Tootfinder

US Housing Supply Gap Grows in 2023; Growth Outpaces Permits in Fast-Growing Sunbelt Metros
Realtor.com - February 27, 2024
“US housing markets continue to struggle with a growing shortage of new homes, the result of more than a decade of under-building relative to population growth.”
https://www.

US Housing Supply Gap Grows in 2023; Growth Outpaces Permits in Fast-Growing Sunbelt Metros
US housing markets continue to struggle with a growing shortage of new homes, the result of more than a decade of under-building relative to population growth. In 2023, the U.S. saw 1.67 million household formations, resulting in 17.2 million household formations between 2012 and 2023. In this time period, 14.7 million housing units were started, and 13.4 million were completed. The total housing starts count includes 9.98 million single-family and 4.71 million multi-family homes. Housing comp…

Robert Moskowitz, Abstract Painter of New York’s Skyscrapers, Dies at 88 - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/arts/robert-moskowitz-dead.html

Robert Moskowitz, Abstract Painter of New York’s Skyscrapers, Dies at 88
He depicted the Empire State Building, the Flatiron Building and, most indelibly, the World Trade Center. Those paintings took on new meaning after 9/11.

AgentStudio: A Toolkit for Building General Virtual Agents
Longtao Zheng, Zhiyuan Huang, Zhenghai Xue, Xinrun Wang, Bo An, Shuicheng Yan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17918

AgentStudio: A Toolkit for Building General Virtual Agents
Creating autonomous virtual agents capable of using arbitrary software on any digital device remains a major challenge for artificial intelligence. Two key obstacles hinder progress: insufficient infrastructure for building virtual agents in real-world environments, and the need for in-the-wild evaluation of fundamental agent abilities. To address this, we introduce AgentStudio, an online, realistic, and multimodal toolkit that covers the entire lifecycle of agent development. This includes env…

Downtown Stockton

A good friend of mine told me about this city-building video game set in a drought-ridden, post-apocalyptic world... but humans have died out and you are on the side of the beavers: "Timberborn"
Looks cute and cool as hell!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/106

Building walls to keep out the consequences of our actions.
(John Washington, The Case for Open Borders)

Meta reports Q1 revenue up 27% YoY to $36.46B, net income up 117% YoY to $12.37B, and family daily active people up 7% YoY to 3.24B for March 2024 (Meta Investor Relations)
https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/…

Meta Reports First Quarter 2024 Results
Meta Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: META) today reported financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2024. "It's been a good start to the year," said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta founder and CEO. "The new version of Meta AI with Llama 3 is another step towards building the world's leading AI. We're seeing healthy growth across our apps and we continue making steady progress building the metaverse as well." First Quarter 2024 Financial Highlights Three Months Ended March 31, % Change In millions, …

SwarmRL: Building the Future of Smart Active Systems
Samuel Tovey, Christoph Lohrmann, Tobias Merkt, David Zimmer, Konstantin Nikolaou, Simon Koppenh\"ofer, Anna Bushmakina, Jonas Scheunemann, Christian Holm
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16388

SwarmRL: Building the Future of Smart Active Systems
This work introduces SwarmRL, a Python package designed to study intelligent active particles. SwarmRL provides an easy-to-use interface for developing models to control microscopic colloids using classical control and deep reinforcement learning approaches. These models may be deployed in simulations or real-world environments under a common framework. We explain the structure of the software and its key features and demonstrate how it can be used to accelerate research. With SwarmRL, we aim t…

Deep dive on #Bluesky's architecture and its history. I have lots of opinions and conjectures but let’s let them finish telling their story first: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.c…

Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network (Real-World Engineering Challenges)
Bluesky is built by around 10 engineers, and has amassed 5 million users since publicly launching in February this year. A deep dive into novel design decisions, moving off AWS, and more.

Meta reports Q1 revenue up 27% YoY to $36.46B, net income up 117% YoY to $12.37B, and family daily active people up 7% YoY to 3.24B for March 2024 (Meta Investor Relations)
https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/…

Meta Reports First Quarter 2024 Results
Meta Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: META) today reported financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2024. "It's been a good start to the year," said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta founder and CEO. "The new version of Meta AI with Llama 3 is another step towards building the world's leading AI. We're seeing healthy growth across our apps and we continue making steady progress building the metaverse as well." First Quarter 2024 Financial Highlights Three Months Ended March 31, % Change In millions, …

Meta Reports First Quarter 2024 Results (Meta Investor Relations)
https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2024/Meta-Reports-First-Quarter-2024-Results/default.aspx

Meta Reports First Quarter 2024 Results
Meta Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: META) today reported financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2024. "It's been a good start to the year," said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta founder and CEO. "The new version of Meta AI with Llama 3 is another step towards building the world's leading AI. We're seeing healthy growth across our apps and we continue making steady progress building the metaverse as well." First Quarter 2024 Financial Highlights Three Months Ended March 31, % Change In millions, …

Remember ten years ago when Diaspora was building bridges to copy content out from Facebook and Twitter and the corps were closing down their APIs and banning 3rd party clients to try and stop it.
My, how the tables have turned.

SwarmRL: Building the Future of Smart Active Systems
Samuel Tovey, Christoph Lohrmann, Tobias Merkt, David Zimmer, Konstantin Nikolaou, Simon Koppenh\"ofer, Anna Bushmakina, Jonas Scheunemann, Christian Holm
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16388

SwarmRL: Building the Future of Smart Active Systems
This work introduces SwarmRL, a Python package designed to study intelligent active particles. SwarmRL provides an easy-to-use interface for developing models to control microscopic colloids using classical control and deep reinforcement learning approaches. These models may be deployed in simulations or real-world environments under a common framework. We explain the structure of the software and its key features and demonstrate how it can be used to accelerate research. With SwarmRL, we aim t…

news articles calling any fedi instance a mastodon instance will never not be funny

I am loving Brandon Sanderson's #TheStormlightArchive series! Kaladin is my spirit character - I find myself cheering him on through every trial and triumph. The world-building is simply phenomenal! I am on Oathbringer right now. I've never felt so immersed in a fantasy world before. What is your favorite fantasy book/series?

German Center for Astrophysics – Beacon of world-class astronomical research opens interim premises in Görlitz: #DZA

Here's their press release from this morning:
Alt text here instead of in images due to length:
NEWS RELEASE Embargoed until April 24, 7:00am PST
Divest From Death USA
Media Contact: Media Liaisons, USC Divest From Death Coalition USCSolidarityOccupation@protonmail.com
USC Divest From Death Coalition to Begin Gaza Solidarity Occupation in University of
Southern California Campus
LOS ANGELES. (April 24, 2023) — USC Divest From Death Coalition today announced theit occupation of USC's Alumni Park, where the increasingly controversial 2024 Commencement is currently set to take place. The students taking part in the Gaza Solidarity Occupation are planning to occupy USC until their demands are met. The coalition joins other students groups across the country in the National Students for Justice in Palestine's "Popular University for Gaza," a coordinated mass movement of students, faculty and staff that disrupts universities, creating climates that push universities to answer community and international calls for full divestment from the Zionist entity, and all of the industries that sustain it.
1. End War Profiteering and Investment in Genocide. USC must fully disclose and divest its finances and endowment from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine, including the US Military and weapons manufacturing. USC must comumit to accountability through full transparency of their financial investments.
2. Complete Academic Boycott of Israel. USC must end its study abroad programs at Hebrew University's Rothenberg International School and Reichman University and sever all academic ties and research cooperation with Israeli universities.
3. Protect free speech on campus and provide full amnesty to all students, staff, and faculty disciplined, penalized, or fired for their pro-Palestine ackivism. USC must abide by their self- proclaimed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion values and implement material policies protecting the safety of its marginalized students.
4. Stop the Displacement, from South Central to Palestine. No land grabs, whether in South Central, Tongva territory, or Palestine. Cease expansion, provide reparations, and support housing for low-income South Central residents. No development by USC without genuine community control.
5. No Policing on Campus. End the targeted repression and harassment of Black, Brown, and Palestinian students and their allies on and off campus, including through university disciplinary processes. Defund the Department of Public Safety and disclose and sever all ties with the LAPD.
6. End the Silence on the Genocide in Palestine. Release a public statement calling for an immediate, permanent ceasefire in Gaza, denouncing the ongoing genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people, and call on government officials o do so too.
"I'm participating in the Gaza Solidarity Occupation at USC to highlight and amplify the anti- zionist Jewish voice at USC and be in solidarity with the Palestinian fight for liberation," says a student organizer from USC's chapter of Jewish Voices for Palestine (JVP). "JVP USC feels our voice is especially important right now as many people at USC and across the country are equating zionism and Judaism, but we are here to say they are not the same! We stand by our belief of free speech, resistance to oppressive systems and solidarity with our valedictorian Asna and all other college campuses where pro-Palestine voices have been silenced."
The USC Divest From Death Coalition establishes the occupation mo st fundamentally in solidarity with the people of Palestine as they resist genocide and continue in their struggle for liberation. The occupation is also in resistance to attempts by USC and other universities to suppress the student movement for Palestine on its campuses, in resistance to the silencing of students that criticize the state of Israel, in resistance to the university administrators and boards of trustees who profit off the genocide of Palestinians; The students taking part are firm in their commitment to speaking out against the university's complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people.
"USC's funding of the ongoing genocide perpetuated by the zionist entity is reflective of maintaining imperialist interests abroad, as well as solidifying the shared ideology of amerikan and zionist institutions in preserving racialized oppression," says a student organizer of the Gaza Solidarity Occupation. "To not stand in opposition to the expressly racist violence here and abroad is to ignore the calls for solidarity demanded by the majority of the world. USC acts in accordance with these oppressions, and to call against this is to recognize both the inhumanity of these systems and our own humanity in opposing them."
We have chosen to use the word "occupation” instead of "encampment" to draw attention to USC as an occupying force on unceded Gabrieleno/Tongva land, an occupying force in South Central through its expansion into, gentrification of, and destruction of the existing community, and as a complicit power in Israeli occupation of Palestine.
About USC Divest From Death
In joining the national "Cut Ties with Genocide: Divest from Death" campaign, USC Divest From Death pushes our institutions to divest from companies complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, in all its iterations, alongside thousands of campuses. The coalition's push for the advancement of the key demand points on campus is the first steps towards the liberation of all people by ending the complicity of the University of Southern California in the violence enacted on our communities. Through the intentional act of coalition building, the students of USC realize that we are part of an interconnected fight for freedom taking place on campus, in our communities and homelands. We envision campuses free from militarism, occupation, and war through the implementation of divestment at USC
About Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)
The student movement for the liberation of Palestine first began in the 1950s through the formation of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS). From the U.S. to Palestine, GUPS chapters galvanized thousands of students towards a liberated Palestine. The 90s” wave of corrupt politicians and faulty deals changed the liberation movement as we knew it and many institutions, including the student movement, collapsed. In the absence of a Palestinian student movement, organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine emerged across occupied Turtle Island (U.S. and Canada) as a way to educate, advocate, and mobilize in support for Palestinian liberation. Nearly two decades after the formation of the first Students for Justice in Palestine, the movement for Palestine has taken colleges and universities across North America by storm. With over 200 campus Palestine solidarity organizations across the continent, students have been leaders in uplifting demands for freedom, Justice, and equality for the Palestinian people.

Israel-Hamas War News: Video Shows Egypt Building a Wall Near the Gaza Border - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/02/15/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news

Israel-Hamas War News: Video Shows Egypt Building a Wall Near the Gaza Border
A large patch of land is being bulldozed and a wall is being built in the buffer zone between Egypt and Rafah, the southern Gaza city overflowing with over a million displaced Palestinians.

A fun, and ironic, historical note:
On August 25, 1918, the Washington Post published an editorial noting the UK's plan to impose a tax of 77% on the "excess profits" of shipping firms that were benefiting from World War I. On September 3, 1918, the International Steel & Ship Building Company placed an ad arguing that the UK tax was evidence that investing in ship building would deliver high profits...

⚗️ Campaigners criticise ‘absurd’ plan to take apart and rebuild Curie lab in Paris
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/04/campaigners-criticise-plan-marie-curie-laboratory-building-paris

A deep dive into how Bluesky is built, including its growth from three engineers to 12 in just over two years and its infrastructure move from AWS to on-prem (The Pragmatic Engineer)
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/bluesky

Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network (Real-World Engineering Challenges)
Bluesky is built by around 10 engineers, and has amassed 5 million users since publicly launching in February this year. A deep dive into novel design decisions, moving off AWS, and more.

One of the main means and purposes of this comprehensive dossier-building is to pass those details to Google who, along with Facebook, hold probably the largest set of surveillance files in the world.
Note at the top that the cookie notice urges us to check out both the daft.ie privacy notice and the Google Privacy Policy.
Daft is so deeply integrated into the Google advertising surveillance machine, you can’t separate one from the other.

Hey #androidDev and #iosDev friends: want to work with some of the most interesting people at Square?

Staff Android Software Engineer, Mobile Observability
Company Description: Since we opened our doors in 2009, the world of commerce has evolved immensely, and so has Square. After enabling anyone to take payments and never miss a sale, we saw sellers stymied by disparate, outmoded products and tools that wouldn’t work together. So we expanded into software and started building integrated, omnichannel solutions – to help sellers sell online, manage inventory, offer buy now, pay later functionality through Afterpay, book appointments, engage …

I've been reading Ray Dailo's "Principles for dealing with the changing world order" in which he charts the rise and fall of empires and kingdoms and dynasties.
The main cycle, he reckons is:
1) Winner of a war consolidates power, unites the population (often through oppression)
2) A smart cooperative equitable educated society with meritocracy means good societal progress and wide sharing of the wealth.
3) Long period of peace, building good tech and military and financial systems.
4) Leadership corrupts: Excessive debt, money-printing, inequality, financial ruin, no sense of solidarity, then a natural disaster pushes it over the edge
5) The fall: Escalating rebellions, very bad inequality, internal conflicts
6) Civil war, revolution, eventually a strong leader proves the winner and back to 1.
We in the western civilization are very clearly in the late states of this kind of cycle, and it's frankly terrifying with the weapons we have these days when it comes to a war.
The leadership is too corrupt to try and fix the inequality or invest in that well educated, equitable, cooperative society.
He explicitly agrees with Marx and implicitly with me a lot more than I'd have expected from the rabid capitalist that Ray Dailo is.
It's interesting to hear his emphasis on inequality and how a prosperous society depends upon sharing the gains of prosperity widely. You tend to hear hyper-capitalists mostly emphasizing that capital's gains should go to capital, and Ray is certainly suggesting the opposite here. That if that happens, it corrupts the leadership and ends with cronyism and debt and revolution.
We seem to basically agree what creates good prosperous peaceful civil society, and that capitalism in the Anglican world isn't doing it, and that fucked up corrupt government is why we aren't doing it.
We'd offer fairly different prescriptions though I think.
#reading #books #economics

📷#OTD 10 years ago I visited the ruins of the Dutch pavilion on the Expo 2000 site in Hanover🇩🇪. I remember visiting Expo 2000 twice (on the then brand-new DB ICE trains from the Netherlands). This building by MVRDV architects, representing stacked landscapes and dealing with limited space, stood out for its optimistic view of tackling climate change (consequences), with the Dutch - real or not - pr…

We should be building transit at a rate like the fate of the world depended on it, because it does

"Russia is building an ‘axis of the anti-West'" by Galeotti.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/c5c09c9c-af44-4836-a8b8-c31456e63ed4?shareToken=848332e8bb1da4da0582a7726607149d

Russia is building an ‘axis of the anti-West’
From missiles to ski trips, Putin and his authoritarian allies are moving ever closer to reshape the world order, the historian and Russia expert writes

Very excited to have been accepted as a participant to this year's "Global Gathering. Where Digital Rights Defenders gather" in Portugal.
Anybody else here who's going?
https://www.digitalrights.community/blog/2024…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.05381 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSE_…

An Exploratory Study of V-Model in Building ML-Enabled Software: A Systems Engineering Perspective
Machine learning (ML) components are being added to more and more critical and impactful software systems, but the software development process of real-world production systems from prototyped ML models remains challenging with additional complexity and interdisciplinary collaboration challenges. This poses difficulties in using traditional software lifecycle models such as waterfall, spiral, or agile models when building \textit{ML-enabled systems}. In this research, we apply a Systems Enginee…

....this may be one of the most anticipated sequels. (By people who like funny post-apocalyptic color-perception based world building.)
Jasper #Fforde #ShadesOfGrey

WarpStream, which is building a cheaper, cloud-native data streaming service based on the Apache Kafka protocol, raised $20M led by Greylock and Amplify (Ron Miller/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/14/warpstream-is-build…

WarpStream is building a cheaper, cloud-native data streaming service | TechCrunch
WarpStream is building a streaming application for the cloud world they claim is cheaper and faster to operate.

Often we don't get to see this news anymore. Sometimes we ignore it. But it's happening every week, in Europe.
The EU needs to stop exports of components for weapons 'to Central-Asia', which end up in Russia and its arms industry, and then on Ukrainian citizens.

Been looking at #gotoSocial a little.
Decided to go hardcore and build it from source, even though I don't even know the programming language Go that it's written in at all.
Went pretty well building and running it, wasn't difficult and it's easy to understand how to adapt the page templates and things.
Seems like account migration works well enough now.
Didn't notice that I'd failed to build a bunch of assets for a while so couldn't understand why the settings page wasn't working as suggested and pages were weirdly ugly and non-functional.
Building those assets is bloody node again. Annoying. Hoping to avoid that.
Anyway. It looks good. So customizable, no effort to really do a reader but you use phanphy or something for that. All I really want is good customizeable shop-windows and a functional API.
Thinking that's what I'll move to if further experimentation goes well.

”Twenty years and two days ago, @… and I introduced #microformats in a conference presentation.“
Congrats, @…! 👏…

Negative Yields Positive: Unified Dual-Path Adapter for Vision-Language Models
Ce Zhang, Simon Stepputtis, Katia Sycara, Yaqi Xie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.12964

Negative Yields Positive: Unified Dual-Path Adapter for Vision-Language Models
Recently, large-scale pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated great potential in learning open-world visual representations, and exhibit remarkable performance across a wide range of downstream tasks through efficient fine-tuning. In this work, we innovatively introduce the concept of dual learning into fine-tuning VLMs, i.e., we not only learn what an image is, but also what an image isn't. Building on this concept, we introduce a novel DualAdapter approach to enable dual-p…

Time to start building.
- the false hope Alex Trebek would offer the contestant who bet big and lost big on a late-game Daily Double

Well, The Script was a great read to the very last page. The world-building off-field was particularly good this year. It took a really interesting detour into a romance subplot. I didn’t hate it. Great on-field ending. Seems like a classic.
#SuperBowl :superbowllviii: #Chiefs :chiefs:

OH: "Have they considered building an underwater tavern? Because that's the lowest bar in the world"

Sometimes I just forget that I live in #NYC now. I get stuck at home with meetings and my world becomes the two blocks between my apartment building and the supermarket.
And then I take the train even 10 minutes out and suddenly… my favorite city in the world.
What do you mean I can just go to these places whenever I want? And then I just get to keep… living here?
I’m so lucky.

“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity, […] it’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20…

Orbšn boycotts parliament session called to ratify Swedish Nato bid
Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party has boycotted a session of parliament called by the opposition to ratify Sweden’s Nato membership, even as a group of western ambassadors arrived in the building to urge a vote.
For months, the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbšn, repeatedly promised his counterparts within Nato that the country would not be last to sign off on Sweden’s membership.
But Orbšn reneged on the p…

The Leading U.S. Markets for Multifamily Building Permitting in 2023 | Arbor - February 1, 2024
“There were many metropolitan markets across the country with strong local economies supporting multifamily growth — a trend that will assuredly continue in 2024.”
https://

The Leading U.S. Markets for Multifamily Building Permitting in 2023
Although multifamily permitting fell nationally, many major metropolitan markets saw strong growth in 2023.

Rights Group Says Israeli Strike on Gaza Building Killed 106 in Apparent War Crime
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2024-04-04/rights-group-says-israeli-strike-on-gaza-building-kille…

A lot of good stuff in here. I often am discouraged after seeing unbelievable playing on social media, but the trick is remembering that it's not just about the playing; in the real world it's also about building a career that puts you in a position where you're going to get paid to play that thing.

“I know some guitarists that will work on a 30-second soundbite for days before filming it in a way that looks off the cuff”: How social media is affecting our perception of guitar playing
Be inspired but don't be intimidated by social media virtuosity, says respected guitar tutor Justin Sandercoe. Remember, these influencers are pros and you're only seeing them at their best

I thought I'd do another update of what I've been reading lately. This time, rather than post about each book, I'll just call out the ones I liked the most.
"Harrow the Ninth" by Tamsyn Muir is the sequel to "Gideon the Ninth", and it's just as good if not better. The story and world-building is unique, and the storytelling uses an unreliable narrator technique in a way I've never seen done before. Muir is such a beautiful and creative writer.…

A photo by Paul Hiller. I can sort of imagine the photoshop (or similar software) process of making the colours so flat and unreal like this, but only sort of. Apparently he shoots in analogue. 🤪 More of his work on this website -> https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/paul-

Paul Hiller’s bittersweet photographs document the ultimate form of escapism
For the past 12 years, the German photographer has been visiting amusement parks around the world, from the famous to the obscure, steadily capturing syrupy scenes in these parks. As “a preservation of an older time,” he tells us about the parks that have closed since and new ones that he finds.

I'd like to live in a very high-end apartment building. Someplace with a nice view of the unrest.

”Twenty years and two days ago, @… and I introduced #microformats in a conference presentation.“
Congrats, @…! 👏…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.15122 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_…

Scaling Is All You Need: Autonomous Driving with JAX-Accelerated Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement learning has been demonstrated to outperform even the best humans in complex domains like video games. However, running reinforcement learning experiments on the required scale for autonomous driving is extremely difficult. Building a large scale reinforcement learning system and distributing it across many GPUs is challenging. Gathering experience during training on real world vehicles is prohibitive from a safety and scalability perspective. Therefore, an efficient and realistic…

Well, The Script was a great read to the very last page. The world-building off-field was particularly good this year. It took a really interesting detour into a romance subplot. I didn’t hate it. Great on-field ending. Seems like a classic.
#SuperBowl :superbowllviii: #Chiefs :chiefs:

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.06488 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_qu…

Operationally independent events can influence each other in quantum theory
In any known description of nature, two physical systems are considered independent of each other if any action on one of the systems does not change the other system. From our classical intuitions about the world, we further conclude that these two systems are not affecting each other in any possible way, and thus these two systems are causally disconnected or they do not influence each other. Building on this idea, we show that in quantum theory such a notion of classical independence is not …

“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity, […] it’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.13854 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csAI_…

WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents
With advances in generative AI, there is now potential for autonomous agents to manage daily tasks via natural language commands. However, current agents are primarily created and tested in simplified synthetic environments, leading to a disconnect with real-world scenarios. In this paper, we build an environment for language-guided agents that is highly realistic and reproducible. Specifically, we focus on agents that perform tasks on the web, and create an environment with fully functional we…

Emotion Classification in Low and Moderate Resource Languages
Shabnam Tafreshi, Shubham Vatsal, Mona Diab
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18424 https://<…

Emotion Classification in Low and Moderate Resource Languages
It is important to be able to analyze the emotional state of people around the globe. There are 7100+ active languages spoken around the world and building emotion classification for each language is labor intensive. Particularly for low-resource and endangered languages, building emotion classification can be quite challenging. We present a cross-lingual emotion classifier, where we train an emotion classifier with resource-rich languages (i.e. \textit{English} in our work) and transfer the le…

Does Israel *want* war? Sure seems like it...
Iranian Supreme Leader says Israel will pay for attack on consulate building
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/live-blog/israel-hamas-war-live-updates-rcna146148#rcrd38073<…

Biden 'outraged' at Israel over aid workers' deaths as Netanyahu rival Benny Gantz calls for new elections
Follow NBC News live updates for the latest coverage of the Israel-Hamas as Biden says he was outraged and heartbroken by the aid worker deaths.

Localization in Digital Twin MIMO Networks: A Case for Massive Fingerprinting
Jo\~ao Morais, Ahmed Alkhateeb
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09614 https://

Localization in Digital Twin MIMO Networks: A Case for Massive Fingerprinting
Localization in outdoor wireless systems typically requires transmitting specific reference signals to estimate distance (trilateration methods) or angle (triangulation methods). These cause overhead on communication, need a LoS link to work well, and require multiple base stations, often imposing synchronization or specific hardware requirements. Fingerprinting has none of these drawbacks, but building its database requires high human effort to collect real-world measurements. For a long time,…

In 1932, 75-year-old socialist #Clara #Zetkin stood in Germany’s Reichstag and, despite being so unsteady that she had to be carried into the building on a stretcher, managed to give a rousing speech lasting more than 40 minutes.
“The fight of the labouring masses,” she declared, is “the fight for their full liberati…

Played the Diceomancer demo and it's really interesting. The name is silly but when you hit the dice moment, you get it.
I haven't played a game where a core mechanic lets you mess with everything in it this fundamentally since Hack n Slash. The dice moment is incredible and worth grabbing the demo to avoid spoiling it -- it occurs early on (after a few battles). Art is really nice too. Love the player animation.

DICEOMANCER on Steam
DICEOMANCER is a roguelike deck-building game. Despite aspiring to live a peaceful life, fate forced you to embark on an adventure. Make the most of your deck and dice in a world filled with swords, magic, and guns, all to restore the tranquility you once knew!

Worldcoin announces World Chain, a Layer 2 Ethereum blockchain designed to prioritize verified humans over bots, slated for release this summer (Sam Kessler/CoinDesk)
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/04/17/worldcoin-sam-…

Building Workflows for Interactive Human in the Loop Automated Experiment (hAE) in STEM-EELS
Utkarsh Pratiush, Kevin M. Roccapriore, Yongtao Liu, Gerd Duscher, Maxim Ziatdinov, Sergei V. Kalinin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.07381

Building Workflows for Interactive Human in the Loop Automated Experiment (hAE) in STEM-EELS
Exploring the structural, chemical, and physical properties of matter on the nano- and atomic scales has become possible with the recent advances in aberration-corrected electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) in scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM). However, the current paradigm of STEM-EELS relies on the classical rectangular grid sampling, in which all surface regions are assumed to be of equal a priori interest. This is typically not the case for real-world scenarios, where phe…

> My usual thesis is if it makes sense, somebody would have already done it. And so I'm trying to figure out, why didn't people like succeed at it? What other things people tried and why did they fail? And is the reason that they, that they failed still valuable?
— vjeux in https://www.devtools.fm/episode/83

Episode #83: Christopher "vjeux" Chedeau - Prettier, React Native
This week we talk to a legend in the dev tools space, Christopher Chedeau. Christopher is a software engineer at Meta (formerly Facebook) and has worked on some of the most popular open source projects in the world. He is the creator of Prettier, a code formatter that has saved millions of developer hours. He is also the co-creator of React Native, a framework for building native apps with React. Christopher has also worked on many other projects such as Excalidraw, Yoga, and and many others. …

A lot of good stuff in here. I often am discouraged after seeing unbelievable playing on social media, but the trick is remembering that it's not just about the playing; in the real world it's also about building a career that puts you in a position where you're going to get paid to play that thing.

“I know some guitarists that will work on a 30-second soundbite for days before filming it in a way that looks off the cuff”: How social media is affecting our perception of guitar playing
Be inspired but don't be intimidated by social media virtuosity, says respected guitar tutor Justin Sandercoe. Remember, these influencers are pros and you're only seeing them at their best

Building ethical guidelines for generative AI in scientific research
Zhicheng Lin
https://arXiv.org/abs/2401.15284 https://arXiv.org/…

Building ethical guidelines for generative AI in scientific research
Generative artificial intelligence tools like large language models are rapidly transforming academic research and real world applications. However, discussions on ethical guidelines for generative AI in science remain fragmented, underscoring the urgent need for consensus based standards. This paper offers an initial framework by developing analyses and mitigation strategies across five key themes: understanding model limitations regarding truthfulness and bias; respecting privacy, confidentia…

I thought I'd do another update of what I've been reading lately. This time, rather than post about each book, I'll just call out the ones I liked the most.
"Harrow the Ninth" by Tamsyn Muir is the sequel to "Gideon the Ninth", and it's just as good if not better. The story and world-building is unique, and the storytelling uses an unreliable narrator technique in a way I've never seen done before. Muir is such a beautiful and creative writer.…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04244 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_ees…

Spatio-Temporal Turbulence Mitigation: A Translational Perspective
Recovering images distorted by atmospheric turbulence is a challenging inverse problem due to the stochastic nature of turbulence. Although numerous turbulence mitigation (TM) algorithms have been proposed, their efficiency and generalization to real-world dynamic scenarios remain severely limited. Building upon the intuitions of classical TM algorithms, we present the Deep Atmospheric TUrbulence Mitigation network (DATUM). DATUM aims to overcome major challenges when transitioning from classic…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15695 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csAI_…

Asking Before Acting: Gather Information in Embodied Decision Making with Language Models
With strong capabilities of reasoning and a broad understanding of the world, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated immense potential in building versatile embodied decision-making agents capable of executing a wide array of tasks. Nevertheless, when deployed in unfamiliar environments, we show that LLM agents encounter challenges in efficiently gathering essential information, leading to suboptimal performance. Conversely, human individuals often seek additional information from their…

Classifying point clouds at the facade-level using geometric features and deep learning networks
Yue Tan, Olaf Wysocki, Ludwig Hoegner, Uwe Stilla
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06506

Classifying point clouds at the facade-level using geometric features and deep learning networks
3D building models with facade details are playing an important role in many applications now. Classifying point clouds at facade-level is key to create such digital replicas of the real world. However, few studies have focused on such detailed classification with deep neural networks. We propose a method fusing geometric features with deep learning networks for point cloud classification at facade-level. Our experiments conclude that such early-fused features improve deep learning methods' per…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.11653 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csHC_…

"It's a Fair Game", or Is It? Examining How Users Navigate Disclosure Risks and Benefits When Using LLM-Based Conversational Agents
The widespread use of Large Language Model (LLM)-based conversational agents (CAs), especially in high-stakes domains, raises many privacy concerns. Building ethical LLM-based CAs that respect user privacy requires an in-depth understanding of the privacy risks that concern users the most. However, existing research, primarily model-centered, does not provide insight into users' perspectives. To bridge this gap, we analyzed sensitive disclosures in real-world ChatGPT conversations and conducted…

It's nice, but I was kind of hoping for a rhombus.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.06488 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_qu…

Operationally independent events can influence each other in quantum theory
In any known description of nature, two physical systems are considered independent of each other if any action on one of the systems does not change the other system. From our classical intuitions about the world, we further conclude that these two systems are not affecting each other in any possible way, and thus these two systems are causally disconnected or they do not influence each other. Building on this idea, we show that in quantum theory such a notion of classical independence is not …

🏗️ Just how climate-friendly are timber buildings? It's complicated
#wood

Just how climate-friendly are timber buildings? It's complicated
The number of people living in urban areas around the world will swell by upwards of 2 billion over the next three decades. Many of those people will need new homes. But building those with conventional materials would unleash a gusher of carbon dioxide: Concrete, steel, glass and bricks for construction make up a combined 9% of global CO2 emissions, according to research by the United Nations Environment Program.

Localization in Digital Twin MIMO Networks: A Case for Massive Fingerprinting
Jo\~ao Morais, Ahmed Alkhateeb
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09614 https://

Localization in Digital Twin MIMO Networks: A Case for Massive Fingerprinting
Localization in outdoor wireless systems typically requires transmitting specific reference signals to estimate distance (trilateration methods) or angle (triangulation methods). These cause overhead on communication, need a LoS link to work well, and require multiple base stations, often imposing synchronization or specific hardware requirements. Fingerprinting has none of these drawbacks, but building its database requires high human effort to collect real-world measurements. For a long time,…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.13919 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_…

WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models
The advancement of large language models (LLMs) leads to a new era marked by the development of autonomous applications in the real world, which drives innovation in the creation of advanced web-based agents. Existing web agents typically only handle one input modality and are evaluated only in simplified web simulators or static web snapshots, greatly limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce WebVoyager, an innovative Large Multimodal Model (LMM) po…

Towards Robust Data-Driven Automated Recovery of Symbolic Conservation Laws from Limited Data
Tracey Oellerich, Maria Emelianenko
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04889

Towards Robust Data-Driven Automated Recovery of Symbolic Conservation Laws from Limited Data
Conservation laws are an inherent feature in many systems modeling real world phenomena, in particular, those modeling biological and chemical systems. If the form of the underlying dynamical system is known, linear algebra and algebraic geometry methods can be used to identify the conservation laws. Our work focuses on using data-driven methods to identify the conservation law(s) in the absence of the knowledge of system dynamics. Building in part upon the ideas proposed in [arXiv:1811.00961],…

Guesty, a platform for accommodation managers to manage Airbnbs and more, raised $130M, sources say at a $900M valuation, after raising a $170M Series E in 2022 (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/10/gues<…

Guesty snaps up $130M at $900M valuation to help property managers list on Airbnb and beyond | TechCrunch
Travel and tourism are very much back on the map for consumers and the business world. Now, to underscore that surge, one of the startups building

People: Let's create a network of connected computers where information can be easily accessed by all and communication across the world is trivial
Also people: Stop collecting all our public information and building profitable services on top of it.
🤷🤷🤷

On the Improvement of Predictive Modeling Using Bayesian Stacking and Posterior Predictive Checking
Mariana Nold, Florian Meinfelder, David Kaplan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.19046

On the Improvement of Predictive Modeling Using Bayesian Stacking and Posterior Predictive Checking
Model uncertainty is pervasive in real world analysis situations and is an often-neglected issue in applied statistics. However, standard approaches to the research process do not address the inherent uncertainty in model building and, thus, can lead to overconfident and misleading analysis interpretations. One strategy to incorporate more flexible models is to base inferences on predictive modeling. This approach provides an alternative to existing explanatory models, as inference is focused o…

New format tarot show is finally done!
What fun it's been building this big virtual stage and writing all the python programs to automatically animate it all.
Took all month, but future shows should barely take a few hours.
There's still a mistake in there but I haven't got time to re-render all the frames. Can you spot it? Shouldn't happen in future.
Anyway, presenting a tarot explanation of what the hell is going on with the world:
#tarot #worldpol #war #video #peertube

🏗️ Just how climate-friendly are timber buildings? It's complicated
#wood

Just how climate-friendly are timber buildings? It's complicated
The number of people living in urban areas around the world will swell by upwards of 2 billion over the next three decades. Many of those people will need new homes. But building those with conventional materials would unleash a gusher of carbon dioxide: Concrete, steel, glass and bricks for construction make up a combined 9% of global CO2 emissions, according to research by the United Nations Environment Program.

Archetype, which is building AI models to help humans understand the data from sensors monitoring the physical world, launches with a $13M seed led by Venrock (Steven Levy/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-ai-startup-archety…

Learning or Self-aligning? Rethinking Instruction Fine-tuning
Mengjie Ren, Boxi Cao, Hongyu Lin, Liu Cao, Xianpei Han, Ke Zeng, Guanglu Wan, Xunliang Cai, Le Sun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18243

Learning or Self-aligning? Rethinking Instruction Fine-tuning
Instruction Fine-tuning~(IFT) is a critical phase in building large language models~(LLMs). Previous works mainly focus on the IFT's role in the transfer of behavioral norms and the learning of additional world knowledge. However, the understanding of the underlying mechanisms of IFT remains significantly limited. In this paper, we design a knowledge intervention framework to decouple the potential underlying factors of IFT, thereby enabling individual analysis of different factors. Surprisingl…