Tootfinder

Don't usually weigh in on L.A. stuff but if it's not safe to build 7 duplexes there, then it's not safe to rebuild 5,000 single-family homes there. Make up your mind, Newsom and Bass.
https://laist.com/news/housing-homeles

LA mayor bans duplexes in Palisades burn zone after getting permission from governor
Following uproar from homeowners and local elected leaders, a state law allowing denser housing in single-family areas will no longer apply to the Pacific Palisades.

Okay, here's the promised follow-up with more authors I respect who didn't make it onto this list. I won't do deep dives but I'll list at least one work per author:
YA novelists:
- Randi Pink ("Girls Like Us")
- Louisa Onomé ("Twice as Perfect")
- Emery Lee ("Meet Cute Diary")
- Robin Benway ("Far from the Tree")
- Angela Velez ("Lulu and Milagro's Search for Clarity")
Children's book authors:
- Jacqueline Davies ("Bubbles Up")
- Freya Hartas ("Slow Down in the Park")
Novelists:
- Rimma Onoseta ("How You Grow Wings")
Graphic novelists:
- Linda Medley ("Castle Waiting")
- 🖋️Magsalene Visaggio 🖌️Paulina Ganucheau ("Girlmode")
- Ursula Vernon ("Digger")
- SJ Sindu ("Tall Water" w/ Dion MBD)
- Hope Larson ("Be That Way"; "Salt Magic" w/ Rebecca Mock)
- Lily Williams Karen Schneemann ("Go With the Flow")
- Maia Kobabe ("Gender Queer")
- Kay O'Neill ("Tea Dragon Society")
- Marjane Satrapi ("Persepolis")
Mangaka:
- Kaoru Mori ("Young Bride's Stories")
- Ryoko Kui ("Delicious in Dungeon")
- Natsuki Takaya ("Fruits Basket")
Anime writers/directors and/or Japanese light/fantasy/SF novelists:
- Nahoko Uehashi ("Moribito")
- Sayo Yamamoto ("Michiko & Hatchin"; "Yuri!!! On Ice")
- Mari Okada ("Ano Hana: The Flower we Saw That Day"; "Toradora!")
Game designers/programmers:
(Upon review I was pretty remiss in skipping over a few of these people, some of whom I wasn't aware of but most of whom I just didn't remember when writing my short list. Subconscious misogyny in action. Short & Thorson probably would have squeezed out some of the YA authors I included, although I have no real regrets.)
- Junko Kawano ("Suikoden")
- Elizabeth LaPensée ("When Rivers Were Trails")
- Momo Pixel ("Hair Nah")
- Zoë Quinn ("Depression Quest"; narrative designer on "Solar Ash")
- Kellee Santiago ("Cloud"; "Flower")
- Tanya X. Short ("Moon Hunters")
- Kim Swift ("Portal")
- Maddy Thorson ("Celeste")
- Andi McClure @… ("Jumpman")
Note: I haven't included composers or artists here, but there's a deep bench.
Games journalists/steamers:
- Tanya DePass @… (#/INeedDiverseGames; twitch streams)
- Anita Sarkeesian (Feminist Frequency)
Game/play scholars:
- Mary Flanagan ("Critical Play")
- Tracy Fullerton ("Game Design Workshop")
- Brenda Laurel ("Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System")
- Janet Murray ("Hamlet on the Holodeck"l
- Susana Tosca ("A Pragmatics of Links")
- Jichen Zhu ("Agency Play: Dimensions of Agency for Interactive Narrative Design")
- Magy Seif El Nasr ("Design patterns to guide player movement in 3D games")
- Kate Compton ("Causal Creators"; also "Spore")
P.S. upon consideration I've decided not to include any authors who are men in this coda.
There are definitely others who probably deserve to be here that I'm forgetting...
#GsmeDesign #Authors

StepORLM: A Self-Evolving Framework With Generative Process Supervision For Operations Research Language Models
Chenyu Zhou, Tianyi Xu, Jianghao Lin, Dongdong Ge
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22558

StepORLM: A Self-Evolving Framework With Generative Process Supervision For Operations Research Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities for solving Operations Research (OR) problems. While reinforcement learning serves as a powerful paradigm for LLM training on OR problems, existing works generally face two key limitations. First, outcome reward suffers from the credit assignment problem, where correct final answers can reinforce flawed reasoning. Second, conventional discriminative process supervision is myopic, failing to evaluate the interdependent steps of OR mo…

Actions as Language: Fine-Tuning VLMs into VLAs Without Catastrophic Forgetting
Asher J. Hancock, Xindi Wu, Lihan Zha, Olga Russakovsky, Anirudha Majumdar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22195

Actions as Language: Fine-Tuning VLMs into VLAs Without Catastrophic Forgetting
Fine-tuning vision-language models (VLMs) on robot teleoperation data to create vision-language-action (VLA) models is a promising paradigm for training generalist policies, but it suffers from a fundamental tradeoff: learning to produce actions often diminishes the VLM's foundational reasoning and multimodal understanding, hindering generalization to novel scenarios, instruction following, and semantic understanding. We argue that this catastrophic forgetting is due to a distribution mismatch …

From Past To Path: Masked History Learning for Next-Item Prediction in Generative Recommendation
KaiWen Wei, Kejun He, Xiaomian Kang, Jie Zhang, Yuming Yang, Jiang Zhong, He Bai, Junnan Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23649

From Past To Path: Masked History Learning for Next-Item Prediction in Generative Recommendation
Generative recommendation, which directly generates item identifiers, has emerged as a promising paradigm for recommendation systems. However, its potential is fundamentally constrained by the reliance on purely autoregressive training. This approach focuses solely on predicting the next item while ignoring the rich internal structure of a user's interaction history, thus failing to grasp the underlying intent. To address this limitation, we propose Masked History Learning (MHL), a novel traini…

Equivalence via surjections
Tom Leinster
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20555 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20555

Equivalence via surjections
Many types of categorical structure obey the following principle: the natural notion of equivalence is generated, as an equivalence relation, by identifying $A$ with $B$ when there exists a strictly structure-preserving map $A \to B$ that is genuinely (not just essentially) surjective in each dimension and faithful in the top dimension. We prove this principle for four types of structure: categories, monoidal categories, bicategories and double categories. The last of these theorems suggests th…

Transient Stability Analysis of a Hybrid Grid-Forming and Grid-Following RES System Considering Multi-Mode Control Switching
Ruiyuan Zeng, Ruisheng Diao, Fangyuan Sun, Wangqianyun Tang, Junjie Li, Baorong Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20552

Transient Stability Analysis of a Hybrid Grid-Forming and Grid-Following RES System Considering Multi-Mode Control Switching
The inherent control switching of renewable energy sources (RESs) during intricate transient processes introduces complexity to the dynamic behavior of modern power systems. This paper reveals the dynamic coupling between grid forming (GFM)/grid following (GFL)-based RES and dominant instability modes of the hybrid system. First, six control combinations are systematically investigated by pairing the two GFM-RES modes, normal control (NC) and current saturation (CS), with the three GFL-RES mode…

Finally got some emulator stuff up and running on my (now-sidelined) #PinePhone running #PostmarketOS. Not that bad, just followed the wiki to install #RetroArch some cores, grabbed some ROMs online, and connected a Bluetooth controller following another wiki page. Definitely needed to pay close attention to RetroArch config settings and I still haven't figured out how to get overlays working. The Bluetooth connection was a bit spotty at first but after pairing and a restart it reconnected automatically with no command line stuff needed which was great.
Sadly, it seems like the phone isn't really powerful enough to run even GB ROMs smoothly, so it may not serve as a good gaming platform for the kids unless I can figure out settings tweaks that will get it working better.

Non-Altermagnetic Origin of Exchange Bias Behaviors in Incoherent RuO$_2$/Fe Bilayer Heterostructures
Shelby S. Fields, Joseph C. Prestigiacomo, Cory D. Cress, Nicholas G. Combs, Olaf van 't Erve, Patrick G. Callahan, Keith E. Knipling, Michelle E. Jamer, Frank M. Abel, Feng Ye, Arianna Minelli, Zachary J. Morgan, Haile Ambaye, Masaaki Matsuda, Avishek Maity, Valeria Lauter, Steven P. Bennett

Non-Altermagnetic Origin of Exchange Bias Behaviors in Incoherent RuO$_2$/Fe Bilayer Heterostructures
Initially identified as a promising altermagnetic (AM) candidate, rutile RuO$_2$ has since become embroiled in controversy due to contradictory findings of modeling and measurements of the magnetic properties of bulk crystals and thin films. For example, despite observations of a bulk non-magnetic state using density functional theory, neutron scattering, and muon spin resonance measurements, patterned RuO$_2$ Hall bars and film heterostructures display magnetotransport signatures of magnetic o…

A test of seven AI chatbots' abilities to identify news photos' location, date, and photographer showed all failed to consistently identify photos' provenance (Columbia Journalism Review)
https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/why-ai-models-are-bad-at-verifyi…

Why AI models are bad at verifying photos
Many of the latest large language models, including OpenAI’s recently released GPT-5, tout an impressive capability: reasoning about images. We have seen viral trends of AI models geolocating obscure vacation pictures, impressive demos of LLMs correctly analyzing blurry or cropped photos, and promising results on benchmark tests. These seem to be fueling punditry on whether […]