Tootfinder

A post from the archive 📫:
Invalid Access to memory location in KUDU App Services
https://www.poppastring.com/blog/invalid-access-to-memory-location-in-kudu-app-services

I love the fact that switching out a failing SSD just involved formatting the new SSD, copying the files over via `rsync`, powering off the computer, and swapping the new SSD in for the old one. I did have to make a minor tweak to the `fstab` because I decided to go with XFS, but the down time for the computer was only for as long as it took me to get the SSD swapped in.
#linux

When do you start feeling like a person and not a collection of impulses you don’t understand?

A surge in AI company valuations is driving the popularity of special purpose vehicles, but some involve high fees, opaque structures, and layers of middlemen (Business Insider)
https://africa.businessinsider.com/mar

Investors warn AI FOMO could be fueling a risky bubble in companies like OpenAI and Anthropic
As AI valuations soar into the hundreds of billions, a parallel market of temporary financial shells is proliferating to meet investor FOMO, and many investors are starting to sound the alarm bells that it portends a bubble in the AI gold rush

Just saw this:
#AI can mean a lot of things these days, but lots of the popular meanings imply a bevy of harms that I definitely wouldn't feel are worth a cute fish game. In fact, these harms are so acute that even "just" playing into the AI hype becomes its own kind of harm (it's similar to blockchain in that way).
@… noticed that the authors claim the code base is 80% AI generated, which is a red flag because people with sound moral compasses wouldn't be using AI to "help" write code in the first place. The authors aren't by some miracle people who couldn't build this app without help, in case that influences your thinking about it: they have the skills to write the code themselves, although it likely would have taken longer (but also been better).
I was more interested in the fish-classification AI, and how much it might be dependent on datacenters. Thankfully, a quick glance at the code confirms they're using ONNX and running a self-trained neural network on your device. While the exponentially-increasing energy & water demands of datacenters to support billion-parameter models are a real concern, this is not that. Even a non-AI game can burn a lot of cycles on someone's phone, and I don't think there's anything to complain about energy-wise if we're just using cycles on the end user's device as long as we're not having them keep it on for hours crunching numbers like blockchain stuff does. Running whatever stuff locally while the user is playing a game is a negligible environmental concern, unlike, say, calling out to ChatGPT where you're directly feeding datacenter demand. Since they claimed to have trained the network themselves, and since it's actually totally reasonable to make your own dataset for this and get good-enough-for-a-silly-game results with just a few hundred examples, I don't have any ethical objections to the data sourcing or training processes either. Hooray! This is finally an example of "ethical use of neutral networks" that I can hold up as an example of what people should be doing instead of the BS they are doing.
But wait... Remember what I said about feeding the AI hype being its own form of harm? Yeah, between using AI tools for coding and calling their classifier "AI" in a way that makes it seem like the same kind of thing as ChatGPT et al., they're leaning into the hype rather than helping restrain it. And that means they're causing harm. Big AI companies can point to them and say "look AI enables cute things you like" when AI didn't actually enable it. So I'm feeling meh about this cute game and won't be sharing it aside from this post. If you love the cute fish, you don't really have to feel bad for playing with it, but I'd feel bad for advertising it without a disclaimer.

IMA-Catcher: An IMpact-Aware Nonprehensile Catching Framework based on Combined Optimization and Learning
Francesco Tassi (Human-Robot Interfaces and Interaction Lab., Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy), Jianzhuang Zhao (Human-Robot Interfaces and Interaction Lab., Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy), Gustavo J. G. Lahr (Human-Robot Interfaces and Interaction Lab., Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy), Luna Gava (Event-Driven Perception for Robotics Lab, Istituto Italiano d…

IMA-Catcher: An IMpact-Aware Nonprehensile Catching Framework based on Combined Optimization and Learning
Robotic catching of flying objects typically generates high impact forces that might lead to task failure and potential hardware damages. This is accentuated when the object mass to robot payload ratio increases, given the strong inertial components characterizing this task. This paper aims to address this problem by proposing an implicitly impact-aware framework that accomplishes the catching task in both pre- and post-catching phases. In the first phase, a motion planner generates optimal tra…

Implicit and Explicit Formulas of the Joint RDF for a Tuple of Multivariate Gaussian Sources with Individual Square-Error Distortions
Evagoras Stylianou, Charalambos D. Charalambous, Themistoklis Charalambous
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16301

Implicit and Explicit Formulas of the Joint RDF for a Tuple of Multivariate Gaussian Sources with Individual Square-Error Distortions
This paper analyzes the joint Rate Distortion Function (RDF) of correlated multivariate Gaussian sources with individual square-error distortions. Leveraging Hotelling's canonical variable form, presented is a closed-form characterization of the joint RDF, that involves {a system of nonlinear equations. Furthermore, for the special case of symmetric distortions (i.e., equal distortions), the joint RDF is explicitly expressed in terms of} two water-filling variables. The results greatly improve …

Tuning chiral anomaly signature in a Dirac semimetal via fast-ion implantation
Manasi Mandal, Eunbi Rha, Abhijatmedhi Chotrattanapituk, Denisse C\'ordova Carrizales, Alexander Lygo, Kevin B. Woller, Mouyang Cheng, Ryotaro Okabe, Guomin Zhu, Kiran Mak, Chu-Liang Fu, Chuhang Liu, Lijun Wu, Yimei Zhu, Susanne Stemmer, Mingda Li
https://ar…

Tuning chiral anomaly signature in a Dirac semimetal via fast-ion implantation
Cd$_3$As$_2$ is a prototypical Dirac semimetal that hosts a chiral anomaly and thereby functions as a platform to test high-energy physics hypotheses and to realize energy efficient applications. Here we use a combination of accelerator-based fast ion implantation and theory-driven planning to enhance the negative longitudinal magnetoresistance (NLMR)--a signature of a chiral anomaly--in Nb-doped Cd$_3$As$_2$ thin films. High-energy ion implantation is commonly used to investigate semiconductor…

Acabei de assistir "Gladiador". Não chega a ser um filme ruim, mas esperava bem mais. A melhor característica do filme é a trilha sonora, composta por dois músicos fantšsticos: Hans Zimmer (famoso por suas composições para o cinema) e Lisa Gerrard (da ótima banda alternativa "dead can dance"). Infelizmente este não é daqueles filmes em que a trilha sonora fica presente e faz grande diferença durante todo o tempo, o tema principal só se faz realmente ser notado na cena fin…

In a UK tribunal filing, ex-Meta employee Samujjal Purkayastha alleges Meta misled advertisers by inflating Shops ads' performance and bypassed Apple's ATT (Trishla Ostwal/Adweek)
https://www.adweek.com/media/whistleblower-alleges-m…

Whistleblower Alleges Meta Artificially Boosted Shops Ads Performance
Ex-Meta employee alleges the company inflated ad results to mask poor performance