Tootfinder

@…

I guess it depends on the language. I use polars heavily with Python. It works really really well. It's not just faster than pandas, it's more ergonomic, more regular, more composable and less quirky.

Python is very flexible and accommodating. And you are strongly discouraged from doing fine grained computation in Python a…

The #IWW #GDC as an antifascist organization was always kind of a hack. It was a beautiful hack and it worked well for what it did.
In 2016, as Trump was rising, I found info from the Twin Cities GDC. They were super organized, building an amazing community defense organization. When we (Seattle) went to set up our chapter, following their lead, they were extremely supportive. When I got shot, Twin Cities folks were at my house keeping my partner safe. They literally flew people out to support us. They very much remain in my mind when I think about what mutual aid looks like.
Unionism is an important strategy of a larger fight. But it's important to realize that it's not the other way around. The GDC was built to defend the union, because there wasn't something larger to do that work. It filled a gap.
When we organized against Trump, we tried to make the GDC the greater thing. We tried to make the GDC into the vehicle for social revolution against the fascist threat... And it sort of worked. We were able to do a lot.
But that was never what it was built to do. It was always built as an appendage of the IWW. This contains its own problem. If Unionism is the revolutionary movement, then it becomes impossible to build a truly revolutionary society. Unionism centers "workers" which implicitly decenters those who can't work in the traditional sense (the young, the elderly, those physically or mentally able to work). It also decenters care labor that hasn't yet been widely commodified. Sure, there are all types of hacks to patch the holes, but the fundamental construction starts from the wrong assumptions.
It felt, for a while, like things could go another way. Like that our ability to bring members in could shift things a bit, maybe set the GDC on more equal footing with the core focus of the IWW. But that was always an illusion, far less important to think about than the crushing terror of the regime we were fighting.
Now, I will absolutely trash talk the IWW on occasion but in the end I do think they're doing good and important work. Any criticism I have should be taken with a grain of salt... And I know I do have a lot of salt. Again, Unionism is an important strategy. It's useful both in improving immediate material conditions and as part of the most powerful weapon we have against the capitalist system: the general strike. It's important, I can't say that enough. But it's not sufficient.
I've been thinking about this a bit recently, and I wonder if there are any other GDC organizers or former organizers who might be feeling the same. Feel free to DM me. I'd like to get some more perspectives and see if my understanding from several years ago deviates significantly from what other folks are feeling right now.
I'd also like to bounce some ideas around that come from my own organizing experience.

Please, think of the hungry kitties. Cats are known to wither away if feeding time is missed by less than 5 minutes. 😭

Regularized Random Fourier Features and Finite Element Reconstruction for Operator Learning in Sobolev Space
Xinyue Yu, Hayden Schaeffer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17884 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17884 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.17884
arXiv:2512.17884v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Operator learning is a data-driven approximation of mappings between infinite-dimensional function spaces, such as the solution operators of partial differential equations. Kernel-based operator learning can offer accurate, theoretically justified approximations that require less training than standard methods. However, they can become computationally prohibitive for large training sets and can be sensitive to noise. We propose a regularized random Fourier feature (RRFF) approach, coupled with a finite element reconstruction map (RRFF-FEM), for learning operators from noisy data. The method uses random features drawn from multivariate Student's $t$ distributions, together with frequency-weighted Tikhonov regularization that suppresses high-frequency noise. We establish high-probability bounds on the extreme singular values of the associated random feature matrix and show that when the number of features $N$ scales like $m \log m$ with the number of training samples $m$, the system is well-conditioned, which yields estimation and generalization guarantees. Detailed numerical experiments on benchmark PDE problems, including advection, Burgers', Darcy flow, Helmholtz, Navier-Stokes, and structural mechanics, demonstrate that RRFF and RRFF-FEM are robust to noise and achieve improved performance with reduced training time compared to the unregularized random feature model, while maintaining competitive accuracy relative to kernel and neural operator tests.
toXiv_bot_toot

Just finished "I'm Awful, Thanks" by Lara Pickle. A good story that serves as a guide to managing emotions, although it's actually a cute story too, not just framing for the mental health discussion.
That said, I feel like it doesn't get far enough into the details of accepting self-control as our only form of real control vs. understanding that some events outside our control aren't fair or are others' attacks, and trying to manage our own emotions as our only response is a disservice to ourselves and others. Even further, I suspect that the HR resolution depicted here, while not impossible, is less frequent than much worse outcomes, which is part of a larger pattern of systemic assaults on our mental health that aren't totally solvable with individual emotional regulation.
Sure, leveling up one's control of ones own emotions and learning to accept and manage a range of emotions is super useful and it's a good thing overall, but the systemic problems of late stage capitalism are real, and making it seem like everyone is responsible for managing their own mental health in the face of these problems helps avoid confronting them.
Still, it's a good book overall, with vibrant art and a well-structured plot.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

People complain about the roads but don't do anything about it... well, some of us do.
I've been avoiding these two potholes on my ride home for weeks now, got fed up, finally stopped to report them to the city last week and they just got filled...
In four days. The city street crew filled them in less than a week. Hell Yeah.
(The first photo is what I submitted, second is from the road crew after repairs.)

On quantum to classical comparison for Davies generators
Joao Basso, Shirshendu Ganguly, Alistair Sinclair, Nikhil Srivastava, Zachary Stier, Thuy-Duong Vuong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07267

Well, it is less than a year until the Nov 2026 mid terms.
And, assuming that those elections are actually held and not manipulated under martial law or some such fabricated emergency, I am not at all sure that the D-party will be even close to ready to win.
I've taken classes of 3rd graders on camping trips (to Joshua Tree and Catalina). I've seen how those 3rd graders, when out of their parents' sight, run around like Brownian Motion in small human form.
From…

View of hills covered by forest canopy looking south from a high point along the Fingerlakes Trail in Caroline -- a rare place south of Cayuga lake where you can find a commanding view
#photo #photography #landscape

I just bought Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis on Good Old Games for less than 3 bucks. I have never played it. It's 33 years old by now...
#scummvm #gog #LucasArts

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Joint distributions of error terms for primes in arithmetic progressions modulo 11
K\"ubra Benl\.i, Greg Martin, Paul P\'eringuey
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05427 https…

I have believed for a long time now that humanity has proven incapable of a 'gradual decline' of anything that it is truly dependent on even if alternatives are available.
We seem pre-programmed to use something to the max... hit rock bottom in terms of impacts on our own health and general well being… and then go pretty much cold turkey. (either through replacement or outright abstinence).
I believe it will be the same with fossil fuels.
We are possibly seeing a slight reduction now globally in overall use of oil. But it is still far and away too too much.
Maybe we’ll cut this by 10% or 20% in the next 10 or 20 years... but zero by 2050? Not a chance.
I believe we will go and go and go, until one day we can go no more, the pressure is too great, the casualties too high, the effects too devastating, and the impact of complete shutdown of the fossil fuel industry in less than 5 years will seem less bad than the damage we have already done and are sure to suffer in future.
I hope I live to see that day, not out of morbidity, but out of hope. I want to die knowing we finally did it. I don't know if that's going to happen.
Not an uplifting prediction, I know, but seriously, tell me I'm wrong.
#CanPoli #Cdnpoli #ClimateCatastrophe #Oil #Gas #EndFossilFuels
chart from the 2025 IEA report: https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/018c3361-bc01-4482-a386-a5b2747ae82a/Oil2025.pdf