Major military contractor and surveillance giant Palantir
has posted a chilling manifesto on social media that calls for tech companies like itself to play a larger role in a dystopian future
where imperialist and white supremacist powers are unleashed and Americans are increasingly subject to the whims of the surveillance state.
The post contains 22 points it says were summarized from a 2025 book,
"The Technological Republic", written by Palantir co-founder…
Learning Latent Memory States from Longitudinal Athlete Monitoring Data
Dae-Jin Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06290 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.06290 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.06290
arXiv:2608.06290v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We propose a new unit of analysis for longitudinal data: the Latent Memory Table. The scientific contribution is not the encoder. It is that table, treated as a reusable statistical object on the same footing as a matrix of principal-component scores, a table of estimated random effects, or a table of predicted probabilities. We estimate a statistical table that summarizes recent longitudinal history and is intended to be stored, queried, analysed and reused throughout the statistical workflow. A memory operator maps each masked windowed history to a finite-dimensional state; collecting those states with uncertainty yields the Latent Memory Table. Validation is organized around six properties---recoverability, personalization, temporal coherence, interpretability, stability and reusability---summarized by a composite quality index \(Q\); the Transformer, the SoccerMon case study and the simulations exist to argue that this table deserves that status. Classical exponentially weighted moving averages and related short- and long-horizon scalar summaries arise as restricted, typically univariate special cases of the same operator class. A simulation study with known memory mechanisms shows that \(Q\) and rotation-invariant recovery scores discriminate genuine multivariate or personalized memory from negative controls and from misspecified windows, whereas regime classification accuracy alone does not. SoccerMon serves as an empirical case study: a constructed Latent Memory Table attains \(Q\approx 0.73\) versus about \(0.40\) for classical and lagged principal-component baselines, with incremental held-out value for some wellness targets and Procrustes ensembles for row-wise reliability.
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Orientation Reading by Production Vision-Language Models on Optotype Charts: A Controlled Multi-Model Evaluation Across Reasoning Modes, Prompts, and Access Modalities
Shahryar Wasif, Avneek Sandhu, Bin Hu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16595 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.16595 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.16595
arXiv:2607.16595v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: OBJECTIVES: Vision-language models are increasingly used to interpret medical and everyday images through consumer chat interfaces, yet their ability to read orientation - the single perceptual operation tested by the tumbling-E acuity optotype - is poorly characterized on the surfaces through which they are actually used. METHODS: We evaluated four production vision-language models (referred to as Claude, GPT, GROK, and Gemini) through their consumer chat interfaces on a locked set of seven optotype charts: four uniform tumbling-E charts (one per cardinal orientation), two mixed-orientation tumbling-E charts, and one Snellen letter chart as a specificity control. Each model was run in two reasoning modes (Fast and Thinking) under two prompt variants (with and without an explicit orientation-decoding rule) by up to three operators. The corpus comprised 920 scoreable trials and 50,420 glyph judgements. The primary outcome was glyph-level accuracy against the chart's designed orientation, summarized with Wilson 95% confidence intervals. RESULTS: Accuracy ranged from 43.0% to 97.0% across models on identical charts, and the strongest model depended on reasoning mode (GPT 97.0% in Fast mode; GROK 96.6% in Thinking mode). Errors were not random but collapsed onto a model-specific attractor direction. Models were 96-100% internally self-consistent yet ranged widely in accuracy, dissociating reliability from validity. An answer-key-free ensemble-consensus estimate tracked accuracy closely (r = 0.998). For one model, consumer-interface accuracy fell 25-27 points below programmatic access, almost entirely on a single orientation. CONCLUSIONS: A single accuracy figure conceals clinically relevant, orientation-specific failure modes; vision-language models should be evaluated along multiple axes and on the deployment surface before image-interpretation outputs are trusted.
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The service summarized ☝️ is called "samsthaana pooje": samsthaana ≈ institution; pooje ≈ service.
The general process ☝️ is typical for mathas of "maadhwa" faith.
Attending such services is wonderful experience. I'm fortunate to be able to attend frequently and mostly get good vantage. 🙇♂️
#gratitude
Super fun stories here...
https://cloudisland.nz/@xssfox/117119924555286238
xssfox@cloudisland.nz - I've written and summarized the wild journey of SondeHub from joke domain to handling military requests to our (accidental) involvement in Ukraine's defenses.
https://sprocketfox.io/xssfox/2026/08/19/sondehub-and-war/
Review of oxygen measurement and relevance to the mechanisms of FLASH radiotherapy
Brian W. Pogue, David I. Hunter, Corbin Narita, William S. Thomas, Xu Cao, Harold M. Swartz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17974 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.17974 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.17974
arXiv:2607.17974v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: FLASH radiotherapy (FLASH-RT) is the phenomenon of relative sparing of normal tissue when ultra-high dose rates (UHDR) are used compared with conventional dose rates (CDR) as clinically used. Despite extensive investigation, the underlying mechanisms remain unexplained. Among the proposed hypotheses, tissue oxygen has consistently been a central theme because oxygen is the most dominant factor known to modulate radiation-induced damage. The factors implicated in FLASH sparing include the baseline partial pressure of oxygen (pO2), transient radiolytic oxygen consumption (ROC), and oxygen-dependent changes in the chemistry of reactive oxygen species (ROS) that vary with dose rate. This review synthesizes current evidence on in vivo oxygen measurement techniques, highlighting their capabilities and limitations in capturing the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of tissue oxygenation. Key experimental studies in skin are summarized and interpreted by modulating oxygen levels via changes in inspired oxygen gas and vascular clamping interventions, demonstrating that the FLASH effect occurs only at intermediate baseline pO2 (normoxic or slightly hypoxic) values, but not at hypoxia or hyperoxia. Direct measurement of oxygen consumption during UHDR irradiation is possible, providing one of the first in situ measurements of radiation chemistry in patients. In parallel, recent advances in fast in vitro radiation chemistry assays indicate that UHDR irradiation alters radical yields, favoring increased production of solvated electrons and reduced hydroxyl radical mediated damage. Taken together, the available data suggest that the FLASH sparing effect arises from an interplay among the delivered dose and dose rate, local oxygen availability, and radiation chemistry, with tissue-specific variation in scavenging, leading to altered biological responses across the CDR-to-UHDR shift.
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Today, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” published 76 years ago about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast: #Bradbury #dystopia #shortstory
@cdarwin@c.im
