Tootfinder

In a vote of 218-214, Republicans passed Trump’s megabill,
sending it to the president’s desk by his self-imposed Independence Day deadline
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/jul/03/trump-big-bill-…

“Well, we are all going to die.”
It's eye-opening to hear such a blatant example of the thoughtless & self-centered nature of today's #Republican party... thanks Joni Ernst.
☑️ Yes. People Will Die. - by Jonathan Cohn - The Bulwark

Yes. People Will Die.
Joni Ernst’s cringey videos were wrong. They also reveal a lot about the GOP’s desperately dishonest sales job.

A generalized Birman-Schwinger principle and applications to one-dimensional Schr\"odinger operators with distributional potentials
Fritz Gesztesy, Roger Nichols
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02251

A generalized Birman-Schwinger principle and applications to one-dimensional Schrödinger operators with distributional potentials
Given a self-adjoint operator $H_0$ bounded from below in a complex Hilbert space $\mathcal{H}$, the corresponding scale of spaces $\mathcal{H}_{+1}(H_0) \subset \mathcal{H} \subset \mathcal{H}_{-1}(H_0) = [\mathcal{H}_{+1}(H_0)]^*$, and a fixed $V\in \mathcal{B}(\mathcal{H}_{+1}(H_0),\mathcal{H}_{-1}(H_0))$, we define the operator-valued map $A_V(\,\cdot\,):ρ(H_0)\to \mathcal{B}(\mathcal{H})$ by \[ A_V(z):=-\big(H_0-zI_{\mathcal{H}} \big)^{-1/2}V\big(H_0-zI_{\mathcal{H}} \big)^{-1/2}\in \math…

The Iarrobino scheme: a self-dual analogue of the Hilbert scheme of points
Joachim Jelisiejew
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21705 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.2…

The Iarrobino scheme: a self-dual analogue of the Hilbert scheme of points
For a fixed quasi-projective scheme $X$ we introduce a self-dual analogue of ${\mathrm{Hilb}}_d(X)$ which we call the Iarrobino scheme of $X$. It is a fine moduli space of oriented Gorenstein zero-dimensional subschemes of $X$ together with some additional data (a self-dual filtration) which is vacuous over a big open set but non-trivial over the compactification. Via the link between Hilbert schemes and varieties of commuting matrices, Iarrobino schemes correspond to commuting symmetric matric…

Donald Trump's big, beautiful act of self-harm (Edward Luce/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/119fd6f2-3c63-40a8-8fe8-3474f4dd1f71
http://www.memeorandum.com/250701/p48#a250701p48

https://pixelfed.social/p/midtsveen/845362298842614379

"Amazon Q: Now with Helpful AI-Powered Self-Destruct Capabilities"
by Corey Quinn
Big oof. This is a great breakdown of what happened and why it's concerning — and especially so because we're not hearing the details from Amazon.
https://www.la…

How popular media gets love wrong
Okay, so what exactly are the details of the "engineered" model of love from my previous post? I'll try to summarize my thoughts and the experiences they're built on.
1. "Love" can be be thought of like a mechanism that's built by two (or more) people. In this case, no single person can build the thing alone, to work it needs contributions from multiple people (I suppose self-love might be an exception to that). In any case, the builders can intentionally choose how they build (and maintain) the mechanism, they can build it differently to suit their particular needs/wants, and they will need to maintain and repair it over time to keep it running. It may need winding, or fuel, or charging plus oil changes and bolt-tightening, etc.
2. Any two (or more) people can choose to start building love between them at any time. No need to "find your soulmate" or "wait for the right person." Now the caveat is that the mechanism is difficult to build and requires lots of cooperation, so there might indeed be "wrong people" to try to build love with. People in general might experience more failures than successes. The key component is slowly-escalating shared commitment to the project, which is negotiated between the partners so that neither one feels like they've been left to do all the work themselves. Since it's a big scary project though, it's very easy to decide it's too hard and give up, and so the builders need to encourage each other and pace themselves. The project can only succeed if there's mutual commitment, and that will certainly require compromise (sometimes even sacrifice, though not always). If the mechanism works well, the benefits (companionship; encouragement; praise; loving sex; hugs; etc.) will be well worth the compromises you make to build it, but this isn't always the case.
3. The mechanism is prone to falling apart if not maintained. In my view, the "fire" and "appeal" models of love don't adequately convey the need for this maintenance and lead to a lot of under-maintained relationships many of which fall apart. You'll need to do things together that make you happy, do things that make your partner happy (in some cases even if they annoy you, but never in a transactional or box-checking way), spend time with shared attention, spend time alone and/or apart, reassure each other through words (or deeds) of mutual beliefs (especially your continued commitment to the relationship), do things that comfort and/or excite each other physically (anywhere from hugs to hand-holding to sex) and probably other things I'm not thinking of. Not *every* relationship needs *all* of these maintenance techniques, but I think most will need most. Note especially that patriarchy teaches men that they don't need to bother with any of this, which harms primarily their romantic partners but secondarily them as their relationships fail due to their own (cultivated-by-patriarchy) incompetence. If a relationship evolves to a point where one person is doing all the maintenance (& improvement) work, it's been bent into a shape that no longer really qualifies as "love" in my book, and that's super unhealthy.
4. The key things to negotiate when trying to build a new love are first, how to work together in the first place, and how to be comfortable around each others' habits (or how to change those habits). Second, what level of commitment you have right now, and what how/when you want to increase that commitment. Additionally, I think it's worth checking in about what you're each putting into and getting out of the relationship, to ensure that it continues to be positive for all participants. To build a successful relationship, you need to be able to incrementally increase the level of commitment to one that you're both comfortable staying at long-term, while ensuring that for both partners, the relationship is both a net benefit and has manageable costs (those two things are not the same). Obviously it's not easy to actually have conversations about these things (congratulations if you can just talk about this stuff) because there's a huge fear of hearing an answer that you don't want to hear. I think the range of discouraging answers which actually spell doom for a relationship is smaller than people think and there's usually a reasonable "shoulder" you can fall into where things aren't on a good trajectory but could be brought back into one, but even so these conversations are scary. Still, I think only having honest conversations about these things when you're angry at each other is not a good plan. You can also try to communicate some of these things via non-conversational means, if that feels safer, and at least being aware that these are the objectives you're pursuing is probably helpful.
I'll post two more replies here about my own experiences that led me to this mental model and trying to distill this into advice, although it will take me a moment to get to those.
#relationships #love

GReAT: leveraging geometric artery data to improve wall shear stress assessment
Julian Suk, Jolanda J. Wentzel, Patryk Rygiel, Joost Daemen, Daniel Rueckert, Jelmer M. Wolterink
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19030

GReAT: leveraging geometric artery data to improve wall shear stress assessment
Leveraging big data for patient care is promising in many medical fields such as cardiovascular health. For example, hemodynamic biomarkers like wall shear stress could be assessed from patient-specific medical images via machine learning algorithms, bypassing the need for time-intensive computational fluid simulation. However, it is extremely challenging to amass large-enough datasets to effectively train such models. We could address this data scarcity by means of self-supervised pre-training…

More or less true. Though I'd argue that even the height and chin requirement is an overstatement..
It really is mostly about personality, friendliness and manners, not appearance.
#love

So what I learned from the recent Google outage, is how much of a cirklejerk "big tech" actually is.
Google did a fucky wucky... Which caused Cloudflare to go belly up, Shopify to go belly up, Spotify to go belly up...
Imagine having given *one* company having so much power that, if they make a mistake somewhere, half the internet is gone.
So if you self-host, make sure to see how your dependency chain is.
How much places can make a mistake that can knock you …

A big question will be how to regulate national scale things. Like our central bank, the Federal Reserve, or our military. We have (or had) a reasonable system over those, and those systems should be retained.
I think the idea that states cover disasters in other states is going to need to be revisited. Some states, like California, are recognizing and beginning to self-address things like earthquakes and fires - For instance my home insurance has increased several fold. But why sh…

"The cult of goal-setting thrives in this illusion. It converts uncertainty into an illusion of progress. It demands specificity in exchange for comfort. And it replaces self-trust with the performance of future-planning."
(Original title: Smart People Don't Chase Goals; They Create Limits)

Smart People Don't Chase Goals; They Create Limits
A few years ago, I sat across from a friend at a late dinner. He was telling me about his new promotion, the big title, the bonus, the corner office. I remember watching his face as he described it. He looked like someone describing a story he’d once believed

I know it is well-meaning, but extrapolating the total size of 2000 events from 320 reports is bogus unless one models the size distribution and how that influences whether an event has a report. I.e. big events get reported, smaller ones not so much.
Even with that, it would be very much open to debate.

Man, I had a shit week.
Tried to stretch outside my comfort zone in a big way; but failed myself really badly.
Old trauma woke up at a crucial moment, and bit me really hard; and I think the whole thing, instead of being healing, just … doubled everything down.
I’m feeling worthless in a whole new way.
Feeling like I undid, in like one hour, years and years of self-confidence building.

Resonant neutrino self-interactions: insights from the full shape galaxy power spectrum
Hern\'an E. Noriega, Josue De-Santiago, Gabriela Garcia-Arroyo, Jorge Venzor, Abdel P\'erez-Lorenzana
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07994

Resonant neutrino self-interactions: insights from the full shape galaxy power spectrum
This paper investigates resonant neutrino self-interactions in cosmology by employing, for the first time, the effective field theory of large-scale structure to model their impact on the matter distribution up to mildly nonlinear scales. We explore a broad range of mediator masses in two main analyses: one combining BOSS Full Shape (FS) galaxy clustering with Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), and another combining FS with Planck Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data. Our results place the stron…

I'm a big proponent of using a `Makefile` to hide as much project complexity as possible.
Just got self-documenting help with nice formatting working on this one!

Small Models, Big Support: A Local LLM Framework for Teacher-Centric Content Creation and Assessment using RAG and CAG
Zarreen Reza, Alexander Mazur, Michael T. Dugdale, Robin Ray-Chaudhuri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05925

Small Models, Big Support: A Local LLM Framework for Teacher-Centric Content Creation and Assessment using RAG and CAG
While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized as student-facing educational aids, their potential to directly support educators, particularly through locally deployable and customizable open-source solutions, remains significantly underexplored. Many existing educational solutions rely on cloud-based infrastructure or proprietary tools, which are costly and may raise privacy concerns. Regulated industries with limited budgets require affordable, self-hosted solutions. We introduc…

@… inb4 someone say "you could find someone at your org to write it". I asked. We have no one with any experience writing this kind of stuff. Or they all have self preservation instinct and refuse to admit it. The latter might be the case since I asked on a channel with 14K developers (big corp).

Just saw this:
#AI can mean a lot of things these days, but lots of the popular meanings imply a bevy of harms that I definitely wouldn't feel are worth a cute fish game. In fact, these harms are so acute that even "just" playing into the AI hype becomes its own kind of harm (it's similar to blockchain in that way).
@… noticed that the authors claim the code base is 80% AI generated, which is a red flag because people with sound moral compasses wouldn't be using AI to "help" write code in the first place. The authors aren't by some miracle people who couldn't build this app without help, in case that influences your thinking about it: they have the skills to write the code themselves, although it likely would have taken longer (but also been better).
I was more interested in the fish-classification AI, and how much it might be dependent on datacenters. Thankfully, a quick glance at the code confirms they're using ONNX and running a self-trained neural network on your device. While the exponentially-increasing energy & water demands of datacenters to support billion-parameter models are a real concern, this is not that. Even a non-AI game can burn a lot of cycles on someone's phone, and I don't think there's anything to complain about energy-wise if we're just using cycles on the end user's device as long as we're not having them keep it on for hours crunching numbers like blockchain stuff does. Running whatever stuff locally while the user is playing a game is a negligible environmental concern, unlike, say, calling out to ChatGPT where you're directly feeding datacenter demand. Since they claimed to have trained the network themselves, and since it's actually totally reasonable to make your own dataset for this and get good-enough-for-a-silly-game results with just a few hundred examples, I don't have any ethical objections to the data sourcing or training processes either. Hooray! This is finally an example of "ethical use of neutral networks" that I can hold up as an example of what people should be doing instead of the BS they are doing.
But wait... Remember what I said about feeding the AI hype being its own form of harm? Yeah, between using AI tools for coding and calling their classifier "AI" in a way that makes it seem like the same kind of thing as ChatGPT et al., they're leaning into the hype rather than helping restrain it. And that means they're causing harm. Big AI companies can point to them and say "look AI enables cute things you like" when AI didn't actually enable it. So I'm feeling meh about this cute game and won't be sharing it aside from this post. If you love the cute fish, you don't really have to feel bad for playing with it, but I'd feel bad for advertising it without a disclaimer.

Algebraic Exceptional Set of a Three-Component Curve on Hirzebruch Surfaces
Wei Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13280 https://arxiv.o…

Algebraic Exceptional Set of a Three-Component Curve on Hirzebruch Surfaces
We study the algebraic exceptional set of a three-component curve $B$ with normal crossings on a Hirzebruch surface $\mathbb{F}_e$. If $K_{\mathbb{F}_{e}}+B$ is big and no component of $B$ is a fiber or the rational curve with negative self-intersection, we prove that the algebraic exceptional set is finite, and in most cases give it an effective bound. We also prove that the algebraic exceptional set coincides with the set of curves that are hyper-bitangent to $B$.

Hot New Early Dark Energy: Dark Radiation Matter Decoupling
Mathias Garny, Florian Niedermann, Henrique Rubira, Martin S. Sloth
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03795 https://

Hot New Early Dark Energy: Dark Radiation Matter Decoupling
We present a microscopic model of the dark sector that resolves the Hubble tension within standard current datasets based on well-known fundamental principles, gauge symmetry and spontaneous symmetry breaking. It builds on the Hot New Early Dark Energy (Hot NEDE) setup, featuring a dark $SU(N)$ gauge symmetry broken to $SU(N-1)$ in a supercooled phase transition that creates a thermal bath of self-interacting dark radiation in the epoch between Big Bang Nucleosynthesis and recombination. Adding…