tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org
Not sure what this account will be about, mostly boosting things I find interesting.
Joined Nov 2022
tobychev
boosted
Happy Europe Day! 🥳 🇪🇺️
Here at the European Rail Passengers Union we believe in the promise of a more connected Europe, with freedom of movement and a sustainable future for everyone.
tobychev
boosted
What does it say about the future of the Labour Party that the people Starmer brings into his cabinet are both almost dead?
And also carrying a shit ton of political history baggage. Wasn't Mandelson enough?
tobychev
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This is a really good, thought provoking article. It's strange how 'society' tells us some things are allowed and others are not. F**k societal norms. Hold your dad's hand.
Holding my dad’s hand: a photographic essay | The Observer
https://observer.co.uk/culture/photography/article/holding-my-dads-hand-a-photographic-essay
tobychev
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What do electric buses do at night? They help balance the grid.
First Bus in Glasgow: "By flexing when buses are charged, the depots can increase demand at times when there is excess renewable energy on the system, particularly wind power in Scotland, and reduce demand during peak periods. This helps reduce the need to curtail renewable generation and supports a more efficient, flexible energy network."
tobychev
boosted
Recently, Sébastien Labbé and Peter Selinger posted a preprint (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.20964) that describes a sophisticated construction for the hat tiling, based on what's called a Markov partition (see the thread by @pieter at https://mathstodon.xyz/@pieter/116484517078239617 for more details).
One nice side effect of their construction is that it provides a means of rendering the hat tiling on the GPU using a fragment shader. That's cool, because it requires a constant amount of work per pixel, regardless of how many tiles you're drawing, and you can pan around forever without ever worrying about running out of information about the positions of tiles (as you would with a drawing algorithm based on substitution).
I have a slightly glitchy prototype written up in Shadertoy. I'll make the code available, but I want to clean it up first.
tobychev
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Peter Selinger has come up with a great way of generating hat tilings by overlaying a triangular grid on a periodic pattern, and placing a tile at each point that is not white, with the orientation and handedness of the tile determined by the colour of the point. A more thorough explanation is given in this preprint
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.20964,
where he and Sébastien Labbé show that this is a Markov partition. As mentioned in the paper, I came up with a similar construction a few years ago, but it required separate steps for tiles of a given orientation modulo 120.
In this series of posts, I'll attempt to explain the connection between the two constructions, and demonstrate the analogous constructions for the hats-in-turtles and turtles-in-hats versions of the Spectre tiling. The aim is to give a sense of the main ideas, rather than a rigorous proof that this works.
Before I get into the details, here is a Markov partition for turtle tilings, where control / anchor points are located on the underside of the turtle's shell.
[Edit: For more background about the paper, see Sébastien's blog post: http://www.slabbe.org/blogue/2026/03/a-construction-of-the-hat-tilings-by-a-markov-partition/ This includes some printable files that can be used to construct patches of hat tilings in practice.]
(1/n)
tobychev
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Katalyst Space has completed environmental testing of its robotic spacecraft, LINK, clearing a key milestone toward launch. LINK will capture and raise the orbit of NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory before it reenters Earth’s atmosphere later this year.
https://www.katalystspace.com/post/katalyst-robotic-spacecraft-passes-testing-milestone
#space #katalyst #link #spacecraft #SwiftObservatory #astronomy #astrodon #science #news #LINKspacecraft
tobychev
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Partisanship is one hell of a drug, exhibit # 12,654
https://bsky.app/profile/drewbaird.bsky.social/post/3mlcchgbfjs2y
tobychev
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Louisiana Republicans Seem Content to Let New Orleans Drown.
While local lawmakers obsess over how to keep Democrats in majority-Black districts from governing, their state is literally shrinking. #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #GlobalWarming
https://newrepublic.com/article/210031/louisiana-republicans-seem-content-let-new-orleans-drown
@johanj.bsky.social
Chockerande! Var det ingen som gjorde en orosanmälan? Huvudskyddsombudet och ledning har mycket att förklara!
> To grasp the historical significance of what the Roberts Court has done, we must understand what America was prior to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and the transformative impact of the Voting Rights Act. [...]
> On paper, the United States became a multiracial democracy almost exactly one hundred years earlier, with the passage of the Reconstruction amendments to the constitution after the end of the Civil War. [...]
> By 1867, well over 80 percent of Black men registered to vote across the South – more than half a million African Americans had joined the electorate by the early 1870s, meaning they outnumbered white voters across the former Confederacy. [...]
> "Redemption” was orchestrated by the white supremacist wing of the Democratic Party – and by organized terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan serving as “Redemption’s” paramilitary arm. They assaulted Black lawmakers and Black voters, targeted biracial local governments and legislatures. At least 2,000 African Americans were killed between 1865 and 1877 [...]
> Starting in the late 1880s, the Southern states rewrote their constitutions to ensure complete white domination. They passed voting laws that disenfranchised Black Americans via poll taxes, literacy tests, or property requirements. As a result, voter registration rates and Black turnout plummeted from around 80 percent to somewhere in the zero to five percent range, where they would remain until at least the 1940s. Black representation was extinguished. After 1881, the South did not elect another Black person to the Senate until 2013. After 1901, no Southern State sent any Black Representatives to the House until 72 years later.
https://steady.page/en/democracyamericana/posts/b0eafc14-f68d-4499-8108-b440bad1af7f
tobychev
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Ukraine's ceasefire collapsed on its first night. Kyiv says Russia fired 3 missiles and 108 drones after the truce took effect at midnight May 6, and Zelensky is now signaling that he won't observe Russia's Victory Day ceasefire on May 8–9. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2026/05/06/russia-ukraine-victory-day-truce-collapses-as-moscow-and-kyiv-trade-accusations-of-violations
@maximilianhenning
Euraciv paywalls all of that article, so I have no idea of what this means sadly :(
@volts.wtf
In the grand tale about the path of American democracy, Obama is now destined to be the false hope before darkness came and brought it all down.
It's an open question how long it takes before the USA is a multi-ethnic democracy again, but with the Supreme Court killing the voting rights act last month there's no doubt that it has fallen far.
tobychev
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Meta: If we are forced to pay billions to make our products safer for kids in New Mexico “…we may have no choice but to remove access to its platforms for users in New Mexico entirely.”
New Mexico: Don't threaten us with a good time.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/04/meta-new-mexico-child-safety-facebook-instagram.html
tobychev
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DeepMind employees at the London headquarters have voted to unionize via the CWU and Unite, citing ethical opposition to Google’s recent classified AI contract with the U.S. Department of Defense. Staff demand the right to conscientious objection for military projects and stricter AI safety principles to prevent the use of research in lethal autonomous weaponry or mass surveillance.
https://gizmodo.com/deepmind-workers-vote-to-unionize-following-googles-pentagon-ai-deal-2000754603
tobychev
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Much of the plot of land that was used in the hit movie The Field has been washed away through climate change.
Storm Éowyn, which lashed Ireland in January of last year, ate into the land close to Leenane on the Galway-Mayo border along the Erriff River, resulting in large chunks of earth being swept into the river and on out to sea
https://extra.ie/2026/05/04/news/the-field-is-washed-away
#ClimateChange #UpheavalClimate #ClimateInstability #MassAtrocity #pollution #ecology #environment #climate
tobychev
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I love it when you find a paper that precisely answers a question we were thinking about today - how much like a natural egg does a dummy egg have to look like so the gull will accept it?
Answer - they'll even accept a bright red cube if it's approximately egg size, which I can vouch for, having seen Herring gulls incubating vaguely spherical rocks, golf balls, and on one occasion, a head from a Barbie doll
tobychev
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Taking the train for cross-border trips in Europe should be the easy choice. But, as passengers, we know how challenging it can be. There’s been a lot of talk recently about how difficult ticketing is and the lack of rights. Now is the time to fix that … and we have a plan!
Read on and join us at: https://erpu.eu
tobychev
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“During the summer of 2025, which was the hottest on record and spanned the period from June through September, 9,203 people in Tokyo were transported to hospitals due to heatstroke. This figure was 2.7 times higher than in 2021 and has continued to increase year by year.”
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20260501/p2a/00m/0na/007000c
Not sure what this account will be about, mostly boosting things I find interesting.
Joined Nov 2022
