Tootfinder

check out this 😳 update to my home insurance policy:
Allstate Indemnity Company
Policy effective date: August 9, 2025
Amendment Of Policy Provisions – AP4995
The following change is made to the provisions throughout your policy documents:
Any reference to gender, including but not limited to, his/her him or he/she also includes any preferred pronouns of identity including, but not limited to, they/them/theirs.

Distinct element-specific nanoscale magnetization dynamics following ultrafast laser excitation
Emma Bernard, Rahul Jangid, Nanna Zhou Hagstr\"om, Meera Madhavi, Jeffrey A. Brock, Matteo Pancaldi, Dario De Angelis, Flavio Capotondi, Emanuele Pedersoli, Kyle Rockwell, Mark W. Keller, Stefano Bonetti, Eric E. Fullerton, Ezio Iacocca, Thomas J. Silva, Roopali Kukreja

Distinct element-specific nanoscale magnetization dynamics following ultrafast laser excitation
Time-resolved ultrafast extreme ultraviolet (EUV) magnetic scattering is used to study laser-driven ultrafast magnetization dynamics of labyrinthine domains in a [Co/Ni/Pt] multilayer. Our measurements at the Co and Ni M-edges reveal distinct ultrafast distortions of the scattering pattern position and width for Ni compared to Co. Ni shows a strong modification of the scattering pattern, 9 to 41 times stronger than Co. As distortions of the labyrinthine pattern in reciprocal space relate to the…

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.

Is anyone aware of publications or research on what sort of bugs LLM-generated or LLM-assisted code tends to have?
Like, we have a huge body of knowledge in the security community about how to audit human-generated codebases for the types of bugs that human developers commonly write.
But we don't have that kind of data yet (AFAIK) for the vibe-coded monstrosities all of us are going to be pentesting soon.
Gut feelings:
* There are some common threads and patterns …

#running slow is hard but my fitness is such that it requires a rebuild of the foundation. Trying to stay in HR2 means a decent amount of walking interspersed. I don’t love it, but it’s necessary.
I have a much more open schedule now, so I should be able to get out and run regularly. The trick will be staying patient and trusting the process.

I've got a 3am start with derpmaster Mike coming up in the next few days. He normally gets up at 5.30am so I've got a feeling there's going to be no settling him after I arrive and his regular humans all leave.
Still, hot weather will mean an early walk and breakfast and then we can both snooze!
My fourth year of looking after Michael.
#Greyhounds

WebGuard :Interpretable Malicious URL Detection via Bidirectional Fusion of HTML Subgraphs and Multi-Scale Convolutional BERT
Ye Tian, Zhang Yumin, Yifan Jia, Jianguo Sun, Yanbin Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19356

WebGuard++:Interpretable Malicious URL Detection via Bidirectional Fusion of HTML Subgraphs and Multi-Scale Convolutional BERT
URL+HTML feature fusion shows promise for robust malicious URL detection, since attacker artifacts persist in DOM structures. However, prior work suffers from four critical shortcomings: (1) incomplete URL modeling, failing to jointly capture lexical patterns and semantic context; (2) HTML graph sparsity, where threat-indicative nodes (e.g., obfuscated scripts) are isolated amid benign content, causing signal dilution during graph aggregation; (3) unidirectional analysis, ignoring URL-HTML feat…

Combinatorial and Gaussian Foundations of Rational Nth Root Approximations: Theorems and Conjectures
Isaac Wolford
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14095 https://

Combinatorial and Gaussian Foundations of Rational Nth Root Approximations: Theorems and Conjectures
We present an approach (the biroot method) for nth root approximation that yields closed-form rational functions with coefficients derived from binomial structures, Gaussian functions, or qualifying DAG structures. The method emerges from an analysis of Newton's method applied to root extraction, revealing that successive iterations generate coefficients following rows of Pascal's triangle in an alternating numerator-denominator pattern. After further exploration of these patterns, we formulate…

I love the non-profit block of the Art Fair, I love to go and argue with the anti-tax people and the Mars society dweebs, to glare at the Republicans, to donate to Planned Parenthood and some of the off-brand religions, to smile and wave and loudly greet the communists HI COMMUNISTS!!! They always wave back. It is such a welcoming feeling!
I’ve been twice already today, once with four grandchildren who collected tons of swag and were cute as hell.