Tootfinder

Ein geniales Konzert war das gestern in der Stuttgarter Matthäuskirche. Paulo Oreni spielte wie in einer französischen Kathedrale.
@…
#Orgel #Stuttgart

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?

Moody Urbanity - Oracles II 🈳
情绪化城市 - 谕 II 🈳
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️ Ilford HP5 Plus 400, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

A methodology for clinically driven interactive segmentation evaluation
Parhom Esmaeili, Virginia Fernandez, Pedro Borges, Eli Gibson, Sebastien Ourselin, M. Jorge Cardoso
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09499

A methodology for clinically driven interactive segmentation evaluation
Interactive segmentation is a promising strategy for building robust, generalisable algorithms for volumetric medical image segmentation. However, inconsistent and clinically unrealistic evaluation hinders fair comparison and misrepresents real-world performance. We propose a clinically grounded methodology for defining evaluation tasks and metrics, and built a software framework for constructing standardised evaluation pipelines. We evaluate state-of-the-art algorithms across heterogeneous and…

Herzliche Einladung zur Langen Nacht der Kirchen in #Ostfildern. Großes Highlight bei uns: Paolo Oreni aus Mailand wird ab 21 Uhr zu einem Stummfilm an der Orgel improvisieren. Er ist wirklich ein begnadeter Organist und Improvisationskünstler, siehe https://www.

Moody Urbanity - Oracles III 🈳
情绪化城市 - 谕 III 🈳
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️ Ilford HP5 Plus 400, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

Overall the media consolidation described below is beyond four alarm fire levels.
E. Musk is dangerous to society, but Musk acts like an addled kid who read too much bad Sci-fi. Ellison doesn't have those positive qualities - he is much like the killer car, Christine, in the Steven King novel.
My first experience with Ellison's Oracle was back around 1980 or '81 when Oracle people came to our company and more than asked, they ordered us, to make sure that their produ…

This billionaire Trump ally and his son are building an unprecedented media empire
Larry and David Ellison’s holdings span movies, TV networks, CBS and soon a stake in TikTok, in a paradigm-shifting portfolio with huge influence.

Oracle will pay for and oversee the construction of three of the new Stargate data centers, and OpenAI will then purchase computing power from Oracle (Cade Metz/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/23/technology/openai-data-centers-united-state…

OpenAI to Join Tech Giants in Building 5 New Data Centers in U.S.
Working with the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and the cloud company Oracle, the A.I. start-up will spend $400 billion over the next five years.

Quantum Simulation of Random Unitaries from Clebsch-Gordan Transforms
Dmitry Grinko, Satoshi Yoshida
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26623 https://arxiv.org/pdf…

Quantum Simulation of Random Unitaries from Clebsch-Gordan Transforms
We present a general method for simulating an action of $t$ copies of a Haar random unitary for arbitrary compact groups. This construction can be viewed as a representation-theoretic generalization of Zhandry's compressed function oracle technique. It is conceptually simple, exact and utilizes Clebsch-Gordan transforms as main building blocks. In particular, for the unitary group, our method is efficient in space and time. Finally, our general oracle for forward queries can be easily modified …

Hierarchies within TFNP: building blocks and collapses
Surendra Ghentiyala, Zeyong Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21550 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21550

Hierarchies within TFNP: building blocks and collapses
We initiate the study of complexity classes $\mathsf{A^B}$ where $\mathsf{A}$ and $\mathsf{B}$ are both $\mathsf{TFNP}$ subclasses. For example, we consider complexity classes of the form $\mathsf{PPP^{PPP}}$, $\mathsf{PPAD^{PPA}}$, and $\mathsf{PPA^{PLS}}$. We define complete problems for such classes, and show that they belong in $\mathsf{TFNP}$. These definitions require some care, since unlike a class like $\mathsf{PPA^{NP}}$, where the $\mathsf{NP}$ oracle defines a function, in $\mathsf{P…