Tootfinder

War is an unconscionable horror. The illusions of "international law" and "rules of war" have lead us to believe that war can be clean, managed, and "civilized."
But wars are fought by humans and humans are messy. Humans are not well suited to following orderly rules. Humans respond to their environment. Humans in extraordinary situations can be extraordinarily vindictive and brutal. Sufficiently traumatized humans can act without a conscience, spreading trauma like an infection. If humans respond to their situation, then there can be no "civilized" war because war is itself an situation outside of the society. It is a place that promotes antisocial behavior and punishes pro-social behavior. War cannot be expected to follow "international law" because it is what fills the void created by the failure of "international law" (so long as we rely on nations).
To call for war is to inflict atrocities on civilians. It is to kill the parents and children who serve, and to destroy the combatants who survive. It is to infect both sides with a trauma that will spread if untreated, when soldiers come home or when they become mercenaries in other wars.
And yet... there are times when the brutality, the incompetence, the evil becomes so unbearable that no other option exists, when taking up arms is simply bringing symmetry to an existing asymmetric conflict. There are times when the worst possible thing is inescapable, though it can never be justified.
In this new era of war, in the scramble of conflict under the collapsing of the (poorly named) "Pax Americana," I hope that we, the people, can understand that war is not a tool to fulfill an objective. It is not part of a larger strategy. It is not an extension of deplomacy.
War is a failure.
While it may be the only way to deal with the irrational - the genocidal, the slaver, the dictator - it is still a failure. It is a failure to build a world in which these people can't control armies and economies, can't turn populations in to cults and bend nations to their will.
And we will continue to have such wars until we unite against those who would use as as pawns, who would control our lives and lead us to our deaths. We will have these wars until we unite, as one world, against those rulers. This is what I mean, and what a lot of other people mean, when we say, "No War, but Class War."

Analyzing Black-Hole Ringdowns with Orthonormal Modes
Soichiro Morisaki, Hayato Motohashi, Motoki Suzuki, Daiki Watarai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12376 ht…

Analyzing Black-Hole Ringdowns with Orthonormal Modes
The ringdown signal following a BH merger can be modeled as a superposition of BH QNMs, offering a clean setup for testing gravitational theories. In particular, detecting multiple QNMs enables consistency checks of their frequencies and damping times, serving as a test of General Relativity -- a technique known as black hole spectroscopy. However, incorporating additional QNMs introduces challenges such as increased parameter correlations and higher computational costs in data analysis. To add…

The permutation dimension of the Klein 4-group
Henry Harman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11469 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11469

The permutation dimension of the Klein 4-group
Let $G$ be a finite group and $k$ a field of characteristic $p > 0$. Balmer and Gallauer's recent result on finite $p$-permutation resolutions of $kG$-modules motivates the study of an intriguing new invariant; the $p$-permutation dimension. Following Walsh's success with cyclic groups of prime order, we compute the (global) $p$-permutation dimension of the Klein 4-group in characteristic $p := 2$, along with the dimensions for each of its indecomposable modules.

Momentum-Resolved Relaxation-Time Approach for Size-Dependent Conductivity in Anisotropic Metallic Films
YoungJun Lee, Jin Soo Lee, Seungjun Lee, Seoung-Hun Kang, Young-Kyun Kwon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08622

Momentum-Resolved Relaxation-Time Approach for Size-Dependent Conductivity in Anisotropic Metallic Films
Shrinking CMOS interconnect dimensions to the nanometer scale intensifies electron scattering at surfaces, interfaces, and grain boundaries, causing severe conductivity loss and challenging copper-based designs. Here we present a momentum-resolved relaxation time framework that integrates density functional theory with the semiclassical Boltzmann transport equation to predict size-dependent resistivity in metallic thin films. Electron phonon interactions are computed from first principles, and …

Some fun facts about #Python limited API / stable ABI.
1. #CPython supports "limited API". When you use it, you get extensions that are compatible with the specified CPython version and versions newer than that. To indicate this compatibility, such extensions use `.abi3.so` suffix (or equivalent) rather than the usual `.cpython-313-x86_64-linux-gnu.so` or alike.
2. The actual support is split between CPython itself and #PEP517 build systems. For example, if you use #setuptools and specify `py_limited_api=` argument to the extension, setuptools will pass appropriate C compiler flags and swap extension suffix. There's a similar support in #meson, and probably other build systems.
3. Except that CPython freethreading builds don't support stable ABI right now, so building with "limited API" triggers an explicit error from the headers. Setuptools have opted for building explicit about this: it emits an error if you try to use `py_limited_api` on a freethreading interpreter. Meson currently just gives the compile error. This implies that package authors need to actively special-case freethreading builds and enable "limited API" conditionally.
4. A some future versions of CPython will support "limited API" in freethreading builds. I haven't been following the discussions closely, but I suspect that it will only be possible when you target that version or newer. So I guess people will need to be building two stable ABI wheels for a time — one targeting older Python versions, and one targeting newer versions plus freethreading. On top of that, all these projects will need to update their "no 'limited API' on freethreading" conditions.
5. And then there's #PyPy. PyPy does not feature a stable ABI, but it allows you to build extensions using "limited API". So setuptools and meson just detect that there is no `.abi3.so` on PyPy, and use regular suffix for the extensions built with "limited API".

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04907 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_…

Verbose ListOps (VLO): Beyond Long Context -- Unmasking LLM's Reasoning Blind Spots
Large Language Models (LLMs), whilst great at extracting facts from text, struggle with nested narrative reasoning. Existing long context and multi-hop QA benchmarks inadequately test this, lacking realistic distractors or failing to decouple context length from reasoning complexity, masking a fundamental LLM limitation. We introduce Verbose ListOps, a novel benchmark that programmatically transposes ListOps computations into lengthy, coherent stories. This uniquely forces internal computation …

Generalist Models in Medical Image Segmentation: A Survey and Performance Comparison with Task-Specific Approaches
Andrea Moglia (Politecnico di Milano), Matteo Leccardi (Politecnico di Milano), Matteo Cavicchioli (Politecnico di Milano), Alice Maccarini (Universit\`a di Pavia), Marco Marcon (Politecnico di Milano), Luca Mainardi (Politecnico di Milano), Pietro Cerveri (Politecnico di Milano, Universit\`a di Pavia)

Generalist Models in Medical Image Segmentation: A Survey and Performance Comparison with Task-Specific Approaches
Following the successful paradigm shift of large language models, leveraging pre-training on a massive corpus of data and fine-tuning on different downstream tasks, generalist models have made their foray into computer vision. The introduction of Segment Anything Model (SAM) set a milestone on segmentation of natural images, inspiring the design of a multitude of architectures for medical image segmentation. In this survey we offer a comprehensive and in-depth investigation on generalist models…

Millisecond-scale Volatile Memory in HZO Ferroelectric Capacitors for Bio-inspired Temporal Computing
Luca Fehlings, Thomas Mikolajick, Beatriz Noheda, Erika Covi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08973

Millisecond-scale Volatile Memory in HZO Ferroelectric Capacitors for Bio-inspired Temporal Computing
With the broad recent research on ferroelectric hafnium oxide for non-volatile memory technology, depolarization effects in HfO2-based ferroelectric devices gained a lot of interest. Understanding the physical mechanisms regulating the retention of these devices provides an excellent opportunity for device optimization both towards non-volatile memory applications and towards real-time signal processing applications in which controlled time constants are of paramount importance. Indeed, we argu…

A Unifying Algorithm for Hierarchical Queries
Mahmoud Abo Khamis, Jesse Comer, Phokion Kolaitis, Sudeepa Roy, Val Tannen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10238 h…

A Unifying Algorithm for Hierarchical Queries
The class of hierarchical queries is known to define the boundary of the dichotomy between tractability and intractability for the following two extensively studied problems about self-join free Boolean conjunctive queries (SJF-BCQ): (i) evaluating a SJF-BCQ on a tuple-independent probabilistic database; (ii) computing the Shapley value of a fact in a database on which a SJF-BCQ evaluates to true. Here, we establish that hierarchical queries define also the boundary of the dichotomy between tra…

Structural and Optical Properties of Crystal Ion Sliced BaTiO$_3$ Thin Films
Hossein Esfandiar, Fatemeh Abtahi, Trevor G. Vrckovnik, G. Quyet Ngo, Rene Heller, Ulrich Kentsch, Fabian Ganss, Stefan Facsko, Uta Lucchesi, Stephan Winnerl, Falk Eilenberger, Dennis Arslan, Sebastian W. Schmitt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05874

Structural and Optical Properties of Crystal Ion Sliced BaTiO$_3$ Thin Films
Barium titanate (BaTiO$_3$) is a compelling material for integrated photonics due to its strong electro-optic and second-order nonlinear properties. Crystal Ion Slicing (CIS) presents a scalable and CMOS-compatible route for fabricating thin BaTiO$_3$ films; however, ion implantation during CIS introduces lattice damage that can degrade structural and optical performance. In this study, we demonstrate that post-slicing thermal annealing effectively restores the structural integrity and optical …