Tootfinder

Initiator of the #NixOS documentation team is stepping down:
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-next-chapter-in-nix-documentation/68425

I like to play around as an anonymous commenter in online newspaper columns. If you point out the biases of #AI systems, the comment gets deleted because it is considered too polemical.
The comment was addressing an article about AI in public service and the use in refugee applications 🫣

“The Tudor state scrapped Latin worship and the lyrics and music that went with it were largely discarded. Most of this stuff is lost. But..."
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/aug/16/monastic-music-t…

Finished “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey, the short novel and 2024 Booker Prize winner. I am at a loss to understand how that could possibly be so. I hated it. Because it is short and in hope there was something redeeming, I saw it through, regrettably.
There are moments of beautifully lyrical prose, but my god… just endless lists of things. The book is plotless, which can work in an essay structure. But it needs to be compelling. This wasn’t.
1/5 stars ⭐️

Orbital
A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Boo…

How Can the Government ‘Take Back’ a City It Largely Controls?
DC collects taxes and funds its own *balanced* budgets.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/upshot/washington-dc-home-rule.html?unlocked_a…

How Can the Government ‘Take Back’ a City It Largely Controls?
President Trump and his allies have berated Washington, D.C., officials. Yet the federal government has often made it harder for those officials to manage the capital.

Obesity & diet
I wouldn't normally share a positive story about the new diet drugs, because I've seen someone get obsessed with them who was at a perfectly acceptable weight *by majority standards* (surprise: every weight is in fact perfectly acceptable by *objective* standards, because every "weight-associated" health risk is its own danger that should be assessed *in individuals*). I think two almost-contradictory things:
1. In a society shuddering under the burden of metastasized fatmisia, there's a very real danger in promoting the new diet drugs because lots of people who really don't need them will be psychologically bullied into using them and suffer from the cost and/or side effects.
2. For many individuals under the assault of our society's fatmisia, "just ignore it" is not a sufficient response, and also for specific people for whom decreasing their weight can address *specific* health risks/conditions that they *want* to address that way, these drugs can be a useful tool.
I know @… to be a trustworthy & considerate person, so I think it's responsible to share this:
#Fat #Diet #Obesity

Facebook is revamping its classic Poke feature to be easier to use and include gamification elements similar to Snapchat and TikTok as it courts younger users (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/04/facebook-is-trying-to-make-pokes-happen-a…

Facebook is trying to make 'pokes' happen again | TechCrunch
The poke-tracking feature is largely designed to appeal to younger users who have grown up with gamification elements built into their social apps, like Snapchat and TikTok Streaks.

Prestige over merit: An adapted audit of LLM bias in peer review
Anthony Howell, Jieshu Wang, Luyu Du, Julia Melkers, Varshil Shah
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15122 https://

Prestige over merit: An adapted audit of LLM bias in peer review
Large language models (LLMs) are playing an increasingly integral, though largely informal, role in scholarly peer review. Yet it remains unclear whether LLMs reproduce the biases observed in human decision-making. We adapt a resume-style audit to scientific publishing, developing a multi-role LLM simulation (editor/reviewer) that evaluates a representative set of high-quality manuscripts across the physical, biological, and social sciences under randomized author identities (institutional pres…

The Social Cost of Intelligence: Emergence, Propagation, and Amplification of Stereotypical Bias in Multi-Agent Systems
Thi-Nhung Nguyen, Linhao Luo, Thuy-Trang Vu, Dinh Phung
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10943

The Social Cost of Intelligence: Emergence, Propagation, and Amplification of Stereotypical Bias in Multi-Agent Systems
Bias in large language models (LLMs) remains a persistent challenge, manifesting in stereotyping and unfair treatment across social groups. While prior research has primarily focused on individual models, the rise of multi-agent systems (MAS), where multiple LLMs collaborate and communicate, introduces new and largely unexplored dynamics in bias emergence and propagation. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of stereotypical bias in MAS, examining how internal specialization, underlyi…

Social Simulation for Integrating Self-Care: Measuring the Effects of Contextual Environments in Augmented Reality for Mental Health Practice
Anna Fang, Jiayang Shi, Hriday Chhabria, Bosi Li, Haiyi Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12081

Social Simulation for Integrating Self-Care: Measuring the Effects of Contextual Environments in Augmented Reality for Mental Health Practice
Despite growing interest in virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) for mental well-being, prior work using immersive interventions to teach mental health skills has largely focused on calming or abstract settings. As a result, little is known about how realistic social simulation may better support the transfer and application of skills to in-person environments. In this work, we present a 14-day user study with 43-participants comparing an augmented reality intervention simulating a realistic c…