Tootfinder

from my link log —
Why is my Chumby’s CPU usage always 100%?
https://www.downtowndougbrown.com/2024/04/why-is-my-cpu-usage-always-100-upgrading-my-chumby-8-kernel-part-9/
saved 2025-01-13

"Half a million hectares of rainforest were saved — in part thanks to journalism"
#Rainforest #Environment

Half a million hectares of rainforest were saved — in part thanks to journalism
Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. In a packed event held in Palo Alto, California, at the end of SF Climate Week in April, Willie Shubert, the vice president of programs and executive editor at Mongabay, shared a compelling example of how Mongabay’s journalism […]

"A mere decade ago, astronomers knew of just 62 #moons around #Saturn. Today the ringed #planet boasts a staggering 274 official satellites. That’s more than any other world in the solar system—and far…

even more famous!
https://english.elpais.com/people/2024-02-10/that-ferrari-isnt-going-to-pay-for-itself-the-controversial-rise-of-jeremy-fragrance-the-perfume-influencer.html

Apparently, many of the new volunteers are quite young, which seems to go against prevailing narrative of an atomised lonely genZ/Alpha that doesn't feel part of society. OTOH, Hjemmeværnet emphasises that many are joining because of the "fælleskab" (an extremely important concept in Denmark which translates as fellowship, but is used much more commonly than the English word, it's something like "being part of the gang")

"A common Israeli taking point [is] 'How should America respond if rockets were launched from Tijuana at San Diego?' ... it highlights both Israeli ignorance and fears and Palestinian and Xicano/Migrant commonality. Just like how Tel Aviv and Gaza are part of Historic Palestine, San Diego and Tijuana were both Mexico but more importantly part of the homeland of the Kumeyaay People."

Earlier this month, the Copyright Office issued the third part of its report on on AI: this one covering how generative AI may infringe on copyright and whether that's fair use (short answer: maybe, maybe not). I have a new article up summarizing the report.
https://www.…

Copyright Office's report discusses whether generative AI use is fair use
Earlier this month, the Copyright Office issued the third part of its report on AI. As with the first two parts, the Copyright Office discusses arguments from people who responded to its call for comments and then provides its analysis. The three main sections in this part focus on infringement, fair use, and licensing regimes. Here, I’m going to cover what the report says about the first two items: whether using copyrighted material in generative AI infringes on owners’ rights and whether…

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#25For25:SoundsOfTheCentury
- Part one: Dawn of a new millennium
Naga Munchetty explores the landmark events of the 21st century via the lens of music. Part one: 2000 to 2008.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002dxy2

Sources: Big Fund III, China's main chip fund that has secured only a part of its $48B goal, plans to focus on key shortcomings in lithography and EDA software (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Optimal solutions employing an algebraic Variational Multiscale approach Part II: Application to Navier-Stokes
Suyash Shrestha, Marc Gerritsma, Gonzalo Rubio, Steven Hulshoff, Esteban Ferrer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21395

Optimal solutions employing an algebraic Variational Multiscale approach Part II: Application to Navier-Stokes
This work presents a nonlinear extension of the high-order discretisation framework based on the Variational Multiscale (VMS) method previously introduced for steady linear problems. Building on the concept of an optimal projector defined via the symmetric part of the governing operator, we generalise the formulation to treat the 2D incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. The arroach maintains a clear separation between the resolved and unresolved scales, with the fine-scale contributions appro…

Absolutely the most surprising part of this obit of Dilip Doshi, a former Indian #cricket player, is that while Doshi always struck me as the squarest of blokes, he was thick chums with MICK JAGGER, the sultan of cool.

Tesla's European car sales nosedive for fifth month in a row.
Tesla 'has sustained brand and reputational damage in part due to CEO Elon Musk's incendiary rhetoric and political activity.'
That's politely put.
https://www.cnb…

Tesla's European car sales nosedive for fifth month as customers switch to Chinese EVs
The U.S. EV maker has sustained brand and reputational damage in part due to CEO Elon Musk's incendiary rhetoric and political activity.

Linear codes arising from the point-hyperplane geometry-Part I: the Segre embedding
Ilaria Cardinali, Luca Giuzzi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21309 https://…

Linear codes arising from the point-hyperplane geometry-Part I: the Segre embedding
Let $V$ be a vector space over the finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$ with $q$ elements and $Λ$ be the image of the Segre geometry $\mathrm{PG}(V)\otimes\mathrm{PG}(V^*)$ in $\mathrm{PG}(V\otimes V^*)$. Consider the subvariety $Λ_{1}$ of $Λ$ represented by the pure tensors $x\otimes ξ$ with $x\in V$ and $ξ\in V^*$ such that $ξ(x)=0$. Regarding $Λ_1$ as a projective system of $\mathrm{PG}(V\otimes V^*)$, we study the linear code $\mathcal{C}(Λ_1)$ arising from it. The code $\mathcal{C}(Λ_1)$ i…

The result is a two-party system where the parties are going at cross purposes: one going full naked stinking fascist, and the other not pushing back in the opposite direction but just…pushing sideways, wishing for the resurrection of a party split that’s gone.
This may explain in part the endless appeal of the centrist mush-meal pitch: “We just need a party that meets these poor benighted Trump voters with common-sense answers to kitchen table issues!” That sounds like the way you win the 1932 presidential election! Yay!
7/

Followerpower if you're from Sweden: I'm trying to figure out how to get around some places near Stockholm. There are some bus stops in a nature reserve, e.g., Järflottvägen (part of Nynäshamn), but the swedish rail webpage sj.se does not find this bus stop. Several sources say there are busses stopping there (lines 848,852), but only thirdparty sources, none look like the bus operator. Should I assume this bus is operating, and where would I find its official timetable and ticket in…

Check Point acquires Israeli cyber startup firm Veriti for $100 million
https://www.ynetnews.com/business/article/byjdi4emee

Check Point acquires Israeli cyber startup firm Veriti for $100 million
The Israeli company, founded in 2021 by Check Point alumni, has developed a platform for identifying and fixing security gaps in real time 30 Veriti employees will join Check Point as part of the deal, which is a continuation of the company's Israeli acquisition strategy

Working with an #acting #coaching client just now, and found how to make the really good writing we're working with have its levels open up. The optimism on the part of the character propelled the pace in one take whereas approaching from pessimism found more dis-regulation on another.

The Federal Communications Commission approved the $8 billion merger between Paramount and Skydance on Thursday -- after several changes at CBS that were widely seen as efforts to placate Donald Trump.
Part of the deal will require an internal monitor to check the media company’s supposed political biases.
FCC commissioner Brendan Carr has been doing the rounds to brag about how he’s getting people on TV to be nicer to the MAGA movement.
“They made commitments to address bia…

FCC to Appoint a Babysitter to Make Sure CBS Isn't Anti-Trump
FCC commissioner Brendan Carr says CBS will have a "bias monitor."

Last week I asked Google to stop releasing broken things. Apologists said maybe I needed to contribute more, write code or demos.
Last year I outlined some of what I *have* done and how, for the most part, Google / Web•dev doesn’t give a shit:
https://adrianroselli.com/2024/07…

Don’t Use Web•dev for Accessibility Info
Web.dev is a site from Google Chrome developer relations that provides content both to evangelize Chrome and to more broadly support the web platform. Rachel Andrew’s monthly “new to the platform” posts are effectively required reading to try to stay abreast of the browser support landscape. However, the accessibility content…

Super busy week, but here's some #FootpathFriday for you (from our amazing sunset solstice hike last Saturday), along a ridge which is part of the DE/AT borderline... 😍
#LandscapePhotography

The new audio effects libraries in CircuitPython are super fun. Here's a quick "taster" showing off some of them, part of my impending "Synthio Tutorial". Thanks Mark & Cooper for making them!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyv7XlQ1d00

Documenting Your Prompts a Best Practice for Success
#promptengineering

My favorite part of Uber is following the little jellybean on the map. It's like being a drone pilot except I don't get to drop a grenade on anybody.

Wazuh the maker of the unified #XDR and #SIEM protection for endpoints
and cloud workloads has technical and non-technical #remote roles open.

Careers | Wazuh
Would you like to be part of our team? If you would like to work on an open source project, Wazuh is the right place for you.

This morning I have a meeting with a PhD student who's working on the history of media coverage of the royals in Canada at exactly the same time as the throne speech. Maybe that's the least interesting part of the day?

Rebecca Solnit: "Me, 2019: "Epstein gambled on the differential between his power and voice in the world and theirs and for the most part he won, because the game was rigged by dozens of people around him... Monsters rule over us, on behalf of monsters." lithub.com/in-patriarch..." — Bluesky
https://bsky.app/profile/rebeccasolnit.bsky.social/post/3luvq327v4c2k

Exciting Update: New Goal Set at €12,439! 💼 With your amazing help, we've already hit €5134. To reach our target, we're counting on you. Your support makes a real difference. Thank you for being part of this journey! 🙏 👉 https://chardonsbleus.org/donate

Not enough petting!!1!

In Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Man of the People" (part of "Four Ways to Forgiveness") there's a scene where the Hainish protagonist begins studying history. It's excellent in many respects, but what stood out the most to me was the softly incomprehensible idea of a people with multiple millions of years of recorded history. As one's mind starts to try to trace out the implications of that, it dawns on you that you can't actually comprehend the concept. Like, you read the sentence & understood all the words, and at first you were able to assemble them into what seemed like a conceptual understanding, but as you started to try to fill out that understating, it began to slip away, until you realized you didn't in fact have the mental capacity to build a full understanding and would have you paper things over with a shallow placeholder instead.
I absolutely love that feeling, as one of the ways in which reading science fiction can stretch the brain, and I connected it to a similar moment in Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME, where the android protagonists need to ride an elevator through the civilization/galaxy-spanning megastructure, and turn themselves off for *millions of years* to wait out the ride.
I'm not sure why exactly these scenes feel more beautifully incomprehensible than your run-of-the-mill "then they traveled at lightspeed for a millennia, leaving all their family behind" scene, other than perhaps the authors approach them without trying to use much metaphor to make them more comprehensible (or they use metaphor to emphasize their incomprehensibility).
Do you have a favorite mind=expanded scene of this nature?
#AmReading

Last week, we continued our #ISE2025 lecture on distributional semantics with the introduction of neural language models (NLMs) and compared them to traditional statistical n-gram models.
Benefits of NLMs:
- Capturing Long-Range Dependencies
- Computational and Statistical Tractability
- Improved Generalisation
- Higher Accuracy
@…

The functions in the {withr} package allow to change your environment temporarily. E.g. create a temp file for a {testthat} test and clean it up afterwards. #rstats

Run Code With Temporarily Modified Global State
A set of functions to run code with safely and temporarily modified global state. Many of these functions were originally a part of the devtools package, this provides a simple package with limited dependencies to provide access to these functions.

Just donated 20€ to @… because it's existence change my life radically 21 years ago. In great part thanks to @…
#teamvieux

Of course they knew no local would go for it. So they would pick their targets, based in part on license plates which made it pretty obvious who was local, and who wasn’t.
My mother, living in Denmark at that point, despite being *from* the town, of course had a foreign car.
So the windshield wipers would always go to town on our car, in the hopes of making a fat tip I suppose.
And my mom would always roll down the window and curse them out in Polish for their little scam.

"when a wealthy guy says the quiet part out loud…"
(A smart one.)
https://substack.com/@artistlike/note/c-136832061?r=n66c&utm_source=notes-share-action

DMC (@artistlike)
I’m resharing this because it’s worth listening to, thinking about, and relistening to and rethinking about. One of the most important set of ideas I have heard.

Automorphism groups of measures on the Cantor space. Part II: Abstract homogeneous measures
Piotr Niemiec
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20797 https://

Automorphism groups of measures on the Cantor space. Part II: Abstract homogeneous measures
The main aim of the paper is to introduce a new class of (semigroup-valued) measures that are ultrahomogeneous on the Boolean algebra of all clopen subsets of the Cantor space and to study their automorphism groups. A characterisation, in terms of the so-called trinary spectrum of a measure, of ultrahomogeneous measures such that the action of their automorphism groups is (topologically) transitive or minimal is given. Also sufficient and necessary conditions for the existence of a dense (or co…

This call for a simple moniterable power monitor soundsrelatively simple; I guess the question is how to do it cheaply; are there any Shelly devices that can voltage monitor that could be stuffed in a box with a mobile modem/phone?
https://www.ukeic.com/opportunity/domestic

Domestic Voltage Monitoring | Energy Innovation Centre
UK Power Networks want a domestic voltage monitoring device customers can install themselves as part of this business opportunity.

Browns reveal first-ever brown helmet as part of 'Alpha Dawg' look for 2025 season https://www.nfl.com/news/browns-reveal-first-ever-brown-helmet-as-part-of-alpha-dawg-look-for-2025-season

#ShamelesslyStolenFromSomewhereElseOnTheInternetHonestlyICantKeepTrackOfThisStuffAnymore

BiLO: Bilevel Local Operator Learning for PDE Inverse Problems. Part II: Efficient Uncertainty Quantification with Low-Rank Adaptation
Ray Zirui Zhang, Christopher E. Miles, Xiaohui Xie, John S. Lowengrub
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17019

BiLO: Bilevel Local Operator Learning for PDE Inverse Problems. Part II: Efficient Uncertainty Quantification with Low-Rank Adaptation
Uncertainty quantification and inverse problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) are central to a wide range of scientific and engineering applications. In this second part of a two part series, we extend Bilevel Local Operator Learning (BiLO) for PDE-constrained optimization problems developed in Part 1 to the Bayesian inference framework. At the lower level, we train a network to approximate the local solution operator by minimizing the local operator loss with respect to the…

#WritersCoffeeClub 5/27. What is a ‘load-bearing’ part of your non-writerly life that makes writing possible for you?
I have a limited amount of energy and my family comes first, and then obligations that I have to take care of. Work is necessary, not optional.
The time I have left is my spare time. We all have that, an hour or two when we're free.
During that time,…

Some of the same people who (correctly) say body shaming is wrong will then go on to shame the looks of a newlywed wealthy couple. It's OK because their wealth is ill gotten?
I mean, let us despise the couple (or part thereof) for something objectively bad, and there's plenty of that. 🙇‍♂️

My daughter's softball team this summer season is something else. For some reason this group of girls who for the most part didn't know each other from other leagues or seasons, are meshing like crazy.
Stuff like asking for extra practice, lol. Usually it's 2 hours, and they ask to practice for one more hour. Constantly asking to pitch to them hitting.
Today they spent 4 hours at a community pool, just playing. Very supportive to each other, etc. Amazing to watch.

🪆 Was the proposal of a nuclear consortium in Kazakhstan just a sham?
https://globalvoices.org/2025/07/05/was-the-proposal-of-a-nuclear-consortium-in-kazakhstan-just-a-sham/

Was the proposal of a nuclear consortium in Kazakhstan just a sham?
Now that Rosatom has been picked, the population has yet to discover what part Kazakhstan will play.

@… @… that's the best possible way to start the BSD Cafe part of my Sunday!
With a smile. Thank you …
@…

[OT] Protecting science: TIB builds dark archive for arXiv #arXiv; …

Protecting Science: TIB builds Dark Archive for arXiv - TIB-Blog
Research and science are international; it is not for nothing that we speak of international specialist communities. Although a service such as arXiv is operated by an institution based in the USA, namely Cornell University, it is used by researchers worldwide. Part of arXiv‘s funding has also been internationalised since 2010 with the introduction of arXiv membership. The TIB finances the German contribution together with the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres (HGF) and the Max…

Well I still suck at it, but thus far I'm really happy with the 1.0.1 build of FreeCAD. They simplified the build procedure so you don't have to keep bouncing between Sketch mode and Part mode. I even figured out how to cut multiple sketches into a part, and the auto-constraint feature is pretty useful.
Progress on this Heltec case is progressing slowly, but it's coming along.
As a side note, I'm starting to see why folks are installing transistors on their GPS …

FreeCAD: Your own 3D parametric modeler
FreeCAD, the open source 3D parametric modeler

New examples of CR submanifolds for the $2$-jet determination problem
Florian Bertrand, Martin Kol\'a\v{r}, Francine Meylan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21221

New examples of CR submanifolds for the $2$-jet determination problem
This paper addresses two questions related to mapping problems. In the first part of the paper, we discuss some recent results regarding the $2$-jet determination for biholomorphisms between smooth (weakly) pseudoconvex hypersurfaces; in light of those, we formulate a general problem and illustrate it with examples. In the second part of the paper, we provide a new example of a real submanifold of codimension $7$ in $\mathbb{C}^{10}$ that is not strictly pseudoconvex and for which its germs of …

#NicoleEggert #DavidCharvet
Season 4 Episode 14 "Coronado Del Soul: part 1"
#RandomBaywatch

My brother and fellow Youtuber Jakeford12 has a #discord server (largely focused on YTPs), show him some love
https://discord.gg/QQkdmXSW

We don’t know about you, but we’re excited for the next instalment of Tech Pizza Monday: Sticker Club!
Bring your stickers, patches and pins for display and potential trading. If you just want to part with them and be happy in the knowledge that they will get the love they deserve, that’s OK too!
#Toronto

The rank condition and strong rank conditions for Ore extensions
Karl Lorensen, Johan \"Oinert
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21030 https://

The rank condition and strong rank conditions for Ore extensions
Let $R$ be a ring, $σ:R\to R$ a ring endomorphism, and $δ:R\to R$ a $σ$-derivation. We establish that the Ore extension $R[x;σ,δ]$ satisfies the rank condition if and only if $R$ does. In addition, we prove analogous results for the right and left strong rank conditions. However, in the right case, the ``if" part requires the hypothesis that $σ$ is an automorphism, whereas, in the left case, this assumption is needed for the ``only if" part. Finally, we provide a new proof of an old resul…

New blog post! Part 2 of the Ethernet switch saga.
This one is a deep dive into the bringup and characterization of the 24-port QSGMII to 10/100/1000 baseT line card.
https://serd.es/2025/06/23/Switch-project-pt2.html

from my link log —
Cranelift compiler efficiency, CFGs, and a branch peephole optimizer.
https://cfallin.org/blog/2021/01/22/cranelift-isel-2/
saved 2021-02-19

Sources: mass production of Microsoft's next AI chip is delayed to 2026 and is expected to underperform Nvidia's Blackwell chip, released in late 2024 (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsofts-ai-chip-effort-falls-b…

Microsoft’s AI Chip Effort Falls Behind
Microsoft has spent years designing its own artificial intelligence chips, in part to reduce its dependence on Nvidia. It isn’t going so well. The software giant, which Nvidia employees say was its largest customer by revenue last year, is taking much longer than expected to design its ...

This was part of Stephen Colbert’s Monday monologue:
After playing clips of the Trump admin spokespeople parroting the party line about not being at war with Iran, but being at war with Iran’s nuclear weapons program, he added the following bit:
“Honey, NO! I’m not having an affair with Stacey, … but I am having an affair with some of Stacey’s parts.

Remember when Wikipedia went dark for a day as a part of a campaign to bring awareness to SOPA/PIPA and was likely half of the reason why those bills got killed? Like we can get shit done if we just organized.

As part of my spam this morning, from Indian telecoms provider Airtel: "to find the right information in seconds" 🙄.

Cowboys trying to fix $4.3 million former Commander who retired at 25 https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/06/26/dallas-cowboys-player-profile-no-77-ol-saahdiq-charles/8438…

IoT and Older Adults: Towards Multimodal EMG and AI-Based Interaction with Smart Home
Wies{\l}aw Kope\'c, Jaros{\l}aw Kowalski, Aleksander Majda, Anna Duszyk-Bogorodzka, Anna Jaskulska, Cezary Biele
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19479

IoT and Older Adults: Towards Multimodal EMG and AI-Based Interaction with Smart Home
We report preliminary insights from an exploratory study on non-standard non-invasive interfaces for Smart Home Technologies (SHT). This study is part of a broader research project on effective Smart Home ecosystem Sagacity that will target older adults, impaired persons, and other groups disadvantaged in the main technology discourse. Therefore, this research is in line with a long-term research framework of the HASE research group (Human Aspects in Science and Engineering) by the Living Lab K…

As part of the #IWP9 #hackathon, we were debugging the bringup of the RISC-V port of 9front to QEMU yesterday. It was really painful, compared to my experiences with other kernels like Linux and the ease of Rust and its built-in print format capabilities. We were finally able to use uartputs with a s…

Natura Urbana II 🏡
城市自然 II 🏡
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1995
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

Yiding Cao Geld mit PayPal.Me senden
Folgen Sie dem Link PayPal.Me/dingsterdingster und geben Sie den Betrag ein. Es ist bequem und sicher. Sie haben noch kein PayPal-Konto? Kein Problem.

Every day, 125 Americans are killed with guns.
But we can work together to make every town safer, and support solutions that will address the causes of gun violence in America.
Sign up today and become part of a movement of millions of everyday Americans.
https://everytownsupportfund.org/join/

Join Us
Every day, 125 Americans are killed with guns. But we can work together to make every town safer, and support solutions that will address the causes of gun violence in …

Senate Parliamentarian Deals Huge Blow To Critical Part Of GOP's 'Big Beautiful Bill' (HuffPost)
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/parliamentarian-medicaid-cuts-provider-tax_n_685d4229e4b0f78c573833aa
http://www.memeorandum.com/250626/p78#a250626p78

I consider myself part of the sarcasm community.

Azerbaijan gives eight journalists prison sentences ranging from 7.5 to 15 years, as part of a series of media trials set to obliterate independent reporting (Committee to Protect Journalists)
https://cpj.org/2025/06/8-journalists-g…

8 journalists given lengthy jail terms as Azerbaijan crushes free press - Committee to Protect Journalists
New York, June 23, 2025— Eight Azerbaijani journalists have received prison sentences ranging from 7 ½ to 15 years, as part of an ongoing series of media trials likely to obliterate independent reporting in the Caucasus nation. In a closed-door trial on Monday, columnist and peace activist Bahruz Samadov was sentenced by a court in...

«The real cost of AI is being paid in deserts far from Silicon Valley»
Of course it's not just the 'AI' boom but our tech consumption more broadly, but it's a good summary of how large-scale resource extraction is doing its part to destroy communities and the planet.
/HT @… for sharing the link!
https://restofworld.org/2025/ai-resource-extraction-chile-indigenous-communities/

#Git has become a fundamental part of our developers' daily routine that it’s hard to remember our lives without it. And yet, most of us use a limited set of commands and options. Today, I want to focus on two commands most developers probably use every day and look at the defaults behind them.

"Of mushrooms and mycelium: How fungi are powering eco-friendly solutions"
#Mushrooms #Fungi

Of mushrooms and mycelium: How fungi are powering eco-friendly solutions
Often hidden from view, fungi are a critical part of our ecosystems. Some can be eaten as mushrooms; others help trees and forests thrive. But that’s not all: they’re also helping us create low-cost, sustainable housing materials and additional income for farmers, says Gabriela D’Elia, director of the Fungal Diversity Survey and a fungi enthusiast, […]

Reconstructing the unitary part of a noisy quantum channel
Adrian Romer, Daniel M. Reich, Christiane P. Koch
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17648 https://arxiv…

Reconstructing the unitary part of a noisy quantum channel
We consider the problem of reconstructing the unitary describing the evolution of a quantum system, or quantum channel, from a set of input and output states. For ideal, fully coherent evolution, we show that the unitary can be reconstructed from two mixed states or $d+1$ pure states, where $d$ is the size of Hilbert space. The reconstruction method can be extended to approximate the unitary part of a dynamical map, provided the decoherence is not too strong to render this question meaningless.…

Every company is undergoing an invisible reorg. You report to your boss but your boss reports to an #AI, offloading the job of management entirely onto a bot and then merely communicating its wishes back to the team.
This is the Nothing Manager, surrounded by #LLM tools to avoid having to interact with…

AI is not an assistant – it's your new boss (The Everything App part 2)
As managers continue to outsource data-gathering and decision-making to LLMs, the person above you on the org chart is transforming into a chatbot's clerk – and leaving product teams with the consequences.

Interesting effect of #Google’s #AI answer box; Sites used to get visitors by folk clicking on search result answers, but now the sites creating the content see nothing because their site is ingested and the content, or a derivative, is shown by Google directly to users as part of an AI response.
This mas…

Semiconductor giant Intel has officially begun a new round of layoffs, following through on CEO Lip-Bu Tan's warning two months ago that job cuts were "inevitable" as part of a wider restructuring strategy.
https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2025/inte

Intel begins laying off 10,000 under CEO Lip-Bu Tan
Plus: Microsoft readies another wave of Xbox cuts

After Houston's Astrodome sits empty two decades plus, support fades for preservation. Despite the better-than-most case for genuine landmark status that can be made for the first indoor baseball stadium. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/us/hous…

Houston’s Astrodome Was a Vision of the Future. It’s Past Its Prime.
Once a wonder of the world, the storied but moldering stadium has long been part of life in Houston. Is it worth saving?

The Last of Us Part 2’s story is just fine the way it is. TLOU2 isn’t for everyone — and maybe it shouldn’t be.
https://share.google/vg2WYB24QZTklDIRH

A profile of London-based CloudNC, a leading provider of AI-powered CNC software that is helping US manufacturers overcome a shortage of trained operators (Jeremy Kahn/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/06/26/ai-manufacturing-parts-cnc-machines…

Can AI help America make stuff again? 
A British startup, CloudNC, is reshaping American manufacturing one precision part at a time.

#WritersCoffeeClub 5/27. What is a ‘load-bearing’ part of your non-writerly life that makes writing possible for you?
I have a limited amount of energy and my family comes first, and then obligations that I have to take care of. Work is necessary, not optional.
The time I have left is my spare time. We all have that, an hour or two when we're free.
During that time,…

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#LateJunction
- Furniture Music
As part of Radio 3’s celebration of French composer and pianist Erik Satie, Jennifer Lucy Allan raids her shelves to drill down into the idea of ‘Furniture Music'.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002dn20

In May, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip
temporary legal protection
from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans living in the United States.
Overnight, TPS holders , found themselves without status—despite following all the rules.
Trump’s termination of TPS for Venezuelans is part of the largest delegalization campaign in modern US history.
“A single act of stripping immigration status in one fell swoop,”
said Ahilan A…

Trump is making thousands of rule-abiding immigrants undocumented
Inside the largest delegalization campaign in modern US history.

#DavidChokachi #DavidHasselhoff
Season 8 Episode 21 "White Thunder at Glacier Bay: part 1"
#RandomBaywatch

Tom Brady on role as Raiders limited partner: 'I'm there as a great sounding board' https://www.nfl.com/news/tom-brady-on-role-as-raiders-limited-partner-i-m-there-as-a-great-sounding-board

How popular media gets love wrong
Had some thoughts in response to a post about loneliness on here. As the author emphasized, reassurances from people who got lucky are not terribly comforting to those who didn't, especially when the person who was lucky had structural factors in their favor that made their chances of success much higher than those is their audience. So: these are just my thoughts, and may not have any bearing on your life. I share them because my experience challenged a lot of the things I was taught to believe about love, and I think my current beliefs are both truer and would benefit others seeing companionship.
We're taught in many modern societies from an absurdly young age that love is not something under our control, and that dating should be a process of trying to kindle love with different people until we meet "the one" with whom it takes off. In the slightly-less-fairytale corners of modern popular media, we might fund an admission that it's possible to influence love, feeding & tending the fire in better or worse ways. But it's still modeled as an uncontrollable force of nature, to be occasionally influenced but never tamed. I'll call this the "fire" model of love.
We're also taught (and non-boys are taught more stringently) a second contradictory model of love: that in a relationship, we need to both do things and be things in order to make our partner love us, and that if we don't, our partner's love for us will wither, and (especially if you're not a boy) it will be our fault. I'll call this the "appeal" model of love.
Now obviously both of these cannot be totally true at once, and plenty of popular media centers this contradiction, but there are really very few competing models on offer.
In my experience, however, it's possible to have "pre-meditated" love. In other words, to decide you want to love someone (or at least, try loving them), commit to that idea, and then actually wind up in love with them (and them with you, although obviously this second part is not directly under your control). I'll call this the "engineered" model of love.
Now, I don't think that the "fire" and "appeal" models of love are totally wrong, but I do feel their shortcomings often suggest poor & self-destructive relationship strategies. I do think the "fire" model is a decent model for *infatuation*, which is something a lot of popular media blur into love, and which drives many (but not all) of the feelings we normally associate with love (even as those feelings have other possible drivers too). I definitely experienced strong infatuation early on in my engineered relationship (ugh that sounds terrible but I'll stick with it; I promise no deception was involved). I continue to experience mild infatuation years later that waxes and wanes. It's not a stable foundation for a relationship but it can be a useful component of one (this at least popular media depicts often).
I'll continue these thoughts in a reply, by it might take a bit to get to it.
#relationships

4 winners from Cowboys' first week of camp include two former 1st-round picks and a UDFA https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/07/27/4-winners-from-the-first-week-of-cowboys-traini…

Natura Urbana II 🏡
城市自然 II 🏡
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1995
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

Yiding Cao Geld mit PayPal.Me senden
Folgen Sie dem Link PayPal.Me/dingsterdingster und geben Sie den Betrag ein. Es ist bequem und sicher. Sie haben noch kein PayPal-Konto? Kein Problem.

The King's Lodge
(Not all kings built hunting lodges, even fewer built them on precipices like these, but some of Bavaria's last ones did and not just in one place... Not endorsing kings in any form, just admiring their choice of locations.... btw. the picture only shows the top half of the drop)
#MountainMonday

Archiverse: an Approach for Immersive Cultural Heritage
Wieslaw Kope\'c, Anna Jaskulska, W{\l}adys{\l}aw Fuchs, Wiktor Stawski, Stanis{\l}aw Knapi\'nski, Barbara Karpowicz, Rafa{\l} Mas{\l}yk
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19376

Archiverse: an Approach for Immersive Cultural Heritage
Digital technologies and tools have transformed the way we can study cultural heritage and the way we can recreate it digitally. Techniques such as laser scanning, photogrammetry, and a variety of Mixed Reality solutions have enabled researchers to examine cultural objects and artifacts more precisely and from new perspectives. In this part of the panel, we explore how Virtual Reality (VR) and eXtended Reality (XR) can serve as tools to recreate and visualize the remains of historical cultural …

{dtrack} makes documentation of data wrangling part of the analysis and creates pretty flow charts: #rstats

In New York City, outer Brooklyn and outer Queens might as well be in different universes from each other.
The city has a plan to change that: a light rail line that would repurpose freight tracks to make travel from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to Jackson Heights, Queens, take about 40 minutes --
and connect 17 different subway lines.
Whether the train will even be built at all depends in part on revenue from the city’s embattled congestion pricing plan.
But, if realized, th…

Opinion | New York Is Planning a Train Line to Connect Its Transit Deserts. We Walked All 14 Miles of It.
What would light-rail service change about the space that keeps us apart?

Yes, I support Trump's big, beautiful bill. Just not this one part. (Sarah Huckabee Sanders/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/26/state-ai-regulations-ban-obbb/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250626/p83#a250626p83

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#BBCProms
- 2025
Guitarist Sean Shibe is joined by a starry cast of friends at the Glasshouse for 'Le marteau sans maître' given as part of the centenary celebrations of the birth of Pierre Boulez.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002g3nr

«The real cost of AI is being paid in deserts far from Silicon Valley»
Of course it's not just the 'AI' boom but our tech consumption more broadly, but it's a good summary of how large-scale resource extraction is doing its part to destroy communities and the planet.
/HT @… for sharing the link!
https://restofworld.org/2025/ai-resource-extraction-chile-indigenous-communities/

DirecTV experiments with discontinuing satellite TV subscriptions for new customers in several US regions and directing subscribers toward its streaming option (Luke Bouma/Cord Cutters News)
https://cordcuttersnews.com/directv-stop…

DIRECTV Stops Selling Satellite TV for New Customers in Select Areas | Cord Cutters News
DIRECTV, a leading provider of television entertainment, has announced a significant shift in its service offerings, discontinuing satellite TV subscriptions for new customers in several regions across the United States. The company is now directing new subscribers toward its streaming option, as part of a broader strategy to adapt to evolving consumer preferences and technological […]

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

Ex-Washington NFL team part-owner Smith dies https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45561511/fred-smith-ex-washington-nfl-team-part-owner-fedex-founder-dies

Every year, hundreds of children in the United States gain access to loaded guns that are unsecured in closets and nightstand drawers, in backpacks and purses, or just left out in the open.
With tragic regularity, children pick up these unsecured guns and unintentionally shoot themselves or someone else.
Everyone has a role to play in preventing these tragedies.
Although unintentional shootings by children are a heartbreaking part of America’s gun violence epidemic,
no…

We must make sure no more children are added to this list
Every year, hundreds of children in the US gain access to firearms and unintentionally shoot themselves or someone else. This is #NotAnAccident.

Recent grads and PhDs are being recruited by AI companies like Handshake to provide specialized training data in fields like music and law for $30-$160 per hour (Emma Haidar/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-24/col…

College Grads Are Finding Jobs Training AI Models
Ever since he picked up a trombone in middle school, Jackson Spellman has wanted to pursue a career in music.“It's 100% going to be a part of my life for the rest of my life,” said the 22-year-old from Wellington, Florida, who graduated in June from Northwestern University with a double major in music and cognitive science.Along with his degree, Spellman finished school with a new gig to add to his resume: artificial intelligence trainer. In the weeks leading up to graduation, Spellman said…

Sen. Alex Padilla grants the Internet Archive federal depository status, making it a part of a network of over 1,100 libraries that archive government documents (Morgan Sung/KQED)
https://www.kqed.org/news/12049420/sf-based…

SF-Based Internet Archive Is Now a Federal Depository Library. What Does That Mean?
The Internet Archive, thanks to its designation by California Sen. Alex Padilla, joins a network of over 1,100 libraries that make government documents accessible to the public.

At the urging of Donald Trump, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called his state Legislature into a special session this week that includes a call💥 to redistrict the Lone Star State to help Republicans pick up seats in Congress.
🔥The move is part of a gerrymandering effort pushed by Trump to prevent the GOP from losing control of the House of Representatives next year.
If Democrats take the House, they could derail the president's agenda,
which has so far included a crackdown on u…

Texas Democrats meet with Newsom to stop Trump's push to 'rig' the 2026 election
Democrats from the Texas Legislature met with Gov. Gavin Newsom in Sacramento to discuss President Trump's push to redistrict the Lone Star State and alter...