Tootfinder

The Steam Frame is released. At a shockingly high price range, but that's RAM for you in these post-ai days.
This means improvement on Linux VR in general with all the latest patches. The home-room is updated, the menus all looking fancy and new. Even if you got an old Vive.
Even more exciting than that, Steam have agreed to serve my place in the wait-queue so one might even arrive here in the coming weeks and thank goodnes it's after payday. If it was a week ago I might have had to give up my place.
Sounds like the Alyx updates intend for that game to run on the machine stand-alone, which would be nice. Able to take that big old complex game on the road to demo at parties.
Anyway. I'm poor again and dunno how long the wait for the package will be, but looking forward to seeing it.
God I hope it's not shit and rescues us from the Facebook-dominated market since they bought Oculus.
#vr #linux

RE: https://dair-community.social/@ZekuZelalem/117320888712641893
There's a bit of context behind this that's worth being aware of, and I'll do my best to explain it second (or third) hand. Abiy Ahmed has been the prime minister of Ethiopia since 2019. He was quite popular initially, but has held on to power for quite a while and has been called out for authoritarian tendencies.
His party, the Prosperity Party, is a liberal party that has privatized parts of the economy and is trying to dismantle ethnic federalism. This type of "modernization" is obviously supported by neoliberal forces around the world, especially since he took over from the ethno nationalist ML TPLF.
The TPLF was also authoritarian, brutal, and anti-democratic, as one would expect from an ML organization. Part of Abiy's popularity came from opposition to the TPLF. But more recently, but his forces also carried out genocide in Tigray during that war in 2022 (after his Nobel Peace Prize).
Part of the opposition to his modernization is that ending ethnic federalism would weaken the power of older ethnic structures. This could be seen as similar in some ways to conflicts across Europe in from 1848 through to the early 1900's and in the Balkans after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The connection between ethnicity and nationality has never really stopped causing problems. Liberalism is usually connected to the domination of one ethnic group into a singular national identity. This flows from the French Revolution, through the Russian revolution, and into both the Ethnic ML exported by Communist Russia as part of their attempts to weaken European capitalism and (via both American Colonial Nationalism and the French Revolution) into the Neoliberalism promoted by the US and European powers as a counter.
Ethiopia is a multiethnic country. Unfortunately the logic of the state (liberal or communist) tends to destroy these ethnic identities through a combination of ethnic cleansing, appropriation, and (often forced) integration.
Some of the conflict here is coming out of the tension between a national identity and ethnic identity, especially in relation to Tigray and Amhara, as well as the continued pressure of economic liberalization, and centralization vs federalization.
The point is that it's actually quite a bit more complicated than it may be presented as, especially outside of the religion. European interests may align with Abiy, and present him as a "modernizing force." Addis is one of the centers of the African Union. Meanwhile, other countries have their own interests in stoking this conflict. China, Turkey, the UAE, and Iran all sell drones to the Federal government. Eretria has an interest in creating a buffer zone to keep Ethiopia from seizing a port city from them. Sudan is involved, and I don't have the local political depth to know why.
Various groups will try to point to one group or another as the "good guy/bad guy" but it's definitely not that simple. It's just kind of tragic for everyone. I hope Ethiopian people find peace and freedom.
My hope is that Ethiopia will develop something like Democratic Confederalism that resolves these conflicts and tensions without wiping out the unique identities of the peoples who make up Ethiopia.

Random close packing at extreme size ratios with an Adam-based inflation protocol
Kenneth Desmond
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12235 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.12235 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.12235
arXiv:2608.12235v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We present \texttt{rcpgenerator}, an openly available code for generating $d$-dimensional dense, disordered, non-overlapping close packings from an arbitrary prescribed list of particle diameters. The method adapts the Clarke--Wiley inflation protocol, but instead uses the Adam optimizer to relax the particle configuration. Typically, particle coordinates are advanced with a single, global step size, which must shrink as the size ratio $S\equiv D_{\max}/D_{\min}$ grows, generally stalling the optimization. Adam instead gives each coordinate its own adaptive step size, stabilizing the optimization time across a broader range of $S$. We demonstrate this in three-dimensional periodic tests that reach $S\sim5\times10^{5}$ for a continuous lognormal distribution ($N\sim10^{6}$ diameters) and particle numbers up to $N\approx5.6\times10^{6}$ for power-law distributions, with the densest packings reaching $\phi\simeq0.87$, each completed in minutes to hours on a multicore machine. Across truncated-lognormal, truncated-power-law, and Weibull distributions, the resulting $\phi$ reproduces trends such as the locations of peaks and knees with distribution shape and $S$ found in prior numerical results and in the parameter-free Farr--Groot prediction, with a remaining offset typically $0.005$--$0.01$. Additionally, results are commensurate with multimodal packing densities measured in vibrated-bed experiments. The code and the complete per-case census behind every figure are released with the paper.
toXiv_bot_toot

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.HC. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.HC/new
[1/2]:
- Data-driven Head Motion Generation through Natural Gaze-Head Coordination
Xiaohan Liu, Yilin Wen, Yusuke Sugano
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25810
- TRIBE: Predicting Team Performance via Communication Behavior Ensembles
Ali Jalal-Kamali, Nikolos Gurney, David V. Pynadath, Fred Morstatter
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06926 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csAI_bot/117070249873784432
- Comprendia: AI-Augmented Code Comprehension
Costain Nachuma, Minhaz F. Zibran
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10290 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSE_bot/117081500356613109
- Neural implants and human safety: single-fault detection for DC-coupled recording front ends
Dimitris Antoniadis, Timothy Constandinou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10361 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eessSP_bot/117081505896378998
- A Neural Network Based Teleoperation for Remote Controlled Vehicles
Ning Ding, Azim Eskandarian
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10367 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csRO_bot/117081440193257425
- Leveraging Human Reading Behavior for Keyphrase Extraction: A Webcam-based Eye-tracking Corpus
Chengzhi Zhang, Xinyi Yan, Wenqi Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10688 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/117081592176417112
- Your LLM, Your Style: Behavioral Mode Axes for LLM Behavioral Control
Haoze Liu, Run Liu, Haiying Xu, Jiahui Han, Siyuan Fang, Siyu Yan, Huiqi Deng, Guanchu Wang, Na Zou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10703 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_bot/117081615179660277
- The GENEA Challenge 2026: A Large-Scale Disentangled Evaluation of Speech-Driven Gesture Generati...
Nagy, Garc\'ia, Voss, Tsakov, Kucherenko, Yoon, Henter
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10839 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/117081628353061346
- Auditable AI-Assisted Research Writing: An Engineering Discipline with Pre-Registered Process Obs...
Yang Zhou, Chengqun Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10858
- R4DSG: Relative 4D Scene Graph Memory for Object-Centric Question Answering in Long Egocentric Video
Ke Ma, Yamin Mao, Weiming Li, Shuai Tan, Yijie Zhong, Hao Chen, Haofen Wang, Meng Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11017 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/117081647623530374
toXiv_bot_toot