Tootfinder

Here’s my 35th “Long Links” outing, curation of long-form offerings, which assume that nobody has time to read all this stuff but one or two of the pieces might brighten your day. This one is mostly political but some of the politics are from France and China. Plus a way-cool analytical history of blogging and a section labeled “wonderful things”.

2/2 Reflection on #citizenship:
I do not treat the concept of “#democracy" lightly. I was born into the aftermath of centuries of totalitarian oppression that ended suddenly, leaving the nascent Ukrainian state of the late 90s and early 2000s floundering in the turbulent whirlpool of hopes and fears felt by millions of people who were finally allowed to ponder: how to build a free democratic state in the place of Soviet and imperial ruins?
I was taught the words "democracy", "citizen", "freedom", "voting", “liberty" (and more) by people who, less than two decades prior, weren't allowed to leave the borders of their country. I was told about self-determination by people whose political choices were ridiculed, punished, and eviscerated form most of their lives. The duty of governing ourselves felt to us ephemeral - a nice fantasy, akin to a fairytale or a utopia from fictional works.
And then I saw those same people fight with their bodies and souls once the previously unfathomable democracy was threatened. Protests in 2004, then again in 2014, then the unthinkable war against foreign invasion in 2022. Democracy no longer felt abstract or silly. It became as tangible as saying "I love you".
I write of Ukraine as I reflect on becoming a citizen of another country because the history and values of my adopted United States feel as real as the skin on my legs, the significance of its legacy lays as heavy as the weight of my waist-long hair, and the desire to uphold the freedoms of its Constitution burns my throat as harshly as dehydration after a long day in the sun.
People have asked me why I even want to join this country, when the present moment is shrouded in impenetrable darkness. And I answer: because I've felt the warmth of a newly lit fire of freedom breaking through shadows that for centuries looked like solid walls. I have seen kindness, and solidarity heal the fear and hate of oppression. I've seen liberty emerge from nothing but the human soul.
I am not a religious person, but I have faith. Faith in the ideals at the foundation of the American project. Faint but powerful recognition that "we the people" now includes me.
I love #America. And I hope to keep loving my home for the rest of my life.

What should you do if you are unable to connect to the Dutch grid? Build your own distribution grid! That’s what a renewable energy developer in the north of the country has done.
https://www.novar.energy/news/novar-establishes-its-own-grid-connection/

Novar establishes its own grid connection - Novar EN
The answer to the congested energy grid: Novar establishes its own grid connection for the largest solar park in the Netherlands. Read the full press release here.

Can LLMs Refuse Questions They Do Not Know? Measuring Knowledge-Aware Refusal in Factual Tasks
Wenbo Pan, Jie Xu, Qiguang Chen, Junhao Dong, Libo Qin, Xinfeng Li, Haining Yu, Xiaohua Jia
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01782

Can LLMs Refuse Questions They Do Not Know? Measuring Knowledge-Aware Refusal in Factual Tasks
Large Language Models (LLMs) should refuse to answer questions beyond their knowledge. This capability, which we term knowledge-aware refusal, is crucial for factual reliability. However, existing metrics fail to faithfully measure this ability. On the one hand, simple refusal-based metrics are biased by refusal rates and yield inconsistent scores when models exhibit different refusal tendencies. On the other hand, existing calibration metrics are proxy-based, capturing the performance of auxil…