Tootfinder

Your tax dollars at work: Using your taxes to establish programs to help you pay... taxes.
IRS to launch taxpayer-funded pilot tax-filing program;
The Internal Revenue Service says the taxpayer-funded program will open on a limited basis — first to state and federal employees in some areas.

IRS to launch taxpayer-funded pilot tax-filing program
The Internal Revenue Service says the taxpayer-funded program will open on a limited basis — first to state and federal employees in some areas.

more details on the #HotDocs mass resignation:
https://povmagazine.com/hot-docs-programmers-resign-en-masse/

Hot Docs Programmers Resign En Masse (Includes Update) - POV Magazine
Ten members of Hot Docs' programming team resign following reports of internal conflict at the documentary festival.

When the impostor syndrome kicks in...
Seen on #programming

I've been reading "On Green” (https://joecarlsmith.com/2024/03/21/on-green) and its following article, “On Attunement” with some interest today. I am uninterested in the ways he is focused on “AGI”, but that might actually be part of what he's saying and missing.
They talk about the philosophy of green in the "magic the gathering" sense, which has five core modes of things, and being a game, designed to balance. It's an attractive system and not without merit as a philosophical labeling system. In short: white, moral; blue, knowledge and rationality; red, passion and desire; black, power and achievement. And green. Green is the subject they can't identify clearly.
I don't think they really understand green. (They come from a very rationalist place, and that's not a good mode to understand Green)
Green is the domain of systems thinking and of ecology. It's one of flexible boundaries and hierarchies that vanish when you look at them for long. They talk about philosophical agents and try to fit a green philosophical stance into that framework, but it misses: the very idea of a self is nebulous in a green philosophy. Yes, it obviously exists, we are all separate from each other. But also we are inseparable from each other. Green is a philosophy of relationality and multiple perspectives and ever shifting viewpoints. It's not just yin, passive, permissive, but holistic. It's not that it lets the Other in, it's that it actively is in relation with the Other. The other is the self, the self is the other.
The essays also label green as conservative, and this is not quite true. It is not about being slow or regressive or traditional, but about being whole. They can't quite see that green's willingness to accept death and pain as things that happen and also its strong preservationist stance are not opposed to each other. It seems incoherent, but it's not: death and pain are things that happen to living parts of an ecosystem. They matter, but so too does the whole matter. Where so many blue rationalists see statistical and demographic counts of deaths and "sentient beings harmed”, green sees a whole ecosystem where some of that is deeply natural. It's unnatural, ecosystem-harming deaths that are disasters in the green philosophy. Wholesale extinctions. Protracted, painful deaths, as much for the wound they cause outside the individual as the individual suffering as well. But we all come to an end, and to change that wholesale would end so many kinds of relationship, so many things.
Green revels in the illegible, the incomplete, and the connected. It's easy to be green-blind, to ignore the subtle systemic effects. So many of us want simple cause and effect, rather than action and plurality of reactions.
Green's ability to embrace the illegible lets it deal with Red chaos; its resilience tempers red passion. It can ally with White philosophies into a pastoral, conservative, moralistic framework. It ends up at odds with the rationalist Blue and the power-hungry Black, because they drive disequilibrium, but more than just transition to new stable ecologies, they drive systems permanently out of stability, destroying relationships in their path. When confronted with this, they will deny it because the objects are still there. Preserved. Catalogued. Legible and accounted for. Perhaps used instrumentally. Perhaps wrecked for some "greater purpose” but only acknowledged as objects. The relationships between things remain illegible.

Dear @…,
A fediverse server called Threads is violating mastodon.social’s second server rule:
“2. No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia…
Transphobic behavior such as intentional misgendering and deadnaming is strictly prohibited.”

Report – Unsafe: Meta Fails to Moderate Extreme Anti-trans Hate Across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads | GLAAD
GLAAD’s Social Media Safety Program reported the following anti-trans hate content across Instagram, Facebook, and Threads; Meta deemed all of it non-violative or did not take action on it.

Distributed Matrix Pencil Formulations for Prescribed-Time Leader-Following Consensus of MASs with Unknown Sensor Sensitivity
Hefu Ye, Changyun Wen, Yongduan Song
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16412

Distributed Matrix Pencil Formulations for Prescribed-Time Leader-Following Consensus of MASs with Unknown Sensor Sensitivity
In this paper, we address the problem of prescribed-time leader-following consensus of heterogeneous multi-agent systems (MASs) in the presence of unknown sensor sensitivity. Under a connected undirected topology, we propose a time-varying dual observer/controller design framework that makes use of regular local and inaccurate feedback to achieve consensus tracking within a prescribed time. In particular, the developed analysis framework is applicable to MASs equipped with sensors of different …

"The Facebook Pages of national news outlets lost approximately 64% of their Facebook engagement following the end of news availability for Canadian users. Local news outlets lost approximately 85%. Almost half of all local news outlets stopped posting on Facebook entirely in the four months following the ban."
And user used workarounds hurting newspaper visibility. Bad choice. But going to be repeated in CH 🤦

Progressive-Proximity Bit-Flipping for Decoding Surface Codes
Michele Pacenti, Mark F. Flanagan, Dimitris Chytas, Bane Vasic
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15924

Progressive-Proximity Bit-Flipping for Decoding Surface Codes
Topological quantum codes, such as toric and surface codes, are excellent candidates for hardware implementation due to their robustness against errors and their local interactions between qubits. However, decoding these codes efficiently remains a challenge: existing decoders often fall short of meeting requirements such as having low computational complexity (ideally linear in the code's blocklength), low decoding latency, and low power consumption. In this paper we propose a novel bit-flippi…

“Largely, the food supply regulatory system is based on an honor system.”.
Which doesn't really work , does it?
Not just food, cf recent recalled eye-drops news, so seems to affect OTC meds as well (and how about prescription med recalls?)
(Even a staunch conservative said "Trust but verify" re Soviets. Surely the evidence shows that applies even more to business?)
Lead-Tainted Applesauce Sailed Through Gaps in Food-Safety System

Lead-Tainted Applesauce Highlights Failings in Food Safety System
Hundreds of American children were poisoned last year. Records show how, time and again, the contamination went unnoticed.

Progressive-Proximity Bit-Flipping for Decoding Surface Codes
Michele Pacenti, Mark F. Flanagan, Dimitris Chytas, Bane Vasic
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15924

Progressive-Proximity Bit-Flipping for Decoding Surface Codes
Topological quantum codes, such as toric and surface codes, are excellent candidates for hardware implementation due to their robustness against errors and their local interactions between qubits. However, decoding these codes efficiently remains a challenge: existing decoders often fall short of meeting requirements such as having low computational complexity (ideally linear in the code's blocklength), low decoding latency, and low power consumption. In this paper we propose a novel bit-flippi…