Tootfinder

Chinese state media: Alibaba has secured China Unicom as a major client for its AI chips; earlier reports said Alibaba was supplying tens of thousands of chips (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-17/ali…

US cybersecurity company F5 discloses a cyberattack in August by suspected nation-state hackers that stole undisclosed BIG-IP vulnerabilities and source code (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/securi…

I've started mostly hibernating my laptop now (save state to disk and power off completely) instead of just suspending it to memory.
First were the days when lol linux hibernate doesn't even work
Then it was laptop HDDs which are painfully slow
Then we had SSDs, but they were really small. Who could spare enough space for a RAM image?
Now I have 64G of RAM and an NVMe where the smallest part I could buy was twice as big as I need, and twice that is only 43% mo…

Partially paywalled but still lots of juicy data. “State of the software engineering job market in 2025”: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-the-tech-market-in-2025
From which:

State of the software engineering job market in 2025
A deepdive into today’s tech jobs market, with exclusive data on tech jobs, AI engineering, Big Tech recruitment, the growing importance of location, and more

Elijah Sarratt's NFL Draft potential, Ty Simpson shines again, more Week 7 reactions https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6709611/2025/10/12/nfl-draft-2026-sarratt-simpson-penn-state/

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy

Seahawks troll Raiders' Ashton Jeanty after big first half by ex Boise State teammate https://www.si.com/nfl/seahawks/seahawks-troll-raiders-ashton-jeanty-george-holani-big-half

Which Oklahoma State football games are most important Ranking Cowboys' 2025 schedule https://www.oklahoman.com/story/sports/college/cowboys/2025/08/03/oklahoma-state-football-2025-schedule-ranking-…

Apple delays iPhone Air pre-orders in China, likely over eSIM regulatory issues, replacing the original schedule with "release information to be updated later" (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tec…

Apple postpones iPhone Air in China as Beijing keeps tight grip on eSIM approval
Apple says all three state-owned telecoms network operators would provide eSIM support ‘subject to regulatory approval’.

Fuck Trump, fuck Silicon Valley, and fuck Big Tech.
Look at the state of these slimy sycophants.
🤮
#Trump

Is Dark Energy Changing? Probing the Universe's Expansion with present and future astronomical probes
Mehdi Rezaei, Supriya Pan, Weiqiang Yang, David F. Mota
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09766

Is Dark Energy Changing? Probing the Universe's Expansion with present and future astronomical probes
This study explores the possibility of a time-varying dark energy (DE) equation of state (EoS) deviating from -1. We employ a comprehensive dataset of usual astronomical probes (Type Ia supernovae, baryon acoustic oscillations, Big Bang nucleosynthesis, Hubble data, and Planck 2018 CMB) alongside future mock gravitational wave (GW) distance measurements from the Einstein Telescope. We utilize the Pad'e approximation, a versatile framework encompassing well-known DE models like constant EoS, Che…

Big-Stop Semantics: A Simple Way to Get the Benefits of Small-Step Semantics in a Big-Step Judgment
David M Kahn, Jan Hoffmann, Runming Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15157 https…

Big-Stop Semantics: A Simple Way to Get the Benefits of Small-Step Semantics in a Big-Step Judgment
As evident in the programming language literature, many practitioners favor specifying dynamic program behavior using big-step over small-step semantics. Unlike small-step semantics, which must dwell on every intermediate program state, big-step semantics conveniently jump directly to the ever-important result of the computation. Big-step semantics also typically involve fewer inference rules than their small-step counterparts. However, in exchange for ergonomics, big-step semantics give up pow…

Oh man, the cybersecurity news is piling up ahead of next week's Hacker Summer Camp, so check out today's Metacurity to stay on top of critical infosec developments you should know, including
--The US Army booted Easterly from West Point post to pacify a conspiracy theorist,
--Big Balls got his hands on sensitive law enforcement HR and payroll systems,
--Fraudsters are flooding Discord with polished websites,
--Likely DPRK hackers stole $44m from India's Co…

The US Army booted Easterly from West Point post to pacify a conspiracy theorist
Big Balls got his hands on sensitive law enforcement HR and payroll systems, Fraudsters are flooding Discord with polished websites, Likely DPRK hackers stole $44m from India's CoinDCX, 90 state and local gov'ts targeted in SharePoint attacks, SSNs swiped in Allianz breach, much more

It's also easy to imagine that Trump is sending his military to Portland. People forget that the military is actually really big and pretty complex.
Most people join the military because they want to get out of poverty. Some people join because they believe in it. A lot of people are just too young to have any kind of politics, but some of them do develop politics in the military... and some of those folks become anarchists.
There are Nazis in the military. It's a big problem. But there are also anarchists who signed up before they developed a critique of the state, and now they're kind of stuck for a few years until they can get out.
It's also worth recognizing that a lot of people join after they graduate. Basic training is like 22 weeks. So, assuming a random selection, there really aren't a lot of folks who would be deploying to PDX who would have joined under Trump. That's just assuming a random selection, and there may be other things at play that I'm not aware of, but the majority of the types of folks who would get deployed now would have joined under Biden.
The troops who will deploy (if they do deploy) may very much not want to be there. These are also not monsters wanting to kill (like Trump wishes them to be). They're kids from nearby towns. That's not awesome, most of Oregon has absolute shit politics. But joining the National Guard doesn't necessarily mean that a person has any politics at all. All of this is worth remembering.

A deep dive into the state of the tech job market in 2025, including an increase in demand for AI engineers and a rising average tenure at Big Tech companies (Gergely Orosz/The Pragmatic Engineer)
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-the-tech-market…

State of the software engineering job market in 2025
A deepdive into today’s tech jobs market, with exclusive data on tech jobs, AI engineering, Big Tech recruitment, the growing importance of location, and more

On the rate of convergence in superquadratic Hamilton--Jacobi equations with state constraints
Prerona Dutta, Khai T. Nguyen, Son N. T. Tu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01528 https…

On the rate of convergence in superquadratic Hamilton--Jacobi equations with state constraints
In this paper, we investigate the convergence rate in the vanishing viscosity limit for solutions to superquadratic Hamilton--Jacobi equations with state constraints. For every $p>2$, we establish the rate of convergence for nonnegative Lipschitz data vanishing on the boundary to be of order $ \mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{1/2}) $ and obtain an improved upper rate of order $ \mathcal{O}\big(\varepsilon^{\frac{p}{2(p-1)}}\big)$ for semiconcave data.

Nº 3 Infielder Nick O'Brien of the Penn State Quakers Makes it to the Base (April 13 game against the Big Red at Booth Field)
#sports #baseball #gobigred

Penn State on top in CBS Sports' expert Big Ten picks; Browns, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Cal name starting QBs

https://www.cbssports.com/colle…

The Boundary Principle of a Single Big Jump: Refined Asymptotics for Branching Processes with Immigration
Yunfan Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05650 https://

The Boundary Principle of a Single Big Jump: Refined Asymptotics for Branching Processes with Immigration
We analyze the stationary tail of a fixed-point equation arising in branching processes with state-independent immigration, when both immigration and offspring distributions have heavy tails with boundary index one. We prove that \[ P(X > x) \sim \frac{1}{(1-b)(1+x)}, \quad x \to \infty, \] and provide a refined asymptotic identifying negligible logarithmic corrections. Our approach develops a closure principle for subexponential summations and a cluster expansion representation, which disentan…

Ukraine’s digital chief pushes for AI-first state amid war and cyber threats https://therecord.media/ukraine-ai-state-digital

Digital Sovereigns Big Tech and Nation-State Influence
Michael Bollerman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21066 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21066

Digital Sovereigns Big Tech and Nation-State Influence
Technology companies have gained unprecedented power and influence in recent years, resembling quasi-nation-states globally. Corporations with trillion-dollar market capitalizations are no longer just providers of digital services; they now wield immense economic power, influence global infrastructure, and significantly impact political and social dynamics. This thesis examines how these corporations have transcended traditional business models, adopting characteristics typically associated wit…

My family keeps mixing up anarcho-syndicalism with Communism (Marxism-Leninism), and honestly, I find that pretty funny because those two are entirely different things.
Anarcho-syndicalism is about workers running things for themselves, directly and democratically, without bosses or a state above them. Workers organize into unions and federate from the ground up, making all big decisions through assemblies and direct votes, not by handing power to politicians or a small elite. There ar…

Yes, I DO believe that child rapists belong in a woodchipper.
Not that the State should be forcefeeding them into one, simply that in a just universe they would go in, feet first, slowly enough to avoid jamming. A sausage auger will do in a pinch, if it’s a big one.
If that makes me inhumane, so be it. https://…

What California and other blue jurisdictions need to do:
Pass a law making it illegal for law enforcement to wear a mask.
Arrest any LE who wear a mask.
Let them go if they prove they're law enforcement -- But require it to be in the form of two notarized pay stubs shipped certified mail from HQ
Then arrest them again the next time they wear a mask.

Ashton Jeanty notes one big difference between Boise State, Raiders offenses https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/news/ashton-jeanty-difference-boise-state-raiders-offenses/df03fc49efcaf0fd49…

I was late to pick my daughter up from camp because #NYCParks closed a huge portion of Corona-Meadows Flushing Park. Apparently for some kind of music festival. There was, of course, no bike detour. The area has highways running through it, and the bridges over the highways are cordoned off. How do you get to

This was a big crowd, with specific actions people can take in a blue area of a blue state. The most important thing is follow up.
https://bsky.app/profile/indivisiblepaplus.bsky.social/post/3luamkf7lkc2i

Ensemble of Pre-Trained Models for Long-Tailed Trajectory Prediction
Divya Thuremella, Yi Yang, Simon Wanna, Lars Kunze, Daniele De Martini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13914 http…

Ensemble of Pre-Trained Models for Long-Tailed Trajectory Prediction
This work explores the application of ensemble modeling to the multidimensional regression problem of trajectory prediction for vehicles in urban environments. As newer and bigger state-of-the-art prediction models for autonomous driving continue to emerge, an important open challenge is the problem of how to combine the strengths of these big models without the need for costly re-training. We show how, perhaps surprisingly, combining state-of-the-art deep learning models out-of-the-box (withou…

‘Prototype’ Big Ten QB Could Land With Cowboys in First Round https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/draft-penn-state-quarterback-drew-allar/?adt_ei=[email]

An interview with California state Senator Scott Wiener on his new AI safety bill SB 53, the bill's scope, his focus on AI safety bills, AI PACs, and more (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/23/scott-wiener-on-his-fi…

Scott Wiener on his fight to make Big Tech disclose AI's dangers | TechCrunch
The California lawmaker is on his second attempt to pass a first-in-the-nation AI safety bill. This time, it might work.

I told these hikers that I was out with my new lens because I'd always struggled to capture the experience of what it's like to hike in Shindagin Hollow State Forest and they said that was a noble mission
#photo #photography

The Student Agency building is the first thing if you head out of Cornell towards Collegtown -- tomorrow I'm hoping to post some photos of a big yellow crane that just went up in this neighborhood but I've got to get through photos of my trip to Newark Valley and Oakley Corners State Forest first
#photo

How Palantir has benefited since President Trump took office, securing new and expanded government contracts and becoming the S&P's top-performing stock of 2025 (Washington Post)

In Trump’s Washington, Palantir is winning big
From warfighting and tracking deportations to writing State Department cables with AI, the company is benefiting from a new technology-driven cost-cutting ethos.

Google plans to invest an additional $9B in Virginia through 2026 to boost its cloud and AI infrastructure, including a new data center in Chesterfield County (Emily Forgash/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Google to Invest Additional $9 Billion in Virginia Data Centers
Alphabet Inc.’s Google is investing an additional $9 billion in Virginia through 2026 to enhance cloud and AI infrastructure across the state, marking the latest in a series of big tech investments in US data centers.

What America needs besides #ElectionSecurity : a big ballroom in the ol' #WhiteHouse #RoseGarden !
#DJTshut down the State …

Touch-me-not seen in Shindagin Hollow State Forest
#flowers #photo #photography #bloomscrolling

AI, AGI, and learning efficiency
My 4-month-old kid is not DDoSing Wikipedia right now, nor will they ever do so before learning to speak, read, or write. Their entire "training corpus" will not top even 100 million "tokens" before they can speak & understand language, and do so with real intentionally.
Just to emphasize that point: 100 words-per-minute times 60 minutes-per-hour times 12 hours-per-day times 365 days-per-year times 4 years is a mere 105,120,000 words. That's a ludicrously *high* estimate of words-per-minute and hours-per-day, and 4 years old (the age of my other kid) is well after basic speech capabilities are developed in many children, etc. More likely the available "training data" is at least 1 or 2 orders of magnitude less than this.
The point here is that large language models, trained as they are on multiple *billions* of tokens, are not developing their behavioral capabilities in a way that's remotely similar to humans, even if you believe those capabilities are similar (they are by certain very biased ways of measurement; they very much aren't by others). This idea that humans must be naturally good at acquiring language is an old one (see e.g. #AI #LLM #AGI

White Wood Aster in Shindagin Hollow State Forest
#photo #photography #flower #flowers