Tootfinder

"Visualizing all books of the world in ISBN-Space"
https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2025/visualizing-all-books-in-isbn-space/
"Libraries have been trying to collect humanity’s knowledge almost since the invention of writing. In the digit…

When a caller says they have info but first demand proof of identity, that's completely backwards.
The caller dialed the number the person provided, so high chance the call connected to the correct recipient, but recipient has absolutely zero knowledge of caller's identity. It's the caller's identity that needs to be established & proven.
Establishing the routine where call recipients provide PII to confirm identity is a fraudster's dream.

Indigenous knowledge confirms what scientists observe: Large birds are disappearing https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/03/indigenous-knowledge-confirms-what-scientists-observe-large-birds-are-disappearing…

Indigenous knowledge confirms what scientists observe: Large birds are disappearing
Indigenous knowledge confirms a trend scientists have observed- large bird populations are declining faster than small birds.

A long time ago, when I was still going to school, I often thought about some class or other: "What's the point of this? I'm just wasting time on stuff I won't ever need. And my grades are going down because of it." So I supported all these bright ideas like having schools work the curriculum out with the industry.
Nowadays, I know better. The purpose of school is not to produce ready-made employees. It's to give people a wider perspective. Perhaps they won't use most of what they learn there, perhaps they'll have bad memories of some classes, but that doesn't really matter. What does matter is that you learn how to learn, how to reason, how to think.
I hate what's been happening to schools lately. They are becoming conveyor belts: we throw children on them, throw specific knowledge at them and see what sticks, we do exams and classify them. We expect to get a thoughtless laborer at the end, someone ready to take a specific job immediately.
A human whose only purpose in life is mindless labor and mindless consumption. Metaphorically, someone who's just going to spend their time off by drinking beer in the front of the TV and breeding more babies. Babies who will eventually become more cogs in the machine, fueling the infinite growth, trying to prevent this mindless system from falling apart.
#AntiCapitalism

Sources: Tencent and Alibaba are in talks to invest in DeepSeek at a $20B valuation, partly benchmarked against Moonshot's pending round at an $18B valuation (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tencent-alibaba…

Tencent, Alibaba in Talks to Invest in DeepSeek at $20 Billion-Plus Valuation
Chinese tech giants Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group are in talks to invest in DeepSeek, the AI upstart that recently started fundraising for the first time, according to four people with knowledge of the conversations. DeepSeek, owned by Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer Capital Management, is ...

Iran confirms it has received ceasefire plan,
but says US is not ready for peace
The US, Iran and a group of regional mediators discussed the terms for a potential 45-day ceasefire that could lead to a permanent end to the war,
according to a report from Axiosthat cites “four US, Israeli and regional sources with knowledge of the talks”.
Now, a senior Iranian official has now confirmed to the Reuters news agency that Tehran has received the two-tier ceasefire plan fro…

Epidemic reproduction numbers in spatial networks
Zahra Ghadiri, Jari Saram\"aki, Takayuki Hiraoka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22150 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.22150 https://arxiv.org/html/2603.22150
arXiv:2603.22150v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The basic and effective reproduction numbers are widely used metrics for characterizing the dynamics of infectious disease epidemics. However, the interpretation of these numbers is based on the assumption of homogeneous mixing and may not hold in real-world populations where the contact patterns deviate from that assumption. In this paper, we present a network-based framework to compare reproduction numbers in populations with and without spatial structure, while other parameters of the disease remain fixed. Using this framework, we show that in homogeneously mixed populations, in the absence of external interventions, the effective reproduction number decreases exponentially as the susceptible population declines. In contrast, in spatially structured populations, the basic reproduction number is smaller, and the effective reproduction number initially decreases faster but eventually converges to unity. We show that the reproduction number is determined by the level of competition between infectious nodes, which is governed by the network structure. Our results suggest that without knowledge of the network structure, reproduction numbers may not be informative for parameterizing the contagiousness of the disease or predicting the behavior of epidemic spreading.
toXiv_bot_toot

Last month, I was in Vienna to talk about #Wikipedia and AI (and #Wikidata, #AbstractWikipedia, and the Wikidata Embedding Project). It took me some time, but I have now written down most of my talk…

The recording of my @… keynote is available online:
Wikipedia and the Semantic Web -- 20 years of co-development, and the future
Drawing on the roots of @… and the Semantic Web, how they influenced each other during t…

Wikipedia and the Semantic Web: Celebrating 20 Years of Co-Development and the Future
In 2005, the very first papers proposed integrating Semantic Web technologies in the nascent Wikipedia ecosystem. This wasn’t just a convergence; it ignited two decades of mutual inspiration and benefit. From this crucible, the work in semantic wikis drew inspiration. Semantic MediaWiki, particularly, which found global adoption at Google, Microsoft, NASA, and beyond. Wikipedia became the bedrock for pioneering knowledge graphs, including DBpedia, Freebase, and Yago. These pivotal experiences…

Just learned from @… 's presentation (https://videolectures.net/videos/iswc2025_nara_vrandecic_wikipedia_future) that there is a