Tootfinder

Just finished "The Terraformers" by Annalee Newitz (@…). It was recommended as a "solarpunk" book, and I'm currently on a quest to find more speculative fiction as good as Le Guin or Butler, so I was eager to dig in. Having tagged the author (hi) I'll try to be polite here, but I'll admit I was disappointed.
Newitz clearly has a powerful imagination and there's lots of great stuff in the book, but it's not at all pushing boundaries in terms of imagining future societies. I think the message and intent was good in a lot of places, but off or self-contradictory in others. I absolutely adore the relatively small point made at the end about revolutions being complicated and not boiling down to heroes and battles, but despite the book's attempt to avoid that, I think it still falls into that pattern. Without too many spoilers, the way that some big problems are resolved near the end leans too much on a legal framework without questioning how it's enforced, and that resolution then means that a few heroic acts are enough to tip the balance, which undermines the point about messy histories.
The biggest contradiction of the book to my mind though is with a central theme. The book really explores a world in which "anyone of any species can be a person, as long as we just bioengineer them to be intelligent enough," and it tries to make a point about how engineering limited intelligences is cruel. At several points characters comment about how personhood shouldn't depend on intelligence. There's even a brief quote about how maybe rivers could be people... But... the point could have been "anyone can be a person, regardless of intelligence." This would have made for much more interesting philosophical territory to explore IMO (how do we then bound personhood; how do we reconcile predator/prey relations between persons, etc.). These are also questions that the indigenous traditions Newitz draws on (and consulted about, as mentioned in the acknowledgements) has interesting answers for, but we don't get to explore them through Newitz' world, and because the question of personhood regresses to the question of intelligence, it feels like the moral philosophy of the ERT folks isn't any better than the "InAss" they disparage.
It's not a bad book overall, even if it doesn't engage with the questions I'm hungry to see others engage with. Newitz' efforts to sketch out a more vibrant and diverse future are still monumental and inspiring in a lot of ways. I'm just still looking for something more. Ultimately, I think it lives up to the "solar" but not very much to the "punk."
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Willem challenged us to ask ourselves what we would do if we were living under Nazi occupation. Before all of this, I doubt anyone thought they would be complicit. I doubt anyone said to themselves, "nothing. I would cower in fear and do nothing."
But for 4 years or so we all answered that question again and again with our lives. Now here we are, answering it again... Every day. But it's no longer "what would you do during the rise of Hitler?" It's now, "what would you do after the invasion of Poland," and "what would you do after you knew about the concentration camps?"
For some people, the answer is still, "nothing."
But a lot of people have been brave in the face of it all. A lot of people have died, and a lot more will die. He will die, perhaps after a ruling by some court or other but, honestly, probably not. That's just how these things work out. Lots of people die, some for no reason, some because they stood up against injustice. A whole lot of people do nothing, until it's safe to claim victory... Until it's no longer safe to be on the other side.
That's just how these things go. Fascism is self-defeating, but it causes incredible harm on it's path of self-destruction. The more people who stand up, who risk themselves, the faster it collapses and the fewer it can hurt. That's also just how these things go. It's incredibly dangerous for everyone until enough people take some extra risk and make it safe for everyone again.
But that question still stands... Which one of those groups are you in? Are you proud of what you are doing, or will you look back with shame? Some of y'all have a lot to be proud of, but, if you're not, it's never too late to earn your way into that proud group.

Stock Up, Down For Dallas Cowboys Rookies After Second Week of OTAs https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/onsi/stock-up-down-dallas-cowboys-rookies-after-second-week-otas

PSA: When was the last time you checked your smoke alarms?
If the answer isn't "earlier this year" you're probably overdue. Do it today.

I wonder if tall walls outside the zoo serve any zoological function. These next to green terrains. Or if they're just a matter of angry greed: "either you pay for a ticket for our whole huge facility, or you won't even see a single sparrow that flew inside."

"everything is brittle and at the mercy of anyone angry enough to poke it"
As a magnet, sticker, mug or more.
Get yours: https://davidaugust.threadless.com/designs/warehouse-fire/accessories/sticker
h/t @…

Replaced article(s) found for cs.CL. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.CL/new
[2/5]:
- POTSA: A Cross-Lingual Speech Alignment Framework for Speech-to-Text Translation
Li, Cui, Wang, Ge, Huang, Li, Peng, Lu, Tashi, Wang, Dang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09232 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115541846907664054
- Beyond Elicitation: Provision-based Prompt Optimization for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks
Yunzhe Xu, Zhuosheng Zhang, Zhe Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10465 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115547607561282911
- $\pi$-Attention: Periodic Sparse Transformers for Efficient Long-Context Modeling
Dong Liu, Yanxuan Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10696 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115564418836654965
- Based on Data Balancing and Model Improvement for Multi-Label Sentiment Classification Performanc...
Zijin Su, Huanzhu Lyu, Yuren Niu, Yiming Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14073 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115575715073023141
- HEAD-QA v2: Expanding a Healthcare Benchmark for Reasoning
Alexis Correa-Guill\'en, Carlos G\'omez-Rodr\'iguez, David Vilares
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15355 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115581410328165116
- Towards Hyper-Efficient RAG Systems in VecDBs: Distributed Parallel Multi-Resolution Vector Search
Dong Liu, Yanxuan Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16681 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115603508442305146
- Estonian WinoGrande Dataset: Comparative Analysis of LLM Performance on Human and Machine Transla...
Marii Ojastu, Hele-Andra Kuulmets, Aleksei Dorkin, Marika Borovikova, Dage S\"arg, Kairit Sirts
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17290 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115604083224487885
- A Systematic Study of In-the-Wild Model Merging for Large Language Models
O\u{g}uz Ka\u{g}an Hitit, Leander Girrbach, Zeynep Akata
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21437 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115621178703846052
- CREST: Universal Safety Guardrails Through Cluster-Guided Cross-Lingual Transfer
Lavish Bansal, Naman Mishra
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02711 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115655090475535157
- Multilingual Medical Reasoning for Question Answering with Large Language Models
Pietro Ferrazzi, Aitor Soroa, Rodrigo Agerri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05658 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115683267711014189
- OnCoCo 1.0: A Public Dataset for Fine-Grained Message Classification in Online Counseling Convers...
Albrecht, Lehmann, Poltermann, Rudolph, Steigerwald, Stieler
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09804 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115700409397020978
- Does Tone Change the Answer? Evaluating Prompt Politeness Effects on Modern LLMs: GPT, Gemini, an...
Hanyu Cai, Binqi Shen, Lier Jin, Lan Hu, Xiaojing Fan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12812 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115729149622659403
- Beg to Differ: Understanding Reasoning-Answer Misalignment Across Languages
Ovalle, Ross, Ruder, Williams, Ullrich, Ibrahim, Sagun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22712 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115808161882146194
- Activation Steering for Masked Diffusion Language Models
Adi Shnaidman, Erin Feiglin, Osher Yaari, Efrat Mentel, Amit Levi, Raz Lapid
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24143 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115819533211103315
- JMedEthicBench: A Multi-Turn Conversational Benchmark for Evaluating Medical Safety in Japanese L...
Liu, Li, Niu, Zhang, Xun, Hou, Wang, Iwasawa, Matsuo, Hatakeyama-Sato
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01627 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115847901607405421
- FACTUM: Mechanistic Detection of Citation Hallucination in Long-Form RAG
Dassen, Kotula, Murray, Yates, Lawrie, Kayi, Mayfield, Duh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05866 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115881545684182376
- {\dag}DAGGER: Distractor-Aware Graph Generation for Executable Reasoning in Math Problems
Zabir Al Nazi, Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Sudipta Kar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06853 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115887753245730019
- Symphonym: Universal Phonetic Embeddings for Cross-Script Name Matching
Stephen Gadd
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06932 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115887767008671765
- LLMs versus the Halting Problem: Revisiting Program Termination Prediction
Sultan, Armengol-Estape, Kesseli, Vanegue, Shahaf, Adi, O'Hearn
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18987 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115972010510378715
- MuVaC: A Variational Causal Framework for Multimodal Sarcasm Understanding in Dialogues
Diandian Guo, Fangfang Yuan, Cong Cao, Xixun Lin, Chuan Zhou, Hao Peng, Yanan Cao, Yanbing Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20451 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115977891530875024
toXiv_bot_toot

Unexpected oof.
"People can do terrible things when they feel safe and powerful. Your father had probably gotten his way for so long that he thought he was untouchable, and that is a dangerous way for a person to feel."
-Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Nå, så fik man da lige lidt ekstra morgenmotion! 🏃‍♀️
Jeg skal til SDU i dag og havde planlagt bus til Hovedbanen i god tid, med hele 15 minutter til afgang. Bortset fra trafikhelvedet på Amager! Lige omkring Christianshavns Vold panikkede jeg over det og hoppede af bussen. For at nå til Hovedbanen i tide måtte jeg så smålŸbe resten af vejen (2 km) - og undervejs kunne jeg så konstatere at jeg snildt kunne have taget mindst et stop til, for der var busbane det næste stykke 🤦‍♀️
Nu sidd…

Is Dee Winters the answer at LB for the Dallas Cowboys? https://insidethestar.com/is-dee-winters-the-answer-at-lb-for-the-dallas-cowboys