Tootfinder

An analysis of 61 settlements signed by Channel 4 staff who left amid employment disputes between 2017 and 2021 shows it paid out ~£5M and all but two had NDAs (Jake Kanter/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2025/06/channel-4-denies-using-nda-zelda-pe…

Channel 4 Says It Doesn’t Use NDAs, But Documents Reveal Company Is Curbing Free Speech Of Aggrieved Ex-Employees
Channel 4 described itself as the "defender of free speech," but documents reveal it is restricting what former staffers can say about the company.

Rams expect Stafford to start Sunday vs. Texans https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46131047/rams-matthew-stafford-expected-start-opener-texans

@… @… That statement alone is… something.
The idea that Python IP should belong to the community is largely agreeable, but the proposed mechanism seems like a hand-wavy hot take at best.
After all, isn’t that already what the …

Non-Ferroelectric to Ferroelectric Phase Transition in epitaxial Y:HfO$_2$ via Rapid Thermal Annealing Induced Nitrogen Doping
Soumyajyoti Mondal, Asraful Haque, Binoy Krishna De, Shubham Kumar Parate, Pramod Kumar Yadav, Arup Basak, Kaushal Tiwari, Bhagwati Prasad, Pavan Nukala
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02229

Non-Ferroelectric to Ferroelectric Phase Transition in epitaxial Y:HfO$_2$ via Rapid Thermal Annealing Induced Nitrogen Doping
Oxygen vacancies are often essential for stabilizing the orthorhombic ferroelectric phase in HfO$_2$, with cationic doping widely employed to introduce such defects. In contrast, systematic studies on anionic doping to induce ferroelectricity remain largely in nascent stages. On epitaxial Y:HfO$_2$ grown on ITO buffered YSZ substrates that crystallize in a mixed monoclinic (non-polar) and orthorhombic (polar) phases, we introduce nitrogen doping via post deposition rapid thermal annealing (RTA)…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #DriveTime
Goat:
🎵 Let It Burn (edit)
#Goat
https://goat.bandcamp.com/album/let-it-burn
https://open.spotify.com/track/3AGGkrFwa2LyzUkzo9rd2L

I suspect we’re doing something similar to the tank classifier when we ascribe intelligence to AIs: there are patterns such as (for example) grammatical correctness which we •associate• with this abstract thing called “intelligence,” and we thus mis-infer the existence of everything else we associate with the notion of “intelligence” when we see (for example) correct grammar.
Or should we just call the machine intelligent because we classify it as intelligence because our brains, which we assume are intelligent, think it fits the pattern of intelligence? And now you see what the OP means about “begging the question of intelligence.”

Quadratic Programming-Based Posture Manipulation and Thrust-vectoring for Agile Dynamic Walking on Narrow Pathways
Chenghao Wang, Eric Sihite, Kaushik Venkatesh Krishnamurthy, Shreyansh Pitroda, Adarsh Salagame, Alireza Ramezani, Morteza Gharib
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23203

Quadratic Programming-Based Posture Manipulation and Thrust-vectoring for Agile Dynamic Walking on Narrow Pathways
There has been significant advancement in legged robot's agility where they can show impressive acrobatic maneuvers, such as parkour. These maneuvers rely heavily on posture manipulation. To expand the stability and locomotion plasticity, we use the multi-modal ability in our legged-aerial platform, the Husky Beta, to perform thruster-assisted walking. This robot has thrusters on each of its sagittal knee joints which can be used to stabilize its frontal dynamic as it walks. In this work, we pe…

Today the European Commission will release a draft budget which is expected to make major changes to agribusiness subsidies (the CAP).
I think the only way to fix the #CAP is to kill it completely. Rename it and forget it. I'm not anti-regulation in general but I don't believe it's possible for bureaucrats in Bruxelles to meaningfully manage lands 2500 km away.
Why? Elinor Ostrom ex…

The Xeno Sutra: Can Meaning and Value be Ascribed to an AI-Generated "Sacred" Text?
Murray Shanahan, Tara Das, Robert Thurman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20525 https://…

The Xeno Sutra: Can Meaning and Value be Ascribed to an AI-Generated "Sacred" Text?
This paper presents a case study in the use of a large language model to generate a fictional Buddhist "sutr"', and offers a detailed analysis of the resulting text from a philosophical and literary point of view. The conceptual subtlety, rich imagery, and density of allusion found in the text make it hard to causally dismiss on account of its mechanistic origin. This raises questions about how we, as a society, should come to terms with the potentially unsettling possibility of a technology th…

Learning Real-World Acrobatic Flight from Human Preferences
Colin Merk, Ismail Geles, Jiaxu Xing, Angel Romero, Giorgia Ramponi, Davide Scaramuzza
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18817

Learning Real-World Acrobatic Flight from Human Preferences
Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) enables agents to learn control policies without requiring manually designed reward functions, making it well-suited for tasks where objectives are difficult to formalize or inherently subjective. Acrobatic flight poses a particularly challenging problem due to its complex dynamics, rapid movements, and the importance of precise execution. In this work, we explore the use of PbRL for agile drone control, focusing on the execution of dynamic maneuve…