Tootfinder

The Trump administration is dismantling the last of the public commons.
It’s cutting billions to state programs tracking disease,
repealing emissions and drinking water regulations,
revoking hundreds of millions in funding for life-saving research,
canceling local food programs for schools and food banks,
rolling back vaccinations,
and shutting down the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Commi…

“Make America Healthy Again” Aims to Make Public Health Your Private Responsibility
The message coming from the Trump administration is: “Take care of yourselves — because we won’t.”…

«The fundamental problem is this: that most of the means of communication are owned or influenced by the very rich. If democracy is the problem capital is always trying to solve, propaganda is part of the solution.»
On the epistemic crisis we're all in, thanks to most ways of knowing and disseminating knowledge being in the hands of a couple of billionaires.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/14/climate-crisis-communication-super-rich

🫰🏿 Snap out of it: Canonical on Flatpak friction, Core Desktop, and the future of Ubuntu
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2025/11/03/canonical_jon_seager_qa/

Snap out of it: Canonical on Flatpak friction, Core Desktop, and the future of Ubuntu
Ubuntu Summit: Jon Seager, VP of Engineering, talks exclusively to The Reg

"A new investigation of Elon #Musk’s X by Sky News found that every account set up by reporters, 'no matter their political orientation, was fed a glut of rightwing content', much of which was extreme. The experts it consulted believe this pattern could have resulted only from an algorithm engineered for this purpose, and that 'an algorithmic bias must be decided by senior people at …

““We visited a dark factory producing some astronomical number of mobile phones,” recalls Greg Jackson, the boss of British energy supplier Octopus.
“The process was so heavily automated that there were no workers on the manufacturing side, just a small number who were there to ensure the plant was working.
“You get this sense of a change, where China’s competitiveness has gone from being about government subsidies and low wages to a tremendous number of highly skilled, educated engineers who are innovating like mad.””
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/10/12/why-western-executives-visit-china-coming-back-terrified/

The EmpathiSEr: Development and Validation of Software Engineering Oriented Empathy Scales
Hashini Gunatilake, John Grundy, Rashina Hoda, Ingo Mueller
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12546

The EmpathiSEr: Development and Validation of Software Engineering Oriented Empathy Scales
Empathy plays a critical role in software engineering (SE), influencing collaboration, communication, and user-centred design. Although SE research has increasingly recognised empathy as a key human aspect, there remains no validated instrument specifically designed to measure it within the unique socio-technical contexts of SE. Existing generic empathy scales, while well-established in psychology and healthcare, often rely on language, scenarios, and assumptions that are not meaningful or inte…

The Ethics Engine: A Modular Pipeline for Accessible Psychometric Assessment of Large Language Models
Jake Van Clief, Constantine Kyritsopoulos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11742 …

The Ethics Engine: A Modular Pipeline for Accessible Psychometric Assessment of Large Language Models
As Large Language Models increasingly mediate human communication and decision-making, understanding their value expression becomes critical for research across disciplines. This work presents the Ethics Engine, a modular Python pipeline that transforms psychometric assessment of LLMs from a technically complex endeavor into an accessible research tool. The pipeline demonstrates how thoughtful infrastructure design can expand participation in AI research, enabling investigators across cognitive…

In #Wikimedia land, I created my first #Lua module in #WikimediaCommons:

Temperature and conditions for thermalization after canonical quenches
Lennart Dabelow
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12696 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12696

Temperature and conditions for thermalization after canonical quenches
We consider quenches of a quantum system that is prepared in a canonical equilibrium state of one Hamiltonian and then evolves unitarily in time under a different Hamiltonian. Technically, our main result is a systematic expansion of the pre- and post-quench canonical ensembles in the quench strength. We first demonstrate how this can be used to predict the system's temperature after the quench from equilibrium properties at the pre-quench temperature. For a thermalizing post-quench system, it …

"The scene (“Hidden Figures”, 2016) ends with Mr. Stafford famously claiming “that’s old!” as if the Pythagorean theorem was suddenly not useful anymore after 3500 years… Mr. Stafford’s reaction is canonical and very appropriate; it is the same that most devs have upon learning the fact that COBOL is running most credit card transactions, or when frontend engineers discover that static or server-rendered HTML websites do not need 10 MB of JavaScript on the browser."