Tootfinder

Q&A with Pavel Durov on Telegram, his arrest, censorship, not using a phone, Romanian elections, VK, encryption, Edward Snowden, spring 2018 poisoning, and more (Lex Fridman)
https://lexfridman.com/pavel-durov-transcript

Experimentally co-evolved E. coli and yeast achieve stable coexistence — and the coevolved E. coli, but not the yeast, is able to resist invasion by other bacterial strains
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-025-02618-w

Scalable Boltzmann Generators for equilibrium sampling of large-scale materials
Maximilian Schebek, Jutta Rogal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25486 https://ar…

Scalable Boltzmann Generators for equilibrium sampling of large-scale materials
The use of generative models to sample equilibrium distributions of many-body systems, as first demonstrated by Boltzmann Generators, has attracted substantial interest due to their ability to produce unbiased and uncorrelated samples in `one shot'. Despite their promise and impressive results across the natural sciences, scaling these models to large systems remains a major challenge. In this work, we introduce a Boltzmann Generator architecture that addresses this scalability bottleneck with …

https://www.the-independent.com/tech/paralysed-man-brain-implant-beer-b2044610.html

Das rechtsextreme #Stadtbild, gegen das Friedrich #Merz mit der @… ganz aktiv so gar nichts unternimmt.
Ich befürchte fast, die rechtsextreme AfD will er…

Ann-Katrin Müller (@akm0803.bsky.social)
Was man zur neuen AfD-Jugend und dem Demo-Wochenende in #Giessen wissen sollte? Das hier. Mit guter Nachfrage des Kollegen Mathis Schneider bei Jean-Pascal Hohm! Ganzes Video gibt’s hier: https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/afd-jugend-in-giessen-so-lief-die-gruendung-der-generation-deutschland-a-61cbbb7a-c25f-4e10-bad5-9b5d2b1bdf51?sara_ref=re-so-app-sh

Contrastive Diffusion Guidance for Spatial Inverse Problems
Sattwik Basu, Chaitanya Amballa, Zhongweiyang Xu, Jorge Van\v{c}o Sampedro, Srihari Nelakuditi, Romit Roy Choudhury
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26489

Contrastive Diffusion Guidance for Spatial Inverse Problems
We consider the inverse problem of reconstructing the spatial layout of a place, a home floorplan for example, from a user`s movements inside that layout. Direct inversion is ill-posed since many floorplans can explain the same movement trajectories. We adopt a diffusion-based posterior sampler to generate layouts consistent with the measurements. While active research is in progress on generative inverse solvers, we find that the forward operator in our problem poses new challenges. The path-p…

Graph Neural Network Acceleration on FPGAs for Fast Inference in Future Muon Triggers at HL-LHC
Martino Errico (Sapienza Universit\`a di Roma, INFN Sezione di Roma), Davide Fiacco (Sapienza Universit\`a di Roma, INFN Sezione di Roma), Stefano Giagu (Sapienza Universit\`a di Roma, INFN Sezione di Roma), Giuliano Gustavino (Sapienza Universit\`a di Roma, INFN Sezione di Roma), Valerio Ippolito (INFN Sezione di Roma), Graziella Russo (Sapienza Universit\`a di Roma, INFN Sezione di Roma)

Graph Neural Network Acceleration on FPGAs for Fast Inference in Future Muon Triggers at HL-LHC
The High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) will reach luminosities up to 7 times higher than the previous run, yielding denser events and larger occupancies. Next generation trigger algorithms must retain reliable selection within a strict latency budget. This work explores machine-learning approaches for future muon triggers, using the ATLAS Muon Spectrometer as a benchmark. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used as a reference, while a Graph Neural Network (GNN) is introduced as a natural model f…

Efficient and Transferable Agentic Knowledge Graph RAG via Reinforcement Learning
Jinyeop Song, Song Wang, Julian Shun, Yada Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26383 https://…

Efficient and Transferable Agentic Knowledge Graph RAG via Reinforcement Learning
Knowledge-graph retrieval-augmented generation (KG-RAG) couples large language models (LLMs) with structured, verifiable knowledge graphs (KGs) to reduce hallucinations and expose reasoning traces. However, many KG-RAG systems compose multiple LLM modules (e.g planning, reasoning, and responding), inflating inference cost and binding behavior to a specific target KG. To address this, we introduce KG-R1, an agentic KG retrieval-augmented generation (KG-RAG) framework through reinforcement learni…

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

"The Civil War still turned states to ash, and killed hundreds of thousands of Andrew Jackson’s generation’s kids and grand-kids. Bad compromises are bad because they don’t meaningfully or persistently solve anything."
https://stuff.davidaugust.com/tyrants-fall/

Tyrants Fall
it is their defining characteristic How many enemies dreamed of destroying the White House. How many soldiers wished they could flatten it. How many generals fantasized about razing the American People’s house. This one man beat them all. Same man brought the confederate flag into the Capitol, same man