Tootfinder

A Scalable Machine Learning Pipeline for Building Footprint Detection in Historical Maps
Annemarie McCarthy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03564 https://arxiv.…

A Scalable Machine Learning Pipeline for Building Footprint Detection in Historical Maps
Historical maps offer a valuable lens through which to study past landscapes and settlement patterns. While prior research has leveraged machine learning based techniques to extract building footprints from historical maps, such approaches have largely focused on urban areas and tend to be computationally intensive. This presents a challenge for research questions requiring analysis across extensive rural regions, such as verifying historical census data or locating abandoned settlements. In th…

Even if “AI” worked (it doesn’t), there’s many reasons why you shouldn’t use it:
1. It’s destroying Internet sites that you love as you use chat bots instead of actually going to sources of information—this will cause them to be less active and eventually shut down.
2. Pollution and water use from server farms cause immediate harm; often—just like other heavy industry—these are built in underprivileged communities and harming poor people. Without any benefits as the big tech companies get tax breaks and don’t pay for power, while workers aren’t from the community but commute in.
3. The basic underlying models of any LLM rely on stolen data, even when specific extra data is obtained legally. Chatbots can’t learn to speak English just by reading open source code.
4. You’re fueling a speculation bubble that is costing many people their jobs—because the illusion of “efficiency” is kept up by firing people and counting that as profit.
5. Whenever you use the great cheat machine in the cloud you’re robbing yourself from doing real research, writing or coding—literally atrophying your brain and making you stupider.
It’s a grift, through and through.

Historic Maps, New Coordinates: 'Machine Learning Meets the Sanborn Maps', TexLibris blog post https://texlibris.lib.utexas.edu/2025/07/historic-maps-new-coordinates/

Off to the Cultra Hill Climb today. It is unambiguously raining out there, which means a few things:
1. No chance of parking shiny clean car on the club stand, so am not even going to try
2. Hopefully exciting racing?
3. Likelihood of being drenched all day: very high
https://www.…

Cultra Motorsport Festival | Ulster Transport Museum
A motorsport festival taking place at Ulster Transport Museum, the home of NI transport history, with the famous Cultra hill climb happening in the grounds of the Ulster Folk Museum!

For The Record: Punk Histories and Archival Practices, Punk Rock Museum - Las Vegas https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/09/05/for-the-record-punk-histories-and-archival-practices-punk-rock-museum-las-ve…

Irgendwie peinlich, aber wos soi ma mochn.
#pastpuzzle 362
🟩🟥🟨🟥 ( 76)
🟩🟩🟥🟥 (-41)
🟩🟩🟥🟥 (-69)
🟩🟩🟩🟥 (-3)
x/4 🟥
https://www.pastpuzzle.de

IT’S BASICALLY THE ONLY PLACE ON THE INTERNET THAT DOESN’T FUNCTION AS A CONFIRMATION BIAS MACHINE.
https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/717322/wikipedia-attacks-neutrality-history-jimmy-wales

How Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
How the world’s largest encyclopedia became the factual foundation of the web, but now it’s under attack from the right wing, tech billionaires, and AI.

it’s a beautiful day to walk around downtown and campus

This took quite a while to experiment, but now that it kinda works, feels pretty cool.
- Still experimental on my local machine (not on dev site)
- Replies are segmented between edit time slots, idea from X https://mastodon.social/@cheeaun/114996911713894433
- Older …

I've switched my keyboard/mouse sharing to 'deskflow'. It seems to be the current descendent of Synergy; it's timeline page is insanely crazy:
https://github.com/deskflow/deskflow/wiki/History
Why Deskflow? Well, I upgraded one machine to

History
Share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple computers. - deskflow/deskflow