Tootfinder

Hey!
believe it or not - I'll have a relax evening today. My muscles are still a bit sore and tomorrow it will be nice as well. So maybe I just have a rest today.
BUT I found a nice clip taken in January that I wanted to share with you. Just a bit of walking a snowy mountain here ;-)
Well equipped with good boots, micro spikes and being very careful, as theres a bit of a drop on the right.

Very well, there shall be a Gist.
And I will address the Fine Gael switch at the top.
And a bit more on facial recognition.
And a new update on the Commission na Mean’s plan to get kids to send their selfies to porn sites.

This Veritasium video explains things very well. I feel like I’ve learned a ton about physics and economics, despite not being versed in either:
https://youtu.be/A5w-dEgIU1M

"Spare me your protest vote because it very well might be the last vote you ever have"
I'm in a really pissy mood today.

Damn! My left hip is painful. The prosthesis, the one with the short pin, was done in 2004, so it has done very well.

Please sign this petition to help convince Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick of #PA01, a Co-Chair of the House #Ukraine Caucus, to support HR 815, for aid to Ukraine and other allies!
#DefendDemocracyAidUkraine

Ask Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick to support the Ukraine funding bill that passed the Senate
PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION TO REPRESENTATIVE BRIAN FITZPATRICK OF PA-01 TO PUSH THROUGH AID FOR UKRAINE AND OTHER ALLIES!! Ukraine is fighting for its very survival as a democracy against the unprovoked aggression of Russia and its dictator, Vladimir Putin. Aid to Ukraine and other allies has been languishing in Congress because of the actions of MAGA extremists as well as their leadership chaos and incompetence for over 5 months. In that time, Ukraine has had to abandon territory because the…

So to let me explain, this is a Very Normal Typesetting task for a book. Make two column text, with an embedded figure. Keep the baseline rhythm uniform. That means the two columns next to each other will always have the same baselines.
Make the figure full column width.
Until this became available, I could not find a way to do this. It's a subtle reason that multicolumn layouts for text on the web never really took off. (horizontal scrolling and snapping is perhaps another reason, but the fact that it looked like crap is part of it.)
I've been hand-solving variations using context-specific hacks for my whole career: text under e-commerce product cards. Images on a product page with a caption with text next to them that don't have funky gaps where the text goes underneath. Images with captions inset in text, too. Marketing pages with two bits of copy next to each other.
Lack of little nuances like this is why the whole web lands on "well I guess we'll set it in 16 pixel Helvetica with one line margins between paragraphs”. It stifles making anything but Browser Default Text or variations on it look good.
Remember how fresh Medium looked when it came out? Even its relatively small shake-up of the dominant formula felt good. Of course now, big easy to read serifed type in a single column is the brand of "this is a newsletter”

The NTSB youtube channel is very nice; you get the raw press briefing videos, but also a lot of 'B-Roll' uncommented, for example today video of them just examining the ship, and plugging a USB stick into it (well, it's VDR).
But heck, the press conferences are pretty good - Jennifer Homendy, the NTSB chair, has run ones on Plane crashes, train derailments, and now the ship/bridge collision and can give a pretty good answer before handing off to specialists.

Series D, Episode 06 - Headhunter
ORAC: Very well.
[Tarrant and Vila on Scorpio. It is dark and icicles are hanging from the ceiling. Both are trying to get into their survival suits.]
https://blake.torpidity.net/s/406/315 📺 B7B5

Have you been on the lookout for the holy grail, never to be reissued officially, very first #Kraftwerk LP? Well my friends, look no further. Forced Exposure now has bootleg copies in stock. At a hefty price. https://www.…

KRAFTWERK : Kraftwerk - LP - ENDLESS HAPPINESS - Forced Exposure
Kraftwerk is the self-titled debut album by the Düsseldorf band Kraftwerk. It was produced by Conny Plank and released in 1970. LP on 180-gram vinyl with gatefold sleeve.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02485 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_hepp…

Parameter Space of Leptogenesis in Polynomial Inflation
Polynomial inflation is a very simple and well motivated scenario. A potential with a concave ``almost'' saddle point at field value $ϕ= ϕ_0$ fits well the cosmic microwave background (CMB) data and makes testable predictions for the running of the spectral index and the tensor to scalar ratio. In this work we analyze leptogenesis in the polynomial inflation framework. We delineate the allowed parameter space giving rise to the correct baryon asymmetry as well as being consistent with data on…

Security Analyst interview did not go very well today, advice appreciated https://reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1b1kixu/

✍️ I really enjoy working with Storybook, but I've found that it's very easy to end up repeating a component's arguments quite a bit. Well, I'm here to say that there is a better way! A DRYer way!
(And I have to remind myself of it every single time I set up a new codebase, so I thought I'd finally write it down 😉)
#StorybookJS #React

I’m reminded of a very old Slashdot comment that I return to which I will share in its entirety. Not the article, not the source, but this single insightful comment from Shannon Love that still rings true:
“I can relate to Zawinski's frustration and many others do as well. I notice that it seems to effect those with more experience than those newer to computing.
When one first acquires a new tool, whether it is hardware, software or a woodworking plane, the very act of learning how use the tool itself works is highly engaging. Just futzing about figuring out how the new tool works is an end in itself.
However, after one has spent 20 years learning the ends and out of each season's new tools the joy fades. One becomes progressively less interested in the tools itself and more interested in product you want to use the tool to make. The time spent futzing with the tool is not engaging but frustrating and wasteful. You want to get the primary work done not spend all your time adjusting your tools.
How many times over the years has Zawinski wrestled with a problem similar to his Linux sound issue? The thrill of solving such a problem is long gone, baby.
The Linux community is dominated by people who enjoy the process of learning and using the tool itself. They are the kind of people who take the toaster apart to see how it works. The vast majority of desktop users, however, just want to make toast.
People like Zawinski, who have taken apart their fair share of toasters, also now just want to make toast. At present, Linux doesn't let him do that.”
https://apple.slashdot.org/story/05/06/12/1315235/jamie-zawinski-switches-to-mac-os-x#

OK buddy, you’re very well endowed, very happy for you, now go clean off your ceiling.

Damn! My left hip is painful. The prosthesis, the one with the short pin, was done in 2004, so it has done very well.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02472 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_…

OffLanDat: A Community Based Implicit Offensive Language Dataset Generated by Large Language Model Through Prompt Engineering
The widespread presence of offensive languages on social media has resulted in adverse effects on societal well-being. As a result, it has become very important to address this issue with high priority. Offensive languages exist in both explicit and implicit forms, with the latter being more challenging to detect. Current research in this domain encounters several challenges. Firstly, the existing datasets primarily rely on the collection of texts containing explicit offensive keywords, making …

Survey of 3,600 US adults: 73% say a free press is very important, while 84% say media is at least somewhat influenced by corporations and financial interests (Kirsten Eddy/Pew Research Center)
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/20

Most Americans say a free press is highly important to society
Ahead of World Press Freedom Day, 73% of U.S. adults say the freedom of the press is extremely or very important to the well-being of society.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.17463 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCG_…

Constructing Optimal $L_{\infty}$ Star Discrepancy Sets
The $L_{\infty}$ star discrepancy is a very well-studied measure used to quantify the uniformity of a point set distribution. Constructing optimal point sets for this measure is seen as a very hard problem in the discrepancy community. Indeed, optimal point sets are, up to now, known only for $n\leq 6$ in dimension 2 and $n \leq 2$ for higher dimensions. We introduce in this paper mathematical programming formulations to construct point sets with as low $L_{\infty}$ star discrepancy as possible…

Good morning!
I'm just scrolling a bit through my timeline and : surprise!
one of the neighbouring districts(?) is here on mastodon as well: @…
Very cool!
#bayern

The NTSB youtube channel is very nice; you get the raw press briefing videos, but also a lot of 'B-Roll' uncommented, for example today video of them just examining the ship, and plugging a USB stick into it (well, it's VDR).
But heck, the press conferences are pretty good - Jennifer Homendy, the NTSB chair, has run ones on Plane crashes, train derailments, and now the ship/bridge collision and can give a pretty good answer before handing off to specialists.

Well that is very interesting! Introducing Mistral-Large on Azure in partnership with Mistral AI | Microsoft Azure Blog
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsof…

Introducing Mistral-Large on Azure in partnership with Mistral AI | Microsoft Azure Blog
Microsoft is announcing a multi-year partnership with Mistral AI, bridging the gap between pioneering research and real-world solutions.

Equivalent Environments and Covering Spaces for Robots
Vadim K. Weinstein, Steven M. LaValle
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18323 https://

Equivalent Environments and Covering Spaces for Robots
This paper formally defines a robot system, including its sensing and actuation components, as a general, topological dynamical system. The focus is on determining general conditions under which various environments in which the robot can be placed are indistinguishable. A key result is that, under very general conditions, covering maps witness such indistinguishability. This formalizes the intuition behind the well studied loop closure problem in robotics. An important special case is where th…

On the codimension of permanental varieties
Ada Boralevi, Enrico Carlini, Mateusz Micha{\l}ek, Emanuele Ventura
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.17839 https://…

On the codimension of permanental varieties
In this article, we study permanental varieties, i.e. varieties defined by the vanishing of permanents of fixed size of a generic matrix. Permanents and their varieties play an important, and sometimes poorly understood, role in combinatorics. However, there are essentially no geometric results about them in the literature, in very sharp contrast to the well-behaved and ubiquitous case of determinants and minors. Motivated by the study of the singular locus of the permanental hypersurface, we f…

Magnetic filaments: formation, stability, and feedback
Evgeny A. Kuznetsov, Evgeny A. Mikhailov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.16989 https://

Magnetic filaments: formation, stability, and feedback
As well known, magnetic fields in space are distributed very inhomogeneously. Some-times field distributions have forms of filaments with high magnetic field values. As many ob-servations show, such a filamentation takes place in convective cells in the Sun and other astro-physical objects. This effect is associated with the frozenness of the magnetic field into a medium with high conductivity that leads to compression of magnetic field lines and forming magnetic filaments. We show analytically…

Bidenomics is still working very well
The basic narrative hasn’t changed. The U.S. economy continues to look like an amazing success story.
Saying this leads, of course, to pushback from Republicans who’ve claimed ad nauseam that Biden’s “socialist” policies would be a disaster
— and as I recently wrote, for such people believing is seeing, so they continue to insist that the economy is terrible even when by all objective measures, it’s doing pretty well.
You also ge…

Opinion | Bidenomics Is Still Working Very Well
Ignore the latest round of inflation doomsaying.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10690 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_hept…

On the degrees of freedom count on singular phase space submanifolds
I discuss singular loci in the phase spaces of theories which lack globally well-defined numbers of dynamical modes. This is a topic which appears quite often in the recent literature on modified gravity. In particular, there were discussions about $R^2$ gravity around Minkowski space. It is a relatively simple case, and still there were some confusions. It clearly shows that one should be very accurate when trying to understand a potentially problematic theory through perturbations around a si…

This is very cool. I just got access to Compass from Blackbird AI that is designed to "help organizations navigate the information overload caused by online misinformation and disinformation."
I asked it if the AT&T outage this week was caused by a cyberattack, and this is the very accurate and well-written answer it gave me.

Putin’s media is very much like a modern Goebbels, influencing Russians.
When we think about the effects of modern media on public discourse, let’s not overlook what’s happening in Russia. This seems like it won’t end well.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10100 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_…

An Ultrahigh-energy $γ$-ray Bubble Powered by a Super PeVatron
We report the detection of a $γ$-ray bubble spanning at least 100$\rm deg^2$ in ultra high energy (UHE) up to a few PeV in the direction of the star-forming region Cygnus X, implying the presence Super PeVatron(s) accelerating protons to at least 10 PeV. A log-parabola form with the photon index $Γ(E) = (2.71 \pm 0.02) + (0.11 \pm 0.02) \times \log_{10} (E/10 \ {\rm TeV})$ is found fitting the gamma-ray energy spectrum of the bubble well. UHE sources, `hot spots' correlated with very massive …

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.08912 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_…

New perspectives on future rip scenarios with holographic dark energy
We explore the asymptotic future evolution of holographic dark energy (HDE) models, in which the density of the dark energy is a function of a cutoff scale $L$. We develop a general methodology to determine which models correspond to future big rip, little rip, and pseudo-rip (de Sitter) evolution, and we apply this methodology to a variety of well-studied HDE models. None of these HDE models display little rip evolution, and we are able to show, under very general assumptions, that HDE models …

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12843 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_qfi…

From characteristic functions to multivariate distribution functions and European option prices by the damped COS method
We provide a unified framework for the computation of the distribution function and the computation of prices of financial options from the characteristic function of some density by the COS method. The classical COS method is numerically very efficient in one-dimension but cannot deal very well with certain financial options in general dimensions. Therefore, we introduce the damped COS method which can handle a large class of integrands very efficiently. We prove the convergence of the (damped…

Jerry Jones on whether Ezekiel Elliott could be Cowboys' lead back https://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/jerry_jones_on_whether_ezekiel_elliott_could_be_cowboys_lead_back/s1_127_40293214

Jerry Jones on whether Ezekiel Elliott could be Cowboys' lead back
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones certainly is not downplaying his interest in one player he knows very well. Jones spoke at length on Friday about a possible reunion with veteran running back Ezekiel Elliott. Jones admitted that the two sides met prior to the NFL Draft, as had been previously reported. Jones was happy to talk up Elliott, saying he was impressed with how the running back finished last season with New England and even suggesting he could be good enough to perform as a lead back. …

WIRED Gadget Lab:
“Michael Calore: “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.” It's the first song on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
Lauren Goode: Oh yeah, I know that song quite well. Wait, what line is it?
Michael Calore: The very first line.
Lauren Goode: Really?
Michael Calore: Yeah.”
JFC 🤦‍♂️

Deep Confident Steps to New Pockets: Strategies for Docking Generalization
Gabriele Corso, Arthur Deng, Benjamin Fry, Nicholas Polizzi, Regina Barzilay, Tommi Jaakkola
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18396

Deep Confident Steps to New Pockets: Strategies for Docking Generalization
Accurate blind docking has the potential to lead to new biological breakthroughs, but for this promise to be realized, docking methods must generalize well across the proteome. Existing benchmarks, however, fail to rigorously assess generalizability. Therefore, we develop DockGen, a new benchmark based on the ligand-binding domains of proteins, and we show that existing machine learning-based docking models have very weak generalization abilities. We carefully analyze the scaling laws of ML-bas…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.16756 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_mat…

Exact Jacobi elliptic solutions of the $abcd$-system
In this manuscript, consideration is given to the existence of periodic traveling-wave solutions to the $abcd$-system. This system was derived by Bona, Saut, and Chen to describe small amplitude, long wavelength gravity waves on the surface of water. These exact solutions are formulated in terms of the Jacobi elliptic function cnoidal. The existence of explicit traveling-wave solutions is very useful in theoretical investigations such as stability of solutions, as well as other numerical analys…

This rotary broach I designed is 1" across the (poorly) knurled section, and the body is only 34mm long. It has the minor downside of not working very well, so I get to re-make the body and nut. The spindle inside is as close to perfect as I can do, so I can keep that for the next iteration. But the next iteration will be larger in diameter which will make it easier to make. And I think no more knurling in the new design.

@… @… There might very well be a bunch of tech debt that makes it extremely difficult, but I really feel like Apple needs to tackle iOS (and all of it’s descendants) multi user.

"Mr. #Bolsonaro said this month that he was not worried about being #arrested.
“I could very well be in another country, but I decided to come back here at all costs,” he said at a political event. “I’m not #afraid

Video: Bolsonaro, Facing Investigations, Hid at Hungarian Embassy
Security-camera footage obtained by The Times shows that Brazil’s former president spent two nights at the Hungarian Embassy in an apparent bid for asylum.

😩
As El Niño Falls Apart, Spring May Come Early To MA: Forecast
https://patch.com/massachusetts/burlington/s/iuweu/as-el-nio-falls-apart-spring-may-come-early-to-ma-forecast

As El Niño Falls Apart, Spring May Come Early To MA: Forecast
An already relatively warm, snow-starved winter may well come to a very early end in Massachusetts.

#30DaysOfBiking, Day 25: A bit over 9km before dinner. Rode through #Tenero (mostly around the railway tracks), alongside the #Verzasca river, and the northern part of the wildlife sanctuary

Precise Mass, Orbital motion and Stellar properties of the M-dwarf binary LP 349-25AB
Salvador Curiel (IAUNAM), Gisela N. Ortiz-Leon (NRAO), Amy J. Mioduszewski (INAOE), Anthony B. Arenas-Martinez (INAOE, Facultad de Ciencias)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16964

Precise Mass, Orbital motion and Stellar properties of the M-dwarf binary LP 349-25AB
LP~349$-$25 is a well studied close stellar binary system comprised of two late M dwarf stars, both stars close to the limit between star and brown dwarf. This system was previously identified as a source of GHz radio emission. We observed LP~349$-$25AB in 11 epochs in 2020$-$2022, detecting both components in this nearby binary system using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). We fit simultaneously the VLBA absolute astrometric positions together with existing relative astrometric observations…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10690 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_hept…

On the degrees of freedom count on singular phase space submanifolds
I discuss singular loci in the phase spaces of theories which lack globally well-defined numbers of dynamical modes. This is a topic which appears quite often in the recent literature on modified gravity. In particular, there were discussions about $R^2$ gravity around Minkowski space. It is a relatively simple case, and still there were some confusions. It clearly shows that one should be very accurate when trying to understand a potentially problematic theory through perturbations around a si…

'We in Ukraine know very well the horror': Zelensky condemns Iranian missile and drone attack on Israel: https://benborges.xyz/2024/04/14/we-in-ukraine.html

Daily inspiration: "One day soon, we’ll recognize that at this very moment in time, we were on the edge of the arrival of the end of reality - and didn’t have a plan to deal with it" - Futurist Jim Carroll
So this happened.
You can scan to about 0:28 on the timeline for the actual incident - with the whole thing being captured automatically on 4 of the cameras on the car when it happened back on February 4. A Tesla Model 3 actually has 8 cameras though - and so I filled…

Daily Inspiration: AI & Risk – “One day soon, we’ll recognize that at this very moment in time, we were on the edge of the arrival of the end of reality – and didn’t have a plan to deal with it”

Bridging hadronic and vacuum structure by heavy quarkonia
Nicholas Miesch, Edward Shuryak, Ismail Zahed
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.18700 https://

Bridging hadronic and vacuum structure by heavy quarkonia
We discuss the central and, mostly, spin-dependent potentials in heavy quarkonia $\bar b b, \bar c c$, with two goals in mind. The first is phenomenological: using the splitting between the 1S and 2S pairs, as well as the 1P and 2P quartet masses, we obtain very accurate values of all matrix elements of the spin-depepdent potentials. The second is theoretical: using standard wave functions, we compute these matrix elements, from perturbative, nonperturbative and ``string" contributions. The mod…

I've been reading "On Green” (https://joecarlsmith.com/2024/03/21/on-green) and its following article, “On Attunement” with some interest today. I am uninterested in the ways he is focused on “AGI”, but that might actually be part of what he's saying and missing.
They talk about the philosophy of green in the "magic the gathering" sense, which has five core modes of things, and being a game, designed to balance. It's an attractive system and not without merit as a philosophical labeling system. In short: white, moral; blue, knowledge and rationality; red, passion and desire; black, power and achievement. And green. Green is the subject they can't identify clearly.
I don't think they really understand green. (They come from a very rationalist place, and that's not a good mode to understand Green)
Green is the domain of systems thinking and of ecology. It's one of flexible boundaries and hierarchies that vanish when you look at them for long. They talk about philosophical agents and try to fit a green philosophical stance into that framework, but it misses: the very idea of a self is nebulous in a green philosophy. Yes, it obviously exists, we are all separate from each other. But also we are inseparable from each other. Green is a philosophy of relationality and multiple perspectives and ever shifting viewpoints. It's not just yin, passive, permissive, but holistic. It's not that it lets the Other in, it's that it actively is in relation with the Other. The other is the self, the self is the other.
The essays also label green as conservative, and this is not quite true. It is not about being slow or regressive or traditional, but about being whole. They can't quite see that green's willingness to accept death and pain as things that happen and also its strong preservationist stance are not opposed to each other. It seems incoherent, but it's not: death and pain are things that happen to living parts of an ecosystem. They matter, but so too does the whole matter. Where so many blue rationalists see statistical and demographic counts of deaths and "sentient beings harmed”, green sees a whole ecosystem where some of that is deeply natural. It's unnatural, ecosystem-harming deaths that are disasters in the green philosophy. Wholesale extinctions. Protracted, painful deaths, as much for the wound they cause outside the individual as the individual suffering as well. But we all come to an end, and to change that wholesale would end so many kinds of relationship, so many things.
Green revels in the illegible, the incomplete, and the connected. It's easy to be green-blind, to ignore the subtle systemic effects. So many of us want simple cause and effect, rather than action and plurality of reactions.
Green's ability to embrace the illegible lets it deal with Red chaos; its resilience tempers red passion. It can ally with White philosophies into a pastoral, conservative, moralistic framework. It ends up at odds with the rationalist Blue and the power-hungry Black, because they drive disequilibrium, but more than just transition to new stable ecologies, they drive systems permanently out of stability, destroying relationships in their path. When confronted with this, they will deny it because the objects are still there. Preserved. Catalogued. Legible and accounted for. Perhaps used instrumentally. Perhaps wrecked for some "greater purpose” but only acknowledged as objects. The relationships between things remain illegible.

Putin’s media is very much like a modern Goebbels, influencing Russians.
When we think about the effects of modern media on public discourse, let’s not overlook what’s happening in Russia. This seems like it won’t end well.

First run in a while, as life had been annoyingly busy for a stretch. I’m in Norfolk today, and explored the wonderfully well-marked and diverse Elizabeth River Trail. Started in downtown Norfolk and turned back near Old Dominion University’s campus.
Very windy and definitely chilly out, but I didn’t care. It felt great to be back #Running

Good morning #Fediverse
How are we all doing today and what are the plans for the day?
No real plans for the day right now. Today is a Wellness Day at work, so the entire company gets a day off, so I've decided to take it as well, which is very unusual for me.
Tonight is Fortnite with friends and then some more catching up on TV shows with the wife now that we have…

Raiders potential draft target won't attend 2024 NFL Combine in Indianapolis https://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/raiders_potential_draft_target_wont_attend_2024_nfl_combine_in_indianapolis/s1_1…

Raiders potential draft target won't attend 2024 NFL Combine in Indianapolis
The Las Vegas Raiders very well may be in the running for a quarterback in this upcoming draft, but to get one of the better ones in the draft, they will likely have to trade up. There have been reports throughout the offseason that the Raiders are interested in Jayden Daniels, the Heisman Trophy winner from last season at LSU, and the quarterback who played his previous three seasons at Arizona State with Antonio Pierce as the defensive coordinator. The fit makes sense. However, he is a top-th…

Bidenomics Is Still Working Very Well (Paul Krugman/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/opinion/biden-economy.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/240222/p85#a240222p85

A park I have visited a few times has 100s of acres of forests and many miles of trails that are designed and maintained very well. It's also a rare park I've seen many people use, and quite heavily.
Despite the heavy foot traffic, I've rarely seen anyone put a dollar into the donation box. 😟
If only they moved that donation box to a place of worship. 🤔
#society

Hey friends, last post for today from me: that was my afternoon #cycling ride! I wanted to test my new cycling computer once more and also do some #workout - and got rewarded with some very nice #sunset …

Honestly, I find the decision in #Wine 9.0 to force #HidRaw by default for specific gamepads a very bad one. Apparently, it was done because these devices use "a proprietary HID protocol", and so they full functionality cannot be exposed via XInput. Well, okay. Except that there are two problems.
Firstly, using them via HidRaw requires special device permissions. In #Gentoo, this means installing games-util/game-device-udev-rules. If you don't do that, the controllers simply don't appear at all, and you don't know why. You have to look for answers. Even if you do, I have some doubts about giving extra permissions to stuff.
Secondly, it requires all software to support these gamepads explicitly. I mean, I've tried this with DualShock 4 in two games. In "Saints Row V", the gamepad work but the Y axis would be reversed for no apparent reason. In "A Plague Tale", the gamepad wouldn't be detected at all.
I prefer a gamepad that works over theoretical support for some fancy hidden features. So it's back to XInput for me:
wine reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\winebus" /v "DisableHidraw" /t REG_DWORD /d 1
https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56306

So, update on the 45Drives HL15 case: still friggin' awesome. The drives are secure, the backplane works very well, and it looks nice. Not too loud, good airflow, and generally great. Also holds a lot of drives. The upgrade allowed me to take it apart a bit and the wiring is done well, front fans have connectors that makes removing the front easy, and you can route the SAS cables behind the backplane. #homelab

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.04754 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_sta…

Estimation of Long-Range Dependent Models with Missing Data: to Impute or not to Impute?
Among the most important models for long-range dependent time series is the class of ARFIMA$(p,d,q)$ (Autoregressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average) models. Estimating the long-range dependence parameter $d$ in ARFIMA models is a well-studied problem, but the literature regarding the estimation of $d$ in the presence of missing data is very sparse. There are two basic approaches to dealing with the problem: missing data can be imputed using some plausible method, and then the estimation…

This is a very good point. Not every conference has live captioning or a sign language interpreter. Since Live Captions runs locally, you can have this on screen during your in-world live conference talks to improve the accessibility of your talks even if the conference is lacking in this area.
And if you’re running a conference, it’s a no-brainer (and free) to have this projected on a screen for all talks.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.12382 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@a…

Multi-lipid synergy in synovial lubrication: natural redundancy vs. natural selection
The very low sliding friction of articular cartilage in the major synovial joints such as hips and knees is crucial for their well-being, and has been attributed to lubrication by phospholipid boundary layers. While single-component lipid layers have demonstrated efficient lubricity in model studies, in living joints there is a large number of different lipids, raising the question of whether this is natural redundancy, or whether this multiplicity confers any benefits. Here we examine lubricat…

Just saw "Treasure", a film by Julia von Heinz with Lena Dunham and @…
I really enjoyed that. Very well played and touching story.

Offshoot #coffee on Hay Street, #Perth. Pretty good, but very busy mainly with the hospital crowd, but I expect being next to the law courts means the lawyers would give it a belting too. I respect the entirely compostable paper cup and lid as well, but it does make the caffeine nozzle look a bit like a rusted s…

Spectroscopic diagnostics of lead stratification in hot subdwarf atmospheres
L. J. A. Scott, C. S. Jeffery, C. M. Byrne, M. Dorsch
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19071

Spectroscopic diagnostics of lead stratification in hot subdwarf atmospheres
Heavy metal subdwarfs are a class of hot subdwarfs with very high abundances of heavy elements, typically around 10 000 times solar. They include stars which are strongly enhanced in either lead or zirconium, as well as other elements. Vertical stratification of the enhanced elements, where the element is concentrated in a thin layer of the atmosphere, has been proposed as a mechanism to explain the apparent high abundances. This paper explores the effects of the vertical stratification of lead…

RankingSHAP -- Listwise Feature Attribution Explanations for Ranking Models
Maria Heuss, Maarten de Rijke, Avishek Anand
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16085 h…

RankingSHAP -- Listwise Feature Attribution Explanations for Ranking Models
Feature attributions are a commonly used explanation type, when we want to posthoc explain the prediction of a trained model. Yet, they are not very well explored in IR. Importantly, feature attribution has rarely been rigorously defined, beyond attributing the most important feature the highest value. What it means for a feature to be more important than others is often left vague. Consequently, most approaches focus on just selecting the most important features and under utilize or even ignor…

#PennedPossibilities 258 — Piggybacking off of the previous question: Are there any insignificant memories that stick with your villain to this day as well?
Well, they hail from another dimension, where they live life very differently than we do here. There is no order, no borders, no peace and no justice. Only chaos. They have memories from being a single entity too, of course, bu…

A very very shitty user interface just cost me (well, my company) 500 Euros 🤬 and of course support can't help me 🤬🤬 guess it's time to dispute that payment

The inclusive Synthetic Control Method
Roberta Di Stefano, Giovanni Mellace
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17624 https://arxiv.org/pdf/24…

The inclusive Synthetic Control Method
We introduce the inclusive synthetic control method (iSCM), a modification of synthetic control type methods that allows the inclusion of units potentially affected directly or indirectly by an intervention in the donor pool. This method is well suited for applications with either multiple treated units or in which some of the units in the donor pool might be affected by spillover effects. Our iSCM is very easy to implement using most synthetic control type estimators. As an illustrative empiri…

Superhuman AI within the context of fighterjets/pilots seems to be a done deal. In the very near future AI controlled planes will win dogfights from almost every human. Enough ethical issues and security risks to solve ofcourse.
https://www.twz.com/air/ai-is-now-dogfight<…

AI Is Now Dogfighting With Fighter Pilots In The Air
The breakthrough in autonomous aerial combat made by the X-62 test jet is set to have far-reaching impacts well beyond dogfighting.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.03082 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_hepp…

Relic neutrino decay solution to the excess radio background
The excess radio background detected by ARCADE 2 represents a puzzle within the standard cosmological model. There is no clear viable astrophysical solution, and therefore, it might indicate the presence of new physics. Radiative decays of a relic neutrino $ν_i$ (either $i=1$, or $i=2$, or $i=3$) into a sterile neutrino $ν_{\rm s}$, assumed to be quasi-degenerate, provide a solution that currently evades all constraints posed by different cosmological observations and reproduces very well the…

I have a brief story to tell: Earlier this week, a large DDoS attack against 2 out of our larger set of #Tor (@…) relays - which also act as stable HSDir nodes - has managed to partially interrupt Internet traffic for the whole #JKULinz. While the attack was not huge compared to others (peak traffic around 3-4 Gbit/s, well above 1M PPS), we suspect either a nation state actor or fairly well-funded organization for 3 reasons:
* The attack was more advanced than simply saturating the upstream with bandwidth/packets, but had proper handshakes with the Tor relays, trying to cause resource exhaustion on the application level (we have seen this pattern multiple times in the last 6 months, but this one was much more massive in terms of incoming packets).
* The attack was very targeted, affecting only 2 IPs out of 25, consistently over some time. This indicates that either the position in the HSDir or specific connections or hidden services that were relayed over those nodes were the target - but note that these are only guesses, we don't have hard data on the motivation of this targeting.
* The only motivations that come to mind are either de-anonymization attacks or take-downs of particular hidden services. These do not seem to be relevant for usual ransom DDoS botnet attackers, but more for political reasons.
We have some flow data and would be interested in doing more analysis. Any ideas or correlation with other data on Tor relay attacks welcome :)
CC @…

@… 's write-up on Amy Von Lintel and Bonnie Roos' book "Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West" (from 2022) really makes us want to read the book.

The Largely Unknown Story of Women, Abstract Expressionism, and Texas
Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West uncovers the little-known stories of professional and creative gains in the region, and especially in the Texas Panhandle.

(riffing on @…'s excellent thread)
I hate cars enough to miss out on some experiences. But I get different experiences as a result. Instead of driving 2-3 hours out of town to go on a hike, I know the Inner Bay Area hikes that are BARTable/bikeable very well; people with cars are impressed I know so many beautiful spots they'd never heard of that are right her…

Her: I'll take dad to the cafe today, maybe I'll get him cake
Me: If he's lucky?
Her: Well her cakes are very variable. You never know if she'll have a good cake in, so you can't plan for cake. Like, you just have to see.
Me: Carpe crustulam
Her: You shouldn't talk to other humans. You've got that off of a podcast haven't you?

Spent the last months between being sick, entertaining kids and dog and working on #NeosCMS based projects for customers.
Little time for all of my OSS topics and even baking. At least kids and dog are well and customers are also very happy.
Hope this tiring health situation will turn around in April and wife and me can find some peaceful time to recharge a bit. I have so many topics in …

Searching for something I read about landed me on this book for sale on Amazon. The seller is naturally enthusiastic about the product ("very nice", "original", "substantial", "well-written", "4 FEET long!"). All very understandable, until you see what it is…

This excellent and very well informed discussion between @… and @… on taxing #wealth is very well worth an hour of your ti…

Common Weal
All of Us First

Raiders' potential draft target won't attend 2024 NFL Combine in Indianapolis https://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/raiders_potential_draft_target_wont_attend_2024_nfl_combine_in_indianapolis…

Raiders' potential draft target won't attend 2024 NFL Combine in Indianapolis
The Las Vegas Raiders very well may be in the running for a quarterback in this upcoming draft, but to get one of the better ones in the draft, they will likely have to trade up. There have been reports throughout the offseason that the Raiders are interested in Jayden Daniels, the Heisman Trophy winner from last season at LSU, and the quarterback who played his previous three seasons at Arizona State with Antonio Pierce as the defensive coordinator. The fit makes sense. However, he is a top-th…

Bidenomics Is Still Working Very Well (Paul Krugman/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/opinion/biden-economy.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/240222/p85#a240222p85

I think I watched too many #mtb videos on YouTube - I'm very keen on finding some nice tracks around. We have a lot of forest roads which are usually very well maintained and aren't very difficult to ride. Most of the hiking trails are just too steep or rough to ride them with the bike (for me!).
Maybe I have to scout older, abandoned forest roads. 🤔

Good morning and happy Thursday to everyone here in the #Fediverse today!
Let's talk about what our days have in store for us today as well as what we all might have planned for the weekend ahead.
It's work stuff as always here, with some database stuff I need to do as well that will take quite a few hours most likely.
Today is also the Early Access release of N…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.12382 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@a…

Multi-lipid synergy in synovial lubrication: natural redundancy vs. natural selection
The very low sliding friction of articular cartilage in the major synovial joints such as hips and knees is crucial for their well-being, and has been attributed to lubrication by phospholipid boundary layers. While single-component lipid layers have demonstrated efficient lubricity in model studies, in living joints there is a large number of different lipids, raising the question of whether this is natural redundancy, or whether this multiplicity confers any benefits. Here we examine lubricat…

Three QBs that could cash-in under the NFL's new salary cap https://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/three_qbs_that_could_cash_in_under_the_nfls_new_salary_cap/s1_13132_40016052

Three QBs that could cash-in under the NFL's new salary cap
With the NFL salary cap increasing to $255.4 million per club in 2024, some quarterbacks could really cash-in. Here’s three that could do very well. Kirk Cousins, Minnesota Vikings Leave it to Cousins to reach free agency in what could be a year of unprecedented NFL spending. The 35-year-old quarterback made a career out of betting on himself with a series of one-year contracts after being drafted by Washington in the fourth round of the 2012 NFL Draft. Cousins didn’t balk at playing under …

Trump hasn’t been taking to martyrdom very well behind the scenes, three sources with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone.
He has privately raged over everything from reports that he can’t stop dozing off,
to how the court sketch artist is rendering him,
to late-night talk show hosts joking about his legal troubles.
The former president is reaching levels of fury over the judicial process and all it entails that are “maxed out, even for him,” says one source who…

Trump Privately Rages About His Sketch Artist, Courtroom Nap Reports
Donald Trump’s anger reached new heights behind the scenes during the first week of his New York hush money trial.

#PennedPossibilities 258 — Piggybacking off of the previous question: Are there any insignificant memories that stick with your villain to this day as well?
Well, they hail from another dimension, where they live life very differently than we do here. There is no order, no borders, no peace and no justice. Only chaos. They have memories from being a single entity too, of course, bu…

Exact Jacobi elliptic solutions of the $abcd$-system
Jake Daniels, Nghiem Nguyen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.16756 https://arxiv.org/p…

Exact Jacobi elliptic solutions of the $abcd$-system
In this manuscript, consideration is given to the existence of periodic traveling-wave solutions to the $abcd$-system. This system was derived by Bona, Saut, and Chen to describe small amplitude, long wavelength gravity waves on the surface of water. These exact solutions are formulated in terms of the Jacobi elliptic function cnoidal. The existence of explicit traveling-wave solutions is very useful in theoretical investigations such as stability of solutions, as well as other numerical analys…

Raiders’ Antonio Pierce Has Strong Message For Aidan O’Connell https://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/raiders_antonio_pierce_has_strong_message_for_aidan_oconnell/s1_17150_40158988

Raiders’ Antonio Pierce Has Strong Message For Aidan O’Connell
While Las Vegas Raiders head coach Antonio Pierce was impressed with quarterback Aidan O’Connell this past season, he has made it abundantly clear that O’Connell is not guaranteed the starting job. Based on some of Pierce’s comments, one can even say that he doesn’t really want O’Connell under center. But, the Raiders live in a world where O’Connell may very well be their starting signal-caller come Week 1 of 2024, and Pierce understands that. When asked about O’Connell this week,…

Why mastering AI is a lot like teenage sex.
(Safe for work)
- they aren't quite sure what it's all about
- no one is sure how to do it, but they hear that it's great
- everyone thinks that everyone else is doing it
- those who say they are doing it are probably lying
- the few who are doing it aren’t doing it very well
- everyone hopes it will be great when they finally do it
- once they start doing it, they’ll discover that it is …

Bubble-wall velocity in local thermal equilibrium: hydrodynamical simulations vs analytical treatment
Tomasz Krajewski, Marek Lewicki, Mateusz Zych
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15408

Bubble-wall velocity in local thermal equilibrium: hydrodynamical simulations vs analytical treatment
We perform real-time hydrodynamical simulations of the growth of bubbles formed during cosmological first-order phase transitions under the assumption of local thermal equilibrium. We confirm that pure hydrodynamic backreaction can lead to steady-state expansion and that bubble-wall velocity in such case agrees very well with the analytical estimates. However, this is not the generic outcome. Instead, it is much more common to observe runaways, as the early-stage dynamics right after the nuclea…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04230 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Medium Resolution 0.97-5.3 micron spectra of Very Young Benchmark Brown Dwarfs with NIRSpec onboard the James Webb Space Telescope
Spectra of young benchmark brown dwarfs with well-known ages are vital to characterize other brown dwarfs, for which ages are in general not known. These spectra are also crucial to test atmospheric models which have the potential to provide detailed information about the atmospheres of these objects. However, to optimally test atmospheric models, medium-resolution, long-wavelength coverage spectra with well-understood uncertainties are ideal, such as the spectra provided by the NIRSpec instrum…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.08655 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_hepp…

The small kt-region in Drell-Yan production at next-to-leading order with the Parton Branching Method
The Parton Branching (PB) method describes the evolution of transverse momentum dependent (TMD) parton distributions, covering all kinematic regions from small to large transverse momenta kT. The small kT-region is very sensitive both to the contribution of the intrinsic motion of partons (intrinsic kT) and to the resummation of soft gluons taken into account by the PB TMD evolution equations. We study the role of soft-gluon emissions in TMD as well as integrated parton distributions. We perfor…

The conventional wisdom, well captured recently by Ethan Mollick, is that LLMs are advancing exponentially.
A few days ago, in a popular blog post, Mollick claimed that “the current best estimates of the rate of improvement in Large Language Models show capabilities doubling every 5 to 14 months”:
The study Mollick linked to doesn’t actually show what he claims.
If you read it carefully, it says literally nothing about capabilities improving.
It shows that models are…

Evidence that LLMs are reaching a point of diminishing returns - and what that might mean
The conventional wisdom, well captured recently by Ethan Mollick, is that LLMs are advancing exponentially. A few days ago, in very popular blog post, Mollick claimed that “the current best estimates of the rate of improvement in Large Language models show capabilities doubling every 5 to 14 months”:

It's Gay Valimont - the ONLY Democrat running against Matt Gaetz.
This article was ALL over the news last week - but it's not a compliment to America's least favorite congressman.
Here's what it talks about:
-His rise to power based on his father's money and success.
-Him allegedly showing his colleagues in congress explicit photos of his girlfriends- GROSS!
-How he's the heir to MAGA, and how he could very well become FL Governor.

Let's #GetGaetzGone
Show your support with a contribution.

I just came across the #FotoVorschlag tag about Gegenlicht (Back Light?) while Lightroom opened and I had the day of this hike still open.
It's been VERY windy and cold up there but luckily I was well prepared. A good jacket, balaclava, trousers and cap so only my eyes were uncovered
And #photography

I just came across the #FotoVorschlag tag about Gegenlicht (Back Light?) while Lightroom opened and I had the day of this hike still open.
It's been VERY windy and cold up there but luckily I was well prepared. A good jacket, balaclava, trousers and cap so only my eyes were uncovered
And #photography