Tootfinder

Moody Urbanity - Relations VI 🧬
情绪化城市 - 关系 VI 🧬
📷 Zeiss IKON Super Ikonta 533/16
🎞️ Ilford HP5 400, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

Now, for any person with a shred of moral dignity, there's some time during US history where you would have to admit that an insurrection or rebellion was necessary. Only complete scum bag fascists would try to argue that a slave revolt wasn't an absolute good, and that it was a bad thing when those revolts were crushed. Anyone with a shred of moral decency has to admit that there is at least one point in US history where the nation was doing something so incredibly evil, that it would have been good if people would have rose up and stopped it.
Today we're talking about the displacement and genocide of people in Gaza. We can look at any number of genocide on US soil carried out by the US government. Who, with any moral clarity, wouldn't point to those and want to believe that they would have resisted, violently if necessary, against those slaughters. Who, that today condemns slavery, could look at John Brown and not wish to have the moral integrity to fight and die along side of him?
Every liberal who actually believes in justice, who isn't just virtue signaling out of guilt, should be able to point to a time in history where they would absolutely agree with the most militant resistance. For those folks, I always wonder, when did that evil end? Where is your line? Have you thought about that?

LLMs are a fundamentally useless technology because their applications (supposedly) boil down to humans not having to think for themselves or do their own writing / drawing / filming.
But if you can do it on your own - why would you need a robot to do it? It’s, at best, a novelty.
That’s why this shit only resonates with executives and capital owners. “Get things done with fewer people and expenses” is at least an actual pitch. “Get things done faster for yourself” isn’t.
The individual angle really works for things you already were trying to avoid doing because you’re either disinterested or don’t have enough time to do things right.
“Avoid your work” as a value proposition doesn’t work when you’re dealing with intellectual labor rather than commodities. Not large scale, not long term.
Sorry for the rant, I saw some Notion ads on the subway and got irritated 😅
#AI #llm #LLMs

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Yeah, Jimmy “I’m actually quite in favour of business and capitalism and all that”* Wales, the surveillance capitalist and Fandom-president adtech man who once told me he doesn’t believe in any form of government regulation – not even in food standards or healthcare – can go fuck himself.
Find better heroes. Or even better yet, get over the whole stupid concept itself.
*

Sound Matching an Analogue Levelling Amplifier Using the Newton-Raphson Method
Chin-Yun Yu, Gy\"orgy Fazekas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10706 https://…

Sound Matching an Analogue Levelling Amplifier Using the Newton-Raphson Method
Automatic differentiation through digital signal processing algorithms for virtual analogue modelling has recently gained popularity. These algorithms are typically more computationally efficient than black-box neural networks that rely on dense matrix multiplications. Due to their differentiable nature, they can be integrated with neural networks and jointly trained using gradient descent algorithms, resulting in more efficient systems. Furthermore, signal processing algorithms have significan…

I can't help but wonder if "...democracy-under-threat messaging might not work on voters in places such as the Central Valley. It hearkens back to 2024, when Democrats repeatedly — and unsuccessfully — warned that then-candidate Trump posed a risk to Democracy." is key to Democratic losses.
I have heard too few Democratic messages that clearly offer a meaningful message of how a #DemocraticParty

Will Prop. 50 burst state Dems’ bubble?
Advocates warn messaging that works in places like SF doesn’t cut it elsewhere.

I can't help but wonder if "...democracy-under-threat messaging might not work on voters in places such as the Central Valley. It hearkens back to 2024, when Democrats repeatedly — and unsuccessfully — warned that then-candidate Trump posed a risk to Democracy." is key to Democratic losses.
I have heard too few Democratic messages that clearly offer a meaningful message of how a #DemocraticParty

Will Prop. 50 burst state Dems’ bubble?
Advocates warn messaging that works in places like SF doesn’t cut it elsewhere.

War toll beim DGNet Kongress dabei gewesen zu sein - nochmal danke @… für die nette Einladung
Thoroughly enjoyed myself at the DGNet conference in Bayreuth presenting my work on social and spatial networks
#NetzwerkForschung

Probing the Dependence of Partonic Energy Loss on the Initial Energy Density of the Quark Gluon Plasma
Ian Gill, Ryan J. Hamilton, Helen Caines
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09523 …

Probing the Dependence of Partonic Energy Loss on the Initial Energy Density of the Quark Gluon Plasma
Considerable evidence now exists for partonic energy loss due to interaction with the hot, dense medium created in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. A primary signal of this energy loss is the suppression of high transverse momentum $p_{\mathrm{T}}$ hadron yields in A-A collisions relative to appropriately scaled $pp$ collisions at the same energy. Measuring the collision energy dependence of this energy loss is vital to understanding the medium, but it is difficult to disentangle the me…