Tootfinder

Are Crypto Ecosystems (De)centralizing? A Framework for Longitudinal Analysis
Harang Ju, Ehsan Valavi, Madhav Kumar, Sinan Aral
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02324

Are Crypto Ecosystems (De)centralizing? A Framework for Longitudinal Analysis
Blockchain technology relies on decentralization to resist faults and attacks while operating without trusted intermediaries. Although industry experts have touted decentralization as central to their promise and disruptive potential, it is still unclear whether the crypto ecosystems built around blockchains are becoming more or less decentralized over time. As crypto plays an increasing role in facilitating economic transactions and peer-to-peer interactions, measuring their decentralization b…

The US DOJ seized ~145 domains and crypto linked to BidenCash, a dark web market that made $17M in revenue since 2022 by selling stolen credit cards and more (Ionut Ilascu/BleepingComputer)
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/secu

I’m well out of my depth here: my historical knowledge to speak to the issues is thin; my cultural knowledge is almost nonexistent. Reading that Standing Together site, seeing how they’ve crafted what they write, I see just how much nuance and awareness I •don’t• have.
I’m grateful to the people who’ve helped me learn, and who’ve pointed me to these resources — in this case @… and @…. Sometimes the Internet really is good for something.
/end

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #AstralPlane
Klaatu:
🎵 Calling Occupants (of Interplanetary Craft)
#Klaatu
https://terrorball.bandcamp.com/track/klaatu-calling-occupants-of-interplanetary-craft-terrorball-edit
https://open.spotify.com/track/6XzgfcOFwpn7747ROhyp86

Large Berry curvature effects induced by extended nodal structures: Rational design strategy and high-throughput materials predictions
Wencheng Wang, Minxue Yang, Wei Chen, Xiangang Wan, Feng Tang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03871

Large Berry curvature effects induced by extended nodal structures: Rational design strategy and high-throughput materials predictions
Berry curvature can drastically modify the electron dynamics, thereby offering an effective pathway for electron manipulation and novel device applications. Compared to zero-dimensional nodal points in Weyl/Dirac semimetals, higher-dimensional extended nodal structures, such as nodal lines and nodal surfaces, are more likely to intersect the Fermi surface, leading to large Berry curvature effects without fine-tuning the chemical potential. In this work, we propose a strategy that utilizes strai…

ManifoldMind: Dynamic Hyperbolic Reasoning for Trustworthy Recommendations
Anoushka Harit, Zhongtian Sun, Suncica Hadzidedic
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02014

ManifoldMind: Dynamic Hyperbolic Reasoning for Trustworthy Recommendations
We introduce ManifoldMind, a probabilistic geometric recommender system for exploratory reasoning over semantic hierarchies in hyperbolic space. Unlike prior methods with fixed curvature and rigid embeddings, ManifoldMind represents users, items, and tags as adaptive-curvature probabilistic spheres, enabling personalised uncertainty modeling and geometry-aware semantic exploration. A curvature-aware semantic kernel supports soft, multi-hop inference, allowing the model to explore diverse concep…

Coupling Electromagnetism to Torsion: Black Holes and Spin-Charge Interactions
Sebastian Bahamonde, Jorge Maggiolo, Christian Pfeifer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02362

Coupling Electromagnetism to Torsion: Black Holes and Spin-Charge Interactions
The coupling between matter fields and gravity (encoded in the geometry of spacetime) can be realized in various ways. Most commonly, a minimal coupling principle is employed, meaning that all matter fields, except spinors, couple only to the spacetime metric, while spinors additionally couple to the spacetime connection. Non-minimal couplings between matter fields and spacetime curvature can arise, for example, from quantum field theory on curved spacetime through renormalization corrections, …

Hardness of Quantum Distribution Learning and Quantum Cryptography
Taiga Hiroka, Min-Hsiu Hsieh, Tomoyuki Morimae
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01292 https://…

Hardness of Quantum Distribution Learning and Quantum Cryptography
The existence of one-way functions (OWFs) forms the minimal assumption in classical cryptography. However, this is not necessarily the case in quantum cryptography. One-way puzzles (OWPuzzs), introduced by Khurana and Tomer, provide a natural quantum analogue of OWFs. The existence of OWPuzzs implies $PP\neq BQP$, while the converse remains open. In classical cryptography, the analogous problem-whether OWFs can be constructed from $P \neq NP$-has long been studied from the viewpoint of hardness…

A Path Planning Model for Intercepting a Moving Target with Finite Obstacle Avoidance
Masuda Akter, Mohammed Mustafa Rizvi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01447

A Path Planning Model for Intercepting a Moving Target with Finite Obstacle Avoidance
This paper investigates the problem of computing a two-dimensional optimal curvature straight line (CS) shortest path for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to intercept a moving target, with both the UAV (pursuer) and target travelling at constant speeds. We formulate an optimal control problem that integrates two critical objectives: avoiding static obstacles and successfully intercepting the target. The approach introduces constraints derived from obstacle avoidance and target interception req…

Improving LLM Agents with Reinforcement Learning on Cryptographic CTF Challenges
Lajos Muzsai, David Imolai, Andr\'as Luk\'acs
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02048

Improving LLM Agents with Reinforcement Learning on Cryptographic CTF Challenges
Large Language Models (LLMs) still struggle with the structured reasoning and tool-assisted computation needed for problem solving in cybersecurity applications. In this work, we introduce "random-crypto", a cryptographic Capture-the-Flag (CTF) challenge generator framework that we use to fine-tune a tool-augmented Llama-3.1-8B with Guided Reinforcement Prompt Optimisation (GRPO), allowing the agent to iteratively write and execute Python inside an isolated REPL. GRPO yields a +53% absolute jum…