Tootfinder

Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI
Kiran Tomlinson, Sonia Jaffe, Will Wang, Scott Counts, Siddharth Suri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935

Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI
Given the rapid adoption of generative AI and its potential to impact a wide range of tasks, understanding the effects of AI on the economy is one of society's most important questions. In this work, we take a step toward that goal by analyzing the work activities people do with AI, how successfully and broadly those activities are done, and combine that with data on what occupations do those activities. We analyze a dataset of 200k anonymized and privacy-scrubbed conversations between users an…

What's Coming Next? Short-Term Simulation of Business Processes from Current State
Maksym Avramenko, David Chapela-Campa, Marlon Dumas, Fredrik Milani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07747

What's Coming Next? Short-Term Simulation of Business Processes from Current State
Business process simulation is an approach to evaluate business process changes prior to implementation. Existing methods in this field primarily support tactical decision-making, where simulations start from an empty state and aim to estimate the long-term effects of process changes. A complementary use-case is operational decision-making, where the goal is to forecast short-term performance based on ongoing cases and to analyze the impact of temporary disruptions, such as demand spikes and sh…

BASILISK III. Stress-testing the Conditional Luminosity Function model
Kaustav Mitra, Frank C. van den Bosch
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08421 https://arxiv…

BASILISK III. Stress-testing the Conditional Luminosity Function model
The Conditional Luminosity Function (CLF) is an effective and flexible way of characterizing the galaxy-halo connection. However, it is subject to a particular choice for its parametrization, which acts as a prior assumption. Most studies have been restricted to what has become a standard CLF parametrization with little to no variation. The goal of this paper is to investigate whether this model is sufficient to fully characterize the small-scale data extracted from spectroscopic surveys and to…

Event Rates at a 10 TeV Muon Collider and Implications for Detector Design: Trigger, Data Acquisition, and Luminosity
Tova Holmes, Lawrence Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06239 …

Event Rates at a 10 TeV Muon Collider and Implications for Detector Design: Trigger, Data Acquisition, and Luminosity
This short document presents a discussion of rates of a wide range of processes at a muon collider. The goal is to provide a first look at what will fill the detector, how often processes of interest are occurring, and the implications for detector readout, a potential trigger system, and luminosity measurements.

The Linear System Package of Magma
Carlos Rito
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06940 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06940 …

The Linear System Package of Magma
We present a complete reimplementation of the LinearSystem package of Magma, with substantial improvements in design and performance. The resulting efficiency enables computations that were previously out of reach. We briefly describe the design principles, capabilities, and algorithms of the new implementation and illustrate them with examples that showcase its power. Rather than comparing speeds, our goal is to advertise the package by demonstrating what can now be achieved in practice. We al…

A Large-Scale Study of Floating-Point Usage in Statically Typed Languages
Andrea Gilot, Tobias Wrigstad, Eva Darulova
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04936 https://

A Large-Scale Study of Floating-Point Usage in Statically Typed Languages
Reasoning about floating-point arithmetic is notoriously hard. While static and dynamic analysis techniques or program repair have made significant progress, more work is still needed to make them relevant to real-world code. On the critical path to that goal is understanding what real-world floating-point code looks like. To close that knowledge gap, this paper presents the first large-scale empirical study of floating-point arithmetic usage in statically typed languages across public GitHub r…

...and what court has decided that it's a genocide? Isn't it a legal term that can only be used if the goal post we keep moving is reached?
Not to draw away attention from the Sudan genocide amidst a brutal civil war, I just think it's adequate to point out how easy it is to name the perpetrator, victim, and the action of genocide by its name when Israel isn't involved.

What is in the model? A Comparison of variable selection criteria and model search approaches
Shuangshuang Xu, Marco A. R. Ferreira, Allison N. Tegge
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02628

What is in the model? A Comparison of variable selection criteria and model search approaches
For many scientific questions, understanding the underlying mechanism is the goal. To help investigators better understand the underlying mechanism, variable selection is a crucial step that permits the identification of the most associated regression variables of interest. A variable selection method consists of model evaluation using an information criterion and a search of the model space. Here, we provide a comprehensive comparison of variable selection methods using performance measures of…

Finance people: If I have a list of mutual fund symbol names and percentages of each, is there an easy API or data source I can use to calculate what my actual underlying equity exposure is?
The specific goal is figuring out how much of my 401k is actually in companies that are propped up by the AI bubble.
I can look at a single ticker symbol and see at least its top n hodlings easily enough but what if I want to know across ten different index funds I own different amounts of, h…

TL;DR: spending money to find the cause of autism is a eugenics project, and those resources could have been spent improving accommodations for Autistic people instead.
To preface this, I'm not Autistic but I'm neurodivergent with some overlap.
We need to be absolutely clear right now: the main purpose is *all* research into the causes of autism is eugenics: a cause is sought because non-autistic people want to *eliminate* autistic people via some kind of "cure." It should be obvious, but a "cured autistic person" who did not get a say in the decision to administer that "cure" has been subjected to non-consensual medical intervention at an extremely unethical level. Many autistic people have been exceptionally clear that they don't want to be "cured," including some people with "severe autism" such as people who are nonverbal.
When we think things like "but autism makes life so hard for some people," we're saying that the difficulties in their life are a result of their neurotype, rather than blaming the society that punished & devalues the behaviors that result from that neurotype at every turn. To the extent that an individual autistic person wants to modify their neurotype and/or otherwise use aids to modify themselves to reduce difficulties in their life, they should be free to pursue that. But we should always ask the question: "what if we changed their social or physical environment instead, so that they didn't have to change themselves?" The point is that difficulties are always the product of person x environment, and many of the difficulties we attribute to autism should instead be attributed to anti-autistic social & physical spaces, and resources spent trying to "find the cause of autism" would be *much* better spent trying to develop & promote better accommodations for autism. Or at least, that's the case if you care about the quality of life of autistic people and/or recognize their enormous contributions to society (e.g., Wikipedia could not exist in anything near its current form without autistic input). If instead you think of Autistic people as gross burdens that you'd rather be rid of, then it makes sense to investigate the causes of autism so that you can eventually find a "cure."
All of that to say: the best response to lies about the causes of autism is to ask "What is the end goal of identifying the cause?" instead of saying "That's not true, here's better info about the causes."
#autism #trump
P.S. yes, I do think about the plight of parents of autistic kids, particularly those that have huge struggles fitting into the expectations of our society. They've been put in a position where society constantly bullies and devalues their kid, and makes it mostly impossible for their kid to exist without constant parental support, which is a lot of work and which is unfair when your peers get the school system to do a massive amount of childcare. But in that situation, your kid is in an even worse position than you as the direct victim of all of that, and you have a choice: are you going to be their ally against the unfair world, or are you going to blame them and try to get them to confirm enough that you can let the school system take care of them, despite the immense pain that that will provoke? Please don't come crying for sympathy if you choose the later option (and yes, helping them be able to independently navigate society is a good thing for them, but there's a difference between helping them as their ally, at their pace, and trying to force them to conform to reduce the burden society has placed on you).

What Matters in RL-Based Methods for Object-Goal Navigation? An Empirical Study and A Unified Framework
Hongze Wang, Boyang Sun, Jiaxu Xing, Fan Yang, Marco Hutter, Dhruv Shah, Davide Scaramuzza, Marc Pollefeys
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01830

What Matters in RL-Based Methods for Object-Goal Navigation? An Empirical Study and A Unified Framework
Object-Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) is a critical component toward deploying mobile robots in everyday, uncontrolled environments such as homes, schools, and workplaces. In this context, a robot must locate target objects in previously unseen environments using only its onboard perception. Success requires the integration of semantic understanding, spatial reasoning, and long-horizon planning, which is a combination that remains extremely challenging. While reinforcement learning (RL) has become…

So tired of this bullshit...
Ya’know what ALL OF THOSE THINGS require? More D's in Congress. Whinging about people working towards that immediate goal is obnoxious and harmful.
https://pdx.social/@portlandy/114971733036422173

Here’s the lightning sketch of Paul’s Treatise Against Efficiency that I’ve never written:
1. Efficiency is asymptotically inefficient: as costs approach zero, the cost of further reducing them approaches infinity.
2. Efficiency prioritizes the measurable over the difficult-to-measure.
3. Efficiency prioritizes what those in power see (or imagine) over on-the-ground reality.
4. Following from 2 and 3, efficiency reduces the amount and quality of information flowing into a human system.
5. Efficiency foments institutional inflexibility.
6. By removing slack, efficiency causes small failures to cascade more readily and increases the risk of catastrophic failure.
7. Following rom 4, 5, and 6, efficiency trades small costs for massive risks: from failures, from missed opportunities, and from inability to adjust.
8. Efficiency, when pushed, strangles the emergent phenomena that in the long term create all new things of value.
9. Thus, although it can be a by-product of evolution, efficiency as a goal in itself strangles evolution.
10. Efficiency as a goal strangles joy.

What does it mean if an aircraft has a radar cross-section of 20 dB? #stealth #aviation

What does it mean if an aircraft has a radar cross-section of 20 dB?
In the Aviation Week issue of 15 February 1999, David A. Fulghum wrote the following in the article “JSF Reflection Is Golf Ball-Sized” on page 27: The overall goal of the JSF program is to produc...

“The President has sent agents here to create chaos and riots in Portland,
to induce a reaction,
to induce protests,
to induce conflicts.
His goal is to make Portland look like what he’s been describing it as,”
Oregon’s junior senator,
Jeff Merkley said.
“He wants to induce a violent exchange.
Let us not grant him that wish.
Let us be the force of orderly, peaceful protest.”

So, what is the most important thing in my life? What is my life goal?
My family is the most important thing in my life. My most important goals are:
1. The health of my wife.
2. The mental health of our son.
3. Enough money to support their life.
-------------------
How to achieve these goals?
Simple, I just need to:
1. Budgetting my income.
2. Saving a portion of the income.
3. Paying all of my debts (hospital debts).
------------…

In 2011, I posted to our forums to explain "Why not Windows?" Our goal is not to make the most money; it's to make the best software that we can make. There are other successful platforms, but I don' t think our software would be better on any of them.
Since 2011 we've moved to different forums and the hardware hosting our archived forums died. Maybe someday I'll revive it from backups, but in the meantime it's nice that the Internet Archive still has a co…

"What's it going to take to win this in the next 15 minutes" asks the pundit on BBC.
Well I'm no highly-paid pundit, but I'd suggest "a goal" is the correct answer there.
#Euro2025

Columbia University trustees removed control of the student disciplinary process from the University Senate,
with the trustees taking control themselves of the process through the provost’s office.
The intent was to make sure that any student guilty of violating university regulations during an anti-genocide protest would be severely punished.
One goal is to make sure that students engaged in such protest are removed from the university and can’t do it again.
Anot…

The Situation at Columbia XVIII
When I first started writing here about what was going on at Columbia, part of the motivation was that I didn’t understand myself a lot of what was happening, especially the actions of the tr…

Expressive Speech Retrieval using Natural Language Descriptions of Speaking Style
Wonjune Kang, Deb Roy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11187 https://arxiv.org/…

Expressive Speech Retrieval using Natural Language Descriptions of Speaking Style
We introduce the task of expressive speech retrieval, where the goal is to retrieve speech utterances spoken in a given style based on a natural language description of that style. While prior work has primarily focused on performing speech retrieval based on what was said in an utterance, we aim to do so based on how something was said. We train speech and text encoders to embed speech and text descriptions of speaking styles into a joint latent space, which enables using free-form text prompt…

The impact on health system expenditure in Australia and OECD countries from accelerated NCD mortality decline through prevention or treatment strategies to achieve Sustainable Development Goal Target 3.4
Bibha Dhungel, Jingjing Yang, Tim Wilson, Samantha Grimshaw, Emily Bourke, Stephanie Khuu, Tony Blakely
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10795…

The impact on health system expenditure in Australia and OECD countries from accelerated NCD mortality decline through prevention or treatment strategies to achieve Sustainable Development Goal Target 3.4
Background: It is unclear what the relative impacts of prevention or treatment of NCDs are on future health system expenditure. First, we estimated expenditure in Australia for prevention vs treatment pathways to achieve SDG target 3.4. Second, we applied the method to 34 other OECD countries. Methods: We used GBD data to estimate average annual percentage changes in disease incidence, remission, and CFRs from 1990-2021, and projected to 2030 to estimate business-as-usual (BAU) reductions in …