Tootfinder

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19301 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCR_…

A Novel Zero-Trust Identity Framework for Agentic AI: Decentralized Authentication and Fine-Grained Access Control
Traditional Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems, primarily designed for human users or static machine identities via protocols such as OAuth, OpenID Connect (OIDC), and SAML, prove fundamentally inadequate for the dynamic, interdependent, and often ephemeral nature of AI agents operating at scale within Multi Agent Systems (MAS), a computational system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents that work collectively. This paper posits the imperative for a novel Agentic AI I…

Topology, Kinetics and Inheritance in Clonal Colonies of Bone Marrow Stromal Cells
Alessandro Allegrezza, Riccardo Beschi, Domenico Caudo, Andrea Cavagna, Alessandro Corsi, Antonio Culla, Samantha Donsante, Giuseppe Giannicola, Irene Giardina, Giorgio Gosti, Tomas S. Grigera, Stefania Melillo, Biagio Palmisano, Leonardo Parisi, Lorena Postiglione, Mara Riminucci, Francesco Saverio Rotondi

Topology, Kinetics and Inheritance in Clonal Colonies of Bone Marrow Stromal Cells
Bone marrow stromal cells (BMSCs), whose populations contain multipotent skeletal stem cells with relevant therapeutic applications, are known to produce very heterogeneous colonies upon in vitro culture, a trait that may severely hinder the clinical usefulness of BMSC-based therapies. Therefore, reaching a better insight on the nature of such heterogeneity, as well as on the factors determining it, is important. Here, by using time-lapse microscopy, we study the structure of N=28 human BMSC co…

Remember how banning guns because of one mass shooting in 20 years didn't reduce violent crime? Well, I'm sure if they just keep banning everything that ever gets used in a violent crime, human nature will just magically change, right?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyvxxd4knjo

Australia fast-tracks first-ever machete ban after weekend attack
The ban follows a machete attack between gangs at a Melbourne shopping centre on Sunday afternoon

"The one thing that can stop the rise of the far right is the one thing mainstream parties are currently not prepared to deliver: greater equality. The rich should be taxed more, and the revenue used to improve the lives of the poor. However frantically centrist parties avoid the issue, there is no other way."
#FightingOligarchy
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/13/trump-populists-human-nature-economic-growth

To dig slightly deeper here, I think that there's a feedback loop between "fall in love/wait for your perfect match (and by the way girls the only career you should aspire to is the literally unattainable 'princess'" Disney stuff and this "my characters are complex I'm so sophisticated; they suffer but it's not intolerable and their lives are good enough despite the imperfections" crap that gets praised as so evocative of the human condition. In fact, I think it merely evokes the condition of its authors & fans who were poisoned by the Disney in their youth and who have remained bad as relationships ever since, though this is not exactly their fault. In any case, their white middle-aged wisdom-shaped-but-quite bitter and intricately-constructed-so-it's-hard-to-see-the-really-untrue-character-facets work ends up keeping their audience within the "romance is luck" cult by way of reassuring them that a middling romance with lots of doubt and complications is "just life" even though the author doesn't actually have any broader perspective on what life is than anyone else.
This has turned into a bit of a rant, but I think I'll just add that reading Mama by Nikkya Hargrove just before Dream State helped immensely to see how the distant & awkward parent-child relationships of the latter are not a product of human nature but instead of white western culture & capitalism.
(The defeatism about climate change is a whole nother dimension of wrong about Dream State, by that's a separate rant.)

The more time goes on, the more conflicted I get about #AI. (or, more specifically, generative AI. I like causal AI a fair bit)
On one hand, I hate so much about it:
the needless environmental and electronic parts waste, the impact on labor, the monopolistic nature of main organizations driving it, the endless conversations about AGI and other absurdly utopian (or dystopian) futures, the widespread theft of IP and human work, the devaluation of labor and craft… so much of it is not okay at all.
On the other hand, I kinda get it?
I like to test software for myself, so I've been dipping my toes into some popular AI tools over the past couple of years. I have a paid subscription to ChatGPT (which I don’t feel great about, I know), and I have found genuine utility in it.
More so, I feel so conflicted when I talk to people I respect and who I think are very smart and creative and they tell me how in love they are with all of these AI tools, about the complex workflows they build, about their experiments with agentic AI and integrations... These people seem so excited, so alive, so joyous about the things that this technology allows them to do. They often wouldn't have had the skills / knowledge / financial capital to do some of those things with human efforts alone. And now I see them coding their own tools, doing complex data analysis, trying creative experiments with graphics / text / video...
And I feel like a total jerk going "BUT ACTUALLY THIS IS UNETHICAL AND INEFFICIENT AND YOU SHOULD STOP IT BECAUSE AI SUCKS".
The technology behind all these gen AI models does have real utility, and it has kicked off a lot of creativity from people who wouldn't have dabbled in those kinds of projects otherwise.
So I don't know how to feel. Because I can't let go of the guilt and the real problems and the awareness of how much empty hype there is.
#technology #artificialintelligence #genAI #ChatGPT