Tootfinder

This is the weirdest article... it reads like something from the Onion.
"While driving last week I saw a young adult riding a bicycle. He was probably in his late teens or early twenties. I don't know him or his story, but when I saw him, I felt impressed. I think he reminded me a bit of myself when I wasn't old enough to drive."

There is more to #SolarPunk than solar panels and bikes. What we are talking about is being part of a living world. The hegemonic culture is one of hierarchical domination.
But many of the the cultures that hegemony suppresses bring a vibrancy to life. I don't buy yeast from the store, sealed in a plastic packet, a coffin for a living thing. I feed my sourdough. I am obligated to it, in a relationship with it, as the culture is reliant on me for it's survival. It speaks to me, with smell and color. I must pay attention. I have to learn it's nature, how it grows and eats at different temperatures informed by different times of the year. Mushrooms, yeast, kiefer, plants, independent things, things I can't control, life that is intertwined with my own.
But even my #bicycle speaks to me, which is something I hadn't considered until reading this and thinking about that framing.
It is not simply that "we need a different economic system." What we are talking about is a fundamentally different interpretation and experience of the world, from the hierarchical structure of death to a web of life, where even "inanimate" things become imbued with agency.
https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=2936873&post_id=151655646

Worth #reading this piece - a level-headed take on #China and how its changed.
https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-op…

App Life in China
“It’s really tough doing anything in China right now,” my friend told me. He’s a serial entrepreneur in Shanghai with a locked-in grin. We were waiting for our food in a Taiwanese restaurant in a lovingly-renovated toy factory in Shanghai. China was my home for 20 years, before moving to the U.S. in 2015. This was my first visit since the pandemic. Almost a decade away from the place where I got married, had kids, started a few companies, and sold one. It may be hard to make money in Ch…

As the tech world grapples with AI doomerism, AI safety has swiftly become Washington’s most combustible political snarl.
Check out today's Metacurity for more on this developing story and other critical infosec developments you should know, including
--South Korea drafts security rules for autonomous AI agents,
--Human contractors are reading sensitive ChatGPT conversations,
--Manhattan DA seizes 12 deepfake porn domains,
--Cops searched 19k Flock cameras “for the lols,”
--US to receive six Black Axe suspects accused of $6.2m fraud,
--Hackers hijack HBO Max Reddit account to spread malware,
--Telus customer accounts exposed in yearlong breach,
--Microsoft issues emergency fix for broken Windows updates,
--Cisco email gateway zero-day exploited for root access,
--Coupang forms security committee after $460m fine,
--Florida DMV hacked after breach claiming 160m IDs,
--CrowdStrike hits record high as AI fears lift cyber stocks,
--Exein raises $270m at $1.7B valuation,
--Supreme Court blocks Trump’s mail-ballot changes,
--Marks & Spencer rebounds from devastating cyberattack,
--Anthropic wants Claude connected to your bank account,
--UK pubs get biometric age checks
https://www.metacurity.com/ai-safety-has-swiftly-become-washingtons-most-combustible-political-snarl/

APEX: Adaptive Expert Prefetching for Memory-Efficient Edge MoE Inference
Alish Kanani, Layan Badawi, Umit Y. Ogras
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11688 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.11688 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.11688
arXiv:2608.11688v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models are attractive for edge deployment because they provide high model capacity while activating only a small subset of parameters per token, improving compute efficiency. However, MoE inference at the edge is fundamentally limited by memory. Expert parameters are large and often reside in off-chip memory due to capacity, cost, and power constraints, putting expert loading to the critical path. We present APEX: Adaptive Expert Prefetching, a predictive resource management framework that overlaps expert loading with useful computation. APEX introduces a lightweight prefetch router that predicts candidate experts before the attention block to dynamically fetch additional experts using a learned confidence model. This adaptive strategy achieves over 99% overlap accuracy, significantly outperforming fixed top-k prefetching techniques. APEX supports two execution modes: a correctness-preserving mode that guarantees exact routing semantics, and a stall-free mode that eliminates residual stalls by operating on available experts with negligible impact on application accuracy. Across multiple MoE models, the correctness-preserving mode reduces per-token latency by up to 26% and improves energy-delay product (EDP) by up to 41% over state-of-the-art baselines, while the stall-free mode provides additional efficiency gains with negligible impact on application accuracy. These results establish adaptive, confidence-driven expert prefetching as an effective approach for efficient MoE inference on edge systems.
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Design G suggests the most modern, banknote-looking front sides for the future #Euro banknotes. Though, I really don't like the corporate-like vector stock images on the backs.
Design B, on the other hand, features very clean and informative illustrations of the European institutions' buildings on the backs. Architecture and banknotes are a dream team. Though, I'm not a fan of th…

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
EELS:
🎵 I'm On Standby (Radio Edit)
#NowPlaying #EELS
https://open.spotify.com/track/3CE5Mnws5D0xuCvoZgbMO6

Just finished "What Elephants Know" by Eric Dinerstein. Leaves me with very mixed feelings: it's a novel in many ways about Nepal, and I don't doubt that the author's experience living there gives him a not-insignificant window into the culture, plus there are multiple people mentioned in the acknowledgements as judging faithfulness to Nepali culture. I myself have no direct connection to the country, nor enough knowledge to see any clear inaccuracies in the writing, nor ways in which it directly disrespects the culture.
That said, my instincts say this is a portrayal of the culture and country that probably elides much about the downsides of foreign influence and the monarchy (something I naturally distrust as an anarchist). At minimum, the internal contradiction is clear between the police as an inept and dangerous institution when encountered directly, but as a clean and unproblematic way to resolve problems with criminals when the Maroons subplot needs wrapping up. This is typical of neoliberals who have begun to acknowledge the most obvious problems with police but who refuse to admit the necessity of police abolition. Furthermore, there's a strong thread of white saviorism thrown in, and a big piece of meritocracy to go along with it. This story presents only highly particular fictionalized solutions to the real structural problems facing the elephants and other animals it describes, and the solutions it imagines require reliance on institutions which are in the real world fundamentally untrustworthy.
I enjoyed learning about the ecology of the Nepali borderlands, and about the cultures surrounding elephants there, plus some of the diversity of religions and cultures that interact in the area, and the story was satisfyingly written in terms of the main character's trials and responses to them, if I disregard the issues mentioned above.
If anyone has recommendations for novels in English (including via translation) by actual Nepali authors, I'd love to hear them, as I'll be looking for that perspective to balance this one.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Eccentricity-Constrained CNN Training Reveals Adaptive Information Coding Around the Visual Field
Dylan M. Diaz, Margaret M. Henderson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19316 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.19316 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.19316
arXiv:2607.19316v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In the primate visual system, center-preferring cortical populations have higher spatial resolution and overlap face- and word-selective regions while periphery-preferring populations have lower spatial resolution and overlap scene-selective regions. This "eccentricity bias" may reflect differential task-relevance: central vision may better support fine-grained tasks like face recognition and reading, while peripheral vision may better support scene understanding. To test whether eccentricity-dependent coding can emerge from natural experience, we used egocentric video and eye-tracking data from the Visual Experience Dataset (VEDB). We trained ResNet-18 models using contrastive learning (SimCLR) on frames modified to isolate different eccentricities (gaze-contingent fovea-only crops, periphery-only crops, and periphery-only crops with a NeuroFovea transform applied). We evaluated downstream task performance and model alignment with human fMRI data (Natural Scenes Dataset; encoding models). In-domain VEDB frame classification showed systematic differences between fovea- and periphery-only models across categories, indicating differential informativeness across tasks. On downstream classification, VEDB-pretrained models generalized better to scene categorization (Places365) than face recognition (VGGFace2), with fovea-only models stronger on both. Across visual cortex, VEDB-pretrained models matched neural predictivity of models trained on mid-sized non-egocentric datasets (ImageNet-100), suggesting egocentric data supports emergence of cortically-aligned representations. In scene-selective cortex (PPA, RSC), periphery-only models held a small but consistent advantage in explained variance over fovea-only models, suggesting these regions are aligned with peripheral statistics. Together, these results suggest egocentric experience may adaptively constrain cortical information processing.
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