Tootfinder

Cowboys free agent proposal lands former $24 million Bengals starting defender https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/cincinnati-bengals/news/cowboys-free-agent-proposal-lands…

Aaron Rodgers to sign with Steelers, attend minicamp next week: Sources https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6231027/2025/06/05/aaron-rodgers-steelers-nfl-free-agency/

Subtooting since people in the original thread wanted it to be over, but selfishly tagging @… and @… whose opinions I value...
I think that saying "we are not a supply chain" is exactly what open-source maintainers should be doing right now in response to "open source supply chain security" threads.
I can't claim to be an expert and don't maintain any important FOSS stuff, but I do release almost all of my code under open licenses, and I do use many open source libraries, and I have felt the pain of needing to replace an unmaintained library.
There's a certain small-to-mid-scale class of program, including many open-source libraries, which can be built/maintained by a single person, and which to my mind best operate on a "snake growth" model: incremental changes/fixes, punctuated by periodic "skin-shedding" phases where make rewrites or version updates happen. These projects aren't immortal either: as the whole tech landscape around them changes, they become unnecessary and/or people lose interest, so they go unmaintained and eventually break. Each time one of their dependencies breaks (or has a skin-shedding moment) there's a higher probability that they break or shed too, as maintenance needs shoot up at these junctures. Unless you're a company trying to make money from a single long-lived app, it's actually okay that software churns like this, and if you're a company trying to make money, your priorities absolutely should not factor into any decisions people making FOSS software make: we're trying (and to a huge extent succeeding) to make a better world (and/or just have fun with our own hobbies share that fun with others) that leaves behind the corrosive & planet-destroying plague which is capitalism, and you're trying to personally enrich yourself by embracing that plague. The fact that capitalism is *evil* is not an incidental thing in this discussion.
To make an imperfect analogy, imagine that the peasants of some domain have set up a really-free-market, where they provide each other with free stuff to help each other survive, sometimes doing some barter perhaps but mostly just everyone bringing their surplus. Now imagine the lord of the domain, who is the source of these peasants' immiseration, goes to this market secretly & takes some berries, which he uses as one ingredient in delicious tarts that he then sells for profit. But then the berry-bringer stops showing up to the free market, or starts bringing a different kind of fruit, or even ends up bringing rotten berries by accident. And the lord complains "I have a supply chain problem!" Like, fuck off dude! Your problem is that you *didn't* want to build a supply chain and instead thought you would build your profit-focused business in other people's free stuff. If you were paying the berry-picker, you'd have a supply chain problem, but you weren't, so you really have an "I want more free stuff" problem when you can't be arsed to give away your own stuff for free.
There can be all sorts of problems in the really-free-market, like maybe not enough people bring socks, so the peasants who can't afford socks are going barefoot, and having foot problems, and the peasants put their heads together and see if they can convince someone to start bringing socks, and maybe they can't and things are a bit sad, but the really-free-market was never supposed to solve everyone's problems 100% when they're all still being squeezed dry by their taxes: until they are able to get free of the lord & start building a lovely anarchist society, the really-free-market is a best-effort kind of deal that aims to make things better, and sometimes will fall short. When it becomes the main way goods in society are distributed, and when the people who contribute aren't constantly drained by the feudal yoke, at that point the availability of particular goods is a real problem that needs to be solved, but at that point, it's also much easier to solve. And at *no* point does someone coming into the market to take stuff only to turn around and sell it deserve anything from the market or those contributing to it. They are not a supply chain. They're trying to help each other out, but even then they're doing so freely and without obligation. They might discuss amongst themselves how to better coordinate their mutual aid, but they're not going to end up forcing anyone to bring anything or even expecting that a certain person contribute a certain amount, since the whole point is that the thing is voluntary & free, and they've all got changing life circumstances that affect their contributions. Celebrate whatever shows up at the market, express your desire for things that would be useful, but don't impose a burden on anyone else to bring a specific thing, because otherwise it's fair for them to oppose such a burden on you, and now you two are doing your own barter thing that's outside the parameters of the really-free-market.

ByteGen: A Tokenizer-Free Generative Model for Orderbook Events in Byte Space
Yang Li, Zhi Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02247 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508…

ByteGen: A Tokenizer-Free Generative Model for Orderbook Events in Byte Space
Generative modeling of high-frequency limit order book (LOB) dynamics is a critical yet unsolved challenge in quantitative finance, essential for robust market simulation and strategy backtesting. Existing approaches are often constrained by simplifying stochastic assumptions or, in the case of modern deep learning models like Transformers, rely on tokenization schemes that affect the high-precision, numerical nature of financial data through discretization and binning. To address these limitat…

From DeSmog International
Top Free-Market Think Tank Unsure That Canada Needs More Pipelines
While Alberta premier Danielle Smith demands new oil corridors, the Macdonald Laurier Institute notes that pipeline capacity is currently ‘sufficient.’
This pro-oil and gas organization stated in an April report that there is currently “sufficient pipeline capacity” for western Canadian oil

Top Free-Market Think Tank Unsure That Canada Needs More Pipelines
While Alberta premier Danielle Smith demands new oil corridors, the Macdonald Laurier Institute notes that pipeline capacity is currently ‘sufficient.’

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.02943 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_qfi…

Striking the Balance: Life Insurance Timing and Asset Allocation in Financial Planning
This paper investigates the consumption and investment decisions of an individual facing uncertain lifespan and stochastic labor income within a Black-Scholes market framework. A key aspect of our study involves the agent's option to choose when to acquire life insurance for bequest purposes. We examine two scenarios: one with a fixed bequest amount and another with a controlled bequest amount. Applying duality theory and addressing free-boundary problems, we analytically solve both cases, and …

How to be a man -- The right's narrative about male attractiveness is grounded in Social Darwinism and free market economics. (Ian Dunt/Striking 13)
https://iandunt.substack.com/p/how-to-be-a-man-4ae
http://www.memeorandum.com/250801/p111#a250801p111

To my fellow Asians:
All you free market, libertarian freakshows - you know who you are - that voted #Trump cuz #MAGA's racism would NEVVVVER come for you... consider this your wake up call.
▶️ Steve Bannon Suggests There Are Too Many

Steve Bannon Suggests There Are Too Many Asian CEOs In Silicon Valley
But Donald Trump says he wants them to stay because "we have to keep our talented people."

Why is Wall Street brushing off Trump’s escalating tariff threats?
Investors feel free to continue bidding up stock prices because they assume TACO Trump will always back down from his most costly tariff plans, market analysts said.
But Trump views stocks’ steady rise as a license to intensify his trade threats,
acting out the economic policy equivalent of his 2016 quip that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without paying a price.
His…

Why Wall Street is brushing off Trump’s escalating tariff threats
President Donald Trump’s escalating tariff threats have not deterred Wall Street, with the stock market continuing to rise despite trade policy uncertainty.

How an open-source approach helped DeepSeek and other Chinese AI companies; Hugging Face: Alibaba's Qwen is now the world's largest open-source AI ecosystem (South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article

How open-source AI is helping China win hearts and market share
China’s free-for-all AI models, developed by firms like DeepSeek and Alibaba, present a viable alternative to US closed-source systems.

Just read this post by @… on an optimistic AGI future, and while it had some interesting and worthwhile ideas, it's also in my opinion dangerously misguided, and plays into the current AGI hype in a harmful way.
https://social.coop/@eloquence/114940607434005478
My criticisms include:
- Current LLM technology has many layers, but the biggest most capable models are all tied to corporate datacenters and require inordinate amounts of every and water use to run. Trying to use these tools to bring about a post-scarcity economy will burn up the planet. We urgently need more-capable but also vastly more efficient AI technologies if we want to use AI for a post-scarcity economy, and we are *not* nearly on the verge of this despite what the big companies pushing LLMs want us to think.
- I can see that permacommons.org claims a small level of expenses on AI equates to low climate impact. However, given current deep subsidies on place by the big companies to attract users, that isn't a great assumption. The fact that their FAQ dodges the question about which AI systems they use isn't a great look.
- These systems are not free in the same way that Wikipedia or open-source software is. To run your own model you need a data harvesting & cleaning operation that costs millions of dollars minimum, and then you need millions of dollars worth of storage & compute to train & host the models. Right now, big corporations are trying to compete for market share by heavily subsidizing these things, but it you go along with that, you become dependent on them, and you'll be screwed when they jack up the price to a profitable level later. I'd love to see open dataset initiatives SBD the like, and there are some of these things, but not enough yet, and many of the initiatives focus on one problem while ignoring others (fine for research but not the basis for a society yet).
- Between the environmental impacts, the horrible labor conditions and undercompensation of data workers who filter the big datasets, and the impacts of both AI scrapers and AI commons pollution, the developers of the most popular & effective LLMs have a lot of answer for. This project only really mentions environmental impacts, which makes me think that they're not serious about ethics, which in turn makes me distrustful of the whole enterprise.
- Their language also ends up encouraging AI use broadly while totally ignoring several entire classes of harm, so they're effectively contributing to AI hype, especially with such casual talk of AGI and robotics as if embodied AGI were just around the corner. To be clear about this point: we are several breakthroughs away from AGI under the most optimistic assumptions, and giving the impression that those will happen soon plays directly into the hands of the Sam Altmans of the world who are trying to make money off the impression of impending huge advances in AI capabilities. Adding to the AI hype is irresponsible.
- I've got a more philosophical criticism that I'll post about separately.
I do think that the idea of using AI & other software tools, possibly along with robotics and funded by many local cooperatives, in order to make businesses obsolete before they can do the same to all workers, is a good one. Get your local library to buy a knitting machine alongside their 3D printer.
Lately I've felt too busy criticizing AI to really sit down and think about what I do want the future to look like, even though I'm a big proponent of positive visions for the future as a force multiplier for criticism, and this article is inspiring to me in that regard, even if the specific project doesn't seem like a good one.

Time for another "review". This one's hard. While the book was quite interesting, it required me to be quite open-minded. Still, I think it's worth mentioning:
Robert Wright — Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
The book basically focused on a thesis that both biological evolution and cultural evolution are a thing, they are directional and this directionality can be explained together using game theory — as eventually leading to more non-zero sum games.
It consists of three chapters. The first one is is focused on the history of civilization. It features many examples from different parts of the world, which makes it quite interesting. The author argues that the culture inevitably is evolving as information processing techniques improve — from writing to the Internet.
The second chapter is focused on biological evolution. Now, the argument is that it's not quite random, but actually directed towards greater complexity — eventually leading to the development of highly intelligent species, and a civilization.
The third chapter is quite speculative and metaphysical, and I'm just going to skip it.
The book is full of optimism. Capitalism creates freedom — because people are more productive when they're working for their own gain, so the free market eliminates slavery. Globalisation creates networks of interdependence that make wars uneconomic. Increased contacts between different cultures makes people more tolerant. And eventually, the humanity may be able to unite facing a common "external" enemy — the climate change.
What can I say? The examples are quite interesting, the whole theory seems self-consistent. Still, I repeatedly looked at the publication date (it's 1999), and wondered if author would write the same thing today (yes, I know I can search for his current opinions).
#books #bookstodon @…

Peacock will raise prices by $3 per month for new users starting July 23 and test a $7.99/month ad-supported "Select" tier without sports and some other content (Josef Adalian/Vulture)
https://www.vulture.com/article/peacock-price-increase-2025.html

Peacock Is Hiking Prices More Than It Ever Has Before
Peacock is raising prices — by nearly 40 percent on its ad-supported plan and 20 percent on its ad-free plan. The streamer now has the most expensive ad-supported tier on the market.

“The economic New Right is like New Coke—it leaves a bad taste in your mouth and won’t last.”
Opinion | The New Right’s Zombienomics - The Wall Street Journal https://apple.news/AZPUdes-PS5aFy92Ru96n3A

This is a good article on Greater Manchester's transition to publicly managed bus services from the total mess of Thatcher's privatised free market.
This is who's really paying for Greater Manchester's publicly-run bus network - Manchester Evening News

This is who's really paying for Greater Manchester's publicly-run bus network
City region officials have defended the system after a Tory MP said it was "£226 million in the red" in its first year

This might also explain why #OpenAI pushed ChatGPT to market before it was worth touching. If you can’t afford testing at scale, why not do a huge free public release so that you can call the last 80% of the dev effort “product support" which should be fully expensible.
NOTE: I AM NOT A TAX EXPERT AND THE ABOVE COULD BE ABSURD.

Alabama football legend Amari Cooper predicted to find new NFL home with ascending AFC squad https://www.sportingnews.com/us/ncaa-football/alabama/news/alabama-footba…

Pricing and hedging the prepayment option of mortgages under stochastic housing market activity
Leonardo Perotti, Lech A. Grzelak, Cornelis W. Oosterlee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08641

Pricing and hedging the prepayment option of mortgages under stochastic housing market activity
Prepayment risk embedded in fixed-rate mortgages forms a significant fraction of a financial institution's exposure. The embedded prepayment option bears the same interest rate risk as an exotic interest rate swap with a suitable stochastic notional. Focusing on penalty-free prepayment because of the contract owner's relocation to a new house, we model the prepayment option value as an European-type interest rate receiver swaption with stochastic maturity matching the stochastic time of relocat…

Biggest remaining need for every AFC team: Jets wide receivers, Bengals edge rushers headline list

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/biggest

Asante Samuel Jr. landing spots: Dolphins likely out after father rips franchise for having 'no backbone'

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news…

Dynamic Asset Pricing with {\alpha}-MEU Model
Jiacheng Fan, Xue Dong He, Ruocheng Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04093 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04093

Dynamic Asset Pricing with α-MEU Model
We study a dynamic asset pricing problem in which a representative agent is ambiguous about the aggregate endowment growth rate and trades a risky stock, human capital, and a risk-free asset to maximize her preference value of consumption represented by the α-maxmin expected utility model. This preference model is known to be dynamically inconsistent, so we consider intra-personal equilibrium strategies for the representative agent and define the market equilibrium as the one in which the stra…