Tootfinder

Technologies that promise to track, manage, and supervise workers,
increasingly using artificial intelligence,
are entrenched in the developing world, according to a new report by Coworker.org,
a labor rights nonprofit based in New York. 
Audits of more than 150 startups and regional companies based in Kenya, Nigeria, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and India showed
workplace surveillance is expanding in scale and sophistication, the researchers said.
While lar…

VC money is fueling a global boom in worker surveillance tech
A funding surge has given rise to technologies to track, analyze and manage workers — often in countries with little regulation.

IMA-Catcher: An IMpact-Aware Nonprehensile Catching Framework based on Combined Optimization and Learning
Francesco Tassi (Human-Robot Interfaces and Interaction Lab., Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy), Jianzhuang Zhao (Human-Robot Interfaces and Interaction Lab., Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy), Gustavo J. G. Lahr (Human-Robot Interfaces and Interaction Lab., Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy), Luna Gava (Event-Driven Perception for Robotics Lab, Istituto Italiano d…

IMA-Catcher: An IMpact-Aware Nonprehensile Catching Framework based on Combined Optimization and Learning
Robotic catching of flying objects typically generates high impact forces that might lead to task failure and potential hardware damages. This is accentuated when the object mass to robot payload ratio increases, given the strong inertial components characterizing this task. This paper aims to address this problem by proposing an implicitly impact-aware framework that accomplishes the catching task in both pre- and post-catching phases. In the first phase, a motion planner generates optimal tra…

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.

Entropic additive energy and entropy inequalities for sums and products
Rupert Li, Lampros Gavalakis, Ioannis Kontoyiannis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20813

Entropic additive energy and entropy inequalities for sums and products
Following a growing number of studies that, over the past 15 years, have established entropy inequalities via ideas and tools from additive combinatorics, in this work we obtain a number of new bounds for the differential entropy of sums, products, and sum-product combinations of continuous random variables. Partly motivated by recent work by Goh on the discrete entropic version of the notion of "additive energy", we introduce the additive energy of pairs of continuous random variables and prov…

"Ideally, that's what you've got in an acting career is an equal number of dramas and comedies and an equal number of small films and big films."
-Jason Bateman
#acting #coaching #inspiration

Tailoring Magnetic Properties of Zigzag Structured Thin Films via Interface Engineering and Columnar Nano-structuring
Sharanjeet Singh, Manisha Priyadarsini, Anup Kumar Bera, Smritiparna Ghosh, Varimalla R. Reddy, Sarathlal Koyiloth Vayalil, Benedikt Sochor, Dileep Kumar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19577

Tailoring Magnetic Properties of Zigzag Structured Thin Films via Interface Engineering and Columnar Nano-structuring
We report the emergence of a novel interface-induced shape anisotropy component in zigzag-structured thin films fabricated via Sequential Oblique Angle Deposition (S-OAD). In this study, we systematically investigate cobalt (Co) and Co2FeAl (CFA) thin films by varying column length, number of bilayers, and magneto-crystalline anisotropy (MCA) to explore how structural modulation affects magnetic behavior. Using magneto-optical Kerr effect (MOKE) measurements in conjunction with synchrotron-base…

Non-linear estimators for the observation and stabilisation of falling liquid films
Oscar Holroyd, Radu Cimpeanu, Susana N. Gomes
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16987

Non-linear estimators for the observation and stabilisation of falling liquid films
Falling liquid films are complex physical processes modelled by infinite-dimensional dynamical systems. The interfacial behaviour is characterised by the Reynolds number, a nondimensional parameter, and above a critical value the uniform film becomes unstable and travelling waves occur. By injecting and removing fluid from the base at discrete locations, we aim to stabilise otherwise unstable flat interfaces, with the additional limitation that observations of the state are restricted to finite…

On $NP \cap coNP$ proof complexity generators
Jan Krajicek
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20221 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20221

On $NP \cap coNP$ proof complexity generators
Motivated by the theory of proof complexity generators we consider the following $Σ^p_2$ search problem $\mbox{DD}_P$ determined by a propositional proof system $P$: given a $P$-proof $π$ of a disjunction $\bigvee_i α_i$, no two $α_i$ having an atom in common, find $i$ such that $α_i \in \mbox{TAUT}$. We formulate a hypothesis (ST) that for some strong proof system $P$ the problem $\mbox{DD}_P$ is not solvable in the student-teacher model with a p-time student and a constant number of ro…

Mechanistic Insights into Nonthermal Ablation of Copper Nanoparticles under Femtosecond Laser Irradiation
Janghan Park, Freshteh Sotoudeh, Yaguo Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17100

Mechanistic Insights into Nonthermal Ablation of Copper Nanoparticles under Femtosecond Laser Irradiation
Femtosecond (fs) laser sintering enables ultrafast and spatially localized energy deposition, making it attractive for additive manufacturing of metal nanoparticles. However, undesired ablation during fs irradiation of copper (Cu) nanoparticles often disrupts uniform sintering, and the underlying ablation mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this work, we investigate the fragmentation and coalescence behavior of Cu nanoparticles subjected to fs laser scanning under fluence conditions relevan…

"Ideally, that's what you've got in an acting career is an equal number of dramas and comedies and an equal number of small films and big films."
-Jason Bateman
#acting #coaching #inspiration