Tootfinder

A great open-source community is about more than just code — it's about people, too. A strong company culture fosters engagement and growth. Join Jessie de Groot and Marion Nehring at this year's Berlin Buzzwords to explore how values such as kindness, collaboration and developer experience influence companies and communities. Gain practical insights into fostering inclusion, engagement, and long-term impact.
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From Culture to Open Source: Build Value-driven Communities
A great open-source community isn’t just about code—it’s about people. For us – Weaviators – we believe a strong company culture of kindness and collaboration is essential for building an inclusive and engaged open-source ecosystem. Join us to learn what you can do to ensure your culture extends beyond your organization and how your values translate into external impact. Based on real-life examples and tactics,, we will explore: - The connection between company culture and open-source…

Great new :qgis: initiative by @… and @…:
Make #QGIS an open platform for building geospatial

QGIS 3D for Open Source Digital Twins | Lutra Consulting
Join our crowdfunding campaign to enhance QGIS 3D tools for open-source digital twins, bringing improved performance, features, and community-driven innovation.

My new webpage is live!
Check it out here: #Autistic!

#buyitforlife https://feddit.org/post/16331311
This is a great example of proprietary abandonware being saved from landfills and remaining useful tech through open-source software.
Why aren't th…

„“I think [Bluesky CEO] Jay [Graber] is great. I think the team is great,” Dorsey told Henshaw-Plath, “but the structure is what I disagree with…I want to push the energy in a different direction, which is more like Bitcoin, which is completely open and not owned by anyone from a protocol layer.“
Jack Dorsey pumps $10 million into a nonprofit focused on open-source social media | TechCrunch

@… Here this combines two of your favourite things: https://securelist.com/open-source-package-for-cur…

Code highlighting with Cursor AI for $500,000
Kaspersky GReAT experts uncover malicious extensions for Cursor AI that download the Quasar backdoor and a crypto stealer.

This is your regular reminder that open source, self-hosting tools are great AND you don't actually have to host them yourself most of the time! Plenty of great companies offer these tools as a paid-for service - exactly like the subscriptions you have on those other platforms, except more ethical.
I'll share my favourites in the thread - please add yours!

Stand Up for Science has a great campaign--"Summer Fight for Science in America!" It's a call to bring science to the people--open labs, etc. Check it out! https://actionnetwork.org/event_campaigns/summer-fight?source=Website

Anybody have a good source for a ripstop nylon zipper pouch, kinda like a pencil case, that's solidly built and fits comfortably in a cargo pants pocket?
Use case is a tiny pocket first aid kit. Nothing fancy, just a couple of bandaids, single-dose ibuprofen, etc. In the past I've tried a plastic clamshell case that eventually broke (and was uncomfortable), a notched vacuum sealed bag (great until you open it, but not resealable), a ziploc (too flimsy).

This story is cute: A malicious "Solidity" (that's the smart contract language Ethereum and other blockchains use) extension for Cursor, the Vibe-Coding Editor included code that steals your tokens/coins.
I find it funny for two reasons:
- Blockchainers love talking about how you need to verify things you interact with but someone wasn't checking if they have the right extension
- Programming smart contracts is hard because it's a massively hostile envir…

Code highlighting with Cursor AI for $500,000
Kaspersky GReAT experts uncover malicious extensions for Cursor AI that download the Quasar backdoor and a crypto stealer.

Even if “AI” worked (it doesn’t), there’s many reasons why you shouldn’t use it:
1. It’s destroying Internet sites that you love as you use chat bots instead of actually going to sources of information—this will cause them to be less active and eventually shut down.
2. Pollution and water use from server farms cause immediate harm; often—just like other heavy industry—these are built in underprivileged communities and harming poor people. Without any benefits as the big tech companies get tax breaks and don’t pay for power, while workers aren’t from the community but commute in.
3. The basic underlying models of any LLM rely on stolen data, even when specific extra data is obtained legally. Chatbots can’t learn to speak English just by reading open source code.
4. You’re fueling a speculation bubble that is costing many people their jobs—because the illusion of “efficiency” is kept up by firing people and counting that as profit.
5. Whenever you use the great cheat machine in the cloud you’re robbing yourself from doing real research, writing or coding—literally atrophying your brain and making you stupider.
It’s a grift, through and through.

Instruction Tuning and CoT Prompting for Contextual Medical QA with LLMs
Chenqian Le, Ziheng Gong, Chihang Wang, Haowei Ni, Panfeng Li, Xupeng Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12182

Instruction Tuning and CoT Prompting for Contextual Medical QA with LLMs
Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in medical question answering (MedQA), yet adapting them to biomedical reasoning remains challenging due to domain-specific complexity and limited supervision. In this work, we study how prompt design and lightweight fine-tuning affect the performance of open-source LLMs on PubMedQA, a benchmark for multiple-choice biomedical questions. We focus on two widely used prompting strategies - standard instruction prompts and Chain-of-Thought (Co…

Happy Fourth of July!
There are many great things about the United States of America, but there are so many ways “we need to do better.” Together, we can.
Check out my article for Heal Our Culture: “Commit To Do Better”
https://open.substack…

Commit To Do Better
At the start of every Caldwell Presbyterian Church worship service, our leaders share a “land acknowledgment,” remembering and acknowledging the native people and First Nations from whom the land our church was built on was unlawfully taken from / stolen from.

Unreal is all you need: Multimodal ISAC Data Simulation with Only One Engine
Kongwu Huang, Shiyi Mu, Jun Jiang, Yuan Gao, Shugong Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08716

Unreal is all you need: Multimodal ISAC Data Simulation with Only One Engine
Scaling laws have achieved success in LLM and foundation models. To explore their potential in ISAC research, we propose Great-X. This single-engine multimodal data twin platform reconstructs the ray-tracing computation of Sionna within Unreal Engine and is deeply integrated with autonomous driving tools. This enables efficient and synchronized simulation of multimodal data, including CSI, RGB, Radar, and LiDAR. Based on this platform, we construct an open-source, large-scale, low-altitude UAV …

New ZFS AnyRAID feature would probably get me to use ZFS at home instead of btrfs.
I have a lot of different-sized old SATA enterprise SSDs retired from @… and a cheap 8 bay eSATA enclosure. The performance is good enough. I can't really justify buying 8 new, matching drives.
AnyMirror would be good enough for my purposes.