Tootfinder

Ukrainian sea drones on Wednesday hit and disabled
a tanker involved in trading Russian oil
as it sailed through Ukraine’s exclusive economic zone in the Black Sea
to the Russian port of Novorossiysk.
The attack is the third sea drone strike in two weeks
on vessels part of Russia’s
“shadow fleet” of unregulated and often western-sanctioned ships helping Moscow export oil to fund the war.

When the working class organizes on the basis of solidarity and direct action, workers and communities can collectively manage and control the means of production, while federations of workers and local communities coordinate production and social life through mutual aid and federalist principles, without bosses or the state.
In an era marked by automation, precarity, and deepening inequality, the struggle for workers’ self-management, economic democracy, and social liberation remains …

Universal scale-free representations in human visual cortex https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013714 "revealing a universal high-dimensional spectrum of visual information that emerges despite individual differenc…

Universal scale-free representations in human visual cortex
Author summary The human cerebral cortex is thought to encode sensory information in population activity patterns, but the statistical structure of these population codes has yet to be characterized. By examining large-scale neuroimaging recordings of human vision using a spectral approach more common in physics than neuroscience, we reveal the universal scale-free structure of population codes in visual cortex, which is found in all subjects and at multiple stages of visual processing. Moreove…

Pleased to see this article translated to English. Wide implications.
The Securitization of Minerals in the EU: Why Europe is Not Immune to the Resource Curse - resilience
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2026-01

The Securitization of Minerals in the EU: Why Europe is Not Immune to the Resource Curse
This article examines how access to mineral raw materials in the EU has been transformed through a process of securitization over the last two decades. What was once mainly a matter of economic policy and trade has been reframed—through narratives constructed by industrial lobbies and political allies—as an existential issue for European security and survival.

The European Union, overcoming deep dissension among its members,
gave the green light to a sweeping trade pact with four South American countries on Friday
that would create one of the largest free-trade zones in the world,
connecting markets with more than 700 million people.
The agreement offers a stark contrast to the amped-up aggression on display this week from the Trump administration.
As Europe worked to extend an era of economic collaboration,
th…

E.U. and South America to Form Free-Trade Zone With 700 Million People
The agreement represents a push for deeper global cooperation, in contrast to the United States’ turning to coercion in its dealings with other countries.

Closed-string mirror symmetry for dimer models
Dahye Cho, Hansol Hong, Hyeongjun Jin, Sangwook Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06699 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06699 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.06699
arXiv:2511.06699v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: For all punctured Riemann surfaces arising as mirror curves of toric Calabi--Yau threefolds, we show that their symplectic cohomology is isomorphic to the compactly supported Hochschild cohomology of the noncommutative Landau--Ginzburg model defined on the NCCR of the associated toric Gorenstein singularities. This mirror correspondence is established by analyzing the closed-open map with boundaries on certain combinatorially defined immersed Lagrangians in the Riemann surface, yielding a ring isomorphism. We give a detailed examination of the properties of this isomorphism, emphasizing its relationship to the singularity structure.
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Robust equilibria in continuous games: From strategic to dynamic robustness
Kyriakos Lotidis, Panayotis Mertikopoulos, Nicholas Bambos, Jose Blanchet
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08138 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08138 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.08138
arXiv:2512.08138v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In this paper, we examine the robustness of Nash equilibria in continuous games, under both strategic and dynamic uncertainty. Starting with the former, we introduce the notion of a robust equilibrium as those equilibria that remain invariant to small -- but otherwise arbitrary -- perturbations to the game's payoff structure, and we provide a crisp geometric characterization thereof. Subsequently, we turn to the question of dynamic robustness, and we examine which equilibria may arise as stable limit points of the dynamics of "follow the regularized leader" (FTRL) in the presence of randomness and uncertainty. Despite their very distinct origins, we establish a structural correspondence between these two notions of robustness: strategic robustness implies dynamic robustness, and, conversely, the requirement of strategic robustness cannot be relaxed if dynamic robustness is to be maintained. Finally, we examine the rate of convergence to robust equilibria as a function of the underlying regularizer, and we show that entropically regularized learning converges at a geometric rate in games with affinely constrained action spaces.
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To honor Renee Nicole Good,
we need to tell two stories.
First, there’s the horror of what happened on the streets of Minneapolis at the hands of ICE goons.
To tell that story, and to reject the vile, baseless claims asserted by both Kristi Noem and Donald Trump, we need to go into the weeds and examine what the evidence shows so far.
I’ll be including images and video clips that may be disturbing to watch, so discretion is advised.
Second, there’s the oversto…

In Honor of Renee Nicole Good
Two stories emerge from her horrific murder: what happened that day, and what is happening now everywhere

#V2G, and the rise of dynamic grid signals – in the form of prices – as a major lever for guiding the charging and discharging of electric vehicles.
https://www.

This week in Berlin, I spent two busy days on all things V2G in Europe: what needs to be done to realise its potential contribution to a robust, reliable, affordable and clean energy system? Hosted… | Jaap Burger
This week in Berlin, I spent two busy days on all things V2G in Europe: what needs to be done to realise its potential contribution to a robust, reliable, affordable and clean energy system? Hosted by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy of Economy and Energy in collaboration with EU Energy, EU Transport and EU Digital & Tech, members of three European expert groups came together to discuss progress on a wide range of topics. What struck me is how dynamic grid tariffs are…

Multi-agent learning under uncertainty: Recurrence vs. concentration
Kyriakos Lotidis, Panayotis Mertikopoulos, Nicholas Bambos, Jose Blanchet
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08132 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08132 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.08132
arXiv:2512.08132v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In this paper, we examine the convergence landscape of multi-agent learning under uncertainty. Specifically, we analyze two stochastic models of regularized learning in continuous games -- one in continuous and one in discrete time with the aim of characterizing the long-run behavior of the induced sequence of play. In stark contrast to deterministic, full-information models of learning (or models with a vanishing learning rate), we show that the resulting dynamics do not converge in general. In lieu of this, we ask instead which actions are played more often in the long run, and by how much. We show that, in strongly monotone games, the dynamics of regularized learning may wander away from equilibrium infinitely often, but they always return to its vicinity in finite time (which we estimate), and their long-run distribution is sharply concentrated around a neighborhood thereof. We quantify the degree of this concentration, and we show that these favorable properties may all break down if the underlying game is not strongly monotone -- underscoring in this way the limits of regularized learning in the presence of persistent randomness and uncertainty.
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