Tootfinder

In the USA there's now bipartisan acceptance that "steaks cost almost 17% more than a year ago" ,[1] 60 % of shoppers buy less beef,[2] 37 % consider plant-based substitutes[3] but not clear how many would simply increase e.g. pulses or go fully #vegan. Prices of lentils are down[4] and production of pulses is expected to go up.[5]
[1]

So I grew up next to #Chernobyl and this is, well, TERRIFYING.
A story for y’all: I’m from a city called Zhytomyr, 2 hours west of Kyiv in the North of #Ukraine. We were downwind of the Chernobyl #nuclear power plant when the 1986 disaster happened.
I wasn’t born for another 12 years, but my childhood was filled with stories and the aftermath of it all. Things like:
- My grandmother worked as a head doctor in a hospital and rehabilitation facility exclusively for children of Chernobyl victims to treat the extremely high prevalence of Tuberculosis and other severe health complications. (To specify: these were SECOND GENERATION of exposure).
- A lot of the kids in that facility were orphans, because their parents died young from health problems.
- My uncle’s wife was born in Pripyat. She was 1 year old when the disaster happened. Her parents were told to evacuate while given no information about what happened. They had to pack up their things and rush out to an unfamiliar city with their baby, never to see the rest of their belongings, apartment, or hometown again.
- When I was a kid, it became so common to see weirdly mutated animals and insects that even 2-3 year olds would make jokes about “Chernobyl mosquitos” and I wouldn’t even flinch seeing occasional giant bugs, dark frogs, weird-looking dogs.
- We’d frequently hear of nearby farms having issues with their animals being born too mutated to survive or random outbreaks from contaminated water / food. Crops would randomly fail. People would get poisoned on a regular basis. This all got less common as I grew up.
- My mother still remembers being a little girl, 10 years old, and looking outside from their balcony at the clouds blowing over from Chernobyl that day. People were told to not go outside and to shut all the windows, but not given an explanation as to why. My mother swears that the rain looked different. They weren’t able to go and buy more food for the kitchen for multiple days.
Anyway - nuclear safety isn’t a joke. I don’t understand how this level of carelessness can happen after Chernobyl and Fukushima.

https://www.404media.co/power-companies-are-using-ai-to-build-nuclear-power-plants/

When Openness Fails: Lessons from System Safety for Assessing Openness in AI
Tamara Paris, Shalaleh Rismani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10732 https://arxiv.…

When Openness Fails: Lessons from System Safety for Assessing Openness in AI
Most frameworks for assessing the openness of AI systems use narrow criteria such as availability of data, model, code, documentation, and licensing terms. However, to evaluate whether the intended effects of openness - such as democratization and autonomy - are realized, we need a more holistic approach that considers the context of release: who will reuse the system, for what purposes, and under what conditions. To this end, we adapt five lessons from system safety that offer guidance on how …

Quasinormal modes from numerical relativity with Bayesian inference
Richard Dyer, Christopher J. Moore
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11783 https://arxiv.org/p…

Quasinormal modes from numerical relativity with Bayesian inference
Numerical relativity (NR) enables the study of physics in strong and dynamical gravitational fields and provides predictions for the gravitational-wave signals produced by merging black holes. Despite the impressive accuracy of modern codes, the resulting waveforms inevitably contain numerical uncertainties. Quantifying these uncertainties is important, especially for studies probing subdominant or nonlinear effects around the merger and ringdown. This paper describes a flexible Gaussian-proces…

Two studies suggest AI chatbots can shift political views more effectively than TV campaign ads, especially by presenting many claims, regardless of accuracy (Will Oremus/Washington Post)

Voters’ minds are hard to change. AI chatbots are surprisingly good at it.
New research suggests AI chatbots can shift people’s political views more effectively than campaign ads on TV.

Good Morning #Canada
Like most Canadians I suspect our grocery bill this week will be over budget as we prepare for a family #Christmas dinner and a week of holiday goodies. But help is on the way in January with the implementation of the Grocery Code of Conduct. Colour me skeptical but I'm not sure this is going to solve the issue of high grocery bills. I understand the attempt to eliminate unnecessary costs in the supply food chain. As a former manager in logistics, the fines and charges for missed delivery windows, fulfillment shortages or even the wrong pallets used, are real. But any reduction in supply chain costs will likely be absorbed as profit, not passed on to consumers. A far more effective solution would be an Excess Profits Tax where companies are charged a penalty tax when they earn profit that is unreasonable or above expectations, such as during COVID or a period of inflation.
#CanadaIsAwesome #Profiteering
https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/article/what-canadians-need-to-know-about-the-grocery-code-of-conduct/

There are no weekends in cybersecurity so check out today's Metacurity for the most critical infosec developments you might have missed since Friday, including
--Over 60 nations signed a controversial cybercrime convention,
--House Democrat service exposed details of government employees with top-secret clearances,
--AI chatbots push Russian propaganda,
--A third-party contractor exposed details on Dublin and Cork airport passengers,
--Philippines' GCash u…

Over 60 nations signed a controversial cybercrime convention
House Democrat service exposed details of government employees with top-secret clearances, AI chatbots push Russian propaganda, A third-party contractor exposed details on Dublin and Cork airport passengers, Philippines' GCash under probe for leak of 8m e-wallet users' data, much more

attrs will have a way to introspect the EFFECTIVE class build parameters in the next version. I swear to Cthulhu I thought this PR is gonna kill me (there's been A LOT more private hence and forth in the background), but I'm happy how it turned out: https://github.com/python-attrs/attrs/pu…

Expose effective class construction properties by hynek · Pull Request #1454 · python-attrs/attrs
ref #602 This is for now just private and the impact zone is limited. But I'm confident it can help us to simplify a bunch of code. I'm especially rather unhappy with the weird entanglement...

I know it was 3000 years ago now, but I want everyone to remember that Portland beat Trump last time because normal people came out every night to resist.
Portland made Trump look weak once. He pulled out everything he had to terrorize and intimidate people, and federal agents got pushed out of the city anyway. He was embarrassed. Now he can do more and he probably thinks that he has more time, but Portland maybe able to prove him wrong.
Portland ended Trump's presidency once, and it can happen again... especially if Portland keeps doing a good job of reminding everyone that the whole invasion is an attempt to distract from #Epstein.
#USPol

Effective Core Potentials for calculations of continuum spectra of molecules using the molecular R-matrix method
Zdenek Masin, Jakub Benda, Martin Crhan, Gregory S. J. Armstrong, Anna Nelson, Sebastian Mohr, Jonathan Tennyson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07270

Effective Core Potentials for calculations of continuum spectra of molecules using the molecular R-matrix method
Implementation of Effective Core Potentials (ECPs) into the molecular scattering suite UKRmol+ is presented together with a set of calculations for a range of targets relevant for plasma modeling. Continuum description in scattering and photoioniza- tion calculations for large targets or high-energy electrons often requires the use of numerical continuum functions and the associated molecular integrals. We derive ex- pressions for ECP integrals over B-spline type orbitals using their momentum-s…