Tootfinder

"""
Writing has been an instrument for some of the highest expressions of the human spirit: poetry, philosophy, science. But to understand it — why it came into being, how it changed the human experience — we have to first appreciate its crass practicality. It evolved mainly as an instrument of the mundane: the economic, the administrative, the political.
Confusion over this point is understandable. Some scholars have equated the origin of “civilization” with the origin of writing. Laypeople sometimes take this equation to mean that with writing humanity put aside its barbarous past and started behaving in gentlemanly fashion, sipping tea and remembering to say “please.” And indeed, this may be only a mild caricature of what some nineteenth-century scholars actually meant by the equation: writing equals Greece equals Plato; illiteracy equals barbarism equals Attila the Hun.
But, in truth, if you add literacy to Attila the Hun, you don’t get Plato. You get Genghis Khan. During the thirteenth century, he administered what even today is the largest continuous land empire in the history of the world. And he could do so only because he had the requisite means of control: a script that, when carried by his pony express, amounted to the fastest large-scale information-processing technology of his era. One consequence was to give pillaging a scope beyond Attila’s wildest dreams. Information technology, like energy technology or any other technology, can be a tool for good or bad. By itself, it is no guarantor of moral progress or civility.
"""
(Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny)

A Multi-Messenger Search for the Supermassive Black Hole Binary in 3C 66B with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array
Jacob Cardinal Tremblay, Boris Goncharov, Rutger van Haasteren, N. D. Ramesh Bhat, Zu-Cheng Chen, Valentina Di Marco, Satoru Iguchi, Agastya Kapur, Wenhua Ling, Rami Mandow, Saurav Mishra, Daniel J. Reardon, Ryan M. Shannon, Hiroshi Sudou, Jingbo Wang, Shi-Yi Zhao, Xing-Jiang Zhu, Andrew Zic

A Multi-Messenger Search for the Supermassive Black Hole Binary in 3C 66B with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array
A sub-parsec supermassive black hole binary at the center of the galaxy 3C 66B is a promising candidate for continuous gravitational wave searches with Pulsar Timing Arrays. In this work, we search for such a signal in the third data release of the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array. Matching our priors to estimates of binary parameters from electromagnetic observations, we find log Bayes factor of 0.22, highlighting that the source can be neither confirmed nor ruled out. We place upper limits at 95% c…

PentaRAG: Large-Scale Intelligent Knowledge Retrieval for Enterprise LLM Applications
Abu Hanif Muhammad Syarubany, Chang Dong Yoo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21593

PentaRAG: Large-Scale Intelligent Knowledge Retrieval for Enterprise LLM Applications
Enterprise deployments of large-language model (LLM) demand continuously changing document collections with sub-second latency and predictable GPU cost requirements that classical Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines only partially satisfy. We present PentaRAG, a five-layer module that routes each query through two instant caches (fixed key-value and semantic), a memory-recall mode that exploits the LLM's own weights, an adaptive session memory, and a conventional retrieval-augmentati…

High-Order Langevin Monte Carlo Algorithms
Thanh Dang, Mert Gurbuzbalaban, Mohammad Rafiqul Islam, Nian Yao, Lingjiong Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17545 https://

High-Order Langevin Monte Carlo Algorithms
Langevin algorithms are popular Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for large-scale sampling problems that often arise in data science. We propose Monte Carlo algorithms based on the discretizations of $P$-th order Langevin dynamics for any $P\geq 3$. Our design of $P$-th order Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) algorithms is by combining splitting and accurate integration methods. We obtain Wasserstein convergence guarantees for sampling from distributions with log-concave and smooth densities. Sp…

Sonnet 113 - CXIII
Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind;
And that which governs me to go about
Doth part his function and is partly blind,
Seems seeing, but effectually is out;
For it no form delivers to the heart
Of bird, of flower, or shape which it doth latch:
Of his quick objects hath the mind no part,
Nor his own vision holds what it doth catch;
For if it see the rud'st or gentlest sight,
The most sweet favour or deform…

Calamus 19 Mind you the timid models of the rest, the majority?
A declaration of intellectual independence and a celebration of brotherly love. Honestly this poem feels a little clumsy to me, I can see why Whitman struck the awkward introducing lines in later editions.
As always, looking for the gay content:
Yet comes one, a Manhattanese, and ever at parting, kisses me lightly on the lips with robust love.
And I, in the public room, or on the crossing of the street, or on the ship's deck, kiss him in return
We observe that salute of American comrades
But I can't in all honestly read this use of "kissing" as erotic. Here the public kissing and the "salute of comrades" makes me think it's more of a fraternal kiss.
Which doesn't exclude a romantic kiss as well, or an erotic one. What's so vital about Calamus is how Whitman blends masculine sexual love with the love of comrades. I think both meanings are latent in every poem.

you can now flash an atmega entirely from your browser* https://glasgowembedded.github.io/glasgow-webusb/
* getting files to/from the virtual filesystem left as an exercise for the reader, bearing in mind that `pyodide.FS` is an Emscripten filesystem object

I am noticing that many websites are no longer giving cookie choices, rather they merely say "we are spying on you" (they use nicer words, but that is the meaning) with only one option:
"I Understand".
To my mind that knocks out the last prop underneath website operators' argument that those of us with ad blockers (and more) are somehow on the wrong side of the ethical fence.

I like Cory's thread. Just like with bikes, fighting systemic issues requires personal choices AND mass mobilization. Personal choices, like getting a cargo bike* instead of an SUV to transport your kids around, help normalize it and influence others (who see you riding with your kid and realize that they can do that too). And then organizing, getting all of your neighbors together to push for safe bike infrastructure, which is particularly effective at the local level.

Sonnet 113 - CXIII
Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind;
And that which governs me to go about
Doth part his function and is partly blind,
Seems seeing, but effectually is out;
For it no form delivers to the heart
Of bird, of flower, or shape which it doth latch:
Of his quick objects hath the mind no part,
Nor his own vision holds what it doth catch;
For if it see the rud'st or gentlest sight,
The most sweet favour or deform…