Tootfinder

Didn't really remember that "Alien" basically is the story of a rational woman having to clean up the mess made by emotional men.

E-Autos laden ist nicht wie Tanken – und genau das macht die Sache kompliziert. 🚗⚡
Zum Artikel: https://heise.de/-11111843

"Chimpanzees revise their beliefs if they encounter new information, a hallmark of rationality that was once assumed to be unique to humans"
(Original title: Chimps Are Capable of Human-Like Rational Thought, Breakthrough Study Finds)
https://www.404med…

@… if you say I’m the same as someone who has directly endangered my loved ones, who I paid a significant social cost for calling out when nobody else was, I’m not going to be calm and rational about it! I’m okay with looking like an asshole about it!

Surgical face masks provide inadequate protection against
flu-like illnesses including Covid,
and should be replaced by respirator-level masks
– worn every time doctors and nurses are face to face with a patient,
according to a group of experts urging changes to World Health Organization guidelines.
There is “no rational justification remaining for prioritising or using”
the surgical masks that are ubiquitous in hospitals and clinics globally,
given …

I was cleaning up my desktop and I found this image. I had forgotten about it. It is a Brenna Quinlan image and comes from David Holmgren's 'Retrosuburbia'. I'm happy to see my position - towards the rational end of the rational/intuitive spectrum (I always think you need to thoroughly, skeptically question your own beliefs, lest you find wishful thinking or prejudices amongst them), and midway along the "leave nature do it's thing/use design to keep your elbows in&…

I recently watched a Veritasium video that touches on Braess's Paradox[1]: sometimes removing connections (eg roads) makes things faster.
The part that caught my attention was "even though every driver made a rational decision to minimize their own time, collectively it made the situation worse."
IOW, proof that adding up everyone's self interested actions does NOT lead to the best outcome. aka,

Why Engineers Can't Be Rational About #ProgrammingLanguages
https://spf13.com/p/the-hidden-conversation/

The funniest thing about all the LLM nonsense is that exactly the people who think of themselves as the most logical and rational are falling for it because it pretends to be human

Americans express fear and negativity toward AI, often relying on bad arguments like water usage, a stark contrast with Asia and Europe's relative positivity (Noah Smith/Noahpinion)
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/i-love-ai-why-doesnt-everyone

I love AI. Why doesn't everyone?
Anti-AI sentiment might or might not be rational, but it certainly relies on a lot of bad arguments.

The Vacancy of the MAGA Mind (The Rational League)
https://therationalleague.substack.com/p/the-vacancy-of-the-maga-mind
http://www.memeorandum.com/251103/p124#a251103p124

hey do you want to see a video that will leave you completely speechless, vying and yet failling to find a comprehensible, rational explanation for what's happening on the screen? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv9xwEKCH_g
[cw: blood, nothing on screen has been seriously injured]

BAU!

It may well be that the so-called political elite surrounding Darth #Trump is currently incapable of rational thinking and is causing a lot of damage (including to US interests). But I believe that there are still strategists, particularly in the military (who are not related to Trump ;-), who will ultimately step in to put the brakes on.
Trump's EU policy is also damaging US interests enormou…

#Blakes7 Series D, Episode 13 - Blake
SOOLIN: Just like that.
AVON: More or less. He is strongly identified with rebels, you see, and very popular with rabbles. They will follow him, and he will fight to the last drop of their blood. [smiles] Idealism is a wonderful thing. All you really need is someone rational to put it to proper use.

The great majority of people have to work in order to earn a livelihood, and a sizable proportion of them are productive workers. A huge number of workers are unproductive as well. They operate entirely with the circumstances and framework created by the capitalist system, such as shuffling invoices, contracts, credit slips, insurance policies, and so forth. Probably nine out of ten "workers" wouldn't have any work to do in a rational society -- one that would not require insur…

What's a programming language/platform you are emotionally biased against? (Think: I avoid running that stuff if I can and not just for rational reasons)
Pick the one it applies the most to.

On Dynamic Programming Theory for Leader-Follower Stochastic Games
Jilles Steeve Dibangoye, Thibaut Le Marre, Ocan Sankur, Fran\c{c}ois Schwarzentruber
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05667 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05667 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.05667
arXiv:2512.05667v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Leader-follower general-sum stochastic games (LF-GSSGs) model sequential decision-making under asymmetric commitment, where a leader commits to a policy and a follower best responds, yielding a strong Stackelberg equilibrium (SSE) with leader-favourable tie-breaking. This paper introduces a dynamic programming (DP) framework that applies Bellman recursion over credible sets-state abstractions formally representing all rational follower best responses under partial leader commitments-to compute SSEs. We first prove that any LF-GSSG admits a lossless reduction to a Markov decision process (MDP) over credible sets. We further establish that synthesising an optimal memoryless deterministic leader policy is NP-hard, motivating the development of {\epsilon}-optimal DP algorithms with provable guarantees on leader exploitability. Experiments on standard mixed-motive benchmarks-including security games, resource allocation, and adversarial planning-demonstrate empirical gains in leader value and runtime scalability over state-of-the-art methods.
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Rachel Dratch also has a podcast now as of 8 days ago and it only has 600 subscribers on youtube!
#comedy

Many parts of the Internet I know and loath are mostly down. I hope this helps shake confidence in US BigTech. Probably won't, because if people were rational, they wouldn't have built the digital world we're currently forced to inhabit, but who knows, it might. Even the vague possibility of it has made my day better as I head to bed.

Ever so fitting for our trying times, and a growing conflict for quite a few people (incl. myself), I imagine...
"Absurdism is the philosophical theory that the universe is irrational and meaningless. It states that trying to find meaning leads people into conflict with a seemingly meaningless world. This conflict can be between rational humanity and an irrational universe, between intention and outcome, or between subjective assessment and objective worth..."

Absurdism - Wikipedia

Entirely true.
However, it is important from a strategic standpoint to maintain the argument that today's GOP is an aberrant degenerate personality cult rather than a real political organization with a rational view of the world.
The GOP is a zombie political party disconnected from its past and reduced to a mechanism for blocking sound government which might impede one man's lust for power.

Trump’s White House chief rips Elon Musk for USAID cuts ‘no rational person’ could support | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/susie-wiles-trump-elon-musk-usaid-b2885727.html

Two-Dimensional Finite-Gap Schrodinger Operators as Limits of Two-Dimensional Integrable Difference Operators
P. A. Leonchik, G. S. Mauleshova, A. E. Mironov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03805 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03805 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.03805
arXiv:2511.03805v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In this paper we study two-dimensional discrete operators whose eigenfunctions at zero energy level are given by rational functions on spectral curves. We extend discrete operators to difference operators and show that two-dimensional finite-gap Schrodinger operators at fixed energy level can be obtained from difference operators by passage to the limit.
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