Tootfinder

"there is nothing whatsoever in the JTAC* assessment which backs up any of the claims being put out in a panic by government ministers."
*JTAC = assessment of the government’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre which forms the basis of the proscription of Palestine Action.
Yvette Cooper is Lying - Craig Murray

Yvette Cooper is Lying - Craig Murray
Yvette Cooper has continually lied about Palestine Action in a panicked attempt to defend the proscription of a direct action protest group which is opposing a Genocide in which Cooper’s government is deeply complicit. Cooper and other government ministers have repeatedly claimed: Palestine Action attacks people, not just weapons-making equipment Palestine Action is funded by […]

Linear representations of the mapping class group of dimension at most $3g-3$
Julian Kaufmann, Nick Salter, Zhong Zhang, Xiyan Zhong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11365

Linear representations of the mapping class group of dimension at most $3g-3$
We classify representations of the mapping class group of a surface of genus $g$ (with at most one puncture or boundary component) up to dimension $3g-3$. Any such representation is the direct sum of a representation in dimension $2g$ or $2g+1$ (given as the action on the (co)homology of the surface or its unit tangent bundle) with a trivial representation. As a corollary, any linear system on the moduli space of Riemann surfaces of genus $g$ in this range is of algebro-geometric origin.

Reminder: public protest is about visibility, not hiding. The power comes from people being willing to be visible, put their time on the line, and if needed, their bodies.
If you're going to start shit, maybe just ... don't. Direct action of the illegal sort requires careful planning and a tactical and strategic plan for why it will win. It happens sometimes, but it's not the mode, it's not the mode of the No Kings protests. This is a popular, public demonstration of outrage. It's legal (for now, and I hope, ever).
Yes, the police may try to kettle protesters and then trap them into curfew violations in places that have curfews. Masks won't save us from that where it happens. Just running the system with competent representation (and enough bodies to make it A Problem for the system) will.
We don't all need to be masked vigilantes at protests, and in a lot of cases, we need to be worried about the people masking up and starting shit. Remember that this is our opponents current tactic: masked, violent attacks. Don't look like them.

Freedom is not a gift to be given or granted; freedom is something we seize through collective struggle and direct action.
#Anarchy #Freedom #CollectiveStruggle

Filing: Disney and NBCUniversal sue Midjourney in California, accusing it of direct and secondary copyright infringement; they say talks with Midjourney failed (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/11/disney-nbcu-midjourney-copyright
…

Disney, NBCU sue Midjourney over copyright infringement
It's the first legal action from major Hollywood studios against a generative AI company.

Filing: Disney and NBCUniversal sue Midjourney in California, accusing it of direct and secondary copyright infringement; they say talks with Midjourney failed (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/11/disney-nbcu-midjourney-copyright
…

Disney, NBCU sue Midjourney over copyright infringement
It's the first legal action from major Hollywood studios against a generative AI company.

I'm not saying any new shit:
"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
- Letter from a Birmingham Jail, MLK

Direct Action and Sabotage
By William E. Trautmann
#UK

Reinforcement learning in densely recurrent biological networks
Miles Walter Churchland, Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09618 https://arxiv…

Reinforcement learning in densely recurrent biological networks
Training highly recurrent networks in continuous action spaces is a technical challenge: gradient-based methods suffer from exploding or vanishing gradients, while purely evolutionary searches converge slowly in high-dimensional weight spaces. We introduce a hybrid, derivative-free optimization framework that implements reinforcement learning by coupling global evolutionary exploration with local direct search exploitation. The method, termed ENOMAD (Evolutionary Nonlinear Optimization with Mes…

Bridging Perception and Action: Spatially-Grounded Mid-Level Representations for Robot Generalization
Jonathan Yang, Chuyuan Kelly Fu, Dhruv Shah, Dorsa Sadigh, Fei Xia, Tingnan Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06196

Bridging Perception and Action: Spatially-Grounded Mid-Level Representations for Robot Generalization
In this work, we investigate how spatially grounded auxiliary representations can provide both broad, high-level grounding as well as direct, actionable information to improve policy learning performance and generalization for dexterous tasks. We study these mid-level representations across three critical dimensions: object-centricity, pose-awareness, and depth-awareness. We use these interpretable mid-level representations to train specialist encoders via supervised learning, then feed them as…

Holographic D-brane constructions with dynamical gauge fields
Yongjun Ahn, Matteo Baggioli, Hyun-Sik Jeong, Masataka Matsumoto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09461

Holographic D-brane constructions with dynamical gauge fields
Holographic D-brane constructions, governed by the Dirac-Born-Infeld (DBI) action, play a central role in the AdS/CFT correspondence, particularly in applications to quantum chromodynamics and condensed matter systems. In this work, we demonstrate how to equip these bottom-up holographic models with dynamical boundary gauge fields, thereby introducing electromagnetic interactions into their dual field theory descriptions. As a direct application of this formalism, we compute the dispersion rela…

Divided difference operators for Hessenberg representations
Mathieu Guay-Paquet
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05614 https://arxiv.org/pd…

Divided difference operators for Hessenberg representations
The equivariant cohomology ring of a regular semisimple Hessenberg variety in type A is a free module over the equivariant cohomology ring of a point. When equipped with Tymoczko's dot action, it becomes a twisted representation of the symmetric group, and the character of this representation is given by the chromatic quasisymmetric function of an indifference graph. In this note, we use divided difference operators to decompose this representation as a direct sum of sub-representations in a wa…

Companies House have just sent me an email telling me that because of new laws, I need to verify my identity. So I leapt into action. There follows an open letter.
Dear Companies House.
The questions "Do you have a passport?" and "Do you have your passport on you in the office right now?" are different fucking questions and you should clarify which you mean before you direct me down an irreversible cul-de-sac in your application's verification logic.

Sea Shepherd fights to defend, conserve and protect the ocean. #ocean #environment

Sea Shepherd Global - Home
Sea Shepherd is an international, non-profit marine conservation organization that engages in direct action campaigns to defend wildlife, and conserve and protect the world’s ocean from illegal exploitation and environmental destruction.

We are barely 6 months into #TheAmericanFascist Presidency and we already find ourselves with fundamental rights in the American Constitution under direct threat and the power of the judiciary to enforce and check the power of the President being pulled back.
And Democratic Party members seem to be all talk and very very little action or leadership to counter this.
Are they waiting for the midterms to take back Congress?
At this pace, surely they see the risk that there may not BE midterms. Or that the results are negated, disputed or invalidated.
I can’t fathom how they are not removing themselves from Congress now in protest and calling for a general protest/strike of all freedom loving Americans to restore the constitution, force the Trump appointed fascist enabling judges to resign, and force Trump and his Administration to go.
July 4th is coming. Independence Day? Or not? Democracy or not?
#usa

EXPO: Stable Reinforcement Learning with Expressive Policies
Perry Dong, Qiyang Li, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07986 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07986 https://arxiv.org/html/2507.07986
arXiv:2507.07986v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study the problem of training and fine-tuning expressive policies with online reinforcement learning (RL) given an offline dataset. Training expressive policy classes with online RL present a unique challenge of stable value maximization. Unlike simpler Gaussian policies commonly used in online RL, expressive policies like diffusion and flow-matching policies are parameterized by a long denoising chain, which hinders stable gradient propagation from actions to policy parameters when optimizing against some value function. Our key insight is that we can address stable value maximization by avoiding direct optimization over value with the expressive policy and instead construct an on-the-fly RL policy to maximize Q-value. We propose Expressive Policy Optimization (EXPO), a sample-efficient online RL algorithm that utilizes an on-the-fly policy to maximize value with two parameterized policies -- a larger expressive base policy trained with a stable imitation learning objective and a light-weight Gaussian edit policy that edits the actions sampled from the base policy toward a higher value distribution. The on-the-fly policy optimizes the actions from the base policy with the learned edit policy and chooses the value maximizing action from the base and edited actions for both sampling and temporal-difference (TD) backup. Our approach yields up to 2-3x improvement in sample efficiency on average over prior methods both in the setting of fine-tuning a pretrained policy given offline data and in leveraging offline data to train online.
toXiv_bot_toot

On the day the UK parliament voted to proscribe the citizen peaceful direct action group Palestine Action as supposedly terrorist, Channel 4 showed the searing Basement Films documentary "Gaza doctors under attack". It showed the actions of the Israeli terrorist State in destroying Gaza's healthcare system, murdering civilians of all kinds and targeting health workers some of whom have died following torture. Sprinkled throughout were the repetitive lies of the occupation.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04147 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csRO_…

SLAC: Simulation-Pretrained Latent Action Space for Whole-Body Real-World RL
Building capable household and industrial robots requires mastering the control of versatile, high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) systems such as mobile manipulators. While reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise for autonomously acquiring robot control policies, scaling it to high-DoF embodiments remains challenging. Direct RL in the real world demands both safe exploration and high sample efficiency, which are difficult to achieve in practice. Sim-to-real RL, on the other hand, is often brittle du…

This year is the 35th anniversary of Queers Read This. A key piece of LGBT activism, arguing for pride and direct action. It had a huge influence on my life.
An army of lovers cannot lose.

Direct Action! Always!
https://mastodon.online/@Geri/114777663457053836

"Listen, all you Fascists, you might be surprised, People in the world, are getting organized, you're bound to loose, Fascists bound to loose":
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/30/opinion/ice-immigration-protest-resistance.html

Opinion | They Saw Their Neighbors Taken Away by ICE. Then They Made a Plan.
The movement against ICE in Los Angeles — one that is starting to take root across the country — demonstrates a shift from symbolic protest to direct action.

Semiconvection unlocks dynamo action in stably-stratified regions of gaseous planets
Paul Pru\v{z}ina, David C\'ebron, Nathana\"el Schaeffer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18521

Semiconvection unlocks dynamo action in stably-stratified regions of gaseous planets
Stably-stratified fluid layers are ubiquitous in gaseous planets, stellar and liquid cores, and have previously been thought not to be capable of driving a dynamo. We demonstrate that semiconvection (convection driven by a destabilising thermal gradient in an overall stably stratified region) can actually lead to dynamo action in such regions. Motivated by recent works suggesting that significant regions of Jupiter and Saturn may be prone to semiconvection, we conduct direct numerical simulatio…

$\displaystyle SL(2, {\Bbb Z})$, les tresses \`a trois brins, le tore modulaire et $Aut^{ }(F_{2})$
Alexis Marin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19371 https://

$\displaystyle SL(2, {\Bbb Z})$, les tresses à trois brins, le tore modulaire et $Aut^{+}(F_{2})$
The action of $SL(2, {\bf Z})$ on the integer torus and its quotient by central symmetry and Artin's presentation of three strings braid group $B_{3}$, produces a presentation with parabolic generators $\pmatrix{1& -1\cr 0& 1\cr}$ and $\pmatrix{1& 0\cr 1& 1\cr}$. This braided presentation describes the action of the derived group on Poincaré's half plane and its quotient the modular torus, just as Nielsen's theorem giving the group of direct automorphisms of the free group on two generators as…

GAF: Gaussian Action Field as a Dvnamic World Model for Robotic Mlanipulation
Ying Chai, Litao Deng, Ruizhi Shao, Jiajun Zhang, Liangjun Xing, Hongwen Zhang, Yebin Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14135

GAF: Gaussian Action Field as a Dvnamic World Model for Robotic Mlanipulation
Accurate action inference is critical for vision-based robotic manipulation. Existing approaches typically follow either a Vision-to-Action (V-A) paradigm, predicting actions directly from visual inputs, or a Vision-to-3D-to-Action (V-3D-A) paradigm, leveraging intermediate 3D representations. However, these methods often struggle with action inaccuracies due to the complexity and dynamic nature of manipulation scenes. In this paper, we propose a V-4D-A framework that enables direct action reas…

Resurgent Lambert series with characters
David Broadhurst, Daniele Dorigoni
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21352 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21352

Resurgent Lambert series with characters
We consider certain Lambert series as generating functions of divisor sums twisted by Dirichlet characters and compute their exact resurgent transseries expansion near $q=1^-$. For special values of the parameters, these Lambert series are expressible in terms of iterated integrals of holomorphic Eisenstein series twisted by the same characters and the transseries representation is a direct consequence of the action of Fricke involution on such twisted Eisenstein series. When the parameters of …

I don’t care what people think or say. I stand in solidarity with the @… and share their vision for a free, self-organized workers’ movement in Norway. Even if syndicalists are few, we’re here, and I proudly support their struggle for worker control and direct action.
I identify as a syndicalist because I actually enjoy working, but only when labor is organized…

SLAC: Simulation-Pretrained Latent Action Space for Whole-Body Real-World RL
Jiaheng Hu, Peter Stone, Roberto Mart\'in-Mart\'in
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04147

SLAC: Simulation-Pretrained Latent Action Space for Whole-Body Real-World RL
Building capable household and industrial robots requires mastering the control of versatile, high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) systems such as mobile manipulators. While reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise for autonomously acquiring robot control policies, scaling it to high-DoF embodiments remains challenging. Direct RL in the real world demands both safe exploration and high sample efficiency, which are difficult to achieve in practice. Sim-to-real RL, on the other hand, is often brittle du…

Bob Vylan, Palestine Action etc - analysis from Archie Bland in Guardian
"It isn’t just that people are angry that the catastrophe in Gaza isn’t being given due attention: it is that their encounters with observable reality are being flatly denied. ...
"Those people have been told that Gaza protests are hate marches; they can see it’s not true. They have been told that US campus protesters are largely motivated by antisemitism; they can see it’s not true. They have been told that Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation because it spray painted military aircraft; they can see it’s not true. They have been repeatedly told, by Benjamin Netanyahu, that opposition to Israel’s war is antisemitic; they can see it’s not true. They have been told that the British government finds Israel’s actions “intolerable”; they can see it’s not true.
"Now they are being told that opposing the IDF is antisemitic, that the Glastonbury crowd is more virulent than the one at Nuremberg, and that direct action is a form of terrorism. They can see all that’s not true, either, and however far their view is from the front pages, they know that they are far from alone."
#BobVylan #PalestineAction #media #bias #Palestine #Gaza #Israel

Holographic flavour and neural networks
Veselin G. Filev
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20115 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20115

Holographic flavour and neural networks
In holography, flavour probe branes are used to introduce fundamental matter to the AdS/CFT correspondence. At a technical level, the probes are described by extremizing the DBI action and solving the Lagrange-Euler equations of motion. I report on applications of artificial neural networks that allow direct minimization of the regularized DBI action (interpreted as a free energy) without the need to derive and solve the equations of motion. I consider, as examples, magnetic catalysis of chiral…

Topological Stars and scalar wave equation: Exact resummation of the renormalized angular momentum in the eikonal limit
Donato Bini, Giorgio Di Russo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14442

Topological Stars and scalar wave equation: Exact resummation of the renormalized angular momentum in the eikonal limit
We show that for a Topological Star the renormalized angular momentum parameter, $ν$, appearing in the Mano-Suzuki-Takasugi-type or in the quantum-Seiberg-Witten-type approaches of the perturbation equations, has 1) a direct link with the geodesic radial action computed along the null orbits of the background and 2) admits an exact resummation in terms of hypergeometric functions, generalizing previous results valid in the Schwarzschild case, see Ref.[arXiv:2504.07862 [hep-th]].

Identifying the sources of noise synergy and redundancy in the feed-forward loop motif
Mintu Nandi, Sudip Chattopadhyay, Suman K Banik
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18620

Identifying the sources of noise synergy and redundancy in the feed-forward loop motif
The propagation of noise through parallel regulatory pathways is a prominent feature of feed-forward loops in genetic networks. Although the contributions of the direct and indirect regulatory pathways of feed-forward loops to output variability have been well characterized, the impact of their joint action arising from their shared input and output remains poorly understood. Here, we identify an additional component of noise that emerges specifically from this convergent nature of the pathways…

The liberal obsession with optics serves the right and persuades no one. There is literally an active ethnic cleansing happening in the US right now, and the only thing that matters is making that as hard as possible to carry out.
Anarchists destroying intelligence assets saves lives. Every escooter thrown at a cop car is one less escort for a goon too afraid to kidnap random brown people without being flanked by a branch full of bad apples. Spray paint is not violence. Vandalism is not violence. Community self defense in all forms is legitimate.
Make no mistake, these raids are about changing demographics. Demographic trends have been shifting blue for a long time, and the right has, for a long time, been blaming "white replacement." Conspiracy theory aside, Democrats have also been relying on the growth of black and brown voters as a block. The nuances of whiteness as an identity are lost on the current administration and their supporters. They see that "white people will be a minority by 2050" and equate that with the "end of Western Civilization."
The only way to "save Western Civilization" is to change those demographics. Forced birth and forced removal are two sides of the same white nationalist objective. Of course they can't have due process, because they need to be able to kidnap anyone who they see as a threat to their demographic future.
They don't care about optics. The plan is to murder away any threat and flood everyone else with propaganda. There is no mythical middle. There's no one unconvinced. They know this, but they win when democrats buy that myth and save the police the work of policing the protests.
If your protest is 90% "peaceful," they'll take pictures of the 10% that isn't. If it's 99% peaceful, they'll shoot rubber bullets and teargas until someone throws a brick and take 100 pictures from a dozen angles. If its 100% "peaceful" and no one can be provoked, they'll generate pictures with AI or photoshop like they did during the George Floyd uprising and the pictures from the CHOP/CHAZ. Do you have literally no memory?
#USPol #FiftyFiftyOne #50501movenent #resistance #NoKingsDay #NoKingsDayOfAction

LLM coding is the opposite of DRY
An important principle in software engineering is DRY: Don't Repeat Yourself. We recognize that having the same code copied in more than one place is bad for several reasons:
1. It makes the entire codebase harder to read.
2. It increases maintenance burden, since any problems in the duplicated code need to be solved in more than one place.
3. Because it becomes possible for the copies to drift apart if changes to one aren't transferred to the other (maybe the person making the change has forgotten there was a copy) it makes the code more error-prone and harder to debug.
All modern programming languages make it almost entirely unnecessary to repeat code: we can move the repeated code into a "function" or "module" and then reference it from all the different places it's needed. At a larger scale, someone might write an open-source "library" of such functions or modules and instead of re-implementing that functionality ourselves, we can use their code, with an acknowledgement. Using another person's library this way is complicated, because now you're dependent on them: if they stop maintaining it or introduce bugs, you've inherited a problem, but still, you could always copy their project and maintain your own version, and it would be not much more work than if you had implemented stuff yourself from the start. It's a little more complicated than this, but the basic principle holds, and it's a foundational one for software development in general and the open-source movement in particular. The network of "citations" as open-source software builds on other open-source software and people contribute patches to each others' projects is a lot of what makes the movement into a community, and it can lead to collaborations that drive further development. So the DRY principle is important at both small and large scales.
Unfortunately, the current crop of hyped-up LLM coding systems from the big players are antithetical to DRY at all scales:
- At the library scale, they train on open source software but then (with some unknown frequency) replicate parts of it line-for-line *without* any citation [1]. The person who was using the LLM has no way of knowing that this happened, or even any way to check for it. In theory the LLM company could build a system for this, but it's not likely to be profitable unless the courts actually start punishing these license violations, which doesn't seem likely based on results so far and the difficulty of finding out that the violations are happening. By creating these copies (and also mash-ups, along with lots of less-problematic stuff), the LLM users (enabled and encouraged by the LLM-peddlers) are directly undermining the DRY principle. If we see what the big AI companies claim to want, which is a massive shift towards machine-authored code, DRY at the library scale will effectively be dead, with each new project simply re-implementing the functionality it needs instead of every using a library. This might seem to have some upside, since dependency hell is a thing, but the downside in terms of comprehensibility and therefore maintainability, correctness, and security will be massive. The eventual lack of new high-quality DRY-respecting code to train the models on will only make this problem worse.
- At the module & function level, AI is probably prone to re-writing rather than re-using the functions or needs, especially with a workflow where a human prompts it for many independent completions. This part I don't have direct evidence for, since I don't use LLM coding models myself except in very specific circumstances because it's not generally ethical to do so. I do know that when it tries to call existing functions, it often guesses incorrectly about the parameters they need, which I'm sure is a headache and source of bugs for the vibe coders out there. An AI could be designed to take more context into account and use existing lookup tools to get accurate function signatures and use them when generating function calls, but even though that would probably significantly improve output quality, I suspect it's the kind of thing that would be seen as too-baroque and thus not a priority. Would love to hear I'm wrong about any of this, but I suspect the consequences are that any medium-or-larger sized codebase written with LLM tools will have significant bloat from duplicate functionality, and will have places where better use of existing libraries would have made the code simpler. At a fundamental level, a principle like DRY is not something that current LLM training techniques are able to learn, and while they can imitate it from their training sets to some degree when asked for large amounts of code, when prompted for many smaller chunks, they're asymptotically likely to violate it.
I think this is an important critique in part because it cuts against the argument that "LLMs are the modern compliers, if you reject them you're just like the people who wanted to keep hand-writing assembly code, and you'll be just as obsolete." Compilers actually represented a great win for abstraction, encapsulation, and DRY in general, and they supported and are integral to open source development, whereas LLMs are set to do the opposite.
[1] to see what this looks like in action in prose, see the example on page 30 of the NYTimes copyright complaint against OpenAI (#AI #GenAI #LLMs #VibeCoding