Tootfinder

I’m not pleased to have gone from expecting an end in less than an hour to having a whole day more to live without lights or heat.

Unfortunately tempted to write an essay comparing Phillip K. Dick's VALIS to Harry Horse's Drowned God. I believe both are deeply similar, very strong and weak in different places, and most interestingly of all, more and less self-aware in different places.

Was just made aware of this pretty good but entirely predictable study:
#LLMs

Anger at the regime continues to spread,
even beyond the borders of the United States.
Millions of workers worldwide are following the fortunes of their brothers and sisters in the US
with intense sympathy for their struggle.
In Germany in particular, Trump’s actions vividly bring to mind Hitler, the Second World War and the Holocaust.
More and more people are becoming aware that a third world war can only be stopped if we succeed not only in overthrowing the…

Voices of solidarity from Germany in the fight against Trump’s drive to dictatorship - Bytes Europe
On Friday, January 23, around 100,000 people in Minneapolis turned out to protest against the Trump administration’s mobilization of ICE against the city’s

Taxes are for things that we can best do together, organised via government. Given the large-scale challenges of climate change, security, and biodiversity, we'll have to do more together.
And yes, I'm aware that governments don't always spend the money wisely. Same for individuals, btw :)

"Why Some Criticisms Matters More Than Others", by Robert J. Hansen:
"""
On the GnuPG-Users mailing list, a user asked the following (paraphrased) question:
> I am very well aware of the consistent and persistent campaign against GnuPG. Is there a reason for this?
There are many reasons.
Before we go further, the things I'm speaking of apply to both LibrePGP and RFC9580 OpenPGP. The criticisms made against one usually wind up getting made against the other, whether for good or ill. These criticisms fall on a spectrum, from infuriatingly dishonest all the way to carefully thought out and researched. I'll start with the ones I think are dishonest.
"""
#GnuPG #PGP

Torn between feeling disconnected and not really wanting to hear any more negative opinions and bad news. Not a big fan of life these days. I am aware of the irony in writing this.

HALO: A Fine-Grained Resource Sharing Quantum Operating System
John Zhuoyang Ye, Jiyuan Wang, Yifan Qiao, Jens Palsberg
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07191 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.07191 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.07191
arXiv:2602.07191v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: As quantum computing enters the cloud era, thousands of users must share access to a small number of quantum processors. Users need to wait minutes to days to start their jobs, which only takes a few seconds for execution. Current quantum cloud platforms employ a fair-share scheduler, as there is no way to multiplex a quantum computer among multiple programs at the same time, leaving many qubits idle and significantly under-utilizing the hardware. This imbalance between high user demand and scarce quantum resources has become a key barrier to scalable and cost-effective quantum computing.
We present HALO, the first quantum operating system design that supports fine-grained resource-sharing. HALO introduces two complementary mechanisms. First, a hardware-aware qubit-sharing algorithm that places shared helper qubits on regions of the quantum computer that minimize routing overhead and avoid cross-talk noise between different users' processes. Second, a shot-adaptive scheduler that allocates execution windows according to each job's sampling requirements, improving throughput and reducing latency. Together, these mechanisms transform the way quantum hardware is scheduled and achieve more fine-grained parallelism.
We evaluate HALO on the IBM Torino quantum computer on helper qubit intense benchmarks. Compared to state-of-the-art systems such as HyperQ, HALO improves overall hardware utilization by up to 2.44x, increasing throughput by 4.44x, and maintains fidelity loss within 33%, demonstrating the practicality of resource-sharing in quantum computing.
toXiv_bot_toot

It’s hard for me to imagine more clear-cut defiance of the injunction. These shits are trying to run the legal blockade by pretend pretending it doesn’t even exist — and Bovino is not only fully aware but physically present for it. Contempt of court is completely meaningless at this point; I dare any judge to prove me wrong.

Des Bishop is fully aware he is a privileged tall, straight, white man & is here to announce that it is ABSOLUTELY NOT 'difficult' to be a tall, straight white man. 😜
Watch more at https://youtube.com/@desbishopcomedy

EAG-PT: Emission-Aware Gaussians and Path Tracing for Indoor Scene Reconstruction and Editing
Xijie Yang, Mulin Yu, Changjian Jiang, Kerui Ren, Tao Lu, Jiangmiao Pang, Dahua Lin, Bo Dai, Linning Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.23065 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.23065 https://arxiv.org/html/2601.23065
arXiv:2601.23065v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recent reconstruction methods based on radiance field such as NeRF and 3DGS reproduce indoor scenes with high visual fidelity, but break down under scene editing due to baked illumination and the lack of explicit light transport. In contrast, physically based inverse rendering relies on mesh representations and path tracing, which enforce correct light transport but place strong requirements on geometric fidelity, becoming a practical bottleneck for real indoor scenes. In this work, we propose Emission-Aware Gaussians and Path Tracing (EAG-PT), aiming for physically based light transport with a unified 2D Gaussian representation. Our design is based on three cores: (1) using 2D Gaussians as a unified scene representation and transport-friendly geometry proxy that avoids reconstructed mesh, (2) explicitly separating emissive and non-emissive components during reconstruction for further scene editing, and (3) decoupling reconstruction from final rendering by using efficient single-bounce optimization and high-quality multi-bounce path tracing after scene editing. Experiments on synthetic and real indoor scenes show that EAG-PT produces more natural and physically consistent renders after editing than radiant scene reconstructions, while preserving finer geometric detail and avoiding mesh-induced artifacts compared to mesh-based inverse path tracing. These results suggest promising directions for future use in interior design, XR content creation, and embodied AI.
toXiv_bot_toot

SOM-VQ: Topology-Aware Tokenization for Interactive Generative Models
Alessandro Londei, Denise Lanzieri, Matteo Benati
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21133 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.21133 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.21133
arXiv:2602.21133v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vector-quantized representations enable powerful discrete generative models but lack semantic structure in token space, limiting interpretable human control. We introduce SOM-VQ, a tokenization method that combines vector quantization with Self-Organizing Maps to learn discrete codebooks with explicit low-dimensional topology. Unlike standard VQ-VAE, SOM-VQ uses topology-aware updates that preserve neighborhood structure: nearby tokens on a learned grid correspond to semantically similar states, enabling direct geometric manipulation of the latent space. We demonstrate that SOM-VQ produces more learnable token sequences in the evaluated domains while providing an explicit navigable geometry in code space. Critically, the topological organization enables intuitive human-in-the-loop control: users can steer generation by manipulating distances in token space, achieving semantic alignment without frame-level constraints. We focus on human motion generation - a domain where kinematic structure, smooth temporal continuity, and interactive use cases (choreography, rehabilitation, HCI) make topology-aware control especially natural - demonstrating controlled divergence and convergence from reference sequences through simple grid-based sampling. SOM-VQ provides a general framework for interpretable discrete representations applicable to music, gesture, and other interactive generative domains.
toXiv_bot_toot

I'm sure there's more to switching party than just taking off your stupid false moustache.

Isn't it time for climate change aware countries to start imposing tariffs on products and services from countries and companies that frustrate efforts to ameliorate the effects of climate change?
https://www.theguardian.…

Under water, in denial: is Europe drowning out the climate crisis?
Even as weather extremes worsen, the voices calling for the rolling back of environmental rules have grown louder and more influential

It is curious how quiet Vance and Rubio are on the Greenland matter.
Not that I would expect them to publicly counter Trumps incoherent rantings but strange that they are not (as far as I am aware) loudly supporting Trumps message. Bessent seems to be more vocal about it.
An optimist would think that perhaps something is going on to remove Trump.
#uspol

Even more platforms are becoming aware of out podcast. What we've found in alphabetical order:
https://curiocaster.com/podcast/pi7666102
http…