Tootfinder

Complex three-dimensional rearing environments amplify compensatory plasticity following early blindness https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.02.651847v1 "underscoring the role of experience in directing compensatory plasticity following early sensory loss.&q…

Complex three-dimensional rearing environments amplify compensatory plasticity following early blindness
The neocortex has a remarkable capacity to alter its functional organization and connectivity in response to sensory loss, particularly if this loss occurs early in life. A key question is whether this cross-modal reorganization is driven by sensory deprivation itself or through enhanced use of the spared senses. We investigated how different rearing environments shape neural responses in primary somatosensory cortex (S1) of short-tailed opossums ( Monodelphis domestica) , following elimination…

Excellent short thread. Applicable generally to life
https://dice.camp/@artemis/115187316650317518

false alarm, folx

The Bills are going to win the Super Bowl*, plus Alcaraz's reign https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6609558/2025/09/08/bills-ravens-comeback-week-1-the-pulse/

Subtooting since people in the original thread wanted it to be over, but selfishly tagging @… and @… whose opinions I value...
I think that saying "we are not a supply chain" is exactly what open-source maintainers should be doing right now in response to "open source supply chain security" threads.
I can't claim to be an expert and don't maintain any important FOSS stuff, but I do release almost all of my code under open licenses, and I do use many open source libraries, and I have felt the pain of needing to replace an unmaintained library.
There's a certain small-to-mid-scale class of program, including many open-source libraries, which can be built/maintained by a single person, and which to my mind best operate on a "snake growth" model: incremental changes/fixes, punctuated by periodic "skin-shedding" phases where make rewrites or version updates happen. These projects aren't immortal either: as the whole tech landscape around them changes, they become unnecessary and/or people lose interest, so they go unmaintained and eventually break. Each time one of their dependencies breaks (or has a skin-shedding moment) there's a higher probability that they break or shed too, as maintenance needs shoot up at these junctures. Unless you're a company trying to make money from a single long-lived app, it's actually okay that software churns like this, and if you're a company trying to make money, your priorities absolutely should not factor into any decisions people making FOSS software make: we're trying (and to a huge extent succeeding) to make a better world (and/or just have fun with our own hobbies share that fun with others) that leaves behind the corrosive & planet-destroying plague which is capitalism, and you're trying to personally enrich yourself by embracing that plague. The fact that capitalism is *evil* is not an incidental thing in this discussion.
To make an imperfect analogy, imagine that the peasants of some domain have set up a really-free-market, where they provide each other with free stuff to help each other survive, sometimes doing some barter perhaps but mostly just everyone bringing their surplus. Now imagine the lord of the domain, who is the source of these peasants' immiseration, goes to this market secretly & takes some berries, which he uses as one ingredient in delicious tarts that he then sells for profit. But then the berry-bringer stops showing up to the free market, or starts bringing a different kind of fruit, or even ends up bringing rotten berries by accident. And the lord complains "I have a supply chain problem!" Like, fuck off dude! Your problem is that you *didn't* want to build a supply chain and instead thought you would build your profit-focused business in other people's free stuff. If you were paying the berry-picker, you'd have a supply chain problem, but you weren't, so you really have an "I want more free stuff" problem when you can't be arsed to give away your own stuff for free.
There can be all sorts of problems in the really-free-market, like maybe not enough people bring socks, so the peasants who can't afford socks are going barefoot, and having foot problems, and the peasants put their heads together and see if they can convince someone to start bringing socks, and maybe they can't and things are a bit sad, but the really-free-market was never supposed to solve everyone's problems 100% when they're all still being squeezed dry by their taxes: until they are able to get free of the lord & start building a lovely anarchist society, the really-free-market is a best-effort kind of deal that aims to make things better, and sometimes will fall short. When it becomes the main way goods in society are distributed, and when the people who contribute aren't constantly drained by the feudal yoke, at that point the availability of particular goods is a real problem that needs to be solved, but at that point, it's also much easier to solve. And at *no* point does someone coming into the market to take stuff only to turn around and sell it deserve anything from the market or those contributing to it. They are not a supply chain. They're trying to help each other out, but even then they're doing so freely and without obligation. They might discuss amongst themselves how to better coordinate their mutual aid, but they're not going to end up forcing anyone to bring anything or even expecting that a certain person contribute a certain amount, since the whole point is that the thing is voluntary & free, and they've all got changing life circumstances that affect their contributions. Celebrate whatever shows up at the market, express your desire for things that would be useful, but don't impose a burden on anyone else to bring a specific thing, because otherwise it's fair for them to oppose such a burden on you, and now you two are doing your own barter thing that's outside the parameters of the really-free-market.

Short-fingered Vulgarian
bot by @…
This is for tee hee, not treason: please don't ruin my life.
#satire #potus45

OneLoc: Geo-Aware Generative Recommender Systems for Local Life Service
Zhipeng Wei, Kuo Cai, Junda She, Jie Chen, Minghao Chen, Yang Zeng, Qiang Luo, Wencong Zeng, Ruiming Tang, Kun Gai, Guorui Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14646

OneLoc: Geo-Aware Generative Recommender Systems for Local Life Service
Local life service is a vital scenario in Kuaishou App, where video recommendation is intrinsically linked with store's location information. Thus, recommendation in our scenario is challenging because we should take into account user's interest and real-time location at the same time. In the face of such complex scenarios, end-to-end generative recommendation has emerged as a new paradigm, such as OneRec in the short video scenario, OneSug in the search scenario, and EGA in the advertising sce…

Seedlings (XPd on PC)
There's some strange new forms of life in the New Zealand forests, take control of one and explore.
So this is a short puzzle platformer with a neat catch: most of what you'll see on the screen are images captured directly from the forests of New Zealand. Using real images as a backdrop is certainly not a new idea, but it's used remarkably well here.
The gameplay is simple enough: as an apparently sentient seed, you are tasked with travers…

Palestine Action / UK censorship
Good article from @….
"While the groups actions may constitute criminal damage, their actions do not represent an attempt to induce fear in the population by creating an imminent threat to life. ...
"Proscribing Palestine Action as terrorists is not about public safety – it is about suppressing protest that we may disagree or agree with, but that stands well short of being an attempt to strike fear into the British public through the use of indiscriminate violence against people. In equating support of damage to military property with support of terrorism, it endangers legitimate debate about the UK-Israel arms trade. ...
"As there is no public evidence of any link to terrorism or support of terrorist groups from Palestine Action, Open Rights Group supports their decision to appeal proscription. While we may have differing opinions on their tactics, we stand against this attack on their right to exist and speak out."
#PalestineAction #UK #censorship #UKPol

NLO Corrections to Dimuonium Production in Photon-Photon Collision
Qi-Ming Feng, Si-Mao Guo, Qi-Wei Hu, Cong-Feng Qiao, Qi-Ming Qiu, Yu-Jie Tian, Bai-Rong Zhang, Hao Zhang, Xuan-Heng Zhang, Bo-Ting Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14424

NLO Corrections to Dimuonium Production in Photon-Photon Collision
Dimuonium ($μ^+ μ^-$) is one of the pure QED bound systems of leptons, together with positronium and ditauonium. The former had been observed in experiment in 1951, while the search for dimuonium and ditauonium ($τ^+ τ^-$) are still in vain. The ditauonium is thought to be hard to measure due to its short life time, whereas the dimuonium is very likely to be observed in current running experiments. We calculate in this work the para and ortho dimuonium production in photon-photon collision …

Prediction Gaps as Pathways to Explanation: Rethinking Educational Outcomes through Differences in Model Performance
Javier Garcia-Bernardo, Eva Jaspers, Weverthon Machado, Samuel Plach, Erik Jan van Leeuwen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22993

Prediction Gaps as Pathways to Explanation: Rethinking Educational Outcomes through Differences in Model Performance
Social contexts -- such as families, schools, and neighborhoods -- shape life outcomes. The key question is not simply whether they matter, but rather for whom and under what conditions. Here, we argue that prediction gaps -- differences in predictive performance between statistical models of varying complexity -- offer a pathway for identifying surprising empirical patterns (i.e., not captured by simpler models) which highlight where theories succeed or fall short. Using population-scale admin…

Comparing Apples to Oranges: A Dataset & Analysis of LLM Humour Understanding from Traditional Puns to Topical Jokes
Tyler Loakman, William Thorne, Chenghua Lin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13335

Comparing Apples to Oranges: A Dataset & Analysis of LLM Humour Understanding from Traditional Puns to Topical Jokes
Humour, as a complex language form, is derived from myriad aspects of life, whilst existing work on computational humour has focussed almost exclusively on short pun-based jokes. In this work, we investigate whether the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to explain humour depends on the particular humour form. We compare models on simple puns and more complex topical humour that requires knowledge of real-world entities and events. In doing so, we curate a dataset of 600 jokes split across…

Complex three-dimensional rearing environments amplify compensatory plasticity following early blindness (in opossums) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.02.651847v1 "underscoring the role of experience in directing compensatory plasticity following early s…

Game-Theoretic and Reinforcement Learning-Based Cluster Head Selection for Energy-Efficient Wireless Sensor Network
Mehrshad Eskandarpour, Saba Pirahmadian, Parham Soltani, Hossein Soleimani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12707

Game-Theoretic and Reinforcement Learning-Based Cluster Head Selection for Energy-Efficient Wireless Sensor Network
Energy in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is critical to network lifetime and data delivery. However, the primary impediment to the durability and dependability of these sensor nodes is their short battery life. Currently, power-saving algorithms such as clustering and routing algorithms have improved energy efficiency in standard protocols. This paper proposes a clustering-based routing approach for creating an adaptive, energy-efficient mechanism. Our system employs a multi-step clustering st…

An LLM's Apology: Outsourcing Awkwardness in the Age of AI
Twm Stone, Anna Soligo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13685 https://arxiv.…

An LLM's Apology: Outsourcing Awkwardness in the Age of AI
A key part of modern social dynamics is flaking at short notice. However, anxiety in coming up with believable and socially acceptable reasons to do so can instead lead to 'ghosting', awkwardness, or implausible excuses, risking emotional harm and resentment in the other party. The ability to delegate this task to a Large Language Model (LLM) could substantially reduce friction and enhance the flexibility of user's social life while greatly minimising the aforementioned creative burden and mora…

Extending a Phylogeny-based Method for Detecting Signatures of Multi-level Selection for Applications in Artificial Life
Matthew Andres Moreno, Sanaz Hasanzadeh Fard, Luis Zaman, Emily Dolson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14232

Extending a Phylogeny-based Method for Detecting Signatures of Multi-level Selection for Applications in Artificial Life
Multilevel selection occurs when short-term individual-level reproductive interests conflict with longer-term group-level fitness effects. Detecting and quantifying this phenomenon is key to understanding evolution of traits ranging from multicellularity to pathogen virulence. Multilevel selection is particularly important in artificial life research due to its connection to major evolutionary transitions, a hallmark of open-ended evolution. Bonetti Franceschi & Volz (2024) proposed to detect m…