Tootfinder

Making America Alone Again (Margaret MacMillan/Foreign Affairs)
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/north-america/making-america-alone-again
http://www.memeorandum.com/250721/p2#a250721p2

Children riding in school buses became so dehydrated and nauseous that they had to be hosed down by the Fire Department.
Hundreds of young people were hospitalized with heat-related illnesses.
But the elderly, and especially the elderly who lived alone, were most vulnerable to the heat wave.
https://

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #DriveTime
Shoko Igarashi:
🎵 Leave Me Alone
#ShokoIgarashi
https://tigersushirecords.bandcamp.com/track/leave-me-alone
https://open.spotify.com/track/15ALBMF4wWL6MDpi1bxSL1

Is the Home Office so inhumane, or is it just some rogue, cynical (un)civil servant who made this judgement?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jun/18/uk-home-office-brazilian-family-children-return-alone?CMP…

AAM: The Washington Post's paid average daily circulation is now just 97,000, dropping below 100,000 for the first time and down from 250,000 five years ago (Vince Morris/Washington City Paper)
https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article…

Washington Post to Merge Metro Coverage Into Sports and Style Sections
The print edition will publish its final stand-alone Metro section on Sunday, as Post average circulation drops below 100,000 for the first time in more than 55 years.

I'm almost through The Shepherd's Crown and it's better than I feared - definitely better than Raising Steam, in my opinion.
There are only two things that I find jarring: Nanny Ogg sounds WAY folksier than it does normally, and it's clear he would've edited it massively ("dainty" appears every second page).
Other than that, I have the feeling he wrote the same book in the Good Timeline, the one where the Embuggerance left him alone.

Classic #america
"The price of our goods doesn't include the basic cost of employing our staff, let alone local sales tax and tips"
Why not just charge me for the bun and I'll guess the rest.
#ffsamerica

Some of the stuff that this guy is saying sounds like the mumbo jumbo you hear in the final act of some animes. GITS part 2 or „Stand-Alone Complex“ for example, where the bad guy is dumping exposition about the universe. You wonder what the author was smoking and can’t follow but you keep watching because of cool mecha action and explosions.
„The non-governmental system isolates you, mirrors you…“ „It lives in soft compliance delays“… yadda yadda. Your brain on ChatGPT.

Fortunately, there are chargers, too.
Costco opening its first stand-alone gas station
https://thehill.com/business/5356039-costco-stand-alone-gas-station-california/

Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Edit: fixed some typos.
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and thus more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of management caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.

Study: US kids who said their social media, phone, or video game use was "addictive" were 2x-3x more likely to have thoughts of suicide or self-harm by age 14 (Ellen Barry/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/…

Real Risk to Youth Mental Health Is ‘Addictive Use,’ Not Screen Time Alone, Study Finds
Researchers found children with highly addictive use of phones, video games or social media were two to three times as likely to have thoughts of suicide or to harm themselves.

Can Pretrained Vision-Language Embeddings Alone Guide Robot Navigation?
Nitesh Subedi, Adam Haroon, Shreyan Ganguly, Samuel T. K. Tetteh, Prajwal Koirala, Cody Fleming, Soumik Sarkar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14507

Can Pretrained Vision-Language Embeddings Alone Guide Robot Navigation?
Foundation models have revolutionized robotics by providing rich semantic representations without task-specific training. While many approaches integrate pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) with specialized navigation architectures, the fundamental question remains: can these pretrained embeddings alone successfully guide navigation without additional fine-tuning or specialized modules? We present a minimalist framework that decouples this question by training a behavior cloning policy dir…

Ai ai ai ai… It’s all about AI! They are forcing you to use it, even if you don’t want to.
I always say, “If it’s too much in your face, they can leave me alone and keep it.”
#ai
#tech
#privacy

Moeten we ons niet eens heel erg boos gaan maken op Microsoft wegens obsctructie van de rechtsgang?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/trumps-sanctions-on-iccs-chief-prosecutor-have-halted-tribunals-…

Trump's sanctions on ICC's chief prosecutor have halted tribunal's work, officials and lawyers say
Staffers and allies of the ICC said the sanctions have made it increasingly difficult for the tribunal to conduct basic tasks, let alone seek justice for victims of war crimes or genocide.

LLM-Based Community Surveys for Operational Decision Making in Interconnected Utility Infrastructures
Adaeze Okeukwu-Ogbonnaya, Rahul Amatapu, Jason Bergtold, George Amariucai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13577

LLM-Based Community Surveys for Operational Decision Making in Interconnected Utility Infrastructures
We represent interdependent infrastructure systems and communities alike with a hetero-functional graph (HFG) that encodes the dependencies between functionalities. This graph naturally imposes a partial order of functionalities that can inform the sequence of repair decisions to be made during a disaster across affected communities. However, using such technical criteria alone provides limited guidance at the point where the functionalities directly impact the communities, since these can be r…

In 2020, Scotland generated 32TWh of electricity from wind alone.
https://www.scottishrenewables.com/our-industry/statistics
In 2023, Scotland consumed 21.8TWh of electricity in total.

Renewable Energy Facts & Statistics | Scottish Renewables
Scotland's renewable energy sector in numbers. Scotland’s renewable energy sector is growing and developing year-on-year. Discover facts, statistics and figures from Scotland's renewable energy sector.

reLAISS: A Python Package for Flexible Similarity Searches of Supernovae and Their Host Galaxies
E. Reynolds, A. Gagliano, V. A. Villar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13449

reLAISS: A Python Package for Flexible Similarity Searches of Supernovae and Their Host Galaxies
Discovery rates of supernovae are expected to surpass one million events annually with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. With unprecedented sample sizes of both common and rare transient types, photometric classification alone will be insufficient for finding one-in-a-million events and prioritizing the 1% of events for spectroscopic follow-up observations. Here, we present reLAISS, a modified framework for similarity searches of supernovae using extracted features of ZTF light curves and Pan-STAR…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MorningShow
The Cure:
🎵 Alone (Four Tet remix)
#TheCure
https://schwerkraftrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-cure-alone
https://open.spotify.com/track/7zHhP0CHO4cONkImJ0Oau6

Predicting interface and spin states in armchair graphene nanoribbon junctions
Sofia Sanz, Daniel S\'anchez-Portal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14065 htt…

Predicting interface and spin states in armchair graphene nanoribbon junctions
We present a theoretical analysis of interface states emerging at junctions between armchair graphene nanoribbons of varying widths. By exploring diverse width combinations and junction geometries, we demonstrate that predicting the precise number of interface states requires considerations beyond the topological classification alone; specifically, the width differences and bonding configuration at the interface play crucial roles. For junctions involving ribbons with small gaps, we further exa…

Why is this a case that the Japanese Railway thinks about in their ticket prices?

'Did not do this alone': Epstein exposer demands Trump DOJ investigate his diabolic network - Alternet.org
https://www.alternet.org/epstein-investigation-trump/

By Israel’s own metric, it has wounded over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza alone.
#israel #genocide #ethnicCleansing

Κάποιος Ταδόπουλος (@_Wiesenthal_S_@todon.nl)
Attached: 1 image "Israel includes those treated for anxiety in the injury count" 🙄

Brad Lander Tried to Escort Immigrants Facing Arrest. He's Not Alone. (Luis Ferré-Sadurní/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/nyregion/ice-immigrants-volunteer-escorts-courthouse.html?unlocked_article_code=1.QE8.mOZ8.b98ePchAG9eY&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
http://www.memeorandum.com/250619/p68#a250619p68

Series D, Episode 10 - Gold
TARRANT: Avon! Soolin!
DAYNA: [Pointing at Keiller.] Tarrant!
TARRANT: Keiller, what happened? He's out cold. [Dayna looks through a door. To Dayna: ] What is it?
DAYNA: Two bodies, I think. The radiation hasn't left much.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/410/134

An early morning alone on the banks of the (still young) Isar river some weeks ago... Really more "flow" rather than #WaterfallWednesday, but I just absolutely cherish places and moments like this & feeling so privileged being able to experience these after decades of living in large cities... (each time also a reminder how much we stand to lose...)

Scaling-Up the Pretraining of the Earth Observation Foundation Model PhilEO to the MajorTOM Dataset
Nikolaos Dionelis, Jente Bosmans, Riccardo Musto, Giancarlo Paoletti, Simone Sarti, Giacomo Cascarano, Casper Fibaek, Luke Camilleri, Bertrand Le Saux, Nicolas Long\'ep\'e
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14765

Scaling-Up the Pretraining of the Earth Observation Foundation Model PhilEO to the MajorTOM Dataset
Today, Earth Observation (EO) satellites generate massive volumes of data, with the Copernicus Sentinel-2 constellation alone producing approximately 1.6TB per day. To fully exploit this information, it is essential to pretrain EO Foundation Models (FMs) on large unlabeled datasets, enabling efficient fine-tuning for several different downstream tasks with minimal labeled data. In this work, we present the scaling-up of our recently proposed EO Foundation Model, PhilEO Geo-Aware U-Net, on the u…

Golden Partition Zone: Rethinking Neural Network Partitioning Under Inversion Threats in Collaborative Inference
Rongke Liu, Youwen Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15412

Golden Partition Zone: Rethinking Neural Network Partitioning Under Inversion Threats in Collaborative Inference
In collaborative inference, intermediate features transmitted from edge devices can be exploited by adversaries to reconstruct original inputs via model inversion attacks (MIA). While existing defenses focus on shallow-layer protection, they often incur significant utility loss. A key open question is how to partition the edge-cloud model to maximize resistance to MIA while minimizing accuracy degradation. We first show that increasing model depth alone does not guarantee resistance. Through th…

Okay, everything is buttoned up again, only almost stripped a rack hole out. However, time to leave things alone and see if it catches fire.
#homelab #minirack

Thread on today's 'red line' demonstration in The Hague. It's called the International city of peace and justice, but our government there has been extremely reluctant to criticize Israel for the genocide it is committing in Gaza. Let alone to take action: long overdue!
https://mastod…

I'm migrating my articles and blogging, and you can kind of follow my process.
I just posted this, which includes this line: "Building your goals in someone else’s sandbox alone is not ideal, a little like building a castle on sand."
https://davaug.medium.com/online-longe

Online Longevity - David August - Medium
I am shifting my article posting and blogging to a new place: https://davidaugust.ghost.io (I signed up for the 14 day trial… not sure yet if investing in paying monthly or annually is a good idea)…

I’ve been doing an unholy amount of weeding recently and keep seeing these little spiders fleeing my progress. Many are carrying a tiny white ball and so I looked them up out of curiosity.
Apparently they are “Rabid Wolf Spiders”, which sounds like they themselves got to pick it out and sought something impressively terrifying so that humans would leave them alone. It’s certainly a misnomer since spiders cannot be rabid.
The white ball is an egg sac.

Sonnet 133 - CXXXIII
Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan
For that deep wound it gives my friend and me!
Is't not enough to torture me alone,
But slave to slavery my sweet'st friend must be?
Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken,
And my next self thou harder hast engrossed:
Of him, myself, and thee I am forsaken;
A torment thrice three-fold thus to be crossed.
Prison my heart in thy steel bosom's ward,
But t…

Marlee Matlin documentary "Not Alone Anymore"
‘It’s hard to find work’: Marlee Matlin on making Hollywood history but waiting for change
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jun/21/marlee-matlin-documentary-not-alone-anymore

The anatomy of a flash flood: Why the Texas flood was so deadly #Texas

The anatomy of a flash flood: Why the Texas flood was so deadly
Between July 3 and 6, Texas Hill Country experienced catastrophic flash flooding along the Guadalupe River system. The floods claimed at least 130 lives, with over 96 fatalities in Kerr County alone. More than 160 people were missing as of July 12, including children attending camps along the river.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #LaurenLaverne
Love:
🎵 Alone Again Or
#Love
https://untrainedanimals.bandcamp.com/track/love-alone-again-or
https://open.spotify.com/track/6fWfJLAQsBkF0kVV0P6AQS

An advisory board convened by OpenAI recommends that the company remain a nonprofit because AI is "too consequential" to be governed by a corporation alone (Thalia Beaty/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/openai-nonpr…

The Meta AI app is a privacy disaster
It sounds like the start of a 21st-century horror film: Your browser history has been public all along, and you had no idea. That’s basically what it feels like right now on the new stand-alone Meta AI app, where swathes of people are publishing their ostensibly private conversations with the chatbot. […]
😬

The Meta AI app is a privacy disaster | TechCrunch
Meta does not indicate to users what their privacy settings are as they post, or where they are even posting to. So, if you log into Meta AI with Instagram, and your Instagram account is public, then so too are your searches.

Oh route me alone as a clean RF tone
Where the signal return currents play
Where seldom is found an interfering sound
And the power's not noisy all day
Home, home on the plane
Where the signal return currents play
Where seldom is found an interfering sound
And the power's not noisy all day
Where the signal's so pure, and so EMI free,
The spectrum so flat and so clean
That I would not exchange my home on the plane
For any ca…

Angry dominant hegemony club gotta dominant hegemony :-)
https://climatejustice.social/@PeterRu/114687881102810320

I have no clue how to play in a band, how to record and track, let alone mix a track. But I love music and I could listen forever to Rick Beato interviewing Eric Valentine about every little detail of his productions – this guy really knows and loves his stuff! Incredible! 😮 #music #audioengineering

Just read through "Sanctuary" by Paola Mendez & Abby Sher, which was electrifying as I read news about ICE kidnappings in local towns, including one in Waltham today where they left a kid alone on the sidewalk:
#ICE #kidnappings

Similarity = Value? Consultation Value Assessment and Alignment for Personalized Search
Weicong Qin, Yi Xu, Weijie Yu, Teng Shi, Chenglei Shen, Ming He, Jianping Fan, Xiao Zhang, Jun Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14437

Similarity = Value? Consultation Value Assessment and Alignment for Personalized Search
Personalized search systems in e-commerce platforms increasingly involve user interactions with AI assistants, where users consult about products, usage scenarios, and more. Leveraging consultation to personalize search services is trending. Existing methods typically rely on semantic similarity to align historical consultations with current queries due to the absence of 'value' labels, but we observe that semantic similarity alone often fails to capture the true value of consultation for perso…

Implicit Constraint-Aware Off-Policy Correction for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Ali Baheri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14058 https://

Implicit Constraint-Aware Off-Policy Correction for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Offline reinforcement learning promises policy improvement from logged interaction data alone, yet state-of-the-art algorithms remain vulnerable to value over-estimation and to violations of domain knowledge such as monotonicity or smoothness. We introduce implicit constraint-aware off-policy correction, a framework that embeds structural priors directly inside every Bellman update. The key idea is to compose the optimal Bellman operator with a proximal projection on a convex constraint set, wh…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #AfternoonShow
The Cure:
🎵 Alone (Four Tet remix)
#TheCure
https://schwerkraftrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-cure-alone
https://open.spotify.com/track/7zHhP0CHO4cONkImJ0Oau6

Ukraine will not be left alone! Is the US preparing to resume military aid?: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/04/ukraine-will-not-be-left.html

Epstein shit and adjacent, Rural America, Poverty, Abuse
Everyone who's not a pedophile thinks pedophiles are bad, but there's this special obsessed hatred you'll find among poor rural Americans. The whole QAnon/Epstein obsession may not really make sense to folks raised in cities. Like, why do these people think *so much* about pedophiles? Why do they think that everyone in power is a pedophile? Why would the Pizzagate thing make sense to anyone? What is this unhinged shit? A lot of folks (who aren't anarchists) might be inclined to ask "why can't these people just let the cops take care of it?"
I was watching Legal Eagle's run down on the Trump Epstein thing earlier today and I woke up thinking about something I don't know if I've ever talked about. Now that I'm not in the US, I'm not at any risk of talking about it. I don't know how much I would have been before, but that's not something I'm gonna dig into right now. So let me tell you a story that might explain a few things.
I'm like 16, maybe 17. I have my license, so this girl I was dating/not dating/just friends with/whatever would regularly convince me to drive her and her friends around. I think she's like 15 at the time. Her friends are younger than her.
She tells me that there's a party we can go to where they have beer. She was told to invite her friends, so I can come too. We're going to pick her friends up (we regularly fill the VW Golf well beyond the legal limit and drive places) and head to the party.
So I take these girls, at least is 13 years old, down to this party. I'm already a bit sketched out bringing a 13 year old to a party. We drive out for a while. It's in the country. We drive down a long dark road. Three are some barrel fires and a shack. This is all a bit strange, but not too abnormal for this area. We're a little ways outside of a place called Mill City (in Oregon).
We park and walk towards the shack. This dude who looks like a rat comes up and offers us beer. He laughs and talks to the girl who invited me, "What's he doing here? You're supposed to bring your girl friends." She's like, "He's our ride." I don't remember if he offered me a beer or not.
We go over to this shed and everyone starts smoking, except me because I didn't smoke until I turned 18. The other girls start talking about the rat face dude, who's wandered over by the fire with some other guys. They're mainly teasing one of the 13 year old girls about having sex with him a bunch of times. They say he's like, 32 or something. The other girls joke about him only having sex with 13 year olds because he's too ugly to have sex with anyone closer to his own age.
Somewhere along the line it comes out that he's a cop. I never forgot that, it's absolutely seared in to my memory. I can picture his face perfectly still, decades later, and them talking about how he's a deputy, he was in his 30's, and he was having sex with a 13 year old girl. I was the only boy there, but there were a few older men. This was a chunk of the good ol' boys club of the town. I think there were a couple of cops besides the one deputy, and a judge or the mayor or some kind of big local VIP.
I kept trying to get my friend to leave, but she wanted to stay. Turns out under age drinking with cops seems like a great deal if you're a kid because you know you won't get busted. I left alone, creeped the fuck out.
I was told later that I wasn't invited and that I couldn't talk about it, I've always been good at compartmentalization, so I never did.
Decades later it occurred to me what was actually happening. I'm pretty sure that cop was giving meth he'd seized as evidence to these kids. This wasn't some one-off thing. It was regular. Who knows how many decades it went on after I left, or how many decades it had been going on before I found out. I knew this type of thing had happened at least a few times before because that's how that 13 year old girl and that 32 year old cop had hooked up in the first place.
Hearing about Epstein's MO, targeting these teenage girls from fucked up backgrounds, it's right there for me. I wouldn't be surprised if they were involved in sex trafficking of minors or some shit like that... but who would you call if you found out? Half the sheriff's department was there and the other half would cover for them.
You live in the city and shit like that doesn't happen, or at least you don't think it happens. But rural poor folks have this intuition about power and abuse. It's right there and you know it.
Trump is such a familiar character for me, because he's exactly that small town mayor or sheriff. He'll will talk about being tough on crime and hunting down pedophiles, while hanging out at a party that exists so people can fuck 8th graders.
The problem with the whole thing is that rural folks will never break the cognitive dissonance between "kill the peods" and "back the blue." They'll never go kill those cops. No, the pedos must be somewhere else. It must be the elites. It must be outsiders. It can't be the cops and good ol' boys everyone respects. It can't be the mayor who rigs the election to win every time. It can't be the "good upstanding" sheriff. Nah, it's the Clintons.
To be fair, it's probably also the Clitnons, a bunch of other politicians, billionaires, etc. Epstein was exactly who everyone thought he was, and he didn't get away with it for so long without a whole lot of really powerful help.
There are still powerful people who got away with involvement with #Epstein. #Trump is one of them, but I don't really believe that he's the only one.
#USPol #ACAB

Distributed Activity Detection for Cell-Free Hybrid Near-Far Field Communications
Jingreng Lei, Yang Li, Zeyi Ren, Qingfeng Lin, Ziyue Wang, Ya-Feng Liu, Yik-Chung Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14254

Distributed Activity Detection for Cell-Free Hybrid Near-Far Field Communications
A great amount of endeavor has recently been devoted to activity detection for massive machine-type communications in cell-free massive MIMO. However, in practice, as the number of antennas at the access points (APs) increases, the Rayleigh distance that separates the near-field and far-field regions also expands, rendering the conventional assumption of far-field propagation alone impractical. To address this challenge, this paper considers a hybrid near-far field activity detection in cell-fr…

If you’re asking if there are people like me, people who smoke pot, want multiple partner relationships, believe in communal living, want the world to be in harmony, take psychedelics, listen to underground music (Psytrance), are against war, and also consider themselves anarchists, the answer is yes. I exist, and I’m definitely not alone in this.
#Hippie

poor #Norris, he is going to go hard on himself here. I hope people give that dude some grace and leave him alone. #F1

Only the combination/simultaneous arrival of both drones and ballistic missiles will have any chance to break through Israel's missile defenses i would think. Unless Iran has some new smart technology up it's sleeve. Those Shahed drones alone are not that effective anymore. What i should worry about as Israel is more assymetric attacks/warfare in the world.
#iran

All Eyes, no IMU: Learning Flight Attitude from Vision Alone
Jesse J. Hagenaars, Stein Stroobants, Sander M. Bohte, Guido C. H. E. De Croon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11302

All Eyes, no IMU: Learning Flight Attitude from Vision Alone
Vision is an essential part of attitude control for many flying animals, some of which have no dedicated sense of gravity. Flying robots, on the other hand, typically depend heavily on accelerometers and gyroscopes for attitude stabilization. In this work, we present the first vision-only approach to flight control for use in generic environments. We show that a quadrotor drone equipped with a downward-facing event camera can estimate its attitude and rotation rate from just the event stream, e…

I do actually love Two Tribes and it easily makes my top ten of all time favourite 80s songs.
The bassline alone remains unsurpassed.
#TOTP

The Rigidity of Constraint: A Spencer-Hodge Theoretic Approach to the Hodge Conjecture
Dongzhe Zheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12720 https://

The Rigidity of Constraint: A Spencer-Hodge Theoretic Approach to the Hodge Conjecture
This paper proposes a new theoretical perspective for studying the Hodge conjecture through an analytical framework based on constraint geometry. Our theory begins with a key observation: in compatible pair Spencer theory, a "differential degeneration" mechanism simplifies Spencer differential operators to classical exterior differential under specific algebraic conditions, bridging constraint geometry and de Rham cohomology. This bridge alone is insufficient to filter rare Hodge classes with a…

Fundamental Parameters for Totally Eclipsing Contact Binaries Observed by TESS
Xu Ding, KaiFan Ji, ZhiMing Song, XueFen Tian, JinLiang Wang, ChuanJun Wang, QiYuan Cheng, JianPing Xiong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11838

Fundamental Parameters for Totally Eclipsing Contact Binaries Observed by TESS
Totally eclipsing contact binaries provide a unique opportunity to accurately determine mass ratios through photometric methods alone, eliminating the need for spectroscopic data. Studying low mass ratio (LMR) contact binaries is crucial for advancing our understanding of binary star evolution and the formation of rare optical transients known as red novae. We identified 143 totally eclipsing contact binaries from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. These high-precision light curves reve…

Extended thermal cycling of ATLAS ITk strip modules with and without stress mitigating interposers
Nikolai Fomin, Bart Hommels, Thomas Ivison, Kosala Kariyapperuma, Jesse Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12586

Extended thermal cycling of ATLAS ITk strip modules with and without stress mitigating interposers
This paper investigates critical mechanical failures during stand-alone thermocycling of ATLAS Inner Tracker strip pre-production modules. Five modules undergo extended thermocycling after adequately levelling thermal chucks and introducing interlocks for unattended operation. Module bow evolution is tracked via regular sensor metrology. All five modules exhibit bow increases with a mean of $146\pm 27~μ$m when raising maximum cycling temperatures from $20^\circ$C to $40^\circ$C. Four such modu…

I have been unable to choose an all-in-one printer/scanner/copy machine for personal use.
Why? There’s an incredible amount of options barely differentiated with tons of details hidden behind undefined terms used inconsistently across brands.
I expect that the result will be: end up choosing one based on price alone and the hate it from that moment on for every paper cut.

Universal Fourier Neural Operators for Micromechanics
Binh Huy Nguyen, Matti Schneider
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12233 https://arxiv…

Universal Fourier Neural Operators for Micromechanics
\noindent Solving cell problems in homogenization is hard, and available deep-learning frameworks fail to match the speed and generality of traditional computational frameworks. More to the point, it is generally unclear what to expect of machine-learning approaches, let alone single out which approaches are promising. In the work at hand, we advocate Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs) for micromechanics, empowering them by insights from computational micromechanics methods based on the fast Fouri…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MorningShow
Hunx and His Punx:
🎵 Alone in Hollywood on Acid
#HunxandHisPunx
https://hunxandhispunx.bandcamp.com/track/alone-in-hollywood-on-acid-2
https://open.spotify.com/track/03CrgvwYLqCxmZdhYJEDyr

"2025: A landmark year for solar energy"
#SolarPower #Energy #Renewables

2025: A landmark year for solar energy
The IEA-PVPS 2025 Snapshot of Global PV Markets reveals a pivotal moment for solar power: global PV capacity surpassed 2.2 TW, with more than 600 GW installed in 2024 alone. As module prices fell due to oversupply, installation volumes continued to grow, highlighting both the strength and volatility of the global PV industry.

Probing flavor effects in QCD showers with heavy-flavor jets
Emma Yeats (on behalf of the ALICE Collaboration)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13928 https://

Probing flavor effects in QCD showers with heavy-flavor jets
Measurements of jet substructure provide precise tests of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) and offer a distinct way to study hadronization mechanisms, compared to measurements of hadrons alone. QCD predicts that jet radiation patterns depend on the mass and color charge of the initiating parton. Parton showers, in particular, are sensitive to the Casimir factors of quarks and gluons, as well as the parton mass due to the dead-cone effect. Three key charm-tagged jet measurements from the ALICE exper…

#book2read: Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam
https://a.co/d/fLuNixl
via Unabashed Faith: Resisting Anti-Spiritual Influences in the Modern World…

Interacting Geodesics on Discrete Manifolds
Oliver Knill
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12054 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12054

Interacting Geodesics on Discrete Manifolds
We define an evolution of multiple particles on a discrete manifold $G$. Each particle alone moves on geodesics and particles can interact if they are on the same facet. They move deterministically and reversibly on the frame bundle $P$ of the abstract simplicial complex $G$. Particles are signed and each is represented by a totally ordered maximal simplex $p \in P$ in $G$. The motion of divisors on $P$ also defines a time dependent reversible deformation of space.

I'm crushing your head! I'm crushing your head!
- Stephen Miller looking out the window as he eats lunch in his office, alone

A new model of spontaneous scalarization of black holes induced by curvature and matter
Zakaria Belkhadria, Salvatore Mignemi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12137

A new model of spontaneous scalarization of black holes induced by curvature and matter
We propose a new model of black hole spontaneous scalarization that combines a scalar--Gauss--Bonnet interaction with a non-minimal coupling to a $U(1)$ gauge field (a dark photon or an electromagnetic field). This construction generalizes earlier single-coupling setups and allows both curvature-induced and matter-induced scalarization within one framework, which allows us to overcome the limitations of each mechanism alone. We focus on charged, spherically symmetric black holes and demonstrate…

Heterogeneous Dynamic Logic: Provability Modulo Program Theories
Samuel Teuber, Mattias Ulbrich, Andr\'e Platzer, Bernhard Beckert
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08581

Heterogeneous Dynamic Logic: Provability Modulo Program Theories
Formally specifying, let alone verifying, properties of systems involving multiple programming languages is inherently challenging. We introduce Heterogeneous Dynamic Logic (HDL), a framework for combining reasoning principles from distinct (dynamic) program logics in a modular and compositional way. HDL mirrors the architecture of satisfiability modulo theories (SMT): Individual dynamic logics, along with their calculi, are treated as dynamic theories that can be flexibly combined to reason ab…

The BAO-CMB Tension and Implications for Inflation
Elisa G. M. Ferreira, Evan McDonough, Lennart Balkenhol, Renata Kallosh, Lloyd Knox, Andrei Linde
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12459

The BAO-CMB Tension and Implications for Inflation
The scalar spectral index $n_s$ is a powerful test of inflationary models. The tightest constraint on $n_s$ to date derives from the combination of cosmic microwave background (CMB) data with baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) data. The resulting $n_s$ constraint is shifted significantly upward relative to the constraint from CMB alone, with the consequence that previously preferred inflationary models are seemingly disfavored by $\gtrsim 2 σ$. Here we show that this shift in $n_s$ is the combi…

AI is just another productivity tool and the productivity gains will be limited; for lasting economic expansion, AI must catalyze new industries and initiatives (Carl Benedikt Frey/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/55bc5876-254a-4daa-86f8-2cd0d939a866

AI alone cannot solve the productivity puzzle
Economic miracles stem from discovery, not repeating tasks at greater speed

It's so funny, my wife travels for work and is like, "It's amazing here! We [the whole family] should visit!"
Ah, those rose-colored traveling-alone glasses. I remember those! ...As opposed to the the-kids-have-been-yelling-and-screaming-at-each-other-for-over-an-hour-because-someone-was-humming-too-loudly-colored glasses. A 12-hour flight with these monsters? 🫠

On expected #V2G returns: “Given the Netherlands’ more strained grid, Faton believes savings will be even higher there.”
Tough bet in a country where grid operators provide no financial incentives to residential customers to shift demand, let alone support the local grid with V2G.

'Utrecht Energized' launched: How bidirectional charging is set to make the breakthrough - electrive.com
Bidirectional charging is often hailed as the holy grail of e-mobility. The batteries of electric cars are not only used for driving but can also power homes

When CP requires $\bar\theta=0$, not $\bar\theta=\pi$
Luca Vecchi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10680 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10680…

When CP requires $\barθ=0$, not $\barθ=π$
Imposing CP or P forces the QCD topological angle to be either $\barθ=0$ or $\barθ=π$. However, only the former is phenomenologically viable. This implies that the assumption of CP or P alone cannot provide a framework for unambiguously solving the Strong CP problem. We show that $\barθ=0$ is naturally selected when the assumption of CP is combined with the hypothesis that the Standard Model is embedded in a suitable gauge group.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #KEXP's #VarietyMix
gSp:
🎵 I'm Supposed to Be Alone
#gSp
https://thrillingliving.bandcamp.com/track/im-supposed-to-be-alone

JFC @… can your iOS app STOP telling me about the “great new interface” for the elebentybillionth time!?!? I’ve said “OK” just leave me ALONE! *sobbing*

Mobility to Campus -- a Framework to Evaluate and Compare Different Mobility Modes
Helena Fehler, Marco Pruckner, Marie Schmidt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13574

Mobility to Campus -- a Framework to Evaluate and Compare Different Mobility Modes
The transport sector accounts for about 20% of German CO2 emissions, with commuter traffic contributing a significant part. Particularly in rural areas, where public transport is inconvenient to use, private cars are a common choice for commuting and most commuters travel alone in their cars. Consolidation of some of these trips has the potential to decrease CO2 emissions and could be achieved, e.g., by offering ridesharing (commuters with similar origin-destination pairs share a car) or ridepo…

You won’t hear this on the news but Scotland and other countries have declared their economy will be based on wellbeing, not GDP.
And They’re not alone.
Countries worldwide are making the same shift.
But here’s the thing: people aren’t waiting for governments.
EThey’re building wellbeing economies themselves through cooperatives, people’s assemblies, and businesses that put purpose over profit.
-- J Friday

Improving Surgical Risk Prediction Through Integrating Automated Body Composition Analysis: a Retrospective Trial on Colectomy Surgery
Hanxue Gu, Yaqian Chen, isoo Lee, Diego Schaps, Regina Woody, Roy Colglazier, Maciej A. Mazurowski, Christopher Mantyh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11996

Improving Surgical Risk Prediction Through Integrating Automated Body Composition Analysis: a Retrospective Trial on Colectomy Surgery
Objective: To evaluate whether preoperative body composition metrics automatically extracted from CT scans can predict postoperative outcomes after colectomy, either alone or combined with clinical variables or existing risk predictors. Main outcomes and measures: The primary outcome was the predictive performance for 1-year all-cause mortality following colectomy. A Cox proportional hazards model with 1-year follow-up was used, and performance was evaluated using the concordance index (C-index…

In Barcelona alone, an estimated 286 people died from the extra heat caused by climate change in the recent heatwave. Here's the story of one of them, healthy, and 51 years old.

Sonnet 029 - XXIX
When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply …

Series B, Episode 06 - Trial
ZIL: To be alone must not be feared. The Host is slow to recognize one who is alone. Though there are many, all stay alone. [Clears off a patch of ground] Do you hunger? [Tears the ground open, scoops up some of the lining of the opening and eats it.] Do you hunger?
BLAKE: What is it?
https://

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

My good, how much I hate the internet and computers. I just wanna scream louder than I ever have at them, my good, I’m angry right now. All my life lost to a dumb-ass screen, brainwashed by the latest tech psyops on YouTube nobody asked for.
It’s like being trapped in a never-ending circus of clicks and scrolls, where the clowns are algorithms and the ringmaster is some faceless corporation laughing at how easy it is to fool us.
Computers and the internet promised freedom but del…

Current and former employees of OpenAI have sold nearly $3B worth of shares in tender offers since 2021, with $1.5B going to SoftBank alone (Natasha Mascarenhas/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-employees-cashed-3-bil…

OpenAI Employees Have Cashed Out $3 Billion in Shares
My colleague Sri Muppidi broke the news Wednesday of OpenAI’s latest fundraising talks as it seeks to raise an unprecedented $40 billion. One previously unreported detail is that SoftBank bought about $240 million in shares from a small group of current and former employees this spring.That deal ...

Series B, Episode 06 - Trial
ZIL: To be alone must not be feared. The Host is slow to recognize one who is alone. Though there are many, all stay alone. [Clears off a patch of ground] Do you hunger? [Tears the ground open, scoops up some of the lining of the opening and eats it.] Do you hunger?
BLAKE: What is it?
https://

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

Hi hi!! I really need some #MutualAid!!
I’m trying to find the full 45-minute documentary “The Anarchist Rabbi” (2014) by Adam Kossoff.
This movie is a documentary about Rudolf Rocker, a German anarchist who worked with Jewish migrants in London’s East End, and it’s narrated by Steven Berkoff.
Here’s the movie on IMDb and similar websites:
- IMDb:

Was Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles to quell demonstrations a dress rehearsal for what’s to come in other states or nationally?
The Atlantic’s David Frum thinks it is.
And he’s not alone in this fear.
If so it’d be another longtime-prediction by those accused of having Trump Derangement Syndrome having come true.
There are increasing indications the administration will expand its use of the military domestically.
500 marines are rep…

WAFT: Warping-Alone Field Transforms for Optical Flow
Yihan Wang, Jia Deng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21526 https://arxiv.org/pdf/250…

WAFT: Warping-Alone Field Transforms for Optical Flow
We introduce Warping-Alone Field Transforms (WAFT), a simple and effective method for optical flow. WAFT is similar to RAFT but replaces cost volume with high-resolution warping, achieving better accuracy with lower memory cost. This design challenges the conventional wisdom that constructing cost volumes is necessary for strong performance. WAFT is a simple and flexible meta-architecture with minimal inductive biases and reliance on custom designs. Compared with existing methods, WAFT ranks 1s…

Snug Safety - Free Daily Check in service for seniors living alone
https://www.snugsafe.com/

Google services, AWS, Spotify, Cloudflare, and other services appear to be in a partial outage, according to Downdetector (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2025/06/12/google-cloud-outage-june-12/

It’s not just you, Google and many other web services appear to be in a partial outage right now
If you’re struggling with Google services right now, you’re not alone as it appears that a partial outage is affecting...

Sonnet 131 - CXXXI
Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art,
As those whose beauties proudly make them cruel;
For well thou know'st to my dear doting heart
Thou art the fairest and most precious jewel.
Yet, in good faith, some say that thee behold,
Thy face hath not the power to make love groan;
To say they err I dare not be so bold,
Although I swear it to myself alone.
And to be sure that is not false I swear,
A thousand groans, b…

I'm all for electrification of energy demand, e.g. for cars, home heating, and industrial processes.
But we shouldn't be betting the climate on it alone. The share of electricity in global final energy consumption reached 20% in 2023, up from 18% in 2015 (IEA, 2024):
https://www.iea.o…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #DriveTime
Thee Sacred Souls:
🎵 We Don't Have to Be Alone
#TheeSacredSouls
https://theesacredsouls.bandcamp.com/track/we-dont-have-to-be-alone
https://open.spotify.com/track/6hRESIERR8gWu6CERwi2Zm

What is the purpose of news?
Air pollution kills 10 million people each year and causes untold additional illness and suffering.
It kills at least 100,000 people in the United States alone annually
— about five times the number of police-reported homicides.
But it rarely features in daily news stories.
Police and prosecutors ignore pollution, much of which is criminal,
and so do most journalists.
For example, federal prosecutors charged 23 people…

Media Panics About “Crime Waves” — But Downplays Crime Committed by Corporations
The news emphasizes low-level theft instead of corporate crime, pollution, and other predatory behavior.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
The Cure:
🎵 Alone (Ex‐Easter Island Head remix)
#TheCure
https://schwerkraftrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-cure-alone
https://open.spotify.com/track/1FlKUh04wsO7Z2AFmzplCw

Waymo introduces teen accounts in Phoenix, allowing teenagers aged 14-17 to use its Waymo One ridehailing service alone with parental approval (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/699580/waymo-teen-account-phoenix

Waymo introduces teen accounts for the first time in Phoenix
Waymo is introducing teen accounts for the first time in Phoenix. Kids as young as 14 can create an account that’s linked to their parent or guardian.

Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek has raised €600M for his new startup, which is developing AI TECH FOR WAR.
Ek still owns 9% of Spotify, but has 37% voting control.
His net worth went from $2.5B to $10B in the last two years alone,
-- on the back of paying musicians a pittance in royalties.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #Audioasis
Casiotone for the Painfully Alone:
🎵 Scattered Pearls
#CasiotoneforthePainfullyAlone
https://cftpa.bandcamp.com/track/scattered-pearls
https://open.spotify.com/track/6wvopyhtMMpMH7JlxU0cKL

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #KEXP's #DriveTime
Hunx and His Punx:
🎵 Alone in Hollywood on Acid
#HunxandHisPunx
https://hunxandhispunx.bandcamp.com/track/alone-in-hollywood-on-acid-2
https://open.spotify.com/track/03CrgvwYLqCxmZdhYJEDyr

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #Early
Hunx and His Punx:
🎵 Alone in Hollywood on Acid
#HunxandHisPunx
https://hunxandhispunx.bandcamp.com/track/alone-in-hollywood-on-acid-2
https://open.spotify.com/track/03CrgvwYLqCxmZdhYJEDyr

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MiddayShow
Aretha Franklin:
🎵 You’ll Never Walk Alone
#ArethaFranklin