Tootfinder

TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?

My point here is not to chide, but to note the system of incentives that keeps money flowing to authoritarians.
They’re winning by making less ethical decisions easy and responsible alternatives difficult if not impossible.
This isn’t just a consumer and social media problem; so much of mainstream journalism today is motivated by professional respectability
— which doesn’t necessarily mean lying, but taking the path of least resistance:
avoiding certain topics or la…

Forgotten treasures in the HST/FOC UV imaging polarimetric archives of active galactic nuclei -- IV. 5 Orphaned AGNs
Thibault Barnouin (Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg, Universit\'e de Strasbourg, France), Fr\'ed\'eric Marin (Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg, Universit\'e de Strasbourg, France), Enrique Lopez-Rodriguez (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of South Carolina, USA, Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford…

Forgotten treasures in the HST/FOC UV imaging polarimetric archives of active galactic nuclei -- IV. 5 Orphaned AGNs
The Faint Object Camera (FOC) onboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) acquired high-resolution, spatially resolved polarimetric images of nearby Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) in the near ultraviolet (near-UV) band. Among the 25 individual targets in the polarized archives, 8 had no published analysis until the beginning of this series of papers. We tackle the last 5 targets in the following. In this paper, we finalize the publication of near-UV imaging polarimetry of AGNs in the HST/FOC archiv…

Lendbuzz, which uses AI to underwrite auto loans, files for a US IPO and reports H1 2025 revenue up 38% YoY to $172.9M and net income up 98.2% YoY to $11.1M (Arasu Kannagi Basil/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/l

WaterFlow: Explicit Physics-Prior Rectified Flow for Underwater Saliency Mask Generation
Runting Li, Shijie Lian, Hua Li, Yutong Li, Wenhui Wu, Sam Kwong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12605

WaterFlow: Explicit Physics-Prior Rectified Flow for Underwater Saliency Mask Generation
Underwater Salient Object Detection (USOD) faces significant challenges, including underwater image quality degradation and domain gaps. Existing methods tend to ignore the physical principles of underwater imaging or simply treat degradation phenomena in underwater images as interference factors that must be eliminated, failing to fully exploit the valuable information they contain. We propose WaterFlow, a rectified flow-based framework for underwater salient object detection that innovatively…

Top Matchup in NY Giants-Cowboys Week 2 Showdown Promises to Be Key https://www.si.com/nfl/giants/big-blue-plus/top-matchup-in-ny-giants-cowboys-week-2-showdown-promises-to-be-key

Jaime Alanís died a day after a frenzied immigration raid of Glass House Farms in Ventura county
where authorities arrested at least 200 workers.
The 57-year-old, who was from the town of Huajúmbaro in Michoacšn, Mexico, is the first known person to die during the Trump administration’s enhanced immigration enforcement operations in southern California.
The federal government’s ramped up enforcement activities have brought chaos across southern California as Ice agents des…

ACE-G: Improving Generalization of Scene Coordinate Regression Through Query Pre-Training
Leonard Bruns, Axel Barroso-Laguna, Tommaso Cavallari, \'Aron Monszpart, Sowmya Munukutla, Victor Adrian Prisacariu, Eric Brachmann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11605

ACE-G: Improving Generalization of Scene Coordinate Regression Through Query Pre-Training
Scene coordinate regression (SCR) has established itself as a promising learning-based approach to visual relocalization. After mere minutes of scene-specific training, SCR models estimate camera poses of query images with high accuracy. Still, SCR methods fall short of the generalization capabilities of more classical feature-matching approaches. When imaging conditions of query images, such as lighting or viewpoint, are too different from the training views, SCR models fail. Failing to genera…

Fear of flying therapy is about reframing the flight experience;
if my mind’s eye squints,
I can almost interpret my sweating palms and pounding heartbeat as a kind of buzz.
But this requires repeated, strenuous effort,
and the result is a mental exhaustion that makes the worst-case scenario appealing:
succumbing to my fears and never flying again.
I imagine this as analogous to what many Americans, aerophobic or not, are feeling.
It’s simply easier…

Winging It | Noelle Mateer
For those trying to overcome their fears of flying, it’s been . . . a challenging time to say the least.