Tootfinder

From Translink
Customer-driven improvements are coming to Metro Vancouver transit
TransLink’s new five-year plan outlines 34 actions shaped by feedback, focused on reliability
Better real-time transit information, more reliable elevators and escalators, easier ways to report cleanliness issues, and continuing design work for Bus Rapid Transit are among the improvements TransLink is advancing through its new Customer Experience Action Plan.

SpyChain: Multi-Vector Supply Chain Attacks on Small Satellite Systems
Jack Vanlyssel, Enrique Sobrados, Ramsha Anwar, Gruia-Catalin Roman, Afsah Anwar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06535

SpyChain: Multi-Vector Supply Chain Attacks on Small Satellite Systems
Small satellites are integral to scientific, commercial, and defense missions, but reliance on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware broadens their attack surface. Although supply chain threats are well studied in other cyber-physical domains, their feasibility and stealth in space systems remain largely unexplored. Prior work has focused on flight software, which benefits from strict security practices and oversight. In contrast, auxiliary COTS components often lack robust assurance yet enj…

Amazon debuts three frontier agents: Kiro autonomous agent, AWS Security Agent, and AWS DevOps Agent, each focused on a different aspect of software development (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2025/12/02/aws-puts-ai-age…

AWS puts AI agents to work on truly autonomous software development - SiliconANGLE
AWS puts AI agents to work on truly autonomous software development - SiliconANGLE

BACHI: Boundary-Aware Symbolic Chord Recognition Through Masked Iterative Decoding on Pop and Classical Music
Mingyang Yao, Ke Chen, Shlomo Dubnov, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06528

BACHI: Boundary-Aware Symbolic Chord Recognition Through Masked Iterative Decoding on Pop and Classical Music
Automatic chord recognition (ACR) via deep learning models has gradually achieved promising recognition accuracy, yet two key challenges remain. First, prior work has primarily focused on audio-domain ACR, while symbolic music (e.g., score) ACR has received limited attention due to data scarcity. Second, existing methods still overlook strategies that are aligned with human music analytical practices. To address these challenges, we make two contributions: (1) we introduce POP909-CL, an enhance…

HC Sean Payton on the Week 8 point of emphasis: 'We've got to work on our first half' https://www.denverbroncos.com/video/hc-sean-payton-on-the-week-8-point-of-emphasis-we-ve-got-to-work-on-our-first-half…

Day 26: Emily Short
If you know who Short is, you know exactly why she's on this list. If you don't, you're probably in the majority. She's an absolutely legendary author within the interactive fiction (IF) community, which gets somewhat pigeonholed by stuff like Zork when there's actually a huge range of stuff in the medium some of which isn't even puzzle-focused, and Short has been writing & coding on the bleeding edge of things for decades.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to Short's work in graduate school, where we played "Galatea" as part of an interactive fiction class. Short uses a lot of clever parser tricks to make your conversation with a statue feel very fluid and conversational, giving to contemporary audiences a great example of how vibrant interaction with a well-designed agent can be in contrast to an LLM, if you're willing to put in some work on bespoke parsing & responses (although the user does need to know basic IF conventions). While I didn't explore the full range of Galatea's many possible outcomes, it left a strong impression on me as a vision for what IF could be besides dorky puzzles, and I think that "visionary" is a great term to describe Short.
If you'd like you get a feel for her (very early) work, you can play Galatea here: #30AuthorsNoMen

I've been working on a bit of a larger project. It is still very much a work in progress. It's an attempt to combine blog and mastodon posts with other things I've written in the past, along with some original analysis, into a zine. I'm probably about 2/3 of the way through.
It's primarily focused on political theory and critique, which, I think, deviates a bit from how a lot of other folks view the world. It's pretty explicitly anarchist, though I don't think I've actually put the word "anarchism" or referenced the ideology anywhere so explicitly.
I'd love feedback (especially around editing and flow) if anyone would be willing to put eyes on it and tell me what they think:
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/

⭐ The Simple Habit That Saves My Evenings | alikhil | software engineering, kubernetes & self-hosting
https://alikhil.dev/posts/the-simple-habit-that-saves-my-evenings/
Spoiler alert:
Here are the two main ideas of it:
* Don’t overwork
*…

"Taking small steps is crucial. You might start by just learning about your immediate neighborhood, how things actually work, finding ways to intervene in things that are not working well. Understand the water supply and how to keep it clean. ... Share. Share what you have."
—YDS professor Willie James Jennings in this interview in the new issue of Reflections, focused on building hope for a living planet

Decoupling …… again
If you've been reading our material for long you'll have seen previous articles about the claim that GDP growth can happen without increasing greenhouse gas (chiefly carbon) pollution: the decoupling thesis. Early work focused on debunking claims that were made without evidence. Later on, evidence for some decoupling was provided and we reviewed its implications.  Briefly we questioned its scale, permanence, and the quality of the data underpinning…

Decoupling …… again
If you’ve been reading our material for long you’ll have seen previous articles about the claim that GDP growth can happen without increasing greenhouse gas (chiefly carbon) pollution: …

Neuralink returns to South San Francisco as Bay Area neurotech regroups https://www.neurofounders.co/post/neuralink-returns-to-south-san-francisco-bay-area How does a patient registry of roughly 10,000 people compare to well over 500,000 Android app i…

Neuralink Returns to South San Francisco as Bay Area Neurotech Regroups
Neuralink has leased a 144,000-square-foot building at 499 Forbes Boulevard in South San Francisco, placing the company back inside the region’s biotech belt after a period of Texas-focused expansion. The move lands alongside a patient registry of roughly 10,000 people, an initial paper submitted to The New England Journal of Medicine, and ongoing first-in-human work. The signals point to a company accelerating rather than slowing.Details on how the new site will be used have not been disclos…

Decoupling …… again
If you've been reading our material for long you'll have seen previous articles about the claim that GDP growth can happen without increasing greenhouse gas (chiefly carbon) pollution: the decoupling thesis. Early work focused on debunking claims that were made without evidence. Later on, evidence for some decoupling was provided and we reviewed its implications.  Briefly we questioned its scale, permanence, and the quality of the data underpinning…

Decoupling …… again
If you’ve been reading our material for long you’ll have seen previous articles about the claim that GDP growth can happen without increasing greenhouse gas (chiefly carbon) pollution: …

Social Simulation for Integrating Self-Care: Measuring the Effects of Contextual Environments in Augmented Reality for Mental Health Practice
Anna Fang, Jiayang Shi, Hriday Chhabria, Bosi Li, Haiyi Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12081

Social Simulation for Integrating Self-Care: Measuring the Effects of Contextual Environments in Augmented Reality for Mental Health Practice
Despite growing interest in virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) for mental well-being, prior work using immersive interventions to teach mental health skills has largely focused on calming or abstract settings. As a result, little is known about how realistic social simulation may better support the transfer and application of skills to in-person environments. In this work, we present a 14-day user study with 43-participants comparing an augmented reality intervention simulating a realistic c…

So in another dream I just woke up from, I was talking to someone about "the idea problem" (that it's becoming harder to monitize ideas, from a vox article written by an AI cooked reporter).
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/executive-disorder-white-house-weekly-46-313675864/
Basically, I was arguing that the majority of inventions target men because patriarchy puts economic control in men's hands. As men have started to help more with childcare, there have been more inventions related to childcare. (I don't have any idea if this is true. Seems legit, but I'm just relating my dream. I think I was also oversimplifying a bit to "men" and "women" because of my audience, but anyway it was a dream.) There's actually more low-hanging fruit, I pointed out, related to making care work easier.
So I argued that the real problem was a failure to invest in research into solving that problem. Today there are all these boondoggles built around killing people. What if, instead of all this government research into killing people, we dumped a ton of money into making it easier to support a household? That would be great for the economy. (Being asleep, I seem to have forgotten that working people need money.)
In the blur of being just awake I started thinking about how you could kickstart the US economy by taking the money from the AI boondoggle and other autonomous murder bots and create something like a program to build robots for housekeepers. You'd still be funding tech with government money, so the same horrible people get paid, but you're now actually solving real problems. It wouldn't even matter if it was a boondoggle, honestly. Just dumping money into something other than murdering people is good enough.
I imagined first if there was a program to fund a robot housecleaner, like robot dog with AI some laundry pickup, that would be provided, free of charge, to help people with children. It would work the same as the military boondoggle where a private company makes the government buy a piece of hardware from them and then also pay them to service it for some number of years. But instead of that hardware sitting around waiting to kill someone, it would be getting brought to people's houses to help them.
Then I thought, hey, you could even boost the economy more if you just had government funding for doulas and housecleaners and paid them a living wage. Hey, you could really kickstart the economy by nationalizing healthcare and including doula support as part of all births. Oh, and you could also just include the optional household help for families with children until the kids turn 18.
None of this is perfect (I don't actually think most of this is possible from any state), but the point is that it's actually wildly easy to figure out all kinds of ways to invest in the economy and monitize ideas as long as you aren't entirely focused on the same old "make money from spying on people and killing them." Funny that. Like they said in the podcast, maybe "finding ideas" isn't the problem.
Hope you enjoyed the weird semi-awake brain dump/rant.

Galois Action and Localization in Number Fields
Jim Coykendall, Jared Kettinger
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10018 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10018

Galois Action and Localization in Number Fields
For a Galois number field $K$, the Galois group $\text{Gal}(K/\mathbb{Q})$ acts on the class group $Cl_K$ in a very natural way: $σ\cdot[I]=[σ(I)]$ for any $σ\in \text{Gal}(K/\mathbb{Q})$, $[I]\in Cl_K$. In this paper, we will explore how the unique properties of this group action work together to elucidate the relationship between these two groups. While previous work on this problem has focused on representation theory, we take a direct approach to some classical and new problems. The pape…

One Life to Learn: Inferring Symbolic World Models for Stochastic Environments from Unguided Exploration
Zaid Khan, Archiki Prasad, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Jaemin Cho, Mohit Bansal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12088

One Life to Learn: Inferring Symbolic World Models for Stochastic Environments from Unguided Exploration
Symbolic world modeling requires inferring and representing an environment's transitional dynamics as an executable program. Prior work has focused on largely deterministic environments with abundant interaction data, simple mechanics, and human guidance. We address a more realistic and challenging setting, learning in a complex, stochastic environment where the agent has only "one life" to explore a hostile environment without human guidance. We introduce OneLife, a framework that models world…

METRICALARGS: A Taxonomy for Studying Metrical Poetry with LLMs
Chalamalasetti Kranti, Sowmya Vajjala
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08188 https://arxiv.org/pd…

METRICALARGS: A Taxonomy for Studying Metrical Poetry with LLMs
Prior NLP work studying poetry has focused primarily on automatic poem generation and summarization. Many languages have well-studied traditions of poetic meter which enforce constraints on a poem in terms of syllable and phoneme patterns. Such advanced literary forms offer opportunities for probing deeper reasoning and language understanding in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their ability to follow strict pre-requisites and rules. In this paper, we introduce MetricalARGS, the first taxonomy …

Detection of quantum information masking via machine learning
Sheng-Ao Mao, Lin Zhang, Bo Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12507 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12…

Detection of quantum information masking via machine learning
Recently, machine learning has been widely applied in the field of quantum information, notably in tasks such as entanglement detection, steering characterization, and nonlocality verification. However, few studies have focused on utilizing machine learning to detect quantum information masking. In this work, we investigate supervised machine learning for detecting quantum information masking in both pure and mixed qubit states. For pure qubit states, we randomly generate the corresponding dens…

Aggregate Modeling of Air-Conditioner Loads Under Packet-based Control with Both On and Off Grid Access Requests
Mohammad Hassan, Mads R. Almassalkhi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10651

Aggregate Modeling of Air-Conditioner Loads Under Packet-based Control with Both On and Off Grid Access Requests
Coordination of distributed energy resources (DERs) can engender flexibility necessary to improve grid reliability. Packetized Energy Management (PEM) is a method for coordinating DERs, such as thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs) and electric vehicles, within customer quality-of-service (QoS) limits. In PEM, a DER uses local information to offer flexibility by sending a request to the DER coordinator to turn-ON or turn-OFF. Much work has focused on modeling and analyzing aggregations of DE…

Abstract second-order boundary control systems
Till Preuster, Timo Reis, Manuel Schaller
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10363 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10363

Abstract second-order boundary control systems
We consider abstract second order systems of the form $\ddot{x}(t) + D \dot{x}(t) + Sx(t)=0$, which are typically analyzed via the operator matrix $\mathcal{A}=\left[\begin{smallmatrix} 0 & I \\ -S & -D \end{smallmatrix}\right]$ governing the free dynamics of the corresponding first-order in time formulation. While previous work (e.g. on spectral properties of) $\mathcal{A}$ has focused on self-adjoint uniformly positive $S$, we consider the more general case which comprises the situation w…

In BC, Abbotsford and other border areas are under flood evacuation orders, especially from the Nooksack River. The Tyee recently reported on the lack of an agreement on flooding of the Nooksack, which is a perennial problem that the US government has ignored.
British Columbia and Washington need to work on a Cascadia-focused agreement on how to manage the Nooksack without meddling from the United States or Canada, which are apathetic to the real issues facing our region

Cascadia Journal
Observations on news, politics, and the arts in the Pacific Northwest.

Day 20: bell hooks.
Despite having decided to continue to 30, number 20 feels important, and hooks gets the spot in part because I haven't yet included a non-fiction feminist author, which feels like an obvious thing to include on such a list. The one category of author being bumped out of the first 20 here is anime writers, but I'll follow up with one of them, along with more academics and mangaka who I've been itching to include.
In any case, hooks is absolutely legendary as a feminist writer for good reason, and as a teacher I've especially appreciated her writing on pedagogy like "Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom" and "Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom". These have challenged me to teach at a higher level, and while I'm not sure I've completely succeeded, they're important to me. They also pair well with Paolo Friere's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed", but hooks always seems to be focused on very practical advice and it's incredibly direct in her writing, even though her advice isn't always straightforward to implement. In fact, that's one of the things I value about her writing: when the truth is complicated or the real work is messy interpersonal relationships that need to be negotiated with each student, she's not afraid to say so and give good advice for navigating those waters instead of trying to dispense simple-seeming platitudes or formulas for success that paper over the deeper issues. Her concern has always been truth, rather than simplicity or audience comfort and the popularity it might seem to entail, which I think is part of why her legacy endures so well.
#20AuthorsNoMen
#30AuthorsNoMen

The Social Cost of Intelligence: Emergence, Propagation, and Amplification of Stereotypical Bias in Multi-Agent Systems
Thi-Nhung Nguyen, Linhao Luo, Thuy-Trang Vu, Dinh Phung
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10943

The Social Cost of Intelligence: Emergence, Propagation, and Amplification of Stereotypical Bias in Multi-Agent Systems
Bias in large language models (LLMs) remains a persistent challenge, manifesting in stereotyping and unfair treatment across social groups. While prior research has primarily focused on individual models, the rise of multi-agent systems (MAS), where multiple LLMs collaborate and communicate, introduces new and largely unexplored dynamics in bias emergence and propagation. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of stereotypical bias in MAS, examining how internal specialization, underlyi…

TabVLA: Targeted Backdoor Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models
Zonghuan Xu, Xiang Zheng, Xingjun Ma, Yu-Gang Jiang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10932 https://

TabVLA: Targeted Backdoor Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models
With the growing deployment of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in real-world embodied AI systems, their increasing vulnerability to backdoor attacks poses a serious safety threat. A backdoored VLA agent can be covertly triggered by a pre-injected backdoor to execute adversarial actions, potentially causing system failures or even physical harm. Although backdoor attacks on VLA models have been explored, prior work has focused only on untargeted attacks, leaving the more practically threaten…

Two-Photon Induced Coherence without Induced Emission
Dong-Gil Im, Seung-Yeun Yoo, Chung-Hyun Lee, Jongheon Suh, Yoon-Ho Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09392 https://

Two-Photon Induced Coherence without Induced Emission
At the heart of recent advances in quantum imaging and spectroscopy with undetected photons is the quantum optical effect known as induced coherence without induced emission. This quantum interference effect has enabled access to challenging wavelength regimes for imaging and spectroscopic applications. However, the potential of undetected photon quantum metrology, particularly the enhanced phase sensitivity offered by Fock or N00N states, has not yet been realized, as prior work focused only o…

Another post on #Quansight PBC blog: "BLAS/LAPACK #packaging"
#BLAS and #LAPACK are the standard libraries for linear algebra. The original implementation, often called Netlib LAPACK, developed since the 1980s, nowadays serves primarily as the origin of the standard interface, the reference implementation and a conformance test suite. The end users usually use optimized implementations of the same interfaces. The choice ranges from generically tuned libraries such as OpenBLAS and BLIS, through libraries focused on specific hardware such as Intel® oneMKL, Arm Performance Libraries or the Accelerate framework on macOS, to ATLAS that aims to automatically optimize for a specific system.
The diversity of available libraries, developed in parallel with the standard interfaces, along with vendor-specific extensions and further downstream changes, adds quite a bit of complexity around using these libraries in software, and distributing such software afterwards. This problem entangles implementation authors, consumer software authors, build system maintainers and distribution maintainers. Software authors generally wish to distribute their packages built against a generically optimized BLAS/LAPACK implementation. Advanced users often wish to be able to use a different implementation, more suited to their particular needs. Distributions wish to be able to consistently build software against their system libraries, and ideally provide users the ability to switch between different implementations. Then, build systems need to provide the scaffolding for all of that.
I have recently taken up the work to provide such a scaffolding for the Meson build system; to add support for BLAS and LAPACK dependencies to Meson. While working on it, I had to learn a lot about BLAS/LAPACK packaging: not only how the different implementations differ from one another, but also what is changed by their respective downstream packaging. In this blog post, I would like to organize and share what I have learned.
"""
#CondaForge #Debian #Fedora #Gentoo

Part of why #Trump has always been so hard to pin down politically is that he was always representing highly conflicting interests. Now, as that eats him alive, the GOP is fracturing in to two main groups: the Pinochet/Franco wing and the Hitler wing.
The Pinochet/Franco wing (let's call them PF) are lead by Vance. PF are also a coalition with some competing interests, but basically it's evangelical leaders, Opus Dei (fascist catholics), tech fascists (Yarvinites), pharma, and the other normal big republican donors. They support Israel, some because apartheid is extremely profitable and some because they support the genocide of Palestinian in order to bring the end of the world. They are split between extremely antisemitic evangelicals and Zionists, wanting similar things for completely different reasons. PF wants strong immigration enforcement because it lets them exploit immigrants, they don't want actual ethnic cleansing (just the constant threat). They want H1B visas because they want to a precarious tech work force. They want to end tariffs because they support free trade and don't actually care about things being made here.
The Hitler wing are lead by Nick Fuentes. I think they're a more unified group, but they're going to try to pull together a coalition that I don't think can really work. They're against Israel because they believe in some bat shit antisemitic conspiracy theory (which they are trying to inject along side legitimate criticism of Israel). They are focused on release of the #EpsteinFiles because they believe that it shows that Epstein worked for Mossad. They don't think that the ICE raids are going far enough, they oppose H1Bs because they are racists. They want a full ethnic cleansing of the US where everyone who isn't "white" is either enslaved for menial labor, deported, or dead. But they're also critical of big business (partially because of conspiracy theories but also) because they think their best option is to push for a white socialism (red/brown alliance).
Both of them want to sink Trump because they see him as standing in the way of their objectives. Both see #Epstein as an opportunity. Both of them have absolutely terrifying visions of authoritarian dictatorships, but they're different dictatorships.with opposing interests. Even within these there may be opportunities to fracture these more.
While these fractures decrease the likelihood of either group getting enough people together, their vision is more clear and thus more likely to succeed if they can make that happen. Now is absolutely *not* the time to just enjoy the collapse, we need to keep up or accelerate anti-fascist efforts to avoid repeating some of the mistakes of history.
Edit:
I should not that this isn't *totally* original analysis. I'll link a video later when I have time to find it.
Here it is:
#USPol