Tootfinder

A Student/Worker’s Guide to European Google Docs / Office 365 Alternatives https://www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist/2025/05/20/docs-office-alternatives/

from my link log —
Don’t use ISO/IEC 14977 Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF).
https://dwheeler.com/essays/dont-use-iso-14977-ebnf.html
saved 2025-05-17

Music writer, producer, and podcaster Dylan Tupper Rupert on envisioning alternatives
https://thecreativeindependent.com/peo

Music writer, producer, and podcaster Dylan Tupper Rupert on envisioning alternatives – The Creative Independent
Music writer, producer, and podcaster Dylan Tupper Rupert discusses growing up in the Seattle arts scene, dealing with music industry hierarchy, and imagining the ideal conditions for creativity.

Once again: #FuckEricAdams
Unbelievable how he's managed to avoid jailtime breaking federal/state laws while City Council allows him to continue to break _their_laws as well.

https://…

No to 15 mph e-bike speed limit, yes to real safety! - Transportation Alternatives
A ridiculous 15 mph speed limit for e-bikes won't work. Tell Mayor Adams and City Council: We need effective, data-driven policies that protect everyone, and accountability for the corporations fueling chaos on our streets — not the cyclists surviving it.

Boosting Open-Source LLMs for Program Repair via Reasoning Transfer and LLM-Guided Reinforcement Learning
Xunzhu Tang, Jacques Klein, Tegawend\'e F. Bissyand\'e
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03921

Boosting Open-Source LLMs for Program Repair via Reasoning Transfer and LLM-Guided Reinforcement Learning
Several closed-source LLMs have consistently outperformed open-source alternatives in program repair tasks, primarily due to their superior reasoning capabilities and extensive pre-training. This paper introduces Repairity, a novel three-stage methodology that significantly narrows this performance gap through reasoning extraction and reinforcement learning. Our approach: (1) systematically filters high-quality reasoning traces from closed-source models using correctness verification, (2) trans…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12911 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCR_…

A Selective Homomorphic Encryption Approach for Faster Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning
Federated learning (FL) has come forward as a critical approach for privacy-preserving machine learning in healthcare, allowing collaborative model training across decentralized medical datasets without exchanging clients' data. However, current security implementations for these systems face a fundamental trade-off: rigorous cryptographic protections like fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) impose prohibitive computational overhead, while lightweight alternatives risk vulnerable data leakage th…

Optimal protocol for collisional Brownian engines
Gustavo A. L. For\~ao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05078 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.0…

Optimal protocol for collisional Brownian engines
Collisional Brownian engines have recently gained attention as alternatives to conventional nanoscale engines. However, a comprehensive optimization of their performance, which could serve as a benchmark for future engine designs, is still lacking. In this work, we address this gap by deriving and analyzing the optimal driving protocol for a collisional Brownian engine. By maximizing the average output work, we show that the optimal protocol consists of linear force segments separated by impuls…

Random Utility with Aggregated Alternatives
Yuexin Liao, Kota Saito, Alec Sandroni
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00372 https://arxiv.org…

Random Utility with Aggregated Alternatives
This paper studies when discrete choice data involving aggregated alternatives such as categorical data or an outside option can be rationalized by a random utility model (RUM). Aggregation introduces ambiguity in composition: the underlying alternatives may differ across individuals and remain unobserved by the analyst. We characterize the observable implications of RUMs under such ambiguity and show that they are surprisingly weak, implying only monotonicity with respect to adding aggregated …

Oh. Minio Community version is going back to be an object browser only
Ceph provides my primary S3 storage but I currently use Minio on a NAS as a backup replica with rclone
Any recommended Minio alternatives?
https://github.com/minio/object-browser/bl…

object-browser/CHANGELOG.md at master · minio/object-browser
Simple UI for MinIO Object Storage :abacus:. Contribute to minio/object-browser development by creating an account on GitHub.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.10950 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

DELight: a Direct search Experiment for Light dark matter with superfluid helium
To reach ultra-low detection thresholds necessary to probe unprecedentedly low Dark Matter masses, target material alternatives and novel detector designs are essential. One such target material is superfluid $^4$He which has the potential to probe so far uncharted light Dark Matter parameter space at sub-GeV masses. The new ``Direct search Experiment for Light dark matter'', DELight, will be using superfluid helium as active target, instrumented with magnetic micro-calorimeters. It is being de…

Sources say Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and other Chinese companies are testing domestic alternatives as they deal with a dwindling stockpile of Nvidia processors (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/bb1315e8-27df-4a93-a4dc-11e2883fdde3

Chinese tech groups prepare for AI future without Nvidia
Tougher US export restrictions on advanced chips give added urgency to testing of domestic alternatives

Thanks to @…'s great list: https://codeberg.org/Taffer/canadian-alternatives I just switched my S3-compatible backups to a Canadian pr…

canadian-alternatives
A collection of Canadian alternatives to common Internet services in the spirit of the various Awesome lists.

At the edge of Donsker's Theorem: Asymptotics of multiscale scan statistics
Johann K\"ohne, Fabian Mies
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05112 https://

At the edge of Donsker's Theorem: Asymptotics of multiscale scan statistics
For nonparametric inference about a function, multiscale testing procedures resolve the need for bandwidth selection and achieve asymptotically optimal detection performance against a broad range of alternatives. However, critical values strongly depend on the noise distribution, and we argue that existing methods are either statistically infeasible, or asymptotically sub-optimal. To address this methodological challenge, we show how to develop a feasible multiscale test via weak convergence ar…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.13720 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csGT_…

Distortion of Multi-Winner Elections on the Line Metric: The Polar Comparison Rule
We study the problem of selecting a committee of size $k$ from a set of $m$ alternatives, based solely on the ordinal preferences of voters. Both voters and alternatives lie on the line metric, and the goal is to minimize a social cost function based on metric distances. While the distances to committee members fully determine the social cost, voting rules only have access to the ordinal preference list of each voter. The distortion of a voting rule is the worst-case ratio between the cost of t…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.24160 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csHC_…

A Comparative Study of Scanpath Models in Graph-Based Visualization
Information Visualization (InfoVis) systems utilize visual representations to enhance data interpretation. Understanding how visual attention is allocated is essential for optimizing interface design. However, collecting Eye-tracking (ET) data presents challenges related to cost, privacy, and scalability. Computational models provide alternatives for predicting gaze patterns, thereby advancing InfoVis research. In our study, we conducted an ET experiment with 40 participants who analyzed graphs…

PandasBench: A Benchmark for the Pandas API
Alex Broihier, Stefanos Baziotis, Daniel Kang, Charith Mendis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02345 https://

PandasBench: A Benchmark for the Pandas API
The Pandas API has been central to the success of pandas and its alternatives. Despite its importance, there is no benchmark for it, and we argue that we cannot repurpose existing benchmarks (from other domains) for the Pandas API. In this paper, we introduce requirements that are necessary for a Pandas API enchmark, and present the first benchmark that fulfills them: PandasBench. We argue that it should evaluate the real-world coverage of a technique. Yet, real-world coverage is not sufficie…

⚠️ Legacy alpha endpoints /llmstxt and /deep-research will be discontinued June 30, 2025
🔓 #Opensource alternatives available including #Firesearch project for deep research functionality

While searching for an AWS alternative, I just stumbled upon the website #EuropeanAlternatives https://european-alternatives.eu/ which lists digital services and products from the EU. …

A deep dive into Apple TV's privacy features shows that Apple's streaming device is more private than the vast majority of alternatives, save for dumb TVs (Scharon Harding/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/0

Breaking down why Apple TVs are privacy advocates’ go-to streaming device
Using the Apple TV app or an Apple account means giving Apple more data, though.

is anyone surprised their $20 streaming sticks sell their data lol
https://www.techmeme.com/250602/p1#a250602p1

A deep dive into Apple TV's privacy features shows that Apple's streaming device is more private than the vast majority of alternatives, save for dumb TVs
By Scharon Harding / Ars Technica. View the full context on Techmeme.

Characterization based Goodness-of-Fit for Generalized Pareto Distribution: A Blend of Stein's Identity and Dynamic Survival Extropy
Gaurav Kandpal, Nitin Gupta
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01473

Characterization based Goodness-of-Fit for Generalized Pareto Distribution: A Blend of Stein's Identity and Dynamic Survival Extropy
This paper proposes a goodness of fit test for the generalized Pareto distribution (GPD). Firstly, we provide two characterizations of GPD based on Stein's identity and dynamic survival extropy. These characterizations are used to test GPD separately for the positive and negative shape parameter cases. A Monte Carlo simulation is conducted to provide the critical values and power of the proposed test against a good number of alternatives. Our test is simple to use and it has asymptotic normalit…

Multi-sample rank tests for location against Lehmann-type alternatives
Nikolay I. Nikolov, Eugenia Stoimenova
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01914 https://

Multi-sample rank tests for location against Lehmann-type alternatives
This paper deals with testing the equality of $k$ ($k\ge 2$) distribution functions against possible stochastic ordering among them. Two classes of rank tests are proposed for this testing problem. The statistics of the tests under study are based on precedence and exceedance statistics and are natural extension of corresponding statistics for the two-sample testing problem. Furthermore, as an extension of the Lehmann alternative for the two-sample location problem, we propose a new subclass of…

Liberals (in basically any western country) think that the political victory of the right is due to messaging: "We just need to get the messaging right".
No. Your politics are shit because you are adopting the narratives of the right (austerity, racism) and provide no meaningful alternatives.

Denkvoer voor het elektriciteitsnetwerk: baseren op hoogste vraag, of inzetten op Non Wire Alternatives om daarmee de netwerkkosten te verlagen?
#energietransitie

Is there a better way to serve retail customers? How about a smaller and cheaper grid connection
Hapless customers have had to pay for an expensive grid design that has delivered a lot of capacity that sits idle most of the time. There is a smarter solution.

Asymptotic analysis of high-dimensional uniformity tests under heavy-tailed alternatives
Tiefeng Jiang, Tuan Pham
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00393 https://…

Asymptotic analysis of high-dimensional uniformity tests under heavy-tailed alternatives
We study the high-dimensional uniformity testing problem, which involves testing whether the underlying distribution is the uniform distribution, given $n$ data points on the $p$-dimensional unit hypersphere. While this problem has been extensively studied in scenarios with fixed $p$, only three testing procedures are known in high-dimensional settings: the Rayleigh test \cite{Cutting-P-V}, the Bingham test \cite{Cutting-P-V2}, and the packing test \cite{Jiang13}. Most existing research focuses…

Friends Don't Let Friends Make Bad Graphs! Do you agree with the examples of bad graphs and the alternatives Chenxin Li (@chenxinli2.bsky.social) lists at https://github.com/cxli233/FriendsDontLetFriends

GitHub - cxli233/FriendsDontLetFriends: Friends don't let friends make certain types of data visualization - What are they and why are they bad.
Friends don't let friends make certain types of data visualization - What are they and why are they bad. - GitHub - cxli233/FriendsDontLetFriends: Friends don't let friends make certain ty...

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16499 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDC_…

Smaller, Smarter, Closer: The Edge of Collaborative Generative AI
The rapid adoption of generative AI (GenAI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), has exposed critical limitations of cloud-centric deployments, including latency, cost, and privacy concerns. Meanwhile, Small Language Models (SLMs) are emerging as viable alternatives for resource-constrained edge environments, though they often lack the capabilities of their larger counterparts. This article explores the potential of collaborative inference systems that leverage both edge and cloud resour…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19164 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csIR_…

BroadGen: A Framework for Generating Effective and Efficient Advertiser Broad Match Keyphrase Recommendations
In the domain of sponsored search advertising, the focus of Keyphrase recommendation has largely been on exact match types, which pose issues such as high management expenses, limited targeting scope, and evolving search query patterns. Alternatives like Broad match types can alleviate certain drawbacks of exact matches but present challenges like poor targeting accuracy and minimal supervisory signals owing to limited advertiser usage. This research defines the criteria for an ideal broad matc…

European cloud providers and enterprise IT customers are sounding alarms over changes to VMware's licensing structure that have driven prices up by as much as 1,500% since Broadcom's acquisition of the virtualisation giant.
https://www.computing.co.uk/news/20…

European customers rail against Broadcom's 1,500% VMware price hike
A new report concludes that Broadcom’s price rises are leaving European customers without viable VMware alternatives.

Any good ffmpeg alternatives out there?

A recent discussion on open-source Photoshop alternatives (https://mastodon.design/@candidexmedia/114558704815706042) led me down a rabbit hole of image background removal in @…

GitHub - Acly/krita-ai-tools: Krita plugin which adds selection tools to mask objects with a single click, or by drawing a bounding box.
Krita plugin which adds selection tools to mask objects with a single click, or by drawing a bounding box. - Acly/krita-ai-tools

Interessantes alternatives Webinterface für Mastodon auf #phanpysocial

Phanpy
Minimalistic opinionated Mastodon web client

Geopolitical Tensions and Financial Networks: Strategic Shifts Toward Alternatives
Antonis Ballis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21480 https://

Geopolitical Tensions and Financial Networks: Strategic Shifts Toward Alternatives
Global financial systems are undergoing strategic shifts as geopolitical tensions reshape international trade and payments. The United States (US)-China trade war, sanctions regimes, and rising concerns over the weaponization of financial infrastructures like SWIFT have led countries to seek alternative networks, including China's CIPS and emerging cross-border CBDCs. This letter presents a dynamic theoretical framework where sanction risks, investment choices, and network effects drive payment…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.00469 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eco…

Regression Adjustment, Cross-Fitting, and Randomized Experiments with Many Controls
This paper studies estimation and inference for average treatment effects in randomized experiments with many covariates, under a design-based framework with a deterministic number of treated units. We show that a simple yet powerful cross-fitted regression adjustment achieves bias-correction and leads to sharper asymptotic properties than existing alternatives. Specifically, we derive higher-order stochastic expansions, analyze associated inference procedures, and propose a modified HC3 varian…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.03554 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eco…

Categorize and randomize: a permissive model of stochastic choice
We model stochastic choices with categorization. The agent preliminarly groups alternatives in homogenous disjoint classes, then randomly chooses one class and randomly picks an item within the selected class. We give a formal definition of a choice generated by this procedure, and provide an axiomatic characterization. The characterizing properties allow an external analyst to elicit that categorization is applied. In a broader interpretation, the model allows to describe the observed choice a…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07114 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_qbi…

Alternatives to the statistical mass confusion of testing for no-effect
In cell biology, statistical analysis means testing the hypothesis that there was no effect. This weak form of hypothesis testing neglects effect size, is universally misinterpreted, and is disastrously prone to error when combined with high-throughput cell biology. The solution is for analysis of measurements to start and end with an interpretation of effect size.