Tootfinder

I'm not sure how this affected me, but my PCP just told me it's ending via form letter.
Making Care Primary (MCP) Model | CMS
https://www.cms.gov/priorities/innovation/innovation-models/making-care-primary

I finally finished the blogpost including some new photos and a short video (!!) from my hike last Saturday.
To me it was a really really gorgeous day!
Read the story here: https://www.franzgraf.de/blog/2025/getting-up-early-for-the-mountains/
(a…

This spam email has a fake "click to unsubscribe". It looks like a link but its destination is set to a no-op in the email source code. I want to support "The Blue Resistance" but they are making it very difficult.

Ethical concerns take a back seat to practical or economic concerns only if a majority of people and power decide they do.
Accepting an ethical compromise is never a given. It is always a choice. Even if it's a choice that gets made by someone else (billionaires, CEOs, political donors, VCs, etc.).
If they're making a choice you don't like, it's time to do something about it.

i don't personally do retrocomputing but a lot of the design for #GlasgowInterfaceExplorer is made with an explicit purpose of making retrocomputing nicer (for example, the support for true 5 V TTL that we went to great lengths to preserve, vs. only supporting 3.3 V at most)
i'm quite happy to add support for more retro interfaces to it too

Natura Urbana IX 🏡
城市自然 IX 🏡
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1995
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

Yiding Cao Geld mit PayPal.Me senden
Folgen Sie dem Link PayPal.Me/dingsterdingster und geben Sie den Betrag ein. Es ist bequem und sicher. Sie haben noch kein PayPal-Konto? Kein Problem.

on my blog!
some notes on making summer coffee so i don't forget and screw it up again next spring
https://dotat.at/@/2025-06-01-bialetti.html

The 13yo was making instant mac & cheese (incorrectly), and my wife yelled "READ the instructions!"
The 13yo responded with, "I DID read the instructions,"and she replied "A day in the library saves a week in the lab." Which I guess is a real expression that scientists say?

For example:
- Telling apart photos of cats and dogs is “AI.”
- Making up fake but plausible facts on an arbitrary topic is “AI.”
- Walking is “AI.”
- Doing long multiplication is something we might call “intelligence” in humans, but it is not “AI” because computers have •always• been good at it.
- Winning at checkers •used• to be “AI” because computers didn’t used to be able to do that, but now it’s not “AI” because computers have been good at it for too long.
5/

TESTQUEST: A Web Gamification Tool to Improve Locators and Page Objects Quality
Dario Olianas, Diego Clerissi, Maurizio Leotta, Filippo Ricca
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24756

TESTQUEST: A Web Gamification Tool to Improve Locators and Page Objects Quality
Web applications play a crucial role in our daily lives, making it essential to employ testing methods that ensure their quality. Typically, Web testing automation frameworks rely on locators to interact with the graphical user interface, acting as connection points to the elements on a Web page. Nevertheless, locators are widely recognized as a major vulnerability in Web testing, as they are highly sensitive to the frequent changes in Web page structures caused by rapid software evolution. The…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.14319 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCR_…

A Quantum "Lifting Theorem" for Constructions of Pseudorandom Generators from Random Oracles
We study the (quantum) security of pseudorandom generators (PRGs) constructed from random oracles. We prove a "lifting theorem" showing, roughly, that if such a PRG is unconditionally secure against classical adversaries making polynomially many queries to the random oracle, then it is also (unconditionally) secure against quantum adversaries in the same sense. As a result of independent interest, we also show that any pseudo-deterministic quantum-oracle algorithm (i.e., a quantum algorithm tha…

$\text{TREX}^2$: Dual-Reconstruction Framework for Teleoperated-Robot with EXtended Reality
Ziliang Zhang, Cong Liu, Hyoseung Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01135

$\text{TREX}^2$: Dual-Reconstruction Framework for Teleoperated-Robot with EXtended Reality
Robot teleoperation with extended reality (XR teleoperation) enables intuitive interaction by allowing remote robots to mimic user motions with real-time 3D feedback. However, existing systems face significant motion-to-motion (M2M) latency--the delay between the user's latest motion and the corresponding robot feedback--leading to high teleoperation error and mission completion time. This issue stems from the system's exclusive reliance on network communication, making it highly vulnerable to …

Correcting for the effects of the point spread function in intra-halo light measurements and application to deep Hyper Suprime-Cam data
L. P. Garate-Nu\~nez, A. S. G. Robotham, S. Bellstedt, L. J. M. Davies
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24395

Correcting for the effects of the point spread function in intra-halo light measurements and application to deep Hyper Suprime-Cam data
The intra-halo light (IHL) is the diffuse stellar component that surrounds galaxies, groups, and clusters. Its formation is intimately linked to the hierarchical assembly of the system, making it a key tracer of galaxy evolution. However, the low surface brightness (LSB) of the IHL makes it challenging to detect and also to distinguish from the point spread function (PSF) effect of the telescope. In this paper, we present two independent techniques that, when combined, provide a statistically r…

Updated Post: Podcast ep 188: 12 ways to make decision-making easier (and why people who hoard find it so hard to make decisions in the first place!) https://www.overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.uk/podcast-ep-188-decision-making-hoarding-disorder…

So my mother-in-law is making some Ukrainian "potatoes" (they're basically cocoa and rum and some kind of binder.. crackers? balled up) for the 7yo's bday party. My wife made these amazing signs for the attendees in case of allergies. 😂

Convex Approximations of Random Constrained Markov Decision Processes
V Varagapriya, Vikas Vikram Singh, Abdel Lisser
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24815 http…

Convex Approximations of Random Constrained Markov Decision Processes
Constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) are used as a decision-making framework to study the long-run performance of a stochastic system. It is well-known that a stationary optimal policy of a CMDP problem under discounted cost criterion can be obtained by solving a linear programming problem when running costs and transition probabilities are exactly known. In this paper, we consider a discounted cost CMDP problem where the running costs and transition probabilities are defined using ran…

Hi friends!
I set my alarm to 5am and headed out for a nice walk. It was getting warm, so I started early. - and it was just so good to do so!
A nice 6h walk with lots of views, lots of photos and just enjoying being out. End the #summit just for me 😍
On the way up I noted all places where I could refuel later using my water filter. Seriously: why didn't I buy that waaays ear…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.16750 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csIR_…

A Gold Standard Dataset for the Reviewer Assignment Problem
Many peer-review venues are using algorithms to assign submissions to reviewers. The crux of such automated approaches is the notion of the "similarity score" -- a numerical estimate of the expertise of a reviewer in reviewing a paper -- and many algorithms have been proposed to compute these scores. However, these algorithms have not been subjected to a principled comparison, making it difficult for stakeholders to choose the algorithm in an evidence-based manner. The key challenge in comparin…

Near-Field Multiuser Localization Based on Extremely Large Antenna Array with Limited RF Chains
Boyu Teng, Xiaojun Yuan, Rui Wang, Ying-Chang Liang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00884

Near-Field Multiuser Localization Based on Extremely Large Antenna Array with Limited RF Chains
Extremely large antenna array (ELAA) not only effectively enhances system communication performance but also improves the sensing capabilities of communication systems, making it one of the key enabling technologies in 6G wireless networks. This paper investigates the multiuser localization problem in an uplink Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) system, where the base station (BS) is equipped with an ELAA to receive signals from multiple single-antenna users. We exploit analog beamforming to…

A nonparametric statistical method for deconvolving densities in the analysis of proteomic data
Akin Anarat, Jean Krutmann, Holger Schwender
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01540

A nonparametric statistical method for deconvolving densities in the analysis of proteomic data
In medical research, often, genomic or proteomic data are collected, with measurements frequently subject to uncertainties or errors, making it crucial to accurately separate the signals of the genes or proteins, respectively, from the noise. Such a signal separation is also of interest in skin aging research in which intrinsic aging driven by genetic factors and extrinsic, i.e.\ environmentally induced, aging are investigated by considering, e.g., the proteome of skin fibroblasts. Since extrin…

Baby's first unun!
My #AmateurRadio journey continues with making some of my own equipment...
I wanted to be able to connect either an EFHW or an EFRW to my KX3, but move the actual antenna away from the radio, so that I can POTA with other people close enough to talk, while keeping the antennas for the different out of each others' near field so they don't interere. To …

Counterfactual Activation Editing for Post-hoc Prosody and Mispronunciation Correction in TTS Models
Kyowoon Lee, Artyom Stitsyuk, Gunu Jho, Inchul Hwang, Jaesik Choi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00832

Counterfactual Activation Editing for Post-hoc Prosody and Mispronunciation Correction in TTS Models
Recent advances in Text-to-Speech (TTS) have significantly improved speech naturalness, increasing the demand for precise prosody control and mispronunciation correction. Existing approaches for prosody manipulation often depend on specialized modules or additional training, limiting their capacity for post-hoc adjustments. Similarly, traditional mispronunciation correction relies on grapheme-to-phoneme dictionaries, making it less practical in low-resource settings. We introduce Counterfactual…

Observation of pseudogap in Cr_{1-x}Y_xN magnetic alloy and its impact on the Seebeck coefficient by ab-initio calculations
Luis Felipe Leon-Pinzon, Elisabeth Restrepo-Parra, Andres Manuel Garay-Tapia
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00687

Observation of pseudogap in Cr_{1-x}Y_xN magnetic alloy and its impact on the Seebeck coefficient by ab-initio calculations
Thermoelectric materials require high electronic conductivity and low thermal conductivity. CrN has been shown to have low phononic thermal conductivity, making it a potential candidate for thermoelectric applications. In addition, similarities have been observed between YN and ScN suggesting that the CrYN alloy may have interesting thermoelectric properties. As CrYN has not been studied in detail at the level of thermoelectric properties, the first study on CrYN alloy of Seebeck coefficient an…

Context…
‘Accessibility at the Edge’ W3C CG Is an overlay smoke screen:
https://adrianroselli.com/2022/09/accessibility-at-the-edge-w3c-cg-is-an-overlay-smoke-screen.html
It has drafted a report…
“Accessi…

‘Accessibility at the Edge’ W3C CG Is an Overlay Smoke Screen
Another post where I lay it all out in the title. What follows is why I am making this assertion (with a handy table of contents). Timeline 26 May 2022 at 10:58am ET 26 May 2022 at 7:56pm ET 27 May 2022 at 7:38pm ET 28 May 2022 at 5:04pm…

For example:
- Telling apart photos of cats and dogs is “AI.”
- Making up fake but plausible facts on an arbitrary topic is “AI.”
- Walking is “AI.”
- Doing long multiplication is something we might call “intelligence” in humans, but it is not “AI” because computers have •always• been good at it.
- Winning at checkers •used• to be “AI” because computers didn’t used to be able to do that, but now it’s not “AI” because computers have been good at it for too long.
5/

James Jani is one of the best serious YouTubers out there and he burned out. So far, so common.
What I find interesting is something what he says that doesn’t resonate with me at all: “you gotta enjoy the process”
For me, I’ve NEVER enjoyed the process of creating ANYTHING.
I always:
1. wanted something to exist (sometimes out of spite 😇),
2. hated every second of making it happen,
3. enjoyed that it exists.
Guess there’re 2 types of creators. 😅
…

Across the country, Republican lawmakers have been working to undermine or altogether undo the will of the voters -- by making it harder to pass amendments and laws through citizen-led initiatives.
In #Missouri, the 2025 legislative session was dominated by Republican lawmakers trying to reverse two major measures that voters had put on the ballot and approved just months before;
one made

Red State Voters Approved Progressive Measures. GOP Lawmakers Are Trying to Undermine Them.
In the wake of ballot measures that increased abortion access and improved sick leave for workers, a coordinated effort is unfolding across the country to restrict direct democracy — and shift power to partisan legislatures.

Trumpty Dumpty
bot by @…
No laws were broken in the making of this bot: let's leave the extrajudicial killing out of it.
#satire #potus45

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08118 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_…

Tilsotua: Reproducing Slitmask Sky Positions for use with the LRIS Multislit Archive
We present tilsotua, a code that calculates sky positions of the slits from Low-Resolution Imaging Spectrograph (LRIS) slitmasks used in multislit observations. Raw data for the Keck/LRIS spectrograph does not include information about the sky positions of the slitmask targets, making it difficult to use beyond the scope of the original programs. tilsotua translates slit coordinates from the mask design files in the mask milling machine frame to sky coordinates. tilsotua also shifts the origina…

Operation of a dual-phase xenon detector with wavelength sensitivity from ultraviolet to infrared
Robert Hammann, Kai B\"ose, Steffen Form, Luisa H\"otzsch, Teresa Marrod\'an Undagoitia
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24682

Operation of a dual-phase xenon detector with wavelength sensitivity from ultraviolet to infrared
Xenon, in both its gaseous and liquid phase, offers excellent scintillation and ionization properties, making it an ideal target medium for rare event searches. We report on measurements performed with a dual-phase xenon time projection chamber sensitive to wavelengths from 170 nm to 1700 nm. In addition to the well-established ultraviolet (UV) scintillation, we observe coincident signals in a photomultiplier tube sensitive to infrared (IR) light, associated with both prompt scintillation in th…

quick and easy way to build a website for your r package: #rstats #package

Hi friends!
I set my alarm to 5am and headed out for a nice walk. It was getting warm, so I started early. - and it was just so good to do so!
A nice 6h walk with lots of views, lots of photos and just enjoying being out. End the #summit just for me 😍
On the way up I noted all places where I could refuel later using my water filter. Seriously: why didn't I buy that waaays ear…

Science progresses one funeral at a time.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it... --Max Planck
#Science #Humor

A couple of folks said I should replace the pop-over email signup form on my blog with a much more subtle inline signup form at the top of the page. So! If you'd like to reward the more user-friendly design with your patronage and support (it's free, I only ask for your attention), you can sign up to get my new posts in your inbox just by sharing your email address. I won't spam you or sell your email, and don't post too often.

Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

A wonderful description of how the technology works.

"ChatGPT generates realistic responses by making guesses about which fragments of text should follow other sequences, based on a statistical model that has ingested billions of examples of text pulled from all over the internet. In Mr. Mata’s case, the program appears to have discerned the labyrinthine framework of a written legal argument, but has populated it with names and facts from a bouillabaisse of existing cases."

Half-Life: completed!
I turned god mode on. I lasted for quite a while without it, making my way through Lambda Core and restarting the reactor, but as I died for the 452nd time making my way up through teleporters, and eventually being transported to the alien world of Xen, it wasn't fun any more. I was saving almost every five seconds, and dying as regularly.

Crowdsourcing MUSHRA Tests in the Age of Generative Speech Technologies: A Comparative Analysis of Subjective and Objective Testing Methods
Laura Lechler, Chamran Moradi, Ivana Balic
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00950

Crowdsourcing MUSHRA Tests in the Age of Generative Speech Technologies: A Comparative Analysis of Subjective and Objective Testing Methods
The MUSHRA framework is widely used for detecting subtle audio quality differences but traditionally relies on expert listeners in controlled environments, making it costly and impractical for model development. As a result, objective metrics are often used during development, with expert evaluations conducted later. While effective for traditional DSP codecs, these metrics often fail to reliably evaluate generative models. This paper proposes adaptations for conducting MUSHRA tests with non-ex…

Recent hype is that o3 solved AI web search.
But so far I've tried using it for two "hard" search problems (meaning I first tried searching manually and didn't find much). Both times it hallucinated a ton, making claims that weren't actually in the sources.
On the other hand, both times, I did ultimately find nuggets of useful information after picking through all the hallucinations. So I'm glad I used it?
[1/3]

Estimating dynamic transmission rates with a Black-Karasinski process in stochastic SIHR models using particle MCMC
Avery Drennan, Jeffrey Covington, Dan Han, Andrew Attilio, Jaechoul Lee, Richard Posner, Eck Doerry, Joseph Mihaljevic, Ye Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24127

Estimating dynamic transmission rates with a Black-Karasinski process in stochastic SIHR models using particle MCMC
Compartmental models are effective in modeling the spread of infectious pathogens, but have remaining weaknesses in fitting to real datasets exhibiting stochastic effects. We propose a stochastic SIHR model with a dynamic transmission rate, where the rate is modeled by the Black-Karasinski (BK) process - a mean-reverting stochastic process with a stable equilibrium distribution, making it well-suited for modeling long-term epidemic dynamics. To generate sample paths of the BK process and estima…

As a kid, my dad bought me the #RadioShack Armatron, a robot arm controlled with 2 joysticks, from Tandy. Sadly it was thrown out when making room for other stuff when I became an adult. That is why I'm proud, at 53, to announce I want to relive my youth and I ordered the #Velleman KS1…

New: Podcast ep 188: 12 ways to make decision-making easier (and why people who hoard find it so hard to make decisions in the first place!) https://www.overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.uk/podcast-ep-188-decision-making-hoarding-disorder

If your business has a factory, and you're not also making sausages, what are you even doing!?
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/consumer/change-wurst-vw-puts-best-selling-sausage-supermarkets

Change for the wurst: VW puts best-selling sausage in supermarkets
Currywurst is estimated to generate seven-figure revenues annually – now it's in German supermarkets

As promised yesterday, an update from fieldwork day 1.
I'm experimenting a bit by making a #FieldDiary, no idea of it's interesting or useful, but hopefully someone will like it...
http://sternaparadisaea.net/2025/05/24/field-diary-2025/

Every company is undergoing an invisible reorg. You report to your boss but your boss reports to an #AI, offloading the job of management entirely onto a bot and then merely communicating its wishes back to the team.
This is the Nothing Manager, surrounded by #LLM tools to avoid having to interact with…

AI is not an assistant – it's your new boss (The Everything App part 2)
As managers continue to outsource data-gathering and decision-making to LLMs, the person above you on the org chart is transforming into a chatbot's clerk – and leaving product teams with the consequences.

Making to do lists is great. It always reminds me of tasks that are more than finishing the list.
#ToDoList

Get up right this damn minute and go see Sinners. If you ever loved Call of Cthulhu, John Wick, Django Unchained, From Dusk til Dawn, or any of the movies that are so clearly made by people who *love* making movies - go. now. See it in Dolby or IMAX if you can for the best sound; you won't regret it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch…

Got this "Little Lime" #hydrangea planted to replace a 40-something-year-old azalea bush that died off. It's healthy now, let's see if I don't fuck it up. I've had good luck with hydrangeas as long as they like the spot they're in.
The #Comcast drop runs through here,…

Making enchies today—they’re in the oven now. YUM.
Also, we found someone to haul away our CA king bed becaaaaause …
we bought 2 full size beds, & we’re gonna smoosh them together so that all 4 dogs can COMFORTABLY sleep with us. Yes, we’re crazy. And?
The 2 of us were able to take the bed (slatted frame, solid wood headboard & footboard, mattress & box springs) apart & drag all of it to the front porch. I still don’t know how. I guess we’re not yet totally d…

Calamus 18 City of my walks and joys!
A celebration of Manhattan. I love Whitman's embrace of cities as being just as vital as nature unspoiled. It reflects the humanist aspect of his joy in the world, not a Thoreau-like rejection of civilization.
I also love that Whitman is writing about cruising the streets, making eye contact with potential lovers, celebrating offerings of love.
as I pass, O Manhattan! your frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love
Offering me the response of my own—these repay me,
Lovers, continual lovers, only repay me.
Whitman punched up the first line in later editions, escalating to "City of orgies, walks and joys!"

At t-2 1/2 hours one independent #Starship flight 9 webcast has already been on for a while at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAdLlG9Rfd4 - others will start at 21:30 UTC on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hgDhgTaV5s (they also have cameras on the Bahamas, just in case ...) and at 22:50 UTC at https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1OwxWXMRAXmKQ from SpaceX themselves. Meanwhile "The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary" has vanished there completely ... so it's "A Road not Taken" now, Robert Frost would approve of that. ;-)

Generating Shakespeare-like text with an n-gram language model is straight forward and quite simple. But, don't expect to much of it. It will not be able to recreate a lost Shakespear play for you ;-) It's merely a parrot, making up well sounding sentences out of fragments of original Shakespeare texts...
#ise2025

Saigon still, even as a megapole, has some almost countryside like areas. But the skyscrapers are rolling in.
On the right hand side you see a glimpse of the Zoo, opened to the public in 1869, making it one of the oldest ones in the world.
#photography day 9 of #30daysIRL

Went to Small World Festival. Mostly dry and occasionally sunny.
Small World has such a nice friendly hippy vibe, lots of deadlocks and goths and pirates and beautiful face paints.
Bands all energetic and talented and mostly have been playing here together for 20 years in one form or another. All of 'em doing it for the love of it. Pony doing a great job of organizing the team to put it together.
One dude seemed pretty new, making up synth songs with his repeats and beeps and rapping from audience suggestions. Failed to photograph him well though. There's another 4 bands mentioned in the photo descriptions here.
Medically necessitated more or less total sobriety at the moment, so different whole thing. Those I knew well there mostly working, so lots of time alone dancing soberly and reading. Wish I was better at talking to strangers.
Still good times.
#smallWorldFestival #music #live

There's certain jobs that I've always done when publishing with more senior colleagues (like formatting the references or tables, checking for consistency) and I thought "well obviously". But now that I'm mostly publishing with more junior colleagues I'm *still* doing those jobs, so I've come to think it's probably just a combination of a certain level of skills obsession 🙃 #academicChatter
(ignoring the gender issue for now which may contribute to making "housekeeping" my job?!)

I've seen outrage expressed at this one percent decrease of the lowest marginal tax rate as "not being a 'middle-class tax cut' since everyone -- billionaires included -- will benefit from it."
It's true; it means that anyone making more than $57,375 will pay 1% less on that first $57K. So, yes, a billionaire and I will both pay $573.75 less. That's how tax brackets work.
It's bad enough that some people don't understand taxation; it's worse that others exploit that to foment outrage.

Delirium often goes underreported, making it hard for #AI to predict accurately. Our review of 120 studies found common data issues that hurt model reliability. We created a step-by-step guide to help build fairer, more accurate models—so we eventually can detect #delirium earlier and im…

SealOS : A Sealos-based Approach for Adaptive Resource Optimization Under Dynamic Workloads for Securities Trading System
Haojie Jia, Zhenhao Li, Gen Li, Minxian Xu, Kejiang Ye
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23258

SealOS+: A Sealos-based Approach for Adaptive Resource Optimization Under Dynamic Workloads for Securities Trading System
As securities trading systems transition to a microservices architecture, optimizing system performance presents challenges such as inefficient resource scheduling and high service response delays. Existing container orchestration platforms lack tailored performance optimization mechanisms for trading scenarios, making it difficult to meet the stringent 50ms response time requirement imposed by exchanges. This paper introduces SealOS+, a Sealos-based performance optimization approach for securi…

"But whatever the motive, we know one thing: it takes five years for Bezos to go from posting his photo op with the headstone of a murdered reporter to making billion-dollar deals with his killer."
https://www.theverge.com/amazon/667916/jeff-bezos-…

It seems @… is not active on Masto, so…
https://bsky.app/profile/mfairchild365.bsky.social/post/3lpugshbmtk2o

the wind splitting seconds again
#bloomscrolling #photography #tulips

Bridging the Narrative Divide: Cross-Platform Discourse Networks in Fragmented Ecosystems
Patrick Gerard, Hans W. A. Hanley, Luca Luceri, Emilio Ferrara
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21729

Bridging the Narrative Divide: Cross-Platform Discourse Networks in Fragmented Ecosystems
Political discourse has grown increasingly fragmented across different social platforms, making it challenging to trace how narratives spread and evolve within such a fragmented information ecosystem. Reconstructing social graphs and information diffusion networks is challenging, and available strategies typically depend on platform-specific features and behavioral signals which are often incompatible across systems and increasingly restricted. To address these challenges, we present a platform…

rant on software dev practices
What is it with P5js and virtually all its ecosystem (like Q5js) that, still today, didn't manage to _properly_ package their libraries to be distributed and used via package managers?
Same with their insistence to push global resources and state everywhere... and of course virtually not documenting any of the truly delicate details, just the trivial stuff that could be auto-discovered by relying on auto-complete tools.
I kind of understand wanting to keep the vanilla experience alive, making it "easy" for novices... but that shouldn't be at odds with more "professionalized" production pipelines, at least *not that much*.
For example, with Q5js:
- The NPM packages could be mentioned in their documentation (they are not, even though they are official)
- The NPM packages could define proper exports (same for the JS modules themselves), not forcing us to rely on relative paths to files in node_modules... 🤦
- Globals could be at least namespaced... of course, it would be much, much better if they didn't exist at all.
I'm writing this in 2025, not 1993... and I'm... "triggered".
At this point I'll have to check if I have any other neuro-condition beyond ADHD that makes me "obsessed" with technical flaws, because it seems to be a "me problem" when either virtually nobody sees that as a huge collection of fatal design flaws... or they see it and don't care at all.

making plans to attend this because it looks fun but also because it means i get to write a blog post called "The Car Café | The Café Car"

Hidden Transits: TOI-2285 b is a Warmer sub-Neptune Likely with a Super-Earth Companion
Akihiko Fukui
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22009 https://

Hidden Transits: TOI-2285 b is a Warmer sub-Neptune Likely with a Super-Earth Companion
TOI-2285 b is a sub-Neptune-sized planet orbiting a nearby M dwarf, discovered through the TESS photometric survey and ground-based follow-up observations. The planet was initially reported to have an orbital period of 27.27 d, making it one of the lowest temperature sub-Neptunes transiting a bright M dwarf. However, additional TESS data reveal that its true orbital period is 13.64 d, half the original value, resulting in a warmer equilibrium temperature (358 K) than previously estimated (284 K…

I've been inspired in this effort by
@… work on Making Sense of It All:
https://buttondown.com/liminalcreations?ref=ufwatch.org
and @… work on 47 Watch:
https://47-watch.com/

Looking forward to it!
https://mastodon.social/@karlgroves/114534519629700177

Natura Urbana V 🏡
城市自然 V 🏡
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1995
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

Yiding Cao Geld mit PayPal.Me senden
Folgen Sie dem Link PayPal.Me/dingsterdingster und geben Sie den Betrag ein. Es ist bequem und sicher. Sie haben noch kein PayPal-Konto? Kein Problem.

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/13/linux_6_15_rc6_keyboards/
This change will cost Mr. Torvalds a lot of money. It's another rabbit hole down which your money is dippi…

Foundational rule of settings management in UI design:
Make sure the only thing anyone ever wants to change is in the Advanced Settings submenu, and make that as difficult as possible to discover. If it can actually be discovered, put in place a short timeout to prevent the user making the change before the option disappears.

So the basic idea is that we first compute a "level" for whatever interaction, by adding beneficial modifiers and subtracting harmful ones. Imagine most modifiers are smallish integers like 2 or -3 (though they can be non-integers too). Each level can be thought of as making things twice as good/bad, although this only applies directly when they're balanced. The actual formula starts with a 50/50 chance of "success" at level 0, and then each positive level halves the chance of failure, or if the levels are negative, each negative level halves the chance of success (note that halving the chance of failure is not the same as doubling the chance of success).
The intuitive explanation is that you start with a coin flip. Then if the level is positive, you flip that many additional coins and succeed if any single coin succeeds, but it the level is negative, you have to flip that many additional coins and succeed only if *all* flips succeed.
For example, if I have a dagger with 5 crit chance, and I attack an opponent with no armor modifiers, I'd have to win any 1 of 6 coin flips to score a crit (p = 1 - (1/(2^6)) = 63/64. Increasing my crit modifier by 1 ups my chances only slightly, to 127/128. This is obviously pretty poor return, indicating that the 5 I already have is very strong. If the opponent had armor with -3 to crits, the interaction is now level 2, so the crit chance is 7/8, which is still pretty good. We can see from these examples that the basic system
rewards a small level advantage a lot, but the rewards diminish rapidly. The system has a few avenues for tweaking how it works though, that can let us modify this. There's also a potential benefit (though sometimes drawback) that no matter what the level gap, there's an effective limit to how much the interaction swings.

"It is an interesting phrase, “the business”, especially when used by engineers to label the group of non-engineers in the organisation. It implies that everybody else is engaged in getting customers and making money, while engineering is a cost centre funded presumably through altruistic motives."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/enough-agile/

"But whatever the motive, we know one thing: it takes five years for Bezos to go from posting his photo op with the headstone of a murdered reporter to making billion-dollar deals with his killer."
https://www.theverge.com/amazon/667916/jeff-bezos-…

Also been making a big upgrade to the home #studio . Just finished it all (for now) a few days ago. Upgraded some gear (nice stereo mic pre, some new plugins), finally tore down the foam panels, built my own (w help from bandmate/upholsterer Barry Gray on the covers). Changed the lighting. Nice and cozy. Now just have to practice. :-/

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.07581 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_qfi…

Optimal Execution Strategies Incorporating Internal Liquidity Through Market Making
This paper introduces a new algorithmic execution model that integrates interbank limit and market orders with internal liquidity generated through market making. Based on the Cartea et al.\cite{cartea2015algorithmic} framework, we incorporate market impact in interbank orders while excluding it for internal market-making transactions. Our model aims to optimize the balance between interbank and internal liquidity, reducing market impact and improving execution efficiency.

My 3D printer is busy creating a fantastic medium-sized plant pot today! 🌱 Excited to see how it turns out. #3DPrinting #PlantPot #DIY

Maryland suspends 20,000 drivers licenses per year because of unpaid child support. And how many does it suspend because of bad driving?
https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/pol…

Maryland lawmakers scale back driver’s license suspensions for unpaid child support
The measure exempts Marylanders making at or 250% below the federal poverty guidelines.

Natura Urbana V 🏡
城市自然 V 🏡
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1995
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

Yiding Cao Geld mit PayPal.Me senden
Folgen Sie dem Link PayPal.Me/dingsterdingster und geben Sie den Betrag ein. Es ist bequem und sicher. Sie haben noch kein PayPal-Konto? Kein Problem.

Our minds have to make sense of it by making a story up https://www.overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.uk/podcast-ep-185-engaging-with-our-stuff-why-we-keep-things-but-dont-use-them-with-dr-jan-eppingstall…

In announcing her resignation from the National Science Board, Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social details #DOGE interference in National Science Foundation #NSF grant making. «

I've read this story a couple of times, though it's been many years. It's maybe not the first King story I'd have thought of making a movie from. And Mark Hamill as the Major? interesting choice.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10374610/?ref_=fn_all_ttl_1

The Long Walk (2025) | Horror
The Long Walk: Directed by Francis Lawrence. With Garrett Wareing, Mark Hamill, Judy Greer, Charlie Plummer. A group of teenage boys compete in an annual contest known as "The Long Walk," where they must maintain a certain walking speed or get shot.

So much enjoying the rustweek! Fantastic information and meeting great folks! Thanks to @… for making it happen !

Episode 2 of #spreadsheet makeover, in which Anais is devious and there is a turtle. See the full emotional arc of getting from a problem statement, some bits and pieces of Excel, to a full solution.
We've discovered that making a great open source spreadsheet isn't enough, we also need to figure out how to show people how to use it. We've done all the formal support site and…

Experimental realization of all logic elements and memory latch in SC-CNN Chua's circuit
Ashokkumar P, Sathish Aravindh M, Venkatesan A, Lakshmanan M
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23303

Experimental realization of all logic elements and memory latch in SC-CNN Chua's circuit
The Chua's circuit is examined using a State Controlled-Cellular Neural Network (SC-CNN) framework with two logical square wave input signals. We illustrate, in particular, that this nonlinear circuit can generate all the basic logic operations, including OR/NOR, AND/NAND, and XOR/XNOR gates, by making use of the hopping of attractors which this circuit produces in different phase space regimes. Further, it is shown that besides two-inputs, the circuit emulates multi-input logic elements. Moreo…

I have a habbit of making (too) many (small) packages for functionality that might be reused in different context. {box} might be an alternative by making scripts into modlues that can be loaded: #RStats

‘box’: Write Reusable, Composable and Modular R Code
A modern module system for R. Organise code into hierarchical, composable, reusable modules, and use it effortlessly across projects via a flexible, declarative dependency loading syntax.

Not sure if those work with a prepaid sim card on a modem (nor if it’s legal to setup such an answering machine on one of them here), but I’ll do some research on it
As for voip numbers, no idea how those work and if they’re universal or if I have to get one from a provider explicitly made for Asterisk compatibility, but they seem quite expensive (specially since the prepaid ones would be basically free since it’s only for receiving calls from nerds, not making calls) anyway.

The Upward-Driven Disk, a Steadily Forced Chaotic Pendulum
Leo Maas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17957 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17957…

The Upward-Driven Disk, a Steadily Forced Chaotic Pendulum
An "upward-driven disk" is a novel mechanical device built from LEGO parts. A circular disk is suspended from the point where it is sandwiched between two wheels, making it free to oscillate as a pendulum, but the location of that suspension point on the disk changes with time due to a steady upward driving force applied by rotation of one of the wheels. The pendulum can dynamically flip between hanging downward and being inverted. Depending on the upward drive and the initial conditions, the d…

Just did code for 3 solid hours, now to run it and see how close I got to it making sense 😂

Making Firefox/Mozilla dependent on money from Google was a gigantic misstep. It should never have happened.
Firefox has become an alibi for Google against claims of monopolistic behavior. It is a repeat of how Bill Gates saved Apple except that Firefox seems to be on permanently boxed in by Google.
#Firefox

Sonnet 021 - XXI
So is it not with me as with that Muse,
Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse,
Who heaven itself for ornament doth use
And every fair with his fair doth rehearse,
Making a couplement of proud compare
With sun and moon, with earth and sea's rich gems,
With April's first-born flowers, and all things rare,
That heaven's air in this huge rondure hems.
O! let me, true in love, but truly write,
And then bel…

This is so hilarious. Antena 3 CNN got pissed off that Simion decided to skip on the debate and run away to #Poland, so they're letting Dan answer questions normally, and digging out the worst clips of Simion to answer their questions. It's making him look so incredibly bad.
Does he show up and get bulldozed by clear concise policy positions while blabbering about covid conspira…

When I was 17 my boyfriend was 23 and everything was fine.
It is shocking AF that today he could, in some states, get prison time for making love to me.
#StopTheHysteria

Towards Verifiability of Total Value Locked (TVL) in Decentralized Finance
Pietro Saggese, Michael Fr\"owis, Stefan Kitzler, Bernhard Haslhofer, Raphael Auer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14565

Towards Verifiability of Total Value Locked (TVL) in Decentralized Finance
Total Value Locked (TVL) aims to measure the aggregate value of cryptoassets deposited in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols. Although blockchain data is public, the way TVL is computed is not well understood. In practice, its calculation on major TVL aggregators relies on self-reports from community members and lacks standardization, making it difficult to verify published figures independently. We thus conduct a systematic study on 939 DeFi projects deployed in Ethereum. We study the meth…

Over the last few months, I have filtered out most USA news, so I have basically a minimal knowledge of what is happening in that part of the world. To be honest, it's great! The same goes for tech, I work long 12-hour days and weekends as a sysadmin, and the last thing I want to see after those days is tech stuff. So, I read tech news through newsletters sent to an email address I only use for that purpose.
It’s making my life more relaxed not to care about what is happening on ot…

Complete fabrication. Just absolutely making shit up, and so confidently.
(The Apollo Archive is a thing, but it has nothing to do with archive.org, and that hostname has nothing to do with the Apollo Archive.)

One of the most important lessons I've learned in life / continue to learn / managed to forget is the importance of "stopping." It is so easy for life to become overwhelming with all the things I must do. Work, family, friends, volunteering, community, finances, chores, taking care of my health, the list goes on...
"Life is a very simple thing. We make it more complex." - Anonymous
"When we are making our life more complex, that is precisely the time when we are totally incapable of seeing what we are doing. The more complex our lives are, the more we need to be present to them and, surprisingly, this is exactly the time when we are most distracted. When we are distracted, we tend to have poor judgment and make more mistakes . . . usually adding to the confusion . . . and so it goes."
"....We usually respond by trying to become even more controlling and, eventually (or immediately!), this just makes things worse."
"It's time to stop, take stock, take some deep breaths, rest, listen to others, and regroup...We may miss something. We may even miss something we think is important. That's okay. We're more important."
"Taking time to stop may be just what I need to move ahead."
-- Anne Wilson Schaef, Meditations for People Who (May) Worry Too Much, Ballantine Books, 1996, entry for May 6th.
#life #quotes #health #productivity

The {conflicted} package makes sure that namespace conflicts are solved explicitly and prevents unpleasent surprises: #rstats

The Stablecoin Discount: Evidence of Tether's U.S. Treasury Bill Market Share in Lowering Yields
Lennart Ante, Aman Saggu, Ingo Fiedler
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12413

The Stablecoin Discount: Evidence of Tether's U.S. Treasury Bill Market Share in Lowering Yields
Stablecoins represent a critical bridge between cryptocurrency and traditional finance, with Tether (USDT) dominating the sector as the largest stablecoin by market capitalization. By Q1 2025, Tether directly held approximately $98.5 billion in U.S. Treasury bills, representing 1.6% of all outstanding Treasury bills, making it one of the largest non-sovereign buyers in this crucial asset class, on par with nation-state-level investors. This paper investigates how Tether's market share of U.S. T…

The Python library "YFinance" decided to force an upgrade. They did this by making the old version report a rate-limit error on every request.
Confusing.
Would have been better if they reported a "old version not supported" error or something instead. So that wasted some time.
That upgrade had dependencies which have dependencies upon a newer version of Python, so needed a whole OS upgrade really.
Which failed. Bricking the Rasp PI it was running on.
Oh well, complete rebuild of the whole machine and software it runs from scratch then.
That took all day yesterday. At the end I notice that the touch-screen doesn't touch. Needs drivers.
The drivers haven't been upgraded in six years. They brick the machine again when trying to install them on Debian Trixie.
Luckily, I kept good notes and could rebuild it all again much faster with no mistakes and knowing what to do and all the required custom software changes already made and saved.
So now I spent a whole day on annoying upgrade work because a single Python library decided to break the old version, and my Rasp Pi has no touch-screen. Which isn't ideal for a machine mostly operating as a fancy light switch for all the LED strips in the house.
This happens all the time in software. Millions of man hours wasted, so much hardware dumped because the drivers get abandoned.

In other news: Microsoft abandons Windows 10 any day now. Good luck to everyone faced with doing that lap on the upgrade treadmill.
I still have more work to do to bring up this RaspPi's software to where it was, but it'll have to wait, other things to do. At least it's back to sending me the nightly finance report and controlling the LED strips. If without a touch screen now.
#software #upgradeTredmil #python #microsoft