Tootfinder

The Dogma tour 30min Q&A... recorded! 😂
▶️ Kevin Smith - Dogma 25th Anniversary Q & A (April 23, 2025- Washington)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=uL0eBZajQYo&si=UDPwM9YDfQC-MHD_

Ernst #Bloch - Konkrete Utopie in der Jetztwelt
".... the very desire to transcend the status quo supports the idea that the world is pregnant with unrealized possibilities (Bloch 1988: 16)"
1988, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

"GenAI art has already reached polyester status, and this is just the beginning. Despite all the techno-utopian promises, our brains see it as ersatz."
(Original title: GenAI is Our Polyester)
https://culture.ghost.io/genai-is-our-polyester/

GenAI is Our Polyester
The best way to understand generative AI art and aesthetics is to consider how previous "synthetics" lost value in the long-run For the first half of the 20th century, white-collar workers wore business shirts made from cotton or linen that wrinkled in the wash. Ironing them into a presentable shape

Even een reactie van mij uit een draadje bevrijdt ...
In de hele discussie over politici door de jaren heen heb ik bij figuren als Wilders dat onderstaande voorbeeld gebruikt. Echte argumenten zijn meestal niet aan de orde aangezien die discussies vaak platgeslagen worden met gelul wat wel leuk overkomt, maar geen basis heeft.
In dit geval is t met Wilders overduidelijk: hij kan niet leveren. Ook al heeft zn partij ministeries im handen en 3 bondgenoten.
(

The more time goes on, the more conflicted I get about #AI. (or, more specifically, generative AI. I like causal AI a fair bit)
On one hand, I hate so much about it:
the needless environmental and electronic parts waste, the impact on labor, the monopolistic nature of main organizations driving it, the endless conversations about AGI and other absurdly utopian (or dystopian) futures, the widespread theft of IP and human work, the devaluation of labor and craft… so much of it is not okay at all.
On the other hand, I kinda get it?
I like to test software for myself, so I've been dipping my toes into some popular AI tools over the past couple of years. I have a paid subscription to ChatGPT (which I don’t feel great about, I know), and I have found genuine utility in it.
More so, I feel so conflicted when I talk to people I respect and who I think are very smart and creative and they tell me how in love they are with all of these AI tools, about the complex workflows they build, about their experiments with agentic AI and integrations... These people seem so excited, so alive, so joyous about the things that this technology allows them to do. They often wouldn't have had the skills / knowledge / financial capital to do some of those things with human efforts alone. And now I see them coding their own tools, doing complex data analysis, trying creative experiments with graphics / text / video...
And I feel like a total jerk going "BUT ACTUALLY THIS IS UNETHICAL AND INEFFICIENT AND YOU SHOULD STOP IT BECAUSE AI SUCKS".
The technology behind all these gen AI models does have real utility, and it has kicked off a lot of creativity from people who wouldn't have dabbled in those kinds of projects otherwise.
So I don't know how to feel. Because I can't let go of the guilt and the real problems and the awareness of how much empty hype there is.
#technology #artificialintelligence #genAI #ChatGPT

Collisionless relaxation to quasi-steady state attractors in cold dark matter halos: origin of the universal NFW profile
Uddipan Banik, Amitava Bhattacharjee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02104

Collisionless relaxation to quasi-steady state attractors in cold dark matter halos: origin of the universal NFW profile
Collisionless self-gravitating systems such as cold dark matter halos are known to harbor universal density profiles despite the intricate non-linear physics of hierarchical structure formation in the $Λ$CDM paradigm. The origin of these attractor states has been a persistent mystery, particularly because the physics of collisionless relaxation is not well understood. To solve this long-standing problem, we develop a self-consistent quasilinear theory in action-angle space for the collisionles…

The Dipole Instability in Gravitational $N$-body Systems: A Natural Explanation for Lopsidedness and Off-Centered Nuclei in Galaxies
Shashank Dattathri, Frank C. van den Bosch, Martin D. Weinberg, Uddipan Banik
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23905

The Dipole Instability in Gravitational $N$-body Systems: A Natural Explanation for Lopsidedness and Off-Centered Nuclei in Galaxies
We explore the stability of isotropic, spherical, self-gravitating systems with a double-power law density profile. Systems with rapid transitions between the inner and outer slopes are shown to have an inflection in their isotropic distribution function (DF), where ${\rm d} f/{\rm d} E > 0$, thereby violating Antonov's stability criterion. Using high-resolution $N$-body simulations, we show that the resulting instability causes the growth of a rotating dipole (or $l=1$) mode. The inflection fe…