Tootfinder

Cowboys have work to do after preseason opener https://insidethestar.com/cowboys-have-work-to-do-after-preseason-opener

📉 California's economy is already getting hit by immigration raids
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-07-30/people-reporting-to-work-in-private-sector-in-california-down-after-raids-report-sa…

California's economy is already getting hit by immigration raids
The number of people reporting to work in the private sector in California has decreased by 3.1% — a downturn only recently matched by the COVID-19 lockdown.

@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social Again and again, I experience that tcpip-connections become unavailable over Wifi (Freifunk). Datagrams do work, ip-packets do work with mobile connection. Only remedy i found is to reboot, after reboot ip-connections with wifi will work again until it stops again needing another reboot.

@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social Again and again, I experience that tcpip-connections become unavailable over Wifi (Freifunk). Datagrams do work, ip-packets do work with mobile connection. Only remedy i found is to reboot, after reboot ip-connections with wifi will work again until it stops again needing another reboot.

Google plans to shut down Tables, a work-tracking tool and competitor to Airtable, in December and directs users to migrate to Google Sheets or AppSheet (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/11/google-is-shutting-down-tables-its-airtable…

Google is shutting down Tables, its Airtable rival | TechCrunch
Google Tables, a work-tracking tool and competitor to the popular spreadsheet-database hybrid Airtable, is shutting down. The app will not be supported after December 16, 2025.

A proposed constellation of satellites has astronomers very worried: #ReflectOrbital would produce light pollution by design.

Bias after Prompting: Persistent Discrimination in Large Language Models
Nivedha Sivakumar, Natalie Mackraz, Samira Khorshidi, Krishna Patel, Barry-John Theobald, Luca Zappella, Nicholas Apostoloff
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08146

Bias after Prompting: Persistent Discrimination in Large Language Models
A dangerous assumption that can be made from prior work on the bias transfer hypothesis (BTH) is that biases do not transfer from pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to adapted models. We invalidate this assumption by studying the BTH in causal models under prompt adaptations, as prompting is an extremely popular and accessible adaptation strategy used in real-world applications. In contrast to prior work, we find that biases can transfer through prompting and that popular prompt-based mit…

Thanks for coming to my talk at @…, everyone! It was a joy and an honour to be invited – and I hope it was valuable! 🤗💚 Here are the slides: https://noti.st/matthiasott/ZXgFeg

Painting With the Web by Matthias Ott
Today’s Web is more complex, unpredictable, dynamic, and powerful than ever. Yet, 25 years after “A Dao of Web Design” we still approach building for the Web with a mindset of control, using linear workflows and static design tools that often don’t reflect the Web’s true nature and potential. The canvas we work on has transformed, the materials we use have changed. Together, we’ll explore how we can use web design engineering to start painting with the Web and create designs that ar…

I tried to go for a ride in the rain today and it sucked. I was hoping to go meet one of the candidates for governor at a local park and while it was "lightly" raining when I left home after a mile it got worse and the top of my legs were soaked.
The rest of my body was okay. I put my rain jacket hood over my helmet, I had gloves and good hiking shoes but damn, pants and legs were just... wet.
I never *want* to ride in the rain but may have to if I'm stuck at work o…

Ah our poor widdle scared congress critters. Poor poor babies who work in 24x7x365 heavily guarded buildings with airport-grade (and beyond) access controls, have clouds of protective officers nearby, whose absence would be noted by staff and press, etc.
Yet, we normies who are being directly threatened by the President on down with arrest by mask agents, arrest, deportation to a death camp in another country, even death in the US are supposed to be accepting of these threats and risks…

'People are scared to death': Members of Congress fear for their safety after Charlie Kirk assassination
The assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has members of Congress afraid for their own safety and canceling some political events.

#GrapheneOS #Android

Eagles RT Johnson calls for 'less predictable' attack https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46549246/eagles-johnson-calls-less-predictable-attack-loss

Adaptive Quantum Computers: decoding and state preparation
Niels M. P. Neumann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08718 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08718

Adaptive Quantum Computers: decoding and state preparation
Interacting with a standard computer can enhance the capabilities of current quantum computers already today, particularly by offloading certain computations to the standard computer. Quantum computers that interact with standard computers to perform computations are called adaptive quantum computers. This work formalizes a model that describes these adaptive quantum computers. As quantum computers are still under development, this work focuses on computations that terminate after a fixed numbe…

Looks like today should be the last day of NES work as the NESRGB mod is coming in today. Even better, the EuroSCART cable is coming in so I can test out the composite, S-Video, and RGB output from the console as well. I'm genuinely curious to see how different the PPU's composite output compares to the NESRGB's version. After everything is done, I'll get the blog post updated and published. Should be a fun day.

(2020) Economic growth is incompatible with biodiversity conservation #environment

Economic growth is incompatible with biodiversity conservation
The increase in resource consumption and polluting emissions as a result of economic growth is not compatible with biodiversity conservation. However, most international policies on biodiversity and sustainability advocate economic growth. These are the main conclusions of the study "Biodiversity policy beyond economic growth," published this week in the scientific journal Conservation Letters. This contradiction became clear after a review of international scientific and policy work on the sub…

The leader of a major press association resigned after his board opposed a lawsuit defending journalists' rights (Mary Randolph/Poynter)
https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2025/illinois-press-association-don-craven-resigns-lawsuit-journalist-rights/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251009/p110#a251009p110

Anyone have experience getting hibernate to work on Fedora 42 with Secure Boot?
Was surprised to find that I can't hibernate fedora without disabling Secure Boot on my dual boot gaming PC. Unfortunately, that's not an option. After doing research, it is wildly complicated to fix.

Weekly news round-up from Saigon:
Nix-shell (for me, as a desktop user) is a powerful tool to, temporarily, enable software I wouldn't otherwise use. And that someone took the trouble to package filen-desktop as a nix package is amazing.
The Intel wifi drivers work ootb on FreeBSD 14.3, which makes it possible for me to install Ungoogled Chromium later on (as a pkg it is only available on stable releases) I got an error after compiling for 4 hrs on an i7 with 16gb, so there'…

DP-SPRT: Differentially Private Sequential Probability Ratio Tests
Thomas Michel, Debabrota Basu, Emilie Kaufmann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06377 https://…

DP-SPRT: Differentially Private Sequential Probability Ratio Tests
We revisit Wald's celebrated Sequential Probability Ratio Test for sequential tests of two simple hypotheses, under privacy constraints. We propose DP-SPRT, a wrapper that can be calibrated to achieve desired error probabilities and privacy constraints, addressing a significant gap in previous work. DP-SPRT relies on a private mechanism that processes a sequence of queries and stops after privately determining when the query results fall outside a predefined interval. This OutsideInterval mecha…

There and Back Again: Bulk-to-Defect via Ward Identities
Jake Belton, Ziwen Kong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08519 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08519

There and Back Again: Bulk-to-Defect via Ward Identities
In conformal field theory, the presence of a defect partially breaks the global symmetry, giving rise to defect operators such as the tilts. In this work, we derive integral identities that relate correlation functions involving bulk and defect operators -- including tilts -- to lower-point bulk-defect correlators, based on a detailed analysis of the Lie algebra of the symmetry group before and after the defect-induced symmetry breaking. As explicit examples, we illustrate these identities for …

Newsroom union members at the Los Angeles Times vote to authorize a strike as they raise the pressure for a new contract after three years of negotiations (Katie Kilkenny/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

Los Angeles Times Journalists Authorize a Strike
Eight-five percent of participating members voted to empower the newsroom union to call a potential work stoppage.

New experiences every day. Today: PHPStorm 2025.2.3 freezes after a few seconds and can only be closed via the Task Manager. Restarting the system doesn't help either. Downgrading via the JetBrains Toolbox brings relief. #work #productivity

I went on a little bike ride after lunch at work today to check out the missing bridge from the flood back in August and got approached by a woman who wanted to ask me some questions...
Local TV reporter, had a camera operator with her, so I put on a lav and talked about the (missing) bridge for a few minutes...
I stood with my bike and had my helmet on during the interview and talked about biking to work so I hope I leveled up on my bike advocacy journey.

According to capitalists:
✅ Working for a company like Google or Microsoft that is complicit in genocide.
❌ Displaying images of the genocide.
Maybe if the consequences of your work are considered “Not Safe For Work”, you shouldn’t be doing that work in the first place.*
But, no, it’s just much easier to look away, isn’t it? After all, you’re just following orders, right?
* Update: because I just *know* that someone will pipe in maliciously with “oh, so you mean…

Does block size matter in randomized block Krylov low-rank approximation?
Tyler Chen, Ethan N. Epperly, Raphael A. Meyer, Christopher Musco, Akash Rao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06486

Does block size matter in randomized block Krylov low-rank approximation?
We study the problem of computing a rank-$k$ approximation of a matrix using randomized block Krylov iteration. Prior work has shown that, for block size $b = 1$ or $b = k$, a $(1 + \varepsilon)$-factor approximation to the best rank-$k$ approximation can be obtained after $\tilde O(k/\sqrt{\varepsilon})$ matrix-vector products with the target matrix. On the other hand, when $b$ is between $1$ and $k$, the best known bound on the number of matrix-vector products scales with $b(k-b)$, which coul…

I went to Stewart Park this Sunday after the Ithaca 5 and 10 to make a 3-d scan of the lighthouse on the jetty which didn't work out but I did see these kayakers goings under this bridge.
#photo #photography #ithaca

Ravens training camp takeaways, plus standouts after preseason Week 1 win over Colts

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/ravens-training-camp-takea…

The only Irish learning app I really need is Mastodon 💖
https://mastodon.online/@caoimhin/115343150517678972

Introspection in Learned Semantic Scene Graph Localisation
Manshika Charvi Bissessur, Efimia Panagiotaki, Daniele De Martini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07053 https://

Introspection in Learned Semantic Scene Graph Localisation
This work investigates how semantics influence localisation performance and robustness in a learned self-supervised, contrastive semantic localisation framework. After training a localisation network on both original and perturbed maps, we conduct a thorough post-hoc introspection analysis to probe whether the model filters environmental noise and prioritises distinctive landmarks over routine clutter. We validate various interpretability methods and present a comparative reliability analysis. …

Ok, yeah, I'm not done processing my anger over liberals doing shit like this. So this historian sees a rise in right wing violence, sees the US government carrying out ethnic cleansing, sees a rise in white supremacist terrorism, and then says, "oh yeah... this reminds me of a time right around the 1920s. Hum... yeah, ANARCHISTS fighting the government! Yeah, that's the same thing."
FFS, IT'S THE RED SUMMER! If you want a parallel between today and some horrible time in US history, TALK ABOUT THE RED SUMMER. The point of the language of dehumanization that the right uses, the point of all the anti-black and anti-emigrant rhetoric, is that it leads to genocide. Trump already carried out an act of genocide (#USPol

A Wave of Resignations in the Aftermath of Remote Onboarding
Darja Smite, Franz Zieris, Lars-Ola Damm
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05878 https://arxiv.org/pd…

A Wave of Resignations in the Aftermath of Remote Onboarding
The COVID-19 pandemic has permanently altered workplace structures, normalizing remote work. However, critical evidence highlights challenges with fully remote arrangements, particularly for software teams. This study investigates employee resignation patterns at Ericsson, a global developer of software-intensive systems, before, during, and after the pandemic. Using HR data from 2016-2025 in Ericsson Sweden, we analyze how different work modalities (onsite, remote, and hybrid) influence employ…

Britain said it will start work within days to implement a deal to return some migrants who arrive on small boats to France -- a key part of its plans to cut illegal migration,
after a treaty on the arrangement was ratified on Tuesday.
Under the new
⭐️ "one in, one out" pilot scheme agreed in principle last month,
👉 France will accept the return of undocumented people arriving in Britain by small boats,
in exchange for Britain agreeing to accept an equ…

rip Nova Launcher https://www.theverge.com/news/773937/nova-launcher-founder-left-kevin-barry-branch-open-source-android

Nova Launcher’s founder and sole developer has left
Kevin Barry, the founder and only developer of the Nova Launcher for Android, has left after being told to stop work on the launcher and open sourcing it.

Learning in ImaginationLand: Omnidirectional Policies through 3D Generative Models (OP-Gen)
Yifei Ren, Edward Johns
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06191 https://

Learning in ImaginationLand: Omnidirectional Policies through 3D Generative Models (OP-Gen)
Recent 3D generative models, which are capable of generating full object shapes from just a few images, now open up new opportunities in robotics. In this work, we show that 3D generative models can be used to augment a dataset from a single real-world demonstration, after which an omnidirectional policy can be learned within this imagined dataset. We found that this enables a robot to perform a task when initialised from states very far from those observed during the demonstration, including s…

Today is my "hamiversary" — Today last year, the wheels at the FCC turned and I was awarded the #AmateurRadio call sign KZ4LY.
Today I celebrated by going to park US-2755 after work and doing some QRP CW #POTA.
I was in a hurry and missed disconnecting the 20m link on t…

OH on slack:
SREcon 2024: hey, just a crazy thing, but we thought about giving the root password to a parrot. What do you think?
SREcon 2025: here's our comprehensive report from parrot's rampage, after equipping it with root password and a spending account
SREcon 2026: codebases should be parrots, not pets
SREcon 2027, presented mostly by parrots: how to work effectively with grumpy humans
#sre #devoops #aipocalypse @sre@tagpush.app

Does anyone else think "OOMF" sounds like a frustrated computer toucher swearing after running out of RAM?
"OOM - F" is definitely something that's gone through my head more than a few times over the years given how much work I do with big images, massive scope waveform datasets, etc.

Pete Carroll to speak with media after Raiders practice https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/raiders/pete-carroll-to-speak-with-media-after-raiders-practice-3409761/

Federal Courts Slow to Fix Vulnerable System After Repeated Hacking
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/us/politics/federal-courts-computer-hacks.html?mid=1#cid=3061919

Federal Courts Slow to Fix Vulnerable System After Repeated Hacking
After a 2020 breach thought to be Russia’s work, the courts told Congress that they would harden a system storing sealed documents. Five years later, the system was hacked again.

Neoen Australia making strides in Western Australia with new big battery projects, signaling shift towards renewable energy powerhouse in the region. #climatechange #climatesolutions #climate

Neoen starts work on first six-hour battery after giant “solar soaker” completed months ahead of schedule
Neoen starts work on its first six-hour battery as the country’s biggest battery – completed four months ahead of schedule – starts its contract as a “solar soaker”

Before and after of my latest bit of mending! An old towel rejuvenated at a smaller size!
I _could_ have just retired this one and used it as scraps to patch another one. But on the other hand, past-me put in some time and effort to add that loop for hanging it up, and I was thinking that if I could turn it back into a good towel, that'd eke out some more use of _that_ bit of work. So that's what I decided to do.
#sewing #mending

Cowboys Coach Speaks Out On New QB’s Progress https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/joe-milton-doing-well-progress/?adt_ei=[email]

So fun things with this camper conversion. The day after I dropped it off he tells me a medical crisis is gonna stop him being able to do the work.
Later find out that now he's over 50 he decided to go on a health kick, and only drink distilled water.
🤦‍♂️
So he ended up flushing all the electrolytes out of his system and having a nervous system crisis the week he was supposed to be working on my van.
😆
Consult your doctors about your health-kicks people!
He managed to fit a kit thing, rather than do the custom job. Seems possible that will be enough and it won't be rescheduled, but live in it a bit first to find out.
Managed to sleep in it okay, even poorly parked on a slope and with a fractured wrist.

First day without rain.
Right after work we brought our car to some maintenance and drove back by bike. Well not the direct way, but a fun way 😊
It felt really good!
#cycling #BikeTooter #getoutside

When you work with animals and have dogs at home, routine sniffspections are required.

Biosphere Substrate and its parameters range
Yegor A. Morozov, Mikhail Bukhtoyarov, Mahdi Yoozbashizadeh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04846 https://arxiv.org…

Biosphere Substrate and its parameters range
The term Biosphere Substrate is introduced for celestial bodies, like terrestrial planets or big gas giant moons, suitable to sustain full-scale open biosphere after Terraforming. The purpose of the work is to examine the range of parameters for a biosphere substrate. Most importantly, Biosphere Substrate gravity should sustain full-scale open breathable atmosphere dense enough after Terraforming during the lifecycle of Planetary System. Humans can not reproduce in too low gravity, can not rest…

"I was shocked, saddened and infuriated by yesterday’s suspension [of Kimmel] and look forward to it being lifted soon. If it isn’t, I can’t in good conscience work for the company that imposed it." - Damon Lindelof
People should not work for companies that enact government restriction of free speech.

This single GH issue page is currently at 88 resources (2.45MB/579KB transferred), and most of the “vendors” and “react” requests have timed out after 3 minutes.
I see the issue title and description, but I can’t work on it because someone made the comment/actions form into a broken asynchronous mess.
I seriously used to point people at GitHub as “here’s someone who’s actually doing progressive enhancement well, and it’s not just super simple stuff”. Not anymore. )-: React ruined…

Oh my God, they riled Donny! The 15 biggest South Park scandals … ranked https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/sep/05/oh-my-god-they-riled-donny-the-15-biggest-south-park-scandal…

At least 475 workers detained in major Ice raid at US Hyundai factory
South Korea alarmed after hundreds of nationals arrested at Georgia work site making batteries for Hyundai and Kia cars

Trump's work.
#trump

'We lived through hell,' say Venezuelans released from mega-prison in El Salvador
Four men deported from the US to a notorious facility in El Salvador tell the BBC after their release they were mistreated.

I was at work soon after five this morning, but my wife did a little harvesting in the garden…

First day at work after a week off. Caffeine, help me quick.

Generative KI f\"ur TA
Wolfgang Eppler, Reinhard Heil
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02053 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02053…

Generative KI für TA
Many scientists use generative AI in their scientific work. People working in technology assessment (TA) are no exception. TA's approach to generative AI is twofold: on the one hand, generative AI is used for TA work, and on the other hand, generative AI is the subject of TA research. After briefly outlining the phenomenon of generative AI and formulating requirements for its use in TA, the following article discusses in detail the structural causes of the problems associated with it. Although …

Trump began putting the federal government to work for him within hours of taking office in January,
and he’s been collecting and using power in novel ways ever since.
It’s a high-velocity push to carry out his political agendas and grudges.
This past month, hundreds of federal agents and National Guard troops fanned out across Washington
after Trump drew on a never-used law that allows him to take control of law enforcement in the nation’s capital.
He’s thre…

How Donald Trump is weaponizing the government in his second term
President Donald Trump has been using his second term to amass and wield unprecedented power. His supporters, who once criticized government overreach, now back his actions. Trump has targeted universities, media companies, and individuals he dislikes, using executive orders and other means to push his agendas and grievances. Trump has threatened or acted against various entities. He's blocked stadium plans, revoked security clearances and dropped corruption charges for political leverage, amon…

Cholesky decomposition for symmetric matrices over finite fields
Prateek Kumar Vishwakarma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04657 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.0465…

Cholesky decomposition for symmetric matrices over finite fields
Inspired by the seminal work of André-Louis Cholesky -- whose contributions remain crucial even after more than a century in broader sciences -- Cooper, Hanna and Whitlatch (2024) developed a theory of positive matrices over finite fields, and Khare and Vishwakarma (2025) described a general Cholesky factorization for a family of the dense cone of Hermitian matrices over real/complex fields, whose leading principal minors (LPM) are nonzero. Building on this, we develop a parallel theory within…

Although this story focuses on el-presidente it should be noted that this is also the work of Elon Musk.
Personally I am skeptical of the claims that "big balls" was defending a woman. My guess is that he is an incel who may have only the most distant conception (pun intended) of women.
"Trump threatens to ‘federalize’ DC after attack on Doge staffer"

#FuckEricAdams so so much. And fuck Hochul for not removing him. #BikeNYC
https://hellgateny…

I know this sounds click-baity, but it's worth reading. Think "hilarious things that kids say" and you're ready to go 🙂 (appeared in my feed because of the education connection)
https://www.upworthy.com/mom-is-completely-embarrassed-ex1

Breakfast is cooking and my legs do not work after last night's workout.

Why did we add Planned Dates to OmniFocus 4.7, when we already have both Due Dates and Defer Dates?
Defer Dates and Due Dates express constraints: you can't work on something before a date, or you need to finish something by a date. They affect the task's status: it's not available until its Defer Date, and it's overdue after its Due Date.
Planned Dates don't affect a task's status, they simply schedule when you currently plan to do the task. Goodbye, fake…

Planned versus Deferred date intended usage?
The defer date indicates when you want a task to become available. Until that date, it won’t show up in any perspectives that are filtering out unavailable tasks. It’s a way of hiding future work so it’s not distracting you today. You’ll start to see available tasks in various perspectives as soon as they’ve reached their defer date. The new planned date is for scheduling when you actually plan to do the task. It could be days or weeks or months later than the defer date. It doesn’…

Shift Before You Learn: Enabling Low-Rank Representations in Reinforcement Learning
Bastien Dubail, Stefan Stojanovic, Alexandre Prouti\`ere
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05193 htt…

Shift Before You Learn: Enabling Low-Rank Representations in Reinforcement Learning
Low-rank structure is a common implicit assumption in many modern reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. For instance, reward-free and goal-conditioned RL methods often presume that the successor measure admits a low-rank representation. In this work, we challenge this assumption by first remarking that the successor measure itself is not low-rank. Instead, we demonstrate that a low-rank structure naturally emerges in the shifted successor measure, which captures the system dynamics after bypa…

I need to stop pretending that I can do any work on afternoons after therapy. It's exhausting, especially with a ~45m drive on either end.

PromptMap: Supporting Exploratory Text-to-Image Generation
Yuhan Guo, Xingyou Liu, Xiaoru Yuan, Kai Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02814 https://arxiv.org/p…

PromptMap: Supporting Exploratory Text-to-Image Generation
Text-to-image generative models can be tremendously valuable in supporting creative tasks by providing inspirations and enabling quick exploration of different design ideas. However, one common challenge is that users may still not be able to find anything useful after many hours and hundreds of images. Without effective help, users can easily get lost in the vast design space, forgetting what has been tried and what has not. In this work, we first propose the Design-Exploration model to formal…

On Monday I started a new GitHub repo, to implement a distributed knowledge graph that knows about stuff in houses and how they are related. I used the Claude AI tools and Claude-flow agent framework to write all the code. Got a simplified thing running and cleaned up on Tuesday, built the full functionality on Wednesday and after a bit more testing and documentation wrapped up work before lunch on Thursday. It’s a lot of well tested and documented functionality.

In 2011, Aaron Swartz was arrested after he downloaded millions of academic journal articles from JSTOR via the MIT network. He was charged under federal laws (including wire fraud and violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) with up to 13 felony counts, carrying the possibility of decades in prison, large fines, and other penalties. These federal charges eventually lead to his death in 2013.
No AI company was ever charged under federal laws.

:privTri: Corveon :brdSmol: (@volpeon)
> OpenAI is planning to release a new version of its Sora video generator, which creates videos featuring copyrighted material unless copyright holders opt out of having their work appear. It's kind of hilarious that they go "if you don't want me to pirate your movies, you ne...

Early sneak peek of #WIP composer UI relayout.
(still on my local dev, not dev site)
#PhanpySocialDev #design

Proceedings 14th International Workshop on Trends in Functional Programming in Education
Rose Bohrer (AIST, Tokyo, JP)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02305 https://

Proceedings 14th International Workshop on Trends in Functional Programming in Education
The goal of TFPIE is to gather researchers, teachers and professionals that use, or are interested in the use of, functional programming in education. TFPIE aims to be a venue where novel ideas, classroom-tested ideas and work-in-progress on the use of functional programming in education are discussed. The one-day workshop will foster a spirit of open discussion by having a review process for publication after the workshop.

Another story from my past experience.
When I was hired on my boss gave me code to look at to learn the system and to see why the developer couldn't get it to work.
I made a copy of the code and dug in to figure out what it did and why it didn't work. After a couple of days I presented my results to the boss and working code that worked. To say he was suprised would be an understatement. I found out the dev was struggling to make it work for weeks and a complete rookie…

Something was off with the keyboard, and I noticed the cursor kept jumping to the left end after every key stroke.
It was surprisingly difficult to enter my password the wrong way around.
Restarted computer, seems to work now again.

Trump does stuff like this often.
Either he has no clue how percentages work or he is counting on his supporters to have no clue. Either way, levels of stupidness 'never seen before' as Trump would say.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trum

'Not How Numbers Work': Critics School Trump After Baffling New Claim
The president bragged about reducing drug prices — except his numbers are way, way off.

This is a good outcome.
Now the government must give asylum to all likely to get it anyway, allow asylum seekers to do paid work, and advocate positively for their right to come here and seek sanctuary.
(Not holding my breath as Starmer is a Reform / #POX enabler).
Asylum seekers to remain at Epping hotel after court of appeal revokes ban | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian

Refereed Learning
Ran Canetti, Ephraim Linder, Connor Wagaman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05440 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05440

Refereed Learning
We initiate an investigation of learning tasks in a setting where the learner is given access to two competing provers, only one of which is honest. Specifically, we consider the power of such learners in assessing purported properties of opaque models. Following prior work that considers the power of competing provers in different settings, we call this setting refereed learning. After formulating a general definition of refereed learning tasks, we show refereed learning protocols that obtai…

Marc Benioff says Salesforce has cut its support staff from 9,000 to ~5,000 in the past year after deploying AI agents to handle a growing share of its work (Aidin Vaziri/San Francisco Chronicle)
https://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/salesforce-ai-job-…

I also wrote up a post about biking to work! I definitely want to do this more. Kind of bummed I need to drive tomorrow as I have some errands to run after work (and have to bring home a 27" monitor) but I'll bike into work again this coming week!
https://rasterweb.net/raster/2025/08/1

I eBiked to Work!
And I wasn't totally sweaty...

Collusion-Resistant Quantum Secure Key Leasing Beyond Decryption
Fuyuki Kitagawa, Ryo Nishimaki, Nikhil Pappu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04754 https://arxi…

Collusion-Resistant Quantum Secure Key Leasing Beyond Decryption
Secure key leasing (SKL) enables the holder of a secret key for a cryptographic function to temporarily lease the key using quantum information. Later, the recipient can produce a deletion certificate, which proves that they no longer have access to the secret key. The security guarantee ensures that even a malicious recipient cannot continue to evaluate the function, after producing a valid deletion certificate. Most prior work considers an adversarial recipient that obtains a single leased …

Emil Bove Continued to Work at Justice Dept. After Judicial Confirmation
The code of conduct for federal judges does not appear to apply to Mr. Bove, who has yet to be sworn in.
But his continued presence at the department has raised eyebrows
Some legal experts said that working for the administration after being confirmed could undermine faith in the court system.
Others expressed worry that Mr. Bove could expose himself to potential conflicts,
advising Justic…

Emil Bove Continued to Work at Trump’s Justice Dept, Even After Judicial Confirmation
The code of conduct for federal judges does not appear to apply to Mr. Bove, who has yet to be sworn in. But his continued presence at the department has raised eyebrows.

Neural Correlates of Language Models Are Specific to Human Language
I\~nigo Parra
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03156 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03156

Neural Correlates of Language Models Are Specific to Human Language
Previous work has shown correlations between the hidden states of large language models and fMRI brain responses, on language tasks. These correlations have been taken as evidence of the representational similarity of these models and brain states. This study tests whether these previous results are robust to several possible concerns. Specifically this study shows: (i) that the previous results are still found after dimensionality reduction, and thus are not attributable to the curse of dimens…

Jerry Jones not confident Micah Parsons will be on the field Week 1 for Cowboys https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6536650/2025/08/05/micah-parsons-cowboys-jerry-jones-contract-dispute/

Wind energy developers and two states sue Trump admin for halting offshore project, arguing for jobs and energy for 350,000 homes. #climatechange #climatesolutions #climate

Trump admin sued by developers and two states after stopping work on nearly complete offshore wind farm project
Offshore wind developers and the attorneys general of Rhode Island and Connecticut are suing the federal government in an effort to reverse a stop-work order on a nearly complete wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island.

Cowboys' Nate Thomas, Tyler Smith work side-by-side through drills https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-nate-thomas-tyler-smith-work-side-by-side-through-drills

Raiders Work Out Veteran DT After Signing Jamal Adams, JT Woods https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/work-out-quinton-jefferson-fa-signings/?adt_ei=[email]

Electric work apparently finished I think. Power only off for fifteen minutes or so.
As said, the existing sockets can't be removed for some reason but he's left 'em live rather than a blank face-plate.
Plenty of electric sockets in this room now! Fourteen! And eighteen USB power sockets too!
Face-plates not attached to the sockets yet, do that after the plastering I believe. So they look a bit shoddy for now.
Next up is presumably wall paper stripping and painting but electrician didn't seem to know if he was doing that or someone else or if it'll be done tomorrow so I guess that'll all be a surprise.

CausalARC: Abstract Reasoning with Causal World Models
Jacqueline Maasch, John Kalantari, Kia Khezeli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03636 https://arxiv.org/pd…

CausalARC: Abstract Reasoning with Causal World Models
Reasoning requires adaptation to novel problem settings under limited data and distribution shift. This work introduces CausalARC: an experimental testbed for AI reasoning in low-data and out-of-distribution regimes, modeled after the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC). Each CausalARC reasoning task is sampled from a fully specified causal world model, formally expressed as a structural causal model. Principled data augmentations provide observational, interventional, and counterfactual fee…

Immigration officers were caught on video -- celebrating proudly -- after using chokeholds and a stun gun to arrest two undocumented immigrants in Florida.
The owner of the video,
an 18-year-old American citizen,
was threatened and charged
after he refused to delete the footage revealing the harsh tactics used by immigration authorities
to meet the Trump administration's mass deportation goals.
Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio was on his way to work on the mor…

This U.S. citizen recorded an immigration arrest. Officers told him to delete it or face charges.
The peaceful traffic stop in Florida turned violent after immigration officers arrived and used chokeholds and a stun gun to make arrests.

BroRL: Scaling Reinforcement Learning via Broadened Exploration
Jian Hu, Mingjie Liu, Ximing Lu, Fang Wu, Zaid Harchaoui, Shizhe Diao, Yejin Choi, Pavlo Molchanov, Jun Yang, Jan Kautz, Yi Dong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01180

BroRL: Scaling Reinforcement Learning via Broadened Exploration
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a key ingredient for unlocking complex reasoning capabilities in large language models. Recent work ProRL has shown promise in scaling RL by increasing the number of training steps. However, performance plateaus after thousands of steps, with clear diminishing returns from allocating more computation to additional training. In this work, we investigate a complementary paradigm for scaling RL, BroR-Lincreasing the number of rol…

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.

Work on Titans' new stadium stopped after discovery of noose at construction site, investigation underway

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/work-on

Entropy After $\langle \texttt{/Think} \rangle$ for reasoning model early exiting
Xi Wang, James McInerney, Lequn Wang, Nathan Kallus
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26522 https://…

Entropy After $\langle \texttt{/Think} \rangle$ for reasoning model early exiting
Large reasoning models show improved performance with longer chains of thought. However, recent work has highlighted (qualitatively) their tendency to overthink, continuing to revise answers even after reaching the correct solution. We quantitatively confirm this inefficiency by tracking Pass@1 for answers averaged over a large number of rollouts and find that the model often begins to always produce the correct answer early in the reasoning, making extra reasoning a waste of tokens. To detect …

Dolphins QB Tua Tagovailoa says relationship with WR Tyreek Hill 'still a work in progress' https://www.nfl.com/news/dolphins-qb-tua-tagovailoa-says-relationship-with-wr-tyreek-hill-still-a-work-in-progress

Sources: Nvidia told suppliers like Amkor and Samsung to halt H20 chip production after China urged local tech firms to avoid H20 over alleged security concerns (Qianer Liu/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-ord…

Nvidia Orders Halt to H20 Production After China Directive Against Purchases
Nvidia has told some of its component suppliers to suspend production work related to the H20, its chip tailor-made for the Chinese market, according to two people with direct knowledge of the communications. The directive comes weeks after the Chinese government told local tech companies to ...

Mathematicians are excited about how Cairo’s work will inspire new research. “I am certain that, from now on, whenever we come upon a problem of similar flavor, we will try to test it against Cairo-like constructions,” Oliveira said.
He and others in the harmonic analysis community will also have to reckon with a changed landscape.
In harmonic analysis, there’s a constellation of questions about how the energy of a wave concentrates.
If a conjecture known as Stein’s conje…

At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery | Quanta Magazine
After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ended up disproving a 40-year-old conjecture.

Nearly 200 employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) signed an extraordinary letter sent to Congress on August 25,
denouncing the current administration’s erosion of their work
and warning that it risks the occurrence of another Hurricane Katrina-sized disaster.
More than 30 provided their names; the rest signed anonymously.
Named the "Katrina Declaration",
the letter was one of the most powerful written so far by beleaguered federal …

FEMA Employees Speak Out After Attacks on Workers Warning of Looming Disaster
“The danger posed to our collective communities … is very real,” said one employee who signed a public letter.

South Korea confirms that a fire at National Information Resources Service's data center, housing 647 government IT systems, directly damaged 96 of them (Lee Jung-joo/The Korea Herald)
https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10585032

Govt. races to restore services after data center blaze; 96 systems confirmed damaged - The Korea Herald
The Ministry of Interior and Safety said Sunday that recovery work is currently in progress at the government-run National Information Resources Service in Daej

Wayne Rooney hits back after Tom Brady questioned his work ethic: 'I don't think he understood football'

https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/wa…

Hundreds of federal employees who lost their jobs in Elon Musk’s cost-cutting blitz are being asked to return to work.
The General Services Administration has given the employees
— who managed government workspaces
— until the end of the week to accept or decline reinstatement, according to an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press.
Those who accept must report for duty on Oct. 6 after what amounts to a seven-month paid vacation,
during which time the G…

White House rehires hundreds of employees terminated by DOGE
Hundreds of laid-off federal employees who managed government workspaces are being called back to their jobs as the Trump administration walks back plans to slash its real estate portfolio. The administration has given employees until the end of this week to accept or decline reinstatement, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press. Those who accept must report to work on Oct. 6 after what amounts to a seven-month paid vacation. Rep. Greg Stanton of Arizona, the top Democrat on the s…

Mathematician Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck was born #OTD in 1942.
She is known for her work on PDEs, calculus of variations, topology, and gauge theory, and was the second woman (after Emmy Noether!) to give the plenary lecture to the International Congress of Mathematicians.

Robert McNees (@mcnees.bsky.social)
Mathematician Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck was born #OTD in 1942. She is known for her work on PDEs, calculus of variations, topology, and gauge theory, and was the second woman (after Emmy Noether!) to give the plenary lecture to the International Congress of Mathematicians. 👩‍🔬 🧪

Multiple former and current government personnel shared with this magazine photos of a highly visible, apparently hand-written “FUCK RFK” sign that sources say appeared recently on the CDC Roybal building.
Matters only degenerated from there.
As this work week came to a close, former and current CDC staff assured Rolling Stone that
internal rank-and-file animus toward the president, Kennedy, and their allies in the federal government has only intensified in recent days.

Team Trump Probes Dissent at CDC as ‘F-CK RFK’ Sign Goes Up at Agency
The Trump administration is investigating dissent at the CDC after the appearance of an "obscene" placard and some "vandalism" at the agency.