Tootfinder

We've reached the point in the evolution of cyber scamming where military units are blowing up buildings to stop the digital crimes.
Stragglers from Myanmar scam center raided by army cross into Thailand as buildings are blown up
https://apnews.com/artic…

Stragglers from Myanmar scam center raided by army cross into Thailand as buildings are blown up
A Thai regional army commander say that the number of people fleeing from Myanmar to Thailand after Myanmar’s military shut down a major online scam center has slowed to a trickle. The news on Tuesday came after more than 1,500 people had left in the past week. The KK Park site was identified by Thai officials and independent experts as housing a major cybercrime operation. It was raided by Myanmar’s army in mid-October as part of operations starting in early September to suppress cross-bor…

Long but very good:
"An essay on wank"
It names and identifies one of my least favorite genre of posts – finally I have a proper term for it!
I'm sure I've been guilty of it too in the past, so it's useful for self-regulation, too.
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/essay_

A regret minimization approach to fixed-point iterations
Joon Kwon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21653 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21653

A regret minimization approach to fixed-point iterations
We propose a conversion scheme that turns regret minimizing algorithms into fixed point iterations, with convergence guarantees following from regret bounds. The resulting iterations can be seen as a grand extension of the classical Krasnoselskii--Mann iterations, as the latter are recovered by converting the Online Gradient Descent algorithm. This approach yields new simple iterations for finding fixed points of non-self operators. We also focus on converting algorithms from the AdaGrad family…

Just finished "Concrete Rose" by Angie Thomas (I haven't yet read "The Hate U Give" but that's now high on my list of things to find). It's excellent, and in particular, an excellent treatise on positive masculinity in fiction form. It's not a super easy book to read emotionally, but is excellently written and deeply immersive. I don't have the perspective to know how it might land among teens like those it portrays, but I have a feeling it's true enough to life, and it held a lot of great wisdom for me.
CW for the book include murder, hard drugs, and parental abandonment.
I caught myself in a racist/classist habit of thought while reading that others night appreciate hearing about: early on I was mentally comparing it to "All my Rage" by Sabaa Tahir and wondering if/when we'd see the human cost of the drug dealing to the junkies, thinking that it would weaken the book not to include that angle. Why is that racist/classist? Because I'm always expecting books with hard drug dealers in them to show the ugly side of their business since it's been drilled into me that they're evil for the harm they cause, yet I never expect the same of characters who are bankers, financial analysts, health insurance claims adjudicators, police officers, etc. (Okay, maybe I do now look for that in police narratives). The point is, our society includes many people who as part of their jobs directly immiserate others, so why and I only concerned about that misery being brought up when it's drug dealers?
#AmReading

Can we please stop making non-Christians the boogeyman? The school was wrong from the get-go, and the comment about Satanic symbols didn't help their case.
https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/a-dispute-over-a-students-parking

A dispute over a student's parking spot shows how schools keep failing Religious Freedom 101
A New York school told a Christian girl she couldn't paint Bible verses in her parking spot because then they'd have to "approve a Satanic symbol"

Simpler is Faster: Practical Distance Reporting by Sorting Along a Space-Filling Curve
Sarita de Berg, Ivor van der Hoog, Eva Rotenberg, Emil Toftegaard G{\ae}de
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19891

Simpler is Faster: Practical Distance Reporting by Sorting Along a Space-Filling Curve
Range reporting is a classical problem in computational geometry. A (rectangular) reporting data structure stores a point set $P$ of $n$ points, such that, given a (rectangular) query region $Δ$, it returns all points in $P \cap Δ$. A variety of data structures support such queries with differing asymptotic guarantees such as $k$-d trees, range trees, $R$-trees, and quadtrees. A common variant of range queries are distance reporting queries, where the input is a query point $q$ and a radius $…

QuantMind: A Context-Engineering Based Knowledge Framework for Quantitative Finance
Haoxue Wang, Keli Wen, Yuante Li, Qiancheng Qu, Xiangxu Mu, Xinjie Shen, Jiaqi Gao, Chenyang Chang, Chuhan Xie, San Yu Cheung, Zhuoyuan Hu, Xinyu Wang, Sirui Bi, Bi'an Du
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21507

QuantMind: A Context-Engineering Based Knowledge Framework for Quantitative Finance
Quantitative research increasingly relies on unstructured financial content such as filings, earnings calls, and research notes, yet existing LLM and RAG pipelines struggle with point-in-time correctness, evidence attribution, and integration into research workflows. To tackle this, We present QuantMind, an intelligent knowledge extraction and retrieval framework tailored to quantitative finance. QuantMind adopts a two-stage architecture: (i) a knowledge extraction stage that transforms heterog…

🤔 Looking at this UI, Forem could probably implement ActivityPub at this point.
Every logo is a server. "Forem feed" = Federated timeline. "Follow" = follow and adding their Local timeline to my Following timeline? 🤔
Related discussion: https://github.com/forem/forem/discuss

I am flummoxed at this sign next to a parking lot for a walking trail. I thought this could be just superfluous quotes, but... it's a parking lot? Then I just thought, do they mean no making out after dark? #scandlous

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen