@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-08-05 09:50:42
Spend management startup Alaan raised a $48M Series A led by Peak XV, one of the Middle East's largest Series A rounds for a fintech, after a $2.5M seed in 2021 (Tage Kene-Okafor/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/05/ai-p
@netzschleuder@social.skewed.de2025-07-05 08:00:07
twitter_15m: Twitter 15-M movement (2011)
A network representing follower-following relations among Twitter users associated with the 15-M Movement or Anti-austerity movement in Spain, in the period April-May 2011. Metadata include hashtags in the tweets.
This network has 87569 nodes and 6030459 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Unweighted, Metadata
@_tillwe_@mastodon.social2025-09-06 09:57:27
#FotoDerWoche nochmal im Plural und nochmal Kopenhagen - u.a. mit Eindrücken zu Christiania und musealen 70ern.
https://blog.till-westermayer.de/index
@andycarolan@social.lol2025-08-06 10:58:29
If anyone I have a connection with has any thoughts on part or full time design/illustration roles, I would LOVE to hear from you.
18 years experience and am open to new challenges!
#lookingforwork #getfedihired
My most recently uploaded work can be found in my portfolio at https://www.andycarolan.com
If you wish to find out more about me as a person, my strengths, skills and what I'm like to work with, please take a look at my personal user manual at https://www.andycarolan.com/myusermanual
CV/Resume on request
@alejandrobdn@social.linux.pizza2025-08-05 16:27:59
AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning
"On July 23, 2025, AWS deleted my 10-year-old account and every byte of data I had stored with them. No warning. No grace period. No recovery options. Just complete digital annihilation".
https://www.seuros.com/blog/aws…
@grumpybozo@toad.social2025-08-06 20:53:16
I already have a deeply-trained deterministic expert system using carbon-based storage and processing which gives me the answer provided by a LLM ('the commands to run to get an answer') in an instant.
It even knows not to tell me 'netstat' when I'm on a FreeBSD box. https://infosec.exchange/…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-07-06 12:45:11
So I've found my answer after maybe ~30 minutes of effort. First stop was the first search result on Startpage (https://millennialhawk.com/does-poop-have-calories/), which has some evidence of maybe-AI authorship but which is better than a lot of slop. It actually has real links & cites research, so I'll start by looking at the sources.
It claims near the top that poop contains 4.91 kcal per gram (note: 1 kcal = 1 Calorie = 1000 calories, which fact I could find/do trust despite the slop in that search). Now obviously, without a range or mention of an average, this isn't the whole picture, but maybe it's an average to start from? However, the citation link is to a study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32235930/) which only included 27 people with impaired glucose tolerance and obesity. Might have the cited stat, but it's definitely not a broadly representative one if this is the source. The public abstract does not include the stat cited, and I don't want to pay for the article. I happen to be affiliated with a university library, so I could see if I have access that way, but it's a pain to do and not worth it for this study that I know is too specific. Also most people wouldn't have access that way.
Side note: this doing-the-research protect has the nice benefit of letting you see lots of cool stuff you wouldn't have otherwise. The abstract of this study is pretty cool and I learned a bit about gut microbiome changes from just reading the abstract.
My next move was to look among citations in this article to see if I could find something about calorie content of poop specifically. Luckily the article page had indicators for which citations were free to access. I ended up reading/skimming 2 more articles (a few more interesting facts about gut microbiomes were learned) before finding this article whose introduction has what I'm looking for: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3127503/
Here's the relevant paragraph:
"""
The alteration of the energy-balance equation, which is defined by the equilibrium of energy intake and energy expenditure (1–5), leads to weight gain. One less-extensively-studied component of the energy-balance equation is energy loss in stools and urine. Previous studies of healthy adults showed that ≈5% of ingested calories were lost in stools and urine (6). Individuals who consume high-fiber diets exhibit a higher fecal energy loss than individuals who consume low-fiber diets with an equivalent energy content (7, 8). Webb and Annis (9) studied stool energy loss in 4 lean and 4 obese individuals and showed a tendency to lower the fecal energy excretion in obese compared with lean study participants.
"""
And there's a good-enough answer if we do some math, along with links to more in-depth reading if we want them. A Mayo clinic calorie calculator suggests about 2250 Calories per day for me to maintain my weight, I think there's probably a lot of variation in that number, but 5% of that would be very roughly 100 Calories lost in poop per day, so maybe an extremely rough estimate for a range of humans might be 50-200 Calories per day. Interestingly, one of the AI slop pages I found asserted (without citation) 100-200 Calories per day, which kinda checks out. I had no way to trust that number though, and as we saw with the provenance of the 4.91 kcal/gram, it might not be good provenance.
To double-check, I visited this link from the paragraph above: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022316622169853?via=ihub
It's only a 6-person study, but just the abstract has numbers: ~250 kcal/day pooped on a low-fiber diet vs. ~400 kcal/day pooped on a high-fiber diet. That's with intakes of ~2100 and ~2350 kcal respectively, which is close to the number from which I estimated 100 kcal above, so maybe the first estimate from just the 5% number was a bit low.
Glad those numbers were in the abstract, since the full text is paywalled... It's possible this study was also done on some atypical patient group...
Just to come full circle, let's look at that 4.91 kcal/gram number again. A search suggests 14-16 ounces of poop per day is typical, with at least two sources around 14 ounces, or ~400 grams. (AI slop was strong here too, with one including a completely made up table of "studies" that was summarized as 100-200 grams/day). If we believe 400 grams/day of poop, then 4.91 kcal/gram would be almost 2000 kcal/day, which is very clearly ludicrous! So that number was likely some unrelated statistic regurgitated by the AI. I found that number in at least 3 of the slop pages I waded through in my initial search.
@aral@mastodon.ar.al2025-08-06 10:46:14
Genocide denial is considered the final stage of the genocidal process. If you’re denying Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, you are literally complicit in genocide and part of the genocidal process. And history is taking notes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_denial
@siggib@infosec.exchange2025-09-06 13:51:37
Those who truly know me would agree that I am very unusual/strange/weird/etc. It's next to impossible to offend me, but calling me normal comes pretty close. There are a lot of reasons why I'm weird/unusual. One is that I don't like to receive gifts for Christmas, birthdays, Valentine's Day, etc. They feel so obligated. If you want to give me a gift, it should be for a weird reason, as a weird guy I love weird reasons, like because it's Tuesday the 13th, or because it's humpday.
If you wa…
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-08-06 08:51:06
Lyric, which offers AI-powered supply chain management and forecasting tools, raised a $43.5M Series B led by Insight Partners, taking its total funding to $67M (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2025/08/05/ne…
