Tootfinder

Day 21: Aya Yoshinaga
I'm actually generally much less aware of the creators involved in the anime I watch, for a number of reasons, and the few anime directors I could name without looking them up were all men before I started this list. I've now got a short list of anime directors/writers who are women, and the first I'll include here is Yoshinaga, in part because she was pivotal to one of my favorite lesser-known anime, "Kurau Phantom Memory". It was actually one of the first anime I watched ever, but I didn't like it just because of that, since I've rewatched it at least twice and still regard it highly. It's got a pretty cool science fiction setting, an extremely cool barely-comprehensible alien race, a female protagonist who is not sexualized and not subjected to romance, and it centers a platonic relationship torn apart by technological hubris. Very "cool seinen stuff that wouldn't make it past the focus groups today" stuff.
Besides Kurau, Yoshinaga has worked on other great stuff like Golden Kamuy, Azumanga Daioh, Durarara, and Fullmetal Alchemist, and when you see a correlation like that between well-written shows and the same writer showing up again and again, it's clear there's talent there, even if most of these are manga-based.
Probably going to circle back to at least one more anime writer, but for tomorrow I'll move on to manga probably, since I want to space out all my YA enthusiasm a bit.
#30AuthorsNoMen

original character do not steal

On the Combinatorics of Pseudo-Latin Squares
Andrew Pendleton
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11980 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11980

On the Combinatorics of Pseudo-Latin Squares
We introduce a new class of combinatorial objects called consecutive pseudo-Latin squares (CPLSs), a variant of Latin squares in which at least one row or column is in consecutive or reverse-consecutive order, but every element may not appear in every row or column. We derive exact and asymptotic formulas for the number of CPLSs of order $n$, showing that their proportion among all pseudo-Latin squares (PLSs) rapidly approaches zero as $n\to\infty$. We also analyze the distribution of CPLSs und…

Finally, what Xia & Lindell call a "separation problem" is, in our view, a feature of our approach and not a bug.
If, e.g., all languages in a family are polysynthetic (or none are), that’s not a statistical artefact – it’s the signal. The outcome is well associated with genealogy, showing that family membership captures someth genuinely informative about the process. When the model finds that family explains a large share of the variance, that's not a failure–it's evidence that phylogenetic structure dominates the pattern.
So while Xia & Lindell insist that "autocorrelation due to relationships and distance cannot be captured in family or regional-level analyses", we see that as an empirical question – and we treated it as one.
The real test is whether a mixed model that explicitly represents phylogeny and geography performs worse than their alternative, where the entire shared history of languages and environments is effectively collapsed into a single dimension (an eigenvector).
In other words: we model relationships – Xia & Lindell summarise them into one number per language.

Day 20: bell hooks.
Despite having decided to continue to 30, number 20 feels important, and hooks gets the spot in part because I haven't yet included a non-fiction feminist author, which feels like an obvious thing to include on such a list. The one category of author being bumped out of the first 20 here is anime writers, but I'll follow up with one of them, along with more academics and mangaka who I've been itching to include.
In any case, hooks is absolutely legendary as a feminist writer for good reason, and as a teacher I've especially appreciated her writing on pedagogy like "Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom" and "Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom". These have challenged me to teach at a higher level, and while I'm not sure I've completely succeeded, they're important to me. They also pair well with Paolo Friere's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed", but hooks always seems to be focused on very practical advice and it's incredibly direct in her writing, even though her advice isn't always straightforward to implement. In fact, that's one of the things I value about her writing: when the truth is complicated or the real work is messy interpersonal relationships that need to be negotiated with each student, she's not afraid to say so and give good advice for navigating those waters instead of trying to dispense simple-seeming platitudes or formulas for success that paper over the deeper issues. Her concern has always been truth, rather than simplicity or audience comfort and the popularity it might seem to entail, which I think is part of why her legacy endures so well.
#20AuthorsNoMen
#30AuthorsNoMen

Jay Jones won the Virginia Attorney General election because people hate President Donald Trump and what he’s doing to this country.
And in an election that provided, as elections invariably do, a jillion takeaways, let’s not lose of sight of what is obviously and toweringly takeaway number one:
Americans have developed a big-time case of buyer’s remorse about Trump, and a very solid majority of them despise what Trump has perpetrated against America.

Verdict Number One: America Has Big-Time Buyer’s Remorse About Trump
Elections are the one opportunity we have to see what the people think. And what they think is clear: Trump sucks.

Selling Privacy in Blockchain Transactions
Georgios Chionas, Olga Gorelkina, Piotr Krysta, Rida Laraki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08096 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08096 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.08096
arXiv:2512.08096v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study methods to enhance privacy in blockchain transactions from an economic angle. We consider mechanisms for privacy-aware users whose utility depends not only on the outcome of the mechanism but also negatively on the exposure of their economic preferences. Specifically, we study two auction-theoretic settings with privacy-aware users. First, we analyze an order flow auction, where a user auctions off to specialized agents, called searchers, the right to execute her transaction while maintaining a degree of privacy. We examine how the degree of privacy affects the revenue of the auction and, broadly, the net utility of the privacy-aware user. In this new setting, we describe the optimal auction, which is a sealed-bid auction. Subsequently, we analyze a variant of a Dutch auction in which the user gradually decreases the price and the degree of privacy until the transaction is sold. We compare the revenue of this auction to that of the optimal one as a function of the number of communication rounds. Then, we introduce a two-sided market - a privacy marketplace - with multiple users selling their transactions under their privacy preferences to multiple searchers. We propose a posted-price mechanism for the two-sided market that guarantees constant approximation of the optimal social welfare while maintaining incentive compatibility (from both sides of the market) and budget balance. This work builds on the emerging line of research that attempts to improve the performance of economic mechanisms by appending cryptographic primitives to them.
toXiv_bot_toot

Now, for any person with a shred of moral dignity, there's some time during US history where you would have to admit that an insurrection or rebellion was necessary. Only complete scum bag fascists would try to argue that a slave revolt wasn't an absolute good, and that it was a bad thing when those revolts were crushed. Anyone with a shred of moral decency has to admit that there is at least one point in US history where the nation was doing something so incredibly evil, that it would have been good if people would have rose up and stopped it.
Today we're talking about the displacement and genocide of people in Gaza. We can look at any number of genocide on US soil carried out by the US government. Who, with any moral clarity, wouldn't point to those and want to believe that they would have resisted, violently if necessary, against those slaughters. Who, that today condemns slavery, could look at John Brown and not wish to have the moral integrity to fight and die along side of him?
Every liberal who actually believes in justice, who isn't just virtue signaling out of guilt, should be able to point to a time in history where they would absolutely agree with the most militant resistance. For those folks, I always wonder, when did that evil end? Where is your line? Have you thought about that?

Moody Urbanity - TWO 2️⃣
情绪化城市 - 贰 2️⃣
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️ Fujifilm NEOPAN SS, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

An important update from the Director of Procurement at one of my customers:
"From Monday 1 December, all your invoices submitted for payment to the Invoice team must include a valid PO number. Invoices without a PO number will be rejected and returned to you. Please ensure that work is not started without a PO number; the PO number will be sent to you via our ERP system, Tech One."
Great, so they have introduced a manual step into my automated process.

On the Role of Temperature Sampling in Test-Time Scaling
Yuheng Wu, Azalia Mirhoseini, Thierry Tambe
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02611 https://arxiv.org/pdf…

On the Role of Temperature Sampling in Test-Time Scaling
Large language models (LLMs) can improve reasoning at inference time through test-time scaling (TTS), where multiple reasoning traces are generated and the best one is selected. Prior work shows that increasing the number of samples K steadily improves accuracy. In this paper, we demonstrate that this trend does not hold indefinitely: at large K, further scaling yields no gains, and certain hard questions remain unsolved regardless of the number of traces. Interestingly, we find that different …

from my link log —
Determination of the fifth Busy Beaver value.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12337
saved 2025-09-17 https://dotat.at/:/7EVGI.html…

Determination of the fifth Busy Beaver value
We prove that $S(5) = 47,176,870$ using the Coq proof assistant. The Busy Beaver value $S(n)$ is the maximum number of steps that an $n$-state 2-symbol Turing machine can perform from the all-zero tape before halting, and $S$ was historically introduced by Tibor Radó in 1962 as one of the simplest examples of an uncomputable function. The proof enumerates $181,385,789$ Turing machines with 5 states and, for each machine, decides whether it halts or not. Our result marks the first determination…

Day 10: Stacey Mason
Another academic, but this time one of my compatriots; we overlapped at UC Santa Cruz as advisees of Michael Mates, and even collaborated on a Twitch stream called ScholarsPlay for a bit, although we never coauthored any papers. We did chat about our research, and I had many good discussions with her about agency in interactive fiction, a topic we both published on. Her paper "On Games and Links: Extending the Vocabulary of Agency and Immersion in Interactive Narratives" (#20AuthorsNoMen

Note on the Number of Almost Ordinary Triangles
Adrian Dumitrescu, J\'anos Pach
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03445 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03445

Note on the Number of Almost Ordinary Triangles
Let $X$ be a set of $n$ points in the plane, not all on a line. According to the Gallai-Sylvester theorem, $X$ always spans an \emph{ordinary line}, i.e., one that passes through precisely 2 elements of $X$. Given an integer $c\ge 2,$ a \emph{line} spanned by $X$ is called \emph{$c$-ordinary} if it passes through at most $c$ points of $X$. A \emph{triangle} spanned by 3 noncollinear points of $X$ is called \emph{$c$-ordinary} if all 3 lines determined by its sides are \emph{$c$-ordina…

Or maybe modern systems use LLMs to count, and all they need to pass quality control is a plausible number, not a correct one.

In #StarTrek, humanity did not just wait for other species to come visit them, but actively sought them out by sending out a number of probes into deep space. And one of them is the topic of today's #TrekTriviaTuesday question.
As always no googling and no spoiling the answer for othe…

Army № 39 Anthony Paradiso jumps in front of Cornell Quarterback № 18 Stefano Luis moments after Luis passed the ball in Sprint Football under the lights this Friday
#photo #photography #football

Good Morning #Canada
A bit late this morning as we went out for a big family breakfast. I think I'll chip away at my #CanadianCapitals series by sharing some tidbits about one of our older cities. Halifax, because of its large natural harbour, served as an important military base for British ships in North America. Founded in 1749 and incorporated as a city in 1842, it is known for a number of 1sts. Halifax had the 1st public school in Canada as well as the first law school and art college. Canada’s 1st newspaper, the Halifax Gazette, was established in 1752, and the city had the first all electric city lighting grid in North America. The harbour was also the site for the world's largest man-made explosion in #WWI when a munitions transport collided with another ship. Awesome place to visit but try not to jump when they fire the traditional noon cannon.
#CanadaIsAwesome
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/halifax

A sum rule for derangements
Jean-Christophe Pain
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14672 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14672

A sum rule for derangements
We propose a sum rule for derangements. Three different proofs are provided. The first one involves integral representations and the second one relies on the Hermite identity for the integer part of the product of an integer by a real number. The third one, which, unlike the previous ones, is not based on induction, proceeds directly from a recurrence relation for the number of derangements.

TASO: Task-Aligned Sparse Optimization for Parameter-Efficient Model Adaptation
Daiye Miao, Yufang Liu, Jie Wang, Changzhi Sun, Yunke Zhang, Demei Yan, Shaokang Dong, Qi Zhang, Yuanbin Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17688

TASO: Task-Aligned Sparse Optimization for Parameter-Efficient Model Adaptation
LoRA has become one of the most widely used parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods due to its simplicity and effectiveness. However, numerous studies have shown that LoRA often introduces substantial parameter redundancy, which not only increases the number of trainable parameters but also hinders the effectiveness of fine-tuning. Since identifying redundant parameters in LoRA is inherently difficult, how to eliminate them efficiently and accurately remains a challenging problem. In this paper…

I’m not saying that this is good, but it recalled for me the ancient times when the phone company (there was only one) sent everyone a fat (in urban areas) book in tiny type on thin paper with everyone’s phone number, alphabetically by surname. Businesses were in their own book. You could also go to the reference section of the public library and use the book with all of the numbers in your area in numerical order.
Ancient times. The 1990s @…

Here is CUPW's fact sheet on Postal Banking “A Bank for Everyone”
Fun fact!
"our post office used to have a national savings bank – up until 1969 – and there is no reason we shouldn't have one today”
Some other reasons:
"Banks are failing to meet the needs of a growing number of Canadians. Thousands of towns and villages across our country do not have a bank. But many of them have a post office that could provide access to financial and banking services.”
"Postal banking is lucrative!
New Zealand: Kiwibank generated 81% of New Zealand Post's after tax profits.”
"France: Banque Postale has an obligation to provide products and services to as many people as possible. It provides a Livret A or passbook savings account, at no charge, to anyone who requests it. It also provides banking services to the financially vulnerable and financing for social housing, voluntary organizations and microentrepreneurs lacking bank credit.”
"Canada Post's secret postal banking study
Canada Post conducted a secret four-year study on postal banking that indicates that adding this service "would be a win-win strategy" for the corporation. This study was obtained though an Access to Information (ATI) request. Unfortunately, 701 of the study's 811 pages were redacted. CUPW has asked Canada Post's President to release the full report, but he has refused.”
#CanadaPost #UPW #Strike #Union #Solidarity
https://www.cupw.ca/en/campaign/resources/postal-banking-–-bank-everyone-fact-sheet

Determination of the fifth Busy Beaver value
The bbchallenge Collaboration, Justin Blanchard (Skelet), Daniel Briggs (Skelet), Konrad Deka (Skelet), Nathan Fenner (Skelet), Yannick Forster (Skelet), Georgi Georgiev (Skelet), Matthew L. House, Rachel Hunter, Iijil, Maja K\k{a}dzio{\l}ka, Pavel Kropitz, Shawn Ligocki, mxdys, Mateusz Na\'sciszewski, savask, Tristan St\'erin, Chris Xu, Jason Yuen, Th\'eo Zimmermann

Determination of the fifth Busy Beaver value
We prove that $S(5) = 47,176,870$ using the Coq proof assistant. The Busy Beaver value $S(n)$ is the maximum number of steps that an $n$-state 2-symbol Turing machine can perform from the all-zero tape before halting, and $S$ was historically introduced by Tibor Radó in 1962 as one of the simplest examples of an uncomputable function. The proof enumerates $181,385,789$ Turing machines with 5 states and, for each machine, decides whether it halts or not. Our result marks the first determination…

On the Chromatic Number of Stable Kneser Hypergraphs: Verifying the Conjecture for New Families
Hamid Reza Daneshpajouh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22026 https://

On the Chromatic Number of Stable Kneser Hypergraphs: Verifying the Conjecture for New Families
One of the key unsolved conjectures in hypergraph coloring is about the chromatic number of $s$-stable $r$-uniform Kneser hypergraphs $\mathrm{KG}^r(n,k)_{s\textup{-stab}}$. The problem remains largely open, particularly in the case where $s > r\geq 3$. To the best of our knowledge, no information is available except a limited number of computations conducted for the instances when $r=3, 4$, $s=4, 5$, $k=2,3$ with some $n$ does not exceed 14. In this study, we verify the conjecture for infinity…

Spreadsheets!!!
Filled in my #dasher tracking sheet today and added a chart!
This one shows most of the stores I've got orders from since I started tracking that more closely in March. (there is a 'long tail' of <5 orders on the right that is not included in the picture.)
No big surprises for me in here. McDs and Dairy Queen are the 'bread and butter' locations. Other good performers pop up as the number of orders declines including NoodleBox, Boston Pizza, and Walmart.
Little Valley and Panago are good ones on the less frequent side.
7-11 is frequent, but pay is terrible.
“Walmart SFS" is their package delivery vs. grocery. It's an anomaly. It does not allow tips, and the orders are generally 5-10 packages at a time per offer which is why it has the most orders, but the very little cash.
I'm also always considering these numbers geographically... as in, where is the best place to stage myself for the most pay. There is a 'north' and 'south' side of town and It's not a clear choice.
#PortAlberni #DasherLife #DoorDash #Uber #GigWork #Charts #Data #Spreadsheet #AppleNumbers

Good Morning #Canada
I've been a bachelor since Thursday as my wife is in Toronto helping my daughter with her latest chemo session. She's back late Monday when life, for me, returns to normal. According to #StatsCan, being married at our age (late 60s) is the most prevalent relationship. But Canadians in younger age brackets are more likely these days to be living common-law and getting married later in life, if at all. Canada has one of the highest rates of common-law relationships worldwide and the highest in the G7. Between 1981 and 2021, common-law couples increased 447% while the number of married couples grew by only 26%. Common-law unions are most prevalent in Nunavut (52%), Quebec (43%), and the Northwest Territories (36%). It's no surprise that more than half of Canadians believe that marriage is not necessary, and even less surprising that this opinion is stronger with young men versus young women.
#CanadaIsAwesome #Relationship
https://madeinca.ca/marriage-statistics-canada/