Tootfinder

The Bonfire team have met their first “maintenance” fundraising goal. The next stretch goal is designing and shipping federated groups.
There is lots of good writing in this post about the needs of different types of groups.
https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/why-<…

Why Community Matters: Groups as the Next Step for the Fediverse
Federated groups in Bonfire will be spaces where communities gather to organise, care, and coordinate across the fediverse. They'll live next to your personal feed, but each group having a specific purpose: a study circle, a lab team, an activist collective, a local mutual aid crew, a project team. Inside you’ll find posts, conversations, calendars, shared resources, and more. Crucially, groups will be portable and interoperable.

Just finished "Low Orbit" by Kazimir Lee.
It's an excellent graphic novel about a queer Malaysian immigrant kid in small-town Maine, the unexpected friends she makes, and the science fiction author who happens to be her landlord. It reminded me a bit of the also excellent "Navigating With You" because of its interwoven fictional sci-fi novel (with really good writing!). CW as predictable for queer family trauma, although it doesn't get too bad and has a happy ending.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

Just finished "Twice as Perfect" by Louise Onomé. This is now the third novel I've read by her about a teenage Nigerian-Canadian second-generation immigrant, two of whom deal with some form of family estrangement ("Like Home" and "The Melancholy of Summer" are the other two). I checked it out because I liked her other novels and was not disappointed; in fact I feel like this is her best novel of the three. Dealing with cultural appropriation, both implicitly and explicitly, along with deep family trauma and a bit of romance, "Twice as Perfect" is suspenseful, wise, and heartfelt. It's got a thread of Nigerian Pidgin in it, which I thoroughly enjoyed although I didn't 100% understand, similar in some ways to the sprinkling of Spanish in "Each of Us a Desert", but with even less of an attempt to subtly explain each instance in English, which I don't mind at all.
The 2nd generation immigrant authors writing YA ~romances I've read recently have all been great, including Adiba Jaigirdar, Samira Ahmed, Sabina Khan, and Randa Abdel-Fattah (a slightly different era), and to a lesser extent Romina Garber (I didn't like "Lobizona" quite as much as stuff by these others). It's been super interesting to contrast their stories with those of people like Mark Oshiro, Angie Thomas, Randi Pink, and Angela Velez who talk about American racism from a non-immigrant perspective (perhaps Ahmed is in between the two groups).
#AmReading #ReadingNow

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.LG. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.LG/new
[2/3]:
- Sharp Structure-Agnostic Lower Bounds for General Functional Estimation
Jikai Jin, Vasilis Syrgkanis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17341 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/115762312049963700
- Timely Information Updating for Mobile Devices Without and With ML Advice
Yu-Pin Hsu, Yi-Hsuan Tseng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17381 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csNI_bot/115762180316858485
- SWE-Bench : A Framework for the Scalable Generation of Software Engineering Benchmarks from Open...
Wang, Ramalho, Celestino, Pham, Liu, Sinha, Portillo, Osunwa, Maduekwe
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17419 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSE_bot/115762487015279852
- Perfect reconstruction of sparse signals using nonconvexity control and one-step RSB message passing
Xiaosi Gu, Ayaka Sakata, Tomoyuki Obuchi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17426 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/115762346108219997
- MULTIAQUA: A multimodal maritime dataset and robust training strategies for multimodal semantic s...
Jon Muhovi\v{c}, Janez Per\v{s}
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17450 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/115762717053353674
- When Data Quality Issues Collide: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of Co-Occurring Data Quality Issu...
Emmanuel Charleson Dapaah, Jens Grabowski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17460 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSE_bot/115762500123147574
- Behavioural Effects of Agentic Messaging: A Case Study on a Financial Service Application
Olivier Jeunen, Schaun Wheeler
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17462 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csIR_bot/115762430673347625
- Linear Attention for Joint Power Optimization and User-Centric Clustering in Cell-Free Networks
Irched Chafaa, Giacomo Bacci, Luca Sanguinetti
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17466 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eessSY_bot/115762336277179643
- Translating the Rashomon Effect to Sequential Decision-Making Tasks
Dennis Gross, J{\o}rn Eirik Betten, Helge Spieker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17470 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csAI_bot/115762556506696539
- Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for Nonlinear Matrix Decompositions
Atharva Awari, Nicolas Gillis, Arnaud Vandaele
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17473 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eessSP_bot/115762580078964235
- TwinSegNet: A Digital Twin-Enabled Federated Learning Framework for Brain Tumor Analysis
Almustapha A. Wakili, Adamu Hussaini, Abubakar A. Musa, Woosub Jung, Wei Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17488 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/115762726884307901
- Resource-efficient medical image classification for edge devices
Mahsa Lavaei, Zahra Abadi, Salar Beigzad, Alireza Maleki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17515 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eessIV_bot/115762459510336799
- PathBench-MIL: A Comprehensive AutoML and Benchmarking Framework for Multiple Instance Learning i...
Brussee, Valkema, Weijer, Doeleman, Schrader, Kers
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17517 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/115762741957639051
- HydroGym: A Reinforcement Learning Platform for Fluid Dynamics
Christian Lagemann, et al.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17534 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_physicsfludyn_bot/115762391350754768
- When De-noising Hurts: A Systematic Study of Speech Enhancement Effects on Modern Medical ASR Sys...
Chondhekar, Murukuri, Vasani, Goyal, Badami, Rana, SN, Pandia, Katiyar, Jagadeesh, Gulati
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17562 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSD_bot/115762423443170715
- Enabling Disaggregated Multi-Stage MLLM Inference via GPU-Internal Scheduling and Resource Sharing
Lingxiao Zhao, Haoran Zhou, Yuezhi Che, Dazhao Cheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17574 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDC_bot/115762425409322293
- SkinGenBench: Generative Model and Preprocessing Effects for Synthetic Dermoscopic Augmentation i...
N. A. Adarsh Pritam, Jeba Shiney O, Sanyam Jain
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17585 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eessIV_bot/115762479150695610
- MAD-OOD: A Deep Learning Cluster-Driven Framework for an Out-of-Distribution Malware Detection an...
Tosin Ige, Christopher Kiekintveld, Aritran Piplai, Asif Rahman, Olukunle Kolade, Sasidhar Kunapuli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17594 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCR_bot/115762509298207765
- Confidence-Credibility Aware Weighted Ensembles of Small LLMs Outperform Large LLMs in Emotion De...
Menna Elgabry, Ali Hamdi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17630 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115762575512981257
- Generative Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization with Scalable Batch Evaluations for Sample-Effic...
Madhav R. Muthyala, Farshud Sorourifar, Tianhong Tan, You Peng, Joel A. Paulson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17659 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/115762554519447500
toXiv_bot_toot

Part of why #Trump has always been so hard to pin down politically is that he was always representing highly conflicting interests. Now, as that eats him alive, the GOP is fracturing in to two main groups: the Pinochet/Franco wing and the Hitler wing.
The Pinochet/Franco wing (let's call them PF) are lead by Vance. PF are also a coalition with some competing interests, but basically it's evangelical leaders, Opus Dei (fascist catholics), tech fascists (Yarvinites), pharma, and the other normal big republican donors. They support Israel, some because apartheid is extremely profitable and some because they support the genocide of Palestinian in order to bring the end of the world. They are split between extremely antisemitic evangelicals and Zionists, wanting similar things for completely different reasons. PF wants strong immigration enforcement because it lets them exploit immigrants, they don't want actual ethnic cleansing (just the constant threat). They want H1B visas because they want to a precarious tech work force. They want to end tariffs because they support free trade and don't actually care about things being made here.
The Hitler wing are lead by Nick Fuentes. I think they're a more unified group, but they're going to try to pull together a coalition that I don't think can really work. They're against Israel because they believe in some bat shit antisemitic conspiracy theory (which they are trying to inject along side legitimate criticism of Israel). They are focused on release of the #EpsteinFiles because they believe that it shows that Epstein worked for Mossad. They don't think that the ICE raids are going far enough, they oppose H1Bs because they are racists. They want a full ethnic cleansing of the US where everyone who isn't "white" is either enslaved for menial labor, deported, or dead. But they're also critical of big business (partially because of conspiracy theories but also) because they think their best option is to push for a white socialism (red/brown alliance).
Both of them want to sink Trump because they see him as standing in the way of their objectives. Both see #Epstein as an opportunity. Both of them have absolutely terrifying visions of authoritarian dictatorships, but they're different dictatorships.with opposing interests. Even within these there may be opportunities to fracture these more.
While these fractures decrease the likelihood of either group getting enough people together, their vision is more clear and thus more likely to succeed if they can make that happen. Now is absolutely *not* the time to just enjoy the collapse, we need to keep up or accelerate anti-fascist efforts to avoid repeating some of the mistakes of history.
Edit:
I should not that this isn't *totally* original analysis. I'll link a video later when I have time to find it.
Here it is:
#USPol

The FCC votes along party lines to repeal a Biden-era cybersecurity rule aimed at preventing intrusions like Salt Typhoon, calling it an ineffective measure (Kelcee Griffis/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Day 23: Thi Bui
Indirect CW: parental neglect, war, intergenerational trauma
Bui is the author of "The Best We Could Do", a graphic memoir which explores her relationship with her parents and unpacks some of the intergenerational trauma coming out of the Vietnam War. It has a lot of wisdom to offer about both dealing with troubled parents as a 1.5th-generation immigrant, and it delves deeply into her parents' histories in Vietnam and the complexities of the situation there both in the north and in the south. It's beautifully illustrated and very nicely plotted together given all the disparate threads it is working with.
I haven't read any of Bui's other work, but it looks like she's published a picture book for kids as well as a series of short comics during the pandemic. Besides Oseman who also writes non-illustrated fiction and the two manga artists Ice mentioned, Bui is the first graphic novel author I've included here, but I've actually got quite a few of them in my longer list, one of whom may make it into the 30 I'll include in this thread. These days I'm reading a bunch of graphic novels since they're easy to get through, and the variety of stories and perspectives in that space is wonderful these days, with a huge array of indie stuff that probably never would have gotten off the ground in traditional publishing/comics spaces.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Cracking CodeWhisperer: Analyzing Developers' Interactions and Patterns During Programming Tasks
Jeena Javahar, Tanya Budhrani, Manaal Basha, Cleidson R. B. de Souza, Ivan Beschastnikh, Gema Rodriguez-Perez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11516

Cracking CodeWhisperer: Analyzing Developers' Interactions and Patterns During Programming Tasks
The use of AI code-generation tools is becoming increasingly common, making it important to understand how software developers are adopting these tools. In this study, we investigate how developers engage with Amazon's CodeWhisperer, an LLM-based code-generation tool. We conducted two user studies with two groups of 10 participants each, interacting with CodeWhisperer - the first to understand which interactions were critical to capture and the second to collect low-level interaction data using…

Day 19 (a bit late): Alice Oseman
As I said I've got 14 authors to fit into two days. Probably just going to extend to 30? But Oseman gets this spot as an absolute legend of queer fiction in both novel & graphic novel form, and an excellent example of the many truths queer writers have to share with non-queer people that can make everyone's lives better. Her writing is very kind, despite in many instances dealing with some dark stuff.
I started out on Heartstopper, which is just so lovely and fun to read, and then made my way through several of her novels. The one I'll highlight here which I think it's her greatest triumph is "Loveless", which is semi-autobiographical and was at least my first (but no longer only) experience with the "platonic romance" sub-genre. It not only helped me work through some crufty internal doubts about aro/ace identities that I'd never really examined, but in the process helped improve my understanding of friendship, period. Heck, it's probably a nice novel for anyone questioning any sort of identity or dealing with loneliness, and it's just super-enjoyable as a story regardless of the philosophical value.
To cheat a bit more here on my author count, I recently read "Dear Wendy" by Ann Zhao, which shouts out "Loveless" and offers a more expository exploration of aro/ace identities, but "Loveless" is a book with more heart and better writing overall, including the neat plotting and great pacing. I think there are also parallels with Becky Albertalli's work, though I think I like Oseman slightly more. Certainly both excel at writing queer romance (and romance-adjacent) stuff with happy endings (#OwnVoices wins again with all three authors).
In any case, Oseman is excellent and if you're not up for reading a novel, Heartstopper is a graphic novel series that's easy to jump into and very kind to its adorable main characters.
I think I've now decided to continue to 30, which is a relief, so I'm tagging this (and the next post that rounds out 20) two ways.
#20AuthorsNoMen
#30AuthorsNoMen