Tootfinder

Wow, there's a mighty wind blowing in Ōtautahi right now - took my life in my hands putting out the washing... Chairs blowing off decks, trees and bedsheets whipping around. The Nor'west is formidable. And it's warm, with all the trees starting to leaf out...

With iOS 26.1 now released, is it worth updating if we are still holding on iOS 18?
How's battery life? Bugs?
My iOS 18.5 is working quite well so i'm not really in a rush
#ios #liquidglass

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #Early
LCD Soundsystem:
🎵 Jump Into the Fire (Radio One live session)
#LCDSoundsystem
https://open.spotify.com/track/0RgDhd6Ww7o6HKRJm5lWf5

Russland zu Gesprächen über US-Atombrennstoff bereit
Russland zeigt sich zu Gesprächen mit dem US-Konzern Westinghouse über Nuklearbrennstoff im ukrainischen Atomkraftwerk Saporischschja bereit. Wie der Chef des russischen Staatskonzerns Rosatom, Alexej Lichatschow, gegenüber der russischen Nachrichtenagentur RIA erklärte, ist Russland offen für Diskussionen über die Frage des dort gelagerten US-Atombrennstoffs.
Im Juni hatt…
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Ukraine-Liveblog: ++ Schäden in Dnipro nach Drohnenangriffen ++
Bei russischen Drohnenangriffen in Dnipro sind nach ukrainischen Angaben mehrere Wohngebäude beschädigt worden. Westliche Truppen in der Ukraine wären nach den Worten von Präsident Putin legitime Angriffsziele.

Deterministic Fault-Tolerant Local Load Balancing and its Applications against Adaptive Adversaries
Dariusz R. Kowalski, Jan Olkowski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01373 https://…

Deterministic Fault-Tolerant Local Load Balancing and its Applications against Adaptive Adversaries
Load balancing is among the basic primitives in distributed computing. In this paper, we consider this problem when executed locally on a network with nodes prone to failures. We show that there exist lightweight network topologies that are immune to message delivery failures incurred by (at most) a constant fraction of all nodes. More precisely, we design a novel deterministic fault-tolerant local load balancing (LLB) algorithm, which, similarly to their classical counterparts working in fault…

Entropy-Guided Loop: Achieving Reasoning through Uncertainty-Aware Generation
Andrew G. A. Correa, Ana C. H de Matos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00079 https://

Entropy-Guided Loop: Achieving Reasoning through Uncertainty-Aware Generation
Reasoning models often outperform smaller models but at 3--5$\times$ higher cost and added latency. We present entropy-guided refinement: a lightweight, test-time loop that uses token-level uncertainty to trigger a single, targeted refinement pass. We extract logprobs, compute Shannon entropy on top-$k$ alternatives, and apply a simple OR-logic trigger over perplexity, maximum token entropy, and low-confidence-token count. Unlike approaches that use entropy only for measurement or decoding, we …

Forecasting LLM Inference Performance via Hardware-Agnostic Analytical Modeling
Rajeev Patwari, Ashish Sirasao, Devleena Das
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00904 https://

Forecasting LLM Inference Performance via Hardware-Agnostic Analytical Modeling
Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly deployed as local agents on personal devices with CPUs, NPUs and integrated GPUs. However, forecasting inference performance on devices with such heterogeneity remains challenging due to the dynamic compute and memory demands. Existing approaches rely on GPU benchmarking or machine learning-based latency predictors, which are often hardware-specific and lack generalizability. To this end, we introduce LIFE, a lightweight and modular analytical…

Logarithmic lightcones in the multiparticle Anderson model with sparse interactions
Daniele Toniolo, Sougato Bose
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02383 https://…

Logarithmic lightcones in the multiparticle Anderson model with sparse interactions
We prove that the dynamics of the one-dimensional $ XY $ model with random magnetic field perturbed by a sparse set of $ ZZ $ terms with a large coupling constant $ Δ$ gives rise to Lieb-Robinson (L-R) bounds with a logarithmic lightcone and amplitude proportional to $ Δ^{-1} $. These spin systems are equivalent to a set of spinless lattice fermions subjected to a random on site potential and sparse density-density interactions. In the absence of the random magnetic field we also obtain a sup…

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

And, on this second day of 'spring' (according to convention in Aotearoa), we've got mostly beautiful sunshine and mild temperatures here in Ōtautahi... We've got the first daffodils blooming and I just saw 5 native skinks in the garden, 3 sunning themselves on the tiles in our lizardarium. At least one was gravid (carrying eggs)... With indigenous NZ skinks, the eggs hatch in the female and are born live.