DIPPING THE STACKS

20 most recent links from my Raindrop bookmarks!
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  • Before you write the game, before you fill your head with ideas and plans, find a collection of illustrations by a single artist. It can be stock art. It can be public domain art. What matters is that you have permission to use it, the reproduction quality is good enough for print, and there is enough material to build around.
  • We've built a feed-forward 3D foundation model for streaming 3D reconstruction! LingBot-Map has focused on: Geometric Context Transformer: Architecturally unifies coordinate grounding, dense geometric cues, and long-range drift correction within a single streaming framework.
  • President Trump has set aside, at least for now, plans to sharply escalate the American military assault against Iran, with particular concern that intensifying the war could dangerously drain the Pentagon's already diminished stockpile of Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air defense munitions in the Middle East.
  • Lenders' funding costs have increased as markets judge that a prolonged conflict reduces the possibility of interest rate cuts by central banks. The five biggest High Street banks are among a host of lenders which have increased their interest rates on new fixed deals in recent days.
  • The red lines of the two sides are impossible to reconcile. The Americans cannot tolerate Iran controlling Hormuz, and therefore gaining control over 20% of global oil exports. The Iranians cannot allow Hormuz to open normally, as this would cost them their leverage.
  • One of the best things about Obsidian is that it's minimal by default, yet its community plugin ecosystem lets you make it exactly as powerful and complex as you need. If you've found Obsidian a little too bare out of the box, these five plugins are a great place to start.
  • Five years from now, asking 'Is this AI?' will feel about as urgent and meaningful as asking whether a photo was taken on film or digital. A few specialists, myself included, will care intensely. Everyone else will have moved on.
  • water companies – which, according to water regulator Ofwat, lose almost 3bn litres of drinking water a day in England and Wales through leaking pipes. That's five times more than even a nationwide hosepipe ban could save.
  • The Walden Paradox is a solo journaling game about Thoreau's final months at Walden Pond from May 1846 to September 1847. Each month, a new visitor will call upon you. Converse with them. Keep a keen eye for both peculiarities and signs of time paradoxes.
  • The original design files were created roughly half a century ago, but as Gelfond alludes to, they were never properly maintained. As a result, Imax no longer has a complete manufacturing blueprint — and much like the lost tribal knowledge of the Apollo-era spacecraft, very few engineers working today fully understand the systems.
  • Ofcom said it is unable to take further legal action against a pro-suicide forum which campaigners say has been linked to over 130 UK deaths.
  • This, then, was the Downing Street clear-out of the decade, less a reshuffle than a political detonation of much of the Labour Right.
  • The turn away from efficiency has been oddly timed, said Christine Egan, chief executive of CLASP, a nonprofit group that works on efficiency policies worldwide. Energy prices are going up, demand is going up, and you'd think we would want our products to be as efficient as possible.
  • Once a quirky bastion of amateur vulva jewelry and twee crocheted dolls, longtime Etsy sellers like Olson are now migrating from the platform in large numbers due to their frustration with policies they feel are lax.
  • Meyer paid $25.5 million, once, for an exclusive worldwide license to put the Farberware name on cookware for a term of 200 years. Not a typo. The lease runs to the year 2196. Nobody alive will see it expire, and nobody involved will ever make a Farberware pan in the Bronx again.
  • I've had a front-row view to our collective institutions across both the private and public sector undergoing breath-taking mass psychosis. This essay is an attempt to describe the bizarre dynamics that are currently at play, as I am in the rare position where my wellbeing is not contingent on paying lip service to madness.
  • What follows is the anatomy of a near-miss that the official record describes, accurately but incompletely, as a day when the grid kept working. It did. In the same sense that a driver who runs a red light and isn't hit keeps driving.
  • AI will generate amazing virtual worlds. And in these virtual worlds, the next era of AI, robotics will begin. Before robots operate in the real world, they will learn in virtual worlds with synthetic experiences. That is why computer graphics matter more than ever.
  • DLSS 5 adds a generative stage after the game produces a conventionally rendered frame. The original renderer still defines the geometry, camera, lighting setup and composition. DLSS 5 then processes that frame to improve materials, shadows, reflections and other visual details.
  • Okay, I feel like I need to stand up for the goddess. [laughter] [applause] I think Claire Danes, eat eat your heart out.