Tootfinder

Things are happening in the C2PA world; here are a couple of useful steps forward, plus cheers and boos for Adobe. Plus a live working C2PA demo you can try out: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/06/17/More-C2PA

June 2025 C2PA News

Similarly, hostility to education cloaks itself as support by saying that education should be useful, should be practical, should be focused only on what students need, should be narrowed to what students need, should narrow students, should narrow students into being only what capitalism needs.
I wrote extensively about this dangerous line of thought here:
https://innig.net/teaching/liberal-arts-manifesto
6/

web nerdery
Functional indexes would make IndexedDB useful in some really neat new ways.
Most of all: encrypted data, with a choice about what's exposed as indexes.

Updated my Fediverse profile page, so it references more background stories rather than just referencing the apps we currently build.
Of course, given space constraints most of those story references are very brief allusions. But they might still serve as useful launch points for conversation! If anything there piques your interest and you're curious to learn more, feel free to ask me about them.

Seeing usually smart folks getting rope-a-doped into arguing for LLM utility like there's a moral justice zero-sum trolley-problem slider between "useful" and "ethical" and we're just arguing about the best setting
But the real problem is even dumber
-is its mere use a climate disaster? Yes
-is its data provenance founded on theft? Also yes
-will it be used to ruin ordinary workers' lives? Yup
-will it ruin countless organizations wh…

“Why do people have such dramatically different experiences using AI?”
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/06/why-do-people-have-such-dramatically-different-experiences-using-ai/
In the example, you have Google engine…

Why do people have such dramatically different experiences using AI?
For some people, it seems, AI is an amazing machine which - while fallible - represents an incredible leap forward in productivity. For other people, it seems, AI is wrong more often than right and - although occasionally useful - requires constant supervision. Who is right? I recently pointed out a few common problems with LLMs. I was discussing this with someone relatively senior who works…

STEP 2: lets understand the useful tools here
get_current_file_errors provides all the file warnings/errors of the file your currently have open in your IDE
"wait" is also very useful... see the prompt.... 😏

I would like to see an initiative that evaluates messaging services that promise encryption and document the findings. For example, a service may claim that emails are encrypted and secure. However, if the secret keys are managed on infrastructure controlled by the service without further protection, there are limitations, and I wouldn't call it end-to-end encryption. I think it would be useful to have a neutral web page where users could lookup the security levels of services (or apps).…

Integrating Knowledge Graphs and Bayesian Networks: A Hybrid Approach for Explainable Disease Risk Prediction
Mbithe Nzomo, Deshendran Moodley
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13920

Integrating Knowledge Graphs and Bayesian Networks: A Hybrid Approach for Explainable Disease Risk Prediction
Multimodal electronic health record (EHR) data is useful for disease risk prediction based on medical domain knowledge. However, general medical knowledge must be adapted to specific healthcare settings and patient populations to achieve practical clinical use. Additionally, risk prediction systems must handle uncertainty from incomplete data and non-deterministic health outcomes while remaining explainable. These challenges can be alleviated by the integration of knowledge graphs (KGs) and Bay…

GMT: General Motion Tracking for Humanoid Whole-Body Control
Zixuan Chen, Mazeyu Ji, Xuxin Cheng, Xuanbin Peng, Xue Bin Peng, Xiaolong Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14770

GMT: General Motion Tracking for Humanoid Whole-Body Control
The ability to track general whole-body motions in the real world is a useful way to build general-purpose humanoid robots. However, achieving this can be challenging due to the temporal and kinematic diversity of the motions, the policy's capability, and the difficulty of coordination of the upper and lower bodies. To address these issues, we propose GMT, a general and scalable motion-tracking framework that trains a single unified policy to enable humanoid robots to track diverse motions in t…

The magic of tensor products of ultrafilters
Mauro Di Nasso
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14344 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14344

The magic of tensor products of ultrafilters
Tensor products of ultrafilters have special combinatorial features closely related to Ramsey's Theorem, making them useful tools in applications. Here we first review their fundamental properties and isolate some new ones, including a characterisation of the limit superior and inferior of sequences as limits along tensor products, and an application to the Banach asymptotic density. We then prove a general result on the combinatorial structure of sets belonging to tensor products and, as a res…

Analyzing Character Representation in Media Content using Multimodal Foundation Model: Effectiveness and Trust
Evdoxia Taka, Debadyuti Bhattacharya, Joanne Garde-Hansen, Sanjay Sharma, Tanaya Guha
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14799

Analyzing Character Representation in Media Content using Multimodal Foundation Model: Effectiveness and Trust
Recent advances in AI has enabled automated analysis of complex media content at scale and generate actionable insights regarding character representation along such dimensions as gender and age. Past work focused on quantifying representation from audio/video/text using various ML models, but without having the audience in the loop. We ask, even if character distribution along demographic dimensions are available, how useful are they to the general public? Do they actually trust the numbers ge…

"A solar panel recycling scheme would help reduce waste, but please repair and reuse first"
#SolarPower #Energy #Renewables

A solar panel recycling scheme would help reduce waste, but please repair and reuse first
Older rooftop solar systems are being scrapped – often well before the end of their useful life. Establishing a product stewardship scheme is part of the solution.

I've just tagged build-and-inspect-python-package 2.13.0 of my popular GitHub Action.
It now offers the package name as an output and uses it in the job summary which should be useful to people building multiple packages at once.
https://github.com/hynek/build-and-ins

Release v2.13.0 · hynek/build-and-inspect-python-package
Added New output: package_name is the name of the built package as stored in metadata. #162 The package name is now part of the action summary which is helpful when you build more than one pack...

Freer Arrows and Why You Need Them in Haskell
Grant VanDomelen, Gan Shen, Lindsey Kuper, Yao Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12212 https://

Freer Arrows and Why You Need Them in Haskell
Freer monads are a useful structure commonly used in various domains due to their expressiveness. However, a known issue with freer monads is that they are not amenable to static analysis. This paper explores freer arrows, a relatively expressive structure that is amenable to static analysis. We propose several variants of freer arrows. We conduct a case study on choreographic programming to demonstrate the usefulness of freer arrows in Haskell.

Understanding the Effect of Knowledge Graph Extraction Error on Downstream Graph Analyses: A Case Study on Affiliation Graphs
Erica Cai, Brendan O'Connor
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12367

Understanding the Effect of Knowledge Graph Extraction Error on Downstream Graph Analyses: A Case Study on Affiliation Graphs
Knowledge graphs (KGs) are useful for analyzing social structures, community dynamics, institutional memberships, and other complex relationships across domains from sociology to public health. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have improved the scalability and accessibility of automated KG extraction from large text corpora, the impacts of extraction errors on downstream analyses are poorly understood, especially for applied scientists who depend on accurate KGs for real-wo…

Discovering Temporal Structure: An Overview of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Martin Klissarov, Akhil Bagaria, Ziyan Luo, George Konidaris, Doina Precup, Marlos C. Machado
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14045

Discovering Temporal Structure: An Overview of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Developing agents capable of exploring, planning and learning in complex open-ended environments is a grand challenge in artificial intelligence (AI). Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) offers a promising solution to this challenge by discovering and exploiting the temporal structure within a stream of experience. The strong appeal of the HRL framework has led to a rich and diverse body of literature attempting to discover a useful structure. However, it is still not clear how one might …

Tactile Beyond Pixels: Multisensory Touch Representations for Robot Manipulation
Carolina Higuera, Akash Sharma, Taosha Fan, Chaithanya Krishna Bodduluri, Byron Boots, Michael Kaess, Mike Lambeta, Tingfan Wu, Zixi Liu, Francois Robert Hogan, Mustafa Mukadam
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14754…

Tactile Beyond Pixels: Multisensory Touch Representations for Robot Manipulation
We present Sparsh-X, the first multisensory touch representations across four tactile modalities: image, audio, motion, and pressure. Trained on ~1M contact-rich interactions collected with the Digit 360 sensor, Sparsh-X captures complementary touch signals at diverse temporal and spatial scales. By leveraging self-supervised learning, Sparsh-X fuses these modalities into a unified representation that captures physical properties useful for robot manipulation tasks. We study how to effectively …

I got this useful info, especially the phone numbers, my my California state assembly person:
We've already seen peaceful demonstrators, legal observers, and even witnesses detained. These are serious and unpredictable situations, and I urge you: stay calm, stay safe, and do not engage directly with ICE agents. Always be peaceful and nonviolent.
Instead, call your local rapid response hotline:
Santa Cruz County: (831) 239-4289
Santa Clara County: (408) 290-…

It was unavoidable that this week I'd end up writing about Apple's latest blunder. But in the context of Figma's Sites bullshit and Shopify recasting designers as "artists" it's even worse than one OS making a stupid decision.
The mission of #UXdesign is being changed: orienting away from making useful products that work for everyone, and towards branding.
…

Apple's Liquid Glass is a grim portent for UX
Industry leaders like Apple and Shopify are redefining design excellence from making products usable to solely luxury branding.

Ended up using a probability game mechanic again today and thought I might explain it here in case other #GameDev folks might find it useful. The basic problem it solves is when you want a percentage probability to be influenced by both beneficial and detrimental stats/effects, and you want these to balance against each other without the system easily tipping too far in either direction. Think about crit chance for example, and how many games have either lopsided systems where it's easy to max out at 100% or really opaque systems to try to balance things somehow. The system I'm about to describe has a nice intuitive explanation, but also permits positive & negative modifiers to balance out naturally (though it may not work well for every situation).

Optimized Spectral Fault Receptive Fields for Diagnosis-Informed Prognosis
Stan Mu\~noz Guti\'errez, Franz Wotawa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12375 http…

Optimized Spectral Fault Receptive Fields for Diagnosis-Informed Prognosis
This paper introduces Spectral Fault Receptive Fields (SFRFs), a biologically inspired technique for degradation state assessment in bearing fault diagnosis and remaining useful life (RUL) estimation. Drawing on the center-surround organization of retinal ganglion cell receptive fields, we propose a frequency-domain feature extraction algorithm that enhances the detection of fault signatures in vibration signals. SFRFs are designed as antagonistic spectral filters centered on characteristic fau…

“The society said any judgments it issued that were potentially seen as political would do ‘more harm than good.’”
The Royal Society has already made a political announcement: that it is perfectly fine with fascism and having fascists as fellows. As far as political statements go, it doesn’t get any stronger than that. The only thing they could do to make their point clearer is if they hang a “Nazi Bar” sign above their headquarters.

I actually found something useful in #jetbrains #MCP server/plugin 😏
We all know the "warnings" in #phpstorm (for example) - so let

Surfing the SWAVES: Lifecycle-aware Service Placement in MEC
Federico Giarr\`e, Holger Karl
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12265 https://…

Surfing the SWAVES: Lifecycle-aware Service Placement in MEC
In Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) networks, users covered by a mobile network can exploit edge clouds (ECs), computational resources located at the network's edge, to execute virtual network functions (VNFs). ECs are particularly useful when deploying VNFs with strict delay and availability requirements. As users roam in the network and get handed over between cells, deployed VNFs must follow users to retain the benefits of edge computing. Yet, having VNFs ready at the closest EC can be chal…

Chaos, coherence and turbulence
Javier Jimenez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13417 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13417

Chaos, coherence and turbulence
This paper is a personal overview of the efforts over the last half century to understand fluid turbulence in terms of simpler coherent units. The consequences of chaos and the concept of coherence are first reviewed, using examples from free-shear and wall-bounded shear flows, and including how the simplifications due to coherent structures have been useful in the conceptualization and control of turbulence. It is remarked that, even if this approach has revolutionized our understanding of the…

Fidelity of entanglement and quantum entropies: unveiling their relationship in quantum states and channels
Komal Kumar, Bivas Mallick, Tapaswini Patro, Nirman Ganguly
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11506

Fidelity of entanglement and quantum entropies: unveiling their relationship in quantum states and channels
Entanglement serves as a fundamental resource for various quantum information processing tasks. Fidelity of entanglement (which measures the proximity to a maximally entangled state) and various quantum entropies are key indicators for certifying entanglement in a quantum state. Quantum states with high fidelity are particularly useful for numerous information-theoretic applications. Similarly, states possessing negative conditional entropy provide significant advantages in several quantum info…

A short proof of the Alt-Caffarelli-Friedman monotonicity formula
Emanuele Salato
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13473 https://arxiv.org/…

A short proof of the Alt-Caffarelli-Friedman monotonicity formula
The Alt-Caffarelli-Friedman monotonicity formula is a cornerstone in the theory of free boundary problems. In this note we provide a short proof of this result. To prove the main stepping stone, namely the Friedland-Hayman inequality, we exploit a useful convexity property.

#Copilot "Think Deeper" mode is much more useful than Quick Response. For coding, it has a "Senior Dev" posture (even alludes to it) including saying "ping if you've a question" and talking vague, defensive BS in circles.
That's a ✅ on ego and mumbo-jumbo parts of senior dev.
#AI #LLM #programming

macOS Tahoe 26 hands-on: Liquid Glass is slick but slightly overwrought, and the new Spotlight search features are nifty and useful, but fall short of Raycast (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/apple/685052/appl

Hands on with macOS Tahoe 26: Liquid Glass, new theme options, and Spotlight
macOS Tahoe 26 developer beta 1 is here, with our first glimpse at Liquid Glass on the desktop, plus the first glimmers of Spotlight’s big new moves.

Joint Denoising of Cryo-EM Projection Images using Polar Transformers
Joakim And\'en, Justus Sagem\"uller
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11283 https:/…

Joint Denoising of Cryo-EM Projection Images using Polar Transformers
Deep neural networks~(DNNs) have proven powerful for denoising, but they are ultimately of limited use in high-noise settings, such as for cryogenic electron microscopy~(cryo-EM) projection images. In this setting, however, datasets contain a large number of projections of the same molecule, each taken from a different viewing direction. This redundancy of information is useful in traditional denoising techniques known as class averaging methods, where images are clustered, aligned, and then av…

Calculating water/energy usage for "AI" per token is a bit problematic: A data center has a massive base load even if nobody uses it just by sheer existence. And since we have no actual data for any of the popular platforms all numbers floating around are problematic and not very useful.
Like how much power does one of those servers NVIDIA cards really save if its utilization is only 50%? And are the overhead costs actually counted?

Computing and compressing local vertex functions in imaginary and real frequencies from the multipoint numerical renormalization group using quantics tensor cross interpolation
Markus Frankenbach, Marc Ritter, Mathias Pelz, Nepomuk Ritz, Jan von Delft, Anxiang Ge
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13359

Computing and compressing local vertex functions in imaginary and real frequencies from the multipoint numerical renormalization group using quantics tensor cross interpolation
The multipoint numerical renormalization group (mpNRG) is a powerful impurity solver that provides accurate spectral data useful for computing local, dynamic correlation functions in imaginary or real frequencies non-perturbatively across a wide range of interactions and temperatures. It gives access to a local, non-perturbative four-point vertex in imaginary and real frequencies, which can be used as input for subsequent computations such as diagrammatic extensions of dynamical mean--field the…

Local empirical Bayes correction for Bayesian modeling
Yoshiko Hayashi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11424 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11…

Local empirical Bayes correction for Bayesian modeling
The James-Stein estimator has attracted much interest as a shrinkage estimator that yields better estimates than the maximum likelihood estimator. The James-Stein estimator is also very useful as an argument in favor of empirical Bayesian methods. However, for problems involving large-scale data, such as differential gene expression data, the distribution is considered a mixture distribution with different means that cannot be considered sufficiently close. Therefore, it is not appropriate to a…

Looks like github copilot PR review now supports all the languages in public preview. This will be useful for me as I commit #fsharp code a lot. In fact I had a PR today that it reviewed, found a few decent suggestions actually.

On the prospects of thermalization of axion-SU(2) inflation
Sukannya Bhattacharya, Matteo Fasiello, Alexandros Papageorgiou, Ema Dimastrogiovanni
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11853 …

On the prospects of thermalization of axion-SU(2) inflation
Axion inflation models coupled to a gauge sector via a Chern-Simons term exhibit an array of interesting phenomenology including a chiral gravitational wave spectrum and primordial black hole production. They may also provide a useful mechanism for generating lepton asymmetry. The possibility to embed this class of models in UV-finite theories and their intriguing, testable, signatures make for a compelling candidate for early acceleration. Due to the Chern-Simons coupling, gauge modes may unde…

I used to think it was "#", but it's such a useful character, I am now convinced I was wrong, and "--" is way better.

Event-by-event reconstruction of air-shower events with IceCube using a two component lateral distribution function
Mark Weyrauch (for the IceCube Collaboration)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11507

Event-by-event reconstruction of air-shower events with IceCube using a two component lateral distribution function
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, located at the geographic South Pole, comprises a surface component, IceTop, and an optical in-ice array. This unique com\-bi\-na\-tion allows for coincident measurements of low-energy ($\sim \rm{GeV}$) and high-energy ($\gtrsim 400\,\rm{GeV}$) muons produced in cosmic-ray air showers. The ratio of the low- and high-energy muon yields can constitute a useful tool not only for composition analyses but also for testing different hadronic interaction models. Howev…

@… @… @… I agree that there are useful applications (with the usual caveats), but my comment was really…

@… @… @… I agree that there are useful applications (with the usual caveats), but my comment was really…

Useful to understand:
"I can tell you how it’s going to end” for Trump’s new courtiers, Wolff predicts. “It’s going to end terribly for everybody.” ... a lot will be sacked. Some will be indicted... But “in 100% of cases,” insists Wolff, “it ends in tears.”
https://www.economist.com/1843/2025/06/06/a-historical-guide-to-surviving-and-thriving-in-the-court-of-trump?giftId=a04100b1-948e-42b1-9c50-660430689d86&utm_campaign=gifted_article

So farewell then Pinetime Watch 🪦.
It isn't showing any signs of charging. even after a completely-flat battery reset. Last hope gone.
Now nobody at all is running my custom software I think, and I have no way to fix the bugs.
Could replace it, but I'm not really paying any attention to the things it measures anyway. Heartrate is too unreliable to be useful and steps seems likely to be counting my leg-jiggles since I tend to hit 10,000 most days without trying or leaving the flat.
The software which tracks my time and mood is probably better running on the phone really. Easier to add notes and detail. Can't really input text from a watch. Location data can be added in ways the watch couldn't.
So back to not wearing a watch at all I think. Who needs it now we all carry pocket watches with internet and telephony.
#pineTime #smartWatch

Interesting. I mean, obviously they're spinning things, but to the extent that Apple is focused on delivering tangible features that leverage LLMs this is actually a fundamental, key difference between them and all the other companies.
Every other company is delivering a Chatbot, and while they may be useful in certain areas, they don't integrate into day-to-day tasks.
It's like the difference between theoretical and applied mathematics.

Unveiling a Population of Strong Galaxy-Galaxy Lensed Faint Dusty Star-Forming Galaxies
Ting-Kai Yang, Chian-Chou Chen, Zhen-Kai Gao, Bovornpratch Vijarnwannaluk, Adarsh Ranjan, Wei-Hao Wang, Caitlin M. Casey, Tomotsugu Goto, Jeyhan S. Kartaltepe, Chayan Mondal, James Pearson, Chris Sedgwick, Stephen Serjeant
https://arxiv.org/a…

Unveiling a Population of Strong Galaxy-Galaxy Lensed Faint Dusty Star-Forming Galaxies
The measurements of the number density of galaxy-galaxy strong lenses can be used to put statistical constraints on the foreground mass distributions. Dusty galaxies uncovered in submillimeter surveys are particularly useful in this regard because of the large volume probed by these surveys. Previous discoveries of strong galaxy-galaxy lensed dusty galaxies are predominantly the brightest in the sky discovered by Herschel, SPT, and Planck. However, models have also predicted a non-negligible fr…

Does AlarmKit let you make an alarm without a stop button, only having an “Open” button?
Would be really useful for apps like Alarmy that require you do do something (such as math or scanning a barcode) before the alarm stops.
#wwdc

The blind leading the gamers https://www.wired.com/story/ross-minor-the-blind-leading-the-gamers/ "when Minor asks a sighted person for help, it might actually be for our sake: to let *us* feel useful and included."

He’s Blind. He Plays Video Games. Here’s How That Works
Ross Minor lost his eyesight at 8 years old. Today, he’s a hardcore gamer who runs YouTube and Twitch channels and consults for big studios. This is not—necessarily—an inspirational story.

Very, very useful:
https://abyssdomain.expert/@filippo/114496179105976467

"The disconnection between designers and users has let user interfaces to drift off to a space where only designers are satisfied by them. It is time to remember the users trying to find those buttons, trying to bend those spoons, and to take their satisfaction into account, too."
https://d…

The Button And The Spoon
As my father approaches his 80th birthday, his first contacts with the latest technologies become ever more interesting. As a pen-and-pencil architect and entrepreneur with 50 years of experience, technology is not a necessity; rather, just another useful tool. He setup his first fax machine at the end of the 90s, and got his first computer a decade after that. At some point in the 2010s he bought a smartphone, and one day asked me for help to finish some task on it. I remember his face when I …

I published the code I am using to make my miles biked per month charts... Nothing fancy, but might be useful to someone besides me.
➡️ https://rasterweb.net/raster/2025/06/06/milesbiked-a-bar-graph-generator/

milesBiked – A Bar Graph Generator
More Python code for you, or someone else...

Novel browser extension idea: Site bookmarks
Sometimes bookmarks are only useful when you're on a specific website, when visiting a specific page, etc. This extension would let you create a bookmark that would only show up as a suggestion on specific pages
Extra credit: allow users to configure include/exclude rules for showing a bookmark

I like these new #firefox tab groups. Very useful for grouping default sets of sites you use at different times of the day.

I like @…’s analysis here in many respects, both its broad conclusion (when the hype dies down, the useful parts remain and we take them for granted as normal tools), and this gem here:
Machine learning is well-suited for ❝any problem where we don’t actually know the rules and where the cost of a wrong answer is significantly lower than the benefit of a right answer.❞
1/2 https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/112716199046923540

I find the @… #firefox #addon very useful: It just takes one click to archive the website you're on. It's also easy to find archived vers…

A Survey of Data Compression Algorithms and their Applications
Mohammad Hosseini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10000 https://arxiv.org/p…

A Survey of Data Compression Algorithms and their Applications
Today, with the growing demands of information storage and data transfer, data compression is becoming increasingly important. Data Compression is a technique which is used to decrease the size of data. This is very useful when some huge files have to be transferred over networks or being stored on a data storage device and the size is more than the capacity of the data storage or would consume so much bandwidth for transmission in a network. With the advent of the Internet and mobile devices w…

Multi-entropy and the Dihedral Measures at Quantum Critical Points
Jonathan Harper, Ali Mollabashi, Tadashi Takayanagi, Kenya Tasuki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10396

Multi-entropy and the Dihedral Measures at Quantum Critical Points
The multi-entropy and dihedral measures are a class of tractable measures for multi-partite entanglement, which are labeled by the Rényi index (or replica number) $n$ as in the Rényi entanglement entropy. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that these quantities are new useful probes of quantum critical points by examining concrete examples. In particular, we compute the multi-entropy and dihedral measures in the $1+1$ dimensional massless free scalar field theory on a lattice and i…

It makes me really happy to see that already more than 1.5k people watched my talk from last month’s @… on YouTube! 🥳🙏 I take it as a sign that it was useful to many of you and that real-world, independent conferences are still valuable and relevant – just like the long tail of YouTube when it comes to the visibility and impact of conferences. I’m so glad I can con…

If you are a last.fm user, i would highly recommend you to have a look at this project:
https://katelyn.moe/bleh/
https://github.com/katel…

This essay by @… on why individual experiments on the usefulness of "AI" (or similar stuff) don't teach us anything useful and might actually harm us is brilliant.
Go read it. Too many insights to pull a quote TBH:

Trusting your own judgement on 'AI' is a huge risk
Web dev at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland

Useful.
I’ve always disliked the fact that SOHO NAT routers all seem to be configured with one of a handful of 192.168.*/24 subnets. Beyond the risk of collision, I’ve had the experience of being told vehemently by benighted customer “IT guys” that I’ve done something horribly wrong by setting their inside up on 10.175.202.0/23 or some similarly uncommon RFC1918 block, because they “knew” that it was supposed to be in the Class C range of RFC 1918.

Picking uncontested private IP subnets with usage data

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05960 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_…

AQUATIC-Diff: Additive Quantization for Truly Tiny Compressed Diffusion Models
Significant investments have been made towards the commodification of diffusion models for generation of diverse media. Their mass-market adoption is however still hobbled by the intense hardware resource requirements of diffusion model inference. Model quantization strategies tailored specifically towards diffusion models have been useful in easing this burden, yet have generally explored the Uniform Scalar Quantization (USQ) family of quantization methods. In contrast, Vector Quantization (VQ…

✨ Spring SIGs wrapped! ✨
From Prague to Paris to Ispra, 4 GÉANT Special Interest Groups (SIGs) met to explore AI, Time & Frequency networks, service strategy development, and network operations.
Spring days packed with great ideas, useful insights, new collaborations, and our beloved Lightning Talks.
👏 Big thanks to CESNET, RENATER, EC JRC & all who joined in-person and online.
Catch up on all the highlights and takeaways here 👉

GÉANT Community Programme | GÉANT CONNECT Online
The GÉANT community programme supports research and education through the activities of Special Interest Groups and Task Forces and connects academia, the business community and governmental organisations.

Balanced quasistatic evolutions of critical points in metric spaces
Stefano Almi, Massimo Fornasier, Jona Klemenc, Alessandro Scagliotti
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09812

Balanced quasistatic evolutions of critical points in metric spaces
Quasistatic evolutions of critical points of time-dependent energies exhibit piecewise smooth behavior, making them useful for modeling continuum mechanics phenomena like elastic-plasticity and fracture. Traditionally, such evolutions have been derived as vanishing viscosity and inertia limits, leading to balanced viscosity solutions. However, for nonconvex energies, these constructions have been realized in Euclidean spaces and assume non-degenerate critical points. In this paper, we take a di…

#Clojure map-interval
Like `map` -- apply function `f` to each element in `col` in turn and return the values returned in sequence, but in a single thread and pausing between each invocation of `f`.

Useful for example in circumstances where you're querying a rate-limited service.

Map, but with a delay
Map, but with a delay. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

Gauges for quadratic gravity: the extended transverse gauge and the energy-momentum tensor of the massive spin-2 field
Matheus F. S. Alves, L. G. Medeiros, Davi C. Rodrigues
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10793

Gauges for quadratic gravity: the extended transverse gauge and the energy-momentum tensor of the massive spin-2 field
We study the 4D Einstein-Hilbert action extension based on the square of the curvature tensors. Analyses of gauge and perturbation modes are often done considering the Teyssandier gauge condition. Although this approach can be useful for other higher-order extensions of quadratic gravity, a generalized transverse (or Lorentz) gauge is clear and sufficient for the present case, as explained here. We provide a detailed analysis of the generalized transverse gauge condition, its residual gauge sym…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.08739 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_qu…

Key Issues Review: Useful autonomous quantum machines
Controlled quantum machines have matured significantly. A natural next step is to increasingly grant them autonomy, freeing them from time-dependent external control. For example, autonomy could pare down the classical control wires that heat and decohere quantum circuits; and an autonomous quantum refrigerator recently reset a superconducting qubit to near its ground state, as is necessary before a computation. Which fundamental conditions are necessary for realizing useful autonomous quantum …

I installed the iPhone Google app.
Can you guess how it decided to be useful?
Without any configuration it hijacked google.com URLa from the default browser to open them in the Google app.
This is how desperation smells.

If you want to support the Fediverse financially, here's a way to do it: @…, a French non-profit, is raising money for the development of Peertube.
https://fediscience…

This week’s edition of my @… newsletter shines a light on the impact of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) across multiple computing eras—leading right up to today.
We’ve arrived at a moment where loose coupling principles are cool (and super useful) again.
Naturally, there are some live demo nuggets in the post to help bring it all to life:
🔗

The Model Context Protocol: Bridging Generational Computing Experiences
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is emerging as a transformative force in computing, with its significance uniquely appreciated across generational lines. This new protocol serves as crucial middleware for LLM-powered productivity tools, addressing needs that previous computing paradigms couldn't fu

Just read through "Sanctuary" by Paola Mendez & Abby Sher, which was electrifying as I read news about ICE kidnappings in local towns, including one in Waltham today where they left a kid alone on the sidewalk:
#ICE #kidnappings

After writing to my MP, it occurs to me that there may be people in the UK who would like to do so too, but may not know about these incredibly useful resources:
https://www.writetothem.com/

WriteToThem
WriteToThem is a website which provides an easy way to contact MPs, councillors and other elected representatives.

quick and easy way to build a website for your r package: #rstats #package

One thing I've noticed about the coverage of the LA protests is the differing use of "non-lethal" and "less-lethal" in describing weapons being used by the state against protesters.
And in this case I think the liability-dodging term "less lethal" is actually more useful, and should be incorporated into style-guides.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.12519 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSE_…

Multi-View Adaptive Contrastive Learning for Information Retrieval Based Fault Localization
Most studies focused on information retrieval-based techniques for fault localization, which built representations for bug reports and source code files and matched their semantic vectors through similarity measurement. However, such approaches often ignore some useful information that might help improve localization performance, such as 1) the interaction relationship between bug reports and source code files; 2) the similarity relationship between bug reports; and 3) the co-citation relations…

Things to watch every 6 months
#mastodonadmin

Mycelium: A Transformation-Embedded LSM-Tree
Holly Casaletto, Jeff Lefevre, Aldrin Montana, Peter Alvaro
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08923 https://

Mycelium: A Transformation-Embedded LSM-Tree
Compaction is a necessary, but often costly background process in write-optimized data structures like LSM-trees that reorganizes incoming data that is sequentially appended to logs. In this paper, we introduce Transformation-Embedded LSM-trees (TE-LSM), a novel approach that transparently embeds a variety of data transformations into the compaction process. While many others have sought to reduce the high cost of compaction, TE-LSMs leverage the opportunity to embed other useful work to amorti…

@… I get that, it doesn't have to be useful for everyone to be the most useful thing, in the same way that if you only have one food-holding device, better make it a pasta bowl, even though not everything is pasta.

Oh god, the picture invokes some very mousetrap-adjacent vibes, in the @… sense of the word. https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/114440131512138899

Written in 2012, very soon after Googles and Facebooks of the world started to create information bubbles for us to trap ourselves in. It will be annoying, but I think useful to see the perspective at the time.
#books #nextread

Very good points, a reply to a CEO who wondered why his engineers were resistant to using LLMs for coding:

Was looking for a trash can in this Black Forest town, searched in @…, no results, so I walked around and added all trash cans I could find and other stuff I found useful 🗑️
#OpenStreetMap

Useful article...
"The National Guard in Los Angeles"
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-national-guard-in-los-angeles

Apropos @… the french developer collective @… are currently trying to raise the (for #bigTech derisory) amount of EUR 75,000 to develop the opensource #fediverse competitor app to Youtube. Maybe chuck 'em a few euros if you think it useful?
https://support.joinpeertube.org/en/

Milwaukee Bike Map Hub
"Track the progress of protected bikeways, plan your bike route through the city, and view existing bike infrastructure maps..."
There's also a bike rack locator, a "low stress" bike map, and other useful info.
https://storymaps.arcgis.co…

Milwaukee Bike Map Hub
Track the progress of protected bikeways, plan your bike route through the city, and view existing bike infrastructure maps

“I can also find no obvious correlation between where someone lands on that spectrum [of finding LLMs useful for coding] and things like experience levels; people fall here and there regardless of where they work, how much trust I have in their ability, how good they are at communicating, how much of a hard worker they are, or how willing to learn they might be.”
3/

Entropic Dynamics approach to Relational Quantum Mechanics
Ariel Caticha, Hassaan Saleem
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07921 https://arx…

Entropic Dynamics approach to Relational Quantum Mechanics
The general framework of Entropic Dynamics (ED) is used to construct non-relativistic models of relational quantum mechanics from well known inference principles -- probability, entropy and information geometry. Although only partially relational -- the absolute structures of simultaneity and Euclidean geometry are still retained -- these models provide a useful testing ground for ideas that will prove useful in the context of more realistic relativistic theories. The fact that in ED the positi…

So all in all, this seems like a pretty normal set of WWDC announcements. A nice cosmetic redesign, which will be fun to play around with; the rest are daily quality of life improvements, and the artificial intelligence stuff seems like modest incremental gains that seem realistic, and maybe even somewhat useful.
Not the pie in the sky bullshit that ended up never shipping last year.
#WWDC25

Another useful article:
"What to know about Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to LA protests"
https://apnews.com/article/insurrection-act-trump-troops-newsom-military-national-guard-…

What to know about Trump's deployment of National Guard troops to LA protests
President Donald Trump says he’s deploying 2,000 California National Guard troops to Los Angeles to respond to immigration protests, over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. It’s not the first time Trump has activated the National Guard to quell protests. In 2020, he asked governors of several states to send troops to Washington, D.C. to respond to demonstrations that arose after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officers. Here are some things to know about when and …

On top of all of this there's a meta-effect: a certain class of their best engineers want no part of this and have left. The people with the peak insight that simplify things and unify products into cohesive, useful systems are leaving.

Infrared Divergence in QED and the Fluctuation of Electromagnetic Fields
Takeshi Fukuyama
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08269 https://ar…

Infrared Divergence in QED and the Fluctuation of Electromagnetic Fields
We reconsider the well known infrared divergence (IRD) in QED from the various graphs and relate with the electromagnetic fluctuation etc. based on the Fock space formalism. It may be useful for discriminating it from the alternative approach based on the dressed asymptotic space.

This is such a perfect analogy.
My goto is "asbestos". Super useful invention which bit us in the ass afterwards.
https://xoxo.zone/@annika/114614639082253074

A Sound and Complete Characterization of Fair Asynchronous Session Subtyping
Mario Bravetti, Luca Padovani, Gianluigi Zavattaro
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06078

A Sound and Complete Characterization of Fair Asynchronous Session Subtyping
Session types are abstractions of communication protocols enabling the static analysis of message-passing processes. Refinement notions for session types are key to support safe forms of process substitution while preserving their compatibility with the rest of the system. Recently, a fair refinement relation for asynchronous session types has been defined allowing the anticipation of message outputs with respect to an unbounded number of message inputs. This refinement is useful to capture com…

It can be useful to remember who are these national guard troops. You may be surprised to realize that the majority of our men (and a few of our women) are already subject to Federal control by FFOTUS as commander-in-chief of the militia.
They are defined by our Federal law https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/te…

US political contradictions; knowledge systems
As Trump at least partially succeeds in constructing an alternate reality for his most ardent followers, it's tempting to think of his dogma as false, in contrast to some imagined "truth" which his non-followers are smart enough to believe in. But a more nuanced view of knowledge would admit that different groups of people have different shared truths, constituting different knowledge systems which each deviate from what's objectively measurable in different ways, and in fact they each accept different standards of what is objective, so there's not really a single "ground truth" we can even compare to to determine which of these knowledge systems is "more correct" (similar problems arise even if we only care about "more useful").
To make this more concrete, we can see that e.g., competing quantum physics theories, or likewise competing religious beliefs, have no reasonable basis on which to judge between them, either in terms of "truth" or "utility." So the Trump-dogma knowledge system, although bad, morally repugnant, etc., can't so easily be dismissed as "false" in my view. "Distorted" or "malignant" or "evil" or "contradictory" are better monikers, in my opinion.
But what I'm even more interested in thinking about is: in what ways does the current American liberal "common sense" knowledge system already bear the scars of past fascist lies & contradictions? I can think of a few:
"Columbus was an explorer."
This is "factually accurate" in the same way some of Trump's propaganda is, but it's also a cruel distortion of "Columbus was a child murderer," and it's a misrepresentation that serves an evil purpose, yet which is widely taught in elementary schools today.
Another: "dropping atomic bombs on civilians in Japan was necessary to end WWII."
Perhaps in the future we'll have "family separation & the 2025 ICE crackdowns were necessary to end the immigration crisis," although I dearly hope not.
"Reparations for slavery aren't reasonable," is yet another...
I'll close this rambling with a question: what other fascist lies have you noticed that are normalized in America right now from past Trump-like leaders (or even from less overtly fascist institutions)?

New version of the most useful software tool on the planet just dropped! https://fosstodon.org/@wader/114606618897014855

Saw a computer (desktop tower PC) on the side of the road today and stopped to see if there were any useful parts I could pull from it because I thought it would be hilarious to have parts in my NAS from a literal garbage PC on the side of the road.

Describing a coup as an “invasion from within” seems fairly accurate to me, and maybe useful to people who are having trouble getting their heads around the danger of the moment.

Non-Abelian orbifolds of the SO(32) heterotic string
Miguel Hernandez-Segura, Saul Ramos-Sanchez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08370 https://

Non-Abelian orbifolds of the SO(32) heterotic string
Non-Abelian toroidal heterotic orbifolds have received comparatively little attention, mainly because of the significant computational challenges they pose, even at the level of computing their matter spectrum. Similarly, the SO(32) heterotic string remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we provide some useful tools to handle this situation. We find that certain non-Abelian orbifolds can be studied using the techniques that are common to Abelian compactifications. In such cases, we show …

I merely remark that a form of littering - that of wrapping single sided packing tape or double sided carpet tape between lamp posts on a street (or across a street), with a small notch cut onto the edge of the tape every six feet, can be a useful non-lethal way to slow the advance of a phalanx of people of troops.
Yes, your fingerprints will stick to the tape and do anticipate being beaten and arrested.

A defense trick:
If you are in a crowd of advancing ICE or maga-cops you can drop strips of packing tape (the two or three inch wide clear stuff available at any drug or stationary store) or carpet tape (double sided super strong adhesive) in their path. It can really entangle an advancing phalanx.
(This trick can bounce back onto those who deploy it. It may be useful to tack one or both ends of the tape to the ground to prevent it from blowing back and entangling you, or if yo…

I consider these kinds of events to be nearly useless symbolism, preaching to the choir.
I do accept that these events are useful as means to meet others, but one should not expect these events to have even the slightest impact on the maga/white-nationalist/musk-ites... Nor do I think they have much impact on those who are in "the middle" and do not particularly engage in politics.
"Nearly 1,000 gather at Main Beach to create ‘Resist!’ human banner protesting Trum…

Nearly 1,000 gather at Main Beach to create ‘Resist!’ human banner protesting Trump administration
Around 1,000 people gathered Saturday morning at Santa Cruz Main Beach to spell out the word “Resist!” The event, organized by Indivisible Santa Cruz County, aimed to protest the Trump administration and celebrate Santa Cruz Pride’s 50th anniversary.