Tootfinder

Which Dallas Cowboys star should be next to sign lucrative extension? https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/which-dallas-cowboys-star-should-be-next-to-sign-lucrative-extension

NFL throwback jersey and helmet rankings: Which team has most impressive collection of classic threads?

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/nfl-jersey…

Hike, which was valued at $1.4B in 2016 and has since pivoted from a messaging app to a real-money gaming app, shuts down following India's ban on such apps (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/13/hike-once-…

Hike, once a unicorn, shuts down as India cracks down on real-money gaming | TechCrunch
Hike, which started as a WhatsApp rival before pivoting to real-money gaming, is now sunsetting after India's sweeping ban.

Airports in more than a half-dozen U.S. markets have declined to display a video in which
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem blames congressional Democrats for the government shutdown and any related travel delays,
citing the political nature of its content, according to local authorities.

Officials that oversee airports serving Buffalo, Charlotte, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle and Portland, Oregon,
said the video could violate internal policies tha…

Airports say they won’t air Kristi Noem shutdown video at TSA checkpoints
Travelers in Cleveland, L.A., Phoenix, Seattle and other cities will not see the footage, which blames congressional Democrats for shutdown-related flight delays.

Anyone know what the hell's going on with the instance fediblock.lol; is the operator just trying to build a list of all users that block spam?
It appears to be just a single user instance with a rotating set of users which pump out useless spam, then a bot displays which users have reported / blocked it.
Oddly enough it doesn't support domain-level blocks, so blacklisting that entire domain, (which appears to be the route to go), seems to be efficient.
Domain regis…

Which Word Orders Facilitate Length Generalization in LMs? An Investigation with GCG-Based Artificial Languages
Nadine El-Naggar, Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Ted Briscoe
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12722

Which Word Orders Facilitate Length Generalization in LMs? An Investigation with GCG-Based Artificial Languages
Whether language models (LMs) have inductive biases that favor typologically frequent grammatical properties over rare, implausible ones has been investigated, typically using artificial languages (ALs) (White and Cotterell, 2021; Kuribayashi et al., 2024). In this paper, we extend these works from two perspectives. First, we extend their context-free AL formalization by adopting Generalized Categorial Grammar (GCG) (Wood, 2014), which allows ALs to cover attested but previously overlooked cons…

Belated #MountainMonday ... Ever been in a place which made you feel you're maybe walking in dream (and it's not a nightmare)? This picture absolutely summarizes why I love the mountains the most in October...
(Had to de-saturate the colors because of polarization filter used, otherwise only slightly cropped and minutely raised shadows)

What’s the difference between ordinary functions and arrow functions in JavaScript?
Arrow functions (also known as ‘rocket’ functions) are concise and convenient. However, they have subtle differences compared to function declarations and function expressions. So how do you know which one to use, and when?
🧑‍💻

What’s the difference between ordinary functions and arrow functions in JavaScript?
Arrow functions (also known as ‘rocket’ functions) are concise and convenient. However, they have subtle differences compared to function declarations and function expressions. So how do you know which one to use, and when?

TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?

Mobile-Friendly Deep Learning for Plant Disease Detection: A Lightweight CNN Benchmark Across 101 Classes of 33 Crops
Anand Kumar, Harminder Pal Monga, Tapasi Brahma, Satyam Kalra, Navas Sherif
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10817

Mobile-Friendly Deep Learning for Plant Disease Detection: A Lightweight CNN Benchmark Across 101 Classes of 33 Crops
Plant diseases are a major threat to food security globally. It is important to develop early detection systems which can accurately detect. The advancement in computer vision techniques has the potential to solve this challenge. We have developed a mobile-friendly solution which can accurately classify 101 plant diseases across 33 crops. We built a comprehensive dataset by combining different datasets, Plant Doc, PlantVillage, and PlantWild, all of which are for the same purpose. We evaluated …

Wa rugú.‘Yes[ sympathyorhumility].’ <-- Kapampangan words to live by :-) which I found in Michael Forman's "Kapampangan Grammar Notes", published in 1971, University of Hawaii Press which I found at https://muse.jhu.edu/book/61288

Note to self:
When you install a dozen HDDs in a server with drive trays without indicators, it might be a good idea to write down which drive with which serial number is installed in what slot.
I just had to unscrew 5 of 14 HDDs to find the right one to remove!!
I normally like my Fractal Design Define 7 XL, but today... 🤬
#learnfrommymistakes

"there is nothing whatsoever in the JTAC* assessment which backs up any of the claims being put out in a panic by government ministers."
*JTAC = assessment of the government’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre which forms the basis of the proscription of Palestine Action.
Yvette Cooper is Lying - Craig Murray

Yvette Cooper is Lying - Craig Murray
Yvette Cooper has continually lied about Palestine Action in a panicked attempt to defend the proscription of a direct action protest group which is opposing a Genocide in which Cooper’s government is deeply complicit. Cooper and other government ministers have repeatedly claimed: Palestine Action attacks people, not just weapons-making equipment Palestine Action is funded by […]

"This PR introduces a new utility, detect-fash, which scans a system for the presence of software and configurations known to be associated with fascist ideologies. This may help identify undesirable and/or malicious activity that may interfere with the intended operations of other systemd utilities."
It seems to detect the presence of Omarchy Linux, Ladybird browser, hyprland, and DHH's ssh public key.

Dinner with daughter and her family cancelled due to work constraints (she had a big project to finish) which rather suited us too. We'll reschedule as soon as daughter and I have enough energy to synchronise our schedules.
Husband and I had potluck finger food for dinner - chicken tender strips and potato gems which we dunked into bowls of homemade chilli sauce. Neither of us wanted to think about cooking real food tonight. It was pretty tasty actually.
I'm testing out…

Which Sectors Are Most Eager to Hire Defenders? An Analysis of Leading Job-Search Websites: https://benborges.xyz/2025/09/12/which-sectors-are-most-eager.html

Exact bounds for efficient consistent matrices obtained from a reciprocal matrix
Susana Furtado, Charles Johnson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12358 https://a…

Exact bounds for efficient consistent matrices obtained from a reciprocal matrix
For a given reciprocal matrix A, we give a union of matrix intervals in which any consistent matrix obtained from an efficient vector for A lies, and, conversely, any consistent matrix in this union comes from an efficient vector for A. The maximal sets of entries in the lower and upper bound matrices of each interval that are attainable by some consistent matrix in the interval are described. This allows us to understand which subsets of the alternatives lie above which other subsets in all ef…

Classical Algebraic Geometry and Discrete Integrable Systems
Gessica Alecci, Michele Graffeo, Alexander Stokes
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12647 https://arx…

Classical Algebraic Geometry and Discrete Integrable Systems
The aim of these notes is to present an accessible overview of some topics in classical algebraic geometry which have applications to aspects of discrete integrable systems. Precisely, we focus on surface theory on the algebraic geometry side, which is applied to differential and discrete Painlevé equations on the integrable systems side. Along the way we also discuss the theory of resolution of indeterminacies, which is applied to the cohomological computation of algebraic entropy of biration…

Reply with your guess of which year this ad is from! (Don't look it up!)
(Solution will be provided in a reply.)

I just made an optician's appointment, which I've been putting off for a while. 😞
Making it 29 years in the software industry without glasses seems like a reasonable innings. (I was needing to use A11y "large text" settings on this desktop, which suggested it might be time...)

Which Raiders players helped or hurt the team the most in Week 6? https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/raiders/which-raiders-players-helped-or-hurt-the-team-the-most-in-week-6-3485449/

Sonnet 074 - LXXIV
But be contented when that fell arrest
Without all bail shall carry me away,
My life hath in this line some interest,
Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.
When thou reviewest this, thou dost review
The very part was consecrate to thee:
The earth can have but earth, which is his due;
My spirit is thine, the better part of me:
So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,
The prey of worms, my body being d…

Cafe life.
(At Vancouver’s Purebread, which is a fine bakery.)
#Photography

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Just fixed an issue where our calendaring server was having issues, which I tracked down to a bunch of old events in the timezone "Europe/Kiev" which now doesn't exist.
Ugh.
(Timezone was renamed Europe/Kyiv in Aug 2022, so now I have to add "tzdata-legacy" to my build scripts.)

Intrinsic Dimension Estimating Autoencoder (IDEA) Using CancelOut Layer and a Projected Loss
Antoine Orioua, Philipp Krah, Julian Koellermeier
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10011 h…

Intrinsic Dimension Estimating Autoencoder (IDEA) Using CancelOut Layer and a Projected Loss
This paper introduces the Intrinsic Dimension Estimating Autoencoder (IDEA), which identifies the underlying intrinsic dimension of a wide range of datasets whose samples lie on either linear or nonlinear manifolds. Beyond estimating the intrinsic dimension, IDEA is also able to reconstruct the original dataset after projecting it onto the corresponding latent space, which is structured using re-weighted double CancelOut layers. Our key contribution is the introduction of the projected reconstr…

A marking graph for finite-type Artin groups
Kaitlin Ragosta
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10394 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10394

A marking graph for finite-type Artin groups
Clean markings on surfaces were a key component in Masur and Minsky's hierarchy machinery, which proved to be a powerful tool in the study of mapping class groups. We construct a marking graph for irreducible finite-type Artin groups which is quasi-isometric to the group modulo its center, i.e., an element of $A_Γ/Z(A_Γ)$ is determined up to finite error by its action on one of our markings. To construct this graph, we construct suitable collections of transverse parabolic subgroups which ext…

GenOM: Ontology Matching with Description Generation and Large Language Model
Yiping Song, Jiaoyan Chen, Renate A. Schmidt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10703 https://

GenOM: Ontology Matching with Description Generation and Large Language Model
Ontology matching (OM) plays an essential role in enabling semantic interoperability and integration across heterogeneous knowledge sources, particularly in the biomedical domain which contains numerous complex concepts related to diseases and pharmaceuticals. This paper introduces GenOM, a large language model (LLM)-based ontology alignment framework, which enriches the semantic representations of ontology concepts via generating textual definitions, retrieves alignment candidates with an embe…

The 2020s: It was the phase in the climate crisis in which we had to start asking ourselves whether it was dust from the Sahara or smoke from Canada's forest fires.
(The former, this time, I think, looking at @copernicusecmwf.bsky.social CAMS maps)

Challenge: "Name 20 living female authors you admire, 1 per day"
Day 19: Alice Thompson
Another of Edinburgh's fine authors. She has written 9 novels of which I have read three.
Definitely do read BURNT ISLAND, it is just amazing. If you are faint-hearted however, you may want to avoid The Book Collector which was utterly terrifying.
#FemmeÉcrivain

Flavors of Quantifiers in Hyperlogics
Marek Chalupa, Thomas A. Henzinger, Ana Oliveira da Costa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12298 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510…

Flavors of Quantifiers in Hyperlogics
Hypertrace logic is a sorted first-order logic with separate sorts for time and execution traces. Its formulas specify hyperproperties, which are properties relating multiple traces. In this work, we extend hypertrace logic by introducing trace quantifiers that range over the set of all possible traces. In this extended logic, formulas can quantify over two kinds of trace variables: constrained trace variables, which range over a fixed set of traces defined by the model, and unconstrained trace…

genders https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/115194668623935513

Partial Dirac Structures and Dynamical Systems
Fernand Pelletier, Patrick Cabau
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10799 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10799

Partial Dirac Structures and Dynamical Systems
In a previous paper (PeCa24), the notion of Dirac structure in finite dimension was extended to the convenient setting. In particular, we introduce the notion of \emph{partial Dirac structure on a convenient manifold} and look for which all geometrical results in finite dimension which are still true in this infinite dimensional framework. Note that this context is justified by many mechanical infinite dimensional examples which recover all the classical ones, such as Hilbert, Banach, Fréchet …

yahoo_ads: Yahoo! advertisement words
A network of words extracted from phrases on which advertisers bid, in Yahoo! advertisements. A node is a word and a directed edge (i, j) denotes word i comes after the word j.
This network has 653260 nodes and 2931708 edges.
Tags: Informational, Language, Unweighted
https://

Sources: OpenAI is working with Arm to develop a CPU designed to work with the AI chip OpenAI is developing with Broadcom, which will be manufactured by TSMC (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-working-softbanks-arm-br…

OpenAI Is Working With SoftBank’s Arm on Broadcom AI Chip Effort
OpenAI’s development of its own artificial intelligence chip will benefit SoftBank, one of its biggest shareholders, which is also helping the ChatGPT maker develop and finance its ambitious data center plan. OpenAI is working with SoftBank’s Arm subsidiary to develop a central processing unit ...

@… worth a mention in the post, for sure. I don’t have control over all of the contexts in which the code will be used though 😭

In case you missed it, my piece yesterday on the 176 CISA employees fired last Friday, which will not go behind the customary archive paywall.
It's critical to note that sources told me more RIFs are in store for the nation's embattled cybersecurity agency.
https://www.

The White House fired 176 CISA employees on Friday, with more layoffs feared
Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters leaked 5m Qantas, 23m Vietnam Air customers' records, Spanish cops dismantle GXC Team, Dutch gov't warns of China's Nexperia security risks, Breach of crypto betting platform Shuffle exposes user data, FCC chair says sites have removed barred Chinese electronics, much more

Starvation is now being used as a weapon of war in numerous conflicts across the globe
— including Sudan, which continues to endure a yearslong famine.
Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric doctor who just returned from Sudan, says that the famine is man-made
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/10/6/fam

Man-Made Famine & Malnutrition in Sudan, Exacerbated by U.S. Aid Cuts
Starvation is now being used as a weapon of war in numerous conflicts across the globe — including Sudan, which continues to endure a yearslong famine. Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric doctor who just returned from Sudan, says that the famine is man-made. “Atrocities in Palestine, atrocities in Sudan that relate to malnutrition, that relate to famine, are a consequence of underlying structures that enable these things to happen,” says Haj-Hassan, who also volunteered in Gaza.

Well, another one bites the dust... Code Climate is shutting down and their new replacement service (only upgrade option) with the fascinating strapline "Code With Vibes, Merge With Confidence" does inspire anything but... 🙄
(Been using CC for years and even though it produced a lot of false positives, it generally was a very useful tool which sent me off on several major refactoring journeys over the years, from which not only I benefited as a maintainer, but all users of my…

Day 19 (a bit late): Alice Oseman
As I said I've got 14 authors to fit into two days. Probably just going to extend to 30? But Oseman gets this spot as an absolute legend of queer fiction in both novel & graphic novel form, and an excellent example of the many truths queer writers have to share with non-queer people that can make everyone's lives better. Her writing is very kind, despite in many instances dealing with some dark stuff.
I started out on Heartstopper, which is just so lovely and fun to read, and then made my way through several of her novels. The one I'll highlight here which I think it's her greatest triumph is "Loveless", which is semi-autobiographical and was at least my first (but no longer only) experience with the "platonic romance" sub-genre. It not only helped me work through some crufty internal doubts about aro/ace identities that I'd never really examined, but in the process helped improve my understanding of friendship, period. Heck, it's probably a nice novel for anyone questioning any sort of identity or dealing with loneliness, and it's just super-enjoyable as a story regardless of the philosophical value.
To cheat a bit more here on my author count, I recently read "Dear Wendy" by Ann Zhao, which shouts out "Loveless" and offers a more expository exploration of aro/ace identities, but "Loveless" is a book with more heart and better writing overall, including the neat plotting and great pacing. I think there are also parallels with Becky Albertalli's work, though I think I like Oseman slightly more. Certainly both excel at writing queer romance (and romance-adjacent) stuff with happy endings (#OwnVoices wins again with all three authors).
In any case, Oseman is excellent and if you're not up for reading a novel, Heartstopper is a graphic novel series that's easy to jump into and very kind to its adorable main characters.
I think I've now decided to continue to 30, which is a relief, so I'm tagging this (and the next post that rounds out 20) two ways.
#20AuthorsNoMen
#30AuthorsNoMen

Which one Performs Better? Wav2Vec or Whisper? Applying both in Badini Kurdish Speech to Text (BKSTT)
Renas Adnan, Hossein Hassani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09957 https://

Which one Performs Better? Wav2Vec or Whisper? Applying both in Badini Kurdish Speech to Text (BKSTT)
Speech-to-text (STT) systems have a wide range of applications. They are available in many languages, albeit at different quality levels. Although Kurdish is considered a less-resourced language from a processing perspective, SST is available for some of the Kurdish dialects, for instance, Sorani (Central Kurdish). However, that is not applied to other Kurdish dialects, Badini and Hawrami, for example. This research is an attempt to address this gap. Bandin, approximately, has two million speak…

NFL Week 2 overreactions: Did Brandon Aubrey save Cowboys' season? Should Browns bench Joe Flacco?

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/nfl-week-2-scores-results-overreactio…

Few-Part-Shot Font Generation
Masaki Akiba, Shumpei Takezaki, Daichi Haraguchi, Seiichi Uchida
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10006 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.…

Few-Part-Shot Font Generation
This paper proposes a novel model of few-part-shot font generation, which designs an entire font based on a set of partial design elements, i.e., partial shapes. Unlike conventional few-shot font generation, which requires entire character shapes for a couple of character classes, our approach only needs partial shapes as input. The proposed model not only improves the efficiency of font creation but also provides insights into how partial design details influence the entire structure of the in…

White House Deputy Chief of Staff
Stephen Miller vowed Friday that
he and Donald Trump would use this week’s assassination of Charlie Kirk
to “dismantle” the organized left using state power.
In a rant on Fox News, Miller
— the architect of Trump’s mass roundups and deportations of immigrants
— shouted that the best way to honor Kirk’s memory was to carry out a political purge against the left,
which he called a “domestic terrorism movement in this co…

Miller Says He and Trump Will Use Law Enforcement to 'Dismantle' the Left After Kirk Shooting | Common Dreams
Stephen Miller, Trump's deputy chief of staff, said that he and the president will use law enforcement to "dismantle" the left, which he called a "domestic terrorism movement" after the Charlie Kirk shooting.

Few Shot Semi-Supervised Learning for Abnormal Stop Detection from Sparse GPS Trajectories
Muhammad Ayub Sabir, Junbiao Pang, Jiaqi Wu, Fatima Ashraf
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12686

Few Shot Semi-Supervised Learning for Abnormal Stop Detection from Sparse GPS Trajectories
Abnormal stop detection (ASD) in intercity coach transportation is critical for ensuring passenger safety, operational reliability, and regulatory compliance. However, two key challenges hinder ASD effectiveness: sparse GPS trajectories, which obscure short or unauthorized stops, and limited labeled data, which restricts supervised learning. Existing methods often assume dense sampling or regular movement patterns, limiting their applicability. To address data sparsity, we propose a Sparsity-Aw…

The kind of IT support we deserve

contiguous_usa: Contiguous states (USA)
A network of contiguous states in the USA, in which each state is a node and two nodes are connected if they share a land-based geographic border. The dataset includes the lower 48 states, and the District of Columbia.
This network has 49 nodes and 107 edges.
Tags: Transportation, Roads, Unweighted

UbiQTree: Uncertainty Quantification in XAI with Tree Ensembles
Akshat Dubey, Aleksandar An\v{z}el, Bahar \.Ilgen, Georges Hattab
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09639 https://

UbiQTree: Uncertainty Quantification in XAI with Tree Ensembles
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques, such as SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), have become essential tools for interpreting complex ensemble tree-based models, especially in high-stakes domains such as healthcare analytics. However, SHAP values are usually treated as point estimates, which disregards the inherent and ubiquitous uncertainty in predictive models and data. This uncertainty has two primary sources: aleatoric and epistemic. The aleatoric uncertainty, which refle…

MSNBC fires analyst Matthew Dowd over Charlie Kirk shooting remarks.
“Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions,” Dowd said, adding: “You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place.”

@… yay! I wanted to play Warcraft 3 with the kids too but it seems like I’d have to buy 4 licenses which would cost about $120 😭

Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
.
.
.
I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading

Sola, which wants to use AI agents to automate businesses' repetitive, manual tasks, raised $21M, including a $3.5M seed and a $17.5M Series A led by a16z (Emma Hinchliffe/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/sola-solutions-ai-startup-r…

Exclusive: Two MIT dropouts raised $21 million for their AI startup that does legacy businesses’ grunt work
Sola Solutions' technology, backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Sarah Guo, automates grunt work for businesses, replacing RPA.

Self-Supervised Stereo Matching with Multi-Baseline Contrastive Learning
Peng Xu, Zhiyu Xiang, Jingyun Fu, Tianyu Pu, Kai Wang, Chaojie Ji, Tingming Bai, Eryun Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10838

Self-Supervised Stereo Matching with Multi-Baseline Contrastive Learning
Current self-supervised stereo matching relies on the photometric consistency assumption, which breaks down in occluded regions due to ill-posed correspondences. To address this issue, we propose BaCon-Stereo, a simple yet effective contrastive learning framework for self-supervised stereo network training in both non-occluded and occluded regions. We adopt a teacher-student paradigm with multi-baseline inputs, in which the stereo pairs fed into the teacher and student share the same reference …

P3D: Scalable Neural Surrogates for High-Resolution 3D Physics Simulations with Global Context
Benjamin Holzschuh, Georg Kohl, Florian Redinger, Nils Thuerey
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10186

P3D: Scalable Neural Surrogates for High-Resolution 3D Physics Simulations with Global Context
We present a scalable framework for learning deterministic and probabilistic neural surrogates for high-resolution 3D physics simulations. We introduce a hybrid CNN-Transformer backbone architecture targeted for 3D physics simulations, which significantly outperforms existing architectures in terms of speed and accuracy. Our proposed network can be pretrained on small patches of the simulation domain, which can be fused to obtain a global solution, optionally guided via a fast and scalable sequ…

Which 0-1 NFL teams need a win most? Chiefs can afford patience, Dolphins and Giants staffs under fire

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/which-0

Someone has the undivided attention of all 4 cats

myspace_aminer: MySpace social graph
This network contains the social graph of MySpace, a social networking website which also has a strong music emphasis. A directed edge (i,j) means that user i follows user j.
This network has 854498 nodes and 6489736 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Unweighted
https://netwo…

CMHG: A Dataset and Benchmark for Headline Generation of Minority Languages in China
Guixian Xu, Zeli Su, Ziyin Zhang, Jianing Liu, XU Han, Ting Zhang, Yushuang Dong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09990

CMHG: A Dataset and Benchmark for Headline Generation of Minority Languages in China
Minority languages in China, such as Tibetan, Uyghur, and Traditional Mongolian, face significant challenges due to their unique writing systems, which differ from international standards. This discrepancy has led to a severe lack of relevant corpora, particularly for supervised tasks like headline generation. To address this gap, we introduce a novel dataset, Chinese Minority Headline Generation (CMHG), which includes 100,000 entries for Tibetan, and 50,000 entries each for Uyghur and Mongolia…

Finch, which offers a voice-based AI system to automate administrative tasks done by paralegals, raised a $20M Series A, source says at a $100M valuation (Rashi Shrivastava/Forbes)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/the-prompt/2025/10/14/a-paralegals-ai-best-friend/…

A Paralegal’s AI Best Friend
Plus: Tech leaders propound the dead internet theory.

Object Fidelity Diffusion for Remote Sensing Image Generation
Ziqi Ye, Shuran Ma, Jie Yang, Xiaoyi Yang, Ziyang Gong, Xue Yang, Haipeng Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10801 htt…

Object Fidelity Diffusion for Remote Sensing Image Generation
High-precision controllable remote sensing image generation is both meaningful and challenging. Existing diffusion models often produce low-fidelity images due to their inability to adequately capture morphological details, which may affect the robustness and reliability of object detection models. To enhance the accuracy and fidelity of generated objects in remote sensing, this paper proposes Object Fidelity Diffusion (OF-Diff), which effectively improves the fidelity of generated objects. Spe…

Diffusion-DFL: Decision-focused Diffusion Models for Stochastic Optimization
Zihao Zhao, Christopher Yeh, Lingkai Kong, Kai Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11590 https://…

Diffusion-DFL: Decision-focused Diffusion Models for Stochastic Optimization
Decision-focused learning (DFL) integrates predictive modeling and optimization by training predictors to optimize the downstream decision target rather than merely minimizing prediction error. To date, existing DFL methods typically rely on deterministic point predictions, which are often insufficient to capture the intrinsic stochasticity of real-world environments. To address this challenge, we propose the first diffusion-based DFL approach, which trains a diffusion model to represent the di…

ceo_club: CEO Club Memberships
A bipartite network of the memberships of chief executive officers and the social organizations (clubs) to which they belong, from the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Data originally collected by Galaskiewicz in 1985.
This network has 40 nodes and 95 edges.
Tags: Social, Affiliation, Unweighted
https://

Credal Transformer: A Principled Approach for Quantifying and Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Language Models
Shihao Ji, Zihui Song, Jiajie Huang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12137

Credal Transformer: A Principled Approach for Quantifying and Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) hallucinate, generating factually incorrect yet confident assertions. We argue this stems from the Transformer's Softmax function, which creates "Artificial Certainty" by collapsing ambiguous attention scores into a single probability distribution, discarding uncertainty information at each layer. To fix this, we introduce the Credal Transformer, which replaces standard attention with a Credal Attention Mechanism (CAM) based on evidential theory. CAM produces a "cre…

Klarna, which is planning a potential NY IPO as soon as September, is focusing on its banking push to boost revenue while shedding its image as a BNPL phenom (Aisha S Gani/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-11/klarna-r…

Klarna Revives Its IPO, But This Time as a Bank
As the payments giant prepares an IPO, it’s trying to persuade millions of consumers to use its debit cards.

MagicMirror: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Fine-Grained Artifacts Assessment in Text-to-Image Generation
Jia Wang, Jie Hu, Xiaoqi Ma, Hanghang Ma, Yanbing Zeng, Xiaoming Wei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10260

MagicMirror: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Fine-Grained Artifacts Assessment in Text-to-Image Generation
Text-to-image (T2I) generation has achieved remarkable progress in instruction following and aesthetics. However, a persistent challenge is the prevalence of physical artifacts, such as anatomical and structural flaws, which severely degrade perceptual quality and limit application. Given the diversity and complexity of these artifacts, a systematic and fine-grained evaluation framework is required, which is lacking in current benchmarks. To fill this gap, we introduce MagicMirror, a comprehens…

jester: Jester joke ratings (2001)
Two bipartite networks of users and jokes, extracted from the online joke recommender system Jester. A user connects to all jokes for which that user entered a rating. Edge weights give the rating score, scaled from -10 to 10. The two files differ by how many joke nodes are included, 100 or 150.
This network has 73521 nodes and 4136360 edges.
Tags: Economic, Preferences, Weighted

Benchmark of stylistic variation in LLM-generated texts
Ji\v{r}\'i Mili\v{c}ka, Anna Marklov\'a, V\'aclav Cvr\v{c}ek
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10179 https://…

Benchmark of stylistic variation in LLM-generated texts
This study investigates the register variation in texts written by humans and comparable texts produced by large language models (LLMs). Biber's multidimensional analysis (MDA) is applied to a sample of human-written texts and AI-created texts generated to be their counterparts to find the dimensions of variation in which LLMs differ most significantly and most systematically from humans. As textual material, a new LLM-generated corpus AI-Brown is used, which is comparable to BE-21 (a Brown fam…

Reducto, which uses OCR with vision language models to convert complex documents into inputs for LLMs, raised a $75M Series B led by a16z at a $600M valuation (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/startup-using-ai-tran…

The Startup Using AI to Translate Documents Into Data
If you’ve ever uploaded a picture of a receipt to an expense report or read a PDF of a book online, you’ve likely used optical character recognition, a decades-old technique that converts images of typed, handwritten or printed text into text that’s editable on a computer.OCR might not sound ...

A Neurosymbolic Framework for Interpretable Cognitive Attack Detection in Augmented Reality
Rongqian Chen, Allison Andreyev, Yanming Xiu, Mahdi Imani, Bin Li, Maria Gorlatova, Gang Tan, Tian Lan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09185

A Neurosymbolic Framework for Interpretable Cognitive Attack Detection in Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality (AR) enriches perception by overlaying virtual elements on the physical world. Due to its growing popularity, cognitive attacks that alter AR content to manipulate users' semantic perception have received increasing attention. Existing detection methods often focus on visual changes, which are restricted to pixel- or image-level processing and lack semantic reasoning capabilities, or they rely on pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), which function as black-box approaches…

Remedio, which uses AI to detect risky device misconfigurations on corporate networks, raised $65M led by Bessemer, a source says at a $300M valuation (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewste

How This Israeli Hacker Bootstrapped Her AI Cyber Company To Profitability
An alum of Israel’s intelligence complex, Tal Kollender built her now $300 million-valued startup largely through word of mouth, counting Amazon and Coca-Cola as customers.

dbpedia_recordlabel: DBpedia artist-label affiliations
Bipartite networks of the affiliations (contractual relations) between artists and the record labels under which they have performed, as extracted from Wikipedia by the DBpedia project.
This network has 186758 nodes and 233286 edges.
Tags: Economic, Employment, Unweighted
http…

Jailbreaking Commercial Black-Box LLMs with Explicitly Harmful Prompts
Chiyu Zhang, Lu Zhou, Xiaogang Xu, Jiafei Wu, Liming Fang, Zhe Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10390 https:…

Jailbreaking Commercial Black-Box LLMs with Explicitly Harmful Prompts
Evaluating jailbreak attacks is challenging when prompts are not overtly harmful or fail to induce harmful outputs. Unfortunately, many existing red-teaming datasets contain such unsuitable prompts. To evaluate attacks accurately, these datasets need to be assessed and cleaned for maliciousness. However, existing malicious content detection methods rely on either manual annotation, which is labor-intensive, or large language models (LLMs), which have inconsistent accuracy in harmful types. To b…

Lila Sciences, which uses AI to develop novel drugs and materials, raised $235M at a ~$1.23B valuation, after coming out of stealth in March with a $200M seed (Brian Kahn/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09…

bitcoin_trust: Bitcoin OTC trust network (2017)
A network of who-trusts-whom relationships among users of the Bitcoin OTC platform. Each directed edge (i,j,w) represents the rating of user j by user i, in which i assigns j a weight w on a scale of -10 (total distrust) to 10 (total trust) in steps of 1.
This network has 5881 nodes and 35592 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Weighted, Signed, Timestamps

Established Psychometric vs. Ecologically Valid Questionnaires: Rethinking Psychological Assessments in Large Language Models
Dongmin Choi, Woojung Song, Jongwook Han, Eun-Ju Lee, Yohan Jo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10078

Established Psychometric vs. Ecologically Valid Questionnaires: Rethinking Psychological Assessments in Large Language Models
Researchers have applied established psychometric questionnaires (e.g., BFI, PVQ) to measure the personality traits and values reflected in the responses of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, concerns have been raised about applying these human-designed questionnaires to LLMs. One such concern is their lack of ecological validity--the extent to which survey questions adequately reflect and resemble real-world contexts in which LLMs generate texts in response to user queries. However, it rem…

Flow Engineering, which provides a collaborative hardware development platform for companies like Rivian, raised a $23M Series A led by Sequoia (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/10/14/exclusive-f…

Exclusive: Flow Engineering raises $23 million Series A led by Sequoia to power hardware’s new era
Flow Engineering has raised a $23 million Series A, led by Sequoia and including the Collisons, Fortune has exclusively learned.

windsurfers: Windsurfers network (1986)
A network of interpersonal contacts among windsurfers in southern California during the Fall of 1986. The edge weights indicate the perception of social affiliations majored by the tasks in which each individual was asked​ to sort cards with other surfer’s name in the order of closeness.
This network has 43 nodes and 336 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Weighted

London-based Dexory, which builds autonomous warehouse robots, raised a $165M Series C in equity and debt, after raising a $80M Series B in 2024 (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/Sifted)
https://sifted.eu/articles/ai-robotics-startup-dexory-raises-165m/

LA-based MarqVision, which uses AI to monitor marketplaces for counterfeits, raised a $48M Series B led by Peak XV Partners, bringing its total funding to ~$90M (Kate Park/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/15/harvard-law-to-ai-marqvisi…

Harvard Law to AI: MarqVision lands $48M to combat brand abuse | TechCrunch
This LA-based startup raised $48M to tackle brand abuse

Divergent Technologies, which makes automated assembly systems and 3D printers to make missile parts and other equipment, raised $290M at a $2.3B valuation (Lizette Chapman/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Berlin-based Motor Ai, which develops neuroscience-driven Level 4 autonomous driving tech and plans to deploy it on German roads in 2025, raised a $20M seed (Dean Takahashi/GamesBeat)
https://gamesbeat.com/after-8-years-motor-ai-raises-20m-for-autonom…

After 8 years, Motor Ai raises $20M for autonomous driving software
After eight years of work, Motor Ai has raised $20 million for autonomous driving software that prioritizes compliance.

Saudi Arabia-based Hala, which offers payment services to more than 142,000 SMBs in the Gulf region, raised a $157M Series B, source says at a ~$900M valuation (Aisha S Gani/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20…

California passes SB 53, which requires AI companies to disclose their safety testing regimes; Newsom vetoed a similar though more expansive measure last year (Chase DiFeliciantonio/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/13/c

Conceivable Life Sciences, which wants to use AI to automate the work done by embryologists in IVF labs, raised $50M, bringing its total funding to $70M (Sarah Frier/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025…

Israel-based Terra Security, which offers an AI-driven penetration testing platform, raised a $30M Series A led by Felicis, bringing its total funding to $38M (Meir Orbach/CTech)
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/awdq1yv5k

AI startup Terra Security raises $30M Series A for continuous penetration testing
Israeli startup aims to scale offensive security testing beyond manual and costly methods.

Sources: chip startup Rivos, which plans to release a GPU for inference as early as 2026, is seeking to raise between $400M and $500M at a $2B valuation (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/chip-startup-rivos-seeks-500-million…

Chip Startup Rivos Seeks Up to $500 Million to Compete With Nvidia
Rivos, a chip startup that aims to compete with Nvidia, is seeking to raise between $400 million and $500 million, according to two people familiar with the matter. The Santa Clara, Calif.–based startup, backed by Intel’s CEO Lip-Bu Tan, is seeking a valuation of more than $2 billion, one of the ...

PayPal launches PayPal Links, which lets users create a personalized, one-time link to send or request payment to other PayPal users (Lance Whitney/ZDNET)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/paypal-links-lets-you-send-and-receive-money-much-f…

PayPal Links lets you send and receive money much faster now - even crypto
With the new PayPal Links option, you can create and share personalized links to send or request payment from other individuals. Here's how.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoes SB 771, which would've fined social media companies if their algorithms intentionally promoted violent or extremist content (Tyler Katzenberger/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/13/n

Microsoft officially ends support for Windows 10, which runs on ~40% of Windows PCs per Statcounter; users can enroll in an Extended Security Updates program (Andrew Cunningham/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/…

Windows 10 support “ends” today, but it’s just the first of many deaths
End users can get an extra year of security updates relatively easily.

YouTube starts rolling out its redesigned video player, which features rounded, slightly translucent on-screen buttons, across mobile, web, and TV globally (Jay Peters/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/799492/youtube-new-video-player-update-changes

YouTube has a new video player
YouTube is introducing a bunch of changes, including a new look for the video player and animations for liking a video.

CoreWeave says it has signed a new $6.3B order with Nvidia, which guarantees that Nvidia will purchase any residual cloud capacity not sold to customers (Harshita Mary Varghese/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/coreweave-nv…

How AI is upending India's business process management sector, which employs 1.65M people; conversational AI startup LimeChat claims to have automated 5K jobs (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/meet-ai-chatbots-replacing-in…

Apple signs a $500M deal to buy rare-earth minerals from US producer MP, which secured Pentagon backing last week, as it seeks to cut its reliance on China (Carlos Caminada/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025…

Goldman Sachs agrees to acquire multi-stage investment firm Industry Ventures, which has $7B AUM, for $665M in cash and equity plus $300M tied to performance (Saeed Azhar/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/go…

SoftBank's $5.4B purchase of ABB's robotics unit is another setback for Europe, which risks losing its edge to Asian and US companies in the "physical AI" era (Chris Bryant/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles

Managed security services provider LevelBlue to acquire cybersecurity firm Cybereason, which raised $850M in total funding and undergone multiple restructurings (Greg Otto/CyberScoop)
https://cyberscoop.com/cybereason-levelblue-acquistion/

LevelBlue to acquire Cybereason in latest cybersecurity industry consolidation
LevelBlue announced Tuesday it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cybereason, a Boston-based cybersecurity firm specializing in extended detection and response platforms and digital forensics. 

Google's Gemini app is the #1 app in the US App Store, driven by its Nano Banana model, which has been used to edit 500M images since its August 26 launch (Abner Li/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2025/09/13/gemini-top-free-apple-app-store/

Google Gemini is the top free iPhone app
Nano Banana has been a hit for Google, and presumably the reason that Gemini for iPhone is the top free app in the US App Store.

Sources: OpenAI makes a five-year business plan to meet $1T spending pledges; it currently books ~$13B in ARR, 70% of which comes from consumers using ChatGPT (Financial Times)

Sources: Amazon plans to cut as much as 15% of its HR staff, and additional layoffs will likely affect other areas of its core consumer business (Jason Del Rey/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/10/14/amazon-layoffs-pxt-hr-andy-jassy/

Amazon is planning a new wave of layoffs, sources say
Amazon's 10,000-plus employee HR division, which includes recruiters, is expected to be among the hardest hit in the job cuts.

Andrej Karpathy unveils nanochat, a full-stack training and inference implementation of an LLM in a single, dependency-minimal codebase (Andrej Karpathy/@karpathy)
https://x.com/karpathy/status/1977755427569111362

Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) on X
Excited to release new repo: nanochat! (it's among the most unhinged I've written). Unlike my earlier similar repo nanoGPT which only covered pretraining, nanochat is a minimal, from scratch, full-stack training/inference pipeline of a simple ChatGPT clone in a single,