Tootfinder

#PgBouncer is useful, important, and fraught with peril
https://jpcamara.com/2023/04/12/pgbouncer-is-useful.html

Cost-effective catalyst for converting CO2 emissions to useful products
McMaster researchers show catalyst made of nickel, nitrogen, and carbon efficient at converting CO2 to CO.
By Greg Basky
Sep 3, 2025
Researchers from McMaster University in Ontario have come up with a new formula that adds tiny particles of a material called nickel zinc carbide to a type of nickel-nitrogen-carbon catalysts under development in their laboratory.

No.
A thing isn't good and useful because many people use it.
A thing is good and useful because it's good and useful.
Just some counterexamples:
- Many people smoke
- Many people use Windows
- Many people use cars way too big for their use case
- Many people use homeopathic "medicine"
- Many people use Ring cameras
Etc. ad infinitum.
There's neither causation nor correlation.

Labor Notes recently released a guide to help organize for the much-anticipated May Day general strike in…2028.
It’s useful information, but as the countdown clock on the site shows, still 937 days away.
At the rate the Trump administration is moving, there might not be much left of unions by the scheduled date.
The criminally underreported National Security Presidential Memorandum recently issued by Trump looks to crackdown on a whole range of activities. -- including act…

🚨🚨🚨 uv has fixed my pet issue https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/6314 and `uv tool install ansible --with-executables-from ansible-core` works now! 🚨🚨🚨
for us, that was the last blocker before going all-in on uv.

Support including dependency executables (e.g., `--include-deps`) in `uv tool install` · Issue #6314 · astral-sh/uv
hi, congrats on 0.3.0! I've noticed one very useful pipx option that uv tool is currently missing: --install-deps. It means that it also adds the CLIs of packages it depends on. This is crucial for...

@… I think there’s more to it. They have outsized influence, not just presence.
Perhaps another term is more useful, then. The UK Competition Act, for example, talks about a “dominant position” in a given market.

Listened in to the Academy Software Foundation's virtual townhall about the Open Review Initiative. I knew that project because they provide very useful ffmpeg command lines and they're doing all the encoding tests to figure out good quality settings and obscure parameters.
Learnings from the presentation: prores by ffmpeg is sadly pretty crappy compared to the real prores from Apple. There's the OpenAPV codec that is gearing up to be an open-source alternative:

IPA: An Information-Preserving Input Projection Framework for Efficient Foundation Model Adaptation
Yuan Yin, Shashanka Venkataramanan, Tuan-Hung Vu, Andrei Bursuc, Matthieu Cord
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04398

IPA: An Information-Preserving Input Projection Framework for Efficient Foundation Model Adaptation
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as LoRA, reduce adaptation cost by injecting low-rank updates into pretrained weights. However, LoRA's down-projection is randomly initialized and data-agnostic, discarding potentially useful information. Prior analyses show that this projection changes little during training, while the up-projection carries most of the adaptation, making the random input compression a performance bottleneck. We propose IPA, a feature-aware projection framewo…

AI can be useful but doesn't "understand" a thing..., this funny AI general picture illustrates that perfectly, it looks nice at first glance 😆
#AI

When are two algorithms the same? Towards addressing Hilbert's 24th problem
Konstantin Doubrovinski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02764 https://arxiv.org/…

When are two algorithms the same? Towards addressing Hilbert's 24th problem
The informal question of when two theorem proofs are "essentially the same" goes back to David Hilbert, who considered adding it (or something largely equivalent) to his famous list of open problems, but eventually decided to leave it out. Given that the notion of a formal proof is closely related to that of a (computer) program, i.e. a recursive function, it may be useful to ask the same question with regard to programs instead. Here we propose a minimalistic approach to this question within R…

MLSD: A Novel Few-Shot Learning Approach to Enhance Cross-Target and Cross-Domain Stance Detection
Parush Gera, Tempestt Neal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03725 https://

MLSD: A Novel Few-Shot Learning Approach to Enhance Cross-Target and Cross-Domain Stance Detection
We present the novel approach for stance detection across domains and targets, Metric Learning-Based Few-Shot Learning for Cross-Target and Cross-Domain Stance Detection (MLSD). MLSD utilizes metric learning with triplet loss to capture semantic similarities and differences between stance targets, enhancing domain adaptation. By constructing a discriminative embedding space, MLSD allows a cross-target or cross-domain stance detection model to acquire useful examples from new target domains. We …

Is Synthetic Image Augmentation Useful for Imbalanced Classification Problems? Case-Study on the MIDOG2025 Atypical Cell Detection Competition
Leire Benito-Del-Valle, Pedro A. Moreno-S\'anchez, Itziar Egusquiza, Itsaso Vitoria, Artzai Pic\'on, Cristina L\'opez-Saratxaga, Adrian Galdran
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02612

Is Synthetic Image Augmentation Useful for Imbalanced Classification Problems? Case-Study on the MIDOG2025 Atypical Cell Detection Competition
The MIDOG 2025 challenge extends prior work on mitotic figure detection by introducing a new Track 2 on atypical mitosis classification. This task aims to distinguish normal from atypical mitotic figures in histopathology images, a clinically relevant but highly imbalanced and cross-domain problem. We investigated two complementary backbones: (i) ConvNeXt-Small, pretrained on ImageNet, and (ii) a histopathology-specific ViT from Lunit trained via self-supervision. To address the strong prevalen…

Interpreting Performance Profiles with Deep Learning
Zhuoran Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02729 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02729

Interpreting Performance Profiles with Deep Learning
Profiling tools (also known as profilers) play an important role in understanding program performance at runtime, such as hotspots, bottlenecks, and inefficiencies. While profilers have been proven to be useful, they give extra burden to software engineers. Software engineers, as the users, are responsible to interpret the complex performance data and identify actionable optimization in program source code. However, it can be challenging for users to associate inefficiencies with the program se…

Plugging Leaks in Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation and Verification
Theodoros Kapourniotis, Dominik Leichtle, Luka Music, Harold Ollivier
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03227 http…

Plugging Leaks in Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation and Verification
With the advent of quantum cloud computing, the security of delegated quantum computation has become of utmost importance. While multiple statistically secure blind verification schemes in the prepare-and-send model have been proposed, none of them achieves full quantum fault-tolerance, a prerequisite for useful verification on scalable quantum computers. In this paper, we present the first fault-tolerant blind verification scheme for universal quantum computations able to handle secret-depende…

Labor Notes recently released a guide to help organize for the much-anticipated May Day general strike in…2028.
It’s useful information, but as the countdown clock on the site shows, still 937 days away.
At the rate the Trump administration is moving, there might not be much left of unions by the scheduled date.
The criminally underreported National Security Presidential Memorandum recently issued by Trump looks to crackdown on a whole range of activities. -- including act…

PromptMap: Supporting Exploratory Text-to-Image Generation
Yuhan Guo, Xingyou Liu, Xiaoru Yuan, Kai Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02814 https://arxiv.org/p…

PromptMap: Supporting Exploratory Text-to-Image Generation
Text-to-image generative models can be tremendously valuable in supporting creative tasks by providing inspirations and enabling quick exploration of different design ideas. However, one common challenge is that users may still not be able to find anything useful after many hours and hundreds of images. Without effective help, users can easily get lost in the vast design space, forgetting what has been tried and what has not. In this work, we first propose the Design-Exploration model to formal…

#ps3
I got to the syscon using my brothers win-pc ( coudnt auth or get the right com port addres on my linux system).
The system has errors related to RSX and i hope not also CELL, since error 3034 is mostly RSX related, but error 4422 on forums can be either CELL or RSX.
Either way if anyone will find useful my syscon log ill post it here:
Communication OK!
>$: au…

An invertible generative model for forward and inverse problems
Tristan van Leeuwen, Christoph Brune, Marcello Carioni
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03910 https://

An invertible generative model for forward and inverse problems
We formulate the inverse problem in a Bayesian framework and aim to train a generative model that allows us to simulate (i.e., sample from the likelihood) and do inference (i.e., sample from the posterior). We review the use of triangular normalizing flows for conditional sampling in this context and show how to combine two such triangular maps (an upper and a lower one) in to one invertible mapping that can be used for simulation and inference. We work out several useful properties of this inv…

Bridging the Prediction Error Method and Subspace Identification: A Weighted Null Space Fitting Method
Jiabao He, S. Joe Qin, H\r{a}kan Hjalmarsson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02529

Bridging the Prediction Error Method and Subspace Identification: A Weighted Null Space Fitting Method
Subspace identification methods (SIMs) have proven to be very useful and numerically robust for building state-space models. While most SIMs are consistent, few if any can achieve the efficiency of the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE). Conversely, the prediction error method (PEM) with a quadratic criteria is equivalent to MLE, but it comes with non-convex optimization problems and requires good initialization points. This contribution proposes a weighted null space fitting (WNSF) approach for…

From @… for @… :
https://www.

The Anti-Porn Crusade That Censored Steam and Itch.io Started 30 Years Ago
Keywords and tags have never been a useful metric for distilling nuance. Pushing for regulations based on them is repeating a 30-year history of porn panic online.

The Open DAC 2025 Dataset for Sorbent Discovery in Direct Air Capture
Anuroop Sriram, Logan M. Brabson, Xiaohan Yu, Sihoon Choi, Kareem Abdelmaqsoud, Elias Moubarak, Pim de Haan, Sindy L\"owe, Johann Brehmer, John R. Kitchin, Max Welling, C. Lawrence Zitnick, Zachary Ulissi, Andrew J. Medford, David S. Sholl
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508…

The Open DAC 2025 Dataset for Sorbent Discovery in Direct Air Capture
Identifying useful sorbent materials for direct air capture (DAC) from humid air remains a challenge. We present the Open DAC 2025 (ODAC25) dataset, a significant expansion and improvement upon ODAC23 (Sriram et al., ACS Central Science, 10 (2024) 923), comprising nearly 70 million DFT single-point calculations for CO$_2$, H$_2$O, N$_2$, and O$_2$ adsorption in 15,000 MOFs. ODAC25 introduces chemical and configurational diversity through functionalized MOFs, high-energy GCMC-derived placements,…

#Russia is a settler colonialist empire.
It's all it ever was. Even during Soviet times.
And if you're pro-Russia, your anti-imperialism is a façade, a joke or a ruse. And you yourself are either cumplicit of a useful idiot.

Type-Based Incorrectness Reasoning
Zhe Zhou, Benjamin Delaware, Suresh Jagannathan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01511 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01511…

Type-Based Incorrectness Reasoning
A coverage type generalizes refinement types found in many functional languages with support for must-style underapproximate reasoning. Property-based testing frameworks are one particularly useful domain where such capabilities are useful as they allow us to verify the completeness, as well as safety, of test generators. There is a surprising connection between the kind of underapproximate reasoning coverage types offer and the style of reasoning enabled by recently proposed Incorrectness Logi…

Perturbations of Plane Waves and Quadratic Quasinormal Modes on the Lightring
Kwinten Fransen, David Pere\~niguez, Jaime Redondo-Yuste
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03598 https://

Perturbations of Plane Waves and Quadratic Quasinormal Modes on the Lightring
We study second order gravitational perturbations on plane wave spacetimes from both the metric and curvature perturbation points of view. For the former, we explicitly use the isometries of the background to introduce tensor oscillator harmonics, which render Einstein's equations algebraic around symmetric plane waves. For the latter, we formulate the first and second order Teukolsky equations in a Geroch-Held-Penrose covariant way. Both approaches are useful in their own right, and together w…

It is important to recognize how horribly *NORMAL* that is.
It's only in the past century or so that humans have had any capacity to fight infection, because we had no idea how it worked until the mid-19thC, even though we had rudimentary Smallpox vaccination (and 'variolation') earlier. We didn't have safe and effective drugs to fight *any* infection until the 20thC and didn't have useful antivirals until the 1990s.
In a sense, we're all spoiled by mode…

Clayton Cubitt (@claytoncubitt.bsky.social)
That "summer cold" you have? It's COVID. You've got COVID. It's a fact and it's still ripping through the world completely unrestrained.

A Way to Get More Useful Performance Feedback?
#MastodonMusician #MusicianTips

A Way to Get More Useful Performance Feedback?
Want to get more useful feedback from colleagues? Turns out you don’t want to ask for “feedback.” Research suggests there’s a better word.

#InfoSec

from my link log —
CSS font-size-adjust is useful.
https://matklad.github.io/2025/07/16/font-size-adjust.html
saved 2025-07-23

Stochastic Calculus Approach to Thermodynamics of Jump Processes
Lars Torbj{\o}rn Stutzer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00940 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00940…

Stochastic Calculus Approach to Thermodynamics of Jump Processes
Stochastic thermodynamics is the field of study relating fluctuations in stochastic systems to thermodynamic quantities. The total entropy production (EP), is central to the thermodynamic classification of systems. Non-equilibrium systems manifestly all have non-zero EP and therefore impose an "arrow of time". Thermodynamic inequalities are lower bounds on the total EP and are especially useful when only parts of systems are operationally accessible. We use a stochastic calculus approach to dir…

Me, shoppingtonz is very smart, I read "mod function".
Then I queried an LLM:
"What does that mean?"
LLM goes "useful in coding or whateva"
I'm like " COOL. Now I know programming!"
Reality: NO YOU DON'T!
I'm like "Yes, I'll become a great programmer. Mod function, I pronounced it! Great achievement!"
Reality: ONE MOMENT! Can I have your attention please
I'm like "I feel…

On Effectiveness of Graph Neural Network Architectures for Network Digital Twins (NDTs)
Iulisloi Zacarias, Oussama Ben Taarit, Admela Jukan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02373 http…

On Effectiveness of Graph Neural Network Architectures for Network Digital Twins (NDTs)
Future networks, such as 6G, will need to support a vast and diverse range of interconnected devices and applications, each with its own set of requirements. While traditional network management approaches will suffice, an automated solutions are becoming a must. However, network automation frameworks are prone to errors, and often they employ ML-based techniques that require training to learn how the network can be optimized. In this sense, network digital twins are a useful tool that allows f…

There might still be a lot of broken rules and errors in there,
Please help me fix them 😏
I hope some people find my little copy&paste project and help fix and add more useful rules. 🙏
Yes, I know, there are tools like mago and other great linters and fixers, but the cool thing is: phpstan is PHP. If a rule does not fit, I can make it fit. If I need a new rule, I can build it myself. I´m not a Rust or Python; I work with PHP, so I prefer independence! 💪
🔗

AI is powerful and useful when it's properly trained and properly constrained.
And the slop we're seeing right now is neither.

The most widespread and arguably most damaging logical fallacy is:
"Many people use [thing], therefore it must be good and useful"

Just pushed an update for https://thi.ng/genart-api (v0.29.0) which now supports dynamic switching of time providers. This is useful for situations where you want to switch from realtime animation to offline-based timing, e.g. to export high-resolution image sequences and give the browser time to grab & encode e…

thi.ng/genart-api

Acceleration of nuclear power development is part of the Trump administration’s efforts to focus NASA on human spaceflight
Acting NASA director Duffy cites plans by China and Russia to put a reactor on the moon by the mid-2030s
as part of a partnership to build a base there.
If they were first, China and Russia “could potentially declare a keep-out zone” that would inhibit what the United States could do there, Mr. Duffy said.
The directive calls for the appointment of…

NASA’s Acting Administrator Calls for a Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
The acceleration of nuclear development is part of the Trump administration’s efforts to focus NASA on human spaceflight. A reactor would be useful for long-term stays on the moon.

Russia exceeds all historical precedents for cruelty and villainy.
Trump supports the evil deeds and plans, increasing the suffering and terror of the Russian genocide against Ukraine.
Americans who voted for Trump and who support him still, they are all useful idiots for the Kremlin, and despicable examples of the lowest depths of depravity.
Worse yet are the billionaires who see themselves as a completely different class of human, above the pull of basic empathy or conce…

Bogged Down in Mud, Torrential Rains, and Bombs
Live from Ukraine 🇺🇦

Reconstructing the Probability Measure of a Curie-Weiss Model Observing the Realisations of a Subset of Spins
Miguel Ballesteros, Ivan Naumkin, Gabor Toth
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03452

Reconstructing the Probability Measure of a Curie-Weiss Model Observing the Realisations of a Subset of Spins
We study the problem of reconstructing the probability measure of the Curie-Weiss model from a sample of the voting behaviour of a subset of the population. While originally used to study phase transitions in statistical mechanics, the Curie-Weiss or mean-field model has been applied to study phenomena, where many agents interact with each other. It is useful to measure the degree of social cohesion in social groups, which manifests in the way the members of the group influence each others' dec…

While travelling through Jeju, SouthKorea a friend of mine and the blog @… met the owners of Burden, a company making reusable tote bags which can be easily packed inside a dog plush or round case. Here is the review he wrote up for us.

Review: BURDEN – Fashionably Reducing Single-Use Plastics
💡This review was written by a friend of mine, with a final proofreading and layout done by myself. It is a well-known fact that plastics are useful, yet they can have a detrimental impact on the environment. Plastic waste has not only been piling up drastically in landfills, but can

Nematic and partially polarized phases in rhombohedral graphene with varying number of layers: An extensive Hartree-Fock Study
Guillermo Parra-Mart\'inez, Alejandro Jimeno-Pozo, Jose Angel Silva-Guill\'en, Francisco Guinea
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00986

Nematic and partially polarized phases in rhombohedral graphene with varying number of layers: An extensive Hartree-Fock Study
Rhombohedral graphene systems with different number of layers feature an abundance of correlated phases and superconducting states in experimental measurements with different doping and displacement fields. Some of the superconducting pockets can emerge from - or close to - one of the correlated states. Therefore, studying the phase diagram of the correlated phases for varying number of layers could be useful to interpret the experimental observations. To achieve this, systematic Hartree-Fock c…

Construction and properties of fuzzy-valued fractal interpolation function by using iterated function system
CholHui Yun, Hyang Choe, MiGyong Ri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00861

Construction and properties of fuzzy-valued fractal interpolation function by using iterated function system
In nature, there are many phenomena with both irregularity and uncertainty. Therefore, a fuzzy-valued fractal interpolation is more useful for modeling them than fuzzy interpolation or fractal interpolation. We construct fractal interpolation functions that interpolate a given data set of fuzzy numbers using an iterated function system and study the Holder continuity of the constructed function. Firstly, we construct an iterated function system (IFS) using the given data set and construct a fuz…

Good. This is how it’s done.
Does this mean “you should love this politician” or “you should count on this politician to save us all” or “you should get a tattoo of this politician on your buttocks?”
No.
Does it mean “the words and behavior of public figures matter” and “politicians can be useful tools of resistance” and “keep the pressure up because it’s working?”
Hell yes. https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:26tsf647wqnoo7umh4ywwz7a/post/3lxuwzcx4s22r

Useful ideas on antifascist action
'It’s a horrendous time to be a refugee' | Morning Star
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/its-horrendous-time-be-refugee

Just finished "Look on the Bright Side" by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann. Sequel to "Go With the Flow" about a group of highschool friends who become activists to get their school to stock free mensuration products. I really enjoyed the first book, and this one was also great, with some discussion of LGBTQI issues and a but more focus on romance. As with the first book, there's a layer of explicit pedagogical material included that makes summer scenes a but less natural, but that's fine and useful. As with the first book, it models making & growing past mistakes, which is great.
I find myself drawing a comparison to "Does my Body Offend You?" by Mayra Cuevas. Both deal with highschool friends doing feminist activism to change their schools, by where Cuevas deals more directly with topics like sex, sexual assault, and racism, Williams & Schneemann avoid those topics while still including a lot of the same friendship struggles.
#AmReading

How quickly have we gone from: it would be useful to be able to select hotels and overnight stays based on #EV charging points to: never mind, I'm not going to charge there anyway because it's bloody expensive. Three years?

@… 's important text about the AI bubble "It's [AI] a grab-bag of useful (sometimes very useful) tools that can sometimes make workers' lives better, when workers get to decide how and when they're used."

#EroticMusings Week 14 (August 31-September 6) Characters: It’s a traditional day of gift-giving for your characters – what do they give you?
If it's winter solstice, they will gift me sweets, lucky ribbons to tie to "wish trees" and blessed charms.
If it's my birthday, they'd give me small but useful trinkets. A new chain for the chatelaine, a new fan, a …

One of my favorite types of Mastodon post is when someone posts a list of useful stuff, and then, as people comment or they get new information, they keep adding more info until it’s a juggernaut of useful stuff.

Experimental Evaluation of Dynamic Topic Modeling Algorithms
Ngozichukwuka Onah, Nadine Steinmetz, Hani Al-Sayeh, Kai-Uwe Sattler
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00710 https://

Experimental Evaluation of Dynamic Topic Modeling Algorithms
The amount of text generated daily on social media is gigantic and analyzing this text is useful for many purposes. To understand what lies beneath a huge amount of text, we need dependable and effective computing techniques from self-powered topic models. Nevertheless, there are currently relatively few thorough quantitative comparisons between these models. In this study, we compare these models and propose an assessment metric that documents how the topics change in time.

Q&A with Pavel Durov on Telegram, his arrest, censorship, not using a phone, Romanian elections, VK, encryption, Edward Snowden, spring 2018 poisoning, and more (Lex Fridman)
https://lexfridman.com/pavel-durov-transcript

Gatherers4J. A library of useful custom intermediate stream operations for Java
https://tginsberg.github.io/gatherers4j/

The Anti-Porn Crusade That Censored Steam and Itch.io Started 30 Years Ago https://www.404media.co/steam-itchio-collective-shout-nsfw-games-campaign/

#Accessibility modelers using #r5r #rstats, check this GUI for playing around with R5 network. If many people find it useful, I would get signal if I should invest any more free time into it.

Really deep dive into how commercial spyware works on mobile phones. Very useful detection and prevention ideas too. #cybersecurity
From: @…

Multi-Agent Data Visualization and Narrative Generation
Anton Wolter, Georgios Vidalakis, Michael Yu, Ankit Grover, Vaishali Dhanoa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00481 https://

Multi-Agent Data Visualization and Narrative Generation
Recent advancements in the field of AI agents have impacted the way we work, enabling greater automation and collaboration between humans and agents. In the data visualization field, multi-agent systems can be useful for employing agents throughout the entire data-to-communication pipeline. We present a lightweight multi-agent system that automates the data analysis workflow, from data exploration to generating coherent visual narratives for insight communication. Our approach combines a hybrid…

It's useful that there's the possibility to add #gnd ids to #zenodo as well (in case creators don't have an #orcid). I wish it'd be clearer from the GUI that the required input format is …

Criticality analysis of nuclear binding energy neural networks
S. A. Sundberg, R. J. Furnstahl
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01001 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.…

Criticality analysis of nuclear binding energy neural networks
Machine learning methods, in particular deep learning methods such as artificial neural networks (ANNs) with many layers, have become widespread and useful tools in nuclear physics. However, these ANNs are typically treated as ``black boxes'', with their architecture (width, depth, and weight/bias initialization) and the training algorithm and parameters chosen empirically by optimizing learning based on limited exploration. We test a non-empirical approach to understanding and optimizing nucle…

Thermal Imaging Survey: DIY vs Professional - Learn how a thermal imaging survey can spot real problems. What does it cost? Is a trained operator useful? #thermalImaging #cutCarbon -

Thermal Imaging Survey: DIY vs Professional
Learn how a thermal imaging survey can spot real problems. What does it cost? Is a trained operator useful? #thermalImaging #cutCarbon

I'm using a lot more ChatGPT lately and it's useful for so many things. But it's absolutely best for cooking. I'm a competent cook and can sort of wing recipes in several cuisines. It's great for things like "help me cook an Indian curry with chicken thighs, cilantro, and yogurt".

I was recently asked where I would see useful applications of CCS. My answer was: Cement🧱🪨 and Biomethane🐄🌱🏭
Most won't be surprised that I said Cement. Yet, Biomethane is not what people usually have in mind. But bear with me, it makes a lot of sense.
CCS is a controversial topic to begin with. That has a lot to do with the fact that many see it - often rightfully so - as a delay strategy by the fossil fuel🛢️ industry.

🫓 Ultra-flat optic pushes beyond what was previously thought possible
#optics

Ultra-flat optic pushes beyond what was previously thought possible
Cameras are everywhere. For over two centuries, these devices have grown increasingly popular and proven to be so useful, they have become an indispensable part of modern life.

Dependence of halo properties on central-satellite magnitude gaps through weak lensing measurements
Mingtao Yang, Jiaxin Han, Wenting Wang, Hekun Li, Cong Liu, Jun Zhang, Shuai Feng, Shiyin Shen, Zhenjie Liu, Xiaohu Yang, Yi Lu, Surhud More
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00667

Dependence of halo properties on central-satellite magnitude gaps through weak lensing measurements
The magnitude gap between the central and satellite galaxies encodes information about the mass accretion history of a dark matter halo, and serves as a useful observational probe for the mass distribution in a halo. In this work, we perform the first weak lensing test of the connections between the magnitude gap and the halo profile. We measure the halo profiles of isolated central galaxies (ICGs) selected primarily from the SDSS Main Galaxy Sample. Halo mass and concentration are inferred by …

In my second instalment of thinking out loud about #ArtsPedagogy for film schools, I touch on drawing, sensory learning, experience, and the audience. I big reach for a short blog post, but a useful way to both train myself to write down what I’m thinking and also to record the connections in my thinking for future reference…

A new addition theorem for the 3-D Navier-Lam\'e system and its application to the method of fundamental solutions
J. A. Barcel\'o, C. Castro, A. Ruiz, M. C. Vilela
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00515

A new addition theorem for the 3-D Navier-Lamé system and its application to the method of fundamental solutions
We obtain a new addition theorem for the fundamental solution of the Navier-Lamé system in dimension 3 satisfying the Kupradze radiation conditions. This provides an expansion of this fundamental solution that involves only the evaluation of Bessel functions and scalar spherical harmonics. This is particularly useful in collocation numerical methods based on fundamental solutions, such as the boundary element method or the method of fundamental solutions. For this last method, we show its effi…

A Gentle Introduction to Blind signatures: From RSA to Lattice-based Cryptography
Aditya Bhardwaj, P\'eter Kutas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02189 https://

A Gentle Introduction to Blind signatures: From RSA to Lattice-based Cryptography
Blind signatures were first introduced by David Chaum. They allow a user to have a message signed by a signer without revealing the message itself. This property is particularly useful in applications such as electronic voting and digital cash, where user anonymity is important. In a blind signature scheme, the user blinds their message before sending it to the signer, who signs the blinded message. The user then unblinds the signed message to obtain a valid signature that can be verified publi…

The structure of weak solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations
Zachary Bradshaw, Igor Kukavica
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01009 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.…

The structure of weak solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations
The existence of superfluous solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations in the whole space implies that not all solutions with uniformly locally bounded energy satisfy a useful local pressure expansion. We prove that every weak solution in a parabolic uniformly local $L^2$ class can be obtained as a transgalilean transformation of a solution satisfying the local pressure expansion in a distributional sense. This gives a powerful representation theorem for a large class of solutions. We use this s…

Open Science, Open Innovation? The Role of Open Access in Patenting Activity
Abdelghani Maddi (GEMASS), Ahmad Yaman Abdin, Francesco Fdp de Pretis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00829

Open Science, Open Innovation? The Role of Open Access in Patenting Activity
Scientific knowledge is a key driver of technological innovation, shaping industrial development and policy decisions worldwide. Understanding how patents incorporate scientific research is essential for assessing the role of academic discoveries in technological progress. Non-Patent References (NPRs) provide a useful indicator of this relationship by revealing the extent to which patents draw upon scientific literature. Here, we show that reliance on scientific research in patents varies signi…

Not invented here, but useful to find diffs after a Nix upgrade.
Nix-shell -p nvd
nvd diff $(ls -d1v /nix/var/nix/profiles/system-*-link|tail -n 2)
Finally those Joplin brainfarts pay off 🤣

Tate-valued Characteristic Classes II: Applications
Shachar Carmeli, Kiran Luecke
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01488 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01488

Tate-valued Characteristic Classes II: Applications
We present a construction that manufactures $\E_\infty$ orientations of Tate fixed-point objects together with useful formulas for these maps, and then give a number of applications. For example, we produce a formula for the Frobenius homomorphisms of Thom spectra such as $\MU$ as well as certain lifts of Frobenius. We prove a rigidity property of $\MU$ as a \emph{cyclotomic} object. We construct a general obstruction theory for $\E_n$ complex orientations and establish various non-existence re…

A few days back I tweeted and blogged about the brand-new RFC 9839, and also published the first draft of tiny Go library to help enforce the subsets defined in the RFC. Got lots of useful input on the library and have progressed it enough to do a v0.8.0 release: https://github.com/timbray/rfc9839…

The #python library that we #qemu developers use for the test harness. Now with support for 3.14. Useful for deep tinkerers: https://pypi.org/proje…

qemu.qmp
QEMU Monitor Protocol library

Investigating nuclear effects in lepton-ion DIS at the LHC
Reinaldo Francener, Victor P. Goncalves, Diego R. Gratieri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00144 https://

Investigating nuclear effects in lepton-ion DIS at the LHC
Recent studies have demonstrated that the far-forward physics program of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can be useful to probe the hadron structure with GeV-TeV neutrinos and muons. In particular, these studies indicate that the measurement of the muon-ion and neutrino-ion cross-sections by the same experiment is feasible. In this paper, we investigate the impact of nuclear effects on the muon-tungsten ($μW$) and neutrino-tungsten ($νW$) deep inelastic scattering (DIS) events at FASER$ν$ an…

I left a comment last week on Smashing’s “Design Patterns For AI Interfaces” (which is still in moderation):
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/07/design-patterns-ai-interfaces/
Essentially, if your UI doesn’t also try to prevent harm then it might …

Design Patterns For AI Interfaces — Smashing Magazine
Designing a new AI feature? Where do you even begin? Here’s a simple, practical overview with useful design patterns for better AI experiences.

Still one of the most useful apps I’ve built in my career, and it’s so simple.
You have a big ass monitor in front of you. If you’re having a call from a dark room, you can use the display as a key light.
https://kelvin-keylight.netlify.app/

Gemini Live could soon get this useful Google Maps upgrade – and it looks perfect for smart glasses https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/gemini/gemini-live-could-soon-get-this-us…

Gemini Live could soon get this useful Google Maps upgrade – and it looks perfect for smart glasses
More info on the places you're seeing

Maximum a Posteriori Probability (MAP) Joint Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO) and Channel Estimation for MIMO Channels with Spatial and Temporal Correlations
Ibrahim Khalife, Ali Abbasi, Zhe Feng, Mingda Zhou, Xinming Huang, Youjian Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01032

Maximum a Posteriori Probability (MAP) Joint Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO) and Channel Estimation for MIMO Channels with Spatial and Temporal Correlations
We consider time varying MIMO fading channels with known spatial and temporal correlation and solve the problem of joint carrier frequency offset (CFO) and channel estimation with prior distributions. The maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) joint estimation is proved to be equivalent to a separate MAP estimation of the CFO followed by minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimation of the channel while treating the estimated CFO as true. The MAP solution is useful to take advantage of the estima…

Characterizing a high-dimensional unitary transformation without measuring the qudit it transforms
Salini Rajeev, Mayukh Lahiri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02816 https://

Characterizing a high-dimensional unitary transformation without measuring the qudit it transforms
We present a method for reconstructing an arbitrary high-dimensional unitary transformation without detecting the qudit that it transforms. We demonstrate the method using orbital angular momentum states of light. Our method relies on quantum interference enabled by path identity of undetected photons. The method is practically useful when suitable detectors are not available for the qudit on which the unitary transformation works.

I think what I’m saying is, peeps with children, if you don’t have a useful grandparent close by, get yourself an aro friend. They’re ace.
Pun 100% intended.

What Makes LLM Agent Simulations Useful for Policy? Insights From an Iterative Design Engagement in Emergency Preparedness
Yuxuan Li, Sauvik Das, Hirokazu Shirado
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21868

What Makes LLM Agent Simulations Useful for Policy? Insights From an Iterative Design Engagement in Emergency Preparedness
There is growing interest in using Large Language Models as agents (LLM agents) for social simulations to inform policy, yet real-world adoption remains limited. This paper addresses the question: How can LLM agent simulations be made genuinely useful for policy? We report on a year-long iterative design engagement with a university emergency preparedness team. Across multiple design iterations, we iteratively developed a system of 13,000 LLM agents that simulate crowd movement and communicatio…

I have nothing useful to add, except that this used to be a feature of some browsers.
https://toot.cat/@jamey/114960843294349709

Diffusion^2: Turning 3D Environments into Radio Frequency Heatmaps
Kyoungjun Park, Yifan Yang, Changhan Ge, Lili Qiu, Shiqi Jiang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02274 https://

Diffusion^2: Turning 3D Environments into Radio Frequency Heatmaps
Modeling radio frequency (RF) signal propagation is essential for understanding the environment, as RF signals offer valuable insights beyond the capabilities of RGB cameras, which are limited by the visible-light spectrum, lens coverage, and occlusions. It is also useful for supporting wireless diagnosis, deployment, and optimization. However, accurately predicting RF signals in complex environments remains a challenge due to interactions with obstacles such as absorption and reflection. We in…

Generalized Parallel Scaling with Interdependent Generations
Harry Dong, David Brandfonbrener, Eryk Helenowski, Yun He, Mrinal Kumar, Han Fang, Yuejie Chi, Karthik Abinav Sankararaman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01143

Generalized Parallel Scaling with Interdependent Generations
Parallel LLM inference scaling involves sampling a set of $N>1$ responses for a single input prompt. However, these $N$ parallel responses tend to be generated independently from each other, partitioning compute resources and leaving potentially useful information in one generation untapped by others. This is in contrast to response length scaling where past computation is used in all future steps. For higher quality responses and response sets, we propose Bridge to generate interdependent resp…

Microsoft rolls out a COPILOT function in Excel for users in the Beta Channel, letting them use text prompts to categorize data, summarize feedback, and more (Sean Endicott/Windows Central)
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/m

Microsoft Excel gets more AI — and this time it’s actually useful
AI in Excel finally feels natural thanks to the new COPILOT function.

Better by Comparison: Retrieval-Augmented Contrastive Reasoning for Automatic Prompt Optimization
Juhyeon Lee, Wonduk Seo, Hyunjin An, Seunghyun Lee, Yi Bu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02093

Better by Comparison: Retrieval-Augmented Contrastive Reasoning for Automatic Prompt Optimization
Automatic prompt optimization has recently emerged as a strategy for improving the quality of prompts used in Large Language Models (LLMs), with the goal of generating more accurate and useful responses. However, most prior work focuses on direct prompt refinement or model fine-tuning, overlooking the potential of leveraging LLMs' inherent reasoning capability to learn from contrasting examples. In this paper, we present Contrastive Reasoning Prompt Optimization (CRPO), a novel framework that f…

Semantically Reflected Programs
Eduard Kamburjan, Vidar Norstein Klungre, Yuanwei Qu, Rudolf Schlatte, Egor V. Kostylev, Martin Giese, Einar Broch Johnsen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03318

Semantically Reflected Programs
This paper addresses the dichotomy between the formalization of structural and the formalization of behavioral knowledge by means of semantically lifted programs, which explore an intuitive connection between programs and knowledge graphs. While knowledge graphs and ontologies are eminently useful to represent formal knowledge about a system's individuals and universals, programming languages are designed to describe the system's evolution. To address this dichotomy, we introduce a semantic lif…

Time asymptotics, time regularity and separation rates for Navier-Stokes flows in supercritical solution classes
Zachary Bradshaw, Joshua Hudson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00714

Time asymptotics, time regularity and separation rates for Navier-Stokes flows in supercritical solution classes
This paper extends the weak solution theory for the 3D Navier-Stokes equations of Barker, Seregin and Sverak from a critical setting to a supercritical setting making sure to include a useful a priori energy bound as well as a statement about stability under weak-star convergence. Two applications of the a priori bound are then explored. The first provides a spatially local, short-time asymptotic expansion in the time variable starting at $t=0$ which, as a corollary, provides an upper bound on …

from my link log —
How to slow down a program? And why it can be useful.
https://stefan-marr.de/2025/08/how-to-slow-down-a-program/
saved 2025-08-27

How to Slow Down a Program? And Why it Can Be Useful.
Making programs slower can be useful to find...

Is External Information Useful for Data Fusion? An Evaluation before Acquisition
Guorong Dai, Lingxuan Shao, Jinbo Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22351 https://

Is External Information Useful for Data Fusion? An Evaluation before Acquisition
We consider a general statistical estimation problem involving a finite-dimensional target parameter vector. Beyond an internal data set drawn from the population distribution, external information, such as additional individual data or summary statistics, can potentially improve the estimation when incorporated via appropriate data fusion techniques. However, since acquiring external information often incurs costs, it is desirable to assess its utility beforehand using only the internal data. …

👬 Analyzing the size and homogeneity of acquaintanceship networks in the Netherlands
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-size-homogeneity-acquaintanceship-networks-netherlands.html

Analyzing the size and homogeneity of acquaintanceship networks in the Netherlands
Young people, working people, those with higher education and people with high incomes have the largest social networks. Having a larger network is useful. "It can help in finding work or social support," said Bas Hofstra, a sociologist at Radboud University. "People with a smaller network often have a harder time."

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

Machine learning driven identification of heavy flavor decay leptons in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider
Raghunath Sahoo, Kangkan Goswami, Suraj Prasad
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00712

Machine learning driven identification of heavy flavor decay leptons in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider
The study of heavy-flavor hadrons is topical in the era of precision measurements, which is useful to test theories based on pQCD. The heavy-flavor hadrons are produced initially during heavy-ion or hadronic collisions and are one of the best probes to understand the initial stages of the collisions as well as the system evolution. In experiments, the heavy-flavor sectors are studied directly via their decay to different hadrons or di-leptons or via their semi-leptonic decay, which is accompani…

Fast, Secure, and High-Capacity Image Watermarking with Autoencoded Text Vectors
Gautier Evennou, Vivien Chappelier, Ewa Kijak
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00799 https://

Fast, Secure, and High-Capacity Image Watermarking with Autoencoded Text Vectors
Most image watermarking systems focus on robustness, capacity, and imperceptibility while treating the embedded payload as meaningless bits. This bit-centric view imposes a hard ceiling on capacity and prevents watermarks from carrying useful information. We propose LatentSeal, which reframes watermarking as semantic communication: a lightweight text autoencoder maps full-sentence messages into a compact 256-dimensional unit-norm latent vector, which is robustly embedded by a finetuned watermar…

I maintain a page linking to comments I have left (or when I’m referenced) on posts at CSS Tricks and Smashing Magazine:
http://a11y-tricks.com/
I started this as a gag, but it’s been hella useful for me to go back and find posts that resulted in me having to debunk them face-to-face with people who believe…

Rote Learning Considered Useful: Generalizing over Memorized Data in LLMs
Qinyuan Wu, Soumi Das, Mahsa Amani, Bishwamittra Ghosh, Mohammad Aflah Khan, Krishna P. Gummadi, Muhammad Bilal Zafar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21914

Rote Learning Considered Useful: Generalizing over Memorized Data in LLMs
Rote learning is a memorization technique based on repetition. It is commonly believed to hinder generalization by encouraging verbatim memorization rather than deeper understanding. This insight holds for even learning factual knowledge that inevitably requires a certain degree of memorization. In this work, we demonstrate that LLMs can be trained to generalize from rote memorized data. We introduce a two-phase memorize-then-generalize framework, where the model first rote memorizes factual su…

E-THER: A PCT-Grounded Dataset for Benchmarking Empathic AI
Sharjeel Tahir, Judith Johnson, Jumana Abu-Khalaf, Syed Afaq Ali Shah
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02100 https://

E-THER: A PCT-Grounded Dataset for Benchmarking Empathic AI
A prevalent shortfall among current empathic AI systems is their inability to recognize when verbal expressions may not fully reflect underlying emotional states. This is because the existing datasets, used for the training of these systems, focus on surface-level emotion recognition without addressing the complex verbal-visual incongruence (mismatch) patterns useful for empathic understanding. In this paper, we present E-THER, the first Person-Centered Therapy-grounded multimodal dataset with …

Generalized Parallel Scaling with Interdependent Generations
Harry Dong, David Brandfonbrener, Eryk Helenowski, Yun He, Mrinal Kumar, Han Fang, Yuejie Chi, Karthik Abinav Sankararaman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01143

Generalized Parallel Scaling with Interdependent Generations
Parallel LLM inference scaling involves sampling a set of $N>1$ responses for a single input prompt. However, these $N$ parallel responses tend to be generated independently from each other, partitioning compute resources and leaving potentially useful information in one generation untapped by others. This is in contrast to response length scaling where past computation is used in all future steps. For higher quality responses and response sets, we propose Bridge to generate interdependent resp…

Samsung Galaxy Watch8 review: thinner and sturdier, but its design with a square casing and a round screen is polarizing, and Gemini is useful but hit-or-miss (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/20

RESTRAIN: From Spurious Votes to Signals -- Self-Driven RL with Self-Penalization
Zhaoning Yu, Will Su, Leitian Tao, Haozhu Wang, Aashu Singh, Hanchao Yu, Jianyu Wang, Hongyang Gao, Weizhe Yuan, Jason Weston, Ping Yu, Jing Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02172

RESTRAIN: From Spurious Votes to Signals -- Self-Driven RL with Self-Penalization
Reinforcement learning with human-annotated data has boosted chain-of-thought reasoning in large reasoning models, but these gains come at high costs in labeled data while faltering on harder tasks. A natural next step is experience-driven learning, where models improve without curated labels by adapting to unlabeled data. We introduce RESTRAIN (REinforcement learning with Self-restraint), a self-penalizing RL framework that converts the absence of gold labels into a useful learning signal. Ins…

"She was useful, but a bit too optimistic": Augmenting Design with Interactive Virtual Personas
Paluck Deep, Monica Bharadhidasan, A. Baki Kocaballi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19463

"She was useful, but a bit too optimistic": Augmenting Design with Interactive Virtual Personas
Personas have been widely used to understand and communicate user needs in human-centred design. Despite their utility, they may fail to meet the demands of iterative workflows due to their static nature, limited engagement, and inability to adapt to evolving design needs. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) pave the way for more engaging and adaptive approaches to user representation. This paper introduces Interactive Virtual Personas (IVPs): multimodal, LLM-driven, conversational …

Making, not Taking, the Best of N
Ammar Khairi, Daniel D'souza, Marzieh Fadaee, Julia Kreutzer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00931 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

Making, not Taking, the Best of N
Obtaining high-quality generations in modern LLMs has largely been framed as a selection problem: identifying a single winning generation from a diverse pool of N samples, the Best-of-N (BoN). Yet, this approach is inherently zero-sum, discarding diverse and potentially useful information from the pool. Instead, we explore a collaborative setup, where all candidates can potentially contribute to the final winning generation. To this end, we propose Fusion-of-N (FusioN): a method that uses a gen…