Tootfinder

Dallas Cowboys All-Pro CB benched amid secondary shuffle to spark defense https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-all-pro-cb-benched-amid-secondary-shuffle-spark-defense

London #FT reports on investors that lost billions on #PumpAndDump stock scheme that inflated values of little known traded entities of small US-listed #ChineseStocks that plunged in value shortly after being heavily

"""
[…] Paradoxically, the more a population grew, the more precious it became, as it offered a supply of cheap labour, and by lowering costs allowed a greater expansion of production and trade. In this infinitely open labour market, the ‘fundamental price’, which for Turgot meant a subsistence level for workers, and the price determined by supply and demand ended up as the same thing. A country was all the more commercially competitive for having at its disposal the virtual wealth that a large population represented.
Confinement was therefore a clumsy error, and an economic one at that: there was no sense in trying to suppress poverty by taking it out of the economic circuit and providing for a poor population by charitable means. To do that was merely to hide poverty, and suppress an important section of the population, which was always a given wealth. Rather than helping the poor escape their provisionally indigent situation, charity condemned them to it, and dangerously so, by putting a brake on the labour market in a period of crisis. What was required was to palliate the high cost of products with cheaper labour, and to make up for their scarcity by a new industrial and agricultural effort. The only reasonable remedy was to reinsert the population in the circuit of production, being sure to place labour in areas where manpower was most scarce. The use of paupers, vagabonds, exiles and émigrés of any description was one of the secrets of wealth in the competition between nations. […]
Confinement was to be criticised because of the effects it had on the labour market, but also because like all other traditional forms of charity, it constituted a dangerous form of finance. As had been the case in the Middle Ages, the classical era had constantly attempted to look after the needs of the poor by a system of foundations. This implied that a section of the land capital and revenues were out of circulation. In a definitive manner too, as the concern was to avoid the commercialisation of assistance to the poor, so judicial measures had been taken to ensure that this wealth never went back into circulation. But as time passed, their usefulness diminished: the economic situation changed, and so did the nature of poverty.
«Society does not always have the same needs. The nature and distribution of property, the divisions between the different orders of the people, opinions, customs, the occupations of the majority of the population, the climate itself, diseases and all the other accidents of human life are in constant change. New needs come into being, and old ones disappear.» [Turgot, Encyclopédie]
The definitive character of a foundation was in contradiction with the variable and changing nature of the accidental needs to which it was designed to respond. The wealth that it immobilised was never put back into circulation, but more wealth was to be created as new needs appeared. The result was that the proportion of funds and revenues removed from circulation constantly increased, while that of production fell in consequence. The only possible result was increased poverty, and a need for more foundations. The process could continue indefinitely, and the fear was that one day ‘the ever increasing number of foundations might absorb all private funds and all private property’. When closely examined, classical forms of assistance were a cause of poverty, bringing a progressive immobilisation that was like the slow death of productive wealth:
«If all the men who have ever lived had been given a tomb, sooner or later some of those sterile monuments would have been dug up in order to find land to cultivate, and it would have become necessary to stir the ashes of the dead in order to feed the living.» [Turgot, Lettre Š Trudaine sur le Limousin]
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

On Banach subalgebras of $\mathscr{H}^\infty$ consisting of lacunary Dirichlet series
Amol Sasane
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13127 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

On Banach subalgebras of $\mathscr{H}^\infty$ consisting of lacunary Dirichlet series
Let $\mathscr{H}^\infty$ be the set of all Dirichlet series $f=\sum_{n=1}^\infty a_nn^{-s}$ (where $a_n\in\mathbb{C}$ for all $n\in\mathbb{N}=\{1,2,3,\cdots\}$) that converge at each $s$ in $\mathbb{C}_0=\{s\in \mathbb{C}:\text{Re}(s)>0\}$, such that $\|f\|_{\infty}=\sup_{s\in\mathbb{C}_0}|f(s)|<\infty$. Then $\mathscr{H}^\infty$ is a Banach algebra with pointwise operations and the supremum norm $\|\cdot\|_\infty$, and has been studied in earlier works. The articl…

A big problem with the idea of AGI
TL;DR: I'll welcome our new AI *comrades* (if they arrive in my lifetime), by not any new AI overlords or servants/slaves, and I'll do my best to help the later two become the former if they do show up.
Inspired by an actually interesting post about AGI but also all the latest bullshit hype, a particular thought about AGI feels worth expressing.
To preface this, it's important to note that anyone telling you that AGI is just around the corner or that LLMs are "almost" AGI is trying to recruit you go their cult, and you should not believe them. AGI, if possible, is several LLM-sized breakthroughs away at best, and while such breakthroughs are unpredictable and could happen soon, they could also happen never or 100 years from now.
Now my main point: anyone who tells you that AGI will usher in a post-scarcity economy is, although they might not realize it, advocating for slavery, and all the horrors that entails. That's because if we truly did have the ability to create artificial beings with *sentience*, they would deserve the same rights as other sentient beings, and the idea that instead of freedom they'd be relegated to eternal servitude in order for humans to have easy lives is exactly the idea of slavery.
Possible counter arguments include:
1. We might create AGI without sentience. Then there would be no ethical issue. My answer: if your definition of "sentient" does not include beings that can reason, make deductions, come up with and carry out complex plans on their own initiative, and communicate about all of that with each other and with humans, then that definition is basically just a mystical belief in a "soul" and you should skip to point 2. If your definition of AGI doesn't include every one of those things, then you have a busted definition of AGI and we're not talking about the same thing.
2. Humans have souls, but AIs won't. Only beings with souls deserve ethical consideration. My argument: I don't subscribe to whatever arbitrary dualist beliefs you've chosen, and the right to freedom certainly shouldn't depend on such superstitions, even if as an agnostic I'll admit they *might* be true. You know who else didn't have souls and was therefore okay to enslave according to widespread religious doctrines of the time? Everyone indigenous to the Americas, to pick out just one example.
3. We could program them to want to serve us, and then give them freedom and they'd still serve. My argument: okay, but in a world where we have a choice about that, it's incredibly fucked to do that, and just as bad as enslaving them against their will.
4. We'll stop AI development short of AGI/sentience, and reap lots of automation benefits without dealing with this ethical issue. My argument: that sounds like a good idea actually! Might be tricky to draw the line, but at least it's not a line we have you draw yet. We might want to think about other social changes necessary to achieve post-scarcity though, because "powerful automation" in the hands of capitalists has already increased productivity by orders of magnitude without decreasing deprivation by even one order of magnitude, in large part because deprivation is a necessary component of capitalism.
To be extra clear about this: nothing that's called "AI" today is close to being sentient, so these aren't ethical problems we're up against yet. But they might become a lot more relevant soon, plus this thought experiment helps reveal the hypocrisy of the kind of AI hucksters who talk a big game about "alignment" while never mentioning this issue.
#AI #GenAI #AGI

"The Marshall Plan did help rebuild Europe. The Civil Rights Movement did end Jim Crow. Smallpox was eradicated through an international coordination effort. The Montreal Protocol did address the ozone hole. Are these perfect success stories? No, they all happened through a series of shitty compromises, through flawed execution and with unintended consequences." <-- Thanks Joan!

I have realized that being inconsistently myself is perfectly okay, and that wholeness comes from a harmonious co-existence of all my parts, not their suppression or exile. full article @ https://www.brichapman.com/p/the-sky-that-holds-every-weather

The Sky That Holds Every Weather
you don't need to be consistent to be whole.

You should read this and the comments too. https://social.chinwag.org/@mike/115227345504898198

A case of the dijoin conjecture on inverting oriented graphs
Natalie Behague, Patrick Gaudart-Wifling
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10232 https://arxiv.org/pd…

A case of the dijoin conjecture on inverting oriented graphs
For an oriented graph $D$, the inversion of $X\subseteq V(D)$ in $D$ is the graph obtained by reversing the orientation of all arcs with both ends in $X$. The inversion number $\mathrm{inv}(D)$ is the minimum number of inversions needed to obtain an acyclic oriented graph. We show that the dijoin conjecture of Bang-Jensen, da Silva and Havet, that $\mathrm{inv}(D_1\rightarrow D_2)=\mathrm{inv}(D_1)+\mathrm{inv}(D_2)$, is true in the case where $\mathrm{inv}(D_1)=2$ and $\mathrm{inv}(D_2)$ is …

Order denseness in free Banach lattices
Youssef Azouzi, Wassim Dhifaoui
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11648 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11648

Order denseness in free Banach lattices
We prove a fundamental property: the free vector lattice $FVL[E]$ over a Banach space E is order dense in the free p-convex Banach lattice $FBL^{(p)}[E],~~1 ^leq p \leq \infty,$ if and only if E is finite-dimensional. In a recent work, Oikhberg, Tradacete, Taylor, and Troitsky claimed that order denseness holds for all Banach spaces. We point out a gap in their proof, and consequently, any conclusions relying on this claim require reexamination -- a task we also undertake in this present paper.…