Tootfinder

Waymo applied for a NYC permit to test its cars with safety drivers and plans to start collecting mapping data with manually driven cars in Manhattan in July (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/689093/waymo-nyc-permit…

Waymo’s robotaxis are coming back to New York City
Waymo applied for a permit to test autonomous vehicles with safety drivers in New York City. And it hopes it can change the state law to allow it to operate fully driverless.

War is an unconscionable horror. The illusions of "international law" and "rules of war" have lead us to believe that war can be clean, managed, and "civilized."
But wars are fought by humans and humans are messy. Humans are not well suited to following orderly rules. Humans respond to their environment. Humans in extraordinary situations can be extraordinarily vindictive and brutal. Sufficiently traumatized humans can act without a conscience, spreading trauma like an infection. If humans respond to their situation, then there can be no "civilized" war because war is itself an situation outside of the society. It is a place that promotes antisocial behavior and punishes pro-social behavior. War cannot be expected to follow "international law" because it is what fills the void created by the failure of "international law" (so long as we rely on nations).
To call for war is to inflict atrocities on civilians. It is to kill the parents and children who serve, and to destroy the combatants who survive. It is to infect both sides with a trauma that will spread if untreated, when soldiers come home or when they become mercenaries in other wars.
And yet... there are times when the brutality, the incompetence, the evil becomes so unbearable that no other option exists, when taking up arms is simply bringing symmetry to an existing asymmetric conflict. There are times when the worst possible thing is inescapable, though it can never be justified.
In this new era of war, in the scramble of conflict under the collapsing of the (poorly named) "Pax Americana," I hope that we, the people, can understand that war is not a tool to fulfill an objective. It is not part of a larger strategy. It is not an extension of deplomacy.
War is a failure.
While it may be the only way to deal with the irrational - the genocidal, the slaver, the dictator - it is still a failure. It is a failure to build a world in which these people can't control armies and economies, can't turn populations in to cults and bend nations to their will.
And we will continue to have such wars until we unite against those who would use as as pawns, who would control our lives and lead us to our deaths. We will have these wars until we unite, as one world, against those rulers. This is what I mean, and what a lot of other people mean, when we say, "No War, but Class War."

Another Mysterious Anti-Trump Statue Has Appeared on the National Mall
Like last year's "memorial" to Jan 6 rioters, this one, too, has a permit—and a Hollywood connection.
https://www.washingtonian.com/2025/06/17/a

"But West Virginia’s new law is unusual. Boasting the “least restrictive regulatory environment in the nation,” it prohibits local officials from having any input into where off-grid data centers go. This provision appears to be a nationwide first and is angering mayors and commissioners statewide."
From: @…

Optimizing electrical stimulation parameters to enhance visual cortex activation in retina degeneration rats #BCI

Optimizing electrical stimulation parameters to enhance visual cortex activation in retina degeneration rats - Scientific Reports
In patients with degenerative retinal diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration, retinal prostheses offer a promising approach to restoring partial vision. Among these, epiretinal prostheses have shown encouraging preliminary clinical efficacy; however, optimizing stimulation parameters remains essential for improving efficiency and reducing power consumption. In this study, we investigated the effects of key electrical stimulation parameters— phase duration, …

Mitigating sloppiness in joint estimation of successive squeezing parameters
Priyanka Sharma, Stefano Olivares, Devendra Kumar Mishra, Matteo G. A. Paris
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15638

Mitigating sloppiness in joint estimation of successive squeezing parameters
When two successive squeezing operations with the same phase are applied to a field mode, reliably estimating the amplitude of each is impossible because the output state depends solely on their sum. In this case, the quantum statistical model becomes sloppy, and the quantum Fisher information matrix turns singular. However, estimation of both parameters becomes feasible if the quantum state is subjected to an appropriate scrambling operation between the two squeezing operations. In this work, …

AI, AGI, and learning efficiency
My 4-month-old kid is not DDoSing Wikipedia right now, nor will they ever do so before learning to speak, read, or write. Their entire "training corpus" will not top even 100 million "tokens" before they can speak & understand language, and do so with real intentionally.
Just to emphasize that point: 100 words-per-minute times 60 minutes-per-hour times 12 hours-per-day times 365 days-per-year times 4 years is a mere 105,120,000 words. That's a ludicrously *high* estimate of words-per-minute and hours-per-day, and 4 years old (the age of my other kid) is well after basic speech capabilities are developed in many children, etc. More likely the available "training data" is at least 1 or 2 orders of magnitude less than this.
The point here is that large language models, trained as they are on multiple *billions* of tokens, are not developing their behavioral capabilities in a way that's remotely similar to humans, even if you believe those capabilities are similar (they are by certain very biased ways of measurement; they very much aren't by others). This idea that humans must be naturally good at acquiring language is an old one (see e.g. #AI #LLM #AGI

"Paris goal of 1.5°C warming is still too hot for polar ice sheets, study warns"
#ParisAgreement #Climate #ClimateChange

Paris goal of 1.5°C warming is still too hot for polar ice sheets, study warns
At the landmark Paris climate agreement, nearly every country in the world pledged to a goal to limit warming to well below 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels by 2100, and work toward a more ambitious goal to limit warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F). The hope is that such a limit will help Earth avoid […]

Private Continual Counting of Unbounded Streams
Ben Jacobsen, Kassem Fawaz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15018 https://arxiv.org/pdf/250…

Private Continual Counting of Unbounded Streams
We study the problem of differentially private continual counting in the unbounded setting where the input size $n$ is not known in advance. Current state-of-the-art algorithms based on optimal instantiations of the matrix mechanism cannot be directly applied here because their privacy guarantees only hold when key parameters are tuned to $n$. Using the common `doubling trick' avoids knowledge of $n$ but leads to suboptimal and non-smooth error. We solve this problem by introducing novel matrix…

SYK model based $\beta$ regime dependent two-qubit dynamical wormhole-inspired teleportation protocol simulation
Sudhanva Joshi, Sunil Kumar Mishra
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15373

SYK model based $β$ regime dependent two-qubit dynamical wormhole-inspired teleportation protocol simulation
This study aims to provide insights into various aspects of quantum chaos and teleportation by implementing the recently developed Wormhole-Inspired Teleportation Protocol (WITP). We commence by constructing an analog of a traversable wormhole utilizing the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model in conjunction with the Thermofield Double (TFD) state framework, implemented within a quantum circuit. Subsequently, we manipulate various parameters, including temperature ($β$) and the location of the messag…