Tootfinder

Hi, it’s Al Franken.
I don’t usually send messages like this, so I’m hoping you’ll read to the end for a GREAT story. 
Before that, though, I want to tell you about Peggy Flanagan.
She is unbelievably great and she’s running to keep Minnesota’s Senate seat blue. 
Her end-of-month fundraising deadline is tonight so I’ll get to the point: Please donate now. 

Peggy Flanagan for Minnesota | Democrat for U.S. Senate
Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan's ready to take our Minnesota values to D.C. — to fight to rebuild the middle class, protect our rights, and hold the extremist billionaires trying to run off with our country accountable. If elected, she’ll be the first Native American woman to ever serve in the U.S. Senate. Will you join us in this Minnesotan-powered campaign?

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

Really silly dream
I had a really silly #dream recently. I dreamt that my CFL broke. Or more specifically, it kept trying to turn out, successive parts of it were lighting up, then it all went off and tried again. And it looked like it had a bunch of cuts across it, and around these cuts little thunder sparks started appearing, like some kind of STALKER-like anomaly.
I finally flipped the switch, but the anomaly remained, and I wanted to get rid of it in case the sparks could jump onto my hardware and damage something. So I threw a metal bowl towards it, supposing the thunder would jump onto it. While it was flying near the anomaly, it slowed down and started turning back like a boomerang. On top of that, pieces of cat food (don't ask me why I threw a full bowl) were getting out of it and staying in the air levitating. When the bowl reached the floor and started turning again, Mr Ek came close to it and started levitating himself; he was sitting a few centimeters above the floor.
In the middle of all this, I've figured out I should record it. I took a bunch of photos with my phone, before I managed to switch to recording video.
Once I've recorded the fascinating flying bowls and levitating cat food, I needed to go back to discharging the thing. I threw a second metal bowl, and that one started levitating as well. I've figured out that's stupid, and I've found some big ass hammer with a metal end and a wooden handle. I held the end near the lamp to charge it, then tried to find something to discharge it to. I've tried some small stuff like the door handle, but obviously that wasn't sufficient. Finally, I've figured out to use the electricity box, since it is grounded. I held the hammer to it, watching sparks light the semi-darkness; I've recorded that as well.
And that's how much of it I remember.

An approximate history of my amateur phone photography:
1. Really poor photos. Unsavory interest in (low resolution) panoramas.
2. Photos get a little better. Sometimes they're HDRs (I suspect the camera app was set to "auto").
3. A new phone. Higher resolution and a gyroscope.
4. Switching to LineageOS, and therefore to #OpenCamera. HDR enabled unconditionally.
5. HDR does not always come great (compared to the stock Motorola app that doesn't work anymore). I enable saving component photos, so I could try getting a better quality combination using the PC. I never manage that.
6. I start experimenting with exposure correction (combined with HDR). Sometimes I do multiple photos with different "Eves" to choose the best one.
7. A new phone. Finally, given even the gyroscope was failing already.
8. I learn that Pixels have "HDR " that gets activated when you do standard mode photos. For a while I do both standard and HDR photos; also I compare the middle component image with the standard mode image. [https://opencamera.sourceforge.io/help.html#faq]
9. Before I reach any final conclusions, I read "What is HDR, anyway?" I disable HDR entirely, instead I save standard mode (i.e. HDR ) raw images (which presumably aren't affected by HDR ) [https://www.lux.camera/what-is-hdr/]. Not that I ever managed to get anything good out of raws.
10. I discover that I can switch the lens. Today I've made my first photos, switching lens to get optical zoom 💪.

Chronologically Consistent Generative AI
Songrun He, Linying Lv, Asaf Manela, Jimmy Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11677 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11677

Chronologically Consistent Generative AI
We introduce a family of chronologically consistent, instruction-following large language models to eliminate lookahead bias. Each model is trained only on data available before a clearly defined knowledge-cutoff date, ensuring strict temporal separation from any post-cutoff data. The resulting framework offers (i) a simple, conversational chat interface, (ii) fully open, fixed model weights that guarantee replicability, and (iii) a conservative lower bound on forecast accuracy, isolating the s…

Manipulating the metal-insulator transitions in correlated vanadium dioxide through bandwidth and band-filling control
Xiaohui Yao, Jiahui Ji, Xuanchi Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10183

Manipulating the metal-insulator transitions in correlated vanadium dioxide through bandwidth and band-filling control
The metal-insulator transition (MIT) in correlated oxide systems opens up a new paradigm to trigger the abruption in multiple physical functionalities, enabling the possibility in unlocking exotic quantum states beyond conventional phase diagram. Nevertheless, the critical challenge for practical device implementation lies in achieving the precise control over the MIT behavior of correlated system across a broad temperature range, ensuring the operational adaptability in diverse environments. H…

I went to Stewart Park this Sunday after the Ithaca 5 and 10 to make a 3-d scan of the lighthouse on the jetty which didn't work out but I did see these kayakers goings under this bridge.
#photo #photography #ithaca

Pattern Formation in Agent-Based and PDE Models for Evolutionary Games with Payoff-Driven Motion
Tianyong Yao, Chenning Xu, Daniel B. Cooney
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20538 htt…

Pattern Formation in Agent-Based and PDE Models for Evolutionary Games with Payoff-Driven Motion
Spatial structure can play an important role in the evolution of cooperative behavior and the achievement of collective success of a population. In this paper, we explore the role of random and directed motion on spatial pattern formation and the payoff achieved by populations in both stochastic and deterministic models of spatial populations who engage in social interactions following a hawk-dove game. For the case of purely diffusive motion, both a stochastic spatial model and a partial diffe…

Taming Spontaneous Stop-and-Go Traffic Waves: A Bifurcation Perspective of A Dynamical Map
Suzhou Huang, Jian Hu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09466 https://a…

Taming Spontaneous Stop-and-Go Traffic Waves: A Bifurcation Perspective of A Dynamical Map
We consider a discrete-time dynamical system in a car-following context. The system was recently introduced to parsimoniously model human driving behavior based on utility maximization. The parameters of the model were calibrated using vehicle trajectory data from the Sugiyama experiment. It was shown that such a system can accurately reproduce the observed collective phenomena of a more elaborate experiment by Tadaki et al. Once the heterogeneity and noise are switched off, the model defines a…

Draw a Portrait of Your Graph Data: An Instance-Level Profiling Framework for Graph-Structured Data
Tianqi Zhao, Russa Biswas, Megha Khosla
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12094 http…

Draw a Portrait of Your Graph Data: An Instance-Level Profiling Framework for Graph-Structured Data
Graph machine learning models often achieve similar overall performance yet behave differently at the node level, failing on different subsets of nodes with varying reliability. Standard evaluation metrics such as accuracy obscure these fine grained differences, making it difficult to diagnose when and where models fail. We introduce NodePro, a node profiling framework that enables fine-grained diagnosis of model behavior by assigning interpretable profile scores to individual nodes. These scor…