Tootfinder

Really funny how CNN set up this very fun interactive site to show how ranked-choice voting works, with lots of flavors in the mix, and after all is said and done, the two final contenders are…chocolate (51.4%) and Vanilla (48.6%). Almost like Rs and Ds.
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2…

Get the scoop on ranked-choice voting
Get a taste of how ranked-choice voting works by ranking your five favorite ice cream flavors. Then follow along as the votes get counted and we find out which flavor tops the cone.

When Judgment Becomes Noise: How Design Failures in LLM Judge Benchmarks Silently Undermine Validity
Benjamin Feuer, Chiung-Yi Tseng, Astitwa Sarthak Lathe, Oussama Elachqar, John P Dickerson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20293

When Judgment Becomes Noise: How Design Failures in LLM Judge Benchmarks Silently Undermine Validity
LLM-judged benchmarks are increasingly used to evaluate complex model behaviors, yet their design introduces failure modes absent in conventional ground-truth based benchmarks. We argue that without tight objectives and verifiable constructions, benchmark rankings can produce high-confidence rankings that are in fact largely noise. We introduce two mechanisms to diagnose these issues. Schematic adherence quantifies how much of a judge's overall verdict is explained by the explicit evaluation sc…

Ukrainian national Artem Aleksandrovych Stryzhak pleaded guilty to his role in launching Netflix ransomware attacks. He faces a maximum penalty of ten years in prison.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/ukrainian-national-…

Ukrainian National Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy to Use Nefilim Ransomware to Attack Companies in the United States and Other Countries
A Ukrainian national pleaded guilty today to one count of conspiracy to commit computer fraud for his role in a series of international ransomware attacks.

Das interessiert jetzt vmtl. nur grüne Parteimitglieder, aber das Ergebnis des V-Anträge-Rankings ist ... überraschend.
Und zeigt, dass auch prominenteste Unterzeichner*innen und mediale Platzierung von V-Anträgen im Vorfeld der Abstimmung in der Parteibasis nicht dazu führen müssen, dass Anträge auf dem Parteitag behandelt werden (weder zum "Gesellschaftsjahr" noch zum internen Streit innerhalb der Grünen Jugend).

Amazon Web Services: Globale Störung
Diverse Internet-Dienste beklagen derzeit Ausfälle. Das geht auf Störungen der Cloud-Dienste Amazon Web Services zurück.
https://www.heise.de/news/Amazon-Web-Servi

BBoE: Leveraging Bundle of Edges for Kinodynamic Bidirectional Motion Planning
Srikrishna Bangalore Raghu, Alessandro Roncone
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20333 https://

BBoE: Leveraging Bundle of Edges for Kinodynamic Bidirectional Motion Planning
In this work, we introduce BBoE, a bidirectional, kinodynamic, sampling-based motion planner that consistently and quickly finds low-cost solutions in environments with varying obstacle clutter. The algorithm combines exploration and exploitation while relying on precomputed robot state traversals, resulting in efficient convergence towards the goal. Our key contributions include: i) a strategy to navigate through obstacle-rich spaces by sorting and sequencing preprocessed forward propagations;…

The International Chess Federation (Fide) said on Wednesday it is examining former world champion Vladimir Kramnik’s public attacks on Daniel Naroditsky,
the American grandmaster whose sudden death at 29 has stunned the chess world and laid bare fissures in the sport’s digital age.
Naroditsky, among the most visible faces of chess’s pandemic-era renaissance,
was one of the most popular players and teachers of his generation,
a Stanford-educated prodigy who won the Und…

Deterministic Frequency--Domain Inference of Network Topology and Hidden Components via Structure--Behavior Scaling
Xiaoxiao Liang, Tianlong Fan, Linyuan L\"u
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19857

Deterministic Frequency--Domain Inference of Network Topology and Hidden Components via Structure--Behavior Scaling
Hidden interactions and components in complex systems-ranging from covert actors in terrorist networks to unobserved brain regions and molecular regulators-often manifest only through indirect behavioral signals. Inferring the underlying network structure from such partial observations remains a fundamental challenge, particularly under nonlinear dynamics. We uncover a robust linear relationship between the spectral strength of a node's behavioral time series under evolutionary game dynamics an…

Multi-port programmable silicon photonics using low-loss phase change material Sb$_2$Se$_3$
Thomas W. Radford, Idris A Ajia, Latif Rozaqi, Priya Deoli, Xingzhao Yan, Mehdi Banakar, David J Thomson, Ioannis Zeimpekis, Alberto Politi, Otto L. Muskens
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18205 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18205 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.18205
arXiv:2511.18205v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reconfigurable photonic devices are rapidly emerging as a cornerstone of next generation optical technologies, with wide ranging applications in quantum simulation, neuromorphic computing, and large-scale photonic processors. A central challenge in this field is identifying an optimal platform to enable compact, efficient, and scalable reconfigurability. Optical phase-change materials (PCMs) offer a compelling solution by enabling non-volatile, reversible tuning of optical properties, compatible with a wide range of device platforms and current CMOS technologies. In particular, antimony tri-selenide ($\text{Sb}_{2}\text{Se}_{3}$) stands out for its ultra low-loss characteristics at telecommunication wavelengths and its reversible switching. In this work, we present an experimental platform capable of encoding multi-port operations onto the transmission matrix of a compact multimode interferometer architecture on standard 220~nm silicon photonics using \textit{in-silico} designed digital patterns. The multi-port devices are clad with a thin film of $\text{Sb}_{2}\text{Se}_{3}$, which can be optically addressed using direct laser writing to provide local perturbations to the refractive index. A range of multi-port geometries from 2$\times$2 up to 5$\times$5 couplers are demonstrated, achieving simultaneous control of up to 25 matrix elements with programming accuracy of 90% relative to simulated patterns. Patterned devices remain stable with consistent optical performance across the C-band wavelengths. Our work establishes a pathway towards the development of large scale PCM-based reconfigurable multi-port devices which will allow implementing matrix operations on three orders of magnitude smaller areas than interferometer meshes.
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mindmap: Spatial Memory in Deep Feature Maps for 3D Action Policies
Remo Steiner, Alexander Millane, David Tingdahl, Clemens Volk, Vikram Ramasamy, Xinjie Yao, Peter Du, Soha Pouya, Shiwei Sheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20297

mindmap: Spatial Memory in Deep Feature Maps for 3D Action Policies
End-to-end learning of robot control policies, structured as neural networks, has emerged as a promising approach to robotic manipulation. To complete many common tasks, relevant objects are required to pass in and out of a robot's field of view. In these settings, spatial memory - the ability to remember the spatial composition of the scene - is an important competency. However, building such mechanisms into robot learning systems remains an open research problem. We introduce mindmap (Spatial…