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’.

Mapped: Big Food’s Routes to Influence at COP30 - DeSmog https://www.desmog.com/2025/11/10/mapped-big-foods-routes-to-influence-at-cop30/

Mapped: Big Food’s Routes to Influence at COP30
In the city of Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon rainforest, Brazil has kicked off the COP30 climate conference, a summit framed as a pivotal moment to reduce emissions and keep the Paris Agreement alive. More than 50,000 people are expected to attend, from heads of state to civil society groups. But as attention […]

Can’t say I know enough to have a real opinion beyond the fact that sending a child into harder subject matter when they haven’t mastered their current level seems like a recipe for disaster. As such, this seems to make sense. #oklahoma #oked

'Big part of the conversation': Legislature to consider reimplementing literacy-based retention
State leaders searching for solutions to turn Oklahoma's education outcomes around are eyeing solutions such as literacy-based retention.

Elijah Sarratt's NFL Draft potential, Ty Simpson shines again, more Week 7 reactions https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6709611/2025/10/12/nfl-draft-2026-sarratt-simpson-penn-state/

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

"Zohran Mamdani is not a symbol of socialism, or communism as Trump says, those boogeymen which fill the hearts of many Americans with terror. He’s something more powerful than that. His cry is: we don’t have to do things like we used to do. Everything can change. And it’s a message of hope that can resonate everywhere"
https://

Empire State Of Mind
Why Mamdani’s win is bigger than the Big Apple

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

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

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…

I had 12 weeks of parental leave for each of my children. (Six of those were paid by my company, and 6 by Washington State. In the US, this might come across as bragging but functional countries will be shocked at how little it is.) My partner fed them, because we had the privilege of being able to breast feed, so I took care of diapers, tummy time, and what other things I could.
I learned about elimination communication (EC). We used cloth diapers, for ecological reasons but also because they can help with potty training later. With EC, it was relatively easy. I actually only had to change dirty diapers a few times. I was available, so I could pay attention to our babies. I could learn their body language. Both of them rarely cried because we knew what they needed before they had to cry about it.
When I was forced back to work, the EC thing fell off. We continued to use cloth diapers for a while with our oldest, but it became too hard with our youngest. We had to switch to disposable diapers because of the overhead.
There have been so many wasteful things we've done because we don't have space to do the right thing. Having kids is both isolating and overwhelming. To maintain sanity, you just have to take short cuts when you don't have time or help.
Before kids, we used to really enjoy cooking together. We would start from basic ingredients and work our way up. We made pad thai, squishing tamarind paste from pods by hand. Even after having kids, my oldest and I would collect acorns from the tree down the street and crack them together. The other day we all cracked acorns we had collected for the first time since moving over here (and I made some Dotori-muk. We've also started making bread together again.
Kids really love making and processing food. There's a sensory element to it, which, if you don't have kids, is actually a really big thing kids need. But there's also a social element to making food together. They just behave better when we do things like that. It's almost like there's some kind of evolutionary incentive for kids to *want* to help. Go figure.
I've really been wanting to make seitan as we try to reduce how much meat we eat in our house. Even that meat consumption is partially about convenience. It's relatively cheap and easy to throw a bag of chicken wings in air fryer, or some ground beef in with pearl couscous in the instant pot, and just have low effort food home made food. My partner is vegan. I used to eat mostly vegan at home and only eat meat on occasion, usually eating out. But it just takes more mental energy to cook without meat. It's an easy protein, and our kids are picky.
These threads, and a few others, all connect back to a single thing. When we can slow down, we can be more careful and thoughtful. We can be mindful. We can make decisions that are better for the environment, that account for climate change. When we are under pressure, when we are tired and overworked, it's just harder or impossible to be careful and mindful... and that's exactly the point.
At a time when the survival of our species depends on our ability to slow down and be mindful, we are more stressed and overwhelmed than ever. Because, if we had a chance to slow down and think, if we could make good choices, we would make choices that would destroy the industries at the core of the global order. To slow down, as we did at the beginning of COVID, is catastrophic for "the economy." Of course it is.
When an industry runs out of room to expand by driving efficiency, it must increase demand. If demand is already fulfilled, it must create waste. The more pressure there is on the population, the worse decisions people make, the more they waste. Waste is the point. We are in an existential conflict. If we do not destroy this system, if we cannot simply slow down and think, we will be destroyed by it.
I think about the microplastics from those diapers, the methane from them rotting (not captured in the municipal biogas digester, but released directly into the environment), the little plastic containers of everything, all the opportunity costs of the carelessness inflicted on us to survive, and I wonder, "is any of this really worth my time in the office? Did I really produce so much more value doing my work than when destroyed in order to allow me to work?" Of course not, because the invisible hand, in it's infinite wisdom, has shuffled away that cost. The cost of our family thrashing is borne by society, we are a burden on everyone, while the value of my labor is internalized to the company.
How much of your "carbon footprint" should belong to your employer? There can be no capitalist solution to the climate crisis because capitalism is the crisis.
#ClimateCrisis

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…

Ukraine’s digital chief pushes for AI-first state amid war and cyber threats https://therecord.media/ukraine-ai-state-digital

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…

Michešl Martin says house building in Ireland is hampered by 'gold-plating' of EU rules https://share.google/jA5qHPaNWnCACKbQJ
<< utterly bollocks, Ireland is one of the most polluting states in the EU.
Most (maybe even every) other EU state is better at building houses without …

Micheál Martin says house building in Ireland is hampered by 'gold-plating' of EU rules
Taoiseach says 'going beyond what is required' is slowing down delivery of housing and other big projects in Ireland

This is a wonderful illustration of the Irish state's capacity for infrastructure investment: a big fanfare to announce there will be *4 new tram stops* in Dublin in six years' time from now.
https://www.irishtimes.com/irelan…

Extension of Luas line to Finglas granted permission and could be completed by 2031
The new line in Dublin is expected to cost about €600 million

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

It's also easy to imagine that Trump is sending his military to Portland. People forget that the military is actually really big and pretty complex.
Most people join the military because they want to get out of poverty. Some people join because they believe in it. A lot of people are just too young to have any kind of politics, but some of them do develop politics in the military... and some of those folks become anarchists.
There are Nazis in the military. It's a big problem. But there are also anarchists who signed up before they developed a critique of the state, and now they're kind of stuck for a few years until they can get out.
It's also worth recognizing that a lot of people join after they graduate. Basic training is like 22 weeks. So, assuming a random selection, there really aren't a lot of folks who would be deploying to PDX who would have joined under Trump. That's just assuming a random selection, and there may be other things at play that I'm not aware of, but the majority of the types of folks who would get deployed now would have joined under Biden.
The troops who will deploy (if they do deploy) may very much not want to be there. These are also not monsters wanting to kill (like Trump wishes them to be). They're kids from nearby towns. That's not awesome, most of Oregon has absolute shit politics. But joining the National Guard doesn't necessarily mean that a person has any politics at all. All of this is worth remembering.

An interview with California state Senator Scott Wiener on his new AI safety bill SB 53, the bill's scope, his focus on AI safety bills, AI PACs, and more (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/23/scott-wiener-on-his-fi…

Scott Wiener on his fight to make Big Tech disclose AI's dangers | TechCrunch
The California lawmaker is on his second attempt to pass a first-in-the-nation AI safety bill. This time, it might work.

Ensemble of Pre-Trained Models for Long-Tailed Trajectory Prediction
Divya Thuremella, Yi Yang, Simon Wanna, Lars Kunze, Daniele De Martini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13914 http…

Ensemble of Pre-Trained Models for Long-Tailed Trajectory Prediction
This work explores the application of ensemble modeling to the multidimensional regression problem of trajectory prediction for vehicles in urban environments. As newer and bigger state-of-the-art prediction models for autonomous driving continue to emerge, an important open challenge is the problem of how to combine the strengths of these big models without the need for costly re-training. We show how, perhaps surprisingly, combining state-of-the-art deep learning models out-of-the-box (withou…

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…

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

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.

"California has a new law to prevent big grid battery fires"
#US #USA #America #California

California has a new law to prevent big grid battery fires
The state enhanced battery safety rules in response to the Moss Landing fire. The industry is on board, hoping better standards will reassure the public.

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…

US cybersecurity company F5 discloses a cyberattack in August by suspected nation-state hackers that stole undisclosed BIG-IP vulnerabilities and source code (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/securi…

What America needs besides #ElectionSecurity : a big ballroom in the ol' #WhiteHouse #RoseGarden !
#DJTshut down the State …

I have been an “end Canada’s connection to the Monarchy”* guy for awhile now. I heard Canadian constitutional expert Phillipe Lagasse say once that it would be a very big lift for Canada to do so because of the requirement to get all provinces to agree on a constitutional amendment, etc etc. In his opinion, the most likely way for it to happen, then, would be for the UK population to end the Royal family’s power themselves.
Seems that is starting to become more likely.
*I avoid using the term Republican because I don’t want to be confused with any notion of advocating for anything like the USA. A Canadian republic can look and function exactly the same as it does today while ending the royal head of state. Bermuda being the most recent example.
#epstein #uk #royalfamily #monarchy #republic #AbolishTheMonarchy
https://mastodon.scot/@ScottishGreens/115440697972592005

Chinese state media: Alibaba has secured China Unicom as a major client for its AI chips; earlier reports said Alibaba was supplying tens of thousands of chips (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-17/ali…

Crack in the layered rock at Treman State Park
#photo #photography #blackandwhite #monochromemonday

Touch-me-not seen in Shindagin Hollow State Forest
#flowers #photo #photography #bloomscrolling

White Wood Aster in Shindagin Hollow State Forest
#photo #photography #flower #flowers