Tootfinder

Causality in the human niche: lessons for machine learning
Richard D. Lange, Konrad P. Kording
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13803 https://

Causality in the human niche: lessons for machine learning
Humans interpret the world around them in terms of cause and effect and communicate their understanding of the world to each other in causal terms. These causal aspects of human cognition are thought to underlie humans' ability to generalize and learn efficiently in new domains, an area where current machine learning systems are weak. Building human-like causal competency into machine learning systems may facilitate the construction of effective and interpretable AI. Indeed, the machine learnin…

Teddy from Good Luck Charlie is now building a satellite communication network.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/06/she-was-a-disney-star-with-platinum-records-but-bridgit-mendler-gave-it-up-to…

She was a Disney star with platinum records, but Bridgit Mendler gave it up to change the world
“The space industry has a ground bottleneck, and the problem is going to get worse.”…

Face the future
#StreetArt #face #photography

I wish my family could see how much I care about anarchism, syndicalism, and especially anarcho-syndicalism, and how serious I am about building a different kind of world.
They still hold on to the image of me as someone who just spends all day gaming, like that’s all I ever was. But people change, grow, and find new paths.
If they can’t accept that, then they don’t really know who I am now, and it’s painful to realize that the people closest to me can’t see the person I’ve beco…

I will be a building. A tall building. I will cast shadows on other buildings!

A look at the intensifying race for super apps in the Gulf, as Careem, Talabat, Amazon, Botim, and Noon consolidate various services into single platforms (Divsha Bhat/Rest of World)
https://restofworld.org/2025/middle-east-super-apps/

Tech giants in the Gulf are building super-apps to dominate digital life
From Dubai to Riyadh, apps are consolidating ride-hailing, payments, and delivery into single platforms.

Impact of Tariff Wars on Global Economy
N. S. Gonchar, O. P. Dovzhyk, A. S. Zhokhin, W. H. Kozyrsky, A. P. Makhort
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05576 https:/…

Impact of Tariff Wars on Global Economy
The Ricardian model of world trade based on comparative advantage is not sufficient to justify equal trade relations.The existing model of trade relations does not explain the distribution of income among trading countries. This paper presents a method for building equitable trade relations. Its essence is to present an algorithm for building such trade relations, based on the previously proposed model of world trade, that the trade balance of each country would be equal to zero. Under such con…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04147 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csRO_…

SLAC: Simulation-Pretrained Latent Action Space for Whole-Body Real-World RL
Building capable household and industrial robots requires mastering the control of versatile, high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) systems such as mobile manipulators. While reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise for autonomously acquiring robot control policies, scaling it to high-DoF embodiments remains challenging. Direct RL in the real world demands both safe exploration and high sample efficiency, which are difficult to achieve in practice. Sim-to-real RL, on the other hand, is often brittle du…

I had a bad day and made a mistake, but I chose to do the right thing and move forward.
Proud bisexual, gender-fluid, autistic anarchist committed to building a world based on mutual aid, solidarity, and freedom for all.
If you believe in challenging power and creating change from the ground up, let’s connect and let’s grow this movement together.
Now, here I am, feeling stronger and ready for better days ahead.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS)
has been a small-but-mighty source of world-changing scientific research for more than a half-century.
NASA scientists first moved into the building,
which another federal agency leases from GISS’s institutional partner, Columbia University, in 1966.
Last month, at the behest of the Trump administration,
NASA officials told GISS it had to move out before the end of May.
In response, more than 100 staffer…

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies Faces Eviction under Trump Plan
Since 1966 NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has been at the forefront of Earth and planetary science from its location in upper Manhattan. Now a Trump administration directive is ejecting its scientists to parts unknown

Bummer. Mozilla, makers of Firefox, are shutting down their "Pocket" and "Fakespot" services.
I use Fakespot constantly, every time I go to buy something from Amazon (or another supported retailer). I'd pay to use it, but it's going away. Ugh...
@… @…

Investing in what moves the internet forward | The Mozilla Blog
Firefox is the only major browser not backed by a billionaire and our independence shapes everything we build. This independence allows us to prioritize bu

Poster: libdebug, Build Your Own Debugger for a Better (Hello) World
Gabriele Digregorio, Roberto Alessandro Bertolini, Francesco Panebianco, Mario Polino
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02667

Poster: libdebug, Build Your Own Debugger for a Better (Hello) World
Automated debugging, long pursued in a variety of fields from software engineering to cybersecurity, requires a framework that offers the building blocks for a programmable debugging workflow. However, existing debuggers are primarily tailored for human interaction, and those designed for programmatic debugging focus on kernel space, resulting in limited functionality in userland. To fill this gap, we introduce libdebug, a Python library for programmatic debugging of userland binary executables…

The UK Conservative Party is in disarray. Since 1979, they have implemented changes with unintended consequences. Water privatisation, sale of social housing, deregulation of building societies, privatisation of railways, and leaving the EU.
Now they are considering withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, born out of the ashes of the 1930s and 40s in Europe and World War 2.
Which of the 16 Articles do they really believe we should not be protected by?

Singer-songwriter Nemahsis on the importance of being uncompromising
https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/singer…

Singer-songwriter Nemahsis on the importance of being uncompromising – The Creative Independent
Singer-songwriter Nemahsis discusses breaking through despite hardships, freedom of expression, and the power of building a genuine community online

Boggles my mind that I can, on a whim, take a day trip to see my favorite building in the world at a great price with several fast trains *per hour*. (Why on a whim? Because I never even considered it, based on the map.) Italian rail is quite something. #Italy25

SLAC: Simulation-Pretrained Latent Action Space for Whole-Body Real-World RL
Jiaheng Hu, Peter Stone, Roberto Mart\'in-Mart\'in
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04147

SLAC: Simulation-Pretrained Latent Action Space for Whole-Body Real-World RL
Building capable household and industrial robots requires mastering the control of versatile, high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) systems such as mobile manipulators. While reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise for autonomously acquiring robot control policies, scaling it to high-DoF embodiments remains challenging. Direct RL in the real world demands both safe exploration and high sample efficiency, which are difficult to achieve in practice. Sim-to-real RL, on the other hand, is often brittle du…

CEO C.C. Wei says TSMC expects record profit in 2025 despite geopolitical, tariff, and FX risks, and confirms it's not building a fab in the Middle East (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/

TSMC expects record 2025 profit despite US tariffs, currency volatility
World's top chipmaker mulls price hike to mitigate $3bn forex impact

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22073 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCY_…

A Closer Look at the Existing Risks of Generative AI: Mapping the Who, What, and How of Real-World Incidents
Due to its general-purpose nature, Generative AI is applied in an ever-growing set of domains and tasks, leading to an expanding set of risks of harm impacting people, communities, society, and the environment. These risks may arise due to failures during the design and development of the technology, as well as during its release, deployment, or downstream usages and appropriations of its outputs. In this paper, building on prior taxonomies of AI risks, harms, and failures, we construct a taxon…

"But there were technologists and open source projects in attendance. Notably, representatives from the Mastodon and Bluesky teams were at the Festival. The Newsmast Foundation was also present, incisively taking part in conversations to help newsrooms onboard themselves onto both of them. I got to hang out with them all, connecting with people I’d spoken with but never interacted with in person. Mastodon has undergone a transformation, has doubled its team, and is working on smoothing out some of its rough edges, while not letting go of its core ethos. It’s also beginning to position itself as a European alternative to American social media platforms, with a community-first values system and new services to directly help organizations join the network.
Bluesky, on the other hand, has done an able job of bringing journalists onto its existing social app, and is now hard at work explaining why its underlying protocol matters. Both want to engage with newsrooms and journalists and do the right thing by them. They each have something different to prove: Mastodon that it can be usable and accessible, and Bluesky that it can provide a return to its investors and truly decentralize while holding onto its values. I’m rooting for both of them.
These platforms’ messages dovetail with my own: news can own the platforms that support them. Lots of people at the Festival were worried about the impact of US big tech on their businesses — particularly in a world where tech moguls seem to be aligning themselves with a Presidential administration that has positioned itself as being adversarial to news, journalists, sources, and, arguably, the truth. The good news is that the technology is out there, the values-aligned technologists are out there, and there’s a strong path forward. The only thing left is to follow it."
#media #Mastodon #BlueSky #Journalism
https://werd.io/2025/notes-from-perugia-journalism-values-and-building-the-web-we

Join Radu Pop and Pietro Mele at Berlin Buzzwords as they discuss building an extensible hybrid search solution with Elasticsearch. They will cover functional modeling, cluster architecture, and practical insights on managing billions of vectors in real-world scenarios. Radu and Pietro will also address hybrid reranking challenges and the limitations of standard fusion techniques, explaining their innovative approach.
Learn more:

To give some examples:
When police get vastly differential results at investigating crimes against some groups (e.g., Black women) vs. others (e.g., white men), that's malcompetence. Probably plenty of simple malice involved too, and probably the whole gamut of mechanisms I mentioned in the last post are involved here.
Another example, from my own experience: when I stumble over the names of my non-white students but pronounce my white students' names flawlessly, that's malcompetence on my part, because the net effect of my selective incompetence is to make some students feel less welcome in my classroom, which hurts their learning. I'm my case, the reasons for the incompetence are not conscious nor (I think) unconscious malice, but instead a differential capability picked up from a certain kind of upbringing and then (sometimes) insufficiently mitigated by capability-building effort. Because of how I grew up, my ability to pronounce different names is biased (this is true of everyone in the world; most people don't have a classroom instructor position that causes it to matter so much). When I'm successful at mitigating my malcompetence, I use practice time with student intro videos to pare down my competence gap for the specific students in my class. This is time consuming (several hours per week for the first few weeks of classes) and I'm sad to admit that I don't always invest that time. But it's a great example of malcompetence because I have a introspective access to it.

A "Wenlu" Brain System for Multimodal Cognition and Embodied Decision-Making: A Secure New Architecture for Deep Integration of Foundation Models and Domain Knowledge
Liang Geng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00570

A "Wenlu" Brain System for Multimodal Cognition and Embodied Decision-Making: A Secure New Architecture for Deep Integration of Foundation Models and Domain Knowledge
With the rapid penetration of artificial intelligence across industries and scenarios, a key challenge in building the next-generation intelligent core lies in effectively integrating the language understanding capabilities of foundation models with domain-specific knowledge bases in complex real-world applications. This paper proposes a multimodal cognition and embodied decision-making brain system, ``Wenlu", designed to enable secure fusion of private knowledge and public models, unified proc…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10640 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSE_…

The Hitchhikers Guide to Production-ready Trustworthy Foundation Model powered Software (FMware)
Foundation Models (FMs) such as Large Language Models (LLMs) are reshaping the software industry by enabling FMware, systems that integrate these FMs as core components. In this KDD 2025 tutorial, we present a comprehensive exploration of FMware that combines a curated catalogue of challenges with real-world production concerns. We first discuss the state of research and practice in building FMware. We further examine the difficulties in selecting suitable models, aligning high-quality domain-s…