Tootfinder

Overly academic/distanced ethical discussions
Had a weird interaction with @/brainwane@social.coop just now. I misinterpreted one of their posts quoting someone else and I think the combination of that plus an interaction pattern where I'd assume their stance on something and respond critically to that ended up with me getting blocked. I don't have hard feelings exactly, and this post is only partly about this particular person, but I noticed something interesting by the end of the conversation that had been bothering me. They repeatedly criticized me for assuming what their position was, but never actually stated their position. They didn't say: "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, it's actually Y." They just said "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, please don't assume my position!" I get that it's annoying to have people respond to a straw man version of your argument, but when I in response asked some direct questions about what their position was, they gave some non-answers and then blocked me. It's entirely possible it's a coincidence, and they just happened to run out of patience on that iteration, but it makes me take their critique of my interactions a bit less seriously. I suspect that they just didn't want to hear what I was saying, while at the same time they wanted to feel as if they were someone who values public critique and open discussion of tricky issues (if anyone reading this post also followed our interaction and has a different opinion of my behavior, I'd be glad to hear it; it's possible In effectively being an asshole here and it would be useful to hear that if so).
In any case, the fact that at the end of the entire discussion, I'm realizing I still don't actually know their position on whether they think the AI use case in question is worthwhile feels odd. They praised the system on several occasions, albeit noting some drawbacks while doing so. They said that the system was possibly changing their anti-AI stance, but then got mad at me for assuming this meant that they thought this use-case was justified. Maybe they just haven't made up their mind yet but didn't want to say that?
Interestingly, in one of their own blog posts that got linked in the discussion, they discuss a different AI system, and despite listing a bunch of concrete harms, conclude that it's okay to use it. That's fine; I don't think *every* use of AI is wrong on balance, but what bothered me was that their post dismissed a number of real ethical issues by saying essentially "I haven't seen calls for a boycott over this issue, so it's not a reason to stop use." That's an extremely socially conformist version of ethics that doesn't sit well with me. The discussion also ended up linking this post: https://chelseatroy.com/2024/08/28/does-ai-benefit-the-world/ which bothered me in a related way. In it, Troy describes classroom teaching techniques for introducing and helping students explore the ethics of AI, and they seem mostly great. They avoid prescribing any particular correct stance, which is important when teaching given the power relationship, and they help students understand the limitations of their perspectives regarding global impacts, which is great. But the overall conclusion of the post is that "nobody is qualified to really judge global impacts, so we should focus on ways to improve outcomes instead of trying to judge them." This bothers me because we actually do have a responsibility to make decisive ethical judgments despite limitations of our perspectives. If we never commit to any ethical judgment against a technology because we think our perspective is too limited to know the true impacts (which I'll concede it invariably is) then we'll have to accept every technology without objection, limiting ourselves to trying to improve their impacts without opposing them. Given who currently controls most of the resources that go into exploration for new technologies, this stance is too permissive. Perhaps if our objection to a technology was absolute and instantly effective, I'd buy the argument that objecting without a deep global view of the long-term risks is dangerous. As things stand, I think that objecting to the development/use of certain technologies in certain contexts is necessary, and although there's a lot of uncertainly, I expect strongly enough that the overall outcomes of objection will be positive that I think it's a good thing to do.
The deeper point here I guess is that this kind of "things are too complicated, let's have a nuanced discussion where we don't come to any conclusions because we see a lot of unknowns along with definite harms" really bothers me.

After reading some of the Epstein/Trump news I am getting the impression that when Trump hovered over and followed Hillary Clinton during the debates that that hovering/following was one of Trump's long-time, well practiced moves to intimidate women.
https://www.

Invariant Rings of $ \mathbb{G}_{a} $-Representations are not always Finitely Generated in Positive Characteristic
Stephen Maguire
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15431 https://

Invariant Rings of $ \mathbb{G}_{a} $-Representations are not always Finitely Generated in Positive Characteristic
Hilbert's 14th Problem asks the following question. Given a linear representation $ β: G \to \operatorname{GL}(\mathbf{V}) $ of a linear algebraic group over a field $ k $ is the ring $ S_{k}(\mathbf{V}^{\ast}) $ a finitely generated $ k $-algebra? For reductive groups the answer is yes. However, in general the answer is no. Nagata provided one of the earliest counterexamples to this claim and his counterexample was extended by Shigeru Mukai. However, if $ G $ is equal to $ \mathbb{G}_{a} $ an…

Probing HZZ Interactions through Single Production of Higgs Boson at FCC-ee
I. Kahraman (Ankara Univ.), O. \c{C}ak{\i}r (Ankara Univ.)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15533

Probing HZZ Interactions through Single Production of Higgs Boson at FCC-ee
The associated production of a Higgs boson with a Z boson in the collisions of electron and positron beams at Future Circular Collider (FCC-ee) have been studied. Here, the Z boson decays into dileptons, while the Higgs boson decays to all possible channels, mostly to the b\bar{b}. The collisions provides a clean and powerful channel to probe the (HZZ) coupling at future lepton colliders. Following the event generation, the analysis is performed using the recoil mass method, which allows model-…

“This is not a hoax, and it’s not going away,”
said Epstein survivor Marina Lacerda.
Trump’s struggles reveal the limits of his usual tactics.
His strategy
—harnessing the anger caused by inequality to deflect blame
—has faltered here.
To understand why, we must look beyond Epstein as a predator to examine the system that protected him.
Documents recently released from Epstein’s estate expose the extent of his aristocratic immunity.
In a 2008 plea …

The real reason Donald Trump can’t escape the Epstein scandal
Donald Trump’s usual tactics to deflect blame are failing as victims of Jeffrey Epstein expose the deep inequalities that protected the predator, and now implicate Trump himself.

Time-optimal Asynchronous Minimal Vertex Covering by Myopic Robots
Saswata Jana, Subhajit Pramanick, Adri Bhattacharya, Partha Sarathi Mandal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14247 ht…

Time-optimal Asynchronous Minimal Vertex Covering by Myopic Robots
In a connected graph with an autonomous robot swarm with limited visibility, it is natural to ask whether the robots can be deployed to certain vertices satisfying a given property using only local knowledge. This paper affirmatively answers the question with a set of \emph{myopic} (finite visibility range) luminous robots with the aim of \emph{filling a minimal vertex cover} (MVC) of a given graph $G = (V, E)$. The graph has special vertices, called \emph{doors}, through which robots enter seq…

Mind the Gap: A Closer Look at Tokenization for Multiple-Choice Question Answering with LLMs
Mario Sanz-Guerrero, Minh Duc Bui, Katharina von der Wense
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15020

Mind the Gap: A Closer Look at Tokenization for Multiple-Choice Question Answering with LLMs
When evaluating large language models (LLMs) with multiple-choice question answering (MCQA), it is common to end the prompt with the string "Answer:" to facilitate automated answer extraction via next-token probabilities. However, there is no consensus on how to tokenize the space following the colon, often overlooked as a trivial choice. In this paper, we uncover accuracy differences of up to 11% due to this (seemingly irrelevant) tokenization variation as well as reshuffled model rankings, ra…

Fine-structure Line Atlas for Multi-wavelength Extragalactic Study (FLAMES) III: [C II] as Tracer, Crisis of SFR, [O III]/[C II] at High-z, New Answers and New Questions
Bo Peng, Gordon Stacey, Amit Vishwas, Catie Ball, Cody Lamarche, Christopher Rooney, Thomas Nikola, Carl Ferkinhoff
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12896

Fine-structure Line Atlas for Multi-wavelength Extragalactic Study (FLAMES) III: [C II] as Tracer, Crisis of SFR, [O III]/[C II] at High-z, New Answers and New Questions
In the final paper of this series, we discuss new perspectives and challenges in the study of interstellar medium (ISM), leveraging comprehensive catalogs and physical insights presented in our previous papers. We focus on key questions of far-infrared (FIR) fine-structure lines (FSLs): their origins, diagnostic value, and implications of correlations. Our analysis reveals a strong dependence on elemental abundance, so that FSL/H$α$ traces metallicity, [N II]/[C II] traces N/O, and $\sim$80% o…

Hmmmm… here is a problem I did not anticipate.
Every time I empty the main pond hole of water, (the actual hole under the liner) water returns within an hour or two. I’ve done it 4 times now, and it keeps filling back up with water.
Obviously there is water underground infiltrating into the pond hole, and/or the water table itself is above the bottom of the hole. It is not coming from either of the other holes because they both have the same amount of water in them as they did this morning.
I have “watered” the blueberry patch and hazelnut tree a lot with the water that I have been cleaning the filter with… and we also had lots of water flying around outside the liners yesterday as I tested the pump. So it is quite possible that the ground around the pond is simply well saturated.
I think I am going to have to just keep removing the water (and putting it into the sewer) until it does not refill. We have a week of hot weather coming. Surely that will be enough time for everything to dry out completely.
Otherwise I might run into some issues if the rains return before I can anchor down the pond liner with gravel and get the plumbing in!
How is time already running short!?
Never underestimate the ability of water to find a place where it is not wanted. 😆
#poolpond #backyardProject #diy

Sparse Neurons Carry Strong Signals of Question Ambiguity in LLMs
Zhuoxuan Zhang, Jinhao Duan, Edward Kim, Kaidi Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13664 https://

Sparse Neurons Carry Strong Signals of Question Ambiguity in LLMs
Ambiguity is pervasive in real-world questions, yet large language models (LLMs) often respond with confident answers rather than seeking clarification. In this work, we show that question ambiguity is linearly encoded in the internal representations of LLMs and can be both detected and controlled at the neuron level. During the model's pre-filling stage, we identify that a small number of neurons, as few as one, encode question ambiguity information. Probes trained on these Ambiguity-Encoding …