Tootfinder

Machine Mirages: Defining the Undefined
Hamidou Tembine
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13990 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13990

Machine Mirages: Defining the Undefined
As multimodal machine intelligence systems started achieving average animal-level and average human-level fluency in many measurable tasks in processing images, language, and sound, they began to exhibit a new class of cognitive aberrations: machine mirages. These include delusion, illusion, confabulation, hallucination, misattribution error, semantic drift, semantic compression, exaggeration, causal inference failure, uncanny valley of perception, bluffing-patter-bullshitting, cognitive stereo…

Self-Stabilizing Replicated State Machine Coping with Byzantine and Recurring Transient Faults
Shlomi Dolev, Amit Hendin, Maurice Herlihy, Maria Potop Butucaru, Elad Michael Schiller
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12900

Self-Stabilizing Replicated State Machine Coping with Byzantine and Recurring Transient Faults
The ability to perform repeated Byzantine agreement lies at the heart of important applications such as blockchain price oracles or replicated state machines. Any such protocol requires the following properties: (1) \textit{Byzantine fault-tolerance}, because not all participants can be assumed to be honest, (2) r\textit{ecurrent transient fault-tolerance}, because even honest participants may be subject to transient ``glitches'', (3) \textit{accuracy}, because the results of quantitative queri…

On the Vertices of Delta-modular Polyhedra
Bludov Mikhail, Gribanov Dmitry, Klimenko Maxim, Kupavskii Andrey, L\'angi Zsolt, Rogozin Alexander, Voronov Vsevolod
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12774

On the Vertices of Delta-modular Polyhedra
Let $P$ be a polytope defined by the system $A x \leq b$, where $A \in R^{m \times n}$, $b \in R^m$, and $\text{rank}(A) = n$. We give a short geometric proof of the following tight upper bound on the number of vertices of $P$: $$ n! \cdot \fracΔ{Δ_{\text{average}}} \cdot \text{vol}(B_2) \sim \frac{1}{\sqrt{Ï€n}} \cdot \left(\frac{2 Ï€}{e}\right)^{n/2} \cdot n^{n/2} \cdot \fracΔ{Δ_{\text{average}}}, $$ where $Δ$ is the maximum absolute value of $n \times n$ subdeterminants of $A$, and $Î…

[PODCAST] Episode 308: The Campus Free Speech Panic: Who’s Fueling the Misinformation Machine?
https://pca.st/episode/a003e200-73bf-405f-9036-f96590459999
“Bradford Vivian is at Penn State. His latest book is Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in Am…

I am astonished that the #Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial
https://www.auschwitz.org/en/
still supports or at least has an account on X (Twitter). They have at least one account here. @…
I have written them to express my dismay and have urged them to drop their X account with no response. I believe that it would help if as many of us as possible would write them to express your feelings about this.
https://www.auschwitz.org/en/contact/
Please boost.

Nanodroplets Condensation on Solid Surfaces
Matteo Teodori, Dario Abbondanza, Mirko Gallo, Carlo Massimo Casciola
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12565 https://…

Nanodroplets Condensation on Solid Surfaces
This paper deals with the condensation of liquid droplets on hydrophobic and hydrophilic surfaces. A stochastic mesoscale model based on the theory of fluctuating hydrodynamics and the thermodynamics of a diffuse interface approach shows how direct simulation of the vapour-liquid transition from the nucleation process to droplet hydrodynamics can be achieved. Such simulations explain the role of wettability in filmwise and dropwise condensation regimes and the main limitations of classical nucl…

Band members pretending to play instruments that don't appear in the song, which was all fairlight and drum machine. Sorry, in feeling bitter for some reason. Scritti Apoliti #totp

How to Show Someone You’re Listening https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_show_someone_youre_listening?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_content=muz4no…

How to Show Someone You’re Listening
When we validate someone, we show them that we understand and care about their feelings and experiences.

Protest filling the street at 24th and Mission in San Francisco
#ICEProtests #FuckICE

Some fun facts about #Python limited API / stable ABI.
1. #CPython supports "limited API". When you use it, you get extensions that are compatible with the specified CPython version and versions newer than that. To indicate this compatibility, such extensions use `.abi3.so` suffix (or equivalent) rather than the usual `.cpython-313-x86_64-linux-gnu.so` or alike.
2. The actual support is split between CPython itself and #PEP517 build systems. For example, if you use #setuptools and specify `py_limited_api=` argument to the extension, setuptools will pass appropriate C compiler flags and swap extension suffix. There's a similar support in #meson, and probably other build systems.
3. Except that CPython freethreading builds don't support stable ABI right now, so building with "limited API" triggers an explicit error from the headers. Setuptools have opted for building explicit about this: it emits an error if you try to use `py_limited_api` on a freethreading interpreter. Meson currently just gives the compile error. This implies that package authors need to actively special-case freethreading builds and enable "limited API" conditionally.
4. A some future versions of CPython will support "limited API" in freethreading builds. I haven't been following the discussions closely, but I suspect that it will only be possible when you target that version or newer. So I guess people will need to be building two stable ABI wheels for a time — one targeting older Python versions, and one targeting newer versions plus freethreading. On top of that, all these projects will need to update their "no 'limited API' on freethreading" conditions.
5. And then there's #PyPy. PyPy does not feature a stable ABI, but it allows you to build extensions using "limited API". So setuptools and meson just detect that there is no `.abi3.so` on PyPy, and use regular suffix for the extensions built with "limited API".