Tootfinder

✅ Settler colonialism
✅ Apartheid
✅ Ethnic cleansing
✅ Genocide
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/08/yellow-line-that-divides-gaza-under-trump-plan-is-new-border-for-israel-says…

Denmark's government has reached a political agreement to ban social media access for anyone under 15, with a possible parental consent exception from age 13 (Euronews)
https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/11/07/denmark-wants-to-ba…

Denmark wants to ban access to social media for children under 15
The proposal would be one of the most sweeping steps yet by a European country to curb social media use among young people.

Garden ponds provide vital habitats – and a revival is under way in Britain https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/dec/04/garden-ponds-provide-vital-habitats-and-a-revival-is-under-way-in-britain

Russia expands internet blackouts under pretense of drone threats, but real goal appears to be information control: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/07/russia-expands-internet-blackouts-under.html

1.6 Million Americans Removed From Medicaid Under Trump Administration | Atlanta Daily World
https://atlantadailyworld.com/2025/12/05/1-6-million-americans-removed-from-medicaid-under-trump-administration/

Life Under a Clicktatorship (Don Moynihan/Can We Still Govern?)
https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/life-under-a-clicktatorship
http://www.memeorandum.com/260107/p41#a260107p41

Recent Raiders' History Points to Under-the-Radar HC Option https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-recent-history-points-under-radar-hc-option

Construction is underway at the Velvet-Wood uranium and vanadium mine in southeastern Utah, the first project approved under the Interior Department’s accelerated permitting process.
https://bsky.app/profile/sltrib.com/post/3m53mor7eex2f

The Salt Lake Tribune (@sltrib.com)
Construction is underway at the Velvet-Wood uranium and vanadium mine in southeastern Utah, the first project approved under the Interior Department’s accelerated permitting process. https://www.sltrib.com/news/2025/11/07/velvet-wood-uranium-mine/

Inductive Learning for Possibilistic Logic Programs Under Stable Models
Hongbo Hu, Yisong Wang, Yi Huang, Kewen Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07069 https://

Inductive Learning for Possibilistic Logic Programs Under Stable Models
Possibilistic logic programs (poss-programs) under stable models are a major variant of answer set programming (ASP). While its semantics (possibilistic stable models) and properties have been well investigated, the problem of inductive reasoning has not been investigated yet. This paper presents an approach to extracting poss-programs from a background program and examples (parts of intended possibilistic stable models). To this end, the notion of induction tasks is first formally defined, its…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MorningShow
Tin Machine:
🎵 Under the God
#TinMachine
https://metalsineater.bandcamp.com/track/under-the-god-tin-machine-cover
https://open.spotify.com/track/6XwKC5y3OvbbFVOUS96VFW

Reddit is rolling out new safety features globally for all users under 18, ahead of Australia's social media ban for under-16s taking effect on December 10 (Newley Purnell/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

#ThursDeath for this week is the excellent debut EP 'Under the Mantle of Desolation' from Chile's blackened death-doom outfit MYST that came out a couple days ago.
https://mystoneiric.bandcamp.com/al…

Chair arrived. Not the same one I was looking at earlier. Similar. That one had sold out. This one slightly less likely to fit under the desk I thought.
But does indeed tuck under the desk properly.
Phew!

The US military has always had a massive global advantage against enemies by having bases all over the world. There are bases in every NATO country. This would appear to be a powerful threat to anyone willing to oppose American hegemon, and under normal conditions it would be.
But a lot of those kids serving on those bases joined, not because they love America but, because they needed a ticket out of poverty. They joined for the education, for the money, maybe a bit for the adventure, but, more than anything, to escape the ghetto or podunk backwater that trapped them. Under normal times, this is the best deal they could expect. Maybe they risk their lives, usually they sit around being bored for a few years, and they get to come out with respect and paid college.
But what they are being offered is normal in most of the countries they're stationed in. Free healthcare, cheap or free education, is just what citizens in a lot of countries have come to expect. If the US attacked a NATO country, how many would snap up citizenship if they were given a chance to defect? Bonus points for taking some hardware with you, I'm sure.
But there are some who love their country. There are some patriotic Americans on those bases. Some of them joined specifically to protect the US from all enemies, foreign *and* domestic. Given a chance to fulfill that oath or violate international law, what happens?
There are a good number of former military folks too who now are unsafe in the countries they served, who would do just about anything for citizenship in any EU country and almost any NATO ally. Some of those folks know things they swore an oath to never share, but the country they swore an oath to has betrayed them. Today there's no value in leaking those secrets, but in a war between the US and NATO allies things would be different. Some of those former military folks still believe in their oath, and know exactly who the real enemy is. What happens when there's a real threat of war, when they can use their knowledge to fulfill that oath to protect the US against those domestic threats?
There are a bunch of civilian tech workers who have become targets of the regime. Some of them had clearance, or know about the skeletons in the closet. They know about critical infrastructure, classified systems, all sorts of things that would be extremely valuable to an opponent. But the opponents of the US have always been a frightening *other*, never familiar societies these folks look up to, have visited, have thought about moving to, are trying to escape to.
All I'm saying here is that invading Venezuela and kidnapping the president has a very different calculus than does attacking Greenland. I don't know if Trump or his people are able to understand that, but if he and his folks aren't then I hope European leaders are. But more than that, I hope it never comes down to finding out.
But perhaps we should all think about what we would do to make sure things ended quickly if American leadership ever made such an incredible mistake.

"Garden ponds provide vital habitats – and a revival is under way in Britain"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #Environment

Spectral Graph Clustering under Differential Privacy: Balancing Privacy, Accuracy, and Efficiency
Mohamed Seif, Antti Koskela, H. Vincent Poor, Andrea J. Goldsmith
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07136

Spectral Graph Clustering under Differential Privacy: Balancing Privacy, Accuracy, and Efficiency
We study the problem of spectral graph clustering under edge differential privacy (DP). Specifically, we develop three mechanisms: (i) graph perturbation via randomized edge flipping combined with adjacency matrix shuffling, which enforces edge privacy while preserving key spectral properties of the graph. Importantly, shuffling considerably amplifies the guarantees: whereas flipping edges with a fixed probability alone provides only a constant epsilon edge DP guarantee as the number of nodes g…

Global weak solutions to nonlinear kinetic Fokker--Planck equations in bounded domains under physical initial data
Young-Pil Choi, Sihyun Song
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06656 h…

Global weak solutions to nonlinear kinetic Fokker--Planck equations in bounded domains under physical initial data
We establish the global existence of weak solutions to a nonlinear kinetic Fokker--Planck equation with degenerate diffusion, under either inflow or partial absorption-reflection boundary conditions. The novelty of our approach lies in constructing solutions under solely the physical assumptions on the initial and boundary data, namely finite mass, kinetic energy, and entropy, with no additional regularity imposed. To overcome the lack of uniform ellipticity, we develop a new compactness princi…

So to quote post in a reply, you click reply and then you click, under same post, yes in the timeline, the repost button and then quote and it inserts it into the reply post form you have already open?
What???
For the love of science Mastodon, hire proper user interface designers

K\"ahlerness of compact Hermitian surfaces under semi-definite Strominger-Bismut-Ricci curvatures
Liangdi Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06648 https://

Kählerness of compact Hermitian surfaces under semi-definite Strominger-Bismut-Ricci curvatures
We prove that a compact Hermitian surface is Kähler under certain non-positivity or non-negativity conditions on Strominger-Bismut-Ricci curvatures. The key tools for achieve these results are new Ricci curvature and Chern number identities for the Strominger-Bismut connection. This work complements and extends earlier results of Yang.

India is world’s second-largest shrimp producer. That is now under threat | Trade War News | Al Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/11/8/india-is-worlds-second-largest-shrimp-producer-that-is-now-under-threat?traffic_source=rss

Here's yet another step in the emasculation of Congress.
Here El Cheato is running a protection racket in which he imposes high tariffs but then offers relief to from those tariffs to companies that jump to a Cheato's tune-of-the-day, in this case, a reduction in certain drug prices under Medicare (presumably Part D?)
Congress should be setting these policies and doing so in a way available to all drug makers, not just certain ones favored by Cheato. But no, Congress jus…

Certain obesity drugs will cost as little as $149 and Medicare will start covering them under White House deals
Certain blockbuster obesity drugs will be available for as little as $149 per month and more Medicare enrollees will have access to them under two deals announced Thursday by the Trump administration.

ELMUR: External Layer Memory with Update/Rewrite for Long-Horizon RL
Egor Cherepanov, Alexey K. Kovalev, Aleksandr I. Panov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07151 https://

ELMUR: External Layer Memory with Update/Rewrite for Long-Horizon RL
Real-world robotic agents must act under partial observability and long horizons, where key cues may appear long before they affect decision making. However, most modern approaches rely solely on instantaneous information, without incorporating insights from the past. Standard recurrent or transformer models struggle with retaining and leveraging long-term dependencies: context windows truncate history, while naive memory extensions fail under scale and sparsity. We propose ELMUR (External Laye…

Reddit is rolling out new safety features globally for all users under 18, ahead of Australia's social media ban for under-16s taking effect on December 10 (Newley Purnell/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

"CJEU’s Russmedia decision: how online marketplace platforms could be held liable under the #GDPR"
https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/20…

CJEUs Russmedia decision how online marketplace platforms could be held liable under the GDPR - Bird & Bird

Explaining Models under Multivariate Bernoulli Distribution via Hoeffding Decomposition
Baptiste Ferrere (EDF R\&D PRISME, IMT, SINCLAIR AI Lab), Nicolas Bousquet (EDF R\&D PRISME, SINCLAIR AI Lab, LPSM), Fabrice Gamboa (IMT), Jean-Michel Loubes (IMT), Joseph Mur\'e (EDF R\&D PRISME)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07088

Explaining Models under Multivariate Bernoulli Distribution via Hoeffding Decomposition
Explaining the behavior of predictive models with random inputs can be achieved through sub-models decomposition, where such sub-models have easier interpretable features. Arising from the uncertainty quantification community, recent results have demonstrated the existence and uniqueness of a generalized Hoeffding decomposition for such predictive models when the stochastic input variables are correlated, based on concepts of oblique projection onto L 2 subspaces. This article focuses on the ca…

HyPlan: Hybrid Learning-Assisted Planning Under Uncertainty for Safe Autonomous Driving
Donald Pfaffmann, Matthias Klusch, Marcel Steinmetz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07210 http…

HyPlan: Hybrid Learning-Assisted Planning Under Uncertainty for Safe Autonomous Driving
We present a novel hybrid learning-assisted planning method, named HyPlan, for solving the collision-free navigation problem for self-driving cars in partially observable traffic environments. HyPlan combines methods for multi-agent behavior prediction, deep reinforcement learning with proximal policy optimization and approximated online POMDP planning with heuristic confidence-based vertical pruning to reduce its execution time without compromising safety of driving. Our experimental performan…

So yeah, as @… is perhaps implying, part of the reason you don’t see it is that the mainstream press is under-covering everything that’s happening in Minneapolis.
BUT! There’s a second reason you might not know about this activity, equally important: the activity that followed the murder of George Floyd — rallies, protests, marches, police riots — was of a highly visible sort. What I see now is much more community infrastructure work: neighborhood organizing, watching for ICE, delivering food. That happened in 2020 too, but the scale of it now…!
https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/115857252713224712

Smart Contract Adoption in Derivative Markets under Bounded Risk: An Optimization Approach
Jinho Cha, Long Pham, Thi Le Hoa Vo, Jaeyoung Cho, Jaejin Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07006

Smart Contract Adoption in Derivative Markets under Bounded Risk: An Optimization Approach
This study develops and analyzes an optimization model of smart contract adoption under bounded risk, linking structural theory with simulation and real-world validation. We examine how adoption intensity alpha is structurally pinned at a boundary solution, invariant to variance and heterogeneity, while profitability and service outcomes are variance-fragile, eroding under volatility and heavy-tailed demand. A sharp threshold in the fixed cost parameter A3 triggers discontinuous adoption collap…

In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence
is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Slow, Fast and Opportunistic FAMA: A Spatial Block-Correlation Analysis under Nakagami-m Fading Channels
Paulo R. de Moura, Hugerles S. Silva, Ugo S. Dias, Higo T. P. Silva
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07142

Slow, Fast and Opportunistic FAMA: A Spatial Block-Correlation Analysis under Nakagami-m Fading Channels
This paper studies slow, fast and opportunistic fluid antenna multiple access (FAMA) under the effect of Nakagami-m fading channels, considering the new and realistic spatial blockcorrelation model. Expressions for the outage probability (OP), based on the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR), are derived for slow FAMA. Interestingly, we provide mathematical relationships that allow the expressions of fast FAMA to be obtained from slow FAMA. Multiplexing gains for an opportunistic FAMA (OFAMA) ne…

Learning Paths to Multi-Sector Equilibrium: Belief Dynamics Under Uncertain Returns to Scale
Stefano Nasini, Rabia Nessah, Bertrand Wigniolle
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07013 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07013 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.07013
arXiv:2512.07013v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: This paper explores the dynamics of learning in a multi-sector general equilibrium model where firms operate under incomplete information about their production returns to scale. Firms iteratively update their beliefs using maximum a-posteriori estimation, derived from observed production outcomes, to refine their knowledge of their returns to scale. The implications of these learning dynamics for market equilibrium and the conditions under which firms can effectively learn their true returns to scale are the key objects of this study. Our results shed light on how idiosyncratic shocks influence the learning process and demonstrate that input decisions encode all pertinent information for belief updates. Additionally, we show that a long-memory (path-dependent) learning which keeps track of all past estimations ends up having a worse performance than a short-memory (path-independent) approach.
toXiv_bot_toot

Portugal updates cybercrime law to exempt security researchers
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/portugal-updates-cybercrime-law-to-exempt-security-researchers/

Portugal updates cybercrime law to exempt security researchers
Portugal has modified its cybercrime law to establish a legal safe harbor for good-faith security research and to make hacking non-punishable under certain strict conditions.

After identification of a Thai worker's remains, the first phase of Gaza’s tenuous 8-week-old ceasefire is
a step closer to completion, with one more hostage’s remains still to be returned.
The subsequent phases under a U.S.-drafted, U.N.-backed plan for Gaza remain deeply uncertain.
There has been no word on how provisions for Hamas’ disarmament will be carried out,
or how a planned international administration and security force will be established.

A single hostage remains in Gaza after identification of Thai worker's remains
JERUSALEM (AP) — The subsequent phases under a U.S.-drafted, U.N.-backed plan for Gaza remain deeply uncertain.

Good to repeat.
The EU’s Fine Against X is Not About Speech or ‘Censorship’ | TechPolicy.Press
https://techpolicy.press/the-eus-fine-against-x-is-not-about-speech-or-censorship

The EU’s Fine Against X is Not About Speech or ‘Censorship’ | TechPolicy.Press
The €120 million fine under the Digital Services Act is just the EU enforcing some normal, boring requirements of its law, writes Stanford's Daphne Keller.

And Juice Media is bang-on as usual: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxRB5qWphJE The 'under 16' social media ban is precisely the wrong approach. The right approach would involve regulating US BigTech by leading the formation of a global consortium of countries. Sadly, few politicians have …

EU bötfäller X för brister i plattformens transparens. USA: "angrepp på amerikaner". Musk: "Bullshit". Medvedev: "Exactly". När allierade och Kreml sjunger samma sång, och om vikten av EU:s digitala suveränitet.
https://carlheath.se/digital-suveranit

Rank Aggregation under Weak Stochastic Transitivity via a Maximum Score Estimator
Haoran Zhang, Yunxiao Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06789 https://arxiv…

Rank Aggregation under Weak Stochastic Transitivity via a Maximum Score Estimator
Stochastic transitivity is central for rank aggregation based on pairwise comparison data. The existing models, including the Thurstone, Bradley-Terry (BT), and nonparametric BT models, adopt a strong notion of stochastic transitivity, known as strong stochastic transitivity (SST). This assumption imposes restrictive monotonicity constraints on the pairwise comparison probabilities, which is often unrealistic for real-world applications. This paper introduces a maximum score estimator for aggre…

She Lies

Oh, almost forgot #silentsunday!
My last hike led me to this summit which is usually very well visited.
But given the weekday & weather, I was totally alone while I was up there. Noone around. No human made sound. Just me and nature. It felt so much like real freedom.
#hiking

"So imagine the Brownstone startup puts 50 pods in one big room. Once they rent pod #1, that person appears to have the right to the entire room. Renting pods #2 through #50 could violate Section 1950. If they do, they are double letting, and 'every tenant in the building, under the same landlord' could withhold rent for as long as the 'double letting' continues." 👀

Sleeping Pods in San Francisco: Are They Even Legal? — Dean Preston
The rise of sleeping pods as a housing solution in San Francisco raises questions about legality. California Civil Code Section 1950 prohibits double letting, but is the startup Brownstone breaking the law?

"Hundreds of staff working across Transport for London and the wider rail network could face deportation under recent changes to Skilled Worker visa rules."
RMT transport workers at No 10 demand end to deportation threat | Morning Star
https://morningstaronl…

What you get in other fields is papers being under submission for literal years. That sort of thing can kill a carer if it happens early on.
The nice thing about conferences a venues is that you get a definite reply by a deadline. Sure, it's a bit of a scramble, but you do get a few months.
I don't think there's much of an incentive to be overly critical. On 10k submissions, it won't do you much good to kill the 10 papers you're assigned.

"I want you to understand, regardless of your politics, the historical danger of a secret police. What happens when a militia is deployed in our neighborhoods and against our own people. Left unchecked their mandate will grow; the boundaries of acceptable identity and speech will shrink. I want you to think about elections in this future. I want you to understand that every issue you care about—any hope of participatory democracy—is downstream of this."

I think the cat has figured out that when I bring up stacks of cat food to put under the kitchen sink, that no one can figure out whether he’s been fed or not, so he can constantly trick one of the three of us into to giving him more food.

Phase relation investigation of U-La-O system under oxidizing conditions and observation of novel meta-stable and mixed-valent uranium phase- Ln3U11O36 (Ln=La, Nd, Sm, Gd)
Shafeeq Muhammed, Geeta Patkare, Rohan Phatak
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06639

Phase relation investigation of U-La-O system under oxidizing conditions and observation of novel meta-stable and mixed-valent uranium phase- Ln3U11O36 (Ln=La, Nd, Sm, Gd)
Total of twelve samples in the U-La-O system with the compositions U1-yLayO2+x (y=0.025, 0.05, 0.1, up to 0.3) were synthesized by gel combustion synthesis method followed by appropriate heat treatment in air atmosphere. Comprehensive experimental analysis using various techniques like X-ray diffraction, thermogravimetry and oxygen to uranium ratio (O/U) are used to establish the phase relation in U1-yLayO2+x system at 1173 K and 1523 K heated in air. A novel meta-stable phase with stoichiometr…

Randomized Quasi-Monte Carlo with Importance Sampling for Functions under Generalized Growth Conditions and Its Applications in Finance
Jianlong Chen, Yu Xu, Xiaoqun Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06705

Randomized Quasi-Monte Carlo with Importance Sampling for Functions under Generalized Growth Conditions and Its Applications in Finance
Many problems can be formulated as high-dimensional integrals of discontinuous functions that often exhibit significant growth, challenging the error analysis of randomized quasi-Monte Carlo (RQMC) methods. This paper studies RQMC methods for functions with generalized exponential growth conditions, with a special focus on financial derivative pricing. The main contribution of this work is threefold. First, by combining RQMC and importance sampling (IS) techniques, we derive a new error bound f…

went thru my bookmarks and found BOOTED HARLEYDUDE. whyd i never go thru this kings site before???
http://bootedman.com/

Sources and US tax lawyers: the IRS's planned audit of private equity and VC firms is faltering under President Trump, as many senior leaders leave the agency (Jesse Drucker/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/business/irs-private…

Push to Audit Private Equity and Venture Capital Falters Under Trump
Specialists have left the I.R.S. and audits have been abandoned since the president returned to office.

Thermal photon emission from quark-gluon plasma: 1 1D magnetohydrodynamics results
Jie Xiong, Xiang Fan, Jing Jing, Weishan Yang, Duan She, Ze-Fang Jiang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06604

Thermal photon emission from quark-gluon plasma: 1+1D magnetohydrodynamics results
We investigate thermal photon production in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) under strong magnetic fields using a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) framework. Adopting the Bjorken flow model with power-law decaying magnetic fields $\mathbf{B}(τ) = \mathbf{B}_0 (τ_0/τ)^a$ (where $a$ controls the decay rate, $B_0 = \sqrtσ T_0^2$, and $σ$ characterizes the initial field strength), we employ relativistic ideal fluid dynamics under the non-resistive approximation. The resulting QGP temperature evolution ex…

The shooting mirrors several others in recent years in which people who arrived at a wrong address were met with gunfire by homeowners worried they were under threat.

I subscribe to a few of these. I'll have to use this as a recommendation list to check out the rest.
"Outstanding Independent Journalism (formerly Outstanding Blog)
Assigned Media
Buckeye Flame
Charlotte’s Web Thoughts
Erin in the Morning
Impact Media
Queer Kentucky
Queer Review
Trans News Network
Under the Desk News
Xtra Magazine"
I'd add to the recommendations list @…

GLAAD Media Awards: ‘Heated Rivalry,’ ‘I Love L.A.,’ ‘Stranger Things’ and The Hollywood Reporter Score Nominations
Jacob Tierney’s ‘Heated Rivalry’ starring Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams netted a nom for outstanding new TV series while THR landed in the outstanding magazine overall coverage category.

Can Spacecraft-Borne Contamination Compromise Our Understanding of #LunarIce Chemistry? https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025JE009132 -> Lunar spacecraft exhaust could obscure clues to origins of life: https://news.agu.org/press-release/lunar-spacecraft-exhaust-could-obscure-clues-to-origins-of-life/ - exhaust methane could travel pole-to-pole in under two lunar days, half of it settling in regions potentially harboring original ingredients of earthly life.

Every Senate Republican voted to screw lower & middle class Americans by doubling or even tripling their costs for healthcare, with millions losing #healthcare ENTIRELY...
... all so the govt can pay for TRILLIONS in tax cuts for billionaires & the ultra-wealthy. No, seriously. This is REAL. All under

#nowplaying
i think mine is the 1978 repressing, definitely not the 1965 original
it's in great shape, not a single scratch
singing along under my breath, and i know every. single. word.
https://ma…

Min kotkompression plågar mig idag - armen gör ont, fingrarna domnar och krampen under skulderbladet hämmar cirkulationen. Varför ska massören vara föräldraledig och tvinga mig att vänta?

Under the hood, Russia’s 'Reaper' drone copy is shockingly American: https://benborges.xyz/2025/11/05/under-the-hood-russias-reaper.html

Excited to speak tomorrow at @… , giving updates about the project i've been volunteering for the last year with @…
Join us in person in Toronto or online at 7PM…

A few snaps from last week’s trip to Forrest, VIC, in the Otway ranges. Taken on a morning run. #running #straya

Korean Students demonstrate a giant video game on the side of a truck on the arts quad
#photo #photography #cornell

Anomalous Criticality of Absorbing State Transition toward Jamming
He-Da Wang, Bo Wang, Qun-Li Lei, Yu-Qiang Ma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06641 https://ar…

Anomalous Criticality of Absorbing State Transition toward Jamming
The jamming transition is traditionally regarded as a geometric transition governed by static contact networks. Recently, dynamic phase transitions of athermal particles under periodic shear provide a new lens on this problem, leading to a conjecture that jamming transition corresponds to an absorbing-state transition within the Manna (conserved directed percolation) universality class. Here, by re-examing the biased random organization model, a minimal model for particles under periodic sheari…

"Converting debts into income streams for third parties is the true basis of the finance industry. It's the means by which socially useless intermediaries extract ever-mounting rents from the productive economy" -- @…

Developing a Sequential Deep Learning Pipeline to Model Alaskan Permafrost Thaw Under Climate Change
Addina Rahaman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06258 https://

Developing a Sequential Deep Learning Pipeline to Model Alaskan Permafrost Thaw Under Climate Change
Changing climate conditions threaten the natural permafrost thaw-freeze cycle, leading to year-round soil temperatures above 0°C. In Alaska, the warming of the topmost permafrost layer, known as the active layer, signals elevated greenhouse gas release due to high carbon storage. Accurate soil temperature prediction is therefore essential for risk mitigation and stability assessment; however, many existing approaches overlook the numerous factors driving soil thermal dynamics. This study prese…

“First responders were unable to get close to the scene because ICE agents did not move their cars to let them through.”
Put these motherfuckers _under_ the jail.
https://minnesotareformer.com/2026/01/07/ice-officer-fatally-…

How the insurance crisis overtook California
Insurance Commissioner Lara’s 2023 regulatory overhaul promised to ease California’s insurance crisis
but instead delivered major concessions to the industry.
Under Lara’s watch, the state’s insurer of last resort exploded
from 123,657 policies in 2019 to over 645,000,
leaving January wildfire victims underinsured.
Six of nine insurers filing under new rules
add zero new policies in high-risk zones
-…

How the insurance crisis overtook California
Insurance Commissioner Lara's 2023 regulatory overhaul promised to ease California's insurance crisis but instead delivered major concessions to the industry.

Diffusion-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Robust Portfolio Optimization under Stress Scenarios
Himanshu Choudhary, Arishi Orra, Manoj Thakur
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07099

Diffusion-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Robust Portfolio Optimization under Stress Scenarios
In the ever-changing and intricate landscape of financial markets, portfolio optimisation remains a formidable challenge for investors and asset managers. Conventional methods often struggle to capture the complex dynamics of market behaviour and align with diverse investor preferences. To address this, we propose an innovative framework, termed Diffusion-Augmented Reinforcement Learning (DARL), which synergistically integrates Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) with Deep Reinforc…

Under Bari Weiss and anchor Tony Dokoupil, CBS Evening News has become state propaganda, costing CBS News respect as mass media's audience shrinks (Jeff Jarvis/Katie Couric Media)
https://katiecouric.com/news/opinion/tony-dokoupil-first-week-cbs-eve…

An Expert's Analysis of Tony Dokoupil's First Week Anchoring "CBS Evening News"
It's the last nail in the coffin of CBS News as respected journalism.

Hell under Pokrovsk: UAF have been holding back Russian assaults for 13 months straight #shorts: https://benborges.xyz/2025/11/05/hell-under-pokrovsk-uaf-have.html

Bring the Apple, Not the Sofa: Impact of Irrelevant Context in Embodied AI Commands on VLA Models
Daria Pugacheva, Andrey Moskalenko, Denis Shepelev, Andrey Kuznetsov, Vlad Shakhuro, Elena Tutubalina
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07067

Bring the Apple, Not the Sofa: Impact of Irrelevant Context in Embodied AI Commands on VLA Models
Vision Language Action (VLA) models are widely used in Embodied AI, enabling robots to interpret and execute language instructions. However, their robustness to natural language variability in real-world scenarios has not been thoroughly investigated. In this work, we present a novel systematic study of the robustness of state-of-the-art VLA models under linguistic perturbations. Specifically, we evaluate model performance under two types of instruction noise: (1) human-generated paraphrasing a…

Under Former Chemical Industry Insiders, Trump EPA Nearly Doubles Amount of Formaldehyde Considered Safe to Inhale (Sharon Lerner/ProPublica)
https://www.propublica.org/article/epa-formaldehyde-risk-assessment
http://www.memeorandum.com/251208/p41#a251208p41

A Stochastic Geometric Analysis on Multi-cell Pinching-antenna Systems under Blockage Effect
Yanshi Sun, Zhiguo Ding, George K. Karagiannidis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06972 ht…

A Stochastic Geometric Analysis on Multi-cell Pinching-antenna Systems under Blockage Effect
Recently, the study on pinching-antenna technique has attracted significant attention. However, most relevant literature focuses on a single-cell scenario, where the effect from the interfering pinching-antennas on waveguides connected to spatially distributed base stations (BSs) was ignored. To fulfill this knowledge gap, this letter aims to provide an analytical framework on performance evaluation for multi-cell pinching-antenna systems where spatially distributed waveguides which are connect…

From various rumors and sources it appears that Open AI - a company organized under Delaware law but with HQ in California - is the cause of the tripling of computer memory prices and shortages.
Word is that Open AI bought up all of the large wafers from Samsung and Hynix that are used to make memory. The intention seems to be to corner the market in order to hobble Open AI's competition.
I am not an expert in either Federal or State laws on anti-competitive practices.

"Pay to protect: Brazil pitches new forest fund at COP30"
#Brazil #COP30 #Environment

Pay to protect: Brazil pitches new forest fund at COP30
Tropical countries from Cameroon to Colombia could earn tens of millions of dollars a year under a novel approach to protecting the world's rainforests being launched at the COP30 summit in Brazil.

Guardian repeats story that Venezuela's oil production low due to corruption and lack of investment.
Actually, the Maracaibo basin is beyond peak extraction so costs rising. And Orinoco oil is heavy, tarry, and hard to get (deep under the rainforest).
Of course the blockade is also part of the reason, and maybe flight of technical staff.
Oil prices fall after Trump says Venezuela will send up to 50m barrels to US | Oil | The Guardian

Plan C turned out to be a nice day in the mountains. But Woah was there a chill wind. Good that I was prepared.
#hiking #wandern #mountains

Inverse Portfolio Optimization with Synthetic Investor Data: Recovering Risk Preferences under Uncertainty
Jinho Cha, Long Pham, Thi Le Hoa Vo, Jaeyoung Cho, Jaejin Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06986

Inverse Portfolio Optimization with Synthetic Investor Data: Recovering Risk Preferences under Uncertainty
This study develops an inverse portfolio optimization framework for recovering latent investor preferences including risk aversion, transaction cost sensitivity, and ESG orientation from observed portfolio allocations. Using controlled synthetic data, we assess the estimator's statistical properties such as consistency, coverage, and dynamic regret. The model integrates robust optimization and regret-based inference to quantify welfare losses under preference misspecification and market shocks.…

Endangered Species Protection Sought for New Mexico Flower Threatened by Fossil Fuel Industry https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/endangered-species-protection-sought-f…

Endangered Species Protection Sought for New Mexico Flower Threatened by Fossil Fuel Industry
TUCSON, Ariz.— The Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today to protect Allred’s flax under the Endangered Species Act.

@… draw for me a woman in a business dress. Put dim light under her skin in the head that looks like fireing neurons. Give her human like robot hands. She is sitting och a chair in a chaotic and slightly broken office from the 1960s

Just back from 4 days in the Great Otway National Park, Victoria. Stunning place, and we mostly managed to stay dry in the wettest part of the state. Here’s photos from a walk along the coastal path. #bushwalking #straya

Ok, yeah, I'm not done processing my anger over liberals doing shit like this. So this historian sees a rise in right wing violence, sees the US government carrying out ethnic cleansing, sees a rise in white supremacist terrorism, and then says, "oh yeah... this reminds me of a time right around the 1920s. Hum... yeah, ANARCHISTS fighting the government! Yeah, that's the same thing."
FFS, IT'S THE RED SUMMER! If you want a parallel between today and some horrible time in US history, TALK ABOUT THE RED SUMMER. The point of the language of dehumanization that the right uses, the point of all the anti-black and anti-emigrant rhetoric, is that it leads to genocide. Trump already carried out an act of genocide (#USPol

Texas A&M, Under New Curriculum Limits, Warns Professor Not to Teach Plato (Alan Blinder/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/us/tamu-plato-race-gender.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/260108/p12#a260108p12

Leonard Blavatnik injects $587M into DAZN, taking his total investment above $7B in under a decade; DAZN losses narrowed last year to $936M from $1.4B in 2023 (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)

As Australia prepares to enact the world's first under-16 social media ban on December 10, a look at the implications, reaction from parents and teens, and more (Nic Fildes/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/e93ab2b2-868f-441f-bbec-0af4fa3edeb5

Trump admin goes to SCOTUS to try and stop order that it pay full SNAP benefits this month: DOJ asks the justices for an order by 9:30 p.m. Friday — as USDA was in the middle of completing its process for making full payments, under a court order to finish Friday.
https://www.lawdork.com/p/trump-admin-goes-to-scotus-to-try

We are told that, under stress, the humanities must be sacrificed
-- of what use are literature, philosophy, and history when we have problems to solve right now?
And yet colleagues meeting in wartime Kyiv have a clearer sense of purpose, more esprit de corps, , and a better instinct for the essential.
And soldiers on the front (as they tell me) want to talk about history and culture.
In traumatic conditions, people think about where they stand amidst larger force…

Ukrainian History Global Initiative
The Creative Humanities During a War of Destruction

Attack on Ukraine: energy sector under attack, casualties reported #shorts: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/07/attack-on-ukraine-energy-sector.html

Robustness of Covariance Estimators with Application in Activity Detection
Hendrik Bernd Zarucha, Peter Jung, Giuseppe Caire
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07044 https://

Robustness of Covariance Estimators with Application in Activity Detection
The first part of this work considers a general class of covariance estimators. Each estimator of that class is generated by a real-valued function $g$ and a set of model covariance matrices $H$. If $\bf{W}$ is a potentially perturbed observation of a searched covariance matrix, then the estimator is the minimizer of the sum of $g$ applied to each eigenvalue of $\bf{W}^\frac{1}{2}\bf{Z}^{-1}\bf{W}^\frac{1}{2}$ under the constraint that $\bf{Z}$ is from $H$. It is shown that under mild condition…

Source: a few weeks before Grok started "digitally undressing" people, Elon Musk expressed frustration over guardrails on Grok's image and video generator (Hadas Gold/CNN)
http://www.cnn.com/2026/01/08/tech/elon-musk-xai-digital-undressing

Elon Musk’s xAI under fire for failing to rein in ‘digital undressing’
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, has been flooded with sexual images of mainly women, many of them real people, by being prompted by users to “digitally undress” them and sometimes placing them in suggestive poses.

Elon Musk's xAI under fire for failing to rein in 'digital undressing' (Hadas Gold/CNN)
https://cnn.com/2026/01/08/tech/elon-musk-xai-digital-undressing
http://www.memeorandum.com/260108/p137#a260108p137

Trump EPA Nearly Doubles Amount of Formaldehyde Considered Safe to Inhale
The chemical industry finally got its wish.
Industry lobbyists have long pushed the federal government to adopt a less stringent approach to gauging the
💥cancer risk 💥from chemicals,
one that would help ease regulations on companies that make or use them.
Last week, in a highly unusual move,
👉the Environmental Protection Agency embraced that approach
in announcing that it is revi…

Under Former Chemical Industry Insiders, Trump EPA Nearly Doubles Amount of Formaldehyde Considered Safe to Inhale
Chemical industry lobbyists have long pushed the government to adopt a less stringent approach to gauging the cancer risk from chemicals, one that would help ease regulations on companies that make or use them.

Turning point in Paris! West prepares to take Ukraine's security under control: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/07/turning-point-in-paris-west.html

As Trump and Big Tech aim to build SMRs to win the AI race, a look at the issues they face; none of the 50 SMRs under development have a US operating license (Jamie Smyth/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/9f6c4db1-559f-48e1-8c21-ac0bc1a1237c

America's affordability crunch is real -- and worse under Trump (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/e569454d-ea51-42c5-86ed-d2d61fa47edc
http://www.memeorandum.com/251207/p14#a251207p14

US, Ukraine launch online portal for potential investment projects under minerals deal: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/07/us-ukraine-launch-online-portal.html

Amazon launches Amazon Bazaar, a standalone low-cost shopping app in 12 markets in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, with most products priced under $10 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/07/amaz

Amazon launches a low-price standalone shopping app, Amazon Bazaar, in over a dozen markets | TechCrunch
On Friday, Amazon announced the debut of Amazon Bazaar, a new low-cost shopping destination for Asia, Africa, and Latin America that will be

Evanston, Illinois Mayor Daniel Biss says what he has seen of federal immigration raids amounts to an “invasion from our own federal government.”
His office is now launching investigations into reports of federal agents brutalizing and threatening community members.
“They appear to have just started beating people up for no reason,”
Biss says.
“If that was anybody except for a federal agent, they would be under arrest.”

“My Community Is Under Invasion from Our Own Federal Gov’t”: Evanston Mayor Decries ICE Raids in Illinois
Amid federal immigration raids in the Chicagoland area, the mayor of one Chicago suburb is on the frontlines of the anti-ICE protest movement. Mayor Daniel Biss says what he has seen of federal immigration raids in Evanston, Illinois, amounts to an “invasion from our own federal government.” His office is now launching investigations into reports of federal agents brutalizing and threatening community members. “They appear to have just started beating people up for no reason,” Biss says…

Trump kicks off strike on Putin's oil: Russian shadow fleet already under arrest, sanctions incoming: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/08/trump-kicks-off-strike-on.html

Polymarket agrees to its first media partnership to supply Dow Jones outlets, including the WSJ and Barron's, with real-time prediction market trading data (Katherine Doherty/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Polymarket to Distribute Prediction Data to Dow Jones Outlets
Polymarket will supply Dow Jones with trading data under a new partnership, the latest in a string of deals between exchanges and media organizations that are putting prediction markets in front of a broader audience.

Trump on Wednesday (January 7, 2026) signed an executive order suspending U.S. support for 66 organisations, agencies and commissions
following his instructions for his administration to review participation in and funding for all international organisations,
including those affiliated with the United Nations.
Most of the targets are UN-related agencies, commissions and advisory panels that focus on climate, labour and other issues that the Trump administration has categori…

U.S. to exit 66 international organisations as Trump further retreats from global cooperation
The U.S. plans to withdraw from 66 international organizations, primarily UN-related, under Trump's administration, emphasizing national interests.