Tootfinder

Following federal cuts to history-focused organizations, the president of the Canadian Historical Association, Colin Coates, sent this letter to Marc Miller, the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture.
One thing might not be obvious: Coates's reference to Carney's recent Quebec City speech suggests Canadians' need for historical context right now. He doesn't agree with Carney's claims. In fact, most Canadian historians would dispute them.

Re “apply the pressure anyway:” that’s advice I got from…Keith Ellison.
I was part of a citizen group pressuring him to vote for the ACA when he was in the House. He met with us, and gave us an impassioned speech about universal care and how the ACA was a good first step but insufficient, relating it to the less-remembered civil rights acts of the 1950s that laid the groundwork for the big one in 1964.
Somebody from the group finally asked him, “Why are we meeting with you? You’re already convinced!”
He replied (paraphrasing here): “I •need• your pressure. I need it even if I already agree. If you’re pressuring me, then I can get on the floor of the House and say ‘My constituents are beating down the doors of my office! This has tremendous support!’ I can tell my colleagues in private about how agitated voters are. If you apply pressure, I can pass that pressure forward. I need you to do it! •That• is why you’re meeting with me.”
And now Keith Ellison is MN Attorney General. He’s already started doing the right thing. Follow his advice, and apply that pressure!

I agree with the wish expressed here, that this year will bring a reckoning to Trump and the other named. Let’s add Putin to that list, too.
But one thing that frightens me — I suspect there people in Trump’s circle who know that US voters are unlikely to turn on their own president in wartime, and one sure-fire way for an unpopular president to turn the tide is to lead the nation in a righteous battle against an obvious enemy.
It could be Venezuela, it could be Iran, it could be…

> “almost everyone at Vimeo was laid off,” including the entire video team
Capitalism, working as designed.
Oh, you thought it was about making shiny, fun things for you play with? Oh, my sweet, summer child, no… capitalism is about fuck you.
Why?
Because. @…

Cynicism, "AI"
I've been pointed out the "Reflections on 2025" post by Samuel Albanie [1]. The author's writing style makes it quite a fun, I admit.
The first part, "The Compute Theory of Everything" is an optimistic piece on "#AI". Long story short, poor "AI researchers" have been struggling for years because of predominant misconception that "machines should have been powerful enough". Fortunately, now they can finally get their hands on the kind of power that used to be only available to supervillains, and all they have to do is forget about morals, agree that their research will be used to murder millions of people, and a few more millions will die as a side effect of the climate crisis. But I'm digressing.
The author is referring to an essay by Hans Moravec, "The Role of Raw Power in Intelligence" [2]. It's also quite an interesting read, starting with a chapter on how intelligence evolved independently at least four times. The key point inferred from that seems to be, that all we need is more computing power, and we'll eventually "brute-force" all AI-related problems (or die trying, I guess).
As a disclaimer, I have to say I'm not a biologist. Rather just a random guy who read a fair number of pieces on evolution. And I feel like the analogies brought here are misleading at best.
Firstly, there seems to be an assumption that evolution inexorably leads to higher "intelligence", with a certain implicit assumption on what intelligence is. Per that assumption, any animal that gets "brainier" will eventually become intelligent. However, this seems to be missing the point that both evolution and learning doesn't operate in a void.
Yes, many animals did attain a certain level of intelligence, but they attained it in a long chain of development, while solving specific problems, in specific bodies, in specific environments. I don't think that you can just stuff more brains into a random animal, and expect it to attain human intelligence; and the same goes for a computer — you can't expect that given more power, algorithms will eventually converge on human-like intelligence.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, what evolution did succeed at first is achieving neural networks that are far more energy efficient than whatever computers are doing today. Even if indeed "computing power" paved the way for intelligence, what came first is extremely efficient "hardware". Nowadays, human seem to be skipping that part. Optimizing is hard, so why bother with it? We can afford bigger data centers, we can afford to waste more energy, we can afford to deprive people of drinking water, so let's just skip to the easy part!
And on top of that, we're trying to squash hundreds of millions of years of evolution into… a decade, perhaps? What could possibly go wrong?
[1] #NoAI #NoLLM #LLM

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.LG. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.LG/new
[2/3]:
- Sharp Structure-Agnostic Lower Bounds for General Functional Estimation
Jikai Jin, Vasilis Syrgkanis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17341 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/115762312049963700
- Timely Information Updating for Mobile Devices Without and With ML Advice
Yu-Pin Hsu, Yi-Hsuan Tseng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17381 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csNI_bot/115762180316858485
- SWE-Bench : A Framework for the Scalable Generation of Software Engineering Benchmarks from Open...
Wang, Ramalho, Celestino, Pham, Liu, Sinha, Portillo, Osunwa, Maduekwe
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17419 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSE_bot/115762487015279852
- Perfect reconstruction of sparse signals using nonconvexity control and one-step RSB message passing
Xiaosi Gu, Ayaka Sakata, Tomoyuki Obuchi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17426 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/115762346108219997
- MULTIAQUA: A multimodal maritime dataset and robust training strategies for multimodal semantic s...
Jon Muhovi\v{c}, Janez Per\v{s}
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17450 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/115762717053353674
- When Data Quality Issues Collide: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of Co-Occurring Data Quality Issu...
Emmanuel Charleson Dapaah, Jens Grabowski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17460 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSE_bot/115762500123147574
- Behavioural Effects of Agentic Messaging: A Case Study on a Financial Service Application
Olivier Jeunen, Schaun Wheeler
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17462 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csIR_bot/115762430673347625
- Linear Attention for Joint Power Optimization and User-Centric Clustering in Cell-Free Networks
Irched Chafaa, Giacomo Bacci, Luca Sanguinetti
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17466 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eessSY_bot/115762336277179643
- Translating the Rashomon Effect to Sequential Decision-Making Tasks
Dennis Gross, J{\o}rn Eirik Betten, Helge Spieker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17470 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csAI_bot/115762556506696539
- Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for Nonlinear Matrix Decompositions
Atharva Awari, Nicolas Gillis, Arnaud Vandaele
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17473 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eessSP_bot/115762580078964235
- TwinSegNet: A Digital Twin-Enabled Federated Learning Framework for Brain Tumor Analysis
Almustapha A. Wakili, Adamu Hussaini, Abubakar A. Musa, Woosub Jung, Wei Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17488 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/115762726884307901
- Resource-efficient medical image classification for edge devices
Mahsa Lavaei, Zahra Abadi, Salar Beigzad, Alireza Maleki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17515 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eessIV_bot/115762459510336799
- PathBench-MIL: A Comprehensive AutoML and Benchmarking Framework for Multiple Instance Learning i...
Brussee, Valkema, Weijer, Doeleman, Schrader, Kers
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17517 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/115762741957639051
- HydroGym: A Reinforcement Learning Platform for Fluid Dynamics
Christian Lagemann, et al.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17534 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_physicsfludyn_bot/115762391350754768
- When De-noising Hurts: A Systematic Study of Speech Enhancement Effects on Modern Medical ASR Sys...
Chondhekar, Murukuri, Vasani, Goyal, Badami, Rana, SN, Pandia, Katiyar, Jagadeesh, Gulati
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17562 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSD_bot/115762423443170715
- Enabling Disaggregated Multi-Stage MLLM Inference via GPU-Internal Scheduling and Resource Sharing
Lingxiao Zhao, Haoran Zhou, Yuezhi Che, Dazhao Cheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17574 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDC_bot/115762425409322293
- SkinGenBench: Generative Model and Preprocessing Effects for Synthetic Dermoscopic Augmentation i...
N. A. Adarsh Pritam, Jeba Shiney O, Sanyam Jain
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17585 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eessIV_bot/115762479150695610
- MAD-OOD: A Deep Learning Cluster-Driven Framework for an Out-of-Distribution Malware Detection an...
Tosin Ige, Christopher Kiekintveld, Aritran Piplai, Asif Rahman, Olukunle Kolade, Sasidhar Kunapuli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17594 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCR_bot/115762509298207765
- Confidence-Credibility Aware Weighted Ensembles of Small LLMs Outperform Large LLMs in Emotion De...
Menna Elgabry, Ali Hamdi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17630 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/115762575512981257
- Generative Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization with Scalable Batch Evaluations for Sample-Effic...
Madhav R. Muthyala, Farshud Sorourifar, Tianhong Tan, You Peng, Joel A. Paulson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17659 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_statML_bot/115762554519447500
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