Tootfinder

Urban planners and other transit oriented folks: SMART is hiring for a Manager of Planning. Previous manager was promoted.
If you want to join the really cool team that keeps Metro Detroit moving every day (👋), apply here. Please share!

The Danish independent media organisation @… are on a member drive with 10 promises if they make it to 50,000, including that they'll share more on social media. I can dream they'll make it to the #fediverse I suppose?
In any case their journalism is outstanding and they carefully avoid making an explicit political stance and contributing to polarisation. #UnbreakingNews
In depth journalism you can read or listen to (try deepL if you don't speak Danish), often beautifully produced, always fascinating. They also don't report on problems without reporting solutions.
It's by far the most uplifting read/listen of my day.
Free link here, pay what you want and free to first time voters...
https://www.zetland.dk/a/rmottram?og=amba25-8

If you get an invite to this generative art software engineering call, note that if you submit something and it gets accepted, as far as I can tell it would cost you $3000 in open access fees... unless you want it to languish behind a paywall (you'd then only be allowed to share an unedited draft, and even then would have to advertise the paywall on it). They don't seem to want to make this clear in their call.

Obesity & diet
I wouldn't normally share a positive story about the new diet drugs, because I've seen someone get obsessed with them who was at a perfectly acceptable weight *by majority standards* (surprise: every weight is in fact perfectly acceptable by *objective* standards, because every "weight-associated" health risk is its own danger that should be assessed *in individuals*). I think two almost-contradictory things:
1. In a society shuddering under the burden of metastasized fatmisia, there's a very real danger in promoting the new diet drugs because lots of people who really don't need them will be psychologically bullied into using them and suffer from the cost and/or side effects.
2. For many individuals under the assault of our society's fatmisia, "just ignore it" is not a sufficient response, and also for specific people for whom decreasing their weight can address *specific* health risks/conditions that they *want* to address that way, these drugs can be a useful tool.
I know @… to be a trustworthy & considerate person, so I think it's responsible to share this:
#Fat #Diet #Obesity

Great one-man effort (in his spare time) by my former colleague Maarten Staats! He went where no organisation went before ;)
Still quite tough to find the information underneath - crossing language and other barriers - but by far the best overview of Europe's grid capacity issues there is.
Rightfully getting a lot of traction!

I couldn't believe this didn't exist yet. So I built it myself.   Electricity grid capacity is an issue throughout the whole EU, but there issn't a clear overview. If you wanted to get this insight… | Maarten Staats | 247 comments
I couldn't believe this didn't exist yet. So I built it myself.   Electricity grid capacity is an issue throughout the whole EU, but there issn't a clear overview. If you wanted to get this insight, you would need to find all maps and paint a mental picture from each country's overview maps.   So that's exactly what I did. I built an overview of grid capacity maps for the whole EU. And made it into an interactive tool.   I'm not going to lie. It took more time than I want to admit. But it wa…

And more to read in your freetime, if you are interested in AI, from Bluesky, Phillip Isola.
"Over the past year, my lab has been working on fleshing out theory applications of the Platonic Representation Hypothesis.
Today I want to share two new works on this topic:"
Eliciting higher alignment:
https://arxiv.org/…

Words That Make Language Models Perceive
Large language models (LLMs) trained purely on text ostensibly lack any direct perceptual experience, yet their internal representations are implicitly shaped by multimodal regularities encoded in language. We test the hypothesis that explicit sensory prompting can surface this latent structure, bringing a text-only LLM into closer representational alignment with specialist vision and audio encoders. When a sensory prompt tells the model to 'see' or 'hear', it cues the model to resolve its next…

Periodic reminder to new followers or anyone just swinging by: I have high speed digital design / SI experience and lots of nice lab toys. Most folks can't afford this kind of stuff so I try to share the love.
If your project is open source or generally noncommercial / hobby in nature, there's NO CHARGE for a quick design review or some basic lab measurements. If you send me a board for characterization and want it back, all I ask is that you send me a prepaid label or reimburs…

The first step on the road to #TNC26 starts today… with the opening of the Call for Proposals!
Next year, our community will gather in Helsinki 🇫🇮 under the theme Digital Sisu—inspired by the Finnish word “sisu,” which embodies inner strength, tenacity, and determination in the face of adversity.
💡 If you have a story to share, or a vision that can shape the conversation—we want to hear f…

If you're advertising (academic) jobs via email/Slack/Zulip/etc and want broad circulation it's really helpful to also have a link to an associated web page to make it easier for folks to share these positions on socials, in other Slacks/Zulips, etc. It doesn't need to be an official job ad, just a page on your website/blog that includes the same information.

Elizabeth Cotton: Ontario Blues
For the guitarists out there, if you want to play this yourself, remember: you must hold the (otherwise normal) guitar upside down.
Yes, and nail all those ragtime licks and walking bass lines while you do. ☺️
https://youtube.com/watch?v=5G8CShJZz6

It’s opportunistic but I’m drunk so sod it: if you want to buy me a book for my birthday, here’s what I want to read: https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/2A169UYO51WU0?ref_=wl_share