Tootfinder

The full formula for the probability of "success" is:
p = {
1/(2^(-n 1)) if n is negative, or
1 - (1/(2^(n 1))) if n is zero or positive
}
(Both branches have the same value when n is 0, so the behavior is smooth around the origin.)
How can we tweak this?
First, we can introduce fixed success and/or failure chances unaffected by level, with this formula only taking effect if those don't apply. For example, you could do 10% failure, 80% by formula, and 10% success to keep things from being too sure either way even when levels are very high or low. On the other hand, this flattening makes the benefit of extra advantage levels even less exciting.
Second, we could allow for gradations of success/failure, and treat the coin pools I used to explain that math like dice pools a bit. An in-between could require linearly more success flips to achieve the next higher grade of success at each grade. For example, simple success on a crit role might mean dealing 1.5x damage, but if you succeed on 2 of your flips, you get 9/4 damage, or on 4 flips 27/8, or on 7 flips 81/16. In this world, stacking crit levels might be a viable build, and just giving up on armor would be super dangerous. In the particular case I was using this for just now, I can't easily do gradations of success (that's the reason I turned to probabilities in the first place) but I think I'd favor this approach when feasible.
The main innovation here over simple dice pools is how to handle situations where the number of dice should be negative. I'm almost certain it's not a truly novel innovation though, and some RPG fan can point out which system already does this (please actually do this, I'm an RPG nerd too at heart).
I'll leave this with one more tweak we could do: what if the number 2 in the probability equation were 3, or 2/3? I think this has a similar effect to just scaling all the modifiers a bit, but the algebra escapes me in this moment and I'm a bit lazy. In any case, reducing the base of the probability exponent should let you get a few more gradations near 50%, which is probably a good thing, since the default goes from 25% straight to 50% and then to 75% with no integer stops in between.

Over the past twenty-one years, I've posted 365 posts to my blog, on average one every twenty-one days. They total almost half a million words.
That's quite some corpus of work.
#Blog
#Blogging

365 posts
Checking my blog yesterday, I noticed that I had published 365 posts, one for every day of the year. Which, considering that the oldest post that remains is from the 24th June 2004, almost twenty one years ago, means that I've averaged one post every twenty-one days over that period. Mind you, I've not been consistent; there've been periods I've posted more, others I've posted less.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Just finished reading Dream State by Eric Puchner, and it kind of pissed me off. I think I can see exactly why it might be popular with a certain WASPy liberal "literati" type that probably includes a lot of influential reviewers, but to me, it's points about love & life, despite being much more complex, ring just about as hollow (and harmful) as a Disney movie.
I've got a lot of quibbles, but I think most galling to me was a throwaway line near the beginning about why platonic relationships get so much less glory in media than romantic ones, when so much of the plot proceeds to revolve around a stale agency-free romantic attraction model that's certainly more complex on its face than a Disney romance but which is ultimately just as misleading.
Go read Loveless or really any YA #OwnVoices romance (especially queer) and you'll be learning more & better lessons about the human condition.

Dynamic Less-Than-Truckload Transportation Planning in Hyperconnected Hub Networks with Multi-Carrier Operations
Tiankuo Zhang, Jingze Li, Benoit Montreuil
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10290

Dynamic Less-Than-Truckload Transportation Planning in Hyperconnected Hub Networks with Multi-Carrier Operations
Less-than-truckload (LTL) shipment is vital in modern freight transportation yet is in dire need of more efficient usage of resources, higher service responsiveness and velocity, lower overall shipping cost across all parties, and better quality of life for the drivers. The industry is currently highly fragmented, with numerous small to medium-sized LTL carriers typically operating within dedicated regions or corridors, mostly disconnected from each other. This paper investigates the large-scal…

Our pick this week is a melancholic, atmospheric track from Steven Wilson. Epic in scope but perfect to kick off a slow, reflective weekend - this one’s worth sinking into.
Give it a spin, check out our thoughts, and let it set the tone.
And don't forget to follow us for your weekly dose of rock and metal ... handpicked, reviewed, and sent straight to your ears.
Stay mellow, stay awesome! 🤘

Steven Wilson - Drive Home
One awesome, hand picked song from the world of rock and metal, showcased every week. Nothing more, nothing less! 🤘

The more it is evolving, the less stable it becomes. I'm using #KDE since version 1.1. And with KF6 it is for the first time that I experience the repeated total freeze of the entire desktop, because it can't handle a dock and more than one monitor. Wayland is definitely the systemd moment for desktop-linux. X-Windows was mutilated before Wayland actually worked (let alone missing network capabilit…

Less is More: some Computational Principles based on Parcimony, and Limitations of Natural Intelligence
Laura Cohen, Xavier Hinaut, Lilyana Petrova, Alexandre Pitti, Syd Reynal, Ichiro Tsuda
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07060

Less is More: some Computational Principles based on Parcimony, and Limitations of Natural Intelligence
Natural intelligence (NI) consistently achieves more with less. Infants learn language, develop abstract concepts, and acquire sensorimotor skills from sparse data, all within tight neural and energy limits. In contrast, today's AI relies on virtually unlimited computational power, energy, and data to reach high performance. This paper argues that constraints in NI are paradoxically catalysts for efficiency, adaptability, and creativity. We first show how limited neural bandwidth promotes conci…

"You are a software worker. And you are able to do your job in more or less good conditions only because you are standing on the shoulders of countless others. We are talking about the fact that if you have 20 days of holidays, if you only work 5 days a week, if you are able to take some days or weeks off after the birth of your child, it is because some others before you have sacrificed their lives so you can work in decent conditions."

#CoWoS, or Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate,
is one of TSMC’s most advanced ways of packaging chips.
It allows several chips to work closely together as one,
making the whole system faster and more efficient while using less energy.

Why this key chip technology is crucial to the AI race between the US and China
In the largest single foreign investment in US history, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s “most powerful company” according to US President Donald Trump, unveiled a $100 billion investment, drawing global attention and prompting concern in Taiwan.

(And now @… are less than €19,000 away from their stretch target of € 75,000 to provide @… services to all. Amazing work folks and fedizens 🤩)
#Fediverse is amazing, less than 24 hours after I posted this and @peertube  is only €223 from the penultimate target with 30 hours to go.
Not taking any credit for that, but happy to see a chord has been struck for all genuine surveillance-capital-free social media. Even more important in the time of #NoKings.
Looks like I'm going to be busy making #Science videos on #ClimateChange in the #Polar Regions too for the next few weeks.
Here's one I made earlier on #SurfaceMass Budget. Let me know if there's something #Climate and/or #ice related you'd like to see a short clip about and I'll see what we can do
#fedizens who may not have seen this already? If they make the €55,000 target I promise to write a peertube channel into my next grant proposal, AND I'll post some better quality videos of our Greenland and #Antarctic research over the coming weeks...
Go!
https://support.joinpeertube.org/en/

Los franceses The Inspector Cluzo aportan también en este viernes de nuevos lanzamientos con su rock potente y bien pesado por momentos. «Less is More» se llama su nuevo disco.
https://open.spotify.com/album/3H1HAHgY3bwSqMlSkFXJup

Nothing less than an invasion, of course. The fear of California seceding must be all too realistic, I guess.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/09/los-angeles-protests?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

One thing I've noticed about the coverage of the LA protests is the differing use of "non-lethal" and "less-lethal" in describing weapons being used by the state against protesters.
And in this case I think the liability-dodging term "less lethal" is actually more useful, and should be incorporated into style-guides.

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)?

Sonnet 096 - XCVI
Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonness;
Some say thy grace is youth and gentle sport;
Both grace and faults are lov'd of more and less:
Thou mak'st faults graces that to thee resort.
As on the finger of a throned queen
The basest jewel will be well esteem'd,
So are those errors that in thee are seen
To truths translated, and for true things deem'd.
How many lambs might the stern wolf betray,
I…

tech nerdery
I mean this: if every receiver just connected to its source when it was ready, and we hadn't made short-timeout stateful firewalls everywhere, we'd have to deploy SO MANY fewer weird one-off services just to receive something.
Instead we have to provision certificates and public facing hostnames to get communication going. Backend development is so much more complex and less robust because of it.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01348 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_…

Distributionally Robust Learning in Survival Analysis
We introduce an innovative approach that incorporates a Distributionally Robust Learning (DRL) approach into Cox regression to enhance the robustness and accuracy of survival predictions. By formulating a DRL framework with a Wasserstein distance-based ambiguity set, we develop a variant Cox model that is less sensitive to assumptions about the underlying data distribution and more resilient to model misspecification and data perturbations. By leveraging Wasserstein duality, we reformulate the …

'Given that the average electric drill is in use for just 15 minutes each year, and is kept in storage for the rest of the time, it’s clear that many household items don’t really need to be owned at all' - @alexjgnana https://www.overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.

US government corruption is blatant at the moment. UK government corruption is (slightly) less blatant. Which is worse? It seems to me that more blatant corruption encourages more corruption across society, but do you agree?
More dangerous for society:

Well, that's more-or-less what I was saying, though obviously addition
is a little more cosmic than the bitwise operators.
-- Larry Wall in <199709051808.LAA01780@wall.org>

What Comes After Harm? Mapping Reparative Actions in AI through Justice Frameworks
Sijia Xiao, Haodi Zou, Alice Qian Zhang, Deepak Kumar, Hong Shen, Jason Hong, Motahhare Eslami
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05687

What Comes After Harm? Mapping Reparative Actions in AI through Justice Frameworks
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are integrated into more aspects of society, they offer new capabilities but also cause a range of harms that are drawing increasing scrutiny. A large body of work in the Responsible AI community has focused on identifying and auditing these harms. However, much less is understood about what happens after harm occurs: what constitutes reparation, who initiates it, and how effective these reparations are. In this paper, we develop a taxonomy of AI harm rep…

The #Fediverse is amazing, less than 24 hours after I posted this and @… is only €223 from the penultimate target with 30 hours to go.
Not taking any credit for that, but happy to see a chord has been struck for all genuine surveillance-capital-free social media. Even more important in the time of #NoKings.
Looks like I'm going to be busy making #Science videos on #ClimateChange in the #Polar Regions too for the next few weeks.
Here's one I made earlier on #SurfaceMass Budget. Let me know if there's something #Climate and/or #ice related you'd like to see a short clip about and I'll see what we can do
#fedizens who may not have seen this already? If they make the €55,000 target I promise to write a peertube channel into my next grant proposal, AND I'll post some better quality videos of our Greenland and #Antarctic research over the coming weeks...
Go!
#bigTech derisory) amount of EUR 75,000 to develop the opensource #fediverse competitor app to Youtube. Maybe chuck 'em a few euros if you think it useful?
https://support.joinpeertube.org/en/

Ding!!
“Politicians promise to make policy that unleashes the power of A.I. to do … something, though many of them aren’t exactly sure what.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/opinion/ai-tech-innovation.html

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14870 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csAI_…

Acting Less is Reasoning More! Teaching Model to Act Efficiently
Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) augments large language models (LLMs) with the ability to invoke external tools during long-form reasoning, such as search engines and code interpreters, to solve tasks beyond the capabilities of internal reasoning. While reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in training such agents, most of existing approaches typically optimize only for final correctness without considering the efficiency or necessity of external tool use. This often leads to excessive …

We can say this at least:
Musk is one of the most malignant people ever to hold a position of influence in American politics.
His actions, without exaggeration, have devastated the health and security of American society
and directly caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people all over the world, with millions more to follow given the course that he has set.
Musk’s DOGE, which is more or less a conspiracy to destroy constitutional government in this country, has …

Go, Elon, and Never Darken Our Doors Again
The worst ultra-billionaire on Earth says he’s leaving government. Let’s hope he actually does it.

There's a lot of fear and panic here in my social circles in #Romania. Very much feels like a rerun of December. I'm actually feeling a bit more optimistic and less afraid than last time. Just a bit though.
There is a path to victory for Nicusor Dan. It relies on expanding the voting base. Not all is lost yet, the sky isn't falling, just need as many Romanians as possible th…

To paraphrase Barry Scwartz: The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less
With the continuous glitz of KDE, Hyprland, dwm, Slackware and Gentoo as daily drivers it's the time of year to start winding down.
Also because I've been revisiting Steve Anelay's videos (OldTechBloke, sorely missed) I'll spend a month on the Mate desktop, starting this Saturday.
But what to run it on? Help me make a choice, appreciated 😎

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09930 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_qu…

Long-Lived Photon Blockade with Weak Optical Nonlinearity
In conventional photon blockade, the occupation of a cavity mode by more than one photon is suppressed via strong optical nonlinearity. An alternative, called unconventional photon blockade, can occur under weak nonlinearity by relying on quantum interference between fine-tuned cavities. A serious limitation is the very short antibunching time window, orders of magnitude less than the cavity lifetime. We present a method to achieve photon blockade over a large time window of several cavity life…

Are Crypto Ecosystems (De)centralizing? A Framework for Longitudinal Analysis
Harang Ju, Ehsan Valavi, Madhav Kumar, Sinan Aral
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02324

Are Crypto Ecosystems (De)centralizing? A Framework for Longitudinal Analysis
Blockchain technology relies on decentralization to resist faults and attacks while operating without trusted intermediaries. Although industry experts have touted decentralization as central to their promise and disruptive potential, it is still unclear whether the crypto ecosystems built around blockchains are becoming more or less decentralized over time. As crypto plays an increasing role in facilitating economic transactions and peer-to-peer interactions, measuring their decentralization b…

Sonnet 102 - CII
My love is strengthened, though more weak in seeming;
I love not less, though less the show appear;
That love is merchandized, whose rich esteeming,
The owner's tongue doth publish every where.
Our love was new, and then but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays;
As Philomel in summer's front doth sing,
And stops his pipe in growth of riper days:
Not that the summer is less pleasant now
Tha…

https://boydkane.com/essays/experts

Consumer price for mobility in 🇨🇭, 2000-2024
The report "Environment Switzerland 2018" (https://www.bafu.admin.ch/bafu/en/home/state/publications-on-the-state-of-the-environment/environment-switz…

Prompt Engineer: Analyzing Skill Requirements in the AI Job Market
An Vu, Jonas Oppenlaender
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00058 https://

Prompt Engineer: Analyzing Skill Requirements in the AI Job Market
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has created a new job role: the Prompt Engineer. Despite growing interest in this position, we still do not fully understand what skills this new job role requires or how common these jobs are. We analyzed 20,662 job postings on LinkedIn, including 72 prompt engineer positions, to learn more about this emerging role. We found that prompt engineering is still rare (less than 0.5% of sampled job postings) but has a unique skill profile. Prompt engineers ne…

Our pick this week is from Big Audio Dynamite, and is a real piece of rock history. If you haven't heard it, well, you need to hand in your rock license until you have!
Give it a spin, check our usual thoughts and ramblings on it and don't forget to follow us for your weekly slice of #rock and #metal

Big Audio Dynamite - V. Thirteen
One awesome, hand picked song from the world of rock and metal, showcased every week. Nothing more, nothing less! 🤘

The way I see self-nurturing is that it's deeper, it's more compassionate to ourselves, it's more sustainable and also it's more personalised. https://www.overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.

This is more or less a note to self, because I always forget how to do this. If you're using git credentials helper to store your personal access token and the personal access token expires, you need to update the token.

To do this, run `git credential-cache exit` and run `git pull` or `git fetch` to enter your new credentials.
#git

Sonnet 020 - XX
A woman's face with nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion:
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou f…

Shortermism and excessive risk taking in optimal execution with a target performance
Emilio Barucci, Yuheng Lan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15611 https://…

Shortermism and excessive risk taking in optimal execution with a target performance
We deal with the optimal execution problem when the broker's goal is to reach a performance barrier avoiding a downside barrier. The performance is provided by the wealth accumulated by trading in the market, the shares detained by the broker evaluated at the market price plus a slippage cost yielding a quadratic inventory cost. Over a short horizon, this type of remuneration leads, at the same time, to a more aggressive and less risky strategy compared to the classical one, and over a long hor…

Biden's record on covid
Saw a comment along the lines of: "seems unfair to criticise Biden's record on covid, while the situation now under Trump is so much worse".
But I don't think of them as separate. Biden's government _contributed_ to how covid stands under Trump.
If Biden's lot had taken the opportunity to educate people (at least the ones open to considering science findings) that
- it's airborne like smoke
- an empty room can hold infectious virus
- air filters, UV and fresh air reduce the levels of it
- masks work better the better they fit
- you can be infectious without/before symptoms
- you're fairly likely still to be infectious for 10 days, a few people longer
- current vaccines don't stop you catching it or transmitting it
- it can mess with your immune system so you're more likely to catch other things
- vaccinated people can still get Long Covid
- it's not "mild", it's just that the damage is quiet
then even if they hadn't done anything more to address the problem, people would be in a far better position to deploy their own common sense.
And unlike funding or laws, that investment in _knowledge_ is something it would be difficult for Trump's lot to roll back.
But Biden & co chose instead to play down the risks, and explicitly or implicitly mislead people (e.g. the 5-day quarantine, which contradicts the real infectious period).
So, yes it's worse now, but they _contributed_ to how it is now. They chose to encourage misapprehensions and confusion, and the effects of that choice are still playing out now.
Not letting them off the hook on the grounds of being comparatively "less bad", when they themselves laid some of the foundations of the current state of play.
#covid #Biden #USPol #CovidIsntOver

Our pick this week is a slice of early '90s rock goodness from #Jellyfish!
Give it a listen, check out our thoughts, and take a quick trip back in time with us. Don't forget to follow us for more tracks from across the epic world of #rock and

Jellyfish - Joining A Fan Club
One awesome, hand picked song from the world of rock and metal, showcased every week. Nothing more, nothing less! 🤘

We did it. I played a small role in Bucharest, but I'm still proud of the work I did as part of the campaign. We now have an intelligent, pro-EU, clean president with no corruption scandals. But... this also means the mayorship of Bucharest is now open :)) Already planning the next steps in a more inclusive, less corrupt and more equitable Romania with my new friends in SENS.
#EU

If you're trying to justify a purchase you don't need, it's very easy to say is this self-care? Sure! https://www.overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.uk/podcast-ep-187-what-if-we-focu…

If the self-care information we are hearing is all about something we have to buy or something we have to spend money on or something that's being marketed at us, that's not actually what the spirit of self-care should be about. https://www.

This week’s pick is a solid ‘90s #alt-rock gem from Spacehog. Catchy, fuzzy, and one of those tracks you probably know but don't know - definitely worth a listen.
Check it out, read our take, and let the nostalgia do its thing.
Don't forget to follow us for your weekly dose of #rock and …

Spacehog - In The Meantime
One awesome, hand picked song from the world of rock and metal, showcased every week. Nothing more, nothing less! 🤘

I know that anything with aquarium on it costs more, but the aquarium tax for snowflake food is ridiculous. I've been keeping shrimp for less than a year, so maybe other shrimp keepers already know about this cheap alternative to snowflake food, but in case you didn't -
After watching some YT shrimp keeper channels, I've been feeding my neocaridina colony snowflake food a couple of times a week. They like it and I was almost out, so I was looking at the bag and realized it only has one ingredient - soy hulls. I paid $12 for 3 1/2 ounces of snowflake food.
I thought there must be a cheaper source, so I looked online and found soy hull pellets for mushroom cultivation were 10 pounds for $20. The pellets are exactly the same size as the ones in the snowflake food bag, and my colony eats them just as eagerly.
Snowflake food: $3.70 an ounce.
Bulk organic soybean husks: $0.13 an ounce. 28x cheaper.
@… @… @… #aquarium #nanotank #shrimptank #neocaridina

This week’s pick is a real toe-tapper from #psychobilly turned #punk rockers The Hellfreaks!
Give it a spin, check out our thoughts, and see if it gets your foot moving.
Follow us for your weekly fix of #rock

This week, we’re leveraging some #NWOBHM nostalgia with a pick from the underrated Tokyo Blade!
It’s got all the classic ingredients that you love / know / yearn for and it flies the flag for one of metal’s most exciting eras. Give it a spin, check out our musings, and as always, don't forget to follow us for your weekly dose of

Tokyo Blade - If Heaven is Hell
One awesome, hand picked song from the world of rock and metal, showcased every week. Nothing more, nothing less! 🤘

This week’s pick is a darkly infectious track from #goth rockers #Corlyx! Catchy, moody, and perfect for anyone craving a modern twist on that classic '80s goth sound.
Give it a listen, check out our thoughts, and sink into the vibe.
Follow us for your weekly fix of

Corlyx - Ghost of the West Coast
One awesome, hand picked song from the world of rock and metal, showcased every week. Nothing more, nothing less! 🤘