Tootfinder

"""
"[…] Wanting a man got me into awful troubles more than once. But wanting to get married, never! No, no. None of that for me."
"Why not?" Tenar demanded.
Taken aback, Moss said simply, "Why, what man'd marry a witch?" And then, with a sidelong chewing motion of her jaw, like a sheep shifting its cud, “And what witch’d marry a man?"
They split rushes.
"What's wrong with men?" Tenar inquired cautiously.
As cautiously, lowering her voice, Moss replied, "I don't know, my dearie. I’ve thought on it. Often I’ve thought on it. The best I can say it is like this. A man’s in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell." She held up her long, bent, wet fingers as if holding a walnut. “It’s hard and strong, that shell, and it’s all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, man-self. And that’s all. That’s all there is. It’s all him and nothing else, inside."
Tenar pondered awhile and finally asked, "But if he's a wizard—"
"Then it's all his power, inside. His power’s himself, see. That’s how it is with him. And that’s all. When his power goes, he’s gone. Empty." She cracked the unseen walnut and tossed the shells away. “Nothing."
"And a woman, then?"
"Oh, well, dearie, a woman's a different thing entirely. Who knows where a woman begins and ends? Listen, mistress, I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into the dark." Moss’s eyes shone with a weird brightness in their red rims and her voice sang like an instrument. “I go back into the dark! Before the moon I was. No one knows, no one knows, no one can say what I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. Who dares ask questions of the dark? Who’ll ask the dark its name?"
"""
(Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu)

🤾 Building a giant catcher's mitt on the moon
#moon

Building a giant catcher's mitt on the moon
Members of the space exploration community are always coming up with novel ideas to solve problems that they view as holding back humanity's expansion into the cosmos. One such problem that has become more noticeable of late, due to the failure of several powered lunar landers, is the difficulty of landing on the moon.

Musk tried and failed to enact systemic change across the entire government.
Many tech executives and investors who support Trump have narrower goals that focus on creating a regulatory climate favorable to themselves.
While Trump and Musk traded barbs on their respective social networks,
a cryptocurrency company whose business had been hamstrung by the Biden administration went public on the New York Stock Exchange,
its share price popping 200 percent.
An art…

Musk and Trump are over. Silicon Valley is just getting started.
The Tech-Trump alliance has always had tensions. But its lucrative nature has outweighed the ideological differences.

"The language of blood and soil, which has once again become central to public debate in many democracies, is very powerful. It helps many people explain a complex world. It cannot easily be defeated or dismissed in one electoral cycle."
https://www.theatlantic.co…

Every Election Is Now Existential
A nationalist’s narrow victory in Poland offers a preview of many knife-edge contests to come, all across the democratic world.

I have many thoughts about generative AI, but the overarching one is this: the better metaphor is not a new brain acquiring human thoughts, but a complex search engine for existing human-generated ideas.

Despite MLB's strong start to the season, with viewership broadly up, it is scrambling to find a buyer for a major TV package ESPN backed out of in February (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters

«We live in the future, and the future is cool. Or it would be cool, if it wasn’t for all these fucking bastards. Even for those of us too young to remember a less-algorithmic internet, we can all see the potential. We see what technology can do. […] We know what’s possible, but we see — whether we acknowledge it or just feel its sheer force shearing off bits of our fucking soul — what these companies are choosing to do to us.»
This, so many times.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forget-what-theyve-done/

Policy Optimization for Continuous-time Linear-Quadratic Graphon Mean Field Games
Philipp Plank, Yufei Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05894 https://

Policy Optimization for Continuous-time Linear-Quadratic Graphon Mean Field Games
Multi-agent reinforcement learning, despite its popularity and empirical success, faces significant scalability challenges in large-population dynamic games. Graphon mean field games (GMFGs) offer a principled framework for approximating such games while capturing heterogeneity among players. In this paper, we propose and analyze a policy optimization framework for continuous-time, finite-horizon linear-quadratic GMFGs. Exploiting the structural properties of GMFGs, we design an efficient polic…

The Apartheid State of #Israel now adds #piracy on the high seas* to its many crimes, kidnapping those bringing material aid to people in the #Gaza territory it illegally occupied, then bombs and starved relentlessly…

Correction**
The Apartheid State of #Israel now adds #piracy on the high seas* to its many crimes, kidnapping those **on a UK-flagged boat** bringing material aid to people in the #Gaza territory it illegally o…