Tootfinder

good news: California Assembly passed a bill to require Caltrans to develop a quick-build program for bike lane and intersection safety projects on state highways! it's #AB891 (Zbur)
https://

Quick-Build Legislation Makes It Through the Assembly - Streetsblog California
Following the success of Quick-Build projects in Santa Monica, their Assemblymember wants to allow them on state highways.

Variational Inference with Mixtures of Isotropic Gaussians
Marguerite Petit-Talamon, Marc Lambert, Anna Korba
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13613 https://

Variational Inference with Mixtures of Isotropic Gaussians
Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. In this paper, we focus on the following parametric family: mixtures of isotropic Gaussians (i.e., with diagonal covariance matrices proportional to the identity) and uniform weights. We develop a variational framework and provide efficient algori…

Navigating the growing field of research on AI for software testing -- the taxonomy for AI-augmented software testing and an ontology-driven literature survey
Ina K. Schieferdecker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14640

Navigating the growing field of research on AI for software testing -- the taxonomy for AI-augmented software testing and an ontology-driven literature survey
In industry, software testing is the primary method to verify and validate the functionality, performance, security, usability, and so on, of software-based systems. Test automation has gained increasing attention in industry over the last decade, following decades of intense research into test automation and model-based testing. However, designing, developing, maintaining and evolving test automation is a considerable effort. Meanwhile, AI's breakthroughs in many engineering fields are opening…

A small aside, during my vacation I finally started on writing a Metal backend for SwiftTerm.
It has a few missing features, so not worth comparing performance yet, but it is feeling great:
https://github.com/migueldeicaza/SwiftTerm/tree/metal-backend

GitHub - migueldeicaza/SwiftTerm at metal-backend
Xterm/VT100 Terminal emulator in Swift. Contribute to migueldeicaza/SwiftTerm development by creating an account on GitHub.

The IRS open sourced much of its incredibly popular Direct File software as the future of the free tax filing program is at risk of being killed by Intuit’s lobbyists and Donald Trump’s megabill.
Meanwhile, several top developers who worked on the software have left the government and joined a project to explore the “future of tax filing” in the private sector

The IRS Tax Filing Software TurboTax Is Trying to Kill Just Got Open Sourced
Direct File has been open sourced, and its creators have left government to continue working on the "future of tax filing."

Thermal conductivity minimum with thickness in ultrathin films
Alessio Zaccone
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11914 https://arxiv.org/pdf…

Thermal conductivity minimum with thickness in ultrathin films
The thermal properties of solids under nanoscale confinement are currently not understood at the atomic level. Recent numerical studies have highlighted the presence of a minimum in the thermal conductivity as a function of thickness for ultrathin films at a thickness about 1-2 nm, which cannot be described by existing theories. We develop a theoretical description of thin films which predicts a new physical law for heat transfer at the nanoscale. In particular, due to the strong redistribution…

Markov Regime-Switching Intelligent Driver Model for Interpretable Car-Following Behavior
Chengyuan Zhang, Cathy Wu, Lijun Sun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14762

Markov Regime-Switching Intelligent Driver Model for Interpretable Car-Following Behavior
Accurate and interpretable car-following models are essential for traffic simulation and autonomous vehicle development. However, classical models like the Intelligent Driver Model (IDM) are fundamentally limited by their parsimonious and single-regime structure. They fail to capture the multi-modal nature of human driving, where a single driving state (e.g., speed, relative speed, and gap) can elicit many different driver actions. This forces the model to average across distinct behaviors, red…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09869 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@a…

How does the limited resolution of space plasma analyzers affect the accuracy of space plasma measurements?
We investigate the systematic errors in measured plasma velocity distribution functions and their corresponding velocity moments, arising from the limited energy and angular resolution of top-hat electrostatic analyzers. For this purpose, we develop a forward model of a concept analyzer that simulates observations of typical solar wind proton plasma particles with their velocities following a Maxwell distribution function. We then review the standard conversion of the observations to physical p…

Real Non-Commutative Convexity I
David P. Blecher, Caleb McClure
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13512 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13512

Real Non-Commutative Convexity I
We initiate the theory of real noncommutative convex sets, following the recent and profound complex case developed by Davidson and Kennedy. The present paper focuses on the real case of the topics from the first several sections of their profound memoir.. Later results will be discussed in a future paper. We give many foundational structural results for real operator systems and their associated noncommutative (nc) convex sets, and elucidate how the complexification interacts with the basic co…

AgentPorn.ai - Where Developers get their fix
https://agentporn.ai/