Tootfinder

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/trumps-budget-director-says-layoffs-begun-government-shutdown-rcna236923
According to a legal filing, 176 people were fired from CISA on Friday.

Trump administration begins laying off more than 4,000 federal workers amid government shutdown, court filing shows
Affected agencies include the departments of Homeland Security, Education, Treasury, Energy and Health and Human Services, according to a DOJ filing.

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?

Broadcom closes up 9.88% following the announcement of its custom chip deal with OpenAI; its stock is up over 50% in 2025 after more than doubling in 2024 (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/13/openai-partners-with-bro…

Broadcom stock pops 7% on OpenAI custom chip deal, adding to Nvidia and AMD agreements
OpenAI is teaming up with Broadcom to jointly develop and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom AI accelerators starting in 2026.

The Undeniable Truth Facing the Raiders Following Week 6 https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-michael-mayer-ashton-jeanty-tennessee-titans-pete-carroll

Complex Logical Instruction Generation
Mian Zhang, Shujian Liu, Sixun Dong, Ming Yin, Yebowen Hu, Xun Wang, Steven Ma, Song Wang, Sathish Reddy Indurthi, Haoyun Deng, Zhiyu Zoey Chen, Kaiqiang Song
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09125

Complex Logical Instruction Generation
Instruction following has catalyzed the recent era of Large Language Models (LLMs) and is the foundational skill underpinning more advanced capabilities such as reasoning and agentic behaviors. As tasks grow more challenging, the logic structures embedded in natural language instructions becomes increasingly intricate. However, how well LLMs perform on such logic-rich instructions remains under-explored. We propose LogicIFGen and LogicIFEval. LogicIFGen is a scalable, automated framework for ge…

New York Attorney General Letitia James today issued the following statement after she was indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s office of the Eastern District of Virginia. 
“This is nothing more than a continuation of the president’s desperate weaponization of our justice system.
He is forcing federal law enforcement agencies to do his bidding,
all because I did my job as the New York State Attorney General.  
“These charges are baseless,
and the president’s own publi…

Attorney General Letitia James Issues Statement on Donald Trump’s Weaponization of the Department of Justice
NEW YORK – New York Attorney General Letitia James today issued the following statement after she was indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s office of the Eastern

A Scoping Review of Machine Learning Applications in Power System Protection and Disturbance Management
Julian Oelhaf, Georg Kordowich, Mehran Pashaei, Christian Bergler, Andreas Maier, Johann J\"ager, Siming Bayer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09053

A Scoping Review of Machine Learning Applications in Power System Protection and Disturbance Management
The integration of renewable and distributed energy resources reshapes modern power systems, challenging conventional protection schemes. This scoping review synthesizes recent literature on machine learning (ML) applications in power system protection and disturbance management, following the PRISMA for Scoping Reviews framework. Based on over 100 publications, three key objectives are addressed: (i) assessing the scope of ML research in protection tasks; (ii) evaluating ML performance across …

Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
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I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading

New York Attorney General Letitia James today issued the following statement after she was indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s office of the Eastern District of Virginia. 
“This is nothing more than a continuation of the president’s desperate weaponization of our justice system.
He is forcing federal law enforcement agencies to do his bidding,
all because I did my job as the New York State Attorney General.  
“These charges are baseless,
and the president’s own publi…

Attorney General Letitia James Issues Statement on Donald Trump’s Weaponization of the Department of Justice
NEW YORK – New York Attorney General Letitia James today issued the following statement after she was indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s office of the Eastern

In July, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that France plans to recognize a Palestinian state
—joining the ranks of more than 100 global states, mostly non-European, that have already done so.
His decision was a clear shot across the bow to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Israeli conduct in Gaza.
The point was made even more blunt in the following days by the news that the United Kingdom also intends to recognize a Palestinian state if no progress is…

What Was the Tipping Point on Gaza?
After almost two years of war, Israel is feeling the growing weight of governmental opprobrium.