Tootfinder

Before states banned abortion,
one of the gravest outcomes of early miscarriage could easily be avoided:
👉Doctors could offer a dilation and curettage procedure, which quickly empties the uterus and allows it to close,
protecting against a life-threatening hemorrhage.
⚠️But because the procedures, known as D&Cs, are also used to end pregnancies, they have gotten tangled up in state legislation that restricts abortion.
🆘Reports now abound of doctors hesitat…

A “Striking” Trend: After Texas Banned Abortion, More Women Nearly Bled to Death During Miscarriage
A new ProPublica data analysis adds to the mounting evidence that abortion bans have made the common experience of first-trimester miscarriage far more dangerous.

Google calendar notifications are not cutting it... Anybody have suggestions on a better "organize all the stuff you have to / want to do" tool?
I'm not even quite sure what I want, other than "tasks that sat around for a year uncompleted should not auto-delete" and "tasks should be able to block other tasks".
I guess the "easy" option is a private github repo that is empty and only used as an issue tracker, but then I'd have to sig…

So #Gentoo #Python eclasses are pretty modern, in the sense that they tend to follow the best practices and standards, and eventually deal with deprecations. Nevertheless, they have a long history and carry quite some historical burden, particularly regarding to naming.
The key point is that the eclasses were conceived as a replacement for the old eclasses: "distutils" and "python". Hence, much like we revision ebuilds, I've named the matching eclasses "distutils-r1" and "python-r1". For consistency, I've also used the "-r1" suffix for the remaining eclasses introduced at the time: "python-any-r1", "python-single-r1" and "python-utils-r1" — even though there were never "r0"s.
It didn't take long to realize my first mistake. I've made the multi-impl eclass effectively the "main" eclass, probably largely inspired by the previous Gentoo recommendations. However, in the end I've found out that for the most use cases (i.e. where "distutils-r1" is not involved), there is no real need for multi-impl, and it makes things much harder. So if I were naming them today, I would have named it "python-multi", to indicate the specific use case — and either avoid designating a default at all, or made "python-single" the default.
What aged even worse is the "distutils-r1" eclass. Admittedly, back when it was conceived, distutils was still largely a thing — and there were people (like me) who avoided unnecessary dependency on setuptools. Of course, nowadays it has been entirely devoured by setuptools, and with #PEP517 even "setuptools" wouldn't be a good name anymore. Nowadays, people are getting confused why they are supposed to use "distutils-r1" for, say, Hatchling.
Admittedly, this is something I could have done differently — PEP517 support was a major migration, and involved an explicit switch. Instead of adding DISTUTILS_USE_PEP517 (what a self-contradictory name) variable, I could have forked the eclass. Why didn't I do that? Because there used to be a lot of code shared between the two paths. Of course, over time they diverged more, and eventually I've dropped the legacy support — but the opportunity to rename was lost.
In fact, as a semi-related fact, I've recognized another design problem with the eclass earlier — I should have gone for two eclasses rather than one: a "python-phase" eclass with generic sub-phase support, and a "distutils" (or later "python-pep517") implementing default sub-phases for the common backends. And again, this is precisely how I could have solved the code reuse problem when I introduced PEP517 support.
But then, I didn't anticipate how the eclasses would end up looking like in the end — and I can't really predict what new challenges the Python ecosystem is going to bring us. And I think it's too late to rename or split stuff — too much busywork on everyone.

I am slowly but surely enjoying Reiner Keller's "Sociology of knowledge approach to discourse". I highly appreciate the level of care towards what is identified/extracted and taken for real. However, as with any other sociological framework, the position of the analyst remains problematic.
Even if one masters the analytical practice, communicating it remains problematic, as language must be used to do so. Traditionally, sociologists attempt to find a new form of language, which often becomes increasingly abstract and incomprehensible.
I wonder what the alternative would be: expressing analytical insights in every possible language or discursive logic (which is practically impossible), or at least in those connected to the analysis. Language translation or 'elif' could be examples of this. However, I also consider 'speaking in your terms' when communicating with individuals from different backgrounds.
#ADSK #Sociology #DiscourseAnalysis

This is of course very bad, but I also found it funny. AI evangelists are suddenly privacy-aware and repeating this as a security risk. And it is. But the idea that using ChatGPT itself hasn’t always been a security risk is ridiculous to me.

TLDR: If you’ve ever used the share function on a ChatGPT chat, that full chat can be found via Google, viewable for anyone in the world.

https:…

@CoMaps@floss.social
The settings offer the option to use ‘Google Fused Location Services’. I assume this is so that this Google service can still be used even if it is disabled in the Android settings. @… offers an alternative #locationService

For example:
- Telling apart photos of cats and dogs is “AI.”
- Making up fake but plausible facts on an arbitrary topic is “AI.”
- Walking is “AI.”
- Doing long multiplication is something we might call “intelligence” in humans, but it is not “AI” because computers have •always• been good at it.
- Winning at checkers •used• to be “AI” because computers didn’t used to be able to do that, but now it’s not “AI” because computers have been good at it for too long.
5/

Grabbed the links for these for @… and might as well post them here too. If you're wondering if the newer Beavis & Butt-head stuff is just as funny as the old stuff, I find it to be. These are new bits, the last one is a recent video review (Sabrina Carpenter) like they used to do and still do-- and I can't get over "does she know that the video ha…

You know, “this” used to be a perfectly innocent word. Nothing special, but a solid citizen of the grammar ecosystem. Who could have predicted it would turn into a major clickbait villain, meaning “We’re not going to tell you what this article is about until you click on it.”
FWIW I think I’m not alone in consciously avoiding clicking on such links.
#enshittification

If any of us #GenX-ers need hearing aids in years to come we'll be pretty chill with it as we're all so used to wearing earbuds so much of the time. I don't think a day goes by when I don't wear one (only ever one). Not all day like, but at some point.

Is it weird to block people you used to be friends with if seeing then makes you legitimately uncomfortable and anxious, or is that an escalation/form of abuse?
#advice #blocking

This U.S. Citizen Recorded an Immigration Arrest. Officers Told Him To Delete It or Face Charges.
The peaceful traffic stop in Florida turned violent after immigration officers arrived and used chokeholds and a stun gun to make arrests.
https://youtu.be/nX7I4znDOKk

Quadratic Programming-Based Posture Manipulation and Thrust-vectoring for Agile Dynamic Walking on Narrow Pathways
Chenghao Wang, Eric Sihite, Kaushik Venkatesh Krishnamurthy, Shreyansh Pitroda, Adarsh Salagame, Alireza Ramezani, Morteza Gharib
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23203

Quadratic Programming-Based Posture Manipulation and Thrust-vectoring for Agile Dynamic Walking on Narrow Pathways
There has been significant advancement in legged robot's agility where they can show impressive acrobatic maneuvers, such as parkour. These maneuvers rely heavily on posture manipulation. To expand the stability and locomotion plasticity, we use the multi-modal ability in our legged-aerial platform, the Husky Beta, to perform thruster-assisted walking. This robot has thrusters on each of its sagittal knee joints which can be used to stabilize its frontal dynamic as it walks. In this work, we pe…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18262 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@a…

Analytic approach to creating homogeneous fields with finite-size magnets
Homogeneous magnetic fields can be generated through the strategic arrangement of permanent magnets. The Halbach array serves as a prominent example of an effective design following this principle. However, it is a two-dimensional approach because it is optimal when placing infinitely long magnets -- line dipoles -- on a circle. If shorter, more realistic magnets are to be used, the optimal arrangement of magnetic moments diverges from the classical Halbach geometry. This paper presents optimal…

Can LLMs and humans be friends? Uncovering factors affecting human-AI intimacy formation
Yeseon Hong, Junhyuk Choi, Minju Kim, Bugeun Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24658

Can LLMs and humans be friends? Uncovering factors affecting human-AI intimacy formation
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in conversational roles, yet little is known about how intimacy emerges in human-LLM interactions. Although previous work emphasized the importance of self-disclosure in human-chatbot interaction, it is questionable whether gradual and reciprocal self-disclosure is also helpful in human-LLM interaction. Thus, this study examined three possible aspects contributing to intimacy formation: gradual self-disclosure, reciprocity, and naturalnes…

Should I be surprised? We just replaced an aging HP ink jet printer with a newer version, also from HP.
About the first thing it did when powered on was to scream about how HP brand ink cartridges must be used, how other cartridges may not work and and that firmware updates may invalidate them in the future.
And that a nearly continuous internet connection is required to use the cartridges that are in the machine, else printing would cease.
This seems to me to be a clear ca…

Tune in this Sunday at 8pm BST (Noon in Vancouver) for this week's #ListeningClub featuring perhaps my very favourite #accordion record all the way through — right up there if I had to pick from any genre it's so nifty
That'll be a treat, so join us, don't give it away …

Machine Learning Experiences: A story of learning AI for use in enterprise software testing that can be used by anyone
Michael Cohoon, Debbie Furman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22064

Machine Learning Experiences: A story of learning AI for use in enterprise software testing that can be used by anyone
This paper details the machine learning (ML) journey of a group of people focused on software testing. It tells the story of how this group progressed through a ML workflow (similar to the CRISP-DM process). This workflow consists of the following steps and can be used by anyone applying ML techniques to a project: gather the data; clean the data; perform feature engineering on the data; splitting the data into two sets, one for training and one for testing; choosing a machine learning model; t…

For example:
- Telling apart photos of cats and dogs is “AI.”
- Making up fake but plausible facts on an arbitrary topic is “AI.”
- Walking is “AI.”
- Doing long multiplication is something we might call “intelligence” in humans, but it is not “AI” because computers have •always• been good at it.
- Winning at checkers •used• to be “AI” because computers didn’t used to be able to do that, but now it’s not “AI” because computers have been good at it for too long.
5/

Something you don’t see any more dept.:
Used to be people would sometimes tuck their napkin into their shirt collar as a bib while eating. When I was a kid it was already mostly only seen in cartoons. I’m old and my hands aren’t as steady as they once were, and I spill stuff on my shirt sometimes. Go to a seafood restaurant and get lobster and they give you a bib with their logo on it, no asking for it necessary. This needs to be re-normalized.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18665 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@a…

Classifying destructive quantum interference in molecular junctions: Towards molecular quantum rulers
Destructive quantum interference in molecular junctions might be used to build molecular quantum rulers, allowing to quantify changes in external control parameters electrically. For this reason, it is important to understand which patterns of destructive quantum interference can occur inside the electronic excitation gap of a molecule, coupled to conducting electrodes. By considering a four-level model, we show that much more complex destructive quantum interference behavior can arise than exp…

Anarchists: often said to be frighteningly violent and/or unhinged because maybe a handful of times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they used bombs or guns to target literal blood-soaked tyrants and help usher in the end of feudalism.
People who manufacture, sell, buy, and use guns and bombs daily to kill another nation's conscripted commoners along with a healthy dose of completely innocent civilians, who perpetuate genocide and other war crimes every year: heroes, I guess? "Civilized?" "Great leaders."
The distinction of course is that one obeys the "rules of society" about who it's okay to wantonly murder (whose "lives matter," in fact) while the other does not, and you've been trained to believe that anyone who violates those rules must not have any principles at all. All along, the rules have been crap.
#anarchy

I don't know if it'll be part of the government plan, but one thing that would help people attempting to measure the quality of their food intake might be a statutory requirement for the sellers of packaged food to publish ingredients and nutrition information as open data (with UPCs). This could then be used by apps (such as those using openfoodfacts.org).

Healthy food revolution to tackle obesity epidemic
New healthy food standard will see big businesses promoting healthier food and drink

As a marketer by profession I feel this very deeply and struggle to find a way to communicate to fellow people on the left that the methods and tools for communicating messages and persuading masses of people SHOULD be used, as effectively as possible, to promote facts and values we align with.
I get that power is uncomfortable when so many parties visibly abuse it for malicious purposes.
But power in and of itself is a tools that needs to be wielded, and we should be cognizant about targeting it at changes that will improve our societies and help us and the planet.
Yes, don’t use power blindly. Don’t manipulate people. But using persuasive, effective tactics for mass communication to educate people on the truth and get them aboard initiatives that will help them??? Why is that evil?
It feels like the left sees power, influence, and thus marketing / PR / propaganda as too black-and-white. We need to be comfortable in navigating the grey. https://sauropods.win/@futurebird/114913847088444610

We don't need AI to produce nonsensical gibberish. Humans are exceedingly good at that all on their own.

New pre-print! #ai
**Universal pre-training by iterated random computation.**
⌨️🐒 A monkey behind a typewriter will produce the collected works of Shakespeare eventually.
💻🐒 But what if we put a monkey behind a computer?
⌨️🐒 needs to be lucky enough to type all characters of all of Shakespeare correctly. 💻🐒 only needs to be lucky enough to type a program for Shakespeare.

Universal pre-training by iterated random computation
We investigate the use of randomly generated data for the sake of pre-training a model. We justify this approach theoretically from the perspective of algorithmic complexity, building on recent research that shows that sequence models can be trained to approximate Solomonoff induction. We derive similar, but complementary theoretical results. We show empirically that synthetically generated data can be used to pre-train a model before the data is seen. We replicate earlier results that models t…

Staining and locking computer vision models without retraining
Oliver J. Sutton, Qinghua Zhou, George Leete, Alexander N. Gorban, Ivan Y. Tyukin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22000

Staining and locking computer vision models without retraining
We introduce new methods of staining and locking computer vision models, to protect their owners' intellectual property. Staining, also known as watermarking, embeds secret behaviour into a model which can later be used to identify it, while locking aims to make a model unusable unless a secret trigger is inserted into input images. Unlike existing methods, our algorithms can be used to stain and lock pre-trained models without requiring fine-tuning or retraining, and come with provable, comput…

Convex Approximations of Random Constrained Markov Decision Processes
V Varagapriya, Vikas Vikram Singh, Abdel Lisser
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24815 http…

Convex Approximations of Random Constrained Markov Decision Processes
Constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) are used as a decision-making framework to study the long-run performance of a stochastic system. It is well-known that a stationary optimal policy of a CMDP problem under discounted cost criterion can be obtained by solving a linear programming problem when running costs and transition probabilities are exactly known. In this paper, we consider a discounted cost CMDP problem where the running costs and transition probabilities are defined using ran…

Optimization of Fragment State Spaces within the Excitonic Renormalization Framework
Marco Bauer, Patrick Norman, Andreas Dreuw, Anthony D. Dutoi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23484

Optimization of Fragment State Spaces within the Excitonic Renormalization Framework
The recently proposed excitonic renormalization framework presents an alternative ansatz to elec- tronic structure theory of weakly interacting fragments. It makes use of absolutely localized orbitals and correlated states evaluated on isolated fragments, which are then used to recover the interaction in an ab-initio manner based on a biorthogonal framework. The correlated monomer information can be heavily truncated, and the Hamiltonian can be expanded in a rapidly converging series, allow- in…

were you ever a directionless young person. did you used to be unable to tell how you felt, or unable to feel, about anything. did you used to lack the capacity to want anything. did you used to never feel fully real. if so, how did you fix it

from my link log —
Making emacs tramp go brrrr.
https://coredumped.dev/2025/06/18/making-tramp-go-brrrr./
saved 2025-06-23

«75% of subjects were expected to use AI at work. 22% felt pressured to use AI when it was not appropriate. So 16% of subjects just say they used the AI when they didn’t! People feel they would be putting their job at risk if they pushed back on AI directives.»
Wow, "my manager would rather believe my work came from the garbage generator" must make any bullshit job even more bullshit.
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/07/25/16-of-employees-pretend-to-use-ai-at-work-to-please-their-boss/

Leveraging In-Context Learning for Political Bias Testing of LLMs
Patrick Haller, Jannis Vamvas, Rico Sennrich, Lena A. J\"ager
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22232

Leveraging In-Context Learning for Political Bias Testing of LLMs
A growing body of work has been querying LLMs with political questions to evaluate their potential biases. However, this probing method has limited stability, making comparisons between models unreliable. In this paper, we argue that LLMs need more context. We propose a new probing task, Questionnaire Modeling (QM), that uses human survey data as in-context examples. We show that QM improves the stability of question-based bias evaluation, and demonstrate that it may be used to compare instruct…

EMU and the DRAGNs I: A Catalogue of DRAGNs
Ray P. Norris, Miranda Yew, Evan Crawford, Nikhel Gupta, Lawrence Rudnick, H. Andernach, Miroslav D. Filipovi\'c, Yjan A. Gordon, Andrew M. Hopkins, Laurence Park, Michael J. I. Brown, Ana Jimenez-Gallardo, S. S. Shabala
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23337…

EMU and the DRAGNs I: A Catalogue of DRAGNs
We present a catalogue of 3557 Double Radio sources associated with Active Galactic Nuclei (DRAGNs) from the First Pilot Survey of the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU), observed at 944 MHz with the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope, covering 270 deg^2. We have extracted and identified each source by eye, tagged it with a morphological type and measured its parameters. The resulting catalogue will be used in subsequent papers to explore the properties of these …

I just used a Family Circus reference to explain what I thought of a coworkers proposed sw architecture plan.
It will work, but it will suck.

I have my share of issues with Parkrose Permaculture, but she has a lot of things I do strongly agree with. I can't stress enough that you never dehumanize your enemies. You can respond appropriately to violence. You can defend yourself from them by any means necessary. But you do not dehumanize them. You always limit your response to the minimum necessary to defend yourself.
There are a number of former Nazi skins who became antifascists after realizing they were wrong. Those folks tend to be some of the most dedicated because they feel a debt, and some of the most knowledgeable because they were there. Coming out of these types of cults, police included, is hard and takes time. A lot of us don't have the ability to work with them. But some do.
By repeatedly humanizing your opponent, you can break some of them. The #Seattle Police Department was not defunded but saw a massive reduction in numbers because their morale was destroyed. Some people will never change. Some people are broken and feel like they need the power. But if you change one person's mind, even give them something to think about, it's a crack. If even one cop quits, that's one less trained gun pointed at you in the future.
The 18 year old marines and federalized national guard troops out there are literally kids. A lot of them came from poor communities. They are being used in a way they haven't been trained to do, doing things they (should) have been told are not legal. They joined to get out of poverty, to go to college, or to "defend the American people" (regardless of how misguided that is). Few, if any, of them joined to abuse people. They will be especially open to persuasion.
Remind those troops that they are carrying out illegal orders, that they are being called on to violate their oath to protect the constitution, that they are suppressing the free speech of the fellow Americans they swore to defend. Remind them that the people they could be illegally arresting now are just like their parents, their neighbors, their families, the friends who didn't join. Remind them that this is the first step. They will be called on to kill Americans if they let this keep going.
Remind them ICE sleeps in hotels while they sleep on the ground. Remind them that their drunk and incompetent leadership thinks of them as disposable tools. Remind them that some of these people are out protesting *for them* against cuts to the VA and other services. Remind them that the people they're defending refuse to make college free so they can recruit from poor schools. Remind them that they will always be welcome when they're ready to join the side of freedom and justice.
When you dehumanize your enemies, you unify them. When you humanize your enemies, you can divide them. There is no weapon available to us right now so powerful as compassion.
https://youtu.be/YtWOYUDMsBw

Back when #Billionaire #Bezos bought the #WaPo , the DC newspaper claiming to shed light on daily doings in the nation's capital , that paper was selling a quarter million copies a day,... Now after Bezos has neutered the news by pu…

Non-Hamiltonian 2-regular Digraphs
Munagala V. S. Ramanath
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21381 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21381…

Non-Hamiltonian 2-regular Digraphs
In earlier papers, we showed a decomposition of 2-diregular digraphs (2-dds) and used it to provide some sufficient conditions for these graphs to be non-Hamiltonian; we also showed a close connection between the permanent and determinant of the adjacency matrices of these digraphs and gave some enumeration and generation results. In the present paper we extend the discussion to a larger class of digraphs, introduce the notions of routes and quotients and use them to provide additional criteria…

Well back before the 2016 election I remember seeing a news video in which Trump said something about how, if he ran for the presidency, he could make money. That video seems to have vanished beyond our event horizon. It would be nice if someone could find and resurrect it.
Anyway, FFOTUS has made that video come true:
"Trump Used Your Tax Dollars to Open His New Scottish Golf Course"

Trump Used Your Tax Dollars to Open His New Scottish Golf Course
Donald Trump inaugurated a new, private golf course in Scotland during an official state trip funded by taxpayers.

That took exactly two weeks and a bit.
Your laptop shouldn't be just a workhorse, it is an expression of you, used for work as well.
Hence my install of Slackware KDE on it, it was by far the best I used for the past year or so.
With a ThinkPad X13 gen 1 liveslaks turned out to be a bit of a challenge, but conferring with @… in the background …

Today I saw a train I've never seen before at Luxembourg central train station. It seemed very old, with "Rheingold" written on it.
Searching online, I cannot find anything about it still running today. The route it used to operate does not pass through Luxembourg.
It seemed to be the main stop on it's way to Köln.
Does anyone know more about it? ( @…

The worst thing besides “Liquid Glass” about iOS 26 on the iPad may be that they took away Split View and slide over, two features I used all the time on it. Now you need to awkwardly self-scale windows and that only works with updated apps.
I’d recommend not upgrading unless they fix it.

Is Ozone a Reliable Proxy for Molecular Oxygen? II. The impact of N$_2$O on the O$_2$-O$_3$ relationship for Earth-like atmospheres
Thea Kozakis, Jo\~ao M. Mendon\c{c}a, Lars A. Buchhave, Luisa M. Lara
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23279

Is Ozone a Reliable Proxy for Molecular Oxygen? II. The impact of N$_2$O on the O$_2$-O$_3$ relationship for Earth-like atmospheres
Molecular oxygen (O2) will be an important molecule in the search for biosignatures in terrestrial planetary atmospheres in the coming decades. In particular, O2 combined with a reducing gas is thought to be strong evidence for disequilibrium caused by surface life. However, there are circumstances where it would be very difficult or impossible to detect O2, in which cases it has been suggested that ozone (O3), the photochemical product of O2, could be used instead. Unfortunately, the O2-O3 rel…

Picked up a new android phone yesterday afternoon so still finding my way around.
The things I thought would be a hassle transferring across weren't so bad but myGov and myID do not play well together when you have a new phone.
myID resets so basic mode so it can't be used to log into myGov and of course, myGov doesn't recognise my password any more. Reset the password and even got an email saying I had successfully set a new password. Still doesn't work.
…

Data-Driven Intrusion Detection in Vehicles: Integrating Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) with Machine Learning
Shuhao Bian, Milad Farsi, Nasser L. Azad, Chris Hobbs
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22404

Data-Driven Intrusion Detection in Vehicles: Integrating Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) with Machine Learning
In the realm of Cyber-Physical System (CPS), accurately identifying attacks without detailed knowledge of the system's parameters remains a major challenge. When it comes to Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), identifying the parameters of vehicle dynamics could be impractical or prohibitively costly. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel framework for attack detection in vehicles that effectively addresses the uncertainty in their dynamics. Our method integrates the widely used U…

Noted while reading: 'a data structure or a block of code are things that make implicit and subjective arguments about how to see the world. This is possibly the single most important basic insight that Digital Humanities as a field needs to impart, because it affects so much of the world around us' - excellent post by @…

Meet a Historian: James Baillie on Digital Humanities and the Medieval Caucasus
Note from the Editor: I’m excited to feature another guest post with you all! This week we have James Baillie discussing how digital humanities and prosopographic methods can be used to bette…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20121 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLO_…

The Computability Path Order for Beta-Eta-Normal Higher-Order Rewriting (Full Version)
We lift the computability path order and its extensions from plain higher-order rewriting to higher-order rewriting on beta-eta-normal forms where matching modulo beta-eta is employed. The resulting order NCPO is shown to be useful on practical examples. In particular, it can handle systems where its cousin NHORPO fails even when it is used together with the powerful transformation technique of neutralization. We also argue that automating NCPO efficiently is straightforward using SAT/SMT solve…

Definitely encouraging as far as shipping emissions goes, and I appreciate that the quicklime used in the process will be produced with renewable energy - but, as I understand the normal process for making quicklime, limestone aka calcium carbonate (CaCO3) is baked at high temperatures, driving the chemical reaction CaCO3 > CaO CO2.
And what is not addressed is how to manage the CO2 from this reaction - Yes, it can (in principle) be captured, but then what do you do with it? This…

Definitely encouraging as far as shipping emissions goes, and I appreciate that the quicklime used in the process will be produced with renewable energy - but, as I understand the normal process for making quicklime, limestone aka calcium carbonate (CaCO3) is baked at high temperatures, driving the chemical reaction CaCO3 > CaO CO2.
And what is not addressed is how to manage the CO2 from this reaction - Yes, it can (in principle) be captured, but then what do you do with it? This…

Researchers demonstrate a Rowhammer-style attack on Nvidia's RTX A6000, widely used in cloud services, and say it would likely work against other Nvidia GPUs (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/

Nvidia chips become the first GPUs to fall to Rowhammer bit-flip attacks
GPUhammer is the first to flip bits in onboard GPU memory. It likely won’t be the last.

If posts on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and the like are used to train AI, it might be a good idea to litter your texts with spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, nonsense words, mixed languages, acronyms, etc., to foil those efforts. 😉

Properties for Paths in Graph Databases
Fernando Orejas, Elvira Pino, Renzo Angles, E. Pasarella, Nikos Milonakis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19329 https://…

Properties for Paths in Graph Databases
This paper presents a formalism for defining properties of paths in graph databases, which can be used to restrict the number of solutions to navigational queries. In particular, our formalism allows us to define quantitative properties such as length or accumulated cost, which can be used as query filters. Furthermore, it enables the identification and removal of paths that may be considered ill-formed. The new formalism is defined in terms of an operational semantics for the query language …

Welcome to Berlin Buzzwords 2025! 
Be sure not to miss our keynote speaker, @…, who will be giving a talk on „Unpacking Digital Sovereignty: How to avoid fueling the nationalist rise," which commences at 9:35 am at stage Kesselhaus.
 
Learn more:

Unpacking Digital Sovereignty: How to avoid fueling the nationalist rise
With the new ruling coalition of Trump, Musk and Big Tech, European digital sovereignty seems to be the widely accepted solution to break free from US companies that are used to threaten European governments. The EU is reviving industrial policy and is willing to invest a lot of money into digital sovereignty - but which problems exactly should it address, and what should be part of the solution? This talk shows that digital sovereignty is prone to open the door to a nationalist agenda which fa…

A Fast Parallel Median Filtering Algorithm Using Hierarchical Tiling
Louis Sugy (NVIDIA)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19926 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19926

A Fast Parallel Median Filtering Algorithm Using Hierarchical Tiling
Median filtering is a non-linear smoothing technique widely used in digital image processing to remove noise while retaining sharp edges. It is particularly well suited to removing outliers (impulse noise) or granular artifacts (speckle noise). However, the high computational cost of median filtering can be prohibitive. Sorting-based algorithms excel with small kernels but scale poorly with increasing kernel diameter, in contrast to constant-time methods characterized by higher constant factors…

{constructive} prints code that can be used to recreate R objects. Like dput, but better... #rstats

Display Idiomatic Code to Construct Most R Objects
Prints code that can be used to recreate R objects. In a sense it is similar to base

For anyone waiting for a bookmark export feature of the #Vanadium browser, here's a workaround that seems to be working:
https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Vanadium/issues/…

TIL that one of the singers on one of my favorite blues bands, the very entertaining "Saffire: the Uppity Blues Women", used to be a computer programmer. I'm sure she was great at that too, but I'm glad she gave it up!

Let It Go? Not Quite: Addressing Item Cold Start in Sequential Recommendations with Content-Based Initialization
Anton Pembek, Artem Fatkulin, Anton Klenitskiy, Alexey Vasilev
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19473

Let It Go? Not Quite: Addressing Item Cold Start in Sequential Recommendations with Content-Based Initialization
Many sequential recommender systems suffer from the cold start problem, where items with few or no interactions cannot be effectively used by the model due to the absence of a trained embedding. Content-based approaches, which leverage item metadata, are commonly used in such scenarios. One possible way is to use embeddings derived from content features such as textual descriptions as initialization for the model embeddings. However, directly using frozen content embeddings often results in sub…

This "pattern" here appears to be unused:
https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/blob/021783860f7e628f7c4e0c101707cd4250e6d61f/drivers/ram/rockchip/sdram_rv1126.c#L1656
Well, it is used in the RK3566…

u-boot/drivers/ram/rockchip/sdram_rv1126.c at 021783860f7e628f7c4e0c101707cd4250e6d61f · u-boot/u-boot
"Das U-Boot" Source Tree. Contribute to u-boot/u-boot development by creating an account on GitHub.

Human Traces 👤
人类的踪迹 👤
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1995
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

Yiding Cao Geld mit PayPal.Me senden
Folgen Sie dem Link PayPal.Me/dingsterdingster und geben Sie den Betrag ein. Es ist bequem und sicher. Sie haben noch kein PayPal-Konto? Kein Problem.

@… To add an important side note: In 0.5 the async client uses ReactPHP while the sync client used a howbrew internal event loop. Making them both non-blocking, be it internally only for one of them

Just updated my #Samsung software and spent the next thirty minutes trying to get everything back to how it used to be, turning off unhelpful and annoying UI tweaks they've decided to add. Fuck this. Can I just have the security updates please?

#TIL that blowing vs sucking the same spot on a harmonica produces notes that are roughly a half-step apart, while adjacent blown/sucked notes are roughly a whole step apart. I always wondered why I couldn't play any melodies on harmonicas because there would always be some notes I just couldn't find no matter how hard I tried, and now I know the answer isn't some tricky block-holes-with-your-tongue technique like I used to think.
I always knew blowing vs sucking produced different tones, but I thought that they were whole-step transpositions of each other such that any note in one modality would appear somewhere in the other.
My wife showed me this fact and when I asked where she learned it, she said she just figured it out herself...

I'm at best a combat C programmer so this latest zmap fix may be perfectly reasonable.
https://github.com/zmap/zmap/pull/944
Is it common, and is it a best practice to not free memory allocated in some use cases? That may be two separation questions.
I have always freed memory allo…

The libxml2 maintainer is basically shrugging his shoulders and saying "deal with your own fucking security issues; libxml was never meant to be used in your projects" to google and the rest of the giant corporations that are using his labor without contributing back. I'm totally on board with that.
https://

Triaging security issues reported by third parties (#913) · Issues · GNOME / libxml2 · GitLab
I have to spend several hours each week dealing with security issues reported by third parties. Most of these issues aren't critical but it's still a lot of...

Please raise your hand if you've disabled PowerShell 2.0 on your Windows systems. What? Didn't know that was a thing you should do? PowerShell 2.0 does not have any of the modern logging and security features that newer versions like v5.1 or 7.x have. But if you don't remove or disable the old 2.0 version, it can be used and abused by malware, info stealers, ransomware operators, etc. Here's an article that provides you with several ways to remove it from you systems (while k…

How to Disable PowerShell 2.0 Effectively
Discover how to disable PowerShell 2.0 effortlessly. This succinct guide leads you through essential steps for securing your systems.

I've just noticed that my railway pass no longer carries an explicit "valid (…) in any class" annotation. It still has an "X" in the "class" field, but that's not that cool.
(Explanation: many years ago, there used to be a few "RegioExpress" trains with first class seats. Of course, barely anybody cared about that, and I doubt people actually bought first class tickets. Alas, these are long gone.)
#rail

Thousands of people are being relocated to the UK as part of a secret £850m scheme set up after a personal data leak of Afghans who supported British forces, it can now be reported.
https://www.

It seems to me that MCP is a modern, cross-platform corollary to the Mac ecosystem’s AppleScript dictionaries. It's a great standard for discovering API endpoints and calling them in a standard way. (And as a bonus, it doesn't involve keeping track of four-byte codes.)
Because it's associated with the AI buzz, lots of developers are integrating it. But it's not limited to and doesn't have to be used with AI; there's a great opportunity to make it easy for humans…

rant on software dev practices
What is it with P5js and virtually all its ecosystem (like Q5js) that, still today, didn't manage to _properly_ package their libraries to be distributed and used via package managers?
Same with their insistence to push global resources and state everywhere... and of course virtually not documenting any of the truly delicate details, just the trivial stuff that could be auto-discovered by relying on auto-complete tools.
I kind of understand wanting to keep the vanilla experience alive, making it "easy" for novices... but that shouldn't be at odds with more "professionalized" production pipelines, at least *not that much*.
For example, with Q5js:
- The NPM packages could be mentioned in their documentation (they are not, even though they are official)
- The NPM packages could define proper exports (same for the JS modules themselves), not forcing us to rely on relative paths to files in node_modules... 🤦
- Globals could be at least namespaced... of course, it would be much, much better if they didn't exist at all.
I'm writing this in 2025, not 1993... and I'm... "triggered".
At this point I'll have to check if I have any other neuro-condition beyond ADHD that makes me "obsessed" with technical flaws, because it seems to be a "me problem" when either virtually nobody sees that as a huge collection of fatal design flaws... or they see it and don't care at all.

Empowering Digital Agriculture: A Privacy-Preserving Framework for Data Sharing and Collaborative Research
Osama Zafar, Rosemarie Santa Gonz\'alez, Mina Namazi, Alfonso Morales, Erman Ayday
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20872

Empowering Digital Agriculture: A Privacy-Preserving Framework for Data Sharing and Collaborative Research
Data-driven agriculture, which integrates technology and data into agricultural practices, has the potential to improve crop yield, disease resilience, and long-term soil health. However, privacy concerns, such as adverse pricing, discrimination, and resource manipulation, deter farmers from sharing data, as it can be used against them. To address this barrier, we propose a privacy-preserving framework that enables secure data sharing and collaboration for research and development while mitigat…

Parameter Identifiability of Linear-Compartmental Mammillary Models
Katherine Clemens, Jonathan Martinez, Anne Shiu, Michaela Thompson, Benjamin Warren
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21889

Parameter Identifiability of Linear-Compartmental Mammillary Models
Linear compartmental models are a widely used tool for analyzing systems arising in biology, medicine, and more. In such settings, it is essential to know whether model parameters can be recovered from experimental data. This is the identifiability problem. For a class of linear compartmental models with one input and one output, namely, those for which the underlying graph is a bidirected tree, Bortner et al. completely characterized which such models are structurally identifiability, which me…

Spirit of the West, "Darkhouse", *1988*:
> We're watching the right hand
> Not watching the left hand
> Soon we'll be watching the world turn
> With no hands at all
> We're really amazing
> This trail we are blazing
> Burning the bridge between our rise and fall....
> We used to dig! lift! heave!
> Now "we" has turned to "it"
> Programs! computes!
> But hardly u…

Related to understanding firearms, "rifles" and hand guns tend to be rifled. Rifling is grooving that runs in a helical pattern down the barrel. When purchasing a firearm, it's important to check the rifling.
First check that the firearm is unloaded. Empty or remove the magazine, cycle the weapon. Next, check again that it's unloaded by looking both down the barrel and into the magazine. Now, shine a light down the barrel and look down it. In the absence of a light, you may be able to reflect light off your thumbnail.
Rifling should look as though it's drawn on with a sharp pencil, and the barrel should look otherwise completely smooth and clean. If the rifling looks like bumpy mountains, then the owner probably used corrosive ammo and didn't clean it enough. It will probably still shoot, but not at all accurately.
Both the rifling and the pin can be used in forensic analysis to match a bullet to a gun. I don't honestly know how accurate this is because a lot of forensic "science" is just made up stuff that relies on the CSI effect and doesn't actually work as advertised.
However, not all firearms are not all rifled. Shotguns are "smoothbore" firearms, meaning they lack rifling. It is not possible to perform forensic analysis of a smoothbore firearm. It *is* possible to check for powder on the hands of someone who has used a firearm within the last few days, but it's not possible to distinguish between firing inside and outside a range.
I've been gathering all kinds of tidbits like this, partially just out of curiosity and partially because I've been wanting to write a story about a revolutionary group fighting a modern authoritarian society. I'm always happy to learn other bits, if anyone has anything else I could throw in my narrative (whenever I finally get back to writing it).

hmm, trying to puzzle out whether the C standard allows pool allocators
where a program malloc()s a large block, carves it up into many objects of different types, and free()s it/them in one go
7.24.3 says the allocation can be used for an object or an array of objects which seems to forbid heterogeneous types
but the discussion of effective types in 6.5.1 allows much more freedom

Reflection positivity in Euclidean formulations of relativistic quantum mechanics of particles
Gohin Shaikh Samad, W. N. Polyzou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20526

Reflection positivity in Euclidean formulations of relativistic quantum mechanics of particles
This paper discusses the general structure of reflection positive Euclidean covariant distributions that can be used to construct Euclidean representations of relativistic quantum mechanical models of systems of a finite number of degrees of freedom. Because quantum systems of a finite number of degrees of freedom are not local, reflection positivity is not as restrictive as it is in a local field theory. The motivation for the Euclidean approach is that it is straightforward to construct exact…

It turns out "my" shirt design was stolen and used by some US assholes who now sell a Rob Anybody t-shirt.
I can't do anything about that, except giving everybody the design for free - if it has to be out there, nobody should profit from it.
If you end up using it, please PLEASE donate to one of Pratchett's favorite charities or at least to somebody in need.
And add a #GNUTerryPratchett

The United States is moving B-2 bombers to the Pacific island of Guam,
as Donald Trump weighs whether the United States should take part in Israel’s strikes against Iran.
It was unclear whether the bomber deployment is tied to Middle East tensions.
The B-2 can be equipped to carry America’s 30,000lb GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator,
designed to destroy targets deep underground.
That is the weapon that experts say could be used to strike Iran’s nuclear program, i…

Trump officially violates Emoluments clause by taking a bribe… again.
https://flipboard.com/@npr/u.s.-news-aspd61boz/-/a-WZ2HYSHPR3WMNXB1Zz2RYw:a:3195441-/0

Trump administration officially accepts jet from Qatar for use as Air Force One
The United States has officially accepted a Boeing 747-8 luxury jetliner as a gift from the Qatari government, and the Air Force has been tasked with upgrading it to be used as a new plane for President Trump, according to an Air Force spokesperson. The spokesperson, who spoke on the condition of …

The Internet IS a *set* of physical things that can be blown up by bombs.
However, where there used to be about a dozen places where you’d need to plant a substantial bomb to wreck the Internet, while now there are hundreds you’d need to hit simultaneously to affect most users. It isn’t even really feasible to figure out where those places all are, because the live interconnections are so complex and the fallback links are entirely invisible normally.

jwz (@jwz@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image I am really enjoying this series W0rldtr33, which takes the positions that A) the Internet is very literally evil, and B) the Internet is a physical thing that can be blown up with bombs... https://jwz.org/b/ykoy

Single-photon loading of polar molecules into an optical trap
Bart J. Schellenberg, Eifion H. Prinsen, Janko Nauta, Luk\'a\v{s} F. Pa\v{s}teka, Anastasia Borschevsky, Steven Hoekstra
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17521 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17521 https://arxiv.org/html/2507.17521
arXiv:2507.17521v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We propose a scheme to transfer molecules from a slow beam into an optical trap using only a single photon absorption and emission cycle. The efficiency of such a scheme is numerically explored for BaF using realistic experimental parameters. The technique makes use of the state-dependent potential in an external electric field to trap molecules from an initial velocity of order 10m/s. A rapid optical transition at the point where the molecules come to a standstill in the electric field potential irreversibly transfers them into a ~7mK optical dipole trap. For a pulsed Stark decelerated beam, we estimated the per-shot efficiency to be ~0.04% or up to ~103 molecules, with a potential factor 20 improvement when the fields are synchronously modulated with the arriving velocity components. The irreversibility of the scheme allows for larger numbers to be built up over time. Since this scheme does not rely on a closed cycling transition for laser cooling, it broadens the range of molecules that can be used for research on cold molecular chemistry, quantum information, and fundamental interactions in optical traps.
toXiv_bot_toot

Some features of the extended phase space approach to quantization of gravity
T. P. Shestakova
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17371 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.…

Some features of the extended phase space approach to quantization of gravity
In this paper, I emphasize those features of the extended phase space approach to quantization of gravity that distinguish it among other approaches. First of all, it is the conjecture about non-trivial topology of the Universe which was supported by Wheeler, Hawking and other founders of quantum gravity. However, this conjecture appears to be in contradiction with the assumption about asymptotic states that is used in the path integral quantization of gauge theories. The presence of asymptotic…

Human Voice is Unique
Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18182 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18182

Human Voice is Unique
Voice is increasingly being used as a biometric entity in many applications. These range from speaker identification and verification systems to human profiling technologies that attempt to estimate myriad aspects of the speaker's persona from their voice. However, for an entity to be a true biometric identifier, it must be unique. This paper establishes a first framework for calculating the uniqueness of human voice objectively. The approach in this paper is based on statistical considerations…

Update - I think I managed to come to a compromise on timeline and firmly established that no AI will be used for this project.
They agreed, although they did make say that “it’s as if you decided to dig up a garden using a shovel instead of a tractor. As long as it’s done, it’s done”
I don’t wanna pick a fight so I left the comment alone but now that I think of it I have two responses:
- who digs a garden with a tractor?
- last I checked tractor didn’t have a ~30% chance of lying about the dirt they did or up to 70% odds of just giving up on working if the ground was too hard to dig

Quantum sensing of displacements with stabilized GKP states
Lautaro Labarca, Sara Turcotte, Alexandre Blais, Baptiste Royer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20627

Quantum sensing of displacements with stabilized GKP states
We demonstrate how recent protocols developed for the stabilization of Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) states can be used for the estimation of two-quadrature displacement sensing, with sensitivities approaching the multivariate quantum Cramer-Rao bound. Thanks to the stabilization, this sensor is backaction evading and can function continuously without reset, making it well suited for the detection of itinerant signals. Additionally, we provide numerical simulations showing that the protocol c…

A bit of context that might be needed for this story about a 2010 website, is that prior to 2011 https wasn't widely used outside of e-commerce. The release of Firesheep in October 2010 led to a push for site authentication to go over https, and the 2013 Snowden revelations shifted the web towards encrypt all transmission.
https…

The CIA Secretly Ran a Star Wars Fan Site
The site, starwarsweb.net, was a covert CIA communications tool. It has pictures of Yoda and C-3PO on it.

Yesterday customs finally released our stuff, after 5 weeks or so of "next week it will be done". So, today we drove 8 hours to Buenos Aires. And tomorrow morning we'll load up the stuff and drive 8 hours back. 🫠
The good news is that we can stop using the camping kitchen utensils we've used so far. 😄🏕️

Human Traces 👤
人类的踪迹 👤
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1995
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

Yiding Cao Geld mit PayPal.Me senden
Folgen Sie dem Link PayPal.Me/dingsterdingster und geben Sie den Betrag ein. Es ist bequem und sicher. Sie haben noch kein PayPal-Konto? Kein Problem.

While not directly related to the cluster, we got a weather station the other week. keeping an eye on temperatures is still high on the priority list. So scaling work down when it gets to hot outside, as a precaution, is on the list to implement.
The weather station will be one of 3 metrics that can be used to terminate pods.
1) Node temperature goes above 60
2) Home office temperature goes above 40
3) Outside temperature goes above 30

Ukraine announced on June 13 that its short-range Sapsan ballistic missile would go into mass production
-- a major development in Kyiv's ongoing efforts to domestically produce the weapons it needs to fight Russia's full-scale invasion.
As Ukraine faces growing challenges in securing weapons from Western partners, and Russia continues launching drone and missile strikes on civilians, the development of Ukraine’s missile production is seen as a critical step toward strength…

Tired of military aid delays, Ukraine has designed its own ballistic missile — and it’s already in mass-production
Ukraine announced on June 13 that it's short-range Sapsan ballistic missile would go into mass production, a major development in Kyiv's ongoing efforts to domestically produce the weapons it needs to fight Russia's full-scale invasion. As Ukraine faces growing challenges in securing weapons from Western partners, and Russia continues launching drone and missile strikes on civilians, the development of Ukraine’s missile production is seen as a critical step toward strengthening its defense c…

AI, AGI, and learning efficiency
An addendum to this: I'm someone who would accurately be called "anti-AI" in the modern age, yet I'm also an "AI researcher" in some ways (have only dabbled in neutral nets).
I don't like:
- AI systems that are the product of labor abuses towards the data workers who curate their training corpora.
- AI systems that use inordinate amounts of water and energy during an intensifying climate catastrophe.
- AI systems that are fundamentally untrustworthy and which reinforce and amplify human biases, *especially* when those systems are exposed in a way that invites harms.
- AI systems which are designed to "save" my attention or brain bandwidth but such my doing so cripple my understating of the things I might use them for when I fact that understanding was the thing I was supposed to be using my time to gain, and where the later lack of such understanding will be costly to me.
- AI systems that are designed by and whose hype fattens the purse of people who materially support genocide and the construction of concentration campus (a.k.a. fascists).
In other words, I do not like and except in very extenuating circumstances I will not use ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, etc.
On the other hand, I do like:
- AI research as an endeavor to discover new technologies.
- Generative AI as a research topic using a spectrum of different methods.
- Speculating about non-human intelligences, including artificial ones, and including how to behave ethically towards them.
- Large language models as a specific technique, and autoencoders and other neural networks, assuming they're used responsibly in terms of both resource costs & presentation to end users.
I write this because I think some people (especially folks without CS backgrounds) may feel that opposing AI for all the harms it's causing runs the risk of opposing technological innovation more broadly, and/or may feel there's a risk that they will be "left behind" as everyone else embraces the hype and these technologies inevitability become ubiquitous and essential (I know I feel this way sometimes). Just know that is entirely possible and logically consistent to both oppose many forms of modern AI while also embracing and even being optimistic about AI research, and that while LLMs are currently all the rage, they're not the endpoint of what AI will look like in the future, and their downsides are not inherent in AI development.

The GAPS Programme at TNG LXVIII. Characterization of the outer substellar companion around HD 72659 with a multi-technique approach
A. Ruggieri, A. Sozzetti, S. Desidera, D. Mesa, R. Gratton, F. Marzari, M. Bonavita, K. Biazzo, V. D'Orazi, C. Ginski, M. Meyer, L. Malavolta, M. Pinamonti, D. Barbato, C. Lazzoni, A. F. Lanza, L. Mancini, L. Naponiello, D. Nardiello, T. Zingales, M. Rainer, G. Scandariato, P. Giacobbe, R. Cosentino, A. Fiorenzano, R. Claudi

The GAPS Programme at TNG LXVIII. Characterization of the outer substellar companion around HD 72659 with a multi-technique approach
Before discovering the first exoplanets, the Radial Velocity (RV) method had been used for decades to discover binary stars. Despite significant advancements in this technique, it is limited by the intrinsic mass-inclination degeneracy that can be broken when combining RVs with astrometry, which allows us to determine the orbital inclination, or direct imaging, from which we can estimate the true mass of the target. HD 72659 is a solar analog known to host a gas giant on a $\sim 10$-yr orbit an…

Domain Knowledge in Requirements Engineering: A Systematic Mapping Study
Marina Ara\'ujo, J\'ulia Ara\'ujo, Romeu Oliveira, Lucas Romao, Marcos Kalinowski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20754

Domain Knowledge in Requirements Engineering: A Systematic Mapping Study
[Context] Domain knowledge is recognized as a key component for the success of Requirements Engineering (RE), as it provides the conceptual support needed to understand the system context, ensure alignment with stakeholder needs, and reduce ambiguity in requirements specification. Despite its relevance, the scientific literature still lacks a systematic consolidation of how domain knowledge can be effectively used and operationalized in RE. [Goal] This paper addresses this gap by offering a com…

Trump appears eager to create optics that support his claim that public dissent constitutes an existential threat to the nation.
He also apparently seeks to get the American public used to seeing our armed forces in a new light.
In the president’s version of America, the military should be seen less as an apolitical body loyal to the Constitution.
-- Rather, it should be viewed as an institution that serves at the behest of a leader and his ideological and political agen…

Opinion | Trump Wants You to Get Used to This
The president wants to get Americans used to seeing the armed forces in a new light.

❝We humans are stability-seeking creatures. Getting accustomed to what used to seem unthinkable can feel like an accomplishment. And when the unthinkable recedes at least a bit…it’s easy to mistake it for proof that the dark times are ending.
But these comparatively small victories don’t alter the direction of our transformation — they don’t even slow it down measurably — even while they appeal to our deep need to normalize.…And so just when we most need to act — while there is indeed room for action and some momentum to the resistance — we tend to be lulled into complacency by the sense of relief on the one hand and boredom on the other.❞
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/opinion/trump-danger-normalization-shock.html

#ScribesAndMakers for July 3: When (and if) you procrastinate, what do you do? If you don't, what do you do to avoid it?
I'll swap right out of programming to read a book, play a video game, or watch some anime. Often got things open in other windows so it's as simple as alt-tab.
I've noticed recently I tend to do this more often when I have a hard problem to solve that I'm not 100% sure about. I definitely have cycles of better & worse motivation and I've gotten to a place where I'm pretty relaxed about it instead of feeling guilty. I work how I work, and that includes cycles of rest, and that's enough (at least, for me it has been so far, and I'm in a comfortable career, married with 2 kids).
Some projects ultimately lose steam and get abandoned, and I've learned to accept that too. I learn a lot and grow from each project, so nothing is a true waste of time, and there remains plenty of future ahead of me to achieve cool things.
The procrastination does sometimes impact my wife & kids, and that's something I do sometimes feel bad about, but I think I keep that in check well enough, and for things my wife worries about, I usually don't procrastinate those too much (used to be worse about this).
Right now I'm procrastinating a big work project by working on a hobby project instead. The work project probably won't get done by the start of the semester as a result. But as I remind myself, my work doesn't actually pay me to work during the summer, and things will be okay without the work project being finished until later.
When I want to force myself into a more productive cycle, talking to people about project details sometimes helps, as does finding some new tech I can learn about by shoehorning it into a project. Have been thinking about talking to a rubber duck, but haven't motivated myself to try that yet, and I'm not really in doldrums right now.

from my link log —
Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX.
https://blog.jreyesr.com/posts/typst/
saved 2024-10-12 https://

The full formula for the probability of "success" is:
p = {
1/(2^(-n 1)) if n is negative, or
1 - (1/(2^(n 1))) if n is zero or positive
}
(Both branches have the same value when n is 0, so the behavior is smooth around the origin.)
How can we tweak this?
First, we can introduce fixed success and/or failure chances unaffected by level, with this formula only taking effect if those don't apply. For example, you could do 10% failure, 80% by formula, and 10% success to keep things from being too sure either way even when levels are very high or low. On the other hand, this flattening makes the benefit of extra advantage levels even less exciting.
Second, we could allow for gradations of success/failure, and treat the coin pools I used to explain that math like dice pools a bit. An in-between could require linearly more success flips to achieve the next higher grade of success at each grade. For example, simple success on a crit role might mean dealing 1.5x damage, but if you succeed on 2 of your flips, you get 9/4 damage, or on 4 flips 27/8, or on 7 flips 81/16. In this world, stacking crit levels might be a viable build, and just giving up on armor would be super dangerous. In the particular case I was using this for just now, I can't easily do gradations of success (that's the reason I turned to probabilities in the first place) but I think I'd favor this approach when feasible.
The main innovation here over simple dice pools is how to handle situations where the number of dice should be negative. I'm almost certain it's not a truly novel innovation though, and some RPG fan can point out which system already does this (please actually do this, I'm an RPG nerd too at heart).
I'll leave this with one more tweak we could do: what if the number 2 in the probability equation were 3, or 2/3? I think this has a similar effect to just scaling all the modifiers a bit, but the algebra escapes me in this moment and I'm a bit lazy. In any case, reducing the base of the probability exponent should let you get a few more gradations near 50%, which is probably a good thing, since the default goes from 25% straight to 50% and then to 75% with no integer stops in between.

For more than a century, putrid fumes emanated from
the “sewer of the Ruhr”,
creating a pungent whiff that assaulted towns throughout Germany’s industrial heartland.
But today, the Emscher bears little resemblance to Europe’s dirtiest river.
Water that used to be fouled by factory waste and human excrement have been free from effluent since 2021.
The river system, the main part of which was once considered biologically dead, is witnessing the return of an abun…