Tootfinder

Next stop on our NLP timeline (as part of the #ISE2025 lecture) was Terry Winograd's SHRDLU, an early natural language understanding system developed in 1968-70 that could manipulate blocks in a virtual world.
Winograd, T. Procedures as a Representation for Data in a Computer Program for Understanding Natural Language. MIT AI Technical Report 235.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #ClassicalMixtape
George Ives, Gerald Drucker, Lyn Fletcher, Robert Heard, Sir Charles Groves, Camille Saint-Saëns, Philharmonia Orchestra, Kenneth Smith, Leslie Pearson & Michael Reeves:
🎵 Aquarium (Carnival of the Animals)
#GeorgeIves

US political contradictions; knowledge systems
As Trump at least partially succeeds in constructing an alternate reality for his most ardent followers, it's tempting to think of his dogma as false, in contrast to some imagined "truth" which his non-followers are smart enough to believe in. But a more nuanced view of knowledge would admit that different groups of people have different shared truths, constituting different knowledge systems which each deviate from what's objectively measurable in different ways, and in fact they each accept different standards of what is objective, so there's not really a single "ground truth" we can even compare to to determine which of these knowledge systems is "more correct" (similar problems arise even if we only care about "more useful").
To make this more concrete, we can see that e.g., competing quantum physics theories, or likewise competing religious beliefs, have no reasonable basis on which to judge between them, either in terms of "truth" or "utility." So the Trump-dogma knowledge system, although bad, morally repugnant, etc., can't so easily be dismissed as "false" in my view. "Distorted" or "malignant" or "evil" or "contradictory" are better monikers, in my opinion.
But what I'm even more interested in thinking about is: in what ways does the current American liberal "common sense" knowledge system already bear the scars of past fascist lies & contradictions? I can think of a few:
"Columbus was an explorer."
This is "factually accurate" in the same way some of Trump's propaganda is, but it's also a cruel distortion of "Columbus was a child murderer," and it's a misrepresentation that serves an evil purpose, yet which is widely taught in elementary schools today.
Another: "dropping atomic bombs on civilians in Japan was necessary to end WWII."
Perhaps in the future we'll have "family separation & the 2025 ICE crackdowns were necessary to end the immigration crisis," although I dearly hope not.
"Reparations for slavery aren't reasonable," is yet another...
I'll close this rambling with a question: what other fascist lies have you noticed that are normalized in America right now from past Trump-like leaders (or even from less overtly fascist institutions)?

Automorphisms of fine curve graphs of planar surfaces
Roberta Shapiro, Rohan Wadhwa, Arthur Wang, Yuchong Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06142 https://…

Automorphisms of fine curve graphs of planar surfaces
The fine curve graph of a surface is the graph whose vertices are simple closed essential curves in the surface and whose edges connect disjoint curves. In this paper, we prove that the automorphism group of the fine curve graph of a surface is naturally isomorphic to the homeomorphism group of the surface for boundaryless planar surfaces with at least 7 punctures.

An Amnesty report documents over 70 attacks and threats on journalists in Northern Ireland since 2019, with no prosecutions for threats from paramilitary groups (Rory Carroll/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/j

2017 les dérives sectaires : dans les griffes du gourou OKC
un docu où on nous a mélangé Š toute une panoplie de cinglé et qui montre, par rapport aux rush avant l'édition, l'exploitation du vécu des personnes dans les médias
https://chardonsbleus.org/les-derives-…

Für die breite Verwendung von #KI, speziell im Kontext #Schule, muss sichergestellt sein, dass #LLMs user:innen nicht zu selbstgefährdendem Verhalten animieren.
Das Nonprofit Transluce arbeitet an verschie…

Surfacing Pathological Behaviors in Language Models
We train reinforcement learning (RL) agents to craft realistic natural-language prompts that elicit specified behaviors in frontier open-weight models (Llama 3.1/4, Qwen 2.5, and DeepSeek-V3), using a proposed variational lower bound to guide the search.

Finiteness properties of stabilisers of oligomorphic actions
Francesco Fournier-Facio, Peter H. Kropholler, Robert Alonzo Lyman, Matthew C. B. Zaremsky
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02319

Finiteness properties of stabilisers of oligomorphic actions
An action of a group on a set is oligomorphic if it has finitely many orbits of $n$-element subsets for all $n$. We prove that for a large class of groups (including all groups of finite virtual cohomological dimension and all countable linear groups), for any oligomorphic action of such a group on an infinite set there exists a finite subset whose stabiliser is not of type $\mathrm{FP}_\infty$. This leads to obstructions on finiteness properties for permutational wreath products and twisted Br…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02971 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_mat…

The affirmative answer to Singer's conjecture on the algebraic transfer of rank four
In recent decades, the structure of the mod-2 cohomology of the Steenrod ring $\mathscr A$ has become a major subject of study in the field of Algebraic Topology. One of the earliest attempts to study this cohomology through the use of modular representations of the general linear groups was the groundbreaking work [Math. Z. 202 (1989), 493-523] by W.M. Singer. In that work, Singer introduced a homomorphism, commonly referred to as the "algebraic transfer," which maps from the coinvariants of a…

The stability of independence polynomials of complete bipartite graphs
Guo Chen, Bo Ning, Jianhua Tu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24381 https://

The stability of independence polynomials of complete bipartite graphs
The independence polynomial of a graph is termed {\it stable} if all its roots are located in the left half-plane $\{z \in \mathbb{C} : \mathrm{Re}(z) \leq 0\}$, and the graph itself is also referred to as stable. Brown and Cameron (Electron. J. Combin. 25(1) (2018) \#P1.46) proved that the complete bipartite graph $K_{1,n}$ is stable and posed the question: \textbf{Are all complete bipartite graphs stable?} We answer this question by establishing the following results: \begin{itemize} \i…