Tootfinder

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is threatening to remove Democratic lawmakers from office
for fleeing the state
and claiming they could be charged with crimes,
-- escalating tensions overnight
in a showdown over redrawing congressional lines
ahead of the midterm elections.

Most of the Democrats in the Texas state House exited the state Sunday
— many of whom arrived in Chicago in the evening
— to prevent Republicans from overhauling the state’s map t…

Abbott threatens to try to expel Democrats who fled Texas, escalating tensions
The Texas state House is set to reconvene at 3 p.m. CT Monday. Democrats have left the state to try to stop Republicans from moving ahead with enacting a new congressional map that would give the GOP five more safe seats.

Flame Skimmer dragonfly resting on a green branch. LA Arboretum, Arcadia, California, USA. #laarboretum #dragonfly #flameskimmer

Day 9: Eniko Fox
Edit: added a store link for Kitsune Tails.
We're back to videogames, and with another author who's on the fediverse: @…
Fox has developed a few games, but the one that I've played and love is Kitsune Tails. It's a sapphic romance take on Super Mario Bros. 3, and (critically for a platformer) it's got very crisp controls and runs smoothly. I think one thing a lot of indie platforms devs struggle with is getting those fundamentals right, because on the technical side they require very challenging things like optimization of your code and extremely careful input handling that go beyond the basic skills necessary to put together a game. From following her on Twitter and now the Fediverse, it's clear that Fox is a deeply competent programmer, and her games reflect that. Beyond the fundamentals, Kitsune Tails has a very sweet plot with a very cool twist in the middle, and without spoilers, that twist made both the levels and gameplay very difficult to design, but Fox rose to that challenge and put together a wonderful game. Particularly past the plot twist (but in subtle ways before it) Fox is able to build beyond SMB3 mechanics in ways that gracefully complement the original, and the movement in the game ends up being difficult but extremely satisfying, with an excellent skill/speed response allowing for both slower, easier approaches that work for a range of players and high-skill extremely-fast options for those who want to push themselves.
There have been plenty of people I follow with indie game projects that are kinda meh in the end, and I'll still boost them without much comment if they're decent. Fox' work is actually amazing, which is why if you've followed me for a while you'll know I tend to mention it periodically, and which is why she makes this list of authors I respect.
You can buy Kitsune Tails here: #20AuthorsNoMen

A Theoretical Framework of the Processes of Change in Psychotherapy Delivered by Artificial Agents
Arthur Bran Herbener, Malene Flensborg Damholdt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02144

A Theoretical Framework of the Processes of Change in Psychotherapy Delivered by Artificial Agents
The question of whether artificial agents (e.g., chatbots and social robots) can replace human therapists has received notable attention following the recent launch of large language models. However, little is known about the processes of change in psychotherapy delivered by artificial agents. To facilitate hypothesis development and stimulate scientific debate, the present article offers the first theoretical framework of the processes of change in psychotherapy delivered by artificial agents.…

fucking clowns

xLSTM Scaling Laws: Competitive Performance with Linear Time-Complexity
Maximilian Beck, Kajetan Schweighofer, Sebastian B\"ock, Sebastian Lehner, Sepp Hochreiter
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02228 …

xLSTM Scaling Laws: Competitive Performance with Linear Time-Complexity
Scaling laws play a central role in the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling the prediction of model performance relative to compute budgets prior to training. While Transformers have been the dominant architecture, recent alternatives such as xLSTM offer linear complexity with respect to context length while remaining competitive in the billion-parameter regime. We conduct a comparative investigation on the scaling behavior of Transformers and xLSTM along the following lines, prov…

Over nearly nine months,
the lawsuit challenging Trump’s attempt to slash foreign aid funding
has ricocheted around the federal judiciary
but still has not reached a final resolution.
It has been reviewed by 21 judges,
spawned thousands of pages of filings
and lumbered forward
even after the administration dissolved the U.S. Agency for International Development,
the government office responsible for disbursing much of the contested funding.

The Monthslong Legal Battle to Save Foreign Aid
One lawsuit, underway since February, has sought to compel President Trump to honor Congress’s vision for foreign aid. It still has a long way to go.

Here’s the lightning sketch of Paul’s Treatise Against Efficiency that I’ve never written:
1. Efficiency is asymptotically inefficient: as costs approach zero, the cost of further reducing them approaches infinity.
2. Efficiency prioritizes the measurable over the difficult-to-measure.
3. Efficiency prioritizes what those in power see (or imagine) over on-the-ground reality.
4. Following from 2 and 3, efficiency reduces the amount and quality of information flowing into a human system.
5. Efficiency foments institutional inflexibility.
6. By removing slack, efficiency causes small failures to cascade more readily and increases the risk of catastrophic failure.
7. Following rom 4, 5, and 6, efficiency trades small costs for massive risks: from failures, from missed opportunities, and from inability to adjust.
8. Efficiency, when pushed, strangles the emergent phenomena that in the long term create all new things of value.
9. Thus, although it can be a by-product of evolution, efficiency as a goal in itself strangles evolution.
10. Efficiency as a goal strangles joy.

1,000 Swiss glaciers already gone, and the melting is speeding up #Switzerland

1,000 Swiss glaciers already gone, and the melting is speeding up
Swiss glaciers lost nearly 3% of their volume in 2025, following a snow-poor winter and scorching summer heatwaves. The melt has been so extreme that some glaciers lost more than two meters of ice thickness in a single season. Scientists caution that the decline is destabilizing mountains, raising risks of rock and ice avalanches. Long-term monitoring efforts are now more critical than ever.

The 2020 Superburst of 4U 1608-522 and its impact on the accretion disk
Tugba Boztepe, Tolga Guver, Elif Ece Devecioglu, Julia Speicher, Motoko Serino, David R. Ballantyne, Diego Altamirano, Gaurava K. Jaisawal, Mason Ng, Andrea Sanna, Can Gungor, Wataru Iwakiri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02713

The 2020 Superburst of 4U 1608-522 and its impact on the accretion disk
Superbursts are rare events observed from bursting neutron star low mass X-ray binaries. They are thought to originate from unstable burning of the thick layer of Carbon on the surface of the neutron star, causing the observed X-ray flashes to last several hours. Given their fluence it has long been thought that superbursts may have significant effects on the accretion flow around the neutron star. In this paper, we first present evidence for a new superburst observed from 4U 1608-522 by MAXI d…