Tootfinder

Distributed fault-tolerant quantum memories over a 2xL array of qubit modules
Edwin Tham, Min Ye, Ilia Khait, John Gamble, Nicolas Delfosse
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01879 http…

Distributed fault-tolerant quantum memories over a 2xL array of qubit modules
We propose an architecture for a quantum memory distributed over a $2 \times L$ array of modules equipped with a cyclic shift implemented via flying qubits. The logical information is distributed across the first row of $L$ modules and quantum error correction is executed using ancilla modules on the second row equipped with a cyclic shift. This work proves that quantum LDPC codes such as BB codes can maintain their performance in a distributed setting while using solely one simple connector: a…

How do Monarch butterflies survive?
I've planted several California native milkweeds - the Monarchs have a definite preference for it. (It's fun to work in the garden and have Monarchs flying around me.)
Eventually the milkweeds are covered by very healthy looking, strikingly patterned caterpillars. The caterpillars consume the milkweed plant until the plant is a leafless hulk. And the caterpillars vanish.
But I have yet to see a chrysalis.
I'm going to…

Quantum repeaters based on stationary and flying Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill qudits
Stefan H\"aussler, Peter van Loock
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00530 https://

Quantum repeaters based on stationary and flying Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill qudits
There are various approaches to long-range quantum communication based on conceptually different forms of quantum repeaters. Here we explore a quantum repeater scheme that employs quantum error correction (QEC) both on the flying (light) qubits and on the stationary (matter) qubits. The idea is to combine the benefits of encoded one-way and two-way schemes where effective channel transmission and loss scaling are enhanced by means of photon loss codes and encoded quantum memories, respectively,…

⏱️ Researchers discover how the human brain organizes its visual memories through precise neural timing
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-07-human-brain-visual-memories-precise.html

Researchers discover how the human brain organizes its visual memories through precise neural timing
Researchers at the University of Southern California have made a significant breakthrough in understanding how the human brain forms, stores and recalls visual memories. A new study, published in Advanced Science, harnesses human patient brain recordings and a powerful machine learning model to shed new light on the brain's internal code that sorts memories of objects into categories—think of it as the brain's filing cabinet of imagery.

Learning Generalizable Shape Completion with SIM(3) Equivariance
Yuqing Wang, Zhaiyu Chen, Xiao Xiang Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26631 https://arxiv.or…

Learning Generalizable Shape Completion with SIM(3) Equivariance
3D shape completion methods typically assume scans are pre-aligned to a canonical frame. This leaks pose and scale cues that networks may exploit to memorize absolute positions rather than inferring intrinsic geometry. When such alignment is absent in real data, performance collapses. We argue that robust generalization demands architectural equivariance to the similarity group, SIM(3), so the model remains agnostic to pose and scale. Following this principle, we introduce the first SIM(3)-equi…

Nice vertices in cubic graphs
Wuxian Chen, Fuliang Lu, Heping Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21471 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21471

Nice vertices in cubic graphs
A subgraph $G'$ of a graph $G$ is nice if $G-V(G')$ has a perfect matching. Nice subgraphs play a vital role in the theory of ear decomposition and matching minors of matching covered graphs. A vertex $u$ of a cubic graph is nice if $u$ and its neighbors induce a nice subgraph. D. Král et al. (2010) [9] showed that each vertex of a cubic brick is nice. It is natural to ask how many nice vertices a matching covered cubic graph has. In this paper, using some basic results of matching covered gra…

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?

Memoirs of the CP/M creator released:
“Our father, Gary Kildall, was one of the founders of the personal computer industry, but you probably don’t know his name. Those who have heard of him may recall the myth that he ‘missed’ the opportunity to become Bill Gates by going flying instead of meeting with IBM. Unfortunately, this tall tale paints Gary as a ‘could-have-been,’ ignores his deep contributions, and overshadows his role as an inventor of key technologies that define how compute…

In His Own Words: Gary Kildall
Gary Kildall was a pioneer of personal computer software. He wrote programming language tools, including assemblers (Intel 4004), interpreters (BASIC), and compilers (PL/M). He created a widely-used disk operating system (CP/M). He and his wife, Dorothy McEwen, started a successful company called Digital Research to develop and market CP/M, which for years was the dominant operating system for personal microcomputers. Thousands of programs were written to run under it, and a million or more peo…

Filtering for Creativity: Adaptive Prompting for Multilingual Riddle Generation in LLMs
Duy Le, Kent Ziti, Evan Girard-Sun, Sean O'Brien, Vasu Sharma, Kevin Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18709

Filtering for Creativity: Adaptive Prompting for Multilingual Riddle Generation in LLMs
Multilingual riddle generation challenges large language models (LLMs) to balance cultural fluency with creative abstraction. Standard prompting strategies -- zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought -- tend to reuse memorized riddles or perform shallow paraphrasing. We introduce Adaptive Originality Filtering (AOF), a prompting framework that filters redundant generations using cosine-based similarity rejection, while enforcing lexical novelty and cross-lingual fidelity. Evaluated across three LL…

"...a steady decline in the proportion of the adult population who believe the monarchy is good for Britain, falling from 60% in July 2019 to 51% in March 2024, according to You Gov."
And if you break out the Scottish part of the same poll, it is obvious that Scots want an independent republic. Only 34% think it's good for Scotland...