Tootfinder

Lithuania-based PR agency Wellstone PR launches Synapse, an AI tool that automatically drafts expert comment email responses to journalist queries (Rob Waugh/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/pr-agency-sells-ai-too…

PR agency sells AI tool which sends out automated expert comment to journalists
A PR agency is selling an AI tool which automatically answers pitches from journalists on services such as ResponseSource, HARO and Qwoted.

Did you know that in two states in the USA there is no “Democratic Party” but a merged coalition that acts in some ways like the Democratic Party but has different values and a different platform?
In Minnesota, for example, there's the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (which was a merge in 1944 between the Farmer-Labor Party and the Democratic Party), which has values like Democratic Socialism and left-wing populism!
The other one is in North Dakota, the Democrati…

Overly academic/distanced ethical discussions
Had a weird interaction with @/brainwane@social.coop just now. I misinterpreted one of their posts quoting someone else and I think the combination of that plus an interaction pattern where I'd assume their stance on something and respond critically to that ended up with me getting blocked. I don't have hard feelings exactly, and this post is only partly about this particular person, but I noticed something interesting by the end of the conversation that had been bothering me. They repeatedly criticized me for assuming what their position was, but never actually stated their position. They didn't say: "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, it's actually Y." They just said "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, please don't assume my position!" I get that it's annoying to have people respond to a straw man version of your argument, but when I in response asked some direct questions about what their position was, they gave some non-answers and then blocked me. It's entirely possible it's a coincidence, and they just happened to run out of patience on that iteration, but it makes me take their critique of my interactions a bit less seriously. I suspect that they just didn't want to hear what I was saying, while at the same time they wanted to feel as if they were someone who values public critique and open discussion of tricky issues (if anyone reading this post also followed our interaction and has a different opinion of my behavior, I'd be glad to hear it; it's possible In effectively being an asshole here and it would be useful to hear that if so).
In any case, the fact that at the end of the entire discussion, I'm realizing I still don't actually know their position on whether they think the AI use case in question is worthwhile feels odd. They praised the system on several occasions, albeit noting some drawbacks while doing so. They said that the system was possibly changing their anti-AI stance, but then got mad at me for assuming this meant that they thought this use-case was justified. Maybe they just haven't made up their mind yet but didn't want to say that?
Interestingly, in one of their own blog posts that got linked in the discussion, they discuss a different AI system, and despite listing a bunch of concrete harms, conclude that it's okay to use it. That's fine; I don't think *every* use of AI is wrong on balance, but what bothered me was that their post dismissed a number of real ethical issues by saying essentially "I haven't seen calls for a boycott over this issue, so it's not a reason to stop use." That's an extremely socially conformist version of ethics that doesn't sit well with me. The discussion also ended up linking this post: https://chelseatroy.com/2024/08/28/does-ai-benefit-the-world/ which bothered me in a related way. In it, Troy describes classroom teaching techniques for introducing and helping students explore the ethics of AI, and they seem mostly great. They avoid prescribing any particular correct stance, which is important when teaching given the power relationship, and they help students understand the limitations of their perspectives regarding global impacts, which is great. But the overall conclusion of the post is that "nobody is qualified to really judge global impacts, so we should focus on ways to improve outcomes instead of trying to judge them." This bothers me because we actually do have a responsibility to make decisive ethical judgments despite limitations of our perspectives. If we never commit to any ethical judgment against a technology because we think our perspective is too limited to know the true impacts (which I'll concede it invariably is) then we'll have to accept every technology without objection, limiting ourselves to trying to improve their impacts without opposing them. Given who currently controls most of the resources that go into exploration for new technologies, this stance is too permissive. Perhaps if our objection to a technology was absolute and instantly effective, I'd buy the argument that objecting without a deep global view of the long-term risks is dangerous. As things stand, I think that objecting to the development/use of certain technologies in certain contexts is necessary, and although there's a lot of uncertainly, I expect strongly enough that the overall outcomes of objection will be positive that I think it's a good thing to do.
The deeper point here I guess is that this kind of "things are too complicated, let's have a nuanced discussion where we don't come to any conclusions because we see a lot of unknowns along with definite harms" really bothers me.

You know that it's a rough day at #SCOTUS when it hands down a ruling from which *eight* justices dissent (albeit in different parts).
https://bsky.app/profile/stevevladeck.bsky.soc…

Time for authors to get off Audible (and ideally Amazon as well) before you'll find yourself trapped in a death spiral.
And yes, I know how hard that would hit most. But if Amazon is able to destroy competitors, nothing will stop them from exploiting you even more.
https://www.instagram.com/r…

Geometry on curves which go around a Whitney umbrella
Masayuki Hara
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15293 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15293

Geometry on curves which go around a Whitney umbrella
We consider curves which go around Whitney umbrella. Then we consider the geodesic and the normal curvatures, ruled surfaces generated by the normal vector and normal developable surfaces with respect to the tangent and bi-tangent vectors of the curve. Then we obtain several functions which represents geometry on Whitney umbrella. Looking at the top terms of them with respect to the radius, we study geometry on Whitney umbrella.

Of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most
#ripozzyosbourne #ozzyosbourne

I went into the Breazzano Family Center for Business Education which is an extension of the Johnson School of Business in Collegetown, here a stairwise rises into an atrium from out of the lobby
#cornell #photo #photography

The Unicode character 🗿 (U 1F5FF) is named "Moyai" which I thought it was typo mistake for "Moai" which are the stone statues in Easter Island, Chile.
Turns "Moyai" are statues in Niijima, Japan which were inspired on the ones from Easter Island.
This makes me a little disappointed but it makes me very happy that the Japanese like our statues.
#chile

BTW, if you've ever wondered what junk food was launched the year you were born, I mean who hasn't? Here is a website to answer that question. Just use the arrow thingies in the bottom corners to move forward or back to find your year of birth.
I was born in 1956, which means the launch of Cocoa Puffs, which is so appropriate for me. I was literally "Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs".
https://www.lovefood.com/galleries/357379/favorite-us-and-canadian-foods-launched-the-year-you-were-born

Infinite convex geometries with lower semi-modularity and join semi-distributivity
Adam Mata
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15511 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15…

Infinite convex geometries with lower semi-modularity and join semi-distributivity
The following article treats about convex geometries which are lower semi-modular and join semi-distributive lattices. Firstly, it is shown that there is a class $K$ of infinite convex geometries which can be build out of finite ones by using the construction of a union of a chain. Then it is shown that elements of $K$ preserve lower semi-modularity and join semi-distributivity which are not default properties in the infinite setting. It is also discussed that not all of the infinite convex geo…

Do I know anyone using DayOne? I am curious if the application has seen any improvements in the last couple of years.
I have abandoned it 3 years ago due to “too many thin but deep paper cuts” mostly around the Markdown editor which led me to feel like the focus of the team behind it is somewhere else.
I have been using Bear meanwhile. Which has been absolutely fabulous in terms of the quality of the editor. I am missing some features in Bear that I really like & appreciate:
1) automatic location; 2) on this day; 3) show entries from location.

In which I spend months in apparently unexplored parts of the nondeterministic-finite-automaton territory and get a good result. Once again, of interest only to people who care about ε-closures. (Those people are my people.)
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/20

QRS: Finite-state Struggles

Not an assault. Genocide.
One that the UK – for which the BBC is the propaganda channel – is complicit in.
#israel

Israeli military says first stages of assault on Gaza City have begun
Call-up letters have gone out to 60,000 reservists to bolster an operation which is expected to last until next year.

Ashby, which offers an AI-powered talent platform combining applications, CRM, search, and more, raised a $50M Series D, following a $30M Series C in 2024 (Judy Rider/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/ai-powered-hr-platform-ashby-raise/

Exclusive: With OpenAI and Shopify As Customers, Ashby Raises $50M Series D For AI-Powered Talent Platform
In a Crunchbase News exclusive, San Francisco-based Ashby, provider of an “all-in-one” AI-powered HR platform, says it has raised $50 million in a Series D round of funding, just over a year after raising its $30 million Series C.

Sonnet 013 - XIII
O! that you were your self; but, love, you are
No longer yours, than you your self here live:
Against this coming end you should prepare,
And your sweet semblance to some other give:
So should that beauty which you hold in lease
Find no determination; then you were
Yourself again, after yourself's decease,
When your sweet issue your sweet form should bear.
Who lets so fair a house fall to decay,
Which husbandry…

Successive Halving with Learning Curve Prediction via Latent Kronecker Gaussian Processes
Jihao Andreas Lin, Nicolas Mayoraz, Steffen Rendle, Dima Kuzmin, Emil Praun, Berivan Isik
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14818

Successive Halving with Learning Curve Prediction via Latent Kronecker Gaussian Processes
Successive Halving is a popular algorithm for hyperparameter optimization which allocates exponentially more resources to promising candidates. However, the algorithm typically relies on intermediate performance values to make resource allocation decisions, which can cause it to prematurely prune slow starters that would eventually become the best candidate. We investigate whether guiding Successive Halving with learning curve predictions based on Latent Kronecker Gaussian Processes can overcom…

Fantasy football bold predictions for '25 NFL season: Bo Nix a top-five QB; rookie to finish as TE1 again? https://www.nfl.com/news/fantasy-football-bold-predictions-for-25-nfl-season-bo-nix-a-top-five-qb-rookie-to…

@… which fancy tool?

Reasoning is about giving reasons
Krunal Shah, Dan Roth
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14488 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14488

Reasoning is about giving reasons
Convincing someone of the truth value of a premise requires understanding and articulating the core logical structure of the argument which proves or disproves the premise. Understanding the logical structure of an argument refers to understanding the underlying "reasons" which make up the proof or disproof of the premise - as a function of the "logical atoms" in the argument. While it has been shown that transformers can "chain" rules to derive simple arguments, the challenge of articulating t…

If you see posts about how Netanyahu is playing Trump — which is plausible, Trump’s a vain nincompoop and people play him all the time — please •mind the undertone•.
Are they really taking about Netanyahu? Or is “Netanyahu” standing in for a larger group?
Is the focus on Trump being a gullible fool? Or is the focus on insinuating that some shadowy group secretly controls world politics?
Take a moment to digest this from @…, notice and recognize the pattern, and be aware as you scroll.
https://babka.social/@dukepaaron/114725457675254104

yahoo_ads: Yahoo! advertisement words
A network of words extracted from phrases on which advertisers bid, in Yahoo! advertisements. A node is a word and a directed edge (i, j) denotes word i comes after the word j.
This network has 653260 nodes and 2931708 edges.
Tags: Informational, Language, Unweighted
https://

A blunt question: Which hashing algorithm do you prefer to use or even another unpopular algorithm? 🤔
I would be grateful for sharing the toot.
(we just discuss it without argument)
#hash #code #sha

The shared braincell was late to work :neocat_woozy:

Local fibrations and morphisms of relative toposes
L\'eo Bartoli, Olivia Caramello
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14379 https://arxiv…

Local fibrations and morphisms of relative toposes
We introduce the notion of local fibration, a generalization of the notion of fibration which takes into account the presence of Grothendieck topologies on the two categories, and show that the classical results about fibrations lift to this more general setting. As an application of this notion, we obtain a characterization of the functors between relative sites that induce a morphism between the corresponding relative toposes: these are exactly the morphisms of sites which are morphisms of lo…

I hit 1,000 miles today, which was my goal for 2025. Some of it was on a bike/trainer in my basement during winter, and this month was mostly on a (borrowed) ebike, and the rest was all on my old Trek 7200.
At some point I need to return the ebike and I'm hoping I can get my own before 2026 so I can make commuting to work by bike a normal thing.
#bikeTooter

I was in fact very doubtful about if it can happen but the local hunter who will take us out is extremely knowledgeable and is sure it can work. We'll see, its hard to beat that kind of knowledge experience, which we can supplement with satellite photos analysis from my @… colleagues in the ice service. And in fact we could watch another sled navigate the same route while we discussed #Fielddiary

Which 10 Players Have The Best Odds to Win 2025 Defensive Player of the Year? https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/who-10-players-best-odds-win-defensive-player-year

so why on earth were CNCF/K8s kicked off Slack's enterprise plan, anyway?
cost? how much can it cost to store a bunch of chat messages for two moderately popular OSS groups, ten dollars a day? all of the capital cost has been paid at this point, it's just the marginal one at question, which cannot be high unless Slack's infrastructure is dramatically worse than any reason could allow
the amount of goodwill they know they'll lose can't possibly compensate the c…

Units in Singapore's military have been called in to help combat a cyberattack against critical infrastructure by UNC3886, which has ties to China.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250719-singapore-military-helps-battle-cyberattac…

Singapore military helps battle cyberattack: minister
Units in Singapore's military have been called in to help combat a cyberattack against critical infrastructure, the country's defence minister said Saturday -- a hack attempt attributed to an espionage group experts have linked to China.

Quantum Blockchain Survey: Foundations, Trends, and Gaps
Saurav Ghosh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13720 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.137…

Quantum Blockchain Survey: Foundations, Trends, and Gaps
Quantum computing poses fundamental risks to classical blockchain systems by undermining widely used cryptographic primitives. In response, two major research directions have emerged: post-quantum blockchains, which integrate quantum-resistant algorithms, and quantum blockchains, which leverage quantum properties such as entanglement and quantum key distribution. This survey reviews key developments in both areas, analyzing their cryptographic foundations, architectural designs, and implementat…

Mind and Motion Aligned: A Joint Evaluation IsaacSim Benchmark for Task Planning and Low-Level Policies in Mobile Manipulation
Nikita Kachaev, Andrei Spiridonov, Andrey Gorodetsky, Kirill Muravyev, Nikita Oskolkov, Aditya Narendra, Vlad Shakhuro, Dmitry Makarov, Aleksandr I. Panov, Polina Fedotova, Alexey K. Kovalev
https://arxiv.org/abs/2…

Mind and Motion Aligned: A Joint Evaluation IsaacSim Benchmark for Task Planning and Low-Level Policies in Mobile Manipulation
Benchmarks are crucial for evaluating progress in robotics and embodied AI. However, a significant gap exists between benchmarks designed for high-level language instruction following, which often assume perfect low-level execution, and those for low-level robot control, which rely on simple, one-step commands. This disconnect prevents a comprehensive evaluation of integrated systems where both task planning and physical execution are critical. To address this, we propose Kitchen-R, a novel ben…

The anger of a woman is the greatest evil with which you can threaten your
enemies.
-- Bonnard

An elementary construction of the ring of dual $K$-$Q$-cancellation property
Shinsuke Iwao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14484 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.1448…

An elementary construction of the ring of dual $K$-$Q$-cancellation property
This paper presents an elementary introduction on $K$-theoretic $Q$-functions, which were introduced by Ikeda and Naruse in 2013. These functions, which serve as $K$-theoretic analogs of Schur $Q$-functions, are known to possess combinatorial and algebraic constructions. In a 2022 paper, the author introduced ``$β$-deformed power-sums" to provide a simpler, more algebraic construction of these functions. Since the original approach relies on fermionic operators and vacuum expectation values, t…

“Therefore, because baby loves baby, baby must be me.”
https://blog.jle.im/entry/the-baby-paradox-in-haskell.html

The Baby Paradox in Haskell
Everybody Loves My Baby is a Jazz Standard from 1924 with the famous lyric: Everybody loves my baby, but my baby don’t love nobody but me. Which is often formalized as: \begin{align} \text{Axiom}_1 . & \forall x. \text{Loves}(x, \text{Baby}) \\ \text{Axiom}_2 . \forall x. & \text{Loves}(\text{Baby}, x) \implies x = me \end{align} Let’s prove in Haskell (in one line) that these two statements, taken together, imply that I am my own baby.

First round PI workup on the switch line card is done.
All of the other rails are fine, the only one with any significant issues of concern is 1V0 which I am suspecting might be a nothingburger (test point too close to the DC-DC so the local bypass caps dont have much of an impact).
Gonna solder a probe on to get a measurement at the actual BGA vias and see how noisy the rail is there, then probably put some diff probes on the QSGMII while I've got the thing decabled.

'Veto the law!' — Protests held across Ukraine after parliament passes bill weakening anti-corruption institutions: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/22/veto-the-law-protests-held.html

Reason #2608 I do not trust “AI” to generate captions or transcripts:
“Complete silence is always hallucinated as 'ترجمة نانسي قنقر' in Arabic which translates as 'Translation by Nancy Qunqar'”
More examples in replies.
#a11y #accessibility

Upcoming Event – Nonconformity and Revolutions:
https://ift.tt/GmDH1uX
When: June 21, 2025 in Bath, Somerset, England 2025 marks the 250th anniversaries which commemorate…
via Input 4 RELCFP

Upcoming Event - Nonconformity and Revolutions: - American Society of Church History
When: June 21, 2025 in Bath, Somerset, England 2025 marks the 250th anniversaries which commemorate the American Revolution. Not only a period of geopolitical upheaval, it saw a transformation in the theologies and networks that had shaped eighteenth-century Dissent throughout the British Atlantic world. Notions of liberty and toleration were again brought into relief; events which were…

How long until the internet, which allowed a generation to benefit from a vast wealth of human knowledge, becomes a swamp filled with generated #AI pollution? It may already be too late. https://www.theregist…

The launch of ChatGPT polluted the world forever, like the first atomic weapons tests
Feature: Academics mull the need for the digital equivalent of low-background steel

While the kids play sportsball, the coaches compare the various aches and minor ailments to which our middle-aged bodies have decided to subject us.

Cursing Out Loud. Pets in Stores. Which Public Behaviors Do You Find Rude?
#survey

Cursing Out Loud. Pets in Stores. Which Public Behaviors Do You Find Rude?
Cursing in public. Bringing pets into stores. Blasting music. Smoking near others. Find out if your etiquette views are typical for your age.

Xelix, which uses AI to automate businesses' accounts payable workflows by connecting with ERP systems, raised a $160M Series B led by Insight Partners (Ryan Lawler/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/fintech-deals/2025/07/21/xelix-160-million-accounts-…

Xelix raises $160M to automate accounts payable
Back office operations fit neatly into AI's strengths.

Continual Neural Topic Model
Charu Karakkaparambil James, Waleed Mustafa, Marius Kloft, Sophie Fellenz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15612 https://arxiv.org/p…

Continual Neural Topic Model
In continual learning, our aim is to learn a new task without forgetting what was learned previously. In topic models, this translates to learning new topic models without forgetting previously learned topics. Previous work either considered Dynamic Topic Models (DTMs), which learn the evolution of topics based on the entire training corpus at once, or Online Topic Models, which are updated continuously based on new data but do not have long-term memory. To fill this gap, we propose the Continu…

AaŠaargh.
https://functional.cafe/@loke/114724782345547751

@… Temporal seems to use RFC 9557 which is a much stricter date format https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/do

yahoo_ads: Yahoo! advertisement words
A network of words extracted from phrases on which advertisers bid, in Yahoo! advertisements. A node is a word and a directed edge (i, j) denotes word i comes after the word j.
This network has 653260 nodes and 2931708 edges.
Tags: Informational, Language, Unweighted
https://

DEPTH: Hallucination-Free Relation Extraction via Dependency-Aware Sentence Simplification and Two-tiered Hierarchical Refinement
Yupei Yang, Fan Feng, Lin Yang, Wanxi Deng, Lin Qu, Biwei Huang, Shikui Tu, Lei Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14391

DEPTH: Hallucination-Free Relation Extraction via Dependency-Aware Sentence Simplification and Two-tiered Hierarchical Refinement
Relation extraction enables the construction of structured knowledge for many downstream applications. While large language models (LLMs) have shown great promise in this domain, most existing methods concentrate on relation classification, which predicts the semantic relation type between a related entity pair. However, we observe that LLMs often struggle to reliably determine whether a relation exists, especially in cases involving complex sentence structures or intricate semantics, which lea…

Which Tight Ends Did Raiders’ Brock Bowers Look Up to? https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/-tight-ends-las-vegas-brock-bowers-look-up-to-travis-kelce-chiefs-george-kittle

So it's been an even more hectic afternoon than usual, preparing kit, including 2 new and rather complex instruments we've never used before, for departure tomorrow morning. We managed to get most things ready, but it's been quite the introduction for my colleague Abraham who has never been to Greenland before! But who seems very at home in the snow practicing with the EM which will measure sea ice thickness (we hope). #FieldDiary

I found out one of my neighbors has an Aventon Pace (either 500.3 or 500.2) and said he loves it. Good to know. He got it at Erik's Bikes, which is where I hope to get one at some point.
#biking #bikeTooter #ebike

Democrats have an age problem
House Republicans managed to pass their draconian budget bill,
-- which promises to make massive cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and food assistance,
-- early Thursday morning by a narrow one-vote margin
💥that was only possible due the deaths of three Democrats in this current Congress. 
The latest Democrat to pass away was 75-year-old Representative Gerry Connolly of Virginia, who died on Wednesday after battling esophageal cancer.

Republicans Pass Horrid Tax Bill Thanks to Democrats Dying in Office
Republicans passed their terrible tax bill by one vote. Guess how many Democrats died in office this year.

Chinese national who sabotaged Ohio company’s systems handed four-year jail stint
https://therecord.media/chinese-national-sentenced-prison

Chinese national who sabotaged Ohio company’s systems handed four-year jail stint
A Houston resident was sentenced to four years in prison for intentionally installing malicious code on his employer's computer systems, which he activated when his role was terminated.

Putin visits center for nuclear weapons research day after Trump says Ukraine can't win without striking Russia: https://benborges.xyz/2025/08/22/putin-visits-center-for-nuclear.html

On Hamiltonian bypasses in digraphs and bipartite digraphs
Samvel Kh. Darbinyan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15435 https://arxiv.org/pd…

On Hamiltonian bypasses in digraphs and bipartite digraphs
A Hamiltonian path in a digraph $D$ in which the initial vertex dominates the terminal vertex is called a Hamiltonian bypass. Let $D$ be a 2-strong digraph of order $p\geq 3$ and let $z$ be some vertex of $D$. Suppose that every vertex of $D$ other than $z$ has degree at least $p$. We introduce and study a conjecture which claims that there exists a smallest integer $k$ such that if $d(z)\geq k$, then $D$ contains a Hamiltonian bypass. In this paper, we prove: (i) If $D$ is Hamiltonian or $z$ h…

Inside Disney's plan to limit AI companies' use of its IP, which led Disney and Comcast to sue Midjourney; Disney is also in talks with companies like OpenAI (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters

"Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though
ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak,
mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers,
thou has dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams has
moved amid the world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust,
and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigat…

xLight, which is developing a new class of laser for EUV machines in partnership with ASML, raised a $40M Series B led by Playground Global (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-startup-xlig…

ELATE: Evolutionary Language model for Automated Time-series Engineering
Andrew Murray, Danial Dervovic, Michael Cashmore
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14667 https://

ELATE: Evolutionary Language model for Automated Time-series Engineering
Time-series prediction involves forecasting future values using machine learning models. Feature engineering, whereby existing features are transformed to make new ones, is critical for enhancing model performance, but is often manual and time-intensive. Existing automation attempts rely on exhaustive enumeration, which can be computationally costly and lacks domain-specific insights. We introduce ELATE (Evolutionary Language model for Automated Time-series Engineering), which leverages a langu…

roadnet: U.S. roads (CA, PA, TX)
Road networks from three US states (CA, PA, TX), in which edges are stretches of road and vertices are intersections of roads.
This network has 1971281 nodes and 5533214 edges.
Tags: Transportation, Roads, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net/roadnet

Microsoft’s 2025 work trend index report found that many workers are increasingly grappling with “infinite workdays”,
which start before sunrise and stretch late into the night.
They are interrupted by some 270 pinging notifications along the way, about one every two minutes.
https://www.…

Breaking down the infinite workday
To unlock AI’s full potential, we need to clear one key barrier. A follow-up to the 2025 Work Trend Index.

Reka AI, which aims to make more efficient LLMs, raised $110M from Nvidia, Snowflake, and others at a $1B valuation, up from ~$300M in 2023, per PitchBook (Brunella Tipismana Urbano/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Russia opposes European troops in Ukraine under Trump-backed security guarantees, Lavrov says: https://benborges.xyz/2025/08/21/russia-opposes-european-troops-in.html

Apple strikes a first-look deal with Peter Chernin's North Road studio, which has been aligned with Netflix for five years, to give Apple access to new films (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

contiguous_usa: Contiguous states (USA)
A network of contiguous states in the USA, in which each state is a node and two nodes are connected if they share a land-based geographic border. The dataset includes the lower 48 states, and the District of Columbia.
This network has 49 nodes and 107 edges.
Tags: Transportation, Roads, Unweighted

Onebrief, which makes military workflow software, raised a $20M Series C extension led by Battery Ventures at a $1.1B valuation, taking the round total to $70M (Chris Metinko/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/enterprise-softw

Exclusive: Defense tech startup Onebrief hits $1.1B valuation
Onebrief's Series C extension was led by Battery Ventures.

Officials in a large North Texas county decided this week to cut more than 100 Election Day polling sites -- and reduce the number of early voting locations,
amid growing concern about GOP efforts to limit voting access ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
The 3-2 vote on Tuesday by commissioners in Tarrant County, 💥which includes Fort Worth,
came one day after Donald Trump vowed to end the use of mail-in ballots.
The president lacks the unilateral power to decid…

A Texas County Cuts Over 100 Polling Sites as Trump Attacks Mail-In Voting Nationally
The decision by commissioners in Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, comes amid growing concern about GOP efforts to limit voting access ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

Trump's intelligence chief ordered halt to intelligence sharing on Russia-Ukraine peace talks among 'Five Eye' allies, CBS reports: https://benborges.xyz/2025/08/22/trumps-intelligence-chief-ordered-halt.html

Amsterdam-listed firm Universal Music Group files confidentially for a US listing, which would fulfill the terms of a deal with Bill Ackman's Pershing Square (Anthony Hughes/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20…

unicodelang: Languages spoken by country (2015)
A bipartite network of languages and the countries in which they are spoken, as estimated by Unicode. Edges are weighted by the proportion of the given country's population that is literate in a particular language.
This network has 868 nodes and 1255 edges.
Tags: Informational, Relatedness, Weighted

BetterComp, which provides compensation management services for HR teams, raised a $33M Series A led by Ten Coves Capital (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2025/07/22/bettercomp-raises-33m-expand-compensation-management-pl…

BetterComp raises $33M to expand compensation management platform - SiliconANGLE
BetterComp raises $33M to expand compensation management platform - SiliconANGLE

Hi, it’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 
If we do not assert ourselves and enshrine our rights
— and demand healthcare, and education, and dignity
— the alternative is barbarism,
which is what we are contending with now.
If we do not win unions, healthcare, wages, and ending endless war,
then we will condemn ourselves to barbarism.
𝗜 𝗿𝗲𝗳𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗴𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘂𝗽. 𝗜 𝗿𝗲𝗳𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝘂𝗯𝗺𝗶𝘁 𝗺𝘆𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗳𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲. 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗮 𝗹𝗶𝗳𝗲.
𝘐𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘤𝘢𝘯, 𝘱𝘪𝘵𝘤𝘩 𝘪𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 …

Donate to AOC.
Alexandria is fighting for progressive policies that can help create social, racial, and economic justice for all. That's why she's taking $0 from corporations and lobbyists and is relying on the grassroots to power her campaign.

Actor Noel Clarke loses his UK libel case against the Guardian over an investigation in which he was accused of sexual misconduct by more than 20 women (Haroon Siddique/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/aug

UK startup Inforcer, which helps SMBs automate and manage Microsoft 365, security, and more, raised a $35M Series B, a source says at a $200M valuation (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media)
https://www.upstartsmedia.com/p/inforcer-raises-35-million-ai-smb

The British Startup Helping SMBs Get Ready To Use AI
Inforcer's software helps IT shops manage security for SMB clients. Now the startup's raised $35 million in a Series B round to get them AI-ready, too.

internet_top_pop: Internet topology (PoP level) (1969-2012)
Assorted snapshots of internet graph at the Point of Presence (PoP) level (which lies between the IP and AS levels), collected from around the world and at various times. The earliest snapshots are for ARPANET (1969-1972), with a few more from pre-2000. Most are from 2006 onward. Metadata include link type or speed, longitudes, and latitudes of nodes, URL, and date of record.
This network has 56 nodes and 75 edges.

SEC filing: Ambiq Micro, which makes ultra-low power chips, is seeking to raise as much as $85M from its IPO, marketing 3.4M shares at $22 to $25 each (Anthony Hughes/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-21/arm…

Chipmaker Ambiq Micro Starts Marketing US IPO
Ambiq Micro Inc., a maker of ultra-low power semiconductors for artificial intelligence applications, is seeking to raise as much as $85 million from an initial public offering.

Hegseth fires head of Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse

The firing follows a June preliminary assessment from the DIA
— the Pentagon’s main intelligence wing
— of the Iran military strikes,
which prompted vicious backlash from the Trump administration.

Hegseth fires head of Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has fired Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the latest national security senior officer to be purged.

elite: Barnes-Burkett elite affiliations (1962)
A small bipartite network of the affiliations among elite individuals and the corporate, museum, university boards, or social clubs to which they belonged, from 1962.
This network has 44 nodes and 99 edges.
Tags: Social, Affiliation, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net/…

Amazon is acquiring Bee, which sells a $50 device that resembles a Fitbit, is always listening, transcribes conversations, and serves up daily AI summaries (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/711621/amazon-bee-ai-wearable-acquisition

Amazon buys Bee AI wearable that listens to everything you say
Amazon is acquiring Bee, an AI startup that created a wrist-based device that listens to everything you say and creates AI-generated transcripts.

bitcoin_trust: Bitcoin OTC trust network (2017)
A network of who-trusts-whom relationships among users of the Bitcoin OTC platform. Each directed edge (i,j,w) represents the rating of user j by user i, in which i assigns j a weight w on a scale of -10 (total distrust) to 10 (total trust) in steps of 1.
This network has 5881 nodes and 35592 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Weighted, Signed, Timestamps

A new bill championed by President Trump calls for cutting $295 billion in federal spending over the next decade from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as SNAP or food stamps, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
“What are we supposed to do?” Ms. Williams said. “I know he doesn’t need it, but the rest of us do

‘An Existential Threat’: Food Banks Brace for Fallout From Trump Cuts
New York City food banks aren’t sure how they will survive the administration’s funding cuts, which could also affect the programs they turn to for help.

A profile of Stability AI, which under CEO Prem Akkaraju and Chair Sean Parker has shifted from building frontier AI models to a Hollywood-focused SaaS company (Zoë Schiffer/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-hollywood-stability/

AI Isn’t Coming for Hollywood. It's Already Arrived
An early winner in the generative AI wars was near collapse—then bet everything on a star-studded comeback. Can Stability AI beat the competition?

windsurfers: Windsurfers network (1986)
A network of interpersonal contacts among windsurfers in southern California during the Fall of 1986. The edge weights indicate the perception of social affiliations majored by the tasks in which each individual was asked​ to sort cards with other surfer’s name in the order of closeness.
This network has 43 nodes and 336 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Weighted

“The Americans must understand—any US military incursion will undoubtedly lead to irreversible consequences.”
Experts believe one of the repercussions of US military adventurism against the Islamic Republic would be the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran controls.
According to Tanker Trackers data, more than 80 percent of oil passes through this narrow strip 
-- and if it’s closed, the global economy and energy sector will be dealt a heavy blow.
Most multi-nation…

Strait of Hormuz closure in event of US aggression against Iran to paralyze world economy
As regional tensions escalate amid the Israeli regime’s brutal aggression against the Islamic Republic, the possibility of the closure of Strait of Hormuz is a possibility, according to experts.

Philadelphia-based Asylon, which modifies Boston Dynamics' robot dog Spot into DroneDog, raised a $26M Series B led by Insight, taking its total funding to $45M (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/22/robot-guard-dogs-help-asylon-rai…

Robot guard dogs help Asylon raise a $26M Series B | TechCrunch
DroneDogs can be sent to places unsafe for humans or real dogs and can do tasks like dangerous chemical detection. 

baseball: Baseball steroid use (2008)
Two networks representing steroid use among baseball players. First, a bipartite network of players and their steroid providers (of illegal performance-enhancing substances). Second, a one-mode projection of players, which are linked if they have a common supplier.
This network has 72 nodes and 1089 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Weighted, Projection

NYC grants Waymo its first permit, which extends through late September, to test up to eight of its autonomous vehicles in Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn (Samantha Subin/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/22/waymo-permit-new-york-city-nyc-rides.html

Waymo granted first permit to begin testing autonomous vehicles in New York City
Waymo is getting one step closer to starting its engine in New York City.

Bees are collapsing in the U.S.
A key to their secrets might vanish.
The Bee Lab’s potential closure comes at a tough time for bees.

Droege studies native bees,
the types of pollinators that only live in the wild,
as opposed to honeybees,
which are farmed and bred for profit.
Entomologists stress that honeybees and native bees are different —
sort of like farmed chickens and wild birds.
But they can be exposed to the same threats,

Bees are collapsing in the U.S. A key to their secrets might vanish.
The top federal lab on native bees is set to close under President Trump’s budget.

Databricks plans to acquire Tecton, which helps companies build and deploy ML applications, for an undisclosed sum; Tecton was valued at $900M in 2022 (Krystal Hu/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/databricks-buy-sequoia-…

highschool: Illinois high school students (1958)
A network of friendships among male students in a small high school in Illinois from 1958. An arc points from student i to student j if i named j as a friend, in either of two identical surveys (from Fall and Spring semesters). Edge weights are the number of surveys in which the friendship was named.
This network has 70 nodes and 366 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Weighted

Vivo demos Vivo Vision, its first MR headset, which looks like an Apple Vision Pro clone but is ~40% lighter with micro-OLED displays, and could cost ~$1,400 (David Heaney/UploadVR)
https://www.uploadvr.com/vivo-vision-discovery-edition-launches-as-store-demo/

Vivo Vision Is 40% Lighter Than Apple Vision Pro & "Could" Be 1/3 The Price
China's Vivo Vision is 40% lighter than Apple Vision Pro, and "could" be one third the price. But for now, it's just an in-store demo, not a product.

Russia orders that state-backed messenger app MAX, which critics say could be used to track users, must be pre-installed on phones and tablets from next month (Andrew Osborn/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/russia-

A look at Apple's conservative approach to M&A, which may need to change to catch up in AI by acquiring a startup like Perplexity, Cohere, Sierra AI, or Mistral (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/…

A look at the invite-only iOS and Android apps for Digg, which now operates similarly to Reddit, with links with a lot of "diggs" moving up the feed (Jay Peters/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/apps/763689/digg-mobile-ios-android-app-relaunch…

Digg’s new app is basic, but a great start
Digg has launched its new mobile apps for iOS and Android. I tried the new iOS app out, and it’s bare-bones but promising.

Austin-based PE firm Haveli Investments agrees to acquire Couchbase, which offers a cloud database for AI applications, for about $1.5B (Akash Sriram/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/hav…

Sources: Crusoe is discussing raising $1B at a $10B valuation; the company, which is helping build OpenAI's first Stargate facility, had $250M revenue in 2024 (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/crusoe-talks-raise-money-10-bill…

OpenAI’s Data Center Provider in Talks to Raise Money at $10 Billion Valuation
Crusoe, the developer behind OpenAI’s first Stargate data center, is discussing raising funds at a $10 billion valuation—more than three times its valuation less than a year ago, according to two people with direct knowledge of the fundraising talks. The seven-year-old company wants to raise at ...

Sources: Meta, X, and LinkedIn appeal an unprecedented ~€1.04B VAT claim by Italy, which is seeking €887.6M from Meta, €12.5M from X, and ~€140M from LinkedIn (Emilio Parodi/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/meta-x-linkedin…

Source: OpenAI's $40B round announced in March is reopening on July 28; SoftBank's commitment could be cut to $10B if OpenAI does not restructure by end of 2025 (Lauren Goode/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-fundraising-round-softbank-sam-altman/

OpenAI Seeks Additional Capital From Investors as Part of Its $40 Billion Round
OpenAI, which recently announced a $40 billion round of financing, is seeking funding from new and existing investors to fulfill the deal.

T-Mobile plans to expand support for the L4S network standard in the coming weeks, helping high-priority internet packets move fast, a first for a US network (Jay Peters/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/710312/t-mobile-low-latency-l4s-5g

T-Mobile is bringing low-latency tech to 5G for the first time
T-Mobile is expanding its 5G network’s support for L4S, which should help make the internet feel faster and improve the experience for apps like video calling and cloud gaming.