After almost two centuries,
Baker & Taylor,
a nationwide library book distributor,
will reportedly shut down operations in January.
Baker & Taylor CEO Aman Kochar told employees Monday that following a recent failed acquisition deal with ReaderLink, the Charlotte-based company has no viable path forward, though he had hoped to find another solution
First the nucleus of #comet SWAN split - https://skyweek.wordpress.com/2025/11/02/allgemeines-live-blog-ab-dem-2-november-2025/#Nov06 ("Der Kern des Kometen C/2025 R2 (SWAN) ist zerbrochen ...") - and now C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) has suffered the same fate: a 2-meter-telescope image from https://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=17487 ("Multiple Fragmentation Observed"), also https://groups.io/g/comets-ml/topic/116216567 (several amateur observations) and https://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=17488 (Hubble detections of more fragments, sadly no pictures included).
RE: https://social.makerforums.info/@mcdanlj/115834722555775922
This morning, I heard the first report of someone passing their US ham radio exam by using Open Ham Prep …
I am trying to reply to a topic on a forum about what can be included in The Movie Database (as opposed to IMDb) and it is getting flagged, which is annoying since the last post includes this nonsensical claim:
> Distribution/release is an essential fact about the existance of a movie- a movie has to have some type of distribution/release (otherwise the movie literally doesnt exist).
I thought I might be hitting filters because I mentioned the name of a documentary about The …
Recently I spoke with a woman in a shop about hiking and she said that she's not experienced in the mountains and thus doesn't dare to go alone.
I wondered if such people would feel better if they'd go for example with me (or just any other person who is a bit into the topic). No need to talk, no social obligations, just walking together a route, no sports event, nothing extreme. 🤔 Not as a guided tour, just walking.
And if I would do that.
We are happy to welcome @… from RWTH in today's #nfdicore playground talking about "Bridging the Gap from Biomedical to Domain-Agnostic Semantics".
Besides others, he is demonstrating that our
Trump Lays Out a Vision of Power Restrained Only by His Own Hubris
On topic after topic, Trump made clear that he thinks he is the arbiter of any limits to his authorities, not international law or treaties.
"My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
“I don’t need international law,”
he added.
“I’m not looking to hurt people.”
When pressed further about whether his administration needed to abide by international law,
Trump said,
ChatGPT is useful for getting the average of the information in its weights on a given topic
Grok (Expert) is useful for filtering search engine slop into a summary with relevant, sourced, checkable web links
Neither of these necessarily produce The Truth, but in this example, Grok generates significantly more reliable output when precision matters. As time goes on and the volume of hallucinated nonsense on the Web mounts higher, Grok's ability to attribute its assertions t…
@… I think I'm OK on Kubuntu 25.10.
Slightly off-topic, I recently began using my hearing aids with an iPad. It's almost indescribably wonderful.
<https://www.oticon.global/support/pairing
OPNsense 25.7.9 released
Started by franco, December 04, 2025, 03:12:42 PM
#opnsense
Transcript of a talk by Cory Doctorow @… on the topic of AI and its near -term effects on society. Long. Summary of an upcoming book.
Many good thoughts in it, some I haven't found described so well before, some new to me. I'm quite aligned on his points about copyright, and he's tying this up better than I have seen in other places. I don…
Excited to speak tomorrow at @… , giving updates about the project i've been volunteering for the last year with @…
Join us in person in Toronto or online at 7PM…
“But software design is just vibes!”
No, it’s absolutely not. It’s an extremely well researched topic with an abundance of studies, literature and scientific articles over the last 75 years.
Here’s some books to get you started. They’re over 30 years old.
Good Morning #Canada
Before #WWII, Canada could still be considered a tiny nation in terms of our influence on world affairs. But after the conflict broke out, we contributed well beyond expectations and our navy was an example. The Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) started the war with only 13 vessels, but when WWII ended, we had the 4th largest navy in the world. By 1945 the RCN had 450 ships in all, plus many smaller auxiliary units. This 1945 figure breaks down as follows: 2 cruisers, 17 destroyers, 68 frigates, 112 corvettes, 67 minesweepers, 12 escort ships, 75 Fairmile motor launches. During WWII, Canadian shipyards built a total of 4,047 naval vessels and 410 merchant ships for a grand total of 4,457 ships. The naval vessels included over 300 anti-submarine warships, as well as thousands of landing craft, escort ships, minesweepers, and tugs.
#CanadaIsAwesome #RemembranceDay
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Royal-Canadian-Navy/Second-World-War
Snapchat launches Topic Chats, which enables public conversations on subjects like F1, and plans to use AI and other safety tech to moderate the chats (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/18/snapchat-rolls-out-topic-chats-for-publ…
Do you remember when I once feared that having my photos as background in video conferences might be unprofessional?
Just yesterday I went into a workshop with strangers and a pretty well known investor - and guess what the first topic was in the call? The beautiful background and that I took it in sub -10°C.
I think it was profess enough
Infection Control Matters
In this podcast series, we discuss new research and issues on the topic of infection prevention and control...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/infection-control-matters/
State and Parameter Estimation for a Neural Model of Local Field Potentials
Daniele Avitabile, Gabriel J. Lord, Khadija Meddouni
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07842 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07842 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.07842
arXiv:2512.07842v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The study of cortical dynamics during different states such as decision making, sleep and movement, is an important topic in Neuroscience. Modelling efforts aim to relate the neural rhythms present in cortical recordings to the underlying dynamics responsible for their emergence. We present an effort to characterize the neural activity from the cortex of a mouse during natural sleep, captured through local field potential measurements. Our approach relies on using a discretized Wilson--Cowan Amari neural field model for neural activity, along with a data assimilation method that allows the Bayesian joint estimation of the state and parameters. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on synthetic measurements before applying it to a dataset available in literature. Our findings suggest the potential of our approach to characterize the stimulus received by the cortex from other brain regions, while simultaneously inferring a state that aligns with the observed signal.
toXiv_bot_toot
On another unspecified social media, I joined a photography challenge called '52 flickers'. I'm supposed to take and post one photograph per week for the entirety of 2026. No archives, no backups, no spares, no descriptions - just a photo of any topic taken on a given week.
I typically shun this kind of challenges for millions of reasons, but since I take photos almost everyday, I decided to give it a shot. But to make it more interesting for myself, I decided not to use the most frequent categories of photos, i.e. reportage or stock.
Adding a thread here for backup purposes. Always tagging as [#]52flickers2026.
Here goes 👇
#photography #52flickers2026
My thread on the topic, if anyone wants to hear it: https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/115375443649657017
@…
2/2
Meine Lieblingsstelle im #Petitionsausschuss zu #Palantir heute war off topic bei 49:00:
Müller: Ich würde auf den Herrn Büttner kurz politikwissenschaftlich antworten…
Marwein: Das ist schon der dritte Name – er heißt Bückner, und nicht Brückner und nicht Büttner.
Mül…
"I am not at all an expert on the topic you propose I should cover, and I see that those topics on which I claim to have some knowledge are already very expertly covered by colleagues. This is actually a source of relief, since I think that such a resource is highly important, yet my schedule over the next year is already so full that I would not be able to give it the attention it deserves. I wish you all the best for the project!"
This article suggests that research in 3D rendering contributed to machine- assisted assassinations of children in Gaza.
It is a topic very close to my heart. When I was starting my academic career at the dept. of Digital Storytelling of ZGDV in Darmstadt, Germany, I took a lot of inspiration by colleagues from the Institute of Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. Their work was funded by DARPA and a lot of it was about military training. Let alone the fact t…
Today is going to be a good day for several large (very large) shots of Scotch.
Working with client for a test file and asked questions on how we are to set up the test environment. It hit me after I asked that I didn't even know what the hell those changes to the files were for.
I checked our current release documents and the next release documents. Zero notes on the changes. I am the release coordinator and I remember nothing on the topic for the current two releases. …
The Global Industry Summit is bringing together an unprecedented coalition to solve a critical challenge: how can developing nations raise living standards without repeating the fossil-fuel mistakes of industrialized countries?
Governments, business leaders, and innovators will collaborate on low-carbon alternatives that deliver prosperity without the pollution. It's about finding climate solutions that work for both people and the planet.
Im 3. Quartal 2025 stammten 65,1 Prozent des Stroms in #Deutschland aus #ErneuerbarenEnergien. Das ist mehr als im gesamten Vorjahr.
#Photovoltaik und
I just handed in my #PhDThesis. 🥳 Feels unreal. Over seven years of work summarized in 122 pages. The topic is:
Quantifying natural #CO2 emissions from mofettes at the Starzach site in Southwest Germany
#PhDLife
Funny how folks in the West will debate the ethics of going back in time to kill baby Hitler whenever the topic of time travel comes up but no one ever considers going back to stop colonialism.
🤔
they walk every day in big flocks over my #fediverse sky
#timeline #mastodon
trans women need to stop wearing hot topic and amazon basics and start weaving and sewing their own garments, forming an original culture of visual symbolism and pattern akin to many women in ancient societies
@… in #Brno at #openalt. A very interesting topic.
'Tarik - A Golden Axe Story' is being ported/worked on for the Atari 2600 - it's a WIP. Here's POC and the latest version: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/369085-tarik-a-golden-axe-story-great-update-2025
Already the spirit of our schooling is permeated with the feeling that
every subject, every topic, every fact, every professed truth must be
submitted to a certain publicity and impartiality. All proffered
samples of learning must go to the same assay-room and be subjected to
common tests. It is the essence of all dogmatic faiths to hold that
any such "show-down" is sacrilegious and perverse. The characteristic
of religion, from their point of view,…
So … I have been busy contributing to this
tldr: real-time #telegram archive of the Russian War against Ukraine.
It’s 100% built with Claude Code in a bit more than 2 months
it’s near 200.000 lines of #python code, without counting with documentation of course.
check it out !
on the topic of #posiwid, I much too frequently repost Mitchell and Webb's brilliant sketch: The Death Ray
#helpfulbullets #doommelon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HgejSCHRi8
MTOS: A LLM-Driven Multi-topic Opinion Simulation Framework for Exploring Echo Chamber Dynamics
Dingyi Zuo, Hongjie Zhang, Jie Ou, Chaosheng Feng, Shuwan Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12423
@… @… @… I would also be very interested in the slides. A very important topic right now!
The #Chandrayaan-3 propulsion module has been discovered again, at first mistaken for an asteroid on an exotic orbit but swiftly ID'd: https://groups.io/g/mpml/topic/116985030#msg41240
I agree with the storyteller: the experience of having a slave is abhorrent, simulated or not, and this story is a window into something •deep• about the present moment. Even without having slaves, we are all in danger of having a •slaver mindset•. It’s a disease that’s running rampant now in billionaire-shaped techno-utopian circles.
I wrote this thread on the topic earlier:
https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/113295613785073188
…and even having written that, it’s still shocking — not surprising, exactly, but shocking — to hear those thoughts expressed so baldly by the colleague in the story above.
OPNsense 25.7.8 released
November 26, 2025, 12:17:59 PM
#opnsense
'Pfade und Wege' / 'paths and ways' (? Or trails 🤔) #FotoVorschlag
Yes, that's a topic for me again 😉
This is from a trail that I did a couple of times already in different seasons. And this sections just offers such a cool view to the south.
The trail itself varies quite a bit in all terms - which I totally like. Well - enjoy!
Kouji Kozaki and Anna Lisa Gentile are opening #ISWC2025 with almost 400 participants this year. Despite the popularity of generative #Ai the largest topic here is still knowledge representation and readoning
#semanticweb
In #StarTrek, humanity did not just wait for other species to come visit them, but actively sought them out by sending out a number of probes into deep space. And one of them is the topic of today's #TrekTriviaTuesday question.
As always no googling and no spoiling the answer for othe…
I think I have a whole blog post/talk/video in me on this topic, but I feel like most ppl lack imagination when thinking about the DB repository pattern. It doesn't have to be just add/list/get—it's probably even wasteful!
Catchy: ”Database Repository Pattern for People Who Don't Hate Databases”
Want to check the google trends for a topic? Use {gtrendsR} directly from within your favorite language: #googletrends
Whoops. My »USB Sticks Are Not a Back-Up« seminar at Convention Zero got the 8am EST slot on Nov 22nd. I've held similar sessions during HistoCamp and LitCampHD, and the topic has never been a crowd favourite. I guess I'll see how many people will be awake enough at that hour. 😬
Relevant Links:
https://conventionzero.carrd.co/
Day 28: Samira Ahmed
As foreshadowed, we're back to YA land, which represents a lot of what I've been enjoying from the library lately.
I've read "Hollow Fires", "This Book Won't Burn", and "Love, Hate, and other Filters" by Ahmed, along with "Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know" which is quite different. All four are teen ~romances with interesting things to say about racism & growing up as a South Asian Muslim, but whereas the first three are set in small-town Indiana, the third is set in France and includes a historical fiction angle involving Dumas and a hypothetical Muslim woman who was (in this telling) the inspiration for several Lord Byron poems.
Ahmed's novels all include a strong and overt theme of social justice, and it's refreshing to see an author not try to wade around the topic or ignore it. Her romances are complex, with imperfect protagonists and endings that aren't always "happily ever after" although they're satisfying and believable.
My library has a plethora of similar authors I've been enjoying, including Adiba Jaigirdar (who appeared earlier in this list), Sabaa Tahir ("All my Rage" is fantastic but I'm less of a fan of her fantasy stuff), Sabina Khan ("The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali"), and Randa Abdel-Fattah ("Does My Head Look Big In This?"; from an earlier era). Ahmed gets the spot here because I really like her politics and the way she works them into her writing. Her characters are unapologetic advocates against things like book bans, and Ahmed doesn't second-guess them or try to make things more palatable for those who want to ban books (or whatever). Her historical fiction in "Mad..." is also really cool in terms of "huh that could actually totally be true" and grappling with literary sexism from ages past.
#30AuthorsNoMen
This is a good video about Masculinity. I generally agree with it. Galloway get a lot wrong on gender. Though I don't really think he is a grifter. I think he cares about the topic and wants a good out come not too far off what the person in this video wants.
As I think more about big tent politics I wonder if this video could do more calling in then calling out. There are real enemies out there and to me, at this time, Galloway is a mistaken ally rather then an enemy
Trump Orders States Not to Protect Children From Predatory AI: "States have been the only effective line of defense against AI harms."
On the topic of states rights, Donald Trump doesn’t exactly follow the party line. During his first term, he couched himself in populist, small-government rhetoric — even as he attacked individual states that dared to defend migrants and legalize marijuana.
Kubernetes Server Side Apply is the topic for the next few minutes at #12Clouds thanks to Rafa Brito
Doc2Query : Topic-Coverage based Document Expansion and its Application to Dense Retrieval via Dual-Index Fusion
Tzu-Lin Kuo, Wei-Ning Chiu, Wei-Yun Ma, Pu-Jen Cheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09557
RE: https://mastodon.social/@PrototypeFund/115626856685738684
A VERY important topic right now… resilience is so critical!
Proposition 50,
one of the most expensive ballot measures in state history,
was initially a coin toss when the state Legislature placed it on the Nov. 4 ballot in August.
But supporters, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, successfully used the proposal as a visceral way for Trump opponents to push back against the president during an off-year election about the esoteric topic of congressional redistricting.
Torquing Cars
Each week we will bringing you the latest motoring news and reviews as well as breaking down out Top 5 topic...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/torquing-cars/
I just decided that I won't blog about the last two days of our #Schwarzwald vacation. I don't have shareable photos or stories from those days. It just feels like writing for the sake of completeness,not for the photos.
All the days can be viewed here:
The topic has also highlighted the rise of “fictosexuality” and fan culture in Japan, where many young people form strong emotional connections with fictional characters.
The rise of candidates centering gun violence is a result of the growing prevention movement across the US, which has become something of 👉a pipeline for new candidates running for office.
#Maxwell #Frost, the nation’s first gen Z US representative, started off as a volunteer before becoming organizing director for <…
RE: https://mastodon.social/@PrototypeFund/115626856685738684
A VERY important topic right now… resilience is so critical!
Create RSS feeds from any Google News webpage, search result or topic
(World, Technology, Business, Sports).
Just copy and paste the Google News URL below to get started.
https://rss.app/rss-feed/google-news-rss-feed
OPNsense 25.7.7 released
This update ships a number of third party security updates, firewall live
log improvements based on user feedback from 25.7.6, plus minor fixes and
improvements like usual.
https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=49616.msg25204…
Nice, I wanted to write about that topic. And there.. Someone wrote about it already.
That's the reason why I never recorded myself walnut walking into the scene.
Even though it looks really cool,it really disturbs my hiking experience and totally turns into filming.
https://blog.lauram…
This is a human-curated small selection of interesting accounts to help you get started on Mastodon and the Fediverse.
Once you follow a few people on a particular topic, you will discover even more people through all the posts they share etc.
For more info on how to follow the accounts listed, see the Help section
https://fedi.directory/
Yesterday I was surprised that my blog post about IP tracking vs "conspiracy" my-phone-is-spying gets low but constant visits. - I reviewed it, corrected a couple of spelling mistakes and added some details.
After all, I'm just happy that I wrote this blog post. I often simply use the blog to "offload" a thought process out of my brain. No matter if someone reads it.