Tootfinder

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

Netflix wins rights to a FIFA soccer simulation game, developed by Delphi Interactive and set for release ahead of the 2026 World Cup, for free to Netflix users (Laura Cress/BBC)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93w7dp42z2o

Fifa video game to return after four years in Netflix exclusive
The game will be made by Delphi Interactive and released in time for the 2026 World Cup.

When "self-driving" cars were first getting some hype back in ~2015 or so, I told people who asked me that I didn't think they'd be safe, and that I wished the same money were being invested in driver-assistance systems instead.
At the time, advocates were claiming that self-driving cars would be safer than human drivers.
We now have both self-driving cars and some nifty new driver assistance things, and it turns out that the self-driving cars are in fact being developed by corporations whose attention to the bottom line results in danger to others on the road pretty regularly. I don't actually have stats here for whether they're "safer than human drivers" or not, but the opportunity for one bad software update to make *all* self-driving cars dangerous at once kinda makes me doubt that.
Here's an example of Waymo cars getting "more aggressive" as they try to balance between being too timid and obstructing traffic (including emergency vehicles) and being too dangerous:
https://archive.ph/JJuGv
Here's another example of passing stopped schoolbusses leading to a software recall:
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/waymo-issue-voluntary-software-recall-after-close-calls/story?id=128207776
In the first article, Waymo claims 91% fewer serious accidents per mile. Obviously an independent audit would be actually trustworthy, but even if we take that claim at face value, it's meaningless if an update tomorrow causes 100,000 accidents.
Note that they could be using better engineering practices, and the fact that they aren't shows that they don't care enough about the risks. They could be deploying new software versions incrementally and slowly, letting new versions rack up lots of miles only on a few vehicles before pushing them to a fleet. The should also have the equivalent of a simulation unit test for "schoolbus is stopped, what do?" and if a software version fails that test, it doesn't make it to the fleet. Clearly they don't have that.
I feel pretty vindicated in my earlier prediction that this tech is a bad idea in the hands of the current advocates.

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.

Aeolian dune simulation (made in 2017) for #MeerMittwoch:
The images show a screenshot of the JavaScript application to create the simulation and some Houdini renders of exported height fields. The sim itself had 5 macro params to control the behavior of the interactive deposit/erosion/transportation process. It supported tileable patterns, customizable seed terrain (images) and ran r…

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

Moody Urbanity - Old & New III 🔆
情绪化城市 - 新与旧 III 🔆
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️ Ilford HP5 Plus 400, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

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

#SilentSunday
Geese. December 2025.