Tootfinder

I won't debate people on conforming with the moral standards set by the far right, because every time a moderate feels the need to condemn a statement that was “inciting violence”, the truth comes out that their so-called violence was a media framing oddly applied to them with a bad-faith reading of their words.

A silent ocean pandemic is wiping out sea urchins worldwide #ocean

A silent ocean pandemic is wiping out sea urchins worldwide
A sudden, unexplained mass die-off is decimating sea urchins around the world, including catastrophic losses in the Canary Islands. Key reef-grazing species are reaching historic lows, and their ability to reproduce has nearly halted in some regions. Scientists suspect a pathogen but haven’t yet confirmed the culprit. The fate of these reefs may hinge on solving this unfolding pandemic.

The US DOJ appeals an order blocking the search of a WaPo reporter's devices, claiming journalists the government fears may have sensitive data aren't shielded (Perry Stein/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026…

Government appeals judge’s order barring search of Post reporter’s devices
The Justice Department appealed a judge’s order that blocked officials from searching a Washington Post reporter’s electronic devices in a leak investigation.

I mentioned a little while back that I was considering starting a new browser project using WebKitGtk. The result, written in Vala, is nearing minimum viability. Right now it's nothing special, just a simple tabbed browser that's missing a lot of features, but the skeleton is good and you already get some goodies that Gnome Web doesn't give you:
- Ability to hide the tab bar
- Ability to hide the address bar and other controls
- When the tab bar is hidden, am overv…

"Applaud the Leaky WiFi" zone.

polblogs: Political blogs network (2004)
A directed network of hyperlinks among a large set of U.S. political weblogs from before the 2004 election. Includes blog political affiliation as metadata.
This network has 1490 nodes and 19090 edges.
Tags: Informational, Web graph, Unweighted, Metadata
https://networks.skewed.d…

Welfarist Formulations for Diverse Similarity Search
Siddharth Barman, Nirjhar Das, Shivam Gupta, Kirankumar Shiragur
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08742 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.08742 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.08742
arXiv:2602.08742v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Nearest Neighbor Search (NNS) is a fundamental problem in data structures with wide-ranging applications, such as web search, recommendation systems, and, more recently, retrieval-augmented generations (RAG). In such recent applications, in addition to the relevance (similarity) of the returned neighbors, diversity among the neighbors is a central requirement. In this paper, we develop principled welfare-based formulations in NNS for realizing diversity across attributes. Our formulations are based on welfare functions -- from mathematical economics -- that satisfy central diversity (fairness) and relevance (economic efficiency) axioms. With a particular focus on Nash social welfare, we note that our welfare-based formulations provide objective functions that adaptively balance relevance and diversity in a query-dependent manner. Notably, such a balance was not present in the prior constraint-based approach, which forced a fixed level of diversity and optimized for relevance. In addition, our formulation provides a parametric way to control the trade-off between relevance and diversity, providing practitioners with flexibility to tailor search results to task-specific requirements. We develop efficient nearest neighbor algorithms with provable guarantees for the welfare-based objectives. Notably, our algorithm can be applied on top of any standard ANN method (i.e., use standard ANN method as a subroutine) to efficiently find neighbors that approximately maximize our welfare-based objectives. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach is practical and substantially improves diversity while maintaining high relevance of the retrieved neighbors.
toXiv_bot_toot

We couldn't have hoped for a better advertisement for this year’s public lecture series than last night's spectacular show of northern lights!
The talks will deal with all the exciting aspects in the fiery relationship between the Sun and the Earth (in German). So if you want to learn more about the Sun, the aurora borealis, the dangers of solar storms, about space weather forecasting and more, join us for
"Im Feuerwerk der Sonne"

polblogs: Political blogs network (2004)
A directed network of hyperlinks among a large set of U.S. political weblogs from before the 2004 election. Includes blog political affiliation as metadata.
This network has 1490 nodes and 19090 edges.
Tags: Informational, Web graph, Unweighted, Metadata
https://networks.skewed.d…

polblogs: Political blogs network (2004)
A directed network of hyperlinks among a large set of U.S. political weblogs from before the 2004 election. Includes blog political affiliation as metadata.
This network has 1490 nodes and 19090 edges.
Tags: Informational, Web graph, Unweighted, Metadata
https://networks.skewed.d…