Tootfinder

So. Much. This.
https://hci.social/@chrisamaphone/115391556289269102

Another example of El Cheato supporting and protecting rape culture....
I am beginning to believe that the 'R' and 'p' in "Republican" stands for "rape" and "pedophile".
https://www.propublica.org/article/andrew-

The White House Intervened on Behalf of Accused Sex Trafficker Andrew Tate During a Federal Investigation
Federal authorities were chided for seizing electronic devices from Tate and his brother, and told to return them, records and interviews show. Experts said the intervention was highly inappropriate.

Do you happen to know, by any rare chance, any *Linux* program that is packed? I mean, I can use as an example some ELF I do run UPX on it myself, but I would prefer something else.

A good example of how governments can make the roll-out of public charging infrastructure faster and cheaper: by integrating permission for construction work into an existing digital platform for road works.
https://www.independent.co.uk/cars/electri

Red tape cut to speed up rollout of public EV chargers across England
New Planning and Infrastructure Act removes key barrier for chargepoint operators, alongside £600m funding boost and moves to cut costs for drivers

Former Disney CEO thinks Disney and ABC messed up.
Because they did.
source: #USpol

I've been fascinated by this new 'pyramid tala' via B C Manjunath, trying to get my head around it for months now
x x - x - - x - - - x - - - -
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DV3RPS2-iZw
Just found an example using this tala on the veena:

Update: Phanpy is NOT supporting the official Mastodon quoted posts at the moment. They are still using their own implementation, means quotes are only shown in Phanpy and for example when using Moshidon as a client.
[When you click the little rocket under a toot a dialog pops up, asking whether you will "boost" or "quote" the toot. In this toot I have chosen "quote"]
(and I don't know if this will work 😄)

So, here's the real terror of AI. I can add my headshot -- or another photo -- and I "become myself" in my own AI video as a "fully realized human being!"
AI fills in the all of me, and a new reality is created!
#ai #video

Careful if you're copying around Firefox profiles and rely on settings to be retained: The default value for the about:config key datareporting.healthreport.uploadEnabled differs by I-don't-know-what. If you disable the "Send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" checkbox in an instance where it's default off, no value is stored (because it's "default"), and it may be on in another.
(For example, I don't have long-running Firefox profiles bu…

Disclaimer: IANAL I am not well-read on applicable laws.
POTUS executive military authority without Congressional Declaration of War should be limited to when full Congress can't be consulted due to urgency and secrecy. Best example I know is raid to get bin Laden — limited in scope, possibly limited time to act on intel, would've leaked the more who knew.
None of that applies to the slowly simmering situation with Venezuela.

<https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/codger?s=t> strong matches:
crank | dodo | eccentric | fellow | galoot | miser
😸 OK, I'm probably most of those, except a miser.
The word "galoot" was new to me. <

Shedeur Sanders' home broken into during Browns-Ravens game https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6815427/2025/11/18/shedeur-sanders-home-break-in-browns-ravens/

"The US is the richest country in the world!"
Oh yeah? What does its balance sheet look like?
Obviously it's absurd to ask that question, as any economist will happily explain why national debts shouldn't be treated like real money.
But it's also absurd that it's absurd to ask that question, and there's a thread to pull here: is the US "rich" because many billionaires live here? That doesn't seem to improve the lives of most of the population. Is it because our median income is so much larger than many other countries? That's in large part a product of exchange rates, since costs of living are also higher here, so is the real reason the fact that the dollar has so much purchasing power? Why does it?
Well, at some level of abstraction, exchange rates boil down to: "How much confidence do the ultra-rich place in the stability of the country" which is intimately related to: "How much military/diplomatic power does the country have?"
So... The US is the "richest" country in the world because it uses its military dominance to bully other countries and keep them down, and it also uses the resulting economic dominance to do the same. We can see this happening via US-sponsored coups, International Monetary Fund bullying, and attendant multinational corporate looting of countries with little economic power (rampant in Africa and Central America, for example).

RE: https://mastodon.social/@lobsters/115741596746900837
This, kids, is why when relying on containers, we should ensure that (at least):
1. Their filesystem is READONLY (example: if you are using Python, generate your .pyc files when creating your OCI image, not at runtime)
2. They run under a non-privileged user
And, at the host & network levels:
3. The private network is properly segmented.
4. We have firewall rules to control outgoing traffic and traffic between subnets.
This is not paranoia not overengineering, shit happens, we ought to be careful.

Is anyone using Packer and VMware and Rocky Linux? I'm having an issue with Rocky 10 and the packer boot. Using the example boot command here https://docs.rockylinux.org/10/guides/automation/templates-automation-packer-vsphere/ I end up with a …

So I just wasted a morning trying to debug why the Highlight.js syntax highlighting in Kitten suddenly began to fail only to realise that @… is stripping the hljs- prefixes from the class names.
You can see this for yourself if you have the 1password extension installed at:

Some guy on eBay is trying to get $15000 (or at least $8000) for a series 1 Depraz mouse. His ball is shinier than mine, and his serial number is much lower (0175 vs 1135) but I will be baffled if anyone bites at that price. It does look like a very nice example, however.

Quantum eigenpair solver with minimal sampling overhead
Sven Danz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14741 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14741

Quantum eigenpair solver with minimal sampling overhead
The advantage that many quantum algorithms have over their classical counterparts may be lost when the results are extracted as classical data (output problem). One example are eigenpair solvers, which encode the eigenpairs in a quantum state. Extracting these states results in significant sampling overheads. We propose an amplitude-amplification-based post-filtering process that reduces the number of eigenpairs encoded in the final state to a feasible amount. Often for practical applications, …

Playing around with progressive JPEGs and their behavior in a web page. You can use ImageMagick to determine if a JPEG is interlaced. Most photo editing apps will export images as interlaced now, but you can see the behavior below.
Non-interlaced: Chunky render
Interlaced: Loads in from low quality to high quality.

Everything Raiders' Geno Smith Had to Say About Brutal Cowboys Loss https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-everything-geno-smith-say-about-brutal-cowboys-loss

Series B, Episode 02 - Shadow
AVON: Obviously.
HANNA: That's why we haven't been killed yet. He's making an example of us.
BEK: Oh, shut up Hanna, Its none of their business.
GAN: Isn't it? I mean if they're making an example of you...
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/202/220

Why it matters to create and maintain open-source infrastructure for security monitoring including collection of forums and malicious communication channels.
This is a strong example (Google dark web report is discontinued) of the risks of relying solely on commercial vendors. If a capability does not align with their business interests or generate sufficient revenue, it can be discontinued at any time. Open-source infrastructure helps ensure continuity, transparency, and long-term ac…

one of my hottest takes is that shared laundry machines in an apartment building is better than in-unit. it's a good example of how individual solutions can be worse than collective ones.
with shared machines you can use two machines at once at a less-busy time. a single in-unit machine would take twice as long. in-unit means the noise the machine generates is inside your apartment, so you can't have guests over or take a meeting while it's running

Towards a holographic description of closed universes
Hong Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14327 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14327

Towards a holographic description of closed universes
We study baby closed universes in AdS, focusing on the Antonini-Sasieta-Swingle (AS$^2$) cosmology, which arises in the gravitational description of partially entangled thermal states (PETS), as well as the classical example of Maldacena-Maoz (MM). We show that the algebraic formulation of AdS/CFT--and in particular the subregion-subalgebra duality--provides a natural framework for describing such universes within the standard AdS/CFT setting, phrased in terms of an operator algebra ${\cal M}$ …

Yes, smart meters are scarce in Germany, but that does not mean scarcity pricing can be applied to them.
Consumers who request a smart meter, for example to benefit from dynamic electricity prices, should not be charged €900 by their grid operator, but rather a maximum of around €100.

Knapp 900 Euro für den Smart-Meter-Einbau: Verbraucherzentrale klagt erfolgreich gegen unangemessene Preise
Landgericht Halle gibt Klage der Verbraucherzentrale gegen die Mitteldeutsche Netzgesellschaft statt

On our Tesla we have noticed that the design and construction has tried new methods to save weight, but that those methods have not withstood the test of time (or weather).
For example we've had to replace some of the ball joints in the front suspension because they were not water proof and ended up corroding - a problem solved back in the 1960s by other car makers.
And now there's this...
"Half of Tesla Model 3s Failed Their Mandatory Inspections in Finland&qu…

Half of Tesla Model 3s Failed Their Mandatory Inspections in Finland
The Tesla Model 3, Model S, and Model X all ranked among the bottom five performers in Finland's mandatory vehicle inspections of 4-year-old cars

Brighton's Wild Park rainscape project filters out pollutants from road runoff, protecting the water supply and enhancing community access to nature. #climatechange #climatesolutions #climate

RE: https://toot.wales/@HannahHowe/115566053185613547
plz, i need a few more votes for Rory Williams 🥲
IMHO he truly is one of the best companions, for example because he doesn't unconditionally idolise the Doctor as a messiah, but instead views hi…

"The Peters case represents an especially clear example of what I’ve come to see as the defining style of the second Trump administration: an incompetent form of authoritarianism that can best be described as “haphazardism.”
Haphazardism is authoritarianism without vision, a governing style defined by a series of individual attacks on democracy without any kind of overarching logic, strategic structure, or clear end state in mind. These attacks can do (and indeed have done) real d…

Why OpenAI is a prime example of the ethical limits of capitalism https://theconversation.com/why-openai-is-a-prime-example-of-the-ethical-limits-of-capitalism-270407

Why OpenAI is a prime example of the ethical limits of capitalism
Money and morality are a challenging corporate combination.

It looks like Nano Retina is back, or are they just trying to sell off their IP? No news since 2022 https://www.nano-retina.com retinal implant.
The clinical study https://

r-graph-gallery.com provides example code for a variety of chart types, both in base R and ggplot: #rstats #ggplot

The R Graph Gallery – Help and inspiration for R charts
The R graph gallery displays hundreds of charts made with R, always providing the reproducible code.

Recursive polygon subdivision inspired by thin-section mineralogy...
(The area of each polygon is mapped to a color from a gradient. Made with https://thi.ng/geom, see next message for example & source code...)
1/2

If you're unclear on why you have to load the video before you can play it it's because the first load only loads the image, title and channel name to make the page itself load much faster.

The person viewing is then allowed to make a more considered choice before activating the video. Perhaps you want to open the link an incognito window instead for example.

One great bonus to this embed is that it shows way less ads, if any.

Helping introductory physics students connect physics with humanities, art, social sciences, and everyday life
Brooke Rouret, Jaya Shivangani Kashyap, Jeremy Levy, Chandralekha Singh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14272

Helping introductory physics students connect physics with humanities, art, social sciences, and everyday life
In this article, we reflect upon our positive experiences incorporating or working on extra credit projects in algebra-based introductory physics that asked students to connect physics with humanities, social sciences, and everyday life. We give an example of a student project that reflects their creativity and ingenuity and encourages other instructors to offer similar projects.

I find it really amuzing that IT-departments around the world is just plainly copying the example DNS-records in my blog-posts about DMARC.
Resulting in me getting reports about their domain to my inbox
#dmarc #email

This is a pretty good example to demonstrate why people are often shocked at the inference cost of #vibe #coding tools. I've been playing with #eca in

gist:af008d6d0d2923f4e8cc361ce80f0951
GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

It's such a cute example of seasonality in data collection: The growth of the "xmas:feature=tree" tag on #OpenStreetMap over time. https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/xmas:feature=tree#chronology
Hint: If you add trees around you now, they'll still be in time to show up in the next @… release 😁

#Youtube has recently began using #AI to upscale #videos from low resolutions. Here is an example of how useless that is.

My mayor:
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/maddow-chicagoland-sets-the-example-for-countering-trump-s-abuses-251256389962

Maddow: Chicagoland sets the example for countering Trump's abuses
Rachel Maddow salutes the bravery and resourcefulness of people of Evanston, Illinois, who have not only activated to help protect their neighbors against the abuses of Donald Trump's ICE agents, but have rallied to collect food to help struggling neighbors as Trump's Republicans try leverage food assistance to force their budget to pass. Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss talks with Rachel Maddow about his community's activism and pushing back against federal agents going too far.

Wait, Floorp is a real browser and not just the ad absurdum example?

from my link log —
InvisiCaps: pointers in Fil-C by example.
https://fil-c.org/invisicaps_by_example
saved 2025-10-28 https://dotat.at/:/0TWPM.h…

Claude skills are a big deal™️
Thanks to skills, you can reduce your multi-agent setup to a single agent with skills, greatly reducing complexity and increasing speed of execution.
In fact, if in the past you could have a number of agents each specialized in, for example, data analysis, getting data from a particular set of websites, making that data available in a dashboard, etc., with skills you can substitute all these agents with skills. (1/2)

Degenerate kinks and kink-instantons in two-dimensional scalar field models with $\mathcal{N}=1$ and $\mathcal{N}=2$ supersymmetry
Evgenii Ievlev, Mikhail Shifman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14324

Degenerate kinks and kink-instantons in two-dimensional scalar field models with $\mathcal{N}=1$ and $\mathcal{N}=2$ supersymmetry
Models with classically degenerate vacua often support quasiclassical configurations of nontrivial topology. In (0+1)-dimensional quantum mechanics with a double-well potential, for example, instantons induce mixing between the two perturbative ground states in the purely bosonic case, while in the supersymmetric version, the tunneling amplitude is suppressed. In this work, we investigate (1+1)-dimensional models featuring classically Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield saturated kinks with degene…

Mitigating Intra-Speaker Variability in Diarization with Style-Controllable Speech Augmentation
Miseul Kim, Soo Jin Park, Kyungguen Byun, Hyeon-Kyeong Shin, Sunkuk Moon, Shuhua Zhang, Erik Visser
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14632

Mitigating Intra-Speaker Variability in Diarization with Style-Controllable Speech Augmentation
Speaker diarization systems often struggle with high intrinsic intra-speaker variability, such as shifts in emotion, health, or content. This can cause segments from the same speaker to be misclassified as different individuals, for example, when one raises their voice or speaks faster during conversation. To address this, we propose a style-controllable speech generation model that augments speech across diverse styles while preserving the target speaker's identity. The proposed system starts …

The Convicted Criminal is rolling back some of his illegal tariffs. Not a victory but another TACO example :-)

Actually, I do want to come back to masculinity under patriarchy and whiteness under white supremacy because I think it's worth talking more about. The "man" under patriarchy (at least "Western" patriarchy) is represented as power and independence. The man needs nothing and thus owes nothing to anyone. The man controls and is not controlled, which is intimately related to independence as dependence can make someone vulnerable to control. The image of "man" projects power and invulnerability. At the same time "man" is a bumbling fool who can't be held accountable for his inability to control his sexual urges. He must be fed and cared for, as though another child. His worst behaviors must be dismissed with phrases such as "boys will be boys" and "locker room talk." The absurdity of the concept of human "independence" is impossible to understate.
Even if you go all Ted Kaczynski, you have still been raised and taught. This is, perhaps, why it is so much more useful to think in terms of obligations than rights. Rights can be claimed and protected with violence alone, but obligations reveal the true interdependence that sustains us. A "man" may assert his rights. Yet, on some level, we all know that the "man" of patriarchy acts as a child who is not mature enough to recognize his obligations.
White violence and white fragility reflect the same dichotomy. "The master race" somehow always needs brown folks to make all their shit and do all the reproductive labor for them. For those who fully embrace whiteness, the "safe space" is a joke. DEI shows weakness. Yet, when presented with an honest history adults become children who are incapable of differentiating between criticism and simple facts. *They* become the ones who must be kept safe. The expectation to be responsible for one's own words and actions, one of the very core definitions of being an adult, is far too much to expect. Their guilt needs room, needs tending, needs caring. White people cannot simply "grow the fuck up" or, as they may say of slavery, "fucking get over it."
And again, interestingly, it is *rights* that they reference: "Mah Freeze PEACH!" I find it hard to distinguish between such and my own child's assertion that anything she doesn't like is "not fair!" No, these assertions fail to recognize the fundamental fabric of adult society: the obligations we hold to each other.
At the intersection of all privilege is the sovereign, the ultimate god-man-baby. Again, referencing the essay (https://hexmhell.writeas.com/observations-on-domination-and-trump)
> This is where it becomes important to consider the ideology behind the sovereign ritual. Participation within the sovereign ritual denotes to the participants elements of the sovereign. That is, all agents of the sovereign are, essentially, micro dictators. By carrying out the will of the sovereign, these micro dictators can, by extension, act outside of the law.
While law enforcement is the ultimate representative of sovereign violence, privileges allow a gradated approximation of the sovereign. Those who are "closer" in privilege to the sovereign may, for example, be permitted to carry out violence against those who are father away. The gradation of privilege turns the whole society, except for the least privileged, into a cult that protects the privilege system on behalf of the most privileged. (And immediately Malcolm X pops to mind as having already talked about part of this relationship in 1963 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf7rsCAfQCo.)

I would add that his comment is spot on but does not apply to the whole population, and we ought to be paying a lot more attention to the people here in the US who do know what life without democracy is like.
Like for example: Jim Crow existed in full force within living memory, and a huge part of the current fascist pitch in the US is bringing it back.

@… Feature request: When I'm looking at a profile page, a way to search within that profile - yeah, I could include the "from:" in my search but for your handle, for example, that's 29 keystrokes.

We always talk about things that get worse with #Aging - but what about the things that get better? For example I feel that people become more confident and able to make faster decisions, especially about what they like or want to do. Can you think of anything else that improves with aging?
Trying to get ideas for a research fellowship proposal :)

Appell Functions for General Lattices
Aradhita Chattopadhyaya, Jan Manschot
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10204 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10204

Appell Functions for General Lattices
We study Appell functions associated to an arbitrary positive definite lattice $Λ$ and a choice of $M\leq {\rm dim}(Λ)$ linearly independent vectors $d_r\in Λ$, $r=1,\dots,M$. These functions are instances of multi-variable quasi-elliptic functions, and specific examples have appeared at various places in mathematics and theoretical physics. For example, if $Λ$ is chosen to be one-dimensional, these functions reduce to the classical Appell function, which is a prominent example in the theor…

Data Integration and spatio temporal statistics can quantify relative risk of medico-legal reforms: the example of police emergency mental health responses in Queensland (Australia)
Nidup Dorji, Sourav Das, Richard Stone, Alan R. Clough
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11101

Data Integration and spatio temporal statistics can quantify relative risk of medico-legal reforms: the example of police emergency mental health responses in Queensland (Australia)
This study examined the spatial-temporal dynamics of Emergency Examination Order or Authority (EE-O/A) admissions in Far Northern Queensland (FNQ) from 2009 to 2020, using 13,035 unique police records aggregated across 83 postcodes. A two-stage modelling framework was used: Lasso was used to identify a parsimonious set of socio economic and health-service covariates, and a Conditional Autoregressive (CAR) model incorporated these predictors with structured spatial and temporal random effects. T…

Beefy release of my Choria Configuration Management system, includes some things I've wanted for years like deeper resource monitoring.
Also a nice new docs site
Change log and release here https://github.com/choria-io/ccm/releases/tag/v0.0.2

It’s late 2025 and Sitepoint is still advocating for the document outline algorithm:
https://www.sitepoint.com/headings-in-html-structure/
The algorithm was never implemented, removed from WHATWG HTML in 2022:

Trump on Wednesday said the Illinois governor and Chicago mayor, both Democrats, should be jailed as they oppose his deployment of National Guard troops for his immigration and crime crackdown in the nation’s third-largest city.
The officials said they would not be deterred.
The Republican president made the comment in a social media post, the latest example of his brazen calls for his opponents to be prosecuted or locked up
— a break from longtime norms as the Justice Depar…

Trump says Illinois governor and Chicago mayor should be jailed
President Donald Trump says the Illinois governor and Chicago mayor, both Democrats, should be jailed as they oppose his deployment of National Guard troops for his immigration and crime crackdown in the nation’s third-largest city. The Republican president made the comment in a social media post Wednesday. It's the latest example of his calls for his opponents to be prosecuted or locked up Trump wrote on Truth Social that Mayor Brandon Johnson and Gov. JB Pritzker “should be in jail for fa…

How the fuck is it SEVENTEEN POUNDS FORTY NINE PENCE per ticket to see a movie in the Odeon cinema Kingston???
For less than double that you can for example go and see a live comedy show with a comedian you've actually heard of. That's a live human coming to where you are and working in front of you for ~90 mins. As opposed to someone on minimum wage pressing a button.
Christ.

🎯 E-commerce order processing example with inventory management and payment processing
💰 Banking transfer service example with balance validation and automatic rollback on errors
👤 User registration example with profile and settings creation in single transaction
🧪 TransactionException error handling for comprehensive failure management
🔁 Nested transaction support using #Laravel

Never have I seen a more pointed example of "generative AI is very good at cliché"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/14/an-ai-generated-band-got-1m-plays-on-spotify-now-m…

NatGVD: Natural Adversarial Example Attack towards Graph-based Vulnerability Detection
Avilash Rath, Weiliang Qi, Youpeng Li, Xinda Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04987 https:/…

NatGVD: Natural Adversarial Example Attack towards Graph-based Vulnerability Detection
Graph-based models learn rich code graph structural information and present superior performance on various code analysis tasks. However, the robustness of these models against adversarial example attacks in the context of vulnerability detection remains an open question. This paper proposes NatGVD, a novel attack methodology that generates natural adversarial vulnerable code to circumvent GNN-based and graph-aware transformer-based vulnerability detectors. NatGVD employs a set of code transfor…

A Proposal for symTFTs and symThs from Holography
Francesco Mignosa, Diego Rodriguez-Gomez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14783 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.1478…

A Proposal for symTFTs and symThs from Holography
We propose an embedding of the symTFT construction in (finite cut-off) holography. The proposal passes several non-trivial consistency checks reproducing the expected symTFTs in various cases, including the recently discussed symTFT for the 1-form symmetry of 4d $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM. Moreover, we comment on the possibility of unifying the symTFT and the symTh descriptions via the democratic formulation of Supergravity, using the 4d $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM theory as an example.

Do we have a name for when AI fails at itself?
For example, a YouTube video with “GPT" in the title and the auto/ai-generated transcript says “ChachiBt”, “Chachib”, “Chbt”, and probably other failures.

Not in Sync: Unveiling Temporal Bias in Audio Chat Models
Jiayu Yao, Shenghua Liu, Yiwei Wang, Rundong Cheng, Lingrui Mei, Baolong Bi, Zhen Xiong, Xueqi Cheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12185

Not in Sync: Unveiling Temporal Bias in Audio Chat Models
Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) are increasingly applied to audio understanding and multimodal reasoning, yet their ability to locate when events occur remains underexplored. We present the first systematic study of temporal bias in LALMs, revealing a key limitation in their timestamp prediction. For example, when asked "At which second does the lecturer introduce the key formula?", models often predict timestamps that are consistently earlier or later than the ground truth. Through control…

Just bundled up my interactive lab notebook system for an open-source release; it's just a panflute filter but has some cool functionality if you want to make little interactive tutorials that live as standalone static pages without any server app necessary beyond a basic host. You can check out an example here:
#AcademicChatter

Nice project: A computational framework for quantifying route diversification in road networks
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02582
Interactive: https://diverc…

Boom's move to modify its supersonic engine to power AI data centers is another example of industrial capacity being repurposed to serve the AI supply chain (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-12-09/the-ai-boom-is-absorbin…

Universal Adaptive Environment Discovery
Madi Matymov, Ba-Hien Tran, Maurizio Filippone
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12547 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12547…

Universal Adaptive Environment Discovery
An open problem in Machine Learning is how to avoid models to exploit spurious correlations in the data; a famous example is the background-label shortcut in the Waterbirds dataset. A common remedy is to train a model across multiple environments; in the Waterbirds dataset, this corresponds to training by randomizing the background. However, selecting the right environments is a challenging problem, given that these are rarely known a priori. We propose Universal Adaptive Environment Discovery …

I keep thinking about working from a coffee shop... but what is the etiquette?
For example...
How much coffee and cake do I need to consume for every hour I am there?
Do I go for some kind of coffee crawl, moving from coffee shop to coffee shop, buying a drink from each one, staying for 30 mins or so?
I will be buzzing after the first couple of hours 😅
Co-working spaces are so very expensive... the one I used to go to didn't survive lockdown.

Recently I spoke with a woman in a shop about hiking and she said that she's not experienced in the mountains and thus doesn't dare to go alone.
I wondered if such people would feel better if they'd go for example with me (or just any other person who is a bit into the topic). No need to talk, no social obligations, just walking together a route, no sports event, nothing extreme. 🤔 Not as a guided tour, just walking.
And if I would do that.

i'm gonna lose it
this is the documentation for an oscilloscope first released in 2025

Understanding Modal Interactions in Non-classically Damped Linear Oscillators with Closely Spaced Modes
Luis M. Baldelomar Pinto, Alireza Mojahed, Sobhan Mohammadi, Keegan J. Moore, Lawrence A. Bergman, Alexander F. Vakakis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14857

Understanding Modal Interactions in Non-classically Damped Linear Oscillators with Closely Spaced Modes
This work addresses non-classically damped coupled oscillators with closely spaced modes focusing on the physics of modal interactions. Considering the simplest representative example in the form of an impulsively excited two-degree-of-freedom (two-DOF) system, we show that there is a single parameter defined as a coupling versus damping non-proportionality ratio, that separates two different dynamical regimes. Based on complexification-averaging analysis, we show that, below the critical value…

Today's open-source part of our VFX Pipeline is #mongodb
We're using the Deadline render manager and it came with mongodb as its backend. Over time I've started to use it for other pipeline needs: keeping track of dependencies between comps and cg (and between Houdini scenes and their abc/usd files) for example. This helps a lot with consolidating and pruning the huge amount of …

Perhaps the silver lining to the UK no longer being in the European Union is that it offers the opportunity to look at developments that are progressing at a different pace in the EU.
Here:
how clean consumer flexibility - EVs, heat pumps - can support the local grid, if allow it to.

Yes, consumer clean energy technologies can support the local grid — if we allow them to. Last week, I shared information about EU policy developments regarding device-level metering for charging… | Jaap Burger
Yes, consumer clean energy technologies can support the local grid — if we allow them to. Last week, I shared information about EU policy developments regarding device-level metering for charging points. This allows EV charging sessions to be measured accurately and enables the flexibility involved to be marketed. I cited the example of the UK, where this has recently become a practical reality, an opportunity to learn for other jurisdictions. Here is another example. The latest amendment to…

@… it is pretty much flawless with Steam games. But you will not play League of Legends for example. Check out site called "ProtonDB" for your favourite titles before you make a switch

I'm using ChatGPT so much as a tourist this trip. Today's example: where can I go on a walk from my hotel? It found me a nice a promising suburban garden I never would have found on my own. Also got the wrong direction (it's west, not east) but it was enough to find my way.

Learning to Make MISTAKEs: Modeling Incorrect Student Thinking And Key Errors
Alexis Ross, Jacob Andreas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11502 https://arxiv.org…

Learning to Make MISTAKEs: Modeling Incorrect Student Thinking And Key Errors
Research on reasoning in language models (LMs) predominantly focuses on improving the correctness of their outputs. But some important applications require modeling reasoning patterns that are incorrect. For example, automated systems that can reason about and simulate student errors are useful for providing real-time feedback in the classroom or offline practice for educators-in-training. This paper presents a new method, MISTAKE, that (1) constructs high-quality synthetic examples of reasonin…

I just created a new acronym for net surfers: LRL, Laughing Really Loud. Example: That dog sure snorted that pasta! LRL! Do u like my acronym

Claude skills are a big deal™️
Thanks to skills, you can reduce your multi-agent setup to a single agent with skills, greatly reducing complexity and increasing speed of execution.
In fact, if in the past you could have a number of agents each specialized in, for example, data analysis, getting data from a particular set of websites, making that data available in a dashboard, etc., with skills you can substitute all these agents with skills. (1/2)

Hidden on page 1692 of his great-grandfather Siegfried’s unpublished memoir, the writer Joe Dunthorne discovers a confession. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002c4x0 A tragic family story but an example of retelling for the next generation. Available globally as 'The History Podcast'

BBC Radio 4 - The History Podcast, Half-Life, 1. Daughter of Radium
Hidden on page 1692 of his great-grandfather's memoir, Joe Dunthorne finds a confession.

The environmental sciences have been modeling pollution for over 100 years, creating a large set of mathematical tools to model and understand pollution and its impact on the environment.
A famous example is the Streeter-Phelps equation, made to study the pollution of of the Ohio River and that has helped understand if or how a stream can support life at different times/distances from the pollution.
Is there an equivalent for digital pollution?
🧵 4/X
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streeter–Phelps_equation

I keep coming back to the mirror dualities of the oppressed and oppressor under authoritarianism.
The oppressed is portrayed as both weak and godlike. The stereotypes are always some variation on sloth and incompetence, but yet somehow also a menace capable of destroying the "pure" society. To use the most relevant current example, Antifa being both little femme soy boys who would always get beat up by "real men" while also being an international terrorist organization on the brink of overthrowing the US government, the unarmed presence of whom makes the heavily armed agents of ICE flee for their lives. Antifa is both having absolutely no impact on ICE, and also having such an impact on ICE that the military needs to come in to protect them. The contradiction is obvious but never seems to occur to those who hold both to be true at the same time.
But few talk about the duality of the oppressor. The sovereign throughout history has always been both a ruler above the law, sometimes even the representative or incarnation of a divine force. Yet, this same superhuman/god-man is also a baby who needs constant care. This is absolutely a through line from the very earliest records of sovereign cults to modern cult leaders, CEOs, and Trump today. Power, for these people, is expressed both as the ability to force others to enact their will and in the ability to compel others to care for them. Can any of these "men" cook? Can they fix anything themselves? They are driven everywhere, cooked for all the time, constantly protected from danger. Kings are still dressed, at least for rituals. I could dissect masculinity here, but that's a whole thing.
It is as though the drive to care for our children, who must be taught to behave within acceptable norms, is hijacked by "leaders" who demand our care and attention... even at the expense of our literal children. And recently we've seen some of those very CEOs, with LLMs and return to office demands, show that their judgment is also little better than children, making decisions while pretending to understand a subject.
The oppressed are portrayed as both god-like and impotent and are, in fact, neither. Meanwhile the rulers portray themselves only as invulnerable and are, in fact, childish in their ability to survive without constant support. Their greatest fear from the collapse of society is figuring out how to make sure people keep taking care of them.
It just keeps rattling around in my head.
#USPol

As the El Cheeto klan destroys our medical and drug systems, let me remind folks that there are alternatives.
For example, I am waiting for RFK jr to announce that Viagra can be replaced by a wooden tongue depressor and some duct tape.

FreeBSD bug 291034 – Minimal base is not compatible with (for example) bsdinstall keymap
<https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=291034>
> … for the correctly-keyed password:
>
> Login incorrect
– via <

r-charts.com provides example code for a variety of chart types, both in base R and ggplot: #rstats #ggplot…

R CHARTS | A collection of charts and graphs made with the R programming language
Over 1400 graphs with reproducible code divided in 8 big categories and over 50 chart types, in addition of tools to choose and create colors and color palettes

We are pleased to announce the release of CTI-Transmute.org, a new free and open-source service designed to facilitate conversions between MISP and STIX 2.x formats.
The service is available both through a web interface and an API, allowing users to convert CTI data easily. The web UI also gives users the option to share or keep private their conversions for further review or collaboration.
You can view an example conversion here: 🔗

This, from Marc Brooker, seems self-evident to me: “AI is going to be most effective in problem spaces where there are what the authors call reliable verifiers.” For example, quality test suites and benchmarks. https://brooker.co.za/blog/2025/10/12/barbarians.html

Just finished "Endgames" by Ru Xu, sequel to "Newsprints." I was happy to see the characters from the first book get their endings, but Xu feels incredibly out of her depth writing about the politics of empire and the power/complicity of the press, which completely dampened my enjoyment.
As just one example, there's a ton of interesting nuance to explore behind the idea of a disabled imperial ruler and how disadvantage/persecution (from which you have been effectively shielded) does not justify harming others. This book explores none of that.
I think it does serve as a great example of how severely one limits one's own imagination when one buys into the myth of nationhood as natural/inevitable/good. It's not that Xu's politics are especially authoritarian, I think, but that she's just (been kept?) resoundingly naïve, and so her plot resolution feels childish (or perhaps that's an insult to children).
#AmReading #ReadingNow

Been in-depth studying the PDF file format spec for the past few days... it's mind boggling that this format with its capacity for monstrous complexity managed to become the de-facto standard for modern documents. So many questionable decisions & undue flexibility in there (in the wrong places) making even a simple task of reliable metadata extraction (for example) incredibly hard... I understand and value flexibility, but not at this cost! Guess I will have to keep on using one of t…

“The state as patronage machine” — that’s the concept here.
The article then does a weird pivot in paragraph 10 where it tries to shoehorn Israel’s international lobbying and propaganda efforts into being an example of this same principle.
It doesn’t work. The shoe doesn’t fit. What the Israeli government has done to find political covers for the horror it has committed in Gaza is an example of something else.
4/

The European Commission says Apple and Google's Android-iPhone data transfer tool, which will be available globally, is an example of the benefits of the DMA (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)
https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/09/iphone-android-switching-ios-26/

EU says easier iPhone-Android switching is proof the DMA is working - 9to5Mac
The EU says Apple and Google’s new iPhone-Android switching tools show the DMA is working, delivering easier, faster data transfers for users.

14-year old Miles Wu just won $25,000 for a research project based on an origami fold called "Miura-ori", which is known for collapsing and expanding with precision.
"I've been folding origami as a hobby for more than six years, mostly of animals or insects," Wu told Business Insider.
"Recently I've been designing my own origami, too."
"A problem with current deployable structures and emergency structures is, for example,
ten…

14-Year-Old Wins Prize For Origami That Can Hold 10,000 Times Its Own Weight
While most 14-year-olds are folding paper airplanes, Miles Wu is folding origami patterns that he believes could one day improve disaster relief.

Hash chaining degrades security at Facebook
Thomas Rivasseau
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12665 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12665

Hash chaining degrades security at Facebook
Modern web and digital application password storage relies on password hashing for storage and security. Ad-hoc upgrade of password storage to keep up with hash algorithm norms may be used to save costs but can introduce unforeseen vulnerabilities. This is the case in the password storage scheme used by Meta Platforms which services several billion monthly users worldwide. In this paper we present the first example of an exploit which demonstrates the security weakness of Facebook's password st…

Metrological approach to the emergence of classical objectivity
Anthony Kiely, Diana A. Chisholm, Akram Touil, Sebastian Deffner, Gabriel Landi, Steve Campbell
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12313

Metrological approach to the emergence of classical objectivity
We present a precise characterization of the onset of classicality that combines the formalism of quantum Darwinism with the tools from quantum metrology. We show that the quantum Fisher information provides a useful metric for assessing the rate at which classical objectivity emerges. Furthermore, our formalism allows us to explore how the choice of measurement impacts the precision with which an observer can determine the state of the system. For a paradigmatic example of the spin-star model,…

{testthat} is great for automatic testing. Here are some tricks for the heavy user: #rstats

The #EV roaming system in Europe is increasingly being hit by hidden fees and absurd price discrimination.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jaapburger_

In principle, EV roaming enables every driver to charge anywhere on a single invoice, with information about the different prices and charging options available in advance, for example in an app. For… | Jaap Burger
In principle, EV roaming enables every driver to charge anywhere on a single invoice, with information about the different prices and charging options available in advance, for example in an app. For an operator, it is a method of attracting more customers to its stations. In recent years, a clear trend has emerged: providers who want to offer roaming at other charging points to their own customers, but at the same time keep roaming customers from others out with absurd price mark-ups and tari…

Study: ~200 Instacart shoppers in four US cities were shown different prices for the same 20 grocery items; Instacart confirms it is running short term "tests" (Ben Casselman/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/business/instacart-algori…

Same Product, Same Store, but on Instacart, Prices Might Differ
The findings are the latest example of how the notion of a single price is breaking down in the digital age, a trend economists say could be pushing up some prices.

An interesting example of how a non-grid operator can achieve a (temporary) grid connection using a battery. Once the grid operator has made the permanent connections, the battery can be used elsewhere.
A temporary variant on contestable build that can be scaled further?

Provincie Noord-Holland helpt woningbouw met oplossing netcongestie
De provincie Noord-Holland stelt € 150.000 beschikbaar aan Woningcorporatie Parteon om de nieuwbouwwoningen aan de D. Doniastraat in Zaandam eerder op te kunnen leveren aan de bewoners.

When "self-driving" cars were first getting some hype back in ~2015 or so, I told people who asked me that I didn't think they'd be safe, and that I wished the same money were being invested in driver-assistance systems instead.
At the time, advocates were claiming that self-driving cars would be safer than human drivers.
We now have both self-driving cars and some nifty new driver assistance things, and it turns out that the self-driving cars are in fact being developed by corporations whose attention to the bottom line results in danger to others on the road pretty regularly. I don't actually have stats here for whether they're "safer than human drivers" or not, but the opportunity for one bad software update to make *all* self-driving cars dangerous at once kinda makes me doubt that.
Here's an example of Waymo cars getting "more aggressive" as they try to balance between being too timid and obstructing traffic (including emergency vehicles) and being too dangerous:
https://archive.ph/JJuGv
Here's another example of passing stopped schoolbusses leading to a software recall:
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/waymo-issue-voluntary-software-recall-after-close-calls/story?id=128207776
In the first article, Waymo claims 91% fewer serious accidents per mile. Obviously an independent audit would be actually trustworthy, but even if we take that claim at face value, it's meaningless if an update tomorrow causes 100,000 accidents.
Note that they could be using better engineering practices, and the fact that they aren't shows that they don't care enough about the risks. They could be deploying new software versions incrementally and slowly, letting new versions rack up lots of miles only on a few vehicles before pushing them to a fleet. The should also have the equivalent of a simulation unit test for "schoolbus is stopped, what do?" and if a software version fails that test, it doesn't make it to the fleet. Clearly they don't have that.
I feel pretty vindicated in my earlier prediction that this tech is a bad idea in the hands of the current advocates.

Day 19 (a bit late): Alice Oseman
As I said I've got 14 authors to fit into two days. Probably just going to extend to 30? But Oseman gets this spot as an absolute legend of queer fiction in both novel & graphic novel form, and an excellent example of the many truths queer writers have to share with non-queer people that can make everyone's lives better. Her writing is very kind, despite in many instances dealing with some dark stuff.
I started out on Heartstopper, which is just so lovely and fun to read, and then made my way through several of her novels. The one I'll highlight here which I think it's her greatest triumph is "Loveless", which is semi-autobiographical and was at least my first (but no longer only) experience with the "platonic romance" sub-genre. It not only helped me work through some crufty internal doubts about aro/ace identities that I'd never really examined, but in the process helped improve my understanding of friendship, period. Heck, it's probably a nice novel for anyone questioning any sort of identity or dealing with loneliness, and it's just super-enjoyable as a story regardless of the philosophical value.
To cheat a bit more here on my author count, I recently read "Dear Wendy" by Ann Zhao, which shouts out "Loveless" and offers a more expository exploration of aro/ace identities, but "Loveless" is a book with more heart and better writing overall, including the neat plotting and great pacing. I think there are also parallels with Becky Albertalli's work, though I think I like Oseman slightly more. Certainly both excel at writing queer romance (and romance-adjacent) stuff with happy endings (#OwnVoices wins again with all three authors).
In any case, Oseman is excellent and if you're not up for reading a novel, Heartstopper is a graphic novel series that's easy to jump into and very kind to its adorable main characters.
I think I've now decided to continue to 30, which is a relief, so I'm tagging this (and the next post that rounds out 20) two ways.
#20AuthorsNoMen
#30AuthorsNoMen