Tootfinder

Wondering if this is related to them messing with GPS in the same area?
FAA Closes El Paso Airspace for 10 Days Citing ‘Special Security Reasons’
FAA GPS Notice https://ground.news/article/faa-closes-el-paso-airspace-for-10-days-citing-special-security-reasons

I just submitted a talk for the Geospatial room at #FOSDEM. It's about #OSM. Do you think this would be interesting for the audience?

Low-maturity #tech orgs fetishize ideas.
Their process goes like this: a senior stakeholder has an idea, then the engineers build it. Only then can the team go and "validate" it.
The main outcome of this process is ANXIETY, because people know they are making a huge bet, but the risks aren't being acknowledged.
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The Product Picnic
Writing on UX and product management to connect today's discourse with classic insights that the industry forgot.

The philanthropist MacKenzie Scott
announced on Tuesday that she had made donations in the past year
totaling nearly $7.2 billion,
vaulting the total value of her gifts to over $26 billion.
Since divorcing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos,
Ms. Scott has come to embody a new brand of philanthropy.
She has made large gifts to nonprofits that were distinguished
not just by their dollar value
but by the fact that she gave without dictating how the money s…

Mackenzie Scott Announces $7 Billion of Giving This Year
The philanthropist known for donating to historically Black colleges and nonprofits working on climate change offered the news by updating an October blog post.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #ClassicalMixtape
Elmer Bernstein & Elmer Bernstein:
🎵 Main Title (To Kill a Mockingbird)
#ElmerBernstein
https://open.spotify.com/track/5PUHkeSbt9urXpVDkZpXAr

Student loan debt tops $1.6 trillion
The average tuition has doubled in the past 30 years.
At the same time, new federal caps on how much parents can borrow for college placing higher education further out of reach for some families.
Against that backdrop, a growing number of schools are making college more affordable
by providing free tuition to undergraduate students from low- and middle-income families.
The movement dates back 20 years but has gained momen…

More colleges are offering free tuition. Explore our database.
Explore our database of nearly 1,000 colleges and universities that offer free tuition programs.

Allometric scaling of brain activity explained by avalanche criticality
Tiago S. A. N. Sim\~oes, Jos\'e S. Andrade Jr., Hans J. Herrmann, Stefano Zapperi, Lucilla de Arcangelis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10834 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10834 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.10834
arXiv:2512.10834v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Allometric scaling laws, such as Kleiber's law for metabolic rate, highlight how efficiency emerges with size across living systems. The brain, with its characteristic sublinear scaling of activity, has long posed a puzzle: why do larger brains operate with disproportionately lower firing rates? Here we show that this economy of scale is a universal outcome of avalanche dynamics. We derive analytical scaling laws directly from avalanche statistics, establishing that any system governed by critical avalanches must exhibit sublinear activity-size relations. This theoretical prediction is then verified in integrate-and-fire neuronal networks at criticality and in classical self-organized criticality models, demonstrating that the effect is not model-specific but generic. The predicted exponents align with experimental observations across mammal species, bridging dynamical criticality with the allometry of brain metabolism. Our results reveal avalanche criticality as a fundamental mechanism underlying Kleiber-like scaling in the brain.
toXiv_bot_toot

Because I constantly hear myths about the good old compact cassette here's a longer post dispelling them:
1. They can sound as good as CDs
2. They don't wear out
3. You can't use a pencil to wind them
4. You can go to specific tracks automatically
5. You don't need to carry around extra batteries
I will elaborate below:
1. Sound Quality
Many higher-end decks can record cassettes on metal tape with various Dolby noise reduction settings; especially the combination of metal tape and Dolby S will make tapes that are pretty much indistinguishable from listening to a CD.
Even normal or chrome tape with Dolby B (around since the 1970s) will give great results; likely indistinguishable from a CD when played in a car or while out and about with a personal player.
Some extremely high-end tape decks produce better than CD results in some regards (for example some Nakamichi models go to 26KHz with frequency response, while CD are inherently limited to top out at 22KHz).
It's true that the dynamic range of CDs is much better than either vinyl records or tapes. However, unless you're super into classical music there's likely not much music for which this truly matters, as 99% is mastered to use much less dynamic range than provided by any audio media format. (If you're super into classical music you probably want SACD or other high-res lossless sources anyway, not CDs.)
2. Yes, it will wear out mechanically but you will wear out mechanically before it does. Please watch VWestlife's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dgJ4hRHBiw
3. European and American pencils are too thin to engage the cassette reel cogs. (You'd need to get a Japanese pencil. People mostly used BIC pens for this purpose which have the right thickness.)
4. Most (nice) decks and personal players from the early-to-mid nineties onwards have track skip features (e.g. Sony has AMS, Automatic Music Sensor), which allow precise winding to a specific track.
Some decks even did this in the early 80s!
5. My late-90s Walkman has seventy-eight (78) hours of playback on one (1) single AA battery.
Anyway, the main reason why I like them is they're fun to use and recording them is very deliberate instead of algorithms selecting music for me. :)

3 #PositiveDinge gestern
- Rote-Linsen-Hokaido-Curry mit Reis
- Das Ölen der Mechanik an meiner Albert & Müller Gitarre mit H311 Präzisionsöl hat Wunder gewirkt. Die Stimmwirbel drehen sich ohne Widerstand und die Gitarre ist wieder super stimmbar
- Konzentriert Gitarre geübt
- Das Buch "Continuo Playing on the Classica Guitar" von Marco Pesci kam. Schon die…

keep thinking about how cool the symbionese liberation army logo is. they really said "fuck getting anyone but edgelord upper-middle class college students to like us, classic villain tropes maxxing looks hard so we're doing it, make it a multi-headed black snake with a silhouette that looks like some sorta deadly microscopic parasite, put it over a blood red background while we're at it, this will surely make black people agree with us when they learn who shot marcus foster&quo…