Tootfinder

Estou traduzindo uma série de textos de Émile Bréhier. O último é "O Sšbio Antigo e o século de Platão", sobre a #etica dos antigos.
Esses textos de Bréhier são muito bons para o público não familiarizado em filosofia por cruzarem as concepções éticas com as noções de mundo vigentes nos mesmos períodos históricos, o que é uma boa porta de entrada para quem, por exemplo, conhece um pouco …

I remember when deepfake legislation was first being passed towards the end of 2019 it was looking like we were on the way for SOME kind of accountability for this sort of thing, but then here comes these machines that generate the whole photo like it's fast food, and platforms most people do these things on bringing in automatic liability responses they're seemingly entitled to from Section 230 and now we're back at square one.

Yo where can I buy one of these sick shirts!? 😂
(I mean, I can dye shirts and screen print maybe I should make my own!)
https://www.kjzz.org/politics/2025-11-03/arizona-teachers-costumes-werent-about-charl…

Arizona teachers' costumes weren't about Charlie Kirk. They're facing death threats anyway
Math teachers at Cienega High School in southern Arizona are facing death threats and calls that they be fired after a Turning Point USA employee falsely accused them of wearing Halloween costumes mocking the assassination of the organization’s co-founder, Charlie Kirk.

There's a reason why most of the people who talk about AI the most are Combat Posters:
Anyone who does not thrive on conflict simply stops bothering to post at some point
-- SE Gyges
https://bsky.app/profile/jmiers230.bsky.social/post/3majnqn2ujk2r

Jess Miers 🦝 (@jmiers230.bsky.social)
There's a massive anti-AI bot network that triggers any time there's a post with slight positive sentiment towards AI. If one of those bots attaches to your post, you're hosed. It sucks and it makes any sort of normal, substantive AI discourse nearly impossible to exist here. [contains quote post or other embedded content]

Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
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.
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I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading

Weighted Stochastic Differential Equation to Implement Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao Gradient Flow
Herlock Rahimi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17878 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17878 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.17878
arXiv:2512.17878v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Score-based diffusion models currently constitute the state of the art in continuous generative modeling. These methods are typically formulated via overdamped or underdamped Ornstein--Uhlenbeck-type stochastic differential equations, in which sampling is driven by a combination of deterministic drift and Brownian diffusion, resulting in continuous particle trajectories in the ambient space. While such dynamics enjoy exponential convergence guarantees for strongly log-concave target distributions, it is well known that their mixing rates deteriorate exponentially in the presence of nonconvex or multimodal landscapes, such as double-well potentials. Since many practical generative modeling tasks involve highly non-log-concave target distributions, considerable recent effort has been devoted to developing sampling schemes that improve exploration beyond classical diffusion dynamics.
A promising line of work leverages tools from information geometry to augment diffusion-based samplers with controlled mass reweighting mechanisms. This perspective leads naturally to Wasserstein--Fisher--Rao (WFR) geometries, which couple transport in the sample space with vertical (reaction) dynamics on the space of probability measures. In this work, we formulate such reweighting mechanisms through the introduction of explicit correction terms and show how they can be implemented via weighted stochastic differential equations using the Feynman--Kac representation. Our study provides a preliminary but rigorous investigation of WFR-based sampling dynamics, and aims to clarify their geometric and operator-theoretic structure as a foundation for future theoretical and algorithmic developments.
toXiv_bot_toot

Time for a social experiment. I have 5 questions:
- What should we work towards as a society?
- What's one thing that doesn't exist now in your community but should?
- What's one action you could take in the coming year to align your life with that goal?
- What's one thing you could achieve in the coming year to get closer to making that thing exist?
- Imagine that we changed everything and you're living in the world you want to see exist. What does the world look like?
I've asked variations of these already (and am still getting great responses), but this time there's a catch. Get together some of your friends (3-5 people) and ask these questions of the group. Come up with *one* answer that everyone in the group agrees on and post it here, then write a bit about your experience.
If you don't know people locally (or otherwise can't do this in person), tag some folks in here or wherever your people are at digitally. Just add some info on if it's online or in person.
For anyone bold enough to actually do this, let me know if you'd be OK with me putting this in an upcoming entry (https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/).

Chats on Air Force One,
prior to this presidency,
were mostly off-the-record
and almost never on camera.
Administrations, prior to Trump’s, engaged in some level of message discipline,
planning what the president would say, how and when.
There is no such coherent planning in this White House.
In summary, Trump’s problem with the press are primarily of his own making.

When the President Hates the Press — and Has the Espionage Act
From license-stripping threats to sedition talk, Trump’s media crusade isn’t just bluster — it fits a troubling American pattern

It was a beautiful day for #flying in southern California. Visibility was at least 90 miles, and I managed to squeeze nearly 2 hours out of a few thermals near Warner Springs before making a stop at Santa Catalina Island on the way home.
#aviation

Towards Long-Term User Welfare in Recommender Systems via Creator-Oriented Information Revelation
Xu Zhao, Xiaopeng Ye, Chen Xu, Weiran Shen, Jun Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10511

Towards Long-Term User Welfare in Recommender Systems via Creator-Oriented Information Revelation
Improving the long-term user welfare (e.g., sustained user engagement) has become a central objective of recommender systems (RS). In real-world platforms, the creation behaviors of content creators plays a crucial role in shaping long-term welfare beyond short-term recommendation accuracy, making the effective steering of creator behavior essential to foster a healthier RS ecosystem. Existing works typically rely on re-ranking algorithms that heuristically adjust item exposure to steer creator…