Tootfinder

Even if “AI” worked (it doesn’t), there’s many reasons why you shouldn’t use it:
1. It’s destroying Internet sites that you love as you use chat bots instead of actually going to sources of information—this will cause them to be less active and eventually shut down.
2. Pollution and water use from server farms cause immediate harm; often—just like other heavy industry—these are built in underprivileged communities and harming poor people. Without any benefits as the big tech companies get tax breaks and don’t pay for power, while workers aren’t from the community but commute in.
3. The basic underlying models of any LLM rely on stolen data, even when specific extra data is obtained legally. Chatbots can’t learn to speak English just by reading open source code.
4. You’re fueling a speculation bubble that is costing many people their jobs—because the illusion of “efficiency” is kept up by firing people and counting that as profit.
5. Whenever you use the great cheat machine in the cloud you’re robbing yourself from doing real research, writing or coding—literally atrophying your brain and making you stupider.
It’s a grift, through and through.

Spirits in the Stacks: A Ghostly Tour at the Congregational Library & Archives
https://ift.tt/qO4XdyU
Conference> Chinese Buddhist Philosophy: From Three Treatises to Five Schools, 7-8 August 2025,…
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#ScribesAndMakers for July 3: When (and if) you procrastinate, what do you do? If you don't, what do you do to avoid it?
I'll swap right out of programming to read a book, play a video game, or watch some anime. Often got things open in other windows so it's as simple as alt-tab.
I've noticed recently I tend to do this more often when I have a hard problem to solve that I'm not 100% sure about. I definitely have cycles of better & worse motivation and I've gotten to a place where I'm pretty relaxed about it instead of feeling guilty. I work how I work, and that includes cycles of rest, and that's enough (at least, for me it has been so far, and I'm in a comfortable career, married with 2 kids).
Some projects ultimately lose steam and get abandoned, and I've learned to accept that too. I learn a lot and grow from each project, so nothing is a true waste of time, and there remains plenty of future ahead of me to achieve cool things.
The procrastination does sometimes impact my wife & kids, and that's something I do sometimes feel bad about, but I think I keep that in check well enough, and for things my wife worries about, I usually don't procrastinate those too much (used to be worse about this).
Right now I'm procrastinating a big work project by working on a hobby project instead. The work project probably won't get done by the start of the semester as a result. But as I remind myself, my work doesn't actually pay me to work during the summer, and things will be okay without the work project being finished until later.
When I want to force myself into a more productive cycle, talking to people about project details sometimes helps, as does finding some new tech I can learn about by shoehorning it into a project. Have been thinking about talking to a rubber duck, but haven't motivated myself to try that yet, and I'm not really in doldrums right now.

Hot springs and dust reservoirs: JWST reveals the dusty, molecular aftermath of extragalactic stellar mergers
Viraj Karambelkar, Mansi Kasliwal, Ryan M. Lau, Jacob E. Jencson, Nadejda Blagorodnova, Marco A. Gomez-Munoz, Hugo Tranin, Maxime Wavasseur, Melissa Shahbandeh, Kishalay De
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03932

Hot springs and dust reservoirs: JWST reveals the dusty, molecular aftermath of extragalactic stellar mergers
We present James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations of four Luminous Red Novae (LRNe): dusty, extragalactic transients from stellar mergers following common-envelope evolution (CEE) in massive binary stars. Our targets - AT2021blu, AT2021biy, AT2018bwo, and M31-LRN-2015 - span a broad range in progenitor primary masses ($\approx$3-24M$_{\odot}$) and post-merger ages ($\approx$1100-3700 days). All four were observed with the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) from 5-25$μ$m; AT2021blu and AT20…

The Board agreed that, in the light of the recent immigration policies implemented at US borders, hosting the 2028 conference there, which following the traditional rhythm is due to move to North America, would not be recommendable.

LMAE4Eth: Generalizable and Robust Ethereum Fraud Detection by Exploring Transaction Semantics and Masked Graph Embedding
Yifan Jia, Yanbin Wang, Jianguo Sun, Ye Tian, Peng Qian
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03939

LMAE4Eth: Generalizable and Robust Ethereum Fraud Detection by Exploring Transaction Semantics and Masked Graph Embedding
Current Ethereum fraud detection methods rely on context-independent, numerical transaction sequences, failing to capture semantic of account transactions. Furthermore, the pervasive homogeneity in Ethereum transaction records renders it challenging to learn discriminative account embeddings. Moreover, current self-supervised graph learning methods primarily learn node representations through graph reconstruction, resulting in suboptimal performance for node-level tasks like fraud account detec…

It's time to lower your inhibitions towards just asking a human the answer to your question.
In the early nineties, effectively before the internet, that's how you learned a lot of stuff. Your other option was to look it up in a book. I was a kid then, so I asked my parents a lot of questions.
Then by ~2000 or a little later, it started to feel almost rude to do this, because Google was now a thing, along with Wikipedia. "Let me Google that for you" became a joke website used to satirize the poor fool who would waste someone's time answering a random question. There were some upsides to this, as well as downsides. I'm not here to judge them.
At this point, Google doesn't work any more for answering random questions, let alone more serous ones. That era is over. If you don't believe it, try it yourself. Between Google intentionally making their results worse to show you more ads, the SEO cruft that already existed pre-LLMs, and the massive tsunami of SEO slop enabled by LLMs, trustworthy information is hard to find, and hard to distinguish from the slop. (I posted an example earlier: #AI #LLMs #DigitalCommons #AskAQuestion

Marsha P. Johnson has become an icon of gay, trans, and queer liberation,
and yet little is known about her life beyond her participation in the Stonewall Uprising of 1969 and the decades long controversy after her lifeless body was found floating in the Hudson River in 1992.
In "Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson",
Tourmaline, an award-winning Black trans artist, filmmaker, and activist who has dedicated her life to uplifting Marsha P. Johnson’s l…

What We Can Learn From the Defiant Life and Legacy of Marsha P. Johnson
Black trans artist, filmmaker, and activist Tourmaline discusses her new book about Marsha’s trailblazing life.

Spirits in the Stacks: A Ghostly Tour at the Congregational Library & Archives
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ANN: New Book on Matriculture, Shamanism, and the Authority of Women: The Powers That Be Linnéa…
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Spirits in the Stacks: A Ghostly Tour at the Congregational Library & Archives
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Rutgers Global Affairs Conference now VIRTUAL - new CFP deadline Rutgers University…
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