Tootfinder

Did you know if you leave the pumpkin guts in the fridge until they get a little squishy you can just rinse all the guts off instead of picking out seeds one-by-one? Happy this experiment worked out. (Was actually intentional, btw. 🙂 I read about how farms that produce pumpkin seeds just leave the pumpkins out in the field for a bit and thought I'd try the fridge version.)

Thought of the day: coding assistants make it very easy to refactor.
On the plus side, it means you can easily experiment. On the minus side, you may waste a lot of time going back and forth, searching for the perfect code.

John Searle, known for "the Chinese Room" thought experiment on AI consciousness, died on Sept. 16 at 93; his UCB tenure ended over alleged sexual harassment (Alex Traub/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/12/books/john-searle-dead.html

John Searle, Philosopher Who Wrestled With A.I., Dies at 93
His blunt debating and imaginative theorizing about artificial intelligence and the human mind made him a leading scholar. But sexual-harassment allegations ended his career.

Sam Altman:
I find this a very interesting thought experiment of what would have to happen for an AI CEO to be able to do a much better job of running OpenAI than me,
which clearly will happen someday.
How can we accelerate that?
What’s in the way of that?
I have found that to be a super useful thought experiment for how we design our org over time
and what the other pieces and roadblocks will be.
I assume someone running a science lab should try …

Strong random unitaries and fast scrambling
Thomas Schuster, Fermi Ma, Alex Lombardi, Fernando Brandao, Hsin-Yuan Huang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26310 https://

Strong random unitaries and fast scrambling
Understanding how fast physical systems can resemble Haar-random unitaries is a fundamental question in physics. Many experiments of interest in quantum gravity and many-body physics, including the butterfly effect in quantum information scrambling and the Hayden-Preskill thought experiment, involve queries to a random unitary $U$ alongside its inverse $U^\dagger$, conjugate $U^*$, and transpose $U^T$. However, conventional notions of approximate unitary designs and pseudorandom unitaries (PRUs…

@… Have you seen this about a monitor you can buy with VGA, BNC, and AV inputs with a serviceable 1280x1024 resolution? https://eigenmagic.net/@vampiress/11546174204534…

Elissa (@vampiress@eigenmagic.net)
Attached: 2 images My old 19" LCD monitor from ages back is finally dying, so I had to splash out and buy a replacement. I don't have the space for a CRT, so I wanted another flat panel. I thought I'd have to go second hand again but to my delight discovered there are NUMEROUS "security" monitors you can get that have modern (if cheap) IPS display, usable 4x3 resolutions and inputs for AV, BNC and VGA! This one seems decent, and didn't cost that much. Going to experiment more with it tonight …