Tootfinder

"In the hands of Islamophobes and pro-Israel flunkies, 'taqiyya' has served as a useful term to dismiss not only criticism, but the growing avalanche of inconvenient facts."
**The Truth About Taqiyya and the Concealment of Genocide**
https://zeteo.com/p/the-truth-about-taqiyya-and-the-concealment

War is an unconscionable horror. The illusions of "international law" and "rules of war" have lead us to believe that war can be clean, managed, and "civilized."
But wars are fought by humans and humans are messy. Humans are not well suited to following orderly rules. Humans respond to their environment. Humans in extraordinary situations can be extraordinarily vindictive and brutal. Sufficiently traumatized humans can act without a conscience, spreading trauma like an infection. If humans respond to their situation, then there can be no "civilized" war because war is itself an situation outside of the society. It is a place that promotes antisocial behavior and punishes pro-social behavior. War cannot be expected to follow "international law" because it is what fills the void created by the failure of "international law" (so long as we rely on nations).
To call for war is to inflict atrocities on civilians. It is to kill the parents and children who serve, and to destroy the combatants who survive. It is to infect both sides with a trauma that will spread if untreated, when soldiers come home or when they become mercenaries in other wars.
And yet... there are times when the brutality, the incompetence, the evil becomes so unbearable that no other option exists, when taking up arms is simply bringing symmetry to an existing asymmetric conflict. There are times when the worst possible thing is inescapable, though it can never be justified.
In this new era of war, in the scramble of conflict under the collapsing of the (poorly named) "Pax Americana," I hope that we, the people, can understand that war is not a tool to fulfill an objective. It is not part of a larger strategy. It is not an extension of deplomacy.
War is a failure.
While it may be the only way to deal with the irrational - the genocidal, the slaver, the dictator - it is still a failure. It is a failure to build a world in which these people can't control armies and economies, can't turn populations in to cults and bend nations to their will.
And we will continue to have such wars until we unite against those who would use as as pawns, who would control our lives and lead us to our deaths. We will have these wars until we unite, as one world, against those rulers. This is what I mean, and what a lot of other people mean, when we say, "No War, but Class War."

Flink App: the only way to stop us forcing ads down your throat is by going outside the app to the system settings and blocking us from there.
#Flink

Optimizers Qualitatively Alter Solutions And We Should Leverage This
Razvan Pascanu, Clare Lyle, Ionut-Vlad Modoranu, Naima Elosegui Borras, Dan Alistarh, Petar Velickovic, Sarath Chandar, Soham De, James Martens
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12224

Optimizers Qualitatively Alter Solutions And We Should Leverage This
Due to the nonlinear nature of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), one can not guarantee convergence to a unique global minimum of the loss when using optimizers relying only on local information, such as SGD. Indeed, this was a primary source of skepticism regarding the feasibility of DNNs in the early days of the field. The past decades of progress in deep learning have revealed this skepticism to be misplaced, and a large body of empirical evidence shows that sufficiently large DNNs following stand…

The Grand Canyon Lodge,
the only lodging inside the park at the North Rim,
was consumed by the flames,
park Superintendent Ed Keable told park residents, staff and others in a meeting Sunday morning.
https://bsky.app/profile/pbsnews.org/post/3lturjh5k2a2h…

An elementary proof of existence and uniqueness of stationary distributions for irreducible Markov chains
Rinaldo B. Schinazi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13662

An elementary proof of existence and uniqueness of stationary distributions for irreducible Markov chains
Consider an $n\times n$ matrix $P$ with the following properties. All entries in $P$ are positive or $0$, the sum of each row is 1 and for all $i$ and $j$ in $\{1,\dots,n\}$ there exists a natural number $k$ such that the $(i,j)$ entry of the matrix $P^k$ is strictly positive. Then, there exists a unique row vector $v$ with only strictly positive entries, whose sum of entries is 1 and such that $vP=P$. We present a proof of this well-known result that uses only basic algebra and the Bolzano-Wei…

How Many Instructions Can LLMs Follow at Once?
Daniel Jaroslawicz, Brendan Whiting, Parth Shah, Karime Maamari
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11538 https://

How Many Instructions Can LLMs Follow at Once?
Production-grade LLM systems require robust adherence to dozens or even hundreds of instructions simultaneously. However, the instruction-following capabilities of LLMs at high instruction densities have not yet been characterized, as existing benchmarks only evaluate models on tasks with a single or few instructions. We introduce IFScale, a simple benchmark of 500 keyword-inclusion instructions for a business report writing task to measure how instruction-following performance degrades as inst…

Product idea announcement:
Securing your company's most important digital assets of the 21st century: [productA] transforms your most valued AI prompts into blockchain-secured NFTs.
(Yes, I feel dirty to have come up with such an idea. But I won't be the only one coming up with such 💩, and by posting it I can later tell people "See? ProductB is just plagiarism!". I don't have any plans to make such a product. If your moral code allows you to do it to exploit …

Variety of wildlife in UK’s woodlands falling as habitats degrade, says report https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/10/variety-of-wildlife-in-uks-woodlands-falling-as-habitats-degrade-says-report

All Eyes, no IMU: Learning Flight Attitude from Vision Alone
Jesse J. Hagenaars, Stein Stroobants, Sander M. Bohte, Guido C. H. E. De Croon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11302

All Eyes, no IMU: Learning Flight Attitude from Vision Alone
Vision is an essential part of attitude control for many flying animals, some of which have no dedicated sense of gravity. Flying robots, on the other hand, typically depend heavily on accelerometers and gyroscopes for attitude stabilization. In this work, we present the first vision-only approach to flight control for use in generic environments. We show that a quadrotor drone equipped with a downward-facing event camera can estimate its attitude and rotation rate from just the event stream, e…