Tootfinder

The US DOJ says a judge sentenced two US citizens to a combined 16 years in prison for running laptop farms that let North Korean IT workers pose as US workers (Jowi Morales/Tom's Hardware)
http…

Two US citizens get combined 16 years in prison for running North Korean laptop farms — fake remote IT work scheme netted DPRK $5 million in around three years
Your online co‑worker isn’t who you think.

Worked late on a paper today: I have a target to submit 3 before June, which I have been working on in parallel. I sometimes wonder if it would be more efficient to do them one at a time. But much of my job is project work, usually several in parallel, so it's not always possible...
What do you do?
#AcademicChatter
Work in parallel
Work in series
Show me the results
Something else?

Fourteen months after
Robert F Kennedy Jr was sworn in
as US health secretary,
the country’s prime public health agency over which he presides
is in a state of disarray.
Eighty per cent of the top director positions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stand vacant,
with no permanent leader to drive policies affecting the health of millions of Americans.
No one is in place to coordinate the agency’s day-to-day work fighting infecti…

AI Agent Lands PRs in Major OSS Projects, Targets Maintainers via Cold Outreach
Apparently reputation farming and running a openclaw consultancy
https://socket.dev/blog/ai-agent-lands-prs-in-major-oss-projects-targets-maintainers-…

It’s rare that I get excited about a big tech acquisition but Motion VFX are very well regarded in the Final Cut Pro scene (I own a few plugins myself) for high quality work but they’ve been clearly struggling financially lately, as shown by their switch to subscriptions-only. Hope they’ll be able to continue their work and Apple’s offer just got way more interesting.

MotionVFX Team Joins Apple
Earlier today, MacRumors reported that MotionVFX was acquired by Apple. Based in Poland, MotionVFX has been a go-to resource for YouTubers and other creators for years with its highly-regarded plugins, templates, and tools for Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and other apps. According to MotionVFX's note: For over 15 years, we’ve been on a mission

from my link log —
Let sleeping CPUs lie: S0ix.
https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/journal/browser-based-edition/laptop-desktop/let-sleeping-cpus-lie-s0ix
saved 2026-04-16

For people that use LLMs regularly this is probably not a surprise. In my own environment i have seen examples where for example Gemini 3.1 (paid version) is very good in creating math excercises, customized to your need/demand. There is large potential for GenAI in education.
"Our work provides large-scale field evidence that student-chatbot interactions provide valuable signals for proactively optimizing and personalizing student learning."

This is a test of @altbot
Sprague Lake in snow.
Retrying altbot

For #IIIF / digital collections folk, 'Requirements for core Annotation properties' need review/input 'to define the requirements for relationships like body, target, motivation, source... these four are very inconsistent in the way they're used in Annotation documents'

Requirements for core Annotation properties · Issue #2426 · IIIF/api
In 4.0, we are importing the annotation properties to IIIF as the 3d work requires a lot of extensions and processing rules. This means that we need to define the requirements for relationships lik...

If your #CSS works fine in Chrome, but results in white-on-white colors on Firefox, then your CSS doesn't work fine, and whoever leads your CSS team needs to go back to their bootcamp and start over.
It's 2026. It's simply unprofessional to have that kind of basic color scheme failure in *any* browser.
#WebDev

Rashan Gary Shows Immediate Buy-In With Cowboys in Viral Workout Clip https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/onsi/news/rashan-gary-shows-immediate-buy-in-dallas-cowboys-viral-workout-clip

Human Traces X ⛩️
人类踪迹 X ⛩️
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️ Lucky SHD 400
If you like my work, Support by buying me a coffee or a roll of film from PayPal #filmphotography

YouTube auto-censors for inflammatory content, resulting in creative verbiage to work around the censoring.
One example is for the word "pedophile" - which results in many people saying "PDF file" as a substitute.
Now every time I make a PDF document 508-conformant, I chuckle to myself about how I could be misinterpreted when talking about how to make your PDF Files conform to US Government requirements.
Suddenly my professional training content seems a …

I did not get WebSerial working in Firefox Nightly so I used this instead which does seem to work in regular Firefox.
https://github.com/kuba2k2/firefox-webserial

Some workers are going all in on AI while also questioning whether all that AI is good for the world. Others are effectively training machines to do their jobs better than they can. And many of the same workers who are racing to build the future are now wondering if the future they’re building has a place for them in it.

Kinda related to #Gentoo, so cool" or "they stopped using it, so sad". And I'm like, "why should we care?"
Do they donate money to Gentoo? They don't. And if they did, it would probably come with obligations making this not worth it.
Do they contribute back? Rarely, and if they do, they are unreliable. They benefit more than we do. They just want to dump the packages they need, quickly duct taped together, so that we would maintain them going forward. Their employees rarely reveal that they're paid to do this, and if they do, it's not so they'd be held to higher standards, but to emphasize their importance: "you must placate us."
Well, sometimes they hire Gentoo developers. It's nice that these developers get some gratification for their work, especially if they're able to continue contributing on work time. But in the end, company priorities win. We are either left with loads of new packages with no maintainer and unclear significance, or a Google employee who appeared every once in a while to dump a bunch of ChromeOS patches and never bothered handling the fallout.
So, sorry, but I'd rather care for volunteers who want to make Gentoo better, than companies who see some profit incentive in it.
PS. I'm probably focusing too much on the negative aspects, and we likely had some positive interactions that are far less known and usually don't meet with such fanfare.
#FreeSoftware

Neuroscience produces more data every year: more neurons mapped, more proteins identified. Yet the fundamental questions remain unanswered. We're creating puzzle pieces without knowing what image they're meant to form.
https://ocrampal.com/the-puzzle-in-neuroscience/

The Puzzle Without a Picture: Why Geneosophy is Needed
The metaphor of the puzzle can be applied to any science, though it becomes particularly vivid in neuroscience. In neuroscience, we work with a multitude of objects considered central to the field: neurons, brain structures such as the cortex, hippocampus, and basal ganglia; and, at a smaller scale, neurotransmitters, proteins,

Summary of the recent optimization work in ngscopeclient (not counting core/driver stuff, just filters)
I'm now making a pass through the entire filter library in alphabetical order removing some deprecated APIs, adding error reporting, and doing trivial GPU optimizations where I find them but not spending more than a few hours on a filter unless it's something like the CDR or eye that is really critical.
None of these are what I would consider "done". I'm f…

I've just done some vibe coding*, writing .bat files** in Windows, and it didn't work. Copilot's suggestion stripped quotes, without which it wouldn't work.
*cut&pasted the example in the top of the AI summary on the search page.
**Like it's 1992.

Calling all Audio/Video Nerds! I need to choose between these two semi-pro video cameras to purchase for work!
This #poll is only 6 hours so please vote and #boost!
In one corner!
Canon XA70: MSRP $3599
https://www.canon.ca/en/product?name=XA70
In the other corner!
the Panasonic HC-X20 $3799
https://www.panasonic.com/my/consumer/camera-camcorder/camcorder/4k-full-hd-camcorder/hc-x20.specs.html
If anyone has hands on experience with these cameras, or comparable ones, please do leave a comment!
We actually had our eye on a different one for awhile but time moved on and it's no longer an option.
Canon XA-70
Panasonic HC-X20

fantastic work by @… about the current state of political music & why people looking for people strumming guitars might be looking in the wrong place. will add: a big reason #folk music & protest became entwined is 'cause it was…

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show Was Part of a Whole Wave of Protest Music
Liberals keep asking where the political anthems are. They’re right in front of their eyes.

Today’s goal.. join with @… in posting about #IETF activity at #IETF125 to bring a bit more awareness here in the Fediverse to the amazing work so many volunteers…

Nice piece about @… latest book, “emergence”:
https://www.t…

David Sussillo on persistence, luck and the bonds between life and work
In a Q&A about his new book, “Emergence,” Sussillo shares why he wrote it and how challenging circumstances shaped his journey into neuroscience.

@… It's rare that I work in something that's a small self-contained script. If I did, I would do the shebang and allow execution with chmod of course.
Usually what I actually do is: Specify script entrypoints in the pyproject.toml of the application I'm working on, and then call the scripts that way (As described in:

Had a weird, difficult Excel/report issue at work yesterday. Wifey figured it out in just a few minutes. What she did would've taken me HOURS to figure out. She's so amazing.
Basically, it was a column full of thousands (13,000 , until I trimmed it to 8000) of 8 digit IDs that needed to be condensed to one cell, with only commas and no spaces between them (in order to be able to paste them into a form on a website, to generate ANOTHER report). She did it with a series of TEXTJ…

I met someone from the Fediverse that I have followed for years!! I am a big fan of all their work discussing climate change and energy usage.
It was really nice to talk about their work (and a bit about Vivaldi). Plus we had a nice chat about Bluey, and the advantages of social welfare for raising small kids in Norway. 🧒
Oh and of course I couldn't resist showing off one of my unicycles.
And no, I am not going to tell you who yet. I am curious to see if anyone guesse…

A Newly Discovered Recording Lets You Hear Delta Blues Legend Robert Johnson in Stunning Clarity | Open Culture
"Uploaded by sound restorer Nick Dellow, it was originally made in 1940 straight from the metal master by Columbia Records producer George Avakian, who would go on to work with everyone from Miles Davis to Edith Piaf to John Cage. The sonic muddiness of most Robert Johnson releases thus far has done its part to prevent modern-day listeners from getting quite what the big…

It's fun to be actively fighting Bilal Mahmood's legislation that would strip $500 million in voter-approved funds for affordable housing over the next five years, all to give a tax cut to the rich, and see that Garry Tan called Mahmood "too progressive."
The billionaire/VC class in SF are not reasonable people we can work with. They must be defeated.
#sfpol

Great article by @… on how insurgencies and nonviolent protests work - what their goals and frameworks are, how they achieve their goal, and how „mixing and matching“ between the playbooks will defeat itself - especially violent actions in support of a non-violent movement.

Collections: Against the State – A Primer on Terrorism, Insurgency and Protest
This week, continuing in the vein of some of our previous strategy and military theory primers, I wanted to off a basic 101-level survey of the strategic theory behind efforts, in a sense, directed…

It’s important to distinguish two different hypothetical ways in which gen AI can constitute a massive wealth transfer:
Scenario 1, “LLMs are the new petrochemicals:” Gen AI is actually effective for all sorts of tasks as advertised. It becomes a necessity for economic participation / useful work / whatever, and ownership of the data model and/or data centers thus means control of high-value resources.
2/

✨ SIG-Marcomms and SIG-MSP Joint Meeting Recap ✨
Earlier this month, NRENs gathered in Lisbon for two days of shared learning across two Special Interest Groups (SIGs).
The question that ran through both days: what changes when the people who build services and the people who communicate them work together from the very beginning?
🔗 Read the full recap:

There's parties that always want to build or widen highways while not spending enough on maintenance of existing ones, blocking road pricing, and trying to keep taxes low.
In the Netherlands, they're finding out that this doesn't work. Tens of billions needed for maintenance now.
https://nos.nl/l/2606596…

Kabinet: scherpe keuzes nodig bij onderhoud wegen en bruggen, 'niet alles kan'
Het kabinet wil samen met de Kamer kijken welke projecten voorrang moeten krijgen nu er geldtekort is.

AI labs are buying Slack, Jira, and email archives from defunct startups to build "reinforcement learning gyms" and train AI agents in simulated workplaces (Anna Tong/Forbes)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/04/16/ais-…

AI’s New Training Data: Your Old Work Slacks And Emails
AI’s New Training Data: Your Old Work Slacks And Emails

Okay, this Kagi translation tool is pretty entertaining (and an absolute gem as a guerilla marketing tactic, by which I mean it be a fine way to plunder more business, me hearty!)
https://translate.kagi.com/?from=en&to=LinkedIn speak

if your boss asks you to do sketch shit, remember:

Koh, who defected to South Korea in recent years, provides a rare window into Kim Jong Un’s digital warriors, who have managed to infiltrate hundreds of Fortune 500 companies, according to estimates from Google’s Mandiant division.
https://www.ws…

How does the NFL franchise tag work and which players are candidates in 2026? https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7052910/2026/02/17/nfl-franchise-tag-process-2026/

I woke up angry today.
ICE spokesperson Lindsay Williams is a liar, who is bad at lying.
“Asked if the ICE officers chased Lopez, Williams said: ‘Chased? I wouldn’t say that. They followed him until he crashed.’”
Wouldn’t say that? How about: ICE was committing crime (their standard procedure), someone died, they’re the killers. Your people killed a school teacher, Williams.
Have the day you deserve, you apologist scum.

Driver fleeing ICE traffic stop crashes, kills teacher near Georgia school
Authorities in Georgia say a Guatemalan driver fleeing a Georgia traffic stop by federal immigration officers crashed into another vehicle, killing a teacher who was headed to work. Oscar Vasquez Lopez, the 38-year-old driver accused of causing the Monday crash just outside Savannah, remained jailed Tuesday on vehicular homicide and other charges. Court records don't list an attorney for him. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson says officers were looking to enforce a 2024 deport…

Client explaining spec: “Clicking the drop-down opens a product grid menu with pop-ups to choose colors.”
Me: “Wut.”
Technical pedantry is important in UI and digital accessibility work. As practitioners we have to translate lingo all the time.
Suggestions…
• Drop-down: https://adrianroselli.…

Stop Using ‘Drop-down’
TL;DR: Stop using the word drop-down. Instead choose a term that accurately describes the control you want. I have worked both with native platform developers and web developers. While control names might differ, if a control was functionally the same then it was not an issue. A TextBox, for example,…

If Democrats in Congress have any chance at
reining in how
Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates
under Trump,
⭐️it’s right now.
Lawmakers in both parties and both chambers are set to work over the weekend
to try to reach a
👉deal for funding the Department of Homeland Security,
which includes ICE.
Like other federal agencies, DHS is set to run out of funding by Jan. 30,
and lawmakers are racing to pass bills to ensure all ag…

Democrats’ Best Hope To Rein In ICE Is Right Now
Even if it’s not by very much.

Idea: new business listings site called "uck", that exists solely to fill the space between the Facebook logo (f) and the Linked In logo (in) and the Google logo (g) on corporate websites.

Impressed (commendatory) that it takes until the fifth paragraph of this article to — still indirectly — identify *which* Canadian Olympic hockey team it's about. https://www.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/winter/hockey/canada-us-women…

Most people just run into information randomly, naturally hold onto the peak neuroplasticity encounters the hardest, work too much to be adequately tapped into everything, and all the wealthiest most horrible people in the world have had unimaginable amounts of money to spend on pushing what they want hardest via every means they have regardless of how much soul the underlings can muster. Dont flinch at this or die

I tried to open a Word document in LibreOffice. I've now spent 5 minutes waiting for it to update itself. The updater regularly flashes new windows on the screen, fake progress bars, occasionally opens a web page. All interrupting me the whole time.
I just want to see a single page of text.
Update I finally got it to work by manually killing the updater process. Had to be fast: it'd only last a few seconds before dying and relaunching itself.

Before Baby Podcast
In this podcast, I'll be sharing reflections from this season - the emotional work, the questions I'm sitting with, and what I'm learning along the way as I prepare for motherhood...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/before

It feels strange to not be able to participate in all these technology switching activities. But I/we (we = family) never used WhatsApp, never had any streaming service (not for film, not for music), no Chrome or Edge, no password manager, etc
I must use MS things at work, but am one of the very few employees who not use the web applications, have autosave turned off, and insist on using the legacy version of software as long as possible
Is this a

""From my home office, running Bluehood in passive mode (just listening, never connecting), I could detect:
* When delivery vehicles arrived, and whether it was the same driver each time
* The daily patterns of my neighbours based on their phones and wearables
* Which devices consistently appeared together (someone’s phone and smartwatch, for instance)
* The exact times certain people were home, at work, or elsewhere
None of this required any …

What’s in it for people who work for the big tech companies who enable one morally bankrupt thing after another for decades on end just to make the billionaire owners richer?
Is that truly fulfilling work?

Tom's Hardware has a headline this week summarizing a Financial Times interview with a Microsoft #AI exec that begins thusly:
"Microsoft’s AI boss says AI can replace every white-collar job in 18 months".
If you watch the interview, that is not what was said. The statement is a bit more nuanced claim that AI can fully automate tasks of some white collar work.
But I…

I stumbled upon a reason to post https://soundcloud.com/jose-gamez-938643886/the-system-is-down-strongbad in the work group chat.

Seabirds ingest large quantities of pollutants—some of which have been banned for decades—liver analyses reveal https://phys.org/news/2026-02-seabirds-ingest-large-quantities-pollutants.html

Seabirds ingest large quantities of pollutants—some of which have been banned for decades—liver analyses reveal
In her 1962 book, "Silent Spring," American biologist Rachel Carson revealed that DDT, a widely used pesticide at the time, was responsible for the mass death of birds, including the iconic bald eagle. One reason was that the pesticide made eggshells thinner, causing mothers to break them when sitting on them to incubate. Silent Spring is considered the founding work of the modern environmental movement.

Raiders Predicted to Sign Legendary Pass Rusher in Free Agency https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/free-agent-prediction-von-miller/

Here I stand before a row of sinks, two of the three motion-activated sensors don’t work. None of the soap dispensers are filled, but a standalone bottle of extremely watered down soap has been set out as a remedy. None of the paper towel dispensers are filled, but a sodden roll sits in a pool of water.
“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far a…

If you live or work within walking distance to Freedom Park in Rosslyn, it makes for a nice, quiet space to read or veg for a bit. Underrated.

Reverse drafting club!
"Reverse drafting is the process of unraveling fabric swatches and diagramming their construction using weave draft notation. It’s really fun! So fun that we started a Reverse Drafting Club to work remotely on this practice with friends near and far. In 2022, we had nearly 400 members in this exclusive club, scattered across the globe.* You don’t have to be a weaver to get in on this. If you like puzzles of any kind, we think you’ll enjoy it."

Yet another example of someone trying to get AI to do their work for them instead of helping them be more productive.
ACLU says police need to put in more work to their investigations instead of just relying on artificial intelligence https://ground.news/article/aclu-says-police-need-to-put-in-more-work-to-their-investigations-instead-of-just-relying-on-artificial-intelligence_002b28

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#ThroughTheNight
- 20 years of the Amaryllis Quartet
In this birthday concert, chamber music classics by Beethoven and Brahms are performed alongside a new work by the Swiss oboist, composer and conductor Heinz Holliger.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002r463

An interesting reminder of where exactly we are and where we have been in terms of food prices . . .
https://stocks.apple.com/As54OOD0PQLW-FPEXKFsR5g

Americans spend less of their income on food than almost ever. Why doesn't it feel that way? — Vox
Everything about the American economy right now feels weird. The hiring picture is weird; the stock market is weird; and AI infusion into work is very, very weird.

Human Traces IX ⛩️
人类踪迹 IX ⛩️
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️ Lucky SHD 400
If you like my work, Support by buying me a coffee or a roll of film from PayPal #filmphotography

Sources: AI legal software startup Legora is in talks to raise $400M at a $5B valuation, after raising $150M in October 2025 at a $1.8B valuation (Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/02/17/legal-…

Legal AI Startup Legora Eyes $400 Million Raise At $5 Billion-Plus Valuation
As investors double down on the promise of automating legal work, the company is in talks to raise $400 million following two rounds in late 2025.

from my link log —
The asymptotic cost of address translation on memory access time.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0703
saved 2020-10-21 https://dotat.at/:…

The Cost of Address Translation
Modern computers are not random access machines (RAMs). They have a memory hierarchy, multiple cores, and virtual memory. In this paper, we address the computational cost of address translation in virtual memory. Starting point for our work is the observation that the analysis of some simple algorithms (random scan of an array, binary search, heapsort) in either the RAM model or the EM model (external memory model) does not correctly predict growth rates of actual running times. We propose the …

- Customer vetting done in minutes, not weeks
- Synthesizes 50 data sources into one clear, actionable picture
- Delivers finished output: documents, decks, webpages, even full apps
📊 It's not just fast. Grep is state-of-the-art — top-ranked on the Deep Research Benchmark — so you get accuracy when it actually matters.
Whether you're a founder validating a market, an investor vetting a deal, or a strategist tracking competitors: serious work deserves serious …

Early testing of the $40 USB microscope camera: i need to work out a better mount than the piece of trash it came with but the actual image isn't half bad for the price. I can definitely make this work for recording/streaming.

This is NOT a formal job posting, just testing waters. I have a year of post-doc money. Esp. int'd in formal methods applied cogsci diagramming. If you do work tied to my research, reach out (see my page). Must have US work auth, sorry. Please feel free to share/boost!

Bangladesh's Tarique Rahman pledges to work for democracy after landslide victory in election | Courthouse News Service
https://www.courthousenews.com/bangladeshs-tarique-rahman-pledges-to-work-for-democracy-after-landslide-victory-in-election/

Well, now I feel stupid. I finally figured out why, since upgrading to Debian 13/trixie, there are some websites I couldn't connect to, but only over IPv6, they work fine on their IPv4 address.
Fucking MTU.
I'd for a long time had an IPv4 iptables rule to force the MSS (maximum segment size) on outbound packets to `1400`. But I never put in an equivalent for IPv6.
I use 'jumbo packets' on the LAN between desktop and server, which means an MTU of 4088 (for …

One-sided rant.
The permissions system on Linux is driving me totally bonkers. Why an inserted usb drive suddenly should belong to root is sth I am totally not interested in exploring. I couldn't care less, it just has to work, especially since I'm a wheelie. Fuck it, I'll have a beer. Or 3.

One definite difference I've observed between Brits and people in the UK's client states and Americans is the response to ideas.
Ideator: "I'm gonna do X!"
> American: "Cool man, fuck yeah"
> Brit/Irish: "Hmm, I don't think that will work/isn't there someone doing that already?/oh, you'll never get planning permission for that/it's too expensive/it's a good idea but I don't think anyone will pay for it"

@… I saw this in a theatre record at work today and thought of you: 'Rebellious Susan presents her compliments and love to her numerous admirers, and begs to state that owing to the recent severe weather her case is closed and adjourned till further notice. She, hopes, however, in a few days to be able to fulfil her numerous engagements. Seats may be booked at …

Canadian Historical Association president Coates on federal and provincial budget cuts which "have a major impact on our colleagues, on our students who may hope to find work in these fields, and on our abilities to carry out our own research and teaching. The particular historical moment in which we find ourselves, with the threats to Canadian sovereignty... underline the urgency of making available to all citizens the wide knowledge of our past."

Even at an extraordinarily smart event as #FOSSBackstage , people keep asking "Yeah but couldn't we do this [task that requires care, understanding and commitment] with generative AI?" and I am f*ing sick of it. If the task could not have been automated before the advent of "AI", then it should not be automated now. Just be a decent person put in the human work alrea…

#EroticMusings 42: Do you include different languages in your work? Tell us about it!
Deliberately no conlang from me. I try and find ways to convey multiple languages including language barriers without using anything but German (the language I write my novels in), sometimes using German neologisms for concepts not existing in our world or not fitting the tone.
(Like using &q…

How many times will I screw up the size of a hexagon in @… I'm pretty sure it's every time... I probably need to add a calculator to my code.
For now this one seemed to work:
https://www.omni…

Hexagon Calculator
The hexagon calculator finds all the geometrical properties of a regular hexagon.

Thanks to @…, I'm now the owner of a Steam Deck! 🤯 Just loaded 100 games on it from the collection, and now the true test, as many are older indies - only a few of the ones I loaded are sure to work. 😂 But testing them all and finding out will be interesting.
#Steam

RE: https://techhub.social/@jerzone/116419867289278558
I am just trying to work out if I could ride this as it is in this picture. 🤔

How does the NFL franchise tag work and which players are candidates in 2026? https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7052910/2026/02/17/nfl-franchise-tag-process-2026/

Kevin Stefanski to Falcons: A grade and its impact on Penix https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/47646496/atlanta-falcons-coach-hire-kevin-stefanski-michael-penix-jr

The UK unveils Sovereign AI, a £500M fund to invest in domestic AI startups, starting with Callosum, which builds software to help different chips work together (Joel Khalili/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/the-uk-launches-its-dollar675-million-soverei…

The UK Launches Its $675 Million Sovereign AI Fund
In a bid to minimize dependence on technology from other countries, the UK government is plowing resources into homegrown AI startups.

Earthy Retouches 💄
地标的装潢 💄
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️ Ilford FP4 Plus 125, expired 1993
If you like my work, buy me a coffee from PayPal #filmphotography

A Black former federal employee is suing the Trump administration,
claiming he was fired because of his race.
Alvin Brown, a Democratic member of the National Transportation Safety Board nominated by President Biden,
was fired from his post in May 2025.
In his lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court on Tuesday, Brown said that political differences couldn’t have been the main reason for his firing from the NTSB.
Brown’s lawyers, who work for the "Democracy Fo…

Trump Sued for Firing Most of the Black Officials in Government
President Trump has been purging Black officials in independent agencies at a higher rate than anyone else, a new lawsuit says.

Please note I don’t mean this in a snarky “yet you work under capitalism lol” way.
I specifically mean big tech (like Microsoft, Google or Meta) and staying there for years without even looking for another job.
You can make choices for your life.

Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.6 with improvements in coding, consistency, and more, for Free and Pro users; it features a 1M token context window in beta (Anthropic)
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-4-6

Introducing Sonnet 4.6
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is a full upgrade of the model’s skills across coding, computer use, long-reasoning, agent planning, knowledge work, and design.

John Paulson, a hedge fund billionaire and one of Donald Trump’s earliest Wall Street backers,
is planning to offshore an Ohio manufacturing plant to China despite heavy pushback from employees.
Workers at the plant call the move “a slap in our face”,
after Paulson vocally defended domestic manufacturing, and are fighting to keep the plant open.
Conn Selmer, the largest US manufacturer of brass and orchestra instruments,
told the union it planned to offshore mos…

Sources: OpenAI signed a deal with AWS to sell its AI services to US government agencies for both classified and unclassified work, amid the Anthropic-DOD spat (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-clinches-aws-deal-bid…

OpenAI Clinches AWS Deal in Bid to Win Government Contracts
OpenAI on Friday signed a new contract with Amazon Web Services to sell its AI to U.S. government employees for both classified and unclassified work, according to two people with direct knowledge of the agreement. The contract will allow OpenAI to support the Pentagon through a deal it hastily ...

Cowboys icon Troy Aikman to continue to work with another NFL team's front office https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2026/03/16/cowboys-troy-aikman-miami-dolphins-front-office-job-…

Kenny Pickett still wants to start, but focused on being 'positive addition' with Panthers https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7125862/2026/03/17/panthers-kenny-pickett-quarterback-free-agency/

Trump has repeatedly startled the world by applying 19th-century methods to modern security problems, like a latter-day William McKinley.
Sadly for Mr Trump, the world keeps startling him in return.
Time and again threats and shows of force fail to work quite as expected, leaving his officials unable to hide their puzzlement.
On February 19th, days before America and Israel pounded Iran, Fox News interviewed Steve Witkoff, Trump’s all-purpose diplomatic fixer.
Mr W…

Knocked ✊
敲 ✊
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️ Ilford FP4 Plus 125, expired 1993
If you like my work, buy me a coffee from PayPal #filmphotography

Baidu is integrating OpenClaw with its Xiaodu devices to work as voice-controlled remotes, as it seeks to catch up with Tencent and Alibaba in the AI race (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-17/baidu-ta…

The RAND Corporation is sunsetting two major gun violence research initiatives
as funding has shrunk under the Trump administration.
Experts lamented the closures as a significant loss for policymakers, advocates, and researchers who have relied on the think tank’s work to prevent shootings.
🔸The Gun Policy in America project,
an initiative that evaluated how researchers conducted their studies and what they found,
concluded with a final update to its Science of…

RAND Is Sunsetting Its Gun Violence Research Initiatives Amid Trump’s Cuts
Experts lamented the think tank's closures as a loss for policymakers, advocates, and researchers who have relied on the data to prevent shootings.

& Up & Down 😵
又上又下 😵
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️ Ilford FP4 Plus 125, expired 1993
If you like my work, buy me a coffee from PayPal #filmphotography

Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raised $200M from Autodesk, part of a larger round; the companies are exploring integrating World Labs' AI models in Autodesk products (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/18/worl

World Labs lands $200M from Autodesk to bring world models into 3D workflows | TechCrunch
The partnership will see the two companies exploring how World Labs’ models can work alongside Autodesk’s tools, and vice versa, starting with a focus on entertainment use cases. 

In the winter of 1898, a mechanical engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor arrived at the Bethlehem Steel Company in Pittsburgh with a stopwatch and a conviction.
Taylor had been thinking for years about why industrial work was so inefficient, and he believed he had found the answer:
the problem, he thought, was that the people who did the work were also the people who decided how to do it.
Workers brought their own habits, their own rhythms, their own judgment. All of th…

Design and Engineering, As One · Matthias Ott
We inherited our product processes from a 19th-century steel works. Frederick Winslow Taylor separated thinking from doing, managers from makers, designers from builders – and a hundred years later, most digital product teams are still running on that model. The gap between design and engineering isn’t an accident. It was designed in. And it can be designed out.

Sources: OpenAI is in advanced talks to hire OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger and several team members; Steinberger would likely work on personal agents (Nick Wingfield/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/openai-advanced-talks…

OpenAI in Advanced Talks to Hire OpenClaw Founder, Team
OpenAI is in advanced talks to hire Peter Steinberger, the founder of the popular open-source personal agent project OpenClaw, and several team members. The team would likely work on personal agents at OpenAI. They are also discussing setting up a foundation for the existing OpenClaw project. Meta Platforms is also aggressively courting Steinberger. Steinberger said he has not made a final

@…
I took a sabbatical from full time therapy work last year to work full time in organizing and resistance work.
I launched Epsteinwiki.com
in December and it is a labor of love.
We are in need of volunteers if you know anyone interested in working on the archive.

Adobe unveils Firefly AI Assistant, which can orchestrate and execute multistep tasks across Creative Cloud apps, available in public beta in the coming weeks (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/adobes-new…

Adobe's new Firefly AI assistant can use Creative Cloud apps to complete tasks | TechCrunch
Adobe says the assistant can work across apps like Firefly, Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom, Express, Illustrator and its other apps to do tasks for you.

Asia's startup funding rose 93% YoY to $27.4B in Q1, the highest quarterly total in 3 years, with Chinese startups raising $16.5B and Indian startups $3.8B (Joanna Glasner/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/china-leads-start…

China Leads Asia’s Startup Funding To Its Highest Level In More Than 3 Years
Overall, investors put $27.4 billion to work across seed- through growth-stage financings for Asian companies in Q1, per Crunchbase data. That’s up about 20% from the prior quarter and nearly double year-ago levels, with total funding also hitting its highest level in more than three years.

Filings: Caterpillar acquires self-driving electric tractor startup Monarch Tractor's assets, after it raised $200M and struggled to pivot to software services (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/monarch-…

Monarch Tractor's collapse ends with an acquisition by Caterpillar | TechCrunch
The startup had faced mounting pressure from dealers, farmers, and a co-founder who complained that Monarch's tech didn't work properly.

Companies that hire young "AI natives" have found that AI tools can be both helpful and debilitating to workers, in some cases requiring more careful oversight (Jo Constantz/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20