Tootfinder

New Gist: News of the World
Strange that Nigel Farage, the answer to the question 'what if nicotine-stained fingers became a whole person?', would buck the international trend against Trumpist rightwing populism but do remember that all these votes were only cast in England.
https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-news-of-the-world/

"Breaching the target would ramp up the extreme weather already devastating communities around the world. It would also require carbon dioxide to be sucked from the atmosphere in future to restore the stable climate in which the whole of civilisation developed over the past 10,000 years."
This is bogus. Carbon-neutral #CarbonCaptureAndStorage is the modern perpetual…

SLAC: Simulation-Pretrained Latent Action Space for Whole-Body Real-World RL
Jiaheng Hu, Peter Stone, Roberto Mart\'in-Mart\'in
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04147

SLAC: Simulation-Pretrained Latent Action Space for Whole-Body Real-World RL
Building capable household and industrial robots requires mastering the control of versatile, high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) systems such as mobile manipulators. While reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise for autonomously acquiring robot control policies, scaling it to high-DoF embodiments remains challenging. Direct RL in the real world demands both safe exploration and high sample efficiency, which are difficult to achieve in practice. Sim-to-real RL, on the other hand, is often brittle du…

That is…terrifying. Beyond terrifying. I’m sure I would not have prepared for this, or expected it, or even imagined it if I were staying there.
We are going to have to reset a whole lot of our expectations about what kind of weather is probable, pretty much everywhere on Earth. And we’re going to have to •keep• resetting them for as long as we keep changing the climate.
https://mastodon.world/@weathermatrix/114796979505937177

Volle Fahrt voraus im Rückwärtsgang!
[Full speed ahead in reverse gear!]
What this TV report opens with seems to be a new motto for the German automotive industry.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jaapburger_

MDR SACHSEN-ANHALT HEUTE: Rückwärts-Weltrekord: Die Fahrt ging noch weiter… | Jaap Burger
Volle Fahrt voraus im Rückwärtsgang! [Full speed ahead in reverse gear!] What this TV report opens with seems to be a new motto for the German automotive industry. This week, a German manufacturer set a new world record for reversing in an electric truck. The German automotive industry as a whole is also attempting to reverse in electric mode: it has presented a 10-point plan to postpone, water down, weaken, undermine, regret, delay, reduce, replace, backtrack on and ridicule European CO2 re…

One dead and woman left in critical condition after fireworks explode and light a whole city block on fire | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/fireworks-explosion-death-pacoima-los-angeles-b2782833.html

“Pivot to AI itself got hit by an AI scraper bot over the weekend! Thankfully the scoundrels who vibe-code these things are idiots.”
➡️ https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/02/fighting-the-ai-scraper-bots-at-pivot-to-ai-and-rationalwiki/…

Fighting the AI scraper bots at Pivot to AI and RationalWiki
We’ve covered the AI scraper bots before. These just hit web pages over and over, at high speed, to scrape new training data for LLMs. They’re an absolute plague across the whole World Wide Web and…

Subtooting since people in the original thread wanted it to be over, but selfishly tagging @… and @… whose opinions I value...
I think that saying "we are not a supply chain" is exactly what open-source maintainers should be doing right now in response to "open source supply chain security" threads.
I can't claim to be an expert and don't maintain any important FOSS stuff, but I do release almost all of my code under open licenses, and I do use many open source libraries, and I have felt the pain of needing to replace an unmaintained library.
There's a certain small-to-mid-scale class of program, including many open-source libraries, which can be built/maintained by a single person, and which to my mind best operate on a "snake growth" model: incremental changes/fixes, punctuated by periodic "skin-shedding" phases where make rewrites or version updates happen. These projects aren't immortal either: as the whole tech landscape around them changes, they become unnecessary and/or people lose interest, so they go unmaintained and eventually break. Each time one of their dependencies breaks (or has a skin-shedding moment) there's a higher probability that they break or shed too, as maintenance needs shoot up at these junctures. Unless you're a company trying to make money from a single long-lived app, it's actually okay that software churns like this, and if you're a company trying to make money, your priorities absolutely should not factor into any decisions people making FOSS software make: we're trying (and to a huge extent succeeding) to make a better world (and/or just have fun with our own hobbies share that fun with others) that leaves behind the corrosive & planet-destroying plague which is capitalism, and you're trying to personally enrich yourself by embracing that plague. The fact that capitalism is *evil* is not an incidental thing in this discussion.
To make an imperfect analogy, imagine that the peasants of some domain have set up a really-free-market, where they provide each other with free stuff to help each other survive, sometimes doing some barter perhaps but mostly just everyone bringing their surplus. Now imagine the lord of the domain, who is the source of these peasants' immiseration, goes to this market secretly & takes some berries, which he uses as one ingredient in delicious tarts that he then sells for profit. But then the berry-bringer stops showing up to the free market, or starts bringing a different kind of fruit, or even ends up bringing rotten berries by accident. And the lord complains "I have a supply chain problem!" Like, fuck off dude! Your problem is that you *didn't* want to build a supply chain and instead thought you would build your profit-focused business in other people's free stuff. If you were paying the berry-picker, you'd have a supply chain problem, but you weren't, so you really have an "I want more free stuff" problem when you can't be arsed to give away your own stuff for free.
There can be all sorts of problems in the really-free-market, like maybe not enough people bring socks, so the peasants who can't afford socks are going barefoot, and having foot problems, and the peasants put their heads together and see if they can convince someone to start bringing socks, and maybe they can't and things are a bit sad, but the really-free-market was never supposed to solve everyone's problems 100% when they're all still being squeezed dry by their taxes: until they are able to get free of the lord & start building a lovely anarchist society, the really-free-market is a best-effort kind of deal that aims to make things better, and sometimes will fall short. When it becomes the main way goods in society are distributed, and when the people who contribute aren't constantly drained by the feudal yoke, at that point the availability of particular goods is a real problem that needs to be solved, but at that point, it's also much easier to solve. And at *no* point does someone coming into the market to take stuff only to turn around and sell it deserve anything from the market or those contributing to it. They are not a supply chain. They're trying to help each other out, but even then they're doing so freely and without obligation. They might discuss amongst themselves how to better coordinate their mutual aid, but they're not going to end up forcing anyone to bring anything or even expecting that a certain person contribute a certain amount, since the whole point is that the thing is voluntary & free, and they've all got changing life circumstances that affect their contributions. Celebrate whatever shows up at the market, express your desire for things that would be useful, but don't impose a burden on anyone else to bring a specific thing, because otherwise it's fair for them to oppose such a burden on you, and now you two are doing your own barter thing that's outside the parameters of the really-free-market.

What's really warming the world?
A classic, by @bloomberg. Do click on the link to see the whole thing.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/

If the billionnaires refuse to share a little to care for the whole, then we will take their power over us away and share it amongst ourselves.
I mean really, how is that not a better outcome than a few people hording 99% of the capital in the world?
#democraticsocialist
https://mastodon.world/@verdantsquare/114773640916904003

Freeing Your Piano Technique - Practising the Piano
#piano
https://practisingthepiano.com/freeing

Freeing Your Piano Technique - Practising the Piano
Fred Karpoff shares some ideas from his recent workshop on how a whole body approach to technique facilitates effortless piano playing.

The U.S is the only country in the world that allows minors to be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Approximately 2,500 juveniles have been effectively sentenced to die in prison
— considered “irredeemable” by the state for crimes committed when they were just teenagers.
One of them was David Luis “Suave” Gonzalez,
who entered prison at 17 expecting to leave in a coffin.
Suave tells the story of what happens when your whole world …

Today's #TuneTuesday theme is #LondonCalling - songs that name-drop a town or city in the title or lyrics.
This has long been a favorite, a song from an alt-country legend about Townes Van Zandt, the composer of some of the finest US songs of the 20th century. It mentions a whole series of cities.…

The Death Stranding games are all about connecting people together through delivery services. So how come every time you meet someone new you don't meet them, you meet a hologram of them instead? It's like the whole world is nothing but Zoom calls.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14305 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csRO_…

Adversarial Locomotion and Motion Imitation for Humanoid Policy Learning
Humans exhibit diverse and expressive whole-body movements. However, attaining human-like whole-body coordination in humanoid robots remains challenging, as conventional approaches that mimic whole-body motions often neglect the distinct roles of upper and lower body. This oversight leads to computationally intensive policy learning and frequently causes robot instability and falls during real-world execution. To address these issues, we propose Adversarial Locomotion and Motion Imitation (ALMI…

Whole-Body Conditioned Egocentric Video Prediction
Yutong Bai, Danny Tran, Amir Bar, Yann LeCun, Trevor Darrell, Jitendra Malik
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21552

Whole-Body Conditioned Egocentric Video Prediction
We train models to Predict Ego-centric Video from human Actions (PEVA), given the past video and an action represented by the relative 3D body pose. By conditioning on kinematic pose trajectories, structured by the joint hierarchy of the body, our model learns to simulate how physical human actions shape the environment from a first-person point of view. We train an auto-regressive conditional diffusion transformer on Nymeria, a large-scale dataset of real-world egocentric video and body pose c…

Zuckerberg’s political shift didn’t shock Meta staff*: ‘The whole time this was all one inch underneath’
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/mark-zuckerberg-meta-nickname-trump-b2774168.html

Zuckerberg’s political shift didn’t shock Meta staff: ‘The whole time this was all one inch underneath’
Meta has implemented policy shifts that are more closely aligned with the administration since Trump was elected

This random NPC ghost is the best character in the whole game!

DIJE: Dense Image Jacobian Estimation for Robust Robotic Self-Recognition and Visual Servoing
Yasunori Toshimitsu, Kento Kawaharazuka, Akihiro Miki, Kei Okada, Masayuki Inaba
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00446

DIJE: Dense Image Jacobian Estimation for Robust Robotic Self-Recognition and Visual Servoing
For robots to move in the real world, they must first correctly understand the state of its own body and the tools that it holds. In this research, we propose DIJE, an algorithm to estimate the image Jacobian for every pixel. It is based on an optical flow calculation and a simplified Kalman Filter that can be efficiently run on the whole image in real time. It does not rely on markers nor knowledge of the robotic structure. We use the DIJE in a self-recognition process which can robustly disti…

this joke ⬇️
https://wetdry.world/@kopper/114694348090220778

Extreme Forward Scattering Observed in Disk-Averaged Near-Infrared Phase Curves of Titan
Chase A. Cooper, Tyler D. Robinson, Jason W. Barnes, Laura C. Mayorga, Lily Robinthal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00924

Extreme Forward Scattering Observed in Disk-Averaged Near-Infrared Phase Curves of Titan
Titan, with its thick and hazy atmosphere, is a key world in our solar system for understanding light scattering processes. NASA's Cassini mission monitored Titan between 2004 and 2017, where the derived dataset includes a large number of whole disk observations. Once spatially integrated, these whole disk observations reveal Titan's phase-dependent brightness which can serve as an analog for how hazy worlds might appear around other stars. To explore Titan's phase curve, we present a pipeline …

Went to Small World Festival. Mostly dry and occasionally sunny.
Small World has such a nice friendly hippy vibe, lots of deadlocks and goths and pirates and beautiful face paints.
Bands all energetic and talented and mostly have been playing here together for 20 years in one form or another. All of 'em doing it for the love of it. Pony doing a great job of organizing the team to put it together.
One dude seemed pretty new, making up synth songs with his repeats and beeps and rapping from audience suggestions. Failed to photograph him well though. There's another 4 bands mentioned in the photo descriptions here.
Medically necessitated more or less total sobriety at the moment, so different whole thing. Those I knew well there mostly working, so lots of time alone dancing soberly and reading. Wish I was better at talking to strangers.
Still good times.
#smallWorldFestival #music #live

Israel is counting on Trump to join the operation against Iran, now that the risks of failure and downed planes have been minimised.
“The whole operation is premised on the fact that the US will join at some point,” an Israeli official told CNN.
“We are waiting for the decision of the president,” another senior official told the network.
Israel has yet to attack Iran’s most secure enrichment facility, at Fordow, which is built into a mountain with up to 100 metres of rock abo…

Generative Blocks World: Moving Things Around in Pictures
Vaibhav Vavilala, Seemandhar Jain, Rahul Vasanth, D. A. Forsyth, Anand Bhattad
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20703

Generative Blocks World: Moving Things Around in Pictures
We describe Generative Blocks World to interact with the scene of a generated image by manipulating simple geometric abstractions. Our method represents scenes as assemblies of convex 3D primitives, and the same scene can be represented by different numbers of primitives, allowing an editor to move either whole structures or small details. Once the scene geometry has been edited, the image is generated by a flow-based method which is conditioned on depth and a texture hint. Our texture hint tak…

Calamus 34 I dreamed in a dream
On the surface this short poem is a sort of City on a Hill vision. But I'm going to go with a more radical reading.
This poem reads to me as a fantasy of a gay society. A city of men, lovers, set apart from the rest of the world.
a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth ...
the quality of robust love ...
the actions of the men of that city
And in all their looks and words.
I can't plausibly argue Whitman conceived of a city set apart in the way I imagine. Although all of Calamus is him constructing the idea of a society of lovers, comrades, brothers, robust love. That to me is very gay.
Intriguingly, in the unpublished Live Oak draft of this poem it is even more explicitly gay:
I saw them tenderly love each other ...
Nothing was greater there than manly love
It seems to me he dreamed a very gay city.

I was handed a bucket full of lego worm gears https://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemPic.asp?P=4716 a few weeks ago and came up with this model:

I nearly missed the fact it's been a year since I translated @… Meta in Myanmar series to Polish.
A year later, I can confidently say that series radicalized me quite a bit.
I've hated Meta products for a while, so not much has changed in that department.
However, re-reading the story of Rohingya ethnic cleansing over and over again made me grow plenty of sheer anger within me.
Anger over general injustice in the world and stuff.
My third 'era' of photography, involving documenting local activism, with particular attention to oppressed or marginalized groups (tenants, Palestinians, Belarusians - to name just a few) wouldn't have happened if I hadn't had my moment of disillusionment about the whole system we live in.
All of that because I started noticing familiar patterns I haven't been aware before. All stories that involve oppression, genocide, ethnic cleansing or any other kind of systemic cruelty started rhyming to me. Only the context and the environment kept changing.
Literally everything about my current life has changed around April 2024 and only now I'm ready to take a look at that.
Anyway. To all of you who want to read that once again:
Full series in Polish:
https://blog.lukaszwojcik.net/pl/meta-w-mjanmie/
Web Archive copy of the above:
https://archive.org/details/meta-w-mjanmie-pl
Original in English:
https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series

Wealth Thermalization Hypothesis
Klaus M. Frahm, Dima L. Shepelyansky
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17720 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.177…

Wealth Thermalization Hypothesis
We introduce the wealth thermalization hypothesis according to which the wealth shared in a country or the whole world is described by the Rayleigh-Jeans thermal distribution with two conserved quantities of system wealth and norm or number of agents. This distribution depends on a dimensional parameter being the ratio of system total wealth and its dispersion range determined by highest revenues. At relatively small values of this ratio there is a formation of the Rayleigh-Jeans condensate, we…

To give some examples:
When police get vastly differential results at investigating crimes against some groups (e.g., Black women) vs. others (e.g., white men), that's malcompetence. Probably plenty of simple malice involved too, and probably the whole gamut of mechanisms I mentioned in the last post are involved here.
Another example, from my own experience: when I stumble over the names of my non-white students but pronounce my white students' names flawlessly, that's malcompetence on my part, because the net effect of my selective incompetence is to make some students feel less welcome in my classroom, which hurts their learning. I'm my case, the reasons for the incompetence are not conscious nor (I think) unconscious malice, but instead a differential capability picked up from a certain kind of upbringing and then (sometimes) insufficiently mitigated by capability-building effort. Because of how I grew up, my ability to pronounce different names is biased (this is true of everyone in the world; most people don't have a classroom instructor position that causes it to matter so much). When I'm successful at mitigating my malcompetence, I use practice time with student intro videos to pare down my competence gap for the specific students in my class. This is time consuming (several hours per week for the first few weeks of classes) and I'm sad to admit that I don't always invest that time. But it's a great example of malcompetence because I have a introspective access to it.

The whole world is a scab. The point is to pick it constructively.
-- Peter Beard

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg‘s recent public support for Donald Trump did not come as a shock to those who know or have closely worked with him.
Dozens of people who have either worked with or known Zuckerberg told the Financial Times that the CEO’s more public shift toward Trump is just Zuckerberg displaying the more “authentic” version of himself to the world,
even though he was once known to support liberal ideology and voiced opposition to Trump’s policies during the first admini…

Zuckerberg’s political shift didn’t shock Meta staff: ‘The whole time this was all one inch underneath’
Meta has implemented policy shifts that are more closely aligned with the administration since Trump was elected

Son House - Low Down Dirty Dog Blues
Well, you know the sun is goin' down
I say, behind that old western hill
I say, behind that old western hill
You know, I couldn't do a thing
Not against my baby's will
Man, you know that's bad
I declare that's too black bad
I declare that's too black bad
You know, my woman done quit me
Oh man, looks like the whole round world is glad

Troops in Los Angeles marked a dramatic new turn in the Trump authoritarian rollout. Yet American protesters are making the turn towards a national mobilization in defense of freedom and democracy.
http://woborders.blog/2025/06/13/resistance-to-trump-reac…

Resistance to Trump reaches its first turning point
“The Whole World Is Watching.” It’s been decades since American protesters chanted this sentence at American police in an effort to deter violence and brutality. But it has perhaps neve…

Just so we're clear:
PRE-EMPTIVE ATTACKS ARE ILLEGAL
ISRAEL IS AN APARTHEID ETHNOSTATE
Israel knows it has lost any popular support it once had. So now it has to drag the whole fucking world into a war with Iran to legitimate Western governmental backing, including enabling the genocide.

Now the whole world knows why Darth #Trump calls himself a friend of Darth #Putin|. He too has no respect for international law and he too has no scruples about committing #warcrimes. Trump is an

Angry dominant hegemony club gotta dominant hegemony :-)
https://climatejustice.social/@PeterRu/114687881102810320

I don’t agree in one respect:
Neither OOP nor FP (nor 4GLs nor IDEs nor SOAs nor any of the other new hotnesses past) had anything remotely resembling the current money behind them. None led to companies speculatively laying off tens of thousands of employees for imagined productivity boosts that had not actually arrived yet. None shaped whole election cycles, or led to national proposals for preemptive deregulation. None led to the construction of nuclear power plants or the draining of rivers. None sent oligarchs or fascists into spasmodic wet dreams of world domination. None started quasi-religious cults like EA.
All •that• is the part that feels like blockchain — but even worse, if such a thing is possible.
@…
2/2

Sample and Expand: Discovering Low-rank Submatrices With Quality Guarantees
Martino Ciaperoni, Aristides Gionis, Heikki Mannila
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06456

Sample and Expand: Discovering Low-rank Submatrices With Quality Guarantees
The problem of approximating a matrix by a low-rank one has been extensively studied. This problem assumes, however, that the whole matrix has a low-rank structure. This assumption is often false for real-world matrices. We consider the problem of discovering submatrices from the given matrix with bounded deviations from their low-rank approximations. We introduce an effective two-phase method for this task: first, we use sampling to discover small nearly low-rank submatrices, and then they are…

Calamus 26 We two boys together clinging
This is one of the gayest of the Calamus poems, a fantasy of two men against the world, full of life and ardor. I should be all over this in my gay reading!
Instead I see a darker form of Americanism here. "Power enjoying ... Armed and fearless ... No law less than ourselves". It's classic American individualism fantasy, a repudiation of community and law. Armed, at that.
On top of that I trip over the "North and South" part every time I read this. In 1860 when this was published we were just steps away from a Civil War after 10 years of enormous tension. I don't blame Whitman for wanting unity, his whole program in Leaves of Grass is American unity. All I can think is how there's no moral equivalence between the North and South. But Whitman wasn't an abolitionist and this poem reflects that.
Sorry for not reveling in the gay, maybe it's the ICE and California National Guard news affecting my reading today.

GMT: General Motion Tracking for Humanoid Whole-Body Control
Zixuan Chen, Mazeyu Ji, Xuxin Cheng, Xuanbin Peng, Xue Bin Peng, Xiaolong Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14770

GMT: General Motion Tracking for Humanoid Whole-Body Control
The ability to track general whole-body motions in the real world is a useful way to build general-purpose humanoid robots. However, achieving this can be challenging due to the temporal and kinematic diversity of the motions, the policy's capability, and the difficulty of coordination of the upper and lower bodies. To address these issues, we propose GMT, a general and scalable motion-tracking framework that trains a single unified policy to enable humanoid robots to track diverse motions in t…

Meaning as Use, Application, Employment, Purpose, Usefulness
Ruy J. G. B. de Queiroz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07131 https://arxiv.o…

Meaning as Use, Application, Employment, Purpose, Usefulness
Arising from the whole body of Wittgenstein's writings is a picture of a (not necessarily straight, linear, but admittedly tireless) journey to come to terms with the mechanics of language as an instrument to conceive `reality' and to communicate an acquired conception of the `world'. The journey passes through mathematics, psychology, color perception, certainty, aesthetic, but, looking at it from a sort of birdview, it seems reasonable to say that these are all used as `test beds' for his ref…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.03997 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

A Tutorial on Event Detection using Social Media Data Analysis: Applications, Challenges, and Open Problems
In recent years, social media has become one of the most popular platforms for communication. These platforms allow users to report real-world incidents that might swiftly and widely circulate throughout the whole social network. A social event is a real-world incident that is documented on social media. Social gatherings could contain vital documentation of crisis scenarios. Monitoring and analyzing this rich content can produce information that is extraordinarily valuable and help people and …

I read "Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It" by Christof Koch.
Interesting book which spends like 8 or 9 chapters detailing all the experiments which prove beyond much doubt that consciousness, and self awareness, is a thing done by a brain.
It describes how perception is a construction of a description, has a chapter called "computational mind"
And then spends the last two chapters describing why he thinks the mind can't be computed, because drugs have made him think experience is some kind of magic associated with highly interconnected causal structures.
Apparently, he thinks, once things become interconnected enough they become able to cause things independently of the physics running those connections.
Which is crazy, obviously. There's nothing causal in direct connections between neurons that isn't equally causal in modeled connections between virtual neurons.
All his evidence in the book from neural MRI scans to the effects of psychedelic drugs and symptoms of strokes and disease point to the brain simulating a virtual reality which is the basis of perception.
That simulated world in which we live is full of colour and shape and sounds and emotions and millions of mental constructs that are built to be correlated by the senses with the outside world, but are not equal to the world itself. We live in a dream constructed to correlate with reality.
But then instead of taking the next step: That consciousness itself is a property of a simulated being inside that mental model of the universe, a property which the brain simulates and applies to the virtual self that's doing the experiencing inside that model, he jumps towards some magic implying pan-psychism or that sufficiently interconnected networks become causally self-complete for some reason nobody can fathom.
Sure, colour and shape and emotions are all made up by the brain but experience can't be! For some reason.
You see in truth dualism is false, in that there is no spirit realm in which ghosts animate the matter of the body somehow.
Yet also, dualism is true, in that there is a simulated mental reality which we live in, computed by the brain in which all perception and experience are created, which is related-to but separate-from the unfolding complicated dance of energy that is the universe our bodies interact with.
People take some DMT trip, and the model of the universe emulated by their brain collapses and breaks. Their virtual simulated self inside their mind has these experiences of being one with the universe or the experience of feeling dead yet conscious or whatever, and these hippies think that the broken down simulated experience is real and reflects how consciousness is more fundamental than the atoms that make up the neurons in their brain.
Instead of realizing it shows them that their experienced universe is a simulacrum, they think they get a more direct experience of reality somehow. A consciousness more pure than any mere base atom.
"Then I am myself the world" is a great title. Everything you ever experience is created and simulated in your brain like a dream, the whole universe is inside your head. Even the fact of experience itself.
But that isn't the conclusion Koch reaches somehow, he just jumps from describing the evidence that this is so straight into ascribing super-causal magic consciousness to particular arrangements of atoms that integrated information theory suggest have high correlation, and thinks therefore conciousness is itself the entire universe.
Ah well, fun book. I like arguing in my head with authors that are wrong.
#reading #books #consciousness #thenIAmMyselfTheWorld

#HunterThompson #Fascism #Capitalism #USA

"Donald Trump’s trade war is fast turning into a fiasco."
That was to be expected!
#Trump
#TarifWar

Why Trump Is Losing His Trade War
He picked a stupid fight with the whole world. The bad results are all on him.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04147 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csRO_…

SLAC: Simulation-Pretrained Latent Action Space for Whole-Body Real-World RL
Building capable household and industrial robots requires mastering the control of versatile, high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) systems such as mobile manipulators. While reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise for autonomously acquiring robot control policies, scaling it to high-DoF embodiments remains challenging. Direct RL in the real world demands both safe exploration and high sample efficiency, which are difficult to achieve in practice. Sim-to-real RL, on the other hand, is often brittle du…

The Python library "YFinance" decided to force an upgrade. They did this by making the old version report a rate-limit error on every request.
Confusing.
Would have been better if they reported a "old version not supported" error or something instead. So that wasted some time.
That upgrade had dependencies which have dependencies upon a newer version of Python, so needed a whole OS upgrade really.
Which failed. Bricking the Rasp PI it was running on.
Oh well, complete rebuild of the whole machine and software it runs from scratch then.
That took all day yesterday. At the end I notice that the touch-screen doesn't touch. Needs drivers.
The drivers haven't been upgraded in six years. They brick the machine again when trying to install them on Debian Trixie.
Luckily, I kept good notes and could rebuild it all again much faster with no mistakes and knowing what to do and all the required custom software changes already made and saved.
So now I spent a whole day on annoying upgrade work because a single Python library decided to break the old version, and my Rasp Pi has no touch-screen. Which isn't ideal for a machine mostly operating as a fancy light switch for all the LED strips in the house.
This happens all the time in software. Millions of man hours wasted, so much hardware dumped because the drivers get abandoned.

In other news: Microsoft abandons Windows 10 any day now. Good luck to everyone faced with doing that lap on the upgrade treadmill.
I still have more work to do to bring up this RaspPi's software to where it was, but it'll have to wait, other things to do. At least it's back to sending me the nightly finance report and controlling the LED strips. If without a touch screen now.
#software #upgradeTredmil #python #microsoft

BiAssemble: Learning Collaborative Affordance for Bimanual Geometric Assembly
Yan Shen, Ruihai Wu, Yubin Ke, Xinyuan Song, Zeyi Li, Xiaoqi Li, Hongwei Fan, Haoran Lu, Hao dong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06221

BiAssemble: Learning Collaborative Affordance for Bimanual Geometric Assembly
Shape assembly, the process of combining parts into a complete whole, is a crucial robotic skill with broad real-world applications. Among various assembly tasks, geometric assembly--where broken parts are reassembled into their original form (e.g., reconstructing a shattered bowl)--is particularly challenging. This requires the robot to recognize geometric cues for grasping, assembly, and subsequent bimanual collaborative manipulation on varied fragments. In this paper, we exploit the geometri…