Tootfinder

Ukraine studied drug cartels to learn how to sneak drones into Russia for its 'Operation Spiderweb' attack
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/ukraine-studied-drug-cartels-learn-044324126.html

Stated Preference for Interaction and Continued Engagement (SPICE): Evaluating an LLM's Willingness to Re-engage in Conversation
Thomas Manuel Rost, Martina Figlia, Bernd Wallraff
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09043

Stated Preference for Interaction and Continued Engagement (SPICE): Evaluating an LLM's Willingness to Re-engage in Conversation
We introduce and evaluate Stated Preference for Interaction and Continued Engagement (SPICE), a simple diagnostic signal elicited by asking a Large Language Model a YES or NO question about its willingness to re-engage with a user's behavior after reviewing a short transcript. In a study using a 3-tone (friendly, unclear, abusive) by 10-interaction stimulus set, we tested four open-weight chat models across four framing conditions, resulting in 480 trials. Our findings show that SPICE sharply d…

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy

Bowser re-ups call for statehood amid Trump DC crackdown
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5449556-bowser-re-ups-call-for-statehood-amid-trump-dc-crackdown/

While China’s older tech pioneers tend to idolize Silicon Valley,
younger founders find their role models in people such as
DeepSeek’s Liang Wenfeng and
Unitree’s Wang Xingxing
— both of whom studied exclusively at Chinese universities and are known to predominantly hire domestic talent.

A December analysis from Citi GPS projected that the world would be populated by 648 million humanlike bots by 2050,
unlocking an enduring production advantage and immen…

The Chinese robots are coming
China is miles ahead in the race to dominate a technology that could define the 21st century.

Morphologies of caustics studied by catastrophe charged-particle optics
Tom Fraysse, Robin Cours, Hugo Louren\c{c}o-Martins, Florent Houdellier
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09551 …

Morphologies of caustics studied by catastrophe charged-particle optics
This paper explores the topologies of caustics observed in instruments that employ charged particles, such as electron and ion microscopes. These geometrical figures are studied here using catastrophe theory. The application of this geometrical theory to our optical situation has enabled us to analytically reproduce the behaviours of various caustics. The interest lies mainly in the universal nature of these results since our treatment requires no prior knowledge of the optical configuration, b…

"""
All of which was of the utmost importance for subsequent developments in the medicine of the mind. In its positivist incarnation, this was little more than the combination of the two experiences that classicism had juxtaposed without ever joining them together: a social, normative and dichotomous experience of madness that revolved entirely around the imperative of confinement, formulated in a style as simple as ‘yes or no’, ‘dangerous or harmless’, and ‘good or not good for confinement’, and a finely differentiated, qualitative, juridical experience, well aware of limits and degrees, which looked into all the aspects of the behaviour of the subject for the polymorphous incarnations that insanity might assume. The psychopathology of the nineteenth century (and perhaps our own too, even now) believes that it orients itself and takes its bearings in relation to a homo natura, or a normal man pre-existing all experience of mental illness. Such a man is in fact an invention, and if he is to be situated, it is not in a natural space, but in a system that identifies the socius to the subject of the law. Consequently a madman is not recognised as such because an illness has pushed him to the margins of normality, but because our culture situates him at the meeting point between the social decree of confinement and the juridical knowledge that evaluates the responsibility of individuals before the law. The ‘positive’ science of mental illness and the humanitarian sentiments that brought the mad back into the realm of the human were only possible once that synthesis had been solidly established. They could be said to form the concrete a priori of any psychopathology with scientific pretensions.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

🌠 Ryugu asteroid research reveals mineral history predating any on Earth
#astronomy

Ryugu asteroid research reveals mineral history predating any on Earth
In 2020, the Hayabusa2 uncrewed spacecraft successfully returned small fragments from the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu, providing the first pristine samples from a carbonaceous asteroid. Grains from those samples were studied at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), revealing new details into the asteroid's composition and origin. This insight could ultimately help answer big questions about how water and organic matter came to exist on early Earth, forming the building blocks of lif…

Surfaces and interfaces of infinite-layer nickelates studied by dynamical mean-field theory
Leonard M. Verhoff, Liang Si, Karsten Held
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09184 https://

Surfaces and interfaces of infinite-layer nickelates studied by dynamical mean-field theory
Infinite-layer nickelate superconductors are typically synthesized as thin films and thus include, besides the more bulk-like inner layers, distinct surface and interface layers in contact with the vacuum and substrate, respectively. Here, we employ density-functional theory and dynamical mean-field theory to investigate how electronic correlations influence these surface and interface regions. Our results show that electronic correlations can significantly modify the electronic structure, even…

Trump officials to link covid shots to child deaths, alarming career scientists
Trump health officials plan to link coronavirus vaccines to the deaths of 25 children as they consider limiting which Americans should get the shots.

The findings appear to be based on information submitted to the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System,
which contains unverified reports of side effects or bad experiences with vaccines submitted by anyone, including patients, doctors, ph…

Trump officials to link covid shots to child deaths, alarming career scientists
The move to link coronavirus vaccines to 25 child deaths alarms career scientists who say the shots have been extensively studied.