Immigrant rights advocates are sounding the alarm
about a high-pitched noise they say is coming from machines installed outside the Home Depot in the Cypress Park area of Los Angeles.
Day laborers say the machines were put in place to drive them away amid immigration raids at the store.
City officials and advocates gathered earlier in the week to protest these alleged noise machines.
They claim that a loud piercing sound has been emitted for months.
The L.A. Ti…
I’ve worked over the past year to reduce the amount of noise in my consciousness on a daily basis.
By that I mean - information noise, not literal sounds “noise”. (That problem was solved long ago by some good earplugs and noise canceling earphones.)
I’ve gotten used to spending less time on social media, regularly blocking most apps on my devices (anything with a feed news, most work communication apps, etc.), putting my phone and other devices aside for extended periods of time. Often go to work places with my iPad explicitly having its WiFi turned off and selecting cafes that don’t offer WiFi at all.
Negotiated better boundaries at work and in personal life where I exchange messages with people less often but try to make those interactions more meaningful, and people rarely expect me to respond to requests in less than 24 hours. Spent a lot of time setting up custom notification settings on all apps that would allow it, so I get fewer pings. With software, choosing fewer cloud-based options and using tools that are simple and require as few interruptions as possible.
Accustomed myself to lower-tech versions of doing things I like to do: reading on paper, writing by hand, drawing in physical sketchbooks, got a typewriter for typing without a screen. Choosing to call people on audio more, trying to make more of an effort to see people in person. Going to museums to look at art instead of browsing Pinterest. Defaulting to the library when looking for information.
I’m commenting on this now for two reasons:
1. I am pretty proud of myself for how much I’ve actually managed to reduce the constant stream of modern life esp. as a remote worker in tech!
2. Now that I’ve reached a breaking point of reducing enough noise that it’s NOTICEABLE - I am struck by the silence. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to navigate it and fill it. I made this space to be able to read and write and think more deeply - for now I feel stuck in limbo where I’m just reacquainting myself with the concept of having any space in my mind at all.
Regularized Random Fourier Features and Finite Element Reconstruction for Operator Learning in Sobolev Space
Xinyue Yu, Hayden Schaeffer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17884 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17884 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.17884
arXiv:2512.17884v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Operator learning is a data-driven approximation of mappings between infinite-dimensional function spaces, such as the solution operators of partial differential equations. Kernel-based operator learning can offer accurate, theoretically justified approximations that require less training than standard methods. However, they can become computationally prohibitive for large training sets and can be sensitive to noise. We propose a regularized random Fourier feature (RRFF) approach, coupled with a finite element reconstruction map (RRFF-FEM), for learning operators from noisy data. The method uses random features drawn from multivariate Student's $t$ distributions, together with frequency-weighted Tikhonov regularization that suppresses high-frequency noise. We establish high-probability bounds on the extreme singular values of the associated random feature matrix and show that when the number of features $N$ scales like $m \log m$ with the number of training samples $m$, the system is well-conditioned, which yields estimation and generalization guarantees. Detailed numerical experiments on benchmark PDE problems, including advection, Burgers', Darcy flow, Helmholtz, Navier-Stokes, and structural mechanics, demonstrate that RRFF and RRFF-FEM are robust to noise and achieve improved performance with reduced training time compared to the unregularized random feature model, while maintaining competitive accuracy relative to kernel and neural operator tests.
toXiv_bot_toot
heise | Noise-Cancelling-Kopfhörer für 21 Euro: Das taugt der Ugreen HiTune Max5c
Der HiTune Max5c verspricht für schmales Geld aktive Geräuschunterdrückung, lange Laufzeiten, LDAC und Multipoint-Verbindung. Doch wie gut klingt der Kopfhörer?
heise | In Ruhe genießen: Elf Over-Ear-Kopfhörer im Test
Viele Over-Ear-Kopfhörer klingen gut, Modelle mit Active Noise Cancellation filtern Störgeräusche heraus. Doch was taugen Bose, Sonos, Sony & Co. wirklich?
ht…
Apart from being cruel this is probably a criminal act - not much different then sitting on a sidewalk and shooting passer-by with a BB-gun.
My city (Santa Cruz) installed these machines to drive homeless people away from some tunnels where assaults had been happening. I went there - but the version used there was tuned to be detectable only by ears younger than my own, but I did get the queasy sensation.
In any case, I would consider these to be a form of criminal (and also civ…
MonochromeEvolutionaryBioDigitalCellularAutomataSimulation
Unlike the recently shared[1] multi-cellular struggles, these here are some selected research stills (handpicked from tens of thousands) of only single CA configurations (aka mono-cultures) which I found interesting/promising and which were then used as raw ingredients/candidates for my infinitely evolving C-SCAPE project[2]...
Each of these cellular automata is 1.5D, meaning each pixel row is one generation, but I allowe…
One of my servers was making a weird noise so I performed a bit of “percussive maintenance” and now it’s making a louder weird noise.
I recently researched the etymology of two interesting German words:
- "nonchalant" (informal, relaxed, casual, carefree, easy-going): I found that interesting because it's obviously a negation and I never read the non-negated form "chalant". Turns out that the non-negated form goes back to latin "calēre" (warm, to be hot, to be alarmed, to be fired up)
- "verschollen" (lost, missing, nothing has been known about the whereabouts of sth. or sb. for a long time). I found it weird because I couldn't make any sense of "schollen". This might be related to "verschallen" (stop making noise) and might go back to old high German "skellan" (which is also related to German "Schelle", a small bell). So, "verschollen" can be seen as a euphemistic expression because stop making noise is used to refer to being lost (and maybe dead).
#etymology #linguistics #German
I would like to listen to the clean broadcast play-by-play announcer audio with noise-cancelling headphones at a hockey game, rather than the often-incomprehensible booming echo over the arena's PA system mixed with screaming people.
That sounds a lot like an assistive technology.
Possibly once existing as a tiny AM radio station, BYOR.
Does it exist today?
#hockey #audio
Okay, initial thoughts on the Thinkpad P14s Gen 6:
- The laptop is better behaved thermally and noise-wise than the X1C with the Intel Core 155U.
- The CPU and GPU seem to be sipping power (3W/3W) which is nice. I haven't punched the CPU yet with something like a vicious `ffmpeg` AV1 encode.
- Replacing RAM/NVMe isn't too painful, the screws in the bottom case of the laptop are captive. Still have to deal with some plastic clips.
- The screen is fine, nothing to…
Phase Transitions of the Additive Uniform Noise Channel with Peak Amplitude and Cost Constraint
Jonas Stapmanns, Catarina Dias, Luke Eilers, Tobias K\"uhn, Jean-Pascal Pfister
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12427
1/ A bit of a pickle… C has had a rough life with mental health. She was diagnosed with #autism around 6 months ago while in her late 30s. She’s terrible at emotional regulation and is unable to cope with things like our baby crying. Half the week we have the four older kids with us too and she struggles greatly with the noise and chaos of it all. I’ve been working from home for the last couple …
Escape-Induced Temporally Correlated Noise Driven Universality Crossover
Mrinal Manna, Sourav Mukherjee, Soumen Giri, Pramod Bhakuni, Sajal Barman, Arnab Kumar Pariari, Anil Gome, Markus Hucker, V. Raghavendra Reddy, Anupam Roy, Sudipta Roy Barman, Smarajit Karmakar, Chandana Mondal, Rajib Batabyal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12593
Make Some Noise
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: #GreatAusPods
#Blakes7 Series D, Episode 13 - Blake
VILA: Why did they land it so far away?
SOOLIN: Presumably they thought the noise would alert someone.
AVON: In your case, they could have put it down on the roof without any trouble.
https://
Wren Loud and Bold Ambient (2021-06) - Ambient soundscape from 16WW back garden birdlife; small bird makes big noise! #wren #soundscape #fieldRecording -
Man, I leave my PC idling on Linux and I often forget I have it on because it makes practically no noise. If I leave this thing on while on Windows I can hear the fan going crazy all the time.
Low and high frequency noise in LEDs
Danylo Bohomolov (Chemnitz University of Technology, National Technical University of Ukraine "Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute"), Vita Ivanova (National Technical University of Ukraine "Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute"), Ulrich T. Schwarz (Chemnitz University of Technology)
https://
moving all my email newsletter/rss reading to mastodon, so I have a single source of random noise to suffocate. (@… is pretty useful)
(consolidating instead to an rss reader might be ok if I could get non-public mastodon posts in the reader. since I can't, this way seems better for now.)
(treating non-public as a separate thing might be ok, but I didn&#…
yes, that was me on the corner of jackson & stadium holding up my POWER to the PEOPLE sign, flashing peace signs to enthusiastic supporters in passing cars, filled with hope and inspiration from the crowd and the noise
power to the homeless, to the refugees, to the victims of racism and poverty, of oppression and injustice, power to the people right now
Evaluating the Impact of Radiographic Noise on Chest X-ray Semantic Segmentation and Disease Classification Using a Scalable Noise Injection Framework
Derek Jiu, Kiran Nijjer, Nishant Chinta, Ryan Bui, Ben Liu, Kevin Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25265
Meta prompt engineering - using GenAI to optimize prompts for GenAI - is the homeopathy of computer science.
Both promise better results by diluting the real essence to the point of nonexistence. What is left is pure noise.
BGRem: A background noise remover for astronomical images based on a diffusion model
R. Nicolaas, S. Caron, F. Stoppa, S. Bhattacharyya, R. Ruiz de Austri, P. J. Groot, A. J. Levan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04718
Enhanced pitch perception in early blind individuals and musicians is due to reduced internal noise https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.25.690447v1
I have become so used to not owning anything (beyond my electronics) that I feel anxious at the idea of buying big things like a car or even a house. When I used to have my own bike I was always going to check on it whenever I heard a noise outside. Eventually I moved on to those shared bikes and that's much more relaxing..
How do you all deal with owning things? If you own a car, or a flat / house, are you actually more happy than if you were renting it? If it got stolen or damaged in…
💥2000 meters to Andriivka
The closer you get to combat, the more jarring it becomes.
Death comes randomly.
The noise is terrifying;
the fear is stifling.
And most people can’t bear to see what war actually does to the human body
—how a brief instant can transform a living, breathing person
into ugly scraps of flesh.
The fighting in Ukraine has, in many ways,
transformed the nature of warfare.
As many as 80 percent of battle casu…
Abstain and Validate: A Dual-LLM Policy for Reducing Noise in Agentic Program Repair
Jos\'e Cambronero, Michele Tufano, Sherry Shi, Renyao Wei, Grant Uy, Runxiang Cheng, Chin-Jung Liu, Shiying Pan, Satish Chandra, Pat Rondon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03217
Haven‘t heard of Trillium but it looks cool. A self-hosted alternative to my Trello board that I‘m just using as a todo list and more and more like a note-taking app anyways. 90% of the UI widgets in Trello are just noise for me. https://mastodon.art/@NiwlCraft/115734410857545510
Two easy questions to keep in mind when considering using an LLM for anything, if you’re going to do that:
1. Does it matter if it’s wrong?
2. Is it useful to have examples of what’s typical?
Those two cut through a lot of noise.
/end
Universal behaviors of the multi-time correlation functions of random processes with renewal: the step noise case (the random velocity of a L\'evy walk)
Marco Bianucci, Mauro Bologna, Daniele Lagomarsino-Oneto, Riccardo Mannella
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11747
Drilling for #AmateurRadio #POTA, I cranked the Morse Walker noise up to "heavy" and was surprised when I heard only one caller when the counter said I had two. The other was literally lost in the noise.…
Impact of nonlinear spectral broadening on the phase noise properties of electro-optic frequency comb
Aleksandr Razumov, Yijia Cai, Jasper Riebesehl, Eric Sillekens, Ronit Sohanpal, Francesco Da Ros, Zhixin Liu, Darko Zibar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02868
Comment on "Physical significance of artificial numerical noise in direct numerical simulation of turbulence"
Ryan M. McMullen, Michael A. Gallis, Ishan Srivastava, Andrew J. Nonaka, John B. Bell, Alejandro L. Garcia
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04828
NGGAN: Noise Generation GAN Based on the Practical Measurement Dataset for Narrowband Powerline Communications
Ying-Ren Chien, Po-Heng Chou, You-Jie Peng, Chun-Yuan Huang, Hen-Wai Tsao, Yu Tsao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01850
Series D, Episode 09 - Sand
TARRANT: Then if he's dead, how come his body's still in perfect condition after five years? [He touches the corpse.] Servalan, his body's still flexible; he's still warm.
SERVALAN: Is he? [There is a noise from outside and a banging on the outer door. They run to it.]
https://blake.…
A Noise Resilient Approach for Robust Hurst Exponent Estimation
Malith Premarathna (Department of Statistics, University of Nebraska-Lincoln), Fabrizio Ruggeri (CNR IMATI, Milano), Dixon Vimalajeewa (Department of Statistics, University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04811
Seeing Life at the Quantum Limit
Congratulations to
Dr Nicolas Mauranyapin,
winner of QUBIC’s inaugural Scientific Achievement Award - Cell Theme!
Nico has built a quantum-limited microscope, so sensitive it operates at the quantum shot noise limit,
the same benchmark used in gravitational wave detection.
This means it can capture the faintest signals nature allows.
This breakthrough enables real-time observation of living cells without damage,
one of my hottest takes is that shared laundry machines in an apartment building is better than in-unit. it's a good example of how individual solutions can be worse than collective ones.
with shared machines you can use two machines at once at a less-busy time. a single in-unit machine would take twice as long. in-unit means the noise the machine generates is inside your apartment, so you can't have guests over or take a meeting while it's running
C has a very low threshold for coping with noise and chaos. Imagine for a moment, 5 kids, C and I in a small 3 bedroom house. The four older kids are boisterous, loud and hyperactive. And then there’s the baby. It’s a lot for me to cope with… and then imagine on top of that, C regularly spiralling into #autistic meltdowns. Fuck. My. Life. I wonder what the divorce rate is for those on the…
A Closed-form Expression of the Gaussian Noise Model Supporting O-Band Transmission
Zelin Gan, Henrique Buglia, Romulo Aparecido, Mindaugas Jarmolovi\v{c}ius, Eric Sillekens, Jiaqian Yang, Ronit Sohanpal, Robert I. Killey, Polina Bayvel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11867
Statistical Benchmarking of Optimization Methods for Variational Quantum Eigensolver under Quantum Noise
Silvie Ill\'esov\'a, Tom\'a\v{s} Bezd\v{e}k, Vojt\v{e}ch Nov\'ak, Bruno Senjean, Martin Beseda
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08727
Composite Generalized Quadratic Noise Modulation via Signal Addition: Towards Higher Dimensional Noise Modulations
Hadi Zayyani, Mohammad Salman, Felipe A. P. de Figueiredo, Rausley A. A. de Souza
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01776
On the Noise Robustness of Affine Frequency Division Multiplexing: Analysis and Applications
Vincent Savaux, Steve Sawadogo, Hyeon Seok Rou, Giuseppe Thadeu Freitas de Abreu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03901
Characterizing Noise in Controlling Superconducting Qubits
Yuanzheng Paul Tan, Yung Szen Yap, Long Hoang Nguyen, Rangga P. Budoyo, Patrick Bore, Kun Hee Park, Christoph Hufnagel, Rainer Dumke
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18482
Characterizing Superconducting Qubits using Averaged Circuit Eigenvalue Sampling
Tauno Palomaki, Shu Xin Wu, Noah Huffman, Samuel D. Park, James Shackford, Ben DalFavero, Leigh Norris, Ryan Sitler, Paraj Titum, Kevin Schultz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02454
@cdarwin@c.im
