Tootfinder

"Hypothesis: Chart Hits Before Maybe 2015 Are Less Likely to Be Remembered Than Hits from Previous Decades"
https://Karl-Voit.at/2026/04/19/hypothesis-chart-hits-popularity-decay
To check my assumption, I asked Claude what it "knows"…

The thesis I was reading spent the majority of it's time focused on John Boyd's OODA loop as a tool for critical analysis in high pressure or constrained situations. Table top exercises could also benefit from using these steps to slow down the thought process, expose what's actually happening, and sharpen these tools.
So each step could start by observing (which is generally what the GM will tell you, but you may ask additional questions to refine observational thinking). What do you look for in any given situation? How do you gather data? What sources do you use?
Next you would orient. Talk through this out loud. What does that data mean? How this fit what you already know, or does it challenge your assumptions? Are you observing something related to a previous action? What does that tell you about your previous action or actions? How do you turn the data you observed into intelligence you can act on? How do your observations narrow the options for the next possible action?
Then you decide your action. But you're not simply deciding, you're coming up with a hypothesis that your action will test. Anything you do is an opportunity to learn something about the world, about your situation, about the accuracy of the model you're using to make decisions. What belief does your next action imply? How will you know if that action was correct or incorrect? What observations would challenge your hypothesis? What observations would confirm it? Are those mutually exclusive, or are there additional observations or actions you must make to clarify things?
Then act. Finish your turn by choosing your action or actions (individually or collectively). Perhaps take a moment to write down notes, like what your observations, your hypothesis, and if you think your previous hypothesis was confirmed or refuted. You can review these all later to refine your thinking.
By exploring these ideas in a safe environment, you can train your brain to run through the process at high speed when under pressure. This helps you avoid panic. It's a lot like slowly practicing marshal arts moves until they become muscle memory, which then just happen without thought when needed.

Routine vaccines may cut dementia risk—experts have startling hypothesis on how - Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/05/routine-vaccines-may-cut-dementia-risk-experts-have-startling-hypothesis-on-how/

Here's somebody's blog post about grackles' fondness for dropping feces in water, written from the perspective of an annoyed koi-pond owner. The author gives the usual explanation that behavior reduces nest predation (presumably because fecal smell is attractant). I couldn't find support for this hypothesis in the primary literature, however. Nor could I find support for the idea that a clean nest reduces parasites such as flesh-eating flies. But I'm not a birdologist so I could have missed the definitive paper. https://www.pondtrademag.com/blackbird-gift-sacs-the-airmail-no-pond-keeper-wants/

RFK Jr. asked the National Institute of Health to dedicate $5 billion (!)
to finding a link between vaccines and autism.
"That would have dedicated more than a tenth of the NIH’s annual budget
to investigating a hypothesis already refuted by scientists worldwide."
https://

Gillian Branstetter (@gbbranstetter.bsky.social)
RFK Jr. asked the National Institute of Health to dedicate $5 billion (!) to finding a link between vaccines and autism. "That would have dedicated more than a tenth of the NIH’s annual budget to investigating a hypothesis already refuted by scientists worldwide." https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/inside-rfk-jrs-push-dismantle-decades-us-vaccine-policy-2026-07-14/

Learning random facts from random people, I mean, that's one of the great things about the internet, right?
#blog

Three things I learned this week 🌱 - Finest Day
Or that I thought about again. Or that I think are wondrous. Anyway, I wanted to share them with you here. • The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis • The concept of affordance...

#Python Hypothesis package now requires #RustLang. This is a scale of reverse dependencies I can't handle. I guess this means it's the end of WD40 profiles on #Gentoo, and therefore the end of support for Alpha, ARM<v6, HPPA, M68k, i486 and some other random subsets of architectures and profiles. Thanks for all the fish, etc.
https://github.com/HypothesisWorks/hypothesis/issues/4740

The racist mob violence in Belfast, and NI more generally, is in Protestant majority areas. That is areas with a legacy of parramilitarism defending WASP supremacy.
No longer a hypothesis.

Not my field at all, but a very interesting and potentially controversial one.
By sheer chance 2 contrasting podcasts on the "wood wide web" hypothesis crossed my @… this week...
Science Fictions: Episode 91: Entangled Life and the wood wide web
https://sciencefictionspod.substack.com/p/episode-91-entangled-life-and-the

The World, the Universe and Us: The Wood Wide Web: The Forest Discovery That Sparked a Backlash on @…
Media file: https://tracking.swap.fm/track/YfZO4tERxneauNcW9Fgn/mgln.ai/e/211/traffic.megaphone.fm/ARML1134826042.mp3?updated=1777040556

Ah, yes - #MayorLurie and his cronies 100% support the #Abundance hypothesis. Why are they so fond of the #RentierEconomy? Maybe when you can afford market rate prices, it'll work for you? But it …

SF was headed for Mamdani-style grocery stores. Those plans have been spiked
Supervisor Bilal Mahmood introduced a proposal last month to fund affordable grocery stores, but last minute political wrangling has effectively nixed it.

Ah, yes - #MayorLurie and his cronies 100% support the #Abundance hypothesis. Why are they so fond of the #RentierEconomy? Maybe when you can afford market rate prices, it'll work for you? But it …

SF was headed for Mamdani-style grocery stores. Those plans have been spiked
Supervisor Bilal Mahmood introduced a proposal last month to fund affordable grocery stores, but last minute political wrangling has effectively nixed it.

University of Montreal resesrch into shared stress between couples found that "lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and nonbinary couples" (SGD) supported each other better through stress than cishet couples - they "recover more efficiently from acute stress and display more engaged and coordinated support behaviors".
One hypothesis explaining this was, essentially, shared oppression and the need to build strong chosen families.

Does anyone have any hypothesis why after rebooting macOS chooses the 2nd input source and not your primary one?
I locked my OS, twice, because of this.
//cc @… @…

We introduce Robin,
the first multi-agent system capable of fully automating both hypothesis generation and data analysis for experimental biology.
By integrating literature search agents with data analysis agents,
Robin can generate hypotheses,
propose experiments,
interpret experimental results,
and generate updated hypotheses,
achieving a semi-autonomous approach to scientific discovery.
By applying this system, we were able to identify pr…

A couple of years ago, I wrote that The #Builderpattern is a finite #statemachine! A state machine consists of states and transitions between them. As a developer, I want to make illegal states unrepresentable, i.e., users of my API can’t create non-existent transitions. My hypothesis is that …

RE: https://indieweb.social/@tchambers/116501722477651878
＂… We do not, however, find statistically significant evidence supporting the hypothesis that an increased rate of AI-generated text on the internet decreases factual accuracy or stylistic diversi…

My impression (backed by a quick check of the localities against denominational distribution) is that the racist mob violence in Belfast, and NI more generally, is in Protestant majority areas. That is areas with a legacy of parramilitarism defending WASP supremacy.
It's a hypothesis: so feel free to disprove it.

Free Floating or Merely Detached? #FreeFloatingPlanets, we estimate that about one-half of the reported 'free-floating' Neptunes are not free but merely 'detached'" -> Detached but Not Alone: https://aasnova.org/2026/06/26/detached-but-not-alone/

Two-Sample Hypothesis Testing for Subspace Equality in Network Data
Rajdeep Brahma, Joshua Agterberg, Yuguo Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06482 https://a…

I need people to try something for a hypothesis
Try and clip out of the map (a few times) and tell me where you end up. Please follow @ap.brid.gy before commenting if you're on bluesky, or i won't be able to see it
@… #VOTV

RE: https://mastodon.social/@CuratedHackerNews/116465094141814972
Interesting and somewhat supporting a hypothesis I shared a few times.
It’s both not as bad as expected and also centralising the cost and billing the ones who create the in…

This study's results suggest that LLM sycophancy amplifies publication bias (the "file drawer" problem)
The LLMs didn't like to tell the user that their hypothesis was not confirmed by the data
H/t @…

The SMC Blind Spot: A Failure Mode Analysis of State-of-the-Art Beat Tracking
Jaehoon Ahn, Tae Gum Hwang, Moon-Ryul Jung
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12287 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.12287 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.12287
arXiv:2605.12287v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Over the past two decades, the task of musical beat tracking has transitioned from heuristic onset detection algorithms to highly capable deep neural networks (DNN). Although DNN-based beat tracking models achieve near-perfect performance on mainstream, percussive datasets, the SMC dataset has stubbornly yielded low F-measure scores. By testing how well state-of-the-art models detect beats on individual tracks in the SMC dataset, we identify three distinct failure modes: octave errors, continuity errors, and complete tracking failure where all metrics fall below 0.3. We reveal that state-of-the-art models tend to generate "confident-but-wrong" activations. Furthermore, we show that the standard DBN's default minimum tempo of 55 BPM prevents it from inferring the correct tempo for 21\% of SMC tracks, forcing double-tempo predictions on slow music. By exposing such fundamental oversights, we provide concrete directions for improving beat and downbeat detection, specifically emphasizing training data diversification and multi-hypothesis tempo estimation.
toXiv_bot_toot

This is an interesting tidbit of information from Henry.
"“The global hypothesis is that the infection, the exposure to the rat feces, or whatever in the dry area that they were in, happened before they arrived on the cruise ship,” she said. “It was a couple from the Netherlands. So then they both became ill, whether they both had the initial exposure, or whether the wife was exposed to her husband once he became ill.””
Specifically: ”the dry area”
Reports are that it was a bird watching expedition to a landfill that is the primary suspect for the source of the exposure. Which, in my mind, means the hantavirus can spread through contact with dirt either on the bottom of a shoe, or on particles in the wind in a dry dusty environment.
That doesn't quite give me confidence that it is not “airborne”... but… ok.
Dr. Henry: #Hantavirus #COVIDisAirborne #Argentina #disease #cruise

A structural reduction for the symmetric hit problem in four variables
Dang Vo Phuc
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02626 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.02626 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.02626
arXiv:2606.02626v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Let $\mathcal{A}$ be the mod $2$ Steenrod algebra, and $P(n) = \mathbb{F}_2[x_1, \dots, x_n]$ be the polynomial algebra viewed as an unstable module over $\mathcal{A}$. The symmetric hit conjecture asks whether the symmetrization of a hit monomial in $P(n)$ is always hit in the symmetric invariant subalgebra $B(n) = P(n)^{\Sigma_n}$. While resolved for $n \leq 3$, the case $n=4$ presents significant obstructions due to combinatorial complexity, orbit cancellations intrinsically tied to $\Sigma_4$-stabilizers, and the emergence of strongly spike-free survivor modules. This paper introduces a conditional structural reduction to overcome these obstructions in the domain where the numerical weight satisfies $\mu(d) \leq 4$. By integrating Walker-Wood duality with a new $\Sigma_4$-stabilizer parity analysis, we reduce the global conjecture to localized algebraic conditions: a symmetric lower-spike reduction and a strengthened four-row digital-engineering hypothesis. Assuming these inputs, the conjecture follows by lexicographic induction on the column-sum and row-sum sequences of the binary exponent matrices.
Our approach isolates the four-variable repeated-row anomaly into exact local identities, utilizing global Steenrod-kernel functionals lifted from local spike-free quotients to detect potential survivor elements. Finally, we provide explicit monomial-level computations in degrees $8$, $12$, and $14$, explicitly illustrating the stabilizer mechanism in practice and framing the precise algebraic identities required for a future unconditional proof.
toXiv_bot_toot

Alignment Pretraining: AI Discourse Causes Self-Fulfilling (Mis)alignment
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10160

Sadly, yes, it worked flawlessly … for about 20 minutes, then blew both fuses (and my hypothesis) and "she's dead, Jim" I hear Bones say 😔

I was getting concerned about the lack of blackbird song but this morning he arrived on next door's TV aerial.
I've a hypothesis: part 1) blackbird song is more complex in cities than more rural areas, part 2) due to greater density and hence a need to differentiate voices.

The physics of AI weather models
George Craig, Tobias Selz, Matthias Beylich, Kirsten I. Tempest
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23778 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.23778 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.23778
arXiv:2605.23778v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Could it be that AI weather models are solving physical equations, although they may not be the equations used by conventional NWP models? We compute correlations of forecast skill and Centered Kernel Alignment, providing evidence that different AI weather models represent the atmosphere in similar ways, despite differences in architecture and capacity. We argue that the architecture and training of the AI models constrains the form of the physical laws that they might simulate. In particular, we propose that the models implement a particle description of the atmosphere, where the latent variables at each mesh point correspond to the position of a particle in the high dimensional latent space. We hypothesize that the movement of the particles follows a gradient flow in the latent space towards a minimum of a learned free energy functional. Analysis of the GraphCast and Aurora models show that they make changes on large spatial scales in the early processor layers and move to smaller scale with increasing layer depth, consistent with the gradient flow hypothesis.
toXiv_bot_toot

Without yet applying power, I have a suspect, and a new quest to find a part only exotic in this century. My hypothesis is when the signal clip on the "overdrive" phono socket came free, it could dangle touching a ground. Unreasonable because there shouldn't be any voltage on input wires, but that dangling clip could have touched anywhere, and falling over in the car (with a thump) likely didn't help.
Now, a new quest for a part not costing more than the part itself. I might have one in a crate of audio junk bits...
Oh and I now have 4 extra 3A 30mm should there be need 😊