Tootfinder

An optimistic planning algorithm for switched discrete-time LQR
Mathieu Granzotto, Romain Postoyan, Dragan Ne\v{s}i\'c, Jamal Daafouz, Lucian Bu\c{s}oniu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19054

An optimistic planning algorithm for switched discrete-time LQR
We introduce TROOP, a tree-based Riccati optimistic online planner, that is designed to generate near-optimal control laws for discrete-time switched linear systems with switched quadratic costs. The key challenge that we address is balancing computational resources against control performance, which is important as constructing near-optimal inputs often requires substantial amount of computations. TROOP addresses this trade-off by adopting an online best-first search strategy inspired by A*, a…

A federal judge dismissed seven of the 14 charges filed against reporter Tim Burke for allegedly obtaining and selling unaired Fox News footage in 2022 (Jack Prator/Tampa Bay Times)
https://www.tampabay.com/news/crime/2025/09/26/tim-burke-fox-…

Federal judge dismisses half of the charges against Tim Burke
U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle ruled that the law used to indict the Tampa media figure violates the First Amendment.

Towards Reliable Neural Optimizers: Permutation-Equivariant Neural Approximation in Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems
Meiyi Li, Javad Mohammadi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19364

Towards Reliable Neural Optimizers: Permutation-Equivariant Neural Approximation in Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems
Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems (DDDAS) motivate the development of optimization approaches capable of adapting to streaming, heterogeneous, and asynchronous data from sensor networks. Many established optimization solvers, such as branch-and-bound, gradient descent, and Newton-Raphson methods, rely on iterative algorithms whose step-by-step convergence makes them too slow for real-time, multi-sensor environments. In our recent work, we introduced LOOP-PE (Learning to Optimize the Opti…

On Thursday, Donald Trump issued a new “domestic terrorism” memorandum
targeting voices and views he dislikes
under the guise of addressing political violence.
That move came hours before news broke that
his hand-picked and recently installed federal prosecutor in the D.C. suburbs of Virginia
sought and obtained an indictment against James Comey,
the former FBI director who Trump has declared to be one of his enemies.
What we are seeing now is extre…

Trump the tyrant is on full display — but his acting out highlights how weak he is
Trump got his Comey indictment Thursday and issued a memo directing "domestic terrorism" investigations. And yet, both provided more evidence that Trump is losing.

Modality Agnostic Efficient Long Range Encoder
Toufiq Parag, Ahmed Elgammal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19409 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19409

Modality Agnostic Efficient Long Range Encoder
The long-context capability of recent large transformer models can be surmised to rely on techniques such as attention/model parallelism, as well as hardware-level optimizations. While these strategies allow input lengths to scale to millions of tokens, they do not fundamentally mitigate the quadratic computational and memory complexity of the core attention mechanism. In this paper, we address the challenge of long-context processing on a single device using generic implementations by reducing…

MAB Optimizer for Estimating Math Question Difficulty via Inverse CV without NLP
Surajit Das, Gourav Roy, Aleksei Eliseev, Ram Kumar Rajendran
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19014 h…

MAB Optimizer for Estimating Math Question Difficulty via Inverse CV without NLP
The evolution of technology and education is driving the emergence of Intelligent & Au- tonomous Tutoring Systems (IATS), where objective and domain-agnostic methods for determining question difficulty are essential. Traditional human labeling is subjective, and existing NLP-based ap- proaches fail in symbolic domains like algebra. This study introduces the Approach of Passive Measures among Educands (APME), a reinforcement learning-based Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) framework that estimates diffic…

A little byte swap here, a change to CONFIG_LOGO_LINUX_VGA16 there, badabing badaboom - the framebuffer console has the right colors!
Linux assumes framebuffers to be little endian.
In case they are not, as I recall reading, the client is supposed to take care of conversion.
But what if the client is the (Linux internal) console driver?
I couldn't find a config option, so I hacked a byte swap into the color map helper (there are many similarly named functions btw):

As anarchists, when we were organizing against Trump, in the lead up to and early in his last term, we recognized the potential for repression. Radicals have always been targeted, but now he's going after moderate liberals. This is going to keep escalating, so it would be a good idea for liberals to *listen to anarchists* since we've been doing this for years.
Anarchists have been kidnapped and held without charges for months at a tim (check out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_grand_jury_resisters. Only for those folks, they were kidnapped and held without trial under Obama.) Radicals have been doing this for years. It's worth your time to listen so you know how to prepare.
We had a bail fund set up. Support your local bail fund and don't try to start your own (liberals in Seattle did that last time). We focused on basic survival for our members. When the regime cracks down it will be random (since they can't get everyone). How are you going to support folks? Bail funds are a nice first step, but the whole process can take a long time. People can (and often do) lose their jobs, even if they aren't convicted of anything. Are you going to make sure targeted people are able to pay rent and get food? Are you going to make sure families are taken care of when a parent is kidnapped?
Resistence is only a threat if it's sustainable, otherwise they can just overpower and wait. You have to be able to wait longer. Occupations are *extremely* expensive. If you can support each other through an occupation, you can win.
So what is your plan? How are you going to make sure that those who fight can keep fighting? The best time to think about that question was under Biden. The second best time is now.

The lesson of Hungary is this:
We cannot claim to care about democracy only when it costs nothing.
Trump, like Orban, no doubt believes that everyone can be bought.
America’s elites are proving him right.
There is a Hungarian phrase I heard often: “Van az a penz” — “There’s always a price.”
If we’re serious about defending democracy, it’s not enough to hold our government accountable in court.
Lawsuits against the Trump administration are fine,
b…

Opinion | I Watched It Happen in Hungary. Now It’s Happening Here.
The real danger of a strongman isn’t his tactics; it’s how others, especially those with power, justify their acquiescence.

Liberals often struggle against these populist narratives because the polar opposite of populism is elitism, which carries much less appeal. Here are some of the narratives that work to create the software of autocracy.
— The Folksy Outsider. Pushing against the boundaries of written and unwritten norms is a standard performative element in the populist toolbox, establishing the populist leader as a folksy outsider disrespected by liberal elites.
We can expect Trump to continue …