Tootfinder

passwords for positive change
#inspiration #BeBetter
https://muz4now.com/2014/passwords-pos

passwords for positive change
Stan Stewart - @muz4now

Writer Andrew Aydin on being persistent with your vision
#creativity #vision

Writer Andrew Aydin on being persistent with your vision – The Creative Independent
Author Andrew Aydin on having faith in your work, manufacturing lightning bolt moments, and why comics are an inherently positive medium.

The full formula for the probability of "success" is:
p = {
1/(2^(-n 1)) if n is negative, or
1 - (1/(2^(n 1))) if n is zero or positive
}
(Both branches have the same value when n is 0, so the behavior is smooth around the origin.)
How can we tweak this?
First, we can introduce fixed success and/or failure chances unaffected by level, with this formula only taking effect if those don't apply. For example, you could do 10% failure, 80% by formula, and 10% success to keep things from being too sure either way even when levels are very high or low. On the other hand, this flattening makes the benefit of extra advantage levels even less exciting.
Second, we could allow for gradations of success/failure, and treat the coin pools I used to explain that math like dice pools a bit. An in-between could require linearly more success flips to achieve the next higher grade of success at each grade. For example, simple success on a crit role might mean dealing 1.5x damage, but if you succeed on 2 of your flips, you get 9/4 damage, or on 4 flips 27/8, or on 7 flips 81/16. In this world, stacking crit levels might be a viable build, and just giving up on armor would be super dangerous. In the particular case I was using this for just now, I can't easily do gradations of success (that's the reason I turned to probabilities in the first place) but I think I'd favor this approach when feasible.
The main innovation here over simple dice pools is how to handle situations where the number of dice should be negative. I'm almost certain it's not a truly novel innovation though, and some RPG fan can point out which system already does this (please actually do this, I'm an RPG nerd too at heart).
I'll leave this with one more tweak we could do: what if the number 2 in the probability equation were 3, or 2/3? I think this has a similar effect to just scaling all the modifiers a bit, but the algebra escapes me in this moment and I'm a bit lazy. In any case, reducing the base of the probability exponent should let you get a few more gradations near 50%, which is probably a good thing, since the default goes from 25% straight to 50% and then to 75% with no integer stops in between.

Some positive news! #noAFD

Bittere Niederlagen für Weidel
Die AfD gewinnt jede Wahl. Zumindest scheint es so, wenn man die Nachrichten verfolgt. Aber stimmt das wirklich? Es gibt einige Fakten, die ein ganz anderes Bild zeichnen. Man muss allerdings genau hinsehen.

"The good news is, those same software workers can still influence the state of the world in a positive light. In the pages of this magazine, now celebrating its fifth year of existence, we have tried to highlight the various ways they can do this:
By promoting a healthy dialogue between management and software engineers.
By showing empathy with one another and with mankind.
By unionizing and fighting against atrocious work conditions."

Oh, the arguments we had! There was a marketing person — quite a good one, and a good person too — who just couldn’t see it, who fought the dev team tooth and nail on this. She finally relented when @… wrote a brief positive plug for our app, and made her realize that the landscape had changed and her J2ME-world design instincts just didn’t work in this new iPhone market.
(I’m not sure that company ever really made the shift. They struggled with and eventually dropped their general consumer app, and concentrated quite successfully on some pro markets where features ruled all.)
4/

TransClean: Finding False Positives in Multi-Source Entity Matching under Real-World Conditions via Transitive Consistency
Fernando de Meer Pardo, Branka Hadji Misheva, Martin Braschler, Kurt Stockinger
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04006

TransClean: Finding False Positives in Multi-Source Entity Matching under Real-World Conditions via Transitive Consistency
We present TransClean, a method for detecting false positive predictions of entity matching algorithms under real-world conditions characterized by large-scale, noisy, and unlabeled multi-source datasets that undergo distributional shifts. TransClean is explicitly designed to operate with multiple data sources in an efficient, robust and fast manner while accounting for edge cases and requiring limited manual labeling. TransClean leverages the Transitive Consistency of a matching, a measure of …

“It is likely that Ukraine will suffer the greatest military and political damage in this situation,
apart from Iran itself, of course.
A new war in the Middle East will not only distract the world’s attention from the [conflict in Ukraine]
but will also, apparently, contribute to the final reorientation of the US towards providing military assistance to Israel.”
But while these may offer short-term gains, the long-term picture is far more precarious for Russia, anal…

Modulating task outcome value to mitigate real-world procrastination via noninvasive brain stimulation
Zhiyi Chen, Zhilin Ren, Wei Li, ZhenZhen Huo, ZhuangZheng Wang, Ye Liu, Bowen Hu, Wanting Chen, Ting Xu, Artemiy Leonov, Chenyan Zhang, Bernhard Hommel, Tingyong Feng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21000

Modulating task outcome value to mitigate real-world procrastination via noninvasive brain stimulation
Procrastination represents one of the most prevalent behavioral problems affecting individual health and societal productivity. Although it is often conceptualized as a form of self-control failure, its underlying neurocognitive mechanisms are poorly understood. A leading model posits that procrastination arises from imbalanced competing motivations: the avoidance of negative task aversiveness and the pursuit of positive task outcomes, yet this theoretical framework has not fully validated in r…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.05590 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arX…

Negative Ties Highlight Hidden Extremes in Social Media Polarization
Human interactions in the online world comprise a combination of positive and negative exchanges. These diverse interactions can be captured using signed network representations, where edges take positive or negative weights to indicate the sentiment of the interaction between individuals. Signed networks offer valuable insights into online political polarization by capturing antagonistic interactions and ideological divides on social media platforms. This study analyzes polarization on Menéam…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.04564 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSI_…

A Generalisation of Voter Model: Influential Nodes and Convergence Properties
Consider an undirected graph G, representing a social network, where each node is blue or red, corresponding to positive or negative opinion on a topic. In the voter model, in discrete time rounds, each node picks a neighbour uniformly at random and adopts its colour. Despite its significant popularity, this model does not capture some fundamental real-world characteristics such as the difference in the strengths of individuals connections, individuals with neutral opinion on a topic, and indiv…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06343 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_…

Should We Expect Further Acceleration of the Earth's Rotation in the Coming Years?
Recently, it has been suggested in the literature that the difference between universal and coordinated time UT1-UTC could reach a large positive value in the coming years (Agnew 2024). This would make it necessary to introduce a negative leap second into UTC for the first time in history, which in turn will cause serious problems in time keeping and synchronization systems around the world. Based on the latest Earth's rotation and universal time data published by the international Earth rotati…

New Hardness Results for Low-Rank Matrix Completion
Dror Chawin, Ishay Haviv
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18440 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

New Hardness Results for Low-Rank Matrix Completion
The low-rank matrix completion problem asks whether a given real matrix with missing values can be completed so that the resulting matrix has low rank or is close to a low-rank matrix. The completed matrix is often required to satisfy additional structural constraints, such as positive semi-definiteness or a bounded infinity norm. The problem arises in various research fields, including machine learning, statistics, and theoretical computer science, and has broad real-world applications. This…