DIPPING THE STACKS

20 most recent links from my Raindrop bookmarks!
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  • LingBot-Map is a feed-forward 3D foundation model that performs streaming 3D reconstruction from monocular video, producing camera poses, depth maps, and dense 3D point clouds in real-time. The original implementation requires PyTorch + CUDA + FlashInfer, restricting it to NVIDIA GPUs. This repository rewrites the entire inference pipeline in Apple MLX, making it run natively on any Apple Silicon Mac (M1/M2/M3/M4/M5) using unified memory — no NVIDIA GPU required.
  • Stateless agents are preferred in simple pipelines oriented to very specific tasks, like text extraction, summarization, or single-turn classification chatbots. They keep the architecture lightweight, which is usually enough in such use cases, avoiding database bottlenecks and allowing seamless horizontal scaling. Stateful agents make much more sense if we intend to develop long-running assistants, coding assistants, or multi-turn bots in applications like customer service.
  • Three hundred year Western search for elsewhere is ending. The yearning it expressed remains; the yearning was always real. But the cure it proposed, the cure Rousseau articulated and the Romantics aestheticized and the modernists abstracted and the hippies spiritualized and the backpackers commodified and the volunteer tourists moralized and Bourdain humanized, is no longer believed in by the people who were supposed to inherit it.
  • UK property sellers who set too high a price and have to cut once or more to win a sale take over four times longer on average to sell than those whose initial asking price is accepted. Research by estate agent Savills into the impact of overpricing properties found that 33 per cent of sales required one cut in asking price and 11 per cent needed two or more.
  • Ian Robertson, personal training manager at Equinox, says that when training your back, any warm-up should be focused on releasing tension in the opposing muscles — your pecs and front deltoid. By creating some length in your pecs you will increase your activation in your upper back muscles, says Robertson.
  • 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.