Tootfinder

By Refusing to Show Faces or Badges, ICE Opens Door to Vigilante Impersonators
The agency’s tactics have led to a rash of crimes committed by people impersonating federal agents
Witnesses have recorded numerous instances of masked ICE agents conducting raids and violently arresting people.
In New York City, a masked federal agent handcuffed city comptroller and then-Democratic mayoral candidate Brad Lander
after he linked arms with a man who ICE was attempting to det…

By Refusing to Show Faces or Badges, ICE Opens Door to Vigilante Impersonators
The masked, plainclothes ICE agents terrorizing immigrant communities are indistinguishable from racist vigilantes.

Hardware acceleration for ultra-fast Neural Network training on FPGA for MRF map reconstruction
Mattia Ricchi, Fabrizio Alfonsi, Camilla Marella, Marco Barbieri, Alessandra Retico, Leonardo Brizi, Alessandro Gabrielli, Claudia Testa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22156

Hardware acceleration for ultra-fast Neural Network training on FPGA for MRF map reconstruction
Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF) is a fast quantitative MR Imaging technique that provides multi-parametric maps with a single acquisition. Neural Networks (NNs) accelerate reconstruction but require significant resources for training. We propose an FPGA-based NN for real-time brain parameter reconstruction from MRF data. Training the NN takes an estimated 200 seconds, significantly faster than standard CPU-based training, which can be up to 250 times slower. This method could enable rea…

What Makes AI Applications Acceptable or Unacceptable? A Predictive Moral Framework
Kimmo Eriksson, Simon Karlsson, Irina Vartanova, Pontus Strimling
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19317

What Makes AI Applications Acceptable or Unacceptable? A Predictive Moral Framework
As artificial intelligence rapidly transforms society, developers and policymakers struggle to anticipate which applications will face public moral resistance. We propose that these judgments are not idiosyncratic but systematic and predictable. In a large, preregistered study (N = 587, U.S. representative sample), we used a comprehensive taxonomy of 100 AI applications spanning personal and organizational contexts-including both functional uses and the moral treatment of AI itself. In particip…

Algebraic invariants of the special fiber ring of ladder determinantal modules
Alessandra Costantini, Louiza Fouli, Kriti Goel, Kuei-Nuan Lin, Haydee Lindo, Whitney Liske, Maral Mostafazadehfard
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22167

Algebraic invariants of the special fiber ring of ladder determinantal modules
We provide explicit formulas for key invariants of special fiber rings of ladder determinantal modules, that is, modules that are direct sums of ideals of maximal minors of a ladder matrix. Our results are given in terms of the combinatorial data of the associated ladder matrix. In particular, we compute its dimension, regularity, $a$-invariant, and multiplicity, which via \textsc{Sagbi} degeneration coincide with those of Hibi rings associated to a distributive lattice. Then, via Gröbner dege…

Just saw this:
#AI can mean a lot of things these days, but lots of the popular meanings imply a bevy of harms that I definitely wouldn't feel are worth a cute fish game. In fact, these harms are so acute that even "just" playing into the AI hype becomes its own kind of harm (it's similar to blockchain in that way).
@… noticed that the authors claim the code base is 80% AI generated, which is a red flag because people with sound moral compasses wouldn't be using AI to "help" write code in the first place. The authors aren't by some miracle people who couldn't build this app without help, in case that influences your thinking about it: they have the skills to write the code themselves, although it likely would have taken longer (but also been better).
I was more interested in the fish-classification AI, and how much it might be dependent on datacenters. Thankfully, a quick glance at the code confirms they're using ONNX and running a self-trained neural network on your device. While the exponentially-increasing energy & water demands of datacenters to support billion-parameter models are a real concern, this is not that. Even a non-AI game can burn a lot of cycles on someone's phone, and I don't think there's anything to complain about energy-wise if we're just using cycles on the end user's device as long as we're not having them keep it on for hours crunching numbers like blockchain stuff does. Running whatever stuff locally while the user is playing a game is a negligible environmental concern, unlike, say, calling out to ChatGPT where you're directly feeding datacenter demand. Since they claimed to have trained the network themselves, and since it's actually totally reasonable to make your own dataset for this and get good-enough-for-a-silly-game results with just a few hundred examples, I don't have any ethical objections to the data sourcing or training processes either. Hooray! This is finally an example of "ethical use of neutral networks" that I can hold up as an example of what people should be doing instead of the BS they are doing.
But wait... Remember what I said about feeding the AI hype being its own form of harm? Yeah, between using AI tools for coding and calling their classifier "AI" in a way that makes it seem like the same kind of thing as ChatGPT et al., they're leaning into the hype rather than helping restrain it. And that means they're causing harm. Big AI companies can point to them and say "look AI enables cute things you like" when AI didn't actually enable it. So I'm feeling meh about this cute game and won't be sharing it aside from this post. If you love the cute fish, you don't really have to feel bad for playing with it, but I'd feel bad for advertising it without a disclaimer.

ABQ mayoral candidate campaigns on fake education, experience and made-up prior elected office - City Desk ABQ https://citydesk.org/2025/08/14/albuquerque-mayoral-candidate-makes-false-claims-echoing-george-santos-scandal/ …

Echoing George Santos, ABQ mayoral candidate campaigns on fake education, experience and made-up prior elected office - City Desk ABQ
(c) City Desk ABQ. Republication is available by request to kevin@newmexico.news According to his campaign website, Albuquerque mayoral candidate Patrick B. Sais graduated from UNM with a degree in political science, was elected to the Albuquerque City Council and earned endorsements from a local business owner, firefighter and educator in his campaign for Albuquerque mayor.  […]

NYC's Muslim mayoral candidate gets car bomb threat, despite not owning a vehicle (Greg Wehner/Fox News)
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/nycs-muslim-mayoral-candidate-gets-car-bomb-threat-despite-not-owning-vehicle
http://www.memeorandum.com/250619/p123#a250619p123

The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science
requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.
-- Robert Heinlein

Sometimes democracy just works.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/nyregion/cuomo-mamdani-mayor-primary-nyc.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Rk8._dtb.J00ws4qd9RB2&smid=url-share

Mamdani Stuns Cuomo in New York Mayoral Primary
Zohran Mamdani appears poised to be the Democratic nominee for mayor, where he could face a contested race that will include Eric Adams and perhaps Andrew Cuomo.

“Greykjavík”
One of my favorite pieces of street art.
#iceland #reykjavik #streetart