Tootfinder

Series A, Episode 11 - Bounty
SARKOFF: Yes, we may have need of thirteen million credits-
TYCE: Over my dead body.
SARKOFF: I hope you're not going to make a habit of that particular threat. Ready!
JENNA: Would you move back, please.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/111/543

Picture the human body. Zoom in on a single cell. It lives for a while, then splits or dies, as part of a community of cells that make up a particular tissue. This community lives together for many many cell-lifetimes, each performing their own favorite function and reproducing as much as necessary to maintain their community, consuming the essential resources they need and contributing back what they can so that the whole body can live for decades. Each community of cells is interdependent on the whole body, but also stable and sustainable over long periods of time.
Now imagine a cancer cell. It has lost its ability to harmonize with the whole and prioritize balance, instead consuming and reproducing as quickly as it can. As neighboring tissues start to die from its excess, it metastasizes, always spreading to new territory to fuel its unbalanced appetite. The inevitable result is death of the whole body, although through birth, that body can create a new fresh branch of tissues that may continue their stable existence free of cancer. Alternatively, radiation or chemotherapy might be able to kill off the cancer, at great cost to the other tissues, but permitting long-term survival.
To the cancer cell, the idea of decades-long survival of a tissue community is unbelievable. When your natural state is unbounded consumption, growth, and competition, the idea of interdependent cooperation (with tissues all around the body you're not even touching, no less) seems impossible, and the idea that a tissue might survive in a stable form for decades is ludicrous.
"Perhaps if conditions were bleak enough to perfectly balance incessant unrestrained growth against the depredations of a hostile environment it might be possible? I guess the past must have been horribly brutal, so that despite each tissue trying to grow as much as possible they each barely survived? Yes, a stable and sustainable population is probably only possible under conditions of perfectly extreme hardship, and in our current era of unfettered growth, we should rejoice that we live in much easier times!"
You can probably already see where I'm going with this metaphor, but did you know that there are human communities, alive today, that have been living sustainably for *tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years*?
#anarchy #colonialism #civilization
P.S. if you're someone who likes to think about past populations and historical population growth, I cannot recommend the (short, free) game Opera Omnia by Stephen Lavelle enough: https://www.increpare.com/2009/02/opera-omnia/

Heh yes. Pretty much this.
"Much more will be written about proposals to build massive undersea walls to hold up Antarctic ice sheets, drill bore holes in Greenland to pump out lubricating meltwater, or scatter glass beads over glaciers. As informed and erudite I'm sure this will be, I don't think it will be as effective as simply yelling "What the hell do you think you are doing?!”"
@… reads through the lines and interprets our recent #Geoengineering paper into plain english in this entertaining blogpost
https://www.technosphere.earth/new-report-concludes-polar-geoengineering-is-dangerous/

Series C, Episode 08 - Rumours of Death
TARRANT: You took your time.
AVON: It was necessary.
TARRANT: Is it done?
AVON: Yes, but it isn't finished.
VILA: Wonderful. Who's next on your list? Servalan?
AVON: [Inserts key] Orac.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/308/306…

CaRT: Teaching LLM Agents to Know When They Know Enough
Grace Liu, Yuxiao Qu, Jeff Schneider, Aarti Singh, Aviral Kumar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08517 https://

CaRT: Teaching LLM Agents to Know When They Know Enough
Many tasks require learned models to strategically gather relevant information over multiple rounds of interaction before actually acting on a task. Strategic information gathering requires models to know not only how to effectively acquire information, but also when to stop gathering information and make a decision, in order to avoid overthinking or getting derailed when acting. In this paper, we formalize this problem and introduce Counterfactuals and Reasoning for Termination (CaRT), an appr…

The first radio view of a type Ibn supernova in SN 2023fyq: Understanding the mass-loss history in the last decade before the explosion
Raphael Baer-Way, A. J. Nayana, Wynn Jacobson-Galan, Poonam Chandra, Maryam Modjaz, Samantha C. Wu, Daichi Tsuna, Raffaella Margutti, Ryan Chornock, Craig Pellegrino, Yize Dong, Maria R. Drout, Charles D. Kilpatrick, Dan Milisavljevic, Daniel Patnaude, Candice Stauffer

The first radio view of a type Ibn supernova in SN 2023fyq: Understanding the mass-loss history in the last decade before the explosion
Supernovae that interact with hydrogen-poor, helium-rich circumstellar material (CSM), known as Type Ibn supernovae (SNe Ibn), present a unique opportunity to probe mass-loss processes in massive stars. In this work, we report the first radio detection of a SN Ibn, SN 2023fyq, and characterize the mass-loss history of its stellar progenitor using the radio and X-ray observations obtained over 18 months post-explosion. We find that the radio emission from 58--185 days is best modeled by synchrot…

DeepPrune: Parallel Scaling without Inter-trace Redundancy
Shangqing Tu, Yaxuan Li, Yushi Bai, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08483 https://…

DeepPrune: Parallel Scaling without Inter-trace Redundancy
Parallel scaling has emerged as a powerful paradigm to enhance reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs) by generating multiple Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces simultaneously. However, this approach introduces significant computational inefficiency due to inter-trace redundancy -- our analysis reveals that over 80% of parallel reasoning traces yield identical final answers, representing substantial wasted computation. To address this critical efficiency bottleneck, we propose DeepPru…

AppForge: From Assistant to Independent Developer - Are GPTs Ready for Software Development?
Dezhi Ran, Yuan Cao, Mengzhou Wu, Simin Chen, Yuzhe Guo, Jun Ren, Zihe Song, Hao Yu, Jialei Wei, Linyi Li, Wei Yang, Baishakhi Ray, Tao Xie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07740

AppForge: From Assistant to Independent Developer - Are GPTs Ready for Software Development?
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability in function-level code generation tasks. Unlike isolated functions, real-world applications demand reasoning over the entire software system: developers must orchestrate how different components interact, maintain consistency across states over time, and ensure the application behaves correctly within the lifecycle and framework constraints. Yet, no existing benchmark adequately evaluates whether LLMs can bridge this gap and c…

Egal zu welchem Thema, es wird immer unterschiedliche Positionen von Personen geben, die zu diesem Thema als Experte gelten. In diesen widersprüchlichen Meinungen öffnet sich ein Raum, in dem eine eigene Stimme entstehen kann:
"Nothing prepared me better for adult intellectual life than getting two sets of contradictory feedback on every essay I wrote for those classes, because I had to decide, over and over, what to make of these expressions of my teachers’ authority. Yes, they k…

What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom
My students call it “Chat,” a cute nickname they all seem to have agreed on at some point. They use it to make study guides, interpret essay prompts, and register for classes, turning it loose on t…