Tootfinder

I blogged about the history of the public-service broadcasting institution ARD in Germany and how I finally got access to TV program data to answer my reoccuring question of when the news program is on tonight in the spirit of "Public Money, Public Good".
https://johl.io/blog/o-news-program-wh…

approximately no one's noticing but stack overflow is reaching its maximum number of questions.
that's because every day, every unanswered, unupvoted, uncommentedon question older than a year gets deleted (see the big jump up on the graph in April 2024). those deletions are now neck and neck with new questions coming in on weekdays. those deletions dwarf new questions coming in on weekends, so the site's already shrinking on weekends.
it was fun while it lasted <3

The DORCHA suite: nature, nurture, and the phase space distribution of the Milky Way's high redshift progenitors today
Sreedhar Balu, Chris Power, Kris Walker, J. Stuart B. Wyithe
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14016

The DORCHA suite: nature, nurture, and the phase space distribution of the Milky Way's high redshift progenitors today
Where in the present-day Milky Way should we search for the remnants of its earliest stars? We address this question using the DORCHA (Gaelic for Dark; DUR-uh-khuh) suite: a set of 25 high-resolution, dark-matter-only cosmological zoom-in simulations of Milky Way analogue (MWA) haloes evolved to $z=0$. Of these, 15 are isolated and the rest are in pairs, similar to the MW and M31. By identifying and tagging the most bound material in high-redshift ($z\geq5$) progenitor haloes -- those likely to…

The FOMO about the 10-year University of Cambridge REAL Centre Anniversary Celebration Conference is *real*.
If you can't be there in person, join online.
Incredible lineup.
12 June 2025
https://www.eventbrite.co…

Let's say you find a really cool forum online that has lots of good advice on it. It's even got a very active community that's happy to answer questions very quickly, and the community seems to have a wealth of knowledge about all sorts of subjects.
You end up visiting this community often, and trusting the advice you get to answer all sorts of everyday questions you might have, which before you might have found answers to using a web search (of course web search is now full of SEI spam and other crap so it's become nearly useless).
Then one day, you ask an innocuous question about medicine, and from this community you get the full homeopathy treatment as your answer. Like, somewhat believable on the face of it, includes lots of citations to reasonable-seeming articles, except that if you know even a tiny bit about chemistry and biology (which thankfully you do), you know that the homoeopathy answers are completely bogus and horribly dangerous (since they offer non-treatments for real diseases). Your opinion of this entire forum suddenly changes. "Oh my God, if they've been homeopathy believers all this time, what other myths have they fed me as facts?"
You stop using the forum for anything, and go back to slogging through SEI crap to answer your everyday questions, because one you realize that this forum is a community that's fundamentally untrustworthy, you realize that the value of getting advice from it on any subject is negative: you knew enough to spot the dangerous homeopathy answer, but you know there might be other such myths that you don't know enough to avoid, and any community willing to go all-in on one myth has shown itself to be capable of going all in on any number of other myths.
...
This has been a parable about large language models.
#AI #LLM

Scientists were preparing an experiment to ask the ultimate question.
They had worked for months gathering one each of every computer that was
built. Finally the big day was at hand. All the computers were linked
together. They asked the question, "Is there a God?". Lights started
blinking, flashing and blinking some more. Suddenly, there was a loud
crash, and a bolt of lightning came down from the sky, struck the
computers, and welded all the conn…

To cross or not to cross, that's the question...
(One of the more intense streams — the outflow of a glacier — I had to cross in my life, that bridge looks a lot safer that it was IRL...)
#FootpathFriday #Hiking

From Average-Iterate to Last-Iterate Convergence in Games: A Reduction and Its Applications
Yang Cai, Haipeng Luo, Chen-Yu Wei, Weiqiang Zheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03464

From Average-Iterate to Last-Iterate Convergence in Games: A Reduction and Its Applications
The convergence of online learning algorithms in games under self-play is a fundamental question in game theory and machine learning. Among various notions of convergence, last-iterate convergence is particularly desirable, as it reflects the actual decisions made by the learners and captures the day-to-day behavior of the learning dynamics. While many algorithms are known to converge in the average-iterate, achieving last-iterate convergence typically requires considerably more effort in both …

Saw a bit of a general knowledge gameshow the other day where the question was something like "Which woman became the UK's shortest-serving Prime Minister in 2022?" and the contestant absolutely blanked on it.

On different platforms, I see at least one post per day of someone willing to switch to #Linux. While seeing our community growing is nice, my first reaction is always: why didn't you take 3 seconds to read the post just before yours?
I may just become too old and grumpy but, generally speaking, I don't understand people who immediatly ask a question that has been answered thous…