Tootfinder

I donated to ACLU today https://www.aclu.org/
"For nearly 100 years, the ACLU has been our nation’s guardian of liberty, working in courts, legislatures, and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and the laws of the United States guarantee everyone in thi…

Home | American Civil Liberties Union
The ACLU dares to create a more perfect union — beyond one person, party, or side. Our mission is to realize this promise of the United States Constitution for all and expand the reach of its guarantees.

"We have a funding system for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that is entirely based on the spending priorities of the UK government in England. The Welsh government has less borrowing powers than a local council, and it often publishes its final budget nine months into the financial year, because the Treasury has decided to change funding in England. This doesn’t work. And it can’t work"

"The prime minister of England also doubles up as the prime minister of the whole of the UK. This is not ideal. The governor of California can’t also be the president of the US. There are clearly conflicting priorities"
#ScottishIndependence
#WelshIndependence

Recursive polygon subdivision inspired by thin-section mineralogy...
(The area of each polygon is mapped to a color from a gradient. Made with https://thi.ng/geom, see next message for example & source code...)
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„ For teaching, this means teaching language with an explicit focus on wellbeing of all class members and striving to be an inclusive setting for all learners. It means finding ways to bring in critical reflection to prompt thinking about social structures, people’s thoughts and feelings in relation to their positioning within social structures, and ways to value and empower individuals.“

“Trump’s America is not merely indifferent to Europe – it’s positively hostile to it. That has enormous implications for the continent and for Britain, which too many of our leaders still refuse to face.
…
The motive hardly matters: whether the US regards the EU as an enemy for transactional or ideological reasons, it now sees it as an enemy.
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[Mark] Rutte warns of war, urging Europe to prepare itself, yet he has nothing to say about the one-time ally across the Atlantic…

Sources: some Telegraph directors alerted the UK government that RedBird's Gerry Cardinale may have breached rules protecting the paper's editorial independence (Simon Goodley/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/nov

Polyharmonic Cascade
Yuriy N. Bakhvalov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17671 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17671 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.17671
arXiv:2512.17671v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: This paper presents a deep machine learning architecture, the "polyharmonic cascade" -- a sequence of packages of polyharmonic splines, where each layer is rigorously derived from the theory of random functions and the principles of indifference. This makes it possible to approximate nonlinear functions of arbitrary complexity while preserving global smoothness and a probabilistic interpretation. For the polyharmonic cascade, a training method alternative to gradient descent is proposed: instead of directly optimizing the coefficients, one solves a single global linear system on each batch with respect to the function values at fixed "constellations" of nodes. This yields synchronized updates of all layers, preserves the probabilistic interpretation of individual layers and theoretical consistency with the original model, and scales well: all computations reduce to 2D matrix operations efficiently executed on a GPU. Fast learning without overfitting on MNIST is demonstrated.
toXiv_bot_toot

Guardian repeats story that Venezuela's oil production low due to corruption and lack of investment.
Actually, the Maracaibo basin is beyond peak extraction so costs rising. And Orinoco oil is heavy, tarry, and hard to get (deep under the rainforest).
Of course the blockade is also part of the reason, and maybe flight of technical staff.
Oil prices fall after Trump says Venezuela will send up to 50m barrels to US | Oil | The Guardian

lol. whoops. apparently the first movie isn't "Jason Bourne" but instead "Bourne Identity" only 10 minutes in and I didn't know but I tried to look up an actor on imdb and saw I was on the wrong movie.
#movies