Tootfinder

Memo: the TikTok US deal is set to close on Jan. 22; terms include retraining the recommendation algorithm on US user data and Oracle overseeing data protection (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

TikTok U.S. Deal to Close Next Month: Oracle and Silver Lake Confirmed in Buyer Consortium
Abu Dhabi's state investment fund will also be a managing investor.

I would like an optional algorithm in Mastodon that autmatically adds an alt-text to a picture, which i can ofcourse edit if i want, i think that would increase accessability. I know that there are bots like @altbot that do this, but that is different in user experience.
#mastodon #features…

Memo: the TikTok US deal is set to close on Jan. 22; terms include retraining the recommendation algorithm on US user data and Oracle overseeing data protection (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

TikTok U.S. Deal to Close Next Month: Oracle and Silver Lake Confirmed in Buyer Consortium
Abu Dhabi's state investment fund will also be a managing investor.

„Only in the world of AI algorithm training can you claim that you were torrenting 2,400 porn videos for personal use and have that seem like the lesser of two evils.“ 😂
https://www.vice.com/en/article/meta-says-the-2400-ad…

Meta Says the 2,400 ‘Adult Movies’ They Torrented Were for Personal Use, Not Training AI
Two adult entertainment companies say Meta’s appetite for information has gotten a little kinky... and now they're suing.

There are 3 fundamental freedoms outlined in Dawn of Everything:
(1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings;
(2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and
(3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.
I think these can all be captured in one statement when reframed as a system constraint: for a system to be free, participation must be optional for all members.
People must be part of *some* system. Even individualistic survivalism is itself a system (if not a very good one). Then there is a corollary as well: any system that is not free, that is not optional, can turn optional systems into mandatory ones, and thus (adopted from the MLK quote) un-freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere.
Edit:
I'm gonna drop the #Philosophy tag on here because apparently that's where I went with it. Challenges and push-back welcome.
Edit:
Aaaaand Its a blog post
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/an-algorithm-for-liberation
As usual, comments, typos, and questions are always welcome.

This is one of the many reasons I use #Bandcamp and #Qobuz.
I actually own my #music, no corporate algorithm deciding what I “should” like, no invisible hand yanking albums away because some…

quantum computers become available. Algorithms like RSA/ECDH are vulnerable to Shor's algorithm.
🛡️ Post-quantum cryptography uses algorithms resistant to quantum attacks. OpenSSH now supports sntrup761x25519-sha512@openssh.com which combines classical
(Curve25519) and post-quantum (NTRU Prime) security for hybrid protection against both threats.

I can't tell if this is a joke or an error and either way it's a tempting shirt...
(To be fair I often have trouble spelling "algorithm" but I've never put the word on a shirt.)
#AlGothRim #algorithm

I like the fact that there’s no algorithm dictating what I see, or manipulating the reach of my toots on #mastodon. The only downside is that it sometimes feels as though I’m screaming into the void. I’m never going to get that addictive viral tweet experience that I had on #twitter here, but I’m not s…

An interview with Nikita Bier, who wants to lure journalists back to X with a rebuilt recommendation algorithm with no keyword suppression or manual downranking (Alex Heath/Sources)
https://sources.news/p/x-wants-its-haters-back

X wants its haters back
Product chief Nikita Bier's message to journalists who left: “We have to earn their trust.”

Tidal For Streaming
I know that Spotify is considered to have the best algorithm for suggesting new music. However, the sound quality isn’t there. Therefore, I use Tidal for lossless hi-res playback (of at least some of the library). Today, I’ve found that Tidal does a pretty good job suggesting other tracks I would like to listen to after playing an album. Some time back, it was just suggesting rap, and other stuff I didn’t care to listen to.

Tidal For Streaming
I know that Spotify is considered to have the best algorithm for suggesting new music. However, the sound quality isn’t there. Therefore, I use Tidal for lossless hi-res playback (of at least some …

For all newcomers: please use hashtags. (reasonable ones would be cool 😉). There is no algorithm that will push your content.

This was fun. But I can clearly optimize the algorithm once I learn #Gleam better.
I just completed "Playground" - Day 8 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode

An interview with Nikita Bier, who wants to lure journalists back to X with a rebuilt recommendation algorithm with no keyword suppression or manual downranking (Alex Heath/Sources)
https://sources.news/p/x-wants-its-haters-back

X wants its haters back
Product chief Nikita Bier's message to journalists who left: “We have to earn their trust.”

Need some data to test a plot idea or algorithm? On #rstats #synthetic…

Meta updates Reels on Facebook to prioritize showing fresher and more-relevant content, and adds AI search suggestions and friend bubbles like on Instagram (Katelyn Chedraoui/CNET)
https://www.cnet.com/news/social-media/fac

Facebook's Algorithm Update Aims to Show You Newer Reels You'll Actually Like, Even if It's AI
Facebook's vice president of product, Jagjit Chawla, talks about how the platform treats AI-generated content and how you can see less of it.

Today, Youtube's ad algorithm seems to think that I am a black woman.
Perfect.

Here is an updated version of the #NFDI graph: large nodes are consortia, small nodes are institutions. Graph created with data from #Wikidata, visualized with #Gephi, using force atlas algorithm and modularity class c…

Simply not compatible with their optimisation function
This loop explains well why commercial algorithms are incompatible with creativity.
"According to this employee, Spotify leadership didn’t see themselves as a music company, but as a time filler. The employee explained that, “the vast majority of music listeners, they’re not really interested in listening to music per se. They just need a soundtrack to a moment in their day.”
Simply providing a soundtrack to your d…

The algorithm failed music
Algorithmic music recommendations failed to cut through the noise and just served us up slop.

by accident i stumbled on this review by the #NSA on Bruce Schneiers "Applied Crypto" book from long ago.

This could just as easily be the US government...
#LLM #AI #Copyright

👾 Unsupervised Instance Segmentation with Superpixels
#cs #arxiv

Unsupervised Instance Segmentation with Superpixels
Instance segmentation is essential for numerous computer vision applications, including robotics, human-computer interaction, and autonomous driving. Currently, popular models bring impressive performance in instance segmentation by training with a large number of human annotations, which are costly to collect. For this reason, we present a new framework that efficiently and effectively segments objects without the need for human annotations. Firstly, a MultiCut algorithm is applied to self-sup…

This is a really good assessment (why people are complaining BlueSky is “mean”), IMO.
It’s also true of Mastodon, for very similar reasons.
If I may mangle a line from “Grosse Pointe Blank”:
“if people are hot in your mentions, you did something to bring them there”
OTOH, BS and Masto have tools to manage that. (though they need improvement)

I discovered Reviewbrah on YouTube a month ago. Not sure why it took the algorithm so long to connect us given that I love non sequitur / absurdist humor.
“My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.”
#ReviewBrah #ScottHumor

Me: "What is best in life?
Younger coworker: "to crush your notifications, see them flee before you, and hear the lamentations of the algorithm"

Deezers 'we think you would like' algorithm is great! Re-found this album #paradiselost

Instagram launches Your Algorithm, which shows users an AI analysis of their activity to let them customize the topics shaping their Reels recommendations (Reece Rogers/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/instagram-lets-you-pick-what-shows-up-in-reels/

Instagram Will Start Letting You Pick What Shows Up in Your Reels
In the battle for your attention, Instagram is betting that more control over the algorithm could keep you scrolling on Reels.

Instagram launches Your Algorithm, which shows users an AI analysis of their activity to let them customize the topics shaping their Reels recommendations (Reece Rogers/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/instagram-lets-you-pick-what-shows-up-in-reels/

Instagram Will Start Letting You Pick What Shows Up in Your Reels
In the battle for your attention, Instagram is betting that more control over the algorithm could keep you scrolling on Reels.

TIdal for streaming: https://eyebeemania.net/2025/10/11/tidal-for-streaming.html

TIdal for streaming
I know that Spotify is considered to have the best algorithm …

Bandits with Single-Peaked Preferences and Limited Resources
Gur Keinan, Rotem Torkan, Omer Ben-Porat
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09425 https://arxiv.org/pd…

Bandits with Single-Peaked Preferences and Limited Resources
We study an online stochastic matching problem in which an algorithm sequentially matches $U$ users to $K$ arms, aiming to maximize cumulative reward over $T$ rounds under budget constraints. Without structural assumptions, computing the optimal matching is NP-hard, making online learning computationally infeasible. To overcome this barrier, we focus on \emph{single-peaked preferences} -- a well-established structure in social choice theory, where users' preferences are unimodal with respect to…

2/2
> "They are in charge of the #algorithm. … For me, we don't speak about #FreeSpeech when the algorithm is hidden and in the hands of very few players."
YouTube, 18.11.2025: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLRMy6xC3Mo

In times like these I'm just SO grateful that the fediverse doesn't operate through algorithms AND that I never wanted to make a business out of my social media presence.
Just posting whatever I want, whenever I want. And you folks are just there and interact (or not). And for every interaction, I know that it's a genuine one, not "for the algorithm". - And THIS is just SO precious to ME.
It simply feels so honest.
Thank you for being there.

Trump quips he’d make TikTok algorithm ‘100% MAGA’ as he signs order for China sale to US group | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/tiktok-deal-trump-china-announcement-b2833916.html

Two new NERDS papers: Algorithmic bias, street network simplification
https://nerds.itu.dk/2025/11/03/two-new-nerds-papers-algorithmic-bias-street-network-simplification/

"regardless of the underlying technology, the pursuit of artificial general intelligence is not necessarily the most efficient route to useful applications. Artificial specific intelligence (AI approaches focused on a specific domain, such as the Nobel prize-winning, protein-folding algorithm, AlphaFold2) gives more reliable and transparent results by combining the subtle pattern detection at which GenAI excels with explicitly encoded, domain-specific knowledge."

Border Patrol and other federal law enforcement agencies are conducting a massive surveillance network monitoring the actions of millions of Americans.
These agencies are not protecting Americans from threats. They are the threat.
https://apnews.co…

Oh joy. I feel so much safer. /s
Border Patrol is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with 'suspicious' travel patterns
https://apnews.com/article/immigration-border-patrol-surveillance-drivers-ice-trump…

Border Patrol monitors US drivers and detains Americans for ‘suspicious’ travel
The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious. The Associated Press has found that the predictive intelligence program has resulted in people being stopped, searched, and in some cases arrested. A network of cameras scans and records vehicle license plate information, and an algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going, …

Oh joy. I feel so much safer. /s
Border Patrol is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with 'suspicious' travel patterns
https://apnews.com/article/immigration-border-patrol-surveillance-drivers-ice-trump…

Border Patrol monitors US drivers and detains Americans for ‘suspicious’ travel
The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious. The Associated Press has found that the predictive intelligence program has resulted in people being stopped, searched, and in some cases arrested. A network of cameras scans and records vehicle license plate information, and an algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going, …

An analysis of 1,100 TikTok users' watch histories across six months in 2024 shows how effective TikTok is at getting even its heaviest users to watch more (Washington Post)

Spending hours on TikTok? Here’s how the app keeps you swiping.
Washington Post reporters analyzed data from over 800 TikTok users to learn how the app turns people into power users, some of whom spend hours per day scrolling.

Google hails breakthrough as quantum computer surpasses ability of supercomputers;
Algorithm performed task beyond capability of classical computers, although experts say real-world application still years away
https://www.theguardian…

An analysis of 1,100 TikTok users' watch histories across six months in 2024 shows how effective TikTok is at getting even its heaviest users to watch more (Washington Post)

Spending hours on TikTok? Here’s how the app keeps you swiping.
Washington Post reporters analyzed data from over 800 TikTok users to learn how the app turns people into power users, some of whom spend hours per day scrolling.

A classic. I've implemented the sweep-merge-interval algorithm in more languages than I can remember. #Gleam
I just completed "Cafeteria" - Day 5 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode

I need to read it properly, but this looks 🔥 https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16652

Evolution Strategies at the Hyperscale
We introduce Evolution Guided General Optimization via Low-rank Learning (EGGROLL), an evolution strategies (ES) algorithm designed to scale backprop-free optimization to large population sizes for modern large neural network architectures with billions of parameters. ES is a set of powerful blackbox optimisation methods that can handle non-differentiable or noisy objectives with excellent scaling potential through parallelisation. Na{ï}ve ES becomes prohibitively expensive at scale due to the…

I am thinking maybe I should call it even and frame this for keepsakes because my latest video of High on Life bombed so hard, the YouTube algorithm called in and asked me to never show up again. It's a complicated game with lots of coarse language and gruesome animated violence against aggressive, degenerate aliens from outer space. (Nah, no official objections from YouTube, but three of the six views are from me, while I am hitting thousands with other videos.)

The YouTube algorithm took me from the wonderful Deborah Ann Woll passionately talking about DnD to how to play DnD solo ...

A book excerpt details how a small team of content curators hired by ByteDance in Mexico City in 2018 shaped TikTok's For You algorithm in Latin America (Emily Baker-White/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-wh

The Humble Origins Of TikTok’s Almighty Algorithm
An exclusive excerpt from Every Screen On The Planet reveals how the social media app’s powerful recommendation engine was shaped by a bunch of ordinary, twentysomething curators—including a guy named Jorge.

This Obsidian theme is wild! I don't see myself using it full-time, but I love having it among my options. :smug:
#obsidian

GitHub - emarpiee/Retroma: Retroma is an Obsidian theme that blends nostalgic, classic design with an intelligent color scheme algorithm.
Retroma is an Obsidian theme that blends nostalgic, classic design with an intelligent color scheme algorithm. - emarpiee/Retroma

White House says TikTok's new US entity would lease a copy of ByteDance's algorithm, which Oracle would retrain; US users wouldn't need to re-download the app (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/22/tiktok-bytedance-trump-algorithm-lease

Inside Trump's deal to save TikTok
TikTok's new U.S. entity would lease its algorithm from Chinese owner ByteDance.

White House says TikTok's new US entity would lease a copy of the algorithm from ByteDance, which Oracle would retrain; users won't need to re-download the app (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/22/tiktok-bytedance-trump-algorithm-lease

Inside Trump's deal to save TikTok
TikTok's new U.S. entity would lease its algorithm from Chinese owner ByteDance.

Hybrid Quantum-Classical Walks for Graph Representation Learning in Community Detection
Adri\'an Mar{\i}n, Mauricio Soto-Gomez, Giorgio Valentini, Elena Casiraghi, Carlos Cano, Daniel Manzano
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01918

Hybrid Quantum-Classical Walks for Graph Representation Learning in Community Detection
Graph Representation Learning (GRL) has emerged as a cornerstone technique for analysing complex, networked data across diverse domains, including biological systems, social networks, and data analysis. Traditional GRL methods often struggle to capture intricate relationships within complex graphs, particularly those exhibiting non-trivial structural properties such as power-law distributions or hierarchical structures. This paper introduces a novel quantum-inspired algorithm for GRL, utilizing…

Seems the #AI #slop #hype #theater is about to crumble...

The Algorithm That Detected a $610 Billion Fraud: How Machine Intelligence Exposed the AI Industry’s Circular Financing Scheme
On November 20, 2025, trading algorithms identified what may become the largest accounting fraud in technology history—not in months or years, but in 18 hours.

Maria Ressa - Fighting Back Against Trump’s Authoritarian Algorithm With Truth | The Daily Show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tsb1I7hqaJ4

Paris prosecutors open a probe into TikTok's algorithm and compliance with requirements to police and report suicide content, after a French government report (Gaspard Sebag/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Model-free algorithms for fast node clustering in SBM type graphs and application to social role inference in animals
Bertrand Cloez, Adrien Cotil, Jean-Baptiste Menassol, Nicolas Verzelen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15989

Model-free algorithms for fast node clustering in SBM type graphs and application to social role inference in animals
We propose a novel family of model-free algorithms for node clustering and parameter inference in graphs generated from the Stochastic Block Model (SBM), a fundamental framework in community detection. Drawing inspiration from the Lloyd algorithm for the $k$-means problem, our approach extends to SBMs with general edge weight distributions. We establish the consistency of our estimator under a natural identifiability condition. Through extensive numerical experiments, we benchmark our methods a…

A new bipartisan Senate bill amends Section 230 to make commercial social media platforms responsible if their recommendation systems cause foreseeable harms (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/policy/824054/algorithm-accountability-act-section-…

Lawmakers want to let users sue over harmful social media algorithms
Sens. John Curtis (R-UT) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) introduced the Algorithm Accountability Act, which would reform tech’s liability shield Section 230.

BBC Director of Children & Education Patricia Hidalgo says YouTube predominantly directs UK children to US content, weakening their ties to British culture (Michael Savage/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2

Google says its Willow quantum chip using a new Quantum Echoes algorithm ran computations 13,000x faster than supercomputers, aiding drug and materials research (Cade Metz/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/technology/googles-quantum-computer-…

Google’s Quantum Computer Makes a Big Technical Leap
Designed to accelerate advances in medicine and other fields, the tech giant’s quantum algorithm runs 13,000 times as fast as software written for a traditional supercomputer.

Evading Overlapping Community Detection via Proxy Node Injection
Dario Loi, Matteo Silvestri, Fabrizio Silvestri, Gabriele Tolomei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21211 https://

Evading Overlapping Community Detection via Proxy Node Injection
Protecting privacy in social graphs requires preventing sensitive information, such as community affiliations, from being inferred by graph analysis, without substantially altering the graph topology. We address this through the problem of \emph{community membership hiding} (CMH), which seeks edge modifications that cause a target node to exit its original community, regardless of the detection algorithm employed. Prior work has focused on non-overlapping community detection, where trivial stra…

IBM says it was able to run a key quantum computing algorithm in real-time on commonly available field programmable gate array chips made by AMD (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/ibm-says-key-quantum…

Fast and Optimal Incremental Parametric Procedure for the Densest Subgraph Problem: An Experimental Study
Dorit S. Hochbaum, Ayleen Irribarra-Cort\'es, Olivier Goldschmidt, Roberto As\'in-Ach\'a
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14993

Fast and Optimal Incremental Parametric Procedure for the Densest Subgraph Problem: An Experimental Study
The Densest Subgraph Problem (DSP) is widely used to identify community structures and patterns in networks such as bioinformatics and social networks. While solvable in polynomial time, traditional exact algorithms face computational and scalability limitations, leading to the adoption of faster, but non-optimal, heuristic methods. This work presents the first experimental study of the recently devised Incremental Parametric Cut (IPC) algorithm, which is an exact method for DSP and other "mono…

Karoline Leavitt confirms Oracle will handle TikTok's data and security, and says the US is "100% confident" a deal is done and it "just needs to be signed" (Ben Berkowitz/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/20/us-china-tiktok-deal

TikTok deal signed soon, includes U.S. control of algorithm, White House says
It's still not clear exactly who will own the app or how the deal will work in practice for users.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says Americans would hold six of the seven board seats for TikTok US and its algorithm would be US-controlled (Kasia Klimasinska/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20