Tootfinder

Model ML, which aims to use AI agents to automate grunt work done by investment bankers like making pitch decks, raised $75M, after raising $12M earlier in 2025 (Aisha S Gani/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

They Seek to Curb Online Hate.
The Trump Regime Accuses Them of Censorship.
Five Europeans who work to tackle disinformation and abuse on the internet
were barred from entering the United States
after Secretary of State Marco Rubio labeled them
“radical activists”
who undercut free speech.

They Seek to Curb Online Hate. The U.S. Accuses Them of Censorship.
The Trump administration said five regulators and researchers who work to tackle disinformation and abuse on the internet had been barred from entering the United States.

Saints work out ex-Ravens kicker Justin Tucker after 10-game suspension, reportedly sign Cade York instead

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/justin-tucker-saints-ravens-kicker-allega…

I had to switch to the milk crate on the back of the bike today to deliver a large package at work, so no "bike light box" today, but I also need to not do a long ride after work as sunset is at 5:56pm today.
Maybe I'll rig up a temporary bike light at work... we've got all the parts!
(I did fix the bike light box but it's at home.)
#bikeTooter

Welp, after a day or two of fermentation and a few hours preparing the accompaniments, like the potato filling, the 'gunpowder' to sprinkle over it, and both tomato and coconut chutneys (all made from scratch, even involving cracking a fresh coconut!), I've made my first ever dosas. I'm quite chuffed by the result. It's a lot of work for a one-off...

HC Sean Payton on facing the Cowboys' offense: 'We're at work right now preparing for it' https://www.denverbroncos.com/video/hc-sean-payton-on-facing-the-cowboys-offense-we-re-at-work-right-now-preparing-for…

Paint samples arrived today and it was obvious which was gonna work better so I ordered a full 2.5l can.
Only to get an email back saying they can't make that colour in that varnish. Weird. That was literally the only actually blue they said they'd do last time they said they couldn't deliver what the website let me order.
After some discussion they have referred it to the Tainting Supervisor and it's apparently going to be here Monday.
Similarly for the wood, failed to arrive again today. They reckon Monday this time really for reals. Fingers crossed coz the carpenter can't do more until the wood arrives really and he's going on holiday this time next week.
So assuming the wood comes, four days to build the doors and finish off the walls of the closet and stuff.
Hopefully it can all be done in that time. Or at least the hard bits leaving the easy stuff for the less carpentery builder.

Platner in Maine is interesting, isn't he? Will the "of course I'm not a socialist" after saying a lot of very socialist things work on the left as the usual "I'm not a Nazi" works on the right?
We'll see.

Quarter Century of Collecting Seeds From Around the World Safeguards Them From Extinction https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/quarter-century-of-collecting-seeds-from-around-the-world-safeguards-them-from-extinction/…

Quarter Century of Collecting Seeds From Around the World Safeguards Them From Extinction
After 25 years of diligent work, an English botanic gardens is ready to face whatever reality climate change may throw at us.

Saints work out former Ravens kicker Justin Tucker after serving 10-game suspension, per reports

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/justin-tucker-saints-ravens-kicker-allegations/

Update: it is no longer clear.
My current work around is to extract the list of linked files and relink my hand after egrep -v list-of-swift-syntax-symbols. What a horrible hack
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/115600154465997324

Two freelance journalists say the UK's Daily Express stole their articles, rewriting one seemingly using AI, and offered £100 only once they reached out (Alice Brooker/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/express-offers-compensa…

Express offers compensation after freelances say work was stolen
First person account of rail journey apparently rewritten using AI.

I struggle to process the fact that Todd Blanche gave my husband his very first job offer in law.
(Yes, THAT Todd Blanche from the DoJ, deputy attorney general, the one who has been in the news for all kinds of terrible things he’s up to)
I went to a party with that guy 3 years ago! And now he’s doing increasingly cartoonish villain things every other week.
He seemed normal. Fun, actually.
And then months after he went to defend Trump as his personal lawyer and since then we’ve continued to be confused and disturbed.
We haven’t had any contact with him after he went to work for Trump, of course. But I can’t stop wondering how the fuck the person my husband worked with is the same person defending pedophiles. (Allegedly)
#USPol #ToddBlanche

Survey: What has it been like going back to work after the shutdown?
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/government-shutdown/2025/11/survey-what-has-it-been-like-going-back-to-work-after-the-shutdown/

What's Next After No Kings?
Tuesday, October 21
8 – 9pm EDT
Virtual event
Join from anywhere
About this event
No Kings was massive, powerful, and meaningfull, but it's not the end of our work.
Join movement leaders and fellow local activists after the big day to celebrate what we accomplished, and learn about what’s next.

Mass Call: What's Next After No Kings? · No Kings
No Kings will be massive, powerful, and meaningful - but it won’t be the end of our work. Join movement leaders and fellow local activists after the big day to come together, celebrate what we accomplished, and learn about what’s next.

There's nothing better than a student who, after stumbling a bit in some of their work over the semester, really raises their game on the final assignment.

Colossal Statues of Ancient Pharoah Stand Again in Luxor After 30 Years of Work https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/colossal-statues-of-ancient-pharoah-stand-again-in-luxor-after-30-years-of-work/

Colossal Statues of Ancient Pharoah Stand Again in Luxor After 30 Years of Work
The right side has an almost complete face, and even the serpent which crowned the nemes headdress over the forehead has survived the ages.

The standalone Proxmox server is basically done at this point, all three DNS servers are online and secure, the Tailscale VM is online after completely forgetting that it was running on one of the Raspberry Pis, and the `authentik` instance that I'm gonna need to work on tomorrow.
#proxmox #dns

TIL about Oskar Speck, who kayaked from Ulm, #Germany, in May 1932, down the Danube, through to Cyprus to work in the copper mines—but decided to continue through to #Australia instead. After over seven years of paddling, he finally arrived on Thursday Island, in Torres Strait, in September 1939, whereupon Au…

The company you work for spends millions on cybersecurity. You set up protocols, firewalls, preventive measures... And then the new girl in the office writes down her work passwords on a sticky note stuck to her laptop.
If I were an IT security professional, I'd be in jail by now after strangling someone like that girl with a power cord.

THIS IS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE!
I think the SFTP server is down again. Expected files not in our INBOX and it happens on a semi-regular basis and usually after a weekend.
On my Linux box I had a very simple CHRON setup to run a specific BASH script. On my work WIN11 machine I have automated running a specific program every Monday morning checking for a specific item.
It should be trivial to do the same on the servers instead of buying software to verify that the servers are w…

My batteries are always low after a long day of work.
No, not emotionally. The devices I work with just take up all my USB ports, leaving my phone empty.

ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants | Brennan Center for Justice
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/ice-wants-go-after-dissenters-well-immigrants

ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants
The Trump administration is being open about its plans to violate Americans’ First and Fourth Amendment rights.

Meet the Welsh Puppies Stopping Wildlife Poachers in Africa https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/meet-the-welsh-puppies-stopping-wildlife-poachers-in-africa/

Meet the Welsh Puppies Stopping Wildlife Poachers in Africa
In the lush, emerald hills and valleys of Wales, dogs are trained to protect endangered wildlife a whole hemisphere away. Their scent tracking allows them to turn hunters into the hunted, and catch poachers even in total darkness; even hours after they’ve left their kill sites. After a decade of work in Africa, these special […]

AI workplace agents startup Genspark raised a $275M Series B at a $1.25B valuation and says it hit $50M in annualized revenue after pivoting from AI search (Anna Tong/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2025/11/20/genspark…

Genspark Joins The Unicorn Club With Latest Funding Round
The startup, which offers AI work productivity tools, got to $50 million in annualized revenue just five months after launching its suite of AI agents.

Memo: after Sinclair bought an 8% stake, Scripps says it's exploring stations sales with "many" broadcasters but talks with Sinclair didn't lead to an agreement (Al Tompkins/Poynter)
https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2025…

Scripps tells staff a Sinclair takeover is unlikely despite surprise stock purchase - Poynter
A memo to staff from CEO Adam Symson downplayed Sinclair’s intentions, even as Scripps shares surged nearly 40%

On Monday, Nov. 24,
after more than 1,100 days on strike,
Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh members were cheered on by supporters
at a rally in downtown Pittsburgh
before returning to work at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Even though strikers have returned to work, however,
many issues at the center of the strike are still in legal limbo
—and their fight for a fair contract is not over.
In this episode of Working People, we speak with three Newspap…

The longest-running strike in the US is over—and the workers won
After over 3 years on strike, members of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh have returned to work at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. While the legal battle is still unresolved, this is a major victory for the labor movement.

A proposed constellation of satellites has astronomers very worried: #ReflectOrbital would produce light pollution by design.

Cowboys leader named Community MVP for work spotlighting mental health https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/11/21/cowboys-dt-solomon-thomas-nflpa-community-mvp-week-12-me…

I'm torn as to whether this is a good part of the job, but today I once again ran into a limitation of Safari and thus also Chrome on the iPhone. After quite some time, I discovered the cause. Tomorrow I'll work on the workaround. #webdev #safari

A couple days ago I was doing a work call in my car (I’m in I.T.) and after I hung up my daughter, who was in the car with me said:
“I could NEVER do your job…I don’t mean the technical part.”
😂

I always find it interesting to compare my work with other developers' work. In this case I built a migration utility for Mastodon written in Python. After I posted to the "Support Post Migration" thread on Github someone else posted with their solution.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/i

If there is any truth in these allegations, we really have to worry about that is going on in both AGS and GSOC.
The initial story was bad enough: the Irish police service being so incompetent that their statistics on homicides were wildly incorrect, and the whistleblower getting penalised; but this is batshit.

Garda whistleblower says she took work leave as she was ‘terrified’ of new analysis chief
Civilian was installed as Garda analysis bureau head after Lois West testified to Oireachtas about errors in homicide data

I know, I know, I should not send work-related messages after office hours. But sometimes I forget to schedule the delivery for “tomorrow at nine.”
But then, colleagues (yes, plural!) accepting meetings at 23:14, what’s wrong with YOU?
#AcademicChatter

Malignancy at work.
#OpenAI #LLM
https://arstechnica.com/tech-poli…

STM32MP2 bringup update: after fixing some weird linker things with weak symbols that per documentation should never have worked and yet somehow never bit me until now, I have a C stub running on the M33 out of RAM (no flash boot, you have to JTAG/SWD load it for now).
It turns on three of the four LEDs on the devkit, for reasons currently unknown the fourth LED doesn't work. My only guess is that it's in the VDDIO3 domain and I might not yet have turned that on due to PMIC c…

The new Raspberry Pi Connect feature works really, really well. After setting one up for work, it has me rethinking what I want to do with my various pieces of pi-ware at home. The latest Raspberry Pi Imager is a bit of a joke, though. Two different installs for two different machines where it completely ignored my custom settings during install, so I had to set up everything twice.

This getting up, getting dressed, commuting to work life is hard after being work from home for so long.

Been redoing my Raspberry PI based heating management around pi5 machines after a few 3s died this month.
Previously designed some 3D Printed cases but I was new to the hobby - and new to 3D design - so they didn't work out great, here's the new attempt, happy with 2 years of experience gains.

A silent scenery in four acts...
(Selenium-toned[1] 4x6 salt print (still in final wash) plus previous work-in-progress stages... see alt text for details)
The picture/motif itself is one of my personal favorites and was taken 4 years ago in the Alpstein massif, when clouds were spontaneously forming around us, creating a wonderful light/scene/drama and a dear memory... now also as print which likely will/can outlast myself
[1] The tones will become more neutral once dry...…

The leader of a major press association resigned after his board opposed a lawsuit defending journalists' rights (Mary Randolph/Poynter)
https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2025/illinois-press-association-don-craven-resigns-lawsuit-journalist-rights/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251009/p110#a251009p110

OpenAI says it will work with SAG-AFTRA, CAA, UTA, and others to crack down on Sora 2 deepfakes, following concerns from actor Bryan Cranston and SAG-AFTRA (Jaures Yip/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/20/open-ai-sora-bryan-cranston-sag-aftra.html
…

OpenAI cracks down on Sora 2 deepfakes after pressure from Bryan Cranston, SAG-AFTRA
OpenAI will also collaborate with United Talent Agency, Creative Artists Agency and Association of Talent Agents to ensure voice and likeness protections.

Feeling very inadequate after watching 7Asian craft an entire floating village by himself. Watch 1 year of amazing engineering & hard work in just 1hr.
▶️ He Left Civilization to Build a Floating Self-Sustaining Island | by 7Asian
https://youtube.com/watch?v=AJSXVUd819

Crepes, egg and bacon, tea and coffee. Mahjongg after work. #TogetherBreakfast https://photos.app.goo.gl/E7dF6TKfhLZppbY69

Props to the #Incus team. I had set up a Rocky 9 machine using Incus and ZFS as a test at the start of the year. I just updated the whole system using dnf update and installed the incus rpms somebody built for inclusion in the epel repo (but they are not part of it yet). And things seem to work great after a single reboot.

Neuralink returns to South San Francisco as Bay Area neurotech regroups https://www.neurofounders.co/post/neuralink-returns-to-south-san-francisco-bay-area How does a patient registry of roughly 10,000 people compare to well over 500,000 Android app i…

Neuralink Returns to South San Francisco as Bay Area Neurotech Regroups
Neuralink has leased a 144,000-square-foot building at 499 Forbes Boulevard in South San Francisco, placing the company back inside the region’s biotech belt after a period of Texas-focused expansion. The move lands alongside a patient registry of roughly 10,000 people, an initial paper submitted to The New England Journal of Medicine, and ongoing first-in-human work. The signals point to a company accelerating rather than slowing.Details on how the new site will be used have not been disclos…

Some positive signs for AI coding tools. Claude-code is a $1B run rate product six month after launch. The latest Claude Opus 4.5 model is several times cheaper and faster than last month’s version and uses about a quarter of the number of tokens to get work done. My own benchmark saw over an hour of coding reduced to 17 minutes. The high rate of change continues. The boundary of what does/doesn’t work is pushing back fast.

Anthropic acquires Bun as Claude Code reaches $1B milestone
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
Caroline Polachek:
🎵 Welcome to My Island
#CarolinePolachek
https://stereonuke.bandcamp.com/track/caroline-polachek-welcome-to-my-island-stereonukes-after-work-edit
https://open.spotify.com/track/4bp2wYweUPvsBrQfntdYcr
Please 🔁 BOOST to share what you like
- your followers don't see if you ⭐ favourite a post

"Go away! I'm trying to f***ing work here! Go away!"
Me, every time I try to use an Adobe or Microsoft app after an install or upgrade or update. NOBODY WANTS YOUR STUPID POPUPS, SOFTWARE PEOPLE!

@… I recently overheard a client raving about how great LLMs are for getting rid of the most annoying part of their work: All those pesky tests they need to write after the code is done.
I did quietly think to myself, if I was going to use LLMs to generate code, I’d do the exact opposite: Hand write the tests, then generate the code that makes them pass.

Neoen Australia making strides in Western Australia with new big battery projects, signaling shift towards renewable energy powerhouse in the region. #climatechange #climatesolutions #climate

Neoen starts work on first six-hour battery after giant “solar soaker” completed months ahead of schedule
Neoen starts work on its first six-hour battery as the country’s biggest battery – completed four months ahead of schedule – starts its contract as a “solar soaker”

Okay, after a bit of work in #vlang:
- I think I prefer golang though I really prefer the error system of `v`.
- I enjoy writing code in `nim` more than `v`. While I do enjoy `v` more than `rust`, the documentation and support extensions are better for almost every other language which makes things difficult starting out.

I am going dual monitors for work. The docking station that was provided had only one HDMI port, but two DP ports. The problem is all of my monitors have HDMI inputs only. I remembered that last year I bought a DP to HDMI adapter and wondered if that would work.
I plugged it all in and it didn't detect the second monitor. I figured the laptop might need a reboot to detect the change. After the reboot it saw the second monitor.
The second is one I borrowed from my wife s…

OpenAI expands group chats in ChatGPT globally to all logged-in users on Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans, after piloting the feature in select regions (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/20/chatgpt-launches-group-chats-globally/

ChatGPT launches group chats globally | TechCrunch
The company sees group chats in ChatGPT as a way for people to coordinate trips, co-write documents, settle debates, or work through research together, while ChatGPT helps search, summarize, and compare options.

After a couple of months of work, I have finally landed the micro-SwiftGodot to our main branch-for people to build small extensions
https://github.com/migueldeicaza/SwiftGodot/releases
We still have that nasty Apple bug that bloats binaries by bolting SwiftSyntax in yo…

Understanding the Modality Gap: An Empirical Study on the Speech-Text Alignment Mechanism of Large Speech Language Models
Bajian Xiang, Shuaijiang Zhao, Tingwei Guo, Wei Zou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12116

Understanding the Modality Gap: An Empirical Study on the Speech-Text Alignment Mechanism of Large Speech Language Models
End-to-end Large Speech Language Models (LSLMs) have demonstrated impressive conversational generation abilities, yet consistently fall short of traditional pipeline systems on semantic understanding benchmarks. In this work, we reveal through systematic experimentation that although LSLMs lose some text input performance after speech-text alignment training, the performance gap between speech and text inputs is more pronounced, which we refer to as the modality gap. To understand this gap, we …

I went on a little bike ride after lunch at work today to check out the missing bridge from the flood back in August and got approached by a woman who wanted to ask me some questions...
Local TV reporter, had a camera operator with her, so I put on a lav and talked about the (missing) bridge for a few minutes...
I stood with my bike and had my helmet on during the interview and talked about biking to work so I hope I leveled up on my bike advocacy journey.

Another of the butchers of Bucha meets death. Still, justice is not served for the victims- nothing can make things right again.
Georgio reports from the trenches of democracy. sharing the receipts with a friend link to bypass the paywall.
Georgio's work stands out for many reasons, it will be evidence in future war crimes trials.
Please support his work, watch his YouTube reports, and share the links so everyone can learn the truth of what is actually happening in Ukr…

One After Another, Russian Criminals Fall
Live from Ukraine 🇺🇦

So yeah maybe don’t try using SaveMii on Wii Fit U to migrate your nnid account save to your pnid one. It not only doesn’t work, but also (seems to) cause at least one weird bug that I only noticed after more than one (almost two by now I think?) year playing
#WiiU

Some leftists have criticized #NoKingsDay2 as useless. Though it was the largest protest in US history, it didn't change anything. I would go further to say that protests like these generally won't change anything. Dictators aren't forced to step down by 2% of the population coming out for one day. If they're forced to step down by protests, those protests are sustained. They are every single day. They are accompanied by general strikes.
We've been watching that happen all over the world. Portland in 2020 gave us a taste of that in the US. The George Floyd Rebellion was the type of resistance that actually brings down dictators like Trump. Occasional protests, no matter how large, can simply be ignored. That is precisely the reason the US developed a militarized police force in the first place. You need more, more than the largest protests in US history, more than Occupy, more than the resistance of the 60's and 70's, more than, and different from, anything we've seen in our lives.
And yet... Each protest has grown, and grown bolder. Some have grown more persistent. If you think of protest as the path to achieve change, you will lose. It is not. But it is a path to escalate. Some people, some otherwise comfortable white folks, came out for their first time. Some people got pepper sprayed for the first time. Some people questioned authority, stood up for the first time, and have had an experience that will radicalize them for the rest of their lives.
Protest is not useful in and of itself. It is training. It's making connections. Authoritarian regimes rely on the illusion of compliance, so visual resistance does actually undermine their power.
Liberals like to teach that non-violence is all about staying peaceful no matter what, that there's some way that morality simply overwhelms an enemy. I remember reading Langston Hughes' A Dream Deferred in high school. I said it was a threat. My teacher said, "you're wrong, he was a pacifist." Pacifism is a threat. If you can spit at me, beat me, shoot me, and I will not move, if I have the strength to absorb violence without flinching, without even rising to violence, what will happen when you push me too far?
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
For peaceful resistance to work, there must be ambiguity. It must not be clear if or when the resistance will stop being peaceful. Peaceful resistance with no possibility of escalation is just cowardice.
My critique then is not so harsh as some other anarchists. If you think that protest alone will work, you're probably going to lose. If you are prepared to escalate, if you are prepared to absorb violence without flinching, then it could be possible for protest alone to topple the dictator. The cracks are already beginning to show.
And then what?
The problems that lead to the George Floyd uprising were never resolved. The problems that lead to Occupy where never resolve. The DAPL was built, protesters were maimed, it leaked multiple times (exactly as predicted). Segregation never went away, it only changed forms. The fact that immigrants have different courts and different rights means that anyone can be arbitrarily kidnaped and renditioned to an arbitrary country. We never did anything about the torture black site. FFS, people can still be stripped of their voting rights and slavery is still legal in the US. The people who control both parties in the US are killing our children and grand children with oil wars and climate change.
Toppling the dictator does nothing to resolve all of the problems that existed before him.
No, #NoKingsDay was absolutely not useless. #NoKings and related protests are extremely useful but they aren't sufficient. But, I think we still need to challenge the movement on two points:
How do you escalate after you're ignored or brutalized?
What do you demand after you win?
#USPol

My husband and I have been sick with the flu and completely out of anything going on with society for the past week.
This time of illness has been worse than COVID - I showed up to urgent care last week with a 104.2 F (40.1 C) fever after sleeping for 22 hours straight.
I am still delirious and unable to keep track of meetings or emails, so trying to get caught up on work will be a struggle.
Don’t be like me, get your flu shots if y’all can 😭

I have an expired credit card with a metal core that I want to destroy. I originally thought the core was an aluminum alloy, but it resisted scissors. With some bending and prying, I'm 99% sure the core is steel.
After a few minutes of work, I managed to peel some of the plastic off the mag-stripe side but cut a finger in the process.
The card had a pleasant heft and feeling of durability, but given the difficulty to destroy it, I really dislike it now.

He doesn't know what tariffs are or how they work, and how the Constitution works.
Great choice of leader Texas.
#USpol #TXpol #tariffs

A Wave of Resignations in the Aftermath of Remote Onboarding
Darja Smite, Franz Zieris, Lars-Ola Damm
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05878 https://arxiv.org/pd…

A Wave of Resignations in the Aftermath of Remote Onboarding
The COVID-19 pandemic has permanently altered workplace structures, normalizing remote work. However, critical evidence highlights challenges with fully remote arrangements, particularly for software teams. This study investigates employee resignation patterns at Ericsson, a global developer of software-intensive systems, before, during, and after the pandemic. Using HR data from 2016-2025 in Ericsson Sweden, we analyze how different work modalities (onsite, remote, and hybrid) influence employ…

Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
.
.
.
I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading

Australian artists and craftspeople please hit me up with a link to your website. I'd love to see your work as I'm looking to buy a couple of steel or silver wire knotwork (Irish style) pins / brooches to buy as small gifts (after the Christmas rush).
#Silver #Steel

Weirdly, after the last update, one of my work computers has started automatically logging me in to Skype for business. Who knew that even still existed?

Influence of coronary plaque morphology on local mechanical states and associated in-stent restenosis
Janina C. Datz, Ivo Steinbrecher, Johannes Krefting, Leif-Christopher Engel, Alexander Popp, Martin R. Pfaller, Heribert Schunkert, Wolfgang A. Wall
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10763

Influence of coronary plaque morphology on local mechanical states and associated in-stent restenosis
In-stent restenosis after percutaneous coronary intervention is a multifactorial process. Specific morphological lesion characteristics were observed to contribute to the occurrence of in-stent restenosis. Local mechanical factors, such as stresses and strains, are known to influence tissue adaptation after stent implantation. However, the influence of morphological features on those local mechanical states and, hence, on the occurrence of in-stent restenosis remains understudied. This work inv…

Entropy After $\langle \texttt{/Think} \rangle$ for reasoning model early exiting
Xi Wang, James McInerney, Lequn Wang, Nathan Kallus
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26522 https://…

Entropy After $\langle \texttt{/Think} \rangle$ for reasoning model early exiting
Large reasoning models show improved performance with longer chains of thought. However, recent work has highlighted (qualitatively) their tendency to overthink, continuing to revise answers even after reaching the correct solution. We quantitatively confirm this inefficiency by tracking Pass@1 for answers averaged over a large number of rollouts and find that the model often begins to always produce the correct answer early in the reasoning, making extra reasoning a waste of tokens. To detect …

Today is my "hamiversary" — Today last year, the wheels at the FCC turned and I was awarded the #AmateurRadio call sign KZ4LY.
Today I celebrated by going to park US-2755 after work and doing some QRP CW #POTA.
I was in a hurry and missed disconnecting the 20m link on t…

The three-year strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ends after a Third Circuit court panel ruled the paper had acted in bad faith; the paper plans to appeal (Riddhi Setty/Columbia Journalism Review)
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_…

The nation's longest strike is over—but the battle isn't.
Journalists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette are ready to return to work.

Majority of CDC staff fired after Trump admin's 'chaos' have returned to work: report - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/cdc-2674177903/

OpenAI forms the Expert Council on Well-Being and AI, with eight experts to help guide OpenAI's work on ChatGPT and Sora (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/14/open-ai-expert-council-safety-ftc.html

OpenAI forms expert council to bolster safety measures after FTC inquiry
The council will help guide OpenAI's work around ChatGPT and Sora, and define what healthy AI interactions look like.

I think today's worker is the owner of the company, he certainly is the assessor.
He worked a lot later than those without the vested interest there. 😆 I finished work at my job before he did! 🤭
All the wood was sanded down and remaining nude wood given some paint. We have a test plank in the foreground of the first picture here which is painted with a second coat of paint. Seems likely we lose all the wood grain when doing that, and so will prefer the paler look where it's obviously made of wood not paint.
Won't really know for sure till it's dry. Prefer the colour a bit darker like that but if we're hiding the wood grain we might as well have used MDF instead of pine. We're after something clearly made of wood.
Another area is test-painted with just the clearcoat top varnish as a second layer. That's likely to be right, just a bit more shiny and protected.
The carpenter proper is back from holiday and starts tomorrow. He has a lot of drawers and doors to build and edging to attach to make the door panels. Still hoping at least the carpentry will be pretty much all done by the end of the week but likely some painting and touching up still to do next week. Hopefully by the end of Tuesday because I'm not really able to be here all day each day for most of the two weeks after that.

After reading a term paper that demonstrated nothing more than the "author's" brainless use of a brainless statistical model to brainlessly vomit brainless prose, I'm deeply grateful for the flawed result of human thinking that turned up second in the grading pile. It's not amazing but it's really not bad and, more importantly, it shows the student learned something. If nothing else, LLMs have given me a new appreciation for the imperfect but honest work we produce …

Long winter nights, red light on, UV burner on... So have missed making my own prints, and so glad to be able to pick this up again (and also working with older techniques, which are new to me), all after more than three decades... Still some more kinks to work out before I can share some proper prints, e.g. experimenting with different exposure times, toners (gold/selenium), fixers, concentrations... All very much like a science experiment and meticulous log keeping has been key (as have be…

I wasn’t feeling well this morning so I went into work late… still didn’t feel good after an hour so I went home. I biked both ways.
I’ve wondered how I might handle having to bike home from work if I wasn’t feeling well, but it was fine.
Did I feel great riding? No, but it wasn’t terrible either. Just gonna lie down the rest of the day.
#bikeTooter

Second time in the past couple of days that I've joined a Teams call for work, hear the person leading the meeting go "We're still missing a few people let's give them a couple minutes", then silence.
And silence.
And 5 minutes later I get a text from someone asking where I am, and I'm like "still in the meeting waiting for people to join?"
But apparently the connection got borked after I joined and I got silently disconnected server side…

New experiences every day. Today: PHPStorm 2025.2.3 freezes after a few seconds and can only be closed via the Task Manager. Restarting the system doesn't help either. Downgrading via the JetBrains Toolbox brings relief. #work #productivity

Filing: Synopsys plans to lay off ~10% of its staff, or ~2,000 employees, after completing its $35B acquisition of engineering design firm Ansys earlier in 2025 (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/synopsys-cut…

Colts' Zaire Franklin defends Brian Branch's punch of JuJu Smith-Schuster: He 'needed his ass whooped'

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/colts-z…

Election integrity advocates are demanding a hand recount in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District
after data shows more than 31,000 votes materialized after 99.4% of ballots were already counted.
At 99.4% reporting, Decision Desk HQ displayed 148,853 total votes.
The final certified tally: 179,899.
The math doesn’t work.
The remaining 0.6% of precincts should have produced roughly 1,000 ballots — not 31,000.
Republican Matt Van Epps was declared the win…

BREAKING: Election Advocates Demand Recount in Tennessee
They’re questioning how 31,000 additional votes appeared with 99.4% votes counted - and that's not all.

I upgraded an old Acer laptop to the latest #mxlinux. It didn't take much work and went smoothly. I still have to put a guest user on and then tweak waht runs, but the basics are there.

Does anyone else think "OOMF" sounds like a frustrated computer toucher swearing after running out of RAM?
"OOM - F" is definitely something that's gone through my head more than a few times over the years given how much work I do with big images, massive scope waveform datasets, etc.

The NYT says it won't be deterred in its work after Trump posted on Truth Social that reporting by The NYT and others about his health was "seditious" (David Bauder/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/trump-health-press-new…

New York Times says it won't be deterred from writing about Trump's health
The New York Times and President Donald Trump are fighting again. The news outlet said Wednesday it won't be deterred by Trump's “false and inflammatory language” from writing about the 79-year-old president's health. The Times has done a handful of stories on that topic recently, including an opinion column that said Trump is “starting to give President Joe Biden vibes.” In a Truth Social post, Trump said it might be treasonous for outlets like the Times to do “FAKE” reports about …

I tried to go for a ride in the rain today and it sucked. I was hoping to go meet one of the candidates for governor at a local park and while it was "lightly" raining when I left home after a mile it got worse and the top of my legs were soaked.
The rest of my body was okay. I put my rain jacket hood over my helmet, I had gloves and good hiking shoes but damn, pants and legs were just... wet.
I never *want* to ride in the rain but may have to if I'm stuck at work o…

Eagles RT Johnson calls for 'less predictable' attack https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46549246/eagles-johnson-calls-less-predictable-attack-loss

Disney nominates former Apple COO Jeff Williams to its board; he retired from Apple in November after overseeing the design team, supply chain work, and more (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

Disney Taps Former Apple COO Jeff Williams to Join Board of Directors
Williams retired from the tech giant earlier this year.

Cowboys exuding confidence after win over Chiefs: 'We'll play anybody, anywhere' https://www.nfl.com/news/cowboys-exuding-confidence-after-win-over-chiefs-we-ll-play-anybody-anywhere

STM32MP2 update: did a quick sanity check of the hardware by booting from the SD card supplied with the devkit.
It comes up to a Linux shell with the SSD detected.
So we know the SSD and board setup is correct.
Will poke at it more after work and see if I can get register dumps etc out of it.

I'm feeling much better today (no abdominal cramps) but I drove to work because I've been having a lot of leg pain in the mornings, for about an hour or so after I get out of bed. It's the end of the year, traditionally the time I break myself... might need to look into physical therapy again. 😢

Adobe launches free ChatGPT-integrated apps for Photoshop, Acrobat, and Express on desktop, the web, and iOS, after OpenAI added app integrations in October (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/841369/chatgpt-apps-adobe-photoshop-acrobat…

ChatGPT can now use Adobe apps to edit your photos and PDFs for free
Adobe is giving ChatGPT users integrated apps for Photoshop, Acrobat, and Express for designing and editing their work without having to switch apps.

Nancy Pelosi is out, and Zohran Mamdani is in.
Or so Republicans hope.
After spending years — and tens of millions of dollars — pillorying Ms. Pelosi and seeking to tie her to seemingly every Democrat in America
Republicans are betting that their next boogeyman has arrived, just in time.
For Republicans facing a newly re-energized Democratic base and a potentially challenging midterms environment, a fresh foil couldn’t come soon enough.

Republicans Retire Pelosi as a Villain, and Turn to Mamdani
Searching for another liberal boogeyman, Republicans have zeroed in on Zohran Mamdani. Whether their strategy will work in the midterms is less clear.

Newsroom union members at the Los Angeles Times vote to authorize a strike as they raise the pressure for a new contract after three years of negotiations (Katie Kilkenny/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

Los Angeles Times Journalists Authorize a Strike
Eight-five percent of participating members voted to empower the newsroom union to call a potential work stoppage.

New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim said he’s still in the dark about the future of the Gateway Tunnel Project
after President Donald Trump declared it dead in the water.
The senator again warned of “catastrophic” consequences if the Hudson River crossings aren’t built.
Work had already begun on the $16 billion,
9-mile passenger rail link to Manhattan’s Penn Station when Trump
—in an apparent act of political revenge against New York Sen. Chuck Schumer
—said it was “t…

Trump’s Gateway Tunnel move risks ‘catastrophic’ fallout, Andy Kim warns

Me, the person who changes the clocks at work: "It's after 4pm already?"
Also me: "Goddammit."

Nevis, which develops AI agents to automate wealth advisers' grunt work, raised a $35M Series A from Sequoia and others at a $200M valuation, after a $5M seed (Biz Carson/Bloomberg)

Human Interest, a 401(k) platform for SMBs that aims to cut down on administrative work, raised $100M at a $3B post-money valuation, up from $1.3B in 2024 (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/31/401k-human-interest

Scoop: 401(k) platform Human Interest now worth $3 billion
The $100 million raise comes just days after HI sued rival Guideline.

Grammarly rebrands as Superhuman after its acquisitions of Superhuman Mail in June and Coda in December 2024; the standalone writing tool Grammarly still exists (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/808472/grammarly-superhuman-ai-rebrand-rel…

Grammarly is changing its name to Superhuman
Grammarly is rebranding to become Superhuman, an AI agent-powered work platform that combines its writing tool with Coda and Superhuman Mail.