Tootfinder

Ukraine Action Summit meets in Washington, calls for return of abducted children, security guarantees: https://benborges.xyz/2025/10/26/ukraine-action-summit-meets-in.html

"Clean energy is getting its own national day of action. It’s about time."
#Energy #Renewables
https://www.

Clean energy is getting its own national day of action. It’s about time.
The first-ever “Sun Day” is coming up Sept. 21. You can get involved in one of the more than 150 events across the country — or plan your own.

Help Calves and Sheep Beaten for Car Interiors #AnimalRights

Help Calves and Sheep Beaten for Car Interiors
Did you know that it takes an average of three cows' hides to cover the interior of a standard car? Take action!

There are three things at the core of every Philadelphian's identity: Cheesesteaks, Liberty, and the 6abc Action News theme song
https://6abc.com/post/conshohocken-baseball-player-chooses-action-news-theme-walk-music/17657880/

8-year-old baseball player chooses Action News theme song as walk-up music
A young slugger has the ultimate hype music when he walks up to bat. His anthem is a theme song that is breaking news and making headlines.

#stopthewar #palestine

"Wolverine": Sony zeigt ersten Trailer zum Action-Spiel
Im ersten Gameplay-Trailer zu "Wolverine" von Insomniac Games geht es ausgesprochen brutal zu. Das Action-Spiel kommt 2026 auf die Playstation 5.

Thousands march in The Hague, urging action on climate change - DutchNews.nl
https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/10/thousands-march-in-the-hague-urging-action-on-climate-change/

Authors celebrate "historic" settlement coming soon in Anthropic class action (Ashley Belanger/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/authors-celebrate-historic-settlement-coming-soon-in-anthropic-class-action/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250827/p110#a250827p110

The on-shell action of supergravity & the B-side of TsT and single-trace $T\bar T$
Luis Apolo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19246 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

The on-shell action of supergravity & the B-side of TsT and single-trace $T\bar T$
We propose boundary terms for the action of the NS sector of supergravity on $M_3 \times S^3 \times T^4$ spacetimes -- where $M_3$ is an AdS$_3$ or a linear dilaton background -- that render the Brown-York stress tensor and the on-shell action finite. For AdS$_3$ backgrounds, we show that the on-shell action yields a free energy with chemical potentials determined by the $B$-field. TsT (T-duality + shift + T-duality) transformations of these backgrounds generate classes of linear dilaton backgr…

Filing: Anthropic reached a settlement in a copyright class action brought by authors whose works were included in two pirate databases Anthropic downloaded (Annelise Levy/Bloomberg Law)
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/class-action/anthro…

Anthropic Settles Major AI Copyright Suit Brought by Authors (1)
Anthropic PBC reached a settlement with authors in a high-stakes copyright class action that threatened the AI company with potentially billions of dollars in damages.

Algorithmic Collective Action with Multiple Collectives
Claudio Battiloro, Pietro Greiner, Bret Nestor, Oumaima Amezgar, Francesca Dominici
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19149 http…

Algorithmic Collective Action with Multiple Collectives
As learning systems increasingly influence everyday decisions, user-side steering via Algorithmic Collective Action (ACA)-coordinated changes to shared data-offers a complement to regulator-side policy and firm-side model design. Although real-world actions have been traditionally decentralized and fragmented into multiple collectives despite sharing overarching objectives-with each collective differing in size, strategy, and actionable goals, most of the ACA literature focused on single collec…

Filing: Anthropic reached a settlement in a copyright class action brought by authors whose works were included in two pirate databases Anthropic downloaded (Annelise Levy/Bloomberg Law)
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/class-action/anthro…

Anthropic Settles Major AI Copyright Suit Brought by Authors (1)
Anthropic PBC reached a settlement with authors in a high-stakes copyright class action that threatened the AI company with potentially billions of dollars in damages.

TIL Viet Nam is aiming to switch off IPv4 in favour of IPv6 by 2032. Which means that software and systems deployed *today* need to consider network environments where IPv4 is unavailable.
https://blog.apnic.net/2025/08/27/modernizing-viet-nam…

Modernizing Viet Nam’s Internet: Infrastructure, security, action | APNIC Blog
From routing security to nationwide IPv6-only, see how coordinated operations are building the future of Viet Nam’s Internet.

Long-VLA: Unleashing Long-Horizon Capability of Vision Language Action Model for Robot Manipulation
Yiguo Fan, Pengxiang Ding, Shuanghao Bai, Xinyang Tong, Yuyang Zhu, Hongchao Lu, Fengqi Dai, Wei Zhao, Yang Liu, Siteng Huang, Zhaoxin Fan, Badong Chen, Donglin Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19958 …

Long-VLA: Unleashing Long-Horizon Capability of Vision Language Action Model for Robot Manipulation
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have become a cornerstone in robotic policy learning, leveraging large-scale multimodal data for robust and scalable control. However, existing VLA frameworks primarily address short-horizon tasks, and their effectiveness on long-horizon, multi-step robotic manipulation remains limited due to challenges in skill chaining and subtask dependencies. In this work, we introduce Long-VLA, the first end-to-end VLA model specifically designed for long-horizon robotic…

“Express support for Palestine Action from your front window and the police will reassure you that what you’re doing is completely lawful.
“Take precisely the same message out of the house, you can be arrested under the Terrorism Act, and in the extreme case of South Wales Police, have your house raided and your baked beans tested for radiation with a geiger counter."
Supporting Palestine Action legal... just not outdoors, say police | Morning Star

In the UK, you can now get arrested under the Terrorist Act for wearing a T-shirt against Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Paul Laverty is to be charged under section 13 of the Terrorist Act for wearing a T-shirt with the words: “Genocide in Palestine, time to take Action”, thought to show support for activist group Palestine Action, proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK Labour government for painting fighter jets in a protest.

Every Subtlety Counts: Fine-grained Person Independence Micro-Action Recognition via Distributionally Robust Optimization
Feng-Qi Cui, Jinyang Huang, Anyang Tong, Ziyu Jia, Jie Zhang, Zhi Liu, Dan Guo, Jianwei Lu, Meng Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21261

Every Subtlety Counts: Fine-grained Person Independence Micro-Action Recognition via Distributionally Robust Optimization
Micro-action Recognition is vital for psychological assessment and human-computer interaction. However, existing methods often fail in real-world scenarios because inter-person variability causes the same action to manifest differently, hindering robust generalization. To address this, we propose the Person Independence Universal Micro-action Recognition Framework, which integrates Distributionally Robust Optimization principles to learn person-agnostic representations. Our framework contains t…

"Morbid Metal": "Devil May Cry" im Zeitraffer
Stylishe Schwertkampf-Action in einem asiatisch-futurischen Szenario, verbunden mit dem Roguelite-Spielprinzip: "Morbid Metal" spielt sich sehr reizvoll.
…

@…: Reform is spewing more lies. This time it’s using attacks against women as a cover for attacks on migrants. We can’t let it stand. Email Reform. #Goodlawproject

Tell Reform to stop exploiting women’s safety to fuel attacks on migrants
Reform UK is pushing racist claims that migrants are a threat to women’s safety. This toxic narrative paints an entire group of people as inherently dangerous. But there’s no credible evidence to back it up. Reform MP Sarah Pochin suggested that migrants have a “warped view of their right to sexually assault women”. She claimed that men from “predominantly Muslim countries like Afghanistan” hold a “medieval view of women’s rights” and that “women are at risk of sexual assaul…

Just added my name to the statement supporting FEMA staff who are now being punished for bravely speaking out. Please join me in this #action! And thank you Stand Up for Science for organizing this! https://www.

Wow, this means the shelves at the liquor and cannabis stores can be re-filled. 😉
But seriously, good news, and congrats to the negotiators on both sides.
https://mastodon.social/@Maxfieldripken/115442407123016124

Tell Kroger: End Habitat Loss in Your Supply Chain https://www.worldanimalprotection.us/take-action/tell-kroger-end-habitat-loss-in-your-supply-chain/

Tell Kroger: End Habitat Loss in Your Supply Chain
Send a letter to Kroger executives urging them to expand the deforestation-free policy to all of its animal products.

Some really good stories this week in
Science In Action: Not cold fusion all over again, Svalbard glaciers and tiny electronics ...
(Try @… in for listening outside of UK)
Episode webpage: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct6yfr

👭 The US’s biggest pro women’s sports unions have found strength together
#sports

A US judge decertifies a class action that accused Apple of monopolizing the market for iPhone apps, citing errors in the plaintiffs' damages model (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa

"There is no one out there doing what #Supergiant does as well as it does, and this exceptional action roguelite is some of this team’s best work on nearly every level (which is an astonishingly high bar to clear). It's the type of video #game that reminds me why I love video games so damn …

Ukrainian drones hit 17% of Russian refineries, new weapons in action | News Pulse: https://benborges.xyz/2025/08/27/ukrainian-drones-hit-of-russian.html

Euro banks block billions in rogue PayPal direct debits after fraud glitch
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/28/euro_banks_block_paypal_direct_debits/

Euro banks block billions in rogue PayPal direct debits after fraud glitch
: US payments platform back in action, says it's informing affected customers

Teaching RL Agents to Act Better: VLM as Action Advisor for Online Reinforcement Learning
Xiefeng Wu, Jing Zhao, Shu Zhang, Mingyu Hu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21126 https://…

Teaching RL Agents to Act Better: VLM as Action Advisor for Online Reinforcement Learning
Online reinforcement learning in complex tasks is time-consuming, as massive interaction steps are needed to learn the optimal Q-function.Vision-language action (VLA) policies represent a promising direction for solving diverse tasks; however, their performance on low-level control remains limited, and effective deployment often requires task-specific expert demonstrations for fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose \textbf{VARL} (\textbf{V}LM as \textbf{A}ction advisor for online \textbf{R}einf…

Federal Reserve Governor
Lisa Cook's lawyer
has filed a lawsuit against Trump
following his unprecedented attempt to fire her on Monday.
Many experts fear that the president's latest action could spell the end of the Fed's independence.

wow cool did Sentry just fucking HALF the spans included in our plan!?
gotta love when a company introduces a feature you never asked for and doubles the price on a feature you care about
cool cool cool, no action required indeed

"Former world leaders call for fossil fuel taxes to fund global climate action"
#FossilFuels #Climate #ClimateChange

Former world leaders call for permanent taxes on oil and gas profits
During an energy price crisis in 2022, similar taxes raised billions, the authors argue.

As fraud surges, UK prepares to replace its broken reporting service https://therecord.media/uk-action-fraud-replacement-report-fraud

This is a weird book because it’s so well-written, darkly witty and clarifying, I can’t stop turning pages, but it also makes me not want to get out of bed. I’m banking on an energizing call to action at the end

Borel Polychromatic Number of Grids
Katalin Berlow, Edward Hou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18559 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18559

Borel Polychromatic Number of Grids
We study Borel polychromatic colorings of grid graphs arising from free Borel actions of $\mathbb{Z}^d$. A polychromatic coloring is one in which every unit $d$-dimensional cube sees all available colors. In the classical setting, every grid admits a $2^d$-polychromatic coloring, while in the Borel setting this fails. Our main result shows that every free $\mathbb{Z}^d$-action admits a Borel $(2^d-1)$-polychromatic coloring. This result is sharp: any action where the generators act ergodically …

Wow. Release the sharks.
"Kimmel Corporate Fallout: Threatening Legal Action, Disney Shareholders Want To Know If “Improper Political Or Affiliate” Pressures Went Into Host’s Weeklong Suspension" - Deadline
https://deadline.com/2025/09/disney-sh

Kimmel Corporate Fallout: Threatening Legal Action, Disney Shareholders Want To Know If “Improper Political Or Affiliate” Pressures Went Into Host’s Weeklong Suspension
Kimmel Fallout Continues: Disney Could Be Facing Lawsuit From Shareholders Over Late Night Host's Benching

Lindsey Graham says lawmakers to be briefed on potential Venezuela land attack
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5574094-trump-military-action-latin-america/

My regular reminder to everyone is that I am proudly, loudly, unapologetically, relentlessly, and forever opposed to tankie ideology, I always have been, and I always will be, sorry, not sorry!
#Anarchism #Syndicalism

Graham says lawmakers to be briefed on potential Venezuela land attack (Max Rego/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5574094-trump-military-action-latin-america/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251026/p57#a251026p57

Interesting sidenote: the US ambassador to France is a convicted felon who served two years in prison.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/08/24/us-ambassador-accuses-fr…

US ambassador accuses France of 'lack of sufficient action' on antisemitism
Charles Kusher, the new United States ambassador to France, sent a letter to President Emmanuel Macron criticizing France's plan to recognize the State of Palestine, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a similar move.

Am i the only one who got an e-transfer from the Yahoo Class Action?
$155.51 CAD, not bad at all.
#yahoo

"It’s the same playbook Trump has used throughout his thugocracy: pressuring the Federal Reserve, gutting the EPA, extorting universities, muzzling the CDC and NIH, and suing NBC, CBS, and the Wall Street Journal. "

Well, it appears there was some very good news on my birthday, when I was too busy involved in celebrations to notice.
#PalestineAction
#RightToProtest

Aggregate Fictitious Play for Learning in Anonymous Polymatrix Games (Extended Version)
Semih Kara, Tamer Ba\c{s}ar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19371 https://

Aggregate Fictitious Play for Learning in Anonymous Polymatrix Games (Extended Version)
Fictitious play (FP) is a well-studied algorithm that enables agents to learn Nash equilibrium in games with certain reward structures. However, when agents have no prior knowledge of the reward functions, FP faces a major challenge: the joint action space grows exponentially with the number of agents, which slows down reward exploration. Anonymous games offer a structure that mitigates this issue. In these games, the rewards depend only on the actions taken; not on who is taking which action. …

#Statamic
https://mastodon.social/@statamic/115107157738684422

Parkinson: Apple zeigt, wie der Action Mode beim Fotografieren hilft
Apple zeigt in zwei Videos, was Menschen mit der neurologischen Erkrankung tun müssen, um ihr iPhone für Filmaufnahmen zu nutzen.
https…

We moved a "miniature" weeping willow from its not-really-suitable home outside our back door to a better home in the garden, over the weekend.
10/10 outdoor action.
Much better than computer touching

The thing is, deportation by definition is the action of expelling someone from a country. I wonder why his Garcia’s lawyer won’t argue on the basis of this. You can’t deport someone to a country where he has no relation with. He would literally need permission to enter a third country. Why wouldn’t he deport him to France or Germany or the Netherlands for example?

Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner@journa.host)
Attached: 1 image BREAKING: Judge Xinis issues order barring Trump administration from deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia “until further order of the Court.” The admin stated earlier that it would not deport him during this habeas consideration. Also per today’s order, the habeas hearing is set for Oct. 6.

All this action is set, in Earth chronology, in 2008, presumably between Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords and Voyage of the Damned. #DoctorWho #BBC3

Tweety Amin
bot by @…
This is satire, not sedition: I hope you'll lol, not take legal action.
#satire #potus45

Sonnet 065 - LXV
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O! how shall summer's honey breath hold out,
Against the wrackful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time'…

Reduction principles for proper actions
Leonardo Biliotti, Gustavo May Custodio, Alessandro Minuzzo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19915 https://arxiv.org/pdf/…

Reduction principles for proper actions
We study the core of a proper action by a Lie group $G$ on a smooth manifold $M$, extending the construction for $G$ compact by Skjelbred and Straume. Moreover, we show that many properties of a proper $G$-action on $M$ are determined by the action of a group $G'$ on the corresponding core $_cM$. We say that such properties admit a reduction principle. In particular, we prove that a proper isometric $G$-action on $M$ is polar (resp. hyperpolar) if and only if the $G'$-action on $_cM$ is polar (…

NFL Week 8 takeaways: What We Learned from Sunday's 11 games https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-week-8-takeaways-what-we-learned-from-sunday-s-11-games

ARL-Based Multi-Action Market Making with Hawkes Processes and Variable Volatility
Ziyi Wang, Carmine Ventre, Maria Polukarov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16589 https://

ARL-Based Multi-Action Market Making with Hawkes Processes and Variable Volatility
We advance market-making strategies by integrating Adversarial Reinforcement Learning (ARL), Hawkes Processes, and variable volatility levels while also expanding the action space available to market makers (MMs). To enhance the adaptability and robustness of these strategies -- which can quote always, quote only on one side of the market or not quote at all -- we shift from the commonly used Poisson process to the Hawkes process, which better captures real market dynamics and self-exciting beh…

The modern Magnificent Seven movie starring Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt is still on Amazon Prime for a few days -- at least here in Germany.
We did some VFX for it. Back in the day I was still doing comp and comp supervision. My shot that I'm most proud of is the knife action on the straw dummy. Our company's showreel of that movie starts with a breakdown of it:

Informal Education is Essential to Physics: Findings of the 2024 JNIPER Summit and Recommendations for Action
Alexandra C. Lau, Jessica R. Hoehn, Michael B. Bennett, Claudia Fracchiolla, Kathleen Hinko, Noah Finkelstein, Jacqueline Acres, Lindsey D. Anderson, Shane D. Bergin, Cherie Bornhorst, Turhan K. Carroll, Michael Gregory, Cameron Hares, E. L. Hazlett, Meghan Healy, Erik A Herman, Lindsay R. House, Michele W. McColgan, Brad McLain, Azar Panah, Sarah A. Perdue, Jonathan D. Perry, …

Informal Education is Essential to Physics: Findings of the 2024 JNIPER Summit and Recommendations for Action
In order to reach the full civic and scientific potential of physics, this white paper calls for a culture change in physics to recognize informal physics education (also referred to as public engagement or outreach) as an essential disciplinary practice. That is, engaging in informal physics education (IPE) is part of what it means to ''do physics.'' In June 2024, we hosted a summit with forty-two members of the Joint Network for Informal Physics Education and Research (JNIPER) to discuss conc…

Back in the galaxy! Firing up SWTOR on my Linux PC tonight. Get ready to jump into the action. I'm going live soon, so tune in and let's go on an adventure! #SWTOR #LinuxGaming #StarWarsTheOldRepublic

LaVA-Man: Learning Visual Action Representations for Robot Manipulation
Chaoran Zhu, Hengyi Wang, Yik Lung Pang, Changjae Oh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19391 https://

LaVA-Man: Learning Visual Action Representations for Robot Manipulation
Visual-textual understanding is essential for language-guided robot manipulation. Recent works leverage pre-trained vision-language models to measure the similarity between encoded visual observations and textual instructions, and then train a model to map this similarity to robot actions. However, this two-step approach limits the model to capture the relationship between visual observations and textual instructions, leading to reduced precision in manipulation tasks. We propose to learn visua…

FreezeVLA: Action-Freezing Attacks against Vision-Language-Action Models
Xin Wang, Jie Li, Zejia Weng, Yixu Wang, Yifeng Gao, Tianyu Pang, Chao Du, Yan Teng, Yingchun Wang, Zuxuan Wu, Xingjun Ma, Yu-Gang Jiang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19870

FreezeVLA: Action-Freezing Attacks against Vision-Language-Action Models
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are driving rapid progress in robotics by enabling agents to interpret multimodal inputs and execute complex, long-horizon tasks. However, their safety and robustness against adversarial attacks remain largely underexplored. In this work, we identify and formalize a critical adversarial vulnerability in which adversarial images can "freeze" VLA models and cause them to ignore subsequent instructions. This threat effectively disconnects the robot's digital min…

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

Fast Fashion = Plastic Pollution #environment…

Cowboys move Diggs to IR, elevate CB to replace him, also RB for Week 8 https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/10/11/cowboys-roster-moves-see-back-to-ir-two-wrs-called-in…

Aujourd'hui je suis seul construction de figurines pour le club. Des français pour la deuxième guerre mondiale
#BoltAction #frenchstarterkit #figurines

Structuring Collective Action with LLM-Guided Evolution: From Ill-Structured Problems to Executable Heuristics
Kevin Bradley Dsouza, Graham Alexander Watt, Yuri Leonenko, Juan Moreno-Cruz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20412

Structuring Collective Action with LLM-Guided Evolution: From Ill-Structured Problems to Executable Heuristics
Collective action problems, which require aligning individual incentives with collective goals, are classic examples of Ill-Structured Problems (ISPs). For an individual agent, the causal links between local actions and global outcomes are unclear, stakeholder objectives often conflict, and no single, clear algorithm can bridge micro-level choices with macro-level welfare. We present ECHO-MIMIC, a computational framework that converts this global complexity into a tractable, Well-Structured Pro…

Do What? Teaching Vision-Language-Action Models to Reject the Impossible
Wen-Han Hsieh, Elvis Hsieh, Dantong Niu, Trevor Darrell, Roei Herzig, David M. Chan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16292

Do What? Teaching Vision-Language-Action Models to Reject the Impossible
Recently, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong performance on a range of robotic tasks. These models rely on multimodal inputs, with language instructions playing a crucial role -- not only in predicting actions, but also in robustly interpreting user intent, even when the requests are impossible to fulfill. In this work, we investigate how VLAs can recognize, interpret, and respond to false-premise instructions: natural language commands that reference objects or condit…

A proposed class action suit against Amazon filed August 22 claims it misleads customers, who think they own content they bought when they only have a license (Winston Cho/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

You Don’t Actually Own That Movie You Just “Bought.” A New Class Action Lawsuit Targets Amazon
A suit challenges Prime Video telling people they can "buy" a movie when they're purchasing a license to watch it for a period of time.

Catalina “Xochitl” Santiago had already made it past the security line at the El Paso airport
when two border patrol agents called her in for questioning
and whisked her away to an immigration detention center.
Nearly a month after her arrest, she and her family still aren’t clear why she is detained.
Santiago is a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program
– which has allowed her to legally live and work in the US.
“They have …

Google says it revised its Android Earthquake Alerts algorithm after it failed to send the highest-level Take Action warnings to 10M people in Turkey in 2023 (BBC)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77v2kx304go

Google failed to warn 10 million of Turkey earthquake severity
The tech giant said only 469 serious warnings were sent out ahead of the 7.8 magnitude quake.

MemoryVLA: Perceptual-Cognitive Memory in Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation
Hao Shi, Bin Xie, Yingfei Liu, Lin Sun, Fengrong Liu, Tiancai Wang, Erjin Zhou, Haoqiang Fan, Xiangyu Zhang, Gao Huang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19236

MemoryVLA: Perceptual-Cognitive Memory in Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation
Temporal context is essential for robotic manipulation because such tasks are inherently non-Markovian, yet mainstream VLA models typically overlook it and struggle with long-horizon, temporally dependent tasks. Cognitive science suggests that humans rely on working memory to buffer short-lived representations for immediate control, while the hippocampal system preserves verbatim episodic details and semantic gist of past experience for long-term memory. Inspired by these mechanisms, we propose…

El Pork-Choppo
bot by @…
This is for tee hee, not treason: I hope you'll lol, not take legal action.
#satire #potus45

NFL Week 4 takeaways: What We Learned from Sunday's 13 games https://www.nfl.com/news/2025-nfl-week-4-takeaways-what-we-learned-from-sunday-s-13-games

“Flamingo” in action: how Ukraine keeps Russians in its sights! | Weapons with @StarskyUA : https://benborges.xyz/2025/08/22/flamingo-in-action-how-ukraine.html

Mom of teen detained in Arleta announces legal action – NBC Los Angeles
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/legal-claim-arleta-teen-detained/3770321/

Replaced article(s) found for cs.LG. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.LG/new
[2/5]:
- Graph Neural Network Based Action Ranking for Planning
Rajesh Mangannavar, Stefan Lee, Alan Fern, Prasad Tadepalli

Donald Trump has bizarrely claimed he didn’t approve of the massive ICE raid of a Hyundai manufacturing plant in Georgia.
“I was very much opposed,”
the MAGA leader told reporters aboard Air Force One,
en route to Japan as part of his wider diplomatic tour of Asia.
Hyundai is a major South Korean car manufacturer.
On Oct. 29, Trump will meet with its President, Lee Jae Myung, who has previously blasted the raid.
She warned the action would have severe con…

Trump Hammers His Own ICE Goons to Suck Up to Foreign Leader
He is slamming ICE over a raid at a U.S. Hyundai plant as he prepares to meet with South Korea’s president.

VT-LVLM-AR: A Video-Temporal Large Vision-Language Model Adapter for Fine-Grained Action Recognition in Long-Term Videos
Kaining Li, Shuwei He, Zihan Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15903

VT-LVLM-AR: A Video-Temporal Large Vision-Language Model Adapter for Fine-Grained Action Recognition in Long-Term Videos
Human action recognition in long-term videos, characterized by complex backgrounds and subtle action differences, poses significant challenges for traditional deep learning models due to computational overhead, difficulty in capturing long-range temporal dependencies, and limited semantic understanding. While Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in multi-modal understanding and reasoning, their direct application to continuous …

Anthropic releases Claude for Chrome, which lets Claude take actions on the user's behalf within the browser, as a research preview for 1,000 Max subscribers (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/26/anthropic-launches-a-clau…

Anthropic launches a Claude AI agent that lives in Chrome | TechCrunch
Anthropic is the latest AI lab to offer an AI agent with the ability to view and take action in a user's Chrome browser.

A general action for a particle in 2 1 anti-de Sitter space
Carles Batlle, Joaquim Gomis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18959 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18959

Paris summons US ambassador after his 'lack of sufficient action' on antisemitism accusations (Philippe Ricard/Le Monde)
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/08/24/us-ambassador-accuses-france-of-lack-of-sufficient-action-on-antisemitism_6744681_4.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/250824/p34#a250824p34

Do What? Teaching Vision-Language-Action Models to Reject the Impossible
Wen-Han Hsieh, Elvis Hsieh, Dantong Niu, Trevor Darrell, Roei Herzig, David M. Chan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16292

Do What? Teaching Vision-Language-Action Models to Reject the Impossible
Recently, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong performance on a range of robotic tasks. These models rely on multimodal inputs, with language instructions playing a crucial role -- not only in predicting actions, but also in robustly interpreting user intent, even when the requests are impossible to fulfill. In this work, we investigate how VLAs can recognize, interpret, and respond to false-premise instructions: natural language commands that reference objects or condit…

Generalist Robot Manipulation beyond Action Labeled Data
Alexander Spiridonov, Jan-Nico Zaech, Nikolay Nikolov, Luc Van Gool, Danda Pani Paudel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19958 …

Generalist Robot Manipulation beyond Action Labeled Data
Recent advances in generalist robot manipulation leverage pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and large-scale robot demonstrations to tackle diverse tasks in a zero-shot manner. A key challenge remains: scaling high-quality, action-labeled robot demonstration data, which existing methods rely on for robustness and generalization. To address this, we propose a method that benefits from videos without action labels - featuring humans and/or robots in action - enhancing open-vocabulary perfo…

Bunker Baby
bot by @…
No laws were broken in the making of this bot: I hope you'll lol, not take legal action.
#satire #potus45

What you need to know from every game: Big questions for every team, win or lose https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46358628/nfl-week-4-2025-season-questions-takeaways-lessons-stats-recap-every-game

Via @JoyCulver on FB:
Indivisible & 50501movement: https://www.mobilize.us
Women’s March: https://action.womensmarch.com
no voice unheard: https://www.nvunheard.org/
the big list of protests: https://theblop.org

Precise Action-to-Video Generation Through Visual Action Prompts
Yuang Wang, Chao Wen, Haoyu Guo, Sida Peng, Minghan Qin, Hujun Bao, Xiaowei Zhou, Ruizhen Hu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13104

Precise Action-to-Video Generation Through Visual Action Prompts
We present visual action prompts, a unified action representation for action-to-video generation of complex high-DoF interactions while maintaining transferable visual dynamics across domains. Action-driven video generation faces a precision-generality trade-off: existing methods using text, primitive actions, or coarse masks offer generality but lack precision, while agent-centric action signals provide precision at the cost of cross-domain transferability. To balance action precision and dyna…

RetoVLA: Reusing Register Tokens for Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language-Action Models
Jiyeon Koo, Taewan Cho, Hyunjoon Kang, Eunseom Pyo, Tae Gyun Oh, Taeryang Kim, Andrew Jaeyong Choi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21243

RetoVLA: Reusing Register Tokens for Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language-Action Models
Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate remarkable generalization in robotics but are restricted by their substantial size and computational cost, limiting real-world deployment. However, conventional lightweighting methods often sacrifice critical capabilities, particularly spatial reasoning. This creates a trade-off between efficiency and performance. To address this challenge, our work reuses Register Tokens, which were introduced for artifact removal in Vision Transformers bu…

Felonious Stunk
bot by @…
This is for tee hee, not treason: I hope you'll lol, not take legal action.
#satire #potus45

NFL Week 8 winners and losers: Saquon Barkley, James Cook lead big-name RBs as Bengals, Falcons defenses fold

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/nfl-week-8-winners-losers-results-scores/

Ukraine marks flag day with symbolic action in Kursk region, regains control of Donetsk Oblast village: https://benborges.xyz/2025/08/23/ukraine-marks-flag-day-with.html

Learning Long-Range Action Representation by Two-Stream Mamba Pyramid Network for Figure Skating Assessment
Fengshun Wang, Qiurui Wang, Peilin Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16291

Learning Long-Range Action Representation by Two-Stream Mamba Pyramid Network for Figure Skating Assessment
Technical Element Score (TES) and Program Component Score (PCS) evaluations in figure skating demand precise assessment of athletic actions and artistic interpretation, respectively. Existing methods face three major challenges. Firstly, video and audio cues are regarded as common features for both TES and PCS predictions in previous works without considering the prior evaluation criterion of figure skating. Secondly, action elements in competitions are separated in time, TES should be derived …

Candyvan McTaco Twit
bot by @…
No laws were broken in the making of this bot: I hope you'll lol, not take legal action.
#satire #potus45

Ranking top five games on 2025 NFL preseason schedule: Browns are must-see TV, Jets-Giants makes list

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/ranking

Combover Caligula
bot by @…
This is a joke, not a threat: I hope you'll lol, not take legal action.
#satire #potus45

A Reliable Robot Motion Planner in Complex Real-world Environments via Action Imagination
Chengjin Wang, Yanmin Zhou, Zhipeng Wang, Zheng Yan, Feng Luan, Shuo Jiang, Runjie Shen, Hongrui Sang, Bin He
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16963

A Reliable Robot Motion Planner in Complex Real-world Environments via Action Imagination
Humans and animals can make real-time adjustments to movements by imagining their action outcomes to prevent unanticipated or even catastrophic motion failures in unknown unstructured environments. Action imagination, as a refined sensorimotor strategy, leverages perception-action loops to handle physical interaction-induced uncertainties in perception and system modeling within complex systems. Inspired by the action-awareness capability of animal intelligence, this study proposes an imaginati…

SoccerNet 2025 Challenges Results
Silvio Giancola, Anthony Cioppa, Marc Guti\'errez-P\'erez, Jan Held, Carlos Hinojosa, Victor Joos, Arnaud Leduc, Floriane Magera, Karen Sanchez, Vladimir Somers, Artur Xarles, Antonio Agudo, Alexandre Alahi, Olivier Barnich, Albert Clap\'es, Christophe De Vleeschouwer, Sergio Escalera, Bernard Ghanem, Thomas B. Moeslund, Marc Van Droogenbroeck, Tomoki Abe, Saad Alotaibi, Faisal Altawijri, Steven Araujo, Xiang Bai, Xiaoyang Bi, Jiawang Cao, …

SoccerNet 2025 Challenges Results
The SoccerNet 2025 Challenges mark the fifth annual edition of the SoccerNet open benchmarking effort, dedicated to advancing computer vision research in football video understanding. This year's challenges span four vision-based tasks: (1) Team Ball Action Spotting, focused on detecting ball-related actions in football broadcasts and assigning actions to teams; (2) Monocular Depth Estimation, targeting the recovery of scene geometry from single-camera broadcast clips through relative depth est…

RobotDancing: Residual-Action Reinforcement Learning Enables Robust Long-Horizon Humanoid Motion Tracking
Zhenguo Sun, Yibo Peng, Yuan Meng, Xukun Li, Bo-Sheng Huang, Zhenshan Bing, Xinlong Wang, Alois Knoll
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20717

RobotDancing: Residual-Action Reinforcement Learning Enables Robust Long-Horizon Humanoid Motion Tracking
Long-horizon, high-dynamic motion tracking on humanoids remains brittle because absolute joint commands cannot compensate model-plant mismatch, leading to error accumulation. We propose RobotDancing, a simple, scalable framework that predicts residual joint targets to explicitly correct dynamics discrepancies. The pipeline is end-to-end--training, sim-to-sim validation, and zero-shot sim-to-real--and uses a single-stage reinforcement learning (RL) setup with a unified observation, reward, and h…

Replaced article(s) found for cs.CV. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.CV/new
[4/6]:
- Beyond Label Semantics: Language-Guided Action Anatomy for Few-shot Action Recognition
Zefeng Qian, Xincheng Yao, Yifei Huang, Chongyang Zhang, Jiangyong Ying, Hong Sun

Discrete Diffusion for Reflective Vision-Language-Action Models in Autonomous Driving
Pengxiang Li, Yinan Zheng, Yue Wang, Huimin Wang, Hang Zhao, Jingjing Liu, Xianyuan Zhan, Kun Zhan, Xianpeng Lang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20109

Discrete Diffusion for Reflective Vision-Language-Action Models in Autonomous Driving
End-to-End (E2E) solutions have emerged as a mainstream approach for autonomous driving systems, with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models representing a new paradigm that leverages pre-trained multimodal knowledge from Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to interpret and interact with complex real-world environments. However, these methods remain constrained by the limitations of imitation learning, which struggles to inherently encode physical rules during training. Existing approaches often rely on…