Tootfinder

Interesting thing about tomorrow's tarot show, rendering now, is that I upgraded from Blender 4.0 to blender 4.4 and it's quite a bit nicer to look at the timeline editor.
Was sad to find that the render time was up though. From about 3 seconds per frame usually to more like 12!?
Trying it with an old version I see that the lights and textures look way better with 4.4 than 4.0 though. A substantial step up in the way the show looks without me even doing anything other than waiting four times longer per frame.
Seems to be heavily dependent upon lighting now. The slow frames are like 12 seconds but the fast frames with minimal lighting and close up on the video are more like 2.
Looks too beautiful now to go back though. Upgraded my cloud-remote render machines too. We will render on four machines tonight. FOUR! The power of it all.
g3.4xlarge is no faster than g3.large but g6.xlarge seems to be twice the speed.
But hard to be sure really coz of the massive variance in time depending on the lighting.
Anyway, great show coming tomorrow. Sometimes I wonder what the hell I'm trying to do with it but tomorrow's show is the answer. Hide the angry bitter political rant behind a strange CGI tarot show. When the rant comes together well I like it.
https://wordcloudtarot.com/@wordcloudtarot/statuses/01JYFF0GQV1680Z0VG0YTFZDTP

Canonical Representations of Markovian Structural Causal Models: A Framework for Counterfactual Reasoning
Lucas de Lara (IECL)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16370

Canonical Representations of Markovian Structural Causal Models: A Framework for Counterfactual Reasoning
Counterfactual reasoning aims at answering contrary-to-fact questions like ''Would have Alice recovered had she taken aspirin?'' and corresponds to the most fine-grained layer of causation. Critically, while many counterfactual statements cannot be falsified -- even by randomized experiments -- they underpin fundamental concepts like individual-wise fairness. Therefore, providing models to formalize and implement counterfactual beliefs remains a fundamental scientific problem. In the Markovian …

The Relationship between Cognition and Computation: "Global-first" Cognition versus Local-first Computation
Lin Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17970

The Relationship between Cognition and Computation: "Global-first" Cognition versus Local-first Computation
What fundamental research questions are essential for advancing toward brain-like AI or AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) capable of performing any intellectual task a human can? Should it be something like the Turing machine (1936), which answers the question "What is computation?" and lays the foundation for the entire field of computer science? Or should it be something like Shannon's mathematical theory of communication (1948), which answers the question "What is information?" and forms…

Dreist: der israelische Verteidigungsminister #Katz aus dem #Terrorregime #Netanjahu|s fordert die gezielte Tötung des iranischen Staatschef

Nach iranischem Angriff auf Klinik: Israels Verteidigungsminister erklärt Tötung Chameneis zum Kriegsziel – „moderner Hitler“
Im Krieg zwischen Israel und dem Iran gehen die gegenseitigen Angriffe weiter. Israels Verteidigungsminister Katz droht dem iranischen Staatschef. Er könne „nicht weiter existieren“.

Practical colinear chaining on sequences revisited
Nicola Rizzo, Manuel C\'aceres, Veli M\"akinen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11750 https://…

Practical colinear chaining on sequences revisited
Colinear chaining is a classical heuristic for sequence alignment and is widely used in modern practical aligners. Jain et al. (J. Comput. Biol. 2022) proposed an $O(n \log^3 n)$ time algorithm to chain a set of $n$ anchors so that the chaining cost matches the edit distance of the input sequences, when anchors are maximal exact matches. Moreover, assuming a uniform and sparse distribution of anchors, they provided a practical solution ($\mathtt{ChainX}$) working in $O(n \cdot \mathsf{SOL} + n …

SVG Favicons and CSS Anchor Positioning are two big wins shipping in Safari 26 Beta: https://webkit.org/blog/16993/news-from-wwdc25-web-technology-coming-this-fall-in-safari-26-beta/

Equality is Far Weaker than Constant-Cost Communication
Mika G\"o\"os, Nathaniel Harms, Artur Riazanov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11162 https://

Equality is Far Weaker than Constant-Cost Communication
We exhibit an $n$-bit communication problem with a constant-cost randomized protocol but which requires $n^{Ω(1)}$ deterministic (or even non-deterministic) queries to an Equality oracle. Therefore, even constant-cost randomized protocols cannot be efficiently "derandomized" using Equality oracles. This improves on several recent results and answers a question from the survey of Hatami and Hatami (SIGACT News 2024). It also gives a significantly simpler and quantitatively superior proof of the…

this potential — for AI companies to tweak their chatbots to give pro-Trump answers to appease MAGA — is one of the reasons I'm avoiding LLMs as a political practice. they are inherently extremely centralized, requiring massive resources to crawl data and train. to become dependent on such products is to subject ourselves to the owners' power. this is just one of the ways that can go disastrously wrong

The campaign to make it illegal for ChatGPT to criticize Trump
The conservative pressure campaign against social networks was hugely successful — and now it's coming for AI

"Comment le boom des milliardaires alimente les inégalités et menace la démocratie."
"Avec une richesse qui se concentre au sommet, l'Europe doit agir maintenant pour défendre la démocratie et la stabilité économique pour tous."
#TaxTheRich #démocratie

Wanted to find out how many calories are in poop to make a nice fat-positive post on here, but after wading through 5 separate results from the top to the bottom of the first page of results, every single one of them showed signs of AI authorship, so none of the info was trustworthy (several contradicted each other or themselves). The one article that cited legit sources didn't include a straightforward answer to the question. Of course, I could dig past the first page, or look through the cited sources do some math myself, and that's not even that hard to do. But 10 years ago, a trustworthy answer would have been among the first 5 search results. When we say #AI is destroying the digital commons, this is what we mean.
Gonna go find some academic papers to answer this and report back.