Tootfinder

With increasing momentum, voices on the Christian right are preaching that EMPATHY has become a VICE.
For them, empathy is a cudgel for the left:
It can manipulate caring people into accepting all manner of sins according to a conservative Christian perspective, including abortion access, LGBTQ rights, illegal immigration and certain views on social and racial justice
“Empathy becomes toxic when it encourages you to affirm sin, validate lies or support destructive policie…

Conservative Christians argue empathy can lead to sin
Some voices on the Christian right are arguing the virtue of empathy has become a vice. Those Christians claim empathy can manipulate people into accepting what they see as sins, like abortion access and LGBTQ+ rights. Conservative evangelicals Allie Beth Stuckey and Joe Rigney have written books within the past year criticizing certain forms of empathy. Stuckey's and Rigney's views have gained traction among President Donald Trump’s Christian base as his Republican administration enacts hard…

From Nothingness - How Emptiness Inspires Us
#inspiration #CreativeProcess
https://muz4now.…

From Nothingness - How Emptiness Inspires Us
Stan Stewart - @muz4now

When Hegemons Backslide -- Trump has been [cough] gunning for the US international order since long before he was inaugurated. (emptywheel)
https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/06/22/when-hegemons-backslide/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250622/p41#a250622p41

Embodied-R1: Reinforced Embodied Reasoning for General Robotic Manipulation
Yifu Yuan, Haiqin Cui, Yaoting Huang, Yibin Chen, Fei Ni, Zibin Dong, Pengyi Li, Yan Zheng, Jianye Hao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13998

Embodied-R1: Reinforced Embodied Reasoning for General Robotic Manipulation
Generalization in embodied AI is hindered by the "seeing-to-doing gap," which stems from data scarcity and embodiment heterogeneity. To address this, we pioneer "pointing" as a unified, embodiment-agnostic intermediate representation, defining four core embodied pointing abilities that bridge high-level vision-language comprehension with low-level action primitives. We introduce Embodied-R1, a 3B Vision-Language Model (VLM) specifically designed for embodied reasoning and pointing. We use a wid…

Nepo babies can be so stupid about their supposed familial expertise…
The Fed doesn't control long-term (i.e. federally-backed mortgage) rates.Those reflect what the credit market believes inflation will be over the long term and how much return they think they can get elsewhere. Lowering rates before inflation has absorbed the tariff shocks and settled down will increase long-term inflation expectations, raising long rates.

emptywheel (@emptywheel.bsky.social)
One reason I wrote this is bc the housing market is in pretty shitty shape. Pulte seems to think lowering rates will fix it which is not remotely true. Yet instead of doing something about that Pulte is off stoking witch hunts. [contains quote post or other embedded content]

Understanding Embedding Scaling in Collaborative Filtering
Zhuangzhuang He, Zhou Kaiyu, Haoyue Bai, Fengbin Zhu, Yonghui Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15709 https://

Understanding Embedding Scaling in Collaborative Filtering
Scaling recommendation models into large recommendation models has become one of the most widely discussed topics. Recent efforts focus on components beyond the scaling embedding dimension, as it is believed that scaling embedding may lead to performance degradation. Although there have been some initial observations on embedding, the root cause of their non-scalability remains unclear. Moreover, whether performance degradation occurs across different types of models and datasets is still an un…

Crimeans in panic: gas stations empty, Kremlin silent!: https://benborges.xyz/2025/08/22/crimeans-in-panic-gas-stations.html

Survey of Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied Manipulation
Haoran Li, Yuhui Chen, Wenbo Cui, Weiheng Liu, Kai Liu, Mingcai Zhou, Zhengtao Zhang, Dongbin Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15201

Survey of Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied Manipulation
Embodied intelligence systems, which enhance agent capabilities through continuous environment interactions, have garnered significant attention from both academia and industry. Vision-Language-Action models, inspired by advancements in large foundation models, serve as universal robotic control frameworks that substantially improve agent-environment interaction capabilities in embodied intelligence systems. This expansion has broadened application scenarios for embodied AI robots. This survey …

X-Nav: Learning End-to-End Cross-Embodiment Navigation for Mobile Robots
Haitong Wang, Aaron Hao Tan, Angus Fung, Goldie Nejat
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14731

X-Nav: Learning End-to-End Cross-Embodiment Navigation for Mobile Robots
Existing navigation methods are primarily designed for specific robot embodiments, limiting their generalizability across diverse robot platforms. In this paper, we introduce X-Nav, a novel framework for end-to-end cross-embodiment navigation where a single unified policy can be deployed across various embodiments for both wheeled and quadrupedal robots. X-Nav consists of two learning stages: 1) multiple expert policies are trained using deep reinforcement learning with privileged observations …

Koopman Operator Based Time-Delay Embeddings and State History Augmented LQR for Periodic Hybrid Systems: Bouncing Pendulum and Bipedal Walking
Chun-Ming Yang, Pranav A. Bhounsule
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14455

Koopman Operator Based Time-Delay Embeddings and State History Augmented LQR for Periodic Hybrid Systems: Bouncing Pendulum and Bipedal Walking
Time-delay embedding is a technique that uses snapshots of state history over time to build a linear state space model of a nonlinear smooth system. We demonstrate that periodic non-smooth or hybrid system can also be modeled as a linear state space system using this approach as long as its behavior is consistent in modes and timings. We extended time-delay embeddings to generate a linear model of two periodic hybrid systems: the bouncing pendulum and the simplest walker with control inputs. Th…