Tootfinder

Hey friends,
we are back from a day in the #mountains! We both didn't feel too well when starting but we did the tour as planned:
We came up to the peak (from where the photo was taken), went to the 2nd behind me, back around the 1st up to the 3rd visible in the center and cont'd to the 4th in the back right at the border of the photo.
And then back down. Mood was good…

I'm still not quite sure if I should choose thread or photo when posting an image on mbin / kbin...
#kbin #mbin #threadiverse

Time For 9 o'clock #HashTagGames hosted by @…
Let's play!
#DebunkAMoviePlot

I wish we didn’t do this to ourselves.
#yaml

Approaching Rate-Distortion Limits in Neural Compression with Lattice Transform Coding
Eric Lei, Hamed Hassani, Shirin Saeedi Bidokhti
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07320

Approaching Rate-Distortion Limits in Neural Compression with Lattice Transform Coding
Neural compression has brought tremendous progress in designing lossy compressors with good rate-distortion (RD) performance at low complexity. Thus far, neural compression design involves transforming the source to a latent vector, which is then rounded to integers and entropy coded. While this approach has been shown to be optimal in a one-shot sense on certain sources, we show that it is highly sub-optimal on i.i.d. sequences, and in fact always recovers scalar quantization of the original s…

Observational Properties of AGN Obscuration During the Peak of Accretion Growth
Bovornpratch Vijarnwannaluk, Masayuki Akiyama, Malte Schramm, Yoshihiro Ueda, Yoshiki Matsuoka, Yoshiki Toba, Naoki Matsumoto, Angel Ruiz, Ioannis Georgantopoulos, Ektoras Pouliasis, Elias Koulouridis, Kohei Ichikawa, Marcin Sawicki, Stephen Gwyn
https://

Observational Properties of AGN Obscuration During the Peak of Accretion Growth
We investigated the gas obscuration and host galaxy properties of active galactic nuclei (AGN) during the peak of cosmic accretion growth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at redshift 0.8-1.8 using X-ray detected AGN with mid-infrared and far-infrared detection. The sample was classified as type-1 and type-2 AGN using optical spectral and morphological classification while the host galaxy properties were estimated with multiwavelength SED fitting. For type-1 AGN, the black hole mass was deter…

$125K stolen in 10 minutes
From Kim Komando's newsletter —
"Feb. 16 was a typical Friday night. Barry and I decided to stay home, grill chicken and make a salad for dinner. At about 6:45 p.m., we heard some loud rumbling overhead.
We walked onto the back patio, and two police helicopters were shining lights all over our property. A recording echoed, “Police. You are under arrest. Stay right there and I won’t shoot you.”
As I looked across the fence, a swarm of armed Phoenix SWAT team members with a few dogs were circling our property. One of the guys said, “Yeah, there’s a jammer right here.” He picked it up. I leaned over the patio and asked, “What’s going on?”
The police told me to go inside
When I asked again, a SWAT member said, “Ma’am, it’s a South American gang targeting homes to steal from. The jammer says you might have been next. Do we have permission to enter your property?” I said, “Yes!” and then he asked something like, “If we find anyone, will you pursue charges so we can arrest them?” I replied, “Of course!”
I opened the driveway gates to our property and the guest house while Barry tossed the police keys to open the security gates. People asked me if I was scared. How could I be? There was a team of really professional police officers protecting me from who knows what.
Turns out, when the gang saw we were home, they likely diverted their attention to the house next door. A house four doors down from us wasn’t so lucky.
The homeowner left at 5 p.m. to have dinner and got a notification his security cameras were offline at 5:05 p.m. He thought the internet went down. Nope, the gang broke in and took $25,000 in cash and valuables worth $100,000. They were in and out in under 10 minutes.
How are they getting away with this?
The gang places cellular and Wi‑Fi jammers around the homes they’re targeting. This way, security cameras and phones are useless. A Phoenix police officer told me the gang probably noticed nothing was down in our house.
We have our cameras and internet hardwired. Even when they tried to jam our signals, the red lights on the security cameras still showed they were recording everything.
But how frightening is that? Your phone doesn’t work. Your cameras aren’t recording anything. On the upside, the gang doesn’t carry guns. This way, if they get caught, they’ll spend about six months in jail before being extradited to Chile.
Nothing is random
The gang scopes out homes beforehand. They drive the neighborhood and look up houses on real estate sites to get an idea of where the primary bedroom is located. They look for dogs, too.
It’s not just in Phoenix, by the way. This is happening all over the country. A friend was robbed by this gang, and he lives in a guarded, gated community in California. Kudos to the Phoenix Police Department — they arrested three members of the gang who were in my neighborhood that night.
So, what can you do?
☑️​ Wireless cameras go kaput with no signal. Try a wired camera for a backup.
☑️​ A cam with SD card storage will still record if there’s no Wi‑Fi.
☑️​ Put up motion-activated lights; they make it harder for anyone to sneak around.
☑️​ A femtocell (think of it as a mini cell tower) could be enough to keep your connection if thieves use jammers — T‑Mobile or Verizon.
☑️​ Have an Amazon Echo? Away mode lets you control your lights so it looks like someone’s home.
☑️​ Make it look like someone’s watching TV at your house when you’re not there with a Television Simulator.
☑️​ A University of North Carolina survey of over 400 incarcerated burglars found security system signs deter thieves.
☑️​ Check Zillow, Realtor⁠.⁠com and Redfin for photos of your house. The more crooks know about the layout, the better for them. Ask to have them removed.
☑️​ Blur your house from Google Maps and Apple Maps while you’re at it.

What's the old adage? "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail..."
Well, the new one is "Every app will add AI and you'll accidentally trigger it without meaning to!"
Also, there's no way to disable this shit. I use a web-based app and it has a "Press 'space' for AI" every time I click to type my own text.

Hey friends!
The hike with my friends was a blast! It was pretty warm today (yet another heat record) but I decided to ascend in the shade and go down again on the sun side,which turned out to be a good decision.
Luckily I also didn't felt very sore from yesterday's cycling! The one photo shows what I call "the window". Not sure what you think, but I love this spot.
Afterwards we had some coffee, cookies and some nice talk. Just a great day!

Hey friends!
The hike with my friends was a blast! It was pretty warm today (yet another heat record) but I decided to ascend in the shade and go down again on the sun side,which turned out to be a good decision.
Luckily I also didn't felt very sore from yesterday's cycling! The one photo shows what I call "the window". Not sure what you think, but I love this spot.
Afterwards we had some coffee, cookies and some nice talk. Just a great day!