Tootfinder

In #Walldürn wurde mit Neusaß II eine der größten #AgriPV-Anlagen Baden-Württembergs eingeweiht.
Auf fast neun Hektar wachsen künftig #Gemüse und

In "Neusaß II" wachsen künftig Kartoffeln im Windschatten von Solarpanelen
In Walldürn ist am Montag ein Pilotprojekt der erneuerbaren Energiegewinnung ans Netz gegangen. "Neusaß II" gilt als eine der größten Agri-Photovoltaikanlagen Baden-Württembergs.

Oh dear -- within a day of hearing about this from another professor, I got my first LLM-generated email from an aspiring grad student. It mischaracterized my research (apparently I write lots of mathematical formulas, ha!) and ascribed papers to me that I never wrote, which are basically remixes of common words in my paper titles. If you do this, you will insult the people you want to impress.

@… I’m very much in the same boat, but given that there’s Akrapovič, well-known manufacturer of exhaust systems for motorcycles and performance cars, I could very well imagine someone saying, “bro, I had an Akropovič exhaust fitted to my Kosmaczewski MX-100, it’s so freaking fast now, gotta install Piotrowski brakes!”

@… I’m very much in the same boat, but given that there’s Akrapovič, well-known manufacturer of exhaust systems for motorcycles and performance cars, I could very well imagine someone saying, “bro, I had an Akropovič exhaust fitted to my Kosmaczewski MX-100, it’s so freaking fast now, gotta install Piotrowski brakes!”

I've reached the point in my life where my meaning of "booting" a computer does not match the meaning usually ascribed to the term.

The Phases of Chaos
Tarek Anous, Diego M. Hofman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20542 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20542

The Phases of Chaos
We develop a novel physical picture to understand certain universal properties of the GUE matrix model which are typically ascribed to quantum chaos, i.e. the ramp and the plateau. We argue that these features should instead be associated with a pattern of spontaneous (or weak explicit) symmetry breaking. In this language, the GUE matrix model corresponds to an effective theory that describes the symmetry-broken phase, and where the Hermitian matrix of the GUE should be understood as a massive …

User Perceptions and Attitudes Toward Untraceability in Messaging Platforms
Carla F. Griggio, Boel Nelson, Zefan Sramek, Aslan Askarov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11212

User Perceptions and Attitudes Toward Untraceability in Messaging Platforms
Mainstream messaging platforms offer a variety of features designed to enhance user privacy, such as disappearing messages, password-protected chats, and end-to-end encryption (E2EE), which primarily protect message contents. Beyond contents, the transmission of messages generates metadata that can reveal who communicates with whom, when and how often. In this paper, we study user perceptions of "untraceability", i.e., preventing third parties from tracing who communicates with whom, with the g…

A visco-plastic constitutive model for accurate densification and shape predictions in powder metallurgy hot isostatic pressing
Subrato Sarkar, Jason R Mayeur, KPK Ajjarapu, Fred A List III, Soumya Nag, Ryan R Dehoff
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11946

A visco-plastic constitutive model for accurate densification and shape predictions in powder metallurgy hot isostatic pressing
Powder metallurgy hot isostatic pressing (PM-HIP) is an advanced manufacturing process that produces near net shape parts with high material utilization and uniform microstructures. Despite being used frequently to produce small-scale components, the application of PM-HIP to large-scale components is limited due to inadequate understanding of its complex mechanisms that cause unpredictable post-HIP shape distortions. A computational model can provide necessary information about the intermediate…

I read "Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It" by Christof Koch.
Interesting book which spends like 8 or 9 chapters detailing all the experiments which prove beyond much doubt that consciousness, and self awareness, is a thing done by a brain.
It describes how perception is a construction of a description, has a chapter called "computational mind"
And then spends the last two chapters describing why he thinks the mind can't be computed, because drugs have made him think experience is some kind of magic associated with highly interconnected causal structures.
Apparently, he thinks, once things become interconnected enough they become able to cause things independently of the physics running those connections.
Which is crazy, obviously. There's nothing causal in direct connections between neurons that isn't equally causal in modeled connections between virtual neurons.
All his evidence in the book from neural MRI scans to the effects of psychedelic drugs and symptoms of strokes and disease point to the brain simulating a virtual reality which is the basis of perception.
That simulated world in which we live is full of colour and shape and sounds and emotions and millions of mental constructs that are built to be correlated by the senses with the outside world, but are not equal to the world itself. We live in a dream constructed to correlate with reality.
But then instead of taking the next step: That consciousness itself is a property of a simulated being inside that mental model of the universe, a property which the brain simulates and applies to the virtual self that's doing the experiencing inside that model, he jumps towards some magic implying pan-psychism or that sufficiently interconnected networks become causally self-complete for some reason nobody can fathom.
Sure, colour and shape and emotions are all made up by the brain but experience can't be! For some reason.
You see in truth dualism is false, in that there is no spirit realm in which ghosts animate the matter of the body somehow.
Yet also, dualism is true, in that there is a simulated mental reality which we live in, computed by the brain in which all perception and experience are created, which is related-to but separate-from the unfolding complicated dance of energy that is the universe our bodies interact with.
People take some DMT trip, and the model of the universe emulated by their brain collapses and breaks. Their virtual simulated self inside their mind has these experiences of being one with the universe or the experience of feeling dead yet conscious or whatever, and these hippies think that the broken down simulated experience is real and reflects how consciousness is more fundamental than the atoms that make up the neurons in their brain.
Instead of realizing it shows them that their experienced universe is a simulacrum, they think they get a more direct experience of reality somehow. A consciousness more pure than any mere base atom.
"Then I am myself the world" is a great title. Everything you ever experience is created and simulated in your brain like a dream, the whole universe is inside your head. Even the fact of experience itself.
But that isn't the conclusion Koch reaches somehow, he just jumps from describing the evidence that this is so straight into ascribing super-causal magic consciousness to particular arrangements of atoms that integrated information theory suggest have high correlation, and thinks therefore conciousness is itself the entire universe.
Ah well, fun book. I like arguing in my head with authors that are wrong.
#reading #books #consciousness #thenIAmMyselfTheWorld