Tootfinder

A look at outlets in Belgium and France that are prioritizing independence from Big Tech and opting for open source or in-house software (Owen Huchon/Columbia Journalism Review)
https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/editorial-independence-means-technologic…

Editorial independence means technological independence.
From Google to Microsoft, European newsrooms often rely on tools built in Silicon Valley. Some are trying to break free, turning to open-source alternatives or home-grown solutions.

As Cyber Threats Escalate, the National Vulnerability Database Is Falling Behind
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is struggling.
It faces a growing backlog to process data in its vulnerability repository, which publicly shares information assessing and detailing mitigation solutions against new cyber exploits.
With nearly 1,800 new reported vulnerabilities sitting in a queue for analysis this year, delays in processing leave the United States increa…

🌿 Oxford’s TIDE Centre launches the Nature’s Intelligence Studio at #COP30 — turning 3.4 billion years of evolution into solutions for today’s climate and energy challenges. Innovation inspired by the Amazon, for the planet. 🌍✨

Oxford's TIDE Centre launches Nature’s Intelligence Studio at COP30 | University of Oxford
The University of Oxford’s TIDE Centre (Technology and Industrialisation for Development Centre) has launched the Nature’s Intelligence Studio, a new programme to translate principles observed in biological systems into technologies that support the energy transition and wider sustainability goals, while ensuring fair benefit-sharing with communities in biodiverse regions.

Optimization of the time-multiplexed SPDC source at 900-950 nm range
V. O. Gotovtsev, I. V. Dyakonov, O. V. Borzenkova, K. A. Taratorin, T. B. Dugarnimaev, A. A. Korneev, S. P. Kulik, S. S. Straupe
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12556

Optimization of the time-multiplexed SPDC source at 900-950 nm range
In the field of quantum technology, single photons have emerged as a pivotal resource, prompting the development of heralded single photon sources (HSPS) with enhanced generation probability. The majority of such sources are based on spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC), but they exhibit a low single photon generation probability. The multiplexing principle (arXiv:quant-ph/0205103) has been proposed as a solution to this problem. This paper presents a demonstration of a time-multiplexe…

Probabilistic Constellation Shaping for OFDM ISAC Signals Under Temporal-Frequency Filtering
Zhen Du, Jingjing Xu, Yifeng Xiong, Jie Wang, Musa Furkan Keskin, Henk Wymeersch, Fan Liu, Shi Jin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12204

Probabilistic Constellation Shaping for OFDM ISAC Signals Under Temporal-Frequency Filtering
Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) is considered an innovative technology in sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks, where utilizing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communication signals for sensing provides a cost-effective solution for implementing ISAC. However, the sensing performance of matched and mismatched filtering schemes can be significantly deteriorated due to the signaling randomness induced by finite-alphabet modulations with nonconstant modulus, such …

Is Enerkem's Waste Gasification technology a Failure or a promising Climate Solution?🗑️💨♨️🏭
Gasification of waste and biomass🪵 could be an enormously helpful tool to make valuable circular or renewable chemicals. Yet, the list of failed gasification projects is long.
Enerkem looked like it had finally unlocked successful waste gasification, with the world's only waste-to-Methanol/Ethanol plant operating in Edmonton, Canada🇨🇦, since 2014. But in early 2024, it was shut down.…

Is Enerkem's Waste Gasification technology a Failure or a promising Climate Solution?
Repsol wants to build a waste gasification plant to make circular and biogenic Methanol in Spain. The Ecoplanta project will use a technology that previously failed to deliver on its promises in Canada.

Just finished "The Word for World is Forest" by Ursula K. Le Guin. Can't believe I didn't read this one earlier, and this strengthens my resolve to finish off the rest of her stuff I have yet to read sooner. I think it benefits somewhat from having read it after "Four Ways to Forgiveness" which gives more of the Hainish context. Certainly none of the blurbs I had read about it did it any measure of justice, which is one reason I hadn't prioritized it. More than being about colonization, it's about a solution to the paradox of tolerance, and both the price and imperfections of that solution. As usual with Le Guin's science fiction, it's a rich companion to anarchist thought.
I think the typical objection to seeing it as an answer to the warlord question would be that it serendipitously positions the indigenous population with more power and a less ruthless opponent than in the imagined scenario, and it uses the League of Worlds as a sort of deus ex machina to foreclose further retribution. Ultimately that's why I think it's more about the paradox of tolerance than anything else, but I also think in regards to the warlord problem that we are too quick to underestimate just how numerous and enthusiastic the opponents of a warlord might be, and to overestimate the strength of technological weapons wielded by frail (and psychologically unarmored) humans.
In any case, Le Guin gives this book's alien humans yet another fascinatingly credible capability, and getting to see the introduction of ansible technology with all its implications is pretty cool too. Maybe not

RefGrader: Automated Grading of Mathematical Competition Proofs using Agentic Workflows
Hamed Mahdavi (Pennsylvania State University), Pouria Mahdavinia (Pennsylvania State University), Samira Malek (Pennsylvania State University), Pegah Mohammadipour (Pennsylvania State University), Alireza Hashemi (City University of New York), Majid Daliri (New York University), Alireza Farhadi (Amirkabir University of Technology), Amir Khasahmadi (Autodesk), Niloofar Mireshghallah (Carnegie Mellon …

RefGrader: Automated Grading of Mathematical Competition Proofs using Agentic Workflows
State-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs have progressed from struggling on proof-based Olympiad problems to solving most of the IMO 2025 problems, with leading systems reportedly handling 5 of 6 problems. Given this progress, we assess how well these models can grade proofs: detecting errors, judging their severity, and assigning fair scores beyond binary correctness. We study proof-analysis capabilities using a corpus of 90 Gemini 2.5 Pro-generated solutions that we grade on a 1-4 scale with detailed err…

A profile of nonprofit Common Crawl, which has scraped billions of webpages since 2013, including paywalled ones, to build an archive used by OpenAI and others (Alex Reisner/The Atlantic)
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/202…

Common Crawl Is Doing the AI Industry’s Dirty Work
“You shouldn’t have put your content on the internet if you didn’t want it to be on the internet,” Common Crawl’s executive director says.