Tootfinder

"White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller says President Donald Trump is looking for ways to expand its legal power to deport migrants who are in the United States illegally. To achieve that, he says the administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, . ."

Trump team mulls suspending habeas corpus to speed deportations. Can it?
Top White House aide Stephen Miller says the Trump administration is looking for ways to expand its legal power to deport migrants who are in the United States illegally. To achieve that, he says President Donald Trump’s team is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, the constitutional right for people to legally challenge their detention by the government. Such a move would be aimed at migrants as part of the Republican president’s broader crackdown at the U.S.-Mexico border. …

I read "Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It" by Christof Koch.
Interesting book which spends like 8 or 9 chapters detailing all the experiments which prove beyond much doubt that consciousness, and self awareness, is a thing done by a brain.
It describes how perception is a construction of a description, has a chapter called "computational mind"
And then spends the last two chapters describing why he thinks the mind can't be computed, because drugs have made him think experience is some kind of magic associated with highly interconnected causal structures.
Apparently, he thinks, once things become interconnected enough they become able to cause things independently of the physics running those connections.
Which is crazy, obviously. There's nothing causal in direct connections between neurons that isn't equally causal in modeled connections between virtual neurons.
All his evidence in the book from neural MRI scans to the effects of psychedelic drugs and symptoms of strokes and disease point to the brain simulating a virtual reality which is the basis of perception.
That simulated world in which we live is full of colour and shape and sounds and emotions and millions of mental constructs that are built to be correlated by the senses with the outside world, but are not equal to the world itself. We live in a dream constructed to correlate with reality.
But then instead of taking the next step: That consciousness itself is a property of a simulated being inside that mental model of the universe, a property which the brain simulates and applies to the virtual self that's doing the experiencing inside that model, he jumps towards some magic implying pan-psychism or that sufficiently interconnected networks become causally self-complete for some reason nobody can fathom.
Sure, colour and shape and emotions are all made up by the brain but experience can't be! For some reason.
You see in truth dualism is false, in that there is no spirit realm in which ghosts animate the matter of the body somehow.
Yet also, dualism is true, in that there is a simulated mental reality which we live in, computed by the brain in which all perception and experience are created, which is related-to but separate-from the unfolding complicated dance of energy that is the universe our bodies interact with.
People take some DMT trip, and the model of the universe emulated by their brain collapses and breaks. Their virtual simulated self inside their mind has these experiences of being one with the universe or the experience of feeling dead yet conscious or whatever, and these hippies think that the broken down simulated experience is real and reflects how consciousness is more fundamental than the atoms that make up the neurons in their brain.
Instead of realizing it shows them that their experienced universe is a simulacrum, they think they get a more direct experience of reality somehow. A consciousness more pure than any mere base atom.
"Then I am myself the world" is a great title. Everything you ever experience is created and simulated in your brain like a dream, the whole universe is inside your head. Even the fact of experience itself.
But that isn't the conclusion Koch reaches somehow, he just jumps from describing the evidence that this is so straight into ascribing super-causal magic consciousness to particular arrangements of atoms that integrated information theory suggest have high correlation, and thinks therefore conciousness is itself the entire universe.
Ah well, fun book. I like arguing in my head with authors that are wrong.
#reading #books #consciousness #thenIAmMyselfTheWorld

Stop Misusing t-SNE and UMAP for Visual Analytics
Hyeon Jeon, Jeongin Park, Sungbok Shin, Jinwook Seo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08725 https://

Stop Misusing t-SNE and UMAP for Visual Analytics
Misuses of t-SNE and UMAP in visual analytics have become increasingly common. For example, although t-SNE and UMAP projections often do not faithfully reflect true distances between clusters, practitioners frequently use them to investigate inter-cluster relationships. In this paper, we bring this issue to the surface and comprehensively investigate why such misuse occurs and how to prevent it. We conduct a literature review of 114 papers to verify the prevalence of the misuse and analyze the …

Diffusion-Based Hierarchical Graph Neural Networks for Simulating Nonlinear Solid Mechanics
Tobias W\"urth, Niklas Freymuth, Gerhard Neumann, Luise K\"arger
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06045

Diffusion-Based Hierarchical Graph Neural Networks for Simulating Nonlinear Solid Mechanics
Graph-based learned simulators have emerged as a promising approach for simulating physical systems on unstructured meshes, offering speed and generalization across diverse geometries. However, they often struggle with capturing global phenomena, such as bending or long-range correlations, and suffer from error accumulation over long rollouts due to their reliance on local message passing and direct next-step prediction. We address these limitations by introducing the Rolling Diffusion-Batched …

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

A giant planet transiting a 0.2 solar mass host star
Edward M. Bryant, Andr\'es Jord\'an, Joel D. Hartman, Daniel Bayliss, Elyar Sedaghati, Khalid Barkaoui, Jamila Chouqar, Francisco J. Pozuelos, Daniel P. Thorngren, Mathilde Timmermans, Jose Manuel Almenara, Igor V. Chilingarian, Karen A. Collins, Tianjun Gan, Steve B. Howell, Norio Narita, Enric Palle, Benjamin V. Rackham, Amaury H. M. J. Triaud, Gaspar \'A. Bakos, Rafael Brahm, Melissa J. Hobson, Vincent Van Eylen, Pedro…

A giant planet transiting a 0.2 solar mass host star
Planet formation models suggest that the formation of giant planets is significantly harder around low-mass stars, due to the scaling of protoplanetary disc masses with stellar mass. The discovery of giant planets orbiting such low-mass stars thus imposes strong constraints on giant planet formation processes. Here, we report the discovery of a transiting giant planet orbiting a $0.207 \pm 0.011 M_{\odot}$ star. The planet, TOI-6894 b, has a mass and radius of $M_P = 0.168 \pm 0.022 M_J (53.4 \…

"...'Without press, we by default have to assume that our government relaying information to us, is true,' Cuccia wrote, calling that attitude 'the antithesis of what we believe in.'..."
She's just soooo close to finally get it... 🤞
It is surprising, but some Magas really seem to have a small sense of ethics and really want to advance the country and not the cult (although the exact arguments/means are still disputable).
🤔