Tootfinder

The Qantas board's decision to dock the pay of its CEO over a cyber incident reflects a new era of breach accountability for top executives.
Check out my latest CSO piece on this topic. Thanks to Joe Sullivan, Martin Tully of Redgrave, and Paul Mee of OliverWyman for their insights.
Qantas cutting CEO pay signals new era of cyber accountability

Qantas cutting CEO pay signals new era of cyber accountability
With boards, regulators, and investors turning up the heat, corporate leaders, not just CISOs, are facing financial and legal consequences for data breaches.

Cutting country in two: Instead of conquering Ukraine, Putin wants to destroy it - Euromaidan Press
https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/10/26/cutting-country-in-two-instead-of-conquering-ukraine-putin-wants-to-destroy-it/#google_vignette

Ce texte devrait être en accès libre…
« En Cisjordanie occupée, Turmus Ayya est peuplé Š 85 % de citoyens américano-palestiniens. Chaque été, ces binationaux viennent retrouver leur famille et entretenir le lien avec leur terre d’origine. Ils constatent alors que leur passeport américain n’offre aucune immunité contre les persécutions de l’armée et des colons sur ce territoire où les implantations israéliennes illégales s’accélèrent. »

Temperature induced optical scatter changes in titania-germania coatings
D. P. Kapasi, T. Counihan, J. R. Smith, S. Tait, G. Billingsley
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20043 https:/…

Temperature induced optical scatter changes in titania-germania coatings
Titania doped with tantala is the high index material (high n) for the optical coatings used in LIGO and Virgo and its thermal noise limits LIGO/Virgo observations of astrophysical sources. In this paper, we study temperature induced changes to optical scatter of a multilayer highly reflective coating comprised of silica (low n) and titania doped with germania (high n) as a potential candidate to reduce coating thermal noise in ground-based observatories operating at room temperature. We observ…

Japanese chipmaker Rapidus plans to start building a second plant in Hokkaido in fiscal 2027, aiming to make advanced 1.4nm chips as early as 2029 (Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/tech/semiconductors…

Japan's Rapidus to build cutting-edge 1.4-nm chip plant in race with TSMC
Construction to begin in fiscal 2027, production to start as early as 2029

I don't envy "vibe coders". I mean, let's for a minute assume that their vision is not a pipe dream, but an accurate prediction of the future.
For a start, what's their plan for life? Driving a tool whose primary selling point is that anyone can use it. And I'm not even talking about all the inside competition. I'm talking of people realizing that they can cut the middleperson and do the coding themselves.
The way I see it, vibe coders are a bit like typists (with no offense to typists). Their profession is a product of a novelty. And just like typists largely disappeared when typewriters and then computers became commonplace, so are vibe coders bound to disappear when vibe coding becomes commonplace.
And are true programmers going to become obsolete? Well, let me ask you: did the proliferation of cars and corresponding self-service skills render car mechanics obsolete? On the contrary. The way I see it, the proliferation of slopcode will only make competent programmers ever the more necessary.
What vibe coders are saying is basically this: "This new automated self-service kit makes car maintenance so easy. Car mechanics will become obsolete now. Everyone's just going to hire *me* to run this kit instead."
#AI #LLM #VibeCoding

Writing unit tests for my random number generation library continues to be difficult. My tests are failing because the bias in the distribution exceeds my expectations, but I'm wondering whether I should just repeat the test more times and permit it to exceed expectations some of the time (as long as it does it symmetrically/rarely/etc. My gut tells me that second-order expectations aren't any better than first-order expectations, but another part of me disagrees.
Thinking more as I write this (writing is thinking): second-order tests can at least give me better info to work with towards fixing things I think! So maybe I'll invest in them.
#coding

"Mercedes unveils car with 20% efficient ultra-thin solar coating’"
#Cars #Vehicles
https://w…

Mercedes unveils car with 20% efficient ultra-thin solar coating
Mercedes-Benz unveiled its first car prototype with a silicon-free, 20%-efficient nanoparticle solar coating that powers the vehicle even when off and uses modules thinner than a human hair.

There must be an error here! Experimental evidence on coding errors' biases
Bruno Ferman, Lucas Finamor
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20069 https://arxiv.…

There must be an error here! Experimental evidence on coding errors' biases
Quantitative research relies heavily on coding, and coding errors are relatively common even in published research. In this paper, we examine whether individuals are more or less likely to check their code depending on the results they obtain. We test this hypothesis in a randomized experiment embedded in the recruitment process for research positions at a large international economic organization. In a coding task designed to assess candidates' programming abilities, we randomize whether parti…

Appfigures: dedicated mobile apps for vibe coding have yet to gain traction, with Instance: AI App Builder, the largest such app, seeing just 16,000 downloads (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/23/dedicated-mob…

Dedicated mobile apps for vibe coding have so far failed to gain traction | TechCrunch
An analysis of mobile apps offering vibe coding tools shows few have found traction.