Tootfinder

I have leveled up once again. I used to be really interested in geo/mapping stuff and this whole biking thing has rekindled that, and now that I need to figure out how to bike to places, I am mapping like mad!
I found a route from work to the shops to home avoiding busy streets, which I *never* thought I would be able to do, but I'm doing it now!
#biking

ICE has used the pretext of combating antisemitism to target dissidents.
A branch of the agency previously used to target drug smugglers and human traffickers has reportedly been directed to scan social media for posts sympathetic to Hamas.
Though ICE is ostensibly still bound by constitutional limits,
the way it has been operating bears the hallmarks of a secret police force in the making.
They typically meet five criteria:
they’re a police force targeting pol…

How ICE is becoming a secret police force under the Trump administration
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement meets most criteria that have defined secret police forces in authoritarian regimes. And the worst may be yet to come.

More progress on the building of the woodwork here. Going pretty well.
But that will be it for a few days. Mostly coz I've caught a damn virus and wanna try and protect the builders from catching it but also because he's used up all the wood. More to be delivered next week.

This came in my feed, and I can't disagree. I have worked with #StackOverflow developers in the past, and I think the result will be the same, or even worse.
https://www.<…

1. Be unhappy that #Element doesn't support multiple accounts.
2. Be unhappy that they've made a new #ElementX that doesn't work with your main account.
3. Realize that you can use both programs to support your main and backup accounts simultaneously.
4. Realize you don't have your backup account password in KeepassDX.
5. Try to figure out which email address you used.
6. It finally works.
7. Realize that you can't get the room address from Element when the server is down.
#Matrix

"I used to think my wife was a control freak because she had to be in charge of everything. And funny enough all my mates have ended up married to exactly the same type of controlling woman. Every guy thinks he’s the guy who’s ended up with this micromanager"
Surprise.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DR85D0pjG8F/

Quantum Dial for High-Harmonic Generation
Lu Wang, Andrew M. Parks, Adam Thorpe, Graeme Bart, Thomas Brabec
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13518 https://arxiv.…

Quantum Dial for High-Harmonic Generation
High-harmonic generation (HHG) is a highly nonlinear optical process that typically requires an intense laser to trigger emissions at integer multiples of the driving field frequency. Since HHG is commonly used as a spectroscopic tool to probe material properties, it becomes impossible to extract information about a material without introducing distortions caused by the strong driving field. Recent advances in bright squeezed vacuum sources have allowed HHG to be driven by purely quantum fields…

I'm still really chuffed that Dan Totally Rad Show, #DanTrachtenburg, is now Dan Totally Brilliant Director Of Prey, Black Mirror, The Boys etc. 🥰
The only warm geeky feels I can compare it to is when #ComputerChronicles used to be hosted by

How Concise are Chains of co-B\"uchi Automata?
R\"udiger Ehlers
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14087 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14087

How Concise are Chains of co-Büchi Automata?
Chains of co-Büchi automata (COCOA) have recently been introduced as a new canonical model for representing arbitrary omega-regular languages. They can be minimized in polynomial time and are hence an attractive language representation for applications in which normally, deterministic omega-automata are used. While it is known how to build COCOA from deterministic parity automata, little is currently known about their relationship to automaton models introduced earlier than COCOA. In this pa…

I watched a short documentary on how bad Starbucks is now. It's a shame as it used to be a nice third place to visit, but now it's overpriced, generally lacks vegan food options and is often quite poorly maintained.
That said, I prefer to visit smaller, independent coffee shops as they are much better in all ways.
#SupportLocalCoffeeShops #SupportIndieCoffeeShops

Looking for other people here who're interested in analog "alt process" photography (especially Kallitype & salt prints in general) and who are also making their own prints. There used to be a few more such people in my TL, but they all seem to have vanished or stopped posting in the past year, and generally it feels there's precious little interest in this topic on Mastodon... (I too have a feeling, either my own photography went drastically downhill over the past 3-4 …

{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

Israeli startup Port, which offers a proprietary developer portal competitor to Spotify's open-source Backstage, raised a $100M Series C at an $800M valuation (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/11/port-raises-100m-at…

Port raises $100M at $800M valuation to take on Spotify’s Backstage | TechCrunch
Port offers a proprietary alternative to Spotify's popular devtool catalog Backstage, but with a valuable addition: it can be used to manage AI agents, too.

Recovering the Coupled Treatment of Redshift-Space Distortions and the Lightcone Effect after Diffuse Foreground Removal
Jennifer Feron, Emma Chapman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13920

Recovering the Coupled Treatment of Redshift-Space Distortions and the Lightcone Effect after Diffuse Foreground Removal
The 21 cm brightness temperature during the Epoch of Reionisation is widely modelled using semi-numeric simulations, used for their computational speed and flexibility in testing astrophysical and cosmological parameters. However, it is common practice to simulate coeval brightness temperature boxes, and then apply post-processing algorithms that treat the lightcone effect and redshift-space distortions separately, assuming they can be added in sequence. We instead model them together, allowing…

I really need to get used to the Moonlander keyboard. I have been on/off it for the last while, and it's just not comfortable in any configuration. On top of that, if I use it in Linux, there always seems to be a delay. Dunno if that is due to the layout that I am using or not.

"I would like to propose that IPs of [NTP] pool-members should not be allowed to host [Tor exit nodes] simultaneously under the same IP."
or put another way, "my employer paid for this whizzy firewall but it complains when we make it talk to a free service run by a volunteer because of other software the volunteer runs. Please educate your volunteers about how they need to go about providing this free service to us."

We found that ChatGPT made executives significantly more optimistic in their forecasts while peer discussions tended to encourage caution. Additionally, we found that the executives armed with ChatGPT made worse predictions, based on actual stock figures, than they had before they consulted the tool.”
But they'll still keep pushing it down our throats, because nobody wants to be first to get out of the bubble.

Research: Executives Who Used Gen AI Made Worse Predictions
In a recent experiment, nearly 300 executives and managers were shown recent stock prices for the chip-maker Nvidia and then asked to predict the stock’s price in a month’s time. Then, half the group was given the opportunity to ask questions of ChatGPT while the other half were allowed to consult with their peers about Nvidia’s stock. The executives who used ChatGPT became significantly more optimistic, confident, and produced worse forecasts than the group who discussed with their peers…

I just used Regedit to clean Microsoft's mess and delete 2 unwanted out of 4 input methods from the language applet menu o.O (This is a clean Win11 install from July. The problem seems to be reported as far back as 2022.)
A week ago, I had to uninstall and re-install OneDrive with the \allusers command line argument to make it stop duplicating itself in the sidebar and get back the share option in the context menu per file or folder. (Also a longstanding bug.)
Copilot is neat…

I'm really starting to love Typst! It's so much easier than LaTeX and it compiles instantly.
Writing stuff in it is so much faster compared to LaTeX that I've started using it for my homework exercises (which I don't have the patience for with LaTeX).
The scripting language is really nice and there are a lot of packages you can use. I'm using physica to get braket notation and quill to be able to draw quantum circuit diagrams for example. Yesterday, I used the…

A long day, but worth every second of it.
While I’m hearing a cock crowing in the background, I’m heading to experience a hopefully great train/bus ride to Poland via Ostrava.
Security guards arriving at the station with supermarket bags containing their wives’ homemade lunches. They call those bags *“sitovka”*—they use them for everything: as a swim bag, for example. I wouldn’t be surprised if they used it to go skiing!
Homeless drunks at the main station comforting each o…

China's biggest oil company just hit a major solar breakthrough.
CNPC developed a perovskite solar cell with 25.05% efficiency—impressive on its own, but here's the bigger story: they're planning to pair it with silicon cells to slash energy costs. Pilot production starts 2026, mass production 2028.
Their goal? Match their oil output with renewables by 2035.

China National Petroleum Corporation achieves 25.05% efficiency for inverted perovskite solar cell
The Chinese energy and oil company said the cell can be used as a top device in perovksite-silicon tandem configurations. The result was confirmed by the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology (SIMIT).

Series D, Episode 02 - Power
TARRANT: [Disbelieving] Telekinesis?
ORAC: The power to move objects at a distance using only the mind-
DAYNA: [Cutting him off] Yes, we know what it means.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/402/445 B7B2

Imagine ChatGPT but instead of predicting text it just linked you to the to 3 documents most-influential on the probabilities that would have been used to predict that text.
Could even generate some info about which parts of each would have been combined how.
There would still be issues with how training data is sourced and filtered, but these could be solved by crawling normally respecting robots.txt and by paying filterers a fair wage with a more relaxed work schedule and mental health support.
The energy issues are mainly about wild future investment and wasteful query spam, not optimized present-day per-query usage.
Is this "just search?"
Yes, but it would have some advantages for a lot of use cases, mainly in synthesizing results across multiple documents and in leveraging a language model more fully to find relevant stuff.
When we talk about the harms of current corporate LLMs, the opportunity cost of NOT building things like this is part of that.
The equivalent for art would have been so amazing too! "Here are some artists that can do what you want, with examples pulled from their portfolios."
It would be a really cool coding assistant that I'd actually encourage my students to use (with some guidelines).
#AI #GenAI #LLMs

"Those who objected could be divided into two categories: people who found the simpler and more flexible game to be bland; and people who didn’t like the game getting “woke.” This is a slippery term, but it often boils down to things not being quite as racist or sexist as they used to be."
https://www.…

Why Elon Musk Needs Dungeons & Dragons to Be Racist
The fantastical roots of “scientific racism”

Sora 2 is scary, but I don't disapprove of its existence. The technology is coming one way or another. Might as well showcase how it can be used for good, which the TikTok-like format does effectively.
However, I do disapprove of the lack of transparency. This is not a raw text-to-video model. If other companies' services are any guide, it's probably using LLMs to enhance the prompt, generate the script, perhaps much more. But that’s all hidden from the user, who only …

«The “big tent” claim, overlaid on with #Framework’s outstanding promotion of Omarchy, looks cartoonishly reckless in this light. People don’t want this for Framework, and they’re cautious to distance themselves because they’ve seen other projects claim to be a “big tent”, only for the tent to catch on fire, melt, and shrink under everyone’s feet, because nobody used a fire extinguisher when it was early enough to do so.»
Great summary of this clusterfuck by @…
https://crimier.github.io/posts/Framework-Omarchy/

Right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel recently told an audience that he pushed Tesla CEO and fellow billionaire Elon Musk not to give money to charity and instead horde it so it could be used to battle a future “Antichrist.”
According to a Thursday Reuters report, Thiel told attendees of closed-door event in San Francisco last month that he pressed Musk to rescind his commitment to the Giving Pledge, the charitable campaign cofounded by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates that asks signatories…

Instead of Charity, Peter Thiel Told Elon Musk to Use Billions for Right-Wing Crusade Against 'Antichrist' | Common Dreams
Billionaire Peter Thiel urges Elon Musk to hoard wealth to battle future "Antichrist." Thiel warns against giving to left-wing nonprofits.

#XSLT used to be my goto tool for transforming documents. Today I was facing a document transformation problem (the daring fireball `markdown` program does not emit valid HTML, and although you can pipe it through `tidy`, tidy won't extract the first `h1` and use it as `title`), so I thought 'yay! XSLT'.
Reader, I am no longer competent to write a simple XSLT transform.
I *kno…

Beautiful night in the woods. It didn't rain at all and we woke up to an awesome sunrise instead of the pouring rain we usually get. I'm not used to packing up my shelter and having it be dry.
Should be a good day of training.
#SearchAndRescue #SoOthersMayLive

Performance Index Shaping for Closed-loop Optimal Control
Ayush Rai, Shaoshuai Mou, Brian D. O. Anderson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10202 https://arxiv.org…

Performance Index Shaping for Closed-loop Optimal Control
The design of the performance index, also referred to as cost or reward shaping, is central to both optimal control and reinforcement learning, as it directly determines the behaviors, trade-offs, and objectives that the resulting control laws seek to achieve. A commonly used approach for this inference task in recent years is differentiable trajectory optimization, which allows gradients to be computed with respect to cost parameters by differentiating through an optimal control solver. Howeve…

My big gripe with "AI" is that a big reason why it's sold as the second coming of Jesus is that most tech people fundamentally do not understand how it actually works.
Their reasoning goes something like, "It works sort of ok for code generation, and programming is the hardest possible thing in the world to do, every other human endeavor is trivial compared to writing code, therefore it must excel at anything else!".
So it ends up being pushed due to a mixture of ignorance and hubris; and especially being stuffed into things it should never be used for (usually when users don't have a say which software they need to use for work).
The finbros are happily along for the ride because they just need something that can be hyped to pump and dump.

kickstarter to launch a satellite that could be used as a sovereign ground for the principality of sealand
if you have, like, $150m or so you could just do this, right? it's effectively exterritorial unless somebody spends the effort to bomb it out of the sky (which isn't going to happen). you can just stream pirated content from it, run a casino, whatever

I've been using multiple high resolution displays since the first non-passthru GPUs offered multiple outputs (heh, VGA or DVI) and WIndows 98 supported it properly.
Used to be the longest part of enabling/disabling external monitor support on a laptop was waiting for the CRT to warm up. Now, on my W11 laptop docking station it takes a full 20-25 seconds to change modes to multi-desktop. That's ridiculous. I know the things that happen (usb device enumeration etc.) but that'…

Curious that whenever someone shows me “the cool #AI flow” they built that’s supposed to be impressive, the conversation goes the same way:
Stage 1: “But you don’t understand. You don’t like AI because you haven’t used it right. Let me show you how much you can do it with.”
Stage 2: “Here are the steps in the flow and the instructions I feed to this agent / custom GPT / Claude project. I tell it to do X, reference document Y, and aim for Z.”
Stage 3: “Now, let me show you the results it gives.”
*Writes task, presses to run the prompt.*
Stage 4: “Umm sorry it’s taking a while. It’s fast but not instant. And by the way, the prompt isn’t perfect, you can definitely make it better. I just threw this together real quick the other day. It makes some mistakes, but it’s really good.”
Stage 5: “Uuuuuuh actually don’t look at the output.” *scrolls or stops screen share or pulls device away.*
“You know it’s already doing so well, if I do more prompt engineering it will get really good but I need to give it better instructions. And it ran just fine last night, I don’t know what’s up with it. And this is a cheap model, if we use another model it will be better.”
Stage 6: “You know, you really shouldn’t judge this so much. The technology will improve, it will get there sooner than you know and then you’ll regret not trying it sooner.”
So curious that this keeps happening 🤷‍♀️
#LLMs #work #tech #AIBubble

I think the concept is similar to Amazon who has killed retail to get a dominant position and then to monetize that position. The AI stuff is cheap and we shall get used to it. And then they slowly start boiling the frog. First, because it is integrated everywhere and one can't escape it. Second, because we lose our ability to do without.
IMHO, this bet can go terribly wrong if people will not become dependent on AI, just use it where it makes sense and is affordable.

"After the 8-bit MOS Technology 6502 that powered the Apple II around 1980, Macs used the 16-bit (later 32-bit) Motorola 68000 around 1990, then 32-bit (later 64-bit) IBM PowerPC around 2000, later settling with Intel’s 32-bit x86 and 64-bit x86-64 around 2010.
We are in 2020, not even around 2020 anymore, and we should be able to spend an insane amount of money to buy Macs powered by ARM architecture CPUs – “finally!”, as some of those headlines online would scream."

Eternally Finally
It is hardly possible these days to browse any blog or news website commenting the latest trends in the Apple galaxy, without reading references to the mythical, yet entirely foreseeable, ARM-based Mac. The existence of this not-yet-announced piece of otherwise overpriced hardware is entirely predicted by a closer reading of technology history in that same galaxy, an exercise usually (sadly) abhored by many.

"So far, only Brazil and Indonesia have announced investments in the scheme. The World Bank has agreed to host the facility. Several countries have murmured positively, but not yet committed any money. The UK has made clear it will not contribute at this stage. There will need to be greater momentum at Cop30 if the plan is to get off the ground."
"Brazilian finance ministry officials, who have spent the past 18 months working on this project, say the TFFF would be a step…

I have a new Kia Sportsge (non EV) in Latvia and the problem is this car is only used 3 months a year.
Rest of the time we have it started and idled etc every few weeks for a hour but it’s just not enough. Battery falling below 40% etc.
I don’t have a garage for it so trickle chargers is hard. Might need to fix the garage wife’s grandma but not sure it will be better. But maybe can then put a battery maintainer.
EV would be worse in this situation I bet. Hard problem.

It always cracks me up when I see stuff like this. I'm now on my second 100yo home, and in both cases the window weight cavities were just empty despite having windows "professionally" installed. Now, my first 100yo home had the windows replaced in the 70s/80s, so.. I can forgive that. The 2nd 100yo home, tho, had the windows replaced in the 2000s. They also insulated from the interior (putting foamboard against the brick, sealed w/ spray foam, then 2x3 metal studs to build a n…

MatheMagic: Generating Dynamic Mathematics Benchmarks Robust to Memorization
Dayy\'an O'Brien, Barry Haddow, Emily Allaway, Pinzhen Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05962

MatheMagic: Generating Dynamic Mathematics Benchmarks Robust to Memorization
Conducting contamination-free evaluation of mathematical capabilities can be difficult for two reasons: models may memorize a test set once it is made public, and current mathematical benchmarks are prone to overfitting due to having limited diversity of symbols and rules, coupled with closed-ended answers. This paper proposes a method to leverage these shortcomings as useful features to a construct dynamic, counterfactual benchmark, which can be used to both reveal overfitting and measure true…

From various rumors and sources it appears that Open AI - a company organized under Delaware law but with HQ in California - is the cause of the tripling of computer memory prices and shortages.
Word is that Open AI bought up all of the large wafers from Samsung and Hynix that are used to make memory. The intention seems to be to corner the market in order to hobble Open AI's competition.
I am not an expert in either Federal or State laws on anti-competitive practices.

And btw: it's not enough to simply subtract 0.5 from their original PIP values to make them comparable to the 0–1 scale used in the response. The difference must also be divided by (1 – 0.5). Correctly scaled, the original PIPs are 0.114 (for Polysynthesis) and 0.588 (for Extended), showing that in their re-analysis the PIPs for Small_Family (0.085 and 0.300) are clearly reduced.

I think today's worker is the owner of the company, he certainly is the assessor.
He worked a lot later than those without the vested interest there. 😆 I finished work at my job before he did! 🤭
All the wood was sanded down and remaining nude wood given some paint. We have a test plank in the foreground of the first picture here which is painted with a second coat of paint. Seems likely we lose all the wood grain when doing that, and so will prefer the paler look where it's obviously made of wood not paint.
Won't really know for sure till it's dry. Prefer the colour a bit darker like that but if we're hiding the wood grain we might as well have used MDF instead of pine. We're after something clearly made of wood.
Another area is test-painted with just the clearcoat top varnish as a second layer. That's likely to be right, just a bit more shiny and protected.
The carpenter proper is back from holiday and starts tomorrow. He has a lot of drawers and doors to build and edging to attach to make the door panels. Still hoping at least the carpentry will be pretty much all done by the end of the week but likely some painting and touching up still to do next week. Hopefully by the end of Tuesday because I'm not really able to be here all day each day for most of the two weeks after that.

Beamforming in Interferometer Arrays with Cross-couplings
Yingfeng Liu, Shijie Sun, Kaifeng Yu, Furen Deng, Shifan Zuo, Jixia Li, Yougang Wang, Fengquan Wu, Xuelei Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10067

Beamforming in Interferometer Arrays with Cross-couplings
For an interferometric array, an image of the sky can be synthesized from interferometric visibilities, which are the cross-correlations of the received electric voltages of pairs of array elements. However, to search for transient targets such as the fast radio burst (FRB), it is more convenient to use the beam-forming technique, where the real-time voltage outputs of the array elements are used to generate data streams (beams) which are sensitive to a specific direction. This is usually achie…

Last night's run: a decent one, but my night vision is not what it used to be, so a little slower than I would like.
Looking like outdoor #running tomorrow and Friday too with great weather. Today was a treadmill day, though, partially because that's all I had time for.
We shall see how long I can go with outdoor running this winter.

Magnetometry with Broadband Microwave Fields in Nitrogen-Vacancy Centers in Diamond
Arezoo Afshar, Andrew Proppe, Noah Lupu-Gladstein, Lilian Childress, Aaron Z. Goldberg, Khabat Heshami
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11720

Magnetometry with Broadband Microwave Fields in Nitrogen-Vacancy Centers in Diamond
Nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers in diamond are optically addressable and versatile light-matter interfaces with practical application in magnetic field sensing, offering the ability to operate at room temperature and reach sensitivities below pT/$\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}.$ We propose an approach to simultaneously probe all of the magnetically sensitive states using a broadband microwave field and demonstrate that it can be used to measure the external DC magnetic field strength with sensitivities below…

Over the past couple weeks, I've been designing a spool with some particular features in #FreeCAD, encompassing 6 parts to 3d-print. I've been manually re-orienting them when I print them.
Now that it's working, I realized that I could use the FreeCAD Assembly workbench to create a good packing of the parts in the right orientation for printing, saving anyone else who wants to prin…

Gr\"obner bases and the second generalized Hamming weight of a linear code
Hern\'an de Alba (SECIHTI, Universidad Aut\'onoma de Zacatecas), Cecilia Mart\'inez-Reyes (Universidad Aut\'onoma de Zacatecas)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09917

Gröbner bases and the second generalized Hamming weight of a linear code
It is known that for binary codes one can use Gröbner bases to obtain a subset of codewords of minimal support that can be used to determine the second generalized Hamming weight of the code. In this paper we establish conditions on a nonbinary code under which the same property holds. We also construct a family of codes over any nonbinary finite field where the property does not hold. Furthermore, we prove that whenever the subset obtained via Gröbner basis suffices to determine the second g…

Energy distance and evolution problems: a promising tool for kinetic equations
Gennaro Auricchio, Giuseppe Toscani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09123 https://

Energy distance and evolution problems: a promising tool for kinetic equations
We study the rate of convergence to equilibrium of the solutions to Fokker-Planck type equations with linear drift by means of Cramér and Energy distances, which have been recently widely used in problems related to AI, in particular for tasks related to machine learning. In all cases in which the Fokker-Planck type equations can be treated through these distances, it is shown that the rate of decay is improved with respect to known results which are based on the decay of relative entropy.

Simple $B_4$ representations associated to cyclotomic Hecke algebras
Lilit Martirosyan, Hans Wenzl
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09928 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

Simple $B_4$ representations associated to cyclotomic Hecke algebras
We determine the structure of the cyclotomic Hecke algebra corresponding to the complex reflection group $G_{25}$ also when it is not semisimple, as long as the generators are diagonalizable. In particular, we classify all simple representations of the braid group $B_4$ for which the generators are diagonalizable and satisfy a cubic polynomial. This will be used in the classification of braided tensor categories of type $G_2$.

It's December, when it used to be winter here at 52 degrees North. We have four straight days of 13°C (55F) ahead. 24-hour average temperature above normal for April.

I was writing (a brilliant) post about something, but now I just want to say: Writing in a box in a browser-window makes the 1980's advice relevant again: *Save your draft often* ! The danger used to be MS Word crashing, now it's just switching away from the window that will destroy your nuggets of wisdom, for them never to be seen by anyone 😪

Park Service orders changes to staff ratings, a move experts call illegal
A top National Park Service official has instructed park superintendents to limit the number of staff who get top marks in performance reviews
-- a move that experts say violates federal code and could make it easier to lay off staff.

Parks leadership generally evaluate individual employees annually on a five-point scale,
with a three rating given to those who are successful in achieving their go…

Park Service orders changes to staff ratings, a move experts call illegal
Lower performance ratings could be used as a factor in layoff decisions and will demoralize staff, advocates say.

Sunset, #Altadena
I’m not completely sure, but I think this magnificent #tree is Fraxinus uhdei. It might be as old as the house which used to stand where I was, taking this photo yesterday. It lost a number of limbs in the windstorm, and fire, of January 7th, and more to an arborist tending to …

Fiber-optic power limiter device based on carbon nanotubes
Ekaterina Borisova, Anastasiya Ponosova, Natalia Arutyunyan, Alexey Shilko, Elena Obraztsova, Boris Galagan, Vadim Makarov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09301

Fiber-optic power limiter device based on carbon nanotubes
We experimentally demonstrate a power limiter based on single-walled carbon nanotubes dispersed in a polymer matrix. This simple fiber-optic device permanently increases its attenuation when subjected to 50-mW or higher cw illumination at 1550 nm and initiates a fiber-fuse effect at 1 to 5 W. It may be used for protecting quantum key distribution equipment from light-injection attacks. We demonstrate its compatibility with phase- and polarisation-encoding quantum key distribution systems.

One ongoing nuisance of my new laptop is that it runs Sequoia. Even with a year of fixes, it still sucks relative to Sonoma in ways I'm still discovering.
Example: I have a little script that runs out of cron at times of day when Kyle is likely to be in earshot. It tells the time. On the old machine it used Apple's "Fiona" Scottish English "Enhanced" voice. We refer to her by name…
Apple didn't include Fiona (or ANY en-GB voice!) in Sequoia. 1/…

Fast Wasserstein rates for estimating probability distributions of probabilistic graphical models
Daniel Bartl, Stephan Eckstein
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09270 https://…

Fast Wasserstein rates for estimating probability distributions of probabilistic graphical models
Using i.i.d. data to estimate a high-dimensional distribution in Wasserstein distance is a fundamental instance of the curse of dimensionality. We explore how structural knowledge about the data-generating process which gives rise to the distribution can be used to overcome this curse. More precisely, we work with the set of distributions of probabilistic graphical models for a known directed acyclic graph. It turns out that this knowledge is only helpful if it can be quantified, which we forma…

Talking #water in Hsinchu: the biggest reservoir and cleanest stream here in the mid-north of #Taiwan is connected with the Science Park. It serves the #semiconductor industry. A bit is for agricu…

invDFT: A CPU-GPU massively parallel tool to find exact exchange-correlation potentials from groundstate densities
Vishal Subramanian, Bikash Kanungo, Vikram Gavini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10529

invDFT: A CPU-GPU massively parallel tool to find exact exchange-correlation potentials from groundstate densities
Density functional theory (DFT) remains the most widely used electronic structure method. Although exact in principle, in practice, it relies on approximations to the exchange-correlation (XC) functional, which is known to be a unique functional of the electron density. Despite 50 years of active research, existing XC approximations remain far from general purpose chemical accuracy of various thermochemical and materials properties. In that light, the inverse DFT problem, of finding the exact X…

Richard Murphy, who previously advocated green growth, gets there in the end.
"The real challenge we face is not how to restart a growth engine that has already driven us to the edge of environmental collapse. It is how to redesign the economy so that the resources we already have are used to meet human and ecological needs.
Growth is not coming back — and nor should our democracy depend upon it."

Growth is not coming back — and nor should our democracy depend upon it
Martin Wolf has (once again) declared in the Financial Times that the fate of democracy rests on economic growth. As he said, in advance of the Budget: [Reeves'] first priority must be to get whatever growth she can.  Growth made democracy possible, he claims, and only growth can now save it, in...

My chromebook seems to be running a lot better since I turned off all of the Google tracking. It has been running on battery since yesterday and still has just under three hours of power. I have used it around 2 hours yesterday and over three today so far. I have not turned on the battery saver option.
Playing music, checking out Mastodon, reading news, checking my email and general web surfing. Even two 15-30 minute sessions relearning and trying to remember what I was taught for …

Temperature and conditions for thermalization after canonical quenches
Lennart Dabelow
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12696 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12696

Temperature and conditions for thermalization after canonical quenches
We consider quenches of a quantum system that is prepared in a canonical equilibrium state of one Hamiltonian and then evolves unitarily in time under a different Hamiltonian. Technically, our main result is a systematic expansion of the pre- and post-quench canonical ensembles in the quench strength. We first demonstrate how this can be used to predict the system's temperature after the quench from equilibrium properties at the pre-quench temperature. For a thermalizing post-quench system, it …

"Those who objected could be divided into two categories: people who found the simpler and more flexible game to be bland; and people who didn’t like the game getting “woke.” This is a slippery term, but it often boils down to things not being quite as racist or sexist as they used to be."
https://www.…

Spent the day tinkering with trying to make #unnamedpopulartilingwindowmanager run in an Armbian VM on my mac with VirGL. Alacritty and kitty don't play nice with acceleration and software rendering has to be used.
Felt like kind of a waste of time, but I guess it was healthy to mess with desktop Linux for a change..

from my link log —
a11y.css: a web page accessibility linter.
https://ffoodd.github.io/a11y.css/
saved 2025-11-03 https://dotat.at/:/CKOLK.html

The Generalized Word Count in Two-Level Fractional Factorial Designs
Xietao Zhou, Steven G. Gilmour
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11609 https://arxiv.org/pdf/…

The Generalized Word Count in Two-Level Fractional Factorial Designs
Unreplicated two-level factorial designs are often used in screening experiments to determine which factors out of a large plausible set are active. A theorem regarding the generalized word count pattern is stated and proved for unreplicated designs. It is shown that a phenomenon regarding optimal designs seen in the recent literature can be explained by the theorem obtained.

Being owned by someone used to be called slavery -- now it's called commitment.

Can't wait for my dishwasher to send Rinsed 2025, the traditional year-end wrap-up. I hope it includes that one extra-chunky lasagna pan.
It's gonna be especially great because I replaced the utensils basket in June or July. 😍
How many pounds of detergent do you think I used this year?! How many loads did I run with the rinse agent depleted?! I'm on the edge of my seat over here!

From "Arbitrary Timberland" To "Skyline Charts": Is Visualization At Risk From The Pollution of Scientific Literature?
Lonni Besan\c{c}on
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05844

From "Arbitrary Timberland" To "Skyline Charts": Is Visualization At Risk From The Pollution of Scientific Literature?
In this essay, I argue that, while visualization research does not seem to be directly at risk of being corrupted by the current massive wave of polluted research, certain visualization concepts are being used in fraudulent fashions and fields close to ours are being targeted. Worse, the society publishing our work is overwhelmed by thousands of questionable papers that are being, unfortunately, published. As a community, and if we want our research to remain as good as it currently is, I argue…

I was just over at my parents house for a birthday party and my brother asked me if I ever thought about buying a car with more range. I'm not sure that I necessarily even want to own a car let alone a car with more range. On the spot, I figured that I would be looking at around $350 per month for a newer used car and an additional $75 per month for comprehensive insurance. Is it worth $425 per month to not need to fast charge your car while on a road trip? ...

it's actually so easy to just hear someone tell you what gendered words they don't want used for them and say "aight bet" rather than arguing
and yet.

Apple has removed Eyes Up, which archives video evidence of ICE abuses, from the App Store; unlike ICEBlock, it doesn't share ICE officers' real-time locations (Joseph Cox/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/apple-banned-an-app-that-simply-archiv…

Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of ICE Abuses
Eyes Up's purpose is to "preserve evidence until it can be used in court." But it has been swept up in Apple's crackdown on ICE-spotting apps.

TWIST: Training-free and Label-free Short Text Clustering through Iterative Vector Updating with LLMs
I-Fan Lin, Faegheh Hasibi, Suzan Verberne
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06747 …

TWIST: Training-free and Label-free Short Text Clustering through Iterative Vector Updating with LLMs
In this paper, we propose a training-free and label-free method for short text clustering that can be used on top of any existing embedder. In the context of customer-facing chatbots, companies are dealing with large amounts of user utterances that need to be clustered according to their intent. In these commercial settings, no labeled data is typically available, and the number of clusters is not known. Our method is based on iterative vector updating: it constructs sparse vectors based on rep…

Partner: Do you know where Vivarium is?
Me: I think it's where Ear Waves used to be...
Partner: What?
Me: Ah, sorry, where Pizza Shuttle used to be...
Partner: What?
Me: Ah, sorry, across the street diagonally from where Pizza Shuttle is now.
(I've lived in Milwaukee a long time.)
#mke

A little bit of left over wood. I figure best used as spare shelves in the closet and the alcove. A couple of steady boards upon which to rest the treadmill. Extra spare steady board for unknown purposes currently but might as well.
So some bits actually cut and painted myself.
Gotta spin them and do the other side tomorrow.
Then a varnish each side the next two days.
Then the bed arrives. Decided to order it and go overdraft if needed. Ordered in untreated pine so I can paint it to match the cupboards.
So a few days painting that before assembling.
Don't worry, I didn't cut them wrong, they're supposed to not all be square 😆

I’ve worked over the past year to reduce the amount of noise in my consciousness on a daily basis.
By that I mean - information noise, not literal sounds “noise”. (That problem was solved long ago by some good earplugs and noise canceling earphones.)
I’ve gotten used to spending less time on social media, regularly blocking most apps on my devices (anything with a feed news, most work communication apps, etc.), putting my phone and other devices aside for extended periods of time. Often go to work places with my iPad explicitly having its WiFi turned off and selecting cafes that don’t offer WiFi at all.
Negotiated better boundaries at work and in personal life where I exchange messages with people less often but try to make those interactions more meaningful, and people rarely expect me to respond to requests in less than 24 hours. Spent a lot of time setting up custom notification settings on all apps that would allow it, so I get fewer pings. With software, choosing fewer cloud-based options and using tools that are simple and require as few interruptions as possible.
Accustomed myself to lower-tech versions of doing things I like to do: reading on paper, writing by hand, drawing in physical sketchbooks, got a typewriter for typing without a screen. Choosing to call people on audio more, trying to make more of an effort to see people in person. Going to museums to look at art instead of browsing Pinterest. Defaulting to the library when looking for information.
I’m commenting on this now for two reasons:
1. I am pretty proud of myself for how much I’ve actually managed to reduce the constant stream of modern life esp. as a remote worker in tech!
2. Now that I’ve reached a breaking point of reducing enough noise that it’s NOTICEABLE - I am struck by the silence. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to navigate it and fill it. I made this space to be able to read and write and think more deeply - for now I feel stuck in limbo where I’m just reacquainting myself with the concept of having any space in my mind at all.

I'm wondering if I really need a LinkedIn account anyway.
I used to be active on it, then I only used it to keep up to date on things, now I find that it's tedious to visit and too time consuming to interact with.

The whole thing is optimized for scams, deception and other criminal behavior:
- user interface that deceptively pretends it's a human you're talking to
- claims from companies highly exaggerate capabilities
companies and "experts" constantly hype "AGI" which they (funnily enough) do to both make investors greedier and spread fear and as a distraction because these algorithms can't actually do what they keep promising
- large-scale accounting and financial fraud (e.g. what Nvidia is doing with circular selling)
- biggest case of copyright infringement in history
Note: I think the underlying technology is really cool, and definitely has use cases and can be used for actually good things. But: some technology just has more downsides than upsides, and some should only be used by experts in controlled environments. Leaded gasoline, asbestos and chlorofluorocarbon are also all really cool technology.
In this case perhaps the techology itself doesn't do anything inherently bad, however the people making it are lying about what it can do, the people selling it are motivated purely by greed and the people using it (often forced to do so) are being deceived.

I'm not even a developer (used to be), I'm the technical writer - so I know as much, sometimes more (been here a while) than they do. So I am frequently Tier 2 support.
If I had $1 everytime _"they"_ came upstream with "its not working", I'd be retired.
What, specifically, isn't working? What product? Version? Clean install or upgrade? logs? diagnostic dump? snap of the license page? Does it start or not? If it starts, is a particular feature n…

Wow. I've dealt with various toxic personalities in software development, but a good portion of the time those toxic personalities were at least extremely knowledgeable in their (often, very limited) domain.
AI, however, seems to be enabling toxic personalities *who are completely clueless*. Impressive!
https://github…

There is a giant mountain in the US carved with the faces of a couple of slavers, and two guys who tried to stop slavery. Now most Americans will stop right there and say, "wait, two? Lincoln did that though..." They'll say that because Americans don't know anything about their own history, including the fact that the practice of slavery remained central to the southern economy well through Roosevelt's administration. If this is not familiar to you (because, maybe, you were taught history in the US) and you'd like to actually learn about that, you might want to read "Slavery by Another Name."
But let's talk about half-slaver mountain for a minute. This mountain is functionally a sacred site for Americans, but it's literally a sacred site for Black Hills Sioux. Speaking of stolen land, did you know that JBLM (a military base in Washington state) is built on land promised the Puyallup in the Treaty of Medicine Creek before being stolen in 1918? I remember being taught that all the land was stolen a long time ago and now there's nothing we can do. Yeah, does anyone remember that DAPL was under Obama? In fact, unused federal lands are supposed to be returned to the tribes from which the land was taken but there's a whole site to auction off federal property... That's a whole section of the government dedicated to violating the Treaty of Fort Laramie.
They could just comply with the treaty, as they are legally obligated to do. These violations are ongoing. Slavery, again, is still legal. Slaves are still used by major corporations today, they just have to be tricked into confessing to a crime first. The sins that this country is built on remain fully active today... Because the system was built to preserve white supremacists patriarchy. How could the founding of the US not lead *directly* to Trump? How could this have been different, from the beginning?
But, please, tell me, how, exactly, are you going to fix that by voting harder in the mid terms. How?

Apple Music's "Discovery" used to be pretty good - but I think they have now attached it to an AI that has no taste or discrimination.

Generalized Distributions of Host Dispersion Measures in the Fast Radio Burst Cosmology
Jing-Yi Jia, Da-Chun Qiang, Lin-Yu Li, Hao Wei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09463 https://

Generalized Distributions of Host Dispersion Measures in the Fast Radio Burst Cosmology
As is well known, Hubble tension is one of the most serious challenges in cosmology to date. So, it is of interest to measure the Hubble constant by using some new probes independent of cosmic microwave background (CMB) and type Ia supernovae (SNIa). One of the promising probes is the fast radio bursts (FRBs), which could be useful in cosmology. In the literature, the methodology proposed by Macquart {\it et al.} has been widely used, in which both $\rm DM_{IGM}$ and $\rm DM_{host}$ are describ…

I recently researched the etymology of two interesting German words:
- "nonchalant" (informal, relaxed, casual, carefree, easy-going): I found that interesting because it's obviously a negation and I never read the non-negated form "chalant". Turns out that the non-negated form goes back to latin "calēre" (warm, to be hot, to be alarmed, to be fired up)
- "verschollen" (lost, missing, nothing has been known about the whereabouts of sth. or sb. for a long time). I found it weird because I couldn't make any sense of "schollen". This might be related to "verschallen" (stop making noise) and might go back to old high German "skellan" (which is also related to German "Schelle", a small bell). So, "verschollen" can be seen as a euphemistic expression because stop making noise is used to refer to being lost (and maybe dead).
#etymology #linguistics #German

Series C, Episode 10 - Ultraworld
AVON: Vila.
ORAC: Vila served a useful purpose in distracting and confusing the energy waves emanating from the planet.
VILA: Useful purpose.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/310/693 B7B6

Two federal judges ruled nearly simultaneously on Friday that President Donald Trump’s administration must to continue to fund SNAP, -- the nation’s biggest food aid program, -- using contingency funds during the government shutdown.
The rulings came a day before the U.S. Department of Agriculture planned to freeze payments to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program because it said it could no longer keep funding it due to the shutdown.
The program serves about 1 in 8 America…

Judges order the Trump administration to use contingency funds for SNAP payments during the shutdown
The rulings Friday came a day before the payments were due to be halted. SNAP is used by 1 in 8 Americans to buy groceries and is a major piece of the nation’s social safety net.

The Slow Space Editor : Broadening Access to Restorative XR
Nate Laffan, Ashley Hom, Andrea Nadine Castillo, Elizabeth Gitelman, Rebecca Zhao, Nikita Shenoy, Kaia Rae Schweig, Katherine Isbister
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07610

The Slow Space Editor : Broadening Access to Restorative XR
The Slow Space Editor is a 2D tool for creating 3D spaces. It was built as part of a research-through-design project that investigates how Virtual and Mixed Reality (XR) environments might be used for reflection and attention restoration. In this phase, we seek to radically simplify the creation of virtual environments, thereby broadening the potential group of users who could benefit from them. The research described in this paper has three aspects. First, we define the concept of "slow space,…

We're all really used to an FBI that is incredibly evil, but generally pretty competent. They have no problem using child sex offenders to infiltrate groups of clowns. They have no problem trying to convince civil rights leaders to commit suicide. They have no problem with sowing confusion within leftists groups and trying to get them to kill each other. They've always been radically anti-left, but they've also always been competent.
Fabricating evidence in a really obvious way would always have been off the table because they wouldn't be willing to throw a case. But those competent people have been pushed out of the FBI. It's now Kash Patel's clown show. It serves the whims of the regime above all else. It will sacrifice decades of hard built trust for a quick win, because no one involved is competent enough to understand the consequences of such actions.
In the past, they may have used torture to elicit a confession. They may have entrapped people. They could have deleted exonerating evidence, but they would probably not have just completely manufactured obviously fake evidence just to forward the regime's narrative. I don't think that we've seen anything like this, at the very least in our lifetimes.
We have to foster a new level of skepticism, far beyond what we have been used to... and this is especially true of Liberals, who still don't understand the level of corruption and incompetence in local law enforcement today.
#USPol #CharlieKirk

13yo: "I think I'm lactose-intolerant."
me: "I used to be lactose intolerant.. I fixed it by eating lots of ice cream."
A: "That is not scientifically..."
me: "ICE CREAM IS MY MEDICINE OKAY??"

The joy and promise of the Internet is that marginal and marginalized people can find each other
and form communities.
If you're the only goth klezmer fan in Toad Suck, Arkansas, you can find others.
If you're het up about a neglected social issue, you can find others.
The trouble is a lot of communities used to be marginalized for extremely good reasons,
and it probably would have been better if they stayed that way.
Dumb pipes can't tel…

Inferring cosmological parameters from galaxy and dark sirens cross-correlation
Giona Sala, Alessandro Cuoco, Julien Lesgourgues, Kostantinos-Rafail Revis, Lorenzo Valbusa Dall'Armi, Santiago Casas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08699

Inferring cosmological parameters from galaxy and dark sirens cross-correlation
The number of observed gravitational wave (GW) events is growing fast thanks to rapidly improving detector sensitivities. GWs from compact binary coalescences like Black Holes or Neutron Stars behave like standard sirens and can be used as cosmological probes. To this aim, generally, the observation of an electromagnetic counterpart and the measurement of the redshift are needed. However, even when those are not available, it is still possible to exploit these "dark sirens" via statistical meth…

I am so sick of how badly companies maintain their software.
Take Roku. Their devices are rapidly becoming less reliable than a 1960 Austin Healey - meaning that you always have to have al alternate 'cause something is always broken.
Today it was the Roku Media Player. It no longer can play .mp4 files that it used to be able to play. It can do the sound, but not the video. It used to do 'em both, with decent synchronization.
But now, nope. Has Roku become yet a…

Ok, another complaint about MacOS26... when a file modal appears, switching between sidebar items is slow. It used to be instant, now it take a few seconds.
FWIW, I'm using a Mac Mini M2Pro 16/500
#MacOS26 #Apple

How Trump leveraged Biden's TikTok ban law to help allies gain control of the app, amid fears it could be used to boost pro-Trump content and suppress criticism (Washington Post)

Trump turns Biden’s TikTok law into a big win
Biden officials said selling TikTok would safeguard it from political influence. Now, critics of a spinoff deal to Trump allies say that aim could be subverted.

"the Fedora Council has approved the latest version of the AI-Assisted Contributions policy formally".
Whoever contributes the code is required to be fully transparent on what AI tool has been used for it.
https://www.gamingonlinux.co…

Fedora Linux project agrees to allow AI-assisted contributions with a new policy
AI generation, it's everywhere! And now it's going to be formally accepted into Fedora Linux, as per the latest approved change with a new policy.

Trump’s brazen approach,
publicly flaunting his corruption,
awards him perverse credit for authenticity
and takes the sting out of scandals that used to be career-ending when uncovered by muckraking journalists.
“This is a dangerous notion that,
just because a president chooses to be corrupt in public openly,
it’s OK,” said Larry Sabato,
director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
“People say, well, if it were really corru…