Tootfinder

A look at Opera's Neon, a $20-per-month agentic AI browser that can take over browsing tasks, but its three built-in AI chatbots can be confusing and unreliable (The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/tech/801899/opera-neon-ai-browser-trial-run

Opera’s Neon shows just how confusing AI browsers still are
Opera’s Neon browser has three AI agents and a $20 per month subscription attached.

In which Nick Radcliffe goes very deep for a month with Claude Code and reports back. I’m convinced by some but not all of what he says, and found the whole thing a stimulating read: https://checkeagle.com/checklists/njr/a-month-of-chat-oriented-programming/…

30,000 Russian losses per month – US “platinum” guarantees and a new phase of the war: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/18/russian-losses-per-month-us.html

Colts QB Anthony Richardson (orbital fracture) returning to practice after two-month absence https://www.nfl.com/news/colts-qb-anthony-richardson-orbital-fracture-practice-return-two-month-absence

Can't read study on Harvard Business Review because I don't have an account. Unlimited costs $$ but says I can see some free per month with an account, so I make one. "You are out of free articles for this month." I HAVEN'T READ A SINGLE THING!

A month into the new Trump administration,
on the predawn streets of suburban Maryland,
a high-ranking ICE official stood alongside a Mazda sedan that his officers had just stopped.
The official told a local TV reporter at the scene what was about to happen.
“He can either give us a license,”
he said,
“or we’ll smash the fucking window out and drag him out.”
Then, as the driver refused to exit the car, officers broke the glass

“We’ll Smash the Fucking Window Out and Drag Him Out”
We’ve documented nearly 50 incidents of immigration officers shattering car windows to make arrests — a tactic experts say was rarely used before Trump took office. ICE claims its officers use a “minimum amount of force.” You can judge for yourself.

moreno_sheep: Bighorn sheep (1984)
Dominance interactions among a group of female bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) from the National Bison Range in western Montana USA, over a 27 month period ending in 1984. Edge weights represent the frequency of interaction. Metadata gives the sheep ages, roughly.
This network has 28 nodes and 250 edges.
Tags: Social, Animal, Weighted, Metadata

GlassWorm: First Self-Propagating Worm Using Invisible Code Hits OpenVSX Marketplace
A month after Shai Hulud became the first self-propagating worm in the npm ecosystem, we just discovered the world's first worm targeting VS Code extensions on OpenVSX marketplace.
🐛 https://www.

GlassWorm: First Self-Propagating Worm Using Invisible Code Hits OpenVSX Marketplace | Koi Blog

This month, GÉANT was in Ireland for HEAnet Conference 2025!
Our CEO Lise Fuhr joined the panel with Ronan Byrne (HEAnet), Heidi Fraser-Krauss (Jisc), and Dr Gerard Culley (University College Cork).
And our very own Monique Pellinkhof & Magdalena Rząca also joined the programme, unpacking the future of EU collaborations, and what the EU AI Act means for the R&E community.
👏 A big thank you to the HEAnet team for an excellent event!

I went cold-turkey with caffeine 10 days ago.
After a few days of severe headaches and generally not feeling great - I started actually to sleep better, and thanks to that - I have more energy during the days, generally in a better mood, and I am finally feeling inspired to do fun stuff again.
Just finished my next meshtastic solar node, and currently fixing up my homelab that has been neglected for 7 month or so.

So I've a medical thing that I need to buy once a month on Amazon and they cancelled my subscription delivery for it last time (but not the subscription itself), without telling me.
I tried to just order it for one time delivery, but the delivery date was a month out and they immediately cancelled my order.
My wife told me to use my developer brain—and yes, imagining a bug with some row in a database being in a fugue state, the exactly a month out delivery date being the biggest hint to something going into a default state when a calculation fails.
So I removed the subscription to the item (they make it hard to find where to do this).
Bingo: I can now order immediately for delivery in two days and for working subscrpition delivery.

November is digital heritage month; in case you need help with your collection, UMaine's all-online graduate certificate has been called "a national standard for the study of digital curation." You can register now for my spring course in preservation or apply for the full certificate at https://DigitalCuration.UMaine.edu<…

A pretty deeply conservative friend of mine told me that the only thing they get on tiktok is videos about people bragging about abusing Food Share. They finally sent me an example (somebody talking about how they don't know how to use the $5,000 per month that they get) and I had to explain to them why there is a "Sora" watermark on it.

Good Morning #Canada
The month of December will typical put a dent in your paycheck, or January if you're using your credit cards, so it's tough to save any money. Canadians rank 21st worldwide with regards to how much of our salary we put into a savings account. According to World Population Review, we put away approximately 7% of our paycheck for a #RainyDay, far behind South Korea at 35%. I'm retired and therefore not a saver at this point, but even during my most successful earnings period I can't imagine I would have been able to put away a third of my salary.
I suspect the savings percentage is driven by a small group of high wage earners as individual Canadian debt has increased. According to Equifax, total consumer debt in Canada reached $2.56 trillion at the end of 2024, a 4.6 per cent increase over 2023.
#CanadaIsAwesome
https://www.equifax.ca/business/blog/all-news/-/story/stable-versus-struggling-canada-s-financial-divide-widens/

Friday night I gave my first event speech (in German) for the Volksbildungswerk Nordenstadt-Erbenheim-Delkenheim's 40th-anniversary celebration. It went well. (I took over the reins as managing director last month.)

🗾 Japan’s new PM faces sumo-sized dilemma: will Takaichi defy the sport’s ban on women?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/12/japan-pm-sumo-wrestling-ban-women

Japan’s new PM faces sumo-sized dilemma: will Takaichi defy the sport’s ban on women?
Women are banned from entering the ‘sacred’ dohyo. Sanae Takaichi is undecided on whether to attend a trophy presentation later this month

So, apparently Peter Thiel, who is obsessed with the antichrist, had never pondered how to respond if someone notices that he's behaving like one, or at least enabling one. Not exactly my idea of resilient thinker.
“You’re an investor in AI,” Douthat says. “You’re deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance and technologies of warfare and so on. And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and us…

It Kind of Seems Like Peter Thiel Is Losing It
He's spent the past month delivering four high-octane lectures in San Francisco's downtown waterfront on the antichrist.

CNN plans to launch its All Access streaming subscription tier on October 28 for $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year in the US (Ted Johnson/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2025/10/cnn-subscription-service-launch-1236588685/

CNN’s Subscription Service To Launch October 28 At $6.99 Per Month
CNN is making another go of it with a subscription service, announcing an Oct. 28 launch for its “all access” service at a price of $6.99 per month. Subscribers will have access to live and on demand content, as well as digital journalism.  “It’s an essential step in CNN’s evolution as we work to give […]

What do you mean, #awsdown? We only get those e-mails from them every month. The best kind of e-mails.

Paper reviews are apparently like buses. 3 sets in the last month!

Circana: EA's Battlefield 6 became 2025's best-selling US game less than a month after its October 10 debut; Pokémon is 2025's fastest-selling physical game (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Been looking for a "new" 3DS XL for a month or so. These prices are insane. For reference, it was $200 brand new. I found a few that looked like they were ran over, thrown into the ocean, and swallowed by a fish for $200 . In good condition they're about $300-$350. That's crazy.

you can bring down 20% of the internet with a single-character typo in a regex, but you can also destroy a nearly 50 year old bridge with a single incorrectly placed piece of heatshrink
isn't technology beautiful
https://blog.cloudflare.com/details-of-t…

The White House points to a
seven-month snapshot
showing low inflation,
but economists say prices are closer to 3 percent.
The shutdown delays fresh data.
Most experts agree inflation has picked up in recent months,
in part because of Trump’s tariffs.
Economists expect more tariff-driven price increases in the months to come.

Trump says inflation is dead. Most data says: Not quite.
The White House says inflation is low and cool. Virtually every alternative calculation paints a less rosy picture.

This is why the OpenBastard team needs to do more community outreach and not just commit more PRs
#cloudflare #opensource #foss

Donation to your mastodon server will be cheaper https://techhub.social/@Techmeme/115737372852805627

RE: https://mastodon.scot/@kristiedegaris/115567036655119546
I'll do the persuading: I think the book is so good that it's worth spreading. I'll gift one copy per month to any address in Germany for the next three month. DM me if you want …

Under Trump, Inflation Is Costing Average US Family $700 More Per Month | Common Dreams
https://www.commondreams.org/news/inflation-under-donald-trump

Golfer, 74, hits three aces in a month - odds 1.95 trillion to one https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/sport/578273/golfer-74-hits-three-aces-in-a-month-odds-1-point-95-trillion-to-one Let that sink in.
🤪

Added a zoom level to the Category page on the Exocortex-Log app. Can make the graphs look a lot cleaner now.
Looking back over the last 100 months here, we can see in general my social life is quite seasonal -- Festivals are a lot of social all weekend long and a couple of them in a month really bumps up the hours from my usual habit of sitting alone in a dark room pressing buttons.
The peak in 2019 is a summer filled with Glasto and Noisily and another festival or camping trip I don’t seem to have recorded the name of.
Then clearly visible is the drop-off in social activity as the COVID pandemic hit. Virtual-Social (IE zoom meetings and the like) picked up quite a bit around there but had died back to almost nothing way before the hours spent with actual people started to tick up.
Annoyingly, I have my biggest gap in data right on top of the pandemic there, where I failed to back up for months and then data became corrupted.
When the data-hole is over we see social life still not really returning until the middle of 2021 and not really getting back into stride until summer 2022.
It remains much lower now on average with lower peaks than before the pandemic too. Multiple reasons.
Work is pretty constant all the way though other than the data-hole. Dipping when I take time off for social mostly.
That data-hole is annoying. Back up your data kids.
#lifeLog #app #exocortexLog

International operation traces $55 million crypto trail of digital piracy sites https://therecord.media/international-operation-traces-millions-crypto-streaming-piracy

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/10/18/ios-26-1-to-ios-26-4-expected-features/

🐟 As west end properties change hands, Kelly’s Dockside Cafe will close this fall
#ithaca

As west end properties change hands, Kelly's Dockside Kafe will close this fall • 14850 Dining
There aren’t many restaurants that last 50 years, let alone under a single owner, and this week, 14850 Dining has learned that Kelly's Dockside Kafe will close next month, a little over a year after the building and business were listed for sale. [...]

During the #COP30 climate conference in Brazil, Australia's opposition party withdrew from the country's net-zero by 2050 target. It now sees net-zero as a potential 'welcome outcome' of using Australia's resources (coal, gas) plus new energy technologies. Reckless.

Liberal Party formally abandons net zero by 2050 climate target
The decision brings the party closer to the Nationals, which ditched its support for the target earlier this month amid internal turmoil over the Coalition's policy.

How much did you spend on AI this month?
#ai #poll

Meta is testing limiting Facebook professional accounts and Pages to posting just two links per month, unless they subscribe to $14.99 /month Meta Verified (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/17/facebook-is-te…

Facebook is testing a link posting limit for professional accounts and pages | TechCrunch
Meta said that the test impacts professional accounts and pages on Facebook.

Driven by a boom in #ArtificialIntelligence startups #SanFrancisco’s rising rent rate now tops the nation ... again.
🟢 Apartment #Rents that now avg well over $3000 a month are up 6% this yr , more than double t…

Renting a San Francisco Apartment in the A.I. Boom? Good Luck.
The artificial intelligence gold rush has pushed San Francisco’s residential rents up by the most in the nation, as A.I. companies lease apartments and offer rent stipends to employees.

FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino says he plans to resign next month as bureau's No 2 official (Eric Tucker/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/bongino-fbi-trump-patel-3f388cb8ccd9124eff3a7c7aec32c1b3
http://www.memeorandum.com/251217/p125#a251217p125

For the last month or so my laptop has given me a lot of troubles since i swapped the mb (the old one died partially because of me, partialy because it wasnt working for the past 3 yrs or so)
Can't understand what this troublemaker wants because sometimes it works sometimes it just doesn't and burns the battery pins and ignores it, then after a day turns from the battery like nothing happened.

The fact that almost no one streams “La Vie en Rosé” by ZOË on Spotify is wonderful, it makes the album feel like a hidden Austrian treasure to me, to be clear, I don't use Spotify, and got the album on qobuz "Download Store".
https://www.qobuz.com/no-en/album/la-vie-e

"Terrence and Lesley Bridges have seen their energy bills drop dramatically, from £375 a month down to as low as £40, since they swapped their gas boiler for a HeatHub – a small data centre containing more than 500 computers."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0rpy7en

'I heat my Essex home with a data centre in the shed'
"It's fantastic because it's eco-friendly...We're not burning any gases," says Terrence Bridges.

Cowboys Trade Pitch Lands 26-Year-Old Star Who is Expected to be Traded https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/trade-proposal-26-year-old-target/?adt_ei=[email]

Dune and Keyrock: bets placed on prediction markets rose from <$100M per month in early 2024 to $13B per month in November, as Polymarket and Kalshi compete (Jill R Shah/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/bc300579-4b19-4f82-b232-e537e992c310

"China’s exports of electric vehicles doubled in September as competition at home intensifies"
#China #EV #ElectricVehicles

China’s exports of electric vehicles doubled in September as competition at home intensifies
HONG KONG (AP) — China has reported that its electric vehicle exports doubled in September from a year earlier as its automakers expanded further into overseas markets. The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers said Tuesday that exports of “new energy vehicles,” which include battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, jumped 100% last month to 222,000 […]

Cowboys' Diggs to return after 2-month absence https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/47288325/cowboys-diggs-return-two-month-absence-vs-vikings

GM and EVgo have teamed up to give me free charging credit that expires in (checks notes) a month and a half?!?
Well, I guess that's not getting used. I really only fast charge on trips...

Glorious day for focused throwing sets.
Vietnam Hat is just a month away, and Boracay Open is in March. Keeeen #ultimatefrisbee

An overview of what this moment means for public transit in SF.
https://dsasf.org/transit-month/

Dianna Russini's Raiders trade deadline rumor reveals Las Vegas may do more than sell https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/news/dianna-russinis-raiders-trade-deadline-rumor-…

While I'm stuck in Cape Town I'm finalising the @… second 18 month report. And honestly, it's *awesome* what we have achieved.
Check out our publications on Google scholar:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=da&as_sdt=0,5&q=101060452&btnG=

Over 1,300 people from 130 countries just spent a month mastering climate action together.
The En-ROADS Climate Ambassador Camp brought participants through 13,800 hours of training on the Climate Solutions Simulator—diving into climate dynamics, testing solutions, and roleplaying real-world scenarios.
Now they're leading climate events in their communities and working toward certification.

En-ROADS Climate Ambassador Camp 2025: A Month of Learning and Leadership
This year’s live training equipped a global network of climate leaders with the tools and confidence to drive change.

Meta is testing limiting Facebook professional accounts and Pages to posting just two links per month, unless they subscribe to $14.99 /month Meta Verified (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/17/facebook-is-te…

Facebook is testing a link posting limit for professional accounts and pages | TechCrunch
Meta said that the test impacts professional accounts and pages on Facebook.

dutch_school: Dutch school friendships (2003)
A series of snapshots of the friendships among freshmen at secondary school in The Netherlands, in 2003-2004. Friendship ties were surveyed four times, at three month intervals. The direction of an edge indicates that student i is friends with student j. Missing data is coded as 0 or 10. Metadata includes sex, age, ethnicity, and religion.
This network has 26 nodes and 91 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted, Metadata, Tempo…

Trump administration prepares sweeping crackdown on leftist networks
Thursday marks a first deadline,
set this month in a memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi,
for all federal law enforcement agencies to “coordinate delivery”
to the FBI of their intelligence files
on “Antifa” and “Antifa-related” activities.
Bondi has tasked the FBI with using those files to draw up lists of Americans and foreigners to investigate
as part of a campaign directed by …

Trump administration prepares sweeping crackdown on leftist networks
The Justice Department’s program to root out violent “Antifa” extremism is raising First Amendment concerns.

David Brooks, who wrote a NYT column last month decrying popular fixation on the Epstein story, appears in newly released photos of a 2011 event with Epstein (Anna Betts/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/18/jeffrey-epstein-estate-f…

Circana: US game console spending fell 27% in November to $695M, the lowest in the pivotal month for holiday shopping since 2005, after a tough year for makers (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025…

US Game Console Sales Crater in Worst November in Two Decades
US spending on video game consoles fell 27% last month, marking the worst November in two decades as tariffs and rising component costs pushed prices to record highs.

"In its shutdown contingency plan, USDA says funds for school lunches are available through October. But advocates say it’s unclear what happens next month."
There's About To Be An Awful New Consequence Of The Shutdown | HuffPost Latest News
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/government-shutdown-funding-school-lunch_n_68f29305e4b0f8088dd6001d

Gah, trying to just get a delivery date so I could order something timed to arrive next week and pressed the wrong button so accidentally ordered the thing and also Prime membership.
Fuckers tricked me into Prime for a month with their dark pattern constant asking and refusal to take no for an answer.
Bastards.
#amazon #bastards

🌐 eduGAIN piloting use of OpenID Federation
eduGAIN has relied on SAML for years, but modern protocols like OpenID Connect 1.0 & OAuth 2.0 are now industry standards.
The eduGAIN service is running a 12-month pilot to test how OpenID Federation could be used as the future trust technology for eduGAIN, alongside SAML.
🔗 Read more in the latest #CONNECT50 article by Lars Fugl…

Chart of the week: Every month, tens of thousands of Ukrainians flee danger: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/16/chart-of-the-week-every.html

Cowboys' Dak Prescott leads NFL in major stat entering final month of season https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/onsi/news/dallas-cowboys-dak-prescott-leads-nfl-major-stat-entering-final-month-of-season

House Speaker Mike Johnson says
he won't call a vote to extend enhanced subsidies under the Affordable Care Act,
effectively guaranteeing they will expire at the end of this month.
That means higher insurance premiums will go into effect for millions of Americans who get coverage through Obamacare next year

House Republican leaders ditch vote on ACA funding, all but ensuring premiums will rise
House Speaker Mike Johnson says he won't call a vote to extend enhanced subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, effectively guaranteeing they will expire at the end of this month.

New far-right party in this month's Dutch elections JA21 does well in the polls after endless talk show invitations.
Turns out they misled the government agency assessing the budget effects of party platforms. The party e.g. tells voters it will 'end aviation tax', but it told PBL they're going to keep it.
https://nos.n…

JA21 veranderde onvermeld verkiezingsbeloftes voor doorrekening
Zo heeft de partij een versnelde verhoging van de AOW-leeftijd laten doorrekenen bij het CPB. In 2060 zou de pensioenleeftijd 1,5 jaar hoger liggen. Dit staat echter niet in het partijprogramma.

email_company: Manufacturing company email (2010)
A network of emails among employee email addresses at a mid-sized manufacturing company. Each directed edge represents an email sent from address i to address j. Edges are timestamped, and occurred over a 6 month period in an unspecified year.
This network has 167 nodes and 82927 edges.
Tags: Social, Communication, Unweighted, Multigraph, Timestamps

Sources: Bari Weiss moved a planned internal CBS town hall, set to lay out her broader vision, from this month to 2026, after the Erika Kirk town hall flopped (Natalie Korach/Status)
https://www.status.news/p/bari-weiss-cbs-news-erika-kirk-town-hall-ratings<…

Weiss’ Wake-Up Call
As her first major CBS News town hall draws underwhelming ratings, Bari Weiss gets a public crash course in the metrics of television success. Now, Status has learned she’s delayed a planned address to staffers about the network’s future.

i was wondering why people keep migrating from netlify to grebedoc and then i looked at netlify's fee structure
what the actual fuck are they doing??
(the paid tier, for $9/month, only gives you ~3x as many credits, escalating the wtf level tenfold)

Edison, which last month released AI tool Kosmos to speed up and automate complex scientific hypothesis generation, raised $70M at a $250M valuation (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-…

The Trump administration has reportedly set a goal of yanking citizenship away from over a thousand naturalized Americans in fiscal year 2026,
in yet another escalation in the administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown.
New guidance issued on Tuesday directs the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) field offices
to “supply Office of Immigration Litigation with 100-200 denaturalization cases per month” next year, according to The New York Times.
Denatu…

Trump Administration Sets Goal to Denaturalize Thousands of US Citizens in 2026
Immigration officials have reportedly issued guidance setting a quota of 100 to 200 denaturalization cases a month.

Ukraine hits key military fuel supplier 1,400 km inside Russia for third time in month - Euromaidan Press
https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/10/11/ukraine-hits-key-military-fuel-supplier-1400-km-inside-russia-for-third-time-in-month/

Memo: the TikTok US deal is set to close on Jan. 22; terms include retraining the recommendation algorithm on US user data and Oracle overseeing data protection (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

TikTok U.S. Deal to Close Next Month: Oracle and Silver Lake Confirmed in Buyer Consortium
Abu Dhabi's state investment fund will also be a managing investor.

Ukraine confirms drone strike on Russian oil refinery in Saratov Oblast, 2nd hit in a month: https://benborges.xyz/2025/10/16/ukraine-confirms-drone-strike-on.html

Soumith Chintala, who co-created the PyTorch ML framework at Meta and left the company this month, has joined Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab (Pranav Dixit/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-soumith-chinta…

A top Meta AI researcher has joined Mira Murati's hot new startup, Thinking Machines Lab
Thinking Machines Lab, led by Mira Murati, hires Meta AI veteran Soumith Chintala as it rapidly expands its team and prepares for major funding.

Various news about a possible future collider,
all pointing to the CERN FCC-ee as the leading proposal.
The Chinese CEPC plan is now on hold, as a decision was reached to not include it in China’s plans for the next five years (2026-30).

As part of the European Strategy for Particle Physics update process, recommendations drafted earlier this month have now been released
As expected, the main recommendation is to pursue the FCC-ee project, which will cost an esti…

Future Collider Update
Various news about a possible future collider, all pointing to the CERN FCC-ee as the leading proposal. For up to date background technical information on proposed colliders, including cost estimat…

Memo: the TikTok US deal is set to close on Jan. 22; terms include retraining the recommendation algorithm on US user data and Oracle overseeing data protection (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

TikTok U.S. Deal to Close Next Month: Oracle and Silver Lake Confirmed in Buyer Consortium
Abu Dhabi's state investment fund will also be a managing investor.

rhesus_monkey: Rhesus monkey grooming (1963)
Grooming interactions among a group of wild adult rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) in Cayo Santiago, during a two month period in 1963. Edge weights represent the frequency of interaction. The two versions below are equivalent.
This network has 16 nodes and 111 edges.
Tags: Social, Animal, Weighted

25,000 losses per month! Ukrainian servicemen repel occupiers' assaults near Pokrovsk: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/03/losses-per-month-ukrainian-servicemen.html

Cloudflare says "a fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved", after a major outage impacted X, ChatGPT, and others from 11:48am UTC (Andrew Griffin/The Independent)
https://www.the-independent.com/tech/cloudf…

Cloudflare down: Websites such as Twitter not working amid technical problems with the internet
Outage comes around a month after Amazon Web Services outage also took much of the internet offline

Circana: Xbox Series console sales fell 70% YoY to an all-time low in November, compared to the PS5's 40% YoY drop and Switch 1 and 2's combined 10% YoY fall (Rebekah Valentine/IGN)
https://www.ign.com/articles/xbox-us-console-unit-sales-…

Xbox U.S. Console Unit Sales Just Reached an All-Time November Low - IGN
This morning, we learned that November was a surprisingly bad month for video game spending across the board. But one console in particular is really struggling, and that's the Xbox.

moreno_sheep: Bighorn sheep (1984)
Dominance interactions among a group of female bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) from the National Bison Range in western Montana USA, over a 27 month period ending in 1984. Edge weights represent the frequency of interaction. Metadata gives the sheep ages, roughly.
This network has 28 nodes and 250 edges.
Tags: Social, Animal, Weighted, Metadata

Chicago Public Media partners with alt-weekly Chicago Reader for a six-month pilot to sell ads and sponsorships; CPM brought in $13.1M in ads in 2024 (Austin Fuller/Current)
https://current.org/2025/11/chicago-public-medi…

Chicago Public Media teams up with alternative weekly Chicago Reader on advertising sales
The six-month pilot will include bundling placements across the Reader and Chicago Public Media’s Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ.

us_air_traffic: U.S. air traffic
Yearly snapshots of flights among all commercial airports in the United States from 1990 to today. Metadata include passengers, distance, carrier, airport located city, state, and month of the flight.
This network has 2278 nodes and 6390340 edges.
Tags: Transportation, Airport, Unweighted, Metadata, Temporal

'We blew it up. And we’ll do it again’.
‘I don’t give a shit what you call it.’
These words, of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance, respectively,
refer to the first of five US bombings of boats in international waters near Venezuela in the last month,
which have reportedly killed twenty-seven people overall.
Washington claims the boats were carrying drugs destined for US shores but has offered no proof;
evidence indica…

Gabriel Hetland, Murder in the Caribbean — Sidecar
The campaign against Venezuela.

Russia’s seaborne oil exports drop to a three-month low amid US sanctions and rising shipping costs: https://benborges.xyz/2025/11/15/russias-seaborne-oil-exports-drop.html

Google says it hit a milestone of 1.3 quadrillion monthly tokens processed across its services this summer, up from 980T monthly tokens announced in July (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder)
https://the-decoder.com/google-boasts-1-3…

Google boasts 1.3 quadrillion tokens each month, but the figure is mostly window dressing
Google says it now processes more than 1.3 quadrillion tokens every month with its AI models. But this headline number mostly reflects computing effort, not real usage or practical value, and it raises questions about Google's own environmental claims.

SAG-AFTRA announces a new agreement tailored for serialized microdramas, or "verticals", with budgets under $300K that it plans to circulate later this month (Katie Kilkenny/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

SAG-AFTRA Gets In the Verticals Game
The union will be circulating a new agreement for microdramas with budgets under $300,000 later this month.

us_air_traffic: U.S. air traffic
Yearly snapshots of flights among all commercial airports in the United States from 1990 to today. Metadata include passengers, distance, carrier, airport located city, state, and month of the flight.
This network has 2278 nodes and 6390340 edges.
Tags: Transportation, Airport, Unweighted, Metadata, Temporal

Ukraine hits Ryazan oil refinery for second time this month amid broader strikes on Russian energy sites: https://benborges.xyz/2025/11/15/ukraine-hits-ryazan-oil-refinery.html

WhatsApp is testing imposing per-month limits on how many messages individual users and businesses can send to unknown people without getting a response (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/17/what

WhatsApp will curb the number of messages people and businesses can send without a response | TechCrunch
The company said the controls are designed to be effective against people and businesses that blast messages and spam people.

Sources: Samsung to showcase its trifold phone at this month's APEC summit; attendees won't be allowed to touch it, as it's expected to be displayed under glass (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Federal data belatedly released Tuesday shows that the
US unemployment rate
rose to the highest level in four years last month
as Donald Trump’s administration continues its assault on the government’s workforce
and American corporations lay off workers at a level not seen in decades.
The unemployment rate rose to 4.6% in November,
up from 4.4% in September,
according to the Labor Department report, whose release was delayed due to the recent governme…

Trump Economy 'Stalling Out' as Unemployment Rate Hits Highest Level in 4 Years | Common Dreams
"Trump may give himself an A++++ on the economy, but these latest jobs numbers are failing working families."

Apple and NBCUniversal announce an Apple TV and Peacock Premium bundle for $14.99 per month, a 30% discount over the individual subscriptions (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/…

Apple TV and Peacock Ink Extensive Streaming Bundle Deal
In addition to getting both services at a discount of more than 30 percent, Apple TV will add select Peacock programming, while Peacock will get selected Apple TV shows.

Google unveils Gemini 3 Flash that it says offers Pro-level performance with lower latency, higher efficiency, and reduced costs compared to 2.5 Pro (Abner Li/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2025/12/17/gemini-3-flash-launch/

Google announces Gemini 3 Flash with Pro-level performance, rolling out now
Following last month's launch of Gemini 3 Pro, Google today announced Gemini 3 Flash for consumers and developers.

President Trump files a 40-page amended $15B defamation complaint against the NYT and others, after a judge initially dismissed it on Sept. 19 due to its length (The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/16/trump-new-york-times-defam…

Trump has been an outspoken critic of Biden’s use of the autopen to conduct executive business,
going as far as to display a picture of one such device in place of a portrait of his predecessor in a new “Presidential Walk of Fame” he created along the West Wing colonnade.
His Republican allies in Congress last month released a blistering critique of Biden’s alleged “diminished faculties” and mental state during his term that ranked the Democrat’s use of the autopen among “the gr…

Justice Department quietly replaced 'identical' Trump signatures on recent pardons
President Donald Trump is facing new scrutiny over the use of a replicated signature on several recent pardons. Online commenters noticed identical signatures on clemency documents for Darryl Strawberry, Glen Casada, and Michael McMahon. Two forensic experts told The Associated Press on Friday that the signatures were identical. The administration replaced the images on Thursday with new documents showing varied signatures. The Justice Department attributed the replacements to a “technical er…

Gavin Newsom, the California governor,
announced the appointment of two prominent scientists
who left the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in recent months over conflicts with the Trump administration to state positions.
Dr Susan Monarez, the former director of the CDC, will lead California’s new public health initiative, the Public Health Network Innovation Exchange (PHNIX).
In August, Monarez was fired by the Trump administration less than a month in…

Apple and NBCUniversal announce an Apple TV and Peacock Premium bundle for $14.99 per month, a 30% discount over the individual subscriptions (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/…

Apple TV and Peacock Ink Extensive Streaming Bundle Deal
In addition to getting both services at a discount of more than 30 percent, Apple TV will add select Peacock programming, while Peacock will get selected Apple TV shows.

Source: OpenAI rolled back ChatGPT's model router, which sent some queries to reasoning models, for Free and $5/month Go tiers, as it was costly and hurt DAUs (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-router-relaunch-gpt-5-sam-altman/

OpenAI Rolls Back ChatGPT’s Model Router System for Most Users
As OpenAI scrambles to improve ChatGPT, it's ditching a feature in its free tier that contributed to last summer's user revolt.

Sources: Anthropic held early funding talks this month with Abu Dhabi-based MGX, which it considers a prior investor, after closing a $13B Series F in September (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-15/ant…

US DHS: Chinese criminal organizations made $1B in the past three years via scam texts; Proofpoint: last month, a record 330K US toll-scam texts were reported (Robert McMillan/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/url