Tootfinder

»Manipulative #Designs im #Online'handel—Warum Dark Patterns immer öfter scheitern:
#Countdown-Timer, knappe Lagerbestände und Glücksräder gehören für viele längst zum

Manipulative Designs im Onlinehandel: Warum Dark Patterns immer öfter scheitern | t3n
Countdown-Timer, knappe Lagerbestände und Glücksräder gehören für viele längst zum Shopping im Internet dazu. Eine Bitkom-Umfrage zeigt, wie Dark Patterns die Kaufentscheidung tatsächlich beeinflussen. Sogenannte Dark Patterns sind im E-Commerce schon lange ein Problem. Sie treten häufig als Hinweise zum Lagerbestand oder zur Nachfrage auf, werden aber auch gezielt eingesetzt, um Shopper:innen zu schnellen Kaufentscheidungen […]

AWS implemented a 15% price hike for EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML on January 3; Amazon says it "reflects the supply/demand patterns we expect this quarter" (Corey Quinn/The Register)
https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/05/aws_price_increase/

AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention
: An anomaly or the beginning of a new trend? My bet's on the latter

product_space: Atlas of Economic Complexity export network
Two networks of economic products, where a pair of products are connected if they are exported at similar rates by the same countries. The data are a projection from a bipartite network of nations and the products they export. Edges weights represent a similarity score (called "proximity"). Data based on UN Comtrade worldwide trade patterns. SITC network based on the Standard International Trade Classification and HS …

Curiously large number of replies to this thread, and a whole lot of them fall into two camps:
“Obviously the original story was bunk and we shouldn’t have trusted it”
“Obviously this debunking is questionable and we shouldn’t trust it”
My main takeaway from the article is that •nothing• is obvious, and we need to be comfortable living with a bit of uncertainty — and being willing to see and act on larger patterns despite uncertainty.

This week’s Gist is about how the U.K. Labour Party unknowingly has been blowing itself up by following Morgan McSweeney’s FG electoral instincts.
They don’t know the patterns, but we do.
https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-uk-labours-fg-mastermind/

The Gist: UK Labour's FG mastermind
The UK Labour Party is being run into the ground, thanks to adopting FG's election tactics. This is the Gist.

On the one hand, I’m heartened to see Scott and Sarah were involved (even if Sarah’s name is misspelled).
OTOH, it treats APG as a source of truth when ARIA is the spec and APG patterns are broken / buggy.
“Request for developer feedback: `focusgroup`”
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/focu

Request for developer feedback: focusgroup  |  Blog  |  Chrome for Developers
Try out focusgroup and comment on the proposal.

Welcome to #TextModeTuesday! For the next few weeks I'll be posting some projects & experiments related to this just spontaneously made up hashtag. If you've got something related to interesting text-based art/experiments, patterns, ASCII-art, ANSI-art etc. please share — the more, the merrier...
To start with, here's an experiment from a few years ago to demonstrat…

A Greenland glacier is cracking open in real time #Greenland

A Greenland glacier is cracking open in real time
A meltwater lake that formed in the mid-1990s on Greenland’s 79°N Glacier has been draining in sudden, dramatic bursts through cracks and vertical ice shafts. These events have accelerated in recent years, creating strange triangular fracture patterns and flooding the glacier’s base with water in just hours. Some drainages even pushed the ice upward from below, like a blister forming under the glacier. Scientists now wonder whether the glacier can ever return to its previous seasonal rhyth…

Series D, Episode 04 - Stardrive
VILA: What's the noise?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/404/295 B7B3

from my link log —
Python anti-patterns.
https://docs.quantifiedcode.com/python-anti-patterns/
saved 2019-07-24 https://do…

Urban Texture 🧩
城市质地 🧩
📷 Nikon F4E
🎞️ ERA 100, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

Invisible gambling puts all other deceptive patterns to shame, but the others are worth knowing about for anyone who might have missed it when folks were talking more about this:
https://www.deceptive.design/

Last evening of Christmas vacation before getting back to work for the new year.
Aiming to make it a good one. Working on GPU acceleration of the TIE filter and maybe the histogram block so I can do jitter analysis faster.
The peak at T=0 in the jitter histogram is related to use of the GPU CDR block and doesn't show up in the CPU implementation. It's likely caused by transients of some sort at thread block boundaries and I need to spend more time chasing it, I wouldn'…

They had to hack the traffic cameras? We buy the cameras ourselves and hang them on our doors in the West. @… https://m.ai6yr.org/@ai6yr/116168854186551062

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

After a couple of weeks off, I’m back to having fun coding with Claude. I spend most of my time watching, so I’m running two ( totally separate project) coding sessions at the same time in different Codespaces windows. The public one is https://GitHub.com/brazil-bench where I’m setting up a github issues based…

Brazil Benchmark Organization
Benchmark agents by asking them to build an MCP server for Brazilian football. Use this project to develop purpose driven automation patterns. - Brazil Benchmark Organization

All you really need to do is switch up drum patterns, chords and chord arrangements to make your record sound kinda diverse and dynamic. But man, some bands just CANNOT simply manage to do even that 😂

The handweaving.net archive seems great and a huge effort, but getting together out of copyright patterns, digitising them and then charging people $6.50 a month to access them under a restrictive license seems a bit wrong?
Surely if you digitise out of copyright patterns you don't have copyright over your derivative work?

my son, daughter, their spouses, and their kids dropped in and the place is lovely, noisy chaos

Tech-Riesen wie Meta und Alphabet bauen bewusst „Dark Patterns“ in ihre Dienste — psychologisches Design, das Nutzer:innen süchtig macht und Daten absaugt. Das ist kein harmloses UX-Feature, sondern ein Geschäftsmodell auf Kosten unserer Selbstbestimmung. #ZDFheute
#DarkPatterns

Social Media und Dark Patterns: So tricksen Tech-Konzerne
Dark Patterns fördern die Sucht nach Social Media. Entwickelt hat die psychologischen Tricks ein Forscher in Stanford. Heutzutage werden sie von allen Tech-Firmen genutzt.

Was surprised to see haptics work here https://haptics.lochie.me/ (https://github.com/lochie/web-haptics) on Safari iOS becau…

Woke up from a dream with a thought about dark patterns and LLMs.
If LLMs (as a service) could be normalized and integrated into everything, as is currently in progress, the next step would be to charge tokens to pay for the interactions. After all, it's not really free. That's just the normal progression. Introduce the tech, get people hooked, then make them pay.
Great, now imagine this future state. Every interaction with a computer ends up mediated through a stochastic parrot. Congratulations, everything now has micro-transactions on steroids. Not only does everything you do with tech have micro-transactions, but every interaction with technology is gambling.

Junior Devs Use try-catch Everywhere. Senior Devs Use These 4 #Exception Handling Patterns
https://blog.stackademic.com/junior-de

I've got 1237 entries in my #KeePassXC storage at the moment.
Don't tell me you're remembering all your #passwords and still have a unique one (without obvious patterns) per service. 😜
Use an open source

#FotoVorschlag 'mein bestes Foto 2025' 'my best Foto 2025'
I was curious which photo might show up if I sort my Catalogue by my rating. Yet there are still some unprocessed folders.
But .. regarding my rating, I took my best photo close to the end of the year! Due to many reasons I didn't take as many photos this year as usual. But this one really resonate…

Eight Sleep, which sells smart mattress accessories to track sleep patterns and adjust temperatures, raised $50M at a $1.5B valuation, up from $500M in 2021 (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/04/eight-sleep-raises-50m-at-1-5b-valuation/

Eight Sleep raises $50M at $1.5B valuation | TechCrunch
Eight Sleep said it was free-cash-flow positive in 2025, and plans to use the new funding for new products, global expansions, and clinical validation.

"Saltier seas in spring double the chance of extreme El Niño events, study finds"
#Climate #ClimateChange
https://

Saltier seas in spring double the chance of extreme El Niño events, study finds
Stronger El Niño events are more likely when springtime surface waters in the western Pacific Ocean become unusually salty, a new study in Geophysical Research Letters suggests. Traditionally, scientists have focused on temperature and wind patterns to understand El Niño—periodic shifts in the tropical Pacific between warmer and cooler conditions that influence weather patterns across the globe. But researchers now show that subtle variations in ocean salinity north of the equator during bo…

When we try to formalize a neuron computationally, we don't translate biology into code—we perform a violent collapse.
https://www.ocrampal.com/what-a-neuron-teaches-us-about-computations-limits/

What a Neuron Teaches Us About Computation's Limits
Introduction: When Success Becomes a Prison Computation has been spectacularly successful. We've used it to simulate galaxies, design aircraft, predict weather patterns, and build technologies that transform civilization. The computational paradigm—breaking systems into discrete components operating on fixed timescales with predetermined coupling rules—has revolutionized physics and engineering. But

"Organisational accounts engaged in scholarly communication on Twitter: Patterns of presence, activity and engagement"
https://doi.org/10.1177/01655515261421164
[closed access 🙄]

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
Suse Millemann:
🎵 Patterns
#SuseMillemann
https://eugeneelectronicmusiccollective.bandcamp.com/track/patterns
https://open.spotify.com/track/540cCQDE4OGFoJ2UlMlEVi
Please 🔁 BOOST to share what you like
- your followers don't see if you ⭐ favourite a post

Palantir Sues Swiss Magazine
For Accurately Reporting That
The Swiss Government Didn’t Want Palantir
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/27/palantir-sues-swiss-magazine-for-accurately-reporting-t…

Palantir Sues Swiss Magazine For Accurately Reporting That The Swiss Government Didn’t Want Palantir
If you run a company whose entire value proposition is the ability to see patterns, predict outcomes, and connect dots that others miss, you’d think someone in the building might have flagged…

◍ Diverse particles form identical geometric patterns when confined, model reveals
https://phys.org/news/2025-11-diverse-particles-identical-geometric-patterns.html

Diverse particles form identical geometric patterns when confined, model reveals
Particles as different as soap bubbles and ball bearings can be made to arrange themselves in exactly the same way, according to a new study that could unlock the creation of brand new materials—including those with promising biomedical applications.

Wireless device uses light patterns to deliver information directly to the brain https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-12-wireless-device-patterns-brain.html
Patterned wireless transcranial optogenetics generates artificial perception (in mice)

Wireless device uses light patterns to deliver information directly to the brain
In a new leap for neurobiology and bioelectronics, Northwestern University scientists have developed a wireless device that uses light to send information directly to the brain—bypassing the body's natural sensory pathways.

The 89th edition of De Programmatica Ipsum is out!
We are thrilled to welcome @… back to the newsroom!
This month, Graham describes the patterns that explain the rise and popularity of Ruby; Adrian raises a warning against the putrefaction of the Ruby community; in our Vidéothèque section, we watch Eileen Uchitelle explain the magic behind Ruby on Rails; and …

T1: One-to-One Channel-Head Binding for Multivariate Time-Series Imputation
Dongik Park, Hyunwoo Ryu, Suahn Bae, Keondo Park, Hyung-Sin Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21043 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.21043 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.21043
arXiv:2602.21043v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Imputing missing values in multivariate time series remains challenging, especially under diverse missing patterns and heavy missingness. Existing methods suffer from suboptimal performance as corrupted temporal features hinder effective cross-variable information transfer, amplifying reconstruction errors. Robust imputation requires both extracting temporal patterns from sparse observations within each variable and selectively transferring information across variables--yet current approaches excel at one while compromising the other. We introduce T1 (Time series imputation with 1-to-1 channel-head binding), a CNN-Transformer hybrid architecture that achieves robust imputation through Channel-Head Binding--a mechanism creating one-to-one correspondence between CNN channels and attention heads. This design enables selective information transfer: when missingness corrupts certain temporal patterns, their corresponding attention pathways adaptively down-weight based on remaining observable patterns while preserving reliable cross-variable connections through unaffected channels. Experiments on 11 benchmark datasets demonstrate that T1 achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing MSE by 46% on average compared to the second-best baseline, with particularly strong gains under extreme sparsity (70% missing ratio). The model generalizes to unseen missing patterns without retraining and uses a consistent hyperparameter configuration across all datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Oppenheimerdinger/T1.
toXiv_bot_toot

The title already hits the nail on its head.
Further down in the article: "Compelled speech isn’t free speech, guys. And this is nothing more than a blatant intimidation campaign to frighten away reporters from reporting the truth about Palantir."
#Palantir #Republik

Trans people are incredible, strong, beautiful, and absolutely bring so much love and strength to our world.
:bisexual_pride: 🏳️‍⚧️ :genderfluid_flag: :nonbinary_flag: :heart_trans: 🏳️‍🌈
I wholeheartedly, unapologetically, and forever believe that #TransRightsAreHumanRights.
Always, forever, endlessly, trans people are real, valuable, and human in every way…

Last keynote of #DGfS2026 🤓😄
Annette Gerstenberg on longitudinal patterns #linguistics

from my link log —
Any Game of Life pattern can be constructed from just 15 gliders.
https://btm.qva.mybluehost.me/building-arbitrary-life-patterns-in-15-gliders/
saved 2022-11-30

Well, I suppose someone had to say it: I'm really disappointed that #PyPI / #PSF went as far as to use dark patterns in the donation banner.
#Python

Jussi Nummelin will speak on 'Pushing Kubernetes to the Far Edge: IoT, AI Workloads, and Evolving Architectural Patterns' as part of our Cloud Native Days track at SCaLE 23x. Full details: https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/23x/p

#Shitpost #Shitposting #ShamelesslyStolenFromSomewhereElseOnTheInternetHonestlyICantKeepTrackOfThisStuffAnymore

Patterns for Deploying #OTel Collector at Scale
https://newsletter.signoz.io/p/patterns-for-deploying-otel-collector

MaxMarten Chats
Each episode blends history, geopolitics, and hard commentary — from the frontlines of Ukraine to the backrooms of Western politics — revealing the patterns of fear, corruption, and courage that shape our world...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/ma…

My #silentsunday contribution is not mountains this time.
This is a memory to our visit to #scotland. Kylemore Abbey to be precise. We have this photo printed on the wall. And to me it's indeed "silence" that I feel with this photo

It's #meme day! (Memedays are days that end in y).
#KidsintheHall #meme

Anthropic researchers detail "disempowerment patterns" in AI assistant interactions where AI potentially distorts a user's reality, beliefs, or actions (Kyle Orland/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/how-often-do-ai-chat…

How often do AI chatbots lead users down a harmful path?
Anthropic's latest paper on "user disempowerment" has some troubling findings.

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#Unclassified
- Dissolving Patterns
Elizabeth Alker with a late-night journey through new music from today’s most exciting genre-defying artists.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002jfz9

Device Activity Tracker — WhatsApp & Signal Activity Tracker via RTT Analysis
A phone number can reveal whether a device is active, in standby or offline (and more). This PoC demonstrates how delivery receipts RTT timing leak sensitive device-activity patterns. (WhatsApp / Signal)
📱 https://github.com/…

GitHub - gommzystudio/device-activity-tracker: A phone number can reveal whether a device is active, in standby or offline (and more). This PoC demonstrates how delivery receipts + RTT timing leak sensitive device-activity patterns. (WhatsApp / Signal)
A phone number can reveal whether a device is active, in standby or offline (and more). This PoC demonstrates how delivery receipts + RTT timing leak sensitive device-activity patterns. (WhatsApp /...

Spain is modernising its grid codes so that generation, demand and storage can cope more robustly with volatility and actively contribute to a more stable power grid. It can no longer wait for the delayed new European grid codes.
https://www.miteco.gob.es/es/energia/parti…

Urban Mirage II 👁️‍🗨️
城市幻境 II 👁️‍🗨️
📷 Nikon F4E
🎞️ Ilford HP5 Plus 400, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

#SilentSunday

I keep reminding folks that MDN is *not* a spec.
Just last month I had to address some of its bad info on CSS carousels.
I’m glad to see @… correcting some of the CSS `interactivity` wrongness:
https://…

@… HP 9000 workstations had an array of LEDs (late models had a two-line LCD) on the front panel. During boot time, it would go through various patterns as system components were tested (allowing you to pinpoint faults, see https://www.

@… HP 9000 workstations had an array of LEDs (late models had a two-line LCD) on the front panel. During boot time, it would go through various patterns as system components were tested (allowing you to pinpoint faults, see https://www.

A ceaseless urge beneath all appearance; an impulse not merely to persist but to intensify; life as duration, as movement, as an unbroken unfolding in time. As a technology of becoming. Life as sequence - procedural quests of forward momentum.
A language underwrites the motion; lines on lines inscribing themselves across a dark field. Pulses like pixels, moving in canon. Constructions that branch, loop, and repeat. Patterns generate patterns, as though the law of existence were simply…

🕶️ First Contact with Dark Patterns and Deceptive Designs in Chinese and Japanese Free-to-Play Mobile Games
#games

As salty as I am about it, there's also another way to think about this. For anyone who still has connections to folks on the right (which is perhaps unlikely for anyone on this server, I digress), the cult that has consumed them thrives on isolation and grievance.
The words "you were right" have the potential to cut through the programming and open up an opportunity for reconnection. The modern conspiratorial cult of the Right has been built partially around people who were told they were wrong or were crazy. In the vast majority of cases, they were wrong and even when they were right they completely misunderstood why, but we'll skip that for now. Liberals making fun of them (even the times when they definitely earned it) has pushed them further and further into their ideological hole.
The thing about those words, "you were right," in this context is that the way they offer reconnection also requires them to take one little step of betraying their ideology to accept them. So they must choose between maintaining allegiance to a pedophile or finally getting to feel superior after years of living in an illusion of persecution.
Under the ideology of the Right, admitting one is wrong is a weakness. It is admitting defeat. They have to "own the libs" by saying things, things that they know aren't true, in order to feel dominant. But these things are often so absurd that they end up being made fun of, feeling even more weak and pathetic, reinforcing their fear and alienation.
Offering what they're looking for can offer a way out, but only if they're willing to start to recognize the thing they've supported for what it is.
And they were right about some things. They were right that Bill Gates was a terrible person. I've had plenty of liberals defend him based on his philanthropy washing, but he's awful and always has been. The Epstein links make that blatant. They intuitively recognized him and didn't trust him, even if they were wildly off base about *how and why* he shouldn't be trusted... Even if their correct mistrust was leveraged into one of the most destructive conspiracy theories ever (vaccine denial and COVID vaccine avoidance).
They were right about Bill Clinton. He was always shady as fuck. Sure, the people who attacked him at the time turned out to be even more shady but that's not the point right now. He was connected to Epstein and that was always creepy as fuck.
And the Epstein thing was an open secret that liberals ignored for a long time. It was seen as some weird thing that right wing nutjobs believed about the Clintons. But it was true. Not all of it, and there has always been an antisemitic element to the right wing interpretation or Epstein stuff, but his whole pedophile conspiracy was always kind of real.
The whole "Illuminati"/deep state thing is a vast oversimplification, an attempt to make comprehensible an incredibly complex set of interlocking and emergent behaviors. But Epstein did very much want to remake the world, to create a new world order, and he absolutely played a part in it.
The Right wing nutjobs talked about global authoritarianism, Blackhawks flying over American cities, masked men with guns disarming and executing legal gun owners in the streets. That's all happening right now.
The "FEMA concentration camps" are not actually that far off. ICE and FEMA are sister agencies, both under DHS. I'd be more than happy to call that one "close enough" in order to hear some MAGA admit that ICE is, in fact, building concentration camps.
There was always a huge millennialist element to these things. They tended to be connected to "the antichrist." It was absurd, especially for me as someone who no longer identifies as a Christian. But I'll even acquiess that to a degree. The "the number of the Beast" is 666. That's just the sum of the Hebrew spelling of "Nero." Revelations focuses a lot on Nero coming back to life after his death. His death that involved a head wound, thus the line from Revelation 13:3:
> And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world marveled and followed the beast.
The parallels between Trump and Nero are easy to draw, and Trump's ear wound feels pretty on-the-nose for this. I don't believe in "prophecy" in this way. I think that there are patterns, and useful patterns can become encoded in beleif systems. But I will, again, happily call this one "close enough" for anyone on that side willing to also acknowledge it. I'm happy to meet on that common ground, because anyone who accepts it must recognize that their duty is to fight against it.
A lot of these correct nuggets are embedded in a framework of religious extremism and antisemitism. The vast majority of the beliefs holding these together are wildly wrong and incredibly toxic. But by giving some room to feel validated, listened to, understood, can give some room to admit things that were wrong.
Cult de-programming starts with an opening. People have to talk through their own thoughts, hear their own inconsistencies. Guiding questions can help them untangle these things for themselves. And it all starts by having enough room to feel safe, to not feel cornered, to not feel stupid. Admitting mistakes means being vulnerable, and the MAGA cult is built on fear. It's built on exploiting vulnerability and locking it away.
De-programming takes a long time. It's not easy. It takes patience. But every person who comes out does so with a powerful perspective, a deep understanding, that can be turned back against it. The best people at getting people out of cults are former members. Some of the most dedicated antifa are former fascists who understood their mistakes and dedicate their lives to fixing them.

from my link log —
Eliminate branches by melding IR instructions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22390
saved 2026-01-01 https://dotat.at/:/J3PP5.html

Eliminate Branches by Melding IR Instructions
Branch mispredictions cause catastrophic performance penalties in modern processors, leading to performance loss. While hardware predictors and profile-guided techniques exist, data-dependent branches with irregular patterns remain challenging. Traditional if-conversion eliminates branches via software predication but faces limitations on architectures like x86. It often fails on paths containing memory instructions or incurs excessive instruction overhead by fully speculating large branch bodi…

product_space: Atlas of Economic Complexity export network
Two networks of economic products, where a pair of products are connected if they are exported at similar rates by the same countries. The data are a projection from a bipartite network of nations and the products they export. Edges weights represent a similarity score (called "proximity"). Data based on UN Comtrade worldwide trade patterns. SITC network based on the Standard International Trade Classification and HS …

For today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent here's a tiny tool we have used in our pipeline: pyRenamer is a simple app to rename/renumber a bunch of files.
Unfortunately it's pretty much an abandoned fork of a Python 2 app that has been abandoned for even longer ago. It still works and for renumbering there's no easier solution at hand. But for file name search & replace …

Gaze patterns during visual mental imagery reflect part-based generation https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-35447-z "eye movements during mental imagery reflect a part-by-part generation process of the imagined content, independent of prior perceptual encoding"

📉 Reduces token consumption by 99%! From ~47,000 tokens to ~400 tokens when using 6 MCP servers with 60 tools - massive savings for AI agent workflows
⚡ Connection pooling with lazy-spawn daemon featuring 60s idle timeout for optimal performance - no manual start/stop needed
🎛️ Tool filtering via allowedTools and disabledTools config to control which tools are available - supports glob patterns like read_* or *file*

GPT-5.2 models match GPT-5 and 5.1 with a 400K context window and 128K max output tokens, but have a newer knowledge cutoff of Aug. 31, 2025 vs. Sept. 30, 2024 (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Newsletter)
https://simonw.substack.com/p/gpt-52-and-useful-patterns-for-…

GPT 5.2 and useful patterns for building HTML tools
Plus a YouTube video, a podcast appearance and more

""From my home office, running Bluehood in passive mode (just listening, never connecting), I could detect:
* When delivery vehicles arrived, and whether it was the same driver each time
* The daily patterns of my neighbours based on their phones and wearables
* Which devices consistently appeared together (someone’s phone and smartwatch, for instance)
* The exact times certain people were home, at work, or elsewhere
None of this required any …

#Blakes7 Series C, Episode 04 - Dawn of the Gods
THAARN: It's too dangerous. Cally.
CALLY: Then I will never be able to trust you. [draws handgun]
THAARN: Very well. You see, your feelings are no different. [Cally shoots randomly around her]

Metacurity operates outside the infosec news echo chamber to track patterns, context, and connections that most other sources miss.
Check out today's issue for the most critical developments you should know, including
--Defense companies face a 'relentless barrage' of cyberespionage, Google,
--Fugitive sentenced to 2 years for pig butchering money laundering,
--Coupang data breach scope was more massive than reported,
--Discord to demand face scans or…

Defense companies face a 'relentless barrage' of cyberespionage, Google
Fugitive sentenced to 2 years for pig butchering money laundering, Coupang data breach scope was more massive than reported, Discord to demand face scans or government IDs, Hacktivist scraped 500k payment records from stalkerware apps, Promotei botnet still excels at stealing passwords, much more

99% of stakeholder "ideas" are just copying a feature they saw on a competitor's product. And the features they notice most are the ones that yell at their users the loudest.
Now all software (not just consumer apps, but also metrics dashboards) yells at you, and trains you to attend to its yelling. Strategy becomes dominated by the overriding need to make the good number go up.

The circular logic of our metrics
We design what is familiar. The design patterns we adopt are the ones yelling at us the loudest.

Triggered by yesterday's discussion about old fluid sims, a short thread with some more examples from that period 2007-2009 to explore fluid dynamics for marbling...
1/3
(cc/ @…)
#FluidSim

🐛 Hidden insect diversity in grass shoots threatened by mowing
#insects

Hidden insect diversity in grass shoots threatened by mowing
When it comes to biodiversity, researchers and the public tend to focus on large-scale patterns. This overlooks a hidden but precious diversity: small, inconspicuous wasps, midges, flies, beetles and other insects that live in plants. These tiny creatures are actually very common, as shown by a team of researchers at the University of Göttingen and the Hungarian HUN-REN Center for Ecological Research.

My general framework for thinking about this stuff:
- Brains vary a lot, in a lot of different ways.
- We have names for a few variations, or common patterns of variation. That can be useful, but it’s hardly complete.
- There’s a wealth of as-yet-unnamed neurodivergences out there.
- It’s all but certain that •everyone’s• mind is atypical in one way or another.
- Comparison with, aspiration to, or forced conformance to the nonexistent “average” mind is unhelpful, frequently harmful.
- Embracing variation is the only reasonable (or humane) approach.
6/

i gave my son-in-law a battery daddy (fully populated), a scrub daddy set, and a gift certificate to fat daddy
#BatteryDaddy #ScrubDaddy #FatDaddy

product_space: Atlas of Economic Complexity export network
Two networks of economic products, where a pair of products are connected if they are exported at similar rates by the same countries. The data are a projection from a bipartite network of nations and the products they export. Edges weights represent a similarity score (called "proximity"). Data based on UN Comtrade worldwide trade patterns. SITC network based on the Standard International Trade Classification and HS …

Hi @… @… people!
If you'd like to support encourage software and community development of Strudel, Tidal and sibling projects, now would be great time!

Urban Demons III 👻
城市鬼魂 III 👻
📷 Nikon F4E
🎞️ Rollei RPX 400
If you like my work, buy me a coffee from PayPal #filmphotography

Patterns for Defensive Programming in #Rust
https://corrode.dev/blog/defensive-programming/

It's a bit frosty outside!
But we're thinking about a small cycling loop ...
#frost #photography #winter

The outcome of a bunch of shader tuning last night: the upsample filter (4x sin(x/x) from 20M to 80M points in this test) went from 6.55 ms to 1.5 ms.
Original: 8% of peak DRAM read BW, 31% write, 14% L2$ hit rate.
New (just changed memory access patterns to be more coalesce/cache friendly): 9% read, 37% write, 73% L2$ hit
A similar memory ordering optimization cut the PAM edge detector from about 14 to 10 ms but my SM occupancy is still crap (around 12% of warp slots used)…

My art, but not my video[1]. The piece is ASCII-SCAPE (2022), a pure text-only version of my C-SCAPE [2] multi-cellular automata piece in which several "organisms" are co-evolving in the same space and forming infinitely changing patterns/structures:
https://art.thi.ng/ascii-scape/
(Reload…

Series B, Episode 03 - Weapon
FEN: You're a sad man, Travis. Life must have reverence.
TRAVIS: Now. I want the other one.
FEN: No.
TRAVIS: Get the other one.
FEN: You know better than this.
TRAVIS: Do I?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/203/5 B7B3

Kiss & Kill
The first podcast to take you inside some of Australia's most high-profile cases of intimate partner homicides and reveal dangerous patterns of behaviour we need to recognise before it's too late...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/kiss-k

How climate breakdown is putting the world’s food in peril - in maps and charts https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2025/dec/18/how-climate-breakdown-is-putting-the-worlds-food-in-per…

Probing Graph Neural Network Activation Patterns Through Graph Topology
Floriano Tori, Lorenzo Bini, Marco Sorbi, St\'ephane Marchand-Maillet, Vincent Ginis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21092 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.21092 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.21092
arXiv:2602.21092v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Curvature notions on graphs provide a theoretical description of graph topology, highlighting bottlenecks and denser connected regions. Artifacts of the message passing paradigm in Graph Neural Networks, such as oversmoothing and oversquashing, have been attributed to these regions. However, it remains unclear how the topology of a graph interacts with the learned preferences of GNNs. Through Massive Activations, which correspond to extreme edge activation values in Graph Transformers, we probe this correspondence. Our findings on synthetic graphs and molecular benchmarks reveal that MAs do not preferentially concentrate on curvature extremes, despite their theoretical link to information flow. On the Long Range Graph Benchmark, we identify a systemic \textit{curvature shift}: global attention mechanisms exacerbate topological bottlenecks, drastically increasing the prevalence of negative curvature. Our work reframes curvature as a diagnostic probe for understanding when and why graph learning fails.
toXiv_bot_toot

After a lot of other poking and prodding at other stuff failed, the PAM edge detector got a 30% speedup and the sin(x)/x upsampling filter is about 4x faster just by restructuring some stuff to change memory access patterns.
As a reminder: a GPU is a device for turning compute bound problems into memory bandwidth bound problems.

Monumental 🪦
纪念 🪦
📷 Nikon F4E
🎞️ Ilford HP5 Plus 400, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑛 𝐼𝑚𝑝𝑎𝑐𝑡 cosplayer stands by three students, a plushie and a laptop representing the Rhythm Gaming at Cornell club
#photo #photography #cornell

Just a hut under a tree in the mist ...
I saw this when I was walking back from a location scouting. When I was back at the car, I turned around - already ready to drive away when I noticed this gnarly tree in the field.
The fog was just light enough to create an interesting mood I think.
#photography

RE: https://indieweb.social/@keithamus/116062761549997084
If you can, please also identify known WCAG conformance errors.
We don’t want another toast escapade where the research failed to identify barriers and risks. Encoding broken patterns into t…

product_space: Atlas of Economic Complexity export network
Two networks of economic products, where a pair of products are connected if they are exported at similar rates by the same countries. The data are a projection from a bipartite network of nations and the products they export. Edges weights represent a similarity score (called "proximity"). Data based on UN Comtrade worldwide trade patterns. SITC network based on the Standard International Trade Classification and HS …

Urban Demons VIII 👻
城市鬼魂 VIII 👻
📷 Zeiss IKON Super Ikonta 533/16
🎞️ Ilford HP5 400 Plus, expired 1993
If you like my work, buy me a coffee from PayPal https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/ydcdingsite

Series B, Episode 08 - Hostage
JOBAN: Supreme commander.
SERVALAN: An honour, Counsellor.
JOBAN: Thank you. [Sits down] Aren't you going to offer me a drink?
SERVALAN: Yes, of course. [Pours drink for Joban]
JOBAN: Not joining me?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/208/199…

Q&A with FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam, only the second CEO in the company's history, on humanoid robots, automation, AI, drones, US-China trade tensions, and more (Jordyn Holman/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/business/fedex-raj-subramaniam.html…

The Man Delivering FedEx Into the Age of Drones, Robots and A.I.
Raj Subramaniam took over three years ago from FedEx’s founder, who ran the company for nearly 50 years. Since then, technology, tariffs and other disruptions have “fundamentally shifted” patterns of global trade.

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:

product_space: Atlas of Economic Complexity export network
Two networks of economic products, where a pair of products are connected if they are exported at similar rates by the same countries. The data are a projection from a bipartite network of nations and the products they export. Edges weights represent a similarity score (called "proximity"). Data based on UN Comtrade worldwide trade patterns. SITC network based on the Standard International Trade Classification and HS …

US CHILDREN 🧒
我們這些孩童 🧒
📷 Zeiss IKON Super Ikonta 533/16
🎞️ Lucky SHD 400
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

Series C, Episode 02 - Powerplay
VILA: But I'll be seeing you and Bar again, won't I?
ZEE: That's not allowed, I'm afraid.
BARR: Zee and I have work to do.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/302/387 B7B4

A profile of Amanda Askell, Anthropic's resident philosopher, who is learning Claude's reasoning patterns in a bid to endow it with a sense of morality (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-aman

Urban Demons V 👻
城市鬼魂 V 👻
📷 Nikon F4E
🎞️ Rollei RPX 400
If you like my work, buy me a coffee from PayPal #filmphotography

product_space: Atlas of Economic Complexity export network
Two networks of economic products, where a pair of products are connected if they are exported at similar rates by the same countries. The data are a projection from a bipartite network of nations and the products they export. Edges weights represent a similarity score (called "proximity"). Data based on UN Comtrade worldwide trade patterns. SITC network based on the Standard International Trade Classification and HS …