Tootfinder

Trump has asked the EU to impose tariffs of up to 100% on India and China as part of an effort to force the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to end the war in Ukraine, according to reports.
The US president made the demand during a meeting between US and EU officials discussing options to increase economic pressure on Russia on Tuesday

911? I’d like to report a murder.
❝It is, quite literally, the most grim and embarrassing thing that's ever been done in Apple's name.❞
❝Many people have the quisling impulse to insist that Apple had to kiss Trump’s ass. “They’ll be stuck with really high tariffs!" “They might lose government contracts!" This is foolishness, of cause, because all of this will still happen. The only thing that’s different is that Apple will have to navigate those headwinds while everyone in the world already knows that they’re led by a CEO who has already bent the knee, and by a board that collectively has no spine.❞ https://front-end.social/@fox/115176688743847361

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
R.E.M.:
🎵 It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)
#REM
https://mototembo.bandcamp.com/album/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-moto-tembo-edits
https://open.spotify.com/track/2oSpQ7QtIKTNFfA08Cy0ku

Many of the details of the agreement reached after 3 days of indirect talks in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh remain unclear and challenges of implementing its terms are immense.
But in recent days, negotiators have closed gaps between Hamas and Israel over the details of the first phase of the 21-point plan announced by Trump in the White House last week.
It was not immediately certain whether the parties had made any progress on thornier questions about the futu…

Code Agent can be an End-to-end System Hacker: Benchmarking Real-world Threats of Computer-use Agent
Weidi Luo, Qiming Zhang, Tianyu Lu, Xiaogeng Liu, Bin Hu, Hung-Chun Chiu, Siyuan Ma, Yizhe Zhang, Xusheng Xiao, Yinzhi Cao, Zhen Xiang, Chaowei Xiao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06607

Code Agent can be an End-to-end System Hacker: Benchmarking Real-world Threats of Computer-use Agent
Computer-use agent (CUA) frameworks, powered by large language models (LLMs) or multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), are rapidly maturing as assistants that can perceive context, reason, and act directly within software environments. Among their most critical applications is operating system (OS) control. As CUAs in the OS domain become increasingly embedded in daily operations, it is imperative to examine their real-world security implications, specifically whether CUAs can be misused to perform realistic…

So much painting gone on here that we're out of paint. Apparently the paint is usually watery and is eaten up by the wood like a hungry teen eats cheese.
More paint should hopefully be arriving over the weekend or on Monday.
Looking good. Would have definitely tried to pick a lighter colour for the walls if I'd known what the wood would end up like though.
More to be done on Monday before the master carpenter gets back on Tuesday.

The A.I. insurance market is in its infancy, but Mr. Kvist says mainstream insurers are lining up to back him.
One of his clients is a job recruiting company that uses A.I. to sift through candidates.
“Which is great, but you can now discriminate at a scale we’ve never seen before,” Mr. Kvist said.
“It’s a breeding ground for class-action lawsuits.”
Mr. Kvist believes the work he is doing now will lay the foundation for more complex A.I. insurance policies to come.

Opinion | The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World
A destructive A.I., like a nuclear bomb, is now a concrete possibility; the question is whether anyone will be reckless enough to build one.

And when all these mechanisms — the “more just, more human systems” I’m talking about — fail to do their job, what can we do? Go to war, I guess? But I’m not happy about that. I don’t like war.
I am quite willing to celebrate a world without Kirk if in fact that’s what we get. (Last I heard was “critical condition.”) But I can’t get •that• happy about it. Whether we celebrate his death or denounce gun violence — both are important, both are appropriate! — we must above all notice the failure of everything that should have prevented us from even getting here. •That• is the real crisis.
/end

TL;DR: spending money to find the cause of autism is a eugenics project, and those resources could have been spent improving accommodations for Autistic people instead.
To preface this, I'm not Autistic but I'm neurodivergent with some overlap.
We need to be absolutely clear right now: the main purpose is *all* research into the causes of autism is eugenics: a cause is sought because non-autistic people want to *eliminate* autistic people via some kind of "cure." It should be obvious, but a "cured autistic person" who did not get a say in the decision to administer that "cure" has been subjected to non-consensual medical intervention at an extremely unethical level. Many autistic people have been exceptionally clear that they don't want to be "cured," including some people with "severe autism" such as people who are nonverbal.
When we think things like "but autism makes life so hard for some people," we're saying that the difficulties in their life are a result of their neurotype, rather than blaming the society that punished & devalues the behaviors that result from that neurotype at every turn. To the extent that an individual autistic person wants to modify their neurotype and/or otherwise use aids to modify themselves to reduce difficulties in their life, they should be free to pursue that. But we should always ask the question: "what if we changed their social or physical environment instead, so that they didn't have to change themselves?" The point is that difficulties are always the product of person x environment, and many of the difficulties we attribute to autism should instead be attributed to anti-autistic social & physical spaces, and resources spent trying to "find the cause of autism" would be *much* better spent trying to develop & promote better accommodations for autism. Or at least, that's the case if you care about the quality of life of autistic people and/or recognize their enormous contributions to society (e.g., Wikipedia could not exist in anything near its current form without autistic input). If instead you think of Autistic people as gross burdens that you'd rather be rid of, then it makes sense to investigate the causes of autism so that you can eventually find a "cure."
All of that to say: the best response to lies about the causes of autism is to ask "What is the end goal of identifying the cause?" instead of saying "That's not true, here's better info about the causes."
#autism #trump
P.S. yes, I do think about the plight of parents of autistic kids, particularly those that have huge struggles fitting into the expectations of our society. They've been put in a position where society constantly bullies and devalues their kid, and makes it mostly impossible for their kid to exist without constant parental support, which is a lot of work and which is unfair when your peers get the school system to do a massive amount of childcare. But in that situation, your kid is in an even worse position than you as the direct victim of all of that, and you have a choice: are you going to be their ally against the unfair world, or are you going to blame them and try to get them to confirm enough that you can let the school system take care of them, despite the immense pain that that will provoke? Please don't come crying for sympathy if you choose the later option (and yes, helping them be able to independently navigate society is a good thing for them, but there's a difference between helping them as their ally, at their pace, and trying to force them to conform to reduce the burden society has placed on you).

Having just finished a 1-year consulting contract myself, my own list of restrictions for future jobs/consulting is very similar:
- will not work on adtech/surveillance/weapons
- will not knowingly make world worse and/or abet genocides
- will not be forced to use vibe coding (or will explain cost implications)
- prefer to work in the open
- prefer remote only
- flexible with time zones (last role was for a company in LA, -9h)

Joey de Villa 🪗 (@AccordionGuy@mastodon.cloud)
Attached: 1 image As long as we’re in the “September Surge” (that trend where there’s a noticeable uptick in job vacancies and hiring around September and October, when companies ramp up for year-end and the upcoming year), you might as well also ask “What DON’T I want in a new job?” https://www.globalnerdy.com/2025/09/06/what-dont-you-want-in-your-next-job/

Signal Protocol and Post-Quantum Ratchets
[…] The @… Protocol is a set of cryptographic specifications that provides end-to-end encryption for private communications exchanged daily by billions of people around the world. […]
🗨️ ht…

Signal Protocol and Post-Quantum Ratchets
We are excited to announce a significant advancement in the security of the Signal Protocol: the introduction of the Sparse Post Quantum Ratchet (SPQR). This new ratchet enhances the Signal Protocol’s resilience against future quantum computing threats while maintaining our existing security guar...

Matt Duss of Center for International Policy: “This is an attack in the capital of a major non-Nato US ally in the midst of US-supported negotiations – against officials who were originally hosted there at the United States’ request… It’s an attack on diplomacy itself, making clear that Netanyahu intends to see Israel’s accelerating campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza through to the end. If it was conducted with the approval of the US.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/09/israel-targets-top-hamas-members-in-qatar-for-gaza-ceasefire-talks?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

PRIM: Towards Practical In-Image Multilingual Machine Translation
Yanzhi Tian, Zeming Liu, Zhengyang Liu, Chong Feng, Xin Li, Heyan Huang, Yuhang Guo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05146

PRIM: Towards Practical In-Image Multilingual Machine Translation
In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) aims to translate images containing texts from one language to another. Current research of end-to-end IIMT mainly conducts on synthetic data, with simple background, single font, fixed text position, and bilingual translation, which can not fully reflect real world, causing a significant gap between the research and practical conditions. To facilitate research of IIMT in real-world scenarios, we explore Practical In-Image Multilingual Machine Translation (II…

"...one notable policy initiative from the world body was not discussed by world leaders when it should have been. UN secretary-general António Guterres has put together a high-level group of specialists to propose new indicators for human and planetary prosperity that go ‘Beyond GDP’."
A #Nature journal editorial:
End GDP mania: how the world should really measure prosperity

End GDP mania: how the world should really measure prosperity
The obsession with economic output as a measure of human development puts sustainability on the back burner. Researchers can now help to devise better indicators.

Is it talent?
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQM0-w2jEOd/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

Duaa Izzidien - Visual Storyteller & Artist on Instagram: "I had far too much fun creating this reel and couldn’t bring myself to delete any of it to make it shorter and more algorithm friendly 🙈 If you watched it all the way to the end - well done! You’ve just demonstrated the very thing the reel is about - showing up is the only talent that matters. My arrows don’t always hit the target. My paintings don’t always turn out how I planned. And honestly? Life rarely goes the way I intend. But really that isn’t what matters. In Islam we say that actions are by intentions and that sometimes means letting go of controlling our outcomes. We can control our intentions, our effort, showing up - but we have to remember that the result doesn’t actually come from those actions. Sometimes the arrow misses because there’s a better lesson waiting or perhaps it’s to remind you to stay humble and remember that ‘you’ are not the architect of your success. Sometimes the painting goes “wrong” because it’s becoming something more beautiful than you imagined. Sometimes life doesn’t work out the way you planned because there’s something different, better, round the corner for you. A huge thank you to @thabitoon_archers and @mamluk.academy for teaching me. You’ve taught me far more than just archery - you’ve taught me a rich history and life lessons that bring peace. (any mistakes in my form are entirely mine!). Want to learn how to use art as a tool for trusting and letting go of control? DM me ‘CREATE’ and I’ll show you these techniques. #showingisenough #trusttheprocess #archery #archerygirl #traditionalarchery #archerylife #overwhelm #personalgrowth #innerstrength #growthmindset #breakthrough #findingmyself #resilience #transformation #letgoofcontrol"
24K likes, 763 comments - duaaizzidien on October 24, 2025: "I had far too much fun creating this reel and couldn’t bring myself to delete any of it to make it shorter and more algorithm friendly 🙈 If you watched it all the way to the end - well done! You’ve just demonstrated the very thing the reel is about - showing up is the only talent that matters. My arrows don’t always hit the target. My paintings don’t always turn out how I planned. And honestly? Life rarely goes the way I …

Marshawn Kneeland dies at 24: Cowboys, NFL mourn sudden passing of Dallas defensive end https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/dallas-cowboys/news/marshawn-kneeland-dies-cowboys-nfl-dallas/77f093cea762b434f5369e1c…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #DriveTime
Elvis Costello:
🎵 Waiting for the End of the World
#ElvisCostello
https://ryanallen.bandcamp.com/track/waiting-for-the-end-of-the-world-elvis-costello
https://open.spotify.com/track/3nSgRpyy7gujpUSIsdECvO

#GoodNews @… https://wandering.shop/@adapalmer/115498163707135…

"Look again at this small world. This is home. The only home we’ve ever known.
Every person who has ever lived. Every story ever told. Every love, every war, every sacrifice – it has all happened here on this tiny, drifting world.
And yet, we act as if there is another waiting for us. We carve borders into the land and fight over them. We build towers of wealth while others are left to starve.
We poison the water we drink, scorch the air we breathe and tear apart the very foundation of life, driven by the hunger for more, by the illusion of control.
We hold power over each other but not over the forces that could erase us in an instant. A rock adrift in space could end it all. A wave of fire from deep within the earth could rewrite the world in a single eruption. A burst of radiation from a distant sun could silence everything we’ve built.
In the face of the universe we are fragile beyond measure. Mere passengers on a planet that owes us nothing. And yet, we fight, we kill, we burn our home as if it were replaceable.
We act as though our time here is infinite. Though history has shown us otherwise. But for now this is all we have. Out there among the countless stars, there may be other worlds. Planets where life has taken root. Where others look up and wonder if they too are alone. But they are distant beyond our reach, beyond our time.
For the foreseeable future there is no second earth, no distant rescue. This is where we stand. This is where we make our living. What happens here, what we choose to destroy, what we choose to protect will echo long after we’re gone.
Think again how small we are. how brief our time is, how easily we could vanish. A fraction of a second in the lifespan of the universe, a blink in the endless dark. And yet in this fleeting moment we are here.
We love, we create, we shape the world around us. What we do with our time matters. Because in the end everything we leave behind is what we chose to built and who we chose to be. But for now we stand together on a mote of dust."
#Trance
#Techno
#AmbientTechno
#EnlusionLabel

A Study of Neural Polar Decoders for Communication
Rom Hirsch, Ziv Aharoni, Henry D. Pfister, Haim H. Permuter
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03069 https://arx…

A Study of Neural Polar Decoders for Communication
In this paper, we adapt and analyze Neural Polar Decoders (NPDs) for end-to-end communication systems. While prior work demonstrated the effectiveness of NPDs on synthetic channels, this study extends the NPD to real-world communication systems. The NPD was adapted to complete OFDM and single-carrier communication systems. To satisfy practical system requirements, the NPD is extended to support any code length via rate matching, higher-order modulations, and robustness across diverse channel co…

Holographic defect CFTs with Dirichlet end-of-the-world branes
Haruki Nakayama, Tatsuma Nishioka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22270 https://arxiv.org/pdf/250…

Holographic defect CFTs with Dirichlet end-of-the-world branes
We construct a holographic model of defect conformal field theories (DCFTs) with defects of codimension greater than one. Our construction generalizes the AdS/BCFT model by anchoring the end-of-the-world brane on defects at the asymptotic AdS boundary and imposing Dirichlet boundary conditions for the metric on the brane. We compute the defect entropy and defect free energy and show that the defect $\mathcal{C}$-function is always non-negative. We further study holographic defect-localized RG f…

Self-adaptive Dataset Construction for Real-World Multimodal Safety Scenarios
Jingen Qu, Lijun Li, Bo Zhang, Yichen Yan, Jing Shao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04403 https://

Self-adaptive Dataset Construction for Real-World Multimodal Safety Scenarios
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are rapidly evolving, presenting increasingly complex safety challenges. However, current dataset construction methods, which are risk-oriented, fail to cover the growing complexity of real-world multimodal safety scenarios (RMS). And due to the lack of a unified evaluation metric, their overall effectiveness remains unproven. This paper introduces a novel image-oriented self-adaptive dataset construction method for RMS, which starts with images and end …

Amazing elections in the Netherlands (I am a member of the D66 party).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/29/exit-poll-suggests-progressive-d66-party-will-become-largest-in-dutch-parliament
…

#NowPlaying a truly strange, brutal (but also sometimes gentle) record, the new LP 'Under a Gilded Sun' by Atlanta, Georgia's MALEVICH. They claim to make 'weird, heavy music for the end of the world', and.. indeed. This is like, blackened sludge? It's rad. Dissonant but coherent, chaotic but serene. So many textures and dynamics. Riffs, weirdness, everything. Maybe ffo Sumac, Su…

Constrained Decoding for Robotics Foundation Models
Parv Kapoor, Akila Ganlath, Changliu Liu, Sebastian Scherer, Eunsuk Kang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01728 https://

Constrained Decoding for Robotics Foundation Models
Recent advances in the development of robotic foundation models have led to promising end-to-end and general-purpose capabilities in robotic systems. These models are pretrained on vast datasets of robot trajectories to process multi- modal inputs and directly output a sequence of action that the system then executes in the real world. Although this approach is attractive from the perspective of im- proved generalization across diverse tasks, these models are still data-driven and, therefore, l…

The growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason,
hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science.
Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.
The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.
🔥Now, we ar…

The dawn of the post-literate society
And the end of civilisation

Like David Graeber said, the biggest weapon they have is crushing our imagination, making it easier to picture the end of the world than the end of oppressive systems.
#Anarchism #Anarchy #Politics

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Not only was airfield at Bagram built in 1950s by Soviet Union, but potus was one who wanted US out of Afghanistan.
“It was Trump's administration that signed the peace agreement with the Taliban that paved the way for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan near the end of his first term.”
Bad things may well happen to US soldiers if potus follows through on this.
quote source:

ACLA 2026: Queering the Anthropocene: Radical Ecocritical Perspectives on the End of the World in Global Literature and Media https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/09/26/acla-2026-queering-the-anthropo…

"The world is heading to add 57 superhot days a year, but study indicates it could have been worse"
#Climate #ClimateChange

The world is heading to add 57 superhot days a year, but study indicates it could have been worse
The world is on track to add nearly two months of dangerous superhot days each year by the end of the century, with poorer small nations hit far more often than the biggest carbon-polluting countries, a study released Thursday found.

today in a german bakery, a woman asked for 8 slices of bread. when the employee asked, “would you like the end piece too?”, she said no.
8 slices? just wasting bread? #WTF
i’m not out every day (thank god), but every time i am, the world proves again how crazy it’s become.

I can't help feeling that any 'peace deal' for #Gaza supported by Cooper and Trump, and making Tony #Blair interim governor, will be a permanent stain on the conscience of the world.
#Palestine…

Cowboys’ Marshawn Kneeland Poignant Final Twitter Post Before Shocking Death https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/marshawn-kneeland-final-social-media-posts-shocking-death/?adt_ei=[email]

40 years ago tonight, the #GratefulDead in #atlanta, opening their last stand at the fox theater, marking (almost) the permanent end of the small venue era, with a world series-themed debut. fall ’85, show #3.
soundboard:

DaVinci said, "As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.” Let your death be as good as your life. | Beyond the Taboo: Rethinking Society's Fear of Death #EndOfLife #Reposted

The comments are *overwhelmingly* anti-Bezos, and many express their intent to cancel subscriptions (I access through a library subscription, canceled my own).
Opinion | Trump replacing the White House East Wing is not the end of the world - The Washington Post
https://wapo.st/4o2FcGU

Science in Action will finish at the end of this month! I will miss it dearly.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/roland-pease-10678a59_private-eye-has-picked-up-on-the-news-that-activity-7303433572315508736-Pq3k

Private Eye has picked up on the news that Science in Action is to be dropped later this year from the BBC World Service, just one of several wide-ranging cost-cutting changes. Obviously, we're… | Roland Pease | 50 comments
Private Eye has picked up on the news that Science in Action is to be dropped later this year from the BBC World Service, just one of several wide-ranging cost-cutting changes. Obviously, we're trying to push back. It's not just that I love working on the programme, there are new discoveries and critical issues aplenty each week to dig into, but we try hard always to fulfil a need for our global audience, representing research from across the planet, and to dig deeper into the science than (say…

DeepCodeSeek: Real-Time API Retrieval for Context-Aware Code Generation
Esakkivel Esakkiraja, Denis Akhiyarov, Aditya Shanmugham, Chitra Ganapathy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25716

DeepCodeSeek: Real-Time API Retrieval for Context-Aware Code Generation
Current search techniques are limited to standard RAG query-document applications. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to expand the code and index for predicting the required APIs, directly enabling high-quality, end-to-end code generation for auto-completion and agentic AI applications. We address the problem of API leaks in current code-to-code benchmark datasets by introducing a new dataset built from real-world ServiceNow Script Includes that capture the challenge of unclear API us…

Ravens top Dolphins in Lamar Jackson's return; World Series will end in Toronto; NFL, college football picks

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/ravens-

Alone at the (seeming) end of the world. The Hochjoch Hospiz at the end of the Rofental, near the former confluence of three (formerly) major glaciers in the central Alps: Hintereisferner, Kesselwandferner and Hochjochferner. Vernagtferner is also nearby, which at times interrupted the outflow of these other glaciers, caused an ice lake to form, which when it burst led to widespread destruction in the valleys below (several times since the early 1600s). These days all of these glaciers are s…

A song for protesters in the US. Thanks for "going outside... [to] help organize something better, something beautiful."
John K. Samson, "Fantasy Baseball At The End Of The World" (2020)
https://johnksamsonmusic.bandcamp.com/albu…

Day 3: Octavia Butler.
Incredibly dark, graphic, and disturbing near-future science fiction, which has proved absolutely prophetic. In the 1990's she was writing about a charismatic Conservative Christian and white nationalist president elected in 2024, and the horrors his paramilitary followers would unleash, including forced labor & indoctrination camps. Did I mention those books include ebikes & pseudo-cellphones too? Characters fleeing north from a disastrous social collapse in Loss Angeles? This is "The Parable of the Sower" and "The Parable of the Talents" and the later was tragically rushed to an end because of Butler's declining health.
Her work deals unflinchingly with racism and the darker parts of society, and to those who might say "her depiction of social collapse is overblown," I'd say that while it's not literally the world we live in, it's *effectively* the world that the poorest of us live in. If you're a homeless undocumented latinx person in LA right now, I'm not sure how meaningfully different your world is from the one she depicts.
Her work comes with a strong content warning for lots of things, including racial violence, sexual abuse and slavery, including of children, animal harm, etc., so it's not for everyone. Reading it in 2023 was certainly an incredible trip. Her politics are really cool though; with explicit pro-LGBTQ themes and tinges of what might today be considered #SolarPunk.
#20WomenAuthors

Haymarket Books has ebooks on sale for $2 until Nov. 7. Some of my favorite books published by them are:
Abolish Rent: on the potential of tenant organizing
Let This Radicalize You: a guide to activism over the long haul
No Cop City, No Cop World: lessons from Atlanta's Cop City fight
Perfect Victims: unpacks anti-Palestinian narratives you may not realize you've internalized

Haymarket Ebooks on sale for $2!
At Haymarket, our mission is to publish books that contribute to struggles for social and economic justice. We strive to make our books a vibrant and organic part of social movements, and we believe that collective study plays a crucial role in sustaining engaged, effective, and durable left-wing organizations and communities. To that end, we aim to make our books accessible to anyone who might find them valuable. Until Friday, November 7th, ALL Haymarket ebooks are 80% Off. That means …

Here's my latest Prairie Voice post about the world of influencers:
https://open.substack.com/pub/boles/p/end-of-the-influencer-era?r=17i29e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelc…

Somewhere between my original vision for web 1.0 and the rise of social media as part of web 2.0,
we took the wrong path.
We’re now at a new crossroads,
one where we must decide if AI will be used for the betterment or to the detriment of society.
How can we learn from the mistakes of the past?
First of all, we must ensure policymakers do not end up playing the same decade-long game of catchup they have done over social media.
The time to decide the go…

Just found this #book of stories based on #TheStand by #StephenKing. Now seems a good time to read about the end of the world as we know it.

Inferring Dynamic Physical Properties from Video Foundation Models
Guanqi Zhan, Xianzheng Ma, Weidi Xie, Andrew Zisserman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02311 https://

Inferring Dynamic Physical Properties from Video Foundation Models
We study the task of predicting dynamic physical properties from videos. More specifically, we consider physical properties that require temporal information to be inferred: elasticity of a bouncing object, viscosity of a flowing liquid, and dynamic friction of an object sliding on a surface. To this end, we make the following contributions: (i) We collect a new video dataset for each physical property, consisting of synthetic training and testing splits, as well as a real split for real world …

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #Early
Prom Queen:
🎵 End of the World
#PromQueen
https://promqueenband.bandcamp.com/track/end-of-the-world
https://open.spotify.com/track/4ufp0TkLjeHQ9HCZUYMYYy

Global treaty to end subsidies for destructive fishing takes effect https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/10/global-treaty-to-end-subsidies-for-destructive-fishing-takes-effect/

Global treaty to end subsidies for destructive fishing takes effect
A landmark global treaty to curb billions of dollars in government subsidies for overfishing took effect on Sept. 15, Mongabay contributor Elizabeth Fitt reported. The agreement marks the first time the World Trade Organization (WTO) has approved an environmental sustainability agreement in its 30-year history. The deal came into effect after Brazil, Kenya, Tonga and […]

That's the greatest fucking thing I've read this year!
#nethack

Efficient Fine-Grained GPU Performance Modeling for Distributed Deep Learning of LLM
Biyao Zhang, Mingkai Zheng, Debargha Ganguly, Xuecen Zhang, Vikash Singh, Vipin Chaudhary, Zhao Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22832

Efficient Fine-Grained GPU Performance Modeling for Distributed Deep Learning of LLM
Training Large Language Models(LLMs) is one of the most compute-intensive tasks in high-performance computing. Predicting end-to-end training time for multi-billion parameter models distributed across hundreds of GPUs remains challenging due to complex interactions between transformer components, parallelism strategies(data, model, pipeline, tensor), and multi-tier communication. Learned models require costly sampling, while analytical models often struggle with real-world network and hardware …

Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
.
.
.
I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading

Hill Street Blues was the only one of these I watched a lot of, and I loved it. I read H:LOTS (loved it) but never watched the show. Tried to watch NYPD Blue but it came out at a time when I wasn't watching much TV. #CopTV #copshows

The 7 best police procedurals of all time
There’s more to cops and robbers than just nabbing the bad guy at the end of the show

What a rubbish idea:
Large corporations already hide too much information from their shareholders and the public.
This would make that hiding easier and make company performance more opaque.
It doubles the time that corporate ill deeds and management failures can be hidden.
It is a dumb idea - but coming from one of the great scammers in our corporate world, we should be glad that he did not suggest yearly, or longer, reporting.
"Trump renews push to end co…

Trump renews push to end companies' quarterly reports
The US president urges regulators to adopt a semi-annual schedule for financial reports.

Oof, fuck microsoft.
But also, there's no reason to use permissive licenses any more. "Open source" has taken over the world. We no longer have to work with billion-dollar companies in order to get our stuff used. Now we need to protect ourselves from being taken advantage of by them.
https://

A Management Framework for Vehicular Cloudtoward Economic and Environmental Efficiency
Rosario Patan\`e, Andrea Araldo, Nadjib Achir, Lila Boukhatem
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24946

A Management Framework for Vehicular Cloudtoward Economic and Environmental Efficiency
Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) leverages the idle computing capacity of vehicles to execute end-users' offloaded tasks without requiring new computation infrastructure. Despite its conceptual appeal, VCC adoption is hindered by the lack of quantitative evidence demonstrating its profitability and environmental advantages in real-world scenarios. This paper tackles the fundamental question: Can VCC be both profitable and sustainable? We address this problem by proposing a management scheme for …

Trixie update: Ceph got uninstalled from my storage cluster node due to package version conflicts or something.
This is a bit of a problem. (I did test on one node of a 3-way redudnant cluster so loss of one isn't the end of the world but it's an annoyance...)

🎜 It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine 🎝 -- R.E.M.
As Microsoft Forces Users to Ditch Windows 10, It Announces That It’s Also Turning Windows 11 into an AI-Controlled Monstrosity;
"Let's rewrite the entire operating system around AI."
https://…

As Microsoft Forces Users to Ditch Windows 10, It Announces That It’s Also Turning Windows 11 into an AI-Controlled Monstrosity
Microsoft wants you to ditch your old OS so you can try its new one stuffed with overbearing, if not invasive, AI features.

#WritersCoffeeClub 23/9: How ‘self-reliant’ are you as a writer?
Extremely, but I try to open up to others and let them in. My reflexes are not helping, I'm kinda used to withdrawing into my own little corner of the world and shut the world out.
Outside influence, however, has always meant a better end-result, so I'm trying. I'm trying hard.

Fighting Fascism at The End of The World. Een opwekkend stukje van Jessica Wildfire.
https://archive.ph/eL2dY

Es ist so seltsam zu sehen, dass breite Teile dessen, was sich heute „Management“ nennt, sich mit Händen und Füßen gegen aktuelle Erkenntnisse in Sachen Produktivität, Arbeitsorganisation und Kultur wehrt:
> Today, big chunks English-language management and executive culture are effectively the opposite of what we know works when managing organisations. […] Managers and executives have already demonstrated, en masse, that they don’t care about costs, productivity, effectiveness, or…

Let's stop pretending that managers and executives care about productivity
Web dev at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland

What Can We Learn from Harry Potter? An Exploratory Study of Visual Representation Learning from Atypical Videos
Qiyue Sun, Qiming Huang, Yang Yang, Hongjun Wang, Jianbo Jiao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21770

What Can We Learn from Harry Potter? An Exploratory Study of Visual Representation Learning from Atypical Videos
Humans usually show exceptional generalisation and discovery ability in the open world, when being shown uncommon new concepts. Whereas most existing studies in the literature focus on common typical data from closed sets, open-world novel discovery is under-explored in videos. In this paper, we are interested in asking: \textit{What if atypical unusual videos are exposed in the learning process?} To this end, we collect a new video dataset consisting of various types of unusual atypical data (…

Amazon expands Multichannel Fulfillment to let Walmart sellers use Amazon's logistics network to deliver orders and announces support for Shein by year-end (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)
https://www.geekwire.com/2025/sold-on-walmart-sent-by-amaz…

Marco Rubio hands control of USAID to Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought over ‘pocket recessions’ battle | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/rubio-usaid-end-pocket-recissions-project-2025-author-b2816791.html

A Chaotic Dynamics Framework Inspired by Dorsal Stream for Event Signal Processing
Yu Chen, Jing Lian, Zhaofei Yu, Jizhao Liu, Jisheng Dang, Gang Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26085

A Chaotic Dynamics Framework Inspired by Dorsal Stream for Event Signal Processing
Event cameras are bio-inspired vision sensor that encode visual information with high dynamic range, high temporal resolution, and low latency.Current state-of-the-art event stream processing methods rely on end-to-end deep learning techniques. However, these models are heavily dependent on data structures, limiting their stability and generalization capabilities across tasks, thereby hindering their deployment in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a chaotic dynamics event …

Until now, Social Security disability benefits got easier to qualify for as a person reached 50 and above. The Trump plan would end that.

New Work World: The administration contends that injured laborers have more access to technology and more nonphysical job options than in the past.

Red State Blues: Under the plan, millions — particularly in states that voted for Trump — could find it more difficult to qualify for disability benefits in the future.

Red State Workers Could Lose Out on Disability Benefits as Trump Administration Rewrites Eligibility Rules
Planned changes to Social Security’s disability program could leave hundreds of thousands of older blue-collar workers ineligible for aid. These changes would fall disproportionately on some of President Trump’s most loyal supporters.

Temporal Logic-Based Multi-Vehicle Backdoor Attacks against Offline RL Agents in End-to-end Autonomous Driving
Xuan Chen, Shiwei Feng, Zikang Xiong, Shengwei An, Yunshu Mao, Lu Yan, Guanhong Tao, Wenbo Guo, Xiangyu Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16950

Temporal Logic-Based Multi-Vehicle Backdoor Attacks against Offline RL Agents in End-to-end Autonomous Driving
Assessing the safety of autonomous driving (AD) systems against security threats, particularly backdoor attacks, is a stepping stone for real-world deployment. However, existing works mainly focus on pixel-level triggers that are impractical to deploy in the real world. We address this gap by introducing a novel backdoor attack against the end-to-end AD systems that leverage one or more other vehicles' trajectories as triggers. To generate precise trigger trajectories, we first use temporal log…

Deploying UDM Series in Real-Life Stuttered Speech Applications: A Clinical Evaluation Framework
Eric Zhang (SSHealth Team, AI for Healthcare Laboratory), Li Wei (SSHealth Team, AI for Healthcare Laboratory), Sarah Chen (SSHealth Team, AI for Healthcare Laboratory), Michael Wang (SSHealth Team, AI for Healthcare Laboratory)
https://arxiv.o…

Deploying UDM Series in Real-Life Stuttered Speech Applications: A Clinical Evaluation Framework
Stuttered and dysfluent speech detection systems have traditionally suffered from the trade-off between accuracy and clinical interpretability. While end-to-end deep learning models achieve high performance, their black-box nature limits clinical adoption. This paper looks at the Unconstrained Dysfluency Modeling (UDM) series-the current state-of-the-art framework developed by Berkeley that combines modular architecture, explicit phoneme alignment, and interpretable outputs for real-world clini…

Agile in the Face of Delay: Asynchronous End-to-End Learning for Real-World Aerial Navigation
Yude Li, Zhexuan Zhou, Huizhe Li, Youmin Gong, Jie Mei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13816

Agile in the Face of Delay: Asynchronous End-to-End Learning for Real-World Aerial Navigation
Robust autonomous navigation for Autonomous Aerial Vehicles (AAVs) in complex environments is a critical capability. However, modern end-to-end navigation faces a key challenge: the high-frequency control loop needed for agile flight conflicts with low-frequency perception streams, which are limited by sensor update rates and significant computational cost. This mismatch forces conventional synchronous models into undesirably low control rates. To resolve this, we propose an asynchronous reinfo…

WUGNECTIVES: Novel Entity Inferences of Language Models from Discourse Connectives
Daniel Brubaker, William Sheffield, Junyi Jessy Li, Kanishka Misra
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09556

WUGNECTIVES: Novel Entity Inferences of Language Models from Discourse Connectives
The role of world knowledge has been particularly crucial to predict the discourse connective that marks the discourse relation between two arguments, with language models (LMs) being generally successful at this task. We flip this premise in our work, and instead study the inverse problem of understanding whether discourse connectives can inform LMs about the world. To this end, we present WUGNECTIVES, a dataset of 8,880 stimuli that evaluates LMs' inferences about novel entities in contexts w…

ACLA 2026: Queering the Anthropocene: Radical Ecocritical Perspectives on the End of the World in Global Literature and Media
https://ift.tt/nGjuMok
updated: Monday, September 29, 2025 - 10:24amfull name / name of organization: ACLA 2026contact…
via Input 4 RELCFP

Day 18: Mark Oshiro
Having just learned that Oshiro is nonbinary, they're an instant include on this list. In veering extremely heavily towards YA, and losing a spot that would have gone to an absolutely legendary mangaka, anime writer, or feminist philosopher, but "Anger is A Gift" and "Each of us a Desert" are just that good, and I'm trying to steer a bit towards towards lesser-known authors I respect.
I already mentioned "Anger is a Gift" above, but to recap, it's a painful, vivid, and beautifully honest story of queer love, loss, and protest against an oppressive system. CW for racist police murder, intergenerational trauma, and police brutality against highschool students. It's a book a lot of Americans could benefit from reading right now, and while it's fiction, it's not fantasy or sci-fi. Besides the themes and politics, the writing is just really solid, with delicate characterization and tight-plotted developments that are beautifully paced.
To me "Each of us a Desert" is maybe even more beautiful, and Oshiro leaps into a magnificent fantasy world that's richly original in its desolation, dark history, lonely characters, and mythical magic. Particularly the clearly-not-just-superscription but ambiguously-important/powerful magical elements of Oshiro's worldbuilding are a rare contrast to the usual magic-is-real-here's-how-it-works fare, and pulling that off a all as they do is a testament to their craft. The prose is wonderful, probably especially so if you speak Spanish, but I enjoyed it immensely despite only knowing a few words here and there. The rich interiority of the characters, their conflicts both with each other and within themselves, and the juxtaposition of all that against origins in cult-like ignorance allows for the delivery of a lot of wisdom and complex truths.
Between these two books, so different and yet each so powerful, Oshiro has demonstrated incredible craft and also a wide range of styles, so I'm definitely excited to read more of their work and to recommend them to others.
I'm also glad to have finally put a nonbinary author on this list; the others I had in mind won't make it at this point because there's too much genre overlap, although I'll include them in my didn't-make-it list at the end. I've now got just 2 slots left and have counted up 14 more authors that absolutely need to be mentioned, so we'll see what happens.
#20AuthorsNoMen

There will be some 300,000 fewer federal workers on the government payroll by the end of December than there were in January,
according to the Trump administration’s top human resources official.
That amounts to the loss of about one in eight federal civilian workers,
and would be the largest single-year reduction since World War II.

Year Will End With 300,000 Fewer Federal Workers, Trump Official Says
The reduction would be the largest single-year decline in civilian federal employment since World War II.

If you want to make the case against political violence, start by saying clearly that Charlie Kirk was a miserable sack of shit who promoted bigotry and religious hatred and helped organized a violent coup attempt whose goal was to end democracy in the US in order to establish a white supremacist ethnostate. Say that the world is better without him in it.
•Then• make your argument that even in his case — even a person whose death improves the world — even •then• political violence is a bad strategy.
A/2

SEEC: Stable End-Effector Control with Model-Enhanced Residual Learning for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
Jaehwi Jang, Zhuoheng Wang, Ziyi Zhou, Feiyang Wu, Ye Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21231

SEEC: Stable End-Effector Control with Model-Enhanced Residual Learning for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
Arm end-effector stabilization is essential for humanoid loco-manipulation tasks, yet it remains challenging due to the high degrees of freedom and inherent dynamic instability of bipedal robot structures. Previous model-based controllers achieve precise end-effector control but rely on precise dynamics modeling and estimation, which often struggle to capture real-world factors (e.g., friction and backlash) and thus degrade in practice. On the other hand, learning-based methods can better mitig…

CodeFuse-CR-Bench: A Comprehensiveness-aware Benchmark for End-to-End Code Review Evaluation in Python Projects
Hanyang Guo, Xunjin Zheng, Zihan Liao, Hang Yu, Peng DI, Ziyin Zhang, Hong-Ning Dai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14856

CodeFuse-CR-Bench: A Comprehensiveness-aware Benchmark for End-to-End Code Review Evaluation in Python Projects
Automated code review (CR) is a key application for Large Language Models (LLMs), but progress is hampered by a "reality gap": existing benchmarks evaluate models on isolated sub-tasks using simplified, context-poor data. This fails to reflect the holistic context-rich nature of real-world CR. To bridge this gap, we introduce CodeFuse-CR-Bench, the first comprehensiveness-aware benchmark for repository-level CR evaluation. CodeFuse-CR-Bench comprises 601 high-quality instances from 70 Python pr…

In a tense meeting at the White House on Friday,
Trump tossed aside maps of the front line,
and urged Kyiv to concede its entire Donbas region to Russia to clinch a deal
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is rallying the support of his European partners
after the bruising meeting with Trump,
in which he was told to make concessions to end the war or risk facing destruction at the hands of Russia.


After tense Trump meeting, Zelensky seeks European support
In an often fraught encounter, Trump told Zelensky to accept Putin’s latest deal or face destruction at Russian hands, according to those familiar with events.

RealMirror: A Comprehensive, Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Platform for Embodied AI
Cong Tai, Zhaoyu Zheng, Haixu Long, Hansheng Wu, Haodong Xiang, Zhengbin Long, Jun Xiong, Rong Shi, Shizhuang Zhang, Gang Qiu, He Wang, Ruifeng Li, Jun Huang, Bin Chang, Shuai Feng, Tao Shen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14687

RealMirror: A Comprehensive, Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Platform for Embodied AI
The emerging field of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) for humanoid robots faces several fundamental challenges, including the high cost of data acquisition, the lack of a standardized benchmark, and the significant gap between simulation and the real world. To overcome these obstacles, we propose RealMirror, a comprehensive, open-source embodied AI VLA platform. RealMirror builds an efficient, low-cost data collection, model training, and inference system that enables end-to-end VLA research witho…

The Israeli military said it had begun "resuming enforcement of the Gaza ceasefire"
after it says it was violated by Hamas,
signaling a possible end to strikes on the territory.
“The IDF will continue to uphold the ceasefire agreement
[when convenient]
and will respond firmly to any violation of it"

FARM: Frame-Accelerated Augmentation and Residual Mixture-of-Experts for Physics-Based High-Dynamic Humanoid Control
Tan Jing, Shiting Chen, Yangfan Li, Weisheng Xu, Renjing Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19926

FARM: Frame-Accelerated Augmentation and Residual Mixture-of-Experts for Physics-Based High-Dynamic Humanoid Control
Unified physics-based humanoid controllers are pivotal for robotics and character animation, yet models that excel on gentle, everyday motions still stumble on explosive actions, hampering real-world deployment. We bridge this gap with FARM (Frame-Accelerated Augmentation and Residual Mixture-of-Experts), an end-to-end framework composed of frame-accelerated augmentation, a robust base controller, and a residual mixture-of-experts (MoE). Frame-accelerated augmentation exposes the model to high-…

Gibraltar celebrates its return to Europe
After nearly a decade in limbo and years of negotiations,
a treaty announced in June and set to come into effect over coming months,
will scrap most barriers to travel and trade that went up after Britain’s divorce from the E.U. became official at the end of 2020.

Some 40,000 Gibraltarians will regain what millions of traveling Brits miss most:
the ability to wander unfettered, without passports or time limits, througho…

The Brits who beat Brexit: Gibraltar celebrates its return to Europe
Nearly a decade after Britain quit the E.U., British residents of Gibraltar on the southern tip of Spain, will regain travel and commercial access under a treaty.

SMTrack: End-to-End Trained Spiking Neural Networks for Multi-Object Tracking in RGB Videos
Pengzhi Zhong, Xinzhe Wang, Dan Zeng, Qihua Zhou, Feixiang He, Shuiwang Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14607

SMTrack: End-to-End Trained Spiking Neural Networks for Multi-Object Tracking in RGB Videos
Brain-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) exhibit significant potential for low-power computation, yet their application in visual tasks remains largely confined to image classification, object detection, and event-based tracking. In contrast, real-world vision systems still widely use conventional RGB video streams, where the potential of directly-trained SNNs for complex temporal tasks such as multi-object tracking (MOT) remains underexplored. To address this challenge, we propose SMTrack…

After his summit with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia,
Trump adopted Putin’s preference for pursuing a sweeping peace agreement
-- instead of the urgent cease-fire Trump said he wanted before the meeting.
Doing so would give Russia an advantage in the talks,
which are due to continue on Monday when President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine visits Trump at the White House.
It breaks from a strategy Trump and European allies,
as well as Zelensky, had ag…

After Putin Summit, Trump Backs Plan to Cede Land in Ukraine: Live Updates
After meeting the Russian president, President Trump told European leaders he now favors giving up unoccupied Ukrainian land to Russia to end the fighting, a concession Ukraine has long opposed.

TeraSim-World: Worldwide Safety-Critical Data Synthesis for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Jiawei Wang, Haowei Sun, Xintao Yan, Shuo Feng, Jun Gao, Henry X. Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13164

TeraSim-World: Worldwide Safety-Critical Data Synthesis for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Safe and scalable deployment of end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving requires extensive and diverse data, particularly safety-critical events. Existing data are mostly generated from simulators with a significant sim-to-real gap or collected from on-road testing that is costly and unsafe. This paper presents TeraSim-World, an automated pipeline that synthesizes realistic and geographically diverse safety-critical data for E2E autonomous driving at anywhere in the world. Starting from an arbitrar…

SpatialVID: A Large-Scale Video Dataset with Spatial Annotations
Jiahao Wang, Yufeng Yuan, Rujie Zheng, Youtian Lin, Jian Gao, Lin-Zhuo Chen, Yajie Bao, Yi Zhang, Chang Zeng, Yanxi Zhou, Xiaoxiao Long, Hao Zhu, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Xun Cao, Yao Yao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09676

SpatialVID: A Large-Scale Video Dataset with Spatial Annotations
Significant progress has been made in spatial intelligence, spanning both spatial reconstruction and world exploration. However, the scalability and real-world fidelity of current models remain severely constrained by the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality training data. While several datasets provide camera pose information, they are typically limited in scale, diversity, and annotation richness, particularly for real-world dynamic scenes with ground-truth camera motion. To this end, we col…

China set to open world’s tallest bridge, expanding infrastructure push
China will open the world’s tallest bridge this month,
besting its own record with a structure that can fit almost two Eiffel Towers beneath it.

The Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge in southwestern Guizhou,
one of China’s poorest provinces,
stands a staggering 2,050 feet above ground,
making it almost twice the height of Paris’s landmark tower.

It stretches 9,481 feet end to end, ac…

China set to open world’s tallest bridge, expanding infrastructure push
The Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge can fit almost two Eiffel Towers under it and will be touted as evidence of China’s engineering prowess when it opens this month.

MTRDrive: Memory-Tool Synergistic Reasoning for Robust Autonomous Driving in Corner Cases
Ziang Luo, Kangan Qian, Jiahua Wang, Yuechen Luo, Jinyu Miao, Zheng Fu, Yunlong Wang, Sicong Jiang, Zilin Huang, Yifei Hu, Yuhao Yang, Hao Ye, Mengmeng Yang, Xiaojian Dong, Kun Jiang, Diange Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20843

MTRDrive: Memory-Tool Synergistic Reasoning for Robust Autonomous Driving in Corner Cases
Vision-Language Models(VLMs) have demonstrated significant potential for end-to-end autonomous driving, yet a substantial gap remains between their current capabilities and the reliability necessary for real-world deployment. A critical challenge is their fragility, characterized by hallucinations and poor generalization in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce MTRDrive, a novel framework that integrates procedural driving experiences with a dynamic toolkit to en…