Tootfinder

🌍 The climate crisis demands urgent action. But which actions are best?
Decision makers face tough trade-offs:
Policy A lowers emissions at home but increases reliance on imports.
Policy B cuts emissions long-term but raises unemployment short-term.
Policy C boosts jobs now but increases emissions in the near term.
None of these choices are simple. A policy that looks good locally may increase global emissions, or its effects may depend on what other countries d…

Case study of anti-marketing in the A.I. Age: The "summaries" that google puts at the top of most searches are such trash that you probably haven't noticed that the "AI Mode" you get clicking on this button is astonishingly good: whenever I ask "I read a paper that came to such and such a conclusion" it gives me that paper within the first three results.

Think 🇪🇺 only regulates bottle caps, and 🍌 curvature?
Enode has a good post on an important and exciting development that adds value to devices. The freedom for consumers to control their connected devices through a service of their choice creates valuable opportunities to enhance European welfare.

The EU Data Act: What the energy industry needs to know before September 12 | Enode
On September 12, 2025, the EU Data Act becomes fully applicable across the EU. For the energy industry, this marks a turning point in how data flows across devices, services, and users. It puts into law what has already been building for years: the principle that people should be able to access and share their own energy data. This post is the first in our EU Data Act series, breaking down what the regulation means and why it matters.

The Road to the Closest Point is Paved by Good Neighbors
Sariel Har-Peled, Benjamin Raichel, Eliot W. Robson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23966 https://arxiv…

The Road to the Closest Point is Paved by Good Neighbors
$\renewcommand{\Re}{\mathbb{R}}$Given a set $P$ of $n$ points in $\Re^d$, and a parameter $\varepsilon \in (0,1)$, we present a new construction of a directed graph $G$, of size $O(n/\varepsilon^d)$, such that $(1+\varepsilon)$-ANN queries can be answered by performing a greedy walk on $G$, repeatedly moving to a neighbor that is (significantly) better than the current point. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first construction of a linear size with no dependency on the spread of the po…

Long but very good:
"An essay on wank"
It names and identifies one of my least favorite genre of posts – finally I have a proper term for it!
I'm sure I've been guilty of it too in the past, so it's useful for self-regulation, too.
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/essay_

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Democrats see themselves as the opposite of Republicans, but the fact that this is wrong becomes obvious during a government shutdown. Both parties agree that violence and cruelty are essential functions of the government. Neither believe that services outside of terror are essential.
The truth is that Democrats recognize that services are useful for keeping the poors from revolting, while Republicans believe that they can simply murder away any resistance. Republicans have been trying to end food stamps for longer than I've been alive. They've always believed that anyone who needs support should either die or become a debt slave. (When snap doesn't come back, just wait for companies to start offering pay day advances backed by police collection.)
The longer benefits are stopped, the more they can "cull the unproductive." Cruelty has always been the point, and Democrats are not ideologically prepared to oppose them.
No, the actual opposite of Trumpism is anarchism. We want to specifically shut down the infrastructure of violence. That's what we mean when we're talking about opposing the state. The other stuff, the stuff Democrats see as optional, we see as so essential we can't trust it to the whims of politicians.
We want all services to be directly democratically controlled, preferably at the most local level possible. We want it to be impossible to shut down the things we share, water services, sewer, internet, mass transit, childcare, public media.
When we talk about "community self defense" we don't mean cops protecting businesses from the consequences of their actions, from those who oppose their use of slave labor or their environmental destruction. We don't mean border patrol kidnapping people so their bosses don't need to pay them, or just straight up carrying out ethnic cleansing. We don't mean organized terror against people escaping environmental or political crises created by, or with the help of, the government attacking them. No, "community defense" means doing what people are doing every day to protect their neighbors against this shit... Shit that Democratic politicians agree is "essential."
Republicans want to destroy every good thing the government does and rule by terror alone. Anarchists want to destroy all institutions of oppression and terror so we can build all the good things together. Democrats are a compromise between the two.

What is a Linux distribution?
Good question.
FreeBSD – up to position 26 (seen in this Linux Renaissance video) is:
― a distro
― a talking point
― a gift.
<https://youtu.be/G5lUyt3pM90?si=yRDYHcOMUaOpkp0o&t=75>

The Smithereens anthology 'From Jersey it Came' was released in September 2004. In 2004 I was 24. The Smithereens had been my favorite band for a while at that point, so this was a treat for a megafan like me. If you ignore the roughness of their super early stuff here, this is a really good primer for some of the Smithereens' best songs. It starts off with ones from their early days like their first single "Girls About Town" and it also includes basically all their lat…

TL;DR: spending money to find the cause of autism is a eugenics project, and those resources could have been spent improving accommodations for Autistic people instead.
To preface this, I'm not Autistic but I'm neurodivergent with some overlap.
We need to be absolutely clear right now: the main purpose is *all* research into the causes of autism is eugenics: a cause is sought because non-autistic people want to *eliminate* autistic people via some kind of "cure." It should be obvious, but a "cured autistic person" who did not get a say in the decision to administer that "cure" has been subjected to non-consensual medical intervention at an extremely unethical level. Many autistic people have been exceptionally clear that they don't want to be "cured," including some people with "severe autism" such as people who are nonverbal.
When we think things like "but autism makes life so hard for some people," we're saying that the difficulties in their life are a result of their neurotype, rather than blaming the society that punished & devalues the behaviors that result from that neurotype at every turn. To the extent that an individual autistic person wants to modify their neurotype and/or otherwise use aids to modify themselves to reduce difficulties in their life, they should be free to pursue that. But we should always ask the question: "what if we changed their social or physical environment instead, so that they didn't have to change themselves?" The point is that difficulties are always the product of person x environment, and many of the difficulties we attribute to autism should instead be attributed to anti-autistic social & physical spaces, and resources spent trying to "find the cause of autism" would be *much* better spent trying to develop & promote better accommodations for autism. Or at least, that's the case if you care about the quality of life of autistic people and/or recognize their enormous contributions to society (e.g., Wikipedia could not exist in anything near its current form without autistic input). If instead you think of Autistic people as gross burdens that you'd rather be rid of, then it makes sense to investigate the causes of autism so that you can eventually find a "cure."
All of that to say: the best response to lies about the causes of autism is to ask "What is the end goal of identifying the cause?" instead of saying "That's not true, here's better info about the causes."
#autism #trump
P.S. yes, I do think about the plight of parents of autistic kids, particularly those that have huge struggles fitting into the expectations of our society. They've been put in a position where society constantly bullies and devalues their kid, and makes it mostly impossible for their kid to exist without constant parental support, which is a lot of work and which is unfair when your peers get the school system to do a massive amount of childcare. But in that situation, your kid is in an even worse position than you as the direct victim of all of that, and you have a choice: are you going to be their ally against the unfair world, or are you going to blame them and try to get them to confirm enough that you can let the school system take care of them, despite the immense pain that that will provoke? Please don't come crying for sympathy if you choose the later option (and yes, helping them be able to independently navigate society is a good thing for them, but there's a difference between helping them as their ally, at their pace, and trying to force them to conform to reduce the burden society has placed on you).

«Microsoft, with the single most "Who asked for this?" application of AI I've seen yet: They're jamming it into Excel. Excel! The spreadsheet program! The one that is already very good at what it does»
I mean "very good" is dubious, given how Excel famously turned gene names into dates – to the point that geneticists rather renamed the genes instead of hoping for MS to get its shit together. Still, turning it outright into a biased random number generator beats that 🤣
https://defector.com/it-took-many-years-and-billions-of-dollars-but-microsoft-finally-invented-a-calculator-that-is-wrong-sometimes?giftLink=50fb6d3bb4d7516dfa13deb4e27638de

This is a very good article regardless, but it makes a point widely ignored in the age of GenAI:
"While our results point to real growth in students’ intellectual abilities and dispositions, they do not capture everything philosophers mean by “intellectual virtue.” Intellectual virtue is not just a matter of possessing certain abilities but of using those abilities well: at the right times, for the right reasons, and in the right ways.
Our measures do not tell us whether phi…

Studying philosophy does make people better thinkers, according to new research on more than 600,000 college grads
Philosophers are fond of saying that their field boosts critical thinking. Two of them decided to put that claim to the test.

Instability of sphalerons in $\phi^4$ models with a false vacuum
Stephen C. Anco
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12150 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12150

Instability of sphalerons in $ϕ^4$ models with a false vacuum
A one-parameter family of nonlinear (quartic) Klein-Gordon models having a sphaleron solution is studied. The sphaleron arises from a saddle point between true and false vacua in the energy functional. Its instability is shown be governed by a Heun differential equation after a change of variable. This allows an explicit formulation of the eigenfunctions and eigenvalues to be obtained in terms of local Heun functions. Good approximations are found for certain ranges of the parameter.

"""
All of which was of the utmost importance for subsequent developments in the medicine of the mind. In its positivist incarnation, this was little more than the combination of the two experiences that classicism had juxtaposed without ever joining them together: a social, normative and dichotomous experience of madness that revolved entirely around the imperative of confinement, formulated in a style as simple as ‘yes or no’, ‘dangerous or harmless’, and ‘good or not good for confinement’, and a finely differentiated, qualitative, juridical experience, well aware of limits and degrees, which looked into all the aspects of the behaviour of the subject for the polymorphous incarnations that insanity might assume. The psychopathology of the nineteenth century (and perhaps our own too, even now) believes that it orients itself and takes its bearings in relation to a homo natura, or a normal man pre-existing all experience of mental illness. Such a man is in fact an invention, and if he is to be situated, it is not in a natural space, but in a system that identifies the socius to the subject of the law. Consequently a madman is not recognised as such because an illness has pushed him to the margins of normality, but because our culture situates him at the meeting point between the social decree of confinement and the juridical knowledge that evaluates the responsibility of individuals before the law. The ‘positive’ science of mental illness and the humanitarian sentiments that brought the mad back into the realm of the human were only possible once that synthesis had been solidly established. They could be said to form the concrete a priori of any psychopathology with scientific pretensions.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

At this point, I’m convinced there’s nothing Reykjavík drivers like more than parking on sidewalks. These were all seen yesterday!

There's a point here, but it's really narrower than it looks.
Many individuals can self-host to a level that meets their needs. Not everyone needs anti-DDoS on their web server. Not everyone needs 10GB of space for email accessible from any device anywhere. Almost no one needs a global anycast DNS network. https://

Day 18: Mark Oshiro
Having just learned that Oshiro is nonbinary, they're an instant include on this list. In veering extremely heavily towards YA, and losing a spot that would have gone to an absolutely legendary mangaka, anime writer, or feminist philosopher, but "Anger is A Gift" and "Each of us a Desert" are just that good, and I'm trying to steer a bit towards towards lesser-known authors I respect.
I already mentioned "Anger is a Gift" above, but to recap, it's a painful, vivid, and beautifully honest story of queer love, loss, and protest against an oppressive system. CW for racist police murder, intergenerational trauma, and police brutality against highschool students. It's a book a lot of Americans could benefit from reading right now, and while it's fiction, it's not fantasy or sci-fi. Besides the themes and politics, the writing is just really solid, with delicate characterization and tight-plotted developments that are beautifully paced.
To me "Each of us a Desert" is maybe even more beautiful, and Oshiro leaps into a magnificent fantasy world that's richly original in its desolation, dark history, lonely characters, and mythical magic. Particularly the clearly-not-just-superscription but ambiguously-important/powerful magical elements of Oshiro's worldbuilding are a rare contrast to the usual magic-is-real-here's-how-it-works fare, and pulling that off a all as they do is a testament to their craft. The prose is wonderful, probably especially so if you speak Spanish, but I enjoyed it immensely despite only knowing a few words here and there. The rich interiority of the characters, their conflicts both with each other and within themselves, and the juxtaposition of all that against origins in cult-like ignorance allows for the delivery of a lot of wisdom and complex truths.
Between these two books, so different and yet each so powerful, Oshiro has demonstrated incredible craft and also a wide range of styles, so I'm definitely excited to read more of their work and to recommend them to others.
I'm also glad to have finally put a nonbinary author on this list; the others I had in mind won't make it at this point because there's too much genre overlap, although I'll include them in my didn't-make-it list at the end. I've now got just 2 slots left and have counted up 14 more authors that absolutely need to be mentioned, so we'll see what happens.
#20AuthorsNoMen

Boosted second moment method in random regular graphs
Bal\'azs Gerencs\'er, Viktor Harangi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12600 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

Boosted second moment method in random regular graphs
Determining the asymptotic independence ratio of random regular graphs is a key challenge in the area of sparse random graphs. Due to the interpolation method, very good upper bounds are known, which are actually known to be sharp for sufficiently large degrees. This paper provides explicit lower bounds for given degrees $d$, beating the previous best bounds for $d \geq 10$. The starting point is a second moment argument that we can boost by arguing that the obtained independent set has a cer…

@… This is a very good point.
@…

I tend to talk to kids like they are regular human people. A small child said to me "You're phone is little." and I replied:
"Yes, this phone is 5 years old. It still works, so there's no reason to replace it. There's really no good reason for people to get a new phone every year or two except for consumerism gone out of control. You see, the more money you put into the pockets of big tech, the more..."
The small child walked away at that point, bu…

A Fixed Point Framework for the Existence of EFX Allocations
S. Rasoul Etesami
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04915 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04915

A Fixed Point Framework for the Existence of EFX Allocations
We consider the problem of the existence of an envy-free allocation up to any good (EFX) for linear valuations and establish new results by connecting this problem to a fixed point framework. Specifically, we first use randomized rounding to extend the discrete EFX constraints into a continuous space and show that an EFX allocation exists if and only if the optimal value of the continuously extended objective function is nonpositive. In particular, we demonstrate that this optimization problem …

The main pond is basically full now. I have been gradually increased the power of the pump. Now 100% at 160W. I won't normally have it at full power but this is good for testing.
I am basically patrolling the edge of the ponds looking for low points. Have shored up a few but nothing serious. The first round of tests with the filter addressed most of them.
When the holes filled over the winter I actually shored up the edges of the main pond then, so there isn't much to do there.
Just waiting for the pump bay to fill up completely now. It'll probably be about an hour. (the water hose has not been on full blast this whole time, only about 1/4)
Then we will see the full level of the entire system.
The Finger of water closest to me in this picture is the overflow that goes into the storm/sewer system. That is the final arbiter of the fill point of the pond.
#poolpond #diy #portalberni #backyardproject

Sb doping effect on transport behavior in the topological insulator Bi2Se3
Shu-Wei Wang, Hang Chi, Jui-Che Chung
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08244 https://a…

Sb doping effect on transport behavior in the topological insulator Bi2Se3
Bismuth selenide (Bi2Se3) is a good topological insulator (TI) with its surface band Dirac point inside the bulk bandgap. However, Bi2Se3 films grown by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) often require tuning of Fermi level near the Dirac point for optimal proximity effect with magnetic or superconducting materials. In this study, we achieve the control of the Fermi level in MBE-grown Bi2Se3 thin films by antimony (Sb) doping and systematically investigate the transport properties of these Bi2-xSbxSe…

I tend to talk to kids like they are regular human people. A small child said to me "You're phone is little." and I replied:
"Yes, this phone is 5 years old. It still works, so there's no reason to replace it. There's really no good reason for people to get a new phone every year or two except for consumerism gone out of control. You see, the more money you put into the pockets of big tech, the more..."
The small child walked away at that point, bu…

The maximal function on spaces of homogeneous type, or adjacent dyadic cubes do good
Alina Shalukhina
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02508 https://arxiv.org/pd…

The maximal function on spaces of homogeneous type, or adjacent dyadic cubes do good
We prove that the Hardy--Littlewood maximal operator $M$ is bounded on the variable Lebesgue space $L^{p(\cdot)}(X,d,μ)$ with $1

I know that 2.25 cents per point is a good deal, but this feels expensive.
#Chicago #Seoul #Travel #TravelHacking #CreditCardPoints

Day 11: Bee Johnson
As promised, back to printed books, and since I hadn't yet done any authors of picture or board books, here's one. It looks like Johnson is primarily an illustrator and has only written a single kids' book, but it's a magnificent one: "What Can A Mess Make?"
Naturally, the illustrations are rich and evocative, but it's also got one of my favorite formats (just a few lines per page, with consistent meter and rhymes throughout) and has the incredibly charming theme of two sisters who are constantly making messes, except it highlights the fun (and other emotions) they get out of their messy play, reminding parents cleaning up messes that there's a benefit to letting your kids make the mess in the first place, which is an idea that's stuck with me as I clean up my own kids' messes. This book checks *all* of my boxes for a good picture book (which is kinda hard).
#20AuthorsNoMen
P.S. at this point, I think I've exhausted the range of "author" definitions I wanted to include in my list, and I've now got the unenviable task of balancing between genres and trying to hit some of my favorite authors before we get to 20. We'll see how that goes...

I've filed a report about a minor problem with a #Python package, namely that the source distribution contained some trailing junk that breaks GNU #tar. On one hand, I'm happy that upstream took the issue seriously. On the other hand, I'm terrified of how much #AI slop was involved in the response.
I mean, my short bug report yielded a few walls of text of #LLM analysis of what the cause of the problem might be, of suggested solutions… and praise of the author's fix. These are interspersed with short comments from the author, all pasted under their own personal account. And the linked pull request is also huge, with "verification code" that's quite sloppy (bits that don't do anything, conditions that will never be true… but at least it seems to do what it was supposed to do).
Honestly, I don't know what to do. Not that I ever planned using this package, but at this point I will definitely stay away from it. It's in #Gentoo, and I'll have to continue maintaining it for the sake of reverse dependencies, but I feel like it's unfair to expose our users to packages that have clearly proven to accept AI slop without reviewing it properly. Or rather, AI slop that's being reviewed… by AI. How can anyone think this a good idea?!
There were multiple times in my life when I've considered retiring from Gentoo, for variety of reasons. There were also multiple times when I wanted to get away from computers altogether. Unfortunately, we're living in a truly fucked up world, and there is no escape. The best you can do is put an ever increasing effort to keep fixing all that crap that will just keep piling on faster and faster.
#FreeSoftware #OpenSource

It's time to lower your inhibitions towards just asking a human the answer to your question.
In the early nineties, effectively before the internet, that's how you learned a lot of stuff. Your other option was to look it up in a book. I was a kid then, so I asked my parents a lot of questions.
Then by ~2000 or a little later, it started to feel almost rude to do this, because Google was now a thing, along with Wikipedia. "Let me Google that for you" became a joke website used to satirize the poor fool who would waste someone's time answering a random question. There were some upsides to this, as well as downsides. I'm not here to judge them.
At this point, Google doesn't work any more for answering random questions, let alone more serous ones. That era is over. If you don't believe it, try it yourself. Between Google intentionally making their results worse to show you more ads, the SEO cruft that already existed pre-LLMs, and the massive tsunami of SEO slop enabled by LLMs, trustworthy information is hard to find, and hard to distinguish from the slop. (I posted an example earlier: #AI #LLMs #DigitalCommons #AskAQuestion