Tootfinder

After the building fire, Hong Kong summoned AFP, FT, NYT, AP, Bloomberg, and WSJ journalists, telling them to avoid "trouble making", and arrested a commentator (Committee to Protect Journalists)
https://cpj.org/2025/12/hong-kong-arre

Hong Kong arrests commentator, summons international media over deadly fire - Committee to Protect Journalists
Updated on December 8, 2025 2:31 AM EST New York, December 8, 2025—Chinese and Hong Kong authorities must immediately stop harassing journalists, release news commentator Wong Kwok-ngon, and allow the media to freely cover the city’s most deadly fire in decades, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Monday. In a rare move, Beijing’s national security arm...

Adaptive Tool Generation with Models as Tools and Reinforcement Learning
Chenpeng Wang, Xiaojie Cheng, Chunye Wang, Linfeng Yang, Lei Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06825 http…

Adaptive Tool Generation with Models as Tools and Reinforcement Learning
Tool-augmented language models have demonstrated strong capabilities, but their reliance on live API access creates scalability and reliability challenges during training and deployment. We propose MTR, a simulation-first training framework for tool-augmented reasoning. Instead of relying on live APIs, MTR learns from complete ReAct traces with schema-validated, simulated observations. Our approach operates through a multi-agent architecture where a ToolMaker generates task-specific, OpenAI-com…

Two sides of the same presidency played out simultaneously along the National Mall on Thursday afternoon.
At one end, Donald Trump was telling the world to give peace a chance at a meeting with African leaders.
It was possible, he said, “to begin healing old wounds and transcending past differences and creating a future where every child of God can live in dignity, prosperity and peace.”
At the other end of the mall, top officials from his Defense Department were being grill…

Trump Trumpets Peace in Africa Amid War on Drug Boats, in Day of Dissonance
President Trump presided over a Congo-Rwanda peace deal on the same day his administration was being questioned about potential war crimes.

Invariant Price of Anarchy: a Metric for Welfarist Traffic Control
Ilia Shilov, Mingjia He, Heinrich H. Nax, Emilio Frazzoli, Gioele Zardini, Saverio Bolognani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05843 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05843 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.05843
arXiv:2512.05843v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The Price of Anarchy (PoA) is a standard metric for quantifying inefficiency in socio-technical systems, widely used to guide policies like traffic tolling. Conventional PoA analysis relies on exact numerical costs. However, in many settings, costs represent agents' preferences and may be defined only up to possibly arbitrary scaling and shifting, representing informational and modeling ambiguities. We observe that while such transformations preserve equilibrium and optimal outcomes, they change the PoA value. To resolve this issue, we rely on results from Social Choice Theory and define the Invariant PoA. By connecting admissible transformations to degrees of comparability of agents' costs, we derive the specific social welfare functions which ensure that efficiency evaluations do not depend on arbitrary rescalings or translations of individual costs. Case studies on a toy example and the Zurich network demonstrate that identical tolling strategies can lead to substantially different efficiency estimates depending on the assumed comparability. Our framework thus demonstrates that explicit axiomatic foundations are necessary in order to define efficiency metrics and to appropriately guide policy in large-scale infrastructure design robustly and effectively.
toXiv_bot_toot

Unsure if I've even mentioned this anywhere before,
but I've maintain a "Steam Curator" page for the last few years, keeping a log of how well games handle custom keyboard layouts - feel free to follow it if you want to see a note on Steam Store pages telling you whether a game's keybind settings are up-to-snuff:

Steam Curator: Can You Change The Keybinds, aka Colemak Gamers
Details on which games, at the time of review, had customizable keybinds - and to what extent. (No, a "DVORAK" switch is not enough, developers!)

Rust JS Tooling 2025: Why Biome, Oxc, and Rolldown Change Everything
Explore how Rust-powered tools like Biome.js and Rolldown are delivering 10x performance gains and revolutionizing the JavaScript ecosystem in 2025.
— by @…
🦀

Rust JS Tooling 2025: Why Biome, Oxc, and Rolldown Change Everything
Explore how Rust-powered tools like Biome.js and Rolldown are delivering 10x performance gains and revolutionizing the JavaScript ecosystem in 2025.

Good Morning #Canada
There are several important Archeology sites in Canada that contribute to our knowledge of how the Americas evolved and the early inhabitants. One site, the Bluefish Caves located in the Yukon, was the source of decades of acrimonious debate because it directly challenged mainstream scientific thinking. Jacques Cinq-Mars, curator of the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec, discovered bones of extinct horses and wooly mammoths bearing marks from human butchering and toolmaking. Radiocarbon test results dated the oldest finds to around 24,000 years ago. This directly challenged established science that humans first reached the Americas some 13,000 years ago, when Asian hunters crossed a now submerged landmass known as Beringia, which joined Siberia to Alaska during the last ice age. What followed was 40 years of dismissal and derision.
This excellent award winning article by Heather Pringle covers this story.
#CanadaIsAwesome #Archeology
https://hakaimagazine.com/features/vilified-vindicated-story-jacques-cinq-mars/#:~:text=In three hollows known as,24,000 years before the present.

How Cowboys could crash 2025 NFL playoffs: Dallas actually has path to division title and NFC No. 1 seed

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/cowboys-2025-nfl-playoffs-da…

An interview with Laura Poitras about her new film, Cover-Up, which examines the career of Seymour Hersh and the role of investigative journalism (A.J. Goldmann/Columbia Journalism Review)
https://www.cjr.org/the-interview/cover-up-laura-poitras-invest…

In 'Cover-Up,' Laura Poitras investigates Seymour Hersh.
The filmmaker on her twenty-year project, the “crisis” in investigative journalism, and how truth-telling can still change the world.