Booth Field)
#sports #baseball #gobigred

My family keeps mixing up anarcho-syndicalism with Communism (Marxism-Leninism), and honestly, I find that pretty funny because those two are entirely different things.
Anarcho-syndicalism is about workers running things for themselves, directly and democratically, without bosses or a state above them. Workers organize into unions and federate from the ground up, making all big decisions through assemblies and direct votes, not by handing power to politicians or a small elite. There ar…

Digital Sovereigns Big Tech and Nation-State Influence
Michael Bollerman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21066 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21066

Digital Sovereigns Big Tech and Nation-State Influence
Technology companies have gained unprecedented power and influence in recent years, resembling quasi-nation-states globally. Corporations with trillion-dollar market capitalizations are no longer just providers of digital services; they now wield immense economic power, influence global infrastructure, and significantly impact political and social dynamics. This thesis examines how these corporations have transcended traditional business models, adopting characteristics typically associated wit…

Called my state rep & senator & now calling US Rep & Senators. Telling them:
1) no law enforcement should conceal identities & affiliation; uniforms, names & faces must be known (no ice disguises).
2) no 287(g) deals between local law enforcement & ice; federal law enforcement should not be done by local leos.
3) US should not wage war on iran, the War Powers Act must stop potus' military adventurism.
4) big bad bill must not pass for re…

Yes, I DO believe that child rapists belong in a woodchipper.
Not that the State should be forcefeeding them into one, simply that in a just universe they would go in, feet first, slowly enough to avoid jamming. A sausage auger will do in a pinch, if it’s a big one.
If that makes me inhumane, so be it. https://…

Ashton Jeanty notes one big difference between Boise State, Raiders offenses https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/news/ashton-jeanty-difference-boise-state-raiders-offenses/df03fc49efcaf0fd49…

Governors and state legislatures will be staring at a quite substantial reduction in Medicaid tax revenue.
They will then be faced with three choices:
-one, raise some other sort of tax;
-two, cut some other state service, like education;
-three, cut Medicaid services.
As congressional Republicans well know,
most states are going to choose number three, because it’s the easiest path.
And that brings devastation.
If you want to see why Republica…

How Can the Democrats Be Losing to These Cruel, Stupid, Inept People?
You may have noticed: While Republicans debate Medicaid and other cuts, there’s one aspect of Trump’s big ugly bill that absolutely cannot be discussed.

I was late to pick my daughter up from camp because #NYCParks closed a huge portion of Corona-Meadows Flushing Park. Apparently for some kind of music festival. There was, of course, no bike detour. The area has highways running through it, and the bridges over the highways are cordoned off. How do you get to

Check out today's Metacurity for the most critical infosec developments you should know today, including
--Salt Typhoon 'extensively' compromised a state national guard network for months,
--Former US army soldier pleads guilty to hacking telcos,
--Ukraine claims hack of big Russian drone maker,
--Korean insurance giant hit by ransomware attack,
--Trump's bill offers $1b spend on offensive cyber,
--Abacus Market goes dark after suspected rug…

Salt Typhoon 'extensively' compromised a state national guard network for months
Former US army soldier pleads guilty to hacking telcos, Ukraine claims hack of big Russian drone maker, Korean insurance giant hit by ransomware attack, Trump's bill offers $1b spend on offensive cyber, Abacus Market goes dark after suspected rug pull, AsyncRAT has spawned 30+ forks, much more

Yes, I support Trump's big, beautiful bill. Just not this one part. (Sarah Huckabee Sanders/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/26/state-ai-regulations-ban-obbb/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250626/p83#a250626p83

“Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win.” – NATO chief
The state of these fuckers. https://mastodon.energy/@Sustainable2050/114739811540017876

Kees van der Leun (@Sustainable2050@mastodon.energy)
Attached: 1 image NATO boss Rutte (fmr Dutch PM) sends app to Trump, who promptly publishes it. "Wow, your bombing of Iran was great; it makes the world a safer place!" Straight from The Hague, formerly known as the International City of Peace and Justice. Awkward.

This was a big crowd, with specific actions people can take in a blue area of a blue state. The most important thing is follow up.
https://bsky.app/profile/indivisiblepaplus.bsky.social/post/3luamkf7lkc2i

The last time a Republican-controlled Congress and President Donald Trump moved to slash Medicaid spending, in 2017, a key political force stood in their way:
GOP governors.
Now, as Congress steamrolls toward passing historic Medicaid cuts of about $1 trillion over 10 years through Trump’s tax and spending legislation,
red-state governors are saying little publicly about what it does to health care
— even as they face reductions that will punch multibillion-dollar hole…

GOP Governors Mum as Congress Prepares To Slash Medicaid Spending for Their States - KFF Health News
In 2017, when President Donald Trump tried to repeal Obamacare and roll back Medicaid coverage, Republican governors helped turn Congress against it. Now, as Trump tries again to scale back Medicaid, Republican governors — whose constituents stand to lose federal funding and health coverage — have gone quiet on the health consequences.

‘Prototype’ Big Ten QB Could Land With Cowboys in First Round https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/draft-penn-state-quarterback-drew-allar/?adt_ei=[email]

The Lifespan of our Universe
Hoang Nhan Luu, Yu-Cheng Qiu, S. -H. Henry Tye
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.24011 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

The Lifespan of our Universe
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) measurements claim that the dark energy equation of state $w \ne -1$. This observation can be explained by the axion Dark Energy (aDE) model of an ultralight axion plus a cosmological constant $Λ$. Despite a relatively large degeneracy, there is a high probability that $Λ<0$. This negative $Λ$ leads the universe to end in a big crunch. Using the best-fit values of the model as a benchmark, we find the lifespan o…

Denmark's Agency for Digital Government has announced plans to phase out Microsoft software across its offices in favour of open source alternatives, joining a growing European movement challenging the dominance of American tech giants.
https://www.co…

Denmark to replace Microsoft Office with open source alternatives
German state of Schleswig-Holstein also turns its back on Microsoft as Europeans fear being ‘blackmailed’ by Big Tech

How Palantir has benefited since President Trump took office, securing new and expanded government contracts and becoming the S&P's top-performing stock of 2025 (Washington Post)

In Trump’s Washington, Palantir is winning big
From warfighting and tracking deportations to writing State Department cables with AI, the company is benefiting from a new technology-driven cost-cutting ethos.

I told these hikers that I was out with my new lens because I'd always struggled to capture the experience of what it's like to hike in Shindagin Hollow State Forest and they said that was a noble mission
#photo #photography

67,000 homes in Ireland still use peat for heating. However, Bord Na Mona stopped extracting peat last year and closed its last peat power station. Now restoring peatlands which in a dried out, denatured state are carbon emitters. Big wind farms now on former extraction sites too. A great deal of historical damage has been done.
#peat

Chip Kelly Expected to Have Massive Role for Michael Mayer https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-ohio-state-michael-mayer-brock-bowers-chip-kelly

I've started mostly hibernating my laptop now (save state to disk and power off completely) instead of just suspending it to memory.
First were the days when lol linux hibernate doesn't even work
Then it was laptop HDDs which are painfully slow
Then we had SSDs, but they were really small. Who could spare enough space for a RAM image?
Now I have 64G of RAM and an NVMe where the smallest part I could buy was twice as big as I need, and twice that is only 43% mo…

Senate strikes AI provision from GOP bill after uproar from the states
https://apnews.com/article/congress-ai-provision-moratorium-states-20beeeb6967057be5fe64678f72f6ab0

Senate strikes AI provision from the Republican tax bill after uproar
A proposal to deter states from regulating artificial intelligence for a decade was soundly defeated in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, thwarting attempts to insert the measure into President Donald Trump’s big bill of tax breaks and spending cuts. The Senate voted 99-1 to strike the AI provision after weeks of criticism from both Republican and Democratic governors and state officials. Originally proposed as a 10-year ban on states doing anything to regulate AI, lawmakers later tied it to federa…

As Florida’s Republican government moves to construct a sprawling new immigration detention center in the heart of the Everglades, environmental groups and a wide range of other activists have begun to mobilize against "Gater Gitmo"
Florida’s Republican attorney general, James Uthmeier, announced last week that construction of the jail,
at the site of a disused airbase in the Big Cypress National Preserve, had begun.
According to Fox 4 Now, an affiliate in Southw…

Environmental and Indigenous Groups Mobilize to Stop 'Alligator Alcatraz' | Common Dreams
"This scheme is not only cruel, it threatens the Everglades ecosystem that state and federal taxpayers have spent billions to protect," said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades.

Raiders’ Jeanty Will Make Big Moves in 2025 https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-ashton-jeanty-boise-state-chip-kelly-pete-carroll

Google plans to invest an additional $9B in Virginia through 2026 to boost its cloud and AI infrastructure, including a new data center in Chesterfield County (Emily Forgash/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Google to Invest Additional $9 Billion in Virginia Data Centers
Alphabet Inc.’s Google is investing an additional $9 billion in Virginia through 2026 to enhance cloud and AI infrastructure across the state, marking the latest in a series of big tech investments in US data centers.

State Medicaid programs face 'big, beautiful' time crunch (Joseph Choi/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5416523-states-scramble-medicaid-cuts/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250724/p40#a250724p40

The Student Agency building is the first thing if you head out of Cornell towards Collegtown -- tomorrow I'm hoping to post some photos of a big yellow crane that just went up in this neighborhood but I've got to get through photos of my trip to Newark Valley and Oakley Corners State Forest first
#photo

New Determination of the $^{14}$C(n, $\gamma$)$^{15}$C Reaction Rate and Its Astrophysical Implications
Yuchen Jiang (China Institute of Atomic Energy, Beijing, China), Zhenyu He (School of Physics, International Research Center for Big-Bang Cosmology and Element Genesis, Peng Huanwu Collaborative Center for Research and Education, Beihang University, Beijing, China), Yudong Luo (School of Physics, Peking University, and Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Peking University…

New Determination of the $^{14}$C(n, $γ$)$^{15}$C Reaction Rate and Its Astrophysical Implications
We present a novel experiment to investigate the spectroscopic factor of the $^{15}$C ground state for the first time using single-neutron $removal$ transfer reactions on $^{15}$C. Two consistent spectroscopic factors were derived from the (p, d) and (d, t) reactions, which were subsequently used to deduce the $^{14}$C(n, $γ$)$^{15}$C reaction cross section and the corresponding stellar reaction rate. A typical cross section of (3.89 $\pm$ 0.76) $μ$b is determined at $E_\mathrm{_{c.m.}}$ = 23…

Sources: lobbyists for Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta back a campaign for a 10-year US state AI regulation ban, a move dividing the AI industry and the GOP (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/52ae52f1-531e-462f-898f-e9f86b3b1869

Big Tech pushes for 10-year ban on US states regulating AI
Call by Amazon, Google and Microsoft lobbyists for a ‘moratorium’ has split industry and the Republican party

Probing Cosmic Neutrino Background through Parametric Fluorescence
Guo-yuan Huang, Shun Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10868 https://

Probing Cosmic Neutrino Background through Parametric Fluorescence
We point out that relic neutrinos from the Big Bang may induce the parametric fluorescence in molecular systems, which offers a novel way to discover cosmic neutrino background. By coherently scattering with molecular energy levels, a massive neutrino can spontaneously ``decay" into a lighter neutrino and an infrared signal photon, i.e., $ν^{}_{i} + M \to ν^{}_{j} + γ^{}_{\rm S} + M$, where the molecular state $M$ remains unchanged after the scattering. Because the amplitudes of different ra…

AI, AGI, and learning efficiency
My 4-month-old kid is not DDoSing Wikipedia right now, nor will they ever do so before learning to speak, read, or write. Their entire "training corpus" will not top even 100 million "tokens" before they can speak & understand language, and do so with real intentionally.
Just to emphasize that point: 100 words-per-minute times 60 minutes-per-hour times 12 hours-per-day times 365 days-per-year times 4 years is a mere 105,120,000 words. That's a ludicrously *high* estimate of words-per-minute and hours-per-day, and 4 years old (the age of my other kid) is well after basic speech capabilities are developed in many children, etc. More likely the available "training data" is at least 1 or 2 orders of magnitude less than this.
The point here is that large language models, trained as they are on multiple *billions* of tokens, are not developing their behavioral capabilities in a way that's remotely similar to humans, even if you believe those capabilities are similar (they are by certain very biased ways of measurement; they very much aren't by others). This idea that humans must be naturally good at acquiring language is an old one (see e.g. #AI #LLM #AGI