Tootfinder

#Minnesota Pubic Radio (MPR) parent company cuts 30 jobs following federal funding cuts | MPR News (h/t akuzee@bsky.social)
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2025/08/15/m

MPR parent company cuts 30 jobs following federal funding cuts
Minnesota Public Radio's parent company laid off 30 staff members Friday after Congress clawed back funding that it had previously approved for public broadcasting. Cuts in state funding from the Minnesota Legislature exacerbated the budget gap.

Just saw this:
#AI can mean a lot of things these days, but lots of the popular meanings imply a bevy of harms that I definitely wouldn't feel are worth a cute fish game. In fact, these harms are so acute that even "just" playing into the AI hype becomes its own kind of harm (it's similar to blockchain in that way).
@… noticed that the authors claim the code base is 80% AI generated, which is a red flag because people with sound moral compasses wouldn't be using AI to "help" write code in the first place. The authors aren't by some miracle people who couldn't build this app without help, in case that influences your thinking about it: they have the skills to write the code themselves, although it likely would have taken longer (but also been better).
I was more interested in the fish-classification AI, and how much it might be dependent on datacenters. Thankfully, a quick glance at the code confirms they're using ONNX and running a self-trained neural network on your device. While the exponentially-increasing energy & water demands of datacenters to support billion-parameter models are a real concern, this is not that. Even a non-AI game can burn a lot of cycles on someone's phone, and I don't think there's anything to complain about energy-wise if we're just using cycles on the end user's device as long as we're not having them keep it on for hours crunching numbers like blockchain stuff does. Running whatever stuff locally while the user is playing a game is a negligible environmental concern, unlike, say, calling out to ChatGPT where you're directly feeding datacenter demand. Since they claimed to have trained the network themselves, and since it's actually totally reasonable to make your own dataset for this and get good-enough-for-a-silly-game results with just a few hundred examples, I don't have any ethical objections to the data sourcing or training processes either. Hooray! This is finally an example of "ethical use of neutral networks" that I can hold up as an example of what people should be doing instead of the BS they are doing.
But wait... Remember what I said about feeding the AI hype being its own form of harm? Yeah, between using AI tools for coding and calling their classifier "AI" in a way that makes it seem like the same kind of thing as ChatGPT et al., they're leaning into the hype rather than helping restrain it. And that means they're causing harm. Big AI companies can point to them and say "look AI enables cute things you like" when AI didn't actually enable it. So I'm feeling meh about this cute game and won't be sharing it aside from this post. If you love the cute fish, you don't really have to feel bad for playing with it, but I'd feel bad for advertising it without a disclaimer.

TRPrompt: Bootstrapping Query-Aware Prompt Optimization from Textual Rewards
Andreea Nica, Ivan Zakazov, Nicolas Mario Baldwin, Saibo Geng, Robert West
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18618

TRPrompt: Bootstrapping Query-Aware Prompt Optimization from Textual Rewards
Prompt optimization improves the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) without requiring parameter updates to the target model. Following heuristic-based "Think step by step" approaches, the field has evolved in two main directions: while one group of methods uses textual feedback to elicit improved prompts from general-purpose LLMs in a training-free way, a concurrent line of research relies on numerical rewards to train a special prompt model, tailored for providing optimal prom…

Nice to see Michael Hansmeyer still following his dreams: The White Tower was finally revealed 2 weeks ago, currently the largest 3D printed structure in the world (30 meters [90ft] tall), located in a small village in Switzerland:
https://www.michael-hansmeyer.com/white-tower

Tor Alva | White Tower - Project Overview
Tor Alva, White Tower, Weisser Turm in Mulegns, Switzerland, Origen Foundation

Strategy Evolution in the Adoption of Conservation Tillage Technology under Time Preference Heterogeneity and Lemon Market: Insights from Evolutionary Dynamics
Dingyi Wang, Ruqiang Guo, Qian Lu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15497

Strategy Evolution in the Adoption of Conservation Tillage Technology under Time Preference Heterogeneity and Lemon Market: Insights from Evolutionary Dynamics
The promotion of Conservation Tillage Technology (CTT) is critical for mitigating global soil degradation, yet their actual adoption rates remain substantially lower than anticipated targets. Existing research predominantly focuses on static factor analyses, failing to adequately capture the dynamic evolutionary mechanisms of farmer strategic interactions and the impacts of information asymmetries in agricultural markets. This study constructs an evolutionary game model integrating heterogeneou…

London #FT reports on investors that lost billions on #PumpAndDump stock scheme that inflated values of little known traded entities of small US-listed #ChineseStocks that plunged in value shortly after being heavily

Symmetry and monotonicity of singular solutions for the Hartree equation
Ying Cai, Guangze Gu, Aleks Jevnikar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07893 https://arxi…

Symmetry and monotonicity of singular solutions for the Hartree equation
In this paper we are concerned with positive singular solutions of the following nonlocal Hartree equation $$-Δu\!=\Big( \int_{\mathbb{R}^N\setminus Γ}\frac{F(u(y))}{|x-y|^μ}dy \Big)f (u(x)), \quad x\in \mathbb{R}^N\setminusΓ,$$ where $F$ is the primitive of $f$ and $Γ$ is the singular set. Under suitable assumptions, we prove that $u$ is symmetric and monotone with respect to the singular set by using moving plane methods. Furthermore, we complement this study by showing the exi…

Existence and multiplicity of normalized solutions for the quasi-linear Schr\"{o}dinger equations with mixed nonlinearities
Qihan He, Hao Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00375

Existence and multiplicity of normalized solutions for the quasi-linear Schrödinger equations with mixed nonlinearities
In this paper, we study the existence and multiplicity of the normalized solutions to the following quasi-linear problem \begin{equation*} -Δu-Δ(|u|^2)u+λu=|u|^{p-2}u+τ|u|^{q-2}u, \text{ in }\mathbb{R}^N,~ 1\leq N\leq4, \end{equation*} with prescribed mass $$\int_{\mathbb{R}^N}|u|^2dx=a ,$$ where $λ\in\mathbb{R}$ appears as a Lagrange multiplier and the parameters $a,τ$ are all positive constants. We are concerned about the mass-mixed case $2