Tootfinder

Ethics Watchdog Group Seeks Investigation Into Border Czar and Contracts Following ProPublica Report (ProPublica)
https://www.propublica.org/article/border-czar-tom-homan-mark-hall-conflicts-interest-ethics-investigation
http://www.memeorandum.com/251021/p155#a251021p155

Raiders EDGE Malcolm Koonce still getting back in the swing of things https://raiderswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/raiders/2025/08/21/raiders-edge-malcolm-koonce-still-getting-back-in-the-s…

Overly academic/distanced ethical discussions
Had a weird interaction with @/brainwane@social.coop just now. I misinterpreted one of their posts quoting someone else and I think the combination of that plus an interaction pattern where I'd assume their stance on something and respond critically to that ended up with me getting blocked. I don't have hard feelings exactly, and this post is only partly about this particular person, but I noticed something interesting by the end of the conversation that had been bothering me. They repeatedly criticized me for assuming what their position was, but never actually stated their position. They didn't say: "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, it's actually Y." They just said "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, please don't assume my position!" I get that it's annoying to have people respond to a straw man version of your argument, but when I in response asked some direct questions about what their position was, they gave some non-answers and then blocked me. It's entirely possible it's a coincidence, and they just happened to run out of patience on that iteration, but it makes me take their critique of my interactions a bit less seriously. I suspect that they just didn't want to hear what I was saying, while at the same time they wanted to feel as if they were someone who values public critique and open discussion of tricky issues (if anyone reading this post also followed our interaction and has a different opinion of my behavior, I'd be glad to hear it; it's possible In effectively being an asshole here and it would be useful to hear that if so).
In any case, the fact that at the end of the entire discussion, I'm realizing I still don't actually know their position on whether they think the AI use case in question is worthwhile feels odd. They praised the system on several occasions, albeit noting some drawbacks while doing so. They said that the system was possibly changing their anti-AI stance, but then got mad at me for assuming this meant that they thought this use-case was justified. Maybe they just haven't made up their mind yet but didn't want to say that?
Interestingly, in one of their own blog posts that got linked in the discussion, they discuss a different AI system, and despite listing a bunch of concrete harms, conclude that it's okay to use it. That's fine; I don't think *every* use of AI is wrong on balance, but what bothered me was that their post dismissed a number of real ethical issues by saying essentially "I haven't seen calls for a boycott over this issue, so it's not a reason to stop use." That's an extremely socially conformist version of ethics that doesn't sit well with me. The discussion also ended up linking this post: https://chelseatroy.com/2024/08/28/does-ai-benefit-the-world/ which bothered me in a related way. In it, Troy describes classroom teaching techniques for introducing and helping students explore the ethics of AI, and they seem mostly great. They avoid prescribing any particular correct stance, which is important when teaching given the power relationship, and they help students understand the limitations of their perspectives regarding global impacts, which is great. But the overall conclusion of the post is that "nobody is qualified to really judge global impacts, so we should focus on ways to improve outcomes instead of trying to judge them." This bothers me because we actually do have a responsibility to make decisive ethical judgments despite limitations of our perspectives. If we never commit to any ethical judgment against a technology because we think our perspective is too limited to know the true impacts (which I'll concede it invariably is) then we'll have to accept every technology without objection, limiting ourselves to trying to improve their impacts without opposing them. Given who currently controls most of the resources that go into exploration for new technologies, this stance is too permissive. Perhaps if our objection to a technology was absolute and instantly effective, I'd buy the argument that objecting without a deep global view of the long-term risks is dangerous. As things stand, I think that objecting to the development/use of certain technologies in certain contexts is necessary, and although there's a lot of uncertainly, I expect strongly enough that the overall outcomes of objection will be positive that I think it's a good thing to do.
The deeper point here I guess is that this kind of "things are too complicated, let's have a nuanced discussion where we don't come to any conclusions because we see a lot of unknowns along with definite harms" really bothers me.

@… @… I'm slightly confused.
01777 at both of the following:
<

Pulled fronts are not (just) pulled
Montie Avery, Matt Holzer, Arnd Scheel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14864 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14864

Pulled fronts are not (just) pulled
Front propagation into unstable states is often determined by the linearization, that is, propagation speeds agree with predictions from the linearized equation at the unstable state. The leading edge behavior is then a Gaussian tail propagating with the linear spreading speed. Fronts following this leading edge are commonly referred to as pulled fronts, alluding to the idea that they are ``pulled'' by this leading-edge Gaussian tail. We describe here a class of examples that exhibits how these…

messal_shale: Messel Shale food web (2014)
A network of feeling links among taxa based on the 48 million years old uppermost early Eocene Messel Shale. Edge property 'certainty' denotes the certainty of the edge. Metadata include evidence, habitat, and trophic roles. The edge direction goes from consumer to resource.
This network has 700 nodes and 6444 edges.
Tags: Biological, Food Web, Uncertain, Weighted, Metadata

4-uniform Maker-Breaker and Maker-Maker games are PSPACE-complete
Florian Galliot
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13819 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13819

4-uniform Maker-Breaker and Maker-Maker games are PSPACE-complete
We study two positional games where two players take turns picking a previously unpicked vertex of a hypergraph $H$. We say a player fills an edge of $H$ if that player has picked all the vertices of that edge. In the Maker-Maker game, whoever first fills an edge wins, or we get a draw if no edge is filled. In the Maker-Breaker game, the first player aims at filling an edge while the second player aims at preventing the first player from filling an edge. We show that, for both games, deciding w…

I'm dispositionally sceptical of falling sky prophesies and what Mr Schneier calls "movie plot threats".
But.
I can't deny I'm a bit nervous that all this noisy dancing up to the edge of disaster and back might be a deliberate scheme, intended to get European militaries locked up on the Eastern front from Finland to Romania, before China finally have a crack at Taiwan.
"Estonia seeks Nato consultation after Russian jets violate airspace"

Nato intercepts Russian warplanes violating Estonian airspace
Estonia says three Russian MiG-31 fighter jets remained in Estonian airspace for 12 minutes.

Componentwise linearity of powers of edge ideals of weighted oriented graphs
Manohar Kumar, Joydip Mondal, Ramakrishna Nanduri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14637 https://

Componentwise linearity of powers of edge ideals of weighted oriented graphs
In this paper, we study the componentwise linearity of powers of edge ideal of a weighted oriented graph $D$. We give a characterization for componentwise linearity of the edge ideal $I(D)$ in terms of forbidden subgraphs of $D$. If $D$ is house-free or complete $r$-partite, then the following statements are equivalent: (1) $I(D)$ is componentwise linear; (2) $I(D)$ is vertex splittable; (3) $I(D)$ has linear quotient property; (4) both $G$ and $H(I(D)_{(2)})$ are co-chordal and $D_1,D_2,D_3,D…

New project post: AnotterKiosk
AnotterKiosk is another full-page web-browser OS for Pi's and other PCs, displays a webpage in full screen 24/7.
It has support for multi-touch input, a watchdog/heartbeat feature, local webserver, fully read-only root FS (won't kill SD cards, ever!), manual EDID overrides, configurable caching, reverse SSH tunnel support...
Can be used for signs, conference info screens, dashboards, home automation, etc.