Tootfinder

Next stop on our NLP timeline (as part of the #ISE2025 lecture) was Terry Winograd's SHRDLU, an early natural language understanding system developed in 1968-70 that could manipulate blocks in a virtual world.
Winograd, T. Procedures as a Representation for Data in a Computer Program for Understanding Natural Language. MIT AI Technical Report 235.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.15625 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCY_…

Dressed to Gamble: How Poker Drives the Dynamics of Wearables and Visits on Decentraland's Social Virtual World
Decentraland is a blockchain-based social virtual world where users can publish and sell wearables to customize avatars. In it, the third-party Decentral Games (DG) allows players of its flagship game ICE Poker to earn cryptocurrency only if they possess certain wearables. Herein, we present a comprehensive study on how DG and its game influence the dynamics of wearables and in-world visits in Decentraland. To this end, we analyzed 5.9 million wearable transfers made on the Polygon blockchain (…

Maximizing the Promptness of Metaverse Systems using Edge Computing by Deep Reinforcement Learning
Tam Ninh Thi-Thanh, Trinh Van Chien, Hung Tran, Nguyen Hoai Son, Van Nhan Vo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02657

Maximizing the Promptness of Metaverse Systems using Edge Computing by Deep Reinforcement Learning
Metaverse and Digital Twin (DT) have attracted much academic and industrial attraction to approach the future digital world. This paper introduces the advantages of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in assisting Metaverse system-based Digital Twin. In this system, we assume that it includes several Metaverse User devices collecting data from the real world to transfer it into the virtual world, a Metaverse Virtual Access Point (MVAP) undertaking the processing of data, and an edge computing ser…

EyeNavGS: A 6-DoF Navigation Dataset and Record-n-Replay Software for Real-World 3DGS Scenes in VR
Zihao Ding, Cheng-Tse Lee, Mufeng Zhu, Tao Guan, Yuan-Chun Sun, Cheng-Hsin Hsu, Yao Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02380

EyeNavGS: A 6-DoF Navigation Dataset and Record-n-Replay Software for Real-World 3DGS Scenes in VR
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is an emerging media representation that reconstructs real-world 3D scenes in high fidelity, enabling 6-degrees-of-freedom (6-DoF) navigation in virtual reality (VR). However, developing and evaluating 3DGS-enabled applications and optimizing their rendering performance, require realistic user navigation data. Such data is currently unavailable for photorealistic 3DGS reconstructions of real-world scenes. This paper introduces EyeNavGS (EyeNavGS), the first publicly…

SEMNAV: A Semantic Segmentation-Driven Approach to Visual Semantic Navigation
Rafael Flor-Rodr\'iguez, Carlos Guti\'errez-\'Alvarez, Francisco Javier Acevedo-Rodr\'iguez, Sergio Lafuente-Arroyo, Roberto J. L\'opez-Sastre
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01418

SEMNAV: A Semantic Segmentation-Driven Approach to Visual Semantic Navigation
Visual Semantic Navigation (VSN) is a fundamental problem in robotics, where an agent must navigate toward a target object in an unknown environment, mainly using visual information. Most state-of-the-art VSN models are trained in simulation environments, where rendered scenes of the real world are used, at best. These approaches typically rely on raw RGB data from the virtual scenes, which limits their ability to generalize to real-world environments due to domain adaptation issues. To tackle …

So, EU users get the more open iOS now than the rest of the world?
Apple Is Working to Permit Other Default Virtual Assistants on iOS, but Only in the E.U. – Pixel Envy https://pxlnv.com/linklog/ios-default-virtual-assistants/

I read "Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It" by Christof Koch.
Interesting book which spends like 8 or 9 chapters detailing all the experiments which prove beyond much doubt that consciousness, and self awareness, is a thing done by a brain.
It describes how perception is a construction of a description, has a chapter called "computational mind"
And then spends the last two chapters describing why he thinks the mind can't be computed, because drugs have made him think experience is some kind of magic associated with highly interconnected causal structures.
Apparently, he thinks, once things become interconnected enough they become able to cause things independently of the physics running those connections.
Which is crazy, obviously. There's nothing causal in direct connections between neurons that isn't equally causal in modeled connections between virtual neurons.
All his evidence in the book from neural MRI scans to the effects of psychedelic drugs and symptoms of strokes and disease point to the brain simulating a virtual reality which is the basis of perception.
That simulated world in which we live is full of colour and shape and sounds and emotions and millions of mental constructs that are built to be correlated by the senses with the outside world, but are not equal to the world itself. We live in a dream constructed to correlate with reality.
But then instead of taking the next step: That consciousness itself is a property of a simulated being inside that mental model of the universe, a property which the brain simulates and applies to the virtual self that's doing the experiencing inside that model, he jumps towards some magic implying pan-psychism or that sufficiently interconnected networks become causally self-complete for some reason nobody can fathom.
Sure, colour and shape and emotions are all made up by the brain but experience can't be! For some reason.
You see in truth dualism is false, in that there is no spirit realm in which ghosts animate the matter of the body somehow.
Yet also, dualism is true, in that there is a simulated mental reality which we live in, computed by the brain in which all perception and experience are created, which is related-to but separate-from the unfolding complicated dance of energy that is the universe our bodies interact with.
People take some DMT trip, and the model of the universe emulated by their brain collapses and breaks. Their virtual simulated self inside their mind has these experiences of being one with the universe or the experience of feeling dead yet conscious or whatever, and these hippies think that the broken down simulated experience is real and reflects how consciousness is more fundamental than the atoms that make up the neurons in their brain.
Instead of realizing it shows them that their experienced universe is a simulacrum, they think they get a more direct experience of reality somehow. A consciousness more pure than any mere base atom.
"Then I am myself the world" is a great title. Everything you ever experience is created and simulated in your brain like a dream, the whole universe is inside your head. Even the fact of experience itself.
But that isn't the conclusion Koch reaches somehow, he just jumps from describing the evidence that this is so straight into ascribing super-causal magic consciousness to particular arrangements of atoms that integrated information theory suggest have high correlation, and thinks therefore conciousness is itself the entire universe.
Ah well, fun book. I like arguing in my head with authors that are wrong.
#reading #books #consciousness #thenIAmMyselfTheWorld

Performance of Confidential Computing GPUs
Antonio Mart\'inez Ibarra, Julian James Stephen, Aurora Gonz\'alez Vidal, K. R. Jayaram, Antonio Fernando Skarmeta G\'omez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16501

Performance of Confidential Computing GPUs
This work examines latency, throughput, and other metrics when performing inference on confidential GPUs. We explore different traffic patterns and scheduling strategies using a single Virtual Machine with one NVIDIA H100 GPU, to perform relaxed batch inferences on multiple Large Language Models (LLMs), operating under the constraint of swapping models in and out of memory, which necessitates efficient control. The experiments simulate diverse real-world scenarios by varying parameters such as …