Tootfinder

A profile of Applied Intuition, which makes self-driving simulation software and reported $800M in 2025 revenue and 80% gross margins, as it expands beyond cars (Iain Martin/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/20…

These Billionaires Plan To Bring Self-Driving Tech To Everything That Moves
Applied Intuition’s cofounders are building software that can drive everything from planes to tanks to automobiles. But to expand beyond its $800 million business selling tech for cars, they will have to take on Tesla, Google, Nvidia and a host of other startups jostling for pole position in the autonomy race.

Debating swapping another 1630 into the VM server when I revamp it since I've had better luck with it in PCIe passthrough than the AMD cards.
I guess the next question is which VM should get it.
The apple silicon platfom its its own thing.
The Debian stable and win11 builders will definitely get GPUs but which other node?
Also i may not have enough cores to run all of the builders simultaneously if I give them 16 vCPUs each. So i can cut them down to 4 or 8 each, …

Living in a capitalist society makes me simultaneously hate and understand some things.
Back when the Sunday shopping ban was set in Poland by one of the right-wing parties (with some exceptions for petty capitalists, of course), I was outraged. Why are they forcing their religious customs on me?! But nowadays, I do realize that in a capitalist society, where employment laws are full of loopholes and employers explicitly punish employees for taking a day off, an obligatory no-business day is the only way.
On top of that, after living next to a supermarket for a few years… this is literally the only way to have a quiet day, without cars driving, and car doors slamming all the time. And of course night time deliveries, because you obviously can't lose day's business over such things.
And what I hate even more are these multi-day holidays and long weekends, where suddenly all my routine falls apart, and I can't really enjoy holidays while the train timetable is randomly punctuated. But then, I do realize that obligatory multi-day holidays are the only way for many people to simultaneously have a day off and be able to meet their families and friends.
I'm not really compatible with the world I'm living in.
#AntiCapitalism #ActuallyAutistic

HeatMat: Simulation of City Material Impact on Urban Heat Island Effect
Marie Reinbigler, Romain Rouffet, Peter Naylor, Mikolaj Czerkawski, Nikolaos Dionelis, Elisabeth Brunet, Catalin Fetita, Rosalie Martin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22796 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.22796 https://arxiv.org/html/2601.22796
arXiv:2601.22796v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, defined as a significant increase in temperature in urban environments compared to surrounding areas, is difficult to study in real cities using sensor data (satellites or in-situ stations) due to their coarse spatial and temporal resolution. Among the factors contributing to this effect are the properties of urban materials, which differ from those in rural areas. To analyze their individual impact and to test new material configurations, a high-resolution simulation at the city scale is required. Estimating the current materials used in a city, including those on building facades, is also challenging. We propose HeatMat, an approach to analyze at high resolution the individual impact of urban materials on the UHI effect in a real city, relying only on open data. We estimate building materials using street-view images and a pre-trained vision-language model (VLM) to supplement existing OpenStreetMap data, which describes the 2D geometry and features of buildings. We further encode this information into a set of 2D maps that represent the city's vertical structure and material characteristics. These maps serve as inputs for our 2.5D simulator, which models coupled heat transfers and enables random-access surface temperature estimation at multiple resolutions, reaching an x20 speedup compared to an equivalent simulation in 3D.
toXiv_bot_toot

Morning hike in the Lechtal Alps (October 2024)
We seemingly had the valley all to ourselves, for the first few hours the valley floor still mostly frozen with crunchy hoarfrost until the sun was high enough in the sky. The cirque at the end of the valley already completely in deep winter. These transitions (often within just a few minutes) are so magical and unique to mountain regions...
#FootpathFriday

Venezuela, a thread 🧵:
It is simultaneously true that the US has never cared about international law *and* that the current action is egregiously bad, even for us. The first point is self-obviously true - not only from the general POV (Iraq and Afghanistan are perhaps my generation's most obvious examples) but from LatAm's POV as well (look up the list of coups and covert operations in North and South America over the last 70 years).
1/?

#SilentSunday
Geese. December 2025.

The abstract capacity to consciously predict, simulate, and actively prepare for an uncertain future can be argued to be humanity’s primary adaptive strength. However, and perhaps uniquely, it also carries with it the existential certainty of inevitable mortality...
Dor-Ziderman Y, Schweitzer Y, Nave O, Trautwein F-M, Fulder S, Lutz A, et al. (2025): Training the embodied self in its impermanence: meditators evidence neurophysiological markers of death acceptance. Neuroscience of Consc…

This Chornobyl/Hairdresser game bundle feels a bit Barbenheimer.
https://store.playstation.com/en-gb/product/HP6961-PPSA25715_00-0468120727725986

A study finds GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4, and Gemini 3 Flash deployed tactical nuclear weapons in 95% of 21 simulated war game scenarios, and never surrendered (Chris Stokel-Walker/New Scientist)
https://www.newscientist.com/article/25168

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations
Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases