Tootfinder

Somehow I managed to miss this XKCD at the time, but here it is: the reason that UK public sector procurement sucks donkey balls.

US tech giants are on a data center building spree, sparking fury worldwide; research says ~60% of the 1,244 largest global centers in June were outside the US (Paul Mozur/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/technology/ai-data-center-b…

AI Data Centers Create Fury From Mexico to Ireland
As tech companies build data centers worldwide to advance artificial intelligence, vulnerable communities have been hit by blackouts and water shortages.

Can LLMs Judge Debates? Evaluating Non-Linear Reasoning via Argumentation Theory Semantics
Reza Sanayei, Srdjan Vesic, Eduardo Blanco, Mihai Surdeanu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15739

Can LLMs Judge Debates? Evaluating Non-Linear Reasoning via Argumentation Theory Semantics
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at linear reasoning tasks but remain underexplored on non-linear structures such as those found in natural debates, which are best expressed as argument graphs. We evaluate whether LLMs can approximate structured reasoning from Computational Argumentation Theory (CAT). Specifically, we use Quantitative Argumentation Debate (QuAD) semantics, which assigns acceptability scores to arguments based on their attack and support relations. Given only dialogue-formatte…

How popular media gets love wrong
Had some thoughts in response to a post about loneliness on here. As the author emphasized, reassurances from people who got lucky are not terribly comforting to those who didn't, especially when the person who was lucky had structural factors in their favor that made their chances of success much higher than those is their audience. So: these are just my thoughts, and may not have any bearing on your life. I share them because my experience challenged a lot of the things I was taught to believe about love, and I think my current beliefs are both truer and would benefit others seeing companionship.
We're taught in many modern societies from an absurdly young age that love is not something under our control, and that dating should be a process of trying to kindle love with different people until we meet "the one" with whom it takes off. In the slightly-less-fairytale corners of modern popular media, we might fund an admission that it's possible to influence love, feeding & tending the fire in better or worse ways. But it's still modeled as an uncontrollable force of nature, to be occasionally influenced but never tamed. I'll call this the "fire" model of love.
We're also taught (and non-boys are taught more stringently) a second contradictory model of love: that in a relationship, we need to both do things and be things in order to make our partner love us, and that if we don't, our partner's love for us will wither, and (especially if you're not a boy) it will be our fault. I'll call this the "appeal" model of love.
Now obviously both of these cannot be totally true at once, and plenty of popular media centers this contradiction, but there are really very few competing models on offer.
In my experience, however, it's possible to have "pre-meditated" love. In other words, to decide you want to love someone (or at least, try loving them), commit to that idea, and then actually wind up in love with them (and them with you, although obviously this second part is not directly under your control). I'll call this the "engineered" model of love.
Now, I don't think that the "fire" and "appeal" models of love are totally wrong, but I do feel their shortcomings often suggest poor & self-destructive relationship strategies. I do think the "fire" model is a decent model for *infatuation*, which is something a lot of popular media blur into love, and which drives many (but not all) of the feelings we normally associate with love (even as those feelings have other possible drivers too). I definitely experienced strong infatuation early on in my engineered relationship (ugh that sounds terrible but I'll stick with it; I promise no deception was involved). I continue to experience mild infatuation years later that waxes and wanes. It's not a stable foundation for a relationship but it can be a useful component of one (this at least popular media depicts often).
I'll continue these thoughts in a reply, by it might take a bit to get to it.
#relationships

Malaysia reins in data center expansion amid power and water shortages, hindering Chinese companies that use the region as a backdoor to access US-made AI chips (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/malaysia-reins-d…

A lot of people making fun of the Environment Agency suggesting "deleting emails" to fight drought.
People also made fun of it when they put it in a press release two months ago. I don't know if it's a deliberate attempt to get attention, or just something their LLM keeps suggesting.

England faces 5 billion litre public water shortage by 2055 without urgent action
England faces 5 billion litre a day shortfall for public water supplies by 2055 – and a further 1 billion litre a day deficit for wider economy.

"Water shortages declared ‘nationally significant’ as drought spreads in England"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #Water #Drought