Tootfinder

I am quite sick and tired of the D-party doing little more than useless posturing (such as writing letters to El Cheeto) or simply asking for money. (The purpose of that money is almost never sufficiently described, if the purpose is described at all.)
So it is good to hear that new candidates are arising who will challenge the fuddy-duddy-crats of the D-party. (My own Congress Critter included.)
Note to others: We need good, fresh faces filling elective posts at *all* levels -…

UK filings: TikTok's revenue in the UK, Europe, and Latin America grew 38% YoY to $6.3B in 2024, up from $2.6B in 2022 (Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2025/08/22/tiktok-booms-in-europe-despite-threat-of-us-ban/…

TikTok Booms In Europe Despite Threat Of U.S. Ban
Revenue from Chinese giant ByteDance’s short video app leapt up 38% to $6.3 billion last year in Europe even as it faces the threat of being banned in the United States.

Leeds former head teacher faces no charges following terrorism arrest for holding up a graphic from a satirical magazine.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz9kdq84j3lo

Leeds former head teacher's terror arrest shock over protest cartoon
Jon Farley is held by police under the Terrorism Act for six hours over a placard he was carrying.

Laser Wakefield Acceleration Driven by a Discrete Flying Focus
Jacob R. Pierce, Kyle G. Miller, Fei Li, John P. Palastro, Warren B. Mori
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19824

Laser Wakefield Acceleration Driven by a Discrete Flying Focus
Laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) may enable the next generation of TeV-scale lepton colliders. Reaching such energies will likely require multiple LWFA stages to overcome limitations on the energy gain achievable in a single stage. The use of stages, however, introduces challenges such as alignment, adiabatic matching between stages, and a lower average accelerating gradient. Here, we propose a discrete flying focus that can deliver higher energy gain in a single stage, thereby reducing the …

Diophantine approximation on abelian varieties; a conjecture of M. Waldschmidt
Lior Fishman, David Lambert, Keith Merrill, David Simmons
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19060

Diophantine approximation on abelian varieties; a conjecture of M. Waldschmidt
Following the work of Waldschmidt, we investigate problems in Diophantine approximation on abelian varieties. First we show that a conjecture of Waldschmidt for a given simple abelian variety is equivalent to a well-known Diophantine condition holding for a certain matrix related to that variety. We then posit a related but weaker conjecture, and establish the upper bound direction of that conjecture in full generality. For rank 1 elliptic curves defined over a number field $K \subset \mathbb{R…

Matt and Ross Duffer officially sign a four-year exclusive deal with Paramount for theatrical films, TV, and streaming projects, starting in April 2026 (Rick Porter/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

Duffer Brothers Officially Move to Paramount With Exclusive Four-Year Deal
The ‘Stranger Things’ creators will create movie, TV and streaming projects for the studio, with a focus on tentpole films.

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.

Automated Energy-Aware Time-Series Model Deployment on Embedded FPGAs for Resilient Combined Sewer Overflow Management
Tianheng Ling, Vipin Singh, Chao Qian, Felix Biessmann, Gregor Schiele
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13905

Automated Energy-Aware Time-Series Model Deployment on Embedded FPGAs for Resilient Combined Sewer Overflow Management
Extreme weather events, intensified by climate change, increasingly challenge aging combined sewer systems, raising the risk of untreated wastewater overflow. Accurate forecasting of sewer overflow basin filling levels can provide actionable insights for early intervention, helping mitigating uncontrolled discharge. In recent years, AI-based forecasting methods have offered scalable alternatives to traditional physics-based models, but their reliance on cloud computing limits their reliability …

Ukrainian commander faces trial for failing to stop torture within his unit: https://benborges.xyz/2025/05/29/ukrainian-commander-faces-trial-for.html

Einschränkung Bahnverkehr Zürich wegen Fahrleitungsstörung
Der Bahnverkehr auf der Strecke Zürich Oerlikon - Zürich HB ist zwischen Zürich Oerlikon und Zürich Hardbrücke eingeschränkt.
Der Grund dafür ist eine Fahrleitungsstörung.
Die Einschränkung dauert bis zirka 08:00.
Betroffen sind die Linien S, S15, S16 und S21.
Es sind Verspätungen, Ausfälle und Umleitungen zu erwarten.