Tootfinder

I had seven moles surgically removed yesterday because my dermatologist didn't like the way they looked.
So now I have stitches all over my body and I'm not allowed to stretch unduly to prevent the sutures from coming apart.
I guess that's one way to keep me from reaching anything but the lowest hanging fruits.

The geopolitical #aiarmsrace seems largely unimpressed by people proclaiming #LLMs have plateaued and #AGI is never coming.
Such assessments are only relevant for the market, but not so much for count…

Hybrid MAC Protocol with Integrated Multi-Layered Security for Resource-Constrained UAV Swarm Communications
Dhrumil Bhatt, Siddharth Penumatsa, Vidushi Kumar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10236

Hybrid MAC Protocol with Integrated Multi-Layered Security for Resource-Constrained UAV Swarm Communications
Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs) present unique challenges due to high node mobility, dynamic topologies, and strict resource constraints. Existing routing protocols often optimize for a single metric, such as path length or energy, while neglecting the complex dependencies between network performance, security, and MAC layer efficiency. This paper introduces a novel hardware software co design framework for secure and adaptive UAV swarm communications, featuring an energy aware protocol stack. …

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…

TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?

Paramount chief communications officer Justin Dini steps down following the Skydance merger; Dini started in 2017 and will be replaced by Melissa Zukerman (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

Justin Dini to Exit Paramount
Dini, who had been chief communications officer, will exit in the wake of Skydance's acquisition of the company.

Robust Recovery and Control of Cyber-physical Discrete Event Systems under Actuator Attacks
Samuel Oliveira, Mostafa Tavakkoli Anbarani, Gregory Beal, Ilya Kovalenko, Marcelo Teixeira, Andr\'e B. Leal, R\^omulo Meira-G\'oes
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11405

Robust Recovery and Control of Cyber-physical Discrete Event Systems under Actuator Attacks
Critical real-world applications strongly rely on Cyber-physical systems (CPS), but their dependence on communication networks introduces significant security risks, as attackers can exploit vulnerabilities to compromise their integrity and availability. This work explores the topic of cybersecurity in the context of CPS modeled as discrete event systems (DES), focusing on recovery strategies following the detection of cyberattacks. Specifically, we address actuator enablement attacks and propo…

Calls coming in are reports of homeless encampments, mental health crises and people sleeping on sidewalks.
Those calls will now be directed to Los Angeles County’s Emergency Centralized Response Center,
a new department designed to consolidate over 150 outreach teams across 88 cities, all under one roof.
The department soft-launched in January of this year following a motion that was introduced by LA County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath back in September 2024
Officials…

A look inside LA County's new emergency dispatch center for homelessness
The department hopes to increase accountability and deliver results

Following our mapping party for OpenStreetMap's birthday, I've been thinking more about the diversity of OSM tools and how they help create and maintain a commons.
#OpenStreetMap

Hmmmm… here is a problem I did not anticipate.
Every time I empty the main pond hole of water, (the actual hole under the liner) water returns within an hour or two. I’ve done it 4 times now, and it keeps filling back up with water.
Obviously there is water underground infiltrating into the pond hole, and/or the water table itself is above the bottom of the hole. It is not coming from either of the other holes because they both have the same amount of water in them as they did this morning.
I have “watered” the blueberry patch and hazelnut tree a lot with the water that I have been cleaning the filter with… and we also had lots of water flying around outside the liners yesterday as I tested the pump. So it is quite possible that the ground around the pond is simply well saturated.
I think I am going to have to just keep removing the water (and putting it into the sewer) until it does not refill. We have a week of hot weather coming. Surely that will be enough time for everything to dry out completely.
Otherwise I might run into some issues if the rains return before I can anchor down the pond liner with gravel and get the plumbing in!
How is time already running short!?
Never underestimate the ability of water to find a place where it is not wanted. 😆
#poolpond #backyardProject #diy