Tootfinder

The Trump administration is not attacking the "excesses" of "woke" scholarship. They're at war with the very idea of power analysis, with the feeling of deep empathy with the oppressed, with ethical commitment to make a just world.

Like all the rest of the nerds, I did a bit of tech support on family computers.
They're all popping up windows from scam virus scanners lying that subscriptions need to be renewed or machines are unprotected. People don't know how to remove these things. Luckily they also don't really know how to pay the subscription.
Their phones are updating on them. Changing where buttons used to be. Removing options. Forcing people to register to use they things they have been doing for years.
They don't know how to register.
Things pop up asking for passwords and they have no idea who is asking or which password to use.
I tell them that I don't really understand why they keep using Windows now it is so shitty and awful. They say they don't know how to use anything else. The fact they don't really know how to use windows either doesn't seem to register.
The tech corporations have given up completely on being user friendly. They are all deliberately user hostile and exploitative now.
Corporate tech is terrible. The industry is failing it's users, abusing them. People don't even know there is any other way. They are just giving up on achieving their tasks until someone can fix the pop-ups and subscription boxes and passwords and 2fa for them.
Tech sucks now. Sucks hard.
#tech #christmasTechSupport

"""
Traditional politics of assistance and the repression of unemployment were now called into question. The need for reform became urgent.
Poverty was gradually separated from the old moral confusions. Economic crises had shown that unemployment could not be confused with indolence, as indigence and enforced idleness spread throughout the countryside, to precisely the places that had previously been considered home to the purest and most immediate forms of moral life. This demonstrated that poverty did not solely fall under the order of the fault: ‘Begging is the fruit of poverty, which in turn is the consequence of accidents in the production of the earth or in the output of factories, of a rise in the price of basic foodstuffs, or of growth of the population, etc.’ Indigence became a matter of economics.
But it was not contingent, nor was it destined to be suppressed forever. There would always be a certain quantity of poverty that could never be effaced, a sort of fatal indigence that would accompany all forms of society until the end of time, even in places where all the idle were employed: ‘The only paupers in a well governed state must be those born in indigence, or those who fall into it by accident.’ This backdrop of poverty was somehow inalienable: whether by birth or accident, it formed an inevitable part of society. The state of lack was so firmly entrenched in the destiny of man and the structure of society that for a long time the idea of a state without paupers remained inconceivable: in the thought of philosophers, property, work and indigence were terms linked right up until the nineteenth century.
This portion of poverty was necessary because it could not be suppressed; but it was equally necessary in that it made wealth possible. Because they worked but consumed little, a class of people in need allowed a nation to become rich, to release the value of its fields, colonies and mines, making products that could be sold throughout the world. An impoverished people, in short, was a people that had no poor. Indigence became an indispensable element in the state. It hid the secret but most real life of society. The poor were the seat and the glory of nations. And their noble misery, for which there was no cure, was to be exalted:
«My intention is solely to invite the authorities to turn part of their vigilant attention to considering the portion of the People who suffer … the assistance that we owe them is linked to the honour and prosperity of the Empire, of which the Poor are the firmest bulwark, for no sovereign can maintain and extend his domain without favouring the population, and cultivating the Land, Commerce and the Arts; and the Poor are the necessary agents for the great powers that reveal the true force of a People.»
What we see here is a moral rehabilitation of the figure of the Pauper, bringing about the fundamental economic and social reintegration of his person. Paupers had no place in a mercantilist economy, as they were neither producers nor consumers, and they were idle, vagabond or unemployed, deserving nothing better than confinement, a measure that extracted and exiled them from society. But with the arrival of the industrial economy and its thirst for manpower, paupers were once again a part of the body of the nation.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

I post a lot here and on Maker Forums Discourse, and have kind of not gotten around to blogging for a while. But today I had time to reflect on my first full year of #HamRadio — this new hobby has surprised me in a lot of (good) ways.

According to sociologist
Tressie McMillan Cottom,
the AI future is for the rich.
Cottom’s contention is a bleak one — the idea that the most powerful billionaires in the world are using AI to seize total control of humanity
But she isn’t short on hope.
“I think refusing is actually the more hopeful, expansion vision of the future...
That’s my daring idea."

Professor Warns That the Wealthy Are Trying to Use AI to Seize Control of Everything
Renowned sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom says that AI is a tool for the rich to cement control over society.

Sword of the Sea (Multi, XP'd on PS5) Restore a dried up ocean world to its former glory as you surf along the land on a magic sword.
From the people that brought you Abzu, The Pathless, and Journey, SotS is the latest gem in their crown of gaming goodness. If you've played any of the previous games, you already have a good idea what to expect from SotS (and should have already played it TBH 😆 )
Basically, this is Journey x Tony Hawk. You travel this world as a Wraith on …

I think this seems like a good idea.
Should the Bureau of Justice Statistics Report UCR Stats?
https://open.substack.com/pub/jasher/p/should-the-bureau-of-justice-statistics?utm_campaign=post-expanded-sh…

Should the Bureau of Justice Statistics Report UCR Stats?
That and other questions raised by a policy brief.

"we encounter a lot of detachment from reality these days, and it seems to be at the core of our lot of problems. People lying habitually and shamelessly, dunces being placed in a position of real power over experts, people in high positions making deeply stupid decisions... people act as they are unconstrained by materiality, consequences or the laws of physics. This essay aims to figure out why" -- @…

Just so you can guess where the "AI" thing is headed, look at this listing from a local community college
"AI made simple for everyday life"
... And look at what comes next:
"Flaggers certification"
The exciting thing (for bosses) is the idea that knowledge workers will be as interchangeable (and precarious) as DOT flaggers
#YouDeserveAUnion

Watching the latest Chubbyemu video gave me an idea: if you can't afford to take a vacation, instead take leave of your senses by inducing a reversible psychosis through bromine poisoning. A world of experiences, and you'll never even have to leave home!

You see a detective on the TV and he’s interviewing all the suspects asking them what they were doing on the night of the murder a month ago last Tuesday night.
And on the TV, the suspects all know. Right away.
If you asked me ten years ago though, I’d have had barely any clue. If you’re lucky it’d have been something planned in my calendar but mostly, dunno. Watching TV maybe? No idea what show. Was that a night I was in the pub?
As we all get older this problem increases I’m told. Eventually full on senility sets in.
But what if you have already built the habit to record what you’re doing? To be able to look back and revise and review how you spent your days? An external aid as a crutch to your own forgetful brain’s cortex?
So I started this Exocortex Log over a decade ago and now I can answer: Ten years ago on Tuesday I was having dinner with the guitarist from my band and his girlfriend and they burned the pudding.
The app has been half finished and barely able to even record let alone review for most of that time, but now it’s ready enough that someone else might use it too if they want.
Try it out: #lifeLog #app #memoryAid

A new idea about how to make clean Hydrogen that fits into an existing industry? ✨🌱💧
Clean Hydrogen🌱💧 will be more difficult than we might've hoped, but we still need it. Just decarbonizing the fossil🦖 Hydrogen industry is a massive undertaking. New ideas are welcome.
I recently learned about Peregrine Hydrogen. They make Hydrogen, but also something else: Sulfuric Acid🧪. They need ~½ the electricity⚡ compared to conventional electrolysis by utilizing a 2nd input.
🧵

This Hydrogen has no Color
Peregrine Hydrogen has an unusual idea for making clean Hydrogen, one that it says fits into existing industrial processes. One of the world's largest Phosphate mining companies is interested.

Yes, digital sovereignty for all things in Canada is a good idea.
That doesn’t mean insulating us from the world: open collaboration with others still fits with this.
Buying from a vendor with nothing of our own (especially from an American vendor) is not the way.
https://bsky.app/profile/nicktser…

Nick Tsergas (@nicktsergas.ca)
omg. Meta clearly trying to polarize the issue of digital sovereignty by running this in the Hub.

The algorithmic regulator
Giulio Ruffini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10300 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10300

The algorithmic regulator
The regulator theorem states that, under certain conditions, any optimal controller must embody a model of the system it regulates, grounding the idea that controllers embed, explicitly or implicitly, internal models of the controlled. This principle underpins neuroscience and predictive brain theories like the Free-Energy Principle or Kolmogorov/Algorithmic Agent theory. However, the theorem is only proven in limited settings. Here, we treat the deterministic, closed, coupled world-regulator s…

Exordia (2024) by Seth Dickinson is a fun romp on trolley problems if your idea of fun includes "nuke Kurdistan or else we nuke the world". Obama is president, and an alien appears in Central Park to drag some broken people into a battle over an artifact that can change the universe. These aliens have actual Original Sin, and visibly so. Humans freak out at the alien wrongness, a metaphysical brand that shows the entire alien race is doomed from birth to go to a literal hell when t…

#Decarbonization #Greenwashing This #Hydrogen has no Color
Peregrine Hydrogen has an unusual idea for making clean Hydrogen, one that it says fits into existing industrial processes. One of the wor…

This Hydrogen has no Color
Peregrine Hydrogen has an unusual idea for making clean Hydrogen, one that it says fits into existing industrial processes. One of the world's largest Phosphate mining companies is interested.

The basic idea of going completely digital is becoming more common these days even with municipal newspapers. But killing an edition 2 days before printing smacks of censorship & looks like IU administration is hiding something.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/20

Indiana University and its student paper are at odds on press freedom
The university administration says dropping the student publication’s print editions was a financial decision; student editors say the 158-year-old paper is being censored.

Imagine if the dumbest person in the world and humanity’s biggest asshole were the same person,
and that guy was president.
It’s a pretty simple lens through which to both view Trump’s lawless, Constitution-shredding rampage of revenge and self-enrichment
while never succumbing to the idea that what’s happening to the country is somehow within bounds.
It is only from this standpoint that one can write the straight story about this administration.

This Is the Media’s Worst Euphemism for Trump’s Tyrannical Abuses
Readers beware—and be on the lookout for the “departure.”

PolySim: Bridging the Sim-to-Real Gap for Humanoid Control via Multi-Simulator Dynamics Randomization
Zixing Lei, Zibo Zhou, Sheng Yin, Yueru Chen, Qingyao Xu, Weixin Li, Yunhong Wang, Bowei Tang, Wei Jing, Siheng Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01708

PolySim: Bridging the Sim-to-Real Gap for Humanoid Control via Multi-Simulator Dynamics Randomization
Humanoid whole-body control (WBC) policies trained in simulation often suffer from the sim-to-real gap, which fundamentally arises from simulator inductive bias, the inherent assumptions and limitations of any single simulator. These biases lead to nontrivial discrepancies both across simulators and between simulation and the real world. To mitigate the effect of simulator inductive bias, the key idea is to train policies jointly across multiple simulators, encouraging the learned controller to…

Socrates has the right idea...
#llm #ai

AI Socrates
A philosophy webcomic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also Jokes

It’s strange to watch the world ignore that it’s not just the medium that matters, but the message does too.
And by “the message” I mean both the ideas and the precise language or visuals used to communicate them.
Subtle differences in linguistic execution of the same idea in the same format can have radically opposite effects. The same applies to an image captured from a different angle or in a different style or in a different composition.
And yet it feels like most organizations and most people within them are determined to march on ignoring any consideration of subtlety and craft.
#writing #design #art #marketing

PPD-CPP: Pointwise predictive density calibrated-power prior in dynamically borrowing historical information
Shixuan Wang, Jing Zhang, Emily L. Kang, Bin Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25688

PPD-CPP: Pointwise predictive density calibrated-power prior in dynamically borrowing historical information
Incorporating historical or real-world data into analyses of treatment effects for rare diseases has become increasingly popular. A major challenge, however, lies in determining the appropriate degree of congruence between historical and current data. In this study, we devote ourselves to the capacity of historical data in replicating the current data, and propose a new congruence measure/estimand $p_{CM}$. $p_{CM}$ quantifies the heterogeneity between two datasets following the idea of the mar…

SCas4D: Structural Cascaded Optimization for Boosting Persistent 4D Novel View Synthesis
Jipeng Lyu, Jiahua Dong, Yu-Xiong Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06694 https://

SCas4D: Structural Cascaded Optimization for Boosting Persistent 4D Novel View Synthesis
Persistent dynamic scene modeling for tracking and novel-view synthesis remains challenging due to the difficulty of capturing accurate deformations while maintaining computational efficiency. We propose SCas4D, a cascaded optimization framework that leverages structural patterns in 3D Gaussian Splatting for dynamic scenes. The key idea is that real-world deformations often exhibit hierarchical patterns, where groups of Gaussians share similar transformations. By progressively refining deformat…

I've filed a report about a minor problem with a #Python package, namely that the source distribution contained some trailing junk that breaks GNU #tar. On one hand, I'm happy that upstream took the issue seriously. On the other hand, I'm terrified of how much #AI slop was involved in the response.
I mean, my short bug report yielded a few walls of text of #LLM analysis of what the cause of the problem might be, of suggested solutions… and praise of the author's fix. These are interspersed with short comments from the author, all pasted under their own personal account. And the linked pull request is also huge, with "verification code" that's quite sloppy (bits that don't do anything, conditions that will never be true… but at least it seems to do what it was supposed to do).
Honestly, I don't know what to do. Not that I ever planned using this package, but at this point I will definitely stay away from it. It's in #Gentoo, and I'll have to continue maintaining it for the sake of reverse dependencies, but I feel like it's unfair to expose our users to packages that have clearly proven to accept AI slop without reviewing it properly. Or rather, AI slop that's being reviewed… by AI. How can anyone think this a good idea?!
There were multiple times in my life when I've considered retiring from Gentoo, for variety of reasons. There were also multiple times when I wanted to get away from computers altogether. Unfortunately, we're living in a truly fucked up world, and there is no escape. The best you can do is put an ever increasing effort to keep fixing all that crap that will just keep piling on faster and faster.
#FreeSoftware #OpenSource

Interesting article from The Guardian about the idea of distinct phases or eras of human brain development.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/nov/25/brain-human-cognitive-development-life-stages-cambridge-study

My takeaway: DS faculty have no more idea than anyone else where we are headed in this brave new world of the LLM 🤔
#genai #datascience #academia #academicSky