Tootfinder

On The Road - To Xi’An/ Urban Spots 🟤
在路上 - 去西安/ 城市的点 🟤
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Fujifilm Neopan F, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

Hey friends, sorry to be so silent again. Busy life - but nothing bad.
Just wanted to share this photo with you :
THIS was the narrowest passage ahead. It's just this and around the corner, after this it widens up again. And I can promise: it does not just look narrow - it really IS.
I admit that I thought "ohkay, I did NOT expect that and I hope it won't get worse".
(it didn't and it was fun after all)

This applies to all of us #Researchers - why do we keep flying all around the world just to give (or watch) some talks that could have been given or watched online???
Yes, in-person conferences are slightly better for "networking"... but is this really worth destroying the planet?!
Quoting @…

🚫 PLEASE STOP USING SPOTIFY! 🚫
Spotify is serving you ICE cream dressed in Gestapo!
You can join the revolution at https://bandcamp.com, but I already know what you’ll whine:
“Oh nooo, but my faaaavorite artist isn’t on Bandcamp! How will I eeeever survive without them?! I’m sooo devastated, this is th…

If you're unclear on why you have to load the video before you can play it it's because the first load only loads the image, title and channel name to make the page itself load much faster.

The person viewing is then allowed to make a more considered choice before activating the video. Perhaps you want to open the link an incognito window instead for example.

One great bonus to this embed is that it shows way less ads, if any.

Series B, Episode 10 - Voice from the Past
VILA: Right.
BLAKE: One more thing, Vila.
VILA: Oh yes, sorry [Releases Blake]
BLAKE: Thank you. Asteroid PK One One Eight.
VILA: Right. [Vila moves in front of Zen]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/210/213 B7B6

How the FBI's hunt for the person who coerced a 13-year-old into livestreaming his suicide led to the arrest of a German member of the online predator group 764 (William Wan/Washington Post)

Teen’s live-streamed suicide set off exhaustive search for ‘White Tiger’
The suicide of a 13-year-old from Washington state set off a years-long global investigation to find an elusive online user called “White Tiger.”

Moody Urbanity - Odes 🎶
情绪化城市 - 颂 🎶
📷 Zeiss Super Ikonta 533/16
🎞️ Ilford HP5 Plus, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

Holy cow. Finnish prosecutors have charged a second person, a 28-year-old foreign national, in the hacking of the Vastaamo psychotherapy center.
https://syyttajalaitos.fi/en/-/the-pro

... as it turns out the folks from R5 were knocking on my door just as I was setting up this shot: here's my new photo backpack and my new water bottle.
They had a bunch of abandoned water bottles at the Catherwood Library so I asked the clerk: "I work for an organization founded by Elmo Roper, can I have the bottle with Elmo?" and they gave it to me.
#sliceoflife…

Attack of the Peets!

Evaluating the Ability of Large Language Models to Reason about Cardinal Directions, Revisited
Anthony G Cohn, Robert E Blackwell
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12059

Evaluating the Ability of Large Language Models to Reason about Cardinal Directions, Revisited
We investigate the abilities of 28 Large language Models (LLMs) to reason about cardinal directions (CDs) using a benchmark generated from a set of templates, extensively testing an LLM's ability to determine the correct CD given a particular scenario. The templates allow for a number of degrees of variation such as means of locomotion of the agent involved, and whether set in the first, second or third person. Even the newer Large Reasoning Models are unable to reliably determine the correct C…

Our realities are constantly diverging, and never completely shared. And we •want• that! It’s important for people to bring different experiences, different ways of seeing and thinking.
One person understands climate science. Another person understands the subculture of Southern Iowa. A third person knows what it’s like to live as a Black person in this society — and so on, to infinity. All these perspectives matter, and nobody gets to hold all infinity of them at once.
Nobody gets to be in full possession of absolute truth.
2/

...normally that won’t be the case, even when the person seems nearly totally to blame (and that isn’t even a very common situation) normally there are obvious weaknesses in the system that put them in the place to fail and will likely put anyone else in the same place in the future.

The streets of New Philangeles crawl with Avoidants. Interdimensional husks with glowing green fog eyes, walking like crickets, made of intergenerational trauma and supermarket tequila and reruns of the first Saw movie. Only Super Empath can save us now. Quick, child! To her therapy-inspo Pinterest alt!! Flood her with prayers for help!!!!

faculty_hiring_us: Faculty hiring networks in the US (2022)
Networks of faculty hiring for all PhD-granting US universities over the decade 2011–2020. Each node is a PhD-granting institution, and a directed edge (i,j) indicates that a person received their PhD from node i and was tenure-track faculty at node j during time of collection (2011-2020). This dataset is divided into separate networks for all 107 fields, as well as aggregate networks for 8 domains, and an overall network for …

If you're in Austin and want to attend #LonghornPHP next week but can't swing the ticket price, we still have some donated in-person tickets available. Pay $20 now, then get that $20 refunded when you show up. https:/…

Longhorn PHP 2025
Longhorn PHP is a 3-day conference in Austin, Texas to help developers level up their craft and connect with the larger PHP community. www.longhornphp.com

A question for Europe after the Alaska summit is "Now what?" , Trump will not be the leading person in ending the war in Ukraine. 🤔

Not one person on the Right acknowledges that Iryna Zarutska was in the US was because she was a refugee, forced to leave her country because of lack of support of Ukraine. The GOP is weak on Russia, a country whose leadership daily vows to destroy the US. Why so weak, why so goddamned weak, eh?

Glad that someone informed me that my side project https://busrouter.sg is featured on CNA Insider's Singapore Hour "The Unseen Side of Singapore’s Bus System", under the chapter "Woodlands Bus Depot: The Eyes and Ears of Singapore’s Bus System" (04:08)

Series D, Episode 02 - Power
NINA: Now the people shall leave this place, Gunn Sar. We shall seek a new home, far from here, a new way of life. [Continues to weep.]
[Control room. Tarrant, Dayna and Vila enter. Vila holds a timer and checks it continually throughout the scene.]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/402/436

HoloGarment: 360{\deg} Novel View Synthesis of In-the-Wild Garments
Johanna Karras, Yingwei Li, Yasamin Jafarian, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12187 htt…

HoloGarment: 360° Novel View Synthesis of In-the-Wild Garments
Novel view synthesis (NVS) of in-the-wild garments is a challenging task due significant occlusions, complex human poses, and cloth deformations. Prior methods rely on synthetic 3D training data consisting of mostly unoccluded and static objects, leading to poor generalization on real-world clothing. In this paper, we propose HoloGarment (Hologram-Garment), a method that takes 1-3 images or a continuous video of a person wearing a garment and generates 360° novel views of the garment in a cano…

General Decentralized Stochastic Optimal Control via Change of Measure: Applications to the Witsenhausen Counterexample
Bhagyashri Telsang, Seddik Djouadi, Charalambos D. Charalambous
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11013

General Decentralized Stochastic Optimal Control via Change of Measure: Applications to the Witsenhausen Counterexample
In this paper we present global and person-by-person (PbP) optimality conditions for general decentralized stochastic dynamic optimal control problems, using a discrete-time version of Girsanov's change of measure. The PbP optimality conditions are applied to the Witsenhausen counterexample to show that the two strategies satisfy two coupled nonlinear integral equations. Further, we prove a fixed point theorem in a function space, establishing existence and uniqueness of solutions to the integr…

One of the most worrying things I find about LLMs at the moment is how normalised it's becoming to just chat to it like a friend or confidant and even so far as to ask it for therapy. I don't mean amongst tech bros and nerds, I mean amongst normal people.
It just seems so reckless. Aside from the problem of hallucinations, these things are built to have an agenda. No sane person should ever ever ever ask Zuckerberg, Musk or Altman for a mental health vibe check

@… FWIW When my wife gave birth, the hospital clearly stated that they had a 2 person maximum in the room. So even if the wife gave in, this dude probably just can’t get what he wants, and needs to deal with that.

The words "bumbling incompetence" comes to mind.
☑️ ICE Adds Random Person to Group Chat, Exposes Details of Manhunt in Real-Time
https://www.404media.co/ice-adds-random-person-to-group-chat-exposes-details-of-manhunt-in-re…

ICE Adds Random Person to Group Chat, Exposes Details of Manhunt in Real-Time
The texts were sent to a group called “Mass Text” and show ICE using DMV and license plate reader data in an attempt to find their target, copies of the messages obtained by 404 Media show.

Life on Different Paths II🚶🚶‍♀️🚶‍♂️
生活诸多路径 II🚶🚶‍♀️🚶‍♂️
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️FOMAPAN Action 400
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

OpenAI hires black hole physicist Alex Lupsasca, the first person to join the OpenAI for Science initiative led by Kevin Weil (Megan Morrone/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/16/openai-science-black-hole-physicist

Exclusive: OpenAI hires black hole physicist in broader science push
The ChatGPT maker wants to compete with Google DeepMind in the sciences.

Uhoh… Didn’t we get EU connectivity via Colt?
Oh. Never mind. Dodged a bullet *AGAIN* by having cancelled that contract (a few years back, actually…)
If I was a superstitious person I’d think that I'd been blessed to never be directly harmed by any sort of cyberattack. If I was a narcissist I'd think that I was somehow specially skilled at intuitively avoiding all attacks...
I’m neither, and recognize the absurdity of random chance, which ALWAYS does the unlikely…

Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social)
Attached: 1 image Here's the forum post, it's a Russian Tor site.

And when I'm talking about understanding the drives to violence, I did write about something similar recently.
https://write.as/hexmhell/algorithmic-violence
The drives behind this and the shooting last week are pretty radically different, but there's some overlap. People like Kirk are part a huge political machine slowly crushing people all over the world. There's a hopeless rage that would naturally drive even the most calm person to the edge of violence. You can't look at the world honestly and be OK. We want to do something. We want to react. But everything we do is silenced or must rmain silent. So it's easy to understand why someone might choose violence. Very different situation, but everyone is subject to the same national and international influences.
I don't promote violence, not because I disagree with it but because I think it's expensive. It takes time to plan, especially for those trying to get away. Guns are not cheap, nor are bullets, nor is the range time you need to get somewhat good under pressure. It's not cheap for the person doing it, and it's not cheap for the community that has to clean up. The community will face police repression (which, if we're honest, was gonna come anyway). The community will have to post bail, will lose a person for a while, will need to support the family, will go to hearings, will write reports, will do interviews.
Sun Tzu said that deploying one soldier to the front takes 7 in the field. Logistics are a huge invisible cost. Some of that time and energy could be reused. It's never bad to be armed and able to defend if needed. But a lot of that energy and time would be better spent planning a community pantry, a tool library, organizing a union, etc. We are living in a disaster, and we need to invest in thriving through the next crumble.
Kirk is replacable. They're almost all replacable, because they don't really care about human life. We do, so none of us are. It's not really a worth while trade, IMHO.

Call for Papers: ICMS 2026 Panel, "The Imagined Woman"
https://ift.tt/ADIFo2C
University of Alaska - Fairbanks - Alaska & Polar Regions Area Studies Bibliographer & Curator of…
via Input 4 RELCFP …

Introducing like-minded people to each other is one of my favourite conference activities. You don't even need to be the host!
Also consider the pacman - leaving a gap in your circle for others to join you
From: @…

New documents and court records obtained by EFF show that
Texas deputies queried Flock Safety's surveillance data 💥in an abortion investigation,
contradicting the narrative promoted by the company and the Johnson County Sheriff that she was
“being searched for as a missing person,” and that“it was about her safety.” 
The new information shows that deputies had initiated a "death investigation" of a "non-viable fetus," logged evidence of a woman’…

Flock Safety and Texas Sheriff Claimed License Plate Search Was for a Missing Person. It Was an Abortion Investigation.
New documents and court records obtained by EFF show that Texas deputies queried Flock Safety's surveillance data in an abortion investigation, contradicting the narrative promoted by the company and the Johnson County Sheriff that she was “being searched for as a missing person,” and that “it was about her safety.” The new information shows that deputies had initiated a "death investigation" of a "non-viable fetus," collected evidence of a woman’s self-managed abortion, and consulted…

When you seem to be only person on the train with a non-Internet ticket, and therefore the only one not asked for ID.
#rail

Documentation: not the most fun thing in the world to do, but it does make things much, much easier for the next (or current) person. Since the NESessity NESRGB combo doesn't use the standard `R`, `G`, or `B` pads off the NESRGB, figured it would be better if I showed where exactly you need to pull the signals off the NESRGB.
#electronics

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy

This is amusing. In a story about Laufey’s upcoming concert in North America, it states that 400,000 tickets were sold and that’s the same as 80 of the big arena in Reykjavík.
Unmentioned: this is the equivalent of every person in Iceland buying a ticket!
https://icelandmonitor.mb…

A major achievement for Laufey
Leifur Björnsson, head of exports at the Iceland Music Office, says the demand for tickets to Laufey Lín’s upcoming concert tour in the United States and Canada is almost without precedent in Icelandic music history.

I truly believe in anarcho-syndicalism. It’s not merely a political position I align with, it’s an emancipatory framework that speaks to me on a level deeper than ideology, a praxis that gives me a sense of meaning and direction I cannot turn away from.
I believe in it because it embodies the struggle against authoritarianism and the hierarchies of the capitalist state, because it affirms horizontalism, mutual aid, and collective power at the very core of life. It matters to me not a…

#Blakes7 Series B, Episode 10 - Voice from the Past
JENNA: He's a hard man to rescue when he doesn't want to be rescued.
AVON: More to the point, are you yourself?
BLAKE: What happened? Why aren't we at Del Ten? What's going on, Avon.

I finally opened my RSS reader today to see what's going on in the country I live in.

I’m not saying I’m the first person to ride the entire length of the new protected bike lane on Lisbon but there’s a good chance I am… (I had to carry my bike across a dozen gaps because it’s not all connected yet!)
#biking #bikeTooter

faculty_hiring_us: Faculty hiring networks in the US (2022)
Networks of faculty hiring for all PhD-granting US universities over the decade 2011–2020. Each node is a PhD-granting institution, and a directed edge (i,j) indicates that a person received their PhD from node i and was tenure-track faculty at node j during time of collection (2011-2020). This dataset is divided into separate networks for all 107 fields, as well as aggregate networks for 8 domains, and an overall network for …

Jag saknar kŸpenhavn

Ein #Lesetipp, den ich Euch momentan besonders ans Herz legen möchte, weil wir uns wieder in Richtung der Zeiten bewegen, von denen dieser Roman, der auf einer realen Person basiert, handelt:
The Personal Librarian
https://

Russian double-tap attack injures 5, including emergency workers, in Nikopol: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/17/russian-doubletap-attack-injures-including.html

Enbee at Den Gamle By in Aarhus.

The word of the day is... BEANS 🐾
🎨by @…

I hope I don't become the sort of person that thinks the country should return to how it was when they were 17, and never change from that point.
But I might.

Chat-Driven Text Generation and Interaction for Person Retrieval
Zequn Xie, Chuxin Wang, Sihang Cai, Yeqiang Wang, Shulei Wang, Tao Jin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12662 https://…

Chat-Driven Text Generation and Interaction for Person Retrieval
Text-based person search (TBPS) enables the retrieval of person images from large-scale databases using natural language descriptions, offering critical value in surveillance applications. However, a major challenge lies in the labor-intensive process of obtaining high-quality textual annotations, which limits scalability and practical deployment. To address this, we introduce two complementary modules: Multi-Turn Text Generation (MTG) and Multi-Turn Text Interaction (MTI). MTG generates rich p…

How did anybody **EVER** think that having TABs vs. spaces be significant in makefiles was a good idea?
Yes, I'm well aware that I am not the first person in history who has ever had this particular complaint.
Still, it's been 40 years since I first encountered this, and I am **still** boggled. WHAT THE FUCK WERE THEY THINKING?

The person who accepts lies for strategic reasons loses the facts as weapons. In the world the liar creates, the liar wins every battle. The only remedy against alternative truths is the truth.
Dutch author Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, on Von der Leyen's "trade deal" with Trump.

Mijn essay in De Morgen van dit weekend: | Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer | 51 comments
Mijn essay in De Morgen van dit weekend: De vernedering van Ursula von der Leyen | Gedeeld artikel van De Morgen https://lnkd.in/dhdwsNMV | 51 comments on LinkedIn

Physics-Informed Neural Networks vs. Physics Models for Non-Invasive Glucose Monitoring: A Comparative Study Under Realistic Synthetic Conditions
Riyaadh Gani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12253

Physics-Informed Neural Networks vs. Physics Models for Non-Invasive Glucose Monitoring: A Comparative Study Under Realistic Synthetic Conditions
Non-invasive glucose monitors often fail outside the lab because existing datasets ignore hardware noise, environmental drift, and person-to-person physiology. We introduce the first ultra-realistic near-infrared (NIR) simulator that injects 12-bit ADC quantisation, +/-0.1% LED ageing, photodiode dark noise, 15-45 C temperature, 30-90% relative humidity, contact-pressure variation, Fitzpatrick I-VI melanin, and diurnal glucose excursions (dawn phenomenon). Using this platform (rho glucose-NIR =…

Just a taste of "Ritual Escape" - #Listen and #Watch -
or play the full playlist 👉🏼

City Features III 🌆
城市特征 III 🌆
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

More Similar than Dissimilar: Modeling Annotators for Cross-Corpus Speech Emotion Recognition
James Tavernor, Emily Mower Provost
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12295 https://

More Similar than Dissimilar: Modeling Annotators for Cross-Corpus Speech Emotion Recognition
Speech emotion recognition systems often predict a consensus value generated from the ratings of multiple annotators. However, these models have limited ability to predict the annotation of any one person. Alternatively, models can learn to predict the annotations of all annotators. Adapting such models to new annotators is difficult as new annotators must individually provide sufficient labeled training data. We propose to leverage inter-annotator similarity by using a model pre-trained on a l…

Since last Friday I am temporarily the support team. This coming Monday the team is back online. Unexpected issues meant they were away leaving me the sole person doing the work of three (and originally a team of seven).
1. Priority list of tasks. Triaged the incoming workload. Sorry, if you are not in the list then when there is free time I will get to you.
2. Outlook rules. I have using this for years. Organized the INBOX by sender or subject. I also put a special soun…

Draw an Ugly Person An Exploration of Generative AIs Perceptions of Ugliness
Garyoung Kim, Huisung Kwon, Seoju Yun, Yu-Won Youn
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12212

Draw an Ugly Person An Exploration of Generative AIs Perceptions of Ugliness
Generative AI does not only replicate human creativity but also reproduces deep-seated cultural biases, making it crucial to critically examine how concepts like ugliness are understood and expressed by these tools. This study investigates how four different generative AI models understand and express ugliness through text and image and explores the biases embedded within these representations. We extracted 13 adjectives associated with ugliness through iterative prompting of a large language m…

More frightening energy-use stats about AI, mostly reporting on the total energy use of GPT, which is pretty abstract, and makes it difficult to answer the question of what impact you yourself are having by using it.
A useful rule of thumb to remember is that the whole energy use per day of a person in a European country (including food, transportation, production etc.) is about 125 KWh if they don't live excessively. 1/n

Series C, Episode 01 - Aftermath
SERVALAN: And this burning desire for independence - was this his only reason for leaving Earth?
DAYNA: What do you mean?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/301/229 B7B2

@… @… I think bludgeoning the person holding the device to death *might* get you up to 42 on the reading.
So that’s nice.

faculty_hiring_us: Faculty hiring networks in the US (2022)
Networks of faculty hiring for all PhD-granting US universities over the decade 2011–2020. Each node is a PhD-granting institution, and a directed edge (i,j) indicates that a person received their PhD from node i and was tenure-track faculty at node j during time of collection (2011-2020). This dataset is divided into separate networks for all 107 fields, as well as aggregate networks for 8 domains, and an overall network for …

The tragedy of a vile person like Charlie Kirk is that we’ve even heard of him, that a person like that managed to hold so many microphones for so long.
He shouldn’t have been shot. He should have been cut off by everyone in every space where he tried to hold the microphone, shamed into living isolated and miserable in his mom’s basement where nobody would ever feel the need to shoot him.

As a survivor of the type of stochastic terrorism that people like Charlie Kirk carry out, and also a survivor of gun violence, I've had a bit to think about.
I still understand the anger, the frustration, that leads someone to snap. I'll always have compassion, if also paired with some frustration, for the person who shot me and her husband. That makes sense to me. I refused to testify because it never made sense to punish a tool who acted out of ignorance.
What doesn't make as much sense to me are the upper class grifters, the stochastic terrorists, who turn a profit of off setting people like that up to kill. I always wanted to see people like that, people who were clearly profiting off of bringing evil into the world, held accountable.
But the way I always want to see them held accountable, is by being forced to live in a world where everyone is free. Charlie Kirk got out easy, and that is a bit sad. He should have had to suffer through our victory. He should have had to watch the fall of Western Civilization, the collapse of all the things he held dear, all the things he tried to uphold. I wish that he had lived long enough to understand the suffering he inflicted on the world. He should have lived long enough to have to do real work, to have to figure out how to feed himself, house himself, in a world that has no market for the hate that he brings.
As much as I had rather that he starved, I would never shed a tear for the opening of a new public urinal.
Rest in piss. Charlie Kirk.

"""
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)

Series A, Episode 02 - Space Fall
[Switch to flight deck of Liberator. Blake enters rubbing his shoulder.]
AVON: What happened?
BLAKE: Slight disagreement with Raiker. And then the hatch closed.
JENNA: We're on our way.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/102/663 B7B3

Is 'Hope' a person or an idea? A pilot benchmark for NER: comparing traditional NLP tools and large language models on ambiguous entities
Payam Latifi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12098

Is 'Hope' a person or an idea? A pilot benchmark for NER: comparing traditional NLP tools and large language models on ambiguous entities
This pilot study presents a small-scale but carefully annotated benchmark of Named Entity Recognition (NER) performance across six systems: three non-LLM NLP tools (NLTK, spaCy, Stanza) and three general-purpose large language models (LLMs: Gemini-1.5-flash, DeepSeek-V3, Qwen-3-4B). The dataset contains 119 tokens covering five entity types (PERSON, LOCATION, ORGANIZATION, DATE, TIME). We evaluated each system's output against the manually annotated gold standard dataset using F1-score. The res…

City Features V 🌆
城市特征 V 🌆
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

As we turned into Lone Pine to begin the half-marathon ascent of Mount Whitney,
I got the sense that Frederick had been distilled into a person whose focus was so singular that she only needed someone to show her direction.
That someone was Boyd.
Frederick asked him to pace the miles into the base of the climb,
and it was then that Boyd told her,
finally, that she was on pace to break the age-group record.
This was the final arrow in his quiver.
…

What It Takes to Crew the Hardest Race on Earth
Every year, ultrarunners sign up to compete in a brutal race that stretches 135 miles across Death Valley in the high heat of summer. Because of its harsh conditions, the Badwater 135 is perhaps the most intensely crewed ultra in the world, and without these dedicated support teams, for most, the race would be impossible.

I'm really impressed with this person who added this to their review of a product:
"That is my business and what I do build day in and day out 60 hours a day... I have 10 lifetimes worth of work to do literally no time to waste doing the steps I have already done..."

dbpedia_occupation: Person-Occupation Affiliations (DBpedia, 2016)
A bipartite network of the affiliations between notable people and occupations, as extracted from Wikipedia by the DBpedia project.
This network has 229307 nodes and 250945 edges.
Tags: Social, Affiliation, Unweighted
https://networks.s…

Series A, Episode 06 - Seek-Locate-Destroy
BLAKE: I thought he was dead. I was sure I'd killed him.
[Cipher room. A group of technicians are rifling through the debris when Travis enters.]
TRAVIS: Stop! [to Prell] What are these men doing here?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/106/248

Obesity & diet
I wouldn't normally share a positive story about the new diet drugs, because I've seen someone get obsessed with them who was at a perfectly acceptable weight *by majority standards* (surprise: every weight is in fact perfectly acceptable by *objective* standards, because every "weight-associated" health risk is its own danger that should be assessed *in individuals*). I think two almost-contradictory things:
1. In a society shuddering under the burden of metastasized fatmisia, there's a very real danger in promoting the new diet drugs because lots of people who really don't need them will be psychologically bullied into using them and suffer from the cost and/or side effects.
2. For many individuals under the assault of our society's fatmisia, "just ignore it" is not a sufficient response, and also for specific people for whom decreasing their weight can address *specific* health risks/conditions that they *want* to address that way, these drugs can be a useful tool.
I know @… to be a trustworthy & considerate person, so I think it's responsible to share this:
#Fat #Diet #Obesity

Series A, Episode 08 - Duel
VILA: Of course I will, how can you doubt me?
BLAKE: It isn't easy, but somehow I manage it. Come on. Put us down. [Blake, Jenna and Gan teleport to the planet's surface and look around]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/108/60 B7B3

Leveraging Multi-View Weak Supervision for Occlusion-Aware Multi-Human Parsing
Laura Bragagnolo, Matteo Terreran, Leonardo Barcellona, Stefano Ghidoni
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10093

Leveraging Multi-View Weak Supervision for Occlusion-Aware Multi-Human Parsing
Multi-human parsing is the task of segmenting human body parts while associating each part to the person it belongs to, combining instance-level and part-level information for fine-grained human understanding. In this work, we demonstrate that, while state-of-the-art approaches achieved notable results on public datasets, they struggle considerably in segmenting people with overlapping bodies. From the intuition that overlapping people may appear separated from a different point of view, we pro…

Remember to stay hydrated, my peeps

On Aug. 1, shortly after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a surprisingly weak employment report,
the conservative economist E.J. Antoni joined Steve Bannon’s influential “War Room” podcast.
“Have we put in our own person into B.L.S.?” Mr. Bannon asked Dr. Antoni.
“Is a MAGA Republican, that President Trump knows and trusts, are they running the Bureau of Labor Statistics yet?”
“No, unfortunately, Steve, we still haven’t gotten there,” Dr. Antoni replied,
go…

Trump’s Pick of E.J. Antoni as BLS Leader Criticized by the Right and the Left
Economists on the left and right criticized E.J. Antoni for misunderstanding the data he would now oversee.

City Features IV 🌆
城市特征 IV 🌆
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

Series B, Episode 05 - Pressure Point
KASABI: Coordinates three three one, eleven zero one.
SERVALAN: That's better.
TRAVIS: Now, Kasabi, listen to this: was the homing beacon to transmit in a code pattern?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/205/186 B7B4

I refuse to replace capitalist hierarchies with red-tinted authoritarianism, because in the end, I want liberation, not another power structure draped in red with the hammer and sickle.
#Authoritarianism #Anarchism

It's worth remembering that the civil war was a slave revolt:
#USPol

#Blakes7 Series C, Episode 07 - Children of Auron
FRANTON: With respect, sir. You and Cally are from the same sibling group, aren't you?
ZELDA: Yes, Cally's my twin.
FRANTON: Identical brain scan.
ZELDA: Optimum telepathic affinity.

In a scorching 46-page opinion, Judge Boasberg found probable cause to hold the government in criminal contempt.
The government could remedy the contempt, Boasberg said, by giving the men detained under the Alien Enemies Act an opportunity to challenge their detentions.
If not, he would initiate proceedings to figure out who was responsible for the contempt.
And, if the Justice Department ultimately declined to charge that person with a crime, Boasberg said that he’d appoin…

#Blakes7 Series B, Episode 09 - Countdown
BLAKE: We'll do it. [Starts to call the ship]
AVON: Wait. Disarming a device is not your field. You finish what we came here for: find Provine.
GRANT: [To Avon] I'll come with you.
AVON: No.

When you’ve spent almost nine hours inside the vortex of Psytrance, you can bet it’s my favorite genre of all time, because once you’re hooked on 145 BPM the line between hearing and being the music completely disappears.
The bassline doesn’t just sit in the background, it takes command with ruthless precision, rewiring thought into rhythm and heartbeat into tempo, proving again and again that Psytrance isn’t just what I listen to, it’s the sound I belong to.
By the time the flow…

Moody Urbanity - Oracles III 🈳
情绪化城市 - 谕 III 🈳
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️ Ilford HP5 Plus 400, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

Series D, Episode 03 - Traitor
LEITZ: Because my meeting was with Hunda, General, and two off-worlders. [Pours a glass of wine for himself. His manner is insolent]
GENERAL: Hunda is a rebel leader.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/403/352 B7B3

City Features II 🌆
城市特征 II 🌆
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

Series C, Episode 05 - The Harvest of Kairos
SHAD: [On screen] Yes, madam.
[Launch platform]
GUARD: Instructions from the Captain. You are to wait for the next shuttle.
CARLON: But there isn't another.
GUARD: One will be sent for you tomorrow.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/305/214

On The Road - To Xi’An/Urban Tomb 🪦
在路上 - 去西安/城市坟茔 🪦
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Lucky SHD 400
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

Series C, Episode 05 - The Harvest of Kairos
JARVIK: [Picks up Servalan and dumps her on a couch] Lie there and keep quiet until I tell you otherwise.
[Liberator flight deck]
VILA: 'Course I may settle down, you know, have kids. What do you think, Cally?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/305/336

Moody Urbanity - Oracles 🈳
情绪化城市 - 谕 🈳
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️ Ilford HP5 Plus 400, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

Series A, Episode 02 - Space Fall
RAIKER: [To Blake] What have we here? Not a troublemaker, I hope?
BLAKE: I didn't hear an order.
RAIKER: You didn't hear an order, sir. ...SAY IT!
BLAKE: I didn't hear an order...sir.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/102/51 B7B3

#Blakes7 Series D, Episode 05 - Animals
SERVALAN: Every time you see him, you're going to hate him.
DAYNA: No!
SERVALAN: In the end you'll tell me you'll hate him and when I believe you I'll stop.
DAYNA: I'll never hate him.
SERVALAN: You will.

Series C, Episode 05 - The Harvest of Kairos
INTERCEPTOR LEADER: [V.O.] Interceptor Leader to Control. Request instructions!
SERVALAN: Hold position, Interceptor Leader, and wait for instructions from Assault Leader One. We will attack when the Liberator breaks out of Alpha Sector. Four should do it nicely. Well, Dastor, I think it's time we had a little strategic counsel. Bring this - Jarvik to me.

Series B, Episode 13 - Star One
VILA: [On communicator] Avon.
AVON: Well?
VILA: [On communicator] There's no response. What's going on, where are they?
AVON: Inside. It must be shielded.
VILA: [On communicator] Do you want to come up?
AVON: No.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/213/285

Series C, Episode 09 - Sarcophagus
TARRANT: NO!
ZEN: Twenty seconds.
CALLY: I think I can bring them out with me, otherwise they'll both die.
DAYNA: This way you'll all die.
ZEN: Fifteen seconds.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/309/141 B7B2

Series B, Episode 04 - Horizon
KOMMISSAR: [O.O.V.] Your companions are still alive.
CALLY: I feel it. You killed him. You killed him because he would not obey you.
KOMMISSAR: What is she talking about?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/204/416 B7B3

Series A, Episode 11 - Bounty
SARKOFF: Yes, we may have need of thirteen million credits-
TYCE: Over my dead body.
SARKOFF: I hope you're not going to make a habit of that particular threat. Ready!
JENNA: Would you move back, please.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/111/543

Series B, Episode 04 - Horizon
BLAKE: That's right.
RO: The name's forbidden. You can't cling to the past. Paura shouldn't have spoken it.
BLAKE: Huh! He probably thought he had nothing to lose - under the circumstances.
RO: Circumstances?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/204/316