Tootfinder

Raiders Could Trade Disappointing Former First-Rounder for 44-Game Starting OL https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/tyree-wilson-trade-braxton-jones-bears/?adt_ei=[email]

So: just watched all the Topaz Video tutorials. Very interesting workflow. There are a whole bunch of different models in there that are trained on specific tasks, so you can try denoise by this or that one, upscaling by a different one altogether.
And you cannot import BRAW directly, so it seems I have to decide if I want my crops/stabilisation/colour grade first, then AI enhancement, since the source footage is 6K. For other clips I may need to upscale first.
My head already hu…

safe to say Joel Engardio is being recalled. he's down 30 points in the first drop
@…'s map also shows the 3 precincts added to the district in 2022 which allowed him to run (he lives in one of them), and which accounted for his margin of victory over Gordon Mar, voting most strongly to recall him. wild!

uh oh the medtimes are doing their thing I may become sleeeeeeps
I want to eat a cheese stick first

Lyft partners with Ann Arbor-based May Mobility to let riders in Atlanta request an autonomous minivan, with a safety driver, first in a seven square-mile area (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/775074/lyft-may-mobility-robotaxi-atlanta…

Lyft’s first ‘robotaxis’ are live in Atlanta
Lyft is launching its first commercial robotaxi service with May Mobility in Atlanta. The vehicles will have safety monitors in the driver seat who may manually operate the vehicle in the initial stages.

Signatures of Chiral Phonons in MnPS$_3$ from first principles
Banhi Chatterjee, Peter Kratzer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11879 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.…

Signatures of Chiral Phonons in MnPS$_3$ from first principles
Two-dimensional (2D) materials may host circular phonons, considered as chiral if the presence of a substrate breaks mirror symmetry. In 2D transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) monolayers lacking inversion symmetry, phonons with a given chirality can be observed in the non-equilibrium state triggered by optical excitations using circularly polarized light. Backed by first-principles calculations, we present the antiferromagnetic semiconductor MnPS$_3$ with a hexagonal crystal structure and ba…

Long post, game design
Crungle is a game designed to be a simple test of general reasoning skills that's difficult to play by rote memory, since there are many possible rule sets, but it should be easy to play if one can understand and extrapolate from rules. The game is not necessarily fair, with the first player often having an advantage or a forced win. The game is entirely deterministic, although a variant determines the rule set randomly.
This is version 0.1, and has not yet been tested at all.
Crungle is a competitive game for two players, each of whom controls a single piece on a 3x3 grid. The cells of the grid are numbered from 1 to 9, starting at the top left and proceeding across each row and then down to the next row, so the top three cells are 1, 2, and 3 from left to right, then the next three are 4, 5, and 6 and the final row is cells 7, 8, and 9.
The two players decide who shall play as purple and who shall play as orange. Purple goes first, starting the rules phase by picking one goal rule from the table of goal rules. Next, orange picks a goal rule. These two goal rules determine the two winning conditions. Then each player, starting with orange, alternate picking a movement rule until four movement rules have been selected. During this process, at most one indirect movement rule may be selected. Finally, purple picks a starting location for orange (1-9), with 5 (the center) not allowed. Then orange picks the starting location for purple, which may not be adjacent to orange's starting position.
Alternatively, the goal rules, movement rules, and starting positions may be determined randomly, or a pre-determined ruleset may be selected.
If the ruleset makes it impossible to win, the players should agree to a draw. Either player could instead "bet" their opponent. If the opponent agrees to the bet, the opponent must demonstrate a series of moves by both players that would result in a win for either player. If they can do this, they win, but if they submit an invalid demonstration or cannot submit a demonstration, the player who "bet" wins.
Now that starting positions, movement rules, and goals have been decided, the play phase proceeds with each player taking a turn, starting with purple, until one player wins by satisfying one of the two goals, or until the players agree to a draw. Note that it's possible for both players to occupy the same space.
During each player's turn, that player identifies one of the four movement rules to use and names the square they move to using that rule, then they move their piece into that square and their turn ends. Neither player may use the same movement rule twice in a row (but it's okay to use the same rule your opponent just did unless another rule disallows that). If the movement rule a player picks moves their opponent's piece, they need to state where their opponent's piece ends up. Pieces that would move off the board instead stay in place; it's okay to select a rule that causes your piece to stay in place because of this rule. However, if a rule says "pick a square" or "move to a square" with some additional criteria, but there are no squares that meet those criteria, then that rule may not be used, and a player who picks that rule must pick a different one instead.
Any player who incorrectly states a destination for either their piece or their opponent's piece, picks an invalid square, or chooses an invalid rule has made a violation, as long as their opponent objects before selecting their next move. A player who makes at least three violations immediately forfeits and their opponent wins by default. However, if a player violates a rule but their opponent does not object before picking their next move, the stated destination(s) of the invalid move still stand, and the violation does not count. If a player objects to a valid move, their objection is ignored, and if they do this at least three times, they forfeit and their opponent wins by default.
Goal rules (each player picks one; either player can win using either chosen rule):
End your turn in the same space as your opponent three turns in a row.
End at least one turn in each of the 9 cells.
End five consecutive turns in the three cells in any single row, ending at least one turn on each of the three.
End five consecutive turns in the three cells in any single column, ending at least one turn on each of the three.
Within the span of 8 consecutive turns, end at least one turn in each of cells 1, 3, 7, and 9 (the four corners of the grid).
Within the span of 8 consecutive turns at least one turn in each of cells 2, 4, 6, and 8 (the central cells on each side).
Within the span of 8 consecutive turns, end at least one turn in the cell directly above your opponent, and end at least one turn in the cell directly below your opponent (in either order).
Within the span of 8 consecutive turns at least one turn in the cell directly to the left of your opponent, and end at least one turn in the cell directly to the right of your opponent (in either order).
End 12 turns in a row without ending any of them in cell 5.
End 8 turns in a row in 8 different cells.
Movement rules (each player picks two; either player may move using any of the four):
Move to any cell on the board that's diagonally adjacent to your current position.
Move to any cell on the board that's orthogonally adjacent to your current position.
Move up one cell. Also move your opponent up one cell.
Move down one cell. Also move your opponent down one cell.
Move left one cell. Also move your opponent left one cell.
Move right one cell. Also move your opponent right one cell.
Move up one cell. Move your opponent down one cell.
Move down one cell. Move your opponent up one cell.
Move left one cell. Move your opponent right one cell.
Move right one cell. Move your opponent left one cell.
Move any pieces that aren't in square 5 clockwise around the edge of the board 1 step (for example, from 1 to 2 or 3 to 6 or 9 to 8).
Move any pieces that aren't in square 5 counter-clockwise around the edge of the board 1 step (for example, from 1 to 4 or 6 to 3 or 7 to 8).
Move to any square reachable from your current position by a knight's move in chess (in other words, a square that's in an adjacent column and two rows up or down, or that's in an adjacent row and two columns left or right).
Stay in the same place.
Swap places with your opponent's piece.
Move back to the position that you started at on your previous turn.
If you are on an odd-numbered square, move to any other odd-numbered square. Otherwise, move to any even-numbered square.
Move to any square in the same column as your current position.
Move to any square in the same row as your current position.
Move to any square in the same column as your opponent's position.
Move to any square in the same row as your opponent's position.
Pick a square that's neither in the same row as your piece nor in the same row as your opponent's piece. Move to that square.
Pick a square that's neither in the same column as your piece nor in the same column as your opponent's piece. Move to that square.
Move to one of the squares orthogonally adjacent to your opponent's piece.
Move to one of the squares diagonally adjacent to your opponent's piece.
Move to the square opposite your current position across the middle square, or stay in place if you're in the middle square.
Pick any square that's closer to your opponent's piece than the square you're in now, measured using straight-line distance between square centers (this includes the square your opponent is in). Move to that square.
Pick any square that's further from your opponent's piece than the square you're in now, measured using straight-line distance between square centers. Move to that square.
If you are on a corner square (1, 3, 7, or 9) move to any other corner square. Otherwise, move to square 5.
If you are on an edge square (2, 4, 6, or 8) move to any other edge square. Otherwise, move to square 5.
Indirect movement rules (may be chosen instead of a direct movement rule; at most one per game):
Move using one of the other three movement rules selected in your game, and in addition, your opponent may not use that rule on their next turn (nor may they select it via an indirect rule like this one).
Select two of the other three movement rules, declare them, and then move as if you had used one and then the other, applying any additional effects of both rules in order.
Move using one of the other three movement rules selected in your game, but if the move would cause your piece to move off the board, instead of staying in place move to square 5 (in the middle).
Pick one of the other three movement rules selected in your game and apply it, but move your opponent's piece instead of your own piece. If that movement rule says to move "your opponent's piece," instead apply that movement to your own piece. References to "your position" and "your opponent's position" are swapped when applying the chosen rule, as are references to "your turn" and "your opponent's turn" and do on.
#Game #GameDesign

Augmentations, reduced ideal point gluings and compact type degenerations of curves
Valery Alexeev, Alexander Kuznetsov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12429 https://

Augmentations, reduced ideal point gluings and compact type degenerations of curves
In this note we demonstrate some unexpected properties that simple gluings of the simplest derived categories may have. We consider two special cases: the first is an augmented curve, i.e., the gluing of the derived categories of a point and a curve with the gluing bimodule given by the structure sheaf of the curve; the second is an ideal point gluing of curves, i.e., the gluing of the derived categories of two curves with the gluing bimodule given by the ideal sheaf of a point in the product o…

Did Jerry Jones admit to forcing Matt Eberflus on first-time HC Schottenheimer? https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/10/15/cowboys-owner-jerry-jones-att-eberflus-hire-brian-…

REAL ENEMIES is an evening-length, multimedia, jazz-fueled exploration of American paranoia. This innovative marriage of music-theater and hybrid nonfiction marks the first collaboration between composer Darcy James Argue, filmmaker Peter Nigrini and writer Isaac Butler, who together chronicle a shadow history of post-war America that may—or may not—be true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpXE-aZ-xhA

RJD-BASE: Multi-Modal Spectral Clustering via Randomized Joint Diagonalization
Haoze He, Artemis Pados, Daniel Kressner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11981 https://

RJD-BASE: Multi-Modal Spectral Clustering via Randomized Joint Diagonalization
We revisit the problem of spectral clustering in multimodal settings, where each data modality is encoded as a graph Laplacian. While classical approaches--including joint diagonalization, spectral co-regularization, and multiview clustering--attempt to align embeddings across modalities, they often rely on costly iterative refinement and may fail to directly target the spectral subspace relevant for clustering. In this work, we introduce two key innovations. First, we bring the power of random…

Day 23: Thi Bui
Indirect CW: parental neglect, war, intergenerational trauma
Bui is the author of "The Best We Could Do", a graphic memoir which explores her relationship with her parents and unpacks some of the intergenerational trauma coming out of the Vietnam War. It has a lot of wisdom to offer about both dealing with troubled parents as a 1.5th-generation immigrant, and it delves deeply into her parents' histories in Vietnam and the complexities of the situation there both in the north and in the south. It's beautifully illustrated and very nicely plotted together given all the disparate threads it is working with.
I haven't read any of Bui's other work, but it looks like she's published a picture book for kids as well as a series of short comics during the pandemic. Besides Oseman who also writes non-illustrated fiction and the two manga artists Ice mentioned, Bui is the first graphic novel author I've included here, but I've actually got quite a few of them in my longer list, one of whom may make it into the 30 I'll include in this thread. These days I'm reading a bunch of graphic novels since they're easy to get through, and the variety of stories and perspectives in that space is wonderful these days, with a huge array of indie stuff that probably never would have gotten off the ground in traditional publishing/comics spaces.
#30AuthorsNoMen

First Passage Problem: Asymptotic Corrections due to Discrete Sampling
Lars Fritz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10226 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10226

First Passage Problem: Asymptotic Corrections due to Discrete Sampling
How long a stochastic process survives before leaving a domain depends not only on its intrinsic dynamics but also on how it is observed. Classical first-passage theory assumes continuous monitoring with absorbing boundaries (``kill-on-touch''). In practice, however, measurements are often taken at discrete times. Between two checks, a trajectory may leave and re-enter the domain without being detected. Under this \emph{stroboscopic} rule (``kill-on-check''), exit statistics change qualitativel…

Infrared spectral signatures of light r-process elements in kilonovae
Anders Jerkstrand, Quentin Pognan, Smaranika Banerjee, Nicholas Sterling, Jon Grumer, Niamh Ferguson, Keith Butler, James Gillanders, Stephen Smartt, Kyohei Kawaguchi, Blanka Vilagos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12410

Infrared spectral signatures of light r-process elements in kilonovae
A central question regarding neutron star mergers is whether they are able to produce all the r-process elements, from first to third peak. The high abundances of first-peak elements (atomic number $Z \sim 31-40$) in the solar composition means they may dominate the ejecta mass in kilonovae. We here study theoretical infrared signatures of such light elements with spectral synthesis modelling. By combining state-of-the-art NLTE physics with new radiative and collisional data for these elements,…

Ten years of gravitational-wave astronomy
Emanuele Berti
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10395 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10395…

Ten years of gravitational-wave astronomy
Ten years ago humankind achieved the first direct observation of gravitational waves. I give some personal recollections of that first detection. I also present an incomplete summary of what we have learned since then, and some speculations on what we may learn in the future.

"how are free people supposed to stay free? One short answer: don’t trust anyone over thirty. Paine, reversing centuries’ worth of regard for age and experience, argued that freedom is not a privilege that the old may confer, but a right that the young must demand. Every rising generation should hold its predecessors accountable, boldly taking its rights from them"
I am an old man and I approve this message.

Inventing the American Revolution: On Thomas Paine’s Guide to Fighting Dictatorship
Back in 2018, two years into the first Trump presidency, when the ground was shifting beneath our feet in ways that, today, might barely register on our wearied internal seismographs, political ana…

Ultrafast optical modulation of vibrational strong coupling in ReCl(CO)$_3$(2,2-bipyridine)
Liying Chen, Alexander M. McKillop, Ashley P. Fidler, Marissa L. Weichman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11439

Ultrafast optical modulation of vibrational strong coupling in ReCl(CO)$_3$(2,2-bipyridine)
Polaritons - hybrid light-matter states formed from the strong coupling of a bright molecular transition with a confined photonic mode - may offer new opportunities for optical control of molecular behavior. Vibrational strong coupling (VSC) has been reported to impact ground-state chemical reactivity, but its influence on electronic excited-state dynamics remains unexplored. Here, we take a first step towards excited-state VSC by demonstrating optical modulation of the ReCl(CO)$_3$(bpy), (bpy …

The Rings of (2060) #Chiron - Evidence of an Evolving System: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae0b6d -> "Chiron thus appears as the fourth small solar system body known for hosting a ring system. Comparisons with previous occultation events that have occurred since 1994 show that these features are not permanent. With these observations, we may witness for the first time the ongoing formation and evolution of a ring system."

Additional JWST/NIRSpec Transits of the Rocky M Dwarf Exoplanet GJ 1132 b Reveal a Featureless Spectrum
Katherine A. Bennett, Ryan J. MacDonald, Sarah Peacock, Junellie Perez, E. M. May, Sarah E. Moran, Lili Alderson, Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, Hannah R. Wakeford, David K. Sing, Kevin B. Stevenson, Natasha E. Batalha, Mercedes L\'opez-Morales, Munazza K. Alam, Joshua D. Lothringer, Guangwei Fu, James Kirk, Jeff A. Valenti, L. C. Mayorga, Kristin S. Sotzen

Additional JWST/NIRSpec Transits of the Rocky M Dwarf Exoplanet GJ 1132 b Reveal a Featureless Spectrum
As an archetypal M-dwarf rocky exoplanet, GJ 1132 b has a varied history of atmospheric measurements. At 1.13 $\rm R_{\oplus}$, 1.66 $\rm M_{\oplus}$, and 580 K, it orbits a bright, slowly rotating M dwarf in a 1.6-day period, making it a prime target for characterization. In this study, we combine two JWST NIRSpec/G395H transits previously reported by May and MacDonald et al. 2023 with two new NIRSpec/G395M transits to constrain the presence of an atmosphere. This marks the first time the G395…

Hash chaining degrades security at Facebook
Thomas Rivasseau
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12665 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12665

Hash chaining degrades security at Facebook
Modern web and digital application password storage relies on password hashing for storage and security. Ad-hoc upgrade of password storage to keep up with hash algorithm norms may be used to save costs but can introduce unforeseen vulnerabilities. This is the case in the password storage scheme used by Meta Platforms which services several billion monthly users worldwide. In this paper we present the first example of an exploit which demonstrates the security weakness of Facebook's password st…

How are Scientific Concepts Birthed? Typing Rules of Concept Formation in Theoretical Physics Reasoning
Omar Aguilar, Anthony Aguirre
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10740 https://…

How are Scientific Concepts Birthed? Typing Rules of Concept Formation in Theoretical Physics Reasoning
This work aims to formalize some of the ways scientific concepts are formed in the process of theoretical physics discovery. Since this may at first seem like a task beyond the scope of the exact sciences (natural and formal sciences), we begin by presenting arguments for why scientific concept formation can be formalized. Then, we introduce type theory as a natural and well-suited framework for this formalization. We formalize what we call "ways of discovering new concepts" including concept d…

FetalSleepNet: A Transfer Learning Framework with Spectral Equalisation Domain Adaptation for Fetal Sleep Stage Classification
Weitao Tang, Johann Vargas-Calixto, Nasim Katebi, Nhi Tran, Sharmony B. Kelly, Gari D. Clifford, Robert Galinsky, Faezeh Marzbanrad
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10082

FetalSleepNet: A Transfer Learning Framework with Spectral Equalisation Domain Adaptation for Fetal Sleep Stage Classification
Introduction: This study presents FetalSleepNet, the first published deep learning approach to classifying sleep states from the ovine electroencephalogram (EEG). Fetal EEG is complex to acquire and difficult and laborious to interpret consistently. However, accurate sleep stage classification may aid in the early detection of abnormal brain maturation associated with pregnancy complications (e.g. hypoxia or intrauterine growth restriction). Methods: EEG electrodes were secured onto the ovine…

🌳 ‘It has a heroic, Roman quality’: how Arkansas’s timber university building could revolutionise architecture
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/aug/26/it-has-a-heroic-rom…

A MeerKAT view of the parsec-scale jets in the black-hole X-ray binary GRS 1758-258
I. Mariani, S. E. Motta, P. Atri, J. H. Matthews, R. P. Fender, J. Mart\'i, P. L. Luque-Escamilla, I. Heywood
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10275

A MeerKAT view of the parsec-scale jets in the black-hole X-ray binary GRS 1758-258
Jets from accreting black hole (BH) X-ray binaries (XRBs) are powerful outflows that release a large fraction of the accretion energy to the surrounding environment, providing a feedback mechanism that may alter the interstellar medium (ISM) properties. Studying accretion and feedback together enables estimates of matter and energy input/output around accreting BHs. We focus on the extended jet structures of the BH-XRB GRS1758-258. First seen in VLA data, these parsec-scale jets arise from jet-…

Farage (short for Fascist Anti-democratic Rage?) may well win the next general election. One way to stand a chance to avoid that is to change the system from a first-past-the-post to a proportional one. But there is no incentive for the party in power to do so. An easier possibility, keeping the constituencies as they are, may be a 2-stage election, with the two largest parties coming out of the first to face off in the second round. Constituencies will at least have MPs with 50 % majoritie…

"Australia may install 220,000 home batteries under subsidy scheme"
#Australia #Batteries #Energy

Australia may install 220,000 home batteries under subsidy scheme
Australia is on track to surpass 2024 home battery installation records, with July data from SunWiz indicating that up to 220,000 units could be deployed in the first year of the federal Cheaper Home Batteries subsidy.

The limits of cosmology
Joseph Silk
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08066 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08066

The limits of cosmology
The Moon is our future. It may seem like a chimera with a projected cost in excess of 100 billion\$, and counting, dispensed on ARTEMIS with little to show to date. However it is the ideal site for the largest telescopes that we can dream about, at wavelengths spanning decimetric radio through optical to terahertz FIR. And it is these future telescopes that will penetrate the fundamental mysteries of the first hydrogen clouds, the first stars, the first galaxies, the first supermassive black ho…

Week 1 NFL injury report: Christian McCaffrey, Micah Parsons may not play in opener; Myles Garrett good to go

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/week-1-…

Physics-Informed High-order Graph Dynamics Identification Learning for Predicting Complex Networks Long-term Dynamics
Bicheng Wang, Jinping Wang, Yibo Sue
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09082

Physics-Informed High-order Graph Dynamics Identification Learning for Predicting Complex Networks Long-term Dynamics
Learning complex network dynamics is fundamental to understanding, modelling and controlling real-world complex systems. There are two main problems in the task of predicting the dynamic evolution of complex networks: on the one hand, existing methods usually use simple graphs to describe the relationships in complex networks; however, this approach can only capture pairwise relationships, while there may be rich non-pairwise structured relationships in the network. First-order GNNs have diffic…

ShiZhi: A Chinese Lightweight Large Language Model for Court View Generation
Zhitian Hou, Kun Zeng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09297 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

ShiZhi: A Chinese Lightweight Large Language Model for Court View Generation
Criminal Court View Generation (CVG) is a fundamental task in legal artificial intelligence, aiming to automatically generate the "Court View" section of a legal case document. Generating court views is challenging due to the diversity and complexity of case facts, and directly generating from raw facts may limit performance. In this paper, we present ShiZhi, the first large language model (LLM) specifically designed for court view generation. We construct a Chinese Court View Generation datase…

"The Cranberries visited Dutch tv show "2 Meter Sessies" on May 25, 1993 for their first television performance abroad. Two songs in this video: 'I Will Always' [00:51] and 'Wanted' [03:38]."
The Cranberries - I Will Always Wanted (Live on 2 Meter Sessions - 2metersessions
https://www.youtu…

Geert Wilders posted an islamophic image in a tweet a few days ago and is now being sued for it.
The thing is, the image is clearly AI generated. This means that the prompt for it is still around somewhere.
Under US discovery, that prompt would certainly be made public; possibly in the Dutch system as well.
This suggests some interesting possibilities. First, if Wilders made the image himself, his language in the prompt may have been more candid than his public persona.

Decent folks may want to block this libertarian, pro-genocide instance.
(libertarian.communitynetwork.space)
https://libertarian.communitynetwork.space/objects/0b38de6a-3cbe-4113-8fbb-25b17b6e5dfe

Korsier (@korsier@libertarian.communitynetwork.space)
@aral Well, she didn't learn her lesson the first time.

The economy created only 33,000 jobs in May and June combined
— anemic growth the likes of which we haven’t seen the final months of President Trump’s first term.
In contrast, under President Biden, the economy gained some 420,000 jobs in May and June 2024.
Trump’s response was as unhinged and authoritarian as you’d expect.
In an unprecedented move, he abruptly firedErika McEntarfer,
the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
-- and as an excuse lied th…

The looming Trump-cession
Orange man bad (for the economy).

Convergence of Fast Policy Iteration in Markov Games and Robust MDPs
Keith Badger, Marek Petrik, Jefferson Huang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06661 https://a…

Convergence of Fast Policy Iteration in Markov Games and Robust MDPs
Markov games and robust MDPs are closely related models that involve computing a pair of saddle point policies. As part of the long-standing effort to develop efficient algorithms for these models, the Filar-Tolwinski (FT) algorithm has shown considerable promise. As our first contribution, we demonstrate that FT may fail to converge to a saddle point and may loop indefinitely, even in small games. This observation contradicts the proof of FT's convergence to a saddle point in the original pape…

Evaluating recognition and recall formats of social network surveys in physics education research
Meagan Sundstrom, Justin Gambrell, Adrienne L. Traxler, Eric Brewe
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08417

Evaluating recognition and recall formats of social network surveys in physics education research
An increasing number of studies in physics education research use social network analysis to quantify interactions among students. These studies typically gather data through online surveys using one of two different survey formats: recognition, where students select peers' names from a provided course roster, and recall, where students type their peers' names from memory as an open response. These survey formats, however, may be subject to two possible systematic errors. First, students may re…

Treatment-Effect Estimation in Complex Designs under a Parallel-trends Assumption
Cl\'ement de Chaisemartin, Xavier D'Haultf{\oe}uille
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07808 h…

Treatment-Effect Estimation in Complex Designs under a Parallel-trends Assumption
This paper considers the identification of dynamic treatment effects with panel data, in complex designs where the treatment may not be binary and may not be absorbing. We first show that under no-anticipation and parallel-trends assumptions, we can identify event-study effects comparing outcomes under the actual treatment path and under the status-quo path where all units would have kept their period-one treatment throughout the panel. Those effects can be helpful to evaluate ex-post the polic…

Surprising Cowboys rookie snatching first-team reps from ex first-rounder https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/surprising-dallas-cowboys-rookie-snatching-first-team-reps-from-former-first-rounder

The Impact of Device Type, Data Practices, and Use Case Scenarios on Privacy Concerns about Eye-tracked Augmented Reality in the United States and Germany
Efe Bozkir, Babette B\"uhler, Xiaoyuan Wu, Enkelejda Kasneci, Lujo Bauer, Lorrie Faith Cranor
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09285

The Impact of Device Type, Data Practices, and Use Case Scenarios on Privacy Concerns about Eye-tracked Augmented Reality in the United States and Germany
Augmented reality technology will likely be prevalent with more affordable head-mounted displays. Integrating novel interaction modalities such as eye trackers into head-mounted displays could lead to collecting vast amounts of biometric data, which may allow inference of sensitive user attributes like health status or sexual preference, posing privacy issues. While previous works broadly examined privacy concerns about augmented reality, ours is the first to extensively explore privacy concern…

My idea of IDROS is in need of a protocol.
First I thought of GAP, or General (maybe Gadget?) Application Protocol.
I may call it the Gadget Widget Distribution Protocol, or GWDP.
I feel like GAP is more intuitive to understand:
It's about deploying apps to machines, considered gadgets, and serving back so that a widget from my control machine would be able to exchange information with it, send commands, etc..

Governing AI R&D: A Legal Framework for Constraining Dangerous AI
Alex Mark, Aaron Scher
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05361 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05…

Governing AI R&D: A Legal Framework for Constraining Dangerous AI
As AI advances, governing its development may become paramount to public safety. Lawmakers may seek to restrict the development and release of AI models or of AI research itself. These governance actions could trigger legal challenges that invalidate the actions, so lawmakers should consider these challenges ahead of time. We investigate three classes of potential litigation risk for AI regulation in the U.S.: the First Amendment, administrative law, and the Fourteenth Amendment. We discuss exi…

"Union leaders and Democratic lawmakers say the move would run afoul of a law adopted under President Trump’s first term."
Trump Suggests Furloughed Federal Workers May Not Receive Back Pay After Shutdown - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/us/politics/trump-back-pay-furloughed-workers-shutdown.html

Profiles, linear spaces, and unirationality of complete intersections
Raymond Cheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08395 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08395

Profiles, linear spaces, and unirationality of complete intersections
Complete intersections may be unexpectedly simple over fields of positive characteristic: for instance, they may be unirational despite being of general type. One explanation is given by profiles, structure that tracks the special shape of polynomials, refining the degree. The aim of this work is to show that complete intersections with small profile should be considered simple by generalizing two classical results on low degree complete intersections: First, the basic geometry of Fano schemes …

For some reason Terry Gilliam's Brazil comes to mind. Little did I know in 1985 this was where we were heading.
#dystopian, with damaged #social_infrastructure added to #ICE and

For some reason Terry Gilliam's Brazil comes to mind. Little did I know in 1985 this was where we were heading.
#dystopian, with damaged #social_infrastructure added to #ICE and

This is part of why I feel confident that I am in my last real job.
In 40 years of working, I've *never* gotten a job in IT/#InfoSec by applying for a publicly visible opening. I have had some interviews from *trying* to do it that way, but never made it to hiring. I think I may not mask or hype myself well enough. I suspect that this would be made worse by today's "AI" desolation.
I also stopped even trying to hide my professional cynicism some time ago...

New Gist: Presidential Numberwang
On a pure horserace assessment of today's Sunday Independent poll, Jim Gavin seems destined for the glue factory. But picking the Copydex candidate may prove fatal for Michešl Martin.
https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-presidential-numberwan…

The Gist: Presidential Numberwang
After weeks of vibereporting, the first big poll of the campaign proper is out. This is the Gist.

Identification of molecular line emission using Convolutional Neural Networks
Nina Kessler, Timea Csengeri, David Cornu, Sylvain Bontemps, Laure Bouscasse
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09119

Identification of molecular line emission using Convolutional Neural Networks
Complex organic molecules (COMs) are observed to be abundant in various astrophysical environments, in particular toward star forming regions they are observed both toward protostellar envelopes as well as shocked regions. Emission spectrum especially of heavier COMs may consists of up to hundreds of lines, where line blending hinders the analysis. However, identifying the molecular composition of the gas leading to the observed millimeter spectra is the first step toward a quantitative analysi…

There may finally come a first peer-reviewed publication about Neuralink with human data, but for now still no details https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/startups-tech/startups/musks-neuralink-submits-brain-implant-patient-data-journ…

Musk’s Neuralink submits brain implant patient data to journal
The company aims to implant its chips in 20,000 people per year by 2031, and generate at least US$1 billion in annual revenue

First highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreak in a commercial farm in Brazil: outbreak timeline, control actions, risk analysis, and transmission modeling
Nicolas C. Cardenas, Francisco N. P. Lopes, Paulo A. S. C. de Souza, Fernando H. S. Groff, Ananda P. Kowalski, Alessandra Krein, Rodrigo N. Etges, Daniela L. de Azevedo, Alencar Machado, Vin\'icius Maran, Felipe A. Machado, Gustavo Machado

First highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreak in a commercial farm in Brazil: outbreak timeline, control actions, risk analysis, and transmission modeling
On May 15, 2025, Brazil reported its first highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) outbreak in a commercial poultry breeder farm in Montenegro, Rio Grande do Sul. This study presents the outbreak timeline, control measures, along with spatial risk assessment and epidemiological model used to simulate detection delays. The transmission model considered Susceptible Exposed Infected Recovered Dead farm statuses to simulate within farm and between farm dynamics under 3 day, 5 day, and 10 day detec…

A June ranking of the top 25 local public radio/TV websites in the US based on traffic shows MPR at the top, followed by LAist and Oregon Public Broadcasting (Joshua Benton/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/08/these-pu

These public radio stations have built online audiences that’ll help them survive federal cuts
They may have been born on the airwaves, but these public media stations compete on the web as well. Here's our first monthly ranking of the top 25 local public media websites in the United States.

Magic and communication complexity
Uma Girish, Alex May, Natalie Parham, Henry Yuen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07246 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07246

Magic and communication complexity
We establish novel connections between magic in quantum circuits and communication complexity. In particular, we show that functions computable with low magic have low communication cost. Our first result shows that the $\mathsf{D}\|$ (deterministic simultaneous message passing) cost of a Boolean function $f$ is at most the number of single-qubit magic gates in a quantum circuit computing $f$ with any quantum advice state. If we allow mid-circuit measurements and adaptive circuits, we ob…

I've had a few of these thoughts stuck in my craw all day because I watched this liberal historian talk about the Galleanisti.
https://youtube.com/shorts/93yHEn8BYE4
Basically, she says that "of course the government had the right to target them." Then she goes on to talk about how it became an excuse to carry out a bunch of attacks on other marginalized people. Now, the Galleanisti had been bombing the houses of politicians and such. I get where she's coming from saying that one of their targets "was in the right" to try to catch them. But there's some context she's not talking about at all.
These were Italian anarchists, so they were not white and they were part of an already marginalized political group. Basically all of Europe and the US was trying to wipe out anarchists at the time. Meanwhile, the sitting president at the time showed the first movie in the White House. That movie was KKK propaganda, in which he was favorably quoted. The US was pretty solidly white supremacist in the 1920's.
Like... A major hidden whole premise of the game "Bioshock: Infinite" is that if you went back to the US in the 1920's, and you had magic powers, you would absolutely use them to kill as many cops as possible and try to destroy society. There's a lot of other stuff in there, I don't want to get distracted, but "fuck those racists," specifically referring to the US in the 1920's, was a major part of a major game.
Those Italian anarchists were also stone cutters. They carved grave stones. But the dust from that can kill you, much like black lung for coal miners. So they were dying from unsafe working conditions, regularly raising money to support dying coworkers and then carving gravestones for those same coworkers.
Now, I personally think insurrectionary anarchism is a dead end. I disagree with it as a strategy. We've seen it fail, and it failed there. But of course it makes sense that they wanted to blow up the government.
...And that's the correct way to structure that. When you say, "of course they were in the right" you're making a very clear political statement. You could easily say, "the cops in Vichy France had every right to hunt down the French Resistance." You would technically be correct, I guess. But it would really say something about your politics if you justified the actions of Nazi collaborators over those fighting against the Nazis.
And you may say, "oh, but the Nazis didn't have justification for anything. They invaded a sovereign nation, so their government wasn't legitimate anyway."
To which I would reply, "have you considered a history book about the US?"

One side of the first leaf is now flat. My technique of using dowels to stabilize vertical movement didn't work as well with pine as it does with oak. Had to take a lot more material off than I expected...and I haven't even touched the other side. If it gets too thin, I may have an issue with my screws being too long. I bought 1/2" screws for a 3/4" board. I may have to find shorter screws or add some plywood backing to the bottom to get that 1/4" back.

Should I be surprised? We just replaced an aging HP ink jet printer with a newer version, also from HP.
About the first thing it did when powered on was to scream about how HP brand ink cartridges must be used, how other cartridges may not work and and that firmware updates may invalidate them in the future.
And that a nearly continuous internet connection is required to use the cartridges that are in the machine, else printing would cease.
This seems to me to be a clear ca…

"If George Boole is the 19th century’s AI scientist, then his contemporary machine learning engineers were Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. The Difference Engine, which would be frequently cited as the first example of a (mechanical) programmable digital computer if it had been built at the time, was explicitly designed to _replace_ rather than _augment_ human thought. Just as modern software engineering managers use Jira to avoid thinking about process engineering."

Douglas Hofstadter
You may be worried that I am going to talk about an author of books that are not about programming, and you are correct and incorrect. Correct, in that Hofstadter's books are not about programming (the intellectually hollow like to claim that they are not about anything at all, or that if you think you know what they are about then you did not understand them; this is untrue). Incorrect, in that Hofstadter's books and computer programs themselves are about the same thing.

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy

On Equivalent Characterizations of NP in Abstract Models of Computation
Jeremy C. Kirn, Lucas Meijer, Tillmann Miltzow, Hans L. Bodlaender
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05894 https…

On Equivalent Characterizations of NP in Abstract Models of Computation
We investigate machine models similar to Turing machines that are augmented by the operations of a first-order structure $\mathcal{R}$, and we show that under weak conditions on $\mathcal{R}$, the complexity class $\text{NP}(\mathcal{R})$ may be characterized in three equivalent ways: (1) by polynomial-time verification algorithms implemented on $\mathcal{R}$-machines, (2) by the $\text{NP}(\mathcal{R})$-complete problem $\text{SAT}(\mathcal{R})$, and (3) by existential second-order metafinite …

Dark Sector Electroweak Baryogenesis In Light Of The Galactic Center Excess
Jean-Samuel Roux, James M. Cline
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06373 https://arxiv…

Dark Sector Electroweak Baryogenesis In Light Of The Galactic Center Excess
We revisit a model of electroweak baryogenesis that includes a dark matter candidate, and sequesters the new CP violation required to produce the baryon asymmetry in a dark sector. The model can successfully explain the baryon asymmetry, dark matter relic density, and the long-standing excess of gamma rays from the galactic center. The first order electroweak phase transition induced by the new physics can give rise to gravitational waves that may be observed in future experiments. The model pr…

Reddy and Able: Cowboys newcomer may get first NFL start in place of All-Pro DaRon Bland https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/09/11/cowboys-reddy-steward-daron-bland-week-2-matt-eberf…

Raiders Linked to Trade With AFC South Team After Backups Struggle in First Preseason Game https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/raiders-linked-to-trade-with-afc-south-team/?adt_ei=[email]

Nonlocal loss of first homotopy in polyhedral approximations of Peano continua
Jeremy Brazas, Hanspeter Fischer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01041 https://ar…

Nonlocal loss of first homotopy in polyhedral approximations of Peano continua
If a Peano continuum $X$ is semilocally simply connected, then it has a finite polyhedral approximation whose fundamental group is isomorphic to that of $X$. In general, this fails to be true. It is known that the fundamental group of a locally complicated Peano continuum may contain nontrivial elements that are persistently undetectable by polyhedral approximations, at all scales. However, we show that such failure is not inherently local.

Decentralized Online Riemannian Optimization Beyond Hadamard Manifolds
Emre Sahinoglu, Shahin Shahrampour
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07779 https://arxiv.or…

Decentralized Online Riemannian Optimization Beyond Hadamard Manifolds
We study decentralized online Riemannian optimization over manifolds with possibly positive curvature, going beyond the Hadamard manifold setting. Decentralized optimization techniques rely on a consensus step that is well understood in Euclidean spaces because of their linearity. However, in positively curved Riemannian spaces, a main technical challenge is that geodesic distances may not induce a globally convex structure. In this work, we first analyze a curvature-aware Riemannian consensus …

The Internal Revenue Service will furlough nearly half of its employees – around 34,000 workers – due to the ongoing government shutdown.
In a statement on Wednesday, the IRS said that “due to the lapse in appropriations”, it will begin its furlough on 8 October for “everyone except already-identified excepted and exempt employees”.
“Employee who are not exempt or excepted are furloughed and placed in a non-pay and non-duty status until further notice; however, all employees should…

Experimental confirmation of barrierless reactions between HeH and deuterium atoms suggests a lower abundance of the first molecules at very high redshifts / Formation of Supersonic Turbulence in the Primordial Star-forming Cloud: #stars may not have been as uniformly massive as astronomers thought: https://theconversation.com/the-first-stars-may-not-have-been-as-uniformly-massive-as-astronomers-thought-263016

First-order theory of torsion-free Tarski monsters
R\'emi Coulon, Francesco Fournier-Facio, Meng-Che "Turbo" Ho
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21244 https://

First-order theory of torsion-free Tarski monsters
We develop methods to control the first-order theory of groups arising as certain direct limits of torsion-free hyperbolic groups. We apply this to construct simple torsion-free Tarski monsters (non-abelian groups whose non-trivial, proper subgroups are infinite cyclic) with the same positive theory as the free group, answering several questions of Casals-Ruiz, Garreta, and de la Nuez González. Moreover, these groups may be chosen so that every non-trivial conjugacy-invariant norm is stably bo…

Exploring Low-Amplitude Variability in First Overtone Cepheids with TESS
E. Plachy, H. Netzel, A. B\'odi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05017 https://arxiv…

Exploring Low-Amplitude Variability in First Overtone Cepheids with TESS
Classical Cepheid stars that pulsate in the first overtone radial mode often exhibit additional periodicities at the millimagnitude level. Extensive studies of the OGLE data of the Magellanic Clouds have revealed distinct groups based on their period ratio with the first overtone mode. These groups are similar to those found in overtone RR Lyrae stars. Theoretical calculations suggest that some of the observed periodicities may be consistent with non-radial modes, while others remain unexplaine…

AudioBoost: Increasing Audiobook Retrievability in Spotify Search with Synthetic Query Generation
Enrico Palumbo, Gustavo Penha, Alva Liu, Marcus Eltscheminov, Jefferson Carvalho dos Santos, Alice Wang, Hugues Bouchard, Humberto Jes\'us Corona Pampin, Michelle Tran Luu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06452

AudioBoost: Increasing Audiobook Retrievability in Spotify Search with Synthetic Query Generation
Spotify has recently introduced audiobooks as part of its catalog, complementing its music and podcast offering. Search is often the first entry point for users to access new items, and an important goal for Spotify is to support users in the exploration of the audiobook catalog. More specifically, we would like to enable users without a specific item in mind to broadly search by topic, genre, story tropes, decade, and discover audiobooks, authors and publishers they may like. To do this, we ne…

Hall of Fame game standouts: Chargers may have found something in undrafted cornerback

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/hall-of-fame-game-stan…

Maximum Biclique for Star 1,2,3 -free and Bounded Bimodularwidth Twin-free Bipartite Graphs $\star$
Fabien de Montgolfier (IRIF), Renaud Torfs (IRIF)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04621

Maximum Biclique for Star 1,2,3 -free and Bounded Bimodularwidth Twin-free Bipartite Graphs $\star$
There are three usual definitions of a maximum bipartite clique (biclique) in a bipartite graph\,: either maximizing the number of vertices, or of edges, or finding a maximum balanced biclique. The first problem can be solved in polynomial time, the last ones are NP-complete. Here we show how these three problems may be efficiently solved for two classes of bipartite graphs: Star123-free twin-free graphs, and bounded bimodularwidth twin-free graphs, a class that may be defined using bimodular d…

#TCRNo11Cap376a & #TCRNo11Cap376b sind für mich jetzt schon mit die größten Helden des #TCRNo11!
Bilder geklaut bei LostDot.

Making congestion control robust to per-packet load balancing in datacenters
Barak Gerstein, Mark Silberstein, Isaac Keslassy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07907 https://

Making congestion control robust to per-packet load balancing in datacenters
Per-packet load-balancing approaches are increasingly deployed in datacenter networks. However, their combination with existing congestion control algorithms (CCAs) may lead to poor performance, and even state-of-the-art CCAs can collapse due to duplicate ACKs. A typical approach to handle this collapse is to make CCAs resilient to duplicate ACKs. In this paper, we first model the throughput collapse of a wide array of CCAs when some of the paths are congested. We show that addressing duplica…

Measurement of Parity-Violating Modes of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Year 1 Luminous Red Galaxies' 4-Point Correlation Function
Zachary Slepian, Alex Krolewski, Alessandro Greco, Simon May, William Ortola Leonard, Farshad Kamalinejad, Jessica Chellino, Matthew Reinhard, Elena Fernandez, Francisco Prada, Steven Ahlen, Davide Bianchi, David Brooks, Todd Claybaugh, Axel de la Macorra, Arnaud de Mattia, Biprateep Dey, Peter Doel, Enrique Gaztanaga, Gaston Gutierrez,…

Measurement of Parity-Violating Modes of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Year 1 Luminous Red Galaxies' 4-Point Correlation Function
Here we report the first measurement of the parity-violating (PV) 4-Point Correlation Function (4PCF) of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument's Year 1 Luminous Red Galaxy (DESI Y1 LRG) sample, motivated by the potential detection of the PV 4PCF in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (SDSS BOSS) galaxies. In our auto-correlation ("auto") analysis, we find a statistically significant excess of the PV signal compared to mocks without any PV, at 4-10$σ$ dependi…

Simultaneous Rational Function Codes: Improved Analysis Beyond Half the Minimum Distance with Multiplicities and Poles
Matteo Abbondati, Eleonora Guerrini, Romain Lebreton
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05284

Simultaneous Rational Function Codes: Improved Analysis Beyond Half the Minimum Distance with Multiplicities and Poles
In this paper, we extend the work of Abbondati et al. (2024) on decoding simultaneous rational function codes by addressing two important scenarios: multiplicities and poles (zeros of denominators). First, we generalize previous results to rational codes with multiplicities by considering evaluations with multi-precision. Then, using the hybrid model from Guerrini et al. (2023), we extend our approach to vectors of rational functions that may present poles. Our contributions include: a rigorous…

First passage times to T cell activation
Tony Wong, Ikchang Cho, Maria R. D'Orsogna, Tom Chou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01694 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

First passage times to T cell activation
Effective recognition of foreign antigens by the adaptive immune system relies on T cells being activated by antigen-presenting cells (APCs) in lymph nodes. Here, diffusing T cells may encounter cognate APCs that present matching antigen fragments or non-cognate ones that do not; they are also subject to degradation. We develop a stochastic model in which T cell-APCs interact via a sequence of recognition steps, represented as a multistage Markov chain. T cells are successfully activated only i…

This may be the first #SilentSunday post I've made where I've literally just taken the photo.

L^p-quasicontractiveness and Kernel estimates for semigroups generated by systems of elliptic operators
L. Angiuli, E. M. Mangino, L. Lorenzi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07216 ht…

L^p-quasicontractiveness and Kernel estimates for semigroups generated by systems of elliptic operators
This paper focuses on systems of strongly coupled elliptic operators whose coefficients may be unbounded and are defined on a domain $Ω\subseteq \mathbb{R}^d$. It is shown that a quasi-contractive semigroup in $L^p$-spaces can be associated with such operators for values of $p$ belonging to an interval that contains $2$ as an interior point. Then, under refined assumptions and considering systems of elliptic operators coupled up to first order, new kernel estimates are established with respect…

AuthPrint: Fingerprinting Generative Models Against Malicious Model Providers
Kai Yao, Marc Juarez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05691 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

AuthPrint: Fingerprinting Generative Models Against Malicious Model Providers
Generative models are increasingly adopted in high-stakes domains, yet current deployments offer no mechanisms to verify the origin of model outputs. We address this gap by extending model fingerprinting techniques beyond the traditional collaborative setting to one where the model provider may act adversarially. To our knowledge, this is the first work to evaluate fingerprinting for provenance attribution under such a threat model. The methods rely on a trusted verifier that extracts secret fi…

Simulation of one and two qubit superconducting quantum gates under the non-Markovian $1/f$ noise
Yinjia Chen, Shuocang Zhang, Qiang Shi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07693 https:/…

Simulation of one and two qubit superconducting quantum gates under the non-Markovian $1/f$ noise
Non-Markovian $1/f$ noise consists a dominant source of decoherence in superconducting qubits, yet its slow nature poses a significant challenge for accurate simulation. Here we develop a hierarchical equations of motion (HEOM) framework that enables efficient and reliable modeling of qubit dynamics and gate operations under $1/f$ noise. By using the approach, it is first shown that perturbative quantum master equations may fail to reproduce the correct dephasing dynamics of a qubit coupled to …

The First Dedicated Survey of Atmospheric Escape from Planets Orbiting F Stars
Morgan Saidel, Shreyas Vissapragada, Heather Knutson, Ethan Schreyer, Mike Greklek-McKeon, Jonathan Gomez Barrientos, W. Garrett Levine, Carlos Gasc\'on, Morgan MacLeod, Haedam Im, Nick Tusay
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05240

The First Dedicated Survey of Atmospheric Escape from Planets Orbiting F Stars
Hydrodynamic escape can strip the envelopes of close-in exoplanets, but most observations of atmospheric mass loss to date have been confined to planets orbiting K and M dwarfs. A growing body of detections of atmospheric escape from planets orbiting early-type stars indicates that they may have significantly stronger and more extended outflows than planets orbiting cooler stars. However, it is unclear whether this limited sample of planets is representative of all gas giants orbiting early-typ…

Phase transitions of boson stars in scalar-tensor theories
Hyat Huang, Burkhard Kleihaus, Jutta Kunz, Meng-Yun Lai, Eugen Radu, De-Cheng Zou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05202 htt…

Phase transitions of boson stars in scalar-tensor theories
In scalar-tensor theories, compact objects may experience spontaneous scalarization. Recently, it was shown that matter-induced spontaneous scalarization of neutron stars is predominantly associated with a first-order phase transition. Here we consider matter-induced spontaneous scalarization of boson stars. Employing a repulsive quartic potential for the bosonic matter, we find only first-order phase transitions.

"You’re only asking for trouble,”
said Charles Massimo, a Long Island, New York-based financial advisor and senior vice president at Wealth Enhancement. 
Pros and cons of private assets in 401(k)s
Retirement plans represent a significant market.
Defined-contribution workplace plans
— which include 401(k)s and 403(b) plans, among others
— held $12.2 trillion as of the end of the first quarter of 2025, according to the Investment Company Institute, a tr…

What private assets in 401(k) plans mean for investors: 'You’re only asking for trouble,' one advisor says
Millions of investors may soon have access to private assets in their 401(k) or other workplace retirement plans. What to know about the risks and rewards.

Cowboys rookie RB continues to stand out during first training camp https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-rookie-rb-continues-to-stand-out-during-first-training-camp

Just like the United States basically outlasted the USSR, the CCP must just be dying laughing as we dismantle ourselves.
It's not enough that we have existential challenges to face in the future, let's also bring back problems from the past.
https://mastodon.social/@kottke/115151

Effect of stochastic kicks on primordial black hole abundance and mass via the compaction function
Sami Raatikainen, Syksy Rasanen, Eemeli Tomberg
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09303

Effect of stochastic kicks on primordial black hole abundance and mass via the compaction function
We study stochastic effects in viable ultra-slow-roll inflation models that produce primordial black holes. We consider asteroid, solar, and supermassive black hole seed masses. In each case, we simulate $10^8$ patches of the universe that may collapse into PBHs. In every patch, we follow $4\times10^4$ momentum shells to construct its spherically symmetric profile from first principles, without introducing a window function. We include the effects of critical collapse and the radiation era tran…

Elon Musk, May 2025: "And then there is a second Neuralink device very similar to the first one, called Blindsight, which will enable people who are blind to see, including people who have been blind from birth." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HcTXA951Mw&t=219s Sa…

Supreme Court cases, starting with Bantam Books v. Sullivan, established that the First Amendment forbids the government from using coercion to suppress speech (Adam Liptak/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/202…

In Pressuring ABC Over Kimmel, Trump May Have Crossed a Constitutional Line
The Supreme Court has distinguished bully-pulpit persuasion, which is permissible under the First Amendment, from coercion and threats, which are not.

An on-sky investigation into factors limiting the performance of Keck-NIRC2 for conducting infrared high-contrast imaging
Rachel Bowens-Rubin, Ma\"issa Salama, Jayke S. Nguyen, William Thompson, Philip Hinz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07138

An on-sky investigation into factors limiting the performance of Keck-NIRC2 for conducting infrared high-contrast imaging
The most common instrument used by the exoplanet/brown dwarf direct imaging community at the W.M. Keck Observatory is currently the NIRC2 near-infrared imager. We performed on-sky testing to investigate three effects which may be limiting the performance of NIRC2 when conducting high-contrast imaging observations from $3-5μ$m. First, we report the measurements of an on-sky test of the throughput of the L/M vector vortex coronagraph. We quantify the throughput and additional background flux pen…

Saturday, March 15, 2025, may have seemed unremarkable to most Americans.
But in time, history will remember it as Black Saturday
—the moment the United States ceased to function as a constitutional democracy.
For the first time in modern American history, a sitting president openly defied a direct federal court order
—and nothing happened.
No intervention. No enforcement. No consequences.
A legal ruling was issued, and the White House simply ignored it

Black Saturday: The Day the United States Ceased to Be a Constitutional Democracy
Black Saturday, March 15, 2025, will be remembered as the day the U.S. ceased to function as a constitutional democracy. A sitting president defied a federal court order, proving that judicial authority no longer constrains executive power. This is not a warning—it is confirmation that democracy has already collapsed.

Super-Quadratic Quantum Speed-ups and Guessing Many Likely Keys
Timo Glaser, Alexander May, Julian Nowakowski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06549 https://arxi…

Super-Quadratic Quantum Speed-ups and Guessing Many Likely Keys
We study the fundamental problem of guessing cryptographic keys, drawn from some non-uniform probability distribution $D$, as e.g. in LPN, LWE or for passwords. The optimal classical algorithm enumerates keys in decreasing order of likelihood. The optimal quantum algorithm, due to Montanaro (2011), is a sophisticated Grover search. We give the first tight analysis for Montanaro's algorithm, showing that its runtime is $2^{H_{2/3}(D)/2}$, where $H_α(\cdot)$ denotes Renyi entropy with paramete…

PromptMap: Supporting Exploratory Text-to-Image Generation
Yuhan Guo, Xingyou Liu, Xiaoru Yuan, Kai Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02814 https://arxiv.org/p…

PromptMap: Supporting Exploratory Text-to-Image Generation
Text-to-image generative models can be tremendously valuable in supporting creative tasks by providing inspirations and enabling quick exploration of different design ideas. However, one common challenge is that users may still not be able to find anything useful after many hours and hundreds of images. Without effective help, users can easily get lost in the vast design space, forgetting what has been tried and what has not. In this work, we first propose the Design-Exploration model to formal…

Packers Fans Troll Cowboys With Chant During Micah Parsons TNF Interview https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/micah-parsons-thank-you-jerry-chant/?adt_ei=[email]

Observation of undepleted phosphine in the atmosphere of a low-temperature brown dwarf: #phosphine in a #BrownDwarf suggests it may be too soon to use the molecule as a sign of #AlienLife: https://cen.acs.org/physical-chemistry/astrochemistry/Phosphine-found-brown-dwarfs-atmosphere/103/web/2025/10 / Phosphine, Evidence, and an Exercise in Scientific Restraint: https://www.seti.org/news/wolf-1130c-phosphine-evidence-and-an-exercise-in-scientific-restraint/

Synthesis of Sound and Precise Leakage Contracts for Open-Source RISC-V Processors
Zilong Wang, Gideon Mohr, Klaus von Gleissenthall, Jan Reineke, Marco Guarnieri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06509

Synthesis of Sound and Precise Leakage Contracts for Open-Source RISC-V Processors
Leakage contracts have been proposed as a new security abstraction at the instruction set architecture level. Leakage contracts aim to capture the information that processors may leak via microarchitectural side channels. Recently, the first tools have emerged to verify whether a processor satisfies a given contract. However, coming up with a contract that is both sound and precise for a given processor is challenging, time-consuming, and error-prone, as it requires in-depth knowledge of the ti…

Dallas Cowboys RB questionable to return after first half injury https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-rb-questionable-to-return-after-first-half-injury

How popular media gets love wrong
Okay, so what exactly are the details of the "engineered" model of love from my previous post? I'll try to summarize my thoughts and the experiences they're built on.
1. "Love" can be be thought of like a mechanism that's built by two (or more) people. In this case, no single person can build the thing alone, to work it needs contributions from multiple people (I suppose self-love might be an exception to that). In any case, the builders can intentionally choose how they build (and maintain) the mechanism, they can build it differently to suit their particular needs/wants, and they will need to maintain and repair it over time to keep it running. It may need winding, or fuel, or charging plus oil changes and bolt-tightening, etc.
2. Any two (or more) people can choose to start building love between them at any time. No need to "find your soulmate" or "wait for the right person." Now the caveat is that the mechanism is difficult to build and requires lots of cooperation, so there might indeed be "wrong people" to try to build love with. People in general might experience more failures than successes. The key component is slowly-escalating shared commitment to the project, which is negotiated between the partners so that neither one feels like they've been left to do all the work themselves. Since it's a big scary project though, it's very easy to decide it's too hard and give up, and so the builders need to encourage each other and pace themselves. The project can only succeed if there's mutual commitment, and that will certainly require compromise (sometimes even sacrifice, though not always). If the mechanism works well, the benefits (companionship; encouragement; praise; loving sex; hugs; etc.) will be well worth the compromises you make to build it, but this isn't always the case.
3. The mechanism is prone to falling apart if not maintained. In my view, the "fire" and "appeal" models of love don't adequately convey the need for this maintenance and lead to a lot of under-maintained relationships many of which fall apart. You'll need to do things together that make you happy, do things that make your partner happy (in some cases even if they annoy you, but never in a transactional or box-checking way), spend time with shared attention, spend time alone and/or apart, reassure each other through words (or deeds) of mutual beliefs (especially your continued commitment to the relationship), do things that comfort and/or excite each other physically (anywhere from hugs to hand-holding to sex) and probably other things I'm not thinking of. Not *every* relationship needs *all* of these maintenance techniques, but I think most will need most. Note especially that patriarchy teaches men that they don't need to bother with any of this, which harms primarily their romantic partners but secondarily them as their relationships fail due to their own (cultivated-by-patriarchy) incompetence. If a relationship evolves to a point where one person is doing all the maintenance (& improvement) work, it's been bent into a shape that no longer really qualifies as "love" in my book, and that's super unhealthy.
4. The key things to negotiate when trying to build a new love are first, how to work together in the first place, and how to be comfortable around each others' habits (or how to change those habits). Second, what level of commitment you have right now, and what how/when you want to increase that commitment. Additionally, I think it's worth checking in about what you're each putting into and getting out of the relationship, to ensure that it continues to be positive for all participants. To build a successful relationship, you need to be able to incrementally increase the level of commitment to one that you're both comfortable staying at long-term, while ensuring that for both partners, the relationship is both a net benefit and has manageable costs (those two things are not the same). Obviously it's not easy to actually have conversations about these things (congratulations if you can just talk about this stuff) because there's a huge fear of hearing an answer that you don't want to hear. I think the range of discouraging answers which actually spell doom for a relationship is smaller than people think and there's usually a reasonable "shoulder" you can fall into where things aren't on a good trajectory but could be brought back into one, but even so these conversations are scary. Still, I think only having honest conversations about these things when you're angry at each other is not a good plan. You can also try to communicate some of these things via non-conversational means, if that feels safer, and at least being aware that these are the objectives you're pursuing is probably helpful.
I'll post two more replies here about my own experiences that led me to this mental model and trying to distill this into advice, although it will take me a moment to get to those.
#relationships #love

$500k move may be first step to clearing $57 million, former All-Pro from Cowboys' books https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/07/20/trevon-diggs-first-step-final-season-97m-cowb…

You Have Been LaTeXpOsEd: A Systematic Analysis of Information Leakage in Preprint Archives Using Large Language Models
Richard A. Dubniczky, Bertalan Borsos, Tihanyi Norbert
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03761

You Have Been LaTeXpOsEd: A Systematic Analysis of Information Leakage in Preprint Archives Using Large Language Models
The widespread use of preprint repositories such as arXiv has accelerated the communication of scientific results but also introduced overlooked security risks. Beyond PDFs, these platforms provide unrestricted access to original source materials, including LaTeX sources, auxiliary code, figures, and embedded comments. In the absence of sanitization, submissions may disclose sensitive information that adversaries can harvest using open-source intelligence. In this work, we present the first lar…

NFL Makes Final Call on Dak Prescott’s Role in Cowboys-Eagles Spitting Incident https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/dak-prescott-no-rules-broken-spitting-nfl/?adt_ei=[email]