Tootfinder

In the 1950s, the Air Force realized that planes were crashing because cockpits didn’t actually fit the pilots’ bodies. Wrong size = danger!! They commissioned a researcher to develop a new, more correct set of standard dimensions for the seat, yoke, etc.
That researcher, Gilbert S. Daniels, came up with 10 body measurements that matter to cockpit size. He gathered measurements of several thousand pilots. And the number of people who were at the average for all ten measurements? Zero. Not a single one.
“Average” proved to be a statistical construct, not a thing that actually exists as a person.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/
3/

I think we can actually prove that this constraint is the *only* constraint that can preserve freedom:
1. There will exist actors in a system who will wish to take advantage of others. Evolution drives survival and one strategy for increasing survival in an altruistic society is to become a parasite.
2. Expecting exploitative dynamics, a system needs to have a set of rules to manage exploitation.
3. If the set of rules is static it will lack the requisite variety necessary to manage the infinite possible behavior of humans so the system will fail.
4. If the system is dynamic then it must have a rule set about how it's own rules are updated. This would make the system recursive, which makes the system at least as complex as mathematics. Any system at least as complex as mathematics is necessarily either incomplete or inconsistent (Gödel's incompleteness theorem). If the system is incomplete, then constraints can be evaded which then allow a malicious agent to seize control of the system and update the rules for their own benefit. If constraints are incomplete, then a malicious agent can take advantage of others within the system.
5. Therefore, no social system can possibly protect freedom unless there exists a single metasystemic constraint (that the system must be optional) allowing for the system to be abandoned when compromised.
Oh, you might say, but this just means you have to infinitely abandon systems. Sure, but there's an evolutionary advantage to cooperation so there's evolutionary pressure to *not* be a malicious actor. So a malicious actor being able to compromise the whole system is likely to be a much more rare event. Compromising a system is a lot of work, so the first thing a malicious actor would want to do is preserve that work. They would want to lock you in. The most important objective to a malicious actor compromising a system would be to violate that metasystemic constraint, or all of their work goes out the window when everyone leaves.
And now you understand why borders exist, why fascists are obsessed with maintaining categories like gender, race, ethnicity, etc. This is why even Democrats like Newsom are on board with putting houseless people in concentration camps. And this is why the most important thing anarchists promote is the ability to choose not to be part of any of that.

TIL: Thorsten Kukuk works on no_new_privs/NoNewPrivs aka removing suid binaries from #openSUSE
Reading https://www.thkukuk.de/blog/no_new_privs/ I never realized how many such binaries exists.

The Virginia Senate just told UVA it’s not getting state funding if it accepts the compact since UVA exists to serve Virginia, its residents, & their interests
—not be a tool of the federal govt.
Scoop from our student newspaper, who’ve been doing vital reporting https://www.

Virginia Senate leaders express “unequivocal opposition” to Compact
The letter calls upon the University to immediately cease consideration of the Compact, and if not, the state will work to negatively impact the University’s funding.

#sqlite key value in 3 lines of sql

The fallacy I've experienced in both personal relations and international politics is the belief that there exists an option in which everything stays the same. Not touching the steering wheel, simply continuing as is, will mean all is well, and it's seemingly not as much of a decision as actively interfering is.
The trolly problem exposes this belief, yet we have not really overcome it.

On the Number of Small Points for Rational Maps
Jit Wu Yap
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12039 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12039…

On the Number of Small Points for Rational Maps
Let $K$ be a number field and $f: \mathbb{P}^1 \to \mathbb{P}^1$ a rational map of degree $d \geq 2$ with at most $s$ places of bad reduction, where we include all archimedean places. We prove that there exists constants $c_1,c_2 > 0$, depending only on $d$ and not on $f$ or $K$, such that $$ \# \left\{ x \in \mathbb{P}^1(K) \mid \widehat{h}_f(x) \leq \frac{c_1}{s} h_{\operatorname{rat}_d}(\langle f \rangle) \right\} \leq c_2 s \log(s). $$ Here, $\operatorname{rat}_d$ is the moduli space of rat…

If this file exists, please do NOT follow the widespread advice to overwrite it:
/usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf
Bug reports for the src and doc trees, and the wiki:
― <https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=291501>
― <

"What has not changed in 50 years is the fact we are still using centralized architectures, prone to government intrusion and privacy leaks. Maybe it is time to think about a “Post Cloud” era where information is distributed instead of centralized. Of course this raises questions of trust, cryptography, security and collaboration, but the technology to build such systems already exists. It is more of a question of policy and education than of technology."

Somebody Else's Computer As A Service
On November 12, 1990, a 35 year-old Bill Gates introduced his "Information at your Fingertips" concept during his keynote at COMDEX. The PC, he said, would become "more personal," integrating "fax, voice and electronic mail," and providing "easy access to a broad range of information." More or less at the same time, Tim Berners-Lee was giving the final touches to the first web browser and web server software ever put in production. Bill Gates was right; as any Internet user can easily confirm 3…

💧 Ultrasonic device dramatically speeds harvesting of water from the air
#water…

Ultrasonic device dramatically speeds harvesting of water from the air
Feeling thirsty? Why not tap into the air? Even in desert conditions, there exists some level of humidity that, with the right material, can be soaked up and squeezed out to produce clean drinking water. In recent years, scientists have developed a host of promising sponge-like materials for this "atmospheric water harvesting."

I wonder how well the low-curiosity people incompetently running our mostly-idle government have understood the nature of who government helps the most.
HINT: If government help was mostly for the poor, we would not have both billionaires and homelessness.
Air traffic control is a state-socialist subsidy service. It exists to make commercial passenger and cargo airlines feasible, an unevenly-distributed benefit. Reducing capacity by 10% won't affect 90% of Americans.
…

The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol

To my eyes, this is an act of war by the US upon the nation of Venezuela. (Not to mention the blurring of GPS and the sinking of boats by the US.)
If indeed a state of war now exists (to borrow a phrase from FDR's speech to Congress after Pearl Harbor) then Venezuela could be anticipated to wage war against the US - endangering US people (including tourists) everywhere in the world.
El Cheato and Whiskey Pete are getting the US in Vietnam Part II.
"Trump says airs…

On singular points in the essential spectrum
Alexander Plakhotnikov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11025 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11025

On singular points in the essential spectrum
The paper investigates the existence of a limit in the operator norm for a family of operators $T_z(H)= F(H-z)^{-1}F^*$ for $z$ tending to the real axis. The conditions for the $H$ operator and the rigging operator $F$ are established, under which the limit exists. Special attention is paid to the separation of cases when the limit point belongs and does not belong to the point spectrum $H$.

Languages of Words of Low Automatic Complexity Are Hard to Compute
Joey Chen, Bj{\o}rn Kjos-Hanssen, Ivan Koswara, Linus Richter, Frank Stephan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07696 …

Languages of Words of Low Automatic Complexity Are Hard to Compute
The automatic complexity of a finite word (string) is an analogue for finite automata of Sipser's distinguishing complexity (1983) and was introduced by Shallit and Wang (2001). For a finite alphabet $Σ$ of at least two elements, we consider the non-deterministic automatic complexity given by exactly - yet not necessarily uniquely - accepting automata: a word $x \in Σ^*$ has exact non-deterministic automatic complexity $k \in \mathbb{N}$ if there exists a non-deterministic automaton of $k$ st…

Hadamard ranks of algebraic varieties
Dario Antolini, Guido Mont\'ufar, Alessandro Oneto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05231 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05…

Hadamard ranks of algebraic varieties
Motivated by the study of decompositions of tensors as Hadamard products (i.e., coefficient-wise products) of low-rank tensors, we introduce the notion of Hadamard rank of a given point with respect to a projective variety: if it exists, it is the smallest number of points in the variety such that the given point is equal to their Hadamard product. We prove that if the variety $X$ is not contained in a coordinate hyperplane or a binomial hypersurface, then the generic point has a finite $X$-Had…

100% I've never seen graphical glitches this prevalent on any Apple software since I started using MacOS in 2003. Definitely the glitchiest iOS I've ever seen. @… https://pdx.social/@louie/115280388834

My wife and I are looking to upgrade our vehicle, a 10 year old Mazda CX-3. Not sure if it will be another new vehicle or used but I've been looking at car reviews on YouTube and reading up on what I can expect. So I was interested when the YouTube algorithm served up an exciting review of the newly announced CX-30 Hybrid. But it was complete AI bullcrap. No such vehicle exists. Gotta love the times we live in.

A question for musician friends here: does anyone know if an available tool already exists for this, or if I’m imagining a problem everyone else has quietly solved? (I should really make it myself, but am not in the mood to. So far when combining different EDOs or working out conversions I do it all manually each time, which obviously takes quite a while.)
What I’m looking for is a simple MIDI transformer that maps note numbers from one chosen EDO to another, using a fixed reference no…

Bounds on the propagation radius in power domination
Imran Allie, Brandon du Preez, Dean Reagon, Adriana Roux
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02211 https://arxi…

Bounds on the propagation radius in power domination
Let $G$ be a graph and let $S \subseteq V(G)$. It is said that $S$ \textit{dominates} $N[S]$. We say that $S$ \textit{monitors} vertices of $G$ as follows. Initially, all dominated vertices are monitored. If there exists a vertex $v \in G$ which is not monitored, but has all but one of its neighbours monitored, then $v$ becomes monitored itself. This step is called a \textit{propagation} step and is repeated until the process terminates. The process terminates when the there are no unmonitored …

The federal government under Trump, can’t be trusted on really anything, because everything in this government exists to serve Dear Leader — not the American people
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/dallas-shooting-charlie-kirk-fbi-patel

You cannot trust the federal government
Everything they say should be assumed to be a lie.

Strong Kurtz Randomness and Binary Expansions of Reordered Computable Numbers
Peter Hertling, Philip Janicki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22406 https://arxiv…

Strong Kurtz Randomness and Binary Expansions of Reordered Computable Numbers
A real number is called left-computable if there exists a computable increasing sequence of rational numbers converging to it. In this article we investigate the Kolmogorov complexity and the binary expansions of a very specific subset of the left-computable numbers. We show in our main result that a real number is reordered computable if, and only if, it is left-computable and not strongly Kurtz random. In preparation of this, we characterize strong Kurtz randomness by a suitable notion of ran…

Zero variance self-normalized importance sampling via estimating equations
Art B. Owen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00389 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00389

Zero variance self-normalized importance sampling via estimating equations
In ordinary importance sampling with a nonnegative integrand there exists an importance sampling strategy with zero variance. Practical sampling strategies are often based on approximating that optimal solution, potentially approaching zero variance. There is a positivisation extension of that method to handle integrands that take both positive and negative values. Self-normalized importance sampling uses a ratio estimate, for which the optimal sampler does not have zero variance and so zero va…

Let's be honest. I've been a strong supporter of #OpenPGP (or #PGP in general) for a long time. And I still can't think of any real alternative that exists right now. And I kept believing it's not "that hard" — but it doesn't seem like it's getting any easier. The big problem with standards like that are tools.
#WebOfTrust is hard, and impractical for a lot of people. It doesn't really help how many tools implement trust. I mean, I sometimes receive encrypted mail via #EvolutionMail — and Evolution makes it really hard for me to reply encrypted without permanently trusting the sender!
The whole SKS keyserver mess doesn't help PGP at all. Nowadays finding someone's key is often hard. If you're lucky, WKD will work. If you're not, you're up for searching a bunch of keyservers, GitHub, or perhaps random websites. And it definitely doesn't help that some of these may hold expired keys, with people uploading their new key only to a subset of them or forgetting to do it.
On top of that, we have interoperability issues. Definitely doesn't speak well when GnuPG can't import keys from popular keyservers over lack of UIDs. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Now with diverging OpenPGP standards around the corner, we're a step ahead from true interoperability problems. Just imagine convincing someone to use OpenPGP, only to tell them afterwards that they've used non-portable tool / settings, and their key doesn't work for you.
That's really not how you advocate for #encryption.

Covering rings by proper ideals
Malcolm Hoong Wai Chen, Eric Swartz, Nicholas J. Werner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18915 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18915…

It's also worth noticing that, when viewed through this lens, a government shutdown with no possibility of resolution is not a mistake. It's the objective. They see everything the government does (outside of violence) as unnecessary.
Their government exists to protect markets by providing capitalists with death squads. Everything else can be disposed of. They don't want to *resolve* the shutdown. The shutdown is what winning looks like for them.