Tootfinder

London-based "neocloud" startup Nscale closed a $433M pre-Series C SAFE round from Nvidia, Nokia, Dell, and others, after raising a $1.1B Series B on Sept. 25 (John Reynolds/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2025/10/01/nscale-closes-433m-round-days-after…

Nscale closes $433M round, days after bagging $1.1BN funding
Nscale, the UK-based AI data centre startup, has closed a $433 million funding round, just days after bagging a $1.1 billion funding round, as the vast investment in AI infrastructure shows no signs of abating.Nscale, which pitches itself as a "hyperscaler engineered for AI", was named as a key local AI infrastructure partner for OpenAI, Microsoft and Nvidia, which announced significant investments into the UK AI ecosystem last week, coinciding with the visit of President Trump.The latest $433m…

The last light of 2025....
(...is giving me big hopes for 2026, against all odds!)
#LandscapePhotography #Sunset #Alps

Semantic Zoom and Mini-Maps for Software Cities
Malte Hansen, Jens Bamberg, Noe Baumann, Wilhelm Hasselbring
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00003 https://arxiv…

Semantic Zoom and Mini-Maps for Software Cities
Software visualization tools can facilitate program comprehension by providing visual metaphors, or abstractions that reduce the amount of textual data that needs to be processed mentally. One way they do this is by enabling developers to build an internal representation of the visualized software and its architecture. However, as the amount of displayed data in the visualization increases, the visualization itself can become more difficult to comprehend. The ability to display small and large …

@… hello! i’ve been following your links feed for a while
thank you for sharing them!
my feed reader only shows the permalink to the link’s landing page on your site, not the link itself, so i took a look at the feed
i think the feed has the guid/permalink and the target link swapped, based on this fragment (spaces added to suppress link rewriti…

Some Further Developments on a Neurobiologically-based Model for Color Sensations in Humans
Charles Q. Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01000 https://arxiv.or…

Some Further Developments on a Neurobiologically-based Model for Color Sensations in Humans
At HVEI-2012, I presented a neurobiologically-based model for trichromatic color sensations in humans, mapping the neural substrate for color sensations to V1-L4: the thalamic recipient layer of the primary visual cortex. In this paper, I propose that V1-L4 itself consists of three distinct sub-layers that directly correspond to the three primary color sensations: blue, red, and green. Furthermore, I apply this model to three aspects of color vision: the three-dimensional (3D) color solid, dich…

On (generative) AI:
"So it's sort of like when we fed cows with cows and got mad cow disease."
https://framapiaf.org/@bbbhltz/115646412773089943

Classification for smooth manifolds looking like $\mathbb{CP}^3\times S^7$
Wen Shen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00613 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00613

Classification for smooth manifolds looking like $\mathbb{CP}^3\times S^7$
In this paper, we classify simply connected closed smooth $13$-dimensional manifolds whose cohomology ring is isomorphic to that of $\mb{CP}^3\times S^7$, up to diffeomorphism, homeomorphism, and homotopy equivalence. Furthermore, if such a manifold satisfies certain conditions, either itself or its connected sum with an exotic $13$-sphere $Σ^{13}$ admits a Riemannian metric of non-negative sectional curvature. As an additional application of our classification, we classify the diagonal $S^1$-…

I use Teedy for document management on my Docker server. The downside is that this application does not allow you to set your preferred language; it chooses it itself based on your browser's language.
What a pain. The Spanish translation is so bad that I had to write a tutorial to figure out what each button does.
#selfhosting

Orbšn slows down support for Ukraine again, – history repeats itself #shorts: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/orbn-slows-down-support-for.html

Just ordered a small VPS to give #selfhosting

YunoHost: garden your own piece of the Internet!
YunoHost is a system that installs itself on a server and allows you to install and maintain - with very little technical knowledge - digital services (apps) that you control.

Reason Emerges for Trevon Diggs’ Release By Cowboys – Report https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/trevon-diggs-reason-realease-timing/

wired: a carefully calibrated generative music system that recombines melodies & textures like a sonic mood ring & won't repeat itself for approximately 387 years.
inspired: another green world, 24/7 forever. @…

Patron-supported journalism, including newsletters on platforms like Patreon and Substack, offers only a precarious income for many journalists (Ana Marie Cox/Talking Points Memo)
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25/patron-supported-journalism-can…

Patron-Supported Journalism Can’t Be the Future of News 
Writing about the failure of patron-supported journalism is itself a kind of...

Putin wants to fool you.
Russia isn’t winning.
Administration officials say that the “fall” of the eastern Ukrainian city of #Pokrovsk is a bellwether for what’s to come for Ukraine.
⭐️Yet, Pokrovsk, whose population was only around 60,000 even before the war, has yet to fall.
And in the entire year and a half that the Russians have spent trying to take this relatively small city,…

Russia isn’t winning. Putin wants to fool you.
Putin’s hope is that U.S. will somehow convince itself that Ukraine can’t succeed. Don’t fall for it.

Planning for Christmas Lego has begun. Sets have been divided between my son and I. The one set by itself is new and we will alternate bags.
#Christmas
#Lego
#WinterVillage

Do you have the ability to write code for Apple platforms? Do you know what MDM / device management is? Do you understand what Compliance is? Do you care about being able to use a Mac or iPad or iPhone for work or school?
Does the idea of dealing with the bugs that can crop up from things like "this needs to be reliably managed like a server, but a human randomly sleeps it mid-process and when it wakes up it's in a different country!" sound interesting to you?
If so - come be my direct co-worker!
Need to be able to be based in/work within the US, but the team itself is fully remote. Multiple positions open.
Feel free to DM me with questions
https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200628824-0836/software-engineer-test-infrastructure

How Manus distanced itself from its Chinese roots to court US investors; a source says Meta's $2.5B deal includes a $500M retention pool for Manus' employees (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/…

Cars, like everything else now, are mostly made to be data collection devices. You can't collect data on every possible thing without lots of chips, man. Get with the program. How is the AI going to simulate us once it wipes us out if it doesn't collect every possible datapoint it can now? Come on. It's like you don't even WANT humanity to sacrifice itself for the betterment of the universe!

Cars, like everything else now, are mostly made to be data collection devices. You can't collect data on every possible thing without lots of chips, man. Get with the program. How is the AI going to simulate us once it wipes us out if it doesn't collect every possible datapoint it can now? Come on. It's like you don't even WANT humanity to sacrifice itself for the betterment of the universe!

For #MonochromeMonday and #Photomontag ... I visited this spot twice now and it looked SO different. Once with a lot of fog in the evening, the other time earlier with less fog.
Not just was it the fog that ws different. But once there were NO birds at all. And the other time it w…

How could this happen in a country that *checks notes* has made itself entirely beholden to US Big Tech and Big Pharma?
#Ireland

'Outrage' as former tech giant lobbyist appointed to Data Protection Commission 
Privacy experts and digital wellbeing activists say appointment 'reflects a concerning level of disregard for EU law

You Can Buy This 100-year-old Convent for a Promise–That You Preserve its History https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/europe-on-the-prairie-will-sell-you-its-100-year-old-convent-for-a-promise-that-you-preserve-i…

You Can Buy This 100-year-old Convent for a Promise–That You Preserve its History
The building itself will be signed over to the new ownership for free, as long as they come with a plan to develop and maintain it. 

We lost power for just a couple of minutes but it took a fair bit longer for FTTN to find itself again 'cos, you know, it's slow.
#WindyWeather #Kambah #Canberra

For those of you in Europe that just had #DST end, I hope you remembered to update your clocks and watches. My watch already updated itself correctly, as you can see. 😉
#ClockChange #TimeChange

The paradox of Nazism being both the most capitalist thing possible, defining itself as explicitly anticommunist, while masquerading as "socialism" is difficult to resolve until you understand one thing: fascism pivots around antisemitism (and its extension, conspiratorial thinking).
I'm, of course, not talking about the redefinition of "antisemitism" into meaning any criticism of Israel but rather an anti-Jewish conspiracy narrative rooted in Roman Christianity.
This is critical to understand as MAGA fascism pivots between capitalist and pseudo-anticapitalist with Trump in the middle. Hitler did the same thing. Strasserism helped the Nazis gain power by pulling in the Left. In the Nazis case they killed the Stasserists pretty quickly. Now, I think we're seeing an attempt to make the opposite pivot happen in MAGA. But it's all the same thing.
Fascism can infinitely fail to address the needs of the people while dismissing it's own responsibility for creating the problem by maintaining a permanent enemy.
This is why it's important to understand antisemitism and how to fight it. It's especially important now because the apparatus of violence in Israel is itself a tool of global fascism, and we finally have an opportunity to dismantle the whole thing. But we have to be aware of how fascists can pivot around to block this.
I've been reading Safety Through Solidarity, and I think it's especially relevant at this time.
https://www.akpress.org/safety-through-solidarity.html

China’s coastal cities are sinking as seas rise at record speed #China

China’s coastal cities are sinking as seas rise at record speed
Sea levels are rising faster than at any time in 4,000 years, scientists report, with China’s major coastal cities at particular risk. The rapid increase is driven by warming oceans and melting ice, while human activities like groundwater pumping make it worse. In some areas, the land itself is sinking faster than the ocean is rising. Still, researchers see progress as cities like Shanghai adopt new technologies to stabilize the ground and prepare for the future.

Behind the Blog: We Have Recommendations For You https://www.404media.co/behind-the-blog-we-have-recommendations-for-you/

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY! Ukraine united the ENTIRE WORLD around itself, – Zelenskyy #shorts: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/22/for-the-first-time-in.html

Liars gotta lie
From: @…
https://mastodon.nu/@janhoglund/115761296244811469

Aging gracefully is more than just life's milestones; it's an investment in the adventure itself. I am dedicated to helping seniors thrive in health and wealth. What do you believe is essential for a fulfilling retirement? Share your wisdom! 💡
#SeniorsLivingWell #RetirementGoals #LifeJourney

⚖️ Weight loss alone not enough to boost men's fertility
#medicine <…

Weight loss alone not enough to boost men's fertility
How men lose weight could affect their chances of having a baby, with new research from the University of Adelaide revealing healthy lifestyle behaviors seem more beneficial for improving fertility than weight loss itself.

The only flavour of decentralisation there’s no room for at FOSDEM is the kind that won’t speak at a conference that allows itself to be sponsored by, and thereby whitewashes, a surveillance capitalist like Google that is complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
ht…

TikTok names veteran government affairs executive Ziad Ojakli as its head of public policy for the Americas, replacing longtime policy lead Michael Beckerman (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/11/25/tiktok-public-policy-ziad-ojakli

Exclusive: TikTok hires Ziad Ojakli as new head of public policy for Americas
Ojakli will become the public face of TikTok's policy strategy as it looks to get sold and save itself from a ban.

Good analysis, my initial personal take was too pessimistic I think.
The EU's decision to secure the funding of Ukraine's war for the next two years is one of the most important developments of the entire year. It is a disaster for Russia, and it shows what Europe exerting itself as a strategic actor looks like in practice.
https://

Nice new accessible trail in #McLarenPark from Mansell Promenade to John F. Shelley Promenade. No more need to loop around up a steep hill on Shelley to get to the part with the great views west.

From a selection of 2099 tracks, this is my week's #MondayRandom10:
1. The Smashing Pumpkins, “Lily (My One and Only)”
2. Goldie, "Inner City Life”
3. Qoiet, “cursedOBJECT”
4. Pop Will Eat Itself, “RSVP”
5. Rocky Leon, “Billionaire”
6. Ronnie James Dio, “Love is All”
7. Frankie Goes to Hollywood, “Relax”
8 Robert Palmer, “Simply Irresistible”

I highly recommend using Avenir Next Condensed as your code editor’s user interface font, and Iosevka as the monospaced editor font itself: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka

GitHub - be5invis/Iosevka: Versatile typeface for code, from code.
Versatile typeface for code, from code. Contribute to be5invis/Iosevka development by creating an account on GitHub.

How the Supreme Court is using Trump to grab more power for itself (Ian Millhiser/Vox)
https://www.vox.com/politics/471611/supreme-court-trump-slaughter-unitary-executive
http://www.memeorandum.com/251208/p111#a251208p111

"Biodegradable Plastic Made from Bamboo Is Stronger and Easy to Recycle"
#Bamboo #Plastic #Plastics

Biodegradable Plastic Made from Bamboo Is Stronger and Easy to Recycle
The rigid yet biodegradable plastic outperforms not only alternative biodegradable options, but plastic itself for mechanical strength.

Amazon Web Services announces AWS RTB Fabric, a real-time bidding service for ad buyers and sellers, aiming to cut integration hours between ad tech partners (Seb Joseph/Digiday)
https://digiday.com/marketing/amazons-next-frontier-in-ad…

Amazon’s next frontier in advertising: the cloud infrastructure it runs on
The ad dollars are nice but the real prize for Amazon is the infrastructure itself -- the rails on which the entire system runs.

a dozen years ago, i wrote liner notes for a reissue of callender's 1972 album, "the way," nixed by a former label owner just before it went into (re)production.
https://social.lol/@thetonearm/115587988828492685

Here is the explanation of @… itself why it was down worldwide yesterday (again) and it styled a lot on the Internet.
»Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025:
On 18 November 2025 at 11:20 UTC (all times in this blog are UTC), Cloudflar's network began experiencing significant failures to deliver core network traffic. […]«
☁️

Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025
Cloudflare suffered a service outage on November 18, 2025. The outage was triggered by a bug in generation logic for a Bot Management feature file causing many Cloudflare services to be affected.

GOP pats itself on the back for not fixing a problem it created
#news

Longest US government shutdown in history set to end after House passes bill
Measure to restart federal operations passes narrowly, but excludes healthcare funding demanded by Democrats

Adding All Flavors: A Hybrid Random Number Generator for dApps and Web3
Ranjith Chodavarapu, Rabimba Karanjai, Xinxin Fan, Weidong Shi, Lei Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12062 h…

Adding All Flavors: A Hybrid Random Number Generator for dApps and Web3
Random numbers play a vital role in many decentralized applications (dApps), such as gaming and decentralized finance (DeFi) applications. Existing random number provision mechanisms can be roughly divided into two categories, on-chain, and off-chain. On-chain approaches usually rely on the blockchain as the major input and all computations are done by blockchain nodes. The major risk for this type of method is that the input itself is susceptible to the adversary's influence. Off-chain…

The increasing variety and abundance of life itself vastly multiplies the number of niches available for life. The resulting system is a web of makers and users, eaters and eaten, collaborators and competitors.
-Pardot Kynes, Report to Emperor Shaddam IV
#dunequotes

@… Hey, it is me again 😅
Just to let you know that I receive some 400 Bad Request errors from some DoH servers (dns.quad9.net and ns0.fdn.fr for instance) while some others accept my queries (dns.google and Cloudflare 1.1.1.1).
I am not sure yet if the error is on my use of the library or within the library itself.
Here is the code to run the query:

There are 3 fundamental freedoms outlined in Dawn of Everything:
(1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings;
(2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and
(3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.
I think these can all be captured in one statement when reframed as a system constraint: for a system to be free, participation must be optional for all members.
People must be part of *some* system. Even individualistic survivalism is itself a system (if not a very good one). Then there is a corollary as well: any system that is not free, that is not optional, can turn optional systems into mandatory ones, and thus (adopted from the MLK quote) un-freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere.
Edit:
I'm gonna drop the #Philosophy tag on here because apparently that's where I went with it. Challenges and push-back welcome.
Edit:
Aaaaand Its a blog post
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/an-algorithm-for-liberation
As usual, comments, typos, and questions are always welcome.

Auto-scaling Continuous Memory for GUI Agent
Wenyi Wu, Kun Zhou, Ruoxin Yuan, Vivian Yu, Stephen Wang, Zhiting Hu, Biwei Huang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09038 https://

Auto-scaling Continuous Memory for GUI Agent
We study how to endow GUI agents with scalable memory that help generalize across unfamiliar interfaces and long-horizon tasks. Prior GUI agents compress past trajectories into text tokens, which balloons context length and misses decisive visual cues (e.g., exact widget size and position). We propose a continuous memory that encodes each GUI trajectory into a fixed-length sequence of continuous embeddings using the VLM itself as an encoder; these embeddings are plugged directly into the backbo…

Such a bleak outlook: «The mere possibility that something could be AI-generated has already eroded trust between users. “AI is turning Reddit into a heap of garbage,” one account wrote in r/AmITheJerk. “Even if a post suspected of being AI isn’t, just the existence of AI is like having a spy in the room. Suspicion itself is an enemy.” Ally used to enjoy reading subreddits like r/AmIOverreacting. But now she doesn’t know if her interactions are real anymore»
/HT @…
https://archive.is/20251206034104/https://www.wired.com/story/ai-slop-is-ruining-reddit-for-everyone/

Someone Is Trying to ‘Hack’ People Through Apple Podcasts https://www.404media.co/someone-is-trying-to-hack-people-through-apple-podcasts/

I needed to replace* my lovely extra long yoga mat and I’ve been angry for a week that I can only buy longer mats (I’m 178 cm tall, most mats are about 180) that are also wider. My new cute blue mat got delivered today in time for my class and … actually it was great. The extra width means less shuffling between poses for long limbs.
* the top layer unstuck from the bottom layer and stuck to itself instead to create a sort of curly lettuce effect, after years of loyal service!

Quantizer Design for Finite Model Approximations, Model Learning, and Quantized Q-Learning for MDPs with Unbounded Spaces
Osman Bicer, Ali D. Kara, Serdar Yuksel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04355

Quantizer Design for Finite Model Approximations, Model Learning, and Quantized Q-Learning for MDPs with Unbounded Spaces
In this paper, for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with unbounded state spaces we present refined upper bounds presented in [Kara et. al. JMLR'23] on finite model approximation errors via optimizing the quantizers used for finite model approximations. We also consider implications on quantizer design for quantized Q-learning and empirical model learning, and the performance of policies obtained via Q-learning where the quantized state is treated as the state itself. We highlight the distinctio…

There should be a policy that when a package provides multiple build systems for itself, and you're building it with #CMake, you should always remove all installed CMake files to make software developed on your platform portable.
#Debian #Fedora #Gentoo #packaging

@… So, depending on context, I think I have three different answers:
#1 for better and worse, the Protestant Christian church has, over centuries, managed to interweave itself with Danish culture.
So even though I don’t have any faith, I would gladly and with no reservations participate in something like Christmas mass. I’ve even been to one at the Nordic hous…

Universality and kernel-adaptive training for classically trained, quantum-deployed generative models
Andrii Kurkin, Kevin Shen, Susanne Pielawa, Hao Wang, Vedran Dunjko
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08476

Universality and kernel-adaptive training for classically trained, quantum-deployed generative models
The instantaneous quantum polynomial (IQP) quantum circuit Born machine (QCBM) has been proposed as a promising quantum generative model over bitstrings. Recent works have shown that the training of IQP-QCBM is classically tractable w.r.t. the so-called Gaussian kernel maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) loss function, while maintaining the potential of a quantum advantage for sampling itself. Nonetheless, the model has a number of aspects where improvements would be important for more general utili…

R2RGEN: Real-to-Real 3D Data Generation for Spatially Generalized Manipulation
Xiuwei Xu, Angyuan Ma, Hankun Li, Bingyao Yu, Zheng Zhu, Jie Zhou, Jiwen Lu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08547

R2RGEN: Real-to-Real 3D Data Generation for Spatially Generalized Manipulation
Towards the aim of generalized robotic manipulation, spatial generalization is the most fundamental capability that requires the policy to work robustly under different spatial distribution of objects, environment and agent itself. To achieve this, substantial human demonstrations need to be collected to cover different spatial configurations for training a generalized visuomotor policy via imitation learning. Prior works explore a promising direction that leverages data generation to acquire a…

CapGeo: A Caption-Assisted Approach to Geometric Reasoning
Yuying Li, Siyi Qian, Hao Liang, Leqi Zheng, Ruichuan An, Yongzhen Guo, Wentao Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09302 …

CapGeo: A Caption-Assisted Approach to Geometric Reasoning
Geometric reasoning remains a core challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Even the most advanced closed-source systems, such as GPT-O3 and Gemini-2.5-Pro, still struggle to solve geometry problems reliably, despite exhibiting strong textual reasoning abilities on tasks like the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). This gap suggests that the bottleneck lies in understanding geometric diagrams rather than reasoning itself. Since geometric figures can often be faithfully des…

With an influx of Meta alums, some OpenAI staffers worry it is adopting Meta's tactics, like using social media dynamics with Sora and a softening stance on ads (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-readies-facebook-era

OpenAI Readies Itself for Its Facebook Era
This summer, Fidji Simo wasted no time addressing a concern among many at OpenAI. Leading her first all-hands meeting as the startup’s new CEO of applications, she acknowledged that she and many others at OpenAI shared the same background: They’d previously worked at Meta Platforms. And then ...

Or just use a solid rectangle selection tool and DELETE whatever you want to redact.
I’ve never understood how people can be so terrible at redacting pixel-based images. PDFs can be a special case (hint: redact, then Print as PDF)
https://todon.eu/@cf/115521875990737714

Crimson Fork /🌌🏳️‍⚧️&ΘΔ (@cf@todon.eu)
Attached: 1 image When censoring names or other things in screenshots/images, it's important to know that a lot of image editing programs default to a brush with partial transparency both for the shape of the brush as well as sometimes the color itself, We've personally been able to extract enough information from censored screenshots to narrow down what the crossed out sections are, even if to the naked eye they were not readable. Built in mobile image editors tend to be the worst offender in…

A lot of companies in tech are non-profit if we're honest. But the issue really is that by being a "non-profit tech company" you kinda align yourself the the idea of the tech company itself and all the baggage that brings. It's where a lot of the issues (for example with Mozilla) come from
https://ma…

NFL predictions: How trade for Sauce Gardner impacts the Colts' Super Bowl chances, according to proven model

https://www.cbssports.com/betting/ne…

@lexinova@mas.to @… @… There's information about it in https://

Setting humane goals for #BigTech
https://www.wired.com/story/big-interview-event-techdirt-mike-masnick-common-tools-alex-komoroske/

Lahore's toxic winters: How smog is reshaping daily life in urban Pakistan #Pakistan…

Lahore's toxic winters: How smog is reshaping daily life in urban Pakistan
In November 2025, Lahore, the second-largest city in Pakistan, registered a "hazardous" air quality index of 509, according to IQAir, a global air quality monitoring organization. The number speaks for itself. Eyes sting, throats burn and headlights blur into halos. In winter, the city feels as though it has slipped beneath a toxic sea.

MCMC for State Space models
Paul Fearnhead, Chris Sherlock
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04932 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04932…

MCMC for State Space models
A state-space model is a time-series model that has an unobserved latent process from which we take noisy measurements over time. The observations are conditionally independent given the latent process and the latent process itself is Markovian. These properties lead to simplifications for the conditional distribution of the latent process given the parameters and the observations. This chapter looks at how we can leverage the properties of state-space models to construct efficient MCMC sampler…

Strategyproof Tournament Rules for Teams with a Constant Degree of Selfishness
David Pennock, Daniel Schoepflin, Kangning Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05235 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05235 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.05235
arXiv:2512.05235v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We revisit the well-studied problem of designing fair and manipulation-resistant tournament rules. In this problem, we seek a mechanism that (probabilistically) identifies the winner of a tournament after observing round-robin play among $n$ teams in a league. Such a mechanism should satisfy the natural properties of monotonicity and Condorcet consistency. Moreover, from the league's perspective, the winner-determination tournament rule should be strategyproof, meaning that no team can do better by losing a game on purpose.
Past work considered settings in which each team is fully selfish, caring only about its own probability of winning, and settings in which each team is fully selfless, caring only about the total winning probability of itself and the team to which it deliberately loses. More recently, researchers considered a mixture of these two settings with a parameter $\lambda$. Intermediate selfishness $\lambda$ means that a team will not lose on purpose unless its pair gains at least $\lambda s$ winning probability, where $s$ is the individual team's sacrifice from its own winning probability. All of the dozens of previously known tournament rules require $\lambda = \Omega(n)$ to be strategyproof, and it has been an open problem to find such a rule with the smallest $\lambda$.
In this work, we make significant progress by designing a tournament rule that is strategyproof with $\lambda = 11$. Along the way, we propose a new notion of multiplicative pairwise non-manipulability that ensures that two teams cannot manipulate the outcome of a game to increase the sum of their winning probabilities by more than a multiplicative factor $\delta$ and provide a rule which is multiplicatively pairwise non-manipulable for $\delta = 3.5$.
toXiv_bot_toot

Kernel ridge regression under power-law data: spectrum and generalization
Arie Wortsman, Bruno Loureiro
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04780 https://arxiv.org/…

Kernel ridge regression under power-law data: spectrum and generalization
In this work, we investigate high-dimensional kernel ridge regression (KRR) on i.i.d. Gaussian data with anisotropic power-law covariance. This setting differs fundamentally from the classical source & capacity conditions for KRR, where power-law assumptions are typically imposed on the kernel eigen-spectrum itself. Our contributions are twofold. First, we derive an explicit characterization of the kernel spectrum for polynomial inner-product kernels, giving a precise description of how the ker…

Goddamn, Jacquis Neal is *such* a good host for Crowd Control, and the show itself is so fun! It always feels fresh and new, mainly because it's unscripted and has new audience members (and comedians) every episode.
https://watch.dropout.tv/videos/this-bush-loves-bush

This Bush Loves Bush - New Releases - Dropout
Jenny, Megan, and Joyelle learn about the Voltron fandom and lift a witch’s curse. Content Warning: Discussion of Childhood Cancer - [18:51-19:32] Discussions of Accidental Death - [19:42-21:18] Description of Physical Injury - [20:12-20:28, 21:22-21:40]

It Sounds Like Jerry Jones Isn’t All-In for a Blockbuster Cowboys Trade https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/jerry-jones-blockbuster-cowboys-trade/?adt_ei=[email]

GCVAMD: A Modified CausalVAE Model for Causal Age-related Macular Degeneration Risk Factor Detection and Prediction
Daeyoung Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02781 https://…

GCVAMD: A Modified CausalVAE Model for Causal Age-related Macular Degeneration Risk Factor Detection and Prediction
Age Related Macular Degeneration(AMD) has been one of the most leading causes of permanent vision impairment in ophthalmology. Though treatments, such as anti VEGF drugs or photodynamic therapies, were developed to slow down the degenerative process of AMD, there is still no specific cure to reverse vision loss caused by AMD. Thus, for AMD, detecting existence of risk factors of AMD or AMD itself within the patient retina in early stages is a crucial task to reduce the possibility of vision imp…

That's how our hike at the #mummelsee started ... and how it was when we were up there. - But the walk was quite okay.
We checked the rain radar and decided to go back down rather quickly. We leveraged our rain gear and it did not disappoint us! 🙂
So we didn't see the area atop - the so called

How OpenSea reinvented itself from an NFT marketplace to a crypto trading aggregator, facilitating $1.6B in trades in the first two weeks of October (Jeff Kauflin/Forbes)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2

OpenSea Is Remaking Itself Into A Crypto Trading Aggregator
The crash of the NFT market led OpenSea to fire more than half of its staff. But the startup has reinvented itself into a place for buying and selling all tokens, especially memecoins, and trading volume is surging once again.

"How the 15-Minute Sustainable City Model Cuts Carbon by 98% While Growing Local Food"
#Sustainability
https://happyeconews.com/15-minute-sustainable-city/

How the 15-Minute Sustainable City Model Cuts Carbon by 98% While Growing Local Food | Happy Eco News
A 15-minute sustainable city framework by Concordia University researchers shows neighborhoods can become self-sufficient in vegetables while cutting emissions by 98 percent. The model combines rooftop gardens, solar-powered electric delivery, and local markets. Testing in Ontario proved the system pays for itself in 2.8 years while strengthening community bonds and building food security.RetryClaude can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.

WBD's "unsolicited interest" statement indicates that it is willing to sell its valuable studio and streaming business instead of splitting itself into two (Peter Kafka/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/wbd-sale-mul…

The possible sale of Warner Bros. just got a lot more interesting
Warner Bros. Discovery rejected Paramount's bid — now it wants more bidders for some or all of the company.

We can't trust Trump with regard to BigTech, we can't trust BigTech itself and the USA is breaking down it's cybersecurity capabilities, plenty of reasons to start walking away from hyperscalers where you can....
https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/ne…

Layoffs, reassignments further deplete CISA
Some CISA staffers have been pushed out, while others are being told to move across the country for jobs outside their skill sets.

OSCAR: Orthogonal Stochastic Control for Alignment-Respecting Diversity in Flow Matching
Jingxuan Wu, Zhenglin Wan, Xingrui Yu, Yuzhe Yang, Bo An, Ivor Tsang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09060

OSCAR: Orthogonal Stochastic Control for Alignment-Respecting Diversity in Flow Matching
Flow-based text-to-image models follow deterministic trajectories, forcing users to repeatedly sample to discover diverse modes, which is a costly and inefficient process. We present a training-free, inference-time control mechanism that makes the flow itself diversity-aware. Our method simultaneously encourages lateral spread among trajectories via a feature-space objective and reintroduces uncertainty through a time-scheduled stochastic perturbation. Crucially, this perturbation is projected …

TikTok pushes merchants to use a new ad-buying tool that promotes videos linking to TikTok Shop rather than merchants' own sites, frustrating some merchants (Ann Gehan/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tiktok-shops-new-…

TikTok Shop’s New Ad Policy Risks Alienating Merchants
As TikTok readies itself for the expected sale of its U.S. business to a new venture controlled by American investors, the company is trying to boost its commerce business, TikTok Shop. But the measures it has taken risk alienating merchants who sell on the shopping service. TikTok Shop in ...

#ThrowbackThursday Platinum printing session at the now defunkt Oregon College of Art and Craft. The pictures are from an unforgettable winter hike in the Eagle Creek valley, just a few days prior (and 6 months before a wild fire consumed the entire valley)...
(Also see my prev. message for my new darkroom setup :)

Good morning!
Here are some photos from the #Mummelsee in the #Schwarzwald . We wanted to visit it last year already but somehow just managed to go there this time.
The lake itself is scenic and beautiful. But definitely a "hot spot". Luckily we were there at a day/time w…

Interleaved Learning and Exploration: A Self-Adaptive Fuzz Testing Framework for MLIR
Zeyu Sun, Jingjing Liang, Weiyi Wang, Chenyao Suo, Junjie Chen, Fanjiang Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07815

Interleaved Learning and Exploration: A Self-Adaptive Fuzz Testing Framework for MLIR
MLIR (Multi-Level Intermediate Representation) has rapidly become a foundational technology for modern compiler frameworks, enabling extensibility across diverse domains. However, ensuring the correctness and robustness of MLIR itself remains challenging. Existing fuzzing approaches-based on manually crafted templates or rule-based mutations-struggle to generate sufficiently diverse and semantically valid test cases, making it difficult to expose subtle or deep-seated bugs within MLIR's complex…

LOBE-GS: Load-Balanced and Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting for Large-Scale Scene Reconstruction
Sheng-Hsiang Hung, Ting-Yu Yen, Wei-Fang Sun, Simon See, Shih-Hsuan Hung, Hung-Kuo Chu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01767

LOBE-GS: Load-Balanced and Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting for Large-Scale Scene Reconstruction
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has established itself as an efficient representation for real-time, high-fidelity 3D scene reconstruction. However, scaling 3DGS to large and unbounded scenes such as city blocks remains difficult. Existing divide-and-conquer methods alleviate memory pressure by partitioning the scene into blocks, but introduce new bottlenecks: (i) partitions suffer from severe load imbalance since uniform or heuristic splits do not reflect actual computational demands, and (ii) co…

There's a word at the beginning and end of Dawn of Everything that feels self-referential right now: Kairos.
> We began this book with a quote which refers to the Greek notion of kairos as one of those occasional moments in a society’s history when its frames of reference undergo a shift – a metamorphosis of the fundamental principles and symbols, when the lines between myth and history, science and magic become blurred – and, therefore, real change is possible. Philosophers sometimes like to speak of ‘the Event’ – a political revolution, a scientific discovery, an artistic masterpiece – that is, a breakthrough which reveals aspects of reality that had previously been unimaginable but, once seen, can never be unseen. If so, kairos is the kind of time in which Events are prone to happen.
> Societies around the world appear to be cascading towards such a point. This is particularly true of those which, since the First World War, have been in the habit of calling themselves ‘Western’. On the one hand, fundamental breakthroughs in the physical sciences, or even artistic expression, no longer seem to occur with anything like the regularity people came to expect in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet at the same time, our scientific means of understanding the past, not just our species’ past but that of our planet, has been advancing with dizzying speed. Scientists in 2020 are not (as readers of mid-twentieth-century science fiction might have hoped) encountering alien civilizations in distant star systems; but they are encountering radically different forms of society under their own feet, some forgotten and newly rediscovered, others more familiar, but now understood in entirely new ways.
Reading this as I write something very inspired by this work feels especially serendipitous, especially at this time. When they wrote the book, I think that kairos felt more serendipitous itself. But as the frequency of opportunity increases, the veil between realities feels more malleable... that perhaps we can poke a finger through and open a portal to a completely different future than the one we've felt locked into for such a long time.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/the-coordinated-swarm-lyhr

Stand Up, NAO! Increasing the Reliability of Stand-Up Motions Through Error Compensation in Position Control
Philip Reichenberg, Tim Laue
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02129 https:…

Stand Up, NAO! Increasing the Reliability of Stand-Up Motions Through Error Compensation in Position Control
Stand-up motions are an indispensable part of humanoid robot soccer. A robot incapable of standing up by itself is removed from the game for some time. In this paper, we present our stand-up motions for the NAO robot. Our approach dates back to 2019 and has been evaluated and slightly expanded over the past six years. We claim that the main reason for failed stand-up attempts are large errors in the executed joint positions. By addressing such problems by either executing special motions to fre…

Vox hires Astead Herndon from the NYT to host a new video podcast and serve as editorial director starting on October 20, a significant loss for the NYT (Natalie Korach/Status)
https://www.status.news/p/nbc-news-layoffs-cuts

Rattled at 30 Rock
NBC News is reeling from its biggest round of cuts in years, cutting about 150 staffers as it divorces itself from MSNBC and CNBC.

Mailbag: Looking back, can history repeat? https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/mailbag-looking-back-can-history-repeat

Hey all, there are some photos from a hike in the #schwarzwald
Actually we thought that it would just take us less than an hour - but it wasn't simply a straight walk :-D
It was raining from time to time - which was indeed pretty cool. A) there was noone around except us and B) the colors were often just insane. Fully saturated green, the brown from the wood - and sometimes…

Great documentary about Demis Hassabis working on AGI. Really about history and humans, working on a hard problem, less about the technology itself. But that makes it interesting to watch for everybody. Also it contains a clear warning about coming AGI.
https://youtu.be/d95J8yzvjbQ?si=BsfJDJ…

Mailbag: Looking back, can history repeat? https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/mailbag-looking-back-can-history-repeat

For #mountainmonday AND #monochromeMonday , here's the start (well and end) of my hike the weekend before last.
Usually I'm not a fan of photographing roads, but this one made a nice line over the saddle and into the fog so I just gave it a try.
And heck was it c…

Daily email newsletter 1440, which has 4.5M subscribers, is repositioning itself from a newsletter-only brand to a destination for explainers on its website (Sara Guaglione/Digiday)
https://digiday.com/media/why-1440-is-evolving-from-a…

Why 1440 is evolving from a newsletter company to a destination of explainers
Newsletter company 1440 is expanding beyond email by building an online library of explainers, amid the rise of AI-driven search.

xAI partners with El Salvador to deploy Grok across 5,000 public schools, reaching 1M students in an "AI-powered education program" over the next two years (Dara Kerr/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/11/elon-musk-el-salva…

Mick Shots: Time to start helping themselves https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/mick-shots-time-to-start-helping-themselves

Reddit launches Interactive Ads, letting brands create immersive, participatory experiences directly in the Reddit feed, now testing with select advertisers (Kendra Barnett/Adweek)
https://www.adweek.com/media/reddit-interactive-ad-format-paramount-runni…

EXCLUSIVE: Reddit Unveils Interactive Ad Format, Piloted by Paramount
Reddit debuts a new interactive ad format that lets brands build custom, participatory experiences—as the platform, buoyed by surging ad spend, positions itself as a creative playground for advertisers seeking deeper engagement and broader reach.

Mick Shots: Time to start helping themselves https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/mick-shots-time-to-start-helping-themselves

Jensen Huang says AMD's deal to offer 10% of itself to OpenAI is "surprising" and "imaginative" considering AMD was "so excited about" its next-generation chip (Annie Palmer/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/08/nvidia-huang-amd-open-ai.html

Nvidia's Huang says he's surprised AMD offered 10% of the company in 'clever' OpenAI deal
The deal includes a warrant for OpenAI to buy up to a 10% stake in AMD.

Source: the 60 Minutes interview with Trump on November 2 drew 13.2M viewers, according to early Nielsen data, the highest-rated episode since January 2021 (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/11/04/trump-60-minutes-cbs-interview-ratings-vie…

Scoop: Trump's "60 Minutes" interview draws roughly 13M viewers
The interview itself was a huge get for CBS, considering the network's complicated history with President Trump.

London is establishing itself as a center for quantitative finance; filings show trading firms XTX, Qube, and Quadrature each made £1B revenue in the past year (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/8a6502c3-f244-4b61-880b-b20cf03299cc

An investigation finds rampant caste bias in ChatGPT and Sora; a researcher also finds caste bias in Sarvam AI, which touts itself as a sovereign AI for India (Nilesh Christopher/MIT Technology Review)
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/01/1124621/openai-in…

OpenAI is huge in India. Its models are steeped in caste bias.
India is OpenAI’s second-largest market, but ChatGPT and Sora reproduce caste stereotypes that harm millions of people.