Tootfinder

Managed to do a fine-scale repair for the first time in years, always a pleasure when it goes well. One of my backup earbuds split along the stem, with half the polycarbonate case and a contact plate falling out. A speck of medical skin adhesive (polyacrylate “superglue“) on each end of the case seam appears to have done the trick w/o losing the pinch functions. WOOT!

Nintendo launches the Switch 2 globally, with long queues outside stores and midnight openings; analysts expect Nintendo to sell 15M to 20M Switch 2 units (David Keohane/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/f63cfbcc-9d0e-440e-ad9a-02d01d328f93

Nintendo sells out Switch 2 console at global launch
Mario fans queue at midnight store openings after games company apologises for failing to meet pre-order demand

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17589 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csIR_…

An Offline Reinforcement Learning Algorithm Customized for Multi-Task Fusion in Large-Scale Recommender Systems
As the last critical stage of RSs, Multi-Task Fusion (MTF) is responsible for combining multiple scores outputted by Multi-Task Learning (MTL) into a final score to maximize user satisfaction, which determines the ultimate recommendation results. Recently, to optimize long-term user satisfaction within a recommendation session, Reinforcement Learning (RL) is used for MTF in the industry. However, the offline RL algorithms used for MTF so far have the following severe problems: 1) to avoid out-o…

Optimized and regularly repeated lattice-based Latin hypercube designs for large-scale computer experiments
Xu He, Junpeng Gong, Zhaohui Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04582

Optimized and regularly repeated lattice-based Latin hypercube designs for large-scale computer experiments
Computer simulations serve as powerful tools for scientists and engineers to gain insights into complex systems. Less costly than physical experiments, computer experiments sometimes involve large number of trials. Conventional design optimization and model fitting methods for computer experiments are inefficient for large-scale problems. In this paper, we propose new methods to optimize good lattice point sets, using less computation to construct designs with enhanced space-filling properties …

@… Just wanted to let you know that Captain Hikaru Sulu is currently making a guest appearance in our Lost Era Star Trek TTRPG. He came up as one of three persons, unusually interested in the ongoings of the court-martial for following orders (read: being framed) of the First Officer of our unit, the USS Sato. 😀

In Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Man of the People" (part of "Four Ways to Forgiveness") there's a scene where the Hainish protagonist begins studying history. It's excellent in many respects, but what stood out the most to me was the softly incomprehensible idea of a people with multiple millions of years of recorded history. As one's mind starts to try to trace out the implications of that, it dawns on you that you can't actually comprehend the concept. Like, you read the sentence & understood all the words, and at first you were able to assemble them into what seemed like a conceptual understanding, but as you started to try to fill out that understating, it began to slip away, until you realized you didn't in fact have the mental capacity to build a full understanding and would have you paper things over with a shallow placeholder instead.
I absolutely love that feeling, as one of the ways in which reading science fiction can stretch the brain, and I connected it to a similar moment in Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME, where the android protagonists need to ride an elevator through the civilization/galaxy-spanning megastructure, and turn themselves off for *millions of years* to wait out the ride.
I'm not sure why exactly these scenes feel more beautifully incomprehensible than your run-of-the-mill "then they traveled at lightspeed for a millennia, leaving all their family behind" scene, other than perhaps the authors approach them without trying to use much metaphor to make them more comprehensible (or they use metaphor to emphasize their incomprehensibility).
Do you have a favorite mind=expanded scene of this nature?
#AmReading

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16423 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_hepp…

Theory of neutrino slow flavor evolution. Part II. Space-time evolution of linear instabilities
Slow flavor evolution (defined as driven by neutrino masses and not necessarily ``slow'') is receiving fresh attention in the context of compact astrophysical environments. In Part~I of this series, we have studied the slow-mode dispersion relation following our recently developed analogy to plasma waves. The concept of resonance between flavor waves in the linear regime and propagating neutrinos is the defining feature of this approach. It is best motivated for weak instabilities, which probab…

RewardBench 2: Advancing Reward Model Evaluation
Saumya Malik, Valentina Pyatkin, Sander Land, Jacob Morrison, Noah A. Smith, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Nathan Lambert
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01937

RewardBench 2: Advancing Reward Model Evaluation
Reward models are used throughout the post-training of language models to capture nuanced signals from preference data and provide a training target for optimization across instruction following, reasoning, safety, and more domains. The community has begun establishing best practices for evaluating reward models, from the development of benchmarks that test capabilities in specific skill areas to others that test agreement with human preferences. At the same time, progress in evaluation has not…

Flying Co-Stereo: Enabling Long-Range Aerial Dense Mapping via Collaborative Stereo Vision of Dynamic-Baseline
Zhaoying Wang, Xingxing Zuo, Wei Dong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00546

Flying Co-Stereo: Enabling Long-Range Aerial Dense Mapping via Collaborative Stereo Vision of Dynamic-Baseline
Lightweight long-range mapping is critical for safe navigation of UAV swarms in large-scale unknown environments. Traditional stereo vision systems with fixed short baselines face limited perception ranges. To address this, we propose Flying Co-Stereo, a cross-agent collaborative stereo vision system that leverages the wide-baseline spatial configuration of two UAVs for long-range dense mapping. Key innovations include: (1) a dual-spectrum visual-inertial-ranging estimator for robust baseline e…

#Harvard challenging #DJT edicts against allowing enrollment of non US #citizens in high courts, as top #students accepted to

Harvard foreign students in limbo as college challenges Trump’s ban
Harvard University is challenging President Donald Trump’s move to block foreign students from coming to the United States to attend the Ivy League school, calling it illegal retaliation for Harvard’s rejection of White House demands. In an amended complaint filed Thursday, Harvard called the president’s action an end-run around a previous court order. Last month, a federal judge blocked the Department of Homeland Security from revoking Harvard’s ability to host foreign students. The fi…