Tootfinder

TL;DR: what if instead of denying the harms of fascism, we denied its suppressive threats of punishment
Many of us have really sharpened our denial skills since the advent of the ongoing pandemic (perhaps you even hesitated at the word "ongoing" there and thought "maybe I won't read this one, it seems like it'll be tiresome"). I don't say this as a preface to a fiery condemnation or a plea to "sanity" or a bunch of evidence of how bad things are, because I too have honed my denial skills in these recent years, and I feel like talking about that development.
Denial comes in many forms, including strategic information avoidance ("I don't have time to look that up right now", "I keep forgetting to look into that", "well this author made a tiny mistake, so I'll click away and read something else", "I'm so tired of hearing about this, let me scroll farther", etc.) strategic dismissal ("look, there's a bit of uncertainty here, I should ignore this", "this doesn't line up perfectly with my anecdotal experience, it must be completely wrong", etc.) and strategic forgetting ("I don't remember what that one study said exactly; it was painful to think about", "I forgot exactly what my friend was saying when we got into that argument", etc.). It's in fact a kind of skill that you can get better at, along with the complementary skill of compartmentalization. It can of course be incredibly harmful, and a huge genre of fables exists precisely to highlight its harms, but it also has some short-term psychological benefits, chiefly in the form of muting anxiety. This is not an endorsement of denial (the harms can be catastrophic), but I want to acknowledge that there *are* short-term benefits. Via compartmentalization, it's even possible to be honest with ourselves about some of our own denials without giving them up immediately.
But as I said earlier, I'm not here to talk you out of your denials. Instead, given that we are so good at denial now, I'm here to ask you to be strategic about it. In particular, we live in a world awash with propaganda/advertising that serves both political and commercial ends. Why not use some of our denial skills to counteract that?
For example, I know quite a few people in complete denial of our current political situation, but those who aren't (including myself) often express consternation about just how many people in the country are supporting literal fascism. Of course, logically that appearance of widespread support is going to be partly a lie, given how much our public media is beholden to the fascists or outright in their side. Finding better facts on the true level of support is hard, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about the "fact" that Trump has widespread popular support?
To give another example: advertisers constantly barrage us with messages about our bodies and weight, trying to keep us insecure (and thus in the mood to spend money to "fix" the problem). For sure cutting through that bullshit by reading about body positivity etc. is a better solution, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about there being anything wrong with your body?
This kind of intentional denial certainly has its own risks (our bodies do actually need regular maintenance, for example, so complete denial on that front is risky) but there's definitely a whole lot of misinformation out there that it would be better to ignore. To the extent such denial expands to a more general denial of underlying problems, this idea of intentional denial is probably just bad. But I sure wish that in a world where people (including myself) routinely deny significant widespread dangers like COVID-19's long-term risks or the ongoing harms of escalating fascism, they'd at least also deny some of the propaganda keeping them unhappy and passive. Instead of being in denial about US-run concentration camps, why not be in denial that the state will be able to punish you for resisting them?

Continuous-Time Distributed Learning for Collective Wisdom Maximization
Luka Bakovi\'c, Giacomo Como, Fabio Fagnani, Anton Proskurnikov, Emma Tegling
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11808

Continuous-Time Distributed Learning for Collective Wisdom Maximization
Motivated by the well established idea that collective wisdom is greater than that of an individual, we propose a novel learning dynamics as a sort of companion to the Abelson model of opinion dynamics. Agents are assumed to make independent guesses about the true state of the world after which they engage in opinion exchange leading to consensus. We investigate the problem of finding the optimal parameters for this exchange, e.g. those that minimize the variance of the consensus value. Specifi…

Ernst #Bloch - Konkrete Utopie in der Jetztwelt
".... the very desire to transcend the status quo supports the idea that the world is pregnant with unrealized possibilities (Bloch 1988: 16)"
1988, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

"“Day science is the executive part. You have the idea and to test it, you do controlled experiments,” says Yanai. “Night science is the world of creativity, the world of ideas"
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01913-3

Energy as a Primitive Ontology for the Physical World
J. E. Horvath, B. B. Martins
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12692 https://arxiv.org…

Energy as a Primitive Ontology for the Physical World
We reanalyze from a modern perspective the bold idea of G. Helm, W. Ostwald, P. Duhem and others that energy is the fundamental entity composing the physical world. We start from a broad perspective reminding the search for a fundamental ``substance'' (perhaps better referred to as ous\'ıa, the original Greek word) from the pre-Socratics to the important debate between Ostwald and Boltzmann about the energy vs. atoms at the end of the 19th century. While atoms were eventually accepted (even by…

As we continue down this path of escalating nihilistic meme violence, it can feel like the worst things have become viral. We are drowning in the memetic effluent of a capitalist media that profits by maximizing engagement. But I wonder if anyone remembers "Pay it Forward?"
A movie came out in 2000 about a kid who started a viral kindness campaign. The idea was that you do something nice for someone else with the expectation that they do the same in the future. I never really saw the movie, but I do remember the time. There were a few weeks, maybe a few months, where people started doing it. People would just be randomly nice, and everything actually just started feeling better.
Over time, the world caught up. Capitalism consumed the whole thing, and life went back to normal. 9/11 happened the next year, and the US started down the path of becoming the most twisted and evil version of itself. But there was a short time that doing nice stuff was a viral meme, a thing that people just started doing.
Gun violence doesn't have to be the only viral meme we have. We can make good things happen too.

What a rubbish idea:
Large corporations already hide too much information from their shareholders and the public.
This would make that hiding easier and make company performance more opaque.
It doubles the time that corporate ill deeds and management failures can be hidden.
It is a dumb idea - but coming from one of the great scammers in our corporate world, we should be glad that he did not suggest yearly, or longer, reporting.
"Trump renews push to end co…

Trump renews push to end companies' quarterly reports
The US president urges regulators to adopt a semi-annual schedule for financial reports.

I may have had an interesting idea! Quick, hand me that screw driver, I'll ram it through my temple!

Visual artist Brian Jungen on embracing the unknown
#creativity #artist

Visual artist Brian Jungen on embracing the unknown – The Creative Independent
Visual artist Brian Jungen discusses how catastrophe sharpens focus, finding the perfect idea, and the artistic benefits of limitation

idea: real-world version of anubis
it gives you an MD5 hash to calculate and you have to do it with a pen and paper
the first time you do something unpleasant, it's one round. then it's two. then... you get the idea

Finished my time-shifted watch of the #USMNT vs Japan from last night. Some thoughts:
I liked the formation change to try a 3-4-3 / 3-5-1 in and ou of possession. The idea of wingbacks is compelling for the talent available. Arfsten & Freeman did well, particularly Arfsten. He should make the World Cup roster, backing up Jedi. Having Ream & Richards paired is winning. Blackmon was good …

Just read this post by @… on an optimistic AGI future, and while it had some interesting and worthwhile ideas, it's also in my opinion dangerously misguided, and plays into the current AGI hype in a harmful way.
https://social.coop/@eloquence/114940607434005478
My criticisms include:
- Current LLM technology has many layers, but the biggest most capable models are all tied to corporate datacenters and require inordinate amounts of every and water use to run. Trying to use these tools to bring about a post-scarcity economy will burn up the planet. We urgently need more-capable but also vastly more efficient AI technologies if we want to use AI for a post-scarcity economy, and we are *not* nearly on the verge of this despite what the big companies pushing LLMs want us to think.
- I can see that permacommons.org claims a small level of expenses on AI equates to low climate impact. However, given current deep subsidies on place by the big companies to attract users, that isn't a great assumption. The fact that their FAQ dodges the question about which AI systems they use isn't a great look.
- These systems are not free in the same way that Wikipedia or open-source software is. To run your own model you need a data harvesting & cleaning operation that costs millions of dollars minimum, and then you need millions of dollars worth of storage & compute to train & host the models. Right now, big corporations are trying to compete for market share by heavily subsidizing these things, but it you go along with that, you become dependent on them, and you'll be screwed when they jack up the price to a profitable level later. I'd love to see open dataset initiatives SBD the like, and there are some of these things, but not enough yet, and many of the initiatives focus on one problem while ignoring others (fine for research but not the basis for a society yet).
- Between the environmental impacts, the horrible labor conditions and undercompensation of data workers who filter the big datasets, and the impacts of both AI scrapers and AI commons pollution, the developers of the most popular & effective LLMs have a lot of answer for. This project only really mentions environmental impacts, which makes me think that they're not serious about ethics, which in turn makes me distrustful of the whole enterprise.
- Their language also ends up encouraging AI use broadly while totally ignoring several entire classes of harm, so they're effectively contributing to AI hype, especially with such casual talk of AGI and robotics as if embodied AGI were just around the corner. To be clear about this point: we are several breakthroughs away from AGI under the most optimistic assumptions, and giving the impression that those will happen soon plays directly into the hands of the Sam Altmans of the world who are trying to make money off the impression of impending huge advances in AI capabilities. Adding to the AI hype is irresponsible.
- I've got a more philosophical criticism that I'll post about separately.
I do think that the idea of using AI & other software tools, possibly along with robotics and funded by many local cooperatives, in order to make businesses obsolete before they can do the same to all workers, is a good one. Get your local library to buy a knitting machine alongside their 3D printer.
Lately I've felt too busy criticizing AI to really sit down and think about what I do want the future to look like, even though I'm a big proponent of positive visions for the future as a force multiplier for criticism, and this article is inspiring to me in that regard, even if the specific project doesn't seem like a good one.

This is a phenomenal article about how Israel got (and has kept) its nuclear arms program.
History is wild, I had no idea about any of this.
https://mastodon.social/@religiousryan/115001494909536798

gardening trivia of the day / no I don't want to get into roses I am just rabbit holing rose varieties and gardens for no reason
#TIL #roses

There’s a crisis in tech product innovation. From when I got into tech when I was maybe 8 or 9 in the late 80s to around 2010 or so there seemed to be something new and innovative—sometimes even world-changing—out at least once a year.
Now my iPad Pro is 7 years old, and I have literally no idea why I would want to upgrade it.
I don't even know other than "faster but you probably won't notice it" what the current iPad Pro has over the one from 2018.
Fwiw 7 years is the span of time between these two Apple products:

I want to push back on the idea in the world of tech work that a PIP (performance improvement plan) is about getting rid of someone, that they're not intended to be survivable.
This is completely false. (I'm sure there's instances of it, of course, but the mode and vast majority are, in fact about performance improvement. Sometimes they're shadow layoffs, but that is cruel callous behavior that not everyone will exhibit.)
Now _most people do not survive the PIP process_. This is to be expected: if someone is in fact not performing, and more gentle remedies haven't worked, it's not looking good.
But here's where I get a bit spicy: most performance problems are constitutional problems with management and management style, not individual performance problems. However, since managers are as a class 'in power' somewhat, the individual contributor takes the fall for this structurally.
The intent of a PIP is not to get rid of people. It's to right performance.
However, as a system, PIPs do largely get rid of people who are constitutionally misaligned with management. Even when it's a management problem (and it usually is)

"Israel controls the flow of food into Gaza. It has calculated how many calories Palestinians need to stay alive. Its data shows only a fraction has been allowed in"
' “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,” a senior adviser to the then prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said in 2006. An Israeli court ordered the release of documents showing the details of those macabre sums two years later.'
And how many Democratic senator…

"Israel controls the flow of food into Gaza. It has calculated how many calories Palestinians need to stay alive. Its data shows only a fraction has been allowed in"
' “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,” a senior adviser to the then prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said in 2006. An Israeli court ordered the release of documents showing the details of those macabre sums two years later.'
And how many Democratic senator…

Low-power Wireless Network with Real-Time Guarantees for Edge-Cloud Applications
Don Tan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03317 https://arx…

Low-power Wireless Network with Real-Time Guarantees for Edge-Cloud Applications
The goal of this project is to explore the feasibility of building a scalable & easy-to-deploy real-time LoRa testbed, made from multiple units of Raspberry Pi (RPI), where each RPI manages its own set of LoRa radios. This project is motivated by the lack of concrete large-scale LoRa testbeds that effectively integrate LoRa communications into the real-time world. The paper introduces how the idea of using RPI came about and why it should work in theory. The paper then carries out experiments o…

The natural-born posthuman: applying extended mind to post- and transhumanist discourse https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-025-05202-4 "Newer discussions have expanded upon this idea through sensory substitution devices, such as The vOICe system which use…

The natural-born posthuman: applying extended mind to post- and transhumanist discourse - Synthese
As a basis for his extensionist theory on the philosophy of the mind Andy Clark attempts to provide a positive definition of the human as a natural-born cyborg, connecting it to Arnold Gehlen’s idea of the deficient being (Mängelwesen). This natural-born cyborg is a being whose cognition relies on the engagement in new kinds of perception-action-cycles with their external world - usually with the help of technology - thereby creating a systemic whole with this external world. Questions about…

I've been listening to a podcast by the German public broadcaster ​ARD about the end of the world. Every episode had a different topic and one was about AI. It was mostly sourced from an interview with a youtuber but one idea is now stuck in my head: what if AI doesn't launch nukes but develops into an all-powerful actor whose aims are not aligned with those of human survival? Do we have a precedent?
Yes. There are such super-human and quasi-immortal beings here on earth today…

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

Maybe it’s the craziness of the world, but I’ve been dreaming of still life painting. I keep imagining spending my days arranging and rearranging small objects on a tabletop, then drawing or painting them. Nothing much: cups and bottles, flowers and fruit. Just the idea of it calms and brings me joy.
#Art #Painting

Ways of Seeing: Still Life
The still life flower paintings of Australian artist Margaret Preston (1875-1963) along with excerpts of Sal Randolph's book The Uses of Art.

DNA Unzipping Transition
Somendra M. Bhattacharjee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.24064 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.24064

DNA Unzipping Transition
This review focuses on the force-induced unzipping transition of double-stranded DNA. It begins with a brief history of DNA melting, which emerged alongside the growth of the field of molecular biology, juxtaposed with the advancements in physics during the same post-World War II period. The earlier theories of melting of DNA were based on the Ising model and its modifications, but gradually moved towards polymer-based models. The idea of force-induced unzipping was first introduced in 1999 as …

Hadjar has always been the most overlooked rookie of the season. Even I didn't think it was a good idea to bring it to the grid. But now he has proven all of us wrong. Super happy for him. #F1 #DutchGP

This is of course very bad, but I also found it funny. AI evangelists are suddenly privacy-aware and repeating this as a security risk. And it is. But the idea that using ChatGPT itself hasn’t always been a security risk is ridiculous to me.

TLDR: If you’ve ever used the share function on a ChatGPT chat, that full chat can be found via Google, viewable for anyone in the world.

https:…

from my link log —
CSS font-size-adjust is useful.
https://matklad.github.io/2025/07/16/font-size-adjust.html
saved 2025-07-23

Any good articles on everything bad about age verification and the lack of privacy they bring and stuff, and why it’s a bad idea to give websites your ID or let the government know every website you use?
Yes there are plenty of fedi toots talking about this but I want like a single link I can easily send people when they defend this shit.
#AgeVerification #OnlineSafetyAct

Les Juifs européens se joignent Š l'appel demandant le départ du « tsar de l'antisémitisme » de l'UE
https://euobserver.com/eu-and-the-world/ar980add78

A "Good" Regulator May Provide a World Model for Intelligent Systems
Bradly Alicea, Morgan Hough, Amanda Nelson, Jesse Parent
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23032

A "Good" Regulator May Provide a World Model for Intelligent Systems
One classic idea from the cybernetics literature is the Every Good Regulator Theorem (EGRT). The EGRT provides a means to identify good regulation, or the conditions under which an agent (regulator) can match the dynamical behavior of a system. We reevaluate and recast the EGRT in a modern context to provide insight into how intelligent autonomous learning systems might utilize a compressed global representation (world model). One-to-one mappings between a regulator (R) and the corresponding sy…

I'm launching a #Substack, just like every other writer! 😎 It's called "Music For A Sunday Afternoon," and this post gives you an idea of what you'll find. Come along for the ride if you like, and tell all your friends and neighbors!

What's It All About?
Years ago, like last century (HA!), my dad broadcast a program on the college radio station called “Music For A Sunday Afternoon.” He’d highlight a composer or occasionally an artist, discuss their music, and play several recordings of their work.

Modeling Open-World Cognition as On-Demand Synthesis of Probabilistic Models
Lionel Wong, Katherine M. Collins, Lance Ying, Cedegao E. Zhang, Adrian Weller, Tobias Gersternberg, Timothy O'Donnell, Alexander K. Lew, Jacob D. Andreas, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Tyler Brooke-Wilson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12547

Modeling Open-World Cognition as On-Demand Synthesis of Probabilistic Models
When faced with novel situations, people are able to marshal relevant considerations from a wide range of background knowledge and put these to use in inferences and predictions. What permits us to draw in globally relevant information and reason over it coherently? Here, we explore the hypothesis that people use a combination of distributed and symbolic representations to construct bespoke mental models tailored to novel situations. We propose a computational implementation of this idea -- a `…

Scaling Group Inference for Diverse and High-Quality Generation
Gaurav Parmar, Or Patashnik, Daniil Ostashev, Kuan-Chieh Wang, Kfir Aberman, Srinivasa Narasimhan, Jun-Yan Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15773

Scaling Group Inference for Diverse and High-Quality Generation
Generative models typically sample outputs independently, and recent inference-time guidance and scaling algorithms focus on improving the quality of individual samples. However, in real-world applications, users are often presented with a set of multiple images (e.g., 4-8) for each prompt, where independent sampling tends to lead to redundant results, limiting user choices and hindering idea exploration. In this work, we introduce a scalable group inference method that improves both the divers…

A little more than 30 years ago, I learned basic general relativity in physics. I couldn't really understand time. It just seemed like there was something that was missing.
I developed an idea of how time and space should be described, but I never managed to explain it to anyone in an understandable way.
After recently watching Sabine Hossenfelder tear down a paper with a similar idea (

Sam Altman: "What if an inhuman AI took control of the world by manipulating people's behavior but its core directive was to make paper clips and it burned down the planet to do that? This is so scary and it's a real thing you should be worried about!"
Governments: "Oh boy that's scary we'll make special rules to invest in your company so you can save us from this frightening possibility. Will we restrict or discourage AI use/development? Haha no that would be foolish!"
Me: "What if an inhuman handful of corporate charters took control of the world by manipulating human behavior but their core directive was to maximize venture capital and they burned down the planet to do that? ..."
Governments (sponsored by said corporations): "Send in the SWAT teams now, this idea is dangerous!"

Leveraging Evolutionary Surrogate-Assisted Prescription in Multi-Objective Chlorination Control Systems
Rivaaj Monsia, Olivier Francon, Daniel Young, Risto Miikkulainen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19173

Leveraging Evolutionary Surrogate-Assisted Prescription in Multi-Objective Chlorination Control Systems
This short, written report introduces the idea of Evolutionary Surrogate-Assisted Prescription (ESP) and presents preliminary results on its potential use in training real-world agents as a part of the 1st AI for Drinking Water Chlorination Challenge at IJCAI-2025. This work was done by a team from Project Resilience, an organization interested in bridging AI to real-world problems.

Going to lament about the changes on Drive World in Roblox, because somehow they somehow do the "you get some, you lose some" updates every time.
Who thought that it is a good idea to change the trucking and delivery system? Now that all of this is replaced with the "Daniel" system (finding trailers on the wild and delivering it to a place), it is now harder to do them.
#DriveWorld