Tootfinder

«Condemning the alteration of Levine’s portrait, he [former deputy assistant secretary for health policy Adrian Shanker] said, it was “hard to understand that this was a priority under a government shutdown.” »
https://www.inquirer.com/politics/nation/r

We're eating good tonight! >:3

Fifa kept the costs of 2026 World Cup tickets under wraps until the very moment of sale,
replacing the usual published table of price points with a digital lottery that decided who even got the chance to buy.
Millions spent hours staring at a queue screen as algorithms determined their place in line.
When access finally came for most, the lower-priced sections had already vanished,
many presumably hoovered up by bots and bulk-buyers (and that’s before Fifa quietly r…

When "self-driving" cars were first getting some hype back in ~2015 or so, I told people who asked me that I didn't think they'd be safe, and that I wished the same money were being invested in driver-assistance systems instead.
At the time, advocates were claiming that self-driving cars would be safer than human drivers.
We now have both self-driving cars and some nifty new driver assistance things, and it turns out that the self-driving cars are in fact being developed by corporations whose attention to the bottom line results in danger to others on the road pretty regularly. I don't actually have stats here for whether they're "safer than human drivers" or not, but the opportunity for one bad software update to make *all* self-driving cars dangerous at once kinda makes me doubt that.
Here's an example of Waymo cars getting "more aggressive" as they try to balance between being too timid and obstructing traffic (including emergency vehicles) and being too dangerous:
https://archive.ph/JJuGv
Here's another example of passing stopped schoolbusses leading to a software recall:
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/waymo-issue-voluntary-software-recall-after-close-calls/story?id=128207776
In the first article, Waymo claims 91% fewer serious accidents per mile. Obviously an independent audit would be actually trustworthy, but even if we take that claim at face value, it's meaningless if an update tomorrow causes 100,000 accidents.
Note that they could be using better engineering practices, and the fact that they aren't shows that they don't care enough about the risks. They could be deploying new software versions incrementally and slowly, letting new versions rack up lots of miles only on a few vehicles before pushing them to a fleet. The should also have the equivalent of a simulation unit test for "schoolbus is stopped, what do?" and if a software version fails that test, it doesn't make it to the fleet. Clearly they don't have that.
I feel pretty vindicated in my earlier prediction that this tech is a bad idea in the hands of the current advocates.

Question to #English speakers. I've heard a weird pronunciation of the Polish "PKP" initialiasm in the English passenger information on some PKP InterCity trains, and I'm wondering if anyone could explain it to me.
The Polish pronunciation is roughly "peh-kah-peh" /pɛ ka pɛ/. I imagined the English would pronounce it as "pee-kay-pee" /piː keɪ piː/. However, it is pronounced as "peh-kah-pey" /pɛ ka pɛɪ/. Any clue why the ending was changed like that?
[EDIT: it was immediately followed by "Intercity", so perhaps it made combining both easier.]

Aha. No fajnie.
Z kolei na marszu antyfaszystowskim jak doszło do jakiegoś nieporozumienia na sam koniec, to do akcji ruszyła grupa kilkunastu policjantów.
Kraj z przemokniętego papieru śniadaniowego.
https://natemat.pl/631040,marsz-niepodleglosci-nawet-nie-ruszyl-a-uczestnicy-juz-zlamali-zakaz

Source: Blue Owl's Digital Infrastructure funds are investing ~$3B in a New Mexico-based Stargate data center, set to consume 4.5GW, as Blue Owl expands into AI (Miles Kruppa/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/open…

OpenAI’s Stargate Project Gets $3 Billion Blue Owl Investment
Blue Owl Capital, one of Wall Street’s biggest private lenders, is ramping up its big bet on artificial intelligence with a roughly $3 billion investment in a New Mexico data center that’s part of OpenAI’s Stargate project, said a person with knowledge of the deal. Blue Owl, which has nearly ...

It’s grossly dishonest to claim South Africa has more race laws than ever before
By Anton Harber
The claim that South Africa has 142 active racial laws on the statute books is seriously misleading, containing many laws that can only be seen as race-based through deeply ideological eyes.

Pelican is putting out a 12" EP 'Ascending' on January 9 with Flickering Resonance era tracks. The last two had a limited release in 2024, and the title track was left off Flickering Resonance as they felt it was more its own thing. Didn't know if I was gonna like Geoff Rickly's (from Thursday) vocals on the 'vocal version' of 'Cascading Crescent', but it rips: <…

Southern California mountain lions recommended for threatened status
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has recommended granting threatened species status
to roughly 1,400 mountain lions roaming the Central Coast and Southern California,
pointing to grave threats posed by freeways, rat poison and fierce wildfires.
The determination, released Wednesday, is not the final say
but signals a possibility that several clans of the iconic cougars will be …

Southern California mountain lions recommended for threatened status
The California wildlife department is recommending listing mountain lions in Southern California and the Central Coast as threatened.