Tootfinder

"The old world is dying,” Antonio Gramsci once wrote.
“And the new world struggles to be born.”
In such interregnums, the Italian Marxist philosopher suggested, “every act, even the smallest,
may acquire decisive weight”.
In 2025, western leaders appeared convinced they – and we – were living through one such transitional period, as the world of international relations established after the second world war crashed to a halt.
During such eras, Gramsci more f…

Sage advice about artificial intelligence: "Do your own original thinking first."
Because “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” 
https://open.substack.com/pub/philkoopman/p/plans-plan…

Plans, Planning, and Generative AI
The creative experience often matters more than the creative output. Be smart about how to use GenAI in that situation.

Reading Berys Gauts essay «The Philosophy of Creativity" (2010) while listening to Gangstagrass — a music collective that combines, well, blugrass with rap... Wondering whether this music is an example of combinatorial creativity or transformational creativity (ref. Boden) or something else entirely.
Did they discover this musical mashup, or did them bring it into existence from nothing?
More and more I find myself in disagreement with the emphasis on the *product* of creati…

We are told that, under stress, the humanities must be sacrificed
-- of what use are literature, philosophy, and history when we have problems to solve right now?
And yet colleagues meeting in wartime Kyiv have a clearer sense of purpose, more esprit de corps, , and a better instinct for the essential.
And soldiers on the front (as they tell me) want to talk about history and culture.
In traumatic conditions, people think about where they stand amidst larger force…

Ukrainian History Global Initiative
The Creative Humanities During a War of Destruction

Learning to Generate Object Interactions with Physics-Guided Video Diffusion
David Romero, Ariana Bermudez, Hao Li, Fabio Pizzati, Ivan Laptev
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02284 h…

Learning to Generate Object Interactions with Physics-Guided Video Diffusion
Recent models for video generation have achieved remarkable progress and are now deployed in film, social media production, and advertising. Beyond their creative potential, such models also hold promise as world simulators for robotics and embodied decision making. Despite strong advances, however, current approaches still struggle to generate physically plausible object interactions and lack physics-grounded control mechanisms. To address this limitation, we introduce KineMask, an approach fo…