Tootfinder

"Why wind farms attract so much misinformation and conspiracy theory"
#WindTurbines #Energy #Renewables

Why wind farms attract so much misinformation and conspiracy theory
Opposition is often rooted in a worldview in crisis.

Why wind farms attract so much misinformation and conspiracy theory (Marc Hudson/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/08/why-wind-farms-attract-so-much-misinformation-and-conspiracy-theory/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250823/p29#a250823p29

"Aussi peu glorieuse qu'elle soit, la réduction des coûts est actuellement logique du point de vue d'OpenAI. L'entreprise est plus que jamais confrontée Š la concurrence et subit une pression croissante pour trouver un moyen de rentabiliser son modèle d'entreprise. Son évaluation anticipée de quelque 500 milliards de dollars s'accompagne de l'attente implicite qu'elle trouvera bientôt un moyen de gagner de l'argent."

How modern media consumption is converging toward a continuous flow of episodic video, across streaming providers, podcasts, and social media apps (Derek Thompson)
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-everything-became-television

Everything Is Television
A theory of culture and attention

How modern media consumption is converging toward a continuous flow of episodic video, across streaming providers, podcasts, and social media apps (Derek Thompson)
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-everything-became-television

Everything Is Television
A theory of culture and attention

A spooky convergence is happening in media.
Everything that is not already television is turning into television.
Whether the starting point is a student directory (Facebook),
radio (podcasts), or
an AI image generator, (Sora)
the end point seems to be the same:
a river of short-form video.
https:/…

Everything Is Television
A theory of culture and attention

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?

AdS3 integrability, Sine-Gordon and fractional supersymmetry
Alessandro Torrielli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12316 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12316

AdS3 integrability, Sine-Gordon and fractional supersymmetry
The massless S-matrix of the pure RR AdS3 X S3 X T4 theory is very similar but not quite the same as Fendley-Intriligator's N=2 S-matrix, in turns related to Sine-Gordon taken at a special coupling. In this short note we review the reason why supersymmetry emerges but with a fractional statistics of the particles. We then use this to obtain a very simple interpolating S-matrix between massless AdS3 and Sine-Gordon, and further find two interpolating S-matrices between these and the mixed-flux r…

🤣
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/oct/15/bored-aliens-has-intelligent-life-stopped-bothering-trying-to-contact-earth?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

🤣
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/oct/15/bored-aliens-has-intelligent-life-stopped-bothering-trying-to-contact-earth?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Theory: ATProto is pointless and it just hit me why.
It's too complicated. Ok, so then your response will be "then we can educate and hold hands and explain and gain trust"
You do THAT and *boom* you ALREADY just solved the problem with humans that you were just trying to solve with complex tech.
At that point just point them to, or become, a good Mastodon server.
#socialmedia

Appreciate the nod that spatial data viz is hard, @…!
The motivation part about expensive GIS tools is a little off though 💸 :qgis:
https://m…

Gauge symmetry and the arrow of time: How to count what counts
Sean Gryb
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14720 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14720

Gauge symmetry and the arrow of time: How to count what counts
This thesis addresses two major problems in the philosophy of physics. The first is how to identify the minimal physical content of a theory; that is, what features of a theory are truly needed to make predictions, and what can be removed without changing its empirical consequences. The second is the problem of time's arrow: why time seems to have a direction, even though the fundamental laws of physics treat the past and future symmetrically. I show that answering the first question leads to…

If you are being a piece of shit to other people, I don't understand why I should be nice to you.
Respect is not something you demand, it's something you earn. If you are calling for "replacement theory" and the "good brits" you are being a piece of shit. Recognise it, apologize, and be better to people, especially the ones you don't even know.

Invisible Languages of the LLM Universe
Saurabh Khanna, Xinxu Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11557 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11557

Invisible Languages of the LLM Universe
Large Language Models are trained on massive multilingual corpora, yet this abundance masks a profound crisis: of the world's 7,613 living languages, approximately 2,000 languages with millions of speakers remain effectively invisible in digital ecosystems. We propose a critical framework connecting empirical measurements of language vitality (real world demographic strength) and digitality (online presence) with postcolonial theory and epistemic injustice to explain why linguistic inequality i…

AI Where It Matters: Where, Why, and How Developers Want AI Support in Daily Work
Rudrajit Choudhuri, Carmen Badea, Christian Bird, Jenna Butler, Rob DeLine, Brian Houck
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00762

AI Where It Matters: Where, Why, and How Developers Want AI Support in Daily Work
Generative AI is reshaping software work, yet we lack clear guidance on where developers most need and want support, and how to design it responsibly. We report a large-scale, mixed-methods study of N=860 developers that examines where, why, and how they seek or limit AI help, providing the first task-aware, empirically validated mapping from developers' perceptions of their tasks to AI adoption patterns and responsible AI priorities. Using cognitive appraisal theory, we show that task evaluati…

Marcus Theory and The Condon Approximation Revisited II: The Horror of Triplet Energy Transfer
Jennifer R. DeRosa, Tian Qiu, D. Vale Cofer-Shabica, Joseph E. Subotnik
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11680

Marcus Theory and The Condon Approximation Revisited II: The Horror of Triplet Energy Transfer
We investigate the applicability of the Condon approximation (i.e. the notion that the diabatic coupling is invariant to geometry) in the context of both electron transfer (ET) and triplet energy transfer (TET) and compare the two cases. Although it is well appreciated that diabatic couplings usually arise from the interactions of electronic wavefunction tails, we show that ET tails are very different from TET tails. Using a simple model problem, our analysis explains in detail why the rates of…

Signals in the Noise: Decoding Unexpected Engagement Patterns on Twitter
Yulin Yu, Houming Chen, Daniel Romero, Paramveer S. Dhillon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08128 https://

Signals in the Noise: Decoding Unexpected Engagement Patterns on Twitter
Social media platforms offer users multiple ways to engage with content--likes, retweets, and comments--creating a complex signaling system within the attention economy. While previous research has examined factors driving overall engagement, less is known about why certain tweets receive unexpectedly high levels of one type of engagement relative to others. Drawing on Signaling Theory and Attention Economy Theory, we investigate these unexpected engagement patterns on Twitter (now known as "X"…

Envy-Free but Still Unfair: Envy-Freeness Up To One Item (EF-1) in Personalized Recommendation
Amanda Aird, Ben Armstrong, Nicholas Mattei, Robin Burke
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09037

Envy-Free but Still Unfair: Envy-Freeness Up To One Item (EF-1) in Personalized Recommendation
Envy-freeness and the relaxation to Envy-freeness up to one item (EF-1) have been used as fairness concepts in the economics, game theory, and social choice literatures since the 1960s, and have recently gained popularity within the recommendation systems communities. In this short position paper we will give an overview of envy-freeness and its use in economics and recommendation systems; and illustrate why envy is not appropriate to measure fairness for use in settings where personalization p…

Ethical and sustainable mathematics is localised: why global paradigms fail and culturally-situated practices are essential
Dennis M\"uller, Maurice Chiodo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05892

Ethical and sustainable mathematics is localised: why global paradigms fail and culturally-situated practices are essential
This paper identifies several different interconnected challenges preventing the move towards more ethical and sustainable mathematics education: the entrenched belief in mathematical neutrality, the difficulty of simultaneously reforming mathematics and its pedagogy, the gap between academic theory and classroom practice, and the need for epistemic decolonisation. In this context, we look at both bottom-up and top-down approaches, and argue that globalised frameworks such as the United Nations…

Understanding Tool-Integrated Reasoning
Heng Lin, Zhongwen Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19201 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19201

Understanding Tool-Integrated Reasoning
We study why Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) makes Large Language Models (LLMs) more capable. While LLMs integrated with tools like Python code interpreters show great promise, a principled theory explaining why this paradigm is effective has been missing. This work provides the first formal proof that TIR fundamentally expands an LLM's capabilities. We demonstrate that tools enable a strict expansion of the model's empirical and feasible support, breaking the capability ceiling of pure-text mo…

Dual is Different: EFTs, Axions and Nonpropagating Form Fields in Cosmology
C. P. Burgess, F. Quevedo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11340 https://arxiv.org/pd…

Dual is Different: EFTs, Axions and Nonpropagating Form Fields in Cosmology
Scalar fields in 4D are known to have equivalent dual descriptions in terms of form-field gauge potentials, but this is often regarded as an arcane fact. Why use more complicated formulations when simpler scalar descriptions exist and are equivalent? We describe three ways in which scalars that arise as duals can differ from their garden-variety counterparts. Two of these -- the interchange of weak and strong couplings and utility in bringing topological information to the low-energy theory -- …

Replaced article(s) found for math.ST. https://arxiv.org/list/math.ST/new
[1/1]:
- Optimal linear prediction with functional observations: Why you can use a simple post-dimension r...
Won-Ki Seo

A General Theory of Emergent Linearity in Complex Dynamical Systems: The Role of Spatial Averaging and Vanishing Correlations
Sabbir Ahmed, Hafiz Fareed Ahmed, Erfan Nozari
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25589

A General Theory of Emergent Linearity in Complex Dynamical Systems: The Role of Spatial Averaging and Vanishing Correlations
Various natural and engineered systems, from urban traffic flow to the human brain, have been described by large-scale networked dynamical systems. Despite their vast differences, these systems are often similar in being comprised of numerous microscopic subsystems with complex nonlinear dynamics and interactions that give rise to diverse emergent macroscopic behaviors. As such, a long-standing question across various fields has been to understand why and how various forms of macroscopic behavi…

Visual Execution and Validation of Finite-State Machines and Pushdown Automata
Marco T. Moraz\'an (Seton Hall University), David Anthony K. Fields (Seton Hall University), Andr\'es M. Garced (Seton Hall University), Tijana Mini\'c (University of Washington)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03641

Visual Execution and Validation of Finite-State Machines and Pushdown Automata
In Formal Languages and Automata Theory courses, students find understanding nondeterministic finite-state and pushdown automata difficult. In many cases, this means that it is challenging for them to comprehend the operational semantics of such machines and, as a consequence, determine why a word is accepted or rejected. This is not entirely surprising, because students are mostly trained to design and implement deterministic programs. Comprehension of pushdown automata is further complicated,…

To Each Their Own: Heterogeneity in Worker Preferences for Peer Information
Zhi Hao Lim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06162 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06162…

To Each Their Own: Heterogeneity in Worker Preferences for Peer Information
Peer information is pervasive in the workplace, but workers differ in whether and why they value such information. We develop a portable, theory-driven methodology to study heterogeneity in information preferences and the underlying mechanisms. In a real-effort experiment with 793 workers, we elicit willingness-to-pay for peer information delivered either before or after a task. We identify four worker types (indifferent, stress-avoidant, competitive, and learning-oriented) whose effort respons…

Towards a fundamental theory of modeling discrete systems
Peter Fettke, Wolfgang Reisig
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19803 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19803…

Towards a fundamental theory of modeling discrete systems
Modeling is a central concern in both science and engineering. However, we need a new fundamental theory to address the challenges of the digital age. In this paper, we first explain why modeling is fundamental and which challenges must be addressed in the digital world. As a main contribution, we introduce the Heraklit modeling framework as a new approach to modeling. We conclude with some general remarks. Future work will involve the correctness of modeling, the notion of information, and the…

A Probabilistic Inference Scaling Theory for LLM Self-Correction
Zhe Yang, Yichang Zhang, Yudong Wang, Ziyao Xu, Junyang Lin, Zhifang Sui
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16456 https:…

A Probabilistic Inference Scaling Theory for LLM Self-Correction
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the capability to refine their generated answers through self-correction, enabling continuous performance improvement over multiple rounds. However, the mechanisms underlying how and why accuracy evolves during this iterative process remain unexplored. To fill this gap, we propose a probabilistic theory to model the dynamics of accuracy change and explain the performance improvements observed in multi-round self-correction. Through mathematical der…

A Strongly Polynomial-Time Combinatorial Algorithm for the Nucleolus in Convex Games
Giacoomo Maggiorano, Alessandro Sosso, Gautier Stauffer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02380 htt…

A Strongly Polynomial-Time Combinatorial Algorithm for the Nucleolus in Convex Games
The nucleolus is a fundamental solution concept in cooperative game theory, yet computing it is NP-hard in general. In convex games-where players' marginal contributions grow with coalition size-the only existing polynomial-time algorithm relies on the ellipsoid method. We re-examine a reduced game approach, refuting a previously claimed polynomial-time implementation and clarifying why it fails. By developing new algorithmic ideas and exploiting the structure of least core polyhedra, we show t…

Demographic synchrony increases the vulnerability of human societies to collapse
Marcus J. Hamilton, Robert S. Walker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07660 https://

Demographic synchrony increases the vulnerability of human societies to collapse
Why do human populations remain vulnerable to collapse, even when they are large? Classical demographic theory predicts that volatility in growth should decline rapidly with size due to the averaging effects of the law of large numbers. As such, while small-scale societies may be demographically fragile, large-scale societies should be much more stable. Using a large census dataset of 228 indigenous societies from Brazil, we show that this prediction does not hold. Instead of volatility declini…

How are Scientific Concepts Birthed? Typing Rules of Concept Formation in Theoretical Physics Reasoning
Omar Aguilar, Anthony Aguirre
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10740 https://…

How are Scientific Concepts Birthed? Typing Rules of Concept Formation in Theoretical Physics Reasoning
This work aims to formalize some of the ways scientific concepts are formed in the process of theoretical physics discovery. Since this may at first seem like a task beyond the scope of the exact sciences (natural and formal sciences), we begin by presenting arguments for why scientific concept formation can be formalized. Then, we introduce type theory as a natural and well-suited framework for this formalization. We formalize what we call "ways of discovering new concepts" including concept d…

Feature Dynamics as Implicit Data Augmentation: A Depth-Decomposed View on Deep Neural Network Generalization
Tianyu Ruan, Kuo Gai, Shihua Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20334

Feature Dynamics as Implicit Data Augmentation: A Depth-Decomposed View on Deep Neural Network Generalization
Why do deep networks generalize well? In contrast to classical generalization theory, we approach this fundamental question by examining not only inputs and outputs, but the evolution of internal features. Our study suggests a phenomenon of temporal consistency that predictions remain stable when shallow features from earlier checkpoints combine with deeper features from later ones. This stability is not a trivial convergence artifact. It acts as a form of implicit, structured augmentation that…

Dynamical Tension Strings with Target Scale Symmetry producing DE, DM and why 4D?
Eduardo Guendelman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17333 https://arxiv.org/pdf…

Dynamical Tension Strings with Target Scale Symmetry producing DE, DM and why 4D?
In the modified measure formulation string or branes the tension appear as an additional dynamical degree of freedom . Furthermore in the presence of an additional background scalar field that couples to the strings and locally changes the tension, the tension field really dynamical and the theory has an intrinsic target space scale symmetry. When many types of strings probing the same region of space are considered this tension scalar is constrained by the requirement of quantum conformal inva…