Tootfinder

Decentralized Federated Averaging via Random Walk
Changheng Wang, Zhiqing Wei, Lizhe Liu, Qiao Deng, Yingda Wu, Yangyang Niu, Yashan Pang, Zhiyong Feng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21286

Decentralized Federated Averaging via Random Walk
Federated Learning (FL) is a communication-efficient distributed machine learning method that allows multiple devices to collaboratively train models without sharing raw data. FL can be categorized into centralized and decentralized paradigms. The centralized paradigm relies on a central server to aggregate local models, potentially resulting in single points of failure, communication bottlenecks, and exposure of model parameters. In contrast, the decentralized paradigm, which does not require …

These days, it's China.
Massive compensation schemes introduced for damage sustained due to flood diversion after heavy rains.
Climate bills are coming in.
#ClimatechangeisWaterchange

i like to imagine there's a version of this clip that perfectly loops, that he's locked in a sisyphean struggle against the matrix

Eh les gars, presque toutes les comparaisons avec l'Allemagne sont louches. Quand on nous dit que seulement 5% d'affections longue durée dans la sécu en Allemagne contre 20% en France, ils oublient de dire que la sécu allemande rembourse 100% et non pas 70% comme en France (et 90% en Alsace/Moselle). Donc on compare des pommes et des poires. Donc, le coût de la maladie longue durée pour l'individu est totalement différent.

Budget 2026 : 20% des Français sont-ils concernés par des affections de longue durée contre 5% des Allemands,
Pour justifier certaines mesures d'économies envisagées dans le domaine de la santé, le Premier ministre a comparé des données concernant la prise en charge des malades chroniques.

Subtooting since people in the original thread wanted it to be over, but selfishly tagging @… and @… whose opinions I value...
I think that saying "we are not a supply chain" is exactly what open-source maintainers should be doing right now in response to "open source supply chain security" threads.
I can't claim to be an expert and don't maintain any important FOSS stuff, but I do release almost all of my code under open licenses, and I do use many open source libraries, and I have felt the pain of needing to replace an unmaintained library.
There's a certain small-to-mid-scale class of program, including many open-source libraries, which can be built/maintained by a single person, and which to my mind best operate on a "snake growth" model: incremental changes/fixes, punctuated by periodic "skin-shedding" phases where make rewrites or version updates happen. These projects aren't immortal either: as the whole tech landscape around them changes, they become unnecessary and/or people lose interest, so they go unmaintained and eventually break. Each time one of their dependencies breaks (or has a skin-shedding moment) there's a higher probability that they break or shed too, as maintenance needs shoot up at these junctures. Unless you're a company trying to make money from a single long-lived app, it's actually okay that software churns like this, and if you're a company trying to make money, your priorities absolutely should not factor into any decisions people making FOSS software make: we're trying (and to a huge extent succeeding) to make a better world (and/or just have fun with our own hobbies share that fun with others) that leaves behind the corrosive & planet-destroying plague which is capitalism, and you're trying to personally enrich yourself by embracing that plague. The fact that capitalism is *evil* is not an incidental thing in this discussion.
To make an imperfect analogy, imagine that the peasants of some domain have set up a really-free-market, where they provide each other with free stuff to help each other survive, sometimes doing some barter perhaps but mostly just everyone bringing their surplus. Now imagine the lord of the domain, who is the source of these peasants' immiseration, goes to this market secretly & takes some berries, which he uses as one ingredient in delicious tarts that he then sells for profit. But then the berry-bringer stops showing up to the free market, or starts bringing a different kind of fruit, or even ends up bringing rotten berries by accident. And the lord complains "I have a supply chain problem!" Like, fuck off dude! Your problem is that you *didn't* want to build a supply chain and instead thought you would build your profit-focused business in other people's free stuff. If you were paying the berry-picker, you'd have a supply chain problem, but you weren't, so you really have an "I want more free stuff" problem when you can't be arsed to give away your own stuff for free.
There can be all sorts of problems in the really-free-market, like maybe not enough people bring socks, so the peasants who can't afford socks are going barefoot, and having foot problems, and the peasants put their heads together and see if they can convince someone to start bringing socks, and maybe they can't and things are a bit sad, but the really-free-market was never supposed to solve everyone's problems 100% when they're all still being squeezed dry by their taxes: until they are able to get free of the lord & start building a lovely anarchist society, the really-free-market is a best-effort kind of deal that aims to make things better, and sometimes will fall short. When it becomes the main way goods in society are distributed, and when the people who contribute aren't constantly drained by the feudal yoke, at that point the availability of particular goods is a real problem that needs to be solved, but at that point, it's also much easier to solve. And at *no* point does someone coming into the market to take stuff only to turn around and sell it deserve anything from the market or those contributing to it. They are not a supply chain. They're trying to help each other out, but even then they're doing so freely and without obligation. They might discuss amongst themselves how to better coordinate their mutual aid, but they're not going to end up forcing anyone to bring anything or even expecting that a certain person contribute a certain amount, since the whole point is that the thing is voluntary & free, and they've all got changing life circumstances that affect their contributions. Celebrate whatever shows up at the market, express your desire for things that would be useful, but don't impose a burden on anyone else to bring a specific thing, because otherwise it's fair for them to oppose such a burden on you, and now you two are doing your own barter thing that's outside the parameters of the really-free-market.

"Dabei hatte Bundestagspräsidentin Julia Klöckner in ihrer Laudatio noch erzählt, dass sie einst Merkel von ihrem Thermomix vorschwärmte, in dem sie Suppen aller Art zubereite. Darauf habe Merkel nur trocken geantwortet: »Ich kann kochen.«"

Sonderlob für die Küchenmannschaft: Was Angela Merkel nach 16 Jahren als Kanzlerin am meisten vermisst
Der Job im Kanzleramt ist mit viel Stress verbunden. Da sind es die kleinen, schönen Dinge, an die Angela Merkel mit Wehmut zurückdenkt. Bei einer Preisverleihung verriet die Kanzlerin a.D. nun Details.

Il y a, paraît-il, des gens qui écrivent le livre qu'ils voudraient lire (transposable Š d'autres arts, je suppose). C'est peut-être pour ça qu'il m'est Š moi si difficile d'écrire: par d'heureux (?) hasards, je tombe régulièrement sur le livre d'un autre qui est celui que j'aurais voulu écrire, voire suis en train d'écrire.
Dernier en date : Don DeLillo, "Body Art" ( je le commence tout juste, peut-être finira-t-il par me décevoir).

Singularity Resolution of Quantum Black Holes in (A)dS
Sofie Ried
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20794 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20794

Singularity Resolution of Quantum Black Holes in (A)dS
The singularities present at the centre of black holes signal a break down of the classical theory. In this paper, we demonstrate a resolution of the Schwarzschild-(Anti-)de Sitter singularity by imposing unitary evolution with respect to unimodular time. Employing the Henneaux-Teitelboim formulation of unimodular gravity, we perform a canonical quantization on a symmetry-reduced Schwarzschild-(Anti-) de Sitter model. This leads to a Wheeler-DeWitt equation that effectively becomes a Schröding…

@… J’aurais une proposition pour «optimiser les solutions proposées dans le contexte budgétaire complexe que nous vivons toutes et tous»: on se débarrasse de Microsoft, voilŠ, des millions économisés.

@… J’aurais une proposition pour «optimiser les solutions proposées dans le contexte budgétaire complexe que nous vivons toutes et tous»: on se débarrasse de Microsoft, voilŠ, des millions économisés.