Tootfinder

At least 2/3 of Americans aren’t daily coffee drinkers. ☕️
Wait, they are.
Well, at least hundreds of millions of American coffee drinkers don’t drink an average of 3 cups a day.
Wait, they do.
Folks, these are #TrumpTariffs, taking money from the American people.
via @…

If you burn fossil fuels (and have no plan to migrate to an EV & heatpump or similar), plus you buy a lot of plastic (made from fossil fuel) and acrylic/polyester clothing - well I hate to break it to you, but you cannot make up for this by being a vegan or re-posting toots from a Kindness to Animals NGO.
Those animals you want to be nice to require a clean world with a normal climate in order to survive (incidentally, so do we).

I have seen toots warning about this and wanted to comment on it.
They are impersonating the Mastodon team to require users to ‘verify their account’ and saying that until they do this their account is suspended.
Verification on mastodon is free and you can do it yourself without giving any personal information and it is TOTALLY OPTIONAL.
No server/instance is going to require verification.
I have my verification with my neocities page, on tkz.one, misskey.social and …

MK2 at PBIG Competition: A Prompt Generation Solution
Yuzheng Xu, Tosho Hirasawa, Seiya Kawano, Shota Kato, Tadashi Kozuno
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08335

MK2 at PBIG Competition: A Prompt Generation Solution
The Patent-Based Idea Generation task asks systems to turn real patents into product ideas viable within three years. We propose MK2, a prompt-centric pipeline: Gemini 2.5 drafts and iteratively edits a prompt, grafting useful fragments from weaker outputs; GPT-4.1 then uses this prompt to create one idea per patent, and an Elo loop judged by Qwen3-8B selects the best prompt-all without extra training data. Across three domains, two evaluator types, and six criteria, MK2 topped the automatic le…

Continents have lost so much water to the ocean since 2002 that they have surpassed ice sheets as the biggest contributor to global sea level rise, a new study reveals.
Almost 70% of this loss is due to unchecked groundwater extraction,
which removes water from deep aquifers and eventually transfers it to the ocean, researchers found.
Together with rising rates of evaporation due to climate change, this has caused rapidly drying "hotspots" to merge into four &quo…

'Like a creeping mold that's spreading across the landscape': Separate dry areas around the world are merging into 'mega-drying' regions at an alarming rate, study finds
Unchecked groundwater extraction and climate change have dried continents significantly over the past 22 years, with 101 countries now losing fresh water to the ocean, research reveals.

Analysis of Propaganda in Tweets From Politically Biased Sources
Vivek Sharma, Mohammad Mahdi Shokri, Sarah Ita Levitan, Elena Filatova, Shweta Jain
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08169

Analysis of Propaganda in Tweets From Politically Biased Sources
News outlets are well known to have political associations, and many national outlets cultivate political biases to cater to different audiences. Journalists working for these news outlets have a big impact on the stories they cover. In this work, we present a methodology to analyze the role of journalists, affiliated with popular news outlets, in propagating their bias using some form of propaganda-like language. We introduce JMBX(Journalist Media Bias on X), a systematically collected and ann…

CLF-RL: Control Lyapunov Function Guided Reinforcement Learning
Kejun Li, Zachary Olkin, Yisong Yue, Aaron D. Ames
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09354 https://

CLF-RL: Control Lyapunov Function Guided Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in generating robust locomotion policies for bipedal robots, but often suffers from tedious reward design and sensitivity to poorly shaped objectives. In this work, we propose a structured reward shaping framework that leverages model-based trajectory generation and control Lyapunov functions (CLFs) to guide policy learning. We explore two model-based planners for generating reference trajectories: a reduced-order linear inverted pendulum (LIP) mode…

Bayesian inference of antibody evolutionary dynamics using multitype branching processes
Athanasios G. Bakis, Ashni A. Vora, Tatsuya Araki, Tongqiu Jia, Jared G. Galloway, Chris Jennings-Shaffer, Gabriel D. Victora, Yun S. Song, William S. DeWitt, Frederick A. Matsen IV, Volodymyr M. Minin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09519

Bayesian inference of antibody evolutionary dynamics using multitype branching processes
When our immune system encounters foreign antigens (i.e., from pathogens), the B cells that produce our antibodies undergo a cyclic process of proliferation, mutation, and selection, improving their ability to bind to the specific antigen. Immunologists have recently developed powerful experimental techniques to investigate this process in mouse models. In one such experiment, mice are engineered with a monoclonal B-cell precursor and immunized with a model antigen. B cells are sampled from sac…

Streaming Star Wars: The Old Republic from my Linux PC tonight. My character is on the Dark Side, but the power of the open-source community is with me. #SWTOR #LinuxGaming #TheOldRepublic

I just dropped in on my BlueSty account for a visit, and discovered that those bastard online hooker accounts that "like" your posts for attention have now migrated there from Elonland. It's soooo tedious.