Tootfinder

We in Game Workers Unite Ireland stand in solidarity with Animation Workers of Ireland, and the international trade union coalition happening to organise against the threat of AI in the animation industry, and we support their call to acton.
Join them Thursday 12 June at 14:00 at the Pâquier in Annecy!!
#Animation

More depressing news as governments swallow propaganda from the nuclear power lobby.
Renewables won't deliver the power currently used, and projected, but nor will nuclear, which also depends on fossil fuels, uses a scarce and diminishing resource, and leaves a toxic legacy for which there is no adequate solution.
The only solution is radical energy descent.
Tide is turning in Europe and beyond in favour of nuclear power | Nuclear power | The Guardian

Happy Pride Month! Wishing all who celebrate a safe and glamorous time.
GDEP is always a safe and supportive ally space for the LGBTIQA community.
#GDEPAU #EOLD #AskAnnetta

Conference colateral benefit: catching up with Good old Friends & colleagues, talking research, and having a decent Espresso 😜
#eswc2025 #slovenia #semanticweb

Skies cleared up just in time for solar activity to get even higher (Kp 8)...
... and the sun to come up. I grabbed a single digit number of shots but the eastern sky was already visibly bright naked eye and my long-exposure shots started getting washed out.
Forecast shows activity will be decent all day (good luck Asian/European sky watchers!) and might persist into the dark for me tonight. Fingers crossed.

Explaining Sustained Blockchain Decentralization with Quasi-Experiments: Resource Flexibility of Consensus Mechanisms
Harang Ju, Madhav Kumar, Ehsan Valavi, Sinan Aral
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24663

Explaining Sustained Blockchain Decentralization with Quasi-Experiments: Resource Flexibility of Consensus Mechanisms
Decentralization is a fundamental design element of the Web3 economy. Blockchains and distributed consensus mechanisms are touted as fault-tolerant, attack-resistant, and collusion-proof because they are decentralized. Recent analyses, however, find some blockchains are decentralized, others are centralized, and that there are trends towards both centralization and decentralization in the blockchain economy. Despite the importance and variability of decentralization across blockchains, we still…

Detect \& Score: Privacy-Preserving Misbehaviour Detection and Contribution Evaluation in Federated Learning
Marvin Xhemrishi, Alexandre Graell i Amat, Bal\'azs Pej\'o
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23583

Detect \& Score: Privacy-Preserving Misbehaviour Detection and Contribution Evaluation in Federated Learning
Federated learning with secure aggregation enables private and collaborative learning from decentralised data without leaking sensitive client information. However, secure aggregation also complicates the detection of malicious client behaviour and the evaluation of individual client contributions to the learning. To address these challenges, QI (Pejo et al.) and FedGT (Xhemrishi et al.) were proposed for contribution evaluation (CE) and misbehaviour detection (MD), respectively. QI, however, l…

I tend to watch Supreme Court rulings, given my old life in the law biz. I'm surprised at the way the ruling split on the just published FELICIANO v. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION case:
Reversed and remanded.
 Gorsuch, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Roberts, C. J., and Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, JJ., joined. Thomas, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Alito, Kagan, and Jackson, JJ., joined.

Maximally recoverable codes with locality and availability
Umberto Mart\'inez-Pe\~nas, V. Lalitha
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24573 https://

Maximally recoverable codes with locality and availability
In this work, we introduce maximally recoverable codes with locality and availability. We consider locally repairable codes (LRCs) where certain subsets of $ t $ symbols belong each to $ N $ local repair sets, which are pairwise disjoint after removing the $ t $ symbols, and which are of size $ r+δ-1 $ and can correct $ δ-1 $ erasures locally. Classical LRCs with $ N $ disjoint repair sets and LRCs with $ N $-availability are recovered when setting $ t = 1 $ and $ t=δ-1=1 $, respectively. Al…

I tend to watch Supreme Court rulings, given my old life in the law biz. I'm surprised at the way the ruling split on the just published FELICIANO v. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION case:
Reversed and remanded.
 Gorsuch, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Roberts, C. J., and Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, JJ., joined. Thomas, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Alito, Kagan, and Jackson, JJ., joined.