Tootfinder

Podcast-Empfehlung: In der aktuellen Folge 106 von @… unterhält sich @… mit @… über den Kollaps komplex…

DTM 106 Vom Kollaps komplexer Systeme
ajuvo hat Thomas Fricke zu Gast und wir reden über den Kollaps komplexer Systeme. damals(tm), neulich, gerade jetzt und vielleicht recht bald. ajuvo hat Thomas Fricke zu Gast und wir reden über den Kollaps komplexer Systeme. damals(tm), neulich, gerade jetzt und vielleicht recht bald. Thomas ist auch ein alter Fahrensmann und hat viele Jahre lang komplexe IT-Systeme gebaut. Aber nicht nur das. Er hat auch die philosophischen Grundlagen dahinter bearbeitet und angesichts der täglichen WTF-…

Day 18: Mark Oshiro
Having just learned that Oshiro is nonbinary, they're an instant include on this list. In veering extremely heavily towards YA, and losing a spot that would have gone to an absolutely legendary mangaka, anime writer, or feminist philosopher, but "Anger is A Gift" and "Each of us a Desert" are just that good, and I'm trying to steer a bit towards towards lesser-known authors I respect.
I already mentioned "Anger is a Gift" above, but to recap, it's a painful, vivid, and beautifully honest story of queer love, loss, and protest against an oppressive system. CW for racist police murder, intergenerational trauma, and police brutality against highschool students. It's a book a lot of Americans could benefit from reading right now, and while it's fiction, it's not fantasy or sci-fi. Besides the themes and politics, the writing is just really solid, with delicate characterization and tight-plotted developments that are beautifully paced.
To me "Each of us a Desert" is maybe even more beautiful, and Oshiro leaps into a magnificent fantasy world that's richly original in its desolation, dark history, lonely characters, and mythical magic. Particularly the clearly-not-just-superscription but ambiguously-important/powerful magical elements of Oshiro's worldbuilding are a rare contrast to the usual magic-is-real-here's-how-it-works fare, and pulling that off a all as they do is a testament to their craft. The prose is wonderful, probably especially so if you speak Spanish, but I enjoyed it immensely despite only knowing a few words here and there. The rich interiority of the characters, their conflicts both with each other and within themselves, and the juxtaposition of all that against origins in cult-like ignorance allows for the delivery of a lot of wisdom and complex truths.
Between these two books, so different and yet each so powerful, Oshiro has demonstrated incredible craft and also a wide range of styles, so I'm definitely excited to read more of their work and to recommend them to others.
I'm also glad to have finally put a nonbinary author on this list; the others I had in mind won't make it at this point because there's too much genre overlap, although I'll include them in my didn't-make-it list at the end. I've now got just 2 slots left and have counted up 14 more authors that absolutely need to be mentioned, so we'll see what happens.
#20AuthorsNoMen

I just had a pleasant thought.
Everyone knows that the LLMs have been trained on stolen books, right? And that will include @… 's Laundry Files series.
Which means that any system that has internalised that text will know that the only most plausible next tokens after someone says "Hello, I'm an auditor, TANGO ECHELON JELLYFISH execute s…

FireRedChat: A Pluggable, Full-Duplex Voice Interaction System with Cascaded and Semi-Cascaded Implementations
Junjie Chen, Yao Hu, Junjie Li, Kangyue Li, Kun Liu, Wenpeng Li, Xu Li, Ziyuan Li, Feiyu Shen, Xu Tang, Manzhen Wei, Yichen Wu, Fenglong Xie, Kaituo Xu, Kun Xie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06502

FireRedChat: A Pluggable, Full-Duplex Voice Interaction System with Cascaded and Semi-Cascaded Implementations
Full-duplex voice interaction allows users and agents to speak simultaneously with controllable barge-in, enabling lifelike assistants and customer service. Existing solutions are either end-to-end, difficult to design and hard to control, or modular pipelines governed by turn-taking controllers that ease upgrades and per-module optimization; however, prior modular frameworks depend on non-open components and external providers, limiting holistic optimization. In this work, we present a complet…

Active Semantic Perception
Huayi Tang, Pratik Chaudhari
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05430 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05430

Active Semantic Perception
We develop an approach for active semantic perception which refers to using the semantics of the scene for tasks such as exploration. We build a compact, hierarchical multi-layer scene graph that can represent large, complex indoor environments at various levels of abstraction, e.g., nodes corresponding to rooms, objects, walls, windows etc. as well as fine-grained details of their geometry. We develop a procedure based on large language models (LLMs) to sample plausible scene graphs of unobser…

Love, love, love this channel.
Philosophy Overdose on YouTube will remind you what it means to think again.
And it's just lovely to hear the great philosophers explain their thoughts, in their voices.
https://www.youtube.com/@Philosophy_Overdose

This was a nice example found by @… of a brickwork tiling that seemed random until someone spotted and shared the pattern - a kind of risset rhythm in brickwork https://forum.alg…

Confinement geometry governs the impact of external shear stress on active stress-driven flows in microtubule-kinesin active fluids
Joshua H. Dickie, Tianxing Weng, Yen-Chen Chen, Yutian He, Saloni Saxena, Robert A. Pelcovits, Thomas R. Powers, Kun-Ta Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01482

Confinement geometry governs the impact of external shear stress on active stress-driven flows in microtubule-kinesin active fluids
Active fluids generate internal active stress and exhibit unique responses to external forces such as superfluidity and self-yielding transitions. However, how confinement geometry influences these responses remains poorly understood. Here, we investigate microtubule-kinesin active fluids under external shear stresses in two geometries. In slab-like confinement (a narrow-gap cavity), external stresses propagated throughout the system, leading to stress competition and a kinematic transition tha…

Just read this post by @… on an optimistic AGI future, and while it had some interesting and worthwhile ideas, it's also in my opinion dangerously misguided, and plays into the current AGI hype in a harmful way.
https://social.coop/@eloquence/114940607434005478
My criticisms include:
- Current LLM technology has many layers, but the biggest most capable models are all tied to corporate datacenters and require inordinate amounts of every and water use to run. Trying to use these tools to bring about a post-scarcity economy will burn up the planet. We urgently need more-capable but also vastly more efficient AI technologies if we want to use AI for a post-scarcity economy, and we are *not* nearly on the verge of this despite what the big companies pushing LLMs want us to think.
- I can see that permacommons.org claims a small level of expenses on AI equates to low climate impact. However, given current deep subsidies on place by the big companies to attract users, that isn't a great assumption. The fact that their FAQ dodges the question about which AI systems they use isn't a great look.
- These systems are not free in the same way that Wikipedia or open-source software is. To run your own model you need a data harvesting & cleaning operation that costs millions of dollars minimum, and then you need millions of dollars worth of storage & compute to train & host the models. Right now, big corporations are trying to compete for market share by heavily subsidizing these things, but it you go along with that, you become dependent on them, and you'll be screwed when they jack up the price to a profitable level later. I'd love to see open dataset initiatives SBD the like, and there are some of these things, but not enough yet, and many of the initiatives focus on one problem while ignoring others (fine for research but not the basis for a society yet).
- Between the environmental impacts, the horrible labor conditions and undercompensation of data workers who filter the big datasets, and the impacts of both AI scrapers and AI commons pollution, the developers of the most popular & effective LLMs have a lot of answer for. This project only really mentions environmental impacts, which makes me think that they're not serious about ethics, which in turn makes me distrustful of the whole enterprise.
- Their language also ends up encouraging AI use broadly while totally ignoring several entire classes of harm, so they're effectively contributing to AI hype, especially with such casual talk of AGI and robotics as if embodied AGI were just around the corner. To be clear about this point: we are several breakthroughs away from AGI under the most optimistic assumptions, and giving the impression that those will happen soon plays directly into the hands of the Sam Altmans of the world who are trying to make money off the impression of impending huge advances in AI capabilities. Adding to the AI hype is irresponsible.
- I've got a more philosophical criticism that I'll post about separately.
I do think that the idea of using AI & other software tools, possibly along with robotics and funded by many local cooperatives, in order to make businesses obsolete before they can do the same to all workers, is a good one. Get your local library to buy a knitting machine alongside their 3D printer.
Lately I've felt too busy criticizing AI to really sit down and think about what I do want the future to look like, even though I'm a big proponent of positive visions for the future as a force multiplier for criticism, and this article is inspiring to me in that regard, even if the specific project doesn't seem like a good one.

Day 6: Kamome Shirahama
Before I wander much father afield, I'd be remiss not to include at least one Mangaka (I've got 8 on my planning list; if you think Manga is pushing it just wait until you see what the next few days have in store).
I'm currently following "Witch Hat Atelier," and it's absolutely amazing in several dimensions: first class world-building, deep philosophical themes, nuanced diverse cast, tightly-constructed interwoven plots, deep mysteries that keep everything churning and show up in unexpected places, absolutely stellar art both in terms of in-panel depictions and page layouts (some are Watchmen-quality), especially if you are sartorially inclined, and general kindness of its core messages. This is a series I wish every programmer would read, because it includes excellent advice about software design in multiple ways (did I mention there's an intricate and logical magic system within which the main character innovates in legible-to-the-reader-as-innovation ways?). Also, I bet I would have enjoyed this just a much as a 10-year-old as I'm enjoying it in my 30's, which is something that takes well-honed skill to pull off.
Shirahama is a master of her craft, and I'm honestly kinda surprised to see Witch Hat is only her second series. Definitely thinking how I can get my hands on her earlier work in English.
#20AuthorsNoMen