Tootfinder

Signal announces a backup feature that includes 100MB of storage for texts and the last 45 days' worth of media for free, or 100GB of storage for $1.99/month (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/08/signal-introduces-free-an…

Signal introduces free and paid backup plans for your chats | TechCrunch
Signal introduces backups with both free and paid plans.

Letitia James, New York’s Democratic attorney general,
has formally announced her intention to intervene in a Texas attempt to penalize a New York doctor accused of mailing abortion pills across state lines,
escalating one of the most consequential fights in the US abortion wars.
The move on Monday tees up a showdown between states that ban abortion and those that protect it
– one that, legal experts say, challenges fundamental constitutional issues and will probably …

Interesting map of the signatures for the repeal of the #OSA in the #UK. Support is widespread although higher in urban areas.
https://

Petition Map (by Unboxed)
Visualise UK Government Petitions

Towards Accurate and Scalable High-throughput MOF Adsorption Screening: Merging Classical Force Fields and Universal Machine Learned Interatomic Potentials
Satyanarayana Bonakala, Mohammad Wahiduzzaman, Taku Watanabe, Karim Hamzaoui, Guillaume Maurin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06719

Towards Accurate and Scalable High-throughput MOF Adsorption Screening: Merging Classical Force Fields and Universal Machine Learned Interatomic Potentials
High-throughput computational screening (HTCS) of gas adsorption in metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) typically relies on classical generic force fields such as the Universal Force Field (UFF), which are efficient but often fail to capture complex host-guest interactions. Universal machine-learned interatomic potentials (u-MLIPs) offer near-quantum accuracy at far lower cost than density functional theory (DFT), yet their large-scale application in adsorption screening remains limited. Here, we p…

Quasi-Monte Carlo integration over $\mathbb{R}^s$ with boundary-damping importance sampling
Zexin Pan, Du Ouyang, Zhijian He
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07509 https://

Quasi-Monte Carlo integration over $\mathbb{R}^s$ with boundary-damping importance sampling
This paper proposes a new importance sampling (IS) that is tailored to quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) integration over $\mathbb{R}^s$. IS introduces a multiplicative adjustment to the integrand by compensating the sampling from the proposal instead of the target distribution. Improper proposals result in severe adjustment factor for QMC. Our strategy is to first design a adjustment factor to meet desired regularities and then determine a tractable transport map from the standard uniforms to the propos…

wow, #kde kmymoney, the changes in the interface also resulted in the inability to move transactions from one ledger to another. Gosh, how can a working piece of software be so messed up in one new release?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to rename the
USNS Harvey Milk,
a highly rare move that will strip the ship of the moniker of a slain gay rights activist who served as a sailor during the Korean War.
The change was laid out in an internal memo that officials said defended the action as a move to align with Trump and Hegseth’s objectives to
“re-establish the warrior culture

Pete Hegseth orders Harvey Milk's name scrubbed from US Navy ship
U.S. officials say Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to rename the USNS Harvey Milk in a highly rare move. The ship was named after the slain gay rights activist who served as a sailor during the Korean War. The officials say Navy Secretary John Phelan put together a small team to rename the replenishment oiler, and that a new name is expected this month. It marks the latest move by Hegseth to purge diversity, equity and inclusion references, and it comes during Pride Month. T…

Measurement of ion acceleration and diffusion in a laser-driven magnetized plasma
J. T. Y. Chu, J. W. D. Halliday, C. Heaton, K. Moczulski, A. Blazevic, D. Schumacher, M. Metternich, H. Nazary, C. D. Arrowsmith, A. R. Bell, K. A. Beyer, A. F. A. Bott, T. Campbell, E. Hansen, D. Q. Lamb, F. Miniati, P. Neumayer, C. A. J. Palmer, B. Reville, A. Reyes, S. Sarkar, A. Scopatz, C. Spindloe, C. B. Stuart, H. Wen, P. Tzeferacos, R. Bingham, G. Gregori

Measurement of ion acceleration and diffusion in a laser-driven magnetized plasma
Here we present results from an experiment performed at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research. A mono-energetic beam of chromium ions with initial energies of $\sim 450$ MeV was fired through a magnetized interaction region formed by the collision of two counter-propagating laser-ablated plasma jets. While laser interferometry revealed the absence of strong fluid-scale turbulence, acceleration and diffusion of the beam ions was driven by wave-particle interactions. A possible mechanis…

Overly academic/distanced ethical discussions
Had a weird interaction with @/brainwane@social.coop just now. I misinterpreted one of their posts quoting someone else and I think the combination of that plus an interaction pattern where I'd assume their stance on something and respond critically to that ended up with me getting blocked. I don't have hard feelings exactly, and this post is only partly about this particular person, but I noticed something interesting by the end of the conversation that had been bothering me. They repeatedly criticized me for assuming what their position was, but never actually stated their position. They didn't say: "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, it's actually Y." They just said "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, please don't assume my position!" I get that it's annoying to have people respond to a straw man version of your argument, but when I in response asked some direct questions about what their position was, they gave some non-answers and then blocked me. It's entirely possible it's a coincidence, and they just happened to run out of patience on that iteration, but it makes me take their critique of my interactions a bit less seriously. I suspect that they just didn't want to hear what I was saying, while at the same time they wanted to feel as if they were someone who values public critique and open discussion of tricky issues (if anyone reading this post also followed our interaction and has a different opinion of my behavior, I'd be glad to hear it; it's possible In effectively being an asshole here and it would be useful to hear that if so).
In any case, the fact that at the end of the entire discussion, I'm realizing I still don't actually know their position on whether they think the AI use case in question is worthwhile feels odd. They praised the system on several occasions, albeit noting some drawbacks while doing so. They said that the system was possibly changing their anti-AI stance, but then got mad at me for assuming this meant that they thought this use-case was justified. Maybe they just haven't made up their mind yet but didn't want to say that?
Interestingly, in one of their own blog posts that got linked in the discussion, they discuss a different AI system, and despite listing a bunch of concrete harms, conclude that it's okay to use it. That's fine; I don't think *every* use of AI is wrong on balance, but what bothered me was that their post dismissed a number of real ethical issues by saying essentially "I haven't seen calls for a boycott over this issue, so it's not a reason to stop use." That's an extremely socially conformist version of ethics that doesn't sit well with me. The discussion also ended up linking this post: https://chelseatroy.com/2024/08/28/does-ai-benefit-the-world/ which bothered me in a related way. In it, Troy describes classroom teaching techniques for introducing and helping students explore the ethics of AI, and they seem mostly great. They avoid prescribing any particular correct stance, which is important when teaching given the power relationship, and they help students understand the limitations of their perspectives regarding global impacts, which is great. But the overall conclusion of the post is that "nobody is qualified to really judge global impacts, so we should focus on ways to improve outcomes instead of trying to judge them." This bothers me because we actually do have a responsibility to make decisive ethical judgments despite limitations of our perspectives. If we never commit to any ethical judgment against a technology because we think our perspective is too limited to know the true impacts (which I'll concede it invariably is) then we'll have to accept every technology without objection, limiting ourselves to trying to improve their impacts without opposing them. Given who currently controls most of the resources that go into exploration for new technologies, this stance is too permissive. Perhaps if our objection to a technology was absolute and instantly effective, I'd buy the argument that objecting without a deep global view of the long-term risks is dangerous. As things stand, I think that objecting to the development/use of certain technologies in certain contexts is necessary, and although there's a lot of uncertainly, I expect strongly enough that the overall outcomes of objection will be positive that I think it's a good thing to do.
The deeper point here I guess is that this kind of "things are too complicated, let's have a nuanced discussion where we don't come to any conclusions because we see a lot of unknowns along with definite harms" really bothers me.

"Professor Cain uses various programming languages to explain these concepts: he starts with C (roughly from the second lecture to the 8th), then Assembly (lectures 9 to 11), C (lectures 12 to 18), Scheme (lectures 19 to 23), and Python (from 24 to 26). The last lecture (27) dives into some other functional programming languages like ML, Miranda, and even Haskell, as well as some advanced type design concepts, to round up your general programming knowledge."