Tootfinder

You may've seen @… 's post about mails he gets about CRA compliance from large companies asking him to answer all kinds of questions. I just saw a similar one to the maintainer of another important FOSS library. The kicker: The company uses a version from 2000. (Yes, no typo, 25 years old. I think it has some unfixed vulnerabilities.)

My late father had a lot of old (c. 2000?) Macintosh books. Are these of interest to anyone?
I can't guarantee I'd be able to dig up any CD-ROMs that came with them, but it's possible. And you'll need to be patient because they're located 100 miles from me.

Isomorphism of almost locally compact Polish metric structures
Maciej Malicki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07765 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07765

Isomorphism of almost locally compact Polish metric structures
A topological space is almost locally compact if it contains a dense locally compact subspace. We generalize a result from \cite{Ma}, showing that isomorphism on Borel classes of almost locally compact Polish metric structures is always classifiable by countable structures. This allows to remove a gap in the proof presented in \cite{Ma} of a positive answer to a question of Gao and Kechris, who asked whether isometry of locally compact Polish metric spaces is classifiable by countable structure…

Data-Driven Einstein-Dilaton Model for Pure Yang-Mills Thermodynamics and Glueball Spectrum
Xun Chen, Yidian Chen, Kai Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06729

Data-Driven Einstein-Dilaton Model for Pure Yang-Mills Thermodynamics and Glueball Spectrum
We develop a machine learning assisted holographic model that consistently describes both the equation of state and glueball spectrum of pure Yang-Mills theory, achieved through neural network reconstruction of Einstein-dilaton gravity. Our framework incorporates key non-perturbative constraints of lattice QCD data: the ground ($0^{++}$) and first-excited ($0^{++*}$) scalar glueball masses pins down the infrared (IR) geometry, while entropy density data anchors the ultraviolet (UV) behavior of …

1.8 per cent measurement of $H_0$ from Cepheids alone
Richard Stiskalek, Harry Desmond, Eleni Tsaprazi, Alan Heavens, Guilhem Lavaux, Stuart McAlpine, Jens Jasche
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09665

1.8 per cent measurement of $H_0$ from Cepheids alone
One of the most pressing problems in current cosmology is the cause of the Hubble tension. We revisit a two-rung distance ladder, composed only of Cepheid periods and magnitudes, anchor distances in the Milky Way, Large Magellanic Cloud, NGC 4258, and host galaxy redshifts. We adopt the SH0ES data for the most up-to-date and carefully vetted measurements, where the Cepheid hosts were selected to harbour also Type Ia supernovae. We introduce two important improvements: a rigorous selection model…

stark och gullig halacha yomis (dagligt mail om judisk lag) idag https://oukosher.org/halacha-yomis/my-father-as…

Geometric Landau Analysis and Symbol Bootstrap
Dmitry Chicherin, Johannes Henn, Elia Mazzucchelli, Jaroslav Trnka, Qinglin Yang, Shun-Qing Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05443

Geometric Landau Analysis and Symbol Bootstrap
We investigate how the positive geometry framework for loop integrands in $\mathcal{N}{=}4$ super Yang-Mills theory constrains the structure of the integrated answers. This is done in the context of a geometric expansion of Wilson loops with a Lagrangian insertion, called negative geometries, extending ideas previously used for scattering amplitudes related to the Amplituhedron. The procedure we adopt combines the knowledge of all maximal codimension boundaries of the geometry, which characteri…

Generalizing Verifiable Instruction Following
Valentina Pyatkin, Saumya Malik, Victoria Graf, Hamish Ivison, Shengyi Huang, Pradeep Dasigi, Nathan Lambert, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02833

Generalizing Verifiable Instruction Following
A crucial factor for successful human and AI interaction is the ability of language models or chatbots to follow human instructions precisely. A common feature of instructions are output constraints like ``only answer with yes or no" or ``mention the word `abrakadabra' at least 3 times" that the user adds to craft a more useful answer. Even today's strongest models struggle with fulfilling such constraints. We find that most models strongly overfit on a small set of verifiable constraints from …

Tetris: Efficient Intra-Datacenter Calls Packing for Large Conferencing Services
Rohan Gandhi, Ankur Mallick, Ken Sueda, Rui Liang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00426 https://

Tetris: Efficient Intra-Datacenter Calls Packing for Large Conferencing Services
Conference services like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet facilitate millions of daily calls, yet ensuring high performance at low costs remains a significant challenge. This paper revisits the problem of packing calls across Media Processor (MP) servers that host the calls within individual datacenters (DCs). We show that the algorithm used in Teams -- a large scale conferencing service as well as other state-of-art algorithms are prone to placing calls resulting in some of the MPs becom…

The oldest Milky Way stars: New constraints on the age of the Universe and the Hubble constant
Elena Tomasetti, Cristina Chiappini, Samir Nepal, Michele Moresco, Carmela Lardo, Andrea Cimatti, Friedrich Anders, Anna B. A. Queiroz, Guilherme Limberg
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02692

The oldest Milky Way stars: New constraints on the age of the Universe and the Hubble constant
We exploit the most robust, old, and cosmology-independent age estimates of individual stars from Gaia DR3 to place a lower bound on the age of the Universe, $t_U$. These constraints can serve as an anchor point for any cosmological model, providing an upper limit to the Hubble constant $H_0$. We consider the stellar age catalog of arXiv:2402.00561, selecting 3,000 of the oldest and most robustly measured main sequence turn-off (MSTO) and subgiant branch (SGB) stars, with ages $>12.5$ Gyr and a…