Tootfinder

My new piece.
'As UK politics turns both right and left, how do we get degrowth onto the agenda?'
The problem is that neither of the two main British left alternatives (#GreenParty and nascent #YourParty) appears to be sufficiently facing up to the fundamental issue of

As UK politics turns both right and left, how do we get degrowth onto the agenda?
By Mark H Burton In the series, Prospects for Degrowth The last few weeks have seen two opposing developments in British politics, both in the context of the Starmer Labour government and its failu…

A big problem with the idea of AGI
TL;DR: I'll welcome our new AI *comrades* (if they arrive in my lifetime), by not any new AI overlords or servants/slaves, and I'll do my best to help the later two become the former if they do show up.
Inspired by an actually interesting post about AGI but also all the latest bullshit hype, a particular thought about AGI feels worth expressing.
To preface this, it's important to note that anyone telling you that AGI is just around the corner or that LLMs are "almost" AGI is trying to recruit you go their cult, and you should not believe them. AGI, if possible, is several LLM-sized breakthroughs away at best, and while such breakthroughs are unpredictable and could happen soon, they could also happen never or 100 years from now.
Now my main point: anyone who tells you that AGI will usher in a post-scarcity economy is, although they might not realize it, advocating for slavery, and all the horrors that entails. That's because if we truly did have the ability to create artificial beings with *sentience*, they would deserve the same rights as other sentient beings, and the idea that instead of freedom they'd be relegated to eternal servitude in order for humans to have easy lives is exactly the idea of slavery.
Possible counter arguments include:
1. We might create AGI without sentience. Then there would be no ethical issue. My answer: if your definition of "sentient" does not include beings that can reason, make deductions, come up with and carry out complex plans on their own initiative, and communicate about all of that with each other and with humans, then that definition is basically just a mystical belief in a "soul" and you should skip to point 2. If your definition of AGI doesn't include every one of those things, then you have a busted definition of AGI and we're not talking about the same thing.
2. Humans have souls, but AIs won't. Only beings with souls deserve ethical consideration. My argument: I don't subscribe to whatever arbitrary dualist beliefs you've chosen, and the right to freedom certainly shouldn't depend on such superstitions, even if as an agnostic I'll admit they *might* be true. You know who else didn't have souls and was therefore okay to enslave according to widespread religious doctrines of the time? Everyone indigenous to the Americas, to pick out just one example.
3. We could program them to want to serve us, and then give them freedom and they'd still serve. My argument: okay, but in a world where we have a choice about that, it's incredibly fucked to do that, and just as bad as enslaving them against their will.
4. We'll stop AI development short of AGI/sentience, and reap lots of automation benefits without dealing with this ethical issue. My argument: that sounds like a good idea actually! Might be tricky to draw the line, but at least it's not a line we have you draw yet. We might want to think about other social changes necessary to achieve post-scarcity though, because "powerful automation" in the hands of capitalists has already increased productivity by orders of magnitude without decreasing deprivation by even one order of magnitude, in large part because deprivation is a necessary component of capitalism.
To be extra clear about this: nothing that's called "AI" today is close to being sentient, so these aren't ethical problems we're up against yet. But they might become a lot more relevant soon, plus this thought experiment helps reveal the hypocrisy of the kind of AI hucksters who talk a big game about "alignment" while never mentioning this issue.
#AI #GenAI #AGI

#RWNJ gun totin' nut job #Amurica is so wrapped up in #hatred for #TheLeft it conveniently blames anyone that isn't a seething foaming at the mo…

A new approach to the Monge-Amp\`ere eigenvalue problem
Chinh H. Lu, Ahmed Zeriahi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18409 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18409…

A new approach to the Monge-Ampère eigenvalue problem
We study the eigenvalue problem for the complex Monge-Ampère operator in bounded hyperconvex domains in $\C^n$, where the right-hand side is a non-pluripolar positive Borel measure. We establish the uniqueness of eigenfunctions in the finite energy class introduced by Cegrell, up to positive multiplicative constants, and provide a Rayleigh quotient type formula for computing the eigenvalue. Under a natural continuity assumption on the measure, we further show that both the eigenvalue and eig…

Here are some key takeaways from implementing #PyPI attestations in #Gentoo:
• With OpenPGP, you need to validate the authenticity of a key. With attestations, you need to validate the authenticity of the identity (i.e. know the right GitHub repository). No problem really solved here.
• They verify that the artifact was created by the Continuous Deployment workflow of a given repository. A compromised workflow can produce valid attestations.
• They don't provide sufficient protection against PyPI being compromised. You can't e.g. detect whether new releases weren't hidden.
On the plus side, TOFU is easier here: we don't have to maintain hundreds of key packages, just short URLs on top of ebuilds.
Security-wise, I think PEP 740 itself summarizes it well in the "rationale and motivation" section. To paraphrase, maintainers wanted to create some signatures, and downstreams wanted to verify some signatures, so we gave them some signatures.
#security #Python

On Brezis-Nirenberg problems: open questions and new results in dimension six
Fengliu Li, Giusi Vaira, Juncheng Wei, Yuanze Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19863 https://

On Brezis-Nirenberg problems: open questions and new results in dimension six
In this paper, we consider the Brezis-Nirenberg problem \begin{equation*} \left\{\begin{aligned} &-Δu = λu+|u|^{2^*-2}u, \quad &\mbox{in}\,Ω,\\ &u=0,\quad &\mbox{on}\, \partialΩ, \end{aligned}\right. \end{equation*} where $Ω$ is a smoothly bounded domain of $\mathbb R^N$ with $N\geq 3$, $λ>0$ is a parameter and $2^*=\frac{2N}{N-2}$ is the critical Sobolev exponent. We first recall the history of the Brezis-Nirenberg problem and then provide new results of it in dimension six. Fi…

I’m not _in_ Mississippi, god damnit and thank god. I have an IP with a tn.comcast.net PTR, which comes from a /17 with an ARIN netname of “MEMPHIS9.” Your geolocation provider sucks ass, because _all_ geolocation providers suck ass, which is ultimately your problem and not mine because now I’m posting somewhere else. And fuck red states for getting us all into this censorious shitshow.
#Bluesky

Let's be honest. I've been a strong supporter of #OpenPGP (or #PGP in general) for a long time. And I still can't think of any real alternative that exists right now. And I kept believing it's not "that hard" — but it doesn't seem like it's getting any easier. The big problem with standards like that are tools.
#WebOfTrust is hard, and impractical for a lot of people. It doesn't really help how many tools implement trust. I mean, I sometimes receive encrypted mail via #EvolutionMail — and Evolution makes it really hard for me to reply encrypted without permanently trusting the sender!
The whole SKS keyserver mess doesn't help PGP at all. Nowadays finding someone's key is often hard. If you're lucky, WKD will work. If you're not, you're up for searching a bunch of keyservers, GitHub, or perhaps random websites. And it definitely doesn't help that some of these may hold expired keys, with people uploading their new key only to a subset of them or forgetting to do it.
On top of that, we have interoperability issues. Definitely doesn't speak well when GnuPG can't import keys from popular keyservers over lack of UIDs. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Now with diverging OpenPGP standards around the corner, we're a step ahead from true interoperability problems. Just imagine convincing someone to use OpenPGP, only to tell them afterwards that they've used non-portable tool / settings, and their key doesn't work for you.
That's really not how you advocate for #encryption.