Tootfinder

TIL: Just wasted 2 hours chasing a super weird ghost bug in my https://thi.ng/monopub release tool, which would suddenly silently quit, even though it's been working without any problems for years...
Turns out the issue was actually (mostly) in Git (`git log`), which now appends a warning I've never hear…

thi.ng/monopub

#ReleaseSaturday 🚀 — Just pushed the new version of https://thi.ng/hiccup-carbon-icons (now a much larger collection of 2200 icons, mentioned yesterday[1]) and some other smaller updates/additions to o…

Full set of IBM's Carbon icons in hiccup format

By day six, CSIS put the cumulative cost to the US of the Iran War at
$12.7 billion.
Today, it is likely to have exceeded
$18 billion – and the meter is still running.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/202…

Why are Harvard’s slavery researchers quitting or being fired?
https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/18/harvard-university-antigua-slavery-history?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Spring, Life.
(Yesterday, as seen from one of my fave spots on the banks of the river Lech...)
#SilentSunday #NaturePhotography #Photography

Vincenzo Iozzo, Joichi Ito and Pablos Holman are barred from future attendance after Justice Department files revealed their roles in efforts to secure Jeffrey Epstein’s access to DEF CON.
https://www.nextgov.com/people/2026/02/def

DEF CON bans hackers, technologists named in Epstein documents
Vincenzo Iozzo, Joichi Ito and Pablos Holman are barred from future attendance after Justice Department files revealed their roles in efforts to secure Jeffrey Epstein’s access to DEF CON.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MidnightInAPerfectWorld
Karizma:
🎵 Stand!ng By
#Karizma
https://kaytronik.bandcamp.com/track/stand-ng-by
https://open.spotify.com/track/2sqw86P7Pd60sXWBgaWUZs

It's been 4.5 years since I last updated the https://thi.ng/hiccup-carbon-icons collection and synced it with the upstream repo, i.e. IBM's Carbon design system. Spent a few hours today updating the icons to the current version, filtering out a hundred unnecessary ones (e.g. obsolete brand logos, IB…

During a Senate hearing, FBI Director Kash Patel says FBI does purchase "commercially available information" that can be used to track people's location history (Alfred Ng/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/18/fbi-buying-data-tr…

FBI is buying data that can be used to track people, Patel says (Alfred Ng/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/18/fbi-buying-data-track-people-patel-00834080
http://www.memeorandum.com/260318/p70#a260318p70

Blue Origin announced the launch date for the third mission of the #New Glenn, slated to launch no earlier than Sunday, April 19, 2026, from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida: https://www.blueorigin.com/missions/ng-3 - the launch window will be open from 10:45 – 12:45 UTC.

Some workers are going all in on AI while also questioning whether all that AI is good for the world. Others are effectively training machines to do their jobs better than they can. And many of the same workers who are racing to build the future are now wondering if the future they’re building has a place for them in it.

Very nice German/French documentary about the Alps as central Europe's weather & climate generator (available until end of May):
Die Alpen - Europas Wetterküche
https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/110976-000-A/die-alpen-europas-wetterkueche/

The experiments, process adjustments and elimination of environmental factors shall continue until the desired results are obtained (and morale improves again... 😅)
Also, Kallitype chemistry is a wondrous/finicky beast and reproduction requires strict discipline, cleanliness and detailed log keeping of pretty much any aspect... The main difference between these two prints is that the red one involved spraying/misting the paper with distilled water 15 mins prior to coating the emulsion.…

Ad buyers say ad rates for ChatGPT are falling from $60 CPM to as low as $25 and the minimum spend to advertise is down to $50K from $250K at launch (Krystal Scanlon/Digiday)
https://digiday.com/marketing/everything-is-coming-down-chatgpt-ads-are-gett…

‘Everything is coming down’: ChatGPT ads are getting cheaper
While the pilot CPM started out at $60, advertisers are now seeing that price drop to as low as $25, just nine weeks into the test.

RE: https://mas.to/@analog_cafe/116381238810946687
Pretty wild color chemistry in this new Harman film... So great to see people still jazzing things up in this field!

This is the story of Weda Bay – and how nature is being sacrificed for mining https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/mar/11/how-mining-threatens-the-worlds-biodiversity-aoe

These aren’t AI firms, they’re defense contractors. We can’t let them hide behind their models
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/mar/15/ai-defense-warfare-companies
> From Gaza to Iran, the pattern is the s…

Share not only your successes but also your failures, they say... Latest 8x6" kallitype of my beloved friend Morteratsch. Printed before breakfast this AM...
It might not be immediately obvious in the thumbnail, but this is a good illustration of what happens if there's not enough weight/pressure applied when creating contact prints (and why I'm impatiently waiting for my heavy glass plate to arrive)... I almost do kinda like these blurred areas creating some weird irregul…

Ad buyers say ad rates for ChatGPT are falling from $60 CPM to as low as $25 and the minimum spend to advertise is down to $50K from $250K at launch (Krystal Scanlon/Digiday)
https://digiday.com/marketing/everything-is-coming-down-chatgpt-ads-are-gett…

‘Everything is coming down’: ChatGPT ads are getting cheaper
While the pilot CPM started out at $60, advertisers are now seeing that price drop to as low as $25, just nine weeks into the test.

‘Exploit every vulnerability’: rogue AI agents published passwords and overrode anti-virus software
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/mar/12/lab…

AI bros are just loving open source — loving it to death... maybe quite literally! (Godot being latest popular example[1])
More and more projects are impacted by floods of bogus AI pull requests and resulting discussions, stealing precious time and nerves away from their maintainers doing actual productive work. More buggy and insecure software (incl. commercial offerings) due to slopcoding, more websites getting attacked daily by AI crawlers in desperate search for any new bits (liter…

California authorities allege that
hundreds of previously redacted records reveal how Amazon put pressure on independent sellers using its platform into raising their prices on the sites of competitors, such as Walmart and Target, so that Amazon can appear to have lower prices
The global conglomerate became concerned even if a competitor was selling an item for as little as a penny less, according to one segment of the newly unredacted evidence.
The newly revealed documents…

I keep on thinking about this so often, now mostly about how the word has been co-opted & abused by contemporary "AI"... Just refound the link (from 2012):
Generative vs generated
https://www.anomalogue.com/2012/05/01/generative-vs-generated/

Generative vs generated
A generative idea is worth much more than a generated idea. * Generative ideas are perceived only indirectly in the ideas they generate — if the generative idea is perceived at all. Most peop…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #StreetSounds
Gang Starr:
🎵 Natural
#GangStarr
https://djgambit.bandcamp.com/track/gang-starr-natural
https://open.spotify.com/track/5oy2wXSzFt7yEz0ngWzIjc

https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/mar/14/datacentre-boom-is-uk-ai-bubble-about-to-burst

This was an interesting problem to work on (back in 2017): A visualization of a path planner for 3D printing (FDM) a single layer/mesh structure of a multi-layer textile. Two setups of the same path strategy which optimized for longest continuous sub-paths and minimum rapids (distance without filament extrusion) between sub-paths. The planner supported six strategies in total, incl. optimizing for straight sub-paths and minimum amounts of "recent" crossings (to allow filament to co…

Linear Memory (2024)
A prototype version of my piece Linear Memory running inside a https://thi.ng/genart-api sandbox on a Motorola phone, connected to a custom early prototype Layer square screen...
The animation consists of dozens of layers of semi-random multi-scale pixel patterns, slowly scrolling in…

En Route To Fellaria
(This is just a tiny fragment, but it was one of the most memorable days and places I had a chance to visit in 2025... Surreal not just because of the many colors and textures at this time of year [late September], but also the vastness and traces of processes so much larger & older than life...)
#MountainMonday

How Amazon pushes employees to integrate AI across their workload despite their concerns that the company's "half-baked" tools are creating more work (Varsha Bansal/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interact…

Somehow 2026 feels like all that mandatory cognitive bias awareness training should maybe have been kept going (with regular repeats/refreshers, much like first aid training) instead of being phased out in most places... (not just talking about tech/AI, but there it's especially dire)
#TheStateOfIt

Nurse Log
(Path through beautifully lush old growth forest on the slopes of Saddle Mountain, Oregon, in the spring of 2017)
#ThickTrunkThursday #NaturePhotography #Mosstodon

As OpenAI retires GPT-4o, some users say they are angry and grieving to lose the flirty, quirky companion (Alaina Demopoulos/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2026/feb/13/openai-chatbot-gpt4o-valentin…

A classified Israeli military database ... indicated that of more than 53,000 deaths recorded in Gaza, named Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters accounted for roughly 17%. That suggests the rest, 83%, were civilians. These are not the statistics of a war fought with precision, this is a war where imprecision is the aim.
When reported verification times for AI-assisted targets are measured in seconds, ... the consequences are written in rows of small coffins.

Bridge(s) Over Troubled Water (2025)
#WaterfallWednesday #LandscapePhotography #BlackAndWhite

The long dream of gentle machines which would equally appreciate the music, calm and general atmosphere of tracks in this amazing compilation:
Music For Machines (2014)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLOJds0V1f0FbNG4pWArzxUe40K8Hp-8cC
Favorite …

Arrrgghhh... the 10mm thick & heavy ultraclear glass plate I ordered for making larger prints will take 4 weeks to arrive. What am I gonna do?! 😩

Hallo lieber @… / @… — ich habe gerade gesehen, dass Ihr immer noch meinen alten Black Disk editor von 1993 verkauft... 🤩

Entering the canyon
(Half an hour earlier we were sitting and basking in the sun at the top of those cliffs on the left...)
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography

Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra review: Privacy Display works well, meaningful camera upgrades, and sleeker than S25 Ultra, but still huge, expensive, and lacks Qi2 (Allison Johnson/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/tech/893936/samsung-galaxy-s26-ultra-review-show-of…

Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra review: show off
The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra features a unique Privacy Display to keep wandering eyes off your screen. It’s a useful update to a feature-packed phone.

Evening Walk
#EveningWalk #LandscapePhotography #Silhouette #Sunset

Made new test prints on some off-cuts, using a slightly stronger developer solution than usual to see impact on max. depth. The main image (Eagle Creek, Oregon) is using 18% sodium acetate (curve corrected negative), the test strips are of 20% and 15% solutions (both uncorrected). The phone capture doesn't really show the differences too well, but I think I will go for the 18-20% from now on...
(Btw. The original image is here:

Hoher Peißenberg (September 2024)
(From my series In The Lands Of Via Claudia Augusta, the ancient and most important Roman road through the Alps which connected the Po Valley in the south with Augsburg and the Danube as northern terminus)
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography

#ReleaseThursday 🎉 Just pushed a new version of the https://thi.ng/column-store database and query engine which adds support for new column types (fixed-size n-dimensional int/uint/float vectors) and RLE (run-…

In-memory column store database with indexing (WIP)

Just returned from a wonderful 11km Friday afternoon walk along the boundary between the seasons...
#FootpathFriday #LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography

In The Lechtal Alps (2024)
Previously (same valley):
#MountainMonday

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@Sempf/116412330882479256
‘By Design’ Flaw in MCP Could Enable Widespread AI Supply Chain Attacks
"Researchers warn that a flaw in Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol allows unsanitized commands to execute silently, en…

RE: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116232505890032336
If you're reading only one thing today, let it be this thread below, connecting the Straight of Hormuz with the recursive risks & dependencies to fertilizers, food safety, energy, minerals, EV…

RE: https://mastodon.social/@jwz/116078186911677336
Taking @…'s suggestion to substitute "AI" with "cocaine" in v…

Light Streaks — generative photography
A small selection of long-exposures of randomly generated IFS (aka Iterated Function Systems), a family of very oldskool primitive/trivial fractal functions, but which can produce a fairly wide variety of outcomes. Each image is the result of billions of iterations of a single particle being iteratively transformed (meaning the particle's current position is used as the input for computing its next position etc.) For each iteration & posit…

Borderlands (2026)
Geographically, geologically, biologically, politically... The sudden onset of the northern Alps and the German-Austrian border (Bavaria/Tirol, near Füssen/Reutte) running along the wooded ridge in mid-distance...
#LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography

Into The Couloir...
(Throwback to early June 2023, when the Dolomites were still half in winter mode...)
#ThrowbackThursday #LandscapePhotography #BlackAndWhite …

Added, updated & simplified the growing collection of darkroom-related calculators and super happy how elegant and concise the code has turned out, making it super easy to add more of them in the future.
I think it's also another great, if minimal, example to illustrate how otherwise completely separate https://thi.ng/umbrella

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116071868206490125
...and happy 33rd anniversary to The Brundles[1], the commercial Atari 8bit clone I wrote and co-designed for a publisher in 1993 (and that without ever even playing the original :)

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/116072682600815829
"Permanence was a mirage, and belief in the permanence a catastrophic delusion." — @…

tl;dr Using https://thi.ng/column-store to accelerate tag intersection queries by a factor of 880x...
Working on the static website generator/export plugin for my personal knowledge tool has been one of the main projects this past month. A key part of this setup is tagging, not just simple flat keywords/cate…

In-memory column store database with customizable column types, extensible query engine, bitfield indexing for query acceleration, JSON serialization with optional RLE compression

Alpenhauptkamm (2025).
Near the central ridge of the Alps. Canon R7, CPF, unedited RAW (only cropped). Sometimes it just feels so unreal how colorful some mountain landscapes can be (even without polarization filter)...
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography

Naming Things Is Hard
Big Tree™ (no understatement!) at Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, 2019.
This beautiful individual is 1500 years old, but will it or its kind survive another 1500 years (or even just 150 years) of human presence?
#ThickTrunkThursday #NaturePhotography

Sunset walk
Happy #FootpathFriday !
#LandscapePhotography #WinterWonderland #Mountains

Random #ThingUmbrella tip & tidbit about unit conversions: I've been sourcing materials for a larger contact printing setup for my kallitype process, incl. getting a much heavier ultra-clear glass plate than what I've been using so far.
Using the https://

Extensible SI unit creation, conversions, quantities & calculations (incl. ~170 predefined units & constants)

Last Light, Last Look Back...
(Lachenspitze, April 2026)
#LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography #BlackAndWhite

RE: https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/116198556485879620
PSA since more people are still asking about the recipe for this recent quick apple cake I posted, but seemingly aren't seeing my reply in the thread...

Speaking of petrichor... Can't wait for that beautiful scent & mood to fill the air again, but in the meantime (and in anticipation), I enjoy having Petrichor's Cloud Chamber EP on repeat again...
Cloud Chamber (2017)
https://soundcloud.…

David Burdeny's "SALT: Fields" studies are _the_ photographic discovery of the month for me... Just wow & right up my street!
SALT: Fields, Plottings and Extracts 2015-2016
https://www.davidburdeny.com/photographs/salt-fields-plott…

Reading through Anthropic's official repo for giving agents various "super skills"[1]... There's an "algorithmic art" skill and the instructions are explicitly encouraging pure deception as one of the key "critical guidelines":
"The philosophy MUST stress multiple times that the final algorithm should appear as though it took countless hours to develop, was refined with care, and comes from someone at the absolute top of their field. This fram…

skills/skills/algorithmic-art/SKILL.md at main · anthropics/skills
Public repository for Agent Skills. Contribute to anthropics/skills development by creating an account on GitHub.

Already 6 years old, so not even taking into account post-2022 hyperscaling, this is a sobering, very rational and well argued 20 min presentation for some cold flush reality check of the hot fever dreams of AI proponents (and all YOLO energy/resource guzzlers of any walk/standing):
Blip (2020)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd…

Golden Hour Pastoral
(two minutes after sunrise)
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography

Latest 8x6" toned kallitype print, fresh from the tray (well, from the drying line)... 🤩
(Kallitype is quite challenging in terms of balancing achieving deep blacks vs detail, so this scene took quite some tweaking to retain the details in the band of dark shadowy forest, but I'm happy how it turned out...)
#AltProcess

Last Light, Last Look Back (Vol.2)
Somewhat unexpectedly, even in the valley, we had the whole place pretty much to ourselves. Not quite the usual Easter weather, but the snow & ice always welcome and emphasizes the majestic scale/depth...
#LandscapePhotography #BlackAndWhite

Thank you, dear people of Hungary! 🇭🇺 🎉

RE: https://mastodon.social/@_elena/116210085518302030
In addition to the people already mentioned by @… below, I highly recommend th…

Slowly getting into a rhythm to start the day with doing a print each morning, each time still tweaking either negatives, concentrations and/or durations of different processing stages to adjust tones/hues... A new adventure with some back and forth each time!
This print is of Langkofel / Sassolungo, one of my favourite mountain massifs, just such interesting features and so many dear memories, here seen from the east (around half and hour before sunset)...

RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@lritter/116059740853317791
ICYMI, some context for the below and recent developments:

#ReleaseSaturday — This week I've been working on extracting, refactoring & generalizing the minimal column store database I've been using for my personal knowledge/media management toolset, and I'm happy to share it with the world now:
https://

One place, two views...
https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/113239365546105202
https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/1143…

#ReleaseThursday A historic moment in the https://thi.ng/umbrella microverse!
I just re-published all 214 projects, the first release referencing their new home at @…

thi.ng/umbrella

Golden glow
(It's a bit of a theme this week... the local woods keep delivering magic light :)
#EveningWalk #NaturePhotography #Forest

Wichtigste Mitteilung an alle wählenden Bürger*innen heute: #NoAfD #FckAfD

My 10mm thick ultraclear glass plate (for contact prints) arrived and the weight and increase in sharpness is like day & night.. wow! 🤩
Since this new glass also seems to transmit more UV light (as I had hoped), I'll have to do more test strips for adjusted exposure times. The print below actually is a test strip too (using 4 sections of different exposure times), but only the right quarter (80 seconds) seems to noticeable different/lighter. So it seems UV transmission has incr…

Finally have been trying out https://github.com/boyter/scc for counting (unique) lines of code, comments, DRYness and complexity and getting a better and more aggregated overview of the scale of my ht…

GitHub - boyter/scc: Sloc, Cloc and Code: scc is a very fast accurate code counter with complexity calculations and COCOMO estimates written in pure Go
Sloc, Cloc and Code: scc is a very fast accurate code counter with complexity calculations and COCOMO estimates written in pure Go - boyter/scc

With Microslop having deprecated the Intellicode auto-completion extension in #VSCode and sooner or later forcing everyone to use cloud-based #Copilot instead, are there any other #TypeScript users wh…

Pastel Fog Rise
(Watching the sunrise and a dramatic fog rise on an early summer morning near Zugspitze, 2024. The summit is partially visible through the clouds...)
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography

Today marks 19 years since the very first _public_ commit of my old #Toxiclibs code library collection, which for many years were one of the largest and most important side-projects related to Java & Processing.org.
Altogether, toxiclibs consisted of ~360 different "building blocks for computational design" and was used as teaching tool in related fields in many universitie…

#ReleaseSunday 🎉 Quite a few https://thi.ng/column-store updates over the past month, including further performance optimizations, more tests and documentation updates...
Just also added a small section an…

Entering the wild canyon...
(May 2024, IIRC it was the same day @… happened to be there too [unknowingly to us]...)
#FootpathFriday #NaturePhotography

It's Friday, spring is here (a bit too early) — it feels like a good day to share another minute recording of a variation of my Actiniaria piece which I worked on last spring and think also captures that much needed #BloomScrolling spirit...
See #Actiniaria for more context...

Bergrücken
(From the same October morning as the previous image...)
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography

Big/important day, little gestures of appreciation...
#InternationalWomensDay

Not quite groundhogs (for groundhog day), but cute hogs nonetheless...
#MonochromeMonday #NaturePhotography #BlackAndWhite

PSA: Migrating the https://thi.ng/umbrella monorepo to Codeberg, including:
- updating thousands of links in ~970 files (readme's, media, API docs/snippets in source files, examples, wiki etc.)
- updated 215 package short links to point to new locations on Codeberg
- re-configured & re-uploaded…

thi.ng/umbrella

Evening walk. Beautiful Wetterstein. Exceptionally clear air & light tonight... 🤩
#EveningWalk #LandscapePhotography #Photography

Meander (2025).
(Unlike people who're associating a strong negative connotation with that word, I've always seen active meandering as a strength, a never ending search and adaptation of one's course in changing environments, finding/encouraging/prioritizing flow, learning/sharing/depositing bits of knowledge/material in different places and thereby also changing your local environment, at least a little...)
"Be like water!"
(Edit: fixed typo)

Some _very_ early algorithm concept/pre-viz sketches/explorations for the Tron Legacy (2010) intro sequence. They informed another concept/approach in which we applied a similar algorithm to progressively trace out edges of an initially invisible and super detailed 3D city mesh. This required a lot of effort to retopologize the (huge) geometry supplied and creating a multi-res navigation graph to prioritize long/major edges over shorter ones, filter out undesired edges/directions, thereby cr…

#MapSurfing Mt Tongariro & Mt Ngauruhoe (New Zealand)... so, so inspirational!

That time when Johnny Klimek (composer for Cloud Atlas and many others of Tom Tykwer films) and Dr. Motte (founder of the Berlin Loveparade) got together in 1996 to create their one-off project Holy Language...
Fireplace (original version, 9 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgL3DNn7OGE

Evening walk. Each (end of) day this past week had such amazing light/mood... it's good to get out!
#EveningWalk #SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography

PSA: Part of the ongoing #ThingUmbrella maintenance and migration to #Codeberg, I've written a script to batch delete 20600 tags from the Git repo[1], basically any release tags older than 2023-01-01. There're still ~4600 tags remaining, covering all releases since that date. This in…

umbrella
⛱ Broadly scoped ecosystem & mono-repository of 214 TypeScript projects for general purpose, functional, data driven development

Toblinger Knoten / Torre di Toblin
(October 2024)
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #Photography

Early morning in Ötztal
(A sleepy and peaceful Sunday morning in October 2025, the view south-west over Längenfeld towards Hoher Kogel, 3296m)
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #Photography