Tootfinder

“Stupid weather,” I grumble to P on a walk. P gently urges me to redirect my frustration. “The weather is just responding to what capitalism has done to it, it’s just trying to adjust. Of course it’s going to be a little erratic.” I soften immediately and apologize to the wind, the cool in the air. It doesn’t owe any of us a gentle transition; it’s allowed to remind us that the level of destruction it's endured will inevitably result in a violent response. That’s how trauma works.
[...]
These are the questions I’m sitting with. I don’t have answers, but I know that some of it starts with more people taking seriously the possibility of other ways of being. The annoying but necessary demand that we consider that if we can’t get the state to stop funding a genocide (or killing Black people and poor people or denying care to trans people or pregnant people), then we have to stop the state."
~ Raechel Anne Jolie
This is a beautiful text, that gave me hope, even though at the end they forgot to list the disabled and chronically ill people, who are being denied care on an epic scale in this ongoing, yet normalized pandemic.
https://raechelannejolie.substack.com/p/impossible-conditions

While it may be good news for some it won't be of a major help until we have an adequate supply that meets the demand of just diabetics and those who are obese. I was on Ozempic until it was not available and was prescribed an alternative.
https://www.

A timely piece by A.Nelson. @…
Timely given the plethora of ill-informed critiques of #degrowth.
She tackles a difficult task, summarising the diversity of degrowth as concept, practice and also movement.
Degrowth as a Concept and a Practice:…

Degrowth as a Concept and a Practice: Introduction
Working within the limits of Earth and people, and celebrating the potential of both, they envisage a substantive democracy, direct action by people, with power distributed on the basis of subsidiarity and exercised in ways highly respectful of Earth, the source of human being.

Someone asked today what a 'sense of self' is.
I want to tie this into ideas of relationality. I am a distinct individual, let's start with that. I'm not disavowing that entirely.
But I am also ‘an unschooler’: but this is not an attribute of my education for comparison. It is a community, a network of relationships with people working in similar ways. It's connections to anabaptist traditions and to a mode of interacting with parents (both in concept and my actual parents)
I'm from Colorado. But it's not just a place on the map: it's my relationship to my sense of smell, and my tolerance for cold weather and bright lights. It's a love of dark skies and clear views of the milky way. It's a relationship to knowing I am very very small in a vast universe. This is not a universal explanation of from-Colorado-ness, but it's mine.
I'm transgender, but that's not just I-myself-was-born-in-a-wrong-body, but I have a community and network and sense of belonging outside of myself. I've got embodied knowledge of being a dozen ways that others don't get to experience. It affects and informs my relationship to my communities and my work.
I’m argumentative and sometimes a little arrogant, but this is also because of how I'm connected: there are things I know deep in my body that I cannot explain how I know, but I do. I forget that others see me as a ‘you' and not a 'we' sometimes, and so misunderstandings happen. But to change that would change me in ways I'm not quite willing to grow into, so there is going to be a small callus in how I socialize. And it's fine. It works. I am who I am, but I also don't think about _me_ that much. To think about me is to think of all the connections instead. They're inseparable.

"For being a collection of open-source Social Media services, theoretically built on top of an open open-source protocol, we spend an incredible amount of time making sure we disable ways to communicate and allowing ourselves to be governed by not-so-open "rules"".
Sometimes it certainly feels that way.
h/t @… in

m@thias.hellqui.st (@m@thias.hellqui.st)
@laurenshof To me that is like giving blood to lose weight. Or killing mosquitos with a shotgun. Sure, it kind of solves the problem. There will be lots of collateral damage though. People who wi...

«You don't help men by telling them that they need to be strong, or clean, or perfect, or that women won't date them if they're not manly enough. You help men by working towards policies that actually help men—and by remembering that there are lots of different ways of being a man. Men can have messy rooms. They can be nurses. They can wear dresses. They can date other men. They can live with their parents.
When we write think piece after think piece on the crisis of mascul…

There Isn't a Crisis of Masculinity
Masculinity is the crisis.

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.

Reading The Case for Open Borders, which has so many heartbreaking stories of senseless cruelty, and thinking: The ways people justify this are the same ways they justify cruel displacement of homeless people in San Francisco...

A look at the rise of free-to-use AI chatbots claiming to help with teens' mental health struggles, as experts disagree about whether the chatbots are effective (Matthew Perrone/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/chatbots-me

New apps test AI chatbots to help mental health crisis
A growing number of AI chatbots are being pitched as a way to address the recent mental health crisis among teens and young adults. Free apps like Earkick can discuss complex emotional problems, offer guided meditation exercises and suggest ways for reframing negative thoughts. But experts disagree about whether these chatbots are delivering a mental health service or are simply a new form of self-help. It's a key question to the future of the industry, because apps that diagnose or treat menta…

Innovative Jewish community leader Yocheved Sidof (#Purim

«As ever, the problem with a gadget isn't what it does: it's who it does it for and who it does it to. There are plenty of benefits from being a centaur – lots of ways that automation can help workers. But the only path to AI profitability lies in reverse centaurs, automation that turns the human in the loop into the crumple-zone for a robot»
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

Coalescing sets preserving cospectrality of graphs arising from block similarity matrices
Sajid Bin Mahamud, Steve Butler, Hannah Graff, Nick Layman, Taylor Luck, Jiah Jin, Noah Owen, Angela Yuan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01561

Coalescing sets preserving cospectrality of graphs arising from block similarity matrices
Coalescing involves gluing one or more rooted graphs onto another graph. Under specific conditions, it is possible to start with cospectral graphs that are coalesced in similar ways that will result in new cospectral graphs. We present a sufficient condition for this based on the block structure of similarity matrices, possibly with additional constraints depending on which type of matrix is being considered. The matrices considered in this paper include the adjacency, Laplacian, signless Lapla…

Allies of former President Donald J. Trump and officials who served in his administration are planning ways to restrict abortion rights if he returns to power that would go far beyond proposals for a national ban or the laws enacted in conservative states across the country.
Behind the scenes, specific anti-abortion plans being proposed by Mr. Trump’s allies are sweeping and legally sophisticated.
Some of their proposals would rely on enforcing the 

Abortion Foes Plan Onslaught of New Restrictions if Trump Wins
Well, that was fast!! At 9 a.m. I posted about a New York Times article published yesterday revealing that Trump wanted a 16-week ban on abortions. Since 93% of abortions are performed by the 13th …

"The hatred against Microsoft, starting with the letter to hobbyists in 1976, fueled by Dijkstra, Wulf, Papert, and so many others, naturally spread to BASIC. If you read carefully, the “13 ways to loathe VB” penned by Verity Stob are directed more to Microsoft than to the language itself:
> 13. Bill is making even more money out of this. And I am powerless to stop him. In fact, I am helping him.
Of course, abominations such as On Error Resume Next did not help."

Programming The Liberal Arts
In 1863, it was discovered on the walls of the Villa Lemmi, near Florence, a previously unknown fresco by Sandro Botticelli covered in whitewash, called "Giovane introdotto tra le Arti Liberali" ("A Young Man Being Introduced to the Seven Liberal Arts.") This work of art was then removed and sold to the Louvre, where it has been exposed since 1882. In it, the young Lorenzo Tornabuoni, son of the head of the Roman branch of the Medici bank during the Quattrocento, is depicted holding the hand of…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.04244 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Window Expressions for Stream Data Processing
Traditional ways of storing and querying data do not work well in scenarios where data is being generated continuously and quick decisions need to be taken. For example, in hospital intensive care units, signals from multiple devices need to be monitored and the occurrence of any anomaly should raise alarms immediately. A typical design would take the average from a window of say 10 seconds (time-based) or 10 successive (count-based) readings and look for sudden deviations. Existing stream proc…

@… There’s multiple distinct ways in which I miss the “good old days”:
1. The feeling of the web not being “serious”, in the sense that nothing in the world seemed to truly *depend* on the web. You could hang out with friends, turn in homework, do banking (Although I wasn’t old enough that it mattered to me yet), all without the web. The web was an *addi…

Reading The Case for Open Borders, which has so many heartbreaking stories of senseless cruelty, and thinking: The ways people justify this are the same ways they justify cruel displacement of homeless people in San Francisco...

HOLY SHIT, I just watched #Nimona!
OMG, honestly, a lot of modern animation movies feel like they're not being very creative with the unique art form.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was nice at showing there were still ways of being creative with animation;
I'm not saying Nimona is on that level, but my god is it creative with it's animation and transitions. So refreshi…

"I'm categorizing LLM as a productivity tool": Examining ethics of LLM use in HCI research practices
Shivani Kapania, Ruiyi Wang, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Tianshi Li, Hong Shen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19876

"I'm categorizing LLM as a productivity tool": Examining ethics of LLM use in HCI research practices
Large language models are increasingly applied in real-world scenarios, including research and education. These models, however, come with well-known ethical issues, which may manifest in unexpected ways in human-computer interaction research due to the extensive engagement with human subjects. This paper reports on research practices related to LLM use, drawing on 16 semi-structured interviews and a survey conducted with 50 HCI researchers. We discuss the ways in which LLMs are already being u…

Ways I knew I was bisexual:
When I was growing up I would sometimes be like
Movies: “Ok, that woman is attractive, but…wait a second show me more of her husband!!! 🤤”
Dancing: “Ok, that lady looks hot in that dress, but…ohhh is that what I think it is in his pants? 🥵”
I tried to excuse these as me being “sinful”, but until I realised I was attracted to men and woman, with the emphasis on the former I didn’t realise my own orientation.

Exploring the efficacy of a hybrid approach with modal decomposition over fully deep learning models for flow dynamics forecasting
Rodrigo Abad\'ia-Heredia, Adri\'an Corrochano, Manuel Lopez-Martin, Soledad Le Clainche
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17884

Exploring the efficacy of a hybrid approach with modal decomposition over fully deep learning models for flow dynamics forecasting
Fluid dynamics problems are characterized by being multidimensional and nonlinear, causing the experiments and numerical simulations being complex, time-consuming and monetarily expensive. In this sense, there is a need to find new ways to obtain data in a more economical manner. Thus, in this work we study the application of time series forecasting to fluid dynamics problems, where the aim is to predict the flow dynamics using only past information. We focus our study on models based on deep l…

There is a yawning gap between
"AI tools can be handy for some things"
and the kinds of stories AI companies are telling
(and the media is uncritically reprinting).
And when it comes to the massively harmful ways in which large language models (LLMs) are being developed and trained,
the feeble argument that
"well, they can sometimes be handy..."
doesn't offer much of a justification.

AI isn't useless. But is it worth it?
AI can be kind of useful, but I'm not sure that a "kind of useful" tool justifies the harm.

one of the many ways $$$ trump health and well-being:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/18/splenda-diabetes-lawsuit
(from the newsletter linking to the above :
"If you haven’t decided what to cook for din…

one of the many ways $$$ trump health and well-being:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/18/splenda-diabetes-lawsuit
(from the newsletter linking to the above :
"If you haven’t decided what to cook for din…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05381 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Palindromic Periodicities
A palindromic periodicity is a factor of an infinite word $(ps)^ω$ where $p$ and $s$ are palindromes and the factor has length at least $|ps|$, for example, $accabaccab$. In this paper we describe several ways in which a palindromic periodicity may arise through the interaction of palindromes and periodicity, the simplest case being when a palindrome is itself periodic. We then consider what happens when a word is a palindromic periodicity in two ways, a situation similar to that con…

Exploring the efficacy of a hybrid approach with modal decomposition over fully deep learning models for flow dynamics forecasting
Rodrigo Abad\'ia-Heredia, Adri\'an Corrochano, Manuel Lopez-Martin, Soledad Le Clainche
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17884

Exploring the efficacy of a hybrid approach with modal decomposition over fully deep learning models for flow dynamics forecasting
Fluid dynamics problems are characterized by being multidimensional and nonlinear, causing the experiments and numerical simulations being complex, time-consuming and monetarily expensive. In this sense, there is a need to find new ways to obtain data in a more economical manner. Thus, in this work we study the application of time series forecasting to fluid dynamics problems, where the aim is to predict the flow dynamics using only past information. We focus our study on models based on deep l…

SMARTY: The mileS Moderate resolution neAr-infRared sTellar librarY
Michele Bertoldo-Co\^elho, Rog\'erio Riffel, Marina Trevisan, Natacha Zanon Dametto, Luis Dahmer-Hahn, Paula Coelho, Lucimara Martins, Daniel Ruschel-Dutra, Alexandre Vazdekis, Alberto Rodr\'iguez-Ardila, Ana L. Chies-Santos, Rogemar A. Riffel, Francesco La Barbera, Ignacio Mart\'in Navarro, Jesus Falcon Barroso, Tatiana Moura

SMARTY: The mileS Moderate resolution neAr-infRared sTellar librarY
Most of the observed galaxies cannot be resolved into individual stars and are studied through their integrated spectrum using simple stellar populations (SSPs) models, with stellar libraries being a key ingredient in building them. Spectroscopic observations are increasingly being directed towards the near-infrared (NIR), where much is yet to be explored. SSPs in the NIR are still limited, and there are inconsistencies between different sets of models. One of the ways to minimize this problem …

Former Patriots CB issues strong response to recent Bill Belichick criticism https://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/former_patriots_cb_issues_strong_response_to_recent_bill_belichick_criticism/s1_127_4…

Former Patriots CB issues strong response to recent Bill Belichick criticism
Bill Belichick has faced some unexpected criticism since he parted ways with the New England Patriots, and one of his former Pro Bowl players has heard enough. Many people felt that the recent AppleTV+ docuseries “The Dynasty” was a hit piece of sorts against Belichick. Several audio clips, including many from Patriots owner Robert Kraft, painted Belichick as being stubborn and set in his ways.  Some former players and coaches featured in the series were unhappy that the producers only us…

It is confusing to know that better methods exist but to see those better methods being ignored. It seems that if there were better ways to manage, people would adopt those methods. But this just isn’t the case; sometimes better methods will be adopted but often they won’t. People can be very attached to the way things have always been done. Or they can just be uncomfortable with the prospect of trying something new...

Large Language User Interfaces: Voice Interactive User Interfaces powered by LLMs
Syed Mekael Wasti, Ken Q. Pu, Ali Neshati
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.07938

Large Language User Interfaces: Voice Interactive User Interfaces powered by LLMs
The recent meteoric advancements in large language models have showcased a remarkable capacity for logical reasoning and comprehension. These newfound capabilities have opened the door to a new generation of software, as has been made obvious through the innumerable ways they are being applied in the industry. This research focuses on harnessing and guiding the upgraded power of LLMs to construct a framework that can serve as an intermediary between a user and their user interface. By comprehen…