Tootfinder

I keep coming back to the mirror dualities of the oppressed and oppressor under authoritarianism.
The oppressed is portrayed as both weak and godlike. The stereotypes are always some variation on sloth and incompetence, but yet somehow also a menace capable of destroying the "pure" society. To use the most relevant current example, Antifa being both little femme soy boys who would always get beat up by "real men" while also being an international terrorist organization on the brink of overthrowing the US government, the unarmed presence of whom makes the heavily armed agents of ICE flee for their lives. Antifa is both having absolutely no impact on ICE, and also having such an impact on ICE that the military needs to come in to protect them. The contradiction is obvious but never seems to occur to those who hold both to be true at the same time.
But few talk about the duality of the oppressor. The sovereign throughout history has always been both a ruler above the law, sometimes even the representative or incarnation of a divine force. Yet, this same superhuman/god-man is also a baby who needs constant care. This is absolutely a through line from the very earliest records of sovereign cults to modern cult leaders, CEOs, and Trump today. Power, for these people, is expressed both as the ability to force others to enact their will and in the ability to compel others to care for them. Can any of these "men" cook? Can they fix anything themselves? They are driven everywhere, cooked for all the time, constantly protected from danger. Kings are still dressed, at least for rituals. I could dissect masculinity here, but that's a whole thing.
It is as though the drive to care for our children, who must be taught to behave within acceptable norms, is hijacked by "leaders" who demand our care and attention... even at the expense of our literal children. And recently we've seen some of those very CEOs, with LLMs and return to office demands, show that their judgment is also little better than children, making decisions while pretending to understand a subject.
The oppressed are portrayed as both god-like and impotent and are, in fact, neither. Meanwhile the rulers portray themselves only as invulnerable and are, in fact, childish in their ability to survive without constant support. Their greatest fear from the collapse of society is figuring out how to make sure people keep taking care of them.
It just keeps rattling around in my head.
#USPol

Survey: 50% of US adults are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life; 53% say AI will harm people's ability to think creatively (Pew Research Center)
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/…

How Americans View AI and Its Impact on People and Society
Americans are worried about using AI more in daily life, seeing harm to human creativity and relationships. But they’re open to AI use in weather forecasting, medicine and other data-heavy tasks.

More than Meets the Eye: Understanding the Effect of Individual Objects on Perceived Visual Privacy
Mete Harun Akcay, Siddharth Prakash Rao, Alexandros Bakas, Buse Gul Atli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13051

More than Meets the Eye: Understanding the Effect of Individual Objects on Perceived Visual Privacy
User-generated content, such as photos, comprises the majority of online media content and drives engagement due to the human ability to process visual information quickly. Consequently, many online platforms are designed for sharing visual content, with billions of photos posted daily. However, photos often reveal more than they intended through visible and contextual cues, leading to privacy risks. Previous studies typically treat privacy as a property of the entire image, overlooking individ…

Humor in Pixels: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models Understanding of Online Comics
Yuriel Ryan, Rui Yang Tan, Kenny Tsu Wei Choo, Roy Ka-Wei Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12248

Humor in Pixels: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models Understanding of Online Comics
Understanding humor is a core aspect of social intelligence, yet it remains a significant challenge for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). We introduce PixelHumor, a benchmark dataset of 2,800 annotated multi-panel comics designed to evaluate LMMs' ability to interpret multimodal humor and recognize narrative sequences. Experiments with state-of-the-art LMMs reveal substantial gaps: for instance, top models achieve only 61% accuracy in panel sequencing, far below human performance. This underscore…

On the set of fixed points for NRS($m$)
Mario DeFranco
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14176 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14176

On the set of fixed points for NRS($m$)
Let $f(z)$ be a degree $d$ polynomial with zeros $z_i$. For arbitrary $m$ we construct explicit set of fixed points (attractors) of NRS($m$), and prove a factored formula for the Jacobian at these points. We prove that if NRS(2), when applied to $f$ with an arbitrary starting point, converges to a point $(w_0, w_1)$, then $w_0$ is of the form $z_i+z_j$ for some $i \neq j$. As a corollary, we prove a formula expressing the elementary symmetric expansion of the function \[ \prod_{1\leq i < j \leq…

Investigating ReLoRA: Effects on the Learning Dynamics of Small Language Models
Yuval Weiss, David Demitri Africa, Paula Buttery, Richard Diehl Martinez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12960

Investigating ReLoRA: Effects on the Learning Dynamics of Small Language Models
Parameter-efficient methods such as LoRA have revolutionised the fine-tuning of LLMs. Still, their extension to pretraining via ReLoRA is less well understood, especially for small language models (SLMs), which offer lower computational and environmental costs. This work is the first systematic study of ReLoRA in SLMs (11M-66M parameters), evaluating both performance and learning dynamics. Through ablation experiments, we find that ReLoRA generally performs worse than standard training on loss,…

AI and the Future of Academic Peer Review
Sebastian Porsdam Mann, Mateo Aboy, Joel Jiehao Seah, Zhicheng Lin, Xufei Luo, Dan Rodger, Hazem Zohny, Timo Minssen, Julian Savulescu, Brian D. Earp
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14189

AI and the Future of Academic Peer Review
Peer review remains the central quality-control mechanism of science, yet its ability to fulfill this role is increasingly strained. Empirical studies document serious shortcomings: long publication delays, escalating reviewer burden concentrated on a small minority of scholars, inconsistent quality and low inter-reviewer agreement, and systematic biases by gender, language, and institutional prestige. Decades of human-centered reforms have yielded only marginal improvements. Meanwhile, artific…

Efficient Compilation of Algorithms into Compact Linear Programs
Shermin Khosravi, David Bremner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13006 https://arxiv.org/pdf/250…

Efficient Compilation of Algorithms into Compact Linear Programs
Linear Programming (LP) is widely applied in industry and is a key component of various other mathematical problem-solving techniques. Recent work introduced an LP compiler translating polynomial-time, polynomial-space algorithms into polynomial-size LPs using intuitive high-level programming languages, offering a promising alternative to manually specifying each set of constraints through Algebraic Modeling Languages (AMLs). However, the resulting LPs, while polynomial in size, are often extre…

Probabilistic Model Checking: Applications and Trends
Marta Kwiatkowska, Gethin Norman, David Parker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12968 https://arxiv.org/pdf…

Probabilistic Model Checking: Applications and Trends
Probabilistic model checking is an approach to the formal modelling and analysis of stochastic systems. Over the past twenty five years, the number of different formalisms and techniques developed in this field has grown considerably, as has the range of problems to which it has been applied. In this paper, we identify the main application domains in which probabilistic model checking has proved valuable and discuss how these have evolved over time. We summarise the key strands of the underlyin…

A study published in 2021 presented cuttlefish with a new version of the "marshmallow test",
and the results showed there's more going on in their strange little brains than we ever suspected.
Their ability to learn, anticipate future rewards, and adapt their behavior, the researchers said,
may have evolved to give cuttlefish an edge in the cutthroat eat-or-be-eaten marine world they live

Cephalopods Passed a Cognitive Test Intended For Human Children
An eye-opening experiment on cephalopods reinforces why it is so important for us not to underestimate animal intelligence.