Tootfinder

i've come around to the utility of the livenation-owned setlist.fm, but i still way prefer a loving fan-made setlist/chronology page. i wrote a bit about why & made a list of a few dozen favorites that i return to often (or just thought were swell). what did i miss? https://jessejarnow.com/202…

NFL Fan Misery Index after Week 17, plus record nights in the NBA https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6924583/2025/12/29/nfl-week-17-fan-misery-index-the-pulse/

Did you know of Explain XKCD ?
These ones are moving.
Two years: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1141:_Two_Years
Seven years:

Dziś jechałem VT628 619.
To 30-letnia jednostka, która w 2015 roku czekała na kasację, a dwa lata później trafiła do Arrivy RP i jeździ sobie radośnie. W ruchu planowym od października 2017, czyli już osiem lat. W tym czasie na dwa lata została wypożyczona do Kolei Wielkopolskich. W czasie tych dwóch lat zaliczyła trzy wypadki na przejazdach — dwa razy w stronę Wolsztyna, raz w stronę Wągrowca. Wszystko wskazuje na to, że w czasie służby w Arrivie nie zaliczyła ani jednego.

Flapping Airplanes, an AI research lab "devoted to solving the data efficiency problem", raised $180M at a $1.5B valuation from GV, Sequoia, Index, and others (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.

In UK sollen Jugendliche im Internet besser geschützt werden indem man ihnen die Verwendung von VPNs verbietet. #keinePointe #security #online

Don't trust your family history to the cloud or an online software company. #Ancestris version 13 is out. https://www.ancestris.org/index.html It's free and has some unique tools and reports not foun…

There is a new release of BSSG, the Bash Static Site Generator, available, 0.33, thanks to @…
Showing the full text posts on the home page (index page) of the blog, instead of just showing the description (from meta data) or, if that is not available, the first few words of a post.
Tried it, and it works:

And not one of them in the UK.
The 30 Most Bike-Friendly Cities in the World, the 2025 Copenhagenize Index Arrives | Momentum Mag
https://momentummag.com/the-30-most-bike-friendly-cities-in-the-world-the-2025-copenhagenize-inde…

NFL QB rankings, Week 13: Josh Allen slips to Tier 2; where does Shedeur Sanders land? https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-qb-rankings-index-week-13-2025-nfl-season

Technology and analysis of game interactivity for people with disabilities https://lseee.net/index.php/te/article/view/1601 "In games, the auxiliary methods of sensory impairment are mainly realized through sensory substitution, information enhancement and tactile feedback."<…

Gastrulation of the blastulation
The blastulation of the morula gives the blastula.
The morula is like a mulberry of cells;
the blastula has a liquid-filled center...
-- Tom Sharp,
A tiny quote from Tom Sharp's (poet, scientist, and, and, and...) excellent web site:
https://sharpgiving.com/index.html

We introduce the Remote Labor Index (RLI),
a broadly multi-sector benchmark comprising real-world, economically valuable remote-work projects
designed to evaluate end-to-end agent performance in practical settings.
Across evaluated frontier AI agent frameworks, performance sits near the floor,
with a maximum automation rate of 2.5% on RLI projects.

TIOBE Software CEO Paul Jansen shares the numbers for November 2025 in its programming popularity index. It seems like C# is almost caught up with Java with a less than 1% difference between the fourth and fifth positions. Python continues to stand in a very comfortable first place.
"TIOBE Index for November 2025 - Is C# going to surpass Java for the first time in history?"

Berlin-based Mirelo, whose AI models can interpret video content to add matching sound effects, raised a $41M seed led by Index and a16z, after a $3M pre-seed (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/15/mirelo-raises-41m…

The non-exodus of California billionaires
The media says they’re fleeing a wealth tax. Except, they’re not.
Nary a day has passed of late that hasn’t seen stories about the billionaires’ flight from California, lest they be subjected to a proposed wealth tax that hasn’t yet gathered the required signatures to qualify for the ballot. The fact that there is no billionaires’ flight from California hasn’t impeded the flow of such tales.
https://americanprospect.bluelena.io/index.php?action=social&chash=28f7241796510e838db4a1384ae1279d.3942&s=a25f328e944fec8e9462e7b6d554a892

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

An MIT study finds that AI can replace 11.7% of the US labor market, or ~$1.2T in wages, based on the "Iceberg Index", which measures job automation potential (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/26/mit-study-

Online tickets are now available for the Fantastic Futures 2025 conference! #FF2025 is the annual conference of the @… community, jam-packed with inspiration and practical lessons for AI in GLAMs. Sign up to watch all talks on Thurs and Fri Dec 4 - 5 for free!

I'm porting a bunch of code that delves heavily into index math from Python to Lua for my incremental/reversible RNG library. In Lua, indices start at 1. I have never in my life been more glad to have a robust suite of unit tests, because the number of off-by-one errors I'm introducing is astronomical.
#coding

NFL Heat Index: Welcome Back, Brock Purdy, and Welcome to the NFL, Shedeur Sanders https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/nfl-heat-index-welcome-back-brock-purdy-welcome-nfl-shedeur-sanders

found the website of a dog-obsessed german couple, then the page where they memorialize their dead dogs
http://www.cmf-dogs.at/index.php/in-memoriam

Multi-port programmable silicon photonics using low-loss phase change material Sb$_2$Se$_3$
Thomas W. Radford, Idris A Ajia, Latif Rozaqi, Priya Deoli, Xingzhao Yan, Mehdi Banakar, David J Thomson, Ioannis Zeimpekis, Alberto Politi, Otto L. Muskens
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18205 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18205 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.18205
arXiv:2511.18205v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reconfigurable photonic devices are rapidly emerging as a cornerstone of next generation optical technologies, with wide ranging applications in quantum simulation, neuromorphic computing, and large-scale photonic processors. A central challenge in this field is identifying an optimal platform to enable compact, efficient, and scalable reconfigurability. Optical phase-change materials (PCMs) offer a compelling solution by enabling non-volatile, reversible tuning of optical properties, compatible with a wide range of device platforms and current CMOS technologies. In particular, antimony tri-selenide ($\text{Sb}_{2}\text{Se}_{3}$) stands out for its ultra low-loss characteristics at telecommunication wavelengths and its reversible switching. In this work, we present an experimental platform capable of encoding multi-port operations onto the transmission matrix of a compact multimode interferometer architecture on standard 220~nm silicon photonics using \textit{in-silico} designed digital patterns. The multi-port devices are clad with a thin film of $\text{Sb}_{2}\text{Se}_{3}$, which can be optically addressed using direct laser writing to provide local perturbations to the refractive index. A range of multi-port geometries from 2$\times$2 up to 5$\times$5 couplers are demonstrated, achieving simultaneous control of up to 25 matrix elements with programming accuracy of 90% relative to simulated patterns. Patterned devices remain stable with consistent optical performance across the C-band wavelengths. Our work establishes a pathway towards the development of large scale PCM-based reconfigurable multi-port devices which will allow implementing matrix operations on three orders of magnitude smaller areas than interferometer meshes.
toXiv_bot_toot

Reduced to the Max: Pebble-Ring für Sprachnotizen hat nur einen Knopf
Ein Mikrofon am Zeigefinger springt nur an, wenn der Daumen den Knopf drückt. Der Pebble Index 01 dient zunächst für Sprachnotizen und Musiksteuerung.

'pandoc' is a document conversion CLI program that can read and write loads of different document formats; mostly for text, but with formulas and references and things; so any type of markdown practically to any other, or to and from html, or ebooks, or wikis or man pages, or...
https://pandoc.org/

Every time a student works on a project related to the fur trade, I'm reminded of how much I love the Biographical Sheets maintained by the Hudson's Bay Company Archives. They present the barest of outlines of the lives of workers over three centuries and across a staggering geographic area. Every one is an invitation to imagine a life that hasn't been celebrated by a monument or a movie.

Full scale attack on peer review and the integrity of science to save OpenAI ?
https://openai.com/index/introducing-prism/

This is 1 of my bumper stickers. Yesterday, I looked in my rear view while sitting at a red light, & in the car behind me, the driver was holding up his hand, displaying metal horns & tracing the shape w/ the index finger of his other hand, while explaining the sticker to his passenger. I flashed my own metal horns hand for her. She laughed. He looked back over & laughed. I laughed. It was a fun little moment. Those are needed in these bleak times. 😉

From David Suzuki
Science Matters - U.S. actions near Venezuela portend an oily catastrophe
Canada’s government has been silent about the United States killing people on boats off the Venezuela coast. Whether or not the boats were being used to transport drugs (and there’s no evidence they were), these appalling acts have been labelled “war crimes” — or “murders,” since no war has been officially declared… yet.

This illustrates what i always thought, there is no copyright issue with regard to AI. It is just a matter of making financial deals...
#ai

Berlin-based Mirelo, whose AI models can interpret video content to add matching sound effects, raised a $41M seed led by Index and a16z, after a $3M pre-seed (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/15/mirelo-raises-41m…

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) said that it would not publish the October consumer price index (CPI)
– one of the country’s key reports for inflation data.
“BLS could not collect October 2025 reference period survey data due to a lapse in appropriations.
BLS is unable to retroactively collect these data,”
a statement on the agency’s website reads.
The report was set to be released in November,
and would serve as an important barometer for the Feder…

Ca ii K Polar Network Index of the Sun - A Proxy for Historical Polar Magnetic Field: #SolarCycle activity: https://www.swri.org/newsroom/press-releases/using-100-year-old-data-help-predict-future-solar-cycle-activity

Blocking outbound port 25 is fine these days (for dynamically numbered networks, like residential ISPs, etc).
(But port 465 shouldn't be described as "Legacy SMTPS", since 2018 it has been the recommended port for secure email submission - RFC8314 section-3.3.)

A pictures says more than 1000 words. How much more can an audio representation of your data tell you? #rstats

Low key product launch to end the year: https://cct-development-management-bot.cct-datascience.xyz/index.html
It's a long story, but we've put out a very niche RAG bot relating to development management in

After `apt upgrade; shutdown -r` I've never heard again from lib.rs server.
I've restored a fresh one from a backup, but it's going to be wonky for a while due to cold caches and rebuilding of search index.

So, tonight's goal is to continue with ngscopeclient performance work.
I started out by doubling the speed of the eye pattern *again* by moving index buffer calculation from CPU to GPU.
Next up is going to be getting the 100baseTX decoder to not be so slow. Right now of the 43 seconds of CPU time in the current 1-minute benchmark, 26.9 is spent sampling the MLT-3 waveform on rising edges of the recovered clock.
The thing is, we already *know* the sample values at the re…

A very heartfelt apology from Japan's Keio University regarding a data breach.
https://www.keio.ac.jp/en/news/2026/Jan/7/48-171848/index.html

The third path here -- beyond personal computers or renting them from the cloud -- is walkable mixed density co-op computing.
@paul-rony.bsky.social covers this in "From groups to individuals, micro-computing and us", @causalislands.com Berlin.
https://www.

Experimental insights into data augmentation techniques for deep learning-based multimode fiber imaging: limitations and success
Jawaria Maqbool, M. Imran Cheema
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19072 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19072 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.19072
arXiv:2511.19072v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimode fiber~(MMF) imaging using deep learning has high potential to produce compact, minimally invasive endoscopic systems. Nevertheless, it relies on large, diverse real-world medical data, whose availability is limited by privacy concerns and practical challenges. Although data augmentation has been extensively studied in various other deep learning tasks, it has not been systematically explored for MMF imaging. This work provides the first in-depth experimental and computational study on the efficacy and limitations of augmentation techniques in this field. We demonstrate that standard image transformations and conditional generative adversarial-based synthetic speckle generation fail to improve, or even deteriorate, reconstruction quality, as they neglect the complex modal interference and dispersion that results in speckle formation. To address this, we introduce a physical data augmentation method in which only organ images are digitally transformed, while their corresponding speckles are experimentally acquired via fiber. This approach preserves the physics of light-fiber interaction and enhances the reconstruction structural similarity index measure~(SSIM) by up to 17\%, forming a viable system for reliable MMF imaging under limited data conditions.
toXiv_bot_toot

Yeah, so the GNU #make jobserver protocol is trivial, which can be a blessing and a curse. It puts the job management entirely on the clients, which means that they must reliably return job tokens, or otherwise the jobserver will be left with no jobs available and everything will hang. The make documentation is clear on this:
> Your tool should be sure to write back the tokens it read, even under error conditions. This includes not only errors in your tool but also outside influences such as interrupts (SIGINT), etc. You may want to install signal handlers to manage this write-back.
#NinjaBuild jobserver implementation may not handle this correctly, but fortunately it does. The irony is, it turns out that GNU make does not…
#Gentoo

Gilbert's Discovery:
Any attempt to use the new super glues results in the two pieces
sticking to your thumb and index finger rather than to each other.

As mentioned yesterday, I think I changed now all startscreens and default searches to qwant.com
I used Bing for a long time (and it was ways better than I often heard) and changed to Ecosia last year. Which was also absolutely fine.
Now I try a (European) company that doesn't only focus on privacy but also builds on an own index (I know they still mix in bing and need bing for monetization). One step at a time...

Vi har lyst ut to stipendiatstillinger knyttet til doktorgradsprogrammet FILMART ved INN (https://www.inn.no/forskning/doktorgradsutdanning/filmart/). Stipendiatene skal knyttes til det nasjonale KI-senteret MishMash (

Lahore's toxic winters: How smog is reshaping daily life in urban Pakistan #Pakistan…

Bing's web crawler is a true putz of the Internet.
By-the-way, various other search engines use Bing as the underlying web crawler, so this is far from being a Microsoft issue.
Bing's web crawler refuses to index content that does not meet its standards.
And what are those standards? It is that pages contain a bunch of meta tags and such.
Well, some of my archival content was written around 1995, long before those meta tags were conceived.
Thus, from Bi…

From David Suzuki
For the past 30 years, global representatives have gathered for United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) climate summits, promising solutions. But political inaction continues to drive worsening climate disasters.
It’s hard not to be cynical. The COP process has become a theatre of contradiction. Recent summits have been hosted by petrostates & financed by polluters. Fossil fuel lobbyists attended COP28 & COP29 [en masse]

The #ICE wiki is back up. It was under DDOS attack yesterday, but it's back up now.
The ICE List Wiki is a public, verifiable record of immigration enforcement activity in the United States.
It documents incidents, agencies, individuals, facilities, vehicles, and legal authorities involved in enforcement operations. Entries are structured, sourced, and timestamped to support verifi…

Oooh, is this a real AfterEffects competitor? https://friction.graphics/

Yesterday at the @… conference, the Brücke-Museum Berlin presented its digitization project on Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s collection of objects from colonial contexts. All objects have been published on #wikiCommons, allowing everyone to contribute and r…

Sure would be cool if one of the big tech companies would give the Internet Archive money to make a full-text searchable index of the Wayback Machine.

Today, I built a cpu #kernel for a #camera again. ✨👩‍💻✨
I.e., I could do `insmod ipcam some-mod.ko` and other fun things.
It took about a minute to build an #initramfs with u-root and cpud *a…

Air Quality Index: Cats

OpenAI introduces a framework to evaluate chain-of-thought monitorability and a suite of 13 evaluations designed to measure the monitorability of an AI system (OpenAI)
https://openai.com/index/evaluating-chain-of-thought-monitorability

@… Probably more about overall electrical systems, and also this apply to offgrid.

I found great guide "Wiring Unlimited" that explains all of this in details. On the end all comes to "do your math" https://www.vic…

I made a list of all the blog posts and other permanent-ish artifacts I could find for over/under
It's largely for my benefit (hence the "to read" section at the bottom) but other people might find it useful too
https://seedlinggames.com/blogging/overunder/index.h…

In the USA there's now bipartisan acceptance that "steaks cost almost 17% more than a year ago" ,[1] 60 % of shoppers buy less beef,[2] 37 % consider plant-based substitutes[3] but not clear how many would simply increase e.g. pulses or go fully #vegan. Prices of lentils are down[4] and production of pulses is expected to go up.[5]
[1]

Random Sunday browsing: from the directory of all websites in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) http://www.dprkportal.kp/guide to the North Korean Cook Association …

Are you afraid of our new GenAI overlords taking over our jobs soon? According to a new benchmark, The Remote Labor Index by Scale AI and the Center for AI Safety (CAIS), there's no need to be. The best current models are able to solve around ~2% of the tasks of the index: #AIResearch #GenAI

Very proud to have my research featured in the latest edition of UCL's alumni magazine Portico alongside a stellar group of Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment colleagues including Fiona Zisch, Claire Heaviside and Haim Yacobi
Read the full piece on how the built environment can support or improve our health and wellbeing:

Time to watch the Pilot episode of Sledge Hammer!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q20qsG7ssQ&list=PLyv4UuGykKa_6dohUDs6nOB3ZdoTXMWba&index=1

NFL QB rankings, Week 16: Aaron Rodgers hurdles Joe Burrow, Lamar Jackson https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-qb-rankings-index-week-16-2025-nfl-season

The {purrr} package is a powerfull way to replace loops. The {furrr} package takes this approach one step further by parallel execution: #rstats

Welcome to the Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR),
a database of master recordings made by American record companies during the 78rpm era.
It is part of the American Discography Project (ADP)
—an initiative of the University of California, Santa Barbara that is edited by a team of researchers based at the UCSB Library.
To begin your research, enter names, titles, places, matrix or catalog numbers below,
or click on the advanced browse or search…

For day 3 of #AdventOfCode I outsmarted myself by using `each` on an array to get the index and the value, but forgot that #Perl does not reset the counter when you exit the loop early. (It worked for part 1, though..). After switching to a stupid c-style for loop it was easy (because I agai…

Disney and OpenAI sign a deal to bring 200 Disney characters to Sora; Disney makes a $1B investment in OpenAI and will become a "major" OpenAI customer (OpenAI)
https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/

Hashrate Index: China's bitcoin mining market share rebounded to 14% by the end of October, making it the world's third-largest miner despite China's 2021 ban (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/bitcoin-mining…

The Pebble Index 01 is a neat idea, and we need more of that in the space. I'm going to wait and see where it goes, though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArxhS4SQaP0

@… thanks, I'll think about it for the future.
All over the shop is partly dyslexia, I try to find a balance between what's in my head (sometimes, everything at once) and compartmentalising things. Chunking stuff, (a) for readers to maybe make sense; and (b) for future reference.
There's also the issue of search engine index limitatio…

Pebble unveils the Pebble Index 01, a $99 smart ring with an on-device LLM for processing voice notes, shipping in March 2026, initially for $75 (Julian Chokkattu/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/pebble-index-ring/

NFL Heat Index: Brian Schottenheimer Proves Critics Wrong, Mike Tomlin on Hot Seat https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/nfl-heat-index-brian-schottenheimer-proves-critics-wrong-mike-tomlin-hot-seat

Rams' Stafford has finger sprain, but 'good to go' https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/47590329/rams-matthew-stafford-index-finger-sprain-good-go

Trump’s intensifying standoff with European leaders over the fate of Greenland
prompted a sharp response from investors Tuesday morning,
with the value of U.S. stocks, dollar and government bonds all falling.
The S&P 500 dropped over 1 percent
as investors reacted to Trump’s increasing threat of higher tariffs on European allies unless they supported his plans for America to take control of Greenland.
Tuesday morning’s decline was first time the index has st…

{slider} helps with aggregation over (sliding) windows, both index and time period based: #rstats

Graphene and thin graphite films for ultrafast optical Kerr gating at 1 GHz repetition rate under focused illumination
Amr Farrag, Assegid M. Flatae, Mario Agio
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17713 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17713 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.17713
arXiv:2511.17713v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The ability to address sub-picosecond events of weak optical signals is essential for progress in quantum science, nonlinear optics, and ultrafast spectroscopy. While up-conversion and optical Kerr gating (OKG) offer femtosecond resolution, they are generally limited to ensemble measurements, making ultrafast detection in nano-optics challenging. OKG, with its broadband response and high throughput without phase-matching, is especially promising when used at high repetition rates under focused illumination.
Here, we demonstrate an ultrafast detection scheme using the third-order nonlinearity of graphene and thin graphite films, operating at 1 GHz with sub-nanojoule pulses and achieving 141 fs temporal resolution. Their exceptionally large nonlinear refractive index, orders of magnitude higher than conventional Kerr media, enhances detection efficiency at smaller thicknesses, enables sub-picosecond response, and supports broadband operation. Their atomic-scale thickness minimizes dispersion and simplifies integration with microscopy platforms, optical fibers, and nanophotonic circuits, making them a compact, practical material platform for nano-optical and on-chip ultrafast Kerr gating.
toXiv_bot_toot

I'm lucky to be chairing a great session with lots of brilliant short papers, from 'The Politics of AI Training Data' (with people who critiqued the KB NL in the audience!), vision language models, work with newspapers and more! https://www.conftool.org/fa…

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar says the company's compute grew from 0.2 GW in 2023 to ~1.9 GW in 2025 and annualized revenue grew from $2B in 2023 to $20B in 2025 (Sarah Friar/OpenAI)
https://openai.com/index/a-business-that-scales-with-the-value-of-intelligence

LION: from 2022-2024, local independent online news organizations with dedicated staff for revenue generation had median revenue 700% higher than those without (Eric Rynston-Lobel/Local News Initiative)
https://localnewsinitiative.northweste

OpenAI opens app submissions for review and publication in ChatGPT, where users can discover or search for apps in a new app directory (OpenAI)
https://openai.com/index/developers-can-now-submit-apps-to-chatgpt

We began #FF2025 with two long papers - Developing Archival AI chatbots and AI to Improve AV Metadata in a Legacy System https://www.conftool.org/fantastic-futures<…

How three Northwest newspapers have remained independent and avoided closure: selling to employees, diversifying print operations, and nurturing future owners (Brier Dudley/Local News Initiative)
https://localnewsinitiative.northweste

Topological interface modes in aperiodic subwavelength resonator chains
Habib Ammari, Jiayu Qiu, Alexander Uhlmann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18363 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18363 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.18363
arXiv:2511.18363v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We consider interface modes in block disordered subwavelength resonator chains in one dimension. Based on the capacitance operator formulation, which provides a first-order approximation of the spectral properties of dimer-type block resonator systems in the subwavelength regime, we show that a two-fold topological characterization of a block disordered resonator chain is available if it is of dominated type. The topological index used for the characterization is a generalization of the Zak phase associated with one-dimensional chiral-symmetric Hamiltonians. As a manifestation of the bulk-edge correspondence principle, we prove that a localized interface mode occurs whenever the system consists of two semi-infinite chains with different topological characters. We also illustrate our results from a dynamic perspective, which provides an explicit geometric picture of the interface modes, and finally present a variety of numerical results to complement the theoretical results.
toXiv_bot_toot

OpenAI is piloting group chats in ChatGPT in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan; up to 20 users can be invited to prompt ChatGPT in a shared space (OpenAI)
https://openai.com/index/group-chats-in-chatgpt

OpenAI releases GPT-5.1 in the API, featuring a "no-reasoning" mode and extended prompt caching with up to 24-hour retention to generate faster responses (OpenAI)
https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-1-for-developers

There are frameworks like {golem} and {rhino} to make shiny development more robust, but I like the concept of {shinytest2} in providing a testing framework for pure shiny. https://rstudio.github.io/shinytest2/index.html

US energy companies and several hedge funds were handsomely rewarded when markets opened on Monday after news of the US attack on Venezuela and abduction of President Nicolas Maduro over the weekend. 
The MSCI US Energy index,
which tracks a basket of American stocks with exposure to the energy industry,
was trading up 2.8 percent on Monday, widely outperforming gains in the broader S&P 500 and other global energy stocks.
The rally was an early reflection of inves…

Projecting the 2026 draft order: Raiders, Giants move up; Dolphins move down https://www.espn.com/nfl/draft2026/story/_/id/46146676/2026-nfl-draft-order-projections-32-first-round-picks

OpenAI launches FrontierScience, a benchmark to measure models' expert-level scientific reasoning with 700 questions, finding GPT-5.2 is its strongest model (OpenAI)
https://openai.com/index/frontierscience/

Interactive resizing of picture and table content in Rmd and Quarto: #rstats

Disney and OpenAI sign a deal to bring 200 Disney characters to Sora; Disney makes a $1B investment in OpenAI and will become a "major" OpenAI customer (OpenAI)
https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/

US energy companies and several hedge funds were handsomely rewarded when markets opened on Monday
after news of the US attack on Venezuela and abduction of President Nicolas Maduro over the weekend. 
The MSCI US Energy index, which tracks a basket of American stocks with exposure to the energy industry,
was trading up 2.8 percent on Monday
-- widely outperforming gains in the broader S&P 500 and other global energy stocks.
The rally was an early reflection …

Anthropic's Claude Cowork launch has revived fears about disruption that weighed on SaaS stocks in 2025; Morgan Stanley SaaS index is down 15% so far in 2026 (Ryan Vlastelica/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Let's simulate the rest of the 2025 NFL season: The last three weeks, plus playoff and Super Bowl results https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/47326035/2025-nfl-season-simulation-final-three-weeks-standings-pl…

OpenAI says it now has 1M business customers globally, with ChatGPT for Work seats up 40% in two months to 7M and ChatGPT Enterprise seats up 9x YoY (OpenAI)
https://openai.com/index/1-million-businesses-putting-ai-to-work

A profile of VC firm Index Ventures, which saw billions in gains from exits in 2025, including Figma, Scale AI, and Dream Games, as it looks ahead to succession (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-08/inde…

Seagate and Western Digital, with stocks each up 200% in 2025, will join Nasdaq 100 before the December 22 market open; GlobalFoundries will leave the index (Isabelle Lee/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/202…

Analysis: global AI-related companies drove ~40% of benchmark convertible bond index returns in 2025, pushing the amount raised to $166.5B, the most since 2001 (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-08/ai-…