Tootfinder

Robust Online Calibration for UWB-Aided Visual-Inertial Navigation with Bias Correction
Yizhi Zhou, Jie Xu, Jiawei Xia, Zechen Hu, Weizi Li, Xuan Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10999

Robust Online Calibration for UWB-Aided Visual-Inertial Navigation with Bias Correction
This paper presents a novel robust online calibration framework for Ultra-Wideband (UWB) anchors in UWB-aided Visual-Inertial Navigation Systems (VINS). Accurate anchor positioning, a process known as calibration, is crucial for integrating UWB ranging measurements into state estimation. While several prior works have demonstrated satisfactory results by using robot-aided systems to autonomously calibrate UWB systems, there are still some limitations: 1) these approaches assume accurate robot l…

The ideas that finally bubbled up to the surface in The Point of No Return last night have been festering in the back of my brain for months. Because, although it's a bit inchoate, it's only saying out loud what most of us already know.
The job now is no longer to turn the ship around. We don't have the wheel, and those who do will not listen.
The task now is to build lifeboats. To build resilient spaces in which fragments of humanity can survive.

The Point of No Return
I can't stop climate change by myself. I can't create a sustainable future for my village by myself. To do either of these things, everyone else needs to work together. But badgering people, being frustrated with people, being angry with people (and yes, I am angry — very angry — with people I know, and like, and respect, very much) doesn't motivate them to work together. My very frustration, my very sense of urgency, makes me a liability. I should stop.

AI Agents for Photonic Integrated Circuit Design Automation
Ankita Sharma, YuQi Fu, Vahid Ansari, Rishabh Iyer, Fiona Kuang, Kashish Mistry, Raisa Islam Aishy, Sara Ahmad, Joaquin Matres, Dirk R. Englund, Joyce K. S. Poon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14123

AI Agents for Photonic Integrated Circuit Design Automation
We present Photonics Intelligent Design and Optimization (PhIDO), a multi-agent framework that converts natural-language photonic integrated circuit (PIC) design requests into layout mask files. We compare 7 reasoning large language models for PhIDO using a testbench of 102 design descriptions that ranged from single devices to 112-component PICs. The success rate for single-device designs was up to 91%. For design queries with less than or equal to 15 components, o1, Gemini-2.5-pro, and Claude…

Addiction (Speculatve)
Kind of a fucked-up metaphor, but I was thinking yesterday that parenting is a lot like addiction. If you separate me from my child, I'll take completely irrational and desperate actions to get them back, driven by a deep instinct that goes well beyond "love." I'll also make self-disadvantageous long-term decisions like forgoing sleep, working an extra job, or quitting a job to do some combination of providing for and/or being present with my child.
Even in parenting situations where love is absent, and beyond, I think, the possessiveness that sometimes festers in those situations, there's often (although not always) a craving for simple presence of the child.
In a healthy relationship, there's a whole lot more than this, but it's interesting to me that the same obsessive craving and absolute priority that we think of as diseased and/or monstrous in someone addicted to a hard drug can be healthy in the right context (that is, when it doesn't contribute to abusive or twisted parental relationships but instead exists alongside a healthy amount of love and respect).
Makes me wonder if there are ways to have a truly healthy drug addiction, although I recognize the answer might well be "no" and that even if it's "technically/theoretically yes" it might still be harmful to hype up or even merely discuss that possibility since it might help addicted people in harmful addictions more easily justify inaction. At minimum I think any "yes" answer here involves assuming utopian-level differences from our current society.
#Parenting #Addiction

CVIRO: A Consistent and Tightly-Coupled Visual-Inertial-Ranging Odometry on Lie Groups
Yizhi Zhou, Ziwei Kang, Jiawei Xia, Xuan Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10867 https://

CVIRO: A Consistent and Tightly-Coupled Visual-Inertial-Ranging Odometry on Lie Groups
Ultra Wideband (UWB) is widely used to mitigate drift in visual-inertial odometry (VIO) systems. Consistency is crucial for ensuring the estimation accuracy of a UWBaided VIO system. An inconsistent estimator can degrade localization performance, where the inconsistency primarily arises from two main factors: (1) the estimator fails to preserve the correct system observability, and (2) UWB anchor positions are assumed to be known, leading to improper neglect of calibration uncertainty. In this …

Which is easier:
Reversing DRAM init binaries or setting up MFA with O365?
(I am forced to, thank you HostEurope...)
Can't access my damn email now, great, -(2**31)/10, cannot recommend.
Yes, the answer is the former. 😱

A new take on district heating and #flexibility: can dynamic pricing help reduce overall heating costs? The short answer is yes, and automatic controllers would reinforce this effect. Peak heat demand, sometimes also from fossil sources, can thus be reduced.

Which is easier:
Reversing DRAM init binaries or setting up MFA with O365?
(I am forced to, thank you HostEurope...)
Can't access my damn email now, great, -(2**31)/10, cannot recommend.
Yes, the answer is the former. 😱

It's time to lower your inhibitions towards just asking a human the answer to your question.
In the early nineties, effectively before the internet, that's how you learned a lot of stuff. Your other option was to look it up in a book. I was a kid then, so I asked my parents a lot of questions.
Then by ~2000 or a little later, it started to feel almost rude to do this, because Google was now a thing, along with Wikipedia. "Let me Google that for you" became a joke website used to satirize the poor fool who would waste someone's time answering a random question. There were some upsides to this, as well as downsides. I'm not here to judge them.
At this point, Google doesn't work any more for answering random questions, let alone more serous ones. That era is over. If you don't believe it, try it yourself. Between Google intentionally making their results worse to show you more ads, the SEO cruft that already existed pre-LLMs, and the massive tsunami of SEO slop enabled by LLMs, trustworthy information is hard to find, and hard to distinguish from the slop. (I posted an example earlier: #AI #LLMs #DigitalCommons #AskAQuestion