@mlawton@mstdn.social2025-07-17 13:59:41
I’ve been doing an unholy amount of weeding recently and keep seeing these little spiders fleeing my progress. Many are carrying a tiny white ball and so I looked them up out of curiosity.
Apparently they are “Rabid Wolf Spiders”, which sounds like they themselves got to pick it out and sought something impressively terrifying so that humans would leave them alone. It’s certainly a misnomer since spiders cannot be rabid.
The white ball is an egg sac.
@cdarwin@c.im2025-08-12 03:20:03
The Los Angeles field office director for the Department of Homeland Security
testified on Monday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers
desperately needed the help of military personnel in carrying out arrests.
The question is whether Donald Trump‘s deployment of armed forces goes against U.S. law that generally prohibits the president from using the military to police domestic affairs.
Ernesto Santacruz Jr. testified at the start of a three-day trial in S…
@arXiv_astrophHE_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-07-15 09:13:21
Continued Rapid Radio Brightening of the Tidal Disruption Event AT2018hyz
Yvette Cendes, Edo Berger, Paz Beniamini, Ramandeep Gill, Tatsuya Matsumoto, Kate D. Alexander, Michael F. Bietenholz, Aprajita Hajela, Collin T. Christy, Ryan Chornock, Sebastian Gomez, Mark A. Gurwell, Garrett K. Keating, Tanmoy Laskar, Raffaella Margutti, Ramprasad Rao, Natalie Velez, Mark H. Wieringa
@teledyn@mstdn.ca2025-08-16 01:20:40
REAL ENEMIES is an evening-length, multimedia, jazz-fueled exploration of American paranoia. This innovative marriage of music-theater and hybrid nonfiction marks the first collaboration between composer Darcy James Argue, filmmaker Peter Nigrini and writer Isaac Butler, who together chronicle a shadow history of post-war America that may—or may not—be true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpXE-aZ-xhA
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot2025-09-05 11:20:45
CAD model of the #tricycle subframe. The chain ring is very nearly as big as the front wheel (80 teeth!). It drives an epicyclic gearbox mounted in the nose of the vehicle, which also has a disc brake. The epicyclic will drive a secondary chain via a sprocket mounted to the left hand spoke flange, but this is not yet shown. There will be no ratchet on the secondary chain, so the disk brake on the…
@arXiv_statME_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-07-14 08:59:32
Total/dual correlation/coherence, redundancy/synergy, complexity, and O-information for real and complex valued multivariate data
Roberto D. Pascual-Marqui, Kieko Kochi, Toshihiko Kinoshita
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08773
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-07-25 10:57:58
Just saw this:
#AI can mean a lot of things these days, but lots of the popular meanings imply a bevy of harms that I definitely wouldn't feel are worth a cute fish game. In fact, these harms are so acute that even "just" playing into the AI hype becomes its own kind of harm (it's similar to blockchain in that way).
@… noticed that the authors claim the code base is 80% AI generated, which is a red flag because people with sound moral compasses wouldn't be using AI to "help" write code in the first place. The authors aren't by some miracle people who couldn't build this app without help, in case that influences your thinking about it: they have the skills to write the code themselves, although it likely would have taken longer (but also been better).
I was more interested in the fish-classification AI, and how much it might be dependent on datacenters. Thankfully, a quick glance at the code confirms they're using ONNX and running a self-trained neural network on your device. While the exponentially-increasing energy & water demands of datacenters to support billion-parameter models are a real concern, this is not that. Even a non-AI game can burn a lot of cycles on someone's phone, and I don't think there's anything to complain about energy-wise if we're just using cycles on the end user's device as long as we're not having them keep it on for hours crunching numbers like blockchain stuff does. Running whatever stuff locally while the user is playing a game is a negligible environmental concern, unlike, say, calling out to ChatGPT where you're directly feeding datacenter demand. Since they claimed to have trained the network themselves, and since it's actually totally reasonable to make your own dataset for this and get good-enough-for-a-silly-game results with just a few hundred examples, I don't have any ethical objections to the data sourcing or training processes either. Hooray! This is finally an example of "ethical use of neutral networks" that I can hold up as an example of what people should be doing instead of the BS they are doing.
But wait... Remember what I said about feeding the AI hype being its own form of harm? Yeah, between using AI tools for coding and calling their classifier "AI" in a way that makes it seem like the same kind of thing as ChatGPT et al., they're leaning into the hype rather than helping restrain it. And that means they're causing harm. Big AI companies can point to them and say "look AI enables cute things you like" when AI didn't actually enable it. So I'm feeling meh about this cute game and won't be sharing it aside from this post. If you love the cute fish, you don't really have to feel bad for playing with it, but I'd feel bad for advertising it without a disclaimer.
@arXiv_condmatmtrlsci_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-07-11 08:08:51
Stabilization of the first-order phase transition character and Enhancement of the Electrocaloric Effect by NBT substitution in BaTiO$_3$ ceramics
M. Karakaya, I. Gurbuz, L. Fulanovic, U. Adem
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07290
@cdarwin@c.im2025-09-07 02:08:10
The United Nations General Assembly will convene its September session in Geneva instead of New York,
following the United States’ refusal to grant entry visas to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and dozens of senior Palestinian officials
President Abbas is expected to address the Assembly in Geneva,
where he will call for international protection, recognition of Palestinian sovereignty,
and accountability for war crimes.
The Geneva session is expected to amp…
@cdarwin@c.im2025-08-04 13:51:31
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is threatening to remove Democratic lawmakers from office
for fleeing the state
and claiming they could be charged with crimes,
-- escalating tensions overnight
in a showdown over redrawing congressional lines
ahead of the midterm elections.
Most of the Democrats in the Texas state House exited the state Sunday
— many of whom arrived in Chicago in the evening
— to prevent Republicans from overhauling the state’s map t…
