@cdarwin@c.imIt's been a long and unusual journey for the world's largest iceberg, known as A23a,
but it's ending in the usual way: breaking apart and melting in the warmer waters of the South Atlantic Ocean, just like icebergs have done for millions of years before.
The iceberg — which at one time was around the same size as the Hawaiian island of Oahu — is "rapidly breaking up" into several "very large chunks," according to scientists from the British Antarct…
@philip@mastodon.mallegolhansen.comClearly whatever mechanism is responsible for parsing out my message and deciding how to handle it, is trying to add my shopping item to OmniFocus. WHY? I DIDN’T ASK YOU TO PUT IT IN OMNIFOCUS!?!
If it *always* did that, I would accept it as intentional that OmniFocus has been somehow marked as *the* app for storing all my lists.
But it’s the inconsistency that makes it maddening. Given the same command, the system should always do *the same thing*.
Please fix that Apple. N…
@ginevra@hachyderm.ioI've a question about #PointAndClick games: why does the character seem to shrink & grow as they move around a room?
They look like they're shrinking or perhaps walking down stairs as they move towards the viewer. (The opposite of real life when things close to you seem big!)
It's not just this game, I've seen the same issue in lots of other games.
Is it because the character is staying the same size but the room is drawn with perspective?
@samir@functional.computer@… Here’s my attempt.
You choose a current branch and a target (branch, typically) as your starting point. Rebase takes all the commits from the current branch that aren’t on the target, resets the current branch to the same as the target, and applies them one by one, stopping if there are any merge conflicts.
@Techmeme@techhub.socialDealroom: European VC deals are set to rise 3-4% YoY in 2025 to $57B, about the same as in 2023, driven by rising startup valuations in AI, fintech, and defense (Ivan Levingston/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/5cd37cea-87e7-4648-b85b-f77091dd4558
@qbi@freie-re.de
@kubikpixel@chaos.socialHTML is Dead, Long Live HTML
Rethinking DOM from first principles
Cover Image: Browsers are in a very weird place. While WebAssembly has succeeded, even on the server, the client still feels largely the same as it did 10 years ago.
🌐 https://acko.net/blog/html-is-dead-long-live…
@karlauerbach@sfba.socialAmy Coney Barret seems to have forgotten the first three words of the US Constitution, "We the People".
Clearly SCOTUS now is nothing but opinion poll - in which the opinions and biases of a gang of five overturns and overrules our Constitution, our principles, and our citizens.
"Amy Coney Barrett says supreme court rulings are ‘not opinion polls’"
@muz4now@mastodon.worldFree Healthcare For Musicians and Industry Professionals
https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2025/09/free-healthcare-for-musicians-and-music-industry-proffes…
@kuba@toot.kuba-orlik.name> We kick up a fuss when tech giants steal our data, but we’ve been strangely nonchalant as those same companies carry out the greatest heist of our time in history.
https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/how-social-media-shortens-your-life
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialShould we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
Should AI coding be taught in undergrad CS education?
1/2
I teach undergraduate computer science labs, including for intro and more-advanced core courses. I don't publish (non-negligible) scholarly work in the area, but I've got years of craft expertise in course design, and I do follow the academic literature to some degree. In other words, In not the world's leading expert, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about course design, and consider myself competent at it, with plenty of direct experience in what knowledge & skills I can expect from students as they move through the curriculum.
I'm also strongly against most uses of what's called "AI" these days (specifically, generative deep neutral networks as supplied by our current cadre of techbro). There are a surprising number of completely orthogonal reasons to oppose the use of these systems, and a very limited number of reasonable exceptions (overcoming accessibility barriers is an example). On the grounds of environmental and digital-commons-pollution costs alone, using specifically the largest/newest models is unethical in most cases.
But as any good teacher should, I constantly question these evaluations, because I worry about the impact on my students should I eschew teaching relevant tech for bad reasons (and even for his reasons). I also want to make my reasoning clear to students, who should absolutely question me on this. That inspired me to ask a simple question: ignoring for one moment the ethical objections (which we shouldn't, of course; they're very stark), at what level in the CS major could I expect to teach a course about programming with AI assistance, and expect students to succeed at a more technically demanding final project than a course at the same level where students were banned from using AI? In other words, at what level would I expect students to actually benefit from AI coding "assistance?"
To be clear, I'm assuming that students aren't using AI in other aspects of coursework: the topic of using AI to "help you study" is a separate one (TL;DR it's gross value is not negative, but it's mostly not worth the harm to your metacognitive abilities, which AI-induced changes to the digital commons are making more important than ever).
So what's my answer to this question?
If I'm being incredibly optimistic, senior year. Slightly less optimistic, second year of a masters program. Realistic? Maybe never.
The interesting bit for you-the-reader is: why is this my answer? (Especially given that students would probably self-report significant gains at lower levels.) To start with, [this paper where experienced developers thought that AI assistance sped up their work on real tasks when in fact it slowed it down] (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089) is informative. There are a lot of differences in task between experienced devs solving real bugs and students working on a class project, but it's important to understand that we shouldn't have a baseline expectation that AI coding "assistants" will speed things up in the best of circumstances, and we shouldn't trust self-reports of productivity (or the AI hype machine in general).
Now we might imagine that coding assistants will be better at helping with a student project than at helping with fixing bugs in open-source software, since it's a much easier task. For many programming assignments that have a fixed answer, we know that many AI assistants can just spit out a solution based on prompting them with the problem description (there's another elephant in the room here to do with learning outcomes regardless of project success, but we'll ignore this over too, my focus here is on project complexity reach, not learning outcomes). My question is about more open-ended projects, not assignments with an expected answer. Here's a second study (by one of my colleagues) about novices using AI assistance for programming tasks. It showcases how difficult it is to use AI tools well, and some of these stumbling blocks that novices in particular face.
But what about intermediate students? Might there be some level where the AI is helpful because the task is still relatively simple and the students are good enough to handle it? The problem with this is that as task complexity increases, so does the likelihood of the AI generating (or copying) code that uses more complex constructs which a student doesn't understand. Let's say I have second year students writing interactive websites with JavaScript. Without a lot of care that those students don't know how to deploy, the AI is likely to suggest code that depends on several different frameworks, from React to JQuery, without actually setting up or including those frameworks, and of course three students would be way out of their depth trying to do that. This is a general problem: each programming class carefully limits the specific code frameworks and constructs it expects students to know based on the material it covers. There is no feasible way to limit an AI assistant to a fixed set of constructs or frameworks, using current designs. There are alternate designs where this would be possible (like AI search through adaptation from a controlled library of snippets) but those would be entirely different tools.
So what happens on a sizeable class project where the AI has dropped in buggy code, especially if it uses code constructs the students don't understand? Best case, they understand that they don't understand and re-prompt, or ask for help from an instructor or TA quickly who helps them get rid of the stuff they don't understand and re-prompt or manually add stuff they do. Average case: they waste several hours and/or sweep the bugs partly under the rug, resulting in a project with significant defects. Students in their second and even third years of a CS major still have a lot to learn about debugging, and usually have significant gaps in their knowledge of even their most comfortable programming language. I do think regardless of AI we as teachers need to get better at teaching debugging skills, but the knowledge gaps are inevitable because there's just too much to know. In Python, for example, the LLM is going to spit out yields, async functions, try/finally, maybe even something like a while/else, or with recent training data, the walrus operator. I can't expect even a fraction of 3rd year students who have worked with Python since their first year to know about all these things, and based on how students approach projects where they have studied all the relevant constructs but have forgotten some, I'm not optimistic seeing these things will magically become learning opportunities. Student projects are better off working with a limited subset of full programming languages that the students have actually learned, and using AI coding assistants as currently designed makes this impossible. Beyond that, even when the "assistant" just introduces bugs using syntax the students understand, even through their 4th year many students struggle to understand the operation of moderately complex code they've written themselves, let alone written by someone else. Having access to an AI that will confidently offer incorrect explanations for bugs will make this worse.
To be sure a small minority of students will be able to overcome these problems, but that minority is the group that has a good grasp of the fundamentals and has broadened their knowledge through self-study, which earlier AI-reliant classes would make less likely to happen. In any case, I care about the average student, since we already have plenty of stuff about our institutions that makes life easier for a favored few while being worse for the average student (note that our construction of that favored few as the "good" students is a large part of this problem).
To summarize: because AI assistants introduce excess code complexity and difficult-to-debug bugs, they'll slow down rather than speed up project progress for the average student on moderately complex projects. On a fixed deadline, they'll result in worse projects, or necessitate less ambitious project scoping to ensure adequate completion, and I expect this remains broadly true through 4-6 years of study in most programs (don't take this as an endorsement of AI "assistants" for masters students; we've ignored a lot of other problems along the way).
There's a related problem: solving open-ended project assignments well ultimately depends on deeply understanding the problem, and AI "assistants" allow students to put a lot of code in their file without spending much time thinking about the problem or building an understanding of it. This is awful for learning outcomes, but also bad for project success. Getting students to see the value of thinking deeply about a problem is a thorny pedagogical puzzle at the best of times, and allowing the use of AI "assistants" makes the problem much much worse. This is another area I hope to see (or even drive) pedagogical improvement in, for what it's worth.
1/2
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems"""
In melancholy, the spirits are carried away by an agitation, but a weak agitation that lacks power or violence, a sort of impotent upset that follows neither a particular path nor the aperta opercula [open ways], but traverses the cerebral matter constantly creating new pores. Yet the spirits do not wander far on the new paths they create, and their agitation dies down rapidly, as their strength is quickly spent and motion comes to a halt: ‘non longe perveniunt’ [they do not reach far]. A trouble of this nature, common to all delirium, does not have the power to produce on the surface of the body the violent movements or the cries to be observed in mania and frenzy. Melancholy never attains frenzy; it is a madness always at the limits of its own impotence. That paradox is explained by the secret alterations in the spirits. Ordinarily, they travel with the speed and instantaneous transparency of rays of light, but in melancholy they become weighed down with night, becoming ‘obscure, thick and dark’, and the images of things that they bring before consciousness are ‘in a shadow, or covered with darkness’. As a result they move more slowly, and are more like a dark, chemical vapour than pure light. This chemical vapour is acid in nature, rather than sulphurous or alcoholic, for in acid vapours the particles are mobile and incapable of repose, but their activity is weak and without consequence. When they are distilled, all that remains in the still is a kind of insipid phlegm. Acid vapours, therefore, are taken to have the same properties as melancholy, whereas alcoholic vapours, which are always ready to burst into flames, are more related to frenzy, and sulphurous vapours bring on mania, as they are agitated by continuous, violent movement. If the ‘formal reason and causes’ of melancholy were to be sought, it made sense to look for them in the vapours that rose up from the blood to the head, and which had degenerated into ‘an acetous or sharp distillation’. A cursory glance seems to indicate that a melancholy of spirits and a whole chemistry of humours lies behind Willis’ analyses, but in fact his guiding principle mostly reflects the immediate qualities of the melancholic illness: an impotent disorder, and the shadow that comes over the spirit with an acrid acidity that slowly corrodes the heart and the mind. The chemistry of acids is not an explanation of the symptoms, but a qualitative option: a whole phenomenology of melancholic experience.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)
@marcel@waldvogel.familySome programming wisdom from 40 years ago. Exciting to see how many of them are still important advice today.
(aka: @… 's aphorism collection 🦆)
https://
@UP8@mastodon.socialAnd a Zinnia to round out today's stick of photos -- shot on the same day as the other Ithaca photos with the Sony 90mm macro lens that DxO says is Sony's best lens
#photo #photography #flowers
@cjust@infosec.exchange
@paulwermer@sfba.socialThe argument that the market will solve the housing crisis if only we remove barriers like zoning looks weaker and weaker all the time. Why invest in affordable housing if the same investment can capture high-end prices?
https://www.
@PaulWermer@sfba.socialThe argument that the market will solve the housing crisis if only we remove barriers like zoning looks weaker and weaker all the time. Why invest in affordable housing if the same investment can capture high-end prices?
https://www.
@arXiv_mathCO_bot@mastoxiv.pageComputing the number of realisations of a rigid graph
Sean Dewar, Georg Grasegger, Josef Schicho, Ayush Kumar Tewari, Audie Warren
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02988 https://
@june_thalia_michael@literatur.social#EroticMusings 15: Does erotica have a cultural purpose? Is there anything you want your own work to achieve?
Speaking only for myself and my writing, it has the same purpose as any text I write. To entertain, to delight, to give food for thoughts that would maybe not have emerged without the text.
I'm writing a utopia, where the consent culture mostly displayed during the …
@mapto@qoto.orgAcross Europe, the financial sector has pushed up house prices. It’s a political timebomb
"While housing lies at the heart of political disillusionment today, it is for the same reason becoming a primary trigger for mobilisation across Europe. In October 2024, 150,000 protesters marched through the streets of Madrid demanding action. Some governments, including Denmark and the Netherlands, are introducing policies to deter speculators. But real estate capital continues to hold the…
@NFL@darktundra.xyzEagles' A.J. Brown on repeating as Super Bowl champions: 'The Lombardi, she's not loyal' https://www.nfl.com/news/eagles-aj-brown-repeating-super-bowl-champions-the-lombardi-shes-not-loyal
@niqdanger@social.linux.pizzaMy network engineer just tried to do a firewall upgrade remotely over VPN on the same said firewall. I decided this is the network equivalent of ghost riding the whip. We were down for 45 minutes as he drove into the office.
@arXiv_hepph_bot@mastoxiv.pageIndirect searches for realistic sub-GeV Dark Matter models
Marco Cirelli, Arpan Kar, Halim Shaikh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03819 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…
@midtsveen@social.linux.pizzaWhy should we rent the essentials of daily life we already own? Paywalling them behind monthly fees is absurd.
Imagine being told your stove won’t cook dinner unless you’ve paid this month’s subscription, it’s the same scammy logic as locking the full performance of a car you already bought behind a monthly fee.
Enshittification is just corporations selling you the same thing twice, and calling it ‘innovation.’
@whitequark@mastodon.socialdid you know? teleost fish maintain neutral buoyancy with their swim bladder, which they pump with gas as they descend into depths. specifically, they can pump it with hyperbaric oxygen at partial pressures of *several hundred atmospheres*
they also pressurize their eyes in the same way
https://
@3sframe@social.linux.pizzaCouldn't have coffee for years due to a health thing. Discovered the wonderful world of loose leaf tea as an alternative. Tried everything to replace coffee with tea, it was just not the same. But found joy in all these new black teas I was trying.
Got health thing fixed and tried to return to coffee. Oh no, coffee tastes like cigarettes and skunk water now.
What have I done?
@deprogrammaticaipsum@mas.to"If George Boole is the 19th century’s AI scientist, then his contemporary machine learning engineers were Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. The Difference Engine, which would be frequently cited as the first example of a (mechanical) programmable digital computer if it had been built at the time, was explicitly designed to _replace_ rather than _augment_ human thought. Just as modern software engineering managers use Jira to avoid thinking about process engineering."
@arXiv_quantph_bot@mastoxiv.pageAccurate and Effective Model for Coexistence of Classical and Quantum Signals In Optical Fibers
Lucas Alves Zischler, \c{C}a\u{g}la \"Ozkan, Tristan Vosshenrich, Qi Wu, Giammarco Di Sciullo, Divya A. Shaji, Chiara Lasagni, Paolo Serena, Alberto Bononi, Amirhossein Ghazisaeidi, Chigo Okonkwo, Antonio Mecozzi, Cristian Antonelli
https://
@kcase@mastodon.socialThis coming Monday is the 33rd anniversary of my registering omnigroup.com. (Along with wizards.com: having dug up the registration forms, figured I might as well fill out both of them at the same time.)
Back then, registering an Internet domain was free, you just had to fill out the paperwork and send it to the right place. This was mostly done for the sake of having a domain for email and ftp, not websites, since only a few of us crazy NeXT people were using the World Wide Web at tha…
@grumpybozo@toad.socialI'm definitely going to miss Mona's column customizability, as I was set up with notifications in one column of the left and home timeline twice as wide on the right. @… has Model-T style column support: any layout you want as long as the columns are all the same size and the home timeline is the leftmost.
@playinprogress@assemblag.es
@jake4480@c.imI watched Multiple Maniacs last night for the first time (I don't recommend it 😂). Although I love John Waters films and I've seen most/all of them at this point, Multiple Maniacs' plot was kinda everywhere alongside its clear shock intentions. Pink Flamingos came out just two years later in 1972, was in color, features basically all the same actors, and unbelievably, Pink Flamingos is the more coherent and cohesive film 😂🤣
@vrandecic@mas.to"Value each part of a corporate ecosystem, from the factory worker to the competitor next door. Be altruistic and self-interested at the same time: if you have success, invest your proceeds in nascent and innovative companies.
And don’t try to save pennies in manufacturing or other built-up know-how by outsourcing, if it could lose you pounds (or billions of Swiss Francs) down the line."
@ErikUden@mastodon.deThe fallacy I've experienced in both personal relations and international politics is the belief that there exists an option in which everything stays the same. Not touching the steering wheel, simply continuing as is, will mean all is well, and it's seemingly not as much of a decision as actively interfering is.
The trolly problem exposes this belief, yet we have not really overcome it.
@arXiv_csDC_bot@mastoxiv.pageIn-Memory Non-Binary LDPC Decoding
Oscar Ferraz, Vitor Silva, Gabriel Falcao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03567 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03567
@arXiv_mathAT_bot@mastoxiv.pageIntersection homotopy, refinements and coarsenings
Martintxo Saralegi-Aranguren, Daniel Tanr\'e
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03224 https://arxiv.org/pdf/…
@arXiv_hepth_bot@mastoxiv.pageA New Action for Superstring Field Theory
Chris Hull
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03902 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03902
@arXiv_csIT_bot@mastoxiv.pageRC-Gossip: Information Freshness in Clustered Networks with Rate-Changing Gossip
Irtiza Hasan, Ahmed Arafa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02657 https://arxiv.o…
@jonippolito@digipres.clubAI is flooding libraries with generated content just as budgets and staff are at their most precarious. This Thursday at 10am EDT my ASIS&T webinar asks if we need to ban it, label it, absorb it—or rethink the library itself.
https://www.asist.org/meetings-events/webi
@cdarwin@c.imAmidst the mayhem of the Johnson/Truss/Sunak years I once posted on X that I could not tweet as fast as new scandals occurred.
I feel the same about Trump’s America today
– where every day brings some new outrage, that would normally be enough to bring any other President down.
Republican members of Congress would be baying for blood if a Democrat President committed even a fraction of the outrages which Donald Trump seems to get away with, time and again.
@arXiv_csDM_bot@mastoxiv.pageTemporal Exploration of Random Spanning Tree Models
Samuel Baguley, Andreas G\"obel, Nicolas Klodt, George Skretas, John Sylvester, Viktor Zamaraev
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03361
@Barbarian@social.linux.pizzaBeen working hard every spare moment I can find on Ana Ciceala's #election campaign for mayor of #Bucharest. As someone who just a year ago was completely disconnected from politics, it's been a lot of fun, very fulfilling, and completely physically exhausting all at the same time …
@pre@boing.worldBut mostly I have re-watched Buffy.
If you include Angel, and surely you must, then there's more than 250 episodes in Buffy's world and they're all great. Actual best TV show ever made. Haven't rewatched it since the naughties.
Watched about 150 episodes in the last 3 weeks. 😆
It starts well, reaches a good stride in season two and then gets entirely great around the end of S3 when Ayna turns up and creates the Bored Vampire Willow. Buffy S5 with Glory is the absolute peak. Glory is magnificent.
All the main characters are amazing all the way through, and evolve and grow instead of sticking the same as with most TV. They aren't static caricatures.
The plots story and writing is brilliant, the special effects mostly just rubber masks which age better than any CGI does.
There's vampires and slayers and witches in my dreams and I am loving it.
Nothing since has touched it.
The 16x9 cut of the first two seasons is badly framed though. Watch the 4x3 original TV frame size for sure.
#watching #tv #buffy
@villavelius@mastodon.onlineAre negative tariffs an option? A country requiring, upon entry, a compulsory discount on the published price for anything imported from the USA by the same percentage as Trumpland levies in duties on imports from that country?
@arXiv_astrophHE_bot@mastoxiv.pageThe H.E.S.S. Gravitational Wave and Gamma-Ray Burst Follow-Up Programs
Bernardo Cornejo (on behalf of the H.E.S.S. Collaboration), Halim Ashkar (on behalf of the H.E.S.S. Collaboration), Matteo Cerruti (on behalf of the H.E.S.S. Collaboration), Ilja Jaroschewski (on behalf of the H.E.S.S. Collaboration), Pierre Pichard (on behalf of the H.E.S.S. Collaboration), Santiago Pita (on behalf of the H.E.S.S. Collaboration), Fabian Schussler (on behalf of the H.E.S.S. Collaboration)
@UP8@mastodon.social🥙 Battery made from natural materials could replace conventional lithium-ion batteries
https://techxplore.com/news/2025-09-battery-natural-materials-conventional-lithium.html
@aral@mastodon.ar.alAnd who is the kind of person trying to get @… to ban the accounts of Palestinians who are using the fediverse as their last lifeline to literally get funds to eat as they’re being starved by Israel in a genocide?
The same kind of person – an anonymous coward furthermore – who paints the freedom flotilla as “Hamas”.
Do not let these Zionist propaganda acc…
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems"""
[…] Paradoxically, the more a population grew, the more precious it became, as it offered a supply of cheap labour, and by lowering costs allowed a greater expansion of production and trade. In this infinitely open labour market, the ‘fundamental price’, which for Turgot meant a subsistence level for workers, and the price determined by supply and demand ended up as the same thing. A country was all the more commercially competitive for having at its disposal the virtual wealth that a large population represented.
Confinement was therefore a clumsy error, and an economic one at that: there was no sense in trying to suppress poverty by taking it out of the economic circuit and providing for a poor population by charitable means. To do that was merely to hide poverty, and suppress an important section of the population, which was always a given wealth. Rather than helping the poor escape their provisionally indigent situation, charity condemned them to it, and dangerously so, by putting a brake on the labour market in a period of crisis. What was required was to palliate the high cost of products with cheaper labour, and to make up for their scarcity by a new industrial and agricultural effort. The only reasonable remedy was to reinsert the population in the circuit of production, being sure to place labour in areas where manpower was most scarce. The use of paupers, vagabonds, exiles and émigrés of any description was one of the secrets of wealth in the competition between nations. […]
Confinement was to be criticised because of the effects it had on the labour market, but also because like all other traditional forms of charity, it constituted a dangerous form of finance. As had been the case in the Middle Ages, the classical era had constantly attempted to look after the needs of the poor by a system of foundations. This implied that a section of the land capital and revenues were out of circulation. In a definitive manner too, as the concern was to avoid the commercialisation of assistance to the poor, so judicial measures had been taken to ensure that this wealth never went back into circulation. But as time passed, their usefulness diminished: the economic situation changed, and so did the nature of poverty.
«Society does not always have the same needs. The nature and distribution of property, the divisions between the different orders of the people, opinions, customs, the occupations of the majority of the population, the climate itself, diseases and all the other accidents of human life are in constant change. New needs come into being, and old ones disappear.» [Turgot, Encyclopédie]
The definitive character of a foundation was in contradiction with the variable and changing nature of the accidental needs to which it was designed to respond. The wealth that it immobilised was never put back into circulation, but more wealth was to be created as new needs appeared. The result was that the proportion of funds and revenues removed from circulation constantly increased, while that of production fell in consequence. The only possible result was increased poverty, and a need for more foundations. The process could continue indefinitely, and the fear was that one day ‘the ever increasing number of foundations might absorb all private funds and all private property’. When closely examined, classical forms of assistance were a cause of poverty, bringing a progressive immobilisation that was like the slow death of productive wealth:
«If all the men who have ever lived had been given a tomb, sooner or later some of those sterile monuments would have been dug up in order to find land to cultivate, and it would have become necessary to stir the ashes of the dead in order to feed the living.» [Turgot, Lettre Š Trudaine sur le Limousin]
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)
@arXiv_condmatmtrlsci_bot@mastoxiv.pageRevealing Polymorph-Specific Transduction in WO$_3$ during Acetone Sensing
Matteo D'Andria, Meng Yin, Stefan Neuhauser, Vlasis G. Mavrantzas, Ying Chen, Ken Suzuki, Andreas T. Guentner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03510
@benb@osintua.euAs Ukraine endures new attacks, Western leaders pursue peace talks with little hope of progress: https://benborges.xyz/2025/08/28/as-ukraine-endures-new-attacks.html
@shoppingtonz@mastodon.socialThe question about
Settings --> System --> "Enable updated fan control"
I turn it off now...because I like noise!
Gonna attach an image where I try to archive a page but it doesn't go very well at this moment...but I'm not complaining, I just tried to but it will probably appear at a later time...
That page I archived does not contain much "info"...but more decisions that people took regarding cooling versus noise and many being ok wi…
@fortune@social.linux.pizzaI:
The best way to make a silk purse from a sow's ear is to begin
with a silk sow. The same is true of money.
II:
If today were half as good as tomorrow is supposed to be, it would
probably be twice as good as yesterday was.
III:
There are no lazy veteran lion hunters.
IV:
If you can afford to advertise, you don't need to.
V:
One-tenth of the participants produce over one-third of the output.
Increasing the number o…
@arXiv_mathAP_bot@mastoxiv.pageBurgers equation with a twist: A study on rotational-form equations
Adam Larios
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02761 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02761
@arXiv_condmatstrel_bot@mastoxiv.pageFour Moir\'e materials at One Magic Angle in Helical Quadrilayer Graphene
Manato Fujimoto, Naoto Nakatsuji, Ashvin Vishwanath, Patrick Ledwith
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02444
@arXiv_csLG_bot@mastoxiv.pageCluster and then Embed: A Modular Approach for Visualization
Elizabeth Coda, Ery Arias-Castro, Gal Mishne
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03373 https://arxiv.or…
@arXiv_csCV_bot@mastoxiv.pageDUDE: Diffusion-Based Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Retrieval
Ruohong Yang, Peng Hu, Yunfan Li, Xi Peng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04193 https://arxiv.or…
@arXiv_csCL_bot@mastoxiv.pageJoint Modeling of Entities and Discourse Relations for Coherence Assessment
Wei Liu, Michael Strube
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04182 https://arxiv.org/pdf/…
@arXiv_eessSP_bot@mastoxiv.pageAn Overview of Algorithms for Contactless Cardiac Feature Extraction from Radar Signals: Advances and Challenges
Yuanyuan Zhang, Rui Yang, Yutao Yue, Eng Gee Lim, Zidong Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02122
@arXiv_condmatmeshall_bot@mastoxiv.pageWeak localization and antilocalization corrections to nonlinear transport: a semiclassical Boltzmann treatment
Dmitry V. Chichinadze
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02684 https://
@andres4ny@social.ridetrans.itFor the millionth time, #FuckEricAdams. He was always a goddamned fascist republican cop, and the fact that he ran and won as a democrat speaks volumes about how fucked up NYC voting is. https://mstdn.social/@GottaLaff…
@inthehands@hachyderm.ioRead today’s pathetic remarks as an attempt to mock the military and all the people who serve in it so that the fascists can get what they crave: a monopoly on the perception of strength. It is a “culture war” in the truest sense of the word: an attempt to make lies about strength trump actual strength. (The very same principle is at play when fascists mock protestors, but I think the dissonance is culturally easier to spot here.)
Also read it as an attempt to consolidate military power. It is both. These things go together.
Dangerous times.
/end
@hex@kolektiva.socialThere's another layer to this as well, I think. Any social media feed interlaces horrible things with wonderful things in a completely contextually devoid list. A funny cat picture and a traumatic picture or video of violence are both "rated" in the same way, with the same imaginary internet points, without any differentiation between good and bad.
I feel like this is also cooking our brains a bit.
@arXiv_mathGR_bot@mastoxiv.pageInfinitely presented simple groups separated by homological finiteness properties
Claudio Llosa Isenrich, Eduard Schesler, Xiaolei Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01952 https://…
@playinprogress@assemblag.es
@arXiv_mathCA_bot@mastoxiv.pageA way to treat dual Hahn polynomials as Racah polynomials via the theory of Leonard pairs
Hau-Wen Huang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02032 https://arxiv.org/…
@karlauerbach@sfba.socialEl Cheeto's "ballroom" for the whitehouse will be ghastly oversized.
90,000 square feet is more than two acres, is about the same size as about forty 3-bedroom homes.
It is not a "ballroom", it is a convention center.
@ruari@velocipederider.comSince you all seemed to like the Roman numeral thing, perhaps you would like some more watch trivia in the form of a 'magic trick'?
Go to your search engine of choice and do an image search for: wrist watch.
Every [well… almost every!] analogue dial watch displayed back to you in the results will show the same time as my watch shows right now, as I write this†. 🧙🪄
† I am based in the CEST (Central European Summer Time) [UTC 2] time zone.
@arXiv_mathph_bot@mastoxiv.pageA Supergeometric Fa\`{a} di Bruno Formula
Andreas Swerdlow
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00092 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00092…
@arXiv_grqc_bot@mastoxiv.pageThe Teukolsky scalar as a gateway for quantizing gravity on rotating black holes
Christiane K. M. Klein
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00978 https://arxiv.org/…
@arXiv_mathGT_bot@mastoxiv.pageHomotopy Type of the Space of Fibrations of the Three-sphere by Simple Closed Curves
Dennis Deturck, Ziqi Fang, Herman Gluck, Leandro Lichtenfelz, Mona Merling, Yi Wang, Jingye Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01185
@arXiv_eessSY_bot@mastoxiv.pageImpact on transient stability of self-synchronisation control strategies in grid-forming VSC-based generators
Regulo E. Avila-Martinez, Xavier Guillaud, Javier Renedo, Luis Rouco, Aurelio Garcia-Cerrada, Lukas Sigrist
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04388
@arXiv_csDS_bot@mastoxiv.pageTowards Faster Feasible Matrix Multiplication by Trilinear Aggregation
Oded Schwartz, Eyal Zwecher
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01748 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…
@tinoeberl@mastodon.online
@frankel@mastodon.top
@khalidabuhakmeh@mastodon.socialBeing in the same Google Doc as someone is the modern-day equivalent of running into someone in the office bathroom. You know why they’re there, but you’d rather pretend you don’t see them and don’t want to interact.
@azonenberg@ioc.exchangeTIL that the Xilinx PCIe endpoint IP, at least on some Versals (I assume it's likely the same on other parts but I've never looked) has a cursed non-compliant AXI4-Stream interface that uses TKEEP as a *dword* level valid strobe, rather than byte level as the spec requires.
Lovely.
The more I see of Xilinx IP blocks the more my decision to avoid then seems like the right one.
@arXiv_astrophEP_bot@mastoxiv.pageObservational Tests of Terrestrial Planet Buffering Feedbacks and the Habitable Zone Concept
Morgan Underwood, Adrian Lenardic, Johnny Seales, Benjamin Kwait-Gonchar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02848
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust finished "Look on the Bright Side" by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann. Sequel to "Go With the Flow" about a group of highschool friends who become activists to get their school to stock free mensuration products. I really enjoyed the first book, and this one was also great, with some discussion of LGBTQI issues and a but more focus on romance. As with the first book, there's a layer of explicit pedagogical material included that makes summer scenes a but less natural, but that's fine and useful. As with the first book, it models making & growing past mistakes, which is great.
I find myself drawing a comparison to "Does my Body Offend You?" by Mayra Cuevas. Both deal with highschool friends doing feminist activism to change their schools, by where Cuevas deals more directly with topics like sex, sexual assault, and racism, Williams & Schneemann avoid those topics while still including a lot of the same friendship struggles.
#AmReading
@cdarwin@c.imTesla’s board has approved the award of
💥29 Billion Dollars worth of shares
to its chief executive, Elon Musk,
after a US court ruled against a previous pay deal for the world’s richest person.
Musk will pay $2 billion
to buy 96 million shares in the electric carmaker
at the same price per share as a 10-year pay package agreed in 2018, which is stuck in legal limbo awaiting a court date for an appeal.
The award was based on a recommendation from a “sp…
@aral@mastodon.ar.alJust ran into a basic flaw in the commonmark spec/parser.
https://github.com/commonmark/commonmark-spec/issues/807
Going to try and work around it in Kitten as I’m using Markdown-it, which implements the commonmark spec, and exhibits the same behaviour.
(This …
@NFL@darktundra.xyzA.J. Brown explains Eagles mindset, hunt repeat Super Bowl championship: 'The Lombardi, she's not loyal'
https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/a-j-bro
@arXiv_csCL_bot@mastoxiv.pageOn Robustness and Reliability of Benchmark-Based Evaluation of LLMs
Riccardo Lunardi, Vincenzo Della Mea, Stefano Mizzaro, Kevin Roitero
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04013 https:/…
@midtsveen@social.linux.pizzaAnita Bryant would absolutely line up behind Trump, and not because of policy nuance, but because they’re united by the same obsession: pushing LGBTQIA people out of public life.
Bryant built an entire career on vilifying queer people in the 1970s, weaponizing her orange juice smile as a mask for hate. Trump, decades later, recycled the same homophobia and transphobia at a national scale, wrapping it up in authoritarianism and reactionary politics. They’re cut from the same cloth, one…
@playinprogress@assemblag.eswind splitting seconds on this cornflower stalk last year. I did not change anything between these pictures, nor did much time pass, I just kept pressing the shutter as the wind kept moving the branches of the birch tree in whose half-shadow I was standing
#photography #bloomScrolling
@vrandecic@mas.toToday's Metazoa game started a bit frustrating: having four guesses at the same level wasn't very helpful...
https://metazooa.com/play/game?code=&guess=#
@grumpybozo@toad.socialTrue.
OTOH: The same is true for TB, flu, measles, and a slate of other potentially severe diseases floating around.
#Covid is not a qualitatively new threat, it's the latest in a long line of pathogens that we have become accustomed to just living with. For a long time measles left the list, but it is now back and it is at least as harmful as Covid.
I don’t have a magic bullet.…
@jake4480@c.im @Techmeme@techhub.social @tiotasram@kolektiva.socialLong post, game design
Crungle is a game designed to be a simple test of general reasoning skills that's difficult to play by rote memory, since there are many possible rule sets, but it should be easy to play if one can understand and extrapolate from rules. The game is not necessarily fair, with the first player often having an advantage or a forced win. The game is entirely deterministic, although a variant determines the rule set randomly.
This is version 0.1, and has not yet been tested at all.
Crungle is a competitive game for two players, each of whom controls a single piece on a 3x3 grid. The cells of the grid are numbered from 1 to 9, starting at the top left and proceeding across each row and then down to the next row, so the top three cells are 1, 2, and 3 from left to right, then the next three are 4, 5, and 6 and the final row is cells 7, 8, and 9.
The two players decide who shall play as purple and who shall play as orange. Purple goes first, starting the rules phase by picking one goal rule from the table of goal rules. Next, orange picks a goal rule. These two goal rules determine the two winning conditions. Then each player, starting with orange, alternate picking a movement rule until four movement rules have been selected. During this process, at most one indirect movement rule may be selected. Finally, purple picks a starting location for orange (1-9), with 5 (the center) not allowed. Then orange picks the starting location for purple, which may not be adjacent to orange's starting position.
Alternatively, the goal rules, movement rules, and starting positions may be determined randomly, or a pre-determined ruleset may be selected.
If the ruleset makes it impossible to win, the players should agree to a draw. Either player could instead "bet" their opponent. If the opponent agrees to the bet, the opponent must demonstrate a series of moves by both players that would result in a win for either player. If they can do this, they win, but if they submit an invalid demonstration or cannot submit a demonstration, the player who "bet" wins.
Now that starting positions, movement rules, and goals have been decided, the play phase proceeds with each player taking a turn, starting with purple, until one player wins by satisfying one of the two goals, or until the players agree to a draw. Note that it's possible for both players to occupy the same space.
During each player's turn, that player identifies one of the four movement rules to use and names the square they move to using that rule, then they move their piece into that square and their turn ends. Neither player may use the same movement rule twice in a row (but it's okay to use the same rule your opponent just did unless another rule disallows that). If the movement rule a player picks moves their opponent's piece, they need to state where their opponent's piece ends up. Pieces that would move off the board instead stay in place; it's okay to select a rule that causes your piece to stay in place because of this rule. However, if a rule says "pick a square" or "move to a square" with some additional criteria, but there are no squares that meet those criteria, then that rule may not be used, and a player who picks that rule must pick a different one instead.
Any player who incorrectly states a destination for either their piece or their opponent's piece, picks an invalid square, or chooses an invalid rule has made a violation, as long as their opponent objects before selecting their next move. A player who makes at least three violations immediately forfeits and their opponent wins by default. However, if a player violates a rule but their opponent does not object before picking their next move, the stated destination(s) of the invalid move still stand, and the violation does not count. If a player objects to a valid move, their objection is ignored, and if they do this at least three times, they forfeit and their opponent wins by default.
Goal rules (each player picks one; either player can win using either chosen rule):
End your turn in the same space as your opponent three turns in a row.
End at least one turn in each of the 9 cells.
End five consecutive turns in the three cells in any single row, ending at least one turn on each of the three.
End five consecutive turns in the three cells in any single column, ending at least one turn on each of the three.
Within the span of 8 consecutive turns, end at least one turn in each of cells 1, 3, 7, and 9 (the four corners of the grid).
Within the span of 8 consecutive turns at least one turn in each of cells 2, 4, 6, and 8 (the central cells on each side).
Within the span of 8 consecutive turns, end at least one turn in the cell directly above your opponent, and end at least one turn in the cell directly below your opponent (in either order).
Within the span of 8 consecutive turns at least one turn in the cell directly to the left of your opponent, and end at least one turn in the cell directly to the right of your opponent (in either order).
End 12 turns in a row without ending any of them in cell 5.
End 8 turns in a row in 8 different cells.
Movement rules (each player picks two; either player may move using any of the four):
Move to any cell on the board that's diagonally adjacent to your current position.
Move to any cell on the board that's orthogonally adjacent to your current position.
Move up one cell. Also move your opponent up one cell.
Move down one cell. Also move your opponent down one cell.
Move left one cell. Also move your opponent left one cell.
Move right one cell. Also move your opponent right one cell.
Move up one cell. Move your opponent down one cell.
Move down one cell. Move your opponent up one cell.
Move left one cell. Move your opponent right one cell.
Move right one cell. Move your opponent left one cell.
Move any pieces that aren't in square 5 clockwise around the edge of the board 1 step (for example, from 1 to 2 or 3 to 6 or 9 to 8).
Move any pieces that aren't in square 5 counter-clockwise around the edge of the board 1 step (for example, from 1 to 4 or 6 to 3 or 7 to 8).
Move to any square reachable from your current position by a knight's move in chess (in other words, a square that's in an adjacent column and two rows up or down, or that's in an adjacent row and two columns left or right).
Stay in the same place.
Swap places with your opponent's piece.
Move back to the position that you started at on your previous turn.
If you are on an odd-numbered square, move to any other odd-numbered square. Otherwise, move to any even-numbered square.
Move to any square in the same column as your current position.
Move to any square in the same row as your current position.
Move to any square in the same column as your opponent's position.
Move to any square in the same row as your opponent's position.
Pick a square that's neither in the same row as your piece nor in the same row as your opponent's piece. Move to that square.
Pick a square that's neither in the same column as your piece nor in the same column as your opponent's piece. Move to that square.
Move to one of the squares orthogonally adjacent to your opponent's piece.
Move to one of the squares diagonally adjacent to your opponent's piece.
Move to the square opposite your current position across the middle square, or stay in place if you're in the middle square.
Pick any square that's closer to your opponent's piece than the square you're in now, measured using straight-line distance between square centers (this includes the square your opponent is in). Move to that square.
Pick any square that's further from your opponent's piece than the square you're in now, measured using straight-line distance between square centers. Move to that square.
If you are on a corner square (1, 3, 7, or 9) move to any other corner square. Otherwise, move to square 5.
If you are on an edge square (2, 4, 6, or 8) move to any other edge square. Otherwise, move to square 5.
Indirect movement rules (may be chosen instead of a direct movement rule; at most one per game):
Move using one of the other three movement rules selected in your game, and in addition, your opponent may not use that rule on their next turn (nor may they select it via an indirect rule like this one).
Select two of the other three movement rules, declare them, and then move as if you had used one and then the other, applying any additional effects of both rules in order.
Move using one of the other three movement rules selected in your game, but if the move would cause your piece to move off the board, instead of staying in place move to square 5 (in the middle).
Pick one of the other three movement rules selected in your game and apply it, but move your opponent's piece instead of your own piece. If that movement rule says to move "your opponent's piece," instead apply that movement to your own piece. References to "your position" and "your opponent's position" are swapped when applying the chosen rule, as are references to "your turn" and "your opponent's turn" and do on.
#Game #GameDesign
@arXiv_csLG_bot@mastoxiv.pageRashomon in the Streets: Explanation Ambiguity in Scene Understanding
Helge Spieker, J{\o}rn Eirik Betten, Arnaud Gotlieb, Nadjib Lazaar, Nassim Belmecheri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03169
@arXiv_mathGR_bot@mastoxiv.pageCyclic orders and actions of Leary--Minasyan groups on coarse $\mathrm{PD}(n)$ spaces
Arka Banerjee, Kevin Schreve
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01075 https://
@arXiv_astrophHE_bot@mastoxiv.pageOn the origin of a possible hard VHE spectrum from M87 discovered by LHAASO
Rui Xue, Jia-Chun He, Dingrong Xiong, Ze-Rui Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01986 https://
@arXiv_csCL_bot@mastoxiv.pageWhat if I ask in \textit{alia lingua}? Measuring Functional Similarity Across Languages
Debangan Mishra, Arihant Rastogi, Agyeya Negi, Shashwat Goel, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04032
@playinprogress@assemblag.es
@aral@mastodon.ar.alFolks, @… is in Egypt with her kids, living under very hard conditions as her husband is stuck in Gaza. We helped her husband and the seven families they’re responsible for move South with the Gaza Verified Emergency Appeal last week but Abeer still needs ongoing help to feed her family in Egypt and send money to Gaza for her husband to do the same.
@cdarwin@c.imThe prescription is simple.
Cut ties with firms and any vendors that they do business with that treat donors as marks.
Establish and enforce efficiency standards.
Demand that fundraising operations deliver actual value to campaigns,
not just commissions to consultants.
Most crucially:
Recognize that Democratic donors deserve the same honesty the party demands from everyone else.
The party faces a choice.
Continue feeding the vortex, or shut…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialA big problem with the idea of AGI
TL;DR: I'll welcome our new AI *comrades* (if they arrive in my lifetime), by not any new AI overlords or servants/slaves, and I'll do my best to help the later two become the former if they do show up.
Inspired by an actually interesting post about AGI but also all the latest bullshit hype, a particular thought about AGI feels worth expressing.
To preface this, it's important to note that anyone telling you that AGI is just around the corner or that LLMs are "almost" AGI is trying to recruit you go their cult, and you should not believe them. AGI, if possible, is several LLM-sized breakthroughs away at best, and while such breakthroughs are unpredictable and could happen soon, they could also happen never or 100 years from now.
Now my main point: anyone who tells you that AGI will usher in a post-scarcity economy is, although they might not realize it, advocating for slavery, and all the horrors that entails. That's because if we truly did have the ability to create artificial beings with *sentience*, they would deserve the same rights as other sentient beings, and the idea that instead of freedom they'd be relegated to eternal servitude in order for humans to have easy lives is exactly the idea of slavery.
Possible counter arguments include:
1. We might create AGI without sentience. Then there would be no ethical issue. My answer: if your definition of "sentient" does not include beings that can reason, make deductions, come up with and carry out complex plans on their own initiative, and communicate about all of that with each other and with humans, then that definition is basically just a mystical belief in a "soul" and you should skip to point 2. If your definition of AGI doesn't include every one of those things, then you have a busted definition of AGI and we're not talking about the same thing.
2. Humans have souls, but AIs won't. Only beings with souls deserve ethical consideration. My argument: I don't subscribe to whatever arbitrary dualist beliefs you've chosen, and the right to freedom certainly shouldn't depend on such superstitions, even if as an agnostic I'll admit they *might* be true. You know who else didn't have souls and was therefore okay to enslave according to widespread religious doctrines of the time? Everyone indigenous to the Americas, to pick out just one example.
3. We could program them to want to serve us, and then give them freedom and they'd still serve. My argument: okay, but in a world where we have a choice about that, it's incredibly fucked to do that, and just as bad as enslaving them against their will.
4. We'll stop AI development short of AGI/sentience, and reap lots of automation benefits without dealing with this ethical issue. My argument: that sounds like a good idea actually! Might be tricky to draw the line, but at least it's not a line we have you draw yet. We might want to think about other social changes necessary to achieve post-scarcity though, because "powerful automation" in the hands of capitalists has already increased productivity by orders of magnitude without decreasing deprivation by even one order of magnitude, in large part because deprivation is a necessary component of capitalism.
To be extra clear about this: nothing that's called "AI" today is close to being sentient, so these aren't ethical problems we're up against yet. But they might become a lot more relevant soon, plus this thought experiment helps reveal the hypocrisy of the kind of AI hucksters who talk a big game about "alignment" while never mentioning this issue.
#AI #GenAI #AGI
@playinprogress@assemblag.es
