Tootfinder

In DeepSeek's first public appearance since R1's success, a senior researcher told a state-run conference he was pessimistic about AI's impact on humanity (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific

Anyone interested in following along with the brain dump before it's completely edified can feel free. It's the same one I've posted before.
Editing support (typos, corrections, questions) is always welcome.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/
Edit:
FYI, I've temporarily renamed it "Rainforest" but WriteFreely doesn't really support changing URLs or titles very well so it's stuck until I finish it. The temporary name is "Rainforest" because it's roughly the opposite of Desert. It is not simply optimistic rather than pessimistic... it's a plan.

Ambidextrous Degree Sequence Bounds for Pessimistic Cardinality Estimation
Yu-Ting Lin, Hsin-Po Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04249 https://arxiv.org/pdf…

Ambidextrous Degree Sequence Bounds for Pessimistic Cardinality Estimation
In a large database system, upper-bounding the cardinality of a join query is a crucial task called $\textit{pessimistic cardinality estimation}$. Recently, Abo Khamis, Nakos, Olteanu, and Suciu unified related works into the following dexterous framework. Step 1: Let $(X_1, \dotsc, X_n)$ be a random row of the join, equating $H(X_1, \dotsc, X_n)$ to the log of the join cardinality. Step 2: Upper-bound $H(X_1, \dotsc, X_n)$ using Shannon-type inequalities such as $H(X, Y, Z) \le H(X) + H(Y|…

I am not as pessimistic as the writer of this article, still an absolute must-read,
"AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself"
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-destroying-the-university-and-learning-itself

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.

Day 16: Mayra Cuevas & Marie Marquardt
Okay so this is cheating, but they're co-authors of multiple books together, and there's no way for me to separate their contributions... I've already got too many authors I'd like to list, so why not?
I read their book "Does My Body Offend You?" and absolutely loved it; it's a celebration of teen activism while also being a deep exploration of feminist issues through practical situations that bring out the complicated side of things, which the authors refuse to reduce back to a simple formulaic answer. It has a supporting cast of appropriately-complex male characters that help in exploring the nuances of issues like the line between female empowerment & male gratification, and it brings race and macho culture into the conversion as well.
CW for sexual harassment & deep discussion of the resultant trauma.
I'll cheat again here to sneak in mention of two male authors whose work resonates with theirs: Mark Oshiro's "Anger is a Gift" has a more pessimistic/complex take on teen activism along with a gay romance (CW for racist cop murder), while Jeremy Whitley's graphic novel "Navigating With You" deals with queer romance & disability, while having a main character pairing that echoes those from "Does My Body Offend You?" in a lot of ways. Another connection (to non-men authors this time) is with "Go With the Flow" by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann. Their graphic novel about teen activism and periods is a bit more didactic and has a much lighter tone, but it does necessarily have some overlapping themes.
To bring it back to Cuevas & Marquhardt, their writing is great and their ability to discuss such complex topics with such nuance, all wrapped up in a story that feels completely natural, is amazing to me, and makes their book feel like one of the most valuable to recommend to others.
In writing this I've realized a grave oversight in the list so far that I'll have to correct tomorrow, but I'm quickly running out of days. The didn't-quite-make-it list is going to be full of more excellent authors, and I'm honestly starting to wonder whether it might actually be harder to name 20 male authors I respect now that I've found the sense to be mostly somewhere between disgusted and disappointed with so many of the male authors I enjoyed as a teen.
#20AuthorsNoMen (cheating a bit)

A Single-Loop Gradient Algorithm for Pessimistic Bilevel Optimization via Smooth Approximation
Cao Qichao, Zeng Shangzhi, Zhang jin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26240 https://

A Single-Loop Gradient Algorithm for Pessimistic Bilevel Optimization via Smooth Approximation
Bilevel optimization has garnered significant attention in the machine learning community recently, particularly regarding the development of efficient numerical methods. While substantial progress has been made in developing efficient algorithms for optimistic bilevel optimization, the study of methods for solving Pessimistic Bilevel Optimization (PBO) remains relatively less explored, especially the design of fully first-order, single-loop gradient-based algorithms. This paper aims to bridge …

Cowboys Latest Trevon Diggs Mystery Concussion News Sounds Pessimistic https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/trevon-diggs-concussion-chance-play-denver/?adt_ei=[email]

from my link log —
Timing conclusions: GPS, NTP, PTP timing with Linux.
https://scottstuff.net/posts/2025/06/10/timing-conclusions/
saved 2025-08-25

Timing Conclusions
This is the 13th article that I’ve written lately on NTP and PTP timing with Linux. I set out to answer a couple questions for myself and ended up spending two months swimming in an ocean of nanosecond-scale measurements. When I started, I saw a lot of misinformation about NTP and PTP online. Things like: Conventional wisdom said that NTP was good for millisecond-scale timing accuracy. I expected that to be rather pessimistic, and expected to see low microsecond to high nanosecond-range synci…

Anyone else remember when we thought 2020 was a rough year? Yeah, I kinda want to rewind to that point now... 2026 is soon upon us, and I don't expect things to improve, unfortunately. And no, I'm not being pessimistic, only realistic...

Mass killings
Was looking through Wikipedia's list of mass killings in America (#guns #GunViolence #Shooting