Tootfinder

US political contradictions; knowledge systems
As Trump at least partially succeeds in constructing an alternate reality for his most ardent followers, it's tempting to think of his dogma as false, in contrast to some imagined "truth" which his non-followers are smart enough to believe in. But a more nuanced view of knowledge would admit that different groups of people have different shared truths, constituting different knowledge systems which each deviate from what's objectively measurable in different ways, and in fact they each accept different standards of what is objective, so there's not really a single "ground truth" we can even compare to to determine which of these knowledge systems is "more correct" (similar problems arise even if we only care about "more useful").
To make this more concrete, we can see that e.g., competing quantum physics theories, or likewise competing religious beliefs, have no reasonable basis on which to judge between them, either in terms of "truth" or "utility." So the Trump-dogma knowledge system, although bad, morally repugnant, etc., can't so easily be dismissed as "false" in my view. "Distorted" or "malignant" or "evil" or "contradictory" are better monikers, in my opinion.
But what I'm even more interested in thinking about is: in what ways does the current American liberal "common sense" knowledge system already bear the scars of past fascist lies & contradictions? I can think of a few:
"Columbus was an explorer."
This is "factually accurate" in the same way some of Trump's propaganda is, but it's also a cruel distortion of "Columbus was a child murderer," and it's a misrepresentation that serves an evil purpose, yet which is widely taught in elementary schools today.
Another: "dropping atomic bombs on civilians in Japan was necessary to end WWII."
Perhaps in the future we'll have "family separation & the 2025 ICE crackdowns were necessary to end the immigration crisis," although I dearly hope not.
"Reparations for slavery aren't reasonable," is yet another...
I'll close this rambling with a question: what other fascist lies have you noticed that are normalized in America right now from past Trump-like leaders (or even from less overtly fascist institutions)?

I am not an expert on this; I have no special knowledge whatever.
Nevertheless, it's my opinion that the future of drone warfare cannot be first-person-view drones, because such drones require near-continuous real-time comms, and any channel over which comms can be transmitted can be jammed or hacked by the enemy.
So future drones will need to be, essentially, sealed boxes, with their target's identifying characteristics and general location set before launch.
Scary…

Joint-GCG: Unified Gradient-Based Poisoning Attacks on Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems
Haowei Wang, Rupeng Zhang, Junjie Wang, Mingyang Li, Yuekai Huang, Dandan Wang, Qing Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06151

Joint-GCG: Unified Gradient-Based Poisoning Attacks on Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by retrieving relevant documents from external corpora before generating responses. This approach significantly expands LLM capabilities by leveraging vast, up-to-date external knowledge. However, this reliance on external knowledge makes RAG systems vulnerable to corpus poisoning attacks that manipulate generated outputs via poisoned document injection. Existing poisoning attack strategies typically treat the ret…

Newsflash: Game developer confident that their joke that relies on political knowledge is in no way political. He'll return now to making apolitical games about having the freedom to shoot people.
https://www.

'I'm not here to apologize but I am here to clarify': Splitgate 2 boss says his Make FPS Great Again hat is 'not a political statement'
The 1047 Games CEO wore the Trump slogan-parody hat on stage at Summer Game Fest.

"Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking, a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions -- to interrogate those who tell us something is true -- to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along."
-- Carl Sagan (Charlie Rose interview)

Applying XAI based unsupervised knowledge discovering for Operation modes in a WWTP. A real case: AQUAVALL WWTP
Alicia Beneyto-Rodriguez, Gregorio I. Sainz-Palmero, Marta Galende-Hern\'andez, Mar\'ia J. Fuente, Jos\'e M. Cuenca
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05958

Applying XAI based unsupervised knowledge discovering for Operation modes in a WWTP. A real case: AQUAVALL WWTP
Water reuse is a key point when fresh water is a commodity in ever greater demand, but which is also becoming ever more available. Furthermore, the return of clean water to its natural environment is also mandatory. Therefore, wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are essential in any policy focused on these serious challenges. WWTPs are complex facilities which need to operate at their best to achieve their goals. Nowadays, they are largely monitored, generating large databases of historical d…

From Developer Pairs to AI Copilots: A Comparative Study on Knowledge Transfer
Alisa Welter, Niklas Schneider, Tobias Dick, Kallistos Weis, Christof Tinnes, Marvin Wyrich, Sven Apel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04785

From Developer Pairs to AI Copilots: A Comparative Study on Knowledge Transfer
Knowledge transfer is fundamental to human collaboration and is therefore common in software engineering. Pair programming is a prominent instance. With the rise of AI coding assistants, developers now not only work with human partners but also, as some claim, with AI pair programmers. Although studies confirm knowledge transfer during human pair programming, its effectiveness with AI coding assistants remains uncertain. To analyze knowledge transfer in both human-human and human-AI settings, w…

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism
#Poetry #Philosophy

Zambia's pre-colonial writing system invented by women but almost killed by colonialism - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5ye50xgw8vo

Zambia's lost language invented by women but almost killed by colonialism
How social media is pushing back against the still common idea that African societies never had a knowledge system.

Dual Approach to Inverse Covariance Intersection Fusion
Ji\v{r}\'i Ajgl, Ond\v{r}ej Straka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05955 https://

Dual Approach to Inverse Covariance Intersection Fusion
Linear fusion of estimates under the condition of no knowledge of correlation of estimation errors has reached maturity. On the other hand, various cases of partial knowledge are still active research areas. A frequent motivation is to deal with "common information" or "common noise", whatever it means. A fusion rule for a strict meaning of the former expression has already been elaborated. Despite the dual relationship, a strict meaning of the latter one has not been considered so far. The pap…