Tootfinder

If I see one more person complaining about Liquid Glass I’m going crazy, it literally looks awesome and way better than that boring flat bullshit

Is it talent?
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQM0-w2jEOd/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

Duaa Izzidien - Visual Storyteller & Artist on Instagram: "I had far too much fun creating this reel and couldn’t bring myself to delete any of it to make it shorter and more algorithm friendly 🙈 If you watched it all the way to the end - well done! You’ve just demonstrated the very thing the reel is about - showing up is the only talent that matters. My arrows don’t always hit the target. My paintings don’t always turn out how I planned. And honestly? Life rarely goes the way I intend. But really that isn’t what matters. In Islam we say that actions are by intentions and that sometimes means letting go of controlling our outcomes. We can control our intentions, our effort, showing up - but we have to remember that the result doesn’t actually come from those actions. Sometimes the arrow misses because there’s a better lesson waiting or perhaps it’s to remind you to stay humble and remember that ‘you’ are not the architect of your success. Sometimes the painting goes “wrong” because it’s becoming something more beautiful than you imagined. Sometimes life doesn’t work out the way you planned because there’s something different, better, round the corner for you. A huge thank you to @thabitoon_archers and @mamluk.academy for teaching me. You’ve taught me far more than just archery - you’ve taught me a rich history and life lessons that bring peace. (any mistakes in my form are entirely mine!). Want to learn how to use art as a tool for trusting and letting go of control? DM me ‘CREATE’ and I’ll show you these techniques. #showingisenough #trusttheprocess #archery #archerygirl #traditionalarchery #archerylife #overwhelm #personalgrowth #innerstrength #growthmindset #breakthrough #findingmyself #resilience #transformation #letgoofcontrol"
24K likes, 763 comments - duaaizzidien on October 24, 2025: "I had far too much fun creating this reel and couldn’t bring myself to delete any of it to make it shorter and more algorithm friendly 🙈 If you watched it all the way to the end - well done! You’ve just demonstrated the very thing the reel is about - showing up is the only talent that matters. My arrows don’t always hit the target. My paintings don’t always turn out how I planned. And honestly? Life rarely goes the way I …

Microsoft became the second company to surpass $4T in market cap, joining Nvidia, after shares jumped 8% in after-hours trading on better-than-expected results (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/30/microsoft-market-cap-tops-4-trillion-…

Microsoft tops $4 trillion in market cap after hours, joining Nvidia in exclusive club
Based on its post-market trading, Microsoft has become the world's second $4 trillion company following quarterly earnings.

Can Synthetic Query Rewrites Capture User Intent Better than Humans in Retrieval-Augmented Generation?
JiaYing Zheng, HaiNan Zhang, Liang Pang, YongXin Tong, ZhiMing Zheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22325

Can Synthetic Query Rewrites Capture User Intent Better than Humans in Retrieval-Augmented Generation?
Multi-turn RAG systems often face queries with colloquial omissions and ambiguous references, posing significant challenges for effective retrieval and generation. Traditional query rewriting relies on human annotators to clarify queries, but due to limitations in annotators' expressive ability and depth of understanding, manually rewritten queries often diverge from those needed in real-world RAG systems, resulting in a gap between user intent and system response. We observe that high-quality …

Day 5: Robin Wall Kimmerer
I'm taking these liberty of changing my hashtag and expanding the intent of this list to include all non-men, although Kimerer is a woman so I'll get to more gender diversity later... I've also started planning this out more and realized that I may continue a bit beyond 20...
In any case, Robin Wall Kimmerer is an Indigenous academic biologist and excellent non-fiction author whose work touches on Potawotomi philosophy, colonialism (including in academic spaces), and ideas for a better future. Anyone interested in ecology, conservation, or decolonization in North America will probably be impressed by her work and the rich connections she weaves between academic ecology and Indigenous knowledge offer a critical opportunity to expand your understanding of the world if like me you were raised deeply enmeshed in "Western" scientific tradition. I suppose a little background in skepticism helped prepare me to respect her writing, but I don't think that's essential.
I've only read "Braiding Sweetgrass," but "Gathering Moss" and her more recent "The Serviceberry" are high on my to-read list, despite my predilection for fiction. Kimmerer incorporates a backbone of fascinating anecdotes into "Braiding Sweetgrass" that makes it surprisingly easy reading for a work that's philosophical at its core. She also pulls off an impressive braided organization to the whole thing, weaving together disparate knowledges in a way that lets you see both their contradictions and their connections.
The one criticism I've seen of her work is that it's not sufficiently connected to other Indigenous philosophers & writers, and that it's perhaps too comfortable of a read for colonizers, and that seems valid to me, even though (perhaps because I am a colonizer) I still find her book important.
An excellent author in any case, and one doing concrete ideological work towards a better world.
#20AuthorsNoMen

Paint samples arrived today and it was obvious which was gonna work better so I ordered a full 2.5l can.
Only to get an email back saying they can't make that colour in that varnish. Weird. That was literally the only actually blue they said they'd do last time they said they couldn't deliver what the website let me order.
After some discussion they have referred it to the Tainting Supervisor and it's apparently going to be here Monday.
Similarly for the wood, failed to arrive again today. They reckon Monday this time really for reals. Fingers crossed coz the carpenter can't do more until the wood arrives really and he's going on holiday this time next week.
So assuming the wood comes, four days to build the doors and finish off the walls of the closet and stuff.
Hopefully it can all be done in that time. Or at least the hard bits leaving the easy stuff for the less carpentery builder.

"What do you lose by using Facebook", asked a friend who is keen to keep his account there for some reason.
What made me leave was the manipulation. I mean: they started hiding your friends posts in order to show you adverts instead! Feeding you slop from their promoted posts and "viral" messages (that aren't actually boosted by anyone, just picked out by their megaphone to show to everyone).
If you let the algorithm determine what you see than you let it determine what you are, who you become.
Even if you think it's better at finding shiny things than you, even if you think it builds the parasocial relationships that you want, even if you think it's saving you time to let the robot manage your reading-list: if you are letting Facebook, or any algorithm written by advertisers, do your reading selection then you are letting Facebook decide who you are.
On behalf of the advertisers who bribe them the most.
This is why you gotta use RSS. You gotta use the chronological timelines not the "for you" feeds. You gotta build follow relationships that you choose and understand because otherwise, you are letting the corporation and it's systems determine these things. You are abdicating some control of your very self to the machine.
Not to mention that we have to stop feeding money to the evil multi-trillion dollar companies built to control and manipulate us through our relationships with our friends. They have enough money, they need less participation not more.
#fediverse #algorithm

When Doug Ford... DOUG FORD... comes across as the conciliatory, nice guy…?
"“What do they expect me to do? Sit back and roll over like every other person in the world?” he said, adding the video was “successful” with over 11.4 billion impressions.
“So why doesn't the president start being nice? Play nice in the sandbox to his biggest customer in the entire world and everything's hunky dory," Ford said.”
Let's face it Canadian friends, the USA is not a nice trading partner. This is a full on abusive relationship and the quicker we can extract ourselves from it, the better.
#CanPoli #CdnPoli #USA #Trade #TheAmericanFascist
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/doug-ford-us-ambassador-apology-ad-9.6958531

People Globally Are Living Better Lives, More Hopeful About the Future: We Know Because They Said So https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/people-globally-are-living-better-lives-more-hopeful-about-the-future-we-know-bec…

People Globally Are Living Better Lives, More Hopeful About the Future: We Know Because They Said So
"The world is not short of significant challenges, from climate change to conflicts and technological upheaval," the Gallup authors wrote.

The world would be a better place if we were more like cats.
Just the reduction in travel alone from everyone sleeping 20 hours a day would drastically reduce our carbon emission!

The background makes ir better than systemd-boot at least. Still not nearly as good as what I had on grub tho. Now I need to figure out if I can customise the rest of it too and if I can send old generations to a separate menu.
Today’s goal was getting remote boot to work before traveling tomorrow tho, so that’s good enough for now.
Commit: https://github.com/LuNeder/nixos-config/commit/01ea9893235654c716ad4200ae0405e031b42b6c

U Better B Read E #PianoImprov #NowPlaying
https://muz4now.com/2025/u-better-b-re

U Better B Read E #PianoImprov #NowPlaying
Stan Stewart - @muz4now

In which I talk about pet peeves in TV shows and how they pull you out of a story. Sorry the post is late today. Website problems.
https://www.bobmuellerwriter.com/ow-isnt-enough-writers-we-can-do-better/

Okay, I couldn't resist and got myself the #Apple watch #ultra3. My fear that it feels much heavier than my previous series 10 did not come true. On the wrist I can't say that I feel a difference. But the better battery life and the prominent look are very welcome.

China to start reducing its CO2 emissions within a decade!
Wind and solar to reach 3.6 TW by 2035; that's just a little below what the whole world has installed so far.
https://bsky.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did…

Simon Evans (@drsimevans.carbonbrief.org)
NEW: China's president Xi Jinping unexpectedly joins the UN climate summit, by video, to offer his nation's 2035 climate pledge * Cut GHGs to 7-10% below peak by 2035, "striving to do better" * Raise non-fossil share of energy to at least 30% * Boost wind/solar to 3,600GW

#WritersCoffeeClub 23/9: How ‘self-reliant’ are you as a writer?
Extremely, but I try to open up to others and let them in. My reflexes are not helping, I'm kinda used to withdrawing into my own little corner of the world and shut the world out.
Outside influence, however, has always meant a better end-result, so I'm trying. I'm trying hard.

Anyone out there able to help Nadeen out at the last minute so she can pay her (and her sister’s) tuition to continue their studies? You would be gifting the world two new dentists for the low price of $2,000.
The last day for them to register is tomorrow.
Please share donate if you can.
💕
#academia

Spent half a day adding error checking for errors that can't really happen anyway on the advice of a robot.
Now, instead of crashing with an error message if the input data is impossibly broken, the function instead checks if the error exists, and if so quits with an error code and a slightly different error message.
This is better code apparently. I guess when it's longer there's more to read so it's more readable.

Back in the 80s, Modern English promised to stop the world and melt with us. But they didn't really offer any solid practical advice on how to do so, or its ramifications, other than claiming that we've seen the difference and that it was getting better all the time.

The Intel deal is a mistake
Like the agreement to allow Nvidia and AMD to export certain chips to China in exchange for 15 percent of sales,
this kind of presidential dealmaking is a bad precedent:
We should do things because they’re good policy, not because the government gets a cut.
This particular policy also risks distorting the free-market system that has delivered better results for America, and the world,
than any state-managed competitor has ever achi…

The Intel deal is a mistake
We cannot beat China by acting like it.

💧 Supercritical subsurface fluids open a window into the world
#geology

Supercritical subsurface fluids open a window into the world
Researchers have built on past studies and introduced new methods to explore the nature and role of subsurface fluids, including water, in the instances and behaviors of earthquakes and volcanoes. Their study suggests that water, even heavy rainfall, can play a role in or even trigger seismic events. This could potentially lead to better early warning systems.

SEEC: Stable End-Effector Control with Model-Enhanced Residual Learning for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
Jaehwi Jang, Zhuoheng Wang, Ziyi Zhou, Feiyang Wu, Ye Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21231

SEEC: Stable End-Effector Control with Model-Enhanced Residual Learning for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
Arm end-effector stabilization is essential for humanoid loco-manipulation tasks, yet it remains challenging due to the high degrees of freedom and inherent dynamic instability of bipedal robot structures. Previous model-based controllers achieve precise end-effector control but rely on precise dynamics modeling and estimation, which often struggle to capture real-world factors (e.g., friction and backlash) and thus degrade in practice. On the other hand, learning-based methods can better mitig…

A song for protesters in the US. Thanks for "going outside... [to] help organize something better, something beautiful."
John K. Samson, "Fantasy Baseball At The End Of The World" (2020)
https://johnksamsonmusic.bandcamp.com/albu…

Charlie Kirk is/was a vile person whose presence in this world made it worse. A world without him is a better world. If he dies, just as with, say, Osama Bin Laden, my feeling will be “good riddance.” I’d celebrate his death, but…not so much his assassination.
2/

This applies to all of us #Researchers - why do we keep flying all around the world just to give (or watch) some talks that could have been given or watched online???
Yes, in-person conferences are slightly better for "networking"... but is this really worth destroying the planet?!
Quoting @…

I randomly bought this book in a quirky bookshop in Copenhagen for the sole reason that it said all the wrong things right on the cover.
(Sales: the single most important profession. NLP™: not natural language processing but neuro-linguistic programming. Meta: the Meta Model™ and Meta Publications™.)
I just started reading it and boy oh boy, I was not disappointed. It's outrageously hilarious.
"Persuasion engineering".

Persuasion engineering by Richard Bandler | Open Library
Persuasion engineering by Richard Bandler, unknown edition,

Many parts of the Internet I know and loath are mostly down. I hope this helps shake confidence in US BigTech. Probably won't, because if people were rational, they wouldn't have built the digital world we're currently forced to inhabit, but who knows, it might. Even the vague possibility of it has made my day better as I head to bed.

ViExam: Are Vision Language Models Better than Humans on Vietnamese Multimodal Exam Questions?
Vy Tuong Dang, An Vo, Quang Tau, Duc Dm, Daeyoung Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13680

ViExam: Are Vision Language Models Better than Humans on Vietnamese Multimodal Exam Questions?
Vision language models (VLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities on English multimodal tasks, but their performance on low-resource languages with genuinely multimodal educational content remains largely unexplored. In this work, we test how VLMs perform on Vietnamese educational assessments, investigating whether VLMs trained predominantly on English data can handle real-world cross-lingual multimodal reasoning. Our work presents the first comprehensive evaluation of VLM capabilities on multi…

Sometimes it feels like nothing I do is good enough to overcome the biases I face.
No one tells you that the glass ceiling is covered in shards of sharp glass spikes rather than getting mashed against a smooth glass surface.
I worked so hard to create a better world for the people around me that I almost forgot that no one was creating a better world for me.

When you're watching a stream in 4K, does anyone else run into the audio begin about half a second behind the video? If like to have the better video quality of 4K but the audio issue drives me nuts.

"More than a century ago, a wild-eyed, vegetarian, free love-promoting German entrepreneur and self-taught economist named Silvio Gesell proposed a radical reformation of the monetary system as we know it. He wanted to make money that decays over time. "
https://www.noemamag.com/what-if-money-exp

TL;DR: spending money to find the cause of autism is a eugenics project, and those resources could have been spent improving accommodations for Autistic people instead.
To preface this, I'm not Autistic but I'm neurodivergent with some overlap.
We need to be absolutely clear right now: the main purpose is *all* research into the causes of autism is eugenics: a cause is sought because non-autistic people want to *eliminate* autistic people via some kind of "cure." It should be obvious, but a "cured autistic person" who did not get a say in the decision to administer that "cure" has been subjected to non-consensual medical intervention at an extremely unethical level. Many autistic people have been exceptionally clear that they don't want to be "cured," including some people with "severe autism" such as people who are nonverbal.
When we think things like "but autism makes life so hard for some people," we're saying that the difficulties in their life are a result of their neurotype, rather than blaming the society that punished & devalues the behaviors that result from that neurotype at every turn. To the extent that an individual autistic person wants to modify their neurotype and/or otherwise use aids to modify themselves to reduce difficulties in their life, they should be free to pursue that. But we should always ask the question: "what if we changed their social or physical environment instead, so that they didn't have to change themselves?" The point is that difficulties are always the product of person x environment, and many of the difficulties we attribute to autism should instead be attributed to anti-autistic social & physical spaces, and resources spent trying to "find the cause of autism" would be *much* better spent trying to develop & promote better accommodations for autism. Or at least, that's the case if you care about the quality of life of autistic people and/or recognize their enormous contributions to society (e.g., Wikipedia could not exist in anything near its current form without autistic input). If instead you think of Autistic people as gross burdens that you'd rather be rid of, then it makes sense to investigate the causes of autism so that you can eventually find a "cure."
All of that to say: the best response to lies about the causes of autism is to ask "What is the end goal of identifying the cause?" instead of saying "That's not true, here's better info about the causes."
#autism #trump
P.S. yes, I do think about the plight of parents of autistic kids, particularly those that have huge struggles fitting into the expectations of our society. They've been put in a position where society constantly bullies and devalues their kid, and makes it mostly impossible for their kid to exist without constant parental support, which is a lot of work and which is unfair when your peers get the school system to do a massive amount of childcare. But in that situation, your kid is in an even worse position than you as the direct victim of all of that, and you have a choice: are you going to be their ally against the unfair world, or are you going to blame them and try to get them to confirm enough that you can let the school system take care of them, despite the immense pain that that will provoke? Please don't come crying for sympathy if you choose the later option (and yes, helping them be able to independently navigate society is a good thing for them, but there's a difference between helping them as their ally, at their pace, and trying to force them to conform to reduce the burden society has placed on you).

I've been reminded how completely terrible some people are this week and I don't like it one bit.
I guess I am just amazed (though maybe I shouldn't be?) at how much people do not give one shit about other human beings.
Perhaps it's not surprise the world is in the state it is in right now...
But! I can't give up and I won't give in... I know there are good people out there, people who care about others, and want to build a better world... and that&…

Not Enough Time to Practise? - Practising the Piano
#piano
https://practisingthepiano.com/no-time-…

Not Enough Time to Practise? - Practising the Piano
Not enough time to practise? Practising more ≠ practising better - Here's how to get better results from your practising in less time!

"...one notable policy initiative from the world body was not discussed by world leaders when it should have been. UN secretary-general António Guterres has put together a high-level group of specialists to propose new indicators for human and planetary prosperity that go ‘Beyond GDP’."
A #Nature journal editorial:
End GDP mania: how the world should really measure prosperity

End GDP mania: how the world should really measure prosperity
The obsession with economic output as a measure of human development puts sustainability on the back burner. Researchers can now help to devise better indicators.

There's a Ghidra pull request to add hd6303/6301 - this is looking much better for doing Epson HX-20 stuff;
Copy the Processors/MC6800/data/languages/*6303* into a standard Ghidra world and run 'ant' in the data directory, restart - and it works!
https://github.com/NationalSecurityA…

Add support for HD6301 and HD6303 microcontrollers by depili · Pull Request #6314 · NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra
HD6303 is a Hitachi clone of 6803. This implementation has been done based on the Hitachi HD6301V1/HD6303R User's Manual. The ISA differs from 6805 and 6809. The flags are implemented as pseudo...

Curbs? Due to genocide?
Better than nothing, I guess. But the thing you should really do would be to shut it completely down. @…
https://assortedflotsam.co…

Raiders Star Continues to Garner Hype for Fantasy Season https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-chip-kelly-lesean-mccoy-ashton-jeanty-fantast-football

Miguel Ángel Russo passed away yesterday. Besides his sports achievements, he was loved and respected everywhere he go. And he died doing what he loved and being fully conscious about it, I can't think of a better way to leave this life.
Today, football is a little bit worse.
https://www.batimes.…

We'll miss you, Miguel
Charismatic, easy-going and more often than not spotted on the touchline with a smile on his face, Miguel Ángel Russo was an old school symbol of Argentine football who was able to adapt enough to stay relevant almost three decades into the 21st century.

Today we celebrate all the wonderful creatures who share our planet. Happy World Animal Day! May every animal live a life full of love, kindness, and care.
#worldanimalday

LazyVim is super cool, but I wanted to run it deliberately with a command alias `lvim` instead of being default for neovim.
Here's a quick snippet on how I solved it: https://blog.lane-fu.com/posts/2025/09/running-lazyvim-as-an-alias/

And when I'm talking about understanding the drives to violence, I did write about something similar recently.
https://write.as/hexmhell/algorithmic-violence
The drives behind this and the shooting last week are pretty radically different, but there's some overlap. People like Kirk are part a huge political machine slowly crushing people all over the world. There's a hopeless rage that would naturally drive even the most calm person to the edge of violence. You can't look at the world honestly and be OK. We want to do something. We want to react. But everything we do is silenced or must rmain silent. So it's easy to understand why someone might choose violence. Very different situation, but everyone is subject to the same national and international influences.
I don't promote violence, not because I disagree with it but because I think it's expensive. It takes time to plan, especially for those trying to get away. Guns are not cheap, nor are bullets, nor is the range time you need to get somewhat good under pressure. It's not cheap for the person doing it, and it's not cheap for the community that has to clean up. The community will face police repression (which, if we're honest, was gonna come anyway). The community will have to post bail, will lose a person for a while, will need to support the family, will go to hearings, will write reports, will do interviews.
Sun Tzu said that deploying one soldier to the front takes 7 in the field. Logistics are a huge invisible cost. Some of that time and energy could be reused. It's never bad to be armed and able to defend if needed. But a lot of that energy and time would be better spent planning a community pantry, a tool library, organizing a union, etc. We are living in a disaster, and we need to invest in thriving through the next crumble.
Kirk is replacable. They're almost all replacable, because they don't really care about human life. We do, so none of us are. It's not really a worth while trade, IMHO.

Is there like a zigbee (or anything that works with home-assistant) device that can connect/disconnect a HDMI cable (4k, etc)? Even better if it’s also a HDMI switch, but just being able to disable the connection without physically removing the cable when my TV is off would be good enough

From fantasy to science, all in one stream! Join me as I explore Middle-earth in LOTRO while 3D printing the legendary Tiangong-1 Space Station. The only thing better than an epic quest is a real-life space build. #LOTRO #3DPrinting

One of the issues in the discussion about (gen)AI is the level of anthropomorphizing (terrible word, i have to look it up everytime). AI is not "intelligent" as humans are. It is something different. In some aspects it is better then humans in other (often relatively simple things) incredibly worse. Also we draw wrong conclusions, being able to win a math olympiad is impressive but is not necessarily a sign of intelligence. I view AI as very capable world changing technology. That&…

this kind of conversation plays out way too often:
Them: “I’m feeling hopeless and like the world is just getting worse”
Me: “You know, there might be a way to help things get better, have you tried A or B?”
Them: “WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT EVERYTHING SUCKS THERE IS NO PATH TO FIXING THIS”
Me: 👁️👄👁️ okay then…..
(Admittedly sometimes I’m playing the role of “them” in this dynamic)

MARS2 2025 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning: Datasets, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Outlook
Peng Xu, Shengwu Xiong, Jiajun Zhang, Yaxiong Chen, Bowen Zhou, Chen Change Loy, David A. Clifton, Kyoung Mu Lee, Luc Van Gool, Ruiming He, Ruilin Yao, Xinwei Long, Jirui Huang, Kai Tian, Sa Yang, Yihua Shao, Jin Feng, Yue Zhong, Jiakai Zhou, Cheng Tang, Tianyu Zou, Yifang Zhang, Junming Liang, Guoyou Li, Zhaoxiang Wang, Qiang Zhou, Yichen Zhao, Shili Xiong, Hyeongjin Nam, Jaerin Lee, Jaey…

MARS2 2025 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning: Datasets, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Outlook
This paper reviews the MARS2 2025 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning. We aim to bring together different approaches in multimodal machine learning and LLMs via a large benchmark. We hope it better allows researchers to follow the state-of-the-art in this very dynamic area. Meanwhile, a growing number of testbeds have boosted the evolution of general-purpose large language models. Thus, this year's MARS2 focuses on real-world and specialized scenarios to broaden the multimodal reasoning applicati…

I agree with him. I'd like to see The Several States end straight-ticket voting. Even better, I'd like to see them remove the political parties from the ballots. Make people look for names.

Nadeen and her sister need $2,000 to pay their tuition fees to continue studying.
If anyone wants to sponsor their education, this is your chance to gift our world two young dentists.
💕
#Gaza #Palestine #FediAid

Who Owns The Robot?: Four Ethical and Socio-technical Questions about Wellbeing Robots in the Real World through Community Engagement
Minja Axelsson, Jiaee Cheong, Rune Nyrup, Hatice Gunes
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02624

Who Owns The Robot?: Four Ethical and Socio-technical Questions about Wellbeing Robots in the Real World through Community Engagement
Recent studies indicate that robotic coaches can play a crucial role in promoting wellbeing. However, the real-world deployment of wellbeing robots raises numerous ethical and socio-technical questions and concerns. To explore these questions, we undertake a community-centered investigation to examine three different communities' perspectives on using robotic wellbeing coaches in real-world environments. We frame our work as an anticipatory ethical investigation, which we undertake to better in…

Notes First or Music First? Which Leads to Better Performance? https://bulletproofmusician.com/notes-first-or-music-first-which-leads-to-better-performance/

Notes First or Music First? Which Leads to Better Performance?
A 2022 study provides an answer to the chicken and egg problem – should students work on the basics first before adding expression? Or should they aim to play with expression from the start?

Documentation: not the most fun thing in the world to do, but it does make things much, much easier for the next (or current) person. Since the NESessity NESRGB combo doesn't use the standard `R`, `G`, or `B` pads off the NESRGB, figured it would be better if I showed where exactly you need to pull the signals off the NESRGB.
#electronics

Bloke on Gardener's World: "My first real invention was a perpetual motion machine ..."
Me: "No it wasn't"
Him: "... which didn't work"
That's better.

If you want to make the case against political violence, start by saying clearly that Charlie Kirk was a miserable sack of shit who promoted bigotry and religious hatred and helped organized a violent coup attempt whose goal was to end democracy in the US in order to establish a white supremacist ethnostate. Say that the world is better without him in it.
•Then• make your argument that even in his case — even a person whose death improves the world — even •then• political violence is a bad strategy.
A/2

AI Behavioral Science
Matthew O. Jackson, Qiaozhu Me, Stephanie W. Wang, Yutong Xie, Walter Yuan, Seth Benzell, Erik Brynjolfsson, Colin F. Camerer, James Evans, Brian Jabarian, Jon Kleinberg, Juanjuan Meng, Sendhil Mullainathan, Asuman Ozdaglar, Thomas Pfeiffer, Moshe Tennenholtz, Robb Willer, Diyi Yang, Teng Ye
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509…

AI Behavioral Science
We discuss the three main areas comprising the new and emerging field of "AI Behavioral Science". This includes not only how AI can enhance research in the behavioral sciences, but also how the behavioral sciences can be used to study and better design AI and to understand how the world will change as AI and humans interact in increasingly layered and complex ways.

When three experiments are better than two: Avoiding intractable correlated aleatoric uncertainty by leveraging a novel bias--variance tradeoff
Paul Scherer, Andreas Kirsch, Jake P. Taylor-King
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04363

When three experiments are better than two: Avoiding intractable correlated aleatoric uncertainty by leveraging a novel bias--variance tradeoff
Real-world experimental scenarios are characterized by the presence of heteroskedastic aleatoric uncertainty, and this uncertainty can be correlated in batched settings. The bias--variance tradeoff can be used to write the expected mean squared error between a model distribution and a ground-truth random variable as the sum of an epistemic uncertainty term, the bias squared, and an aleatoric uncertainty term. We leverage this relationship to propose novel active learning strategies that directl…

Sources: OpenAI is recruiting people to work on humanoid robots and is training AI algorithms that are better able to make sense of the physical world (Will Knight/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ramps-up-robotics-work-in-race-toward-agi/

OpenAI Ramps Up Robotics Work in Race Toward AGI
The company behind ChatGPT is putting together a team capable of developing algorithms to control robots and appears to be hiring roboticists who work specifically on humanoids.

TL;DR: what if instead of denying the harms of fascism, we denied its suppressive threats of punishment
Many of us have really sharpened our denial skills since the advent of the ongoing pandemic (perhaps you even hesitated at the word "ongoing" there and thought "maybe I won't read this one, it seems like it'll be tiresome"). I don't say this as a preface to a fiery condemnation or a plea to "sanity" or a bunch of evidence of how bad things are, because I too have honed my denial skills in these recent years, and I feel like talking about that development.
Denial comes in many forms, including strategic information avoidance ("I don't have time to look that up right now", "I keep forgetting to look into that", "well this author made a tiny mistake, so I'll click away and read something else", "I'm so tired of hearing about this, let me scroll farther", etc.) strategic dismissal ("look, there's a bit of uncertainty here, I should ignore this", "this doesn't line up perfectly with my anecdotal experience, it must be completely wrong", etc.) and strategic forgetting ("I don't remember what that one study said exactly; it was painful to think about", "I forgot exactly what my friend was saying when we got into that argument", etc.). It's in fact a kind of skill that you can get better at, along with the complementary skill of compartmentalization. It can of course be incredibly harmful, and a huge genre of fables exists precisely to highlight its harms, but it also has some short-term psychological benefits, chiefly in the form of muting anxiety. This is not an endorsement of denial (the harms can be catastrophic), but I want to acknowledge that there *are* short-term benefits. Via compartmentalization, it's even possible to be honest with ourselves about some of our own denials without giving them up immediately.
But as I said earlier, I'm not here to talk you out of your denials. Instead, given that we are so good at denial now, I'm here to ask you to be strategic about it. In particular, we live in a world awash with propaganda/advertising that serves both political and commercial ends. Why not use some of our denial skills to counteract that?
For example, I know quite a few people in complete denial of our current political situation, but those who aren't (including myself) often express consternation about just how many people in the country are supporting literal fascism. Of course, logically that appearance of widespread support is going to be partly a lie, given how much our public media is beholden to the fascists or outright in their side. Finding better facts on the true level of support is hard, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about the "fact" that Trump has widespread popular support?
To give another example: advertisers constantly barrage us with messages about our bodies and weight, trying to keep us insecure (and thus in the mood to spend money to "fix" the problem). For sure cutting through that bullshit by reading about body positivity etc. is a better solution, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about there being anything wrong with your body?
This kind of intentional denial certainly has its own risks (our bodies do actually need regular maintenance, for example, so complete denial on that front is risky) but there's definitely a whole lot of misinformation out there that it would be better to ignore. To the extent such denial expands to a more general denial of underlying problems, this idea of intentional denial is probably just bad. But I sure wish that in a world where people (including myself) routinely deny significant widespread dangers like COVID-19's long-term risks or the ongoing harms of escalating fascism, they'd at least also deny some of the propaganda keeping them unhappy and passive. Instead of being in denial about US-run concentration camps, why not be in denial that the state will be able to punish you for resisting them?

Just wrote two more ministers with the request to vote AGAINS #chatcontrol .
Imagine a world where antidemocratics gain power—and want to “cleanse” the country. What better tool than access to all private chats?
My grandma experienced denunciations during WW2. I don’t want to relive that. And backdoors can and WILL be exploited by enemies of the country.
And once it's …

Die Chatkontrolle ist wieder da und wir haben nur noch ein paar Wochen, um die EU-Pläne für CSAM-Scans zu stoppen. | Tuta
Die EU-Verordnung zur Verhütung und Bekämpfung von sexuellem Kindesmissbrauch, die erstmals im Mai 2022 veröffentlicht wurde, ist zum "meistkritisierten Gesetz aller Zeiten" geworden. Hier erfahren Sie, wie Sie es jetzt stoppen können!

Anything to deflect the narrative!
Adelita Grijalva elected but not yet sworn in.
Epstein files not released.
Hundreds of thousands will lose health care under the Republican budget.
Foreign governments buying gold and not USD.
But what is the MSM reporting?
Democrats shut down the Government.
Blue cities unsafe.
Tylenol unsafe.
Circumcision unsafe.
And now we get to talk about this?

mekka okereke :verified: (@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io)
Attached: 1 image Some of y'all are pointing out that Trump ran the FBI on Jan 6, and had run it for ~1,400 days straight at this point. But this doesn't have to pass your discerning eye. It has to work on people that believe that Haitians eat your dogs, and that raw milk and Ivermectin is better than vaccines.🤷🏿‍♂️ You live in a world where the Ivermectin sipping, Black people hating, anti-vaxxers have consolidated enough power that they don't have to even pretend to care what …

Everything is better at the #library. #amreading #books

Which countries have the most patent applications per million inhabitants?
My Dataguessr score:
✅✅🟥✅✅🟥✅
Can you do better?
https://dataguessr.com/

Dataguessr
Update your knowledge of the world. One quiz at a time.

Super Mario Odyssey: completed!
It seems a little contrived to say it's completed, really, since I can see that there are over half the moons I am yet to discover, and the game is still throwing new ideas at me each time I play. However, Peach has been rescued, Bowser is defeated, and the world is a better place. I stopped the wedding, which I hasten to add wouldn't have been legally binding in any case as Peach was not entering it of her own free will.

I think he is trying to say he is an Avenger without realising he is the supervillain.
Also, does he know that while he is torrenting the world libraries into his bank account, you could set up for $10 a month your own Mastodon instance which is ten times better federated than his 'federated' Threads?

Open science hymn.
Imagine no more journals
It's easy if you try.
No more rejections
No "publish or you'll die".
Imagine everybody
Having access to your work.
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join me And the world'll be a better one

Maybe I should mention how well it does.
It's caught some bugs before they're published, some fairly serious. But mostly its hallucinated many problems which aren't really there.
With all the code we write being reviewed by robots now, the code is written slightly differently to avoid it going on about issues that aren't really there.
People imagine that code is written for the computer to run, but really it's always been written for the programmers to understand. Now it's also written keeping in mind it'll be reviewed by an AI that has no context or understanding tasked with nit-picking to review.
Arguably this is ending up with better code. More unnecessary re-validation of everything mostly, but its also taking longer rather than being quicker.
Is that more efficient? 🤷 Sort of maybe?
3/3

TCPO: Thought-Centric Preference Optimization for Effective Embodied Decision-making
Kechen Jiao, Zhirui Fang, Jiahao Liu, Bei Li, Qifan Wang, Xinyu Liu, Junhao Ruan, Zhongjian Qiao, Yifan Zhu, Yaxin Xu, Jingang Wang, Xiu Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08500

TCPO: Thought-Centric Preference Optimization for Effective Embodied Decision-making
Using effective generalization capabilities of vision language models (VLMs) in context-specific dynamic tasks for embodied artificial intelligence remains a significant challenge. Although supervised fine-tuned models can better align with the real physical world, they still exhibit sluggish responses and hallucination issues in dynamically changing environments, necessitating further alignment. Existing post-SFT methods, reliant on reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought (CoT) approaches,…

Morning’d Better Come #musicvideo #music https://muz4now.com/2023/morningd-better-come-musicv…

Improving the world, one PR at a time: #smallstep step-ca will accept the old name "nonRepudiation" in the X.509…

Accept nonRepudiation when unmarshalling keyUsage by neverpanic · Pull Request #811 · smallstep/crypto
Name of feature: Accepting NonRepudiation when unmarshalling keyUsage. Pain or issue this feature alleviates: Better user experience for users that are used to the old name (e.g., from OpenSSL, whi...

“Instead of understanding that sometimes the best deal in front of you today is the best deal you’re going to get, the prime minister has shown again and again that he prefers to wait for tomorrow and hope a better deal shows up,” Mr. Chen said.
“He miscalculated.”

New Hostage Videos Sow Fear and Horror in Israel
A “living skeleton, buried alive” in Gaza’s tunnels, was how the family of one hostage described him after seeing a video circulated by Hamas this week.

GrACE: A Generative Approach to Better Confidence Elicitation in Large Language Models
Zhaohan Zhang, Ziquan Liu, Ioannis Patras
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09438 https://…

GrACE: A Generative Approach to Better Confidence Elicitation in Large Language Models
Assessing the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) by confidence elicitation is a prominent approach to AI safety in high-stakes applications, such as healthcare and finance. Existing methods either require expensive computational overhead or suffer from poor calibration, making them impractical and unreliable for real-world deployment. In this work, we propose GrACE, a Generative Approach to Confidence Elicitation that enables scalable and reliable confidence elicitation for LLMs. GrACE…

As we continue down this path of escalating nihilistic meme violence, it can feel like the worst things have become viral. We are drowning in the memetic effluent of a capitalist media that profits by maximizing engagement. But I wonder if anyone remembers "Pay it Forward?"
A movie came out in 2000 about a kid who started a viral kindness campaign. The idea was that you do something nice for someone else with the expectation that they do the same in the future. I never really saw the movie, but I do remember the time. There were a few weeks, maybe a few months, where people started doing it. People would just be randomly nice, and everything actually just started feeling better.
Over time, the world caught up. Capitalism consumed the whole thing, and life went back to normal. 9/11 happened the next year, and the US started down the path of becoming the most twisted and evil version of itself. But there was a short time that doing nice stuff was a viral meme, a thing that people just started doing.
Gun violence doesn't have to be the only viral meme we have. We can make good things happen too.

Just finished "Get a Life, Chloe Brown" by Talia Hibbert. It's... much less chaste than most of the other romances I've been reading, but also incredibly sweet and positive, so I enjoyed it a lot.
My one reservation is that it does the thing a lot of romance novels do where they equate physical desire with romantic desire, and physical flirtations/advances with actual communication, and yes people equate those things in the real world all the time, by it's often really harmful when they do that.
This novel does better with consent than 99% of the field probably, and legitimately deserves props for that, so this isn't the harsh criticism I'd level if it seriously broke the "would this be okay if we didn't have access to interior monologues" test, but it skirts the edges of that a bit.
#AmReading

Multi-Armed Bandits with Minimum Aggregated Revenue Constraints
Ahmed Ben Yahmed, Hafedh El Ferchichi, Marc Abeille, Vianney Perchet
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12523 https://

Multi-Armed Bandits with Minimum Aggregated Revenue Constraints
We examine a multi-armed bandit problem with contextual information, where the objective is to ensure that each arm receives a minimum aggregated reward across contexts while simultaneously maximizing the total cumulative reward. This framework captures a broad class of real-world applications where fair revenue allocation is critical and contextual variation is inherent. The cross-context aggregation of minimum reward constraints, while enabling better performance and easier feasibility, intro…

Do we have a duty to be honest when writing #obituaries? #familyhistory #genealogy

This Woman's Controversial Obituary For Her Mom Caused Outrage — But We Need More Like It
"As American novelist Anne Lamott famously said, 'If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.'"

SocialPulse: An On-Smartwatch System for Detecting Real-World Social Interactions
Md Sabbir Ahmed, Arafat Rahman, Mark Rucker, Laura E. Barnes
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03980 h…

SocialPulse: An On-Smartwatch System for Detecting Real-World Social Interactions
Social interactions are a fundamental part of daily life and play a critical role in well-being. As emerging technologies offer opportunities to unobtrusively monitor behavior, there is growing interest in using them to better understand social experiences. However, automatically detecting interactions, particularly via wearable devices, remains underexplored. Existing systems are often limited to controlled environments, constrained to in-person interactions, and rely on rigid assumptions such…

That’s almost certainly the better strategy for them, even if the cynical view is true and they really are an investment org and not an educational institution at heart. We know that caving to bullies just marks you as a target. We know that, as @… said, those who resist grow in stature, and those who capitulate emerge as shadows of themselves (https://www.theindex.media/p/donald-trump-can-t-make-cowards-of-us-all). If Harvard is a brand, well….
But investment is a fear-driven world, and there’s a lot of fear circulating.
5/

Does Aiming for Perfection Actually Hurt Performance? https://bulletproofmusician.com/does-aiming-for-perfection-actually-hurt-performance/

Does Aiming for Perfection Actually Hurt Performance?
A year-long study looked at two approaches to optimizing performance, and found one mindset that worked significantly better!

Finished "Lobizona" by Romina Garber. I have extremely mixed feelings about this book. It's a powerful depiction of the fear of living as an undocumented child/teen and it has interesting things to say about rejection, belonging, and the choice between seeking to be recognized for who you are and wanting you blend in enough to be accepted as normal. However, it's also an explicit homage to Harry Potter, and while it doesn't include antisemitic tropes or glorify slavery or even have any anti-trans sentiments I can detect, to me the magical school setup felt forced and I thought it would have been a better book had it not tried to fit that mould. Also, it would have been a super interesting situation to explore trans issues, and while it's definitely fine for it not to do that, the author's praise of Rowling's work has me wondering...
There's a sequel that I think could in theory be amazing, but given the execution of the first book, I think I'll wait a bit before checking it out. By putting her main character in opposition to both ICE in the human world and the magical authorities in the other world, Garber explicitly sets the stage for a revolution standing between her protagonist and any kind of lasting peace. But I'm not confident she's capable of writing that story without relying on some kind of supernatural deus ex machina, which would be disappointing to me, since "a better world if only possible through divine intervention" is an inherently regressive message.
Overall, #OwnVoices fantasy centering an undocumented immigrant is an excellent thing, and I've certainly got a lot of privilege that surely influences my criticism. However, #OwnVoices stuff has a range of levels of craft and political stances, and it can be excellent for some reasons and mediocre for others.
On that point, if anyone reading this has suggestions for fiction books grappling with borders and the carceral state, Is be happy to hear them.
#AmReading

far from being idealists reaching for the rebirth of a better world, they were the usual human mixture of self-promotion, self-delusion, and fakery

Small is Sufficient: Reducing the World AI Energy Consumption Through Model Selection
Tiago da Silva Barros, Fr\'ed\'eric Giroire, Ramon Aparicio-Pardo, Joanna Moulierac
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01889

Small is Sufficient: Reducing the World AI Energy Consumption Through Model Selection
The energy consumption and carbon footprint of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have become critical concerns due to rising costs and environmental impacts. In response, a new trend in green AI is emerging, shifting from the "bigger is better" paradigm, which prioritizes large models, to "small is sufficient", emphasizing energy sobriety through smaller, more efficient models. We explore how the AI community can adopt energy sobriety today by focusing on model selection during inference. Model se…

She's right. So very, very right.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOwANiADYoc/?igsh=dnFiN3M5cjJjZXF6

Irene's Entropy on Instagram: "In a world where the top is trying to tear us apart, know that we hold power in our every day decisions of how we treat our friends, strangers, and neighbors. There is always some commonality in our human experience. Find it. Sometimes it takes work, but it’s what will make this world a better place. #storyteller #musician #news #currentevents #quinceñera #empowerment #love #fyp"
229K likes, 15K comments - irenes.entropy on September 18, 2025: "In a world where the top is trying to tear us apart, know that we hold power in our every day decisions of how we treat our friends, strangers, and neighbors. There is always some commonality in our human experience. Find it. Sometimes it takes work, but it’s what will make this world a better place. #storyteller #musician #news #currentevents #quinceñera #empowerment #love #fyp".

Mitigating Modal Imbalance in Multimodal Reasoning
Chen Henry Wu, Neil Kale, Aditi Raghunathan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02608 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.…

Mitigating Modal Imbalance in Multimodal Reasoning
Foundation models (FMs) deployed in real-world tasks such as computer-use agents must integrate diverse modalities. How good are FMs at performing joint reasoning, simultaneously reasoning over multiple modalities, especially when the modalities interact and relate to each other to form cross-modal context? To better understand this problem, we study FMs on cross-modal conflicts: scenarios where conflicting evidence is presented across modalities. This allows us to examine whether FMs prioritiz…

Given the chance, I think her words could resonate in a Provincial election against both the David Eby #BCNDP and the Rustad #BCConservatives (and whatever other parties happen to pop into existence).
It was nice to see a leader actually genuinely congratulate and lift up her rivals in the contest. A rarity these days in too many party leadership races!
Key lines from her speech:
"take on this province's billionaires, largest corporations, and big oil... who take far more than they give.
"democracy is in retreat around the globe, but I am encouraged to see young people in BC fighting back.”
"the BC Green Party has solutions”
"the BC NDP.. are making decisions based on scarcity and fear”
"David Eby... rolling out the red carpet for Donald Trump's inner circle of oligarchs to buy and control even more of our province”.
"The NDP's big idea… to double down on raw resource exports.... no manufacturing, no innovation, no vision for a future beyond more foreign billionaires ripping and shipping our resources while families wait for the wealth to trickle down.”
“while workers wait for fair wages and homes we can afford, the BC NDP doubles down on MAGA backed fossil fuel projects, ignores the need to obtain consent, and refuses to care for our community members”
”The horrors that we are witnessing now are the death rattle of the old world.”
"it is up to us force a new world through”
"We can build a plan to take back the public wealth that has been looted with real taxation on the ultra wealthy”
"Build on our massive advantage of renewable energy… create thousands of jobs”
"will reclaim BC's economy for working people… together we can build a resilient thriving province that respects indigenous sovereignty and our planetary boundaries.”
“we are worthy of better, and worthy of hope. When we learn to believe that again, we can win.”
@…
#BCPoli #BCGreens #CanPoli #CdnPoli #RenewableEnergy

Segment First, Retrieve Better: Realistic Legal Search via Rhetorical Role-Based Queries
Shubham Kumar Nigam, Tanmay Dubey, Noel Shallum, Arnab Bhattacharya
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00679

Segment First, Retrieve Better: Realistic Legal Search via Rhetorical Role-Based Queries
Legal precedent retrieval is a cornerstone of the common law system, governed by the principle of stare decisis, which demands consistency in judicial decisions. However, the growing complexity and volume of legal documents challenge traditional retrieval methods. TraceRetriever mirrors real-world legal search by operating with limited case information, extracting only rhetorically significant segments instead of requiring complete documents. Our pipeline integrates BM25, Vector Database, and C…

Hierarchical Reduced-Order Model Predictive Control for Robust Locomotion on Humanoid Robots
Adrian B. Ghansah, Sergio A. Esteban, Aaron D. Ames
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04722

Hierarchical Reduced-Order Model Predictive Control for Robust Locomotion on Humanoid Robots
As humanoid robots enter real-world environments, ensuring robust locomotion across diverse environments is crucial. This paper presents a computationally efficient hierarchical control framework for humanoid robot locomotion based on reduced-order models -- enabling versatile step planning and incorporating arm and torso dynamics to better stabilize the walking. At the high level, we use the step-to-step dynamics of the ALIP model to simultaneously optimize over step periods, step lengths, and…

Incentivizing Time-Aware Fairness in Data Sharing
Jiangwei Chen, Kieu Thao Nguyen Pham, Rachael Hwee Ling Sim, Arun Verma, Zhaoxuan Wu, Chuan-Sheng Foo, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09240

Incentivizing Time-Aware Fairness in Data Sharing
In collaborative data sharing and machine learning, multiple parties aggregate their data resources to train a machine learning model with better model performance. However, as the parties incur data collection costs, they are only willing to do so when guaranteed incentives, such as fairness and individual rationality. Existing frameworks assume that all parties join the collaboration simultaneously, which does not hold in many real-world scenarios. Due to the long processing time for data cle…

Just finished Transiruby, along with a 9k-line journal file for it. I almost got 100, but not quite; I don't have time to go back to it before the semester starts though.
If you like exploration games, it's an excellent one, with great level design & tons of secrets. It actually makes you do significant secret-finding and map-reading in order to beat the game, not just for extras or a special ending, which is something that a lot of metroidvania games since Super Metroid don't do. My one complaint is that the map system isn't perfect, and finding obscure secrets to progress is fine when the map hints at them but much less fun when it hints incorrectly (I looked one progress item up in a speedrun video because of this).
Decently cool movement mechanics, although the combat does take a back seat and almost all of the bosses are easy (I beat the final two bosses in the third and second tries respectively). I don't think that's any better or worse than a game like Nine Sols where the final boss took me hundreds of tries though; just a different flavor. The world-building isn't as rich as the more epic metroidvanias like Hollow Knight or Lone Fungus (or again, Nine Sols) but again I'm fine with that. It's just a more casual game that has really excellent level design & exploration poetics.
#AmPlaying

Voting in the UK Green party elections is half over. Too late to join the party and vote, and sounds like Zack is very likely to win.
Which is good. I voted for him.
I think the job-share rule is important and that any job should be possible to share between workers. But in the case of the "leader", which is literally the face of the party, having two faces is difficult in the public hive mind. Even with a united front, it's litterally two faced.
But mostly my vote was just for Zack, and would have likely voted for him in a job-share too.
He's very personable and seems to know how to talk to the public and express not just environmental issues but other green issues like inequality and war and how your enemy is not a boat of refugees but the concentration of power in the hands of maniacs both political and corporate.
I confess I gave up trying to read anything about the candidates and cast a vote about half way down all the other jobs being elected. I'm just adding noise. I dunno who any of these people are or even what the job entails most of the time and there's too many all at once. Should stagger them weekly or something.
Anyway here's Zack on Mark Steel's sweary podcast being brilliant on the issues and how to explain them better than I can.
I love Mark Steel too. Miss the sketches things it used to have in the newish revised entirely-an-interview format.
🤞
In two parts
#podcast #green #uk #ZackPolanski #listening

TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?

6 years probation with her prison time suspended? What the actual hell? This wasn't abuse. It was manslaughter. She was a freaking nurse. She knew better. And she tried to keep the paramedics from running vitals? Dear God, what kind of justice was this?
https://wausau…

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
Should AI coding be taught in undergrad CS education?
1/2
I teach undergraduate computer science labs, including for intro and more-advanced core courses. I don't publish (non-negligible) scholarly work in the area, but I've got years of craft expertise in course design, and I do follow the academic literature to some degree. In other words, In not the world's leading expert, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about course design, and consider myself competent at it, with plenty of direct experience in what knowledge & skills I can expect from students as they move through the curriculum.
I'm also strongly against most uses of what's called "AI" these days (specifically, generative deep neutral networks as supplied by our current cadre of techbro). There are a surprising number of completely orthogonal reasons to oppose the use of these systems, and a very limited number of reasonable exceptions (overcoming accessibility barriers is an example). On the grounds of environmental and digital-commons-pollution costs alone, using specifically the largest/newest models is unethical in most cases.
But as any good teacher should, I constantly question these evaluations, because I worry about the impact on my students should I eschew teaching relevant tech for bad reasons (and even for his reasons). I also want to make my reasoning clear to students, who should absolutely question me on this. That inspired me to ask a simple question: ignoring for one moment the ethical objections (which we shouldn't, of course; they're very stark), at what level in the CS major could I expect to teach a course about programming with AI assistance, and expect students to succeed at a more technically demanding final project than a course at the same level where students were banned from using AI? In other words, at what level would I expect students to actually benefit from AI coding "assistance?"
To be clear, I'm assuming that students aren't using AI in other aspects of coursework: the topic of using AI to "help you study" is a separate one (TL;DR it's gross value is not negative, but it's mostly not worth the harm to your metacognitive abilities, which AI-induced changes to the digital commons are making more important than ever).
So what's my answer to this question?
If I'm being incredibly optimistic, senior year. Slightly less optimistic, second year of a masters program. Realistic? Maybe never.
The interesting bit for you-the-reader is: why is this my answer? (Especially given that students would probably self-report significant gains at lower levels.) To start with, [this paper where experienced developers thought that AI assistance sped up their work on real tasks when in fact it slowed it down] (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089) is informative. There are a lot of differences in task between experienced devs solving real bugs and students working on a class project, but it's important to understand that we shouldn't have a baseline expectation that AI coding "assistants" will speed things up in the best of circumstances, and we shouldn't trust self-reports of productivity (or the AI hype machine in general).
Now we might imagine that coding assistants will be better at helping with a student project than at helping with fixing bugs in open-source software, since it's a much easier task. For many programming assignments that have a fixed answer, we know that many AI assistants can just spit out a solution based on prompting them with the problem description (there's another elephant in the room here to do with learning outcomes regardless of project success, but we'll ignore this over too, my focus here is on project complexity reach, not learning outcomes). My question is about more open-ended projects, not assignments with an expected answer. Here's a second study (by one of my colleagues) about novices using AI assistance for programming tasks. It showcases how difficult it is to use AI tools well, and some of these stumbling blocks that novices in particular face.
But what about intermediate students? Might there be some level where the AI is helpful because the task is still relatively simple and the students are good enough to handle it? The problem with this is that as task complexity increases, so does the likelihood of the AI generating (or copying) code that uses more complex constructs which a student doesn't understand. Let's say I have second year students writing interactive websites with JavaScript. Without a lot of care that those students don't know how to deploy, the AI is likely to suggest code that depends on several different frameworks, from React to JQuery, without actually setting up or including those frameworks, and of course three students would be way out of their depth trying to do that. This is a general problem: each programming class carefully limits the specific code frameworks and constructs it expects students to know based on the material it covers. There is no feasible way to limit an AI assistant to a fixed set of constructs or frameworks, using current designs. There are alternate designs where this would be possible (like AI search through adaptation from a controlled library of snippets) but those would be entirely different tools.
So what happens on a sizeable class project where the AI has dropped in buggy code, especially if it uses code constructs the students don't understand? Best case, they understand that they don't understand and re-prompt, or ask for help from an instructor or TA quickly who helps them get rid of the stuff they don't understand and re-prompt or manually add stuff they do. Average case: they waste several hours and/or sweep the bugs partly under the rug, resulting in a project with significant defects. Students in their second and even third years of a CS major still have a lot to learn about debugging, and usually have significant gaps in their knowledge of even their most comfortable programming language. I do think regardless of AI we as teachers need to get better at teaching debugging skills, but the knowledge gaps are inevitable because there's just too much to know. In Python, for example, the LLM is going to spit out yields, async functions, try/finally, maybe even something like a while/else, or with recent training data, the walrus operator. I can't expect even a fraction of 3rd year students who have worked with Python since their first year to know about all these things, and based on how students approach projects where they have studied all the relevant constructs but have forgotten some, I'm not optimistic seeing these things will magically become learning opportunities. Student projects are better off working with a limited subset of full programming languages that the students have actually learned, and using AI coding assistants as currently designed makes this impossible. Beyond that, even when the "assistant" just introduces bugs using syntax the students understand, even through their 4th year many students struggle to understand the operation of moderately complex code they've written themselves, let alone written by someone else. Having access to an AI that will confidently offer incorrect explanations for bugs will make this worse.
To be sure a small minority of students will be able to overcome these problems, but that minority is the group that has a good grasp of the fundamentals and has broadened their knowledge through self-study, which earlier AI-reliant classes would make less likely to happen. In any case, I care about the average student, since we already have plenty of stuff about our institutions that makes life easier for a favored few while being worse for the average student (note that our construction of that favored few as the "good" students is a large part of this problem).
To summarize: because AI assistants introduce excess code complexity and difficult-to-debug bugs, they'll slow down rather than speed up project progress for the average student on moderately complex projects. On a fixed deadline, they'll result in worse projects, or necessitate less ambitious project scoping to ensure adequate completion, and I expect this remains broadly true through 4-6 years of study in most programs (don't take this as an endorsement of AI "assistants" for masters students; we've ignored a lot of other problems along the way).
There's a related problem: solving open-ended project assignments well ultimately depends on deeply understanding the problem, and AI "assistants" allow students to put a lot of code in their file without spending much time thinking about the problem or building an understanding of it. This is awful for learning outcomes, but also bad for project success. Getting students to see the value of thinking deeply about a problem is a thorny pedagogical puzzle at the best of times, and allowing the use of AI "assistants" makes the problem much much worse. This is another area I hope to see (or even drive) pedagogical improvement in, for what it's worth.
1/2

Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
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I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
2/2
To address the bigger question I started with ("should we teach AI-"assisted" coding?"), my answer is: "No, except enough to show students directly what its pitfalls are." We have little enough time as it is to cover the core knowledge that they'll need, which has become more urgent now that they're going to be expected to clean up AI bugs and they'll have less time to develop an understanding of the problems they're supposed to be solving. The skill of prompt engineering & other skills of working with AI are relatively easy to pick up on your own, given a decent not-even-mathematical understanding of how a neutral network works, which is something we should be giving to all students, not just our majors.
Reasonable learning objectives for CS majors might include explaining what types of bugs an AI "assistant" is most likely to introduce, explaining the difference between software engineering and writing code, explaining why using an AI "assistant" is likely to violate open-source licenses, listing at lest three independent ethical objections to contemporary LLMs and explaining the evidence for/reasoning behind them, explaining why we should expect AI "assistants" to be better at generating code from scratch than at fixing bugs in existing code (and why they'll confidently "claim" to have fixed problems they haven't), and even fixing bugs in AI generated code (without AI "assistance").
If we lived in a world where the underlying environmental, labor, and data commons issues with AI weren't as bad, or if we could find and use systems that effectively mitigate these issues (there's lots of piecemeal progress on several of these) then we should probably start teaching an elective on coding with an assistant to students who have mastered programming basics, but such a class should probably spend a good chunk of time on non-assisted debugging.
#AI #LLMs #VibeCoding