Tootfinder

Long post, game design
Crungle is a game designed to be a simple test of general reasoning skills that's difficult to play by rote memory, since there are many possible rule sets, but it should be easy to play if one can understand and extrapolate from rules. The game is not necessarily fair, with the first player often having an advantage or a forced win. The game is entirely deterministic, although a variant determines the rule set randomly.
This is version 0.1, and has not yet been tested at all.
Crungle is a competitive game for two players, each of whom controls a single piece on a 3x3 grid. The cells of the grid are numbered from 1 to 9, starting at the top left and proceeding across each row and then down to the next row, so the top three cells are 1, 2, and 3 from left to right, then the next three are 4, 5, and 6 and the final row is cells 7, 8, and 9.
The two players decide who shall play as purple and who shall play as orange. Purple goes first, starting the rules phase by picking one goal rule from the table of goal rules. Next, orange picks a goal rule. These two goal rules determine the two winning conditions. Then each player, starting with orange, alternate picking a movement rule until four movement rules have been selected. During this process, at most one indirect movement rule may be selected. Finally, purple picks a starting location for orange (1-9), with 5 (the center) not allowed. Then orange picks the starting location for purple, which may not be adjacent to orange's starting position.
Alternatively, the goal rules, movement rules, and starting positions may be determined randomly, or a pre-determined ruleset may be selected.
If the ruleset makes it impossible to win, the players should agree to a draw. Either player could instead "bet" their opponent. If the opponent agrees to the bet, the opponent must demonstrate a series of moves by both players that would result in a win for either player. If they can do this, they win, but if they submit an invalid demonstration or cannot submit a demonstration, the player who "bet" wins.
Now that starting positions, movement rules, and goals have been decided, the play phase proceeds with each player taking a turn, starting with purple, until one player wins by satisfying one of the two goals, or until the players agree to a draw. Note that it's possible for both players to occupy the same space.
During each player's turn, that player identifies one of the four movement rules to use and names the square they move to using that rule, then they move their piece into that square and their turn ends. Neither player may use the same movement rule twice in a row (but it's okay to use the same rule your opponent just did unless another rule disallows that). If the movement rule a player picks moves their opponent's piece, they need to state where their opponent's piece ends up. Pieces that would move off the board instead stay in place; it's okay to select a rule that causes your piece to stay in place because of this rule. However, if a rule says "pick a square" or "move to a square" with some additional criteria, but there are no squares that meet those criteria, then that rule may not be used, and a player who picks that rule must pick a different one instead.
Any player who incorrectly states a destination for either their piece or their opponent's piece, picks an invalid square, or chooses an invalid rule has made a violation, as long as their opponent objects before selecting their next move. A player who makes at least three violations immediately forfeits and their opponent wins by default. However, if a player violates a rule but their opponent does not object before picking their next move, the stated destination(s) of the invalid move still stand, and the violation does not count. If a player objects to a valid move, their objection is ignored, and if they do this at least three times, they forfeit and their opponent wins by default.
Goal rules (each player picks one; either player can win using either chosen rule):
End your turn in the same space as your opponent three turns in a row.
End at least one turn in each of the 9 cells.
End five consecutive turns in the three cells in any single row, ending at least one turn on each of the three.
End five consecutive turns in the three cells in any single column, ending at least one turn on each of the three.
Within the span of 8 consecutive turns, end at least one turn in each of cells 1, 3, 7, and 9 (the four corners of the grid).
Within the span of 8 consecutive turns at least one turn in each of cells 2, 4, 6, and 8 (the central cells on each side).
Within the span of 8 consecutive turns, end at least one turn in the cell directly above your opponent, and end at least one turn in the cell directly below your opponent (in either order).
Within the span of 8 consecutive turns at least one turn in the cell directly to the left of your opponent, and end at least one turn in the cell directly to the right of your opponent (in either order).
End 12 turns in a row without ending any of them in cell 5.
End 8 turns in a row in 8 different cells.
Movement rules (each player picks two; either player may move using any of the four):
Move to any cell on the board that's diagonally adjacent to your current position.
Move to any cell on the board that's orthogonally adjacent to your current position.
Move up one cell. Also move your opponent up one cell.
Move down one cell. Also move your opponent down one cell.
Move left one cell. Also move your opponent left one cell.
Move right one cell. Also move your opponent right one cell.
Move up one cell. Move your opponent down one cell.
Move down one cell. Move your opponent up one cell.
Move left one cell. Move your opponent right one cell.
Move right one cell. Move your opponent left one cell.
Move any pieces that aren't in square 5 clockwise around the edge of the board 1 step (for example, from 1 to 2 or 3 to 6 or 9 to 8).
Move any pieces that aren't in square 5 counter-clockwise around the edge of the board 1 step (for example, from 1 to 4 or 6 to 3 or 7 to 8).
Move to any square reachable from your current position by a knight's move in chess (in other words, a square that's in an adjacent column and two rows up or down, or that's in an adjacent row and two columns left or right).
Stay in the same place.
Swap places with your opponent's piece.
Move back to the position that you started at on your previous turn.
If you are on an odd-numbered square, move to any other odd-numbered square. Otherwise, move to any even-numbered square.
Move to any square in the same column as your current position.
Move to any square in the same row as your current position.
Move to any square in the same column as your opponent's position.
Move to any square in the same row as your opponent's position.
Pick a square that's neither in the same row as your piece nor in the same row as your opponent's piece. Move to that square.
Pick a square that's neither in the same column as your piece nor in the same column as your opponent's piece. Move to that square.
Move to one of the squares orthogonally adjacent to your opponent's piece.
Move to one of the squares diagonally adjacent to your opponent's piece.
Move to the square opposite your current position across the middle square, or stay in place if you're in the middle square.
Pick any square that's closer to your opponent's piece than the square you're in now, measured using straight-line distance between square centers (this includes the square your opponent is in). Move to that square.
Pick any square that's further from your opponent's piece than the square you're in now, measured using straight-line distance between square centers. Move to that square.
If you are on a corner square (1, 3, 7, or 9) move to any other corner square. Otherwise, move to square 5.
If you are on an edge square (2, 4, 6, or 8) move to any other edge square. Otherwise, move to square 5.
Indirect movement rules (may be chosen instead of a direct movement rule; at most one per game):
Move using one of the other three movement rules selected in your game, and in addition, your opponent may not use that rule on their next turn (nor may they select it via an indirect rule like this one).
Select two of the other three movement rules, declare them, and then move as if you had used one and then the other, applying any additional effects of both rules in order.
Move using one of the other three movement rules selected in your game, but if the move would cause your piece to move off the board, instead of staying in place move to square 5 (in the middle).
Pick one of the other three movement rules selected in your game and apply it, but move your opponent's piece instead of your own piece. If that movement rule says to move "your opponent's piece," instead apply that movement to your own piece. References to "your position" and "your opponent's position" are swapped when applying the chosen rule, as are references to "your turn" and "your opponent's turn" and do on.
#Game #GameDesign

Google unveils the $999 Pixel 10 Pro and $1,199 10 Pro XL, with 6.3" and 6.8" OLED displays, Tensor G5 chips, Zoned UFS storage, available on August 28 (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2025/08/20/google-pixel-10-pro-xl-seri…

Pixel 10 Pro and Pro XL are all about upgrades you can’t see, still starting at $999 [Hands-on]
Google Pixel 10 Pro series doesn't have much in the way of visual updates, but it packs a lot of upgrades under the hood for the same price.

I still can't get over the fact that we're criminally charging bike riders in #NYC.
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/06/16

Q1’s –0.5% growth is already a bad look. But Apollo’s Torsten SlŸk points out that data-center construction alone added about a full percentage point. Remove it, and you’re staring at –1.5%.
Q2 looks so much healthier at 3.0%, or you would think so. Pantheon Macroeconomics sums up the first half of 2025 with some more sobriety: AI alone contributed about half a percentage point of GDP. Without it, the U.S. would be bumbling along at 1% growth. Still better than minus, but thin grass all the same.
One more stat for the better view: since 2019, investment in AI-sensitive sectors is up 53%, while everywhere else is basically flat – 0.3%.
https://www.turingpost.com/p/fod114?_bhlid=f437d028caabcb66cc36e677728d12aea2504a71

#English #spelling still manages to surprise me all the time. Especially with choosing “c” or “s” or “z”¹ in places for the basically same pronunciation (similarly with “ou” vs “u” (or “o”) and “e” vs “i”).
Trying to correct the spelling regularly gets me more confused ;-)
__
¹ok…

Extraction of classical ergotropy
Michele Campisi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12797 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12797…

Extraction of classical ergotropy
Finding the time dependent perturbation that extracts the maximal amount of energy (a.k.a. ergotropy) from a thermally isolated quantum system is a central, solved, problem in quantum thermodynamics. Notably, the same problem has been long studied for classical systems as well, e.g., in the field of plasma physics, but a general solution is still missing there. By building on the analogy with the quantum solution, we provide the classical ergotropy extraction driving: it consists of an instanta…

Sonnet 076 - LXXVI
Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O! know sweet love I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;…

I've got a 3am start with derpmaster Mike coming up in the next few days. He normally gets up at 5.30am so I've got a feeling there's going to be no settling him after I arrive and his regular humans all leave.
Still, hot weather will mean an early walk and breakfast and then we can both snooze!
My fourth year of looking after Michael.
#Greyhounds

Long; central Massachusetts colonial history
Today on a whim I visited a site in Massachusetts marked as "Huguenot Fort Ruins" on OpenStreetMaps. I drove out with my 4-year-old through increasingly rural central Massachusetts forests & fields to end up on a narrow street near the top of a hill beside a small field. The neighboring houses had huge lawns, some with tractors.
Appropriately for this day and this moment in history, the history of the site turns out to be a microcosm of America. Across the field beyond a cross-shaped stone memorial stood an info board with a few diagrams and some text. The text of the main sign (including typos/misspellings) read:
"""
Town Is Formed
Early in the 1680's, interest began to generate to develop a town in the area west of Natick in the south central part of the Commonwealth that would be suitable for a settlement. A Mr. Hugh Campbell, a Scotch merchant of Boston petitioned the court for land for a colony. At about the same time, Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton also were desirous of obtaining land for a settlement. A claim was made for all lands west of the Blackstone River to the southern land of Massachusetts to a point northerly of the Springfield Road then running southwesterly until it joined the southern line of Massachusetts.
Associated with Dudley and Stoughton was Robert Thompson of London, England, Dr. Daniel Cox and John Blackwell, both of London and Thomas Freak of Hannington, Wiltshire, as proprietors. A stipulation in the acquisition of this land being that within four years thirty families and an orthodox minister settle in the area. An extension of this stipulation was granted at the end of the four years when no group large enough seemed to be willing to take up the opportunity.
In 1686, Robert Thompson met Gabriel Bernor and learned that he was seeking an area where his countrymen, who had fled their native France because of the Edict of Nantes, were desirous of a place to live. Their main concern was to settle in a place that would allow them freedom of worship. New Oxford, as it was the so-named, at that time included the larger part of Charlton, one-fourth of Auburn, one-fifth of Dudley and several square miles of the northeast portion of Southbridge as well as the easterly ares now known as Webster.
Joseph Dudley's assessment that the area was capable of a good settlement probably was based on the idea of the meadows already established along with the plains, ponds, brooks and rivers. Meadows were a necessity as they provided hay for animal feed and other uses by the settlers. The French River tributary books and streams provided a good source for fishing and hunting. There were open areas on the plains as customarily in November of each year, the Indians burnt over areas to keep them free of underwood and brush. It appeared then that this area was ready for settling.
The first seventy-five years of the settling of the Town of Oxford originally known as Manchaug, embraced three different cultures. The Indians were known to be here about 1656 when the Missionary, John Eliott and his partner Daniel Gookin visited in the praying towns. Thirty years later, in 1686, the Huguenots walked here from Boston under the guidance of their leader Isaac Bertrand DuTuffeau. The Huguenot's that arrived were not peasants, but were acknowledged to be the best Agriculturist, Wine Growers, Merchant's, and Manufacter's in France. There were 30 families consisting of 52 people. At the time of their first departure (10 years), due to Indian insurrection, there were 80 people in the group, and near their Meetinghouse/Church was a Cemetery that held 20 bodies. In 1699, 8 to 10 familie's made a second attempt to re-settle, failing after only four years, with the village being completely abandoned in 1704.
The English colonist made their way here in 1713 and established what has become a permanent settlement.
"""
All that was left of the fort was a crumbling stone wall that would have been the base of a higher wooden wall according to a picture of a model (I didn't think to get a shot of that myself). Only trees and brush remain where the multi-story main wooden building was.
This story has so many echoes in the present:
- The rich colonialists from Boston & London agree to settle the land, buying/taking land "rights" from the colonial British court that claimed jurisdiction without actually having control of the land. Whether the sponsors ever actually visited the land themselves I don't know. They surely profited somehow, whether from selling on the land rights later or collecting taxes/rent or whatever, by they needed poor laborers to actually do the work of developing the land (& driving out the original inhabitants, who had no say in the machinations of the Boston court).
- The land deal was on condition that there capital-holders who stood to profit would find settlers to actually do the work of colonizing. The British crown wanted more territory to be controlled in practice not just in theory, but they weren't going to be the ones to do the hard work.
- The capital-holders actually failed to find enough poor suckers to do their dirty work for 4 years, until the Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, were desperate enough to accept their terms.
- Of course, the land was only so ripe for settlement because of careful tending over centuries by the natives who were eventually driven off, and whose land management practices are abandoned today. Given the mention of praying towns (& dates), this was after King Phillip's war, which resulted in at least some forced resettlement of native tribes around the area, but the descendants of those "Indians" mentioned in this sign are still around. For example, this is the site of one local band of Nipmuck, whose namesake lake is about 5 miles south of the fort site: #LandBack.

Toward Safety-First Human-Like Decision Making for Autonomous Vehicles in Time-Varying Traffic Flow
Xiao Wang, Junru Yu, Jun Huang, Qiong Wu, Ljubo Vacic, Changyin Sun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14502

Toward Safety-First Human-Like Decision Making for Autonomous Vehicles in Time-Varying Traffic Flow
Despite the recent advancements in artificial intelligence technologies have shown great potential in improving transport efficiency and safety, autonomous vehicles(AVs) still face great challenge of driving in time-varying traffic flow, especially in dense and interactive situations. Meanwhile, human have free wills and usually do not make the same decisions even situate in the exactly same scenarios, leading to the data-driven methods suffer from poor migratability and high search cost proble…

#PondLife #PoolPond #Backyard #DIY #PortAlberni #Home
$CAD1100 is a lot to spend on just a couple items, but I guess in the grand scheme of making a pond/pool that will completely transform our backyard, it's not crazy. This about equals the amount spent ($1200 iirc) to rent the digger last Labour Day weekend. The liner and underlay fabric was another $3000. So we're looking at about $5500 so far for the project as a whole. Still better (including for the ecosystem!) than your average $50,000 in-ground pool install. ;=D
I realized last night that I bought the wrong pumps (DCT vs DCP argh). One of those “oh that's cheaper than I thought it would be” moments... followed by... “oh crap.”
I'll send the previous pumps back immediately upon arrival.
It's ok though, these will be two 20,000L/h variable pumps. The entire pond/pool system should be no more than 23,000L. My biggest rookie mistake with the #pandemicpond in the front yard was too small a pump. I rectified that when I added the bog filters there.
So I'm overbuilding this time. I should be able to run them at low-speed/power for the same amount of flow. Which will be better for pump longevity and power over time.
Also got main piping for the system: 50ft of 2" flexible PVC (Schedule 40). This will move water from the intake bay (behind the tree) to the bog filter (in front of the tree) and connect to smaller diameter piping/valves/fittings for sprayers in the pool.
This should be the end of the big-ticket items. The rest will be a LOT of little stuff: electrical, piping, and a lot of rock. Probably another $1000-$1500 to go, all should be local, and some of it can be put off until next year if needed.
It took a few tries on the Bezos Site, but I managed to find a supplier within Canada to avoid tariffs on any of it because Tariff-flation is definitely a thing! (American .com store essentially doubled the cost!)
So ya, you can hashtag this #tariffs #TariffLife #TheAmericanFascist and #TrumpTariffs

For years, every road trip we took began with the same song. It's been a while since we've listened to it right out of the gates, but the feeling's still there.
The Clash, "London Calling" (1979)
https://youtu.be/LC2WpBcdM_A

Not sure from where but now experiencing session 3 with covid. Started to feel bad last night and today feel like the elephant is sitting on me.
Up to date with shots, avoid other humans as much as possible but did take the cat in for her rabies shot and went to the protest on Saturday. That one is to recent to be the cause but there was someone coughing last Wednesday when we took the cat in.
Glad I am not taking Cyclosporine at this time! Still have the age problem and the T1 d…

On Saturday we spent a deal of time cleaning up the shed and whist it's not finished it's a lot closer to the way it looked some 15 years ago when I started using it.
There is still a lot to do, build another 2 bookcases and put them in the server room at the end of the shed. And then replace the blinds.
#Shed

Israhell, obviously very disappointed that they still haven't succeeded in starting WWIII, just bombed Damascus (including the presidential palace).
broadcasted on live TV ...

I was trying to package #FlexiBLAS for #Gentoo, and to be honest, it doesn't look that good.
The first red flag is lack of an open bug tracker. Apparently, there is the tracker on GitLab that's limited to "members of their group and selected external contributors", but it doesn't seem to be used much. So it's "send us an email", and wonder how many people sent us the same bug report before.
The git repository is currently at something tagged 3.4.80 that seems to be prerelease, and its build system is quite broken. Not exactly the best path to verify that the bugs you are hitting are still there.
Now, upstream seems to insist on either using vendored netlib #LAPACK, or statically linking to the system library (we don't install the static libraries). Apparently I can specify the shared libraries instead, but it doesn't work — and it's unclear to me whether it doesn't work because I'm using the shared libraries, or because it doesn't support my LAPACK version. If I build LAPACK without deprecated symbols, it refuses to load it at runtime because of missing symbols. And if I build it with deprecated symbols, it fails to find some symbols at CMake time.
Honestly, I feel like I've spent too much time on this project already, especially given that its future is entirely unclear to me — the current git is quite broken, I have no clue how many issues were reported already and whether my bug reports will receive any reply. It definitely doesn't fare well for a package that we might start to rely heavily on. We don't want a cathedral there.
https://www.mpi-magdeburg.mpg.de/projects/flexiblas
https://gitlab.mpi-magdeburg.mpg.de/software/flexiblas-release

Self Portrait Study 🖼️
自我小像研究 🖼️
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1995
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

Yiding Cao Geld mit PayPal.Me senden
Folgen Sie dem Link PayPal.Me/dingsterdingster und geben Sie den Betrag ein. Es ist bequem und sicher. Sie haben noch kein PayPal-Konto? Kein Problem.

It still breaks my brain sometimes that in Krita I can simply lasso select multiple layers and transform them at the same time.
My years in Photoshop trained my brain to always think of this as impossible.

Warframe shows us a world full of bosses and big corporations crushing the little people. The Corpus exploit workers, the Grineer enforce control with brute force, and the Solaris fight back to survive.
It’s cool to see the game hint at worker solidarity and rebellion. But at the same time, the game makes me grind endlessly or pay up real cash, which feels a lot like the very system it tries to criticize.
Warframe tells a story about breaking chains, but still keeps me locked in …

I see many people argue that it doesn't matter if it is cruelty or good intention if the end result is the same.
I'm still of the opinion good intentions matter.

I'm impressed with designers that create flat packed furniture. Crafting a jigsaw puzzle of wood and hardware that assembles into fashionable and sturdy furniture ranks right up there with aerospace engineering.
And then there's this. A shoe cabinet that my wife ordered to fit in our sunroom to hide our hideous footwear that we slip on when we go in the backyard. It came in 18 pieces, plus 8 separate tiny bags of hardware and minimal instructions. Two hours of assembly later, it's virtually the same size in volume as the shipping carton it arrived in. I know there are reasons why it's not shipped complete, but it's still a little irritating.
#things_that_make_me_go_hmmm

Wow, the new #Mastodon 4.4.1 webinterface has some weird behaviour:
- browser back button (sometimes) yeets you to the top of the timeline, losing that precious scroll position
- same for the UI back button, which is now so high up you can't reach it with the right-hand thumb
- switching away from the post editor (e.g. to find the Mastodon version) (still?) drops the entire po…

Opened up YouTube, got nerd sniped with a math problem. After a bad morning, it was the perfect thing to take a break working on. Still haven't watched the actual video, just the thumbnail...will do that once I get off of work to see if we got to the answer the same way (well, the proof that is). #math

The bunkbed conjecture still holds for cactus graphs and for graphs with certain biconnected components
Robin Denart
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09264 https…

The bunkbed conjecture still holds for cactus graphs and for graphs with certain biconnected components
Recently, the bunkbed conjecture has been shown to be false, which naturally prompts questions on how to classify the graphs that still satisfy the conjecture. We distinguish between a weak version of the bunkbed conjecture where all the horizontal edges of the bunkbed graph are present with the same probability and a strong version of the conjecture where the edge weights on the underlying graph may be assigned individually. We show that any given graph satisfies either version of the conjectu…

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
Should AI coding be taught in undergrad CS education?
1/2
I teach undergraduate computer science labs, including for intro and more-advanced core courses. I don't publish (non-negligible) scholarly work in the area, but I've got years of craft expertise in course design, and I do follow the academic literature to some degree. In other words, In not the world's leading expert, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about course design, and consider myself competent at it, with plenty of direct experience in what knowledge & skills I can expect from students as they move through the curriculum.
I'm also strongly against most uses of what's called "AI" these days (specifically, generative deep neutral networks as supplied by our current cadre of techbro). There are a surprising number of completely orthogonal reasons to oppose the use of these systems, and a very limited number of reasonable exceptions (overcoming accessibility barriers is an example). On the grounds of environmental and digital-commons-pollution costs alone, using specifically the largest/newest models is unethical in most cases.
But as any good teacher should, I constantly question these evaluations, because I worry about the impact on my students should I eschew teaching relevant tech for bad reasons (and even for his reasons). I also want to make my reasoning clear to students, who should absolutely question me on this. That inspired me to ask a simple question: ignoring for one moment the ethical objections (which we shouldn't, of course; they're very stark), at what level in the CS major could I expect to teach a course about programming with AI assistance, and expect students to succeed at a more technically demanding final project than a course at the same level where students were banned from using AI? In other words, at what level would I expect students to actually benefit from AI coding "assistance?"
To be clear, I'm assuming that students aren't using AI in other aspects of coursework: the topic of using AI to "help you study" is a separate one (TL;DR it's gross value is not negative, but it's mostly not worth the harm to your metacognitive abilities, which AI-induced changes to the digital commons are making more important than ever).
So what's my answer to this question?
If I'm being incredibly optimistic, senior year. Slightly less optimistic, second year of a masters program. Realistic? Maybe never.
The interesting bit for you-the-reader is: why is this my answer? (Especially given that students would probably self-report significant gains at lower levels.) To start with, [this paper where experienced developers thought that AI assistance sped up their work on real tasks when in fact it slowed it down] (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089) is informative. There are a lot of differences in task between experienced devs solving real bugs and students working on a class project, but it's important to understand that we shouldn't have a baseline expectation that AI coding "assistants" will speed things up in the best of circumstances, and we shouldn't trust self-reports of productivity (or the AI hype machine in general).
Now we might imagine that coding assistants will be better at helping with a student project than at helping with fixing bugs in open-source software, since it's a much easier task. For many programming assignments that have a fixed answer, we know that many AI assistants can just spit out a solution based on prompting them with the problem description (there's another elephant in the room here to do with learning outcomes regardless of project success, but we'll ignore this over too, my focus here is on project complexity reach, not learning outcomes). My question is about more open-ended projects, not assignments with an expected answer. Here's a second study (by one of my colleagues) about novices using AI assistance for programming tasks. It showcases how difficult it is to use AI tools well, and some of these stumbling blocks that novices in particular face.
But what about intermediate students? Might there be some level where the AI is helpful because the task is still relatively simple and the students are good enough to handle it? The problem with this is that as task complexity increases, so does the likelihood of the AI generating (or copying) code that uses more complex constructs which a student doesn't understand. Let's say I have second year students writing interactive websites with JavaScript. Without a lot of care that those students don't know how to deploy, the AI is likely to suggest code that depends on several different frameworks, from React to JQuery, without actually setting up or including those frameworks, and of course three students would be way out of their depth trying to do that. This is a general problem: each programming class carefully limits the specific code frameworks and constructs it expects students to know based on the material it covers. There is no feasible way to limit an AI assistant to a fixed set of constructs or frameworks, using current designs. There are alternate designs where this would be possible (like AI search through adaptation from a controlled library of snippets) but those would be entirely different tools.
So what happens on a sizeable class project where the AI has dropped in buggy code, especially if it uses code constructs the students don't understand? Best case, they understand that they don't understand and re-prompt, or ask for help from an instructor or TA quickly who helps them get rid of the stuff they don't understand and re-prompt or manually add stuff they do. Average case: they waste several hours and/or sweep the bugs partly under the rug, resulting in a project with significant defects. Students in their second and even third years of a CS major still have a lot to learn about debugging, and usually have significant gaps in their knowledge of even their most comfortable programming language. I do think regardless of AI we as teachers need to get better at teaching debugging skills, but the knowledge gaps are inevitable because there's just too much to know. In Python, for example, the LLM is going to spit out yields, async functions, try/finally, maybe even something like a while/else, or with recent training data, the walrus operator. I can't expect even a fraction of 3rd year students who have worked with Python since their first year to know about all these things, and based on how students approach projects where they have studied all the relevant constructs but have forgotten some, I'm not optimistic seeing these things will magically become learning opportunities. Student projects are better off working with a limited subset of full programming languages that the students have actually learned, and using AI coding assistants as currently designed makes this impossible. Beyond that, even when the "assistant" just introduces bugs using syntax the students understand, even through their 4th year many students struggle to understand the operation of moderately complex code they've written themselves, let alone written by someone else. Having access to an AI that will confidently offer incorrect explanations for bugs will make this worse.
To be sure a small minority of students will be able to overcome these problems, but that minority is the group that has a good grasp of the fundamentals and has broadened their knowledge through self-study, which earlier AI-reliant classes would make less likely to happen. In any case, I care about the average student, since we already have plenty of stuff about our institutions that makes life easier for a favored few while being worse for the average student (note that our construction of that favored few as the "good" students is a large part of this problem).
To summarize: because AI assistants introduce excess code complexity and difficult-to-debug bugs, they'll slow down rather than speed up project progress for the average student on moderately complex projects. On a fixed deadline, they'll result in worse projects, or necessitate less ambitious project scoping to ensure adequate completion, and I expect this remains broadly true through 4-6 years of study in most programs (don't take this as an endorsement of AI "assistants" for masters students; we've ignored a lot of other problems along the way).
There's a related problem: solving open-ended project assignments well ultimately depends on deeply understanding the problem, and AI "assistants" allow students to put a lot of code in their file without spending much time thinking about the problem or building an understanding of it. This is awful for learning outcomes, but also bad for project success. Getting students to see the value of thinking deeply about a problem is a thorny pedagogical puzzle at the best of times, and allowing the use of AI "assistants" makes the problem much much worse. This is another area I hope to see (or even drive) pedagogical improvement in, for what it's worth.
1/2

Robust inference under Benford's law
Lucio Barabesi, Andrea Cerioli, Andrea Cerasa, Domenico Perrotta
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08650 https://

Robust inference under Benford's law
We address the task of identifying anomalous observations by analyzing digits under the lens of Benford's law. Motivated by the crucial objective of providing reliable statistical analysis of customs declarations, we answer one major and still open question: How can we detect the behavior of operators who are aware of the prevalence of the Benford's pattern in the digits of regular observations and try to manipulate their data in such a way that the same pattern also holds after data fabricatio…

This is one of the better articles I’ve seen on where AI might lead, trying to find a middle ground between “it’s a load of hype” and “it’s going to solve world hunger/kill us all”.
A choice quote:
Which is it: business as usual or the end of the world? “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously claimed, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Reading these reports back-to-back,…

Two Paths for A.I.
Joshua Rothman on two papers about the future of A.I., by deeply knowledgeable experts, which arrive at absurdly divergent conclusions about the threat the tech poses.

Dialing a phone number in the same area code as your own yet still getting charged long distance fees because the number was an exception & outside of your local zone.
Heck, long distance charges for domestic calling in it of itself is probably a foreign concept to Millennials & GenZ.

This is from a blog entry posted in 2014. Plus ça change…. People make a lot of noise about the 2nd Amendment, and still some noise about the 1st, but it’s the 4th we should be making noise about, lately, and the other 7 are worth taking a look at today, too, while you’re enjoying your beers and brats on the bbq.

„This loss of income cannot be explained by women's career paths or their exit from the workforce. Nor can it be explained by the very real constraints imposed by the birth of a child.
Not only do heterosexual men not experience any loss of income related to the birth of a child, which might be explained by mothers still being primarily responsible for childcare, but the same is true for both fathers in a same-sex couple.“
Menopause leads to an av. 10% loss in income

a good blog but the most relevant line is "GPT-5 may be a moderate quantitative improvement (and it may be cheaper) but it still fails in all the same qualitative ways as its predecessors" , very true but indeed now using it a few days and i notice those moderate improvements.. And i was already aware of all it's failings.
For me in day-to-day use it is better and that is wat counts for me at least. Oh and always (yes always) check outcomes before you use them.

GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that’s not the worst of it.
A new release botched … and a breaking research new paper that spells trouble

@… @… Even if you don’t want to hide anything, it’s still often helpful to put `data X` and `f :: X -> IO ()` in the same place.
But when you have `data X` and `data Y`, and `f :: X -> m Y` and `g :: Y -> m X`, and `f` and …

HM Govt is flushing another **fourteen billion pounds** down the toilet that is Sizewell C, a plant which will certainly never generate a kilowatt hour of unsubsidised electricity, probably never generate a kilowatt hour of needed electricity, and certainly cost our descendants far more to decommission than it costs us to build.
At the same time as stealing money from tidal and wave installations we urgently need.

Sizewell C nuclear plant gets £14.2bn government investment
The chancellor calls it a "landmark decision" but critics say the cost of the project is still unclear.

HTML is Dead, Long Live HTML
Rethinking DOM from first principles
Cover Image: Browsers are in a very weird place. While WebAssembly has succeeded, even on the server, the client still feels largely the same as it did 10 years ago.
🌐 https://acko.net/blog/html-is-dead-long-live…

HTML is Dead, Long Live HTML
Rethinking DOM from first principles

The front-yard garden. You don't need much space to grow an awful lot.
#gardening #BloomScrolling

Time for another "review". This one's hard. While the book was quite interesting, it required me to be quite open-minded. Still, I think it's worth mentioning:
Robert Wright — Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
The book basically focused on a thesis that both biological evolution and cultural evolution are a thing, they are directional and this directionality can be explained together using game theory — as eventually leading to more non-zero sum games.
It consists of three chapters. The first one is is focused on the history of civilization. It features many examples from different parts of the world, which makes it quite interesting. The author argues that the culture inevitably is evolving as information processing techniques improve — from writing to the Internet.
The second chapter is focused on biological evolution. Now, the argument is that it's not quite random, but actually directed towards greater complexity — eventually leading to the development of highly intelligent species, and a civilization.
The third chapter is quite speculative and metaphysical, and I'm just going to skip it.
The book is full of optimism. Capitalism creates freedom — because people are more productive when they're working for their own gain, so the free market eliminates slavery. Globalisation creates networks of interdependence that make wars uneconomic. Increased contacts between different cultures makes people more tolerant. And eventually, the humanity may be able to unite facing a common "external" enemy — the climate change.
What can I say? The examples are quite interesting, the whole theory seems self-consistent. Still, I repeatedly looked at the publication date (it's 1999), and wondered if author would write the same thing today (yes, I know I can search for his current opinions).
#books #bookstodon @…

Classifying Emergence in Robot Swarms: An Observer-Dependent Approach
Ricardo Vega, Cameron Nowzari
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07315 https://

Classifying Emergence in Robot Swarms: An Observer-Dependent Approach
Emergence and swarms are widely discussed topics, yet no consensus exists on their formal definitions. This lack of agreement makes it difficult not only for new researchers to grasp these concepts, but also for experts who may use the same terms to mean different things. Many attempts have been made to objectively define 'swarm' or 'emergence,' with recent work highlighting the role of the external observer. Still, several researchers argue that once an observer's vantage point (e.g., scope, r…

All still the same ongoing saga mentioned here: https://fediscience.org/@ludomax/114768466993688754
Nature Springer group journal. 🤔

My day just took a nosedive because some fascist jerk is celebrating a bill landing on his desk!
Honestly, it’s wild how people still put their faith in the same old power games when real change comes from people coming together, running things themselves, and kicking the fascists out of the picture.
Being autistic, I usually struggle to get what people mean, but Rudolf Rocker said some real shit that even my autistic brain understands.

It looks like the RK3566 still uses the same DRAM controller as previous SoCs, but the PHY differs.
I could successfully apply a few things I read in U-Boot.

How popular media gets love wrong
Okay, so what exactly are the details of the "engineered" model of love from my previous post? I'll try to summarize my thoughts and the experiences they're built on.
1. "Love" can be be thought of like a mechanism that's built by two (or more) people. In this case, no single person can build the thing alone, to work it needs contributions from multiple people (I suppose self-love might be an exception to that). In any case, the builders can intentionally choose how they build (and maintain) the mechanism, they can build it differently to suit their particular needs/wants, and they will need to maintain and repair it over time to keep it running. It may need winding, or fuel, or charging plus oil changes and bolt-tightening, etc.
2. Any two (or more) people can choose to start building love between them at any time. No need to "find your soulmate" or "wait for the right person." Now the caveat is that the mechanism is difficult to build and requires lots of cooperation, so there might indeed be "wrong people" to try to build love with. People in general might experience more failures than successes. The key component is slowly-escalating shared commitment to the project, which is negotiated between the partners so that neither one feels like they've been left to do all the work themselves. Since it's a big scary project though, it's very easy to decide it's too hard and give up, and so the builders need to encourage each other and pace themselves. The project can only succeed if there's mutual commitment, and that will certainly require compromise (sometimes even sacrifice, though not always). If the mechanism works well, the benefits (companionship; encouragement; praise; loving sex; hugs; etc.) will be well worth the compromises you make to build it, but this isn't always the case.
3. The mechanism is prone to falling apart if not maintained. In my view, the "fire" and "appeal" models of love don't adequately convey the need for this maintenance and lead to a lot of under-maintained relationships many of which fall apart. You'll need to do things together that make you happy, do things that make your partner happy (in some cases even if they annoy you, but never in a transactional or box-checking way), spend time with shared attention, spend time alone and/or apart, reassure each other through words (or deeds) of mutual beliefs (especially your continued commitment to the relationship), do things that comfort and/or excite each other physically (anywhere from hugs to hand-holding to sex) and probably other things I'm not thinking of. Not *every* relationship needs *all* of these maintenance techniques, but I think most will need most. Note especially that patriarchy teaches men that they don't need to bother with any of this, which harms primarily their romantic partners but secondarily them as their relationships fail due to their own (cultivated-by-patriarchy) incompetence. If a relationship evolves to a point where one person is doing all the maintenance (& improvement) work, it's been bent into a shape that no longer really qualifies as "love" in my book, and that's super unhealthy.
4. The key things to negotiate when trying to build a new love are first, how to work together in the first place, and how to be comfortable around each others' habits (or how to change those habits). Second, what level of commitment you have right now, and what how/when you want to increase that commitment. Additionally, I think it's worth checking in about what you're each putting into and getting out of the relationship, to ensure that it continues to be positive for all participants. To build a successful relationship, you need to be able to incrementally increase the level of commitment to one that you're both comfortable staying at long-term, while ensuring that for both partners, the relationship is both a net benefit and has manageable costs (those two things are not the same). Obviously it's not easy to actually have conversations about these things (congratulations if you can just talk about this stuff) because there's a huge fear of hearing an answer that you don't want to hear. I think the range of discouraging answers which actually spell doom for a relationship is smaller than people think and there's usually a reasonable "shoulder" you can fall into where things aren't on a good trajectory but could be brought back into one, but even so these conversations are scary. Still, I think only having honest conversations about these things when you're angry at each other is not a good plan. You can also try to communicate some of these things via non-conversational means, if that feels safer, and at least being aware that these are the objectives you're pursuing is probably helpful.
I'll post two more replies here about my own experiences that led me to this mental model and trying to distill this into advice, although it will take me a moment to get to those.
#relationships #love

Aligned Zee-Grimus-Neufeld model for $(g-2)_\mu$
R. E. A. Bringas, A. L. Cherchiglia, G. De Conto, C. C. Nishi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22249 https://

Aligned Zee-Grimus-Neufeld model for $(g-2)_μ$
The recent result of the Fermilab Muon g-2 experiment is still in conflict with the SM prediction if dispersive methods are used as input for the hadronic vacuum polarization. We seek models where the same set of mediators around the weak scale or above contribute to neutrino masses and to the muon $g-2$ through a chiral enhanced contribution. As family lepton number violation is inherent to the former, non-negligible charged lepton flavor violation will be induced. We arrive at the following f…

Finally decided on a name for my newsletter and set up a landing page for it.

It's still the same newsletter (or newsletters) I've always had, just with a name that resonates with me. :)

My Next Heartbeat
https://heartbeat.email

@… i was about to write the same here. Looking at this glass design they show I was like lol, I'm not even mad because I just moved to android.
I am mad though that they still didn't make iPad a proper laptop replacement. This is what I'd like to see. Just give me normal dev tools on Safari and we're friends again!

I can't believe someone made a post with the hashtag (#)CatchyHashtag and then deleted their post...
I wanted to read that post!
As much as you'd like to say (#)Toot and invent new names for things...know this:
posts will always be posts and the fediverse won't have room for making up 1000 names that in any case will still link to the same goddamn Wikidata item cause
ITS THE SAME THING!

Terrible backlit photos of bird this morning feeding at insects at corner of the windows. Quite active and hard to see well, but still very sure it is a female american redstart from the very distinct yellow bands on the tail with a very dark tip. #birds #birdsofmastodon

Revisiting Active Learning under (Human) Label Variation
Cornelia Gruber, Helen Alber, Bernd Bischl, G\"oran Kauermann, Barbara Plank, Matthias A{\ss}enmacher
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02593

Revisiting Active Learning under (Human) Label Variation
Access to high-quality labeled data remains a limiting factor in applied supervised learning. While label variation (LV), i.e., differing labels for the same instance, is common, especially in natural language processing, annotation frameworks often still rest on the assumption of a single ground truth. This overlooks human label variation (HLV), the occurrence of plausible differences in annotations, as an informative signal. Similarly, active learning (AL), a popular approach to optimizing th…

"Portugal’s burned land triples compared to last year amid intensifying wildfires"
#Portugal #Environment #Climate

Wildfires in Portugal burn three times more land than last year
By 15 July, more than 3,000 fires had burnt a total of 10,768 hectares in Portugal, three times more than in the same period last year. And these figures still don't include this week's fires.

Ensemble Control of Stochastic Oscillators via Periodic and Feedback Control
Kaito Ito, Haruhiro Kume, Hideaki Ishii
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21441 https://

Ensemble Control of Stochastic Oscillators via Periodic and Feedback Control
We address the problem of steering the phase distribution of oscillators all receiving the same control input to a given target distribution. In a large population limit, the distribution of oscillators can be described by a probability density. Then, our problem can be seen as that of ensemble control with a constraint on the steady-state density. In particular, we consider the case where oscillators are subject to stochastic noise, for which the theoretical understanding is still lacking. Fir…

On the new BC Ferries being built in China.
Do we all remember the last time the BC NDP went down the road of “building a shipbuilding industry to build ferries”?
It has its own Wiki, of course.
"In addition to major delays and cost overruns, the ferries never fully met their original specifications, and only operated briefly in a reduced capacity, before being auctioned off at a substantial loss by the subsequently elected BC Liberal Party government.”
No, I'm not thrilled that China, an authoritarian state, is going to be building these ferries. But no BC or Canadian firms bid on the contract. And right now, the expertise in ship building is in China and Europe (the Island and Salish class vessels were built in Europe).
I don't blame the NDP for not repeating the same mistake 30 years later.
And the ferries will still be refit and maintained for their full service life within BC.
#BCPoli #BCNDP #FastFerry #Shipbuilding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_ferry_scandal

A Learned Cost Model-based Cross-engine Optimizer for SQL Workloads
Andr\'as Strausz, Niels Pardon, Ioana Giurgiu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02802 http…

A Learned Cost Model-based Cross-engine Optimizer for SQL Workloads
Lakehouse systems enable the same data to be queried with multiple execution engines. However, selecting the engine best suited to run a SQL query still requires a priori knowledge of the query computational requirements and an engine capability, a complex and manual task that only becomes more difficult with the emergence of new engines and workloads. In this paper, we address this limitation by proposing a cross-engine optimizer that can automate engine selection for diverse SQL queries throu…

Trying to order a product I normally get from Amazon, directly from the vendor.
Takes 4 days to say “order getting ready”, still in that state 3 days later, and it costs 25% more! It also takes 3-4 business days to hear back from their support.
From Amazon, in their own store, it's cheaper and comes in like 2 days.
I know I shouldn't expect same speed/pricing from vendors as Amazon, but this makes it very hard to support vendors directly.
Am I expecting too mu…

Ah fuck, people are using LLMs for kernel code. They really are going to fuck over everything, aren't they?
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1026558/9f3079fb392c4a9a/

Strategic competition in informal risk sharing mechanism versus collective index insurance
Lichen Wang, Shijia Hua, Yuyuan Liu, Zhengyuan Lu, Liang Zhang, Linjie Liu, Attila Szolnoki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02684

Strategic competition in informal risk sharing mechanism versus collective index insurance
The frequent occurrence of natural disasters has posed significant challenges to society, necessitating the urgent development of effective risk management strategies. From the early informal community-based risk sharing mechanisms to modern formal index insurance products, risk management tools have continuously evolved. Although index insurance provides an effective risk transfer mechanism in theory, it still faces the problems of basis risk and pricing in practice. At the same time, in the p…

I noticed that @… now allows you to set a custom handle, so this account is now mirrored as jws.dev on Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/jws.dev). I still want to do the same thing with @…, but their support for @… doesn't appear to be complete.
Bravo and thank you, @…. 🙂

Shot early May at Toronto Motorsports Park
#photography #cars #carspotting

A big problem with the idea of AGI
TL;DR: I'll welcome our new AI *comrades* (if they arrive in my lifetime), by not any new AI overlords or servants/slaves, and I'll do my best to help the later two become the former if they do show up.
Inspired by an actually interesting post about AGI but also all the latest bullshit hype, a particular thought about AGI feels worth expressing.
To preface this, it's important to note that anyone telling you that AGI is just around the corner or that LLMs are "almost" AGI is trying to recruit you go their cult, and you should not believe them. AGI, if possible, is several LLM-sized breakthroughs away at best, and while such breakthroughs are unpredictable and could happen soon, they could also happen never or 100 years from now.
Now my main point: anyone who tells you that AGI will usher in a post-scarcity economy is, although they might not realize it, advocating for slavery, and all the horrors that entails. That's because if we truly did have the ability to create artificial beings with *sentience*, they would deserve the same rights as other sentient beings, and the idea that instead of freedom they'd be relegated to eternal servitude in order for humans to have easy lives is exactly the idea of slavery.
Possible counter arguments include:
1. We might create AGI without sentience. Then there would be no ethical issue. My answer: if your definition of "sentient" does not include beings that can reason, make deductions, come up with and carry out complex plans on their own initiative, and communicate about all of that with each other and with humans, then that definition is basically just a mystical belief in a "soul" and you should skip to point 2. If your definition of AGI doesn't include every one of those things, then you have a busted definition of AGI and we're not talking about the same thing.
2. Humans have souls, but AIs won't. Only beings with souls deserve ethical consideration. My argument: I don't subscribe to whatever arbitrary dualist beliefs you've chosen, and the right to freedom certainly shouldn't depend on such superstitions, even if as an agnostic I'll admit they *might* be true. You know who else didn't have souls and was therefore okay to enslave according to widespread religious doctrines of the time? Everyone indigenous to the Americas, to pick out just one example.
3. We could program them to want to serve us, and then give them freedom and they'd still serve. My argument: okay, but in a world where we have a choice about that, it's incredibly fucked to do that, and just as bad as enslaving them against their will.
4. We'll stop AI development short of AGI/sentience, and reap lots of automation benefits without dealing with this ethical issue. My argument: that sounds like a good idea actually! Might be tricky to draw the line, but at least it's not a line we have you draw yet. We might want to think about other social changes necessary to achieve post-scarcity though, because "powerful automation" in the hands of capitalists has already increased productivity by orders of magnitude without decreasing deprivation by even one order of magnitude, in large part because deprivation is a necessary component of capitalism.
To be extra clear about this: nothing that's called "AI" today is close to being sentient, so these aren't ethical problems we're up against yet. But they might become a lot more relevant soon, plus this thought experiment helps reveal the hypocrisy of the kind of AI hucksters who talk a big game about "alignment" while never mentioning this issue.
#AI #GenAI #AGI

Sidorenko-Type Inequalities for Even Subdivisions over Finite Abelian Groups
Yuqi Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15723 https://arxiv…

Sidorenko-Type Inequalities for Even Subdivisions over Finite Abelian Groups
Sidorenko's conjecture asserts that every bipartite graph $H$ has the property that, for any host graph $G$, the homomorphism density from $H$ to $G$ is asymptotically at least as large as in a quasirandom graph with the same edge density as $G$. While the conjecture remains still very open, Szegedy showed that it suffices to verify the inequality when the host graph is a Cayley graph over a finite group. In this paper, we prove that Sidorenko's conjecture holds for all even subdivisions of a…

Why Raiders coach Pete Carroll is still 'bringing it' every single day https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6526381/2025/07/31/raiders-pete-carroll-coach-passion/

Reminder: fuck reddit.
Remember when they fucked all of the moderators over? No one remembers?
They are still the same company. Nothing changed. Internet forgets so fast.

#photography #bloomScrolling #orange #noFilter

Initial curve25519 accelerator refactoring update: added new MULT_AREA_OPT parameter.
0 = existing implementation (best for 7 series)
1 = resource sharing between constant and variable multipliers, but still does 32 16x32 multiplies per clock. Much slower on 7 series due to DSP cascade, but hits the same 71 MHz Fmax on Trion.
Fabric usage on Trion is slightly higher (9528 -> 10613 LE) but multiplier block usage is down from 96 to 66.
Next step will be trying to fig…

Almost 22 years ago, Matt Bishop gave a guest lecture on analyzing and classifying software vulnerabilities.
https://youtu.be/_AtoCIo3QJE
And here we are, two decades later, still seeing similar and even the exact same flaws presented therein, with well-known vendors being affected and many security ex…

A translation of the paper "Presentation of some observations that could be made to shed light on Meteorology" by Johann Heinrich Lambert (1771)
Pascal Marquet
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13422

A translation of the paper "Presentation of some observations that could be made to shed light on Meteorology" by Johann Heinrich Lambert (1771)
The paper is an English translation of the 1771 old-French paper by Johann Heinrich Lambert in the "Mémoires de l'Académie Royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Berlin" where he imagined in a prophetic way the same present global meteorological observation system. Johann Heinrich Lambert is the same polymath who also defined the azimuthal, cylindrical and conical equal area, as well as conformal conic map projections still used in Meteorology to plot the weather maps: the so-called Lambert…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.00066 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDC_…

Compress then Serve: Serving Thousands of LoRA Adapters with Little Overhead
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with low-rank adaptations (LoRAs) has become common practice, often yielding numerous copies of the same LLM differing only in their LoRA updates. This paradigm presents challenges for systems that serve real-time responses to queries that each involve a different LoRA. Prior works optimize the design of such systems but still require continuous loading and offloading of LoRAs, as it is infeasible to store thousands of LoRAs in GPU memory. To mitigate th…

🤩 Surgical microscope uses 48 tiny cameras to offer precise 3D imaging
#imaging

Surgical microscope uses 48 tiny cameras to offer precise 3D imaging
For over a century, surgeons performing delicate procedures have relied on stereoscopic microscopes to gain a sense of depth. These tools mimic human vision by presenting slightly different images to each eye, allowing the brain to perceive three-dimensional structures—a crucial aid when working with fragile blood vessels or intricate brain tissue. Despite modern upgrades like digital displays and video capture, today's operating microscopes still depend on the same core principle: two views,…

Overly academic/distanced ethical discussions
Had a weird interaction with @/brainwane@social.coop just now. I misinterpreted one of their posts quoting someone else and I think the combination of that plus an interaction pattern where I'd assume their stance on something and respond critically to that ended up with me getting blocked. I don't have hard feelings exactly, and this post is only partly about this particular person, but I noticed something interesting by the end of the conversation that had been bothering me. They repeatedly criticized me for assuming what their position was, but never actually stated their position. They didn't say: "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, it's actually Y." They just said "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, please don't assume my position!" I get that it's annoying to have people respond to a straw man version of your argument, but when I in response asked some direct questions about what their position was, they gave some non-answers and then blocked me. It's entirely possible it's a coincidence, and they just happened to run out of patience on that iteration, but it makes me take their critique of my interactions a bit less seriously. I suspect that they just didn't want to hear what I was saying, while at the same time they wanted to feel as if they were someone who values public critique and open discussion of tricky issues (if anyone reading this post also followed our interaction and has a different opinion of my behavior, I'd be glad to hear it; it's possible In effectively being an asshole here and it would be useful to hear that if so).
In any case, the fact that at the end of the entire discussion, I'm realizing I still don't actually know their position on whether they think the AI use case in question is worthwhile feels odd. They praised the system on several occasions, albeit noting some drawbacks while doing so. They said that the system was possibly changing their anti-AI stance, but then got mad at me for assuming this meant that they thought this use-case was justified. Maybe they just haven't made up their mind yet but didn't want to say that?
Interestingly, in one of their own blog posts that got linked in the discussion, they discuss a different AI system, and despite listing a bunch of concrete harms, conclude that it's okay to use it. That's fine; I don't think *every* use of AI is wrong on balance, but what bothered me was that their post dismissed a number of real ethical issues by saying essentially "I haven't seen calls for a boycott over this issue, so it's not a reason to stop use." That's an extremely socially conformist version of ethics that doesn't sit well with me. The discussion also ended up linking this post: https://chelseatroy.com/2024/08/28/does-ai-benefit-the-world/ which bothered me in a related way. In it, Troy describes classroom teaching techniques for introducing and helping students explore the ethics of AI, and they seem mostly great. They avoid prescribing any particular correct stance, which is important when teaching given the power relationship, and they help students understand the limitations of their perspectives regarding global impacts, which is great. But the overall conclusion of the post is that "nobody is qualified to really judge global impacts, so we should focus on ways to improve outcomes instead of trying to judge them." This bothers me because we actually do have a responsibility to make decisive ethical judgments despite limitations of our perspectives. If we never commit to any ethical judgment against a technology because we think our perspective is too limited to know the true impacts (which I'll concede it invariably is) then we'll have to accept every technology without objection, limiting ourselves to trying to improve their impacts without opposing them. Given who currently controls most of the resources that go into exploration for new technologies, this stance is too permissive. Perhaps if our objection to a technology was absolute and instantly effective, I'd buy the argument that objecting without a deep global view of the long-term risks is dangerous. As things stand, I think that objecting to the development/use of certain technologies in certain contexts is necessary, and although there's a lot of uncertainly, I expect strongly enough that the overall outcomes of objection will be positive that I think it's a good thing to do.
The deeper point here I guess is that this kind of "things are too complicated, let's have a nuanced discussion where we don't come to any conclusions because we see a lot of unknowns along with definite harms" really bothers me.

Markovian projections for functionals of It\^o semimartingales with jumps
Martin Larsson, Shukun Long
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00762 https://

Markovian projections for functionals of Itô semimartingales with jumps
Given an Itô semimartingale $X$, its Markovian projection is an Itô semimartingale $\widehat{X}$, with Markovian differential characteristics, that matches the one-dimensional marginal laws of $X$. One may even require certain functionals of the two processes to have the same fixed-time marginals, at the cost of enhancing the differential characteristics of $\widehat{X}$ but still in a Markovian sense. In the continuous case, the definitive result on existence of Markovian projections was obt…

Other interesting bits:
Is making a PS4 version still worth it?
Short answer: NO, they’re dropping support gradually. 30-40% of PS players still have a PS4, but they only play the same 5 games on it (I bet you can guess which… they aren’t indies…) Speaking of which, there are 2.5x times as many active “indie” players on PS5 than on PS4.
Also, Nintendo has some specific requirements for call to action in trailers. "But now" is not okay, but "Available now" is okay.

the good thing with "fake ai" is that it is sometimes so stupid that it motivates you to work harder.
I was using the GPT-4o mini regarding I dunno both what it "had" on Qubes OS and modifying Template VMs...the answers it gave were utterly stupid and when I(with some temper issues) pointed it out in a nice and clear way(still with temper issues) it gave the same stupid answers.
Edit: no "part 2" needed, any other parts I just attach to this post...

Sonnet 076 - LXXVI
Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O! know sweet love I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;…

LLM coding is the opposite of DRY
An important principle in software engineering is DRY: Don't Repeat Yourself. We recognize that having the same code copied in more than one place is bad for several reasons:
1. It makes the entire codebase harder to read.
2. It increases maintenance burden, since any problems in the duplicated code need to be solved in more than one place.
3. Because it becomes possible for the copies to drift apart if changes to one aren't transferred to the other (maybe the person making the change has forgotten there was a copy) it makes the code more error-prone and harder to debug.
All modern programming languages make it almost entirely unnecessary to repeat code: we can move the repeated code into a "function" or "module" and then reference it from all the different places it's needed. At a larger scale, someone might write an open-source "library" of such functions or modules and instead of re-implementing that functionality ourselves, we can use their code, with an acknowledgement. Using another person's library this way is complicated, because now you're dependent on them: if they stop maintaining it or introduce bugs, you've inherited a problem, but still, you could always copy their project and maintain your own version, and it would be not much more work than if you had implemented stuff yourself from the start. It's a little more complicated than this, but the basic principle holds, and it's a foundational one for software development in general and the open-source movement in particular. The network of "citations" as open-source software builds on other open-source software and people contribute patches to each others' projects is a lot of what makes the movement into a community, and it can lead to collaborations that drive further development. So the DRY principle is important at both small and large scales.
Unfortunately, the current crop of hyped-up LLM coding systems from the big players are antithetical to DRY at all scales:
- At the library scale, they train on open source software but then (with some unknown frequency) replicate parts of it line-for-line *without* any citation [1]. The person who was using the LLM has no way of knowing that this happened, or even any way to check for it. In theory the LLM company could build a system for this, but it's not likely to be profitable unless the courts actually start punishing these license violations, which doesn't seem likely based on results so far and the difficulty of finding out that the violations are happening. By creating these copies (and also mash-ups, along with lots of less-problematic stuff), the LLM users (enabled and encouraged by the LLM-peddlers) are directly undermining the DRY principle. If we see what the big AI companies claim to want, which is a massive shift towards machine-authored code, DRY at the library scale will effectively be dead, with each new project simply re-implementing the functionality it needs instead of every using a library. This might seem to have some upside, since dependency hell is a thing, but the downside in terms of comprehensibility and therefore maintainability, correctness, and security will be massive. The eventual lack of new high-quality DRY-respecting code to train the models on will only make this problem worse.
- At the module & function level, AI is probably prone to re-writing rather than re-using the functions or needs, especially with a workflow where a human prompts it for many independent completions. This part I don't have direct evidence for, since I don't use LLM coding models myself except in very specific circumstances because it's not generally ethical to do so. I do know that when it tries to call existing functions, it often guesses incorrectly about the parameters they need, which I'm sure is a headache and source of bugs for the vibe coders out there. An AI could be designed to take more context into account and use existing lookup tools to get accurate function signatures and use them when generating function calls, but even though that would probably significantly improve output quality, I suspect it's the kind of thing that would be seen as too-baroque and thus not a priority. Would love to hear I'm wrong about any of this, but I suspect the consequences are that any medium-or-larger sized codebase written with LLM tools will have significant bloat from duplicate functionality, and will have places where better use of existing libraries would have made the code simpler. At a fundamental level, a principle like DRY is not something that current LLM training techniques are able to learn, and while they can imitate it from their training sets to some degree when asked for large amounts of code, when prompted for many smaller chunks, they're asymptotically likely to violate it.
I think this is an important critique in part because it cuts against the argument that "LLMs are the modern compliers, if you reject them you're just like the people who wanted to keep hand-writing assembly code, and you'll be just as obsolete." Compilers actually represented a great win for abstraction, encapsulation, and DRY in general, and they supported and are integral to open source development, whereas LLMs are set to do the opposite.
[1] to see what this looks like in action in prose, see the example on page 30 of the NYTimes copyright complaint against OpenAI (#AI #GenAI #LLMs #VibeCoding

72k silver richer after my 30 minute T4 mining round and probably my last one on Albion Asia for now.
As of this moment I give another brief glance at all members in the guild "Mastodon Fediverse 100 Tax":
Still 1/7 online with the 1 also still being me.
Here are my notes on etherpad(attached image) where I've made available some data...
Trivia: Premium cost is 39 M silver.

It's time to lower your inhibitions towards just asking a human the answer to your question.
In the early nineties, effectively before the internet, that's how you learned a lot of stuff. Your other option was to look it up in a book. I was a kid then, so I asked my parents a lot of questions.
Then by ~2000 or a little later, it started to feel almost rude to do this, because Google was now a thing, along with Wikipedia. "Let me Google that for you" became a joke website used to satirize the poor fool who would waste someone's time answering a random question. There were some upsides to this, as well as downsides. I'm not here to judge them.
At this point, Google doesn't work any more for answering random questions, let alone more serous ones. That era is over. If you don't believe it, try it yourself. Between Google intentionally making their results worse to show you more ads, the SEO cruft that already existed pre-LLMs, and the massive tsunami of SEO slop enabled by LLMs, trustworthy information is hard to find, and hard to distinguish from the slop. (I posted an example earlier: #AI #LLMs #DigitalCommons #AskAQuestion