Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen
DX Engineering invited John Robert Stratton N5AUS, ARRL West Gulf Director, to give more details about why this new attempt to give #HamRadio similar rights already given for broadcast antennas (the FCC's Over-the-Air Reception Devices, or "OTARD", rule) has a real chance to pass this time.
Go to
Many of us probably hope that we’ll get back to normal when the #genAI bubble bursts, but this isn’t going to happen. In academia, genAI *does* work, in the sense of: for many people it solves a lot of problems, and removes the need for like doing homework, reading, writing, learning, and, yes, thinking. Who cares whether its “ethical” or whatever, everybody’s using it!
My bet is that post-…
Many of us probably hope that we’ll get back to normal when the #genAI bubble bursts, but this isn’t going to happen. In academia, genAI *does* work, in the sense of: for many people it solves a lot of problems, and removes the need for like doing homework, reading, writing, learning, and, yes, thinking. Who cares whether its “ethical” or whatever, everybody’s using it!
My bet is that post-…
Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.LG. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.LG/new
[2/3]:
- Sharp Structure-Agnostic Lower Bounds for General Functional Estimation
Jikai Jin, Vasilis Syrgkanis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17341 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/115762312049963700
- Timely Information Updating for Mobile Devices Without and With ML Advice
Yu-Pin Hsu, Yi-Hsuan Tseng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17381 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csNI_bot/115762180316858485
- SWE-Bench : A Framework for the Scalable Generation of Software Engineering Benchmarks from Open...
Wang, Ramalho, Celestino, Pham, Liu, Sinha, Portillo, Osunwa, Maduekwe
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17419 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSE_bot/115762487015279852
- Perfect reconstruction of sparse signals using nonconvexity control and one-step RSB message passing
Xiaosi Gu, Ayaka Sakata, Tomoyuki Obuchi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17426 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/115762346108219997
- MULTIAQUA: A multimodal maritime dataset and robust training strategies for multimodal semantic s...
Jon Muhovi\v{c}, Janez Per\v{s}
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17450 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/115762717053353674
- When Data Quality Issues Collide: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of Co-Occurring Data Quality Issu...
Emmanuel Charleson Dapaah, Jens Grabowski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17460 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSE_bot/115762500123147574
- Behavioural Effects of Agentic Messaging: A Case Study on a Financial Service Application
Olivier Jeunen, Schaun Wheeler
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17462 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csIR_bot/115762430673347625
- Linear Attention for Joint Power Optimization and User-Centric Clustering in Cell-Free Networks
Irched Chafaa, Giacomo Bacci, Luca Sanguinetti
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17466 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eessSY_bot/115762336277179643
- Translating the Rashomon Effect to Sequential Decision-Making Tasks
Dennis Gross, J{\o}rn Eirik Betten, Helge Spieker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17470 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csAI_bot/115762556506696539
- Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for Nonlinear Matrix Decompositions
Atharva Awari, Nicolas Gillis, Arnaud Vandaele
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17473 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eessSP_bot/115762580078964235
- TwinSegNet: A Digital Twin-Enabled Federated Learning Framework for Brain Tumor Analysis
Almustapha A. Wakili, Adamu Hussaini, Abubakar A. Musa, Woosub Jung, Wei Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17488 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/115762726884307901
- Resource-efficient medical image classification for edge devices
Mahsa Lavaei, Zahra Abadi, Salar Beigzad, Alireza Maleki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17515 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eessIV_bot/115762459510336799
- PathBench-MIL: A Comprehensive AutoML and Benchmarking Framework for Multiple Instance Learning i...
Brussee, Valkema, Weijer, Doeleman, Schrader, Kers
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17517 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/115762741957639051
- HydroGym: A Reinforcement Learning Platform for Fluid Dynamics
Christian Lagemann, et al.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17534 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_physicsfludyn_bot/115762391350754768
- When De-noising Hurts: A Systematic Study of Speech Enhancement Effects on Modern Medical ASR Sys...
Chondhekar, Murukuri, Vasani, Goyal, Badami, Rana, SN, Pandia, Katiyar, Jagadeesh, Gulati
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17562 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSD_bot/115762423443170715
- Enabling Disaggregated Multi-Stage MLLM Inference via GPU-Internal Scheduling and Resource Sharing
Lingxiao Zhao, Haoran Zhou, Yuezhi Che, Dazhao Cheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17574 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDC_bot/115762425409322293
- SkinGenBench: Generative Model and Preprocessing Effects for Synthetic Dermoscopic Augmentation i...
N. A. Adarsh Pritam, Jeba Shiney O, Sanyam Jain
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17585 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eessIV_bot/115762479150695610
- MAD-OOD: A Deep Learning Cluster-Driven Framework for an Out-of-Distribution Malware Detection an...
Tosin Ige, Christopher Kiekintveld, Aritran Piplai, Asif Rahman, Olukunle Kolade, Sasidhar Kunapuli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17594 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCR_bot/115762509298207765
- Confidence-Credibility Aware Weighted Ensembles of Small LLMs Outperform Large LLMs in Emotion De...
Menna Elgabry, Ali Hamdi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17630 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115762575512981257
- Generative Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization with Scalable Batch Evaluations for Sample-Effic...
Madhav R. Muthyala, Farshud Sorourifar, Tianhong Tan, You Peng, Joel A. Paulson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17659 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/115762554519447500
toXiv_bot_toot
This marketing image for a garage door keypad's tech support is perfect in its soulless vapidity. Yes, it lacks any sort of subtlety in the ludicrously homogenous selection of people. 😠
However, my initial gut reaction was a fascination w/ reconciling the man on the left's impressive promontory of hair & his headset.
Does he have a single thin indentation in his hair plateau after a long day's work? The equivalent of a hat head, but thinner? Is there a horizontal…
TALK> Rupert Gethin - Dec 4 - at Mangalam Research Center & on Zoom
https://ift.tt/ljHu0XW
Critical Survey (Vol. 34, Issue 2) Dear Colleague, The latest issue of Critical Survey…
via Input 4 RELCFP
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/115604873348659045
Maybe you think all of this is irrelevant now, who gives a fuck about a media format more than 50 years old?
Well, fun fact, the design of SD cards is referencing the design of floppy disks, and were specifically made thin enough to be used in floppy adapters (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath).
Yes, they made an adapter to stick your SD card in and read and write it in a standard floppy disk drive; though you would need to install special software to use it (ironically that software probably came on a CD).
Why would they do such a thing? Because there was no (widespread) USB.
Replaced article(s) found for cs.LG. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.LG/new
[4/5]:
- Sample, Don't Search: Rethinking Test-Time Alignment for Language Models
Gon\c{c}alo Faria, Noah A. Smith
https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03790 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/114301112970577326
- A Survey on Archetypal Analysis
Aleix Alcacer, Irene Epifanio, Sebastian Mair, Morten M{\o}rup
https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12392 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statME_bot/114357826909813483
- The Stochastic Occupation Kernel (SOCK) Method for Learning Stochastic Differential Equations
Michael L. Wells, Kamel Lahouel, Bruno Jedynak
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11622 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/114539065460187982
- BOLT: Block-Orthonormal Lanczos for Trace estimation of matrix functions
Kingsley Yeon, Promit Ghosal, Mihai Anitescu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12289 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_mathNA_bot/114539035462135281
- Clustering and Pruning in Causal Data Fusion
Otto Tabell, Santtu Tikka, Juha Karvanen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15215 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/114550346291754635
- On the performance of multi-fidelity and reduced-dimensional neural emulators for inference of ph...
Chloe H. Choi, Andrea Zanoni, Daniele E. Schiavazzi, Alison L. Marsden
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11683 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/114692410563481289
- Beyond Force Metrics: Pre-Training MLFFs for Stable MD Simulations
Maheshwari, Tang, Ock, Kolluru, Farimani, Kitchin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14850 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_physicschemph_bot/114709402590755731
- Quantifying Uncertainty in the Presence of Distribution Shifts
Yuli Slavutsky, David M. Blei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18283 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/114738165218533987
- ZKPROV: A Zero-Knowledge Approach to Dataset Provenance for Large Language Models
Mina Namazi, Alexander Nemecek, Erman Ayday
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20915 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCR_bot/114754394485208892
- SpecCLIP: Aligning and Translating Spectroscopic Measurements for Stars
Zhao, Huang, Xue, Kong, Liu, Tang, Beers, Ting, Luo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01939 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_astrophIM_bot/114788369702591337
- Towards Facilitated Fairness Assessment of AI-based Skin Lesion Classifiers Through GenAI-based I...
Ko Watanabe, Stanislav Frolov, Aya Hassan, David Dembinsky, Adriano Lucieri, Andreas Dengel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17860 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/114912976717523345
- PASS: Probabilistic Agentic Supernet Sampling for Interpretable and Adaptive Chest X-Ray Reasoning
Yushi Feng, Junye Du, Yingying Hong, Qifan Wang, Lequan Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10501 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csAI_bot/115032101532614110
- Unified Acoustic Representations for Screening Neurological and Respiratory Pathologies from Voice
Ran Piao, Yuan Lu, Hareld Kemps, Tong Xia, Aaqib Saeed
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20717 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSD_bot/115111255835875066
- Machine Learning-Driven Predictive Resource Management in Complex Science Workflows
Tasnuva Chowdhury, et al.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11512 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDC_bot/115213444524490263
- MatchFixAgent: Language-Agnostic Autonomous Repository-Level Code Translation Validation and Repair
Ali Reza Ibrahimzada, Brandon Paulsen, Reyhaneh Jabbarvand, Joey Dodds, Daniel Kroening
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16187 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSE_bot/115247172280557686
- Automated Machine Learning Pipeline: Large Language Models-Assisted Automated Dataset Generation ...
Adam Lahouari, Jutta Rogal, Mark E. Tuckerman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21647 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_condmatmtrlsci_bot/115286737423175311
- Quantifying the Impact of Structured Output Format on Large Language Models through Causal Inference
Han Yuan, Yue Zhao, Li Zhang, Wuqiong Luo, Zheng Ma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21791 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115287166674809413
- The Generation Phases of Flow Matching: a Denoising Perspective
Anne Gagneux, S\'egol\`ene Martin, R\'emi Gribonval, Mathurin Massias
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24830 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/115462527449411627
- Data-driven uncertainty-aware seakeeping prediction of the Delft 372 catamaran using ensemble Han...
Giorgio Palma, Andrea Serani, Matteo Diez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04461 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eessSY_bot/115507785247809767
- Generalized infinite dimensional Alpha-Procrustes based geometries
Salvish Goomanee, Andi Han, Pratik Jawanpuria, Bamdev Mishra
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09801 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/115547135711272091
toXiv_bot_toot
Direct Measurement of the $5s5p\,{}^1P_1 \to 5s4d\,{}^1D_2$ Decay Rate in Strontium
Naohiro Okamoto, Takatoshi Aoki, Yoshio Torii
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22184 https://