Tootfinder

Mes amis français, envisagez de signer ces pétitions contre la loi Yadan ici:
https://petitions.assemblee-nationale.fr/initiatives/i-5158

Non à la loi Yadan - Non à la loi Yadan - Plateforme des pétitions de l’Assemblée nationale
Ce projet de loi, porté par Caroline Yadan, prétend lutter contre de nouvelles formes d'antisémitisme. Cependant, lorsque l'on lit l'exposé des motifs, on remarque un amalgame entre l'antisémitisme et la critique d'Israël (antisionisme). On peut lire par exemple : "Cette haine de l’État d’Israël est aujourd’hui consubstantielle à la haine des Juifs. L’appel à la destruction de cet État, parce qu’il forme un collectif de citoyens juifs, est une manière détournée de s’a…

The whole #LLM ROI thing reveals something interesting. It's basically impossible to figure out the ROI of an LLM. That makes it impossible for bean counters to make a comparison between human work and LLM work, or human work without an LLM and LLM-assisted work, to determine if the incredibly high price is worth it. But it's also impossible because you can't measure the ROI of a human, especially for skilled labor.
You can't measure the ROI of a human, because managers have no idea what people do. There's an eternally expanding amount of work designed to address this problem. But no matter how closely people are surveilled, interrogated, analyzed, there's never any real answer.
I've talked in the past about in relation to medical care. One of the dirty secrets of hospitals is that they have no way to figure out how much individual treatment costs. It's easy to understand at scale. You can know exactly how much something costs society. You can even identify patterns, using public health models, and decrease costs for society by trying to get people to avoid risky behavior (stop smoking, use protection during sex, etc). But it is absolutely not possible, at all, in any way, to figure out how much a single visit costs. This is similar to the problem of predicting climate change vs predicting the weather tomorrow in Amsterdam at 15:00. One is possible, the other is simply not.
But what is becoming painfully clear now is that this is true *everywhere*. It's trivial to know how much an industry costs. It's possible to figure out it's ROI for society. It is not possible to figure out how much value any individual worker provides. LLM ROI and cost comparison is an instance of this larger problem.
This is a problem for capitalism because it shows that the fundamental assumptions behind capitalism, that product value and labor value are quantifiable, that people can actually make comparisons between competing products, etc, are completely bullshit. The capitalist apologetics that makes up so much of economics, the lies that are told that hold this system together, are crumbling before our eyes.
If you make a lot of money, it's because you've been lucky. You have the right social networks, you have become good at convincing people to give you money. There is absolutely no way to connect that to actually providing value to society. If you make a lot of money, internalize that. Understand that you are not special, and things can change. If you don't make a lot of money, it's not because you don't provide value. Don't forget that. The system is a lie built to destroy you. Don't let it.
The ideology is sick, something something time of monsters and all that, we are together in this dying machine. We need to understand the lies. Your value can never be quantified. The way we have always figured out how to do the right thing for each other is through each other. Social connection has always guided us. But now the most socially disconnected people on the planet have hijacked the system. They direct the resources of the world, and game the system to avoid personal responsibility.
We have to build a system where everyone is accountable. We can't use abstract numbers and lies to figure things out for us. We have to build systems around people and accountability. There is no other solution.

Israel Said It's Applying the Gaza Model in Lebanon. This Is What the Devastation Looks Like. (Associated Press)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/05/03/world/middleeast/israel-lebanon-hezbollah-gaza-destruction.html?unlocked_article_code=1.flA.BLJS.iKECwCTuKpRV&smid=url-share
http://www.memeorandum.com/260503/p41#a260503p41

E3/DC (part of the Hager Group) has released a new bidirectional DC charger that can operate independently (a previous version could only be used with a complete home hybrid inverter setup).
It is compatible with 400V and 800V vehicles, works with VW ID. vehicles. Price unknown.

pv magazine spotlight für neue DC-Wallbox von E3/DC: Vom Carport zum Strommarkt - pv magazine Deutschland
Mit der bidirektionalen Wallbox "edsn" bringt E3/DC eine der ersten serienreifen Vehicle-to-Home-Lösungen auf den Markt. Gemeinsam mit Hauskraftwerk und Energiemanagement soll sie Elektrofahrzeuge als flexible Speicher in Gebäude, Strommarkt und Netz einbinden – und damit ein seit Jahren diskutiertes Konzept der Energiewende in die Praxis überführen.

Remember when Xbox tried to move away from physical media to reduce distribution costs during the 2013 Xbox One launch?
And Sony pissed all over Microsoft for it? 🤔
✅ Xbox One loses some disc-free play, family game-sharing plan with revised policies
https://www.

Xbox One loses some disc-free play, family game-sharing plan with revised policies

(tldr: Transparenz in der Politik ist wichtig und soll bleiben)
Während an den meisten Stellen über die Krankschreibung diskutiert wird, bekommt das Thema IFG nur wenig Aufmerksamkeit, ist aber nicht weniger wichtig. Mit den angekündigten Änderungen soll dies massiv kastriert werden - Vereine und die Presse dürften gar keine Informationen mehr anfragen, bei privaten Anfragen sollen immer alle Namen geschwärzt und die Gebühren "angepasst" werden. Kommt es durch, können sich Po…

Welfare Maximization in Bilateral Trade: Improved Approximation Guarantees Beyond the Fixed Price Barrier
Shahar Dobzinski, Ariel Shaulker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04890 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.04890 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.04890
arXiv:2606.04890v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study the setting of welfare maximization in bilateral trade, where the values of both the buyer and the seller are drawn from independent distributions. Our goal is to maximize social welfare. In this setting, fixed price mechanisms have been extensively studied. In a fixed price mechanism, there is a price $p$ that depends only on the distributions of the buyer and the seller. Trade occurs if and only if the buyer's value is at least $p$ and the seller's value is at most $p$. A long line of work has culminated in determining almost exactly the approximation ratios achievable by fixed price mechanisms: there exists a fixed price mechanism that obtains at least a $0.72$ fraction of the social welfare, but no fixed price mechanism can guarantee more than a $0.7381$ fraction of it [Cai and Wu, STOC'23; Liu, Ren, and Wang, STOC'23]. No other incentive-compatible mechanism is known to beat the performance of fixed-price mechanisms in this setting.
This paper shows how to achieve a larger fraction of the optimal welfare with other classes of mechanisms. Specifically, we study the buyer-offering mechanism with a reserve price. In this mechanism, the buyer observes its value and makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to the seller, where the offer is at least the reserve price. Beyond its simplicity, this natural mechanism is attractive because the seller always has a dominant strategy: accept the offer if its value is at most the offer, and otherwise reject it. We show that there always exists a reserve price that guarantees a $0.746$ fraction of the social welfare. This not only improves upon the best previously known approximation guarantee for the problem, but also demonstrates that fixed-price mechanisms are not optimal in this setting.
toXiv_bot_toot

My 10-year-old daughter is making an ice cream truck out of cardboard, sized for one of her little stuffed animals. She is being very detailed, and has chosen the particular flavors of ice cream and sherbet the truck will have, and is making a menu sign.
Naturally she's putting prices on it. But she's not making numbers up, or asking us for a common price for a scoop of ice cream. (Which seems absurdly expensive these days -- I know, inflation, but, yikes.)
No, she's …

District attorney challenges new Georgia law that removes party labels in Atlanta-area elections (Kate Brumback/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/georgia-district-attorney-elections-nonpartisan-republicans-kemp-9aeed6b014c27ae826533acef95805c6
http://www.memeorandum.com/260603/p83#a260603p83

Alabama and Tennessee move to draw new congressional districts in wake of Supreme Court ruling (Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/redistricting-supreme-court-voting-rights-act-b4e3a7be89305f94a4f05c09981406ce
http://www.memeorandum.com/260504/p34#a260504p34