Tootfinder

Indirect CW for teen pregnancy, rape, death.
Just finished "Girls Like Us" by Randi Pink. Pink has a knack for telling stories that capture the grim but also vibrant nuances of African-American history. I previously read "Under the Heron's Light" which has more elements of magical realism and connects more directly to the history of enslavement; "Girls Like Us" is more historical fiction, with a bridge at the end to contemporary times (circa 2019, when the book was published). It tells the story of a disparate group of mostly-Black teens who are pregnant in 1972, and shows a range of different outcomes as varied as the backstories of the different girls. Rather than just separate vignettes, the girls' stories are women together into a single plot, and Pink is a expert at pulling us in to deeply contemplate all the complexities of these girls' lives, showing rather than telling us truths about the politics of teen pregnancy and abortion, and how even though the choices involved don't have simple answers, taking those choices out of the hands of the people they most intimately affect is cruel and deadly.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

Quick! Get that Trump of Doom out of the mouth of that babe!!
Howland Owl shakes the hand of Albert Alligator and says, "Congratulations! Thou art in the hands of a good man. SAFE! Safe until the TRUMP OF DOOM soundeth." Albert replies, "Right coach. 'Til the TRUMP of DOOM." Meanwhile, in the background, a bear holding a trumpet up towards a child, says, "Watch--Even a child...Wanna try the bugle, son?" Churchy La Femme, a turtle, looks on with concern…

webkb: WebKB graphs (1998)
Web graphs crawled from four Computer Science departments in 1998, with each page manually classified into one of 7 categories: course, department, faculty, project, staff, student, or other. All graphs included in a single .zip; also included are 'co-citation' graphs, which links i and j if they both point to some k. Edge weights count the number of links from i to j.
This network has 348 nodes and 33250 edges.
Tags: Informational, Web gr…

I opened the drawer of my little desk and a single letter fell out, a
letter from my mother, written in pencil, one of her last, with unfinished
words and an implicit sense of her departure. It's so curious: one can
resist tears and "behave" very well in the hardest hours of grief. But
then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window... or one notices
that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed... or
a letter slips f…

I love this shot: it's raining cherries!
(There's a tree-shaker out of view.)
From Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/michigans-cherry-country-federal-safety-net-is-fraying-2025-08-16/

Collaborative Loco-Manipulation for Pick-and-Place Tasks with Dynamic Reward Curriculum
Tianxu An, Flavio De Vincenti, Yuntao Ma, Marco Hutter, Stelian Coros
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13239

Collaborative Loco-Manipulation for Pick-and-Place Tasks with Dynamic Reward Curriculum
We present a hierarchical RL pipeline for training one-armed legged robots to perform pick-and-place (P&P) tasks end-to-end -- from approaching the payload to releasing it at a target area -- in both single-robot and cooperative dual-robot settings. We introduce a novel dynamic reward curriculum that enables a single policy to efficiently learn long-horizon P&P operations by progressively guiding the agents through payload-centered sub-objectives. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches for lon…

Crash Report Enhancement with Large Language Models: An Empirical Study
S M Farah Al Fahim (Peter), Md Nakhla Rafi (Peter), Zeyang Ma (Peter), Dong Jae Kim (Peter), Tse-Hsun (Peter), Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13535

Crash Report Enhancement with Large Language Models: An Empirical Study
Crash reports are central to software maintenance, yet many lack the diagnostic detail developers need to debug efficiently. We examine whether large language models can enhance crash reports by adding fault locations, root-cause explanations, and repair suggestions. We study two enhancement strategies: Direct-LLM, a single-shot approach that uses stack-trace context, and Agentic-LLM, an iterative approach that explores the repository for additional evidence. On a dataset of 492 real-world cras…

Remember the cat litter story from https://social.treehouse.systems/@mgorny/115107752572750888?
So, the vendor insisted that the delivery company will take two packages with a single label. The delivery man disagreed. So over the weekend I had to keep asking, and finally got two labels. The delivery man took the packages. I got my money back.
As soon as I found the time, I've left a negative comment on the sales platform, explaining the problem in detail. And what? With a speed of a shitty script I got a request to change the opinion. Of course, it's all a cheap template, cut in the middle because it didn't fit in the explanation length limit. "Oh dearie, could we know why did you give us a negative opinion? Blah blah blah." Yeah, sure. You could have just read it!
But well, I've changed my comment. To one that's even worse. Added that they shamelessly automatically send requests to change the opinion. The platform wanted me to confirm that they didn't offer me a reward for this change of opinion 😆.

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

sp_primary_school: Primary school dynamic contacts (2009)
Two temporal networks of contacts among students and teachers at a primary school in Lyon, France, on consecutive days of in October 2009. Each network accumulates all contacts over the course of a single day; contacts were sampled at 20-second intervals.
This network has 242 nodes and 125773 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Weighted, Temporal, Metadata