Tootfinder

Sunspot Observations in 1684-1702: John Flamsteed and Philippe de La Hire
Nadezhda Zolotova, Mikhail Vokhmyanin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11375 https://ar…

Sunspot Observations in 1684-1702: John Flamsteed and Philippe de La Hire
In this work, we present an extensive review and detailed analysis of sunspot measurements, drawings, and engravings made by John Flamsteed and, mainly, by Philippe de La Hire during the Maunder minimum. All available information and contemporary knowledge about the sunspot nature are shown. The coordinates, areas, and numbers of sunspots and sunspot groups are reconstructed. Based on these observations, La Hire, Jean-Dominique Cassini, and his son Jacques Cassini regularly published results th…

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…

Memory Retrieval and Consolidation in Large Language Models through Function Tokens
Shaohua Zhang, Yuan Lin, Hang Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08203 https://

Memory Retrieval and Consolidation in Large Language Models through Function Tokens
The remarkable success of large language models (LLMs) stems from their ability to consolidate vast amounts of knowledge into the memory during pre-training and to retrieve it from the memory during inference, enabling advanced capabilities such as knowledge memorization, instruction-following and reasoning. However, the mechanisms of memory retrieval and consolidation in LLMs remain poorly understood. In this paper, we propose the function token hypothesis to explain the workings of LLMs: Duri…

Observation Matrix Design for Densifying MIMO Channel Estimation via 2D Ice Filling
Zijian Zhang, Mingyao Cui
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08887 https://arxi…

Observation Matrix Design for Densifying MIMO Channel Estimation via 2D Ice Filling
In recent years, densifying multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has attracted much attention from the communication community. Thanks to the subwavelength antenna spacing, the strong correlations among densifying antennas provide sufficient prior knowledge about channel state information (CSI). This inspires the careful design of observation matrices (e.g., transmit precoders and receive combiners), that exploits the CSI prior knowledge, to boost channel estimation performance. Aligned with t…

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

We distinguish "personal unfairness",
-- the view that one’s own economic situation is unfair,
from "social unfairness",
-- the view that the economic situation of others in society is unfair.
Uncertainties associated with the transition to a globalized knowledge economy heighten people’s feelings of personal unfairness
Feelings of personal unfairness increase support for the "populist right"
and feelings about social unfairn…

Left-Wing Populism vs. Right-Wing Populism - What's the Difference? | This vs. That
What's the difference between Left-Wing Populism and Right-Wing Populism? Left-wing populism and right-wing populism are both political movements that aim to...

★ Do you get excited or upset about AWS SCPs, or GCP Org Policies?
★ Do you have experience developing software to solve cloud security challenges?
★ Do you downplay your cloud security knowledge but actually you know a lot of niche oddities of cloud IAM?
★ Do you like working in diverse security teams that care about your wellbeing?
★ Do you want to get paid to work on cloud security for one of the most sophisticated AWS environments in the world?
I'm hiring a…

Security Software Engineer (L5), Cloud Infrastructure Security | USA - Remote | Netflix
Netflix is one of the world's leading entertainment services, with over 300 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, films and games across a wide variety of genres and languages. Members can play, pause and resume watching as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, and can change their plans at any time. Netflix operates our streaming service control plane on Amazon Web Services, which has led to one of the largest and most sophisticated AWS environments in the world. C…

Join us today for 'Relational Ecologies of Knowledge and Practice: A Workshop of the Epistemic Justice Network', following from the UNESCO Chairs Forum in Dakar.
UKFIET Conference in Oxford, Wednesday, 17 September, 13:30-15:00
We will brainstorm actionable ideas for achieving epistemic justice as we face broader global challenges of opposition, to imagine visions and learn from lived experiences of reparative partnerships for research and knowledge co-creation.

The decay of values continues...
https://climatejustice.social/@PeterRu/115277445442427554

Google launches Gemini 3 Pro Image, aka Nano Banana Pro, with more control, improved text rendering, and enhanced world knowledge, for free in the Gemini app (Abner Li/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2025/11/20/gemini-3-nano-banana-pro/

Google rolling out Gemini 3-powered ‘Nano Banana Pro’ image gen, editing
Google is following the launch of Gemini 3 Pro with Nano Banana Pro. The image generation and editing model is officially Gemini 3 Pro Image.