Tootfinder

Nielsen: in May, Americans watched more TV on streaming than on cable and broadcast networks combined, the first time that has happened over a full month (John Koblin/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/business/media/streaming…

It’s Official: Streaming Is Now the King of TV
In May, more Americans watched television on streaming than on cable and network television combined, Nielsen said. It is the first time that has happened over a full month.

Nielsen: in May, Americans watched more TV on streaming than on cable and broadcast networks combined, the first time that has happened over a full month (John Koblin/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/business/media/streaming…

It’s Official: Streaming Is Now the King of TV
In May, more Americans watched television on streaming than on cable and network television combined, Nielsen said. It is the first time that has happened over a full month.

49ers break the seal on second-round signees, as Alfred Collins' contract may pave way for others to sign

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/49ers-b

Tubi says it crossed 100M monthly users in May and accounted for 1B hours of total TV viewership time; Nielsen: Tubi accounted for 2.2% of total TV viewership (Kayla Cobb/The Wrap)
https://www.thewrap.com/tubi-users-100-million-monthly-nielsen/

Tubi Surpasses 100 Million Monthly Users for the First Time
Tubi surpassed 100 million monthly hours and accounted for 1 billion hours of total TV viewing in May, a first according to Nielsen.

All-sky search for long-duration gravitational-wave transients in the first part of the fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Observing run
The LIGO Scientific Collaboration, the Virgo Collaboration, the KAGRA Collaboration
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12282

All-sky search for long-duration gravitational-wave transients in the first part of the fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Observing run
We present an all-sky search for long-duration gravitational waves (GWs) from the first part of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA fourth observing run (O4), called O4a and comprising data taken between 24 May 2023 and 16 January 2024. The GW signals targeted by this search are the so-called "long-duration" (> 1 s) transients expected from a variety of astrophysical processes, including non-axisymmetric deformations in magnetars or eccentric binary coalescences. We make minimal assumptions on the emitted GW …

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

Measuring Informativeness Gap of (Mis)Calibrated Predictors
Yiding Feng, Wei Tang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12094 https://arxiv.org/…

Measuring Informativeness Gap of (Mis)Calibrated Predictors
In many applications, decision-makers must choose between multiple predictive models that may all be miscalibrated. Which model (i.e., predictor) is more "useful" in downstream decision tasks? To answer this, our first contribution introduces the notion of the informativeness gap between any two predictors, defined as the maximum normalized payoff advantage one predictor offers over the other across all decision-making tasks. Our framework strictly generalizes several existing notions: it subsu…

Mixed Discrete and Continuous Planning using Shortest Walks in Graphs of Convex Sets
Savva Morozov, Tobia Marcucci, Bernhard Paus Graesdal, Alexandre Amice, Pablo A. Parrilo, Russ Tedrake
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10878

Mixed Discrete and Continuous Planning using Shortest Walks in Graphs of Convex Sets
We study the Shortest-Walk Problem (SWP) in a Graph of Convex Sets (GCS). A GCS is a graph where each vertex is paired with a convex program, and each edge couples adjacent programs via additional costs and constraints. A walk in a GCS is a sequence of vertices connected by edges, where vertices may be repeated. The length of a walk is given by the cumulative optimal value of the corresponding convex programs. To solve the SWP in GCS, we first synthesize a piecewise-quadratic lower bound on the…

"Golden eagle spotted in England for first time in more than a decade"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #Birds #BirdsOfPrey

Golden eagle spotted in England for first time in more than a decade
A golden eagle has been spotted in northern England for the first time since 2015, indicating the birds may soon be expanding their range south from Scotland into England, where they’re currently considered locally extinct. Conservationists and scientists working in a remote area of rural Northumberland, an English county that borders Scotland, reported seeing the […]

"I Hadn't Thought About That": Creators of Human-like AI Weigh in on Ethics And Neurodivergence
Naba Rizvi, Taggert Smith, Tanvi Vidyala, Mya Bolds, Harper Strickland, Andrew Begel, Rua Williams, Imani Munyaka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12098

"I Hadn't Thought About That": Creators of Human-like AI Weigh in on Ethics And Neurodivergence
Human-like AI agents such as robots and chatbots are becoming increasingly popular, but they present a variety of ethical concerns. The first concern is in how we define humanness, and how our definition impacts communities historically dehumanized by scientific research. Autistic people in particular have been dehumanized by being compared to robots, making it even more important to ensure this marginalization is not reproduced by AI that may promote neuronormative social behaviors. Second, th…

Operators of Dirac's theory with mass and axial chemical potential
Ion I. Cotaescu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12748 https://arxiv…

Operators of Dirac's theory with mass and axial chemical potential
The Dirac equation with mass and axial chemical potential is solved analytically obtaining the mode spinors and corresponding projection operators giving the spectral representations of the principal conserved operators. In this framework, the odd partner of the Pryce spin operator is defined for the first time showing how these operators may be combined for defining the particle and antiparticle spin and polarization operators of Dirac's theory of massive fermions either in the free case or in…

My dad knew about bugs.
He taught us to be curious about the mundane, to be adaptable and resilient, to be confident in the might of the small.
On this Father's Day, I think I may have located the first of his academic articles from 1962. 🤍
https://www.sciencedirect.com…

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

Reconstruction of dark energy and late-time cosmic expansion using the Weighted Function Regression method
Alex Gonz\'alez-Fuentes, Adri\`a G\'omez-Valent
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11758

Reconstruction of dark energy and late-time cosmic expansion using the Weighted Function Regression method
Recent data from multiple supernova catalogs and DESI, when combined with CMB, suggest a non-trivial evolution of dark energy (DE) at the $2.5-4σ$ CL. This evidence is typically quantified using the CPL parametrization of the DE equation-of-state parameter which corresponds to a first-order Taylor expansion around $a = 1$. However, this truncation is to some extent arbitrary and may bias our interpretation of the data, potentially leading us to mistake spurious features of the best-fit CPL mod…

Chargers WR Tre Harris becomes first rookie training camp holdout, and he may not be the last

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/chargers…

Asymptotics and Scattering for Critically Weakly Hyperbolic and Singular Systems
Bolys Sabitbek, Arick Shao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11348 https://

Asymptotics and Scattering for Critically Weakly Hyperbolic and Singular Systems
We study a very general class of first-order linear hyperbolic systems that both become weakly hyperbolic and contain lower-order coefficients that blow up at a single time $t = 0$. In "critical" weakly hyperbolic settings, it is well-known that solutions lose a finite amount of regularity at the degenerate time $t = 0$. In this paper, we both improve upon the results in the weakly hyperbolic setting, and we extend this analysis to systems containing critically singular coefficients, which may …

Primordial black holes in cosmological simulations: growth prospects for supermassive black holes
Lewis R. Prole, John A. Regan, Daxal Mehta, Peter Coles, Pratika Dayal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11233

Primordial black holes in cosmological simulations: growth prospects for supermassive black holes
It has long been suggested that a fraction of the dark matter in the Universe could exist in the form of primordial black holes (PBHs) that have existed since the radiation dominated era. Recent studies have suggested that these PBHs may be the progenitors to the population of high-redshift, supermassive black holes (SMBHs) observed since the launch of JWST. For the first time, we have included PBHs in cosmological simulations, to test whether PBHs can sink to the center of collapsing halos, lo…

Strategic Customer Behavior in an M/M/1 Feedback Queue with General Payoffs
Peter Taylor, Jiesen Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11263 https://

Strategic Customer Behavior in an M/M/1 Feedback Queue with General Payoffs
We consider an M/M/1 feedback queue in which service attempts may fail, requiring the customer to rejoin the queue. Arriving customers act strategically, deciding whether to join the queue based on a threshold strategy that depends on the number of customers present. Their decisions balance the expected service reward against the costs associated with waiting, while accounting for the behavior of others. This model was first analyzed by Fackrell, Taylor and Wang (2021), who assumed that waiti…

"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…

Mario Guevara, an El Salvador-born journalist who covers immigration raids, may face deportation after his arrest while covering No Kings protests in Atlanta (CNN)
http://www.cnn.com/2025/06/17/media/mario-guevara-salvadoran-jo…

Salvadoran journalist arrested while streaming a ‘No Kings’ protest could face deportation
ICE has requested an immigration “detainer” for Mario Guevara, the first step towards potentially deporting the El Salvador-born reporter, his lawyer said.

Cloudflare starts blocking access to pirate sites in the UK; previously, blocking was almost entirely done by local ISPs (Andy Maxwell/TorrentFreak)
https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-starts-blocking-pirate-sites-for-uk-users-tha…

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…

The justification that Trump used to claim (illegally) federalize the California National Guard and deploy the marines is from 10 U.S. Code § 252:
> Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.
Specifically he's called out the "make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States."
Trump cannot legally hold office because of his participation in an insurrection. Trump should have been impeached and removed on day 1 of his first administration based on the Emoluments clause. Trump colluded with Russia to manipulate the election, so even his swearing in was a failure of the US government to "enforce the laws of the United States." The supreme court justices he appointed explictly undermined and continue to "make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States," as with all of his appointees. The troops he has federalized remain deployed, even after being declared illegal.
When, then, do we call the entire time since January 20th, 2017 to now an insurrection and his government an illegal assembly? Who will order them to "disperse?"
#NoKingsDay

Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defence minister, said “an acceptable armistice may never formally arrive” and that Kyiv should formulate “a revised theory of victory” – which accepts that the Kremlin considers itself engaged in a forever war against its smaller neighbour.
The former minister describes the new approach as “strategic neutralisation”, a permanent and dynamic military effort to ensure that Russia’s forces cannot advance and that Moscow becomes “operationally incapab…

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

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 …

Proposed Trade Has Raiders Land First-Round Draft Bust WR With Big-Time Upside https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/treylon-burks-trade-rumors/?adt_ei=[email]

In 73/74 my first job was in a car accessory shop and paint factors, for the magnificent sum of £10.50 a week.
One of its few attractions was that it also sold 8 track music and for weeks I'd play "Holland" by The Beach Boys.
It may not be the strongest album but it kept me warm.
#Music

Hyperfixiation Joy, Stay if You Love It, Scroll if You Don’t!
Next year marks a decade since I first heard Loin d’ici by Zoë Straub. Ten years of the same song looping in my mind, ten years of clinging to every word, every note, as if it’s the only thing keeping me afloat. I remember May 14, 2016, like it’s a scar, the day my hyperfixation began. Time keeps slipping past me, but the song stays, haunting and comforting at once, as if Zoë herself is quietly following me through the endle…

Understanding Japan’s AI Promotion Act: An “Innovation-First” Blueprint for AI Regulation
https://fpf.org/blog/understanding-japans-ai-promotion-act-an-innovation-first-blueprint-for-ai-regulation/

All good advice.
https://mastodon.social/@GeePawHill/114820870596337330

"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…

It's worth bearing in mind that all AI companies are in that phase where they burn money to attract the most customers and hope that the competition blinks first. That means all AI is pretty badly underpriced.
For coding, that's a problem. It's just on the edge of being arguably positive for some. If the price goes up by an order of ten, the bubble is going to burst. And it may take the other AI use cases with it. After all, coding was kind of a killer app.

Anthropic Is Bleeding Out
Hello premium customers! Feel free to get in touch at ez@betteroffline.com if you're ever feeling chatty. And if you're not one yet, please subscribe and support my independent brain madness. Also, thank you to Kasey Kagawa for helping with the maths on this. Soundtrack: Killer Be Killed -

The justification that Trump used to claim (illegally) federalize the California National Guard and deploy the marines is from 10 U.S. Code § 252:
> Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.
Specifically he's called out the "make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States."
Trump cannot legally hold office because of his participation in an insurrection. Trump should have been impeached and removed on day 1 of his first administration based on the Emoluments clause. Trump colluded with Russia to manipulate the election, so even his swearing in was a failure of the US government to "enforce the laws of the United States." The supreme court justices he appointed explictly undermined and continue to "make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States," as with all of his appointees. The troops he has federalized remain deployed, even after being declared illegal.
When, then, do we call the entire time since January 20th, 2017 to now an insurrection and his government an illegal assembly? Who will order them to "disperse?"
#NoKingsDay

Impacts of internal heating on temperature distribution in channels
Lubom\'ir Bure\v{s}, Per Nilsson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08515 https://

Impacts of internal heating on temperature distribution in channels
In molten-salt-fuelled reactor systems, the fluid may experience substantial volumetric heat generation in addition to heat removal from surrounding structures. To quantify these effects, we investigate developed channel flow with internal heating using a systematic multi-scale approach comprising Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS), Large Eddy Simulation (LES), and a semi-analytical solver (SAS). First, DNS and LES are compared in a turbulent parallel-plate configuration at different Prandtl and…

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…

Cloudflare starts blocking access to pirate sites in the UK; previously, blocking was almost entirely done by local ISPs (Andy Maxwell/TorrentFreak)
https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-starts-blocking-pirate-sites-for-uk-users-tha…

"‘Europe is becoming a solar powerhouse’: Solar tops EU electricity as coal sinks to new low"
#Europe #SolarPower #Energy

Solar becomes EU’s largest electricity source for the first time
The Netherlands and Greece were the top solar record setters, while wind power also hit new highs in May and June.

I'm getting a bit tired of government censorship of the Arts community
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/21/state-library-of-queensland-karen-wyld-first-nations-writer-…

V455 Car: an oscillating eclipsing Algol-type binary in triple star system
Zhao-Long Deng, Wen-Ping Liao, Li-Ying Zhu, Xiang-Dong Shi, Nian-Ping Liu, Ping Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10124

V455 Car: an oscillating eclipsing Algol-type binary in triple star system
V455 Car is a southern oscillating eclipsing Algol-type system with an orbital period of 5.132888 days. Our first photometric solutions based on the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite indicate that it is a semi-detached binary with the secondary star is almost filling its Roche lobe. The noticeable O'Connell effect in light curve could be explained by hot spot on the primary component, which may be attributed to the mass transfer from the secondary component to the primary one. The absolute …

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…

OpenAI's o3-pro is much smarter than o3 and amazing at using tools, but the model requires extensive context to perform optimally and may overthink without it (Ben Hylak/Latent.Space)
https://www.latent.space/p/o3-pro

God is hungry for Context: First thoughts on o3 pro
OpenAI dropped o3 pricing 80% today and launched o3-pro. Ben Hylak of Raindrop.ai returns with the world's first early review.

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

Confirmed: the May average of atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa was 430.5 ppm, first time above 430 ppm in 15 million years, and a big jump from a year ago, again: 3.6 ppm!
Overall, we're still speeding in the wrong direction.

LA was a dress rehearsal for what Trump really has planned - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/trump-lo…

LA was a dress rehearsal for what Trump really has planned
Trump: Well, we’re going to have troops everywhere.Reporter: What’s the bar for sending in the Marines?Trump: The bar is what I think it is.The 2026 and 2028 elections may have just gotten a lot more distant. First, the backstory.It was around 2 a.m. on July 15, 2020, when Mark Pettibone, then 29, w...

I always find the use of first person plural pronouns in discussions of the distant future to be too cute…
Humans didn’t exist a million years ago. There were some crafty hominid apes but not the sort you could clean up and mistake for a human.
There is no “us” 7 billion years from now. There is very likely no “us” in half a million years. We may or may not have descendants but they won’t be “us” in any sense.
A billion years is longer than Earth has had visible life

Last morning in Qaanaaq, time to go home, but first a massive clean up is due! Lots of notes to write up, still some data to download, need to go and repair a cable too. May have time to update and round off the full #FieldDiary later.
But first a peaceful shot from last night, when the narwhals were in the bay again...

Variational first-principles approach to self-trapped polarons
Vasilii Vasilchenko, Matteo Giantomassi, Samuel Ponc\'e, Xavier Gonze
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05112

Variational first-principles approach to self-trapped polarons
The behavior of charge carriers in polar materials is governed by electron-phonon interactions, which affect their mobilities via phonon scattering and may localize carriers into self-induced deformation fields, forming self-trapped polarons. We present a first-principles study of self-trapped polaron formation in paradigmatic polar semiconductors and insulators using the variational polaron equations framework and self-consistent gradient optimization. Our method incorporates long-range correc…

More Belgian (Flemish?) households with solar panels, batteries or electric vehicles will be able to benefit from the flexibility they can offer the energy system as energy retailers Bolt and Trevion collaborate with VPP operator Powernaut.
https://powernaut.io/press/powernaut-a

Powernaut, Bolt, Trevion and Partners launch Belgium’s first energy contracts that pay consumers for grid support - Powernaut
Using Powernaut’s smart software, households with solar panels, home batteries, or EVs can now earn money by allowing their energy retailer to manage their devices intelligently. For example, devices may charge or reduce output during peak times to avoid grid overload. Retailers like Bolt and Trevion are offering these new contracts, allowing customers to benefit financially without sacrificing comfort. Partners such as Qbus and Innovoltus support the initiative, which is seen as a key step …

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…

Alas, too late for members of the current United States mis-administration.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/21/world-first-gonorrhoea-vaccine-rollout-england

'Good opportunity to put him in the graveyard': Myles Garrett fires first warning at Steelers QB Aaron Rodgers

https://www.cbssports.c…

if you want to read the new translation of Capital, it's 50% off until May 31st, which means there is only half as much socially-necessary labor time embodied in it
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190075/capital

Optimal Task Offloading with Firm Deadlines for Mobile Edge Computing Systems
Khai Doan, Wesley Araujo, Evangelos Kranakis, Ioannis Lambadaris, Yannis Viniotis, Wonjae Shin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09180

Optimal Task Offloading with Firm Deadlines for Mobile Edge Computing Systems
Under a dramatic increase in mobile data traffic, a promising solution for edge computing systems to maintain their local service is the task migration that may be implemented by means of Autonomous mobile agents (AMA). In designing an optimal scheme for task offloading to AMA, we define a system cost as a minimization objective function that comprises two parts. First, an offloading cost which can be interpreted as the cost of using computational resources from the AMA. Second, a penalty cost …

Fusion of heterogeneous data for robust degradation prognostics
Edgar Jaber (EDF R\&D PRISME, CB, DATAFLOT), Emmanuel Remy (EDF R\&D PRISME), Vincent Chabridon (EDF R\&D PRISME), Mathilde Mougeot (ENSIIE, CB), Didier Lucor (DATAFLOT)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05882

Fusion of heterogeneous data for robust degradation prognostics
Assessing the degradation state of an industrial asset first requires evaluating its current condition and then to project the forecast model trajectory to a predefined prognostic threshold, thereby estimating its remaining useful life (RUL). Depending on the available information, two primary categories of forecasting models may be used: physics-based simulation codes and datadriven (machine learning) approaches. Combining both modelling approaches may enhance prediction robustness, especially…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05101 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSE_…

On the Need to Monitor Continuous Integration Practices -- An Empirical Study
Continuous Integration (CI) encompasses a set of widely adopted practices that enhance software development. However, there are indications that developers may not adequately monitor CI practices. Hence, this paper explores developers' perceptions regarding the monitoring CI practices. To achieve this, we first perform a Document Analysis to assess developers' expressed need for practice monitoring in pull requests comments generated by developers during the development process. After that, we …

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…

Characterizing Stability in Many-to-One Matching with Non-Responsive Couples
Shashwat Khare, Souvik Roy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07490 https://

Characterizing Stability in Many-to-One Matching with Non-Responsive Couples
We study many-to-one matching problems between institutions and individuals, where each institution may be matched to multiple individuals. The matching market includes couples, who view pairs of institutions as complementary. Institutions' preferences over sets of individuals are assumed to satisfy responsiveness, whereas couples' preferences over pairs of institutions may violate responsiveness. In this setting, we first assume that all institutions share a common preference ordering over i…

INTER: Mitigating Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models by Interaction Guidance Sampling
Xin Dong, Shichao Dong, Jin Wang, Jing Huang, Li Zhou, Zenghui Sun, Lihua Jing, Jingsong Lan, Xiaoyong Zhu, Bo Zheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05056

INTER: Mitigating Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models by Interaction Guidance Sampling
Hallucinations in large vision-language models (LVLMs) pose significant challenges for real-world applications, as LVLMs may generate responses that appear plausible yet remain inconsistent with the associated visual content. This issue rarely occurs in human cognition. We argue that this discrepancy arises from humans' ability to effectively leverage multimodal interaction information in data samples. Specifically, humans typically first gather multimodal information, analyze the interactions …

from my link log —
10 years of stable Rust: an infrastructure story.
https://rustfoundation.org/media/10-years-of-stable-rust-an-infrastructure-story/
saved 2025-05-15

10 Years of Stable Rust: An Infrastructure Story - The Rust Foundation
A note from the Rust Foundation: Today, May 15, 2025, marks 10 years since the first stable release of Rust. To commemorate this milestone, we are excited to share the following guest blog contributed by Graydon Hoare, initial author of the Rust programming language.   Rust turns 10 today, or at…

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…

“TNC is where it all comes to life.”

In this video message, our CEO Lise Fuhr shares excitement ahead of her very first TNC, and why this global gathering matters so much to our Research & Education community.

Watch her personal welcome message below, as we all get ready for next week’s #TNC25 in Brighton 🇬🇧

And if you’re not coming in person, don’t forget to g…

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

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.

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.

Modern Minimal Perfect Hashing: A Survey
Hans-Peter Lehmann, Thomas Mueller, Rasmus Pagh, Giulio Ermanno Pibiri, Peter Sanders, Sebastiano Vigna, Stefan Walzer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06536

Modern Minimal Perfect Hashing: A Survey
Given a set $S$ of $n$ keys, a perfect hash function for $S$ maps the keys in $S$ to the first $m \geq n$ integers without collisions. It may return an arbitrary result for any key not in $S$ and is called minimal if $m = n$. The most important parameters are its space consumption, construction time, and query time. Years of research now enable modern perfect hash functions to be extremely fast to query, very space-efficient, and scale to billions of keys. Different approaches give different tr…

"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.

Revisiting Diffusion Models: From Generative Pre-training to One-Step Generation
Bowen Zheng, Tianming Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09376 https://

Revisiting Diffusion Models: From Generative Pre-training to One-Step Generation
Diffusion distillation is a widely used technique to reduce the sampling cost of diffusion models, yet it often requires extensive training, and the student performance tends to be degraded. Recent studies show that incorporating a GAN objective may alleviate these issues, yet the underlying mechanism remains unclear. In this work, we first identify a key limitation of distillation: mismatched step sizes and parameter numbers between the teacher and the student model lead them to converge to di…

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).

History of UHECR production in Centaurus A
Cain\~a de Oliveira, Vitor de Souza
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06894 https://arxiv.org/pdf…

History of UHECR production in Centaurus A
The origin of the UHECR continues to puzzle, however, an excess of detection in the direction of the radio galaxy Centaurus A (Cen A) raises the possibility of this object being the first UHECR source identifiable. Cen A is known to be currently active, and also exhibits known past episodes of high activity. In this work, we investigate whether the known activity episodes in Cen A may be related to the excess events in the \textit{Centaurus region}. Analysing the energy of the events and the ov…

A first-order method for nonconvex-nonconcave minimax problems under a local Kurdyka-\L{}ojasiewicz condition
Zhaosong Lu, Xiangyuan Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01932

A first-order method for nonconvex-nonconcave minimax problems under a local Kurdyka-Łojasiewicz condition
We study a class of nonconvex-nonconcave minimax problems in which the inner maximization problem satisfies a local Kurdyka-Łojasiewicz (KL) condition that may vary with the outer minimization variable. In contrast to the global KL or Polyak-Łojasiewicz (PL) conditions commonly assumed in the literature -- which are significantly stronger and often too restrictive in practice -- this local KL condition accommodates a broader range of practical scenarios. However, it also introduces new analyt…

Can Biologically Plausible Temporal Credit Assignment Rules Match BPTT for Neural Similarity? E-prop as an Example
Yuhan Helena Liu, Guangyu Robert Yang, Christopher J. Cueva
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06904

Can Biologically Plausible Temporal Credit Assignment Rules Match BPTT for Neural Similarity? E-prop as an Example
Understanding how the brain learns may be informed by studying biologically plausible learning rules. These rules, often approximating gradient descent learning to respect biological constraints such as locality, must meet two critical criteria to be considered an appropriate brain model: (1) good neuroscience task performance and (2) alignment with neural recordings. While extensive research has assessed the first criterion, the second remains underexamined. Employing methods such as Procruste…

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…

AI is coming for entry-level jobs. Everybody needs to get ready.
CEOs are saying that AI is coming for a lot of jobs, and soon
— perhaps as many as half of all white-collar workers.
That’s likely to show up first in entry-level jobs, where the basic skills required are the easiest to replicate,
and in tech, where the ability to rapidly adapt the latest software tools is itself an entry-level job requirement.
Sure enough, in recent years unemployment has risen…

AI is coming for entry-level jobs. Everybody needs to get ready.
AI may replace a lot of entry-level skills. So how will workers acquire more advanced ones?

Q-Detection: A Quantum-Classical Hybrid Poisoning Attack Detection Method
Haoqi He, Xiaokai Lin, Jiancai Chen, Yan Xiao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06262 ht…

Q-Detection: A Quantum-Classical Hybrid Poisoning Attack Detection Method
Data poisoning attacks pose significant threats to machine learning models by introducing malicious data into the training process, thereby degrading model performance or manipulating predictions. Detecting and sifting out poisoned data is an important method to prevent data poisoning attacks. Limited by classical computation frameworks, upcoming larger-scale and more complex datasets may pose difficulties for detection. We introduce the unique speedup of quantum computing for the first time in…

A Framework for Creating Non-Regressive Test Cases via Branch Consistency Analysis Driven by Descriptions
Yuxiang Zhang, Pengyu Xue, Zhen Yang, Xiaoxue Ren, Xiang Li, Linhao Wu, Jiancheng Zhao, Xingda Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07486

A Framework for Creating Non-Regressive Test Cases via Branch Consistency Analysis Driven by Descriptions
Automated test-generation research overwhelmingly assumes the correctness of focal methods, yet practitioners routinely face non-regression scenarios where the focal method may be defective. A baseline evaluation of EvoSuite and two leading Large Language Model (LLM)-based generators, namely ChatTester and ChatUniTest, on defective focal methods reveals that despite achieving up to 83% of branch coverage, none of the generated tests expose defects. To resolve this problem, we first construct …

Related to understanding firearms, "rifles" and hand guns tend to be rifled. Rifling is grooving that runs in a helical pattern down the barrel. When purchasing a firearm, it's important to check the rifling.
First check that the firearm is unloaded. Empty or remove the magazine, cycle the weapon. Next, check again that it's unloaded by looking both down the barrel and into the magazine. Now, shine a light down the barrel and look down it. In the absence of a light, you may be able to reflect light off your thumbnail.
Rifling should look as though it's drawn on with a sharp pencil, and the barrel should look otherwise completely smooth and clean. If the rifling looks like bumpy mountains, then the owner probably used corrosive ammo and didn't clean it enough. It will probably still shoot, but not at all accurately.
Both the rifling and the pin can be used in forensic analysis to match a bullet to a gun. I don't honestly know how accurate this is because a lot of forensic "science" is just made up stuff that relies on the CSI effect and doesn't actually work as advertised.
However, not all firearms are not all rifled. Shotguns are "smoothbore" firearms, meaning they lack rifling. It is not possible to perform forensic analysis of a smoothbore firearm. It *is* possible to check for powder on the hands of someone who has used a firearm within the last few days, but it's not possible to distinguish between firing inside and outside a range.
I've been gathering all kinds of tidbits like this, partially just out of curiosity and partially because I've been wanting to write a story about a revolutionary group fighting a modern authoritarian society. I'm always happy to learn other bits, if anyone has anything else I could throw in my narrative (whenever I finally get back to writing it).

Deaf President Now! review – passion and energy in stirring record of student protest;
Documentary follows the 1988 anti-audism revolt in the US after the world’s first deaf university appointed a hearing person to head it
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/…

Low-rank Momentum Factorization for Memory Efficient Training
Pouria Mahdavinia, Mehrdad Mahdavi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08091 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08091 https://arxiv.org/html/2507.08091
arXiv:2507.08091v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Fine-tuning large foundation models presents significant memory challenges due to stateful optimizers like AdamW, often requiring several times more GPU memory than inference. While memory-efficient methods like parameter-efficient fine-tuning (e.g., LoRA) and optimizer state compression exist, recent approaches like GaLore bridge these by using low-rank gradient projections and subspace moment accumulation. However, such methods may struggle with fixed subspaces or computationally costly offline resampling (e.g., requiring full-matrix SVDs). We propose Momentum Factorized SGD (MoFaSGD), which maintains a dynamically updated low-rank SVD representation of the first-order momentum, closely approximating its full-rank counterpart throughout training. This factorization enables a memory-efficient fine-tuning method that adaptively updates the optimization subspace at each iteration. Crucially, MoFaSGD leverages the computed low-rank momentum factors to perform efficient spectrally normalized updates, offering an alternative to subspace moment accumulation. We establish theoretical convergence guarantees for MoFaSGD, proving it achieves an optimal rate for non-convex stochastic optimization under standard assumptions. Empirically, we demonstrate MoFaSGD's effectiveness on large language model alignment benchmarks, achieving a competitive trade-off between memory reduction (comparable to LoRA) and performance compared to state-of-the-art low-rank optimization methods. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/pmahdavi/MoFaSGD.
toXiv_bot_toot

Tight Efficiency Bounds for the Probabilistic Serial Mechanism under Cardinal Preferences
Jugal Garg, Yixin Tao, L\'aszl\'o A. V\'egh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03359 …

Tight Efficiency Bounds for the Probabilistic Serial Mechanism under Cardinal Preferences
The Probabilistic Serial (PS) mechanism -- also known as the simultaneous eating algorithm -- is a canonical solution for the assignment problem under ordinal preferences. It guarantees envy-freeness and ordinal efficiency in the resulting random assignment. However, under cardinal preferences, its efficiency may degrade significantly: it is known that PS may yield allocations that are $Ω(\ln{n})$-worse than Pareto optimal, but whether this bound is tight remained an open question. Our first…

"This tree may reach the age of 250 years and is fast growing the first third of those years, then grows slowly."
I love how trees make us think long term. If I plant one of these tomorrow, I'll be long gone by the time that slowing of growth happens (250 / 3 = 83 years).
https://www.

Resolving the QCD Axion Domain Wall Problem with a Light Axion
Junseok Lee, Kai Murai, Fuminobu Takahashi, Wen Yin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07075 https:/…

Resolving the QCD Axion Domain Wall Problem with a Light Axion
We propose two novel solutions to the domain wall problem of the QCD axion by introducing a massless or light axion that also couples to gluons. The first solution applies when the new axion forms strings after inflation. Due to its mixing with the QCD axion, domain walls of the QCD axion are bounded by these strings and confined into cosmologically safe string bundles. This scenario predicts the existence of such string bundles, which may survive until today and leave observable signatures, su…

The LDP of McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equations with H\"{o}lder continuous conditions and integrable conditions
Hao Wu, Junhao Hu, Chenggui Yuan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07368

The LDP of McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equations with Hölder continuous conditions and integrable conditions
In this paper, we first study the large deviation principle (LDP) for non-degenerate McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equations (MVSDEs) with Hölder continuous drifts by using Zvonkin's transformation. When the drift only satisfies Hölder condition, the skeleton equation may have multiple solutions. Among these solutions, we find one that ensures the MVSDEs satisfy the LDP. Moreover, we introduce a new definition for the rate function that reduces to traditional rate function if the drif…

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

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

$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…

Q&A with Mary Meeker on publishing her first Trends report since 2019, its focus on the AI revolution, why OpenAI may have an insurmountable lead, and more (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/30/mary-meeker-trends-report-openai

Q&A with Mary Meeker on the AI revolution
The famed internet analyst turned VC just published her first Trends report since 2019.

"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.

Hijacking JARVIS: Benchmarking Mobile GUI Agents against Unprivileged Third Parties
Guohong Liu, Jialei Ye, Jiacheng Liu, Yuanchun Li, Wei Liu, Pengzhi Gao, Jian Luan, Yunxin Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04227

Hijacking JARVIS: Benchmarking Mobile GUI Agents against Unprivileged Third Parties
Mobile GUI agents are designed to autonomously execute diverse device-control tasks by interpreting and interacting with mobile screens. Despite notable advancements, their resilience in real-world scenarios where screen content may be partially manipulated by untrustworthy third parties remains largely unexplored. Owing to their black-box and autonomous nature, these agents are vulnerable to manipulations that could compromise user devices. In this work, we present the first systematic investi…

Deep Learning of Continuous and Structured Policies for Aggregated Heterogeneous Treatment Effects
Jennifer Y. Zhang, Shuyang Du, Will Y. Zou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05511

Deep Learning of Continuous and Structured Policies for Aggregated Heterogeneous Treatment Effects
As estimation of Heterogeneous Treatment Effect (HTE) is increasingly adopted across a wide range of scientific and industrial applications, the treatment action space can naturally expand, from a binary treatment variable to a structured treatment policy. This policy may include several policy factors such as a continuous treatment intensity variable, or discrete treatment assignments. From first principles, we derive the formulation for incorporating multiple treatment policy variables into t…

Why Lamar Jackson could get $70 million per year, plus ranking 12 teams who could win their first Super Bowl

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news…

The rate of descent did not slow as much as expected,
and the spacecraft probably made a hard landing.
The laser instrument that measured how high Resilience was above the surface was slow in making its measurements,
which may have contributed to the problem.
“At this point, we do not know clearly about the cause,”
Takeshi Hakamada, the chief executive of Ispace, said in translated remarks.
The loss of the second mission could lead NASA to rethink its pla…

Ispace of Japan’s Moon Lander Resilience Has Crashed
The loss of the Resilience spacecraft by Ispace repeated a crash into the moon in 2023 of the company’s first robotic lunar landing mission.

Paradromics implanted and removed its Connexus brain implant in a patient for ~10 minutes during epilepsy surgery on May 14, a first for the Neuralink rival (Emily Mullin/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/paradromics-neuralink-rival-tested-brain-impl…

A Neuralink Rival Just Tested a Brain Implant in a Person
Paradromics, a brain-computer-interface startup, inserted its brain implant in a person—briefly—in an early test of its technology.

Cowboys new backup QB outranks 10 drafted higher, including 2 first-round picks https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/06/04/cowboys-milton-backup-qb-rankings-2025/84029638007/

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.

Patriots WR Stefon Diggs prefers to keep 'personal life personal' regarding boat video https://www.nfl.com/news/patriots-wr-stefon-diggs-prefers-to-keep-personal-life-personal-regarding-boat-video

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22984 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_…

A Computational Approach to Improving Fairness in K-means Clustering
The popular K-means clustering algorithm potentially suffers from a major weakness for further analysis or interpretation. Some cluster may have disproportionately more (or fewer) points from one of the subpopulations in terms of some sensitive variable, e.g., gender or race. Such a fairness issue may cause bias and unexpected social consequences. This work attempts to improve the fairness of K-means clustering with a two-stage optimization formulation--clustering first and then adjust cluster …

EPA Has Terminated Over $15 Million in Funding for “Forever Chemicals” Research
The EPA said in May that it will delay enforcement on the drinking water limits for PFOA and PFOS until 2031.
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-epa-pfas-drinking-water

Trump’s First EPA Promised to Crack Down on Forever Chemicals. His Second EPA Is Pulling Back.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin claims to prioritize combatting long-lasting chemicals called PFAS. Despite this, the agency has delayed enforcement of standards and terminated over $15 million in funding for “forever chemicals” research.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS)
has been a small-but-mighty source of world-changing scientific research for more than a half-century.
NASA scientists first moved into the building,
which another federal agency leases from GISS’s institutional partner, Columbia University, in 1966.
Last month, at the behest of the Trump administration,
NASA officials told GISS it had to move out before the end of May.
In response, more than 100 staffer…

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies Faces Eviction under Trump Plan
Since 1966 NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has been at the forefront of Earth and planetary science from its location in upper Manhattan. Now a Trump administration directive is ejecting its scientists to parts unknown