Tootfinder

Perhaps the silver lining to the UK no longer being in the European Union is that it offers the opportunity to look at developments that are progressing at a different pace in the EU.
Here:
how clean consumer flexibility - EVs, heat pumps - can support the local grid, if allow it to.

Yes, consumer clean energy technologies can support the local grid — if we allow them to. Last week, I shared information about EU policy developments regarding device-level metering for charging… | Jaap Burger
Yes, consumer clean energy technologies can support the local grid — if we allow them to. Last week, I shared information about EU policy developments regarding device-level metering for charging points. This allows EV charging sessions to be measured accurately and enables the flexibility involved to be marketed. I cited the example of the UK, where this has recently become a practical reality, an opportunity to learn for other jurisdictions. Here is another example. The latest amendment to…

Moody Urbanity - Passer By 🚶‍♂️
情绪化城市 - 路人 🚶‍♂️
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️ Kentmere Pan 400
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

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

Salesforce says it expects FY 2030 revenue of $60B , vs. $58.37B est., excluding impact from the $8B pending acquisition of data management company Informatica (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/15/salesforce-stock-jumps-a…

Salesforce stock jumps after company offers rosy forecast for 2030
Salesforce is counting on Agentforce artificial intelligence software to pull in more revenue from customers.

Infinitely many solutions to a conformally invariant elliptic equation with Choquard-type nonlinearity
Mona Almutairi, Mathew Gluck
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11263 https://

Infinitely many solutions to a conformally invariant elliptic equation with Choquard-type nonlinearity
The existence of an unbounded sequence of solutions to a conformally invariant elliptic equation having nonlocal critical-power nonlinearity is established. The primary obstacle to establishing existence of solutions is the failure of compactness in the Sobolev embedding. To overcome this obstacle, the problem under consideration is lifted to an equivalent problem on the standard sphere so that the symmetries of the sphere can be leveraged. Two classes of symmetries are considered and for each …

Five Minutes of DDoS Brings down Tor: DDoS Attacks on the Tor Directory Protocol and Mitigations
Zhongtang Luo, Jianting Zhang, Akshat Neerati, Aniket Kate
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10755

Five Minutes of DDoS Brings down Tor: DDoS Attacks on the Tor Directory Protocol and Mitigations
The Tor network offers network anonymity to its users by routing their traffic through a sequence of relays. A group of nine directory authorities maintains information about all available relay nodes using a distributed directory protocol. We observe that the current protocol makes a steep synchrony assumption, which makes it vulnerable to natural as well as adversarial non-synchronous communication scenarios over the Internet. In this paper, we show that it is possible to cause a failure in t…

Generalizing Behavior via Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Closed-Form Reward Centroids
Filippo Lazzati, Alberto Maria Metelli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12010 https://

Generalizing Behavior via Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Closed-Form Reward Centroids
We study the problem of generalizing an expert agent's behavior, provided through demonstrations, to new environments and/or additional constraints. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) offers a promising solution by seeking to recover the expert's underlying reward function, which, if used for planning in the new settings, would reproduce the desired behavior. However, IRL is inherently ill-posed: multiple reward functions, forming the so-called feasible set, can explain the same observed beha…

Dark Patterns Meet GUI Agents: LLM Agent Susceptibility to Manipulative Interfaces and the Role of Human Oversight
Jingyu Tang, Chaoran Chen, Jiawen Li, Zhiping Zhang, Bingcan Guo, Ibrahim Khalilov, Simret Araya Gebreegziabher, Bingsheng Yao, Dakuo Wang, Yanfang Ye, Tianshi Li, Ziang Xiao, Yaxing Yao, Toby Jia-Jun Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/…

Dark Patterns Meet GUI Agents: LLM Agent Susceptibility to Manipulative Interfaces and the Role of Human Oversight
The dark patterns, deceptive interface designs manipulating user behaviors, have been extensively studied for their effects on human decision-making and autonomy. Yet, with the rising prominence of LLM-powered GUI agents that automate tasks from high-level intents, understanding how dark patterns affect agents is increasingly important. We present a two-phase empirical study examining how agents, human participants, and human-AI teams respond to 16 types of dark patterns across diverse scenario…

A Survey on Parallel Reasoning
Ziqi Wang, Boye Niu, Zipeng Gao, Zhi Zheng, Tong Xu, Linghui Meng, Zhongli Li, Jing Liu, Yilong Chen, Chen Zhu, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Enhong Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12164

A Survey on Parallel Reasoning
With the increasing capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), parallel reasoning has emerged as a new inference paradigm that enhances reasoning robustness by concurrently exploring multiple lines of thought before converging on a final answer. It has become a significant trend to explore parallel reasoning to overcome the fragility of standard sequential methods and improve practical performance. In this paper, we aim to survey and summarize the progress and challenges of parallel reasonin…

Just finished "The Word for World is Forest" by Ursula K. Le Guin. Can't believe I didn't read this one earlier, and this strengthens my resolve to finish off the rest of her stuff I have yet to read sooner. I think it benefits somewhat from having read it after "Four Ways to Forgiveness" which gives more of the Hainish context. Certainly none of the blurbs I had read about it did it any measure of justice, which is one reason I hadn't prioritized it. More than being about colonization, it's about a solution to the paradox of tolerance, and both the price and imperfections of that solution. As usual with Le Guin's science fiction, it's a rich companion to anarchist thought.
I think the typical objection to seeing it as an answer to the warlord question would be that it serendipitously positions the indigenous population with more power and a less ruthless opponent than in the imagined scenario, and it uses the League of Worlds as a sort of deus ex machina to foreclose further retribution. Ultimately that's why I think it's more about the paradox of tolerance than anything else, but I also think in regards to the warlord problem that we are too quick to underestimate just how numerous and enthusiastic the opponents of a warlord might be, and to overestimate the strength of technological weapons wielded by frail (and psychologically unarmored) humans.
In any case, Le Guin gives this book's alien humans yet another fascinatingly credible capability, and getting to see the introduction of ansible technology with all its implications is pretty cool too. Maybe not