Tootfinder

RecCoT: Enhancing Recommendation via Chain-of-Thought
Shuo Yang, Jiangxia Cao, Haipeng Li, Yuqi Mao, Shuchao Pang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21032 https://…

RecCoT: Enhancing Recommendation via Chain-of-Thought
In real-world applications, users always interact with items in multiple aspects, such as through implicit binary feedback (e.g., clicks, dislikes, long views) and explicit feedback (e.g., comments, reviews). Modern recommendation systems (RecSys) learn user-item collaborative signals from these implicit feedback signals as a large-scale binary data-streaming, subsequently recommending other highly similar items based on users' personalized historical interactions. However, from this collaborat…

The cafe I visit the most often clearly knows every product that I buy as they email me after every order asking how it was...
... so why do they also keep emailing me photos of meat and dairy items. They know I'm Vegan!
#Vegan

My man here doing the late night grocery shopping in his bathrobe. 😂 🤔 👏

Earlier this month, the Copyright Office issued the third part of its report on on AI: this one covering how generative AI may infringe on copyright and whether that's fair use (short answer: maybe, maybe not). I have a new article up summarizing the report.
https://www.…

Copyright Office's report discusses whether generative AI use is fair use
Earlier this month, the Copyright Office issued the third part of its report on AI. As with the first two parts, the Copyright Office discusses arguments from people who responded to its call for comments and then provides its analysis. The three main sections in this part focus on infringement, fair use, and licensing regimes. Here, I’m going to cover what the report says about the first two items: whether using copyrighted material in generative AI infringes on owners’ rights and whether…

From multi-allocations to allocations, with subadditive valuations
Uriel Feige
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21493 https://arxiv.org/pdf…

From multi-allocations to allocations, with subadditive valuations
We consider the problem of fair allocation of $m$ indivisible items to $n$ agents with monotone subadditive valuations. For integer $d \ge 2$, a $d$-multi-allocation is an allocation in which each item is allocated to at most $d$ different agents. We show that $d$-multi-allocations can be transformed into allocations, while not losing much more than a factor of $d$ in the value that each agent receives. One consequence of this result is that for allocation instances with equal entitlements and …

Setup fee gets withdrawn immediately when you make a buy order or a sell order in Albion Online.
If you have 0 silver while you create a buy order or a sell order you can't make the order!
Thus if you wanna know your TRUE profit you just do [total]-(amount of items you are selling/buying * your price*0.025)
I think I probably got this right.
In my case: 161000 - 4375(calculated automatically) = 156625 = 156k silver in profit!

I want to bring back polishing, dusting, and maintaining household items, because then you actually feel them in your hands https://www.overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.uk/podcast-ep-185-engaging-with-ou…

Oversharing is becoming part of who I am, a way I process the world, connect with others, and just be unapologetically myself.
If it’s not your thing, no worries at all, I totally get it, and I’ve got a handy pinned mute ready just for you whenever you need it.
📌 Pinned Oversharing
https://s…

Earlier this month, the Copyright Office issued the third part of its report on on AI: this one covering how generative AI may infringe on copyright and whether that's fair use (short answer: maybe, maybe not). I have a new article up summarizing the report.
https://www.…

Copyright Office's report discusses whether generative AI use is fair use
Earlier this month, the Copyright Office issued the third part of its report on AI. As with the first two parts, the Copyright Office discusses arguments from people who responded to its call for comments and then provides its analysis. The three main sections in this part focus on infringement, fair use, and licensing regimes. Here, I’m going to cover what the report says about the first two items: whether using copyrighted material in generative AI infringes on owners’ rights and whether…

My neighbour dropped by to kill some time. As we are chatting in the garage, two other groups, 5 people in total, arrive and start looking over items. My neighbour suddenly raises his voice and says, "So... it was a messy divorce?"
#YardSaleHumour

Synteesiraportti: Luonnonvaraiset eläimet konfliktin osana ‒ kokemuksia ja suosituksia #luonto

https://wgme.com/news/i-team/while-in-mourning-hacker-used-a-maine-moms-facebook-to-sell-her-late-daughters-items
Oh lord

While in mourning, hacker used Maine mom's Facebook to 'sell' her late daughter's items
We share our lives online. Family photos. Health updates. But those years of memories are vulnerable.

How Walmart, seeking to compete with e-commerce rivals like Amazon, built a multibillion-dollar HQ in Bentonville, aiming to attract workers and woo shoppers (Kevin Draper/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/21/business/walmart-rebrand-hea…

Walmart Tries to Shed a Stodgy Vibe to Battle Digital-Native Rivals
The retailing giant is spending billions to attract workers to a new headquarters and woo shoppers with drone delivery and a broader range of items (like Louis Vuitton handbags).

From
"A forever home for your collection #Pocket becomes your permanent library—so even if a page you’ve saved is taken down, you’ll still have a copy of it in Pocket."
to
"Your export file will include links (URLs) of your saved items. The export does not extract the text of saved links."
Thanks for nothing,

Exact and approximate maximin share allocations in multi-graphs
George Christodoulou, Symeon Mastrakoulis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20317 https://

Exact and approximate maximin share allocations in multi-graphs
We study the problem of (approximate) maximin share (MMS) allocation of indivisible items among a set of agents. We focus on the graphical valuation model, previously studied by Christodolou, Fiat, Koutsoupias, and Sgouritsa ("Fair allocation in graphs", EC 2023), where the input is given by a graph where edges correspond to items, and vertices correspond to agents. An edge may have non-zero marginal value only for its incident vertices. We study additive, XOS and subadditive valuations and we …

In 1967
artist Michael Bowen advertised
"A Gathering of Tribes for the Human Be-In"
in the underground newspaper the San Francisco Oracle
to bring together the "tribes" of psychedelic San Francisco hippies and Berkeley anti-war activists.
https://exhibits.library.uc…

On Albion EU right now in "Highland Cross Marketplace" part of Martlock's beginner area
they are not selling T7 Pork Pies at all...so here presents itself an opportunity...
I could sell I dunno, depending on price, 20% the price I buy em with from Martlock. I could start at 50 items or less...and then we'll see...
25 in the chest and 25 that I put inside the marketplace...so now I'm going to Martlock...to buy and then return with the sell order...

By 24%
Prices for common baby items are rising due to Trump's tariffs, congressional analysis says
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/prices-common-baby-items-are-rising-due-trumps-tariffs-congressional-a-rcna212753

Citizen science illuminates the nature of city lights: #LightPollution

Even the export is crap
"What is contained in the export file?
Your export file will include links (URLs) of your saved items. The export does not extract the text of saved links. Additionally, the export does contain tags or highlights."

I'm a day or two behind with reading toots in my usual time line, but I do have some lists covering current events. And it feels very disturbing reading about the bombing in Iran (and Trump's erratic statements) AND official news items stating that and how “Europe” urges Iran to negotiate with Trump. As if there would have been any chance to solve this mess

Seven short items I call #7points.
#blogging

Fair Diversity Maximization with Few Representatives
Florian Adriaens, Nikolaj Tatti
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08110 https://arxiv.o…

Fair Diversity Maximization with Few Representatives
Diversity maximization problem is a well-studied problem where the goal is to find $k$ diverse items. Fair diversity maximization aims to select a diverse subset of $k$ items from a large dataset, while requiring that each group of items be well represented in the output. More formally, given a set of items with labels, our goal is to find $k$ items that maximize the minimum pairwise distance in the set, while maintaining that each label is represented within some budget. In many cases, one is …

Semantic-enhanced Modality-asymmetric Retrieval for Online E-commerce Search
Zhigong Zhou, Ning Ding, Xiaochuan Fan, Yue Shang, Yiming Qiu, Jingwei Zhuo, Zhiwei Ge, Songlin Wang, Lin Liu, Sulong Xu, Han Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20330

Semantic-enhanced Modality-asymmetric Retrieval for Online E-commerce Search
Semantic retrieval, which retrieves semantically matched items given a textual query, has been an essential component to enhance system effectiveness in e-commerce search. In this paper, we study the multimodal retrieval problem, where the visual information (e.g, image) of item is leveraged as supplementary of textual information to enrich item representation and further improve retrieval performance. Though learning from cross-modality data has been studied extensively in tasks such as visual…

Cowboys nailed 4 of 6 items on offseason checklist, but 2 remaining items are big deals https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/06/03/cowboys-offseason-checklist-update/84011326007/

London Design Museum Turns its Massive Warehouse Collection into Another Museum—with 250K Items https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/london-design-museum-turns-its-massive-warehouse-collection-into-another-museu…

London Design Museum Turns its Massive Warehouse Collection into Another Museum—with 250K Items
Rather than hold the power of deciding what the public gets to see, in a stroke of democracy, they have given the reins over to the public.

Diversifying Conformal Selections
Yash Nair, Ying Jin, James Yang, Emmanuel Candes
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16229 https://arxiv.org…

Diversifying Conformal Selections
When selecting from a list of potential candidates, it is important to ensure not only that the selected items are of high quality, but also that they are sufficiently dissimilar so as to both avoid redundancy and to capture a broader range of desirable properties. In drug discovery, scientists aim to select potent drugs from a library of unsynthesized candidates, but recognize that it is wasteful to repeatedly synthesize highly similar compounds. In job hiring, recruiters may wish to hire cand…

Urban Rhythms 🎵
城市节奏 🎵
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Lucky SHD 400
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.

@… Did you know that Humble Indie Bundle 12 had a tier that would send out physical items, including a floppy disk? https://archive.org/details/hib12floppy It was news to me

Humble Indie Bundle 12 - 1.44 MB Floppy : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
In 2014, with the release of Humble Indie Bundle 12, a physical package was available if you spent enough money, including a vinyl, stickers, and an HIB 12...

It can be hard to keep up with crucial news at the University of Florida because of the minimal communication from the administration. To make it easier for folks to keep up I'm starting
@index@ufwatch.org to provide short summaries of key news items with links to the sources.
https://ufwatch.org/uf-watch-keep-up-with-crucial-news-about-the-university-of-florida/
If that's helpful to you can keep up using:
Mastodon/Fediverse: @index@ufwatch.org
BlueSky: @ufwatch.bsky.social
Newsletter/Website: ufwatch.org
RSS: ufwatch.org/rss

Clothes from UK brands found discarded in Ghana wetland dumps – video https://www.theguardian.com/environment/video/2025/jun/18/clothes-from-uk-brands-found-discarded-in-ghana-wetland-dumps-video

A Principled Approach to Randomized Selection under Uncertainty
Alexander Goldberg, Giulia Fanti, Nihar B. Shah
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19083 https://…

A Principled Approach to Randomized Selection under Uncertainty
Many decision-making processes involve evaluating and then selecting items; examples include scientific peer review, job hiring, school admissions, and investment decisions. The eventual selection is performed by applying rules or deliberations to the raw evaluations, and then deterministically selecting the items deemed to be the best. These domains feature error-prone evaluations and uncertainty about future outcomes, which undermine the reliability of such deterministic selection rules. As a…

that's... one way to describe it, royal mail

Optimal Non-Adaptive Group Testing with One-Sided Error Guarantees
Daniel McMorrow, Jonathan Scarlett
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10374 https://

Optimal Non-Adaptive Group Testing with One-Sided Error Guarantees
The group testing problem consists of determining a sparse subset of defective items from within a larger set of items via a series of tests, where each test outcome indicates whether at least one defective item is included in the test. We study the approximate recovery setting, where the recovery criterion of the defective set is relaxed to allow a small number of items to be misclassified. In particular, we consider one-sided approximate recovery criteria, where we allow either only false neg…

Multimodal large language models and physics visual tasks: comparative analysis of performance and costs
Giulia Polverini, Bor Gregorcic
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19662

Multimodal large language models and physics visual tasks: comparative analysis of performance and costs
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) capable of processing both text and visual inputs are increasingly being explored for uses in physics education, such as tutoring, formative assessment, and grading. This study evaluates a range of publicly available MLLMs on a set of standardized, image-based physics research-based conceptual assessments (concept inventories). We benchmark 15 models from three major providers (Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI) across 102 physics items, focusing on two main…

Taiichi Ohno: I wrote about how items waiting in a queue are a form of waste, as a cautionary tale
Scrum guys coming up with the backlog: we have created the work queue from the classic manual "Don't Create A Work Queue"

1st PR opened to add a setting allowing you to choose how many columns you want your library displayed with in #Jellyfin for #Roku.
Here's a screenshot of me viewing #movies in genre vi…

And now I’m in Krispy Kreme having a 🍩 ☕️
One of the few places around here that actually have vegan food items at breakfast
#Vegan #KrispyKreme

Don’t start with your most emotionally charged items. Don’t start with your difficult items or your most expensive items to make decisions about. Start with low stakes things. https://www.overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.uk/podcast-ep-188-decision-making…

Amazon's Ad Video Generator, a free tool to create gen AI ads and depict items as they would be used in the real world, is now available for sellers in the US (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/685160/amazon-ads-…

Amazon is about to be flooded with AI-generated video ads
Amazon Ad’s Video Generator has some new tricks and is now generally available in the US to create “photorealistic video assets” in five minutes or less.

1973 Hew Report Via https://bsky.app/profile/miriamposner.com/post/3lnxspqi7hc22
https://migurski…

Miriam Posner (@miriamposner.com)
Wow the cover of the 1973 Hew Report (precursor to 1974's Data Privacy Act) is *wild*. https://ia601702.us.archive.org/8/items/recordscomputers00unit/recordscomputers00unit_jpg.pdf

Urban Rhythms 🎵
城市节奏 🎵
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Lucky SHD 400
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.

Here's some ideas, #Starbucks:
1️⃣ Overhaul the coffee. It's hot garbage.
2️⃣ Provide better chairs, faster Internet.
3️⃣ Bring back the secret menu items.
#coffeebean #alfred

Howard Schultz says he's a fan of Brian Niccol's plan for Starbucks
Schultz said he did a "cartwheel in my living room" when he heard Niccol's turnaround plan for the coffee chain.

For me I use both type of laptops. The windows machine (soon going to #linux) and my #linux laptop (retiring after I convert the windows laptop) I use for serious photo editing, condo newsletters, some work related programming, personal items (like medical).
The Chromebook I use for light…

Information-theoretic Estimation of the Risk of Privacy Leaks
Kenneth Odoh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12328 https://arxiv.org/pdf/250…

Information-theoretic Estimation of the Risk of Privacy Leaks
Recent work~\cite{Liu2016} has shown that dependencies between items in a dataset can lead to privacy leaks. We extend this concept to privacy-preserving transformations, considering a broader set of dependencies captured by correlation metrics. Specifically, we measure the correlation between the original data and their noisy responses from a randomizer as an indicator of potential privacy breaches. This paper aims to leverage information-theoretic measures, such as the Maximal Information Coe…

Imaginative bit of maths for a '2 for £3' order:
(MusicMagpie)

Generating uniform linear extensions using few random bits
Mark Huber
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14725 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.147…

Generating uniform linear extensions using few random bits
A \emph{linear extension} of a partial order \(\preceq\) over items \(A = \{ 1, 2, \ldots, n \}\) is a permutation \(σ\) such that for all \(i < j\) in \(A\), it holds that \(\neg(σ(j) \preceq σ(i))\). Consider the problem of generating uniformly from the set of linear extensions of a partial order. The best method currently known uses \(O(n^3 \ln(n))\) operations and \(O(n^3 \ln(n)^2)\) iid fair random bits to generate such a permutation. This paper presents a method that generates a unifor…

This is the header from a german book seller's website. Notice, that the sorta *wishlist* heart icon badge maxes out at single digit 9 !
Is that the real world, where people only have like nine items that they save? Is this just for “design aesthetics”? My wishlist contains 107!

The presentations at the 2nd #AAS246 presser were about the papers https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adc911 (Discovery of the Seven-ring Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon Cyanocoronene (C24H11CN) in GOTHAM Observations of TMC-1, also https://public.nrao.edu/news/cosmic-chemistry-breakthrough-largest-aromatic-molecule-found-in-deep-space/), https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05575 (A map of the outer gas disk of the Galaxy with direct distances from young stars, also https://www.uah.edu/news/items/uah-researcher-unveils-new-map-of-milky-way-galaxy-in-atomic-hydrogen-revealing-its-clumped-flocculent-nature-for-first-time) and https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/adbbd9 (Surveying the Giant H ii Regions of the Milky Way with SOFIA. VII. Galactic Center Regions Sgr B1, Sgr B2, and Sgr C, also https://www.seti.org/press-release/unusual-stellar-nurseries-near-our-galaxys-center-puzzle-scientists) plus two results with apparently neither papers nor press releases going with them.

A Hierarchical Bin Packing Framework with Dual Manipulators via Heuristic Search and Deep Reinforcement Learning
Beomjoon Lee, Changjoo Nam
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01628

A Hierarchical Bin Packing Framework with Dual Manipulators via Heuristic Search and Deep Reinforcement Learning
We address the bin packing problem (BPP), which aims to maximize bin utilization when packing a variety of items. The offline problem, where the complete information about the item set and their sizes is known in advance, is proven to be NP-hard. The semi-online and online variants are even more challenging, as full information about incoming items is unavailable. While existing methods have tackled both 2D and 3D BPPs, the 2D BPP remains underexplored in terms of fully maximizing utilization. …

An LLM (Copilot, in this case) made an impressive looking graph of collection items over time for a colleague, but after a bit of probing he came to the most 2025 realisation possible:
'Oh wait I've just realised it's made the whole thing up....DOH!'
#AI #LLM

I had this idea for a Cairn lifepath generator where there are three stages of life and you roll 1d6 for your stats at each stage, and also get appropriate items.
It has not been playtested, it's barely been proofread, but I've been having a lot of fun generating guys
perchance.org/lt8m69fg35
#ttrpg #CairnRpg

#AurelioVoltaire is perfect for #FridayThe13th tunes
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2Adq

Vampair Songs by Voltaire And Daria Cohen
Playlist · aureliovoltaire · 7 items · 261 saves

00:50—Good night #Fediverse! 😴💤
Domestic! Wife Material! Marry Me! Someone! Anyone!
https://social.linux.pizza/@midtsveen/114672309461436816

Amazon's Ad Video Generator, a free tool to create gen AI ads and depict items as they would be used in the real world, is now available for sellers in the US (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/685160/amazon-ads-…

Amazon is about to be flooded with AI-generated video ads
Amazon Ad’s Video Generator has some new tricks and is now generally available in the US to create “photorealistic video assets” in five minutes or less.

CORONA: A Coarse-to-Fine Framework for Graph-based Recommendation with Large Language Models
Junze Chen, Xinjie Yang, Cheng Yang, Junfei Bao, Zeyuan Guo, Yawen Li, Chuan Shi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17281

CORONA: A Coarse-to-Fine Framework for Graph-based Recommendation with Large Language Models
Recommender systems (RSs) are designed to retrieve candidate items a user might be interested in from a large pool. A common approach is using graph neural networks (GNNs) to capture high-order interaction relationships. As large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities across domains, researchers are exploring their use to enhance recommendation. However, prior work limits LLMs to re-ranking results or dataset augmentation, failing to utilize their power during candidate filtering…

»How to build a copy-to-clipboard HTML«
– by @…
With JavaScript set HTML to easy use web GUI's.
📃 https://gomakethings.com/how-…

How to build a copy-to-clipboard HTML Web Component
Yesterday, we looked at how to copy items to a user’s clipboard with JavaScriprt. Today, we’re going to turn that into an HTML Web Component. Let’s dig in! The Custom Element For this Web Component, let’s use a element. With the HTML Web Component approach, we start with HTML and enhance it rather than rendering all the things with JavaScript. Let’s add a with our desired text inside the custom element.

Improving Online Bin Covering with Little Advice
Andrej Brodnik, Bengt J. Nilsson, Gordana Vujovi\'c
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09004 https://

Improving Online Bin Covering with Little Advice
The online bin covering problem is: given an input sequence of items find a placement of the items in the maximum number of bins such that the sum of the items' sizes in each bin is at least~1. Boyar~{\em et~al}.\@~\cite{boyar2021} present a strategy that with $O(\log \log n)$ bits of advice, where $n$ is the length of the input sequence, achieves a competitive ratio of $8/15\approx0.5333\ldots$. We show that with a strengthened analysis and some minor improvements, the same strategy achieves t…

My favourite hammock for on our balcony broke and landed me on my ass, last month. Just got around to fixing it with parts of a new lashing strap that's rated for much more weight than me. The hammock itself is still in good shape, so this should last me some more years, now.
(I got the hammock from Kickstarter years ago, in a time when I was still fascinated by that website...

Überlege eine Todo-Bankrotterklärung zu machen. Es gibt diese Items die ich seit Wochen, manche seit Monaten immer nach hinten verschiebe.
Wie wäre es wenn ich den Beteiligten dabei offen erkläre, dass ich raus bin, statt die ganze Zeit mit schlechtem Gewissen nur minimale Beiträge zu leisten damit es irgendwie weiter geht.
Wäre sicherlich sehr schmerzhaft (weshalb ich es bisher nicht getan habe).
Und: Creative Procrastination. Ich schaffe mehr neue Sachen weil ich diese Dinge nicht tue.

Excellent keynote in the #SemDH2025 workshop by Laura Hollink on Cultural Bias in Linked Open Data. Laura is addressing all bias related aspects in cultural heritage items itself, in the data representing it, the data schemata, vocabularies, and ontologies on which the data are based, as well as in the knowledge representation languages used to create the schemata.

The estate of David Lynch is currently being auctioned off and I got curious and went through all the things on offer so you don't have to (ok I was just bored but). The stuff I found most intriguing turned out to be his self-made or self-restored furniture, like these:
https://www.…

Park Discovery 🏞️
公园探险 🏞️
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Lucky SHD 400
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.

Kam Wai Dim Sum
Article content
249 East Pender St., Vancouver
The pork siu mai and har gow are bestsellers in a long menu of items. There’s another to open in the Hastings-Sunrise neighbourhood in late summer — bigger and with more tables.

Evaluating Large Language Models on Non-Code Software Engineering Tasks
Fabian C. Pe\~na, Steffen Herbold
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10833 https://

Evaluating Large Language Models on Non-Code Software Engineering Tasks
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code understanding and generation; however, their effectiveness on non-code Software Engineering (SE) tasks remains underexplored. We present the first comprehensive benchmark, which we name `Software Engineering Language Understanding' (SELU), for evaluating LLMs on 17 non-code tasks, spanning from identifying whether a requirement is functional or non-functional to estimating the effort and complexity of backlog items. …

In the last few days, I"ve heard about TACO (Turnip Always Chickens Out). It's a reference to the fact that #POTUS47 often will make some bold move (e.g. declaring huge tariffs), only to back down a few days later when the move proves to be unpopular or unsuccessful.
Now it is reported that Trump Burger restaurant is getting flooded with inquiries about whether they serve chicken tac…

Texas ‘Trump Burger’ joint getting spammed by chicken taco comments online. Why?
Trump Burger has 4 locations in Texas with MAGA-themed menu items. Commenters have asked for a chicken taco, acronym for “Trump always chickens out.”

Pierrepont Holme Hall, February 2025
#photography #heritagephotography #sunlight #silentsunday

Fair Allocation with Money: What is Your Objective?
Noga Klein Elmalem, Rica Gonen, Erel Segal-Halevi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18794 https://

Fair Allocation with Money: What is Your Objective?
When allocating indivisible items, there are various ways to use monetary transfers for eliminating envy. Particularly, one can apply a balanced vector of transfer payments, or charge each agent a positive amount, or -- contrarily -- give each agent a positive amount as a ``subsidy''. In each model, one can aim to minimize the amount of payments used; this aim translates into different optimization objectives in each setting. This note compares the various models, and the relations between uppe…

A Comprehensive Guide to the U.S. Civil Space Budget
Lindsay DeMarchi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11138 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.111…

A Comprehensive Guide to the U.S. Civil Space Budget
This paper presents an overview of the U.S. federal civil space budget between FY23 and proposed spending in FY25, providing a foundational reference dataset for civil space budget analyses. Projects that support, enable, or leverage space activities for civil purposes are found in more than 100 individual line items spread across 17 federal departments and agencies and are funded by 4 different appropriations bills. Across all these elements, civil space-related appropriations total roughly 44…

Next-User Retrieval: Enhancing Cold-Start Recommendations via Generative Next-User Modeling
Yu-Ting Lan, Yang Huo, Yi Shen, Xiao Yang, Zuotao Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15267 …

Next-User Retrieval: Enhancing Cold-Start Recommendations via Generative Next-User Modeling
The item cold-start problem is critical for online recommendation systems, as the success of this phase determines whether high-quality new items can transition to popular ones, receive essential feedback to inspire creators, and thus lead to the long-term retention of creators. However, modern recommendation systems still struggle to address item cold-start challenges due to the heavy reliance on item and historical interactions, which are non-trivial for cold-start items lacking sufficient ex…

Sigh, the client wants to add more items to the release for next week and they don't even have it tested. This time around I am putting a flag on each and every program they want to add so when (not if) they pull it Friday afternoon a quick search & delete will nuke those modules. I am not going to be popular in a bit when I do the pre-release walkthrough for the release schedule in a few minutes.

'Local community schemes have the potential to share expensive and rarely used items and change the way household goods are consumed' - @christinecole_ https://www.overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.uk/having-more-owning-less-how-to-fight-thr…

Sorry if I fucked up your day too, but I fucking love you all! After looking at this GIF, I’m over it!
Autism is real as hell, and autism is fucking awesome. Fuck the haters, fuck anyone who’s “anti-autism,” and fuck domestic violence against autistic people.
I exist, I’m proud, and I’m not going anywhere. Autism power, always fucking rad!
Mistakes happen, and I gotta work on myself, lmao! You do you, and I’ll do me. Cool? Cool.

I was supposed to use Ruggothrikh for very specific tasks, why did I not do them?
Anyway now we'll do another Albion run...
What I like with Albion is that it is player driven...even the loot contains crafted items by other players.
I don't think many games are like this...I think this may be unique to Albion and a few other games like it.
They took player based crafting to a new level!

Dividing Conflicting Items Fairly
Ayumi Igarashi, Pasin Manurangsi, Hirotaka Yoneda
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14149 https://arxiv.or…

Dividing Conflicting Items Fairly
We study the allocation of indivisible goods under conflicting constraints, represented by a graph. In this framework, vertices correspond to goods and edges correspond to conflicts between a pair of goods. Each agent is allocated an independent set in the graph. In a recent work of Kumar et al. (2024), it was shown that a maximal EF1 allocation exists for interval graphs and two agents with monotone valuations. We significantly extend this result by establishing that a maximal EF1 allocation e…

Architecture is All You Need: Improving LLM Recommenders by Dropping the Text
Kevin Foley, Shaghayegh Agah, Kavya Priyanka Kakinada
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15833

Architecture is All You Need: Improving LLM Recommenders by Dropping the Text
In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in the applications of large pre-trained language models (PLMs) to recommender systems, with many studies showing strong performance of PLMs on common benchmark datasets. PLM-based recommender models benefit from flexible and customizable prompting, an unlimited vocabulary of recommendable items, and general ``world knowledge'' acquired through pre-training on massive text corpora. While PLM-based recommenders show promise in settings whe…

Disney launches a new perks program for Disney US subscribers, offering discounts, free items, and more; Hulu plans to debut its own perks program on June 2 (Thomas Buckley/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Demonstrating Multi-Suction Item Picking at Scale via Multi-Modal Learning of Pick Success
Che Wang, Jeroen van Baar, Chaitanya Mitash, Shuai Li, Dylan Randle, Weiyao Wang, Sumedh Sontakke, Kostas E. Bekris, Kapil Katyal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10359

Demonstrating Multi-Suction Item Picking at Scale via Multi-Modal Learning of Pick Success
This work demonstrates how autonomously learning aspects of robotic operation from sparsely-labeled, real-world data of deployed, engineered solutions at industrial scale can provide with solutions that achieve improved performance. Specifically, it focuses on multi-suction robot picking and performs a comprehensive study on the application of multi-modal visual encoders for predicting the success of candidate robotic picks. Picking diverse items from unstructured piles is an important and chal…

Grow a Garden, a hit game on Roblox, has spawned a market where in-game items are sold for real money on sites like eBay, potentially violating Roblox's ToS (Cecilia D'Anastasio/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20…

Also, my real-life friends, you can use any free RSS reader you like, I’m not promoting any specific one, to follow my Mastodon without signing up.
To download an RSS reader, just search “RSS reader” on Google Play or the Apple App Store.
Then copy and paste this "https://social.linux.pizza/@midtsveen.

We sold about 200 items in our yard sale last Saturday, and today, I took two carloads of stuff to the donation site at our recycling centre. I feel like I'm being judged by the quality of my junk (" OH... we don't want that") even though I realize the community thrift store is flooded with donations and can't take everything. Only about 10% of my junk was deemed trash, so I'll take that as a win.
#Recycling #Donation

Breath of the Wild taught me that I should *not* order the third one.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15996 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Asymptotically Fair and Truthful Allocation of Public Goods
We study the fair and truthful allocation of m divisible public items among n agents, each with distinct preferences for the items. To aggregate agents' preferences fairly, we focus on finding a core solution. For divisible items, a core solution always exists and can be calculated by maximizing the Nash welfare objective. However, such a solution is easily manipulated; agents might have incentives to misreport their preferences. To mitigate this, the current state-of-the-art finds an approxima…

Downstream: efficient cross-platform algorithms for fixed-capacity stream downsampling
Connor Yang, Joey Wagner, Emily Dolson, Luis Zaman, Matthew Andres Moreno
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12975

Downstream: efficient cross-platform algorithms for fixed-capacity stream downsampling
Due to ongoing accrual over long durations, a defining characteristic of real-world data streams is the requirement for rolling, often real-time, mechanisms to coarsen or summarize stream history. One common data structure for this purpose is the ring buffer, which maintains a running downsample comprising most recent stream data. In some downsampling scenarios, however, it can instead be necessary to maintain data items spanning the entirety of elapsed stream history. Fortunately, approaches g…

AliBoost: Ecological Boosting Framework in Alibaba Platform
Qijie Shen, Yuanchen Bei, Zihong Huang, Jialin Zhu, Keqin Xu, Boya Du, Jiawei Tang, Yuning Jiang, Feiran Huang, Xiao Huang, Hao Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00954

AliBoost: Ecological Boosting Framework in Alibaba Platform
Maintaining a healthy ecosystem in billion-scale online platforms is challenging, as users naturally gravitate toward popular items, leaving cold and less-explored items behind. This ''rich-get-richer'' phenomenon hinders the growth of potentially valuable cold items and harms the platform's ecosystem. Existing cold-start models primarily focus on improving initial recommendation performance for cold items but fail to address users' natural preference for popular content. In this paper, we intr…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04665 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csGT_…

An O(log log n)-approximate budget feasible mechanism for subadditive valuations
In budget-feasible mechanism design, there is a set of items $U$, each owned by a distinct seller. The seller of item $e$ incurs a private cost $\overline{c}_e$ for supplying her item. A buyer wishes to procure a set of items from the sellers of maximum value, where the value of a set $S\subseteq U$ of items is given by a valuation function $v:2^U\to \mathbb{R}_+$. The buyer has a budget of $B \in \mathbb{R}_+$ for the total payments made to the sellers. We wish to design a mechanism that is tr…

New #Bandcamp Purchase!
Title: Shiva (Webra Remix)
Artist: Avalon & Waio
Link: https://bandcamp.com/pmarg

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09795 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csIR_…

Beyond Pairwise Learning-To-Rank At Airbnb
There are three fundamental asks from a ranking algorithm: it should scale to handle a large number of items, sort items accurately by their utility, and impose a total order on the items for logical consistency. But here's the catch-no algorithm can achieve all three at the same time. We call this limitation the SAT theorem for ranking algorithms. Given the dilemma, how can we design a practical system that meets user needs? Our current work at Airbnb provides an answer, with a working solutio…

Go check out my Bandcamp wishlist, which even includes some tracks for just $1 at: #Bandcamp

'Given that the average electric drill is in use for just 15 minutes each year, and is kept in storage for the rest of the time, it’s clear that many household items don’t really need to be owned at all' - @alexjgnana https://www.overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.

An O(log log n)-approximate budget feasible mechanism for subadditive valuations
Rian Neogi, Kanstantsin Pashkovich, Chaitanya Swamy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04665

An O(log log n)-approximate budget feasible mechanism for subadditive valuations
In budget-feasible mechanism design, there is a set of items $U$, each owned by a distinct seller. The seller of item $e$ incurs a private cost $\overline{c}_e$ for supplying her item. A buyer wishes to procure a set of items from the sellers of maximum value, where the value of a set $S\subseteq U$ of items is given by a valuation function $v:2^U\to \mathbb{R}_+$. The buyer has a budget of $B \in \mathbb{R}_+$ for the total payments made to the sellers. We wish to design a mechanism that is tr…

Breaker: Removing Shortcut Cues with User Clustering for Single-slot Recommendation System
Chao Wang, Yue Zheng, Yujing Zhang, Yan Feng, Zhe Wang, Xiaowei Shi, An You, Yu Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00828

Breaker: Removing Shortcut Cues with User Clustering for Single-slot Recommendation System
In a single-slot recommendation system, users are only exposed to one item at a time, and the system cannot collect user feedback on multiple items simultaneously. Therefore, only pointwise modeling solutions can be adopted, focusing solely on modeling the likelihood of clicks or conversions for items by users to learn user-item preferences, without the ability to capture the ranking information among different items directly. However, since user-side information is often much more abundant tha…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.20580 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csIR_…

Coherence-guided Preference Disentanglement for Cross-domain Recommendations
Discovering user preferences across different domains is pivotal in cross-domain recommendation systems, particularly when platforms lack comprehensive user-item interactive data. The limited presence of shared users often hampers the effective modeling of common preferences. While leveraging shared items' attributes, such as category and popularity, can enhance cross-domain recommendation performance, the scarcity of shared items between domains has limited research in this area. To address th…

I finally got rid of the old bed I’d kept since moving in, so the room feels pretty empty right now.
I’m in the process of reorganizing everything and plan to turn this space into my own anarchist sanctuary.
Soon, I’ll add a bookshelf and more anarchist art to the wall, right next to the communist hammer and sickle symbol.
#Declutter

Achieving Equitability with Subsidy
Yuanyuan Wang, Tianze Wei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23251 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23251

Achieving Equitability with Subsidy
We study the fair allocation problem of indivisible items with subsidies. In this paper, we mainly consider the notion of fairness - equitability (EQ), which requires that items be allocated such that all agents value the bundle they receive equally. Firstly, we study the upper bounds of the required subsidy to achieve EQ in different settings of items and provide the corresponding lower bounds. Secondly, we consider the bounded subsidy for achieving EQ and another popular notion of fairness - …

INTERPOS: Interaction Rhythm Guided Positional Morphing for Mobile App Recommender Systems
M. H. Maqbool, Moghis Fereidouni, Umar Farooq, A. B. Siddique, Hassan Foroosh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12661

INTERPOS: Interaction Rhythm Guided Positional Morphing for Mobile App Recommender Systems
The mobile app market has expanded exponentially, offering millions of apps with diverse functionalities, yet research in mobile app recommendation remains limited. Traditional sequential recommender systems utilize the order of items in users' historical interactions to predict the next item for the users. Position embeddings, well-established in transformer-based architectures for natural language processing tasks, effectively distinguish token positions in sequences. In sequential recommenda…

Engineering Serendipity through Recommendations of Items with Atypical Aspects
Ramit Aditya, Razvan Bunescu, Smita Nannaware, Erfan Al-Hossami
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23580

Engineering Serendipity through Recommendations of Items with Atypical Aspects
A restaurant dinner or a hotel stay may lead to memorable experiences when guests encounter unexpected aspects that also match their interests. For example, an origami-making station in the waiting area of a restaurant may be both surprising and enjoyable for a customer who is passionate about paper crafts. Similarly, an exhibit of 18th century harpsichords would be atypical for a hotel lobby and likely pique the interest of a guest who has a passion for Baroque music. Motivated by this insight…

Online Fair Allocations with Binary Valuations and Beyond
Yuanyuan Wang, Tianze Wei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24321 https://arxiv.or…

Online Fair Allocations with Binary Valuations and Beyond
In an online fair allocation problem, a sequence of indivisible items arrives online and needs to be allocated to offline agents immediately and irrevocably. In our paper, we study the online allocation of either goods or chores. We adapt popular fairness notions, including envy-freeness up to one item (EF1) and maximin share fairness (MMS), and use utilitarian social welfare (USW) to measure efficiency. For both settings of items, we present a series of positive results regarding the existence…

Serendipitous Recommendation with Multimodal LLM
Haoting Wang, Jianling Wang, Hao Li, Fangjun Yi, Mengyu Fu, Youwei Zhang, Yifan Liu, Liang Liu, Minmin Chen, Ed H. Chi, Lichan Hong, Haokai Lu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08283

Serendipitous Recommendation with Multimodal LLM
Conventional recommendation systems succeed in identifying relevant content but often fail to provide users with surprising or novel items. Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) possess the world knowledge and multimodal understanding needed for serendipity, but their integration into billion-item-scale platforms presents significant challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical framework where fine-tuned MLLMs provide high-level guidance to conventional recommendation models, s…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23630 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csIR_…

Finding Interest Needle in Popularity Haystack: Improving Retrieval by Modeling Item Exposure
Recommender systems operate in closed feedback loops, where user interactions reinforce popularity bias, leading to over-recommendation of already popular items while under-exposing niche or novel content. Existing bias mitigation methods, such as Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS) and Off-Policy Correction (OPC), primarily operate at the ranking stage or during training, lacking explicit real-time control over exposure dynamics. In this work, we introduce an exposure-aware retrieval scoring appr…